- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Apr/15/24 1:46:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is very telling that no Conservative would stand up on a point of order and say that they had actually defended Alberta farmers during the catastrophic drought, because they have not, so they have to change the subject.
The reason I bring this up is—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- 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, it is always such a great honour to rise for the great communities of Timmins—James Bay. Talking about agriculture is extremely important in a region so dependent on the agricultural families in beef, canola, rye and dairy. There is such great pride to see young farmers coming in to build up our region from the traditional lands in Temiskaming all the way up through emerging lands in Cochrane, Val Gagné and Matheson.
It is really important to point out in this discussion today, happening a week after the latest IPCC report, what we are facing globally in terms of the climate crisis. I know it makes my Conservative colleagues very uncomfortable when we talk about climate reality, because it is something they pretend does not exist. However, with respect to vulnerabilities on the planet right now, there is no industry more vulnerable than agriculture, because those businesses are dependent on weather and the vagaries of weather and what is happening with growing fires, storms, droughts and floods. These have caused enormous amounts of damage. One has only to look at British Columbia, which, in 2021 suffered $17 billion in damages from the climate storms, the wildfires, the droughts and severe flooding. Agriculture took severe losses from all that.
Therefore, finding ways for agriculture to be part of the conversation about sustainability is fundamental because it is also recognizing that farmers and the agricultural community are thinking about sustainability all the time. It is part of the fundamentals of their business.
In Canada, about 250,000 farmers look after and manage about 68 million hectares of land. Through these farmers, over the last 20 years, we have seen incredible improvements in sustainability, soil management practices for crops and grazing, and rising standards that the farmers have pushed for in terms of water management. Furthermore, since 2000, Canada's agricultural soils have been sequestering more carbon than was emitted. That is the result of the sustainability commitments made by the farming community.
However, we have to look at it in a larger context because it has been reported that, since the 1960s, agricultural yields around the world are 21% lower than they would have been if we had not been dealing with erratic temperatures and the increase of over 1.1°C around the world. Even as we are working harder for sustainability, we are losing ground.
It needs to be said that the inputs in agriculture, including fuel inputs and the need for fertilizer, are all fundamental costs that are borne by the farming community and individual farm families. We also know there are significant drivers in some areas in terms of climate risk. We can look at nitrogen, for example. We know that, if there is better management of nitrogen, the losses in the environment will be only a fraction of what they are now. The latest study said that there could be a $500-billion societal benefit for food supply and human health if we start to put in mitigation measures on nitrogen, which would cost in the area of $20 billion.
Therefore, my question for the Conservatives, who only ever go on carbon tax and nothing else with a vision for dealing with the climate crisis, is this: Where is the commitment for investments in agriculture to deal with nitrogen mitigation?
My colleagues in the Liberal Party are more than willing to give billions of dollars to big oil, but farmers have to deal with the costs themselves. Therefore, nitrogen is something we have to talk about. It is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Runoffs from nitrogen are causing algae blooms that have created dead zones in waterways. We all know this needs to be addressed, so let us start looking at investments in that.
In terms of the input costs for fuel, they are extraordinary costs that are borne by farmers. We need to start looking at how we can move toward more sustainability so that Canada's agricultural community will truly be the world leader.
The measure that is being brought forward is about a carve-out provision to ensure that the fuels that are being used are not covered by the carbon tax, and I think that is a reasonable solution. However, the Conservatives only have the one tool. They have one hammer, which is the carbon tax, and they pound on the table all the time. When I talk with farmers, they say they are looking at long-term ways they can make their farming operations sustainable with regard to the climate commitments that Canada and the world are looking at for the reduction of fossil fuels. They know that the more we burn, the more damage it is going to do to the land in the long term.
I look at the issue of tractors and diesel. There is the potential, if the federal government was willing to work with partners, to invest in technologies so that we could not only move more to batteries but also allow for automation because we cannot find workers on many of the farms to sustain what is happening.
I have heard Conservatives tell me that we cannot use batteries in diesel tractors. Have they ever been to a mine? There are 70-tonne trucks running underground that have moved from diesel to clean energy sources. What we are not seeing is a vision to support farming to be able to do that, because right now these costs are borne by farmers. Farmers are not in a position to shift their tractors to batteries. Financially, it is not possible. However, for example, with carbon capture, big oil companies are making record profits, but they are still coming for handouts and they are still expecting that the people of Canada will cover those costs.
To me, this is a fair question: Why are we willing to invest billions in the oil sector, which is already hugely profitable, when we are not willing to ask farming communities how we could start to move toward sustainability, and how we could remove our dependence on diesel and other fuels? That is a conversation we need to have, and it raises questions about the grid. We do not have a grid in rural Canada that could even carry electrification through batteries and other sources to get to farms. Farms are on their own.
We have the one tool before us right now. We need to deal with the high input costs of farming, of drying grain and of sustaining barns. These are big operations, and they are taking heavy amounts of cost in inputs. They cannot pass those on to the consumers. That is the reality. These are mostly family-run farm operations that have limits in terms of how much of the cost they can accept.
I am more than willing to support this motion to get to committee so we can look at it. However, I am urging my colleagues, in light of the latest IPCC report, to get serious about addressing issues such as nitrogen, which is much more of a planet killer than carbon dioxide. We need to be looking to find the alternatives for fuels such as diesel.
If we are going to insist that every other sector of the economy shifts, then we need to be showing the shift in agriculture. Agriculture is a fundamental of sustainability. Agriculture is the area that takes the biggest hit, but the problem is that agriculture bears the costs of the transition, and agriculture bears the cost of the damage that is done to the economy by other sectors that do not do their part.
I would urge my colleagues from all parties to work together to put a vision forward with sustainability measures, with support and with conversation with agriculture. It is the farmers who understand environment better than anyone else, it is the farmers who understand how to run their operations, and it is the farmers who will have the solutions, ultimately, to make farming sustainable in the 21st century so that the world is sustainable in the 21st century.
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