Mr. Dreeshen, there are a number of ways to answer that.
I don't mean to take away from everyone else, but I think the reality is that if we're not careful in the approach we take here, we may very well put Canada in a situation where it gets credit for nothing, not just its clean energy. Think about our ability to sell more LNG to China. However, because we have pipeline blockages in this country tolerated by this government...and I hate to say that. We saw this before the pandemic. The economy came to a virtual shutdown.
We have signed the Paris climate accord agreement, which your party, by the way, supports, Mr. Dreeshen, which says that Canada gets absolutely no credit for the amount of natural gas it could sell to stop countries like China and India from building more coal plants as an alternative.
We have the solutions here, and not just the technological solutions, but I suspect that we tend to get a little ahead of ourselves in saying, “Here's where we want to go, but we can't do it alone,” and we certainly shouldn't be penalizing Canadians to achieve that.
We should also celebrate the fact that we have significant clean energy to begin with.
The Hydro-Québec projects in Quebec are one example. As I said earlier, there are nuclear power plants in my former riding of Pickering. To make the transition, we need to talk about money.
How much is it going to cost to achieve these things? No one seems to want to do that.
Mr. Dreeshen, when I did the study on the CFS.... Before the federal government had, in fact, implemented what I think to be a very dangerous second carbon tax, a clean fuel standard—and no environmental economist globally would support a second carbon tax to ruin the first carbon tax—it turned out that the federal government had never done a cost benefit analysis. We found out that for every dollar of environmental benefit of a clean fuel standard, it costs the public six dollars. In that kind of scenario, you can see where manufacturing may decide to leave and Canadians may not have the ability to make ends meet.
I want to bring this back to where I think politicians and our representatives have to be. You can talk a great deal about the things you want to do, but you can't forget the people who elected you. Consumers are rarely taken into consideration. We need to have an affordable and balanced approach to how we want to make these transitions. I think we all want them, but they have to come gradually, and they have to come in lockstep.
I mentioned Toyota Canada a little earlier to my friend Brian Masse. There's a company that will not go all green, all electric vehicle, for obvious reasons. It believes it can drop the amount of emissions through other technologies like, for instance, hydrogen.
I suspect that we can do all of these things, but we have to make sure that we keep Canadians on board. We're living in a time when we're borrowing a lot of money to maintain the standard of living. What comes out of this pandemic will be extraordinarily devastating, potentially, to the Canadian economy.
