44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 17, 2022 10:00AM
- May/17/22 11:07:46 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very interested in having my hon. colleague explain to me the fact that there was no business case for TMX. The public was told to buy it for $4.7 billion. Then it was $17.3 billion. Now there is another $10 billion on top of that in loans. That is public money to export and expand oil production. That oil production of an extra 800,000 or a million barrels a day goes offshore and does not count in Canada's emissions.
My hon. colleague said this is a global issue, and I totally agree with her. Would she not agree that it does not matter where the oil is burned, as it is still affecting the planet? If we have 2025 as a target to stop increasing production, why is the government using taxpayers' money to export oil to be burned in other jurisdictions, which will not be counted on its register?
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- May/17/22 12:51:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, let us talk about subsidies. Let us talk about TMX. The private sector was walking away from it, but the Liberals, with the support of the Conservatives, said that in 24 hours they would come up with $4.5 billion to buy the pipeline. It turns out, as the PBO said, that it was $1 billion more than it was even worth. Subsequent to that, we have seen tens of billions of dollars poured into TMX, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer again said this is simply not a project that will ever return on investment the money that has been poured in from the public sector. Now we have a loan guarantee of an additional $10 billion, so over $30 billion has been poured into TMX, which will never return that money to taxpayers. Why do the Conservatives not speak out against that abuse of public funds?
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- May/17/22 1:36:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.
I would like to start by thanking the member for Victoria for bringing forward this motion and the member for Timmins—James Bay for the incredible work he has done on fossil fuel subsidies.
Canadians spend more tax dollars propping up the fossil fuel industry than any other country in the developed world, with an average of around $14 billion per year in subsidies before the massive COVID-19 orphan well bailout. The question is why. What do we as Canadian taxpayers get for all of this money? Where does this money go?
From 2014-21, corporate profits in the oil and gas sector in Canada rose steadily, seeing an all-time high of $445 billion in 2021. Public subsidies were a significant factor in those record high profits, adding nearly $100 billion over this time to these multinational corporations' bottom lines.
In March 2022, Topaz Energy announced an 8% increase to its quarterly dividend, the company's third such increase since launching its dividend program in 2020. In October 2021, Suncor doubled its quarterly dividend for shareholders, and just last week the oil sands company announced a more than threefold increase in profits in the first three months of this year.
While this is great news for the Americans, the Chinese and other shareholders who own these companies, it is not good news for Albertans. It is not good news for Canadians. While Canadian taxpayers are underwriting these corporation dividends to shareholders, they are laying off workers. During this same period of time, while these massive multinational corporations were soaking up Canadian taxpayers' largesse, the fossil fuel sector was laying off 53,000 Canadian workers. That is 53,000 families, most of them in Alberta, who are facing the worst of times, while their former employers are relishing in the best of times.
What are Canadians getting for this unprecedented public investment? Surely we are at least getting some environmental protection, or some environmental mitigation from emission reductions. The answer is no.
In 2020, the government provided $1.7 billion to the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia to fund the cleanup of inactive oil and gas wells as part of the COVID-19 economic response. The member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay and I wrote to the minister at the time and begged him to attach strings to that money so we would know that it would go to workers, and that it would not just go to corporations that would then not clean up their wells. Can members guess what happened? The money went to the corporations, and the wells have not been cleaned up. In short, this $1.7 billion handout to the oil and gas industry did nothing to create jobs or mitigate pollution. It merely allowed these companies to replace the costs they were obligated to cover with government money.
At the same time that these companies were reaping billions in subsidies, recording record high profits and asking for public dollars to underwrite their own obligations to reduce emissions, they are refusing to pay their local and municipal taxes. In Alberta, rural municipalities are now facing $253 million in unpaid taxes owed by delinquent oil and gas companies. These taxes pay for the roads and the water systems that the companies are relying upon. These taxes support the communities who own the resources, yet the companies are pocketing the profits, walking away from their local tax obligations, just like they walked away from their emissions obligations and their orphan well obligations.
It does not have to be this way. We know what we get with billions in fossil fuel subsidies. We get layoffs. We get devastated communities. We get pollution, and we get climate change. We get to prop up a sunsetting industry whose days are numbered, whether we as taxpayers like it or not, and oil and gas companies get massive profits.
Why would we continue this cycle? There are much better things we could be spending these public dollars on. In Alberta, we have lived through the boom and bust cycles of an economy that is chained to the fossil fuel industry. We need to break this chain. We need to make sure that Albertans, the people in my province, have a future. We need to diversify the economy before it is too late.
