Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to share my time with my colleague, the member for Mississauga—Erindale.
Let me begin by saying that during my time as minister of natural resources, I learned firsthand that energy costs are particularly difficult for lower income Canadian families, who pay a disproportionately large amount of their disposable income on home heating costs and other forms of energy. That, I think, is why so many of us in this House are concerned about the effect of the rising costs of fuel and home heating oil on all Canadians and particularly on lower income Canadians. To date, we have seen little, if any, action by the Conservative government. In fact, what we have seen is that it has taken things that the Liberal government had put in place or set in motion and soon after taking the power of government scrapped those things which would have been helpful to lower income Canadians and helpful for monitoring energy prices or taking action in the case of anti-competitive behaviour.
In October 2005, shortly before I became the minister of natural resources, the previous Liberal government tabled Bill C-66, which included a provision to create the office of petroleum price information. The office's principal responsibility would have been to monitor energy price fluctuations and provide clear current information to Canadians. The bill received royal asset in November, just before the last election.
Unfortunately for Canadians who are eager for the federal government to ensure that gasoline is competitively priced, as soon as it came to power, Canada's new government, so-called, decided to gut the bulk of Bill C-66. I find it somewhat disingenuous that the government now professes such concern for Canadians in this environment of rising energy prices while one of its first acts upon assuming office was to cancel the office of petroleum price information. The reason that office would have made such a difference is it would have provided up to date information to Canadians.
What Canadians see now are oil companies pulling in larger and larger annual profits while the price Canadians pay at the pump goes up and up. They see prices go up between competing gasoline retailers at virtually the same time and wonder if it is collusion.
Another thing that Canadians lost when the Conservatives gutted Bill C-66 was greater power for the Competition Bureau to examine anti-competitive behaviour in the energy sector. Apparently, ensuring strong competition in Canada's marketplace is not a priority for the Conservative government. The minister, when he was in the House, pointed out that a number of investigations into this in the past revealed the absence of collusive behaviour. However, that is no reason not to give the Competition Bureau more powers in the event that those powers are needed to control such behaviour. If such behaviour did not exist, the powers would not be needed. However, if the Competition Bureau is to do its job, it would certainly be better placed were it to have those additional powers.
There were other Bill C-66 casualties after the last election. The Conservatives completely revamped the home energy retrofit program in order to ensure that lower income Canadians would largely be excluded from the program. The essential principle of the program was to reduce your home heating costs by identifying possible energy savings through an energy audit. The government would pay for half the costs of the audit and then pay for half of the costs of renovations to make your home more energy efficient. The Conservative government, however, decided that paying half the costs of the energy audit was not an effective use of taxpayer dollars.
The big problem with this is that lower income families simply do not have the money to pay for these energy audits on their own. That means they cannot qualify for the retrofit program and they cannot make their homes more energy efficient. They cannot realize the savings and they cannot help the environment by using less home heating oil or natural gas, for example. However, that is not what Canadians got from the Conservative government.
I want to really emphasize this point about the energy audit because I think this was one of the most reprehensible acts of the government. On the one hand, it is common knowledge that lower income families pay a much higher fraction of their income on energy, so they, of all people, need access to energy audits and more energy efficient home heating.
When the government says it will no longer pay for the audit and thereby excludes lower income Canadians, that is a meanspirited and reprehensible action because it excludes those who need this help most. I cannot accept the argument that audit costs are administrative costs and the government did this to save on administrative costs. Audit costs are absolutely essential to help lower income Canadians pay for the audits which they otherwise would not be able to afford.
The Prime Minister, while in opposition, used to talk about axing the tax on tax, that is to say, to ensure that the GST was not levied on the 10¢ per litre excise tax. In fact, as recently as four months before the last election, the Prime Minister pledged to eliminate all GST on fuel sold for over 85¢ a litre. That, however, was when the Conservatives were in opposition. Once they assumed power, they quickly discovered that Canadians really did not need those tax savings quite as much as what has become Canada's biggest spending government in history. I will concede that it does take an awful lot of tax dollars to increase government spending by $35 billion in just three years.
Now what we hear from the Prime Minister is “the ability of governments to affect the price of gasoline per se is so small that it is not worth doing”. He might be the only leader of a political party to ever profess to have less power to do something after becoming Prime Minister than the power he thought he had before.
These broken promises are simply a part of a larger pattern. Just before and during the last election, the Conservatives used to say, “We will axe the tax on tax and fix high gas prices. We will not tax income trusts. We will honour the Kelowna accord. Do not worry, the Atlantic accords are safe with us”. After the election, every single one of these promises turned out to have been made in bad faith with the Canadian people.
What Canadians need is more money dedicated toward building efficient systems of public transportation so that they have a real option to take public transportation in cities and towns of even modest size. We need to strengthen the Competition Bureau to ensure that it has all the powers it needs to investigate any suspicious pricing in the energy sector. It needs also to have the power to administer appropriate penalties to deter such behaviour.
What we also need to understand is that the demand for oil is not going to lessen on its own. Rapidly growing economies all over the world, especially India, China and other Asian countries, are going to be buying more and more of the world's oil supplies to meet the demands of their growing industries and middle classes.
The Canadian government needs to take a leadership position, something the government should try to understand. It has to take a leadership position, not an obstructionist position, and help our economy transform itself into an energy that relies less on fossil fuels to drive it. We need to invest in the development of technologies that will help to make Canada a global leader in alternative forms of energy not only for the sake of our environment but also for our standard of living and the standard of living of our children.
At a very minimum, if the government is not able to take a leadership position in this important area, it should at least explain to the people of Canada why, on coming to power, it cancelled three important and positive measures in the area of energy. Why did it cancel the creation of an office to monitor prices? Why did it cancel the proposal to give the Competition Bureau more powers in this area? Why did it deprive the most vulnerable of Canadians from the help they needed in carrying out an energy audit in order to produce more energy efficient housing? I would like the government to answer those three questions, at a minimum.