Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak in support of the principles of Bill C-48, a bill to create the Department of Natural Resources.
The Reform Party has long supported the downsizing of the federal cabinet and the reduction of bureaucracy. This initiative makes good sense particularly in the areas of provincial jurisdiction such as natural resources.
Having said that, however, I am disappointed to see another Tory bill brought before the House by the new Liberal government that promised to govern differently. There are no promises in the red book to finish Kim Campbell's agenda. All this bill does is formalize what has long been happening and has long been the case. Instead of seizing this opportunity to substantially downsize government and duplication, getting this government off the backs of Canadians, it takes half measures as we have seen in almost every piece of legislation the government has introduced into this House.
While I believe there is an opportunity in the reorganization of this department to realize substantial economic savings, it appears from my analysis of this bill that it will effect very little economic savings or the downsizing of the bureaucracy.
My colleagues who have spoken previously have addressed a number of areas of concern we have with this new super ministry. I will concentrate on yet another area that we believe could have and should have been included in this initiative to effect an economic benefit in the streamlining of these departments.
The area I refer to is the completion of the privatization of Petro-Canada. The creation of Petro-Canada with billions of dollars of tax money was part of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the energy producing regions of this country. This fraud through government interference and regulation deprived the energy producing provinces of billions of dollars that should have accrued to them during the oil price shock of 1973-74 when OPEC cut off the oil to the west during the Yom Kippur war, causing a tripling of oil prices within weeks. The producing provinces were never allowed to benefit from this oil price surge because of the interference and regulation from the federal government.
Because of this false fear of its future energy security, the federal government created with tax dollars a national oil company. The mandate of this crown owned oil company was through an aggressive acquisition and exploration program to provide for Canada's oil self-sufficiency. In spite of the reckless spending of the tax dollar to acquire grossly overpriced foreign multinational oil company holdings such as Atlantic Richfield Pacific Petroleum, Petrofina, British Petroleum and Gulf Petroleum, creating one of the largest oil companies in Canada, this bureaucratic boondoggle was never able in any substantial way to fulfil the mandate.
I well recall the early days of Petro-Canada's intrusion into the energy field with bureaucrats flying around in private jets and helicopters awarding extravagant cost plus contracts like the money would never run out. All this was sold to the Canadian taxpayer as necessary to reduce our dependency, or was it the U.S. dependency, on mid-east oil reserves.
We were told in Canada that we had less than 20 years recoverable oil reserves and that a high gasoline tax burden was justifiable to guarantee our future energy needs and pay for this spending binge. Now, 20 years later, we know that it was so much Liberal hogwash, a simple money grab and a flagrant breach of the principles of Confederation by the federal government, a Liberal federal government. We have 20 years later proven oil reserves that will supply Canada's energy needs for the next several centuries, almost 400 years of recoverable reserves in the tar sands of northern Alberta alone.
The past Tory government, knowing the moral dishonesty of these policies, moved with much foot dragging and procrastination to end this fraud by cutting taxpayer subsidization and even moved to partial privatization, turning our state owned oil company into a simple commercial enterprise no different than any other large oil company operating in Canada. I ask the question, why would the Canadian taxpayers want to own just another oil company? Is this oil company returning some benefit to the taxpayers in return for their billions of dollars in the form of lower gasoline prices or providing cheap clean burning natural gas to the homes in Atlantic Canada? No, it is not.
The fact is MPs on both sides of this House have been made aware of the unethical tactics of our state owned oil company harassing small independent gasoline retailers in an effort to remove competition, hardly what we might expect from our own taxpayer owned oil company.
It is engaged in the same export frenzy as all the other multinationals. Is it engaged in an aggressive Canadian frontier exploration program? No more so than any other multinational. In fact, Petro-Canada is competing with other multinational companies in the far flung corners of the globe.
Again the Reform Party questions why the Canadian taxpayer would want to own a national oil company. Why would this government not sell off this national oil company while the industry is strong and recoup some of those billions of taxpayers' dollars that were used to create this Liberal boondoggle? Why not use this opportunity when we are supposed to be downsizing and streamlining government to do something really significant and use revenue from the sale of Petro-Canada to reduce Canada's debt burden?
Could it be that we are about to become the victims of yet another Liberal fraud. This government, instead of behaving like a fresh new government with new innovative ideas that would stop this fatal spiral of debt and deficit we find ourselves in, continues to bring in this stale, tired Tory initiative that destroyed the PC Party, or it reaches back and resurrects the obsolete Liberal ideas of the Trudeau era.
In conclusion, as I said at the outset, we support the amalgamation and reduction of government ministries but let us take some new and innovative steps. Let us get government out of private enterprise and let private enterprise do what it can do better. Let us get government spending under control and reduce the necessity of this desperate sell-off of Canada's natural resources to support an unsustainable level of government spending.
Let us create technology to track the movement of profits of multinational corporations that move around the world at the speed of light and often escape the taxman. At the same time let us not tax to the point where we destroy the incentive to reinvest those profits in Canada's resource industries as we did in the case of the national energy program, particularly in value added manufacturing so we might escape the dependency on the exports of raw natural resource products.
Simply put, let us not continue on the same policies that in the last 25 years have plunged us into the position as one of the most indebted nations in the world at the same time that many of our natural resources that this country was built upon are in serious decline.