Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the members for Kootenay—Columbia, Calgary Southeast and Kelowna.
I will start with a couple of quotations. Approximately 500 years ago a fairly intelligent man said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I have heard a lot of passion about the environment and the need to take action, whether it will work or not, to deal with the problem, that it is urgent and must be dealt with. I cannot help but think of what that fairly intelligent man said when he said the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I also came across a quote from Warren Buffett the other day. I have heard a lot of models and forecasts on economic projections from the Minister of Natural Resources and the Minister of the Environment. Mr. Buffett said we have economic forecasters so that fortune tellers look smart. I think there is a lot of truth in what he had to say.
I want to focus on Saskatchewan. There are a number of areas in which Saskatchewan would be devastated by the Kyoto protocol. For the benefit of all the government members who are here tonight, let me explain that in Saskatchewan we have a government owned crown corporation that provides all our public power. Seventy per cent of our power comes from coal generating plants. Reducing dependence on that by 30% within 10 years would have a devastating effect on that crown utility. The only way it could be done is through major capital investment, with money the province does not have, to find other energy sources. In the interim what it will have to do is drive up the power costs to very high rates. It is going to be hard on seniors, farmers, businesses and everybody who is dependent on power in that province. It is going to be devastating.
I want to focus in on one business alone, IPSCO. It directly employs 1,500 people in Regina. It is a green industry and is probably the North American leader in scrap iron. Everyone wants to recycle, but IPSCO has looked at the implications of the Kyoto protocol and has made it clear. If it passes, IPSCO will be closing its operations and moving out of Saskatchewan. That will have a devastating effect on the province. I have talked to the CEO and he has said it is not a manageable problem. It is an unmanageable problem and is insurmountable for them. It will be moving its operations to Davenport, Iowa, with the rest of its operations and that will be another industry out of Saskatchewan.
Let us look at government revenues. The Government of Saskatchewan is going through rough times with fiscal imbalances. It is projecting a deficit heading into the next year. We are back into deficits. The federal government may not know that, but if we look at the provincial level it is coming. Saskatchewan is into that territory. Over 10% of its revenue is derived from petroleum royalties. If we are going to decrease our reliance on petroleum by 30% of fossil fuels, it is pretty easy to see that the imbalance will get worse in that province, not better. What does that mean? It means that health care, education, highways and other important government services will be shortchanged as revenues dry up. That is another area of concern.
A third area of concern is farming and transportation. Both those industries in Saskatchewan are totally dependent on diesel fuel and they will be hit hard. One thing I am amazed at is how the government totally neglected the uranium industry in Saskatchewan. We are sending uranium to France, Japan and other places that are going to find it much easier to meet the Kyoto standards because they are using atomic power, but we get no credit at all for being the major exporter of uranium to these other countries. To me that is either incompetence or something else, and I do not want to get into problems like the Prime Minister did with George Bush and use other words, but it really makes me wonder what the government was doing when it was negotiating this agreement.