In this episode of The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast, we will be talking to three men on the frontbenches of the Trans Mountain Pipeline issue, Ed Fast, Jamie Schmiel and Tom Kamich, about their perspectives on the issue.
00:00:00.000Coming up on The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast, we'll be talking to three gentlemen who are on the front benches of the Trans Mountain Pipeline issue. Join us.
00:00:12.220You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:17.640Is the Prime Minister actually saying that taxpayers should be on the hook when he breaks the law?
00:00:23.900What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:39.180All these deficits leading to nothing but burying Canadians in taxes.
00:00:49.300And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:51.580Welcome to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:55.600I'm your host, Tony Clement, Member of Parliament for Paris Saint-Muskoka, and I've got with me three gentlemen who are on the front benches of the Trans Mountain Pipeline issue.
00:01:05.900With me today, the Honourable Ed Fast, who's the MP for Abbotsford, and as well the Environment and Climate Change Shadow Minister and Critic.
00:01:16.000We've got Jamie Schmiel, the MP for Halliburton, he's the Deputy Natural Resources Critic Shadow, and Tom Kamich from Calgary Shepherd Riding, who is the Deputy Finance Minister Critic.
00:01:28.880And, of course, I'm your host again, Tony Clement.
00:01:31.820We're going to talk about Trans Mountain, which has a number of different aspects to it.
00:01:37.100Of course, we've seen a precipitous decline in Canadian energy investment during the Trudeau years, the biggest decline in 70 years, a loss of $80 billion and 110,000 energy jobs.
00:01:52.220We'll get into that a little bit as well, especially from Tom Kamich's perspective as a Calgary MP.
00:01:57.580But the breaking news today is, based on a previous podcast we had, we talked about the summer jobs program.
00:02:06.900Maybe listeners will be aware of that and how the Liberals have applied a values test for the recipients of the money to hire summer students across the country.
00:02:16.980A number of conservative MPs and leader Andrew Scheer have expressed concerns about that.
00:02:21.220Now we learn today that some of the money from the summer jobs program is actually going to advocacy organizations like Dogwood Initiative that are committed ideologically and from their perspective, political perspective, to shutting down Canada's resource sectors.
00:02:39.300Well, Mr. Speaker, if the Prime Minister claims to be trying to build public support for this pipeline, perhaps he can explain to the House why his government gave a grant to an environmental lobby group that specifically used those funds to hire an activist to protest against the Trans Mountain project.
00:02:58.140So here's a case, again, of the Liberals applying their values test for the people they dislike and then ignoring being nonpartisan when it comes to their own fellow travelers.
00:03:11.060So a lot to talk about today. I'm going to dive right into it and welcome Ed Fast to the program.
00:03:18.740Tell us, set the table. You're the shadow minister when it comes to the environment and climate change.
00:03:23.640From your perspective as an Abbotsford MP, a B.C. Member of Parliament, as well as your critic responsibilities, tell us what is so important about the indication of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project and the Liberal basically mucking up the issue.
00:03:40.420Well, Canada's natural resources play a very significant role in our national prosperity.
00:03:46.240There are millions of jobs that depend on our resource sector.
00:03:50.640And in order for Canada to benefit the most from its resources, we need to be able to get those resources to market.
00:03:57.840When it comes to oil and gas, which we have a lot of, we need pipelines to get that product to foreign markets.
00:04:06.020Because right now we can't get them to foreign markets because we don't have the pipelines in place to Tidewater.
00:04:11.900And what that means is that we sell mostly to the North American marketplace, which means we leave billions of dollars a year on the table that Canadians don't benefit from because we can't get the maximum dollar for those resources.
00:04:26.760So this is a question not only of the oil and gas sector, would it be safe to say that this is a question for Canada's economic activity, the jobs that are created and how governments pay for things like health care and education through taxes?
00:04:44.920Yes, yes, and yes. Our national prosperity and also the taxation that is derived from it and that allows governments to provide the key services that Canadians expect all depend on us getting our resources to market, getting the maximum dollar for those resources.
