44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 9, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/9/24 12:34:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Miramichi—Grand Lake.
It is a pleasure to stand here on behalf of the constituents of Edmonton—Wetaskiwin.
That was an interesting exchange we just heard when the NDP member took issue with many of the things the Liberals are doing that are destroying the economy of our country right now. However, at the same time, when she and her colleagues have a chance to vote against the Liberal government and go into an election to change the government, they side with it every single time.
I just had the opportunity to come back from my constituency, where, like many colleagues, I was meeting with constituents. I had 6 two-hour constituent round tables last week. I had a chance to interact with dozens of constituents at these round tables, and a lot of issues were raised. Interestingly, the number one issue was not the carbon tax at those round tables. Time and again, in Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, what was articulated at those round tables by constituents was how we can get rid of the Liberal Prime Minister before he destroys the economy of Canada.
I will just mention a few of the other issues that were raised. The carbon tax was definitely the main policy issue raised, as well as housing, runaway deficits, safety in our streets, immigration and the recent challenges with the immigration system. Of course, health care is always raised, especially at a time when it is clear that we are going to spend more on interest on the debt the Liberal government has rang up than we will spend on health care in this country over the next few years, so there are a lot of issues to talk about.
I think it is helpful, in the context of what we are talking about today, to revisit the legacy of economic chaos that is in the DNA of the Liberal Party, and that is the Trudeau legacy. It is very important to revisit the Trudeau legacy of the 1970s and 1980s. It was a Liberal government that ran up 14 deficits in 15 years, and there were results of that time. Of course, that was a time of drastic economic experimentation by, at the time, the most left-leaning prime minister we had ever had. Obviously, that has definitely been beaten by the current government, but at that time, it was the most left-leaning government we had ever had. It undertook an economic experiment, and we saw crises, including an energy crisis, an inflation crisis, a housing crisis and a national unity crisis, that stretched right to the end of that government in 1984 and, interestingly, way beyond the time it was in power.
Of course, the nine years following that government was the Mulroney government. I remember when some of the Liberal members were new and would come into the House in 2015 and 2016 to talk about the biggest deficits in Canadian history being under the Mulroney government, but what they did not mention at that time was that those deficits were made up entirely of interest on Trudeau's debt. The deficits it ran were largely in balance, in fact, probably a bit in surplus, but the interest payments on the Trudeau debt caused us to run deficits for many years after that. That bill came due in about the mid-nineties, from 1995 to 1997, when we were under the Liberal Chrétien-Martin government. Some of these members served under that government. When the bill came due, we saw absolutely dramatic cuts, some of the most significant cuts we have ever seen, to health care and social services spending in this country.
That is interesting because Liberal members often stand up to ask what Conservatives are going to cut when we talk about bringing some sanity to our fiscal situation in this country, but what really made significant cuts to spending on things that are important to Canadians was that Liberal government, which in two years, from 1995 to 1997, cut 32% from health care and social services transfers in this country. Can members imagine a government in 2024 having to cut 32% from health care and social services funding? That is what happened from 1995 to 1997 because of the absolutely tragic economic legacy of a Trudeau government.
Here we are again. We are now eight years into a government. It has been eight deficits in eight years for the current government. I assume we will have a ninth coming up soon, so it will be nine deficits in nine years. That is 23 deficits in 24 years under the economic policies of the current Prime Minister and the Prime Minister Trudeau of the seventies and eighties.
Under the current Liberal government, backed up by the NDP, we have doubled our country's debt. Taking a look at the things that could help that, and thinking about the conversation we are having today, what might help us in terms of our economic situation right now and the chaos we are seeing economically and otherwise is, perhaps, revenues from oil and gas. That might actually help.
I took a look at the oil and gas import numbers for 2022, the most recent numbers we have to date, and they would be astonishing to Canadians who assume we have a lot of oil and gas production in Canada. Obviously, we are one of the world leaders in terms of our vast resources and the potential that comes with our oil and gas resources, but what a lot of people do not realize is that Canada, every year, imports oil and gas, because the policies of the current Liberal government have made it impossible to build a pipeline in this country. Instead, mostly to eastern Canada, we are importing oil and gas.
