Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Oshawa raised an interesting point, and in my opinion it is in order for us to talk about jobs in Oshawa. It might not be a point of order, but it is a point. I felt that he delivered it in a manner that is orderly, so I will address it in my remarks as well.
This Prime Minister has claimed, wrongly, that he was trying to save jobs by interfering in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. I invite members to look back at my earlier remarks. In them I deposited conclusive evidence that there were not 9,000 jobs at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair. That said, there are jobs at stake in other parts of the country for which the Prime Minister has done absolutely nothing to help mitigate the job losses.
Let us start with the auto sector.
The member for Oshawa is probably the greatest champion of the auto sector in the House of Commons. It is very hard to imagine anyone who has done more for that sector than that particular member. He has championed an end to regulatory red tape. He has fought for free trade. He has opposed excessive taxation. He has done all of this in order to make our auto makers as competitive as humanly possible so that our workers can earn a better living and our consumers can have access to even better products.
Now the Prime Minister stands by and witnesses as GM shuts down its operations and as Chrysler announces 1,500 additional job losses. While auto makers are adding jobs in other non-Canadian jurisdictions and the auto industry around the world is on the rise, here at home these companies are heading for the hills, and it is no surprise.
Let us go through the laundry list of all of the damaging policies that the current government has inflicted on our manufacturers.
The Liberals implemented a carbon tax that will make it more expensive for factories to operate here in Canada. It is a job-killing tax. They have added new red tape that contributes to the administrative cost of operating a manufacturing facility on this side of the border. They signed on to a trade agreement with Donald Trump that puts a cap on the future growth of Canada's auto exports to our biggest market—and by the way, they made that concession to Trump without getting anything in return that we did not already have. They have done all of these things, and then they have stood by and watched as these policies have led to their natural consequences: massive job losses in the automotive sector.
It is not just the automotive sector. It is also the energy sector, where tens of thousands of western oil and gas workers and thousands of additional refinery workers in the east have suffered for lack of a pipeline.
When the Prime Minister took office, three of the world's most respected pipeline companies were ready to put shovels in the ground and get building. Trans Canada had energy east, Enbridge had the northern gateway project, and of course Kinder Morgan had Trans Mountain. One by one, all three of those companies have now left. They are all gone. They were, up until the day the Prime Minister took office, ready to deploy billions of dollars in building pipelines with their own money, but not anymore.
Trans Canada backed out after the Prime Minister changed the approval process for that pipeline, adding endless delays and changing the criteria by which the pipeline's approval would be judged to include what is called upstream and downstream emissions. In other words, the pipeline would not only be judged based on the emissions its own operations would cause but by the emissions caused by the production and later consumption of all the oil that would travel through it. No other pipeline in our competitor jurisdictions faces that same kind of test.
Furthermore, the Prime Minister imposes no similar requirement on Saudi, Algerian or Venezuelan oil. When the tankers from those countries arrive at our shores, he does not say, “Wait, you can't come in unless I do an examination of the upstream and downstream emissions of all this oil.” No, he just says, “Come right in.” That oil is converted into gasoline and pumped into Canadian cars and other manufacturing outlets for other uses, even though it has not been subjected to the same strict examination that the Prime Minister was going to impose on the energy east pipeline.
Therefore, that pipeline, which would have brought a million barrels of oil a day from western Canada to eastern refineries, was cancelled.
Then we have the northern gateway pipeline, a project that had the support of 80% of the four first nations communities along the path of the pipeline. They had signed onto partnership agreements that would have rendered them entitled to jobs, training, income for schools and hospitals, and an opportunity to escape poverty once and for all.
Even though those communities had signed those agreements, the Prime Minister was happy to violate that decision and veto the northern gateway pipeline. It is funny. He claims to believe in consultation with indigenous people. How many of the communities along the pathway of the northern gateway pipeline did he consult when he vetoed their right to build that pipeline?
Do we only believe in consultation if that consultation leads to the answer, “No”? It is apparently so. That is why numerous first nations groups are now taking the Liberal government to court for its refusal to properly consult them before killing their pipeline projects. There are great new consortiums of aboriginal business leaders now fighting, tooth and nail, to get these resource projects approved, but the Prime Minister is ignoring his constitutional duty to consult with those first nations, because he does not like what they have to say.
Then, of course, we have the Kinder Morgan pipeline, or Trans Mountain, as it is called. That pipeline should be without any controversy. It does not require any new right of way. It simply twins an existing pipeline to increase the capacity from 300,000 to 900,000 barrels a day, giving Alberta and Saskatchewan producers the ability to meet the Asian market of billions of people.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister added so many delays and was so weak in responding to environmental extremists and foreign interest groups that the company finally said that it had had enough, it was not prepared to do business in Canada anymore and it was leaving.
In order to win the votes of the majority of Canadians who want pipelines, the Prime Minister engaged in a very costly and confusing public relations exercise. He said, “I know, we'll buy the existing pipeline.” It was $4.5 billion for a $2 billion, 60-year-old pipeline. Here is the thing: No one was looking for him to buy a pipeline. He did not need to buy the pipeline. We already had that pipeline. We want to build a pipeline.
Here is the difference between the Prime Minister's approach and ours. He bought a pipeline without building one. We will build one without buying it.
Just like we did in the Harper era where four major pipeline projects were built, including those that shipped oil to tidewater. Literally millions and millions of barrels of oil are currently shipped through pipelines built during the time when the Harper government was in office. We had also approved the northern gateway pipeline, which was about to begin construction when the Prime Minister took office and vetoed its construction altogether.
I want to go back to the Trans Mountain pipeline, a project for which the Prime Minister has now paid $4.5 billion and there is not a single shovel in the ground; not a single inch of pipeline has been built. Here is the irony. We have gone from the Texas company planning to invest $8 billion in Canada to build a pipeline here to the company taking 4.5 billion tax dollars out of Canada to build pipelines in Texas. I congratulate everyone. Our tax dollars are now being used to build pipelines in Texas.
