Bill C-48 (Historical)

Oil Tanker Moratorium Act

An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coast

This enactment enacts the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which prohibits oil tankers that are carrying more than 12 500 metric tons of crude oil or persistent oil as cargo from stopping, or unloading crude oil or persistent oil, at ports or marine installations located along British Columbia’s north coast from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska border. The Act prohibits loading if it would result in the oil tanker carrying more than 12 500 metric tons of those oils as cargo.
The Act also prohibits vessels and persons from transporting crude oil or persistent oil between oil tankers and those ports or marine installations for the purpose of aiding the oil tanker to circumvent the prohibitions on oil tankers.
Finally, the Act establishes an administration and enforcement regime that includes requirements to provide information and to follow directions and that provides for penalties of up to a maximum of five million dollars.

Opposition Motion—Natural Resources

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, 31 indigenous partners were counting on the northern gateway pipeline before the current Liberal Prime Minister outright rejected it, instead of redoing the consultations and getting it right. There are dozens of indigenous communities who were not consulted over the shipping ban, Bill C-48, robbing their communities of future opportunities. Hundreds of indigenous-owned businesses and dozens of indigenous communities oppose the no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69. Indigenous, northern and Inuit communities were not consulted about the government's unilateral ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the north.

How can the member possibly ask anyone to believe a single word he says when he talks about consulting indigenous communities and people on major resource projects, given the Liberals' own record of running roughshod over indigenous communities that support it?

[Roy Haakonson]

Answering as a B.C. coast pilot, whatever the government decides on the moratorium, or Bill C-48, the pilots will only move the product if it can be done safely. It's not our role to have personal opinions on such matters. We can be trusted to carry out all of our commitments responsibly and with the utmost regard to safety.

I'll back up a bit. If the government decides to move ahead on Bill C-48—meaning that it would like us to look at moving the oil on the north coast—that responsibility goes to the B.C. coast pilots, and we become an independent, unbiased authority that cannot be influenced by political, economic or community pressures. We make our decisions based solely on safety.

With the amendments in the Pilotage Act, that independence will be enshrined, so we're comfortable with the decision either for or against the moratorium. We wait on the government's decision.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

They don't require pilotage.

Last week, we asked your colleagues at the national association, as well as the Atlantic Pilotage Authority, about the impact of Bill C-48. I'd like to ask you about the real and theoretical implications of Bill C-48, the proposed oil tanker moratorium act. How does this concept of a moratorium sit with your organization?

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Bill C-48 makes 12,500 metric tons of crude oil the cut-off for loading and unloading on B.C.'s north coast. Do Canadian vessels of this size and smaller require pilotage services?

[Wendy Zatylny]

Well, Bill C-48, the ban, has been challenging to address. Certainly, the scope of the surface area was limited, such that two of the port authorities were not included. They're not caught up in that ban, other than in areas that we are flagging on the regulatory side: to be careful about issues, say, that you don't catch a bunkering, for example, or transportation of diesel.

I believe that in practical terms there is still the ability to continue to move oil. The signal that it sends internationally on its own would probably not have that much of an effect, because it aims to preserve the important space on our west coast, but any kind of reputational decision is made within a much broader context. The concern we have is that it, plus the current discussions around various pipelines, plus all of the other ranges of prohibitions or challenges to development, may end up negating Canada's positive reputation abroad.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Second, would a blanket moratorium such as Bill C-48, which imposes a ban on tanker traffic on B.C.'s northern coast, be good for our Canadian reputation and our economy?

Natural Resources

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, tonight I rise in Adjournment Proceedings to take up a question that I asked quite some time ago now, but it is still timely. Given the response to the question from the member for Saskatoon—Grasswood, I am disappointed with what I have heard so far.

My question was to the Minister of Natural Resources. I asked him to apologize for remarks he made in December on Power and Politics, when he said, “Any intelligent person will tell you that Northern Gateway was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal. ... Not moving forward on Energy East was a decision of the company.”

