- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Apr/11/24 1:31:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today is an important day and a proud day. It is a day that we fulfill the promise to workers who came to us and said that they needed to have their voices heard in dealing with the biggest economic and environmental crisis of the last 300 years.
I think back seven years ago, in Edmonton, when I met with the incredible workers at Local 424 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They had asked me to go to their plant and meet with them. They wanted to show me the incredible training they were doing for a clean-tech future. They said that the world was changing and they were not going to be left behind, that they had the skills to take on whatever. They also said, which I knew then and believe, that there was no place in the world that could move to a clean-energy economy quicker than Alberta, and these workers were at the front of the line in the training.
They asked me where the government was on this. They saw the future coming. That question has stayed with me ever since. In the seven years since, the climate crisis has become much more pronounced. We no longer talk about the summer, we talk about the fire season. Our national fire chiefs have talked about a ferocious fire season after last year, when 200,000 Canadians were forced from their homes because of the ongoing climate disaster due to increased burning of fossil fuels.
However, we also see how fast the transition is happening around the world. It is not a myth. It is not a lie. It is not, as the Conservatives claim, some kind of globalist woke conspiracy. It is a fact. When the market changes and we do not have a plan, it is heartbreaking.
I live in mining country. I remember when the market changed in iron ore prices. Kirkland Lake and my community of Cobalt were never the same again. I remember being on one of the last shifts underground at Stanleigh Mine in Elliot Lake when the uranium market fell. It did not matter how much one believed in disinformation or claimed there was a conspiracy, once it was gone, those jobs were gone forever.
We have lost 45,000 jobs in the oil sector, and those jobs are not coming back. We lost 1,500 jobs just this year. Richie Rich Kruger from Suncor told investors in his company, which was part of the group that made $78 billion in profits, that he was going to target work as a way to be more efficient. The billions of dollars they are making they are putting into automation. They are not putting it into communities or jobs. We are seeing a reality where there will be a drop in oil and gas jobs, we figure from 171,000 down to 100,000 by 2030. Therefore, we have to be prepared.
When we lost our mining economies in the north, there was no plan. There was no place where people could go, and it was devastating. We talk about a just transition. I always say it is a transition where I come from when we see U-Hauls on the lawns of our neighbours, who are leaving with no future.
The IBEW, the operating engineers, Unifor, the Canadian Labour Congress came to us and said that there had to be a plan in place, otherwise we would miss the boat. The transition is happening. China put $890 billion into clean tech last year, more than the rest of the world combined. The result was that it pumped $1.6 trillion into its economy and brought it up 30% in a single year. It is moving ahead.
South of the border, Joe Biden's IRA has created 170,000 jobs and over half a trillion dollars in new investments. What we hear from the Conservatives now is that this is some kind of George Soros woke conspiracy that is being planned, a planned Soviet economy to destroy jobs. It was the workers themselves who came to us and said that we needed plan in place, that they did not want all those jobs going stateside.
Where are we in Canada? Danielle Smith blew $30 billion in clean-tech investments out of Alberta and said that they were not welcome. Why? It was just out of ideology. This is a province that was Canada's energy superpower and she cannot even keep the lights on in April. It is becoming Canada's banana republic for energy at a time when the climate crisis in Alberta is burning the fields. We are in fire season already and it does not have the water. We have never heard a single Alberta Conservative ever talk about the drought that is hitting due to the climate crisis. We need to take action.
It is a reasonable step that we are talking about. We need to ensure this transition happens, and, for my Liberal colleagues, that plan is not moving fast enough. We have to keep up and we have to be competitive, but we need to have workers at the table. They have a right to be at the table, because decisions will be made. It could be pork barrel, misspending or it could be a plan that ensures we build on the strengths of the workers we have and our incredible resources.
It is amazing. The other day the leader of the Conservative Party was asked about his opinion on the industrial carbon tax, and of course after having belittled the member for Victoria, which is very much in keeping with his style, he claimed there was no industrial carbon tax. It is a falsehood.
We have this funny tradition in Parliament. One can come into the House and lie all day long, but one can never be accused of being a liar because one is supposed to be an honourable member. The fact that the leader of the Conservative Party is making disinformation about the industrial price of carbon is a concern. Maybe he just does not know his file, but I do not think that is the case.
