Madam Speaker, my colleague talked about all kinds of generalities from the budget, but he did not speak specifically about Motion No. 45, which is what I am going to speak on.
Canada is a country that needs jobs. We've lost hundreds of thousands of jobs on the Liberal government's watch. The government promised Canadians that it would run a deficit to put people back to work by emphasizing infrastructure spending. That is what Liberals said during the campaign, and what they repeated ad nauseam last session. It has been a year, and every month the job numbers show that there are more and more people out of work. The infrastructure money is flowing too slowly to change that, and now the government wants to entertain a motion that would slow the pace of infrastructure spending approval from a bureaucratic nightmare to a snail's pace.
I was an engineer overseeing capital projects when the large multinational companies adopted their sustainability goals. They started doing greenhouse gas emission analysis. In fact, I myself have done the calculations for greenhouse gas emissions analysis. The analysis is very complicated. There are a lot of questions to consider. Do we include everything from the carbon and greenhouse gas emission footprint of the raw materials, like the steel and concrete used to construct the project? How do we find out what that footprint was without sometimes knowing confidential information from the company that made the raw material, or by making assumptions about it? What about including the carbon footprint of all the vehicles that all the constructors use on the project? What about counting the footprint of the compressors and diesel generators used to build the project, and how do we estimate that? How do we predict the emissions that are post start-up from the project? Do we include those or not?
These are just a few of a myriad of questions that have to be considered for each project, even when there is a greenhouse gas emissions guideline. Most of the time, what is included for each project has to be decided on a per-project basis because each one is different. We cannot compare GHG emission information for different projects, because different things are included on each one.
Well then, how do we decide what is an acceptable level of emission or footprint? If it is better than something currently built, is that okay? What if it is not quite as good as the best available technology? Is that okay? Do we include the footprint of the existing infrastructure that is being repaired or not?
What happens is that there are endless delays while these questions and issues and the seeking of data are resolved, resulting in huge delays for the project. At the end of the day, there is no good way to compare projects or figure out whether they are good enough on GHG emissions or not.
That said, many municipalities and provinces have already started implementing their GHG emission requirements. Now the federal government will add an additional layer of bureaucracy, and the federal program will be different from the municipal and provincial programs that have been put in place. Therefore, this is adding another layer of red tape that will not get these projects built.
Who will pay for these endless hours of searching for information, calculating and estimating emissions? Will it be the municipalities? They cannot afford it. Will it be the federal government, with more taxpayer money? Hopefully, not.
The motion claims that it is going to help the national climate change strategy. Let us talk about that for a moment. Canada makes up less than 2% of the global carbon footprint. We could eliminate our entire footprint and it would not make any factual evidence-based scientific difference to the temperature of the planet. Let me repeat that. Canada could eliminate its entire footprint and it would make no difference to global warming.
What we should be doing is leveraging our carbon emissions reduction technology to the substantive contributors to climate change, like China, India, and the U.S. They make up nearly half of the global footprint. We could create jobs for Canadians and we could help the planet at the same time. However, this motion will not help the planet, and it will not help us create the jobs we need to create quickly with infrastructure funding.
The motion certainly goes against the direction that was told to Canadians when the infrastructure minister said that the focus for infrastructure would be road repairs, maintenance, and rehabilitation of existing assets to quickly create jobs for Canadians. Under this motion criteria, road repairs will never make the list, and we have not seen any job creation on the part of the government from infrastructure spending as it is.
There are plenty of opportunities to create jobs with the infrastructure funding. For example, in my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, we need $12 million to build an oversized load corridor to create 3,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs. The manufacturing shops already exist and already produce these large fabricated modules that can be exported to markets within Canada, the U.S., and the Middle East. However, the current government, which I have been presenting this opportunity to since November of last year, has done nothing to follow up and help create Canadian jobs. It has given away $200 million to Iraq for economic development, but it cannot give my riding $12 million to create 3,000 well-paying Canadian jobs.
Additionally, Motion No. 45 has been amended to make it even more ambiguous and vague. By removing the criteria that a greenhouse gas analysis would only be done on projects over $500,000, it has now created a disadvantage for smaller projects. When we do the analysis, smaller projects typically have less greenhouse gas emissions because less widgets are used to build them and less time is spent putting them together. This motion is another Liberal action that makes me wonder if the Liberals want to have any private sector jobs at all.
Putting GHG screening into pipeline approvals has all but stalled that process, eliminating the potential for hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs. Threatening carbon taxes has caused businesses not to invest here and to move their expansions to the United States, along with their carbon footprint. The United States does not have an uncompetitive tax. This has happened with two expansions in my riding, costing another 2,000 Canadian jobs.
Therefore, I am speaking against this motion. It will not create the economic stimulus that the infrastructure money promised by the Liberals was supposed to create when they campaigned. It will not result in projects getting approved in a timely fashion. It will not help the planet or contribute significantly to reducing the global carbon footprint. It will bog down the process of supporting municipalities in their need to upgrade infrastructure. Based on the other evidence that the government presented last session, it will likely result in project awards to friends of Liberals and Liberal municipalities, which is not a fair outcome for all Canadians.
Motion No. 45 is a warm, fuzzy, feel-good motion that is not well thought out. The evaluation of the greenhouse gas emissions cannot be well defined or applied equitably to different projects, as I have shown. It will slow down the process and delay the creation of the Canadian jobs we so desperately need. Therefore, members should say no to Motion No. 45.