Mr. Speaker, this feels like déjà vu. It was not that long ago that we were here debating nearly the exact same issue as we are today.
Today, we have in front of us a bill. As opposition members, we get to propose ideas through opposition day motions, which are not necessarily binding upon the House or the government. Back in April, we were debating virtually the exact same thing. I would point out that the Liberals voted back in April against removing the tax on gas and diesel fuel. I reluctantly must compliment the Liberals on this bill.
Another thing about this bill is that it is quite brief, which is amazing for the Liberals. Generally, the Liberals say they are doing one thing, then come out with a bill that does three to five things; some of the things we like and some of the things we do not like. They have made it very easy to support this bill. Perhaps the bill is a day late and a dollar short, but nonetheless, it is a good bill.
This bill would remove the gas tax going forward past January. I think that is something that we have been calling for for a long time. This is an idea that the Conservatives put forward. What is becoming a trend in this Parliament is that we have the good ideas and the Liberal government steals those ideas, plagiarizes those ideas and implements those ideas. We will continue to do that. We will continue to propose good ideas that the government can then take and run with.
I just want to talk a bit about what this means for people who live in northern Alberta. The further away from Edmonton someone lives, the more their average driving per year happens to be. The average person in Enilda, which is a couple of hours north of where I live and about three and a half hours north of Edmonton, drives probably 28,000 kilometres a year. If someone lives in Keg River, which is about three hours south of the Northwest Territories border, they are driving 38,000 kilometres a year on average. If someone lives in Edmonton, they are driving about 14,000 kilometres a year on average. If someone lives in Vancouver, they are driving about 10,000 kilometres a year.
I say that to show that when people live outside major city centres, they are generally driving significantly more. This is why we have been proposing this type of legislation. This is something that would definitely help those folks. The savings may be modest, but they would impact those at the bottom much more. When they save $500 a year on fuel, that is 10 tanks of gas, essentially. For someone from Keg River or from Peace River, that neck of the woods, it could translate to approximately $500 a year in savings with these fuel reductions.
I argued back in April about the fact that we are coming into harvest season, and the farmers use a lot of diesel fuel when they are bringing in their crops. That is the reality. Diesel fuel makes our economy work. Diesel fuel makes it so that the farmers can take the food off the field. It makes it so they can truck it to a terminal. It makes it so they can take it from the terminal to the processing facility. If it is flour, that flour is then trucked to a bakery, which is then baked into bread. Often, that bread is then trucked to a grocery store. Every step along the way takes diesel fuel. When the diesel fuel price is reduced just marginally, it can have a big effect because of all those steps along the way, and it makes a big difference. That is one of the cases that we have been making and we will continue to make.
The other thing that we want to talk about in this session is about putting Canada first. We want to make sure that we have a government that takes care of Canadians first.
Some of the ways to do this are around changing the tax structure, and we support this particular bill. However, other things are just around ensuring that Canadian industry and business have the tools and that they have a government that is ensuring that Canadian businesses are taken care of. We have seen just recently in the United States, Donald Trump has put tariffs on our Canadian honey producers. This is a major challenge, particularly for western Canada and Alberta, as 70% to 90% of our honey, depending on the year, will cross the border and go to the United States.
What is very interesting about that is that we import more honey into Canada than we export into the United States. This tariff is just driving the cost of our honey up, as a 50% tariff as it crosses the border going into the United States makes it kind of unaffordable for Americans to buy our honey. We are bringing in honey from around the world, and we are bringing in more of that than we send to the United States. We could perhaps displace that foreign honey with our own honey, provided we were to protect the border a bit more. People would say, “We have free trade agreements and that would allow for the importation of honey from other parts of the world” and that is all true.
The challenge that the honey producers have in Canada right now is that there is stuff called adulterated honey or fake honey. It is stuff that just says “honey” on it but actually is not honey. It is made from corn syrup, rice syrup or a different sugar product and it is made to look like honey. In the past, we discovered this was happening. We would test the product that would say “honey” on the bottle and it would turn out that there was no pollen in this product. That was a pretty easy test. We could just test for the presence of pollen. If there is no pollen in honey, it obviously was not made by a bee because bees collect pollen and they tend to accidentally drop it in the honey, generally. Based on that pollen, they can actually tell where in the world that honey came from. There was this product sitting on the shelves here in Canada that said “honey” on the bottle, and there was zero pollen in it so we knew that it was not honey. Honey producers in Canada said this was a problem, so we started to test for that. Lo and behold, pretty soon, this stuff had pollen in it. It turned out that players around the world were buying pollen from Canada, dumping that pollen into the sugar water, essentially, and shipping it back, calling it honey.
I tell this entire story to say that there are mechanisms in place, things that we can do, to help our honey producers to ensure that our honey is consumed here in Canada. If we work hard on protecting our consumers from this adulterated honey, if we work to control the border around this adulterated honey, that will reduce the competition of our honey producers against stuff that is not honey. We have been calling for this for a very long time, but now it seems like there is a big opportunity to fix this problem. I am looking forward to seeing some action from the government on this topic, particularly because our honey producers are being disproportionately penalized by the 50% tariff that the United States has placed on honey. We have put a countertariff on the honey from the United States, and I anticipate that will have some effect. Instead of 80% to 90% of our product heading across the border down to the United States it will be diverted left and right across this country to other provinces. I am sure some of the honey was coming from the United States and different places.
Honeybees in Canada are extremely important. Approximately one-third of our food production relies on the bees to do their pollination, so it is incredibly important that our beekeepers remain viable in this country so that we have a stable food supply.
