Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, today’s Conservative opposition day motion puts forward a number of points, some of which I will agree with and some of which I will not agree with. I want to focus on the areas of what I think is commonality. I began to suggest this in my last exchange with the hon. member for Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan. Today’s Conservative opposition motion looks to what we could do to create more infrastructure in Canada for producing more Canadian-owned fossil fuel products. I would like to start by trying to keep my remarks to some broad principles. We should do it more often in this place, by the way. We should try to find the areas around which we can agree, and then maybe work to make those things happen. Obviously, I think we do need a consumer carbon price. The Conservatives are not going to agree with me, but then again, neither is the new version of the Liberals. I will take this moment to correct the Liberal member for Winnipeg North, who has said a number of times that this country elected a Prime Minister. I hate to be so persnickety about it, but in the Westminster parliamentary democracy system, we do not elect prime ministers. We elect members of the House under the Westminster parliamentary system of government, within which we are supposed to be equals. Each of us is equal to the others as members of Parliament, and the Prime Minister is to be first among equals, not lord above all. Ever since Pierre Trudeau created the Prime Minister’s Office, there has been a steady, some would say, creep, and every now and then it is a major grab, for more power to the PMO. Let us get back to first principles around resources. One of the things I would hope we could agree on is that Canada’s economy lags in productivity. Would it not be good if we actually addressed that and improved Canada’s productivity? What would do that? Our productivity lags when we export more raw resources. It improves when our balance is towards manufactured products where we have value added. That improves productivity always. As a country, we have been known for a very long time as hewers of wood and drawers of water. If we are going to improve our economic future and economic sovereignty, we need to do two things. First, Canadians need to control our resources. Second, we need to process more here before we export. Those two things would make us a stronger and healthier economy. I submit that neither is happening. There is a great deal of talk about how we are diversifying our market for fossil fuel exports, and I will talk about that. However, I will turn to the basics. We have basically become a branch plant. Earlier today, a parliamentary secretary boasted of money invested in defence contracting to a company, General Dynamics, a wholly owned subsidiary of a U.S. company. That is not a Canadian investment; that is yet another branch plant investment where we are under the control of a transnational corporation based in the U.S., in terms of that particular investment. Basically, after at least decades or a century of lamenting that we do not control our own resources here in this country through resource sovereignty, I certainly agree with the point my hon. colleague made a moment ago that we should have strategic reserves. If we had strategic reserves of our own resources, we could control those resources and protect them from the tariffs that the White House is administering. If we used our own money to buy up, for instance, what we wanted to put in a reserve and sell only to Canadians or allies, we could do that at market prices, for instance for potash, so the producers are properly compensated. Then we would have that reserve and could protect it for Canadians. We could even create funds. Canada savings bonds were advocated by the Green Party in the last election. We had it costed out by the Parliamentary Budget Office. It would work to create a guaranteed return on investment for individual Canadians to invest in our own economy and keep key strategic resources protected from U.S. tariffs. However, we still maintain a rip-and-ship economy. We still export raw logs from British Columbia, when our sawmills are begging for fibre so they could work full shifts, work 24 hours of the day and keep workers employed in mill communities. However, we cannot, because we do not control our own resources. They get shipped out before processing. Even in the great bastion of the free-market economy, the United States, the state of Alaska does not allow unprocessed salmon to be exported. In British Columbia, out it goes. We even have factory trawlers just offshore so our Canadian wild Pacific salmon that is harvested in British Columbia gets processed on Chinese-owned vessels. We have to be very careful, when we go to the grocery store, to make sure we are getting a B.C. product processed in B.C., not one that says in the fine print that it is processed in the People’s Republic of China, on a factory trawler just offshore. We have to stop exporting our raw resources unprocessed. Because of the topic of the opposition debate, I am going to extend the rest of what I am going to say. This applies to all the resources I have talked about so far. We need to improve productivity, get value added and not export before we have gathered up every ounce of economic benefit for Canada. What the Conservatives are saying in the motion is absolutely true. We export fossil fuels raw. We do not have refineries to process our own gasoline, so it goes down to the U.S., and we buy it back. Why is that? Let us just unroll that a bit. In the early 1970s, there were 40 refineries in Canada. Now there are about 17. Why did that go down? It was not red tape. If anything, it was lax enforcement of environmental regulations that caused us to lose so many refineries. The U.S. brought in stricter air quality control standards for refineries that forced U.S. refineries to continually modernize. However, the masters of our refineries were owned by the U.S. and did not really care if ours rusted out. They did not care if we were non-competitive, because we would only be competing with them in the U.S. anyway, so they did not invest or modernize. When the Trans Mountain pipeline was built, the first version of it through the 1950s was bringing actual crude oil from Alberta to the Lower Mainland, to Burnaby, where there were four refineries that processed it. That meant that the people who lived in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia were buying gas for their cars and diesel for their trucks that was processed locally. It cost less. Of course, we now have one refinery left, not four, and what goes through the Trans Mountain pipeline does not go for Canadian use. It gets put in Aframax tankers. The horrible project the Liberals are going to bring is going to destroy Roberts Bank, which is a sensitive zone of an extreme level of importance ecologically. It is going to turn that into the end point for a diluted bitumen pipeline. It will put it into larger tankers and ship it offshore. It is mostly going to go due south. It does not go to Asia. If we want to look at the little bit that goes to Asia of what we are now exporting, I will reference what is in the spring economic statement, which is the most recent update I can find. Of the fossil fuels Canada exports, 90% goes to the United States. That is after the people of Canada paid for the Trans Mountain pipeline to take diluted bitumen out of Burnaby. It mostly goes south. What goes to China, by the way, and this might be of interest to know, is diluted bitumen. Bitumen is a solid tar substance to which a diluent is added to make it flow through a pipeline. That is all. There is no value added at all. When it gets to a refinery, the diluent has to be taken out because it is not part of an improved product. Then it is shipped back to Canada. The only part of the Kinder Morgan pipeline system the Liberals held onto when it was sold was the part that runs from the U.S. north so they could take the diluent out of the diluted mess it gets and ship it back to northern Alberta. However, when bitumen gets to China, in the most recent statistics I can find, roughly between one-third and one-half of what gets to China is solid bitumen, tar, which it uses to pave roads. I imagine the whiz kids in the PMO who are looking for big slogans do not want to call Canada a tar superpower, so they pretend it is an energy superpower when we are shipping out diluted bitumen. Why do we not build refineries here? It is costly. There is a low return on investment. If there were a high return on investment, producers would want to build refineries. However, the policy of the Green Party since 2019 has been that we should process our fossil fuel products here, use only Canadian oil here and not be subservient to U.S. corporations that at this point own most of the oil and gas sector in this country. It should be Canadian.
