Thank you.
Much time has been taken in addressing almost nothing in both public meetings and non-public meetings; I hope that was better said, Mr. Chair.
It is a shame that this committee has accomplished almost nothing in the 12 months I've been on this committee. When I share that with Canadians, and I hope to share that with Canadians, they're going to wonder why we're paying these people to come to Ottawa and sit in meetings where they get nothing done. Let me challenge my colleagues across the table and my colleagues down the table: We need to start getting things accomplished here. Those accomplishments need to include getting the right subamendment, which is what we're talking about here.
Let me give a quick indication of what happens at committee.
This will be illustrative, Mr. Chair. I hope you don't mind.
I was previously on the environment committee. Here's what happened on the environment committee when we were addressing changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The thing about the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is that it requires melding the science of environmental protection with the legal language of making sure that the scientific reality is put into legislation. It is an art and a science built into one. We took the time to do that. There were protestations from the Liberal side of the bench that we were taking too much time.
In the end, we made some significantly good amendments with the help of a couple of good Liberal backbenchers who actually respected things like science. They respected things like parliamentary jurisdiction and where we were overlapping with the jurisdictions of provinces. We got a better piece of legislation with some significant scientific and legal input from wonderful public officials who provided us advice on that committee.
What was the end result? The amended bill went to Parliament at report stage. All the changes that we'd laboured through in that committee—extensive, positive, constructive, scientific and legalistic changes—were undone in an instant because the Liberals were, I'll call it, blackmailed by the NDP, who said, “Undo all the amendments or else we will not vote for your legislation.”
The Minister of the Environment, one Steven Guilbeault, acquiesced. He acquiesced as he shouldn't have done, because we have a parliamentary process here. Good input from several parliamentarians and the good work of several public officials was completely wasted. Nobody can tell me with a straight face and not sound like a hypocrite that we spend too much time doing the work we're supposed to do at committee. It hasn't been what I've seen done at this committee for the last 12 months.
I also heard one of my colleagues talk about Mr. Dalton's comments when he was a previously elected provincial legislator and the provincial carbon tax in British Columbia. The numbers are off, but I will say that we looked at what the actual reductions at the time were in British Columbia that coincided with the introduction of the carbon tax that was imposed in British Columbia. They almost exactly coincided with the reduction of economic activity.
I'll put that on Mr. El-Khoury's desk, if he can take a look at that, to educate himself. If you're going to have less economic activity, of course you're going to have fewer carbon emissions. If his suggestion is that in Canada we just stop economic activity in order to reduce our carbon footprint, well, we're going to have a lot more people on the street and a lot more people doing nothing. Sooner or later we'll have a lot less public officials and a lot less parliamentarians, because there's nothing to sustain the economy if the economy isn't working.
Mr. El-Khoury, please take a look at that, because it isn't necessarily as direct as what you're saying. In any event, you have now the NDP Premier of British Columbia admitting that it doesn't work and saying that, if the federal backstop legislation weren't there, he would walk away from it.
I don't know what exactly you need to hear from the people it's impacting the most. Canadian citizens have said very clearly, British Columbians have said very clearly and everybody who actually looks at the carbon tax and its ineffectiveness at reducing emissions have said that it is a cost without a benefit.
I'll go into it further later with regard to an education on what a carbon tax is supposed to do and what it doesn't do. The science is clear and the economics are also clear. We can go into that in great detail and I'll debate anybody in the House of Commons on those matters.
What this is really about and why we want to get towards making sure we get a carbon tax election...because we do want a carbon tax election. The reason this has gained some significant tailwinds from all Canadians, Canadians across this country, is that they know now they've been misled by this Parliament. It's a Parliament run by the leadership of the party that's facing me right now, the Liberals, with the acquiescence of the NDP and sometimes of the Bloc Québécois.
We have to make sure that we put it on trial here, and that trial will be when the Canadian people decide that they get to pass judgment on the government that has misled them beyond measure for several years now on what they're trying to accomplish. The question is, of course, if you keep jacking up this tax and keep increasing inflation, why aren't the emissions going down in the world? Why is carbon still going up? Why is carbon increasingly going up from people we should be helping reduce carbon? It's because—I'm going to say this very clearly, Mr. Chair—this government doesn't know what it's doing. It thinks that taking money out of people's pockets is the way to accomplish something, but really what it's accomplishing is taking money out of people's pockets and giving it to their friends. It's a wealth transfer and nothing but.
Like I say, Canadians now are wise to it, and I think they got wise very clearly. If I can think of a crystallizing event on it, it was when Gudie Hutchings, the Liberal Minister of Rural Development, was very clear about why eastern Canadians got a break on their carbon tax for home heating oil, which has a much higher carbon footprint than natural gas. They got a break on that because it was affecting them, and there was the question of how come eastern Canadians get that break but western Canadians and other Canadians don't. She said that maybe western Canadians should elect more Liberals and then they'd do something about it. That is the height of cynicism, and frankly, I think most Canadians thought it was grounds for her to be fired as a cabinet minister.
