Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for this invitation. I don't know, though, we might be sticking around here for a little while.
I want to tell you that I got a call from my brother-in-law. He lives in Smithers, just a little ways down the road. He saw on Facebook that I was going to be here. I asked him about the port. He pretty much reiterated what you said, and that is that this has been a great boon to the economy.
I want to talk a little bit in defence of Mr. Brison. He's absolutely right. He is a free trader, but it befuddles me when he starts talking about carbon tax. I'm going to give you my take, if you'll bear with me a little while.
This is a great example. Ontario has a green energy program that has introduced wind turbines, and nobody would be against that. But a number of years back--we don't have to go back too far--Ontario was an exporter of energy, and today we have become an importer of energy. Here's the problem. The wind's blowing at nighttime when nobody uses the stuff, and in the daytime, when we need it, the wind quits blowing. So what we do is sell the energy at a loss, or I think at 2¢ a kilowatt, to Quebec and they dam up the dams and open them up in the daytime and sell it back to us for 9¢ or 10¢ during the day at the peak times. So it has disrupted our grid.
Again, we'd all love to see a perfectly green environment, but I look at a country like China, and God bless them, they're doing wonderfully. But Mr. Brison and I, when we went there--and I talked about this at the last meeting too--the air was thick with coal. They're buying your coal and they're running it through the port here and producing energy at 3¢ or 4¢ a kilowatt.
The result in Ontario is that our manufacturing has been totally dissipated. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but it certainly is a major cost. The fact that we can no longer compete in one of the areas, and one of the last areas in which we were competitive was in energy, is indefensible. And the Chinese have told us that they're not interested in any of those projects you're talking about, any of those green....They look at us as being the polluters for the last 200 years, and they've got a long way to go before they catch up.
How do you balance that? Ms. Sanchez, you've made a wonderful request--and I don't think there's anybody here whose heart doesn't go out to our children--but when you talk about 1% of GDP when we are in a time where tax revenues are such that we're running a deficit and we're starting to load up our national debt to the effect that we're going to become a have-not, how do you balance that? I'm really looking for a balance. When I hear about carbon tax, that simply blows me away, because now not only have we disadvantaged ourselves in the marketplace with energy, we're now going to load something else on. How do you balance that? How do we become a generous nation, as Ms. Sanchez rightly pointed out, a rich nation that rather than take moneys from an economy that we saw four or five years ago, when there was a surplus and we could have these projects, to a situation now where we're hanging by a thread...? How can you advocate something like a carbon tax? I'm curious, especially with that kind of information.