Thank you.
I am very concerned by what I think is a clear pattern from my Liberal colleagues to filibuster this motion and keep us from presenting to Parliament the findings of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
I have a number of concerns. It was one of the reasons I pushed for a study of TMX. I think it speaks to the underlying falsehood of the Prime Minister's promise to Canadians and the Prime Minister's promise to the world.
We remember the Prime Minister at COP26 saying that Canada was back and that we were going to be an environmental leader. He had no intention—ever—of following through on that. We had the environment commissioner, Mr. DeMarco, come before our committee and say that Canada has missed every single target it has established under this Prime Minister. We are now the outlier of the G7. Canada is leading the world in increased oil production while they tell us that they are going to address increasing emissions.
Mr. Guilbeault regularly makes repeated falsehoods that we are bending the curve on emissions. Well, we are somewhat bending a very tiny bit of a curve, except when it comes to the oil sector, and this is where the government has decided to invest their money. It's been two years since they promised action on the clean energy file. Through that time, for Cenovus and Imperial, for anything they needed in terms of money for the bogus carbon capture schemes, government was there. The $34-billion TMX pipeline, which had no financial case, they were there for. Under this Prime Minister, we have seen oil production increase 41% over what happened under Stephen Harper.
Why does that matter? It matters because what we know from the IPCC is that every increase in carbon at this point is putting us closer and closer to a dangerous red line from which we don't return. I've found in this Parliament that climate denialism is deeply embedded. It's certainly deeply embedded in my colleagues in the Conservative Party, but it's much more concerning to have nice climate denialism—the climate denialism of the Liberals, who tell us, yes, we can massively increase unrefined bitumen exports around the world, but we won't count it as part of our inventory. It's as though somehow the world won't notice the increase, with Cenovus going from 800,000 to 950,000 barrels of unrefined bitumen a day, if they burn that in the United States or Malaysia or China. It won't affect the atmosphere that Imperial Oil production levels had a 3% increase just this past February. They are now at the highest production levels ever.
The Prime Minister went to COP. He made promises. He made promises of an emissions cap. It's a ridiculous suggestion, if you're going to massively increase production, to then say you're going to put an emissions cap in place. It's part of what the Liberal government says: “Don't worry. Trust us. We're going to get behind the wheel and drive and drink our way to sobriety. You can trust that we'll be safe on the highway.” This is not environmental stewardship.
I have a number of concerns about the PBO report. I think it was overly optimistic. I think he ignored a number of key factors, such as changing the net present value to present value, which basically wiped out the massive debt. Canadians want to know who's going to pay to get us whole again after the $34 billion.
We had the Deputy Prime Minister come and tell our committee that, yes, all that $34 billion would paid back, and more. She was going to make money off it. That was either an open falsehood or she hadn't looked at the numbers. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, even though I believe he has overly optimistic scenarios, says that's impossible and that we are going to lose money.
The issue before us is that Mr. Simard has moved a motion that we should present the PBO's report to Parliament. That's reasonable. Normally, I would suggest that it's reasonable to do it within a larger study, and I get that, but the TMX is not a normal study. The TMX was not a normal investment. The TMX investment was this Prime Minister going all in on betting on oil infrastructure when the International Energy Agency was saying not to do this and when the IPCC was saying not to invest in this kind of infrastructure.
This is the Prime Minister's legacy project, a legacy that will impact Canadians for generations to come, so it deserves to be brought to Parliament as well as undergo a full study with all the witnesses. They don't preclude one another and they don't erase one another, but what is being erased here is our ability to get our reports done because the Liberals are filibustering. They're filibustering because they don't want the issue of TMX to be brought to the House.
I reject this attempt to continue to obstruct this effort on our committee's part to bring the PBO report to Parliament so that parliamentarians can discuss it. I reject the filibustering and I reject the falsehoods of a Prime Minister who promised to be an environmental leader while Canada is now the laggard of the G7 and our planet burns.