In 2022 we imported $21.5 billion in crude oil alone. That was up 46% from 2021. Of course, the Americans are the number one supplier of oil and gas products like crude oil to Canada. The number two and three countries are Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, totalling over $5 billion in crude oil alone coming into Canada. On refined petroleum products, we are talking about even more: $26.1 billion in 2022 alone, which was up 55% from 2021. We were importing about $47 billion between the two of those in 2022, and that is product that could absolutely have been sourced here in Canada.
The reason that situation exists is that we hold Canadian producers, hard-working producers and workers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and across the country, to a higher standard than we hold producers in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. We do not ask producers in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia to account for upstream emissions, for the impact on the environment or for the impact on the social fabric of their countries.
It was interesting that about a year ago we had the minister before committee and I had a chance to ask him about this. His was response was that, of course, Canada has no ability to hold those countries to account. Their own domestic governments control those types of things, and Canada cannot walk in and hold them to account, but we definitely hold Canadian producers to account for that. The one thing we can do is refuse to take oil and gas from countries that do not meet the Canadian standard, the same standard we apply to Canadian producers.
This is the world the Prime Minister has created in eight years. If we go back eight years and take a look at the situation that existed eight years ago, and our leader summed it up very well this morning when he spoke, it was a world where we had a balanced budget. In 2015, we had worked hard, coming out of the economic slowdown, and The New York Times spoke of Canada having the richest middle class in the world, having just overtaken the Americans after decades. It was a situation where we did not have the housing crisis we have right now.
I look forward to speaking some more about these things when we take questions from the other parties.
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- Apr/9/24 12:44:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member made reference to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whom many Canadians have respected as one of Canada's greatest prime ministers for a lot of his efforts and the things he brought in, like Canada's Charter of Rights and the repatriation of the Constitution, at the very least. I think the member undervalues that. It is interesting that he wanted to highlight the past, although he has often criticized me for bringing back some of the disasters of the Stephen Harper era.
Maybe he can justify how it is that Stephen Harper had a mega, multi-billion dollar surplus handed to him, which he converted into a multi-billion dollar deficit. That was before the recession took place. How does he justify that Stephen Harper's government did not balance the budget? Even during the last year of Stephen Harper's government, he had to sell off shares of GM at a huge discount to try to give the impression that he balanced the books.
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- Apr/9/24 4:41:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, the parliamentary secretary, for giving me the opportunity to make a brief speech on today's motion. I thank him profusely.
I have been here for the full day of debate. Let me break down what the supply motion today from the Conservative Party deals with. It posits that we have a carbon tax crisis and suggests that the solution is to bring the premiers to Ottawa, or somewhere, and have a first ministers conference.
I am going to try to address two very large and complex questions in the next 10 minutes. One is the climate crisis, and associated with that, the role of carbon pricing. The other is the nature of our federation, the role of first ministers conferences and what else might work.
The first thing to do is to clearly state that there is no carbon tax crisis. The real crisis, the real urgency, is global warming and climate change. It is almost too late. Time is running out.
We have a very large climate crisis, which threatens all aspects of our lives in Canada. In British Columbia, in four days, 619 people died in the summer of 2021 because of a heat dome. Those were preventable deaths, but 619 people still died, according to the B.C. Coroners Service, which studied those deaths. In the same season, we had wildfires that also compromised our health and threatened lives.
That fall, we had the atmospheric rivers that were responsible for billions of dollars of infrastructure needing to be replaced, which was a huge hit to the economy. We also had the other side of the country dealing with hurricane Fiona, which lifted houses up along the shore of Port aux Basques and deposited them in the ocean. In other words, we have had loss of life, as well as unprecedented fires and floods that threaten lives.
We are seeing a climate crisis that requires us to pull together, yet how do we behave in terms of the question of a first ministers conference? I look at the European Union and at Canada, and I think we have a crisis where, for some reason, we cannot even think like a country. We act like a vulcanized group of federations that do not like each other very much. We have 10 provinces, three territories and one federal government, and we do not have our act together nearly as well as the European Union does.
