Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. NDP colleague for his question.
He is quite right. At this time, we have an enormous amount of energy in Canada and we are wasting it. Yet we have no reason to waste it. We should be conserving it for future generations. There is no urgent need to take everything we can easily extract from the tar sands. We could leave it there and use it later. We will always need oil. It will continue to be an important resource, especially for aviation.
How is it that we are not doing more to look to the future and practice sustainable development? The magic words are “sustainable development”, but the government does not seem to know what that means, which I find unbelievable. People do not care about future generations. People are using natural gas as much and as quickly as they can, because it brings in a lot of revenue. However, they are forgetting about future generations. They are forgetting that Canadians will still be around 10 years from now. What will we do then?
Some natural resources, including certain minerals like tin and zinc, will disappear within the next five to seven years. There will be none left, simply because we did not think about the future and use those resources only when necessary. We are doing the same thing with our energy resources. We are wasting them, instead of using them only when absolutely necessary.
I think this government behaves as it does because it is so backward thinking. Its archaic way of thinking dates back to a time when we did not need to think about the future.