Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise at this later hour, having had some hours pass since the Minister of Finance tabled the spring economic update.
It is always an honour to rise in the House as leader of the Green Party of Canada. It is a great honour for me.
I did not have high expectations or much hope for the 2026 spring economic update—it is not a budget—but still, I am disappointed. No explanation was provided concerning the measures we were expecting. The government promised to provide details on measures it had already announced. They are not in this update.
I want to explain the things that are most important to the Green Party, including the challenges facing Canada right now. It is clear that the Prime Minister and the Liberal majority government are facing major challenges related to global events beyond their control.
It is very clear, and I do not want to suggest that the situation would be easy if I were in the Prime Minister's chair. It would not be easy for any government to deal with the fact that our greatest ally and trading partner, our neighbour to the south, is no longer a reliable ally, which is a gross understatement.
We are not just dealing with our regional relationships, as neighbours here on Turtle Island, between the United States and Canada. We are dealing with much more than that. What Donald Trump represents to the world is the source of geopolitical instability.
The United States and Israel together launched a war on Iran. I agree with my colleague from the New Democrat Party, and it needs to be acknowledged every time we talk about the impacts of the war in Iran, that it is an illegal war. It did not have even the minimal justifications under international law of necessity for a war. It is a war of choice. It was reckless.
Much of the spring economic statement talks about the economic uncertainty created by what is now happening, the disruption of the war against Iran and how it spread with Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Iran's retaliation against numerous gulf states. There is no question that there are challenges for any finance department or any central bank anywhere in the world in trying to project and predict what the world holds, what the economy is going to be like even six months from now, much less on a usual budgetary horizon of budgeting out and forecasting four years' worth of spending.
Still, despite those challenges, I am surprised at this spring economic statement's overall tone. It is remarkably sanguine, as if we do know what is ahead and can confidently predict that the government has done a great job already.
For instance, there are numerous graphs and charts throughout this spring economic statement that present a picture that is not real. Even in examining the pictures that are in the budget and looking at the graphs, there are claims that we have done a great job of expanding markets outside of the United States for our fossil fuel exports. It is suggested in graphs and bar charts. To the casual observer, it might seem that we had made a major difference in how much of our fossil fuel exports do not go to the United States anymore. Those bar charts are misleading. They say there has been a big increase in non-U.S. exports. Yeah, from 3% to 10%, and when we present percentages in bar charts, we can make that look like a lot, but the reality is still the same. About 90% of our fossil fuel exports go to the United States.
It is the same thing for exports of our other products. Our economies are still very interlocked. We are mutually dependent on each other's exports and imports. We do want trade diversification; Greens do as well. Again, the tone of the spring economic update is remarkably sanguine.
There is a comment on page 27 that suggests that longer-term oil price expectations are now more firmly anchored. I am baffled by that. Certainly, global energy economists do not share that sense of assurance that we now have more firmly anchored oil price expectations. On the contrary, around the world, energy economists are saying that it is extremely volatile, that it does not seem to be settling down and that there is no way we would possibly know that. Given that, the appropriate things to do are not necessarily where the government is heading.
There is much discussion in the spring economic update of how the Middle East uncertainty, the illegal war against Iran launched by the United States and Israel, is going to affect Canada's future. In reading the spring economic update, it is as though the most we can say about it is that it has been some kind of blip and that we can almost say we are going to be past it soon. That is completely contradicted by the opinion of experts.
I am saddened by the fact that there is no mention in the spring economic update of the conclusion of one of the world's leading energy economists and experts, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. He has said very clearly that the oil crisis triggered by the Iran war has changed the fossil fuel industry for ever.
What the International Energy Agency is saying is that the days of fossil fuels are now very limited and it is not just by the climate crisis. We should have said the days of fossil fuels are limited some time ago, the days are drawing to a close. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did say that at one point, that we know that we are moving away from fossil fuels.
However, this is interesting. We are at a tipping point in terms of climate science and we are at risk. Global scientists are saying we are at a significant risk of hitting a tipping point. There is a whole system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC. The Gulf Stream is part of it. It is basically a vast conveyor belt of ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean. We are at the point where global scientists are saying we are perilously close to where it becomes inevitable that the AMOC is going to stall or collapse. This is not just startling or alarming, it is terrifying.
The scientists who have done this work say they now see that the chances are not less than 5% as previously thought, but are approaching fifty-fifty. That is a global tipping point in climate science, which should be moving us off fossil fuels quite rapidly and toward tree planting and anything we can do to avoid, as the lead scientist on this report said, the collapse of the AMOC. We must avoid its collapse “at all costs” because the impact of this would be a rapid climatic shift that is planetary and would soon become inevitable and unstoppable.
