44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 17, 2022 10:00AM
- May/17/22 1:53:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am happy to rise today to speak to the NDP motion before us. The NDP has always focused entirely on helping Canadian families. The most important issues for Canadians right now are the affordability crisis, the impossibility of the housing market, the rising cost of groceries, the soaring price of gas and the more existential crisis of climate change that asks what kind of planet we are going to leave our children and our grandchildren.
The NDP motion today asks the government to stop subsidizing highly profitable oil and gas companies once and for all. We are talking billions of dollars every year. Instead, it should invest those funds in relief for the millions of Canadians who are struggling right now with the high cost of everything, as well as renewable energy and other initiatives to deal with the climate crisis.
I would like to start by talking about fossil fuel subsidies. Canada and its G20 partners promised 13 years ago to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. Four years ago, I was at a G20 meeting in Argentina where that promise was reaffirmed and a peer review of the subsidies was initiated. That review is now years behind schedule. Finance officials recently admitted that they will not even finish the self-review portion of that until the summer of 2023, which is five years later. Most of the other countries finished their peer review within 18 months.
A couple of years ago, the environment commissioner could not even do a proper audit of our commitment to end subsidies, because the government admitted it did not yet have a clear definition of what an inefficient fossil fuel subsidy was.
Only last year, the Liberals forked out over $8.6 billion in subsidies and public financing to the multinational oil and gas companies. Over $5 billion of that was provided by Export Development Canada. Canada gives more tax dollars to oil and gas companies than any other G20 country, handing out 14 times more taxpayer dollars to that sector than it did to renewable energy companies between 2018 and 2020.
Canada paid $4.5 billion for the Trans Mountain pipeline when the private company building it said it was no longer a viable project. We are now facing a $21-billion cost for the expansion of that pipeline. It is an expansion that assumes and depends on an increasing demand for oil, when everyone realizes we must drastically cut our oil consumption worldwide.
We will never recoup the cost of Trans Mountain, so if there ever was an inefficient subsidy, I would say that buying a pipeline that a private company did not want and then spending $20 billion to expand it to provide capacity for expanded oil production that the world will not need and cannot withstand is—
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- May/17/22 1:57:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the latest budget, the Liberal government promises over $2 billion for carbon capture and storage projects for fossil fuel companies. That is more taxpayer dollars to companies that are doing very well. Imperial Oil is making more money than it has for 30 years. Suncor made a profit of almost $3 billion in the last quarter alone.
Again, is this an inefficient subsidy? Even if carbon capture projects can be developed that actually work, and there is a lot of evidence that most do not, using them to clean up an industry whose raison d'être is providing oil and gas for the world to burn to create more carbon dioxide is an highly inefficient way to wean the world off of fossil fuels.
What do Canadians get for this multi-billion dollar propping-up of oil and gas multinationals? They get record-high prices for gasoline. The oil barons are doing well, but ordinary Canadians are not. What Canadian families need is help during these times of increasing costs. We all need help transitioning to a low-carbon future. Let us imagine a future where our car, truck and home heating costs were not left to the vagaries of world markets and the international price of oil.
Canada has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. We cannot achieve this goal if we continue to pour 14 times the number of taxpayer dollars into the fossil fuel industry than we provide to the development of renewable energy.
The latest IPCC report had a stark warning. Either we take action now on mitigation and adaptation for climate change, or we risk suffering even more severe consequences from extreme weather events, wildfires and floods.
António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, said some government and businesses have not entirely been truthful in claiming to be on track. In his words, he warned, “Some governments and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another...And the results will be catastrophic.”
Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2030, and the good news from the IPCC report is that this can be done. The final cost of necessary actions will be minimal, but will require a massive effort by governments around the world.
Wayne Gretzky once said that a good hockey player plays where the puck is, but a great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. For Canada's energy future, the puck is going to be with renewable energy. Canada is uniquely positioned for becoming a renewable energy superpower. Our nation is rich in hydro, wind, solar power and the rare earth minerals that are needed for that low-carbon future.