The Conservatives this morning, with some of the numbers they were talking about, were trying to claim that Bill C-50 is some kind of plot. They were saying that there were 1.4 million jobs, 170,000 jobs and 200-some thousand jobs that would immediately disappear if this happened. One can only make ridiculous claims like that if one deliberately shuts down the voices of the people who came to testify.
What happens when legislation is brought forward, and it can be good or bad and can be amended, is that we hear from the witnesses. Who were the witnesses who were not allowed to speak? The Conservatives did not allow the IBEW to speak. They did not let the carpenters union speak. They shut them down. It was the New Democrats who brought the people who have gone through the coal transition, and the Conservatives did not give a darn about those workers in the coal transition. They did not want to hear them. They did not want to hear anyone from Unifor. Those are the people who are working in the EV technologies. They shut them down and would not let them speak. They did not want the Alberta Federation of Labour to speak.
They did not want that, because if they let people speak who actually speak the truth, then disinformation falls by the side of the road. They cannot then walk around with claims of conspiracy and idiocy if there are people who say something is simply not true.
When one says to Conservatives something is simply not true, they really lose their minds. Look at the Conservative leader and his support from Alex Jones. Alex Jones is an absolute hate-monger. This is a man who taunted the families of 20 children who were murdered by an evil conspiracy hater. Alex Jones was on the John Birch Society podcast, which is another hate site, bragging about the member who lives in Stornoway. Does anyone think he was going to challenge that? Not a chance.
However, I challenged Alex Jones, and within an hour, photos of my daughters were online with their addresses. We know how the hate machine works. It is the politics of intimidation. When I take on the member for Carleton for not even bothering to show up for the election he is threatening to call, boy oh boy, within an hour their hate memes are going through my riding to call me and threaten me.
What Conservatives wanted to do was shut down Bill C-50. When they brought forward the amendments, most of which had to be generated by AI because I do not think the Conservatives were smart enough to actually bring them forward, we had to sit through hours with them screaming. They screamed for eight hours of intimidation. It was like gong-show Brownshirts. In all my career, I have never seen such deplorable and disgraceful behaviour.
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Mr. Speaker, I am honoured, as always, to rise in this House. I have been here 20 years, and I have never seen a time when I feel that our country and our planet are at risk as much as they are now. This is a time when people should be looking to parliamentarians to come together to deal with solutions. Instead, we are dealing with yet another Conservative motion, which shows that the Conservative Party leader's entire economic plan could fit on a lapel button.
I think what is missing in the discussion today is the fact that we are in the midst of a global crisis. Europe is worried that it could be dealing with a massive expansion of a potential war with Putin. There is the need for Canada to be a strong ally. Contrary to what the member who lives at Stornoway says, Ukraine is not some faraway land, as he quotes Neville Chamberlain, but it is the front line in the fight for democracy. This is something we should be coming together on.
We are seeing a mass humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza, with Canada cutting off supplies at a time when people are facing starvation. This is a humanitarian disaster that Canadians could step up for. Instead, we are siding with Benjamin Netanyahu. We are dealing with the fact that every hour 30 million tonnes of ice melt from the Greenland ice floes; that is 30 million tonnes an hour. Last year, 200,000 Canadians were forced out of their homes because of climate fires, yet the Conservative leader flew into the fire zones to brag that he would make burning fossil fuels free.
The Liberals do not really have an environmental plan. That is something we should be arguing; they do not. However, the Conservatives refuse to put forward a climate plan, other than to let the planet burn. That is the sum total of what I have heard from the Conservatives for the last three years: let the planet burn. At a time when our young people are facing a future that is increasingly unstable, we are left with yet another dismal debate in the House of Commons on slogans and bumper-sticker excuses.
When Kelowna was facing a potential catastrophic disaster with fires, the member for Kelowna—Lake Country was bragging that if her party formed the government, it would make fossil fuel burning free. In Alberta, when I was there last week, there was just a little powder of snow on the ground in January. It is above freezing now. It is now coming into the fourth year of a serious drought.
There are 13 counties in Alberta that have declared environmental disasters because they cannot get their crops out. In 2021, the cattle farmers were talking about how only 36% of their crops were in good condition; that was in 2021. They made it through that year by getting the holdover pay from 2020.
