Mr. Speaker, the energy sector has long been an important source of jobs and wealth in Canada, and will continue to play that role for years to come. The oil industry is central to that sector. As we all know, the reason for this debate is that there has been in a serious downturn for the past two years because of low world prices for oil. Tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs, especially in Alberta.
The natural resources committee recently completed a study on how the government could support the oil and gas industry to bring back those jobs. At the heart of this challenge is the fact that Canadian oil is expensive to extract and refine, since it is almost all in the form of bitumen and oil sands.
While we heard a lot of testimony at committee on the very innovative work the industry is doing to reduce costs and reduce the environmental footprint of the sector, many of the industry witnesses admitted that most of those innovations would not be built into the extraction plants until the price of oil was over $70 a barrel. There is little indication in world energy markets that this price is likely to be seen in the near or medium future. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for oil prices to increase significantly to create jobs in the energy sector.
One strategy would be to provide more initiatives to produce value-added products in the oil and gas sector. Refining our bitumen before we ship it would benefit both the economy and the environment. More of our abundant natural gas reserves could be used to produce the building blocks of plastics and other materials with a fraction of the carbon footprint compared to similar processes using oil.
As the natural resources critic, I travelled with the minister last year to the clean energy ministerial meetings in San Francisco, often described as the implementation arm of the Paris climate agreement. The mood at those meetings was positive and upbeat, because speaker after speaker reported that we had passed a tipping point, and the world was shifting quickly, more quickly than anyone had predicted, away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. I heard exactly the same message this past Monday at the Energy Council of Canada meetings.
One of the obvious paths forward is for Canada to take bold steps to build the renewable energy sector in this country. Global investment in renewables has been skyrocketing and now outstrips investments in fossil fuels. Canada needs to catch up. I have tried unsuccessfully to have the natural resources committee study how the government can help Canada join this shift to renewables. I have talked to many workers in my riding, welders, electricians, and carpenters, who are working or who have worked in remote camps in the oil patch, but would rather live full time in their homes in southern B.C. They would welcome the opportunity to work in a distributed renewable energy industry, whether in solar, wind or geothermal, where they could go home every night to their families. This downturn, this crisis, offers an obvious opportunity to make significant investments in renewable energy.
Another point that I heard at the clean energy ministerial meetings was that the best new fuel is efficiency. The federal government could take one simple step, which is to reintroduce the eco-energy program to provide incentives to homeowners to retrofit their houses to be more energy efficient. This program was so successful that the previous government cancelled it in 2012 before it ran its course. When I talk to construction groups, such as the Canadian Home Builders' Association, they would be ecstatic if such a program were reinstated. It would bring good jobs to communities across the country, and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time.
We cannot wait for oil prices to rise another $20 or so to let the market revive the oil industry in Canada. We may be waiting a long time for that to happen. We should provide incentives to refine our bitumen here in Canada, and we must take bold steps now to diversify our energy sector and create jobs across the country, joining the rest of the world in the shift to sustainable renewable energy.