Blaine Calkins

[Government Appointments, February 2nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, in 1990, a minister had to resign for making a telephone call to a judge.

In 1996, a minister had to resign because he wrote a letter to the Immigration and Refugee Board.

In 2013, a minister resigned for writing a letter to the federal Tax Court.

All of these ministers resigned because of inappropriate contact with judges and tribunals.

Will the Prime Minister be setting the same standard for his government?

[Income Tax Act, February 1st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to quickly ask my hon. colleague this. Most income earners, when they are starting out in their lives, are at their lowest point of income earnings, for example, under $45,000 if they are single, and they might not be able to save money. It does not make financial sense for them to put money into an RRSP as a tax deferral at that particular time.

Therefore, I would like to ask my colleague this. Does the tax-free savings account allow younger people or people starting out in their careers an opportunity to put money into an account where it is tax sheltered until they get into a high-income earning position where contributing to an RRSP makes more sense because they would get a bigger tax break at that tax bracket? I wonder if my hon. colleague could, through his financial experience, enlighten the Liberal Party across the way on how, if we empower people to look after themselves, it means fewer people the government has to look after.

[Points of Order, February 1st, 2016]

Surely I do, Mr. Speaker.

Pursuant to Standing Order 36, I will ask for the unanimous consent of the House to table the following document. This is from the assistant training coordinator for UA Local 527, and it goes on to say:

“We have just been notified by [Prime Minister]'s election team that [Prime Minister] will be at UA Local 527 Tuesday morning (Sept 15/15) for a big announcement regarding Skilled Trades. His team has also asked us for approx. 25 people to participate in performing various skills that we do as pipe trade workers, this will be for the National News”.

Is it possible--

[Labour, January 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, earlier today the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour introduced Bill C-4, an act to take away employees' rights to a secret ballot vote.

During the last Parliament, I introduced Bill C-525, the employees voting rights act, which would give every worker the right to a mandatory secret ballot vote to determine if they wanted to be in a union or not. After a series of secret closed-door meetings with their big union boss friends, today's announcement shows once again that the Liberals are only are in it for their big union boss friends.

Canadians elect their politicians with a secret ballot. Five provinces currently use secret ballots in their labour laws. When unions tried to challenge this in Saskatchewan, Justice Richards said, “The secret ballot, after all, is a hallmark of modern democracy.” He also said, “...a secret ballot regime does no more than ensure that all employees are able to make the choices they see as being best for themselves.”

We are getting a clearer picture of how the Liberals think when it comes to the democratic process and the outcomes of elections. They apparently only support models that ensure they get the outcomes they want.

[Business of Supply, January 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, here we go, fomenting more division across the country with comments and questions like this. It is really unfortunate that my hon. colleague would actually go down this path.

Social licence is simply about putting a political lens on it. That is just politically correct jargon that people are using these days. If he wants to use the words “social licence”, he can go ahead and use the words “social licence”. I am going to stick to science and the technology that the National Energy Board and other engineers and technologists actually have to make sure that pipelines are built. I am an environmentalist, too. I love the environment. I love fishing, I love hunting. I am a farm boy from Lacombe, Alberta. I do not want a dirty environment any more than anyone else does, but I understand the value of the energy sector and building a pipeline from Alberta to the east coast of Canada, the west coast of Canada, or to the Gulf of Mexico. It is good for Alberta, which is good for Canada.

If the hon. member ever wants to doubt me, he can simply go back and look at the various financial documents that have been tabled in budgets in the House for years and years, and he will see who are the net contributors to and net recipients from the civil program called equalization. I am a proud Albertan and happy to be a net contributor, to the point of $4,000 per capita by the average Albertan over the last 10 years. Per year, Albertans pay more into the confederation than we receive back in benefits in Alberta.

Not only that, but people enjoyed the best quality of life in Alberta because of the energy sector. We had a government, even though it was Conservative, that spent more on things like health care, education, and roads per capita than any other government before. I will not apologize for the fact that Canada is blessed with abundant natural resources. Some of them are non-renewable. Let us use them. It improves the quality of our lives.

[Business of Supply, January 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, let me catch the hon. member up. I have had the privilege and pleasure of not only working in the oil and gas sector, but I have also had the privilege and honour of getting an education, three of them, as a matter of fact. The biggest education I have ever had is becoming a member of Parliament, talking to common sense folk who vote Conservative in Alberta.

He wants to go back and take a look at studies that have been done. I just referred to one by a professor from Toronto, who appeared before the natural resources committee. All the information I presented here is in the paper coming right out of the committee report. The study was done in 2014, in the spring. He is free to go to the committee for information and read it for his own edification. He might even become so enlightened that he will jump ship and come over here with the common sense people in the House.

