Debates of Nov. 7th, 2013

Opposition Motion—Keystone XL Pipeline

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the speech by my colleague from Vegreville—Wainwright today, for the most part.

Similar to what I said earlier, he pointed out that Canada is refining more than it uses already, and we are probably going to be refining and upgrading more in the future. Even if we do that, how does he propose to move it if there are no pipelines? That highlights the illogic of the New Democrats' point of view. They are pretending that they support jobs, but if one listens to anybody who works in the industry, as I did recently when I was in Calgary, they will say that there is already a slowdown. Things are not happening now in terms of job creation in upgrading and so forth, the things that create jobs here in Canada, because of the lack of access to markets. Yes, we need the energy east pipeline, but they also tell me that the Keystone pipeline is very important.

I do not think it helps when the Prime Minister goes to the U.S. and says that we will not take no for an answer. Maybe my colleague could tell me what he thinks the Prime Minister was saying. What will he do if it is a no? Is that some kind of threat? Is that really a logical, rational approach, to tell the U.S. that we will not take no for an answer?

[Leon Benoit, Conservative, Vegreville—Wainwright, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member, who is on the natural resources committee. He missed some key studies that demonstrated that the jobs in the oil and gas sector are in production and in building pipelines to move the product.

On his question about the Prime Minister's comments to the American President, he was saying that decisions like this should be based on science and that the science shows clearly that this pipeline can be built in an environmentally friendly way. That is what he was saying, unlike the leader of the official opposition, the New Democratic Party, who went to Washington railing against the development of the oil sands and the pipelines that are needed to move crude oil, upgraded oil, or the products that would be produced in these very refineries the members are talking about. He went there and railed against them, and that makes no sense whatsoever.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please. We will be resuming debate with the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. Before we do that, there is a great interest in participating in questions and comments today, as sometimes occurs, especially on opposition motion days. I would just say, to give some preference to other members who wish to participate, that if members in questions and comments could keep their interventions short—up to about a minute or so—then more members would be able to participate in the debate.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, before I get into the issues I wanted to raise here, I want to say that I will be splitting my time with my friend from Western Arctic.

I will wait for Hansard to get the exact quote from my friend from Alberta, but it was something to the effect that the only real jobs that get created in oil and gas development are on the mining and pipeline construction side. That is fascinating, because he should go to some of the refineries around his riding in Alberta and some of the LNG-proposed terminals in British Columbia and say that they are not real jobs and that the only good ones are on the mining side.

It is fascinating to hear the Conservatives talk about what real jobs are and their sudden new-found love of science. They just found religion on science. For years when we talked about climate change, they said it did not exist, that the scientists were all wrong—those elites who they and the Prime Minister keep talking about. Now when there is some scrap of evidence that supports one part of an argument, they suddenly think science is important.

My friend from Western Arctic can probably talk about some of the science and the implications on real people in the real world, as opposed to the fiction the members of the Flat Earth Society have created for themselves year after year. They do not even believe the science and dark art of economics themselves; they said there was no recession, six months into the last global recession, and produced an austerity budget. So much for believing in facts and science. The entire world recognized we were heading into a global recession. The finance minister got up in one of his more sanguine moments and said “Let us have an austerity budget” going into the teeth of a global recession, until he reversed that entirely.

He is also a finance minister who has the lucidity to say that the Senate should be abolished and who had some very interesting comments on the mayor of Toronto this morning, as well, that were quite passionate.

Let us talk about Keystone XL. Let us talk about a Prime Minister—

[John Baird, Conservative, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Don't you attack the finance minister. Don't you dare. Little Jimmy is not even here to defend himself.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will thank the foreign affairs minister. I know sometimes he travels abroad and thinks that he is so far away that he has to shout all of his comments back to Canada. However, we are here in the House of Commons, not 15 feet apart. I can hear everything he has to say, and I will look forward to his questions.

The using of a baseball bat for diplomacy, as the Prime Minister has done, has made it more difficult to approve the projects he is hoping to get approved in the United States. In a question and comment earlier to my friends, I asked them to imagine a scenario wherein a U.S. president comes to Canada to an economic forum in Toronto, to speak to the business community and the people of Canada, and when discussing a contentious project, 95% of which was based in Canada, said, “We will not take no for an answer on this project. If Canada says no for legitimate science-based reasons or social justice reasons, we're simply not going to accept it, as the United States of America”. The hue and cry from our Prime Minister, the Canadian people and the foreign affairs minister would be heard throughout the land, because how dare a U.S. president threaten us that way? We will take care of our own domestic affairs.