Now, coming into 2024 with no snow on the ground, we are seeing rivers drying up, and not a single Conservative from Alberta or Saskatchewan has ever bothered to stand up to defend their farmers in the face of the biggest climate crisis since the dirty thirties. They would throw them under the bus to satisfy their leader, who lives in a 19-room mansion, because it is about letting the planet burn.
The Conservatives from British Columbia will get up and falsely try to mislead their own citizens that they are paying a federal carbon tax when there is not one. Not a single Conservative from British Columbia has dared to stand up in the House to talk about the fact that the rising hydro prices in B.C. are from the depleted reservoirs from the droughts. British Columbia, a hydro superpower, had to import 20% of its energy capacity last year because it could not keep the lights on because of the droughts and the low reservoirs. That is the effect of the climate crisis.
We are dealing with real-time planetary breakdown of the disappearance of the ice shelves and of unprecedented fires, where much of last summer, across from Chicago and across North America, children could not go outside without getting sick. What did we hear from the Conservatives? Let the planet burn.
In all my years, there were times we came together on simple things, like jobs. However, that is not in the Conservative agenda because the Conservatives tell people that Canada is broken, even though we were voted number one in the world. If Canada is not broken, the Conservatives will make it broken.
Bill C-49 is a bill so that Canada could get in the game with the clean energy projects that are taking off in the United States, right now. Since 2021, under the Biden administration, $360 billion in clean energy projects got off the ground, and they are not getting off the ground here for two reasons. While the Liberals are trying to get their tax credits and work it all out, Biden is getting that money out the door. We are also seeing the Conservatives blocking sustainable jobs legislation and doing every kind of monkey-wrenching, idiotic stunt to stop workers from having a seat at the table.
Even more astounding is Bill C-49 where the Newfoundland and Labrador premier and the Nova Scotia premier have called for Ottawa to come to the table because the United States is moving ahead so rapidly on offshore wind development that would set up projects for construction and long-term jobs in the hundreds of thousands of homes that are getting clean energy. However, the Conservatives from Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia are determined to block jobs because that is what their leaders said: Make Canada broken. If it is not broken, they are going to break it. Their plan is to let the planet burn.
Here is the thing. The Premier of Nova Scotia said that Bill C-49 is the necessary first step in unlocking our energy potential, yet the member for Cumberland—Colchester, a guy who has just been elected for two or three years, is announcing that he is going to oppose offshore development and jobs in Nova Scotia. The member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame said that he thought the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador had been hoodwinked and that the premier was not bright enough to negotiate good construction and permanent jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador. There was a time when we all would have worked to get those jobs off the ground because we know sustainability in every part of Canada is important. However, these are clean-energy jobs, and that is something that the leader of the Conservative Party does not want to have happen, because his environmental plan is to let the planet burn.
The Conservatives talk about affordability. It was the Conservatives who led the fight against taking the HST off home heating. This is not about making it easier for people; it is about making people angrier. That is his one plan.
However, what really concerns me now is that we are in the midst of a climate catastrophe that is unfolding in real time, and we need to bring our plans to the table. We need to debate them. We need to find out how Canada can, number one, get in the clean-energy market that is taking off in China, in Europe and in the United States while we are sitting at the side of the road. Even more, there is the need to reassure this young generation that we will have their backs in trying to address the catastrophic collapse of the ice shelves and the unimaginable burning that we saw last year. We still have fires burning in northern Alberta today. That is unprecedented. The northern boreal forest burned at an unprecedented rate. What do we hear from the Conservatives? They do not have an environmental plan. They have a bumper-sticker slogan and if people push them hard, it is “let the planet burn”.
I did not come here to tell my kids and their next generation of kids, “Guess what. We let the planet burn because it was easy.” Yes, it is easy to let the planet burn and, yes, it is going to be hard to make sure that we stand up for our kids. Yes, it is going to be hard to stand up to Putin. Yes, it is going to be hard to come together, but we need to do that as a nation right now. This is a nation that will be judged on the absolute failure to put forward a plan in the midst of the biggest existential crisis the human race has faced, and it needs something better than a bumper sticker and a toxic lapel-pin slogan.
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- Dec/7/23 2:49:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the people of Attawapiskat continue to suffer a brutal housing crisis. Now there are serious questions about their water supply, and with winter hitting hard, a crisis is looming.
