Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. parliamentary secretary for splitting his time with me.
I want to start by saying how deeply distressing it is to lose jobs in any industry at any time, and we know that families are suffering and individuals are faced with great uncertainty. We have seen job losses in the past in industries or sectors where people suddenly lose their jobs and overnight a government has wanted to respond. Therefore, I want to talk about the things that governments have done in the past that did not work. I want to come to that later.
I want to focus first on the irony of something that we might generally call “disruptive technologies”. It brings us back to thinking about a 2006 documentary, which is ironic as we stand here tonight as the clock ticks toward midnight. There was a 2006 film that was enormously popular, a documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? It documented efforts back in the mid-1990s by the State of California to pursue zero-emission vehicles, both because of the acute health impacts of smog in the Los Angeles area and the climate crisis, in order to move us away from the dependence on fossil fuels.
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a fascinating story of the development of the EV1, an electric car made available at the behest of government pressure. It was manufactured by General Motors, and the industry fought that electric car. General Motors bought back every EV1 to destroy it. Therefore, Who Killed the Electric Car? ironically dealt with an early effort to convince General Motors that the future lay with electric vehicles. This was pushed back by those in the big three who wanted to continue with the internal combustion engine.
Earlier in debate tonight, it was mentioned, when I put it in a question for one of my friends in the Conservative Party, that the Oshawa closure was anticipated, that more than year ago General Motors said that it would be moving away from the internal combustion engine, wanting to move toward zero-emission vehicles, electric vehicles, and that we did not prepare for that in Canada. We did not start thinking about how we would protect those jobs in Oshawa. The response by my Conservative colleague was to say that consumer choice would rule, that people would buy what they want to buy.
Let us revisit this. In Canada and right now in the year 2018, the move toward electric vehicles is not a result of governments demanding it. If anything, the Trump administration is moving in a different direction. The move to electric vehicles is a result of a disruptive technology that is better than the one we now have. In the face of this, there were electric vehicle rebates put in place by the former government of Paul Martin. They were eliminated at the federal level by the government of Stephen Harper and, to my bafflement, they have not been brought back by the new Liberal government, which still needs to embrace every possible tool in the federal tool kit to have anything that looks like a plan to fight climate change. We have very little that has been done on electric vehicles by the current government federally, but it is true that disruptive technologies do not really need government help. It really helps if disruptive technologies are not obstructed by government efforts to prop up industries that are on their way out.
This is very similar to the problem we are facing in Canada right, where we want to pretend that there is a future for the oil sands. There may be a future for the oil sands, but not in mining bitumen for fuel. The future for the oil sands might be in mining bitumen for petrochemical industries for other products, but the reality is that disruptive technologies happen very fast and if we were not subsidizing fossil fuels as much as we are, we would be seeing much more uptake of renewable energy.
Let me just quickly describe historical examples of a couple of disruptive technologies, so they will resonate. When the automobile, the Model T Ford, came along—ironically again this is an automobile example—the horse and buggy disappeared. There were not organized lobbies in those days for people who made horse whips and buggies and people who drove the horse-drawn carriages. The disruptive technology was simply more attractive and better. There was an industrial revolution to take up the individual car and it took place within a decade.
There is an even earlier example, from the 1850s. In the 1850s, every household was lit by lamps burning whale oil. We were not yet running out of whales, although the damage done by the whaling industry was devastating on specific species. The whale oil industry did not end because of a public movement to stop the killing of whales for oil. After we had discovered coal, the whale oil industry was done in when a Nova Scotian, Gesner, figured out he could adapt that product into kerosene, which burned brighter, was cheaper and was a disruptive technology that ended the whaling industry.
There is an interesting thing about these disruptive technologies, which has been demonstrated by Amory Lovins out of Rocky Mountain Institute, who has written books on this that I recommend to members. He pointed out that the price falls for something before the demand falls. The current drop in oil prices has a lot to do with the fact that we are moving away from fossil fuels.
The larger context needs to be remembered when we look at these things. Amory Lovins actually has a classic photograph of the Easter parade in Manhattan, with a caption like “Can you see the car?”, and there is one Model T Ford somewhere in the background. Then 10 years later, he asks, “Can you spot the horse and buggy?”, because at that point, the streets are clogged with cars.
When we look at this, we have to recognize that General Motors is now making a decision, because the future is moving and General Motors does not want to be left behind. The future is moving to electric vehicles. The Canadian government should not want to be left behind. We need to assist individuals in moving to electric vehicles and insist on it. We need EV charging stations to be consistent across the country. I noticed that in the budget update we received last week there is a reference to one section of highway in Canada that is getting electric vehicle chargers.
The Government of Canada has the largest purchasing power of any purchaser in Canada. It should decide not to buy any cars with internal combustion engines and only buy electric vehicles. That drives the marketplace and that gives us a chance to compete. When we look at what is being manufactured in Oshawa, we should make sure those jobs are protected, but not through manufacturing internal combustion engines. Should workers be building windmill components there? Should they be building electric vehicles there?
We need to bear in mind the principle of just transition for workers. I turn to the situations I can remember in which lots of workers lost their jobs all at once in Canada, and to the really poor responses of government.
Certainly one of the worst I can recall involved Hawker Siddeley. Being from Nova Scotia, I remember it clearly, as my friend from Milton would, as she mentioned earlier in debate tonight that she is also from Cape Breton.
When Hawker Siddeley decided to close its steel mill in the late 1960s, the government panicked and decided it could not lose all those jobs and that it would buy the steel mill. I remember Gordon Ritchie telling me once that he had advised Allan MacEachen that it would be cheaper if every year the government had a helicopter hover over the doors of the steel plant to drop a bag with $60,000 for every worker, telling them all to go home for the year. That would save the taxpayers of Canada a lot of money. As I recall, Allan J. MacEachen told Gordon Ritchie, “That is probably true, but this is an election year.”
The result of that foolish decision was the creation of the largest toxic waste site in Canada, which took $400 million to bury. It was never cleaned up.
Another poor example of government response was when we lost our North Atlantic cod fishery, which was destroyed by bad Department of Fisheries and Oceans policies. I could go into that, but simply put, our fishery was destroyed by DFO mismanagement.
The response to the individual fishers was to give them new jobs. The department was going to train them up for something new. What did DFO think of? I remember the slogan, “Trade the fish net for the Internet”. A lot of these fishers, who were decent, hard-working people, had never completed high school. “Trade the fish net for the Internet” became such a cruel joke.
If we are serious about just transition for these workers, we should start figuring out what just transition is going to really look like. We have trained-up people who are some of the best workers in Canada. Can we train them up for other jobs, like the new clean-tech jobs? By the way, we have massive shortages of skilled people in many other sectors. Can they be retrained to work in the mining industry or to build different components right in Oshawa for things we really need?
We must not abandon these workers. We do not protect these workers by destroying their children's futures, just as we did in creating toxic waste in the Sydney tar ponds that killed not only the workers but their children. We do not support these workers by letting their grandchildren die by clinging to fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. We move into the future.