Madam Speaker, I listened with interest
to my hon. colleague's speech.
As with almost all of the Liberal speakers today,
they seemed to mix up consultation for action.
They seem to use those phrases interchangeably.
The reality is that there is no action whatsoever.
Maybe he misspoke, but based on
the government's record, I don't think so.
He said, quote "we will stand by as a government."
That is exactly what they are doing.
They are standing by as a government.
They inherited a situation where
Northern Gateway had been approved,
before they came to power.
Where Energy East was well on its way.
What did they do? They cancelled Northern Gateway.
They changed the rules to make it impossible
for Energy East to move forward.
My question for the hon. member is:
Why should anyone believe that
they will actually take action this time?
Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Alberta.
He and I have worked considerably on the cause of autism
in raising awareness of it in my riding.
To directly answer his comments,
the first thing we had to do was
rebuild confidence in the institutions,
something that the Conservatives
under 10 years of their rule eroded.
They eroded the confidence
in approvals for getting pipelines done,
so we had to balance the economy
and the environment to work hand in hand.
That was one of the first things we did.
We put in an interim set of guiding principles.
Yes, we approved TMX, and yes, it will be built,
and yes, we will bring oil, bitumen, to tidewater.
We will export it. We will reduce that differential,
ensuring we get the world price, not the discount,
which is costing us literally a billion
or a billion and a half dollars
depending on who you look at in terms of research,
a month in lost forgone revenues and taxes.
We will get that done as a government
because we have listened,
we have consulted,
and we have put in place a set of measures
that bring confidence to the process,
something the other side failed to do in 10 years.