Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, by creating such an element of uncertainty, this is actually doing harm to the very industry the government hopes to support.
On one hand, the government is saying there is some sort of tanker moratorium, be it voluntary or otherwise. On the other hand, it is telling Enbridge to please apply for a pipeline project that is going to enable 225 tankers in the same place the government says there may be a moratorium. That uncertainty is a killer to business. Everybody knows that.
Another element of this project which is important to my colleague from Timmins—James Bay and anybody in this House who happens to represent a resource constituency, a place that draws from our natural environment, is that this is all for raw export, export of raw bitumen to other places to do the upgrading. This represents thousands of jobs.
It also helps create, as the finance minister will well know, the precarious nature of what is often called Dutch disease, where the Canadian dollar in fact becomes a petrodollar. Every time another tar sands operation is developed, the dollar incrementally rises and manufacturing in places like Quebec, Ontario, even in Alberta itself, becomes harder and harder to do. It becomes harder and harder for us to compete.
This is a known economic reality, and it is being perpetrated by a government that agrees to everything if it has the name “tar sands” attached to it.