Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise tonight to talk about pipelines and their impact on the national economy. I know that 125,000 people in northern Alberta have lost their jobs due to the government's inaction on getting the products produced in the resource development sector to market.
In my riding, we have been devastatingly hit by the actions of the Liberal government. One of the major projects that has not gone forward because of the actions of the government was the Carmon Creek SAGD project. This is a project that was going to bring the oil out of the ground near Peace River, Alberta, and it was going to bring oil to the international markets. The company cancelled that project shortly after the current government came into power, due to the lack of pipeline access. It said that given the remarkable actions by the government it did not see that a pipeline was going to be going forward anytime soon and so it pulled out. It was a $10-billion project. The company had already spent $2 billion developing the project and it backed away from $2 billion. It left $2 billion lying up in northern Alberta. In that same week, the company made an announcement that it was investing in Kazakhstan.
I ride the airplane a lot of times back and forth from here to home, and I sit in the back of the airplane and talk to the oilfield workers. Paul Cox was the last guy I sat beside on my way home from here. He is working in Kazakhstan. That is a coincidence, one might say, but I do not think it is a coincidence. A company named Shell was the proposer for the Carmon Creek project. It backed out and it is now investing in Kazakhstan. This guy happens to be working in Kazakhstan. He is from Alberta. He flies halfway around the world to work in Kazakhstan in an industry that he knows and loves. That is what we are dealing with when it comes to the actions of the Liberal government.
Everyone knows the current situation with the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline. Kinder Morgan has been saying it has stopped proceeding with it. Just today, we heard that it has pulled out all its people who have been working on permitting. It has pulled them out of B.C. and told them to go home as the company does not see a way forward right now. Kinder Morgan has already halted action on the ground there, and we are looking to the government to do something.
Today as well, the member for Calgary Shepard moved a motion at the finance committee to study the financial impact of this pipeline on Canada. The government continues to say that this pipeline will get built, that this is a national building project. What did the Liberals do at committee? They voted the motion down. They voted not to study the impacts of the pipeline. I thought they said it was such a great pipeline. If this was such a great pipeline and they were so happy, would they not want to show the world how great this pipeline is? No, they voted that motion down.
This is not the first energy project to be in jeopardy. We have seen the death of energy east. We have seen Kinder Morgan come and go. Northern gateway was approved. The Liberals said, “We have approved the pipeline.” We have heard them say that over and over again, and here we are, northern gateway is dead. Petronas LNG is gone, sold off to the highest bidder. The government has a terrible track record when it comes to standing up for our resource industry. It has a terrible record when it comes to any pipeline development in this country.
What is going to be the net impact on the national GDP? We have seen things that have happened in Alberta before that have impacted the national GDP. What is going to be the impact on the national GDP of the Liberals' actions up to this point?