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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 73

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 17, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 73 - May/17/22
Mr. Greg McLean (Calgary Centre, CPC)
  • May/17/22 11:43:24 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate being able to get up and speak to the motion the NDP has put forward. However, as I was drafting my speech, I had to ask myself where I could start here today. When I look at the motion, in the preamble it says, “(i) Canadians are paying almost $2 per litre of gas at the pump,” which is true. They do pay that. It then says, “(ii) oil and gas companies are making record profits,” and we will analyze what that actually means. The preamble then continues, “(iii) Canada spends 14 times more on financial support to the fossil fuel sector than it does for renewable energy,” which is complete hogwash, and I will address that item first. The preamble itself is a mulch of misinformation, and the NDP is very good at that. The NDP is very good at putting misinformation on the table and saying, “Here's what's going to happen here.” They then repeat a narrative that is completely false. I tried to participate last week at a forum hosted by my colleague who put this motion forward. I noticed that my party was the only party that was not invited to that forum, and that is because the other parties in the House have members who buy into this nonsense narrative about the way the transition happens. Now, my party and I have very good ideas about how we actually transition and decarbonize our economy, all of which are based on reason and outcomes, and none of which I have seen from the Liberals, the Bloc, the NDP nor the Green Party. Getting somewhere on the environmental equation is essential, and none of the other parties have presented anything that advances the environmental equation for the world. All they do is kneecap the Canadian industry. I did some research after that forum. I went to look for where this figure came from of subsidies in Canada for our oil and gas industry being 14 times more than what we fund for our alternative energy industry, and it comes from a group called Oil Change International, which is a proxy organization for Greenpeace. Its leadership comes from Friends of the Earth, and it is funded by the Tides Foundation. It is a splash of the same voices producing louder and more dissonant narratives about how we can actually decarbonize the world. Frankly, I will take licence on this, Madam Speaker, and you may have to slap me here, but it is a lie. It is something that this misinformation is based upon, and frankly, it needs to be called out for what it is whenever we see it here. As parliamentarians, our job here is to speak the truth and only the truth. When we foment misinformation by repeating lies from the Internet, we are going towards that confirmation bias, which we buy into and which our people buy into. We must get the real facts on the table here. We must ignore these groups, such as Oil Change International, which are just rent-seekers putting money in their own pockets at the expense of Canadians. I actually asked if there were—
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Context: House Hansard - 73 - May/17/22
Mr. Greg McLean (Calgary Centre, CPC)
  • May/17/22 4:20:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I heard the member refer in her speech to the same misinformation we identified earlier when we talked about a lie, which was propagated by a subsidiary of Tides International. It is the only place where this “14 times” number comes up. I hope she is happy, in this House of Commons, as she and her colleagues continue to repeat that misinformation, but they should recognize what it is. I am going to challenge the member on the whole thing: on carbon capture, utilization and storage, because she talked about it being at a demonstration level only in Canada. She also referred to the Shell Quest facility. Shell Quest is using the technology it has at Edmonton in the Northern Lights project that is offshore of Norway, which has a better tax regime than Canada with respect to carbon capture, utilization and storage. Can she comment on why we have developed technology in Canada that is now leaving to be exploited around the world in other environmental countries that are approaching the same problem?
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