Mr. Speaker, I am going to be sharing my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.
Due to the precedents that have been set in this budget debate, I am going to ask whether I have a 20-minute time slot to share or a four-day time slot. It's 20-minutes. Okay, thank you.
I am proud to represent the fine people of central Alberta. My colleague from Red Deer—Mountain View is beside me. We have unfortunately seen over the last three and a half years, since the last election, probably some of the hardest times for all of Alberta since Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the prime minister of Canada. If anyone in central Alberta is asked what the issue is, it is the lack or loss of confidence in the investment climate surrounding the energy sector.
I want to take Canadians back to what happened. One of the very first things the government did after it was elected was to change the goalposts on the two pipeline projects, the energy east project at the time, and, of course, the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion. There was the absolutely devastating notion of cancelling the already approved pipeline. We had over 30 of the 40 indigenous groups along the route, and the National Energy Board had already approved the pipeline. Enbridge was seeking to fulfill all of its 206 obligations under the agreement.
The northern gateway pipeline was the only pipeline going to the west coast that would diversify Canada's market when it comes to its oil products. The Trans Mountain expansion pipeline, should it ever get built, and we will discuss that in my speech further, will add capacity, but it will not diversify the markets. All of the tankers that currently come into the port of Vancouver to pick up the oil that is moved from the current Trans Mountain pipeline end up along the American west coast to be processed at the crude refineries there.
Anyone from the Liberal Party or the NDP provincially who suggests to Albertans and to Canadians that this pipeline is going to close the gap on the market price between the North American price of crude oil and the international price of crude oil is not being honest with Canadians.
Alberta has been devastated by the job losses in the energy environment. It has been over 130,000 jobs directly. These are jobs where there were people with payroll taxes. They were counted amongst the people who were laid off from a business. This does not include the numerous people who have not found work, who are self-employed contractors in the energy sector. I am not sure that anyone across the row here understands what that means.
These people would never show up on an unemployment list, because they are self-employed. They are contractors. They are the folks who would be employed at the very high end of the energy sector to be out on site and doing all the consultations. These are consultants who are out on the drilling pads, out doing all of the work. These are the ones with the most expertise in the energy sector. They too have had to dig deep into their savings, and many of them have exhausted those savings a long time ago. It is also anyone with a small business. There are only a few service companies left, the long-standing service companies, that have been able to withstand the economic pressures. Numerous small businesses have all but closed up their shops and gone in a different direction. A lot of them are leaving Alberta.
With regard to those Albertans who remain and are trying to find work, about one in three have managed to keep their jobs and the others are finding employment in places like Texas. When I was first elected as a member of Parliament to this House, there were two flights a day to both Edmonton and Calgary direct from Ottawa. Those flights would source out of Halifax or Montreal, and they would stop in Ottawa and continue on to Edmonton and/or Calgary. Those airports would serve me and my colleague equally well, because they are equidistance from Red Deer, which is in the heart of central Alberta.
Those planes used to be full of workers. They would all be wearing their Firebag project jackets or their Kearl project jackets, and they would be coming from Atlantic Canada or from Quebec. Many, many workers were coming from Quebec, starting in Montreal. They were getting on Air Canada flight 104 on its way back to Alberta. I remember that number, as I took that flight for over a decade. Those people are not on those planes anymore, and the reason is that there is no expansion of the energy sector in Alberta. There are continuing operations for those projects that were already completed, but the reality is that the pipeline capacity is already there.
The other projects that were on the books, and there is over $100 billion worth of these projects, have been cancelled or shelved. That money has been taken elsewhere to invest in other countries, basically to compete against our current energy sector here in Canada. Those employees are no longer coming and that investment is no longer there. The pipeline capacity is at max, and the current price of oil makes railing oil uneconomical, especially when we saw the devastating oil prices at around $11 a barrel just a few months ago. This is for a sector of our economy that traditionally provides Canada with billions of dollars in revenue, which is shared among all the provinces through social transfers, the education transfer and likely even a good portion of it in equalization payments to other provinces.
I am proud to say that under the tenure when I was here, until the change of government in the last election, my province had not had to receive an equalization payment for the better part of 40 years. We had been a have-province. As a matter of fact, there have been times, because of the energy sector, that Alberta has been the only have-province in this confederation. However, it did not take very long for Premier Rachel Notley and the current government in Ottawa to put Alberta in a position where we had to beg for an emergency assistance transfer under the equalization program. I think it was a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I do not think it really amounted to a whole lot of difference other than a kind gesture.
Here is a sector of our economy that is typically producing billions of dollars of revenue, and not only corporate revenue, but also from employees, tens of thousands of workers. There were over 130,000 direct jobs lost, and probably another 30,000 or 40,000 of those consultants I talked about, people who are self-employed in the sector. Those jobs are all gone. On April 8, a few days ago, the industry came out with another forecast that is expecting another 12,500 jobs lost in the sector, most likely in Alberta.
Alberta is taking it on the chin, so much so that before Christmas, the government announced $1.6 billion for the energy sector. Imagine that happening in three short years when the energy sector has rebounded everywhere else. Albertans are now going to Texas or other places on the planet to work in the energy sector. Energy is booming. The United States used to be a net importer of Canadian energy; now the United States, because of its domestic policies, is in a position to export to Canada of all things. Here we are in this situation. We know that it cannot be the international price of energy anymore. We know it cannot be, because the energy sector is booming in other parts of the world, notably right next door to us in the United States. Therefore, it can only be government policy here in Canada that is causing this problem.
These job losses are catastrophic. If we take a look in the budget document today, we will see that there are millions of dollars allocated for consultation. The Prime Minister got up on his high horse and said that the previous government had it all wrong with the CETA 2012 and everything else, and that the government was going to create a process that guaranteed that pipeline projects would go ahead. What do we have? We have a project to the east coast that is dead in the water because of the regulatory burden and the quagmire that nobody in their right mind would ever subject stakeholder investment to. We have a cancelled northern gateway project that is likely never going to be reinstated by Enbridge. We have a group of indigenous people who are putting together the Eagle Spirit pipeline, which would follow a similar path as northern gateway.
We have Bill C-48, the northern coast tanker ban, which is only a tanker ban if that tanker happens to have Alberta oil on it. It is not a tanker ban for anybody else. LNG Canada is building a wonderful facility in Kitimat right now for liquefied natural gas, and we wish it the best of luck. We think that is a fantastic opportunity for the people there as well.
However, we are left with the Trans Mountain expansion from Kinder Morgan. The government has botched that so much and so badly that it had to take $4.5 billion of Canadian taxpayers' money to buy a 65-year-old existing pipeline and the rights to continue to develop the Trans Mountain expansion itself. We know from the documents, which Kinder Morgan has publicly announced, that the Government of Canada likely paid $1 billion more for that pipeline project than it should have paid. All we have in the budget out of the $1.6 billion that was promised before Christmas are a few million dollars to continue on with consultations.
In the budget document that I have been able to look at and examine, not one dollar is allocated to putting a shovel in the ground to build the Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain expansion. Until we can change the mind of the current government on how it is approaching the energy sector, the only hope we have in Alberta is a change in the government.