Mr. Speaker, I want to inform you that I will share my time with my esteemed colleague from Drummond. This is a good idea, as always.
This may sound strange, but I have looked forward to some version of such a bill for many years. With Bill C-46, the government has finally come to acknowledge a principle that for more than 20 years the New Democrats thought was important for the energy sector and industry at large. This is the principle that we commonly now know as the polluter pays. It is a very simple concept. It is a concept that should be embedded in all of our economic thinking about resource development and the potential for pollution, which is the company that causes the pollution should pay for the pollution.
This is an important concept for us because we also believe in pricing pollution across the board. We have heard the Prime Minister recently muse about the idea of perhaps putting a price on carbon similar to the Alberta model. It has some faults, but the very concept that pricing carbon, a known pollutant in causing climate change, is now something to which the Conservative government may be open. However, we hear Conservatives day after day ridicule and rile the opposition for any hint of the very same policy, which the Conservatives rain on.
Juxtapose that with the strange crossing of ideologies where the Liberal leader now says that pricing carbon should not be up to the federal government at all. It is odd to watch those two leaders cross themselves. More important, in Bill C-46 and the liability around spills from pipelines, we recall that the Prime Minister in an economic forum declare that Canada would quickly become a world energy superpower. This vision was outlined by the Prime Minister in very forceful terms. What one would have expected to be behind such a declaration was a plan or a strategy to achieve that vision.
As we have seen in the last eight or nine years, that commitment has been nothing but an unmitigated failure for the government. We have not seen the approach taken by the Conservatives enhance Canada's standing in the world when it comes to energy in any measurable way, not with our largest trading partner in the United States.
As pointed out by my Liberal colleagues, not only has the relationship around one particular project, in this case Keystone, caused all sorts of tensions between the government and the White House, but it has caused tensions in our trading relations in general. I recently had meetings with some trade department officials and investors from the United States, They wondered about the Conservative government's obsession with one project to the detriment of so many other important trade relations with the United States.
In making the declaration, when the Conservatives said that we would be an energy superpower, one would have thought there would have been some foundational elements included. One of them would have been the polluter pays principle. It is an important and key strategy in bringing the public along to any development, like a pipeline development. If there is a spill, it should not be the public who is on the hook for cleaning up the costs.
As has been pointed out in this debate already, Enbridge, which has proposed the northern gateway pipeline that will go through my region, had that exact experience just south of the border, when 3.5 million litres of diluted bitumen was spilled in the Kalamazoo River. It has spent north of one billion dollars cleaning that up.
In Canada, we had this perverse incentive in that the companies were never on the hook for that money for the cleanup. The companies receive the profit; the public gets the pain when there is an accident. There are spills. There have been several hundred spills across Canada over the last couple of years, some small and some quite a bit larger. The idea that the public would foot the bill for a company's mistake and damage to our environment is indeed perverse.
Several things in the bill remain lacking in a true energy policy from the government. If becoming an energy superpower were so important, one would have thought the government would have sincerely, and with great dedication, sought what would be a very important principle for any company operating, and that is the social licence to operate.
This is a commonly used term by industry today, particularly by extractive industries, heavy industries, that in order to be profitable and to remain viable, having a social contract with the public, an agreement on how companies conduct themselves, supported in the communities in which they operate would be foundational of any investment.
When I talk to the investment banks, the major banks in Canada, and some of the other investors who invest heavily in our country, the social licence of any particular project is paramount to the investor's rational to invest or not invest. If a company is facing protracted legal battles, if a company is in the face of strong public discontent, that affects the investor's decision.
Even with the Conservatives government, which is particularly fixated, having put so many of their eggs in one particular resource extraction basket, on oil, we would have thought that bringing forward legislation, working policies that would increase the level of public support would have been job number one. The efforts by the government to treat and negotiate with first nations in Canada would be job number one. The Prime Minister hired a special investigator, Doug Eyford, to go British Columbia to consult with first nations and find out what was lacking. In his report, Mr. Eyford stated that there was a lack of federal leadership in treating and negotiating with the first nations of British Columbia in particular .
Having lost almost 180 consecutive Supreme Court decisions that deal with first nations rights and title, we would think the federal government would have woke up to the idea that rights and title maybe matters, particularly to a resource like this one.
The bill is missing the ability of the government to understand, to respect and to negotiate with the first nations people of Canada. In provinces like British Columbia, rights and title have been confirmed again and again in the federal courts and at the Supreme Court level, and the government considers it an option to ignore those rulings, as if anything will get built, as if anything will get done by ignoring our Constitution and first nations rights and title.
We have also seen the government utterly ignore another foundational question that Canadians have with respect to any resource development, which is risk versus benefit. The benefits are generally seen in two areas: one through taxation and the other through job creation. What have we seen from the Conservatives? We saw the whole temporary foreign worker fiasco where they drove loopholes so big through the program that companies were firing Canadians working in the banking and energy sector and then hiring temporary foreign workers to the point where the Conservatives had to swing the pendulum back so hard that they essentially shut down virtually all of the temporary foreign worker program.
We have also seen a government absolutely ambiguous about the notion of value-added. Particularly when we deal with a one-time, non-renewable resource, we would think the government of the day would have some interest one way or the other as to whether companies are adding value or shipping the product out in its raw form. We know the true job components in any oil and gas project is when we add value to it.
The proposed projects, which heavily supported by the government, all purport to export raw bitumen in its most raw form. That leaves the risks with Canada and exports the lion's share of the benefits elsewhere.
The economy of the people I represent in northern British Columbia is primarily based on resource extraction. We understand the resource industry, we are support of it and are particularly supportive when it works with the values in the communities in which it seeks to operate.
Conservatives have ignored this time and time again and have lost public support, not just in their wild enthusiasm for projects that do not help the Canadian economy and certainly risk the Canadian environment, but they have run roughshod over first nations rights and title. The record shows they are not getting anything done. All they are doing is increasing conflict and uncertainty, which drives away investment and the ability of the Canadian economy to be more than just a raw export economy.
Time and time again we see the government make the same mistake. The Conservatives suggest that doing the same thing again will get them somehow a different result. We know the definition of someone who believes that doing the same thing repeatedly will get a different result: insanity. Increasing uncertainty, increasing conflict has done so little to even advance the agenda the Conservatives had.
What else do we miss from the Conservative government? It is not just a diversification of our trading partners, but also the diversification of our energy resources. The support for oil has been so outweighed by no support whatsoever for the clean energy sector.
The good news for Canadians is that globally last year, and we look forward to 2015 being similar, the advancements and the investments in clean energy technology, with the costs of production dropping and the acceptance and encouragement by the public writ large across the world for clean technology, solar, wind, geothermal and rest, has only grown and investments are outpacing investments in carbon energy.
Canada should be embracing this enthusiastically, with a government that understands we need to have a balance between these things. However, to put all of the attention on one energy source alone, we see what happens. The Conservatives have had to delay their budget. They have no plan B. All they have is this, and it is not working.
The bill is a small and important step in advancing a more balanced approach to the energy sector in Canada. We look forward to its passage. We will see if the calendar allows for its passage and how much enthusiasm the Conservatives have for it to become law.
