Madam Speaker, I hear the same member chirping away again. I am sure it is a different condition out there in Hamilton and the regions that he comes from, but in my neck of the woods, in the southeast part of Calgary, I have a lot of oil and gas workers who have been out of work for years now.
Their severance pay has run out, they have no more space in a home equity line of credit, they are at the limit of what they can afford and the outlook is grim. For many of them, their kids, spouses, friends and former co-workers have moved to the United States or Algeria or South America to seek work, because there is a booming industry worldwide for oil and gas development. That might be hard to believe, but it is still going on. One of my neighbours is an LNG specialist, and he spent time working in Venezuela.
I have a lot of family members who moved out west specifically for work opportunities. Lots of those have dried up, and in connected industries the same thing is happening. We know in Alberta that oil and gas is not going to bounce back to the same as it was before. We have been through this before. Albertans are extremely resilient. This is not the first bust that we have experienced, frankly, and there will be other booms and other busts in the future. We have adapted, every single time, by changing our legislation, changing our regulations and looking after the environment. That is what we do best. That is what this piece of legislation proposes to do.
Through this, I see an opportunity to harness the power of the private sector to invest in things that it cares about. I see these hedge funds and equity funds out there, all over North America, looking toward investing in projects that have environmental and social goals behind them. ESG is the way of the future. Many of them are looking at things like carbon net-zero investments that they would like to make.
My riding is home to one of the most efficient gas turbine electricity-producing power stations in North America, with something like a 98% to 99% efficiency, producing half of the city of Calgary's electrical power. It is hyperefficient. There are barely any people working in that facility, and it has now added on a carbon capture and carbon utilization system as well.
Projects like this are how we are going to get to our environmental goals. Changes like this to the Income Tax Act would help the private sector achieve the environmental goals that we all share in this House. Climate change is real. We have to address it. This is a way to get there because, as I said, “he that cannot pay, let him pray.”
We are done praying. There is an opportunity here to make sure that the private sector pays for these types of costs.