How about we allow the Americans to do the same thing? I know it helps the newspapers and television stations in Washington to have all the ad revenue coming from the current government and the Government of Alberta, pumping and promoting this project. Ironically, I was at an oil and gas session organized by the first nations in Prince George just a few weeks ago, where the national resources minister got up and had the audacity and incredibility to say that his government does not promote projects like Keystone or Enbridge northern gateway. The Conservatives do not promote them; rather, they just buy ads for them. They run down to Washington, banging them over the head in New York. They stand in our communities saying, “You have to; we insist.” They change all the laws in order to make the economic and environmental evaluating processes for these projects a sham. They make it a rubber-stamp process. However, the government does not actually promote them.

We know for a fact that this particular project creates jobs in the United States. I met with a Texas congressman who has become a friend. He is a Republican and a decent fellow, who my friends would get along with so well. Back in 2008, we had a nice meeting in Washington. At one point he said, “This whole Keystone thing, let me get it straight. Is your government actually promoting this pipeline?” He asked that because the refineries that would take all of this raw bitumen and upgrade it are based in his constituency. I said, “Yes, Congressman, the Canadian government's current position is to promote this project”. He said, “I want you to take a message home to my Canadian friends. Tell them this. If the roles were reversed and we had the oil sands and y'all had the refineries, it would be over my dead body that we would allow the raw export of our natural wealth to your country to have all the jobs created”—I think he said “y'all”.

The Conservatives now believe that all those refinery and upgrading jobs are not real jobs. They believe that the temporary pipeline jobs are real jobs, that the jobs that happen once are real but those others are not.

That is what the Conservatives just said, verbatim, that those are real jobs. Tell that to the people in the forestry industry, the fishing industry and the mining industry, and anybody who works in an upgrading facility, anybody who works in a plant that takes the natural wealth and endowment of this country and does something with it. Tell them they are not in real jobs.

I think it was actually a salient and transparent moment for the government, because by its policies, that is exactly what it thinks of those jobs that add value to our natural resources. That is what has happened to those jobs under the Conservative government. We have lost 350,000 of those manufacturing and upgrading jobs since the government took office. That is a fact.

The government is entitled to its opinions, but not its own facts. The facts of the matter are that it simply does not care. The government does not think those are real jobs.

The government talks about opening secondary markets and feeding the U.S. market. Let us understand that this is a generational decision. These pipelines are generational. They are not built for 5 or 10 years; they are built for 40, 50 or 60 years, which is also some of the problem.

My friends talk about how safe pipelines are and that they never leak. They should tell that to the people in Kalamazoo. That is what Enbridge said. It has been cited 115 times by the EPA. It said that, scientifically, this pipeline was in trouble, and this Canadian company said, “Never mind; we are just going to keep running the oil through”.

All those people lost their houses and got sick because of a company from this country and because of a government in this country that does not think regulations matter and that thinks industry can just watch itself. The Americans named it properly when they called it the Keystone Kops. That is how Enbridge was running it.

These are the same companies that spill here in Canada as well. There have been 850 spills since 2001; significant spills, not trickles. Often they are found by hunters and trappers out in the bush who notice that they are standing in a bunch of muck out in the muskeg and that is not quite right. What is it? It is oil that has been leaking for who knows how long.

The idea that a Canadian government would stand up for the exporting of 40,000 value-added jobs is anathema to me. It is contrary to Canadian values.

If a government ran on some slogan about standing up for Canada, one would assume it meant standing up for Canada, and that it would stand up for Canada and Canadian jobs. No, that is not what the government does. The numbers do not lie.

To my friends across the way, the comments about a “no-brainer” from their strategic genius leader and “we will not take no for an answer” do not make their case. That sounds tough. The boys in the patch like that. The oil executives like that tough-guy stuff from the fake cowboy across the way who grew up in Toronto. That is what they like. They want the sense that the sheriff is in town and he is going to tell those Yanks what for. That does not work.

It actually makes it harder for the President and the administration to approve the project, because now it looks as if he is being bullied. It does not help when the government denies the existence of climate change, year after year. When it finally accepts the science, it does nothing about it. That is not me saying that; that is the Environment Commissioner saying that the government does not understand the implications of the science in climate change. It does not have any programs that are ready to go, that will actually reduce the carbon footprint.

All of those things make it so much easier to get a no. When Canada flips off at the international community time and time again, it makes things harder, not easier. Maybe the government thinks being tough is what it is all about, but it is not.

