Mr. Speaker, today I rise to talk about the oil and gas industry in Newfoundland and Labrador with regard to our production and specifically our refining.
Newfoundland and Labrador had an oil refinery meeting our province's consumption demands since 1976. There is no doubt it had its ups and downs, but over the years it employed thousands of people including myself, my father, my mother and many friends and family throughout the community. At one point, it was 5% of our province's GDP. There were no royalties from the throughput, but simply income tax revenues and other spinoffs.
The refinery used to produce 100% of our island's diesel, propane, jet fuel and gasoline. Then the Liberal government wasted $89 million of federal tax dollars while the province wasted another $17 million on a conversion that converted only to biodiesel fuel. Now we have to ship fuel in from all around the world and everyone is paying the price, literally. Newfoundlanders are paying five cents per litre to accommodate the added cost of storage and shipping from these other countries. The Liberal government refused to build pipelines to bring Alberta oil to the east coast, so instead we are shipping it in from France. We are not even getting Canadian oil. We are not getting Newfoundland oil. We are getting oil refined in France.
On June 6, a Liberal colleague from Newfoundland proudly announced that the North Atlantic Refining company was expanding. I thought that was exciting. I rejoiced until I found out that it was expanding into France, not Newfoundland, not Canada. While the Prime Minister was flying around Europe to try to find a good deal, I wonder if he forgot which country he was finding a good deal for. He blames Trump for continuously losing car manufacturing plants to the United States; I wonder what his excuse is for losing refining jobs to France.
I just cannot wrap my head around how somehow a group of Liberals thought it would be a good idea to spend $100 million to take a refinery that produced 130,000 barrels a day to fuel our province's demands and reduce it to a mere 14,000 barrels a day of only biodiesel that could not even service our gas stations. How on earth could any business produce 10% of the throughput and maintain the same number of workers and the same amount of GDP contribution? How could they not see that this refinery conversion would be on a road to disaster? lt has only been open a little over a year, and they are already announcing that they are on shaky ground, so shaky that they just had to accept another $25 million from the provincial government just to keep the doors open.
When will the Liberal government abolish its green fantasy and actually support oil and gas investments in this country that make sense? Or will it at least get our of the way and steal our common-sense policies to put Canada back on track?