Mr. Speaker, along with the member for Kings—Hants, I want to wish everybody a very happy Robbie Burns Day. In honour of that I am wearing my Oliphant tartan tie. It is a minor nod to the heritage that some of us share in this place.
It is a great privilege to participate in tonight's debate, which has been very wide-ranging. This debate is about a pipeline and the decision by a democratically elected President of the United States of America to cancel a long-hoped-for pipeline that was to take Canadian energy to our neighbours to the south. However, it is much more than that. It is about Canadians, mostly Albertans but not only Albertans, who are worried about their livelihoods with the cancellation of this pipeline.
It is about Canadians across the country who are worried about how they will fit into an economy that is undergoing a fundamental transition regarding the way we live, the way we work and the way we engage together, and it is dramatically changing our economic and industrial landscape.
It is also about Canadians who are wrestling with the reality of climate change, of threats to air quality and the health impacts of environmental degradation. Mostly, it is about how we hold all three of these things together at the same time, protecting livelihoods in the short term, ensuring economic transitions in a fair and just way and ensuring that no one is left behind, and how we do these things while taking real and concrete steps to address climate change and improve the quality of life in Canada and around the world for the benefit of everyone.
As we wrestle with these three things simultaneously, we also recognize very clearly that Canada is not an island. We share this continent and, maybe more to the point, we share an economic, cultural and deeply important energy and environmental relationship with the United States. It is second to none in the way it impacts all of us. That relationship is something that all Canadians are now coming to grips with. We are each other's top energy supplier across virtually every source of energy: oil, gas and hydroelectricity.
We are also the United States' number one partner in energy security, ensuring our industries and consumers have a supply of power to sustain jobs and communities. That energy security also demands environmental sustainability as a key component. The Canadian government and Canadian industry are committed to the ongoing process of increasing the sustainability of our energy supply, and together we are taking action to drive down the environmental footprints of traditional energies, developing and deploying clean energies, and increasing energy efficiency.
As we move into a clean-energy transition and toward a decarbonized economy that will address the challenges of the changing climate, our bilateral energy and climate change collaboration becomes even more important. That is because climate change is, at its core, an issue that requires collective action. We are committed to that work. This applies to the energy sources we use today, the ones we invent tomorrow, and our policies to fight climate change in the weeks, months and years to come. Every energy projection indicates that over the next few decades we will continue to need fossil fuels as that transition continues.
Today, I bought a new car. It is kind of fun to pick up a new vehicle. It is my second hybrid: a Toyota made in Woodstock, Ontario. It will use gasoline, but it will use less gasoline than a car with a conventional engine. It is a symbol of the transition that we are in, moving to new technologies while continuing to be dependent on fossil fuels. Many of us find ourselves in that same place. In Canada and in the United States, we are in that together. Today, Canada is by far the best source for the United States for that fuel because of many factors, including our geographic proximity and world-leading energy production practices. We are good producers of some of the world's best sources of energy, and I think we all share, in the House, the goal of producing the oil and gas we will continue to need for some time in as sustainable a way as possible.
Canada's environmental, social and governance record for oil production ranks third in the world, well ahead of any other supplier to the United States, which itself ranks sixth. Is this good enough? Not good enough for us, but it is an excellent record and can only get better.
Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, for example, which represents all the major oil sands companies, is developing new technologies and sharing best practices to enable a further reduction of the impact of their in situ operations on freshwater resources.
Canada is also a leader in clean tech and reducing the environmental footprint of fossil fuel production. Just today, two Calgary companies, Enhance Energy and Whitecap Resources, announced they had gone beyond net zero to achieve net negative production of oil. This remarkable accomplishment was achieved by capturing carbon which was then itself used to extract the oil. This means that the companies are storing more emissions underground than they are producing in their operations. This is the kind of innovation that will accelerate our transition towards a green future, which underpins our climate commitments as a country. The world is watching and taking note.
It is in that context that I, for one, very much welcome the renewed commitment to climate change that we saw in the election campaign of the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and in the early signals coming from President Biden in his new administration, such as rejoining the Paris Agreement and implementing a build back better green recovery.
Canada is committed and determined to work closely with the United States as we move forward addressing climate change. There is no greater problem in our world than climate change. We will not always agree, and from time to time there will be bumps in the road with the United States, but our two countries will show the world that we are serious about the existential crisis that is climate change.
On December 11, our government announced an initial $15 billion investment as part of its plan to accelerate the fight against climate change so that Canada can exceed its 2030 Paris Agreement targets and reach the government's additional commitment of net-zero emissions by 2050. The Prime Minister has already raised climate change with the president in both of his telephone calls.
We are all in this debate together and though we are not all in agreement, we do agree that climate change is an existential crisis that needs to be dealt with. At the same time, we also recognize that people continue to need jobs and that we need to continue to have fossil fuels for the way we live in this country as we transition to a new economy and a new way of life. Together we can ensure our economies so that our children and our grandchildren live in safety as we recover from COVID, and that we will benefit from a complete mix of energy sources that reduce emissions and enhance North American energy security, combatting climate change and making this climate livable for generations to come.
I am very pleased to engage in questions now as we continue in this very important debate.