Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
I have a motion on notice and I would like to move it today. I'll read the motion. It is:
WHEREAS Alberta has suffered significant job losses in the last two years;
WHEREAS Alberta is an important economic driver of the economy;
WHEREAS Members of Parliament have been meeting with constituents and stakeholders throughout Alberta to discuss what the Government can do to improve the job situation in Alberta;
AND WHEREAS a report with recommendations entitled the Alberta Jobs Task Force Report has been produced and presented to the Minister of Finance;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Standing Committee on Finance undertake a study to review the report produced and its conclusions, invite witnesses to provide expert testimony on the situation in Alberta, and create a report to identify both short term and long term actions the Government could take to enable continued economic growth in Canada.
Mr. Chair, in looking at our calendar, we see we have three meetings scheduled in the month of March. To the best that I can determine, we have a clean slate for all three of those meetings after today. The members of Parliament of Alberta decided about three months ago to take on the task of meeting with Albertans to try to identify and make some recommendations as to what kinds of measures could be taken, whether provincial, federal, or by the business community, to improve the job crisis in Alberta.
And it is a crisis, Mr. Chair, because we have in my city alone, Calgary, an unemployment rate above 10%. That's unheard of in Calgary. I know, Mr. Chair, that on many occasions Atlantic Canada experiences high unemployment rates, and they are probably going through that today, I would think, because for the past decade there have been literally thousands of Canadians who have been flying in and out of Alberta and earning good money in the oil and gas business. In fact, I know you've mentioned on several occasions that you couldn't get a seat on a flight from Prince Edward Island because of all the Islanders who were transiting through Ottawa to Edmonton or Calgary to their employment.
I know that many of the folks who had been flying in and out of the oil sands are no longer able to do that because construction has dried up, and there just aren't jobs there anymore. I know that in my particular riding of Calgary Signal Hill there are—and this is not an exaggeration—hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unemployed, highly trained professionals, whether they're geologists, geophysicists, or petroleum engineers, who are out of work. These are people who have young families. They are maybe in their thirties or forties, maybe even in their fifties. Many Albertans have two-income families that are no longer working, and so we have in Alberta today a jobs crisis.
I'm putting forward this motion today because I believe we, as the finance committee, have the duty and responsibility, when reports like this come forward, to examine them, consider them, interview people who can add to the report itself, and in fact then make recommendations to the government. It's up to the government whether or not it accepts recommendations of the finance committee, but clearly the finance committee's having an opportunity to review this report would give it considerably more weight than the report itself.
We all know that many of these reports sit on a shelf and frankly don't get a lot of attention, but I think that when the finance committee takes the opportunity to review something and does a study, it has special extra clout. I really believe that when we've had consultation in Alberta with literally thousands of Albertans and have come up with some very interesting concepts and ideas, it's incumbent upon this committee to take a look at this report.
I'm putting forward this motion today because the Canadian economy is struggling. When Alberta struggles, Canada struggles. When western Canada struggles, Canada hurts deeply. I believe that's what's happening today.
We have an opportunity here as a committee to do work that I would say would be of interest to Department of Finance officials. I think it would probably be of interest to the folks who are sitting at the table here today, Mr. Chair.
I want to make sure that committee members have an opportunity to deeply think through the various recommendations that are in this report. On a couple of occasions on this side of the table, we've attempted to put forward recommendations for this committee to study. I know my colleague had a couple of recommendations or a couple of motions last week that were rejected offhandedly without a lot of discussion. I think this particular report and this motion need some time for assessment. I want to take a little bit of time today and talk in depth about the situation in Alberta and why this particular report has merit.
We all know that growth in Canada has not improved as the government hoped it would. We know that the government, in its last budget, went deeply into debt in order to try to stimulate the economy, and that simply hasn't worked. We also know that we probably have a challenging situation coming before us over the next three or four years as the U.S. administration is clearly going to make an effort to stimulate its economy, cut red tape, and reduce taxes. All of that is going to have a major impact on the Canadian economy. I think a report like the one that was produced by the Alberta MPs has an opportunity to maybe cut some of that off early.
There are a number of recommendations in there, and the important thing is that these are recommendations that came not from the civil service or from elected officials but simply from regular Albertans, many of whom are unemployed and many of whom have small businesses that if they haven't gone out of business are getting pretty close to doing so. There is an opportunity for us to take a position and to examine in depth and in detail how a report that was done with literally hours and hours of work by elected officials can contribute to the overall Canadian economy.
As I said earlier, we know that for many years Alberta and western Canada contributed more than their share. In fact, I think at one point in time while Alberta's population was 10%, its GDP contribution was 20%. I think there's an opportunity here to get some of that back. I don't know where it stands today, but it's nowhere near what it was a number of years ago.
We look at some of the things that we were told during our hearings. One example is how a small adjustment to the small business tax could make a tremendous difference when it comes to small businesses deciding to put more money into their business or to hire more employees. It seems as though this kind of thing is absent from anything we've seen coming before this committee from department officials. I know department officials are only putting forward what their elected officials are prepared to allow them to bring to the table, but bringing a report like this before committee gives us an opportunity to study it and to bring before our committee representatives of small business in Alberta or, for that matter, from anywhere in western Canada, and if we wanted to we could even expand that outside of western Canada, because there is a significant impact.
In the manufacturing sector in Ontario a while back I don't think you had to go very far to find someone in manufacturing in Ontario who would openly acknowledge that somewhere between 20% and 50% of their business came from the Alberta oil patch. The Keystone pipeline is now going to move forward, so there are going to be a number of opportunities for manufacturing facilities in central Canada to benefit because of that. I'm sure there are lots of opportunities in the province of Quebec and elsewhere to piggyback on that. Hopefully we're going to have Kinder Morgan and some of the other initiatives move forward, which is certainly a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, however, many of those things are not going to put Albertans back to work in the short term.
This particular report talks of both long term and short term. Some of the short-term initiatives are things like an orphan well program. I was reading the other day that in the last year alone, 158 orphan wells in Alberta were cleaned up with the orphan well fund, but 258 further wells have been abandoned because companies have gone bankrupt and they've walked away from them.
If the federal government jumped on it immediately, this is the kind of initiative that this coming summer could put thousands of unemployed Albertans back to work in an industry that they're comfortable with. Many of these people are rig workers or construction workers who could easily slide into the orphan well reclamation program.
In addition to that, one of the things we haven't calculated into our economy—and I don't think the finance minister has calculated it well—is the complete drying up of the construction industry in Alberta. I know there is a lot of talk about infrastructure projects, but I haven't found one constituent who can point to an infrastructure project that has commenced as a result of this extra spending that the federal government undertook in last spring's budget.
I would hope that in this particular budget some attention could be paid to the work that was done in this report and that some time could be taken to study some of the recommendations that have been made by everyday Albertans and to seriously look at approving this motion.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I would ask that this committee hear from some of the other members and consider the motion and have it approved.