Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to have the opportunity to rise in debate today on the opposition day motion, and I have the great honour of splitting my time with the terrific MP for Vancouver Kingsway. I want to start by saying that this is a thoughtful motion. I will be voting against it, but I do think it is important to have Canadians use this moment as a teachable moment. There is no question that the price of fossil fuels, particularly gasoline, throughout North America and around the world, has felt the shock created by Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegally bombing Iran. It had an immediate effect on gas prices around the world. Yes, it is worth Canadians asking, given that has had a global impact, how come gas prices are higher in Canada. As such, I want to dig into that a bit. I want to state right off the top, and we often fail to say this, even as Greens, but we need to say it, that the cheapest way to move people around in vehicles and the cheapest way to power those vehicles is to move 100% off fossil fuels. I want to say very quickly, before friends anywhere get angry with me, that this is not a useful choice if it is not there for them. Let me give a contrast. In Germany, pensioners can hang solar panels off their balconies in urban places, and they have the capacity to safely plug their home appliances into the solar panel, just as friends of mine in the Cobble Hill area in British Columbia have solar panels on their roof and plug their car into their house. This means that the source of energy is abundant, renewable and essentially free once everything is in place. These are larger discussions to have, but the question that I want to focus on now is the one before us from the Conservative Party: Why is there a price differential, even with the international volatility caused by war and mistakes? To say they were mistakes is to be charitable toward the U.S. White House. To say they were monstrously reckless decisions is more accurate. Why is there this price differential? To get into this, I have to drill down a bit, no pun intended. When the Green Party issued our climate policy in 2019, called “Mission: Possible”, we made the commitment, which I think very few Canadians ever heard of, that we should, as we ramp down on our dependence on fossil fuels in Canada, only use Canadian fossil fuels in this country and absolutely bring imports from other countries to zero. There is a logic to this, but let us look at the current situation. One of the reasons that fossil fuel prices are higher for Canadians who want to put gas in the tank is that, of the fossil fuels we produce in this country, about 75% of them are exported, and the bulk of that by far, 75% of what we export, or about 60% of total, is exported unprocessed raw. I became more aware of this back in 2016. I was an intervenor in the National Energy Board review of what was then the Kinder Morgan pipeline project, and the largest union representing workers in the oil sands, Unifor, was also intervening against the pipeline project. Why would the largest union in the oil sands be against the pipeline project? They pointed out the obvious. The pipeline was then idiotically bought and built by Canada at a cost of $36 billion of public funds. However, the pipeline project was then and is now, as it operates, transporting something that is a solid, low-value form of fossil fuel called bitumen, which is diluted with enough fossil fuel condensates that it can flow through a pipeline. Unprocessed raw gets shipped out of Canada to go to refineries in other countries to be upgraded to synthetic crude, and from there it goes to refineries elsewhere. Focusing on our refinery capacity, in the 1970s, Canada had about 40 refineries. One of the things that the Unifor brief pointed out to the National Energy Board is that we have lost a huge amount of our refinery capacity. It is now down to, in 2026, about 14 to 16 refineries, depending on how one counts. That is down from 40 refineries. Our capacity to take a domestic product, refine it and use it here has been substantially structurally reduced. Unifor told the National Energy Board that it did not want an export pipeline built because it felt it would inevitably lead to the closure of refineries in the Lower Mainland of B.C. This is because the product that those refineries might want to refine was moving offshore before there was any value added, as is the case whenever we ship out raw materials. We do this a lot in Canada with shippers, hewers of wood and drawers of water. Because we ship out raw logs, the sawmills in Canada cannot operate at full capacity. We ship out raw bitumen, and people could have had jobs in refineries if we had kept up the capacity in our refineries and if we had built upgraders to go with the refineries so that Canadian bitumen could be used in Canadian gas tanks without being shipped out of the country first. This is a big problem. This affects the price of gas in Canada. We are the fifth largest producer of fossil fuels in the world. We export most of it by far, and we import product from other countries. That is quite astonishing. Why do we do that? Well, I think it is still the mindset of hewers of wood and drawers of water, and because we are failing to listen to smart folks in the refinery business and in the workforces who have been looking at why we do not want to have value added to our refining capacity and be able to say that what we are using in our tanks, as long as we are still using the internal combustion engine, comes from Canada, because this is a Canadian product. It does make it more expensive, as we can imagine, to ship it out of the port in Burnaby, ship it overseas, and, in some cases, down to refineries in Washington state, only for British Columbians to buy it back from refineries in Washington state. Despite the fact that we have been told some fairy tales over the years, like if we had a pipeline from British Columbia to eastern Canada or from Alberta to New Brunswick, the Irving refinery in New Brunswick could process that and it would be good and we could we use it domestically, the reality is that the Irving refinery is still the only refinery in Canada that imports Saudi oil. The Irving refinery does not have an upgrader to take solid bitumen, turn it into synthetic crude and then refine it. These are some of the basic structural impediments to Canada getting maximum workforce benefit and maximum domestic economic benefit. We could get more benefit and more jobs in Canada while reducing our overall production of fossil fuels, which we primarily export to the United States. It is still, on the order, about 90% of our exports that go to the United States. One little curious point people might find amusing as a factoid, but that is rather despairing, is the idea that there was some great benefit coming to Canada by getting our bitumen to tidewater. In fact, a great deal of what gets shipped out of the port of Burnaby towards China, because it is still a solid thing, is a lot like tar. A lot of what we ship to China gets used to pave roads because it is a lot like tar. If we wanted to have a domestic industry that would improve our productivity measurements as an economy, we would not be shipping out raw product. Every time we increase the relative proportion of value-added product before shipping it out of the country, we improve our overall economic indicators. To that, I will only add that I am concerned about getting rid of the excise tax on our fuel, which we are doing with the spring economic statement, Bill C-30. Stephen Harper’s made the wise decision that the excise gas tax would be forever dedicated to public transit in urban areas. The Liberals have now ditched that plan and are giving a short-term, and I think insufficient, tax break to Canadians because it ends on Labour Day. For all of that, the one sure thing is that nothing is going to hurt our economy like the climate crisis, which is barrelling towards us. Nothing is going to damage our economy as much as the government is currently doing by slashing carbon and climate control programs in order to boost what it thinks will turn into economic growth.
