Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to take up the question I had during question period a little while ago. It was about the hard-working men and women at Evraz steel, the steel plant in Regina, Saskatchewan, and the fact that they have continually had to lay off more and more workers because there is just not as much work as there used to be back in the good old days, one might say. We have had years of policies put forward by the Liberal government, such as Bill C-48, the shipping ban; Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” law; and the emissions cap, which has been shown to really affect the resource industry in our country. My colleague for Calgary Midnapore said it very well: We have seen a thousand people getting laid off in Calgary recently. We have seen mills being closed in B.C. because of the tariffs on softwood lumber.
I know there are five projects from the Major Projects Office that have been announced. The question I focused on was this: If these get built, first and foremost, they should be built with Canadian steel, Canadian product and Canadian labour. This is one of the questions I would like to follow up on.
The other one is this: Five projects were announced, but there are still 38 major projects at the impact assessment phase. Over the last few years, according to my numbers, 86,000 jobs and $54 billion have fled the country in investment in our energy sector. TransCanada, for example, is building pipelines, just not in Canada; they are in the United States.
I would like a couple of answers to the questions I laid out. They are fair, and they are non-partisan. I think there is something we need to work on to grow our energy and our resource industry as a major economic driver. Along with that would be our agriculture industry as well. We have seen fertilizer reduction targets. We have seen industrial carbon tax. We have seen carbon tax 2.0 being added to farming. This has increased farmers' cost of doing business, and we have then seen the price of food go up also.
I would love an answer from my colleague from across the way, and I will follow up in a minute.