Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to participate tonight. We have heard the term for centuries of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. Sometimes it has been used in a negative way, but in Canada we are phenomenal at it. That is our resource industry. We are experts at it. We are respected around the world for the technologies we have developed in this industry.
I know my Liberal colleague will tell me how much Liberals have supported the resource sector, but I have visited with alternative energy sectors in my riding. We have had wind turbines for decades in my riding. We are into the second and third generation of them. The biggest solar farm in Canada is being built in my riding. If we visit those we will find that it takes 200 great Canadian coal to make one blade for a windmill. If we look at the components for solar, the metal, the plastic, it does not work without the resource industry in oil and gas to make those.
The resource sector is a great one to provide energy, but the other industries are complementary to it. For decades we will be using the resource industry in our country. When we have a trillion dollars of debt, unemployment and an economy that has slowed down because of COVID-19, it is the resource sector that can drive this economy back to where we need to be.
The energy sector is also the largest employer of indigenous people in this country, businesses and workers. The simple fact is that we will continue to need the fossil fuel industry in the future, for decades to come.
Speaking of hewers of wood and drawers of water, we have another phenomenal industry called the agricultural industry. Agriculture is an essential industry with essential workers. As the Minister of Agriculture told me at committee, to the federal government and the provinces, it is an essential industry. When it comes to vaccinations, let us hope the government understands that these are essential workers in this industry, which provides us food security and is able to produce food that is distributed to the world to feed people, and that these workers in the agricultural industry are considered essential for vaccination, if they so choose.
Another part of the agricultural industry is broadband. Part of the challenge is that the Liberals have not quite understood a couple of things about broadband. Yes, they want to move it up. They want to do it sooner, but they keep talking about the last community, whether it was in the east, north or central Canada. That is not the community for agriculture. It is the farm gate. The farm gate may be only a few kilometres out of town, but our agricultural industry is the most advanced in the world. The technology it is using is incredible, and 50 down and 10 up is a minimum for our agricultural industry. The Liberal government does not understand that it needs to get this for the agricultural industry.
All of those things in the resource sector are important to make our economy work.