[Business of Supply, January 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be on my feet again. It seems to be happening quite a lot as a representative from Alberta to have to protect the interests of the people of my province from the transgressions of the current Liberal government. I am happy to split my time with the hon. member for Durham, giving me about 10 minutes on this.

I am not going to take the normal tack that has been taken by some of my colleagues here today. I was a member of the natural resources committee for a number of years in the last Parliament. I am very proud to talk about these issues as they pertain to my province.

One of the most interesting witnesses we ever had in front of the natural resources committee was a professor. His name was Pierre Desrochers, University of Toronto. He came with quite an unorthodox deck that he gave to us at that meeting. He gave a very historical, appreciated, and informative recap of the value that fossil fuels have played in the earth's development.

Just imagine going back a couple hundred years, what life must have been like. We do not talk about these things here, but the average lifespan for somebody in the 1800s was about 30 years of age. The average man was about 5.5 feet tall, about 145 pounds. They often died from things like disease or working so hard, subsistence living.

There was no quality of life, other than just basically working from sun up to sun down to provide for the necessities of life. We did not have advanced scholars; we did not have advanced medical facilities; we did not have teachers or doctors; we did not have any of these kinds of professions, because we were basically just eking out a living.

What did that do to our environment? The Liberals are opposed to these pipelines because they are claiming that this is bad for the environment. What was it like for the environment when people were living a subsistence living? People would basically try to grow food or earn a living off every square inch of the earth's surface that they could. That meant all sorts of marginal land, along the edges of cliffs, lakeshores, and oceans. It would all be used to try to grow food.

Forests would be cut down. Vast tracts of forest were cut down to burn wood for fuel, for cooking, or heating, or whatever else was necessary at that time.

He gave us some maps. If we go back and take a look at what these things looked like, there was less forest in 1920 in the United States than there is today. Actually because of the advancement of fossil fuels and the use of fossil fuels for things like transportation and heating, we live a much cleaner, much healthier, much more environmentally sustainable life than we could have ever imagined. We now live well into our 80s. Our size, our nourishment, the amount of technology from fossil fuels, has grown, including the fuel that goes into the input of agriculture. This is not just the input of driving the tractor, but the actual inputs like the creation of fertilizer that we can apply to our crops to grow far more food than we ever had.

That is not the biggest thing. The biggest thing is the advancement in transportation, Mr. Desrochers said. People used to only be able to eat food that could be grown within their local communities. While that sounds like a romantic idea, and there are lots of people pushing that agenda from all corners of this House at certain times, the reality is that if there was a bad crop or a bad year on the farm when people were living a subsistence living, they were in danger of dying.

This was not all that long ago. Imagine what it was like 200 years ago to move a ton of grain 50 kilometres when all they had was a couple of horses. Imagine how much grain would be needed to feed that horse just to move that grain.

In the late 1800s, I believe it was 1898, in New York City, regional municipal planners got together for their first-ever meeting. The issue of the day was not about where they would build sewer lines or pipelines or water lines or anything like that, it was what they were going to do with horse manure. That was their transportation mode.

Enter fossil fuels. We have coal now that we can burn in ships. We are not relying on the trade winds or sailing ships to trade. We can move food anywhere we want in the world, anytime we want. When one region of the world has a drought, another region of the world has tremendous crop successes. We see this now. We take it for granted. We have forgotten how this actually happens. Now we can transfer food from Australia to Southeast Asia. We can transfer food from North America to China. We can transfer food from Africa to Europe, or from Europe to Africa for that matter, in the form of aid.

Where would the planet be right now if we could not actually airlift or move food quickly, by ship or cargo planes or whatever the case might be, with the technological advances of the petrochemical industry?

I do not know if anybody has been in a cockpit of an airplane lately, but it is not made out of wood. Where would we be without the advancements in fossil fuels?

These are the things that we have so much taken for granted and forgotten, as we have these debates about what is a social licence. I know where I can apply for my driver's licence. I know where I can apply for my fishing licence. If I am lucky, I might even be able to get a marriage licence. However, I do not know anywhere we can apply for a social licence. This is just a manufactured term, trying to create an agenda on one side of the issue to stop something that makes complete sense; to stop the industry and to stop things that improve our quality of life.

God forbid that we did not have fossil fuels in our lives. Where would we be? What would we be able to do? Nothing. There would not be politicians in this room debating it, because we would be out scratching a living off rocks.

I do not know of any other fuel or any other technology right now that allows us to do long-range transportation. Is there anything else that we could put in an airplane to make it fly? Are they going to put a battery-operated commercial airline in the air and get on it and go over the Pacific? I am not doing that. I am pretty happy with that airplane burning carbon fuels to get me across the ocean. That is absolutely fantastic. That is a modern advancement.

