Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, your government’s environmental plan is estimated to cost tens of thousands of good-paying jobs across the energy sector. Your mandate letter says that you must, “Work with the Minister of Labour in moving forward with legislation and comprehensive action to achieve a Just Transition. . . .” for these workers. One year later and your colleague, minister, has tabled no such legislation.

Minister, has your government abandoned the idea of coming up with a just transition plan for workers in the energy sector? How much longer are Canadian oil and gas workers, whose jobs are on the line, supposed to wait to see a meaningful plan from your government?

Hon. Jonathan Wilkinson, P.C., M.P., Minister of Natural Resources: First of all, I haven’t seen any specific proposals to date of people trying to advance something that’s moved through a lot of thinking. I would say that this is exactly why we have an environmental assessment process. To be honest, it’s why we put better rules into place for environmental assessments — so that we can really look in a thoughtful way and engage with Indigenous communities. We would look in a thoughtful way at the risks associated with any of those types of projects.

From my perspective, I think the biggest challenge would be thinking about how you would do that kind of shipping in a manner that is safe in the Arctic. There’s a reason there is a moratorium on Arctic drilling. It’s a very sensitive ecosystem. We don’t have the ability to actually clean things up there. We don’t have much of a Coast Guard presence. We don’t have the ability, as we do in the Port of Vancouver, for example, to very quickly get to a spill and contain it.

So any project that would be proposed would have to address those issues straight on if it were going to move forward. However, as I say, I have not heard any detailed project proposals coming forward with respect to that idea.