Mr. Speaker, we know, particularly in the north, that boom economies are also bust economies, and that if we put all our eggs in one basket while times are good, they can be very good, but when they go bad, because we only have one leg to stand on, they go bad quickly. Obviously, creating a diversified economy with diversified markets is absolutely essential to Canada's growth and prosperity.
With reference to the fishing community, just the wild salmon economy in the northwest is a $150 million per year sustainable economy. It can continue forever if it is done right. The fishing economy across British Columbia is more than $1 billion. Tourism on Canada's west coast is even more than that. With those two economies in the mix, weakened environmental assessments and weaker protection in the event of oil spills will put all of that at risk to ship 500,000 barrels of raw bitumen a day out of Alberta to China.
One would ask why we are shipping it out raw. We have experience in another important economy in British Columbia, the lumber industry, in which the provincial government continually pushes for export of raw logs, thereby leaving so much economic opportunity on the table. A mill was just lost in Houston, B.C., with 225 workers, in part because of fundamental government mismanagement and the promotion of exporting raw logs to China.
Now we are moving it up the scale and saying we should do the same thing with oil. The only difference is that the stakes are even higher. The amounts of money we are talking about are even higher when we forgo the benefits of upgrading it to conventional oil and then refining it even higher. Why do we not give preferential treatment to companies that actually invest in the technology to add value to our resources?
The Conservatives have nothing to say about this. They say their invisible hand is always magical and always correct. If China wants to fund the promotion of an oil pipeline like this and buy Nexen, which is supplying most of the oil for the gateway, and if China owns the source of the oil, promotes it, maybe ends up owning most of the pipeline in this project, and is also the consumer of this project, this presents no cautionary tale to the government whatsoever.
At what point does it stop becoming a Canadian project? It is when somebody else owns it.
Those resources that are our endowment, our heritage, and our inheritance are forgone by this approach, meanwhile threatening other economies that we know are sustainable, such as the tourism and fishing sectors. All the while, these guys are racing to approve pipelines, racing over the interests of the public, racing over the concerns of science, which the Conservatives refuse to listen to, and becoming international pariahs on the climate change front.
This is a bad cocktail mix and a bad formula. It is bad for the economy and increasingly bad for our environment.