Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to follow up on a question I asked of the Minister of Natural Resources back in May. I asked him about the review process he had set up for the National Energy Board, which has come up with some very offensive recommendations, quite frankly, including basically alleging that Calgarians and the people of Alberta are unable to operate ethically as National Energy Board members and that the board's functions should be moved to Ottawa closer to politicians and lobbyists.
I am grateful that as a result of the work of the official opposition and others, it has backed down from that recommendation. However, the question I asked in May was why the Liberals were making it harder for job-creating energy projects to proceed. Since May, we have seen several major multi-billion dollar projects not proceed in Canada, in part because of the red tape and interference in those projects by the Liberal government.
When looking at the investments necessary to create an LNG processing facility, to create a pipeline that crosses multiple provinces to deliver Canadians oil to Canadian refineries, investors need certainty before they are willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to proceed with their investments.
The government has sent signals to these international investors and Canadian investors in energy projects that these are not secure investments. When it rejected the northern gateway pipeline, what message did that send? It signalled that even if one can get a project through the National Energy Board process, even if one can get a permit from the government, even if one can get cabinet approval for a project with 209 binding conditions, a change in government can mean that a multi-year process is upended with the snap of a finger. If the political whims of the Prime Minister are such that he is opposed to a pipeline going through a forest he is fond of, that project can be cancelled, even if three-quarters of a billion dollars has been spent getting it to approval.
What message does it send if the rules are changed in the middle of the application process, or the goal posts are continually moved as they were with energy east? We saw a process that was restarted, with a new board being appointed. We saw the rules change, with the National Energy Board being forced to examine the upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions of the product that would flow through the pipeline, something that has never been done before in Canadian history and is certainly not required of the foreign tankers coming into Canadian ports, whether in New Brunswick, Quebec, or even Vancouver.
The Liberals changed the rules of the game, and that is bad for investment and competitiveness. What we lost was a $55 billion increase in our GDP. We lost 15,000 construction jobs when energy east was killed.
I know that from the parliamentary secretary's prepared notes, she will talk about the Trans Mountain pipeline, and that is great. That was approved using the Harper government's process, with the same 157 conditions that were imposed by the Harper government. The Liberals layered on another ministerial process onto that, which did not change a single recommendation and did not really do anything except add to the cost. That is what the government has done.