Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member of Parliament for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.
I graduated from Trent University in 1989, where I studied the Mackenzie Valley pipeline inquiry as well as renewable energy. For years I studied pipeline politics in environmental and resource studies. I really believed we were in a new time of understanding, that we understood that forcing projects on communities that did not want them and not recognizing indigenous rights and title was not good. I believed that time was behind us.
The year 1989 was also a politically powerful year. The Berlin Wall fell. It was the year of the velvet revolution and Tiananmen Square, a democracy uprising with a brutal police response. It was also the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, which hit the headlines in a phenomenal way. It was a time of great political imperative for change and activism, and a time of real hope.
However, I have spent my entire professional life since then fighting bad energy megaprojects: nuclear plants in Ontario, the GSX pipeline through the southern Salish Sea, and the Duke Point power plant off Mudge Island. It took our community four and a half years to fight off that pipeline and power plant.
I hear again and again from my home island of Gabriola, and also from constituents whom I am proud to represent in my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith, that people are hungry to implement a sustainable, renewable, locally based, worker-focused economy. They want to stop fighting off projects they do not want.
I honestly thought that getting elected to this Parliament and beating Stephen Harper and the Conservatives was what we needed to do to stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline. I am frankly astonished that we are still here two and a half years later, still debating last century's energy project that was approved for all of the wrong reasons.
It is deeply disappointing to people on B.C.'s coast to have the Liberal government, with all its goodwill, its sunny ways, and its innovation promises, invest $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money into an obsolete, 60-plus-year-old, leaky pipeline, let alone committing taxpayers and perhaps even Canada pension plan money to the expansion of the pipeline. It will increase sevenfold the number of bitumen-carrying oil tankers going through the ridings we represent.
I am astonished that we are here still discussing that, but I am delighted that our leader Jagmeet Singh and our party have brought this motion forward and taken over today's agenda to talk about our hope for a renewable and sustainable, worker-focused economy, and all the benefits that can come from that.
We have examples in my riding of great success stories, despite all the impediments that have been put up by the B.C. Liberal Party over the last 16 years and the federal Conservatives for 10 years. Despite these impediments, I am really proud of the local innovation.
Nanaimo's Harmac Pacific mill has a generation capacity of 55 megawatts of power, which it produces from biofuels and waste wood in its facility. The Greater Nanaimo Pollution Control Centre captures methane, which would be a fairly calamitous greenhouse gas exaggerator, and converts it to electricity that powers 300 homes.
Nanaimo is home to Canadian Electric Vehicles Ltd., which for 25 years has been making industrial vehicles, including electric Zambonis and electric BobCats. That has been happening for some time in my riding.
People are now moving into a fantastic affordable housing facility that has just been built. It is a beautiful facility. It was built by the Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre on Bowen Road. It has a passive energy design, which was started in Saskatchewan. Our federal government failed to keep the passive energy program going, and it moved to Europe, where it has expanded and become more innovative. The Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre affordable housing project uses 80% less energy than traditional home construction, so the residents have fewer expenses. Their cost of living is more affordable, but the homes are also clean, with wonderful air quality. We are really proud of the centre.
This is a Canada-wide phenomenon. Canada's green building sector has $128 billion in gross annual income, and the green building sector employs more direct full-time workers than forestry, mining, and oil and gas combined. That is not a story we tell every day, and we need to tell it again and again. This is where the jobs are now, and if we have the right priorities and support the right trend and direction, we can do even better with that.
The Vancouver Island Economic Alliance has an annual summit. A few years ago, I talked to energy entrepreneurs at that conference in Nanaimo. They said the provincial and federal governments put more barriers in front of their business than anywhere they have seen or experienced in the world. We have local entrepreneurs trying to manufacture and sell on Vancouver Island and across Canada, but they are having to move their manufacturing as well as their sales focus internationally, because they cannot do business at home. That is so discouraging. It is one of many things Canada should be able to do well but has not.
Another great example we are so proud of in Nanaimo is Vancouver Island University. It is right now building a geothermal project. It is inserting down into old coal mining shafts in our riding. Nanaimo was originally built on coal, so that coal history will now move to geothermal, where they are going to be able to pull from the natural heat of the ground to heat the whole university complex and new residences. It's going to be a real showcase, and it is going to be a way to show young people the possibilities in innovation and the jobs they can generate.
I have also met people out in the community, in Ladysmith in particular, where we have a lot of people who have been migrant workers within our own country, living on Vancouver Island and flying to Alberta for work. It is very dangerous and hard work. It is hard for them to be away from their families. Often, people come home with addictions or injuries.
I now bump into people who have returned, whether they learned vertical drilling in the oil and gas sector and are now bringing that back to our region to utilize that same technology and expertise for geothermal power, or whether they are simply doing residential solar installations. I hear these young men in particular tell their friends to come home, that it is safer, the work is steady, and they can sleep in their own bed and keep their family together. That is the work our government should be doing to encourage such a transition.
While I have the floor, I need to do a bit of myth busting on the Kinder Morgan investment. I keep hearing, including just now from the parliamentary secretary, that we need to find the Asian markets. Crude exports from Vancouver to China topped out in 2011. They were at that time only 28% of outbound shipments. By 2014, they had dropped to 6%. By 2016, they were essentially zero. Right now, we do not have Asian markets hungry for our unrefined bitumen. It is simply not borne out by the facts.
We also hear about the imperative for jobs. In fact, the experts say that every time Canada ships 400,000 barrels of unrefined bitumen abroad, it is exporting approximately 19,000 refining and upgrading jobs every year to other countries.
The $15 billion that we are apparently losing by not accessing foreign markets has been rebutted again and again. Robyn Allan has done this powerfully. The natural resources minister keeps saying it is a $15-billion differential. In fact, the original source was Scotiabank. It says $7 billion, and it is a deep investor in Kinder Morgan. Therefore, we must be extremely careful about agreeing with any of the Prime Minister's promises about economic output.
It is to the deep dismay of British Columbians that this investment would risk the $2.2-billion fishery and aquaculture sector. It risks tens of thousands of jobs that exist right now in British Columbia, whether they be in film, tourism, or fishing, and billions of dollars in economic activity that results from a clean coast.
I ask the government to please let us truly innovate with green jobs in the next century's work and energy, not the Kinder Morgan pipeline.
