Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to address the bill and the measures the government is taking to assist families with the cost of fuel and particularly with the cost of heating.
I am especially pleased that we have a bill in front of us that essentially has three prongs to it. The first one, which is important, is the direct financial assistance to low income seniors or households with children who will be facing increased heating costs this winter.
However we are also using this opportunity to inject extra resources into ensuring Canadians are less dependent on fossil fuels. This would have a benefit in long term savings for families who qualify for these incentives to make home improvements, but it would also have a hugely important environmental benefit, in that as we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels we also would be reducing our impact on the atmosphere and our contribution to the greenhouse effect and to global climate change.
Therefore, not only are we addressing the immediate issue of the cost of fuel, but we are also addressing the long term issue of how we reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.
We also are addressing issues around market transparency. How can Canadians know better about how the price of fuel is determined and where perhaps there are questionable practices in the cost charged for fuel, whether it is gas at the pump or heating fuel going into our homes in the winter?
There have been persistent concerns about competitiveness in the oil industry. Measures are in this bill, as well, to strengthen the oversight of the Competition Bureau and its ability to take action.
I will speak more about this after question period but I hope the bill and the measures the government has announced will be an incentive for the provinces to look at how they can contribute.
We are clearly at a point now where gas prices have returned to, and I think perhaps a bit below, where they were prior to the Katrina storm that impelled a 25% increase in the cost of gasoline at the pumps, but it does not take away from or minimize the importance of these measures in the bill.