Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to enter the debate on Bill C-3. Most of the country is seized with the issue of energy as we speak. Many homeowners and small businesses are reeling with the shock and the horror of the rising, out of control, skyrocketing fuel prices, so it is timely that we are having this debate now.
It is timely but maybe not fitting, given the content of the bill. We see Bill C-3 as the death rattle of a national dream. There was a time when Canadians believed that the federal government had some role to play in looking after the interests of ordinary Canadians in terms of access to energy.
In 1975, the minority Trudeau government, held up by the David Lewis NDP, saw fit to enter into the energy industry with some presence, whether it was as a watchdog or a producer. It saw that the whole oil and gas industry was owned by offshore interests.
We really did not know if Canadians were getting gouged. We did not know if we were paying a fair market price or a grossly inflated price. Given that Canada is, first, geographically challenged in that it is huge and, second, that it has a cold northern climate, this was no small issue.
However, in 1975 people had the vision and forethought to try to do something about it. They still believed in the nation state of Canada that we could do something to control our own future and destiny.
When we raise the subject, people look at us as if it is heresy to even recommend that the federal government might be able to do something to help Canadians. Government shrugs its shoulders and says that it actually traded that away in the last free trade agreement it signed, that it used to be able to influence and dictate domestic market prices for our energy resources but it traded that away and cannot help us any more.
Frankly that is why I think it is sad today that we are dealing with the death rattle of a national dream, when people with vision actually had some idea and some awareness of how critical access to reasonably priced energy resources would be to the economic stability of the country.
It is even more galling to Canadians when they realize that our energy resources are part of our common wealth. There is that old term. We used to use that word that in the name of our party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Our natural resources are part of our birthright as Canadians. They are in the ground. They are under our feet. They are something we all need and we all should be able to share.
We believe some things should be regulated. We all know that capital has no conscience as such, so it is government's role to introduce regulation on the free market to make sure that it meets ordinary people's needs. We could certainly argue that the absence of any national energy strategy is not serving Canadians well. We could ask any homeowner in this country what he or she thinks about the way the free market has served the interests of Canadians when it comes to energy supply. We could ask any small business person or any trucking company representative how he or she likes waking up in the morning not knowing if the price of fuel has arbitrarily fluctuated by six, seven or ten cents.
What really annoys Canadians most is this seemingly arbitrary nature of the wild price fluctuations. That is what really galls people. That is why, when we did have Petro-Canada, when we did actually own a piece of the action, we knew what the real cost of production was. Then we could tell if we were paying the real cost or if we were being gouged like most Canadians feel they are being gouged now.
I am not at all impressed with Bill C-3. It is a huge step backward. It is the end of an era in terms of the nation state of Canada being able to dictate its own domestic price for energy strategy.
There is a growing interest, of course, in the whole issue of energy resources. As prices skyrocket there is a growing realization that we have to do something about energy conservation. We have to get more involved in the demand side of our resources rather than the supply side.
I am a carpenter by trade. I used to build hydro dams and oil refineries. I worked on megaprojects of that nature. It used to be heresy for a tradesperson to advocate demand side management because we wanted the jobs. We wanted to build hydro dams to put people to work.
In actual fact, the more people dig into the subject, we are pleased to be able to say that there are far more job opportunities in demand side management in terms of energy retrofitting buildings like schools and hospitals than there are in building a hydro dam. We have to start considering that a unit of energy harvested from the existing system by demand side management measures is indistinguishable from a unit of energy generated at a generating station except for a number of key things: it is available at about one-quarter of the cost; it creates as much as seven times the number of person years or jobs; it is available and online immediately instead of the 10 year lag time there is to build a new generating station; and it does not degrade the environment, but in fact rehabilitates the environment by reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
That is the type of message we should be getting from our federal government as we enter into an era of energy supply crisis. Instead of throwing money at it with a dysfunctional rebate system, why are we not hearing about a progressive approach to serving the needs of Canadians by demand side management energy conservation? If I heard the government say that even once, it would be of some comfort. Instead we have a token gesture.
Let us start with the federal government itself as a demonstration pilot project. The federal government owns 68,000 buildings in Canada, many of which are absolute energy pigs because they were built in an era when people did not worry about energy conservation. These buildings waste energy like crazy.