For Alberta, the climate crisis is an existential crisis, just like it is for the rest of Canada and the rest of the world. We see an increase in devastation from wildfires, and an increase in droughts and floods. We feel the impacts on our agriculture and forestry sectors. However, for Alberta, it is different.
A transition from fossil fuels is also a matter of economic survival. Instead of $100 billion in public dollars padding fossil fuel's bottom line, and instead of throwing this money at foreign investors, the government should be investing in Alberta, and elsewhere in Canada, to help workers and to create jobs of the future.
More than 50,000 Canadian oil and gas workers have lost their jobs to automation over the past decade, and experts expect layoffs to continue. Why are we not investing to help these workers and apply their skills to other sectors? Why are we not investing to create the jobs they need now, and that their children will need in the future?
Today, approximately 140,000 Albertans work directly in the sector, and hundreds of thousands more rely on jobs from it, but we know that subsidizing the industry is not going to save those jobs. We have decades upon decades of experience demonstrating that. How much longer are we going to keep doing this?
Alberta is uniquely positioned to be a global leader in renewable energy. My province has abundant solar, wind and geothermal resources, and it would have abundant jobs in these areas, if only there were substantial investments in the means necessary, and if only we were not pouring those billions of dollars into subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
However, there are also opportunities outside of energy, opportunities that develop sectors of our economy based on strategic advantage, such as biomedical research, engineering or artificial intelligence, just to name a few, but these require investment. These opportunities require investment from the federal government. The government should be leading the way when it comes to diversifying Alberta's economy.
Canada has benefited for decades from the oil and gas development in Alberta. I am proud of that. I am proud that Alberta helped build this country. Now, it would be to every Canadian's advantage to help Alberta out of its reliance on oil and gas, and the government has the means to do this. It just needs the will.
I have said this before in the House, but I will finish by saying that I come from an oil and gas family. My grandfather worked in oil and gas. My father was a trucker in the oil and gas sector. My brother washes trucks in the oil and gas sector, and my husband works in the pipeline sector. Members would be hard pressed to find anyone in Alberta who does not have a link to the oil and gas sector. It is our history, and it is a history I am proud of.
I am proud of being Albertan, and I want to make it very clear that Albertans know climate change is real, and we know our future cannot depend on fossil fuels. We do not love our children any less, and we do not want any less for our communities, but unlike other provinces, and unlike folks in other areas of this country, Albertans have so much more to lose if we do not get this right. It is our families and our livelihoods we will lose, if we do not get the just transition right.
We know we cannot depend on the fossil fuel sector. We simply cannot continue along this path of losing jobs, polluting our province and destroying our planet any longer. Whether we want to or not, we know we must change, but we need the government to reverse course, live up to its climate commitments and invest in diversifying our economy before it is too late.
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- May/17/22 1:47:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, if I were a worker in Alberta, I would have zero trust that the government has any interest in supporting me, because it has not shown any interest in supporting Alberta workers. I mentioned in my speech that we asked the government to tie a string so that workers were supported, not big business, and it refused to do it.
In terms of carbon capture, here is my question for the member. Why would taxpayers need to subsidize carbon capture? Why can industry not pay for the carbon capture that it is so proud of and would like to see happen? It should be responsible for funding it.
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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 4:08:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of the motion put forward by my colleague, the member for Victoria.
The NDP motion calls for the government to stop using Canadian taxpayers’ money to subsidize oil and gas companies, and to instead reinvest that money into renewable energy and measures to help Canadians with the rising cost of living.
The motion could not have come at a more desperately needed time. This week, constituents in my riding are paying over $2 a litre for gas at the pump. Many of the people scraping together the necessary funds to pay for fuel are essential workers, small business owners, families with young children and people with mobility challenges who need to drive for their livelihoods or to access essential goods and services.
Canadian families are already struggling with sky-high housing costs and income precarity exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. Even before the rise in gas prices, people were living paycheque to paycheque and struggling to make ends meet. Retirees and people on fixed incomes have not seen a rise in income to account for the rise in living costs.
By glaring contrast, the oil and gas companies are making record profits, while being heavily subsidized by taxpayers’ money. This grossly unjust situation is a direct result of the government’s heavily misaligned priorities. The NDP motion calls on the government to fix this dire situation and place people and the planet before oil and gas company profits.
As Canadians are struggling more than ever, we are also faced with the most urgent crisis of our time: the climate change crisis. The most recent IPCC report states:
It is unequivocal that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems.
