“The world is moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy. I want to know if the government checked the financial risks before spending money and giving tax credits to oil and gas.”

“Mr. Chair, I wish the hon. minister a good evening. I will watch my time closely and try to give him adequate time to respond because I hope to have a conversation more than a grilling. I note that the hon. minister referred frequently to the International Energy Agency as authoritative. I wonder if he noted that last month the executive director, Fatih Birol, said that based on the global experience of the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran and the geopolitical instability around fossil fuels, the days of fossil fuels are numbered, that the world is shifting more quickly to renewables and electrifying, and that there would be a steep decline in any demand for oil in the future. I wonder if the various investments that are described as subsidies and investment tax credits in budget 2025 and in the spring economic update have been subjected to a risk assessment of what the Prime Minister once referred to as what happens when we have unburnable carbon and there is no market for it. Have we seen in the finance department a real assessment of the risks of assuming that investing in fossil fuels is a good bet for this country?”

“Canada has a major problem with low economic productivity. Big companies control too much of our telecom, banking, and grocery industries, which hurts competition. We also export too many raw materials instead of finished goods. I want the minister to explain how the government plans to fix this.”

“Mr. Chair, I thank the minister for his very kind comments. I want to turn to a perennial challenge for Canada’s economy and ask where the minister sees his government’s efforts to deal with the productivity crisis going. We are not making any headway since back when David Dodge first declared that we had a crisis in productivity. This is my analysis, and I could be dead wrong on this. Certainly in countries and sectors that are dominated by oligopolies, we have a problem where there is a relatively small number of firms dominating an entire sector. It is pretty well known that Canada’s telecommunications sector, banking sector and the large grocery store chains lack the kind of competitiveness that would lead to better productivity. However, a multifactorial issue for productivity occurs when we export a relatively large proportion as raw material without value added. I wonder if the minister has any thoughts on how Canada can improve productivity or can point to any measures in the existing financial documents of the last year that actually would make a difference in improving our productivity.”

“Past efforts to get Canadian businesses to invest in research and development have failed. Will the government create policies to process our raw materials here at home instead of shipping them out raw?”

“Mr. Chair, I ask the hon. minister if he would not agree with me that we have seen a steady stream of efforts to get Canadians corporations to invest in themselves and reinvest in R and D, and it is a string of failures, as David Dodge pointed out. The tools that we have tried just have not worked, and then people tend to turn on the corporate sector, which it does not appreciate. They say that the sector is not investing in itself and it is its fault. I am just hoping that we can learn lessons from the past and decide that it is time to ensure that we actually use Canadian workers in Canada to further process our raw materials and not ship them out raw. Might the government be thinking of putting in some measures that would encourage that?”

“We are borrowing $25 billion to start a new fund. At the same time, our national pension plan has almost $800 billion, but it invests most of that money outside Canada.”

“Mr. Chair, we are here borrowing $25 billion to start a sovereign wealth fund, but we have $793 billion in assets in the Canada pension plan, managed by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Most of those investments go to the United States. The vast majority of them go to countries other than Canada. We have had some—”