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House Hansard - 260

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 1, 2023 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 260 - Dec/1/23
Mr. Philip Lawrence (Northumberland—Peterborough South, CPC)
  • Dec/1/23 12:13:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I continue to try to speak French. In the future, I hope to do an entire speech in French. For today I will continue in English. In 2019, we started a journey to remove the carbon tax on farmers. Our farmers said that it did not make sense to them that diesel and dirtier fuels were exempt for farmers but natural gas and propane were not. Propane's carbon footprint is considerably less, fully 50% less, than that of diesel. Here was my naïveté coming into 2019, which was not far from 2015, when we were hearing things like “sunny ways” and “open by default”. I thought the Liberals probably made a mistake, that it was probably a drafting error. I was positive that once I brought it to their attention, they would say, “We do not want our farmers to be suffering. We have that one farmer in Milton, so we need to take care of this.” I thought, in my naïveté, that when I would bring this to their attention, they would say we would not even need to pass legislation; they would fix it in their next budget. However, somehow that did not happen. We therefore brought it forward, and members will not believe this, but we got the support of the Green Party. We got the support of the NDP. We got the support of environmental activists; they were on our side. They realized that propane is cleaner than diesel, so why would we give an exemption to diesel but not propane? The Liberal logic world is a very muddled place, because we then found out that they doubled down. Instead of providing an exemption on home heating with natural gas, which is way cleaner than oil, they gave an exemption to oil. It boggles the mind. The logic behind the carbon tax is to put a cost on fuels with a higher carbon intensity to reduce their usage. If that is true, they should be making it go up eight or 10 times on fuel, but they know it is not true. The logic behind Bill C-234, which is in the Senate right now, is that if we give farmers an exemption and give them control of their resources, they will make the right decisions. They will invest in the technologies that will clean our planet. This ham-fisted stick-before-carrot approach of the carbon tax has been proven to not only increase costs but also increase global emissions, because it drives production, whether it be in a factory or on a farm, off clean Canadian energy and into coal-producing jurisdictions around the world. This is the ultimate in greenwashing. There is no bigger greenwashing tool than the carbon tax, because it moves farms and factories to Guangdong province, where, instead of being powered by clean Canadian hydro power in Quebec or Winnipeg or by natural gas in Alberta, they are powered by coal. We are raising worldwide emissions because of the carbon tax. Instead of energy being produced here in Canada in a clean, sustainable way, we are exporting it. Worst of all, we are impoverishing ourselves to do it. Instead of having paycheques going to workers in our clean Canadian energy sector, those paycheques are going to Dubai. What is going on in Dubai? I believe they are in an air-conditioned dome in the middle of the desert. Can we get any more ironic than that? The fossil fuels they are burning will somehow reduce the amount of fossil fuels. The hypocrisy has no end with the Liberals. Bill C-234 needs to be passed. Even if someone is a wholehearted believer in the carbon tax, Bill C-234 gives equity to our farmers. It does not matter if members are in the Green Party or the NDP. We all agree, except for the Liberals, that farmers deserve a break.
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