First, Mr. Speaker, I am not alone. The OECD itself has recommended that favourable tax treatment for the non-renewable sector should be eliminated. In 1998, the Minister of Finance constituted a task force on business taxation, which also recommended the same thing as the OECD. The reason we must have different types of taxation is that we have to look at other issues as well; we have to look at societal issues.
The fact is that climate change is a fact of life. Just this year, for people living in the west, the forest fires that raged were not just an accident of history. The Ward Hunt ice shelf, the size of the Island of Montreal, has detached itself from Ellesmere Island. It has broken down. That is not an accident of history. Hurricane Juan flew into Halifax, creating all kinds of damage.
There is climate change. It is a fact of life. What we have to do is, on the one hand, foster clean energy technologies. We are not saying to put penalties on the oil and gas industry, but the oil and gas industry is flourishing at this time and it does not need any new breaks. It does not need another $260 million a year.
We would be far better off to put that additional money into wind energy, where we put hardly any at all, only $260 million for five years, so that we develop a new stream of energy. Oil reserves, regardless of whether we like it or not, are resources that are going to be depleted.
I quoted the International Energy Agency, which my colleague from Davenport visited recently. It says that the mid-depletion point of world oil reserves is going to happen in 2020. Beyond that, the agency reckons there will be another 20 to 30 years of additional reserves and then there will be depletion unless we find new oil.
We need to start building another stream of energies. We do not say to shut off the oil and gas industry, very far from it. I realize that my colleague from Alberta has a vested interested in his province producing a resource that we need today and that we use today. And we are happy to do so.
At the same time, let us not give the industry additional treatment so that it benefits from additional breaks when the time has come to, on the contrary, put new money we might have into a clean energy stream. This is really what we recommend: a parallel stream so that when the oil energy resources are depleted in 20, 30 or 50 years, this other stream will be thriving.
At one point, coal was the big energy source. It was too polluting, so oil started to come on stream. At that time there was the same debate that is happening today. I have read that then people said oil would never replace coal, but it did. We have to prepare for the time when clean energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass and cogeneration will replace oil and gas.