It goes on to say:
Societal choices and actions implemented in the next decade determine the extent to which medium- and long-term pathways will deliver higher or lower climate resilient development.... Importantly climate resilient development prospects are increasingly limited if current greenhouse gas emissions do not rapidly decline, especially if 1.5°C global warming is exceeded in the near term.
A new climate update issued by the World Meteorological Organization pointed out that there is a fifty-fifty chance that the annual average global temperature will temporarily reach 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years, and this likelihood is increasing with time.
Let us just think about that for one minute. They are saying that we are not going to meet our target. I should not need to remind anyone in this house of the importance of the 1.5° mark. Climate scientists have long established that holding global warming to 1.5° could limit the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate change.
Our global temperatures have already risen by 1.1° since pre-industrial levels. We are already feeling the devastating effects of climate change. B.C., my province, has just experienced one of the most challenging years of extreme weather in recent memory, with a heat dome that shattered temperature records and killed hundreds of people, followed by weather bombs that destroyed critical infrastructure, livestock and agricultural lands with record precipitation and floods. For days, B.C. was cut off from the rest of Canada by rail and road because of the damages from the unprecedented floods.
Left unchecked, extreme weather connected to climate change will continue to wreak havoc on Canadian lives and livelihoods.
Around the globe, we are witnessing how climate change has caused substantial damage to terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and ocean marine ecosystems. We are seeing glaciers melt, mountains change and permafrost thaw in the Arctic ecosystem. Let us be clear: This is the result of human-induced climate change. That is why we must fight the climate crisis like we mean to win.
Despite the urgency of the climate crisis on our doorstep, Canada has failed to meet any of its climate targets to reduce carbon emissions over the past 40 years. In fact, not only has Canada repeatedly failed to meet its climate targets, Canada is also one of the few wealthy countries where carbon emissions continue to rise. Industrialized and wealthy nations are responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world, but the effects of climate change impact developing nations and indigenous peoples the hardest.
Climate justice is justice, period. Continuing to subsidize oil and gas companies while delaying the economic and infrastructure overhaul and transition to green energy is the very opposite of climate leadership that Canadians and the world so desperately need. The new carbon capture tax credit is, in effect, a $2.6-billion subsidy to oil and gas disguised as a so-called climate solution by the Liberal government. It is the wrong path to take.
Earlier this year, more than 400 Canadian climate scientists and academics pleaded with the finance minister to scrap the plan to create the carbon capture tax credit. Professor Christina Hoicka, from the University of Victoria, stated that carbon capture is expensive and unproven in its effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Julia Levin, senior climate and energy program manager, stated that by relying on unproven “techno-fixes”, the government is “gambling with our lives.”
Carbon capture projects exist at the demonstration level only, and have not successfully been deployed at the scale needed to make them part of a viable pathway to reach net-zero by 2050. More than 80% of the carbon capture projects attempted in the United States have ended in failure. Shell's Quest carbon capture facility near Edmonton is emitting more greenhouse gas than it captures.
Across the board, scientists are calling for the government to invest in proven climate solutions, including renewable energy, efficient affordable housing and the electrification of transportation as the way to go. The choices we make today will have a lasting impact on future generations.
It has long been my belief, and the NDP's belief, that a just transition must not only create a healthier environment, but also create better opportunities and improve affordability for Canadian workers and families. A just transition creates good jobs in the renewable energy sector and supports workers and communities in transitioning to jobs in this sector.
Canada could become a world leader in renewable energy development. Investing in energy-efficient home retrofits and affordable energy-efficient new homes, as well as investing in a robust electric public transit system, would make life more affordable for Canadians and reduce emissions. In other words, a just transition would help to build a stronger, resilient economy. It is an opportunity that any government that values people and the planet would jump on. Instead, Canada is spending 14 times more on financial support to the fossil-fuel sector than it does on renewable energy.
The Liberals promised a just transition act in 2019, but have failed to deliver and were recently rebuked by the Environment Commissioner for their lack of a plan to support workers and communities through the transition to a low-carbon economy. At the same time, oil and gas companies are making record profits, and Canadians are being decimated at the pump with record-high prices while the world is on the brink of a climate disaster.
The majority of Canadians are concerned about climate change and affordability as the cost of living continues to rise. If the Liberals eliminated the tax credits for oil and gas exploration and development right now, it would bring in almost $10 billion over the next four years. Instead—
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