Madam Speaker, my regards to you and all our dedicated colleagues who are here in the House with us.
I very much like being surprised. Today, I was very excited because we knew there was going to be a Conservative opposition day. Yesterday, I scratched my head and wondered what they would talk about. I came up with three options: taxes, taxes and maybe taxes. In the end, I was wrong.
The Conservatives are still talking about the carbon tax. So I will make it easier for me by keeping seven or eight speeches on file. When they have an opposition day, I will take out one of the speeches and that should cover it.
This time, however, they invented a tax. They are talking about the carbon tax. This tax exists; that is right, it is not a conspiracy. They are saying that there are regulations on biofuels and that that, too, is a tax. Anyone who took first year economics knows the difference between a tax and a regulation because there is always a chapter called “taxation versus regulation”. We teach the very young that it is not the same thing. The Conservatives' speeches are so made up that they made up a tax.
I wanted to take the time to thank them for their imagination. They made me laugh. Obviously, when we look at the motion, we see that the goal is to feed misinformation to the public. I showed how absurd that is. The Conservatives oppose any suggestion, no matter what it may be, that could actually have a positive effect on the environment and the fight against climate change. The reason is simple. It goes against the interests of the oil industry, and the two are not often reconcilable.
The Conservatives do not want us to put corn oil in gas. Basically, that is what they are telling us. Before, they were saying that Canada was importing oil from dictatorships. They said that we needed ethical oil and that we should no longer import oil from Saudi Arabia and Algeria because that was bad. Now, in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, we almost exclusively use North American oil. However, the government wants to take it one step further. It wants to set a standard so that fuel contains fewer petroleum products and more material from renewable sources. However, the Conservatives are against that because they do not want anything mixed into their oil. The worst part is that they do not even realize that the people who will be asked to process the grains to make the ethanol that goes into the fuel are business owners in their own ridings and their provinces.
Having said that, there are complaints about these types of regulations. There is truth to that. It is true that the environmental impacts of biofuels on the whole are modest because we have to grow the grain, use the raw material, use agricultural land, process the grain to produce, for example, ethanol. There are other formulations. Some countries make biofuel with palm oil, and so forth. The fact is that biofuels include elements that are renewable but that still pollute. This reminds us of the importance of reducing our dependence on fuel, whether or not it contains hydrocarbons. The impact of these regulations will be modest.
The Conservatives are right about the Parliamentary Budget Officers' comments. They are right sometimes. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that this policy could be regressive. Why? It is because producing biofuels is expensive. At first, to comply with the standards, fuel distributors will have to produce these fuels, develop the infrastructure and purchase these biofuels. There will be an impact on the price at the pump. Several projections demonstrate that the cost will be passed on to consumers.
They are looking at me. We are talking about a tax that will be passed on to consumers. Quite surprising, is it not? I am going to play the role of teacher today. It is Thursday evening and we are among friends. An economics course always teaches methods for assessing the effect a tax, a production cost increase, will have on consumers. Sometimes increased production costs, as is the case with ethanol, are fully passed on, as in 100%. Sometimes it is 75%. It is also possible that producers do not pass it on to consumers at all. There are reasons for that. The tax or increased production cost attributable to these regulations is passed on to consumers when they have no choice but to buy the product, when there is no other option. For example, if I decide to tax carrots but not turnips, those who like both will buy more turnips.
In that case, producers will not be able to pass the tax on to consumers. However, in the case of oil, in some provinces, dependence is so high that consumers will have to pay the full tax.
I have the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report in front of me. It is odd, but the provinces where the tax is hurting the most are Newfoundland and Labrador, Alberta and Saskatchewan. These are the places that have had successive Conservative governments, where few alternative sources have been developed, where the economy is dependent on the oil industry and where people are generally extremely dependent on the oil industry.
If we do not want these standards to drive up consumer prices, or if we want it to be harder to pass these taxes on to consumers, there are solutions. We can increase public transit, finance infrastructure, electrify transportation and make the power grid more environmentally friendly. Of course, if we power electric cars with energy made from coal or oil, it will not do much good. What we can do is change behaviours. There are plenty of ways to offer consumers alternative solutions.
The Conservatives told us today that people would no longer be able to live because of the cost. When we look at the report of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, we see that provinces where there is less of an impact on consumers and households are the provinces where more alternatives have been developed. They are also the provinces that are less dependent on oil. We are talking here about Quebec and, to a lesser extent, Ontario and so on.
This shows one thing. We have provinces where, because of Conservative way of thinking, they are chasing their tails, in the sense that they are not developing any alternative solutions, which makes people dependent on oil and gas. Since they are dependent on oil and gas, these people will be hit hard if the government ever imposed an economic policy against oil. Since these people will be hit hard, the Conservatives are saying that these policies should not be implemented. If these polices are not implemented, these people do not change their behaviours, and it goes on.
We end up with the well-known Conservative model where the Conservatives are always right. That hurts households because the Conservatives are not doing anything, and they are not doing anything because it hurts households. They are against policies that take aim at both the supply of and demand for oil, so the carbon tax, which takes aim at the demand for oil, does not work. Then, all of a sudden the regulations do not work.
To show how deeply ingrained this logic is in the culture of some provinces, we need only look at what happened during the election campaign in Alberta. The Conservatives won in Alberta, and a few NDP members took seats. Do my colleagues know how many days of the campaign were dedicated to the environment? The answer is none. How much time was spent talking about the environment during the leadership debates? Almost none. There was a left-wing Albertan who is pro-oil. I heard the NDP yelling “Calgary” and “Edmonton” at the Conservatives this week to irritate them, because the NDP won some seats. It is the pro-oil NDP. Those members are pro-oil. There are clans in the NDP too.
That is the big Conservative contradiction. Their motions sometimes seem sensible, but one bad motion leads to another bad motion, which in turn leads to another bad motion, and so forth. This makes the Conservatives believe that they are always right, but they just keep going round in circles, as I just demonstrated. They are number one in the world for contradictions. The Conservatives are masters of contradiction. They are first in their class, perhaps even world champions, or, as we sometimes say, they look like real winners.