Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is another part of how this is so frustrating, in that it is factually inaccurate, and that is part of the challenge with the preamble as written. The fact that the money.... It wasn't just that this was sitting in some slush fund of the Government of Alberta, gaining interest and just sitting back.... Every single dollar of this federal funding to the site rehabilitation program was actually committed to be spent. They had programs in place, they had worked with the backing of 17 different first nations chiefs to be able to do this and they were working on trying to get an extension. I'm sure that, had it been a different province, perhaps, the answer as to whether they would have been able to get an extension might have been different, depending on the political backing of that particular province. This is part of the frustration.
It's also curious that the decision to have first nations involvement was the decision of the Government of Alberta. This wasn't something where the Government of Canada was like, “Oh, cool, let's do this. This is a great idea.” This was from the amazing and spectacular leadership of one of my good friends and former colleagues, the Minister of Indigenous Relations for the Province of Alberta, Rick Wilson. This was something that Rick actually brought forward because he knew how important it was, how sacred some of these lands were, and he had heard conversations not dissimilar to the conversations that my colleague Mr. Dreeshen, my colleague Mrs. Stubbs and I have all heard when engaging with indigenous communities in our regions, understanding that some of these lands that have been disturbed by these wells are lands that were sacred for a variety of reasons and that this was something of importance. This isn't something, when you're creating something brand new, where you can just snap your fingers and this happens.
It is factually inaccurate, yet there's been no attempt from the Liberals to correct this. We're in a space where it's almost like Schrödinger's cat: Either it's alive in the box or it's dead in the box, and we don't really know until we open the box.
We're sitting here where either the Department of Natural Resources and the Prime Minister's Office directed the parliamentary secretary to bring this forward at this committee, or she decided that she didn't actually care about doing what's right for Canada and brought this forward on her own volition as an affront to Alberta, as a political weapon, and thinks that this is somehow okay. I don't know which one's worse, so this becomes a challenge.
We know that there are at least 24 MLAs who do not support the Prime Minister. Perhaps Ms. Dabrusin has outed herself—