Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I agree wholeheartedly with what Mr. Allen said as far as the NEB's role is concerned, and I won't go through that again, but I just want to make a few fairly basic points.
Looking around the table, I believe I'm the only member of Parliament from a province that's directly going to have these pipelines there, from the prairies, one of the oil-producing regions of the country. I just want to make that point, because this is an issue of regional sensitivity.
Western Canada is the sedimentary basin, and now the oil sands in Fort McMurray have been an extraordinary source of national wealth for our country. Many of the equalization transfers to the eastern Canadian provinces come directly because of the oil wealth of the prairies. That's where it comes from; it's what pays for people's social and health care, day care programs, you name it. That extra money that provides just that much more, to do just that much more, in the have-not provinces tends to come partially from Ontario's manufacturing wealth, but partially from oil.
So we should understand that what we're dealing with here is tampering with the regional economic viability of one region--that's what we're talking about here--but that region has helped to fund and generously pay for the whole country. I think everyone should remember that when we're talking about this.
What's being put out by the advocates who want to review and stop this is that it's going to cost Canada jobs. It's going to cost Alberta and Saskatchewan jobs. The chair is also from the region, and he knows this as well as I do: where in the world are we going to get the workers?
The unemployment rate in Alberta is 3.5%. It is only that high—and I use the word “high” for an unemployment rate of 3.5%--because they have figured out creative ways to get everyone over the age 15 working and pulled into the labour force, because they have thousands of people flying in from the United States, from Newfoundland, from overseas. Where are we going to find these supposedly 18,000 people to work with?
In my riding, I was talking to construction companies. They can't get basements dug in time. The mayor of my city wants to put up another 700 lots. He wanted to do it this spring. We can't do it because we're so short of contractors to pave.
So we're not “protecting” jobs if we ask this to be reversed in western Canada. We just can't literally find those people. If this were Windsor, with an unemployment rate of 9%, we might have a case.
Let's put it on the table that this is not about protecting jobs in western Canada. There are other agendas here at play. I want that to be remembered.
I also want it remembered...to talk about and make sure the provinces involved have their say. If this were done on a Hydro-Québec project, I'm pretty sure I would know how the members from the province of Quebec would react. They would be fairly negative, because they want to defend what they provincially want.
Western Canada needs to have these pipelines to keep expanding. I would love to have the upgraders built, but it's just not that possible or feasible at this point. I'd love every upgrader to be built continuously in the area, but after the NEB has spent its two years going through this project, with many representations from all the players involved, I don't see how we can urge the cabinet to do it. If there is some major national security issue or something like that, I'm sure the cabinet will say it, but those are two reasons for us not to do it.
In closing, the provinces and the regions should be respected on this. We don't have an unemployment problem in the prairies, we have a massive labour shortage. Unless we empty the provinces of Quebec, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia—and we are doing that currently—we are not going to be able to fill those jobs in western Canada. A lot of those people naturally want to stay in their home areas and don't want to work in our area, because they have great homes where they come from. So it's very difficult to get it fulfilled.
Those are a couple of the reasons why I am particularly opposed to this motion, as much as I would like to see all the upgraders and refineries built in western Canada that could possibly be built.