Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the member for Berthier—Maskinongé.
We are here today to discuss the Conservatives' opposition day motion. It is not hard to guess what today's topic of discussion will be. For at least a year, I cannot recall a single Conservative opposition day that addressed anything but the carbon tax. Generally, when another party has an opposition day, we wonder what the next day's debate will be about. We do research, we discuss it and we look forward to finding out the topic. For the Conservatives, however, it never changes, it is always the carbon tax. It is like an obsession. For them, oil is a religion. Any interference with that and they lose their minds.
More specifically, today's motion seeks to uncover more information about the impact of carbon pricing on the national and provincial GDP for the period from 2022 to 2030. Essentially, the Department of the Environment did the calculations and submitted them to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Projections were made to determine what the impact of carbon pricing might be. The Conservatives were outraged because the government ordered the Parliamentary Budget Officer not to disclose these documents.
To everyone's surprise, five minutes before today's session, the Liberals decided to unveil the famous documents that they did not want the Parliamentary Budget Officer to unveil. With the Conservatives' motion now moot, they had to come up with a new angle of attack. They had a look at the documents and examined the numbers. To their eyes, it was catastrophic: The impact on the GDP is expected to be about $30 billion by 2030.
One member, who thought he was pretty clever, came to tell us this would be a big deal for Quebec. We have been saying for months that the carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. For the longest time, the Conservatives did not seem to get it, but eventually they understood. They understood and changed their tune.
Now they are back at it after finding one row. I know which row it is. It is row 17, column AN. The file tab is labelled “Grrowth_GDP_pivot”.
That was like the holy grail for them. They were pretty proud of their coup. The number on row 17 is $5 billion, so when they saw “Quebec” and “2030”, the Conservatives concluded that the carbon tax would cost Quebec $5 billion.
I wondered about a few things when I saw that, so I had a look at the document, which is an Excel spreadsheet. I looked at the estimated effect of the infamous carbon tax in 2030. The figure for Alberta is $4.9 billion. The figure for British Columbia is $3.5 billion. The figure for Saskatchewan is $1.2 billion, and the figure for Ontario is $8 billion. The figure for Quebec is $5.25 billion.
I had to wonder. The figure for Quebec is $5.25 billion, but the carbon tax does not apply there, so these are all indirect effects of the carbon tax. Quebec will therefore have more indirect effects from the carbon tax than Alberta as a whole. That is what the Conservatives are saying.
I do not know if the Conservatives have thought about this, but there may be another hypothesis, another possible explanation for that much-touted figure. The document provides an explanation, in the preamble, but it seems that the Conservatives may have been too lazy to read it. The document states that this is basically a theoretical model. It is based on the cost of the carbon tax and GDP growth over time. This is then applied to all sorts of calculations, taking into account greenhouse gas emissions by sector, to show the impact it would have in each of the provinces.
That is the effect that it would have in each of the provinces if the carbon tax applied everywhere. The thing is that the carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. It is as simple as that. The Conservatives have been lying through their teeth all day. They have gone all out. Basically, ordinary citizens need to start realizing what is happening. The Conservatives think that this will all go off without a hitch, that no one will ask any questions. They are talking about the $5 billion in column AN for Quebec and saying that it is settled until 2030. They are saying that that is the impact of the carbon tax in Quebec, when in actual fact, the carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. It will never apply in Quebec because Quebec uses the carbon exchange model, so this $5 billion they keep talking about does not exist. It is hypothetical and comes from a fictional, theoretical model in an Excel spreadsheet. That is where it comes from. It is as simple as that.
One question comes to my mind when I see all this. It took me five minutes of looking the Excel spreadsheet to figure it out. The Conservatives are the official opposition. They have a research team. They want to form the next government, yet they are being sloppy and behaving like amateurs. They think people will swallow anything. The Conservatives want to govern a G7 country, but they cannot even read an Excel file and some documents. Nevertheless, they take themselves seriously and think that people will trust them. That is just sad.
The moral of this story about the Conservatives trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes is that their fearmongering must never be believed. Basically, they failed to prove that the carbon tax would be a disaster for Quebec's economy. No, all they proved was their shocking bad faith. That is all they proved. They have shown that they will say anything and everything to fool people into believing their cockamamie stories. They think people are stupid. The good news is that they have been caught in the act. The Conservatives can huff and puff all they like, but what they say does not matter.
The fact is, the real carbon tax that Quebeckers pay is all the lovely subsidies the Liberal government hands out to oil companies. The Liberals blew $35 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline. In the last two budgets, they shelled out $83 billion in carbon capture tax credits so oil companies could pump even more oil out of the ground. Who pays for all that? Ordinary people. It impacts their bottom line. It is a lot of money. Ordinary people foot the bill, but the Conservatives and Liberals will never talk about that. Instead, the Liberals finance oil companies with our tax dollars. It is downright scandalous. Quebec needs to get out of this country now. Canada needs to stop using Quebec taxpayers' money to finance oil companies and pollution.
The good news is that the train has already left the station in Quebec. No matter how worked up the Conservatives get or how much they huff and puff, the reality is that there are already 275,000 electric cars on the road in Quebec. The reality is that one in four cars sold in Quebec is a zero-emission car. The reality is that by 2030, gas-powered vehicles will no longer even be sold in Quebec. The Conservatives are panicking. The reality is that, sooner or later, Quebec is going to separate. Quebec will be independent and we will finally be free from the lies we keep hearing from the Conservatives, the Liberals and all federalists. All they do all day long is try to scare us out of moving forward as a nation, to prevent us from doing what we need to do to fulfill our destiny.