Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be joining the debate at this late hour.
“He who looks for light work goes very tired to bed.” That is a Yiddish proverb and is often used to tell people who are looking for an easy way out of a hard day's work that at the end what happens is people actually work much harder. There is no such thing as easy work. There is no such thing as an easy way out.
We heard earlier from the member for Lakeland, who added that this was part of the Liberal Party's platform. The Liberals rolled this out right after the last election, and there was very little time for evidence-based policy-making to review whether this was the best thing to do. The Liberals committed to it, but it is an error in commitment. I would consider that the concept that the hard work of balancing the economy and the environment can be done with a quick moratorium is the easy way out.
If we look at the contents of the bill, we see that a blanket exemption could be provided by cabinet for anyone at any time to ship through those lanes. American tankers will still be able to go through this area, as long as they do not stop at a Canadian port. It simply shifts some of the tanker traffic further west off of the coast. It does not apply to where 95% of the tanker traffic is, which is on the southern part of the coast.
I have a lot of constituents who ask me what is wrong with the British Columbian government. They want to know why it is harassing oil and gas companies and pipeline companies. I am sure that some day it will start harassing railway companies as well for trying to ship a product that Vancouverites, people of the Greater Vancouver area and the entire Lower Mainland, want to use. People want a tank of gasoline, they want diesel, and they want to be able to heat their homes. These are products that everyday Canadians need to use. We live in a colder climate, and it is a necessity.
For people in my riding, this is twofold, because they work in the oil and gas sector. I have a great many white-collar employees and a lot of blue-collar workers—riggers, guys and women who used to work on the rigs—for whom this was their livelihood. They moved to Alberta or grew up in a small community in Alberta and went out to work on the rigs, and they earned an amazing income and were able to provide for their families.
Decisions like this, a tanker moratorium ban—which truthfully should be called a pipeline ban, because that is effectively what it is going to do—puts those people out of work. It is just one part of this grand Liberal strategy to phase out the oil sands, but also, in great part, to phase out the oil and gas industry, the lifeblood of Albertans. To phase it out, Liberals are going to have to do things like these moratoriums, cancelling pipelines, and making it so much more difficult to upgrade the product right here at home.
Today—and I checked the Library of Parliament—we pretty much upgrade and refine most of the product that we produce right here in Canada. It is about a 2,000-megalitre difference between the two. In the Greater Vancouver area over the past 30 or 40 years, there were refineries that closed, and new ones did not open. It is pretty easy to see. Most provincial governments and the federal government have been imposing carbon taxes, and they fall very heavily on large emitters. It turns out that it is not free to produce a refined good. It produces large amounts of carbon emissions. Therefore, they get taxed at an excessive rate. It is not that easy.
There is no such thing as easy work or an easy job. I think that through this piece of legislation, the government will find that it will not achieve its goal of balancing the economy and the environment. It is actually going to hurt the economy much more than it is thinking.