Mr. Speaker, the Liberal illusion is now on a collision course with reality. See, the Prime Minister ran an entire election campaign promising to be the opposite of who he was and to do the opposite of what he had been saying and writing and what the Liberal government had been doing for the prior 10 years. It was not just on the question of developing our resources; it was on questions of fiscal policy. He had obviously caused a massive inflation and housing crisis in the U.K. by printing nearly endless sums of money over there, and then he came back here promising that he would spend less, a promise he promptly broke.
The Prime Minister advised the then prime minister of this country, Justin Trudeau, to do likewise and then promised to do precisely the opposite. He argued not only that there should be a carbon tax, but that the tax should be raised even further, only to promise that he would get rid of it, a promise that he is already in the process of breaking. He campaigned around the world to defund the energy sector, convincing financial institutions to stop loaning and investing in Canadian energy, writing that he believed that “as much as half of oil reserves, proven reserves, need to stay in the ground if we're going to get to where we are.” He further said that it was a “sensible” decision to cancel the northern gateway pipeline, stating, “I think it's the right decision.”
Those were his positions up until about two months before he launched his campaign for prime minister, at which point he suddenly reversed them and tried to plagiarize the positions of the Conservative Party. The problem with someone pretending to believe something he clearly does not just to get elected is that after the election is over, he reverts quickly to his original course. This is what we have seen. While there have been many illusions that the Prime Minister would change course, that he would approve projects, that he would build at unimaginable speeds, none of this has materialized in any form of reality. Here we are six months into the latest Liberal term, and there is not a single new project that was not already in the works and had been given the green light, and certainly not one that is under construction. Today, we have an opportunity to find out what the Liberals' real position is on the subject of a pipeline, because, yes, this motion is about our ability to ever build a pipeline.
Let us break it down. We all agree that Canada has the most resources in the world. We all agree, at least Liberals and Conservatives agree, that the only reason we cannot build pipelines to move those resources to tidewater is federal bureaucracy and federal laws.
One might ask how the Liberals could agree with that proposition. The answer is that they passed Bill C-5, the foundation of which is that we need to go around all the Liberal laws and bureaucracies in order to get things built. The law literally allows the Prime Minister, through the stroke of the pen, to go around all of the environmental and public safety laws and associated bureaucracies, which means that he believes those laws and bureaucracies are neither necessary to protect the environment, nor possible if we want to get anything done.
Therefore, we agree that laws and bureaucracy are the obstacle. Here is where we disagree. The Prime Minister's view is that to solve the problem of Liberal laws and Liberal bureaucracies, we need more Liberal laws and Liberal bureaucracies, which is to say he confuses the problem with the solution. We believe that if there are Liberal laws and bureaucracies roadblocking development, then get rid of those Liberal laws and bureaucracies. Put simply, get out of the way. Let investors pour the hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment into building the projects of the future, projects that will pay tax rather than take government handouts. Get out of the way. Grant fast permits so that our workers, our prodigious welders, pipefitters, industrial carpenters and labourers, can get busy earning six-figure paycheques so they can build our country and make us independent from the Americans. In other words, get out of the way.
I will split my time with the member for Edmonton West.
Liberals would retort that they could still get a pipeline built without removing all of the destructive laws and rules that are in place because their new powers would allow them to go around those laws and rules, but here is the problem: Even if the Prime Minister were to use the powers in Bill C-5 to lay out a path to build a pipe from, say, Hardisty, Alberta, the biggest tank farm in Canada, all the way to the Pacific to either Kitimat or Prince Rupert, no one would build that pipeline today because the government bans the production of the oil going into it and the shipping of the oil coming out of it. It is another illusion. We see what the Prime Minister is setting us up for here. He wants to be able to say, “Geez, we would really love to build a pipeline, but there are no proponents. No one wants to build it. There is just not a market case for it. That's too bad.”
I guess we can just move on to another money-losing corporate welfare project that will make the Prime Minister's friends fabulously wealthy and make other people poor, because no one wants to build a pipeline. I guess pipelines are just out of fashion. Forget that they are being built far and wide outside of Canada, including by Canadian companies. In Canada, they are not being built. Why is that? It turns out that nobody wants to build a pipeline when the government bans companies from producing the oil to put into it and from shipping what comes out of it. They ultimately have to get rid of the production cap that is preventing the oil from going in, and the shipping ban that is preventing the oil from coming out. These are two things that the current government has so far refused to do.
To put this into context, the production cap that the government has imposed, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, will cause over 54,000 job losses and blow a $20-billion hole in Canada's GDP. It will also make it impossible for us to get our oil to any market other than the United States of America, making us ever more dependent on the U.S., which is exactly the opposite of what the Prime Minister promised. Here we have yet another Liberal bait and switch. The Prime Minister who ran on elbows up has been elbows down. Now he prevents us from shipping to overseas markets, making us even more reliant on the Americans. It is no wonder that President Trump said it would be a lot easier for him to deal with the Liberals. He was right. He knows that the Liberals want to continue to hand over our resources to the U.S. at enormous price discounts.
That is why Conservatives propose to get rid of the production cap. We are giving the Liberals an opportunity to vote here and now. If they vote to keep the production cap in place, it will be a signal that all of the flirtations the Prime Minister has done with the possibility of building pipelines were nothing but an illusion, a tragic and extremely costly illusion.
Let us put the illusions behind us and get to the real deal. Here is what it is: We need to pass a Canadian sovereignty act that would get rid of the production cap, repeal the anti-pipeline law Bill C-69, legalize shipping oil off the northwest British Columbia coast and axe the entire carbon tax, the industrial carbon tax, the fuel standard and all of the taxes that make our energy uncompetitive. We need to replace it with a law that would allow us to approve major projects in just six months and axe the capital gains tax for any business owner or person who reinvests their money in Canada. This would be rocket fuel for our economy. That is what we need. This is a plan for stronger take-home pay with a more powerful dollar that would buy food, fuel and homes at a more affordable price for our people.
The goal in all of this is to make our people richer, to give them bigger and bolder opportunities and to make this, once again, a country that is strong and self-reliant, and that stands on its own two feet. This is a patriotic act. We call on the government to adopt it. We will work with anyone from any party to get this done because, as always, we put Canada first.