I renew my call to the minister to apologize for insulting the intelligence of Canadians, who see quite clearly what the government has done to ensure that pipelines do not get built, and the extreme lengths that it will go to.

On the question of northern gateway, it is as if that minister was not even aware of Order in Council 2016-1047. This was the order in council that terminated northern gateway. It was a minister's decision to terminate approval for that project.

It was also as if that minister was not aware that his own government had introduced Bill C-48, which is right now struggling its way through the Senate, where hopefully it will die, but this House had passed Bill C-48, a bill that would render the northern gateway project impossible.

For him to say that “any intelligent person will tell you” and that it was not the government that rendered this project unviable is insulting to Canadians, who can see very clearly how the government's policies have affected pipelines.

Let us look at where we were when the government took office. There were four very large pipeline projects, and two were already approved, the Keystone XL project and the northern gateway project. There were approvals in place on both of these projects. The energy east project was contemplated. It had not reached the stage of a formal application, and there was also the Trans Mountain expansion, again, which was at the pre-approval stage.

The Liberal government chased away all of these projects in its own way. It failed to champion Keystone XL and wasted time during the Obama administration, and that project is still not built.

As for the northern gateway, we know that the Liberal government deliberately killed it by order in council and by the shipping ban.

In the case of energy east, we know that the Liberal government moved the goalposts to render approval an impossibility and not even worth pursuing by the proponent.

In the case of Trans Mountain, time does not even allow me to get into the entire debacle of the Trans Mountain expansion. The Liberal government ignored all of the problems that were mounting on that project. It voted against opposition motions calling upon the government to take positive steps to ensure its approval. Then it bought it, paid $4.5 billion for it and promised construction would begin immediately, and still there are no shovels in the ground.

That makes four projects, but none built.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Mr. Speaker, this past December, I asked the Liberal government an important and straightforward question: When will the Liberal government finally start standing up for the Canadian energy sector and kill Bill C-69, a bill which absolutely suffocates this critical sector with additional regulation burdens and uncertainty? I received the usual Liberal response of another non-answer.

Tonight, I know the Liberals have no intention of backing away from Bill C-69, even though this bill would have a very severe impact on many of the thousands of Canadians who are employed in the energy sector throughout this country. Instead of working to support Canadians, the Liberal government continues to stubbornly persist in working against Canadians.

We know the policies of the Liberal government when it comes to our energy sector, a sector which represented nearly 11% of our country's normal GDP in 2017. The Liberals, we should be reminded, killed the northern gateway pipeline. They stopped the energy east pipeline by piling on the red tape and additional regulations. They passed Bill C-48 in the House to place a moratorium on the traffic of oil tankers along B.C.'s northern coast. They failed to support the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline. As a result, they had to spend $4.5 billion of taxpayer money to buy the existing Trans Mountain pipeline just to keep the project from collapsing entirely.

It is clear that the Liberals have never had a plan to support the Canadian energy sector. It is clear, through their insistence on passing Bill C-69, that the Liberals do not intend to support our energy sector any time soon.

The Liberal government has a responsibility to look out for the hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers who are employed in the Canadian energy sector, and it is obvious that it is failing to do so. Through the dangerous and reckless policies of the Liberal government, investment in our resource and energy sectors is collapsing like never before. In 2018, Statistics Canada reported capital spending on oil and gas extraction fell for the fourth straight year, decreasing by 12% from the spending of 2017.

Why is the Liberal government doing nothing to protect the livelihoods of the many thousands of hard-working Canadians who actually work in Canada's energy sector? When will the Liberals finally scrap Bill C-69?

[Robert Lewis-Manning]

I've testified about Bill C-48 at this committee before, and I think you know my feelings about it. Marine policy has to be based on evidence, and I had a concern about that. Having said that, since we're here to discuss pilotage, this is an evidence-based framework that has to support keeping Canada's coasts safe and moving trade. I think the changes in this bill can support that and, hopefully, that will prevail. That's why I remain optimistic, despite some of the comments I heard.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

You'll forgive our skepticism of the comments you made about the future energy projects, given Bill C-69, which is in the Senate right now, but this does open the door for me to ask you about how Bill C-48, the oil tanker moratorium, is viewed by the shipping industry as a whole.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here today and accommodating the shortened period of time that we have to ask you questions, notwithstanding the fact that all of these substantive changes have been included in a budget implementation act that, in and of itself, shortens the kind of scrutiny that we would be able to give to the changes in this act.

