Elizabeth May

“I agree with the previous speaker. These bills hurt environmental laws and Indigenous rights. There is no clear definition of what counts as a project or region of national interest. I want to hear the member's thoughts on that.”

“Madam Speaker, I completely agree with the speech from the member for Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj. Bill C-39, and also part of the first Bill C-5, destroyed environmental laws and indigenous rights. There is currently no definition of what constitutes a region of national interest or a project of national interest. Does my colleague have any comment about that?”

“Many large projects help American companies and send Canadian products to the U.S. I want to know if the government checks this before it announces these projects.”

“Mr. Speaker, so many of these large projects actually benefit U.S. companies and continue to send Canadian products to the U.S. I am wondering if there is any screen or filter of which the member is aware within government that ensures that before projects of national interest are announced, there is an analysis of this in advance.”

“The Liberals support these pipeline projects without asking if they make financial sense. We already wasted $34 billion on a pipeline that does not make enough money to pay the interest on its debt. Experts say other countries do not even want our bitumen, so we should not spend public money on another one.”

“Madam Speaker, here is the thing. All the statements being made by Liberal members about these projects’ being so wonderful are premised on the idea that we do not ask questions such as how a particular project diversifies markets. So far, we have wasted $34 billion. The previous government, under Justin Trudeau and former finance minister Bill Morneau, spent $34 billion to build a pipeline, which still has massive objections, across the landscape, but it still has not made enough money in any given year to pay the interest on the debt Canadians took on to build it. Now, as we are proposing a second one, also built with public money, experts in financial markets are saying there really is not a market for bitumen in other countries, though we are presuming there is one when we do not have any evidence for it.”

“I disagree with the member about why this happened. Towns in Manitoba tried to ban mega barns because they hurt local farmers and made communities worse to live in. A former NDP premier took away their power to stop those barns.”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to reflect on what the member said. That is the situation today. I am looking at how this evolved, and I recall how many municipalities, local governments, across Manitoba passed bylaws to stop having mega barns put in their communities, making life less livable and hurting local farmers. They were stopped by a draconian law from former NDP premier Gary Doer, who took away the right of local municipalities to ban these productions in their communities.”

“Past government policies created huge hog farms in Manitoba to use up extra grain. Most of these pigs are shipped to the United States instead of feeding Canadians. These hog farms are now polluting and destroying Lake Winnipeg.”

“Mr. Speaker, I did not expect to be speaking to the issue of pork in Manitoba, but I cannot help myself in responding to the hon. parliamentary secretary. The history there is fascinating. We should learn the lessons. It was Pierre Trudeau who killed the Crow rate, which made it harder for prairie farmers to ship out their grain. That led to a glut of grain on the Prairies, which meant asking, “What do we do with all of this grain?” They put it in mega hog barns, with thousands of sows in the same barn, and fed them the grain, because if they could not ship the grain out, they could ship the hogs out. Where did they go? They are not local food security for Manitoba. Only 10% are consumed in Canada. Most are shipped out. Millions of live pigs are shipped to the United States, bringing us back to the same argument we are making here. They are not processed in Canada. Live pigs are sent to Iowa, where they are fattened up, fed lots of drugs and slaughtered. Meanwhile, the hog barns have so contaminated Lake Winnipeg that it is dying.”

“Billions of dollars in government subsidies are going to gas projects owned by foreign companies, not Canadian ones. I want the leader of the official opposition to tell us if that bothers him.”

“Mr. Speaker, what a pleasure for me, as the leader of the Green Party of Canada, to be able to put a question to the leader of the official opposition. It is rare that we have this chance leader to leader. I wonder if the member would like to comment on the fact that so many billions of dollars of subsidies are going to projects that are primarily based in the United States. For instance, we hear a lot about Ksi Lisims’ LNG project that will be a floating LNG terminal. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western LNG, which is, of course, Texas-owned and -based. The so-called LNG Canada operation is 40% Shell oil. Other than Shell, the next owners are Petronas from Malaysia, PetroChina and Korea’s state-owned gas company. There is nothing Canadian about it, except the name. Does this bother the leader of the official opposition?”

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“Atlantic Canadian refineries cannot process raw oil from the west, and they have no plans to change that. Why should we ship this oil to the east coast just to send it to the United States on tankers?”

“Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend from Foothills mentioned that the east-west pipeline was cancelled, but part of the problem there relates to this debate today, which is the ability of Canadian refineries to process bitumen. None of the refineries in Atlantic Canada could have done that. The Irving Oil refinery in Saint John had no plans then, nor does it have plans now, to add an upgrader. On our capacity to process Canadian raw resources here, would the member not agree with me that there is no point in shipping diluted bitumen to the east coast of Canada only to put it in tankers to go to the United States?”

“American companies own most of Canada's oil industry. I want the former minister to tell me if he agrees that our energy policy should support Canadian companies instead.”

“Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to put a question to my esteemed colleague, the former minister. My question relates specifically to the oil industry. I have previously given a speech about the ownership of the fossil fuel sector in Canada, which is largely controlled by American interests. I would like to ask the former minister whether he agrees with me that we would be better off shifting our energy policy toward Canadian industries.”

In response to a question from Kevin Lamoureux

“Canada does not act like it owns its own oil and gas. Most of our oil and gas companies are owned by foreign interests, and our government just serves them instead of controlling our own resources.”

“Mr. Speaker, nothing that has been talked about in the last 18 months, two years or five years has had anything to do with Canada’s ownership of our own resources. We would have to go back to Peter Lougheed to find a leader who understood the principles of how to deal with a fossil fuel resource and how to control it. His first rule was to think like an owner. We do not. We think like serfs: What can we do to better serve the masters of the universe who own the oil and gas industry globally? They own Canada’s oil and gas industry, but we pretend it is Canadian. I am going to reference Gord Laxer’s 2021 report titled “Posing as Canadian”. Ninety-eight per cent of the companies in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers are using—”

In response to a question from Fraser Tolmie

“Food and supply problems in my riding are caused by bad rail and shipping management, not high fuel prices. The rail companies fail to plan for the grain harvest each year. This bad planning drives up prices and hurts our food supply.”

“Mr. Speaker, one of the biggest irritants in my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands is the presence of free parking for large bulk carriers in what are called anchorages. The port of Vancouver just takes ships that are partially filled and sends them to wait. As the member will know, the grain farmers suffer from the poor transportation lengths to get prairie grain shipped to the port of Vancouver and efficiently sent to their buyers. It has gotten worse since we got rid of the wheat board, but one thing that happens is that CN and CP are not prepared. They seem not to know that, every fall, there is going to be a harvest of grain and that they should be prepared for it. There is CN, where the largest shareholders are Bill and Melinda Gates. CP’s full name is the Canadian Pacific Kansas City railway. They are not very interested in whether Canadian farmers get their grain to market. My constituents are very worried about it. One time, we had to ship grain from the Prairies by truck. The price went way up. We almost ran out of feed for livestock on Vancouver Island because we have an extremely bad supply chain. It has nothing to do with price of diesel. It is just bad planning and bad management.”

In response to a question from Marilyn Gladu

“Small modular nuclear reactors do not work commercially anywhere in the industrialized world yet. They are too expensive and have too many problems. If we want cheap and reliable power quickly, we should build wind and solar power with battery backup instead.”

“Mr. Speaker, I love agreeing with the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong. Unfortunately, this will not be one of those occasions. What we do not have, as she described it, is “our” small modular reactors. There is not one in commercial operation anywhere in the industrialized world. There may be one in China, but it is hard to verify. It is a future technology with lots of issues attached to it, including very high expense. If we want the cheapest, most reliable electricity, the very fastest we can get it, we would be rolling out solar and wind as fast as we could, with battery storage backup.”

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“We should agree on what is best for Canada: we need to process our own resources here instead of shipping them out raw. Exporting raw oil, logs, and fish hurts our economy and sends good jobs out of the country. Canada needs to control its own resources and refine its own oil.”

“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.”

“I want to ask the member if we can agree on one thing. Canada should process its own raw materials so we can keep the extra jobs here.”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking the hon. member for Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan for splitting his time with me. Would he not agree there might be some fundamental principles on which we could all agree that we think that in Canada we should process raw materials before shipping them out and capturing the value-added jobs here?”

“The new pipeline moves diluted bitumen, not regular oil that can go straight to a refinery. Diluted bitumen is more dangerous. The government needs to be honest and describe this project accurately.”

“Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the parliamentary secretary is aware that when he refers to the new pipeline, now rebranded as Pacific link, and says it is moving Canadian oil, that it is not actually moving Canadian oil. The project description from the Government of Alberta correctly describes the project as moving diluted bitumen. “Canadian oil” suggests it might be crude that could go straight to a refinery, which this cannot. It is a more hazardous project, being diluted bitumen. Does the government not think it is important to correctly describe a project that it thinks is in the national interest?”