Jacob Mantle

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Mr. Speaker, I am rising to follow up on a question that I posed to the Minister of Natural Resources not that long ago about the Liberal government’s failure to remove antidevelopment laws from our oil and gas industry that are hindering our ability to become, in the government’s own words, an energy superpower. We still have, as I pointed out to the minister, a west coast shipping ban. We still have an industrial carbon tax. CEOs have come out and said that Canada is a tough place to invest in this industry because of these issues. Energy security is fundamentally a geographic issue. Members can think about the news and the Strait of Hormuz, which is a geographic issue. One place that does not have a geographic issue is the Pacific west coast. Before TMX, exports of Canadian crude to Asia were basically negligible. Today, exports of Canadian crude are reaching Asian markets in significant amounts. In fact, the Asia Pacific Foundation estimates that it is over $500 million per month in exports, which is half a billion dollars of new Canadian exports, because of one pipeline. That is not the only issue. The barrier is not just getting exports to tidewater. That is only part of the challenge. Canadian crude is a distinctive type of heavy crude. Refineries around the world cannot always switch from one blend of crude oil to another without investments in upgrading equipment, storage, transportation, processing and refining infrastructure. Canada has another barrier that it has put in front of our oil and gas industry, one barrier that the Liberals are entirely responsible for, because Canada has chosen to restrict one of the tools that could be used to develop these new Asian markets. When the Prime Minister was the UN envoy for climate action and the financial adviser at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP, or COP26 to be specific, in Glasgow, countries around the world, including Canada, signed what is called the Glasgow statement. The Glasgow statement, among many other things, forced countries to ban their export promotion agencies from supporting new investments in oil and gas development. Therefore, as an agency of the Government of Canada, Export Development Canada had to adhere to the Glasgow statement. If we go on their website, they have a policy from 2023, when the government signed on to the Glasgow statement, saying that they are now going to follow this and prohibit investment in those industries. That means that Export Development Canada and other Canadian export promotion agencies can no longer fund or invest in the kind of infrastructure that would facilitate the export of Canadian crude oil, in particular, to Asian markets. My question to the parliamentary secretary is whether the government will repeal that prohibition so that Canadian export agencies can once again support strategic international infrastructure that expands markets for Canadian industry to, in its own words, make Canada an energy superpower.