Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with my colleague and friend from Ottawa Centre.
We experienced this in Quebec: we stripped our land of its natural resources and shipped them to other countries as quickly as we could. Rip it, strip it and send it so others can build bridges and all sorts of things.
We experienced this. At some point, we realized that it was not a brilliant approach and we learned our lesson.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives have not learned from the past or from others. I believe they have not learned because they do not want to. They do not want to know, as we say. They have their blinkers on and they just keep going, without caring about anything and without looking past their noses.
As the Prime Minister said recently, they don't care.
However, the New Democrats care. That is why we have presented this motion today, the motion presented by my colleague, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, whose personal commitment to this issue I really admire.
There are two main problems with the Keystone project. First, it is a mismanagement of our natural resources and our economy and, in a nutshell, it is a mismanagement of our future.
The Prime Minister's government is obsessed with natural resource development, often to the detriment of other sectors of our economy. All it wants to do is export our crude oil.
As the premier of Alberta said, moving crude oil is like destroying a plot of land, selling it and then handing the farm down to the next generation. If we want to properly develop the Alberta oil sands, we have to meet three basic conditions. First, we have to do it in an intelligent way. That means that we have to consider our long-term interests, which, I believe—and this is very important—include protecting our environment and everything that sustains us. The third condition is that we have to think about the future, especially that time when the oil will be gone.
What the government is proposing does not meet any of these three conditions. I would like to quote Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour. At the National Energy Board hearings on the TransCanada Keystone project held in December 2007, he said:
What we fear is that the consequence of this particular action will be to deny Albertans literally thousands of high-paying, long-term jobs in upgraders and refineries....[E]very barrel of bitumen shipped down the Keystone pipeline or other similar proposed pipelines is a barrel of oil no longer available for value-added production and job creation here in Alberta.
However, the government is stubbornly insisting on going forward with this project. With such an approach, it is not surprising that Canada now has a trade deficit even though we had a surplus when the Conservatives took office.
I have other important concerns. In 2010, the oil sands accounted for 7% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. That is expected to rise to 14% by 2020.
Like the Liberal governments before them, the Conservatives—other than one leader who never became Prime Minister—do not take climate change seriously. However, there comes a point where we must do just that.
Since 2006, the government has been promising to regulate emissions from the oil and gas sectors. If I am not mistaken, it is now 2013. Nothing has been done for seven years. Is this because of ill will or incompetence? Seven years seems like a long time to wait to resolve such an important issue. Worse yet, the Conservatives think that others are not aware of what is happening. They are a bit like children who believe that they can behave however they like and still get whatever they want. Unfortunately, that is not how things work.
We know that President Obama has serious doubts. Although he says so in a very diplomatic fashion, the reason for his doubts is quite clear. President Obama said that he would evaluate the project based on whether or not it will significantly contribute to carbon in our atmosphere. He added that there is no doubt that Canada, at the source, could potentially be doing more to mitigate carbon release.
What was our Prime Minister's response? He said that he would not take no for an answer. We have to wonder what he will do. Maybe he will close the embassy in Washington. The Prime Minister does love to close embassies. He is looking to set an all-time record for closing embassies, on top of his records for issuing gag orders and muzzling scientists, to name just two. Maybe he will send a few important ministers to Washington to make a lot of noise, as he likes to do. However, he will do absolutely nothing to address the root cause of the problem, which is his poor environmental management.
We know that colleagues on the other side are very skeptical of root causes. We heard a few months ago that the root cause of terrorism was terrorists. Well, I think that for the Conservative government, the root cause of climate change is probably climate. I think it should take the issue a bit more seriously.
That is all typical of this government's attitude. Make a whole lot of noise, but do not take any meaningful action. That is also typical of the Conservatives' short-sighted approach.
If we want to manage our natural resources properly, we have to think about the environment and climate change; we have to think about the future of Canadians and younger generations. We have to think about what we will do after, what we will do to break our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to focus more on green technologies, and we need to offer high-quality jobs here in Canada, not elsewhere.
I do not think that the members on the other side of the House are paying attention to what I am saying or what my colleagues in the official opposition have to say about this. That is too bad, and it all comes down to their attitude, which is that it does not matter what happens as long as it is not in their lifetime.
Unfortunately, this government's attitude is already having disastrous consequences for this planet. It is people like you and me who are paying the price, in Canada and around the world.
