Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's speech. I was shocked at the very beginning of his speech when he implied that sound environmental technology is just a recent thing. As someone who has been in the business since 1973, and part of the Mackenzie valley pipeline assessment, I can tell him that we have had 40 years of continuous environmental improvement.
I want to talk about what is happening to the Canadian economy because of what the Liberal government is doing. Interestingly, in March of this year, the United States economy added 196,000 jobs, while in the same month, employment in Canada fell by 7,200. Back in the day, the Canadian and American economies were in lockstep. If the U.S. grew 200,000 jobs, we would grow 20,000. Now our economies are starting to diverge, strictly because of the regulatory regime that the Liberal government has put in place.
C.D. Howe reports that during this time investment in the Canadian oil and gas sector fell from $125 billion in 2014, under the watch of the great former prime minister Stephen Harper, to $75 billion in 2018. This was during a period when global investments in oil and gas have increased, especially in the U.S., which had a 50% rise in oil and gas sector investment in 2017.
How can the member defend this shabby record?