Madam Speaker, I want to start by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Elmwood—Transcona.
We are meeting here this evening to debate the significance of the decision by President Biden to cancel the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have provided an increased capacity for shipments from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf coast.
The Liberals and the Conservatives both claim that this will be a serious blow to the Alberta economy. I think the minister, with maybe a bit of Newfoundland hyperbole, said it was going to be an existential blow. While it is certainly true that the oil sector in Alberta has suffered a number of blows that have impacted tens of thousands of workers over the past six or seven years, mainly involving the world oil price and global investments, it is clear that this is not one of them.
I think everyone in the debate today would agree that we must act quickly to ensure that workers in the oil sector can find jobs that they can count on over the coming years. The question, then, is this: What actions will produce those long-lasting jobs for the future? Will building more pipelines produce those jobs? Or should we be creating jobs to transition out of the fossil fuel industry into a future that tackles climate change with bold investments in energy efficiency, oil and gas well cleanup and clean-energy technologies?
As members may guess, I think that doubling down on pipelines is a waste of time, a waste of money and, most of all, a huge disservice to the future of oil patch workers. I would like to take a bit of time to explain why.
In 2014, oil prices dropped from about $100 a barrel to the $40 or $50 range. Those prices tumbled further last year as COVID hit, but have since recovered to around $50. Over the past five years, I have heard at committee from many top oil executives about their needs in the sector. When l have asked them what prices we need to make new projects financially viable, the answers have always been around $70 or $80. I do not think there is a single analyst in the world who would predict that we will see prices in that range over the next 20 years.
When we had Irving Oil before the committee in the last Parliament, witnesses were asked whether they would build new refinery capacity for Alberta bitumen if the energy east pipeline was built to tidewater in New Brunswick. Their reply was basically they would have to look at the economic viability of that.
However, it is not just low prices that have affected the oil sector. Projections for future oil demand have fallen every year, and as those demand projections fall, investors have become very concerned about putting significant money into big new projects that cost billions of dollars and take decades to pay off. They are happy to put money into companies that are actively producing oil, but not into new projects.
We have seen this in big companies, like Total, one of the biggest companies in France, which wrote down over $9 billion of oil sands assets last year, stranded assets that it figures it will never be able to viably develop. This is not because of lack of pipelines, but because of lack of demand.
We will need oil over the next 30 years at least, but we will not need any more of it than we are already producing. All these big pipeline projects are expansion projects. Keystone XL, the Trans Mountain expansion and the Enbridge Line 3 expansion are based on the premise that oil sands production of expensive, difficult-to-refine oil will boom during a time when the world is awash in cheap oil.
More and more, we are seeing that this future is very unlikely. Just before Christmas, the Canada Energy Regulator put out its report on Canada's energy future. For the first time, it projected oil demand into the future based on the assumption that Canada and other countries will actually try to tackle climate change. This so-called evolving scenario was based on Canada's announced policies to fight climate change, not policies that will get us to net zero by 2050. The CER did not go that far, but these policies would at least recognize that we had to move in that direction.
Under those assumptions the report showed that oil sands production in Canada would plateau very quickly and that only one of those three pipelines would be needed to accommodate all further production increases. Since Line 3 is scheduled to be online later this year, it follows that Keystone XL will not be needed by Canada's oil producers. The Trans Mountain expansion will not be needed, nor will expanded rail transport.
When I last spoke with Canadian pipeline industry representatives, I asked them how much more capacity we needed to transport Canadian oil. They said that Line 3 would fix all our needs with respect to the capacity constraints we have been seeing.
The narrative we hear tonight is that if only we had Keystone XL, all would be well with the oil industry; if only we had the Trans Mountain expansion, all would be well. It is clear that this is simply not the case. Even industry analysts know this well. Rystad Energy, a respected Norwegian analyst of the global oil sector, notes that shutting down the Keystone project would have almost no effect on the Canadian oil production sector, as we simply have enough capacity lined up.
What should we be doing to help the tens of thousands of oil industry workers who have lost their jobs? We should be creating tens of thousands of jobs now, not next year and not in five years. If we respect the workers who have lost jobs, that is what we have to do, and we can do that with a major effort to clean up oil and gas wells.
The federal government made a start to that last year, but we really have to ramp that up. We could create good jobs across the country in energy-efficiency efforts. The government's plan in this regard is the $2 billion that was announced in the economic statement before Christmas. However, Efficiency Canada has recommended spending 10 times that to ensure our buildings are energy efficient by 2050. These jobs would be the same jobs that are being lost in the oil sector as new projects are scaled back, for welders, electricians, carpenters, plumbers and more.
Estimates show that even if we met the old goals of the pan-Canadian framework for energy efficiency, we would create over a million jobs. These are of course jobs in clean energy and clean technology, good jobs that closely match the jobs that have been lost.
This is what we should be talking about when talking to the United States government. This is where Canadian industries can cash in on the huge expenditures the U.S. and countries around the world are talking about. If we want to negotiate with the U.S. on future trade, let us talk about where the future is going as far as technology goes. Let us make sure that Canada has access to the ambitious programs that the Biden administration has planned in sectors where Canada is already experienced and is often leading the way, like hydrogen technology, electric vehicle manufacturing and clean energy.
This is where the puck is going and this is where we need to go with our investments and policies. This is where good jobs are going to be created. If we respect the workers who are looking desperately for those jobs, this is what we need to do. Another pipeline will not get us there.