We remember the winter of 2011 when Attawapiskat asked the Conservatives for help. The Conservatives falsely blamed them for ripping off taxpayers and then expelled a democratically elected council. However, under the Liberals, there has just been vague promises and no action.
As this winter hits, will the government send a team to assess the situation on the ground and help find a solution for the people of Attawapiskat?
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Mr. Speaker, the issue raised was an attempt to intimidate and stop members from speaking. I will not be intimidated.
I will continue to speak even if it takes all night. I will speak out about climate change denial, even if I am interrupted relentlessly. These are the facts of this bill. I will continue to speak on behalf of the work that is being done, particularly the work we have done with energy workers.
I was speaking about the urgency. I spoke about the urgency of the climate crisis, and that certainly triggered the Conservatives. I spoke of the urgency of what the International Energy Agency is reporting, warning governments against continuing to invest in the fossil fuel industry because they are going to be stranded assets. The urgency is at the point that we are now reaching peak oil by 2025-30. We have this falsehood that if we continue to build infrastructure, we could ignore science, the economy and reality, which is something the Conservatives have done for so long.
I would like to speak to one other element of urgency in getting this legislation passed, which is the fact that the United States, under the IRA, in a single year, has created what is being called economic shock waves for their investments in clean tech. This is a game-changer of unprecedented proportions.
Again, I do not know any jurisdiction on the planet that chases away investment, but I know how upset the Conservatives are whenever we talk about what is happening in the United States. Offshore wind, under Joe Biden, in a single year, is moving to 40 gigawatts of power. The Vineyard Wind project would run 400,000 homes on cheap, clean energy. The Conservatives do not want Canadians to know that because they want to continue to promote coal and oil. There is 146 billion dollars worth of investment in the United States in offshore wind. This is something the Conservatives would shut down in a second.
We are seeing right now, within one year, 86,000 new permanent jobs, and 50,000 in EV. What we have seen is the Conservatives, again and again, ridiculing investments in battery technology and EV technology. We had the member who lives in Stornoway, which I do not believe is in his riding, show up in Timmins—James Bay to ridicule the critical mineral strategy, in a mining town. For God's sake, the guy has had a paper route. However, here is a man who comes into a mining region and makes fun of EV technology, when our communities and our workers are going to be ones building this new technology, and we are investing in it. We will push the government to continue to invest.
The legislation was very problematic for New Democrats. There was not a lot there. We pushed hard by working with labour and union workers who are on the front lines. One of the key places we went to was Alberta. We hear Conservatives talk about workers in Alberta, but they do not talk to them. They misrepresent them. We met with the electrical workers. We met with the construction workers. We met with the boiler workers.
We asked them what they wanted, and they said that they know the world is changing around them. Forty-five thousand jobs have been lost in oil and gas at a time of record profits, and the workers know those jobs are not coming back. Suncor fired 1,500 workers this year. Richie Rich Kruger, its CEO, bragged to his investors about the urgency, at a time of climate crisis, to make as much money as possible. He said he would target workers, that he would make every one of those workers in Suncor prove their worth if they were going to keep their jobs. It is taking record profits, over $200 billion, to big oil. It is putting it into stock buybacks and automation.
The workers knew there was no future. They told us they wanted a seat at the table. That is something New Democrats fought for in this legislation. Is it enough? No. We want to make sure that we have labour represented in the regional round tables that are moving forward. The idea of the Liberal government meeting with Danielle Smith without labour is a ridiculous proposition.
Here is the thing, there is no place on the planet that was more ready for the clean tech revolution than Alberta. In fact, just last Christmas, they were talking about the solar gold rush in Alberta. Just this past July, they were talking about how Alberta was set to become the clean energy capital of the world. Then Danielle Smith stepped up and shut it down. That was $33 billion. Here we go again—
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Madam Speaker, I am certainly proud to rise on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay to speak to Bill C-49, an act to amend the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Act and the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Resources Accord Implementation Act. It would make sure that we can finally embed the issue of getting renewables in wind energy development off of the east coast of Canada.