Now we know, because it has been our history and it must be our future, that the basic and fundamental principle in this country, which is so rich, so diverse and endowed with so much wealth in our natural resources, should be to respect the environment and to actually treat with first nations for rights, title and accommodation, to gain the social licence at the community level and create the jobs that those resources have created for generations.

However, we have a government that is wedded to an ideology that says that is not its role. That is not the government's role. The government's role is to build the biggest rubber stamp it can and stamp everything that comes in front of it, regardless of what the actual prospects say. When someone comes along and says there is a pipeline that will take 40,000 jobs out of Canada, and Alberta will move from upgrading as much as 60% of the bitumen out of the oil sands down to about a third and dropping, the government's saying it has no part in that conversation is not standing up for Canadian values.

That is not a government standing up for Canada. We need one that will. We need one that understands the balance between the environment and the economy and understands that these resources only happen once. We can only take the oil out of the ground once. By definition, it is not renewable, so let us do it right. Let us have environmental considerations. Let us get the social licence from the community. For heaven's sake, let us create the jobs that have built this country from day one.

[Rob Merrifield, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague spew his ideology, and it really is west-coast ideology that is not driven by any facts.

First, I am in the United States a considerable amount of time and I know quite a bit about what is going on there. To help out the member, I would tell members that the oil that came up and was part of the disaster in Lac-Mégantic was not Canadian oil. That was American oil being refined in Canada. The member said that would never happen in America; I beg to differ with him.

Second, the member's ideology in this motion is all about refusing to move oil through a pipeline because it is environmentally a poisonous way to do it. Looking at the facts of it, oil is going to move one way or another. It is going to move by rail or by pipe. The NDP is so driven by ideology that the members will not look at the facts of that; they will not look at what is good for Canada or for the environment. They are just driven by ideology and saying no to something that they have no idea what they are saying no to. I refuse to accept that.

This motion just reinforces what I have thought of the NDP all the time: that anti-trade—

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please.

The hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

I have particular concern with my friend's use of terminology, which we can discuss later. Let me read the motion from my friend so he can actually understand what we are talking about today.

[Rob Merrifield, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I read the motion.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

No, I do not think he actually did. The Conservatives are claiming that they did, so let me just give it to them verbatim so they can understand what is happening here. It states:

That, in the opinion of the House, the Keystone XL pipeline would intensify the export of unprocessed raw bitumen and would export more than 40,000 well-paying Canadian jobs, and is therefore not in Canada’s best interest. That is what the motion says.

The motion is correct in its statement of fact, that 40,000 jobs are associated with the upgrading of this much oil, raw bitumen, moving south. Those are facts. My friends are going to dispute this, but these are the same facts that they rely on when they talk about the economic benefits. They cannot have it both ways.

This is what is in the reports that study this particular project. If they want to argue about the number of jobs, they can go ahead, but it is job export policy. That is what the current government is running: raw export—

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please.

The hon. member for Halifax West.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that my hon. colleague, the House leader of the official opposition, and I have in common, along with our absence of surplus hair, would be the frustration we feel every day in the House of Commons during question period when we in the opposition ask questions and do not get answers from the government. Therefore, I want to give my hon. colleague a really clear, simple question and give him an opportunity to give an answer.

Does the NDP House leader agree with his party's candidate in Toronto Centre when she says about the oil sands, “...we need some kind of moratorium on further development...”?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if my friend has ever been to Fort McMurray.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

That was not the question.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is part of the answer. He is impatient for the answer, and we will get there.

I have been to Fort McMurray. I have met with people working in the patch, and I have also met with the mayor of Fort McMurray. The mayor of Fort McMurray has consistently said to the current government and others that the rapid boom-and-bust approval of licences within the oil patch goes far beyond Fort McMurray's ability to keep pace. That has been a fact, not for this year but for the last eight years she has been in office. I have met with the mayor and I wish my friend would spend some time with her.

To the Alberta government and to the federal government when she has been here, she has said—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my goodness, they certainly have a lot to say about nothing.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please.

There really is too much noise in the chamber today. I appreciate that the members are enthusiastic about today's debate, but the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley has the floor now. As in other situations, when members have been recognized and have the floor, it is in the interests of all members to give them the time to say their piece, and there will be other opportunities for members to participate in the debate.

The hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we know that the boom-and-bust economy that is enabled and, in fact, accelerated by governments like the current one causes significant harm on the bust side of things. That is not me who has been saying that; it has been Alberta premiers like Lougheed and Stelmack and on down the line.

