Mr. Speaker, I would like to clarify, so the people back home know I am very respectful of the rules. There is a difference between saying whether someone is here and whether someone is actually willing to participate in a debate. It is the lack of willingness of the Liberal leader to participate in key debates that is an issue that needs to be discussed, because this is about policy, about vision and where we are going.
For example, two weeks ago at the height of the scandal in the Senate, the Liberal leader was in Washington promoting the Keystone XL.
Last week, during one of the largest weeks in memory in terms of scandal, the Liberal leader asked a mere three questions on the scandal but was meeting with Calgary oil executives. It is about priorities. Is that not the slogan of the Liberals? It is about the priorities that matter.
The priority that matters within this House is debating; that is, the fact that the Liberal leader may or may not participate in this debate. The fact is that these are issues that need to be brought to the Canadian people. We are not shy at all, as New Democrats, to talk about our economic vision for the country, because we believe it is the right vision for the country.
Our colleagues on the Conservative side are not afraid to stand up on their vision, and we know their vision is the wrong one, but within the democratic tradition, at least we will debate each other and Canadians will not be fooled. There are no games here. They will not use slick slogans. It is about debate. This is where we are today.
I come from Coleman township, which was in its time the richest township in Canada. Most people do not know that. It is a fact. Coleman township, in the rich silver boom in the early years of the 20th century, was considered the richest township in Canada and we never had a paved road in Coleman township in all those years. A lot of cyanide has been dumped in the lakes. We have arsenic beaches. We call them the green beaches of Cobalt. At that time, the idea of a boom was that people got what they could get and they got out.
All across northern Canada there is a history of boom and bust. I come from the boom-bust economy of gold mining. My grandfather Charlie Angus died on the shop floor of the Hollinger Mine. My grandfather MacNeil broke his back underground. My uncles worked in the mines. We understand what the mining economy is about.
We have been extremely blessed in Canada with enormous resources. Even though I do not think we have handled our resources with the grace and sustainable vision that we should, we continue to find more resources. We are the envy of the world in that.
However, when I compare the mining industry with what is happening now with the plan for the Keystone XL, I see how the government allowed Inco and Falconbridge, two of the greatest world-class mining companies in the world, to be bought out by corporate raiders, and within a year we lost all the copper refining capacity in Ontario.
The member for Parry Sound—Muskoka shrugged, as though that was no big deal. At the time we were told there would never be another copper refinery built in Ontario if we let this one go down.
It was about the exporting out of Ontario of raw resources. This is the issue. It is the same when we talk to people about the Ring of Fire. I have yet to meet a miner or a miner's family anywhere in northern Ontario who says their idea of mining is to get it fast, get it out of the ground, dump what we want behind and ship it out without refining it. I have never heard a miner say that. In fact miners say that if the Ring of Fire is not to be done properly, we should leave it in the ground because it is the capital for the next generation. That is what I hear about sustainability.
I hear a lot of talk from the Conservatives about how Keystone and the oil sands are not subsidized in any way, but of course that is false, because the fundamental subsidy of the rip and ship philosophy is stripping the environmental protections, so it is shifting the cost of these operations and making them seem cheaper than they are, but that is because they are allowed to get away with the stripping of basic environmental standards across this country.
I refer to a November 5 Reuters article, which goes out internationally, on Canada's poor environment record, which could hit our energy exports. That is what Reuters is saying, based on the report of the interim commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, which said that the Conservative government's record on the environment is so bad that it is being noticed internationally and will affect the government's ability to negotiate projects like Keystone. The report says, “...the wide and persistent gap between what the government commits to do and what it is achieving” has missed the mark on “key deadlines to protect migratory birds, failed to protect wildlife habitat” and does “nowhere near enough to protect species at risk”.
We saw that in the interest of helping their friends get the oil pipelines through as quickly as possible, the Conservatives stripped the Navigable Waters Protection Act of this country so that they could push pipelines through without proper review.
This is not, as the Conservatives hysterically say, about stopping development. Development has to be based on sustainable resources with a sustainable plan. If one is going to ship bitumen, one has to know that it can be done safely. That is why we have had environmental standards over the years, and that is why the Conservative government is stripping them across this country. It is to get it out as fast as possible.
On the Keystone issue, the Conservatives are talking about shipping raw bitumen to Texas and shipping 40,000 jobs to Texas.
The new word my colleagues in the Liberal Party have discovered is “middle class”. The Liberal leader is saying that he is going to create middle-class jobs in the resource sector. Certainly they are in the resource sector, but if we are going to export 40,000 of them, it is not really that much of a plan.
There he was, down in Washington, calling out the people who have been raising legitimate questions about greenhouse gases rising out of the oil sands. He was saying that they were just “sound-bites”. Well, President Obama does not think they are sound bites.
The question Canada is facing is the fundamental question of a lack of credibility. The Conservatives would rather try to ship bitumen to the United States, where even the Americans are saying that Canada's record on the environment is atrocious and that unless Canada can show that it can develop these resources in a sustainable manner, America is going to look elsewhere.
We have an enormous ability to transition this economy by putting the investments in the right way. Simply shipping raw resources out of the country as fast as possible is not a vision for the long term.
As I said, the New Democrats are not afraid to talk about this. We represent the resource regions of northern Canada. We understand the need to reflect, in the 21st century, as we pass yet another dismal target in terms of increasing greenhouse gas emissions around the world, on the fact that we are entering a period when the abuse of the earth is no longer something we can just take for granted.
It was the Conservatives and the Liberals who stood up in this House and voted against the motion brought forward in this House heeding the climate scientists' warning that if we pass that two degree centigrade mark in the increase in global temperature, we will be in an unstable climate. Both the Conservatives and Liberals stood together, because they will not deal with this issue of climate change. It has to be dealt with. It is going to be the fundamental cost of doing business in the 21st century.
My colleagues on the other side, who believe in the free market, as they call it, need to factor that in, which is what our leader has said. Whenever we factor in the development of resources, we cannot do it on the backs of the next generation. We cannot do it by simply assuming that greenhouse gas emissions have no impact. They are having a significant impact.
Until the government comes forward with a credible environmental plan, it will continue to be seen as an outlier around the world, regardless of whether its friends in the Liberal Party are out there trying to shill for them.
