Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's been a while since I've been on this committee. My colleague, Ms. Dabrusin, is presenting this, and I've worked with her behind the scenes in the past to try to get her more information on the oil and gas industry. However, the data points are all off. I would request that she get more information on this data because these data points are distinctly different from the reality we're facing in Alberta.
This is a problem. You must recognize that, during COVID, the federal government intervened in order to keep people working in the oil and gas service industry, when everything in Canada shut down and people were given CERB and CEWS in order to kind of keep moving along.
In Alberta, with the oil and gas services industry, it decided to keep people moving, working and getting paid who were taking care of an environmental problem that had existed for too long a period of time. It was a good employment intervention from the federal government, and most Albertans are very thankful for that intervention and the amount it added to keeping people employed—not on some kind of CEWS but actually doing good things for the economy.
The lapse in that.... I'll speak about the Indian Resource Council here as well, because they came and they were prodding the government. They pushed and pushed to try to get the remainder of the funding, which they were being left high and dry with here, post the date, because spending a billion dollars all at once is not an easy thing to do, Mr. Chair, as I'm sure you can realize. They were trying to get that extended to make sure that indigenous workers in the oil field service environmental remediation industry were allowed that extra time to spend this money.
The answer from this government was, no, it would not spend this money. The fault lies as much in logistics and the political will of this government to extend it as it does in anything else, including with respect to our indigenous entrepreneurs.
I will say, however, as a final note—and you'll appreciate this, Mr. Chair, because you're also from Alberta—that the oil and gas industry is heavily regulated by the province. The oil and gas remediation, the orphan well program, is administered by the province. It is provincial jurisdiction. Once again, we're looking into a study here in which a committee of the House tries to step in and tell the provinces how to regulate an industry that they're doing their best to regulate strongly right now.
I will point out that Canada has amongst the most regulated industries of all the oil and gas industries in the world, because it's very environmentally friendly. Yes, it matters in this country because—and I'll tell my friend Mr. Angus—this is one of the only industries left paying taxes to fund hospitals, schools, our social welfare and the myriad of social programs put on the table by the Liberal government. If we don't have the oil and gas industry paying taxes, we will have monumental deficits, beyond the $50 billion in monumental deficits we already have.
I hope that's enough information for my colleagues to reconsider the folly of this motion. We need to move on to study things the House can actually have an impact on, and not those where it's going to pretend to tell other jurisdictions how they should do their jobs.