QUESTION PERIOD — Natural Resources
Oil and Gas Industry
June 11, 2019
Honourable senators, my question is for the government leader in the Senate. It concerns the ongoing crisis in Canada’s energy sector.
Imperial Oil has delayed the Aspen oil sands project in Alberta, citing uncertainty in the current business environment. It also cut back its crude rail shipments earlier this year.
Oklahoma-based Devon Energy said it’s pulling out of our country, selling its Canadian assets. Husky Energy is slowing its capital spending on projects in Western Canada over the next five years. The Enbridge Line 3 replacement has been delayed.
These announcements are all since the beginning of 2019. Senator Harder, what more will it take for the federal government to take the crisis in our energy sector seriously?
I thank the honourable senator for his question. I don’t want to congratulate him on what I hope is his last question, unless he has enthusiasm for future days ahead. I appreciate his questions. They’ve always focused on the sector he knows so well.
Let me, in my response, remind him that the Government of Canada is putting in place legislation — indeed we have Bill C-69 before us — that will put a more predictable and more effective environmental assessment regime in place so that the private sector can respond with greater confidence, and that not only will the assessment process be accomplished in a shorter period of time but the projects will actually get built.
Senator Harder, how long will Liberals be blind and deaf to the problems that are happening in Western Canada in the oil and gas industry? You stand up and say the government is going to introduce Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, all, as you say, destined to make the oil and gas industry better.
Have you not heard the voices from Western Canada? Have you not heard the people, all those unemployed people, over 100,000 of them who lost their jobs? Is that just easy for you to glance over and think, oh, it’s just 100,000 jobs? When will you actually listen to Albertans and people from Saskatchewan about the problems that they’re facing? People are losing their homes. We had a young man actually testify over Bill C-48 who was almost crying. He had to lay off all the people who worked for him. No jobs. He was losing his house and probably the next thing is his family. You stand here and say you’re doing something that actually will make it better, yet you’re being deaf and blind to those voices coming from Western Canada. When will you finally realize there’s a problem in the energy sector?
I thank the honourable senator for his question. There is nothing in Bill C-48 that will advance or bring to a close a project in Western Canada. Bill C-48 is a bill that we are debating in this chamber with respect to respecting a moratorium in the northwest and is a complementary strategy of the government with respect to overall environmental, economic and Indigenous rights that is part of the agenda of moving forward so that we can both build and exploit our energy resources in a responsible fashion and meet the obligations of First Nations and the requirements of a modern environment, respecting the needs for adjustment to the less carbon-intensive economy of the future.
