Mr. Speaker, I will resume where I left off just before question period. I was talking about the fine folks in Rimbey. This was in response for one of my Liberal colleagues across the way who, during a question to one of my colleagues, said that everything was fine for him now that he made the switch to public transportation. That is fine for people who live in a community where they can get everything they need within a 10-block radius, but that does not work for the fine folks in Rimbey.
If a mother in Rimbey who is looking after the kids, while her spouse has hopefully maintained a job in the energy sector, which is not always the case, wants to take them to play hockey or soccer, it is not a community where they can take public transit down to the hockey arena. In fact, there are not enough kids in the community or the surrounding area to even have a house league. If people want to take their kids to hockey in Rimbey, Alberta that means they will be playing teams in Blackfalds, which is 45 minutes away. They are going to be playing teams in Sylvan Lake, which is 35 or 40 minutes away. They are going to be playing kids in Lacombe, which is another 45 minutes away. Drayton Valley is an hour away. Rocky Mountain House is an hour away. Ponoka is 45 minutes away. There are no options for these folks. The carbon tax is going to disproportionately affect these families and their kids because the cost of living in rural Alberta, and any other rural community in Canada, is so high.
I would point out that everything we have that is good in our homes, whether we live our entire lives in that 10-block radius in a downtown urban area, is brought to us from a rural community at some point in time. Chances are that the food we eat is not raised or grown within 10 minutes of our house. Chances are that most of it is not even raised within 10 miles of our house. The input costs are the fertilizers that are energy based, the production, whether it is fuel, harvesting, all of it is there. Transportation to the marketplace and the processing, if we are lucky enough to have the processing done in Canada, are all energy intensive. Most of the good things we have in our lives, most of the wealth, and our ability to prosper and pursue careers in whatever we want to do are brought to us by the fact that we have cheap or affordable energy, or at least we had cheap or affordable energy in our lives.
Our quality of life is going to go down in our country because of the cost of heating our homes and putting fuel in our cars for transportation. It will affect every aspect of our lives. We only have to sit in a room and look around. If we were to take everything out of the room that was either made in part from or brought to us in part by fossil fuels, we would virtually have nothing left in the room. In fact, we likely would not even be able to count the walls of the room, because all of that material was brought to us by fossil fuels as well. This is the cost of a carbon tax. It is going to increase the cost of living for every person.
That is the cost to families. Here is the cost to investment. Investors are crying foul right now because they know almost $90 billion have fled capital markets in our country. We have projects in Alberta that have been waiting for four years for provincial approval for an oil sands expansion project. We have over 7,000 kilometres of tidewater pipelines that have been cancelled or killed by the current Liberal government. That is driving up the cost and creating uncertainty. The regulatory environment is changing.
Alberta shares about $20 billion of its wealth every year with the rest of Canada in the form of equalization payments. Tax is collected from Alberta, it goes to the Government of Canada, and it is redistributed. The money that is being redistributed across Canada affects quality of life and services, medicine, hospitals, and education for everyone.
The cost of the carbon tax for Canadian families, businesses, and workers is far too high. I do not know why the Liberal government will not tell us what it will cost.