Mr. Speaker. I am pleased to rise tonight with respect to Bill C-49, which would amend, in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia, the offshore petroleum board's mandate from petroleum to regulating overall energy. We have proposed an amendment at this stage to deal with the fact that parts of this bill would implement elements of the Impact Assessment Act, IAA, that have been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
I would like to start by addressing some of the concerns that I have heard over the last few weeks from Liberal members from my part of the world in Atlantic Canada. One of them, the member for Kings—Hants, has an agriculture riding, so he is expert at spreading manure. He has very much pushed the envelope on what this bill is about. It almost makes us believe that maybe he had not read it.
I am going to talk a bit about the issue of tidal energy to start, which was mentioned a little earlier by one of my NDP colleagues. The good news is that the first North American tidal project that was able to produce actual electricity without being destroyed by the tides of the Bay of Fundy worked. The bad news is the project is dead. Why is that project dead? It is dead because of the natural virtue-signalling tendencies of the current Liberal government; the Liberal government killed it, if members can believe it.
Sustainable Marine Energy started developing the alternative energy project in the Bay of Fundy. If members do not know, I will tell them that the Bay of Fundy's tides, every day, push more water in and out of the Bay of Fundy than all other rivers in the world combined in their flow in one day. That is the power of the Bay of Fundy. Many attempts have been made to put turbines at the bottom of the ocean, millions and millions of dollars in the Bay of Fundy, and within about 48 hours they are blown apart by the actual power of the sea and those tides that rise 48 feet and drop 48 feet every day. They are the highest tides in the world.
Sustainable Marine Energy developed a different approach, basically put the turbines on the top of the water, and that energy project in the Bay of Fundy was licensed in 2012. Who was the government in 2012? I think it was the Conservatives. The first energy tidal project producing clean, renewable energy was approved by the Conservative government in 2012. That is when the green energy bonanza, which could have been a bonanza, was started in Atlantic Canada. What happened? The tidal project would have provided nine megawatts of clean, green energy to Nova Scotia's electrical grid and could have generated up to 2,500 megawatts while bringing in $100 million in inward investment and eliminating 17,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is the equivalent of taking 3,700 cars off the road. It sounds pretty good to me and it sounded pretty good to the Harper government, and that is why it was approved to go ahead with the experiment.
If the Liberal government really cared as much about combatting climate change and about green energy as the Liberals claimed to, one would think that they would have continued to license this project, to develop it and to draft this offshore power that we have. However, they did not; one would be wrong.
For its trail-blazing efforts, this is what happened to Sustainable Marine Energy. It was awarded, I would say, a red tide. In the ocean, a red tide kills everything. A blue tide, everything lives in; and the red tide in the ocean actually kills all fish. The company was awarded a red tide of red tape from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. For those familiar with the energy projects out west and the power of DFO in preventing energy projects in western Canada, the government of course decided to use this in the ocean as well when it came to Sustainable Marine Energy. The government repeatedly delayed the permits and rejected permits, even after being provided reams and reams of science about how the fisheries were not impacted by this project.
The last project, which is the straw that broke the camel's back, was last year. After five years of the regulatory challenges by DFO, the project in Digby county, and I know the Speaker is very familiar with it since Digby county is in his constituency, that would have gone a long way to fighting against climate change was cancelled by DFO.