That partisan approach to how we take taxes from certain people in certain parts of Canada and give carbon breaks to people in other parts of Canada is not the way a country holds itself together. This government has been excessively good at divide and conquer. “Where are our votes, and how do we transfer wealth from people who might not vote for us to people whose pockets we can put money into to vote for us?” is not a strategy that holds together at the end of the day.
As Margaret Thatcher once said, sooner or later when the economy goes downhill you run out of other people's money to take away and give to your friends. That is not the way to run this country. It hasn't been the way it's been run in a proper government, and it shouldn't be run that way now.
Let's talk about a consumer carbon tax, because that's what we're talking about here. There are a few carbon taxes that have been put on our plates by this government. There's not just the carbon tax that's there for people to see. There is, in effect, the clean fuel regulations, which are an additional carbon tax that's on top of the other tax. It's almost double at the end of the day, because in the end, the consumer pays for everything. It's another tax that's built into the energy that goes into producing everything in our economy.
Then there is the regulatory overburden that happens. They're trying to push forward with a clean electricity standard. If you take a look at the $40 billion-plus that has been reported for batteries in Canada, the Government of Quebec put out its number and talked about the cost per tonne of CO2 reduced by batteries. It's over $800 per tonne, which is 10 times higher than the consumer carbon tax. This is subsidization and regulation. Taxpayers' money is being poured out of governments.
Minister of Industry François-Philippe Champagne's moniker in many parts of Canada now is the “minister of writing cheques.” The whole notion, of course, is that if there are going to be cheques written, you may as well have your hand out. It is now just a handout. We have a $50-billion deficit across this country with no end in sight for this government's spendy ways. It's something that has to turn itself around in a hurry. Batteries, of course, are the worst example of how exactly we're feeling this right now in Canada.
Most people don't know this, but I'll tell my colleagues. I know that the only Albertans on this committee are in this party. I look at the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc, and most of them won't realize that the first jurisdiction in Canada to have a carbon tax was Alberta. Alberta has the industrial carbon tax, and it has been there for 20 years now. It is a very good tax, and it has evolved. I was a critic of the tax in its early stages because it was rewarding activity that was not reducing emissions. Reducing emissions is what we have to do. All these systems evolve.
The 20-year evolution of the industrial carbon tax in Alberta was something during which there was a lot of trial and learning about the robustness of a system that's the envy of the rest of Canada and that this Government of Canada would like to emulate, if it could, although it doesn't like to emulate things from Alberta. It would like to emulate it as far as its own output-based pricing system and industrial carbon tax, if you will, yet it doesn't know how to do that because it doesn't have any expertise, whereas the provincial government in Alberta actually does have expertise in this matter.
When you have siloed expertise in Canada, take the lessons from the people who know what they're doing. That's step one. Find out who knows what they're doing in this process and follow their lead. Follow the Government of Alberta as far as what they're doing on carbon reduction efforts.
I want to bring to my colleagues' attention here that those efforts have led to the reduction in carbon per barrel produced in Alberta by about 34% over 20 years. Think about that. We produce energy, and the energy we produce at the production end has gone down by about a third thanks to the government's efforts in Alberta. Is there any other industry in Alberta that has reduced its carbon footprint the way the oil and gas industry has? Absolutely not.
What about the way the Government of Alberta has? Absolutely not. Where this country has actually seen greenhouse gas emissions reductions is in the province of Alberta and in our additions to the Canadian economy and our efforts to make sure that our production is the cleanest in the world by the measurement standards we have.
Please take a good look at that before you continue to just repeat your government's nonsense lines and understand where we're actually making headway on reducing emissions in Canada's economy.
In a carbon tax, as many people will chirp on social media or other media.... The purity of a carbon tax was introduced by a guy named William Nordhaus, who was both an economist and a climate scientist. I'll bring this to the committee's attention too, and for anybody watching: He brought the whole notion of what the cost of a carbon tax should be and could be. He initially came out with a number of about $26, and he revised that later to about $38 U.S. The issue is that, if you have one tax, one mechanism in society that would address the effects of carbon.... We're not abusing a public good, because the air is a public good, the atmosphere. The climate is a public good and it's not to be changed for free, so it is a way of actually addressing it.
Mr. Nordhaus's approach to it was, “What is the one thing you can do?” If you had a pure carbon tax, it would be the number he came up with, $28 to $38 U.S. per ton. Eighty dollars of course, is much higher than that. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at the time thought it was around $50, so there's not one thought on this. However, that is in the absence of all of the other ridiculous measures that this government has brought into play on the file, which include another industrial carbon tax, the clean energy regulations, the clean fuel standards, the regulations that cost—as with the batteries—$800 dollars per tonne of emissions reductions. These are ridiculous measures on top of any purity associated with the concept of a carbon tax, which is not represented in the consumer carbon tax that this government put into play here, which is a complete in-and-out scheme for Canadian taxpayers' money.
It was tabled in Parliament this week that, based on an access to information request by one of my colleagues, this consumer carbon tax, which is an instrument of this Liberal-NDP coalition, will cost Canadians $9 billion by 2030. That's $9 billion in extra taxes and they're hiding it behind where you're going to have to make tax increases.