What my friends are suggesting with their promotion of the Keystone pipeline is a policy that one cannot touch the brake, that things simply have to go the way they go and, if one were ever to somehow guide them to the benefit of this country, it would cause calamity. If I were on the road with somebody and I said, “It feels as if we are going a bit fast” and the driver said, “Sorry, I can't touch the brake”, I do not think I would ever get in the car with that driver again. That is dangerous driving.

These guys are dangerous drivers. They should not be driving this economy anymore, into the toilet.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to debate this topic. I live downstream from the oil sands in the Northwest Territories. We have great concerns about those oil sands.

I will start with a little history. In 2007, the oil sands industry in Alberta was looking at massive investment in upgraders. What happened to change that? In Texas, the government of the day in the United States decided that Venezuelan heavy oil coming from the Chavez regime was not appropriate. The Chavez regime agreed with that and we saw the stifling of heavy oil to the Texas refineries. That changed the situation in 2007.

The upgraders then were to be replaced with the heavy oil upgraders in Texas, and the multinationals that ran the Alberta oil industry had no consideration at all for Canada only their bottom line and their corporations, which is what they can only look at, decided to go to Texas. The bitumen could be put into the heavy oil upgraders there.They would not have to invest $60 million to $100 million over 20 or 30 years to build upgraders, modern upgraders that could provide the best possible service in upgrading our bitumen. They would not have to do that in Alberta. They would not have to make that decision. They would not have to invest that money, but they needed to get a pipeline. They wanted to get a pipeline down to Texas where they could use those heavy oil upgraders, which would increase their profits. They did not really have a reason to support Canadian industry, to support Canadian workers or to support the Alberta economy. In fact, if they used these heavy oil upgraders, that could open up more investment than they could put into the oil sands, so they could produce more of it and ramp up the speed by which they developed this resource, because they were just taking it out of the ground and shipping it somewhere else. They could start moving more and more projects.

How does that make the people in our region feel? When we talk to the people in Fort Chipewyan, the people in Fort MacKay or talk to any of the people who actually live in that region, like myself, in Fort Smith, we do not like it. We want orderly development. We do not want the oil sands to blow up to three times its size in the next decade and a half because we are simply taking the oil out of the ground and shipping it out of the country. If we were building the upgraders in Canada, there would be plenty of jobs and economic development for Alberta. This would work. This would mean more orderly development of the oil sands.

Instead, what do we have? We have the wild west going. The Jackpine project has just been approved. What did the Environmental Assessment Board say about the Jackpine project? It would have significant impact on the environment. However, for economic reasons, it was allowed to go ahead anyhow. It was needed for the economy. Because raw bitumen was just being shipped out, these plants had to be built that take it out of the ground and get it out of the country. What kind of process is that for Canada?

Who are the big promoters of this project in the United States? The guys who control the petcoke industry, the Koch brothers. The biggest climate change deniers in the world love this product. They love to get the petcoke into the states where they send that dirty product that comes out of the upgrading using the coking process, which is a process that actually should not be the main process right now for upgrading, but I will get into that a little later. They take that petcoke and sell it to China, the dirtiest product to put into a coal-fired plant the world has ever seen. That is what is done with it. That is what we end up supporting with our Canadian Keystone pipeline.

The Koch brothers were pretty careful at the beginning. They would not admit any involvement with Keystone. They did not want to tie any of their processes, but it has been proved now, pretty conclusively, that these guys are doing it for their purposes.

This is what Canada is supporting right now. The dirtiest product is going to go from the United States to China and to other countries to be burned in their coal-fired plants.

Keystone XL would produce about 15,000 tonnes of petcoke a day from its process. What can we do differently? We could build upgraders in Canada.

When they switched to coking from hydrogen addition, it was because the price of natural gas went through the roof at the beginning of the last decade. Where is the price of natural gas now? It is down there.

We are building LNG terminals to ship the natural gas out of the country when we could be using it in upgraders in Alberta to upgrade the bitumen in an environmentally reasonable fashion, reasonable but not perfect. Instead, we are going to build the Keystone pipeline, ship it all down, put it in the old beat-up refineries along the Texas coast that have handled Venezuelan heavy crude for the last 40 years. It will stick it in there, it will process it there and it will take the petcoke and ship it to China.

How does that fit with Canada's image in the world? What does that make Canada? More of a pariah? Is this what the Conservative government wants: everyone in the world looking at Canada as a purveyor of ill-gotten environmentally unfriendly good? Is that the Conservative government's plan for Canada's economy?

