Mr. Speaker, if you could give me seven minutes' notice, I will at least have three minutes left for some questions and answers. I am sure the member for Kingston and the Islands has all sorts of burning questions relevant to Line 5 and nothing else.
Last Thursday, Canada's ambassador to the U.S. made the following statement on CBC's Power and Politics regarding the potential shutdown of Enbridge's Line 5:
It is not a threat to Canada's national economic or energy security. I think that it is an important dispute or disagreement that exists between Enbridge and the state of Michigan that needs to be taken very seriously.
The minister said something totally different. This is a bit of a pivot for the government, whose Minister of Natural Resources stated at the committee back on March 4 that Line 5 “is a critical energy and economic link. It is vital to Canada's energy security,” and that the government takes the threat “to our energy security very seriously”.
That was last week. We are talking about the government supposedly understanding the consequences of Line 5 being shut down, yet our ambassador, when asked, does not seem to see the same urgency necessarily as we see here in Canada or as the minister claims to be saying is here in Canada. Why the disconnect?
If we had a true, actual plan in place to deal with Line 5 and the shutdown of Line 5, there would be no missteps, misquotes or misspeaking. There would be a consistent message coming from not only the minister, the Prime Minister, our ambassador and everybody who is talking to people down in the U.S. in regard to Line 5, but there is not one. We have to wonder how seriously the government has taken the Line 5 shutdown.
I am sure the member for Kingston and the Islands would ask, “Well, why aren't you bringing forward suggestions and proposals?” Let me bring in some proposals. On May 12, the line shuts down. How many trains have you acquired? How many railcars have you acquired? How many trucks have you booked? Just on the trains, I think we would need something like 800 railcars a day, which is roughly 200 cars to a train. That is a train every six hours on top of what is already heading down those lines as we speak today.
I am a farmer here in Saskatchewan and we have all sorts of rail issues in the wintertime when it comes to getting trains delivering product to ports on time. Has anyone put in a plan to deal with that?
When we look at trucks, if we are going to go to 25,000 trucks a day, has anyone talked to the Windsor border authority to see how that volume of trucks going across the border will be handled? How many people have you hired to deal with the movement of those trucks across the border? What has been done about talking to the mayors of Windsor and Detroit in regard to facilitating this type of movement through their cities? I bet no one has thought about that.
It is really interesting that the government does not do anything until it is a crisis. Now, there was talk about this during the campaign last fall with the governor, who had this proposal. The governor is of an extreme leftist philosophy and she is an extreme environmentalist. She does not care if she shuts everything down and people get laid off or thrown out of work. She does not care, but she wants to go to her environmental buddies to check a box. If they were really serious about the environment, if they were really concerned about it and really had an issue with it, why would they not put in a reasonable plan? They could have said that they told us that they needed to do something different in the States.
Wait a minute. Enbridge already has a reasonable plan. It already had a game plan where it was actually going to burrow underneath the straits and then put the pipe in concrete to make sure of that. It just needs time to get it done, but what is happening? It is just being shut down.
If I was a consumer in Ontario and Quebec, I would be very concerned listening to my members of Parliament. It is lucky we are going into summertime. It is lucky I do not need heat for my house. If I was a farmer going into harvest and it was a damp harvest, it is lucky I do not need propane to dry my corn. If this does get shut down, those questions are not going away and there has been no plan B put in place to deal with them. It is really disappointing when we start hearing parties from the left talking about how they are worried about our own sovereignty. Here is a situation where Canada's sovereignty is being dictated in a U.S. court. That means there are 25,000 jobs in Sarnia being decided outside of Canada. That is what is happening right now.
When we go to the committee and speak to members from other parties, we tell them that this is not that smart. The member who spoke before me talked about this. Maybe we should have our own pipeline. Maybe we should make sure that we have our own capacity, so that we can actually take care of ourselves, especially from the lessons we have learned from COVID-19. Nobody talks about the 25,000 to 30,000 people who, on May 13, if this is shut down, may or may not have jobs. They may or may not be able to pay their mortgage, and may or may not be able to buy groceries.
Is there a game plan put in place for unemployment offices? Is there a game plan put in place to transition them into new jobs?
If we look at it, what about the auto sector and the other manufacturing sectors? Everybody thinks this is just oil and gas. What about the plastics and the other components that come out of those refineries that go into Ontario manufacturing that get shipped around the world? The auto sector right now is having an issue with computer chips. What would happen if all of a sudden it could not get the plastics it needs for the bumpers or other items in its cars? How sustainable is that auto sector in Canada if we cannot even supply the components that go into the cars? Does it just move to the U.S. with everything else and then the left say that is what happens when we shut everything down?
It is very frustrating when I look at Line 5. We had this special committee and I thought everybody was on the same page and understood the importance of it, then I started hearing comments from people in government or our ambassador that were different. I see the member for Kingston and the Islands not even talk about it and show such contempt for the 25,000 jobs, not understanding that two days from now these folks could possibly be unemployed. He wants to worry about an election. The Liberals want to talk about an election. I am worried about the jobs. I am worried about those people. I am worried about the economy. I am worried about Canada having a future for our kids to grow up in.
When we had an NDP government in Saskatchewan, at least people could go to Alberta to work, but when we have an NDP-Liberal government federally, where do our kids go to work?
I will end it there.