Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to rise today on behalf of the good people of Peace River—Westlock to discuss Bill C-39. This bill comes on the heels of Bill C-5, which was passed over a year ago and, in my opinion, proposed to do something very similar. I do question why we are here to do this if Bill C-5 was the solution to all of these problems. Why are we back again, passing another piece of legislation around this?
I want to go back a little, back to about 2005, 2006, 2007, when a gentleman named Stephen Harper featured large in Canadian politics. He was making the case back then that we sold 90% of our product to the United States. While this relationship was a good one, it was a major risk to Canada in the event that, should something happen to that relationship, we would be then held ransom, essentially, by the Americans.
He also pointed out that we often sold our energy products at a dramatic discount to the United States because they were our only customer. We were basically a captive market, so we were stuck selling those products to them for whatever we could get, which was often at a $10 to $18 discount per barrel. Stephen Harper pursued an ambitious agenda, which seems to now have been adopted by the Liberals, to turn Canada into an energy superpower. He tried to streamline the approvals of major projects in general across the country. He worked hard to build free trade agreements around the world.
We will often hear the Liberals tell us about the agreements the Prime Minister has now signed with other countries for X, Y or Z products. However, those are essentially just really nice photo ops, because we already have free trade agreements with 60% of the world's GDP because of the work of Stephen Harper, which he started way back in the mid-2000s. He signed 43 free trade agreements, and did that because he said we needed to diversify our markets from only selling to the United States to selling to others around the world. The two notable ones he never got across the finish line were CETA and the TPP, but shortly after Justin Trudeau took power, those two were signed.
Those were not the only things he did. Stephen Harper also worked to solidify our money, to make sure our money was worth something. I remember particularly the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, when our dollar was actually worth more than the American dollar, because Stephen Harper had worked hard to ensure we worked towards a balanced budget. He was making sure our fiscal house was in order and that we were not robbing our old people and the labourers in this country by making their money worth less and less each year, unlike the current government.
The other thing he did was flatten the taxes. He worked hard to make sure that the harder we worked, the more of our money we got to take home, not the other way around. He worked on the tax rate. The tax rate is fundamental to getting things built in this country. The other thing about our money and making the money worth something was that the interest rate went down. When the interest rate went down, that spurred economic activity.
I have a story about a cousin of mine. He builds houses in Edmonton, and he was telling me about how, during COVID, when the interest rates hit about zero, they built 400 units in Edmonton that year. He said that was entirely a function of the interest rate. He said that this year, they built 75 houses, and that is only because they could not carry any more houses than that because of the interest rate. He said he discovered what his company is capable of building at zero interest rate.
We have the capacity in terms of manpower, skills and logistics to build 400 houses a year, but because of the higher interest rate, we are only capable of building 75 houses since we cannot carry that amount of debt over the year. An interesting thing to think about is how interest rates affect building things in this country. When builders are building things, they are often paying interest on the materials they put into a product they are building for the period of time between when they build the product, invoice it and get paid for the thing they built. That is an interesting thing.
As to the tax rate, we have been talking about building and Canada becoming an energy superpower. The Liberals have adopted Conservative language on this. They are sounding like the Conservatives, but they are not doing the things it takes to make sure things happen.
One thing that affects the tax rate is around what we have talked a lot about today: the price of diesel fuel. We talked about how we need to make sure we get our products to market, but also about how we need to be able to refine our own product here in Canada. The reality is that no company is going to come to Canada to refine because of the industrial carbon tax.
Fertilizer companies have already complained to me bitterly about the fact that they are paying a tax that no other jurisdiction in the world has to pay. They have to compete with fertilizer coming in from out of the country that does not have these taxes. They said they are under water every month because of the industrial carbon tax. If that is what our fertilizer producers are saying, no companies are going to come to Canada to build refineries, only to lose money. That is why the government needs to incentivize companies to come here by removing the industrial carbon tax.
The Liberals sound like us. We battled against the carbon tax for 10 years, and the Liberals finally came to their senses after the Canadian population was about to punish them severely over the carbon tax. They removed the consumer carbon tax, but we are not going to be an energy superpower, with all the great projects the Liberals keep talking about and insinuating will happen in Canada, without addressing that.
The other thing I want to talk about is Bill C-69 and the approvals process. With Bill C-5 and now this bill, the Liberals are trying to build a workaround to Bill C-69. We have been saying for years that they are not going to get pipeline projects, major energy infrastructure and railways, all of those kinds of things, built. The big projects that everybody thinks they are going to build are not going to get built while Bill C-69 is in place. I have not heard one member of the Liberal Party mention Bill C-69 tonight. They have not said anything about the barriers that have been put in place by the Liberal government. It is super frustrating for me to see the Liberals stand here as if they are the heroes of their own story, as if they are solving the problems of Canada, while they are the ones who created those problems.
Bill C-48 killed the northern gateway pipeline. I remember driving across northern British Columbia and seeing excavators on the ground. The pipe was laying in a field ready to be put in for the northern gateway pipeline. Then the Liberals dropped Bill C-48, saying people could not take petroleum product off the shore of B.C. and put it on a boat. People could build the pipeline, the Liberals said. People were welcome to build the pipeline, but they were not to take the product that was in that pipeline and put it on a boat. That was what Bill C-48 did, and when the Liberals did that, it ended the pipeline.
Those two bills, Bill C-48 and Bill C-69, have to be repealed. We have to do that to match the rhetoric that we are hearing from the Liberal side. The Liberals need to work on that.
Under Stephen Harper, we built six major pipelines across this country. In 2014, we had 14 LNG projects proposed. I want to remind Canadians that these projects were entirely proposed by private industry. They were going to be tax-generating projects. Canadian public coffers were going to be filled with the revenues generated by these projects. The Canadian taxpayer would not have had to pay for them. The Trans Mountain pipeline was going to be a $6-billion project. By the time the government was done building it, it was a $36-billion project.
This bill is, I am afraid, another smoke and mirrors thing. I am looking forward to hearing what the Liberals have to say about it.