Having said that, I know there have been lengthy consultations in regard to this pilotage review, as have been referred to. I'm sure none of us want to even believe that the 1970s was 50 years ago and that it's been that length of time since there have been any changes to this act.

I take your point that it was time, and I do hear that you are cautiously optimistic about the act as it stands today and supportive of the amendments, albeit you do have some recommendations.

I'm sure you're all aware that we can take up those recommendations, and certainly it will be up to the governing party whether or not they go forward. If they do go forward, they will go forward to the finance committee, where that committee will determine whether or not those recommended amendments will be made to the budget implementation act.

My first question will be for you, Mr. Pelletier.

Reflecting on the second last paragraph of your April 24 letter to our committee, Chair, perhaps for the rest of the witnesses, I'll just quote what was in your letter. You said:

What is perhaps most gratifying about the proposed amendments is that the changes to the Pilotage Act will contribute to further Canada’s economic prosperity by optimizing our capacity to trade competitively and responsibly. In particular, the amendments enhance the safety of marine transportation to facilitate the movement of such dangerous cargo as petroleum products, while reflecting the preoccupations of the Canadian public for environmentally-responsible practices.

I know that I'm going to have an opportunity to ask this question of your colleagues from British Columbia, but first I want to ask you about Bill C-48, the government's oil tanker moratorium act, of you specifically as the president of the national association. How does the marine pilot industry view the concept of a moratorium on shipping?

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, at this time I would like to address a different topic. The question is about trade.

Canada is a trading nation and has been a trading nation for hundreds of years. We have some challenges. In my riding, we have some legislation that is not only hampering trade but is divisive, particularly in western Canada.

Bill C-69, for example, is a piece of legislation this government has brought forward that we find very divisive. Trade is important, but we have lots of issues in western Canada. For example, the government has never fixed the problems with Italy. Durham wheat, which we grow in my riding, is the best in the world, and we can no longer send it to Italy.

Regarding India, we grow a tremendous amount of lentils and peas in western Canada and in my area. We had the situation in India after the Prime Minister's visit, and now, with the tariffs, that trade is not a possibility.

The highest quality barley in the world, as of a year ago, is no longer traded with Saudi Arabia.

We then get to China. The issues we have with China started with officially shutting down trade in canola seed. However, there are two other parts to canola: the meal and the oil. The Chinese are refusing to offload it. There are boats in harbours sitting in China paying the demurrage fees back to the producers because they will not even unload it. Now we are hearing of more agricultural products produced in the west. We feel a lot of divisiveness in the sense of trade issues and the challenges we have.

Then we get to Bill C-69 and the tanker ban, Bill C-48, which basically says that we are not going to build pipelines anymore. Was there consultation on Bill C-48? I do not remember that one. Bill C-69 is here. Martha Hall Findlay says that it will significantly increase political interference in the regulatory process. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association states, “It is difficult to imagine that a new major pipeline could be built in Canada under the Impact Assessment Act”.

Stephen Buffalo, president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council says, “Indigenous communities are on the verge of a major economic breakthrough, one that finally allows Indigenous people to share in Canada's economic prosperity. Bill C-69 will stop this progress in its tracks.”

We find that those two pieces of legislation, Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, are very divisive in western Canada and very much against what we are as a trading country.

Budget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's comments and his humour. It is always funny watching Liberals stand up and try to explain all the great things they have done for western Canada, such as Bill C-69, the no new pipelines bill, and Bill C-48. It is amazing that we had four, now down to three, Liberal MPs from Alberta betray the people of Alberta by supporting the Liberal plan to destroy our energy industry.