It has 27 separate sovereign nation-states that are not part of the same country. In fact, they have countries that were, in my parents' lives, at war with each other: Germany and France. The European Union has 27 nation-states and 24 official languages. From the very beginning of addressing the climate crisis, going back to Kyoto in December 1997, the European Union came with a collective pledge, divvied it up among all the nations and started achieving it. Every single European nation more than achieved their Kyoto targets to well below 1990 levels, while Canada continued to soar above 1990 levels.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, the European Union said, “We'd better help Ukraine and make sure it can get electricity, because clearly Putin wants people to freeze.” It took a matter of weeks for the European Union to tell Ukraine it was going to plug Ukraine into its electricity grid. We cannot get Quebec hydroelectricity into Nova Scotia, where the electricity is still generated by coal, because we cannot get Hydro-Québec to work with Emera in Nova Scotia to deliver zero-carbon hydroelectricity. We cannot get our clean electricity from southern Canada up to Nunavut so it can stop burning diesel. Why is this? We do not seem to be able to coordinate very well.
I will look at the history of first ministers conferences. We had a lot in the past, and maybe it is not the best way to get action. If we look back at the Mulroney government, action on acid rain was not taken by pulling everyone together into the same room. Mulroney's genius on this was to get one deal at a time bilaterally. If they were going to shut down the pollution that causes acid rain, they started with the easiest of the provinces, the one that polluted the least but was having a lot of damage. Prince Edward Island was the first bilateral deal between the federal government and a province, Canada-P.E.I.
The last one was the federal government and Ontario, because Ontario's Inco smelter was the single largest point source of acid rain causing pollution in all of North America. One at a time, we got deals with each province all the way across; the Mulroney government then told the Americans that it was coming to them with clean hands. It had already cut its pollution in half, so the Americans should do the same; in that way, they could clean up acid rain.
Mulroney did have a lot of first ministers meetings as well. If we look at his history on this, Pierre Trudeau had five first ministers conferences, some of them historic. Repatriating the Constitution was a rather big first ministers meeting. Former prime minister Mulroney, whom I have mentioned, had 14 first ministers conferences; Jean Chrétien had seven. However, they came to a grinding halt under Stephen Harper, who, over a nine-year period, had two, one in 2008 and one in 2009. The current Prime Minister, over a nine-year period, has held three. It is not a great record in terms of collaboration, but at least there were far more first ministers conferences than under Stephen Harper.
Are first ministers conferences the way to go? How do we do it? What is the best way to get our country to think like a country? Today, April 9, happens to be the 40th anniversary of the day that the House unanimously passed the Canada Health Act. I was reminded of this fact by our former colleague and friend Jane Philpott, who has written a book about how we need to collaborate for health care.
We do not have a carbon tax crisis. I would say we have an affordability crisis right across Canada. There is no question. The carbon tax plays, according to every economist, a minuscule role in the affordability crisis. We have a health crisis. Family doctors are not available to everyone. Is health care a right in this country? That would be a good place to have a collaborative first ministers conference. Could we do that? We certainly have a climate crisis. How do we address that? How can we get ourselves to pull together?
Canadians pull together when the climate crisis hits home. When people are out of their homes because of floods or fires, we know Canadians pull together. We still have no national firefighting force or plan for it. We do not have water bombers sufficient to deal with the summer of climate crisis fires that we can expect to see. There is so much more we could do if we tried to figure out how to get collaboration to occur.
One thing we need to do is agree that electrifying almost everything is one of the best ways to reduce emissions, and the best way to make that reliable is to treat the grid like a battery. Let more people produce. Let more people into the market. Let indigenous nations produce solar and wind. Let coastal communities produce tidal and wind power and sell it into the grid, and when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, pull it out of the grid.
Going back to Europe, Denmark's excess wind is sold to Norway. Norway takes that excess wind power, pumps it up into reservoirs and lets it flow down to create electricity when the sun is not shining in Denmark. This is not rocket science. For God's sake, as Canadians, we know we are the same people and the same communities. We basically love each other, and we have to start acting like a country, because the climate crisis threatens our kids' future in a real way that carbon pricing does not. Carbon pricing, at long last, has gotten some reduction in emissions. However, the truth of the matter is that, for so long, the government in Canada, regardless of Conservative or Liberal, has been so busy trying to build up the fossil fuel industry and throw it tens of billions of dollars in subsidies that we have not confronted the problem.
The problem is big polluters. We need to address that. We need to move off fossil fuels. We need to do it quickly while we still have time to save our future. We need to tax the excess profits. So far this year, Shell has had $28 billion in profits and paid it out to its shareholders. For Heaven's sake, this is not rocket science. We can get this right. Let us move this debate to solutions.
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