Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my friend, I think he badly mischaracterizes our position. Our position is that consultation with communities is important. That consultation should focus on those who are actually affected, not create a forum for activists who have no expertise and no connection to the community to drag on the process indefinitely.
We believe that those consultations should be focused, should engage the affected communities and should engage the knowledge of experts. They should be designed to allow a predictable process whereby companies are able to hear a result and are able to make proposals with a predictable understanding of where things are going. Hopefully, projects will be able to succeed under that framework in cases where the necessary work is done.
The member talks about the need to engage with communities where people may be opposed to these projects. Of course, the same goes the other way. Communities that are supportive of these projects do not want projects unilaterally shut down without consultation.
Our party would welcome the proposal of a pipeline project that would allow all of Canada to benefit as a market, where resources from Alberta could go to eastern Canada instead of eastern Canada being dependent on resources from Saudi Arabia.
I would hope that member, whose party has been quite rightly vocal about human rights issues in Saudi Arabia, would understand the connection between buying Saudi oil and the opportunities that would come as an alternative from having eastern Canada benefit from Canadian natural resources.