I want to begin by saying that I extend my deepest concern in solidarity with the people of Atlantic Canada, who have just come through the devastation of hurricane Lee. I was supposed to be in Lunenburg this past weekend. It was the second year in a row that I had attempted to be at the Lunenburg writers festival, both years with planes booked and hotels all set. Last year it was the devastation of hurricane Fiona that shut down the writers festival, with a cost of $800 million in damages for the people of the region. I was invited to come again this year, and then we had hurricane Lee.
What we are seeing is the climate crisis up close. It used to be that hurricanes were spread out over many, many years. Now we are starting to see them regularly, and they are moving further north as we are seeing an increasingly destabilized climate.
This past summer, 200,000 Canadians were displaced by climate catastrophe. Some communities were almost lost, from Kelowna to Yellowknife to Halifax to my region of Kashechewan and Fort Albany in the James Bay subarctic. Fires in the subarctic of James Bay are almost unheard of. As we were scrambling to try to get Hercules aircraft up to get people out of the fire zones, people had to put their families in canoes to stay ahead of the fire. All through this time, of course, the leader of the Conservative Party was running his tour to make pollution free across Canada. In fact, he had to cancel a number of his events because people were being chased out by the toxic fumes of a climate catastrophe.
How do the fires in James Bay, what we just saw in the Arctic and the almost toxic levels of air quality we have seen for the last number of weeks in Edmonton tie into the crisis being faced in Atlantic Canada? The scientists who are monitoring the collapse of the Greenland ice shelves have noticed a very disturbing trend. Soot from fires that is landing on the ice shelves draws heat because it is dark, and ice normally is reflective of the sun. However, the more soot that falls on the Greenland ice shelves, the quicker the disintegration of those ice shelves has become. That is causing increasingly destabilized waters in the Atlantic.
When 14 million hectares of Canadian forest burn in a single summer, we can see that we are at an environmental tipping point. It needs to be said clearly and simply that the cause of this collapse is the burning of fossil fuels. The oil industry bears responsibility. It knows that and it has known that for decades.
In the early 1980s, Exxon produced some of the best scientific evidence showing that a climate catastrophe would unfold if the diminution of the use of fossil fuels was not implemented immediately. In fact, in 1982, we had a memo from Exxon Mobil warning that if steps were not taken, the damage would not be reversible. Unfortunately, this is what our country and our planet are living through now. Exxon and the other oil players decided to suppress evidence and in fact spent millions on a disinformation campaign falsifying what was very straightforward science saying that the more carbon that is put into the atmosphere, the more heat will be trapped, and the more heat that is trapped, the more the temperature changes and the more the planet destabilizes.
It is therefore really important that we address this crisis straight on. We have to address it with a sense of urgency. There is an urgent need for the government to start moving quickly on addressing this. There is a need to urgently hold the big oil companies to account.
We know that this past summer, Rich Kruger, the CEO of Suncor, said the only urgency facing his company was to make as much money as possible. This is at a time when it is making record profits, yet he sees the urgency of burning more of our planet quicker in order to pay shareholders, most of whom live offshore.
However, there is an impact to that that is not just about this year, next year or 10 years from now. Scientist David Archer states, “The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge...longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.” That is the cavalier attitude of those who are promoting the expansion of big oil to not just the world we have today, but the world that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will have to live with. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.
I will refer to last week's really interesting report by the International Energy Agency, hardly a left-wing think tank, that warned we are at “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”. It says that since the war in Ukraine, there has been a massive push in Europe to increase clean energy so that they get off Russian oil and gas. The Biden administration's IRA has launched a huge clean energy transformation, something that is not being picked up in Canada. In fact, Danielle Smith has just spiked investments by $33 billion and has shut down numerous projects out of the ideology she has that clean energy is somehow a threat to oil and gas in Alberta, even though thousands of jobs would be created. In fact, Calgary Economic Development says Alberta alone stands to gain 170,000 jobs from clean energy development. Unfortunately, we have a premier who believes the world is flat. It is not flat; it is burning.
To the International Energy Agency's comment that “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era” is here, Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency says, “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to prepare ourselves for the next era.” I am hoping that this legislation to update the accords with Atlantic Canada to increase offshore oil will be part of that process. Birol says, “Oil and gas companies may not only be misjudging public opinion...they may well be misjudging the market if they expect further growth of oil and gas demand across this decade. New large-scale fossil fuel projects carry not only major climate risks but major financial risks.”