That is a tipping point in global climate science, but here, we have the head of the International Energy Agency saying we have basically hit a tipping point due to geopolitical instability, and that economies around the world are not going to want fossil fuels because of the instability and because they are inevitably and inextricably tied to wars and instability.
This spring economic update is tone-deaf to even the possibility that Canada's future economic stability is not tied to boosting fossil fuels. We have new subsidies for LNG and new announcements for pipelines, and there is practically a hallelujah chorus for this, but not from the Green Party.
We are looking at what it means for Canada's economy, not just our survival, as if our survival as a human civilization is a small thing, to hard-wire itself to fossil fuels when we know what we know about the transition that is happening globally based on price alone. Price point alone is moving investment dollars away from fossil fuels and rapidly to renewable energy, to solar, wind and geothermal, but particularly solar because solar electricity is now cheaper than coal.
It is astonishing that in the spring economic statement, renewable energy is not mentioned or increased. There is no commitment to expand it. We do have a commitment here that we have been waiting for, for some time. The November 4, 2025, budget, said, at page 19, that one of the great building Canada strong kinds of projects would be “building clean power grids for a sustainable future”. We have been waiting for announcements for a green electricity grid for some time. The Prime Minister has hinted at it at various points at press conferences. He said we would see this commitment to a green electricity grid strategy very soon.
In this spring economic statement, it is mentioned, all right, that something we are looking at is building “a stronger grid” for Canada, but what we get is not a commitment to fund it, build it or put it on the major projects list. What we get is that very soon we will see a discussion paper. That is not just underwhelming; it is appallingly negligent. We need to do more than have a discussion paper about a key piece of infrastructure that has been promised over and over again without details, and now, after all of that, what we get in today's spring economic update is the promise of a discussion paper to be released soon. The ways in which this disappoints are quite numerous, and I know I have enough speaking time to get to some of them, but not all of them.
Let us look again at what was one of the big-ticket items announced yesterday. Before we got the spring economic statement, we were told that Canada is unveiling a new Canadian sovereign wealth fund. It sounds wonderful. It sounds very patriotic. It sounds like a new idea. Of course, it immediately brought to light and raised comparisons with Norway's sovereign wealth fund. We were told that there would be details in the spring economic statement of how this was going to work. The Prime Minister said yesterday that the sovereign wealth fund was also going to give individual Canadians a chance to invest, and that was going to be part of this. The sovereign wealth fund would allow individual Canadians to be part of putting together the investment dollars that we need for a sovereign wealth fund.
First of all, let us compare it to Norway. Norway's sovereign wealth fund was built on taxation of oil revenues. Ironically, it was the Norwegian experts who came to Alberta who understood the rules of Peter Lougheed, who was a visionary, for developing the oil sands: “act like an owner” and “don't live on oil rents but set them to the side”. The sovereign wealth fund has allowed individual Norwegians to have millions of dollars of assets in a sovereign wealth fund built on North Sea oil. Ironically, that Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was developed based on what Peter Lougheed was doing in Alberta, which was then cancelled by Ralph Klein. It is interesting how leaders of the same party can follow such radically different approaches. In any case, Norway's sovereign wealth fund was built on oil taxation with revenues for the benefit of all.
What is the Canada Strong fund going to be? We do not know yet. We do know that it is not based on revenues from taxation of oil wealth. It is, rather, the opposite. It is based on borrowing $25 billion, again public borrowing and debt, to call it a sovereign wealth fund. We do not have any details in today's document. The spring economic statement has no details on how this is going to work.
We do know that we have created a new entity once again. It is very common in the current government for all kinds of new offices to open, and the Canada Strong fund now would have a Canada Strong fund transition office. The Canada Strong fund transition office, once established, and of course it does not exist now, would consult widely and then tell us how the Canada Strong fund would work.
If it is not ready to be announced, the Liberals could wait until they had answers before announcing things, but that is just me. I would like to know the details about something that is basically the top-line headline for the spring economic update: that we have a new, first time ever, Canadian sovereign wealth fund.
Just as advice to the government, I will say that it might be useful to figure out how to do this, because the Green Party already did the research. We asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to figure out how we could have funding for Canadians and for our own resources, and create it based on the concept of Canada savings bonds. We called them “saving Canada bonds”, and we had the Parliamentary Budget Office cost this out for us.
