Mr. Speaker, I am surprised that a Conservative member wants to talk about clean energy and the government's record on clean energy when we consider what has happened over the past almost five years since the government was elected. It removed the renewable power production incentive and killed the wind power production incentive. The government has had very little interest over that five-year period in anything related to clean energy. The capital allowance is finally something toward clean energy but it is not very much.
Overall, the government has shown little appetite or interest for this matter at all. Until August, I was the critic for the last year or so on natural resources and had occasions to sit in the Standing Committee of the House of Commons on Natural Resources and heard from people working in this industry about how frustrated they were.
These were people working in renewable energy, for instance, assessing homes, examining the energy efficiency of a house and helping people to renew them based upon the program that existed until the end of March last year, which the government killed. They said that it had a devastating impact on an industry that was involved not only in examining and assessing the energy standards in a house and giving advice to people on how they could improve their energy use, reduce their costs and better insulate, but also on the companies that were doing the renovations to actually reduce heating costs. Those are lost jobs because of the government's action.