As to the member's comment about infrastructure, again I have to laugh at this. The independent-controlled Senate, filled with Liberal senators and appointees, came out with a report that said there is no metric for success for the infrastructure spending by the government apart from money spent. Therefore, are we spending money so that people can get to work faster, improve productivity, which we are not, or improve the environment? No, the Liberal plan is not any of those. Its metric of success is spending.

We saw the spending for Alberta. The Prime Minister stood up and talked about it the other day. He bragged about putting ashtrays at bus stops in Alberta. We have 100,000 unemployed energy workers and the government is bragging about upgrading a bus stop with its infrastructure money. The current government has failed Alberta and this is another perfect example of it.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to be sharing my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.

Due to the precedents that have been set in this budget debate, I am going to ask whether I have a 20-minute time slot to share or a four-day time slot. It's 20-minutes. Okay, thank you.

I am proud to represent the fine people of central Alberta. My colleague from Red Deer—Mountain View is beside me. We have unfortunately seen over the last three a half years, since the last election, probably some of the hardest times for all of Alberta since Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the prime minister of Canada. If anyone in central Alberta is asked what the issue is, it is the lack or loss of confidence in the investment climate surrounding the energy sector.

I want to take Canadians back to what happened. One of the very first things the government did after it was elected was to change the goalposts on the two pipeline projects, the energy east project at the time, and, of course, the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion. There was the absolutely devastating notion of cancelling the already approved pipeline. We had over 30 of the 40 indigenous groups along the route, and the National Energy Board had already approved the pipeline. Enbridge was seeking to fulfill all of its 206 obligations under the agreement.

The northern gateway pipeline was the only pipeline going to the west coast that would diversify Canada's market when it comes to its oil products. The Trans Mountain expansion pipeline, should it ever get built, and we will discuss that in my speech further, will add capacity, but it will not diversify the markets. All of the tankers that currently come into the port of Vancouver to pick up the oil that is moved from the current Trans Mountain pipeline end up along the American west coast to be processed at the crude refineries there.

Anyone from the Liberal Party or the NDP provincially who suggests to Albertans and to Canadians that this pipeline is going to close the gap on the market price between the North American price of crude oil and the international price of crude oil is not being honest with Canadians.

Alberta has been devastated by the job losses in the energy environment. It has been over 130,000 jobs directly. These are jobs where there were people with payroll taxes. They were counted amongst the people who were laid off from a business. This does not include the numerous people who have not found work, who are self-employed contractors in the energy sector. I am not sure that anyone across the row here understands what that means.

These people would never show up on an unemployment list, because they are self-employed. They are contractors. They are the folks who would be employed at the very high end of the energy sector to be out on site and doing all the consultations. These are consultants who are out on the drilling pads, out doing all of the work. These are the ones with the most expertise in the energy sector. They too have had to dig deep into their savings, and many of them have exhausted those savings a long time ago. It is also anyone with a small business. There are only a few service companies left, the long-standing service companies, that have been able to withstand the economic pressures. Numerous small business have all but closed up their shops and gone in a different direction. A lot of them are leaving Alberta.

With regard to those Albertans who remain and are trying to find work, about one in three have managed to keep their jobs and the others are finding employment in places like Texas. When I was first elected as a member of Parliament to this House, there were two flights a day to both Edmonton and Calgary direct from Ottawa. Those flights would source out of Halifax or Montreal, and they would stop in Ottawa and continue on to Edmonton and/or Calgary. Those airports would serve me and my colleague equally well, because they are equidistance from Red Deer, which is in the heart of central Alberta.

Those planes used to be full of workers. They would all be wearing their firebag project jackets or their Kearl project jackets, and they would be coming from Atlantic Canada or from Quebec. Many, many workers were coming from Quebec, starting in Montreal. They were getting on Air Canada flight 104 on its way back to Alberta. I remember that number, as I took that flight for over a decade. Those people are not on those planes anymore, and the reason is that there is no expansion of the energy sector in Alberta. There are continuing operations for those projects that were already completed, but the reality is that the pipeline capacity is already there.