Canada as a petrostate needs to get very serious very quickly about the diversification of energy, not just to deal with the fact that our northern boreal forest is on fire and our communities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts are facing more and more climate urgency, but to deal with the fact that our economy needs to shift so that we do not lose the competitive advantage. It is a competitive advantage that is being taken very much by our colleagues and neighbours in the United States.
Why is it urgent to move on Bill C-49? Until now, the Liberal government has talked a good game on the climate crisis, but it has not really delivered. It made numerous promises in the fall economic statement and in the budget about clean energy tax credits, but those clean energy tax credits have to come into force very quickly. Again, as we have seen in the United States, there are huge opportunities and huge investments are being made.
As McCarthy Tétrault notes:
Bill C-49 would modernize the Atlantic Accord Acts by notably establishing a framework for the development and regulation of offshore renewable energy projects in both provinces and their offshore areas. Bill C-49 also expands regulation of current petroleum projects and clarifies jurisdictional rules regarding domestic and internal sea boundaries.
As this also includes petroleum, we have to get a really clear sense as New Democrats of how much the government is going to hold petroleum exploration to account. As the International Energy Agency says, we cannot allow more development of the energy that is burning our planet. The Liberals will have to be clear with us on this.
We really need to catch up with the United States. My colleagues in the Conservative Party seem to think that clean energy projects are some kind of ridiculous, outrageous attack on the 20th century, where they are very comfortable living. We have seen the Conservatives' attack on the investments in the battery plants being put in the auto sector, while huge amounts of investment are happening in the United States. We see their attacks on wind energy, relentless attacks, as though it is some kind of threat, particularly the members coming from Alberta, where we have 170,000 abandoned wells spewing toxic stuff all over farmlands.
Look at what is happening in the United States off the Atlantic coast right now. One wind farm off Rhode Island is going to create energy for 250,000 homes. There are 27 major projects on track to be completed by 2025 in the United States on the east coast. The Vineyard Wind project will create power for 400,000 homes. Canada is no where near this.
The Maritimes, with its huge energy costs, has an opportunity to step up right now, create thousands of jobs and dramatically lower the energy costs people face. This is why we need to move quickly on this.
The other huge opportunity we have is hydrogen, and getting a strong hydrogen economy off the ground is essential.
This past November, I was in Berlin. We had excellent meetings with various ministers. I met with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The question the Germans asked of us was whether we could deliver them a hydrogen economy. That is what they were interested in from Canada.
My Conservative colleagues have always gone on about how Canada should be selling its LNG to Germany and Europe. They said to us very clearly that they were not interested in Canadian LNG, because by the time we could actually build a pipeline, they would be off that energy. They wanted a hydrogen economy. However, hydrogen is something the Conservatives do not believe in because it does not burn the planet. They think it is some kind of threat.
The Germans are a major industrial economy. They want to know if Canada will partner. When I met with Chancellor Scholz, I told him about the huge potential for hydrogen in Alberta. Now that we have Danielle Smith and her stagecoach to nowhere sitting out on the dead prairie grass, the Germans will not be going to Alberta if she does not get her act together. However, they will go to Atlantic Canada, and Atlantic Canada has a huge opportunity right now.
In Alberta, we saw $33 billion in clean energy projects spiked out of ideology. Again, this is because the Conservatives believe the world is flat.
Let us compare this to the Calgary economic development study that predicted 170,000 jobs in Alberta alone from a clean energy economy. I meet with Alberta energy workers all the time. Those workers want a clean energy economy. They know what is happening in big oil.
Big oil has fired 50,000 people in the oil patch in the last 10 years. Suncor got rid of 1,500 jobs this year alone. Rich Kruger is bragging he is going after work; they are moving toward automation. There is nothing in this for workers, but where the opportunities are going to be is in clean energy. We need to move beyond ideology. We need to address the economic issues and opportunities, because this investment is going stateside in a big way.
I talk with people in energy and mining sector all the time. They are saying that they we need to get a tax credit program up quickly, that the Americans are moving forward on that. How fast are the Americans moving? Since Biden moved forward on a clean energy vision, there has been $240 billion in new clean energy manufacturing investment in the United States. The private sector in the United States has over $110 billion in the clean energy manufacturing investments, $70 billion in electric vehicle supply chain and more than $10 billion in solar manufacturing.