If we have strategic reserves of our resources, to avoid having them shipped to the U.S. and tariffed or whatever, we could, for instance, buy up all of Canada's potash at the price that potash producers want to receive, at market prices, and we could store it. We actually had the Parliamentary Budget Office include reasonable estimates for what it would cost to store the potash until we wanted to sell it to someone. There would be a guaranteed return on investment to individual Canadians of 5%.
Therefore, I recommend to the Minister of Finance that he have a look. I have already mentioned this to the Prime Minister. On the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's website is the research that was done, because once the PBO does research for a political party, it does not belong just to the political party for which it did the research. It is publicly available information. The government could find out how to generate $50 billion in revenue from wealth taxes or how to use financial transaction taxes at basically 20¢ for every $100 in stock market transactions, and how that would create new sources of government revenue to afford the things we need.
We need to address rapidly what is happening with youth unemployment. We need to address what is happening in the affordability crisis. Yes, we should have excess profit taxes on the grocery chains and, yes, excess profit taxes on oil and gas companies and wealth taxes on the very wealthiest people, not affecting most Canadians. These are things we could do. By asking the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer to cost them out, we have proven they can be done.
Actually, it is striking to me that the Green Party, with our rather abysmal lack of resources compared to the Government of Canada's resources, did a better job pointing out how we could protect our economy, protect our natural resources, avoid Trump's tariffs and have better economic sovereignty than the Government of Canada has done to date. Members can please check if they do not believe me. We actually brought the deficit down more as a party than did any other party, not by cutting, but by generating new revenue for the Government of Canada.
The government claims that there is revenue. It is a shocking claim in the spring economic update that there is more revenue by expanding a subsidy. This goes back to one of the main reasons that the former minister of the environment resigned over last year's budget. At page 348 of the November 2025 budget there was a commitment that investment tax credits would apply for carbon capture, utilization and storage “but not [for] enhanced oil recovery”.
In this spring economic update, we finally find out, because it was very clear that the commitment made to Danielle Smith in the November 27 MOU with Alberta very specifically said that there would be investment tax credits available for enhanced oil recovery. This is a little tricky, and I will try to get through it quickly. We had to ask a lot of questions in our off-the-record lock-up with the Department of Finance Canada officials, because I just found it too perplexing for words to hear that now the Liberals were going to admit that, as of today, there will be investment tax credits available for enhanced oil recovery.
Astonishingly, at page 64, it says that this will, “increase federal revenues by $395 million over four years”. I had to press. I asked how increasing a subsidy to the oil and gas industry would increase federal revenue. The government had to admit that It might be considered misleading because it does not actually increase government revenue. What it does is decrease some government spending as against the system of November 2025, the carbon capture, utilization and storage piece. The Government of Canada was supporting keeping carbon in the ground, which meant it was paying to help the oil and gas industry store carbon. When it does not store as much, because with enhanced oil recovery it takes it out of the ground, it increases the profits of the oil industry by allowing that oil to come out of the ground and be sold and burned. I kept pressing on how that would increase federal revenues, as the spring economic update claims at page 64. Finally, it was admitted that it was not exactly that it increases the revenue, but decreases the spending, as the federal government no longer has to provide as much money to the oil industry for the purpose of keeping carbon in the ground. It just creates more profits for the oil industry and somewhat reduces the spending of the federal government. It is not new revenue.
There is so much here that I found difficult to absorb and hard to accept, particularly the government's vision on artificial intelligence. I have to say, from yesterday's protests of young people on the lawns of Parliament, that they are concerned about the impacts of artificial intelligence and screen time on their mental health and well-being. Here we have the government's vision, “Artificial Intelligence for All”. That is just plain tone-deaf. We need legislation that regulates online harms from this development. We are not going to be able to stop AI, but the idea that we are going to have a homegrown AI industry that creates lots of jobs for Canadians is hooey. However, it is a big part, apparently, of the vision of the government for the future of Canada's economy.
I will close by saying this. There are opportunities for Canada, even in this world of geopolitical instability. There are opportunities for us to stand up for human rights, to stand up for other democracies, to only trade with other democracies that respect human rights and to be a beacon of hope and sanity in this world. However, to decide, as though we are still living in the 1950s, that our future lies in fossil fuels, and that economic growth and growing the GDP is enough to make Canada a more prosperous country with greater societal well-being, is simply wrong. It does not lead us there. History has taught us that. What makes Canada's economy strong is economic sovereignty. What gives us resilience is to not be dependent on the United States to the degree we are, but to broaden our links and link arms with democracies that respect human rights and climate action. That is not too late to achieve.