Madam Speaker, I believe you can hear me now.
On March 25 of this year, at the beginning of a pandemic whose effects were multiplied by an ill-timed global oil price war between large state-owned enterprises half a world away, the then minister of finance and the Liberal government proclaimed that support for the industry would be provided not in days or weeks, but in hours.
Clearly, that proclamation was over-promising and under-delivering. Nearly seven months later, the oil and gas industry continues to face the onslaught of temporary drastic reductions in demand for its resource amidst the world's supply that is robust for the near future. Were the situation to be a new structural scenario for the world energy industry, it is certain that state-owned enterprises would know and would cease further development of their assets.
Let me provide clarity. Despite some European producers, this is not the case at all. The Middle East sees robust demand for its oil resource for the foreseeable future, going out 30 to 40 years. The world needs energy and it will still need the energy intensity provided by hydrocarbons for which the world has, as of yet, no close competitor, particularly with respect to transportation fuels.
I know parties will quarrel that this is a sunset resource. An energy-educated person will tell them to give their heads a shake or to get an actual education in how energy is produced and which energy sources have environmental footprints. To be clear, every energy source has an environmental footprint.
At this moment, we, Canadians in particular, are betting that the environmental effects caused by greenhouse gases are worse than those produced by other energy sources, as in the soot and greenhouse gases produced from a burning biomass or as in the full scale build out required for an electricity grid that currently has no replacement source of electricity here or around the world.
Damming all the rivers in the world will not replace the energy we use and has its own environmental impacts. The steel, aluminum, concrete, copper, nickel, aggregate, rare earth metals and construction industries, all heavy on emissions, will free us from our power needs. We are deluding ourselves. The government is a cheerleader in this pretense.
Sometimes we get to see some sense of reality emerge when the vanity of the slogans we have heard for five years meet up with the wall of reality. Such seemed to be the case early in this pandemic. The government seemed to indicate that, yes, this industry, the world's environmentally leading oil and gas extraction industry, heavily regulated to ensure it meets the exacting environmental standards of Canadians, would withstand the economic downturn. There was the short pause of attacking the industry with obfuscation and opaque regulations and indeterminate timelines for decision-making when the government might need to admit how important this industry is to Canadians, and to the world, particularly with respect to our environmental practices.
Believe me, for a country that produces less than 5% of the world's oil supply, we lead by example, environmentally and with respect to society's outcomes. Show me industry participants around the world whose practices are as sound, as transparent, as responsive and as progressive as the Canadian oil and gas industry. There are none.