Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Repentigny.
To put it mildly, the honeymoon between the Conservatives and the Liberals was short-lived. The new couple, united by Bill C-5, is breaking up this morning over electric vehicles. It seems the Liberals may not be willing to buy into all kinds of nonsense when it comes to the energy transition and carbon pricing. Perhaps they are not prepared to go as far as the Conservatives.
I have participated in many Conservative opposition days, particularly with regard to the carbon tax. What are they repeating today with this motion? What are they repeating in this new Parliament? One thing is very clear to me: Today’s motion, once again, shows that the Conservative Party is completely out of touch with Quebec's reality. Not only is the party out of touch, but the Conservative members from Quebec do not have the influence they need within their caucus to make progress on the issues facing the Quebec nation. We saw that this week.
As members know, we had an opposition day on the $800 million that was stolen from Quebeckers and reimbursed to the rest of Canadians for carbon tax payments they never made. What was my Conservative Party colleagues' reaction? They proposed an amendment to the effect that the $800 million could be repaid, if Quebec agreed to end its carbon exchange. The Conservative Party wanted to tell the Government of Quebec how to take action on carbon pricing.
Let us recall the psychodrama that we experienced in the last Parliament when the Conservatives were shouting about how we were the "Liberal Bloc" and about how we were supporting the infamous carbon tax, a tax that did not apply to Quebec. Now, lo and behold, the Conservatives have seen the light and have understood that this much-talked-about carbon tax did not apply to Quebec.
Let us get back to the issue of electric vehicles. I think the key question here is, who has the most to gain from the electrification of transportation and who has the most to lose? The Conservative motion picks a side. It sides with Alberta and the oil and gas sector. The people who have something to lose in the electrification of transportation are in Alberta, the oil and gas sector. The people who have something to gain are in Quebec.
What about Quebec? For the past 30 years, there has been an energy transition. I will come back to the issue of setting up a battery industry. Hydro-Québec has developed a unique expertise that could help us become North America's battery producers. What else could be said about Quebec? Quebec sits atop vast reserves of critical minerals. It has clean electricity that is accessible to everyone at a very low cost. No one pays as competitive a price for electricity as we do in Quebec. It is a favourable geographic location that could allow us to become part of the battery industry. It is a vibrant industrial ecosystem with a low carbon footprint. Consider the forestry sector. The forest is a carbon sink that allows us to sequester carbon when we use wood. Consider Quebec aluminum, which is tied to the hydroelectric sector. It is thanks to Quebec's clean electricity that we can produce aluminum and that the Americans depend on us and our aluminum smelters. Quebec has all these significant advantages that are steering us toward a major transformation and the electrification of transportation, yet my Conservative colleagues from Quebec prefer to side with Alberta.
In many areas, the battery industry that is crucial to electric vehicles in Quebec is booming. Unlike what they are doing out west, Quebec does not invest in carbon capture or storage strategies. Quebec's investments are in this battery industry. The Quebec minister has repeatedly said that his government is in talks with about a hundred companies to develop such projects.
To illustrate the pertinence of my arguments, the two main projects that are likely to develop and create an economic boom in my region of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean are related to the battery sector. I am talking about the phosphate industry, with First Phosphate and Arianne Phosphate. Those are two major projects.
Unfortunately, we never hear the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord talk about that. During the election campaign, he preferred to talk about GNL Québec, a project that was rejected by the Government of Quebec and that had no future for us. We never heard him say that it was possible to develop a phosphate sector. We have to put all our eggs in—