The Conservatives have to shake their heads a little. They have to recognize that Canada has a place in the world. We are not alone in the world. We are not immune to the opinions of the rest of the world. We live off the opinions of the rest of the world through trade. If we do proper trade, people will continue to work with us.

I sat on a board that dealt with environmental issues on rivers. The Al-Pac pulp mill on the Athabasca River, through public pressure, was forced to increase its environmental capacity before it was built. The executives of that company told me five years later that it was the best thing that ever happened. They could sell their pulp anywhere in the world as a high premium, environmentally correct product. It was the best thing that ever happened to them.

What are we doing with our oil sands that are going to be around for 150 years? What kind of reputation are we building for this product that we want to sell to the rest of the world for decades to come? We are doing nothing. We are just trying to get it out of the ground as fast as possible. Mine it and ship is the viewpoint right now in this industry.

We could move in another direction. We could set up the most modern upgraders in the world using the excess natural gas we have for hydrogen addition. We could produce an industry that had a lot more environmental aspects to it. We would also then have synthetic oil, which we could send anywhere in the world. Synthetic oil created out of bitumen can go into any refinery in the world.

Rather than being a hostage to the Texas coast where, in a few years, perhaps Venezuela will be back to being a friend of the United States and then, all of a sudden, we would be competing with heavy oil coming by tankard loads from Venezuela to the same refineries. All of a sudden, the value of the bitumen would start to drop because there would be competition for the same upgrading.

I appreciate that I have one minute left, but if we look at it environmentally, our country has about one minute left.

We have moved so quickly to a position in this world where we are simply not accepted anymore. We are not accepted as being good citizens of the world. This is a tragedy that goes on the backs of all those people sitting across there. The Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister are the guys responsible for the mess we are in today. They sit there and grin and pretend that this is all just going to pass by. It is not going to pass by. We will remember what they did.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is somewhat disappointing that the motion has been brought forward from the New Democrats. When we look at their past record, I do not know what they have against the Prairies. They seem to attack rural development in our communities in the Prairies. We have had NDP MPs travel to Washington to be critical of the oil sands. The New Democrats say “hear, hear” with grins on their faces. A good number of Prairie people and all Canada benefit when we see development on our Prairies. They should focus a little more positive attention on this.

The New Democrats have a candidate in Toronto Centre and she, in reference to the development of the oil sands in Alberta, made the statement that we needed some kind of moratorium on further development. Is this the position of the NDP? Does it want a moratorium on the oil sands?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, quite clearly, what we want is more value out of the oil sands. That is what we are saying today. There is no question about it.

I had a conversation at one point in time with the premier of Manitoba, Mr. Selinger. We talked about the potential for upgrading bitumen in Manitoba. There is an opportunity there. Other provinces should take a look at this. Why are we only thinking in terms of exporting raw bitumen when we could be looking at the opportunities right across the country. With the establishment of proper transportation systems within our own country, we could use the bitumen. Perhaps we could upgrade it in Manitoba and create good long-term jobs for Manitobans and for people in Saskatchewan, in Sarnia, Ontario, and on the east coast of our country.

There are opportunities, if we want to talk about upgrading, that go far beyond simply the borders of the Ft. McMurray area. Therefore, be careful when you talk about exporting jobs out of our country.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, just as my colleague was concluding his inspired, well-structured and well-argued speech, the first comment I heard from the other side of the House was “same old crap”. We are talking about a complicated issue here. We are talking about non-renewable resources. We need to examine the environmental regulatory framework and the matter of value added because we are talking about a non-renewable resource. It is not “crappy”, it is crucial.

In fact, it is so crucial that I would like to ask my colleague a question.

Does he have more of what is being called “crap” by the other side?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, right across northern Canada, everyone is looking at resources. How we develop those resources and what we do with them is very important. It makes a huge difference to the communities. In the territory I live in, over the last decade we had a GDP rate of increase greater than almost anywhere else in Canada. At the same time, we saw our cost of living go through the roof. We saw the level of poverty in our communities increase. All of these things happen in resource economies. However, when we put good jobs on the line that are not simply extractive, when we give someone a future in a manufacturing plant, like an upgrader, over the next 40 years, we create some security in the economy. We create something that has value.

Fort McMurray, in some way, will have to switch from exploitation to operation. It understands that. That will build a good community in Fort McMurray. However, with this exploitation, this constant rush to develop these resources, because there is no added value in them, is just a bad idea for Canada and a bad idea for Alberta.