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- May/17/22 3:13:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when we left off for question period, I was talking about how Canada is uniquely positioned to become a renewable energy superpower. During the natural resources committee's study on critical minerals, we learned that Canada is the only nation in the western hemisphere with all of the minerals and metals needed to produce the advanced batteries, electric motors and wind turbine generators that will be needed in the low-carbon economy. The International Energy Agency's net-zero energy scenario estimates that the global value for select critical minerals will grow substantially over the next two decades, reaching today's level for coal market value of about $400 billion U.S. by 2040.
The opportunity is there for Canada to both reach net zero and prosper, but we cannot continue down the path that Liberal and Conservative governments have chosen when it comes to spending money on the oil and gas sector. Canada currently spends more per capita on those subsidies than any other developed country. We cannot keep paying companies to clean up their own pollution.
New Democrats know that public funds are best spent supporting the transition to renewable energy and helping Canadians struggling with the high cost of living, rather than on profitable oil and gas companies. Instead of spending billions on new oil pipelines, we should be building hydrogen infrastructure for heavy transportation hubs, stronger provincial interties to distribute clean electricity across Canada, and electric vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing, and we should be training and employing workers now working in the oil and gas sector in these new opportunities. They are opportunities that will last into the future.
This is where the puck is going.
We need to stop providing those subsidies to oil and gas companies, which delay climate action, and instead spend that money on climate action. Increasingly, we need to spend money on climate adaptation, since the effects of global warming are locked in. We have to talk about the cost of climate inaction, and that cost is rising every year.
Right now, Canadian governments, businesses and citizens spend more than $5 billion annually to fix the destruction caused by increased fires and floods. That is predicted to rise to over $40 billion by 2050. At the moment, the federal government puts up just over $300 million of that cost. It is past time that we faced up to the rising costs of climate change.
We must realign the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund to spend more on adaptation, so that we protect communities from disaster rather than rebuild them after the fact. Last year, British Columbia communities such as Lytton, Princeton, Merritt and many more, were badly impacted by fire and floods. Small communities such as these do not have the monetary resources to rebuild under present funding formulas.
We must have a clear strategy for the future that faces the facts of climate change, both limiting the extent of future changes and dealing with the changes that have already taken place. Canada's future is very bright, but first we must invest in that future, not in the past.
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- May/17/22 3:18:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the answer to the member's question is, of course, “no”. We do not want to put oil and gas workers out of work. The oil and gas industry has been very good to Canada over the past decades. The member for Calgary Centre recounted in great detail how much benefit it has provided Canadians and Canadian workers.
However, that is not where we are going. What I am saying is we have to make sure that those workers who have good union jobs now will have good union jobs in the future, but those jobs are disappearing, whether they like it or not. A lot of those workers are rightly concerned about what they see. We have to invest in that future for them and their families.
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- May/17/22 3:19:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, obviously, the price of gas is at the top of a lot of Canadians' minds right now. It has gone up a tremendous amount. It has probably gone up $1 a litre since the war in Ukraine has changed the world markets.
What I am looking for is a future that we are moving toward and planning for, which will create an energy market that is not so sensitive to world events. I am looking for an energy future where Canada is creating its own energy and not subject to world prices for oil.
The Conservatives are always talking about using Canadian oil to fuel Canada, but I can bet that if we had that system right now, Canadian oil companies would not want the Conservatives to say that we will cut the price of oil in half because we control oil in Canada. We need a system that is good for the planet and for consumers, and we have to plan for that.
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- May/17/22 3:21:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I outlined some of that in my speech. I would like to thank the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley for allowing me to go on.
We need to spend those monies on reaching this future with a clean economy. I mentioned interprovincial interties in electrical redistribution. That would help us get clean electricity across the country and reduce our emissions tremendously, but it costs a couple of billion dollars for each intertie. Those are the kinds of things we have to be looking at, instead of funding the oil and gas industry, which is very profitable.
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- May/17/22 4:33:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member's riding includes Windsor, which is where my grandmother was born and raised. As he said, it is not a wealthy riding. I just checked, and the median income there is $31,000, which means more than half of his constituents were too low-income to benefit from the Liberals' much-vaunted tax cut for the middle class.
All this is to say, I am just wondering if he could comment on the fact that we have multinational oil companies making billions of dollars in profits while we are spending tax money to support them. We are doing this, in various ways, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
How can he justify that, with where we are in the world today, when we have to move away from the oil and gas sector? Why are we supporting these very profitable companies with tax dollars?
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