Let us just talk about the electric vehicle supply chain for a moment. The Conservatives have been regularly attacking EV investments to keep our auto sector competitive. If we do not play in this field, it goes stateside, and the states are very willing to get this. It will have a huge impact in regions like mine, which is based on mining. They are looking at the opportunities of the base metal and clean energy critical minerals supply chain in which Canada could be a leader. We can do this, but we need to move quickly. We need to get the regulations in place to make these things happen. These are huge projects.
In Scotland, where North Sea oil is continuing to diminish, the huge offshore wind projects in Aberdeen have been transformative. We have not seen that in Canada. Therefore, we need to move on that.
As for what we see in the United States on the Inflation Reduction Act, it is expected that there will be 1.5 million additional jobs over the next decade based on clean-energy jobs. That is a huge transformation. However, here is the other element that is really fascinating. When the Biden plan came into place, there were a lot of skeptics. It was hard to tell whether this would work or not, but he brought a whole-of-government approach, something that the Liberal government has not done. At every level, the U.S. is focused on making this happen. They are saying now that with the Biden investments, the clean-energy takeoff that has happened, they are going to see 50% to 52% below current emissions by 2030.
The environment commissioner says that the Liberal government's promises to get to 40% below is still very much pie in the sky, very unrealistic, because the Liberals have missed every single climate target they have made. This is a problem with the Prime Minister going to COP26, standing on the world stage and making big, bold pronouncements, but not actually having done the work.
For example, when he announced the emissions cap, the Liberals did not talk to anybody here about what that emissions cap would look like. They went to COP26, made an announcement of an emissions cap and then did not follow through. The Liberals are going to have to follow through on the emissions cap now, because what we are seeing from the walk-away of the big oil companies in the Pathways Alliance is the lack of investment in clean tech, the fact that Suncor has walked away and divested itself through its clean energy projects and that it wants to vastly increase oil and gas production. The emissions cap has to happen and the government needs to get serious about this.
There is another interesting element for why we need to ensure that we get these regulations and tax credits and update our act so we can actually compete with the United States. In the United States, American families are projected to save between $27 billion to $38 billion on their electricity bills from 2022 to 2030 relative to a scenario if they did not have that act. The other thing we have learned about clean energy is that it is much cheaper to produce than gas or oil right now. That is why we are seeing this movement, where the International Energy Agency says that we have reached the economic tipping point. Is Canada going to continue to live in the 20th century or is it going to embrace the realities and the crises of the 21st century, not only the realities of a burning planet and destabilized weather systems that we have to address but also the opportunities to dramatically decarbonize?
The other element we need to really focus on is who is going to pay the cost for the huge damages that are being done to our planet right now, the billions in damages to communities and provinces from these unprecedented wildfires. We were so lucky and thankful that we did not lose communities this summer. We have seen a lot of damage, but we realize that we do not have the capacity anymore to deal with the kinds of fires we are seeing that easily could have taken out Kelowna, Yellowknife and communities in my region. We have to start addressing fires in a new and different way.
Growing up in northern Ontario, firefighting in the summer was a summer job before going to college or coming home from college. We need to talk at the national level. My colleague from the Kootenays has put forward a vision of the need to have a national program, but also who will fund this.
We see that Suncor made $70 billion in profits in two years. Those profits should be put into a fund for the damages that are caused by Suncor's actions. Who takes the risk when fossil fuels are burned? Ordinary Canadians and citizens around the world. If the shareholders are to make a profit, the people who really have a stake in this crisis should be able to get some recompense.
The New Democrats will be supporting this bill. We have a number of questions we want clarified at committee, and we will be more than willing to work to make this happen. We need to move quickly and decisively in the face climate crisis, but also for the opportunities we see.
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- Feb/2/23 12:51:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have never seen the level of threat and fear that I see in Timmins and northern communities, which have always been very peaceful, and we know this is directly related to the opioid crisis. I talk to Timmins police, and they say we cannot arrest our way out of this crisis and that they are working in the city to establish a safe site, because this is about keeping people from dying. On top of that, it is about putting supports in place to deal with the homelessness crisis, with opioids and with bail reform, because there are certain offenders who simply cannot be released back into the community again and again to perpetuate violence.
