44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 17, 2022 10:00AM
- May/17/22 10:42:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to rise today as the member for Timmins—James Bay on this very important issue. We are dealing with two major crises right now. One is the question of affordability and the massive prices that people are paying at the pumps, at a time when we see big oil racking up record profits and gouging consumers at the pumps.
The fact is that Imperial Oil announced its best opening quarter in 30 years, with $1.17 billion in profits. Canadian Natural Resources doubled its year-over-year first-quarter results with a profit of $3.1 billion, and Suncor brought home $2.95 billion in quarter one, quadrupling last year's results of $800 million.
Where is all that money coming from? It is coming from Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average who go to work every day and are getting gouged at the pumps. We will never hear the Conservatives talking about price gouging. They have all kinds of theories about how unfair it is for big oil to make record profits while people cannot afford to go to work. It is the same as how the Conservatives are trying to talk about high grocery prices as some kind of Bank of Canada conspiracy on inflation, when, in fact, we learned that Loblaws made record profits this year. They are making money gouging Canadians.
At the same time, of course, big oil continues to get free money from the Canadian taxpayer. It refused to pay $256 million in taxes to municipalities in rural Alberta. It left an abandoned oil well cleanup of over a billion dollars: abandoned wells are leaking planet killers such as methane. It expects the public to pay for that. It is calling on the government to change the basic environmental regulations that protect the Athabasca River system, a fragile ecosystem, so that it can dump the toxic waters from tailings ponds. It never talks about the huge damage that it does from every barrel taken out of the oil sands or the amount of water that is contaminated and held in these tailings ponds, which are larger than the city of Vancouver, but it expects the public to assume those costs.
Of course, we see the $570 million for the methane cleanup. Methane is a planet killer. We all know that. This is something that big oil, with its record profits, could easily have handled, but no: It asked the public to pay to stop the leaking methane. What we saw from the Environment Commissioner's report was that this was used as a subsidy to increase production.
The issue of affordability is one factor, but there is a much bigger factor facing us. We are the first generation in history to actually be in a position to decide whether our children have a future or whether we are going to continue to have cheap gas.
We talk about a climate emergency. It does not even come close to talking about the situation we are in. The UN has released its latest statement calling “a code red for humanity”. It claims “a damning indictment of failed global leadership” on the climate crisis. UN Secretary-General Guterres says that what we are looking at is “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
He says:
Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone—now. Many ecosystems are at the point of no return—now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction—now.
There is nothing theoretical about this. The Economist, which is hardly a left-wing journal, says that we have to act quickly before time runs out. It gives us until 2025 to deal with peak oil. The International Energy Agency, another industry voice, says that given the emergency of the climate crisis, there cannot be any more new fossil fuel projects, yet what we see in the House, and what the Canadian people see, is that climate change denial is the fundamental cornerstone of Canadian economic policy and it is the fundamental cornerstone of the government.
We know that the Conservatives will ridicule any efforts on climate change. We hear them laughing when it is talked about. The issue is with the Liberals, though. The Liberals have made promises because Canadians want someone to do the right thing on the climate crisis. We are not seeing that.
We want to talk about a number of things that we need to break apart on the Liberals' arguments because they are perpetrating a scam on the Canadian people. The idea of net zero by 2050 is an absolute scam.
They went to COP26, where the Prime Minister and the environment minister claimed they would cap emissions. That certainly shocked everyone in Canada because they had not talked to anybody about this emissions cap. We are never going to see that emissions cap. It is not going to happen. Why is it not going to happen? The emissions cap is not going to happen because the Liberals are telling Canadians that they can increase oil production while getting to net zero.
It is a ridiculous proposition, and it is all based on the idea that they were somehow going to decarbonize the oil, but the problem with that is that it is not possible because what is coming out of the oil sands has one of the the highest carbon emissions prints on the planet. Year in and year out, despite all the promises to lower those emissions, it has not happened. A headline in The Wall Street Journal refers to it as among the “Dirtiest Oil” on the planet. Those are the facts.
We can look at the environment minister's latest big green plan, which he said was planned out based on the Canadian Energy Regulator's information. The Canadian Energy Regulator predicts that, under the government's plan, in 2050 the amount of oil that will be produced and burned will be the same as the amount of oil burned and produced in 2019.
Liberals are not moving off the carbon economy. In fact, as the Canadian Energy Regulator says, they are planning a massive increase of up to 1.2 million barrels a day. We have already seen this. We have seen Bay du Nord, with an extra 300,000 barrels a day. We see the money they are pumping into TMX for an extra 800,000 barrels a day.
This is not going to help Canadians at the pumps. This is for export. The Deputy Prime Minister made it clear that the primary objective of the government is the supremacy of the market, and the market is exporting Canada's oil and increasing exports to the world market, yet the Liberals claim they are going to get to net zero.
Here is the other part of the scam: Every barrel of oil exported does not count toward Canada's emissions. They are going to come up with some hoodoo numbers to say there are no emissions costs here, but right now, even without the increase of 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada's offshore oil export emissions are more than all of the emissions in every sector in Canada today.
The government says it is not efficient to actually target the full amount of emissions. The fact is that the planet does not care who burns the oil or where it gets burned. The government is committed to driving the oil agenda and giving big oil whatever they ask for to make that happen.
This leads me to the other issue I am very concerned about, which is the so-called “just transition”. It has been very depressing to sit at the hearings on the just transition and see where the government is going on this.
I come from in Northern Ontario where we have lived through unjust transitions. When 4,000 workers lost their jobs in the uranium mines, there was not an alternative. When we lost the entire silver and iron mining economy in Temiskaming, there was not an alternative. The transition then was brutal.