All the empirical evidence now shows that we can reduce the operating costs of those 68,000 buildings by as much as 40% by working on the building envelope. I am talking about new insulation, smart thermostat controls, basic caulking and sealing of windows, and smart lighting systems that dim and light up as the day brightens and darkens. All of these measures are easily done and would serve as a demonstration project to the private sector that it too can reduce its fuel consumption and operating costs. We all have to realize that our energy resources are extremely finite and that Canada is the most wasteful country in the world when it comes to energy consumption.
David Suzuki was quoted recently as saying that for the rest of the world to live in the same manner we do or use the same level of energy we do, seven more plants would be required to provide the raw resources. There are not enough energy resources in the world for every man, woman and child in developing nations to live the lifestyle that we enjoy with our energy use.
Let us face it. Essentially the jig is up as far as our cheap access to unlimited energy use is concerned. Conservation is going to be the key and will ultimately save the planet. Sooner or later we are going to have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels altogether.
In regard to the demand side management I described, possibly there would be some optimism and hope on the part of Canadians if they heard our government make visionary statements like that. Frankly, we could show the world how to do it. We could be a centre of excellence for energy retrofitting technology because we are a harsh northern climate and we have challenges in terms of energy supply now. We could develop and export the technology and become world leaders in the sensible use of energy resources instead of showing the world just how wasteful we can be, which is our practice, frankly.
I started by saying that there was a time within living memory when Canadians still believed that we were not impotent as a government, but now as we sign more and more trade agreements we are locking ourselves in deeper and deeper, to the point where we can no longer dictate our own domestic energy strategy. We cannot give preferential pricing to our own customers, our own citizens, our own kids. We are not allowed to because somebody traded it all away. I call it economic treason to trade away our birthright and our ability.
In the 1980s and 1990s in the private sector, in the Business Council on National Issues and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, everybody wanted to deregulate everything. The idea was to let the free market prevail and get government out of business because it was tying up the free hand of the marketplace. The government sold Petro-Canada. It sold the goose that laid the golden egg. Why did we want to get out of the energy sector just at a time when world prices were going through the ceiling? We sold it off.
Last year, $800 million in profit would have been in the coffers of the federal government, but no, we had to let the free market handle things: all things private, good, and all things public, bad, and the public sector could not organize a peanut stand. Although frankly, with the way the government has managed its energy rebate system there is not much room for confidence in its ability to run anything else.
However, the really galling thing is that we used to own it. We used to have a piece of it. It was called Petro-Canada. Bill C-3 puts to bed any idea of ever getting involved in that kind of thing again because the powers that be simply will not tolerate it.
We are not being served well. Ask Californians with their energy problems how much they like deregulation. They are trying to re-regulate as fast as they can to save their bacon, to save their industries, to save their economic base. Ask Albertans how much they like deregulation. They always say they do, until the price of natural gas goes up 125% in one year. Thanks a million. The free market is really servicing them well. These outrageous gouging costs have to be offset by energy rebates to Albertans every month.
However, we never get to the root of the problem. Rebates are just offsetting the profits of the oil companies. If we are in fact being gouged—and we do not know if we are being gouged or not—rather than the government intervening to try to put some semblance of order into the industry, it is telling us that if we are being charged too much it will help us by giving us a little bit of money, a $125 lump sum payment.
That does not even heat one house for a week in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. I had phone calls from people in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut—I spoke about it in question period today—who were complaining that the fuel oil delivery guy will not deliver now unless customers have cash up front. Many people are defaulting on their monthly bills. They have to pay cash in advance to get oil to heat their homes. That is a desperate situation when it is 40 degrees below zero or worse in Nunavut.
We are not being well served with what is our common wealth, with what we used to consider our birthright and our property. We are not being well served when we cannot even afford to heat our homes or we are paying $500 or $600 a month for an 800 square foot house in Nunavut. The $125 rebate will not even heat that house for a week. One cannot be without heat for more than an hour in that part of the world.
