Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise in this emergency debate on gas prices. I will be sharing my time with the member for Ottawa South.
The one point I would like to get across tonight is the difference in the effect this has on northerners. Someone has to speak up for the people in the north, the Arctic and the northern parts of the provinces. These prices have caused this crisis, and this is the subject of the debate tonight. It is even harder on northerners. I was delighted to hear the finance critic mention the special needs of the north.
Let me outline why it is even a more critical crisis in the north.
First, quite often people need a car to get to work. They are in rural areas with long distances. We have roughly 14 communities in my riding and only one of them has public transit. We cannot get on subway, a streetcar or a go-train. We have to get to work somehow and quite often it is a long distance. In the Arctic when one wants to find a seal hole, one does not get on a subway to get there.
On the price of gas, my southern colleagues tonight were complaining about how $1.30 a litre was hurting them so badly. In the far north of my community, where I was a week ago Saturday, it was $1.67 a litre.
In the north resource extraction is a major activity. Once again, although we are committing to invest in improving green technologies, we still use a lot of hydrocarbons in mining, forestry and placer mining. Once again, when these prices go up, it has a huge effect on northerners.
Just think about remote airlines. In my city alone we have roughly four jet airliners coming in and out every day. For us to do business and for all those people to get in and out, it will be hugely expensive. It will be expensive even for those who live on wildlife subsistence. To get to their trap lines or to hunt, they go by snowmobile. To get to their fish nets or to other areas, they use motor boats.
My riding is in the only territory in the country where tourism has the largest number of employees in the private sector. To get to my riding, tourists have to come hundreds or thousands of miles. The huge increase in gas prices will be devastating. We will see tourism go down as the fuel prices go up for the RVs, planes and vehicles that go there. This will even affect people doing wilderness hiking or canoeing in the riding.
For people living in the high Arctic, to get their supplies, food and necessities of life let alone everything else is very expensive.
People have asked my why when they go farther north, they seem to get poorer gas mileage. If every Yukoner looks at the gas pump, they will see that they are adjusted to a volume of 15°C. That is because gas changes with the temperature, and the average is much colder than that in the north.
The most important point of my speech is the devastating effects that the increase in home heating oil can have on northerners, particularly those on low and fixed incomes, the elderly, people on social assistance, single mothers. Imagine the cost for their survival with this huge increase in heating oil.
I live in a relatively small mobile home and it costs me $900 to heat it. For people who are getting a few hundred dollars on social assistance or a fixed pension, it is not like they have a choice. When it is 30° to 40° below, they have to heat their house. If they did not, their pipes would freeze and then they would freeze. Are they going to give up food, for example, or something else to heat their homes? This is devastating and something has to be done.
The prices have gone up. The minister said tonight that under his watch the price for a barrel of oil had doubled, so there has been a huge increase. In 2005 the former Liberal government announced the energy cost benefit program of $565 million to help, specifically, the elderly and poor families, but the Conservative government did not implement it.
What type of sympathy do these poor families receive from the Prime Minister when prices go up? The Prime Minister said, “the truth of the matter is higher gas prices-that's going to be something that we're going to have to get used to”. That was reported in the Vancouver Sun,on April 20, 2006.
Perhaps that is why the Conservatives have cancelled or reduced many of the energy saving programs the Liberals had in place. EnerGuide, which thousands of Canadians used, was revamped and downgraded. I was trying to be helpful and I put it in my newsletter. I was reamed over the coals by one of the contractors who normally used the program. He explained how poor it was. One of the speakers tonight already said it was adjusted so poor people would have less access to it by taking away the audits. This is totally unacceptable and a backward step.
We also had the residential rehabilitation program. We will put all sorts of pressure on the government to ensure it extends that program. Right now it goes until March 31, 2009. Once again, the people who can least afford these high energy prices are the ones who need to make these residential changes and upgrades to their houses. The Minister of Finance refuses to say if he will extend the program past March 31, 2009.
It is true that the recent price increases are due almost entirely to world supply tensions, market speculation, increasing demand from emerging nations, low inventories, political instability in oil producing countries and limiting refining capacity. Does that mean we can do nothing? Does it mean we should do nothing? No, of course not.
When we were in government, we set up the office of energy price information. It was allocated about $15 million. Someone already mentioned tonight that the former Alliance Party was the only party against it. The government closed the office. The minister said tonight, as did several other Conservatives, that the Competition Bureau had investigated six times and found no collusion. People do not know this because the government closed the office that would tell people this.
It is a very complicated system from the oil provider, to the pipeline fees, the refinery, the wholesaler and the retailer. To have this office keep track of these prices and explain to Canadians how it works would remove a lot of the fear and ensure nothing untoward was going on.
Simply because world oil prices are beyond our control does not mean that supply and demand are beyond our control. I am talking about the supply of alternative energies. That is why the previous Liberal government had programs that would increase these alternate energies so there would be less need for these high oil and gasoline prices. We invested in solar, biofuel, wind, tidal, clean coal, nuclear, cellulose ethanol, heat pumps, hydro and hydrogen fuels. We will continue to invest in a number of those.
When we talk about demand, we can also affect demand. We can reduce demand. When we were in government, we had that historic agreement with the auto manufacturers to schedule new fuel efficiency cars to some of the highest in the world. If the Liberals were in power, we would increase motor vehicle fuel consumption standards in Canada to meet or exceed international best practices.
We would also create a $1 billion advance manufacturing prosperity fund and improve the science, research and experimental development tax credit to support major investments in the manufacturing and the auto sector and position Canada as a leader in green vehicles and other technologies. That would decrease demand, so we would not have all these problems.
The Prime Minister said that if he came into office and if gas went above 85¢ a litre, he would take off the GST. He did not keep that promise. When we were in government, instead of us keeping those taxes, we put in the gas tax transfers. I know the municipalities in my riding are very thankful that they can use this for sustainable projects, a number of which will reduce their energy consumption and help on these high prices.
The thing I want people to remember the most is the devastating effect high gas prices are having on the north, far more than on southerners. An elderly first nations man came into my office when I was there on the weekend and simply said that he could not pay the bills. He showed me his pension stubs. He had a family. He was not in good health. What is such a person to do when he has a $900 oil bill? He is receiving a few hundred dollars a month from a couple of pensions. If that $900 oil bill doubles, how will he ever pay that?
As parliamentarians, if this price level stays at this high level or continues to go up, we have to do something about it. That is why I put in a preliminary suggestion of actions, but we certainly have to think of that elderly gentleman who cannot make it for his family.