TransCanada is moving more and more of its investment and operations to Texas. In fact, there are rumours it might take the word Canada out of its name altogether. All these companies are taking their operations, their dollars and their jobs and going to Texas. In other words, all our exes are in Texas, so the Prime Minister should hang his hat in Tennessee. I think he might enjoy Nashville.
Nevertheless, the fact is we need to defend our energy workers and their ability to ship their goods to market. They are not looking for welfare. They do not want a more generous government cheque in their mailbox. They do not want corporate welfare for the companies that employ them. They want the government to get out of the way and let them build pipelines. When the Conservative government takes office, it will clear the way for pipelines. The Conservative leader has laid out a very clear plan to make that happen.
First, the Conservatives will cancel Bill C-69, the “no new pipelines” bill. That bill extends further the hearing process to make it uneconomical and risky for proponents to put their money aside for projects in Canada. It requires that companies engage in ill-defined sociological debates about pipelines. For example, they would need to do a gender impact study. As far as I know, pipelines are genderless, but apparently the government believes that everything has to do with sociology and nothing has to do with economics. Liberals want a gender study on each natural resource project.
Most people were scratching their heads to try to understand what this meant, until the Prime Minister explained it to them. He was in South America and he explained that male construction workers bring negative gender impacts to rural communities. In the period after he made these bizarre comments, rural women from across the country started to share the gender impacts they had experienced from having construction workers in their communities. They shared that they bring jobs and pay taxes to fund local schools and hospitals. They support families.
By the way, Mr. Prime Minister should know that not all energy workers are men. There are highly skilled female energy workers whose jobs he has killed by blocking the construction of these key projects.
If he reads a gender impact study of a pipeline, why does he not actually go out to a natural gas or oil development project in western Canada and talk to real people on the ground instead of grandstanding at some fancy international conference in South America, showing off his spectacularly colourful and radiant socks as he lectures the world on the negative gender impacts of construction workers? These workers do important work for our economy and our country. There is dignity in what they do and they deserve our respect.
They will get our respect when the Conservative government forms office.
First, we will scrap Bill C-69, the no new pipelines bill.
Second, our Conservative leader has announced that he will invoke subsection 92(10) of the British North America Act to declare pipeline projects to be to the general advantage of Canada.
This a power that our founding fathers created in our Constitution for the federal government in the case of any interprovincial construction project. For example, if a rail project or a pipeline or any other project travels over provincial boundaries, then all of the approvals for that project can be uploaded to the federal government under subsection 92(10) of the Constitution. In this way the prime minister and his executive branch can set up the approval process that prevents parochial, not-in-my-backyard local politicians from blocking the construction of pipelines.
We understand that in a federation, it is impossible to have the free flow of goods, services and people if individual municipal or provincial decision-makers are able to block those projects anywhere along the line.
Imagine if we allowed just any municipality to say that it was going to ban the passage of a railway through its community and would not allow railways there. Well, I guarantee that not a single railway would traverse our country. It would be impossible. That is why the federal government is exclusively responsible for railways.
It should be the same with pipelines. All it takes is a prime minister who has the courage to make it so by invoking subsection 92(10) of the Constitution that our founding fathers provided to us when they brought about Confederation over a century and a half ago.
Third, we will place strict time limits on the hearings so that we will not have endless processes that go nowhere. We will signal to businesses from around the world that they have a particular and confined time period during which they will get either a yes or a no. Once they have that answer, they can proceed. No business is going to tie up $10 billion or $15 billion for five, six or seven years when they can go to jurisdictions almost anywhere else on the planet and build their projects within less than two years, or at least start them. Therefore, the Conservative leader will bring in strict time limits on the hearings.
Fourth, the Conservative leader has announced that his plan for pipelines will ban foreign money and foreign interests from the hearings on these projects.
We know why these groups want to block the construction of pipelines. It is in their naked self-interest to keep ripping off Canadians by banning us from building pipelines and getting our product to market. It is clear why Saudi, Algerian, Venezuelan and other interests would want to ban us from getting western oil to eastern refineries. That guarantees that they can continue to corner the market for our very large refineries in the eastern part of the country.
Furthermore, it is clear why American oil companies would like to see us fail to build pipelines. After all, absent pipelines to tidewater, Canada is forced to export 99% of its oil to the United States of America at massive discounts, which have equalled, in some cases, more than 50% below world prices. We sell them the product for $15, and they can resell it for $55 or $60. No wonder these American oil interests have funded phony environmental groups to obstruct and block the construction of Canadian pipelines here in Canada.
The Leader of the Opposition's plan is to ensure that only those who have either specific and unique expertise related to the project or who are resident on or near the project's construction itself will appear at hearings. People will not be able to just claim esoteric interest in pipelines and environmental policy and then burn up hours upon hours of hearing time before the National Energy Board under this proposed change. Instead, the studies will focus very specifically on the expertise of people who know what they are talking about with respect to the particular project and the people who live along the affected path. That is it.
All of this can and will be done while carrying out our moral and constitutional obligation to consult with first nations people, who are increasingly the most passionate proponents of resource development across the country. We will no longer allow the hard left in this country to stigmatize and stereotype first nations people as monolithically opposed to resource development.
In fact, the resources for which we propose to allow development are, in many cases, on the property of the first nations themselves. They are the owners, and therefore they should have the harvesting rights in many of these particular projects. That is why we will streamline the approval process to get resource projects built. In the process, we will lift thousands of first nations people out of desperate poverty and into great upward mobility with jobs, schools and hospitals paid for through revenues generated from their communities.
That is—
