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House Hansard - 40

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 3, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 40 - Mar/3/22
Mr. Charlie Angus
  • Mar/3/22 11:59:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would tell my hon. colleague that if the truth hurts, too bad, so sad, because the Conservatives have taken the crisis in Ukraine, the humanitarian suffering, the deaths, the murder of innocent people, turned it around and said this is a great opportunity for them to take billions in taxpayers' money to promote the interests of oil and gas. If they do not like the mathematics of how bad that is, then they should not be in the chamber. Too bad, so sad, because this is their motion. We could have been debating anything of substance. Instead, we are debating Conservative mythologies. As I was saying, over the last few years, 60 financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings plc, Hartford Financial, the Japan Petroleum Exploration, have all pulled out of Canada. Why? It is because of the lack of a plan to deal with the climate crisis. Not only are the Conservatives misrepresenting the facts in terms of the horrific humanitarian crisis, but they are misrepresenting the facts to workers because the transition is here. We see the potential. Calgary Economic Development and Edmonton Global are saying that if we start to invest now in clean energy, we are looking at an additional $61 billion for the provincial Alberta economy. If they continue with business as usual, there will be only $4 billion. Year in, year out, we see drops in employment in the oil sector and that is not because people are being mean to them. It is because industry is cutting jobs and making more profits. That is the thing. That leads me back to the Forbes comparison. Forbes says that having lost the debate in Canada on the climate crisis, oil and gas have shifted, like big tobacco, to the global south, where the number one plan is to make some claims about greenwashing, shift massive exports to the global south where it does not count and then only invest enough in clean tech so it looks like they are doing something. Meanwhile, the market has moved beyond, and it has moved beyond in a substantial way. What we have been given, time and time again, by the Conservative Party is a fake, failed mythology when, year in, year out, jobs in the oil patch have gone down and the opportunity for a clean-tech economy is staring us in the face. There is a huge potential, but if we do not meet that, then we are consigning our children to no future. To get back to the motion at hand in a very clear way, I have seen a lot of ways the Conservatives and the Liberals will bend over backwards to give taxpayers' money to big oil, to excuse all manner of abuses of accountability and to go along with all manner of fake claims about dealing with the crisis, but emissions have continued to rise, year in, year out. We are talking about the future of our planet, but we are talking about it now, within the context of a global crisis, a humanitarian crisis where people are dying. They expect more from us than this gaudy attempt to claim that our best response to Ukraine is to spend billions of dollars on an unproven, unplanned, unidentified pipeline, when the Europeans are already moving toward clean energy alternatives. This is exploitative and crass. I have enormous respect for my colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills, so I will offer an amendment in order for us to come together and show a higher standard. I move that the motion be amended in paragraph (c) by deleting all the words after “Government of Canada to” and substituting the following, “greatly increase humanitarian aid for Ukraine and for countries bordering Ukraine that have already accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees and provide targeted supports to ethnic minorities who have faced discrimination in their attempt to flee Putin's war in Ukraine.”
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Context: House Hansard - 40 - Mar/3/22
Mr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC)
Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Ottawa South represents more Arabs in his constituency than I do in Edmonton Manning, but in the meantime, I thank him for putting this bill together and bringing it forward. How does he see community members integrating into Canadian society and having been in Canada for almost 140 years?
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