Deregulation has hurt ordinary people. The previous speaker from the Bloc Quebecois was saying that the average joe, the little guy, the working person, has suffered in all of this. People who own shares in the oil companies have benefited while the rest of us have suffered. Who will stand up for us? Who will be our champion, our advocate? Who will say on behalf of the Canadian people that enough is enough?
Who will say that they will find a way to produce and distribute energy resources in a way that is fair and equitable so that all Canadians can share in the benefit of what is ours, not theirs but ours collectively? That was the dream of Petro-Canada. The government is putting the final stake through the heart of that dream as we deal with Bill C-3. That is nothing to celebrate. I have heard other speakers saying it is great that we are moving forward with a whole new way of dealing with our energy resources. We are not. We are moving backward.
People cannot survive without energy. It is one of the fundamental basics. It gets to be an economic development issue because he who has the energy can attract the business. This is why in all the free trade agreements the Americans have been quite up front. They are after our energy resources and our water because without those two resources no country will move forward. They are two resources that we used to have in great abundance.
Now, frankly, that natural gas might as well be in the United States because we have to sell it to our own domestic customers at the same price we sell it to our export partners south of the border, who have an insatiable appetite for our resources. Even if we run short and are freezing in the dark, we are not allowed to turn off the tap once it is turned on. That is the miracle of NAFTA.
This is the frustration that Canadians are feeling. They feel that we are no longer in control and that their freely elected representatives, like us in the House of Commons, cannot even help them. They are right, because in my opinion somebody committed economic treason by signing away our economic sovereignty and giving it away for next to nothing in a trade agreement that we neither wanted nor voted for. It does not serve ordinary Canadians. It only serves the powerful and the elite or maybe those who have shares in oil companies.
We are worried that we have lost the ability to have any kind of national energy strategy. That is why I recently introduced a private member's bill calling on the government to create a national energy price commission. On energy issues the commission would at least be an advocate on behalf of ordinary Canadians. It would champion their issues, so that if the oil companies wanted to raise the price of gas or home heating fuel or whatever, they would have to come before this independent tribunal and justify why the increase is warranted. What is so wrong with that?
Granted, it would be a regulation, and maybe it would be the first tentative step toward a new national energy policy that would in fact set policy which would provide for ordinary Canadians. Maybe that same energy price commission would say that charging the GST on home heating fuel is not only wrong but amoral and fundamentally antithetical to anything Canadians should be standing for.
Maybe that energy price commission would say that we need to start investigating more sources of alternative energy. Maybe it would be the think tank that would actually set some energy policy. Perhaps it would say that the real value of a barrel of oil is not $25 or $27 but that the whole cost of a barrel of oil is about $150, because we have to factor in the price of the American military to keep supertankers in the Persian Gulf to get the oil out of there and then we have to factor in the environmental degradation and the cleanup afterward.
If we look at the whole cost of burning fossil fuels, all other sources of energy seem cheap in comparison. Even if solar energy and wind energy need some investment before we are ready for them, that seems like a bargain when we start really viewing what burning fossil fuels does to our planet and our environment and what the whole cost of that is.
We are ready to move on. We would hope that most Canadians are also ready to move on and into an era of progress and new maturity about our energy resources. That includes taking the bull by the horns and not saying that we cannot do it. We are always making excuses about why we cannot shape our domestic policy. There is a saying I heard that “there are no more prizes for predicting rain, that from now on we are only giving prizes for building arks”. There should be no more excuses.
The government should not tell us that it cannot help us. It must get creative and find a way to make sure there is a reliable supply of affordable energy so that Canadians can heat their homes without breaking the bank.
We do not want more repeat situations like Cambridge Bay where people have to go down to the fuel dealer with five gallon jerry cans and pay in advance to get ten gallons of fuel oil to heat their homes. That is a disgrace.
It is a complete abdication of responsibility by the federal government in not representing the interests of Canadians in this way. Bill C-3 takes us one step further from the complete abdication of responsibility by the government. It simply does not think it has a role in any kind of a national energy strategy, and we think that is wrong.
I look back fondly on the days when David Lewis had the official balance of power in a minority government. He could influence government and demand that government exercise its sovereign right to manage the affairs of the country in terms of energy supply. That was 1975. This is 2001. Bill C-3 will drive a stake through the heart of any national dream we might have in taking care of our own interests.
