Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight to pursue a question that I initially asked in question period on June 7. It is remarkably timely these many months later, although the circumstances have changed.
My question pertained to the quite inexplicable decision by the government to purchase the 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. In my question, I compared it to having the “business acumen of buying up all of Blockbuster's assets while Netflix takes off”. In other words, it is not a wise business decision. It is quite bizarre to buy a 65-year-old pipeline that is an ongoing working concern. It does not create a single new job to buy a 65-year-old pipeline, albeit it was all in aid of trying to build the Kinder Morgan expansion.
My question at the time dealt with whether we would see the contract for purchase and sale. Since that time, the contract for purchase and sale was made public. I reviewed it carefully and it had a couple of features that are relevant to my pursuit of this matter in debate tonight.
One is that the contract for purchase and sale of Kinder Morgan's assets in Canada did not include all of its assets. It also did not include a closing date. There was no date specified for the closing of the purchase of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. There was something called the “outside date”, December 31, which has not yet arrived. It is quite inexplicable. I use that word often because I think it is the best word.
There is no explanation for the lack of fiscal prudence and lack of concern for evidence-based decision-making that would lead the government to spend $4.5 billion on an old pipeline, particularly when the cheque to Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion was delivered to it on August 31, less than 24 hours after the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the permits for the expansion.
This was foreseeable. In fact, I pointed out to the government on many occasions in the House that taking the chance that the permits would not be quashed was reckless. The matter was before the courts. Why did every minister stand up and say that the pipeline would be built, the pipeline must be built? The pipeline should not be built.
Now that we have wasted $4.5 billion on a 65-year-old pipeline, it is a little late to point out to the government that the Federal Court of Appeal's decision not only found that the Government of Canada had broken the law, but also that Kinder Morgan had broken the law through the process of the environmental review and indigenous consultations. Therefore, we had a material breach that could have gotten Canada out of wasting $4.5 billion on a 65-year-old pipeline for purposes of building an expansion, for which it does not have permits, at a cost of at $10 billion more.
Now for the kicker. Perfectly foreseeable was that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was going to deliver a report this October. It was foreseeable because the Minister of Environment herself played a significant role in COP21 in Paris, and the COP21 decision document mandated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to prepare exactly this report to tell us what we already knew, that we are not moving fast enough and the Harper targets that the government has held onto for action on climate change are completely inadequate to meet the Paris target of holding global average temperature to 1.5°C. Now we know that missing 1.5°C is globally catastrophic and potentially sets in motion irreversible disaster.
The government must cancel any and all new fossil fuel projects, including the Kinder Morgan pipeline.