Mr. Speaker, this is another one of those things that brings Conservatives and the NDP together, the sale of Trans Mountain by Kinder Morgan to the people of Canada. Who knew we wanted to be shareholders in a pipeline.
I could talk all night about this, but I will try to be brief.
First, what has this accomplished? What did we get for our $4.5 billion? We got past the May 31 deadline. However, with the factors that Kinder Morgan was concerned about, it was ready to walk away from this project, or so we were led to believe. However, none of those were fixed by spending $4.5 billion. We ended up with an old leaky pipeline.
With respect to the competition, now we have the government owning a pipeline and trying to get permission for the pipeline. There is a big conflict of interest there. How can the government assure the first nations groups that have concerns about this that they will get a fair hearing? The government says that it owns the pipeline, that it will get the project done and, by the way, that it will consult with first nations groups. There are real conflict of interest issues there.
From my point of view, the other issues are around subsidies to fossil fuel industries. Canada signed on, through the G7 and G20, with a promise to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies over the next few years. Now we have bought a pipeline.
I was in Argentina with the then-minister of natural resources at a G20 meeting. The whole theme of the meeting was the grand transition to a low-carbon future. The minister had to get up and, in his little three-minute spiel on where Canada was, say that we bought a pipeline and try to explain why this was not a subsidy to the oil and gas industry, especially when we paid $4.5 billion, as the member pointed out, for a project that was worth, at best, $2 billion.
There is a lot of very problematic parts to this purchase of the pipeline. A lot people who talk to me about it want to know what we could have done better with $4.5 billion that would have made Canada ready for the future of the energy industry and a low-carbon future.