The other projects that were on the books, and there is over $100 billion worth of these projects, have been cancelled or shelved. That money has been taken elsewhere to invest in other countries, basically to compete against our current energy sector here in Canada. Those employees are no longer coming and that investment is no longer there. The pipeline capacity is at max, and the current price of oil makes railing oil uneconomical, especially when we saw the devastating oil prices at around $11 a barrel just a few months ago. This is for a sector of our economy that traditionally provides Canada with billions of dollars in revenue, which is shared among all the provinces through social transfers, the education transfer and likely even a good portion of it in equalization payments to other provinces.

I am proud to say that under the tenure when I was here, until the change of government in the last election, my province had not had to receive an equalization payment for the better part of 40 years. We had been a have-province. As a matter of fact, there have been times, because of the energy sector, that Alberta has been the only have-province in this confederation. However, it did not take very long for Premier Rachel Notley and the current government in Ottawa to put Alberta in a position where we had to beg for an emergency assistance transfer under the equalization program. I think it was a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I do not think it really amounted to a whole lot of difference other than a kind gesture.

Here is a sector of our economy that is typically producing billions of dollars of revenue, and not only corporate revenue, but also from employees, tens of thousands of workers. There were over 130,000 direct jobs lost, and probably another 30,000 or 40,000 of those consultants I talked about, people who are self-employed in the sector. Those jobs are all gone. On April 8, a few days ago, the industry came out with another forecast that is expecting another 12,500 jobs lost in the sector, most likely in Alberta.

Alberta is taking it on the chin, so much so that before Christmas, the government announced $1.6 billion for the energy sector. Imagine that happening in three short years when the energy sector has rebounded everywhere else. Albertans are now going to Texas or other places on the planet to work in the energy sector. Energy is booming. The United States used to be a net importer of Canadian energy; now the United States, because of its domestic policies, is in a position to export to Canada of all things. Here we are in this situation. We know that it cannot be the international price of energy anymore. We know it cannot be, because the energy sector is booming in other parts of the world, notably right next door to us in the United States. Therefore, it can only be government policy here in Canada that is causing this problem.

These job losses are catastrophic. If we take a look in the budget document today, we will see that there are millions of dollars allocated for consultation. The Prime Minister got up on his high horse and said that the previous government had it all wrong with the CETA 2012 and everything else, and that the government was going to create a process that guaranteed that pipeline projects would go ahead. What do we have? We have a project to the east coast that is dead in the water because of the regulatory burden and the quagmire that nobody in their right mind would ever subject stakeholder investment to. We have a cancelled northern gateway project that is likely never going to be reinstated by Enbridge. We have a group of indigenous people who are putting together the Eagle Spirit pipeline, which would follow a similar path as northern gateway.

We have Bill C-48, the northern coast tanker ban, which is only a tanker ban if that tanker happens to have Alberta oil on it. It is not a tanker ban for anybody else. LNG Canada is building a wonderful facility in Kitimat right now for liquefied natural gas, and we wish it the best of luck. We think that is a fantastic opportunity for the people there as well.

However, we are left with the Trans Mountain expansion from Kinder Morgan. The government has botched that so much and so badly that it had to take $4.5 billion of Canadian taxpayers' money to buy a 65-year-old existing pipeline and the rights to continue to develop the Trans Mountain expansion itself. We know from the documents, which Kinder Morgan has publicly announced, that the Government of Canada likely paid $1 billion more for that pipeline project than it should have paid. All we have in the budget out of the $1.6 billion that was promised before Christmas are a few million dollars to continue on with consultations.

In the budget document that I have been able to look at and examine, not one dollar is allocated to putting a shovel in the ground to build the Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain expansion. Until we can change the mind of the current government on how it is approaching the energy sector, the only hope we have in Alberta is a change in the government.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

It was on the impact on first nations' ability to pursue their own economic development opportunities when a government imposes legislation requested specifically by foreign-funded activists, like the oil shipping tanker ban in Bill C-48.