We have seen the economic possibilities. We have Calgary Economic Development and Edmonton Global talking about thousands of new jobs. We also have clean energy tech talking about a 50% increase in clean energy jobs. The problem is that, to get those jobs, we need investment, and the government continues to deliberately underinvest in the new economy, so it is leaving workers high and dry, and it is making vague promises about a transition, but that is not happening.
The clock is ticking. The government, Parliament, leaders in the provinces and our federal leaders are responsible to the next generation as we look at a situation of the planet overheating. The red lines are there, and we have the opportunity and the possibility to transform, but we just do not see the political will. That needs to be challenged.
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- May/17/22 11:41:57 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I hate to imagine that the Bloc has joined the course of MPs and parties that want to drive up fuel prices at a time when we are seeing record high fuel prices.
I have come here today to fight for my constituents who are finding it impossible—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Chris Warkentin: Madam Speaker, the NDP is heckling me, because I am asking for fuel prices to be reduced—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Chris Warkentin: Madam Speaker, it is amazing. The NDP is heckling and suggesting there are record profits. Do members know who is enjoying record profits from the high price of fuel right now? It is the Government of Canada and governments across this country, and those are being invested in health care, our roads and the infrastructure across this country. The NDP does not suggest for a second that those should be reduced. They are just saying—
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- May/17/22 12:04:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I hope that my colleague from Calgary Centre was not offended by my little joke earlier. I loved his speech, and I barely missed a second of it.
The Conservative members spoke earlier about the billions of dollars the oil industry reinvests in society, and we have also heard about the extraordinary profitability of the sector. The first quarter of 2022 does show record profits for Canadian oil companies. At the same time, however, consumers are paying exorbitant taxes at the pump and then paying huge subsidies to the industry though their taxes.
I have a very simple question that should be easy to answer. Given the situation, would it not be better to reduce or even stop the subsidies—which I think would be even better—and redistribute the money in assistance to Quebeckers and Canadians? Our fellow citizens are having a hard time with the price of gas, but also with the constantly rising inflation and the impact of the price of gas on the economy overall.
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- May/17/22 2:27:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the greedy executives are laughing it up. They are sucking us dry at the pump while making record profits. They are taking even more taxpayers' money through federal subsidies. Glug-glug go the gluttons. Every new coin they see is more golden than the last.
Suncor made $3 billion in profits last quarter. These fat cats do not need public money. Rather than fattening them up any further, why will the federal government not give that money to the less fortunate or put it towards the energy transition?
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- May/17/22 4:04:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to remind the member that today's motion is about ending fossil fuel subsidies. How does it make any sense that as a G7 nation we give billions of dollars to a sector that is already profitable and is right now making massive if not record profits? I would contend that makes absolutely no sense. Instead, we should be spending our public money, those precious public dollars, on helping workers who are impacted by the climate crisis and whose jobs go through bust and boom cycles. We should invest it in families that are struggling with the cost of living and invest it in building more renewable energy, which we know we need today and for the future.
This is really the fundamental question here: Why would we be giving profitable companies more public dollars?
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- May/17/22 5:25:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am really happy to participate in this debate. It is hard to know where to start with this motion because, to be kind, it makes very little sense.
The first thing we talk about is record profits or profits. The New Democrats talk about this as if it is something terrible or dirty. How dare a company make a profit? The thing they always have difficulty with, as I do not think there are very many business people in that caucus, is that companies sometimes make profits, yes, and in other years they do not. Profit is what enables companies to invest in things like technology and CCUS. The problem is that right now we have a global search for investment, so we have to compete here in Canada with the investment opportunities being offered all around the world, in particular with CCUS.
What is the alternative? This is where the New Democrats and the Liberals are together on everything. They want to shut down all kinds of development in this country so that they can say they balanced and lowered our carbon emissions. However, guess what? The demand for oil is not going anywhere. The demand for other products in the energy industry is not going anywhere either. Guess what happens. These companies go to other parts of the world to supply that demand. How do they do that? They do it in countries where the environmental standards are lower and where they do not have to worry about their carbon emissions, so we end up with greenhouse gases increasing. Why has so much industry moved to China? It is because it uses coal-fired energy, which is terrible for greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather than trying to stop all of these projects here in this country, why do we not look at making Canada an energy superpower with low-carbon emissions? That is what investments in things like CCUS are going to do. Otherwise, oil and gas production, mineral exploration and anything else will go into higher-intensity production per barrel and per kilogram around the world. The last time I checked, we do not have a carbon dome over Canada. We are not protected by exporting carbon emissions to China or other countries around the world.
This ideological approach actually harms the country. We lose investments in businesses and industry, investments that create good-paying jobs and that allow companies to make profits. Here is what the NDP often forgets: Profits lead to taxes and taxes fund the social services we have in this country. Taxes fund everything. Corporations have to be profitable in order for us as a country to have tax revenue to provide the services we have in this country.
Why the New Democrats are so unhappy that there are profits in the oil and gas sector I do not know. The profits and taxes from the oil and gas sector have funded so much across this country, and somehow they pretend they do not. It is terrible. The New Democrats talk about the record oil profits of those terrible companies, but they are paying loads of taxes that provide the social safety net in this country.
It is completely irresponsible to say there should be no CCUS in this country for oil and gas. What would that do? As I have said before, it would dramatically reduce oil and gas in this country. The New Democrats would say that is great; that is what we want to do, except the demand does not go anywhere. Rather, it just shifts to other countries that will not worry about their carbon emissions and may not worry about other environmental standards.
Canada cannot go to the dark ages of investment that this NDP motion is trying to take us to. The motion has to be opposed. The cognitive dissonance the NDP has that somehow stopping all oil and gas production in Canada will solve the problem does not make any sense and does not work. Let us vote against this motion.
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