Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address what is becoming a crisis of confidence. I spent the last two weeks in my riding and I had the privilege of travelling throughout Alberta visiting communities that I represent. Like many in the House, I heard from my constituents about this crisis.
I heard from a young father named Adam. He told me he had just purchased a home. He works for a pipeline company. He said that he believed there was long-term opportunity in the province when he purchased that house just two months ago. He told me that he has a personal crisis right now, that if the pipeline does not get built, he will not have a job. His kids will not have the opportunities that he had hoped he might be able to afford to provide for them, such as the opportunity to live in a vibrant community, to be involved in sports and all the rest of it, the opportunity for mom and dad to have a job.
There is a crisis of confidence and we are hearing those voices. Many politicians in this room will have heard the voice of Saskatchewan's Premier Scott Moe, the voice of the premier of Alberta, the voice of Jason Kenney, the official opposition leader in Alberta, the voices from western Canada that are desperately calling on the Prime Minister to intervene in what is becoming an unmitigated disaster. It is a crisis.
When I go home, I listen to the voices who are going to live out this crisis, the moms and dads who will not be able to provide the opportunities they had hoped to provide for their children, the young people who are looking for their first jobs in engineering, their first jobs in construction, jobs that would have been provided by either the pipeline construction or the facilities that those pipelines would tie into.
This crisis is not just about this one pipeline. This is such a crisis right now. The premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta and the people in my constituency are so animated about this because this is the only hope left.
The crisis started when the Prime Minister cancelled a project that had already been duly approved. This all started when the Prime Minister unilaterally decided to overrule the national regulator and said he would cancel the northern gateway project. That happened after the election. He put forward the tanker ban on northern British Columbia. There was no consultation.
Now first nation communities are suing the Prime Minister for not consulting them on limiting their long-term opportunities and prosperity for their communities, their children and their children's children. This is how the Prime Minister's time in office started. Then he stalled all the regulatory processes and then Petronas withdrew its project which was the Pacific NorthWest LNG project that would have seen natural gas going from Dawson Creek all the way through to the coast.
Not only did we see delays and cancellation of approved projects, we also saw the changing of the rules. Midway in the approval process of the energy east project that was being undertaken, in the eleventh hour the Prime Minister announced there was going to be a whole set of new rules. The company that was building pipelines would now be responsible for the upstream and downstream emissions from that project. The company would have to assess and determine what those would be, increasing the cost to that company to the point in this case where it could no longer afford to continue to build that project.