Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will try to be concise and specific.
I love live performances, and we're being treated to quite a spectacle today. Quite a few things about this spectacle surprise me. We just saw my Liberal colleague get all worked up about the importance of climate change, yet his is the party that bought a $34-billion pipeline to produce and export more oil. This government is the one trying to convince us that it sees climate change as a priority.
I don't really see vegetarians owning butcher shops. But that is how this government operates. It says it's green. It says it's fighting climate change. Then it goes and spends our money, our taxes, on a $34-billion pipeline to produce more oil, pollute more and export that oil outside Canada.
Both parties are engaging in some very partisan speechifying. They're politicizing this committee, and that makes me sad.
My Conservative colleagues seem to be concerned about students' cost of living. On Tuesday, March 19, 2024, there was a multi-party press conference about increasing federal student funding. That funding hasn't gone up at all in 20 years.
The Bloc Québécois, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party were at that press conference. We were there, along with the Union étudiante du Québec, the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars, Support Our Science and the Ottawa Science Policy Network.
The only party not there was the Conservative Party of Canada. They want power, but they don't think it's important to increase scholarship amounts at all, even though that funding has been stagnant for 20 years. If anyone understands the importance of taxes, it's the Conservatives, but they also need to understand what inflation is. They don't care that this funding hasn't gone up in 20 years.
Here they are, tying themselves in knots to convince us that they care about food insecurity and the cost of living for students, all the while blaming the carbon tax. They're contradicting themselves, and they cannot be trusted to support scientific research. They most certainly cannot be trusted to support students whose scholarships, as I said, have not increased at all in the past 20 years.
That's all I have to say, Mr. Chair.