Is my hon. colleague willing to work with us on addressing this issue of bail reform? How are we going to see the government move on the serious issue of the opioid crisis, which is devastating our northern communities?
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- Oct/18/22 1:48:58 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, it is really important that we are talking about a bill that is about dealing with the central crisis of our time, which is climate. I would ask my hon. colleague what she thinks about a government that has made promise after promise to create a clean-energy economy but has missed every single climate target it has set.
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- Jun/16/22 9:49:44 p.m.
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Madam Chair, what is really concerning is that we are dealing with an unprecedented situation where hunger and famine are being used as tools of war. It is really important for Parliament to be looking beyond our own backyard and how we might benefit.
I have lots of farmers in my region who could help, but we are dealing with a much larger international crisis, with Russian disinformation and war crimes. I am asking my colleagues about their willingness to put a larger frame on this. How are we going to deal with this in an age of destabilization, with the failure of globalization and the fact that the modern norms we have trusted in the international community are not helping us deal with a war criminal like Putin?
We need to have a broader, bigger picture. I am asking my colleague if can he articulate where he sees this going in an age of growing instability.
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- Jun/16/22 8:10:53 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, we are in a really disturbing time, because all the myths of globalization have been blown apart. We saw it happen during COVID. Supply chain networks, access to PPE and the ability to supply our own communities were severely hampered. We are now seeing Putin use food as a weapon of war, threatening possible mass hunger. We are also seeing supply chain issues from the climate crisis. I was speaking earlier about the crisis of the Colorado River. It supplies a lot of agricultural support to the southern United States, which feeds world markets.
I want to ask my colleague about the bigger question of whether or not the government is looking at how we deal with supply issues and how we deal with instability in a world where globalization is falling apart and we have war criminals like Putin using food as a hunger weapon. Our old systems are not working. What is the government looking at in terms of a new strategy to get Canada secure and help the world be more secure?
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- Apr/26/22 2:49:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, God help our planet with answers like that from the minister, because the environment commissioner today warned that energy workers are facing a potential economic upheaval as devastating as the collapse of the cod fisheries in the 1990s. Slogans and promises about a so-called “just transition” just will not cut it. The commissioner reminds us that the government has broken every environmental promise it has made, and now it is breaking faith with energy workers and their families.
It is simple. The climate crisis is here. How can the minister stand in the House and continue to show such a dismal record of failure?
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- Mar/3/22 12:05:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I did not know they built the pipeline in 1854 to deal with the food crisis in Ukraine, but again, the Conservatives will tell us anything. We start with this being a big oil and gas issue, but as soon as we poke them, they start talking about children being hungry.
We do not carry nitrogen in pipelines. This is about oil and gas. This is a simple fact. For my hon. colleague who wants to go back to 1854, we can go back throughout history. They were not using pipelines to deliver agricultural support and they still are not. Once again, we see the Conservatives using a humanitarian disaster and a humanitarian crisis to promote the false interests of the oil and gas sector.
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- Mar/1/22 1:46:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the crisis in Ukraine is about democracy. The Conservatives keep using it to claim that we should be pumping oil production, which I think is abusive, but my colleague surprised me when he said there is a crisis in Ukraine and chastised the Bloc for talking about the democratic set-up of the House.
The fight in Ukraine is about democracy. It is about the right of people to make decisions about how their democracy is going to be maintained. I welcome this decision by the Bloc. The Bloc has a right to bring this forward and should not be chided for it. This is a fair conversation.
Why does my hon. colleague think that, just because we are talking about the international crisis, we cannot talk about improving democracy at home?
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- Feb/19/22 10:53:50 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, what we have seen here is a complete, manifest failure of leadership at every level that put us in this situation. The fact is, something that should have been contained through ticketing and normal police activity was allowed to metastasize to such a level that it became an international embarrassment that happened at the Ambassador Bridge.
I ask my colleague this: Will the Liberals agree to our call for a full, complete, independent inquiry into every level of this crisis that has been allowed to happen, and then follow up as well to ensure that these tools that we need to use now will not be misused in future? Where is the oversight committee, so that we can make sure that these are limited tools to be used to get people safe again in the streets of Ottawa, without any further government abuse?
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