Madam Speaker, I thank my dear colleague from Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques.
I would like to thank my colleague for sharing his time with me.
I would also like to take a moment to thank the voters of Skeena—Bulkley Valley, in the northwest part of beautiful British Columbia, for sending me back to this place. It is always a humbling and honouring experience to stand in the House of Commons on behalf of the people of northwestern British Columbia. People who have spent any time there have found it to be a beautiful place. The people are diverse and proudly Canadian.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to enter into this debate today, because we know first-hand in British Columbia, perhaps more than many Canadians, just how bad the process for evaluating such energy projects has become in Canada. We were ground zero for the discussions surrounding the controversial northern gateway pipeline project that is still being proposed. We call it the zombie project because, no matter how many times it gets defeated by opposition from first nations, environmental groups, businesses, and successive reports from the provincial government, it still walks around with some unnatural energy and manages to stay alive.
This project has exposed to us how bad governing can become. The previous Conservative government decided it was going to attempt in its own awkward and unintelligent way to try to so-call “reform” the energy system in Canada and did so by gutting just about every environmental and fisheries law we had, in order to ram through pipelines all across this country, under the former prime minister's aspirations. It leaves one with some doubts about the sincerity or the abilities of the previous government, because the very definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
What that government attempted to do with us in northern British Columbia was to bully and pressure and undermine the very basic civic duties that we all share as Canadians, which is to speak, represent our concerns, and raise our voices in any publicly held process.
We saw from letters issued by the previous prime minister's office in the midst of the process that anyone who had any questions, any people who dared to have concerns about a massive raw bitumen pipeline traversing 1,100 rivers and streams over two mountain ranges, as well as supertankers in Kitimat sailing out to China, were called enemies of the state and foreign-funded radicals. Anyone who had the audacity to raise concerns about such a proposal was called by the Conservative prime minister's office an enemy of the state or a foreign-funded radical. I am not even paraphrasing. Those were the government's actual words.
Lo and behold, that same government actually accused some of its own supporters of the same thing. People up in the north who like to hunt and fish were also raising concerns about what a potential bitumen spill would look like in the mighty rivers of northwestern British Columbia. They were concerned about what impact such a spill would have on the fishing industry off the north coast, which has sustained us for thousands of years.
The Conservative government growled and said we were either with it or against it. We either stood with the pipelines or we stood against Canada, the government said. How did that work for that party? Not so well, not just in the merits of the projects it proposed, but it did not work out so well for them electorally. The growling, bullying, and cajoling did not work out for that government.
Once more, in today's motion, the Conservatives have taken the same “with us or against us” stand. We have sought to amend the motion by adding the very controversial words that the House of Commons express its view that pipeline reviews must be credible, thorough, open, and free from political interference. My goodness, who would want to stand against such a motion as that?
The breadth and depth of ignorance around what Canadians believe about energy projects being held by the Conservative Party knows no bounds. The Conservatives shot down our amendment to today's motion because they clearly do not want a credible, thorough, and open review, free from political interference. They want to cast judgment on what will happen with energy east before it even hits the hearing stage. They want to say whether this thing is good or bad. They want to tell Canadians how it is and how it ought to be, and then they have the audacity to stand in the House, as some of my Conservative colleagues have done today, and say we have to get behind these things because otherwise the jobs will go overseas. They are talking about a raw bitumen export project, which the Alberta Chamber of Commerce has studied, and it said that when we add no value to these things, we are exporting three times as many jobs as we would be creating here in Canada.
Why would an opposition party choose its opposition day to talk about something so hypocritical as to affect the process around pipelines? After 10 disastrous years, it was unable to convince even its own allies that the process it manipulated and conjured up was anything close to fair and reasonable. Canadians rejected the Conservatives' way of doing things and rejected their pipelines. Thus, they have no pipelines that go to tidewater. Not a single kilometre of pipeline was built to take the product to tidewater. Now we have oil at $30, give or take. We have an economic crisis in Alberta and Saskatchewan that is affecting other parts of the region, and rather than standing up with anything approaching the intelligible or comprehensive, we have the Conservatives growling again, saying we are either with them or against them and, if we are not with them, they are going to send out fundraising letters this afternoon and try to make money off something that is playing politics with pipelines.
We also know from the northern gateway experience that the prime minister of the day changed the process midstream. We were halfway through the reviews when the prime minister deigned to tell us how it was actually going to be. The Conservatives somehow made what was a bad process into a worse process and, now that these new pipeline proposals are approaching, they have made it even worse still because at present there are closing arguments taking place in Burnaby, British Columbia, over the somewhat controversial TransCanada pipeline heading into the Lower Mainland, and Canadians are not allowed to cross-examine the oil company. They are not allowed to test the evidence that the companies bring forward, because how dare we make such an affront in Canada as to dare to question any of the company's evidence or practices?
We know from past experiences that it is good to hold up good company practices, but verification is a lot better than trust. “Just trust me” is what happened in Kalamazoo, where millions of litres of diluted bitumen spilled into the Kalamazoo River. Five years later, $1.3 billion has been spent trying to clean up the river. They had to physically dredge up the bottom to try to recover the oil, which they were unable to do. Therefore, we know that it is better to verify than to simply trust.
Now we have this motion in front of us. We have a former Conservative government that was the worst friend the oil and gas sector ever knew, because what did it sow in the hearts and minds of the Canadian public? It was mistrust, conflict, and misapprehension about any of these proposals. Meanwhile, it tried to bully a president. How did that work out for the former prime minister? I guess he would be right in saying it was a no-brainer. It was quite correct to stand in New York and essentially call the president stupid. That always works out well with cross-border relations with the United States. Then the Conservatives were shocked when President Obama rejected it, if not for the insult then for the lack of merits for the project itself. We do need a credible, thorough, and open process, free from political interference.
Just yesterday, the environment minister and the natural resources minister were out attempting to put a bit of a band-aid over a bad process. We have a few questions that remain.
Finally, we are going to say the words “climate change” when talking about oil pipelines. That is revolutionary. It is a new day. It is shocking that we are able to put those two things together. However, we do not yet know how the process will actually unfold. How much will climate matter when making the decisions in cabinet? That was a choice actually made by the former prime minister. He took the decision for all of these resource projects out of the hands of the independent and quasi-judicial National Energy Board and put them in cabinet. I remember the day when we asked the Conservatives why they would do such a thing. The former prime minister said they wanted to take politics out of the process, to take the decision away from the National Energy Board and put it into the hands of politicians because that would take politics out of the process. I will say this for my Conservative colleagues: they are able to be ironic and hilarious with a straight face.
It is remarkable to see the audacity and hypocrisy of the motion put forward today; as if attempting to help the people who are suffering from an energy downturn in Alberta and Saskatchewan is to play politics with the issue; as if to help those families struggling to make ends meet right now is to suggest it is somehow against their interests to diversify our economy, green our economy, and help modify the ups and downs, the booms and busts; against the interests of the people of the great province of Alberta, or Saskatchewan, or anywhere else across the country.
We need to look at our pipelines with the best available science and the most open and broad public consultation possible.
Canadians do not take well to bullying or insults. They expect to be brought into the conversation, conversations that affect them, conversations that they know best how to determine the outcome.