Be honest with Canadians. That's all we're asking for here. They found you misleading them about the carbon tax. They continue to try to hold you to account, and you won't give them an election on the matter. I can guarantee you that every meeting I had this summer was, “Can you please get these people to call an election? It's done. It's over.” Any support this government may have had has been washed away with its dishonesty. People recognize it now very clearly.
You're no longer obfuscating in the cloudy middle or grey area of whether you're telling the truth or not—you're not. You misled Canadians. They recognize it. Now get on with it and face the music, because the music has to be faced here. There is no other outcome. We are going to have an election. People are going to remember exactly what you said on this matter, how you misled them and how much this is going to cost them.
The end outcome here, of course, is that we're here. We're democratically elected. I had a podcast yesterday, and we talked about the whittling away of democracy that's happened here. I'm going to challenge my colleagues, particularly on the government side of the bench, the Liberal-NDP coalition. If you're going to support a carbon tax and say that you're going to continue to not face the public on what it has to say about a carbon tax, then you need to recognize that you have to get better informed about it, because democracy requires people in your positions to actually understand what you are doing.
We're becoming more and more a government of siloed expertise. Anybody who tells me that somebody's an expert in lost Canadians.... Okay, they're an expert in lost Canadians, but connect the dots. Lost Canadians don't exist in silos. For lost Canadians, we have to make sure that we're doing some significant good here at the end of the day.
For anybody who thinks they're experts, bring that expertise to a mix of everything we need to accomplish here in society and ensure we get the right things done for this country, because I can tell you right now, there's a country here that's being wasted, a country whose productivity has gone down significantly. Our country underperforms the world now as far as our economic growth goes.
If it wasn't for the excess immigration that's happened over the last two years, our GDP—gross domestic product—would be negative. What does that tell you? The economy is shrinking except for the new people coming into the economy whom we have to make sure we continue to produce for. That's not a recipe for success. Our productivity has to get better in this country. We have to start producing more per capita.
None of this government's policies have led to any of those outcomes, and it's a shame. It's an absolute shame because I would love to see more people on the government side of the bench who actually understand the economics of what they're trying to do and how it affects everybody in the country, because it is a whittling down of what they can buy with their after-tax dollars.
Let's take a look at those after-tax dollars. With the increases in taxes brought on by this government, people have less take-home pay. Less take-home pay, in addition, buys less because of the inflated dollars that this government has run through as a result of their money-printing operations. Inflation has caused everything to go up in society and created less ability to buy everything Canadians need: food, shelter, clothing, goods. We get less out of the dollars we spend when our take-home paycheques are whittled away by government taxes, and then the take-home pay gets stretched because it doesn't buy as much as it used to buy.
Canada is a democracy still, despite the whittling away that happens, including in the bills that these members across the way bring to the House of Commons. Be accountable on your carbon tax. Show up. Go talk to your.... It's the number one judgment you're going to get. If you're so solid about this being a good thing to move forward with, then let's have a carbon tax election. If you don't think you've misled Canadians, then show up at their doors and tell them you only misled them for their own good. They won't believe you.
I've had many conversations on the sidelines with my Liberal colleagues, with my NDP colleagues, with my Bloc colleagues, and I want to tell them, if you don't think the by-elections in two safe Liberal ridings in June and September were a very clear indication that the Liberals don't have the support of the people anymore, then you're tone-deaf. You're not paying attention. Your eye is off the ball.
Admit to Canadians that you want to continue to dither and whittle away at their savings, whittle away at the country's productivity, whittle away at the democracy that we've fought hard for and won here in Canada, whittle away at everything Canadians stand for in order to continue this facade of what you're actually trying to do. What you're doing is ruining Canadians' lives, ruining the economy, ruining the take-home pay, making everything worse in this country.
Now I'm asking you to think about it and get to the point where we actually get better outcomes, a better Canada, for all our citizens.
I think the last thing I want to say, Mr. Chair, if I may, is...and I'd like my colleagues, particularly my colleagues in the Liberal Party of Canada, because I know most of you are backbenchers and some of you are people I've worked with well in other committees....
Ms. O'Connell, it's the first time I've been on committee with you, so welcome, but please, go to your leadership. Do a quick examination yourselves. You are people who are elected by your constituents. Do you think your constituents are going to be pleased when they look at how much money has been taken out of their pockets, through various means, including this carbon tax, and given to a bunch of your boss's friends, because that is overwhelmingly obnoxious.
The amount of money...and pardon me, I had a finance career before I came here. One thing we do in finance is that we follow the money. The money that's been taken—I'd like to say stolen, but it's not stolen—from the pockets of Canadians, despite the fact that they've been misled about it, has landed in the pockets of several friends of your leadership.
Take a look at all the organizations that are getting greased on the wheels of this dishonesty. Do your constituents a favour and say that you don't stand up for that. That would be a challenge I would put to you. That would be a challenge I would put to my NDP colleague who protested that the NDP only supported that bill 15 years ago because “we were told to”.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Step up. Hold your head up. Go to your constituents and say, “This is what I found out. This is why I'm actually calling for an election as well.”
Mr. Chair, thank you.