Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Calgary Signal Hill.
I am very proud to speak in favour of the motion to support the energy east pipeline. I am also very proud of the environmental record of the Conservatives when we were in government.
Let me give hon. members some numbers, because too often numbers are forgotten. Members on the other side speak with passion and emotion, but never with numbers. Under our watch, there was a 9.5% decrease in per capita C02 emissions. There was a significant decline in sulphur dioxide, significant declines in nitrogen dioxide, and a very significant decline in the concentrations of volatile organic compounds.
In 2010 the United Nations said Canada had the second best water quality ranking among selected industrialized countries. All our protected areas increased by 95%, and our government designated over 135,000 square kilometres of new protected areas since 2006, the largest increase in history. There was the Sydney tar ponds cleanup; Hamilton Harbour remediation; Lake Simcoe cleanup; the habitat stewardship program; Great Lakes cleanup; the recreational fisheries partnership program; and 800,000 new hectares of habitat conserved under the natural areas conservation program. In my own jurisdiction, significant improvements were made to Lake Winnipeg with our Lake Winnipeg cleanup program,
Our government had a tremendous environmental track record, one that I am very proud of, but I am very frightened of the way the new government is operating in terms of the environment.
It is very shameful that the Liberals and the NDP have literally declared war on Canada's natural resource industries and the people and communities who depend on those industries. It is shameful, and I have the honour to represent communities and people who are supported by the natural resources industries.
Natural resources account for about 20% of the Canadian economy, and the health of these industries affects all of us. Look at the recent decline in the stock market. Look at the recent decline in the value of pension funds. Much of the stock market and most of Canada's pension plans are supported by the natural resource industries, those same industries that the Liberals and the NDP actually want to kill.
Energy is Canada's most valuable export, and in addition to creating hundreds and thousands of jobs, these energy exports fuel social programs, support transfer payments, and contribute very strongly to Canada's balance of payments.
Although natural resources are important to all people in Canada, as I said, they are especially important to rural communities, the kind I represent, where most resource harvesting and extraction is done. In fact, I could even go so far as to say the Liberals and the NDP have declared war on small-town Canada.
When a natural resources company closes down, as recently happened with the potash mine in Sussex, New Brunswick, the affected community itself literally closes down. The Minister of Natural Resources and the House leader were there to watch this, crying crocodile tears for that community, but as a person who lived in a community where a paper mill closed down, I know these are literally life and death events.
Pipelines are critical to the energy industry, and it is critical that Canada gets our crude oil to tidewater. As many people know, there is a two-price system for oil in the world, and since Canada has no pipeline access to salt water, we are essentially a captive supplier to the United States, where we receive the lower West Texas price, as opposed to the higher Brent price.
The difference was very significant four or five years ago when oil prices were very high, and from the figures I saw, we lost about $20 billion per year because we could not access the higher Brent price. This is why the energy east project is so important. That is why I am so proud to support this particular motion. Not only will this diversify our oil markets and get us higher prices, but it will generate over 14,000 jobs in the nine-year construction phase, much needed jobs, many of them in economically depressed areas. We are talking about 2,3000 construction jobs in New Brunswick alone, which is reeling from the loss of the potash mine, as I described. Western producers, eastern refiners, and all levels of government would benefit from this.
Furthermore, this would replace imported Saudi oil, which is currently being refined in New Brunswick, with Canadian crude oil instead. Who in their right mind could be against that? If that is not enough, most of this pipeline is already in place, and all that we are talking about over most of the length is a substitution of gas with oil. Who in their right mind could be against that?
It must be noted that pipelines are the safest mode of oil transportation, with 99.999% of oil shipped through federally regulated pipelines arriving at its destination without incident.
What goes into building a pipeline? When I was fresh out of graduate school with my fisheries degree, my first job was in the Mackenzie Valley, way back in the 1970s, with the first proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. I had the honour of serving the entire pipeline route, along with engineers, wildlife biologists, ecologists, and land use specialists. I will never forget flying in a helicopter over the proposed pipeline route, dropping in at various streams, sampling the streams for fish and benthic invertebrates, looking at the quality of the habitat for spawning, over-wintering, and so on. The wildlife biologist did the same thing for wildlife, and the engineers looked at the capability of the land to support a pipeline, the depth of the hydrology of the stream to ensure that the pipeline would be buried deep enough and so on and so forth.
This was some 40-odd years ago, if not more. Even then, Canada was a world leader in the construction of pipelines. What was interesting is that back in the 1990s, when the price of gas went back up again, the environmental process of the day required that all of that be repeated all over again. Nothing had changed up there, but another 10-year process was put in place to do all the same surveys that we did in the 1970s, and again, ultimately, that particular pipeline was not built because the price of gas declined.
I want to talk about the environmental process. Much of what the Liberals are talking about putting in place will actually be of no benefit to the environment itself. At the briefing yesterday, I asked the staff to quantify any environmental effects that the process we had put in place had. I wanted numbers and measurements of the real environment. The staff people could not do a thing. All we are doing is talking about a process here; we are not talking about the environment itself.
The problem with these processes that the Liberals are going to put in is that delay of a single pipeline project that could improve market access could cost up to $70 million per day, not to mention the foregone benefits of property taxes, jobs, and social benefits.
I also asked the officials yesterday if there were any intent to do an economic impact analysis of the proposed process, and what I heard was basically crickets. There will be no analysis of the cost of these delays, but we do know that every day's delay costs the Canadian economy about $70 million.
One of the things that it is important to realize is that the energy business is a people business. People work in the energy industry to put their kids through school, to buy homes, and now with the energy industry in decline, these people are really suffering.
Again, going back to the environmental process that the government announced yesterday, these changes are not improvements. They are all about interference. In fact, this charade should really be called “five steps to get to no”. Under this particular process, we can easily see that after all is said and done, the answer will clearly be no. Again, Canada's oil will stay in the ground, and many of the members on the Liberal and NDP sides want Canada's oil to stay in the ground, regardless of the human cost.
I had the honour of working in the oil sands in the winter of 2009-10. I worked at a camp doing environmental assessments. I got to know a lot of the energy workers from all across Canada who worked at the camp, including moms and dads wanting to put their kids through school or to put a down payment on a house, or a young person wanting to pay their university education, or seniors working to ensure that they would have a dignified retirement.
This is the cost of what the Liberals are proposing. This is what will really happen. I find their lack of concern for the working people in this country truly appalling. It is quite clear that the only party that cares about working Canadians is the Conservative Party of Canada.
That is why I call upon all members of the House to support this vitally important project. It will contribute to nation building, provide much-needed jobs and economic benefits, and guarantee it will be done in an environmentally sound manner. This motion must be supported.