Did members know that the air quality in Toronto 100 years ago was worse than the air quality in Beijing today? Most Canadians do not know that. It is true. What were they burning 100 years ago to heat their homes in Toronto? It was some of the dirtier carbon of the day. They were burning wood and coal.

These are the things, as we have advanced through our society, burning garbage or whatever waste they could, that we have advanced from over time. Right now China is going through the same thing. This is just industrial revolution all over again. It is just happening at different times in different countries around the world. China will advance. Certain countries are so advanced over Canada. Here we are in Canada, one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and other countries that are still in or just coming out of third world status have better communications systems than we do. They got to skip the whole part where we dug our lines and buried them in the ground. They went right to radio telecommunications and satellite communications in their country, on cellphones not made out of wood.

I have nothing against wood. I have nothing against our other natural resources. I even prefer wooden hockey sticks, but that is a different issue altogether.

My point is that fossil fuels have done more to make us wealthier and healthier. The wealthier we are, the healthier we are. In a country where people are living under the poverty line, where the per capita GDP is less than $5,000 per year, are those people living as long as we are? Are they as healthy as we are? Can they afford the same quality of food as we can afford? Absolutely not.

The fossil fuel sector creates wealth. Wealth creates health. Not only do we live longer because we can have better food and all the other things that go along with that, but we have freed up a massive amount of our population to move to our urban areas to pursue education, to study, and to create a powerful centre of innovation and technology so we can have advancements. We can solve our problems with technological improvements.

We do not need to politicize something that is so uncontroversial. Saying they want to go through their day without fossil fuels is like saying they can get by without eating bread. It does not make any sense. They would never say that. Why would they say they could get through their day without using a bit of carbon or using some fossil fuels from time to time?

Those happiest about the advancement of fossil fuels were the whales. Let me explain. Prior to the invention or refinement of kerosene, the major source of oil in the world was whale oil. I am listening to the Liberal Party blubber on and on about these environmental issues when the advancement of the fossil fuel industry actually probably saved the whales on the planet. I thank Shell. I thank Nexon. I thank all those companies for the great environmental work that they do.

[The Economy, January 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, unemployment is skyrocketing in Alberta. In the riding of Red Deer—Lacombe, people are faced with the prospect of losing their homes and their life savings. Some of my constituents are desperate to put food on their table and to pay their mortgage. They do not want to be left out in the cold.

However, the Minister of Veterans Affairs yesterday callously referred to these as refreshing times. Does he think it is refreshing to lose one's home in Alberta in January?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, January 26th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome back my colleague from Edmonton—Strathcona. It is always great to see her in the House.

My colleague brought up the issue of rail. The Conservative government had the rail review process and legislated action to ensure that the grains and oilseeds got to the port of Vancouver or any other port in time to make sure that the waiting ships were not charging demurrage to farmers. The previous government put that through and worked with the rail companies on that. The reality is that if the NDP and all of its supporters were not so happy to be blocking pipelines, we could free up a lot more rail service to get agriculture products to ports.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, January 26th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, let me use this opportunity to edify my clearly unedified colleague across the way.

Before I do, I would like to welcome a fellow Albertan to the House. He is going to have a lot of things to explain to the 4.5 million Albertans by the end of his tenure here, because I do not think it is going to go well for him.

I will remind him that before the last Conservative government, there were only five countries Canada had trade agreements with. As it stands right now, the member and his new government have inherited over 40-some countries that either are trading partners with Canada or are pending trading partners with Canada. All the government has to do is sign the ratification of the Canada-Europe trade agreement and the trans-Pacific partnership to make those things a reality.

We have not had a very clear signal about what the Liberals are going to do on that front, but if he is going to talk about things like pipelines, one thing they should not do is send a signal to the market that they are going to ban tanker traffic off the west coast to appease a special interest group, which will shut down the northern gateway pipeline that would put billions of dollars of Alberta crude into the marketplace, eliminating the price differential that Alberta's captive market currently is in the North American marketplace.

If you will indulge me, Mr. Speaker, in the last 10 years, the northern Alberta Clipper pipeline, applied for on May 30, 2007, fully in service in April 2010, produced 450,000 barrels of oil a day; TransCanada Keystone, not Keystone XL, applied for on December 12, 2006, fully implemented in June 2010, produced 435,000 barrels per day; the Kinder Morgan anchor loop project increased capacity by 40,000 barrels per day, and it was done in October 2006; the Enbridge line 9 reversal, applied for in 2014, has reversed and produced 300,000 barrels of oil per day. That is over 1.2 billion barrels of oil flowing in projects that were started and implemented in the last 10 years. That does not even include the projects that were applied for and approved and that are pending construction, waiting for a market signal from the current government.