00:05:02.180If you ask the average Canadian out there, they expect us to extract our resources and get them to market in the most sustainable, environmentally responsible way.
00:05:12.780And we as a Conservative Party strongly believe that every single project that gets built to get our resources to market needs to pass a high environmental standard.
00:05:23.940When we're talking about oil and gas, those standards are the highest in the world, bar none.
00:05:29.360So Canada is very good at what it does in extracting oil and gas, getting that product to market.
00:05:35.660The problem is there are some people in Canada for whom the only process to get these pipelines approved is a no.
00:05:43.700They will never accept any process that will allow our product to get shipped to market at the best price possible and with the highest environmental standards applied to them.
00:05:54.320Ed, before we talk to Tom and Jamie a little bit, tell us from a perspective as a British Columbian, because there's obviously been a huge debate in British Columbia, are British Columbians seeing the value of the project and seeing that we can properly balance environmental concerns with economic expansion and activity?
00:06:13.020Absolutely. In fact, you now see that all of the polls that are being conducted show that a very significant majority of British Columbians now support the Trans Mountain pipeline being built.
00:06:26.740And that makes sense. I'm from the city of Abbotsford. That pipeline runs right through our community.
00:06:32.320Our city has signed a benefits agreement with Kinder Morgan, which is going to provide significant benefits to our community.
00:06:41.640There are many, there are dozens of First Nations along the route of this pipeline that are also benefiting because they themselves have signed benefits agreements with Kinder Morgan.
00:06:51.400Thank you, Ed. And let's bring it over to Tom Kamich, the MP for Calgary Shepard, who has critic and shadow responsibilities on finance.
00:07:04.140Again, love to get a little bit of the local perspective. Obviously, you're kind of at ground zero being a Calgary MP.
00:07:11.400What's the type of debate that's going on in Calgary and Alberta right now about this project?
00:07:17.220So for everybody in Alberta, especially in Calgary, we have all the office towers where people are working, what we call the white collar workers, who are the engineers, they're the technicians, they're the designers.
00:07:27.620All of them are pretty much out of work or they're not getting enough work, so they can't work a full week.
00:07:32.880And basically, since the recession, I'd say 2014 and us electing an NDP provincial government, things have been really bad.
00:07:40.120And for the first time since 2005, since I could possibly remember, you see people begging on the street.
00:07:47.000You see young men and women who used to be working in the energy sector, designing pipelines, designing facilities.
00:07:53.980You see them on street corners. You see them in suburban communities like mine.
00:07:57.620I represent a deep, deep southeast part of the city where the new hospital is.
00:08:01.160You find people there literally begging on corners because they can't make ends meet.
00:08:05.980Lots of people have lost their homes, lost their jobs. They've gotten divorced. Suicide rate has gone up.
00:08:10.780It's been a huge impact on communities, like the social impact of not getting our product to market is a really big deal back home.
00:08:18.180And one other thing I'll mention is we saw Northern Gateway get canceled.
00:08:21.360We saw Energy East get canceled because of the Trudeau Liberals.
00:08:26.320Pacific Northwest LNG project was canceled.
00:08:29.640This is a really big deal. This is the last attempt.
00:08:32.060Apart from Keystone XL, which is still wrapped up in a lot of regulatory red tape down south in court cases, we depend on this.
00:08:38.860This is it. If May 31st doesn't come around, we get clear indication from the government of what it's going to do.
00:08:45.620They got us into this mess. What are they going to do?
00:08:47.580We're facing a situation where a lot of Alberta-based workers and Alberta-based companies that hire them are going to simply start letting people go this summer.
00:08:54.920So I think that's an important couple of points that you've made, that Kinder Morgan has set a drop-dead date of May 31st, that either some of these issues get resolved to their satisfaction, that they have comfort that the project can go ahead, or they just don't want to throw good money after bad and continue the project.
00:09:10.960So this project is either going to proceed or not proceed by May 31st.
00:09:15.960And I think the second point that you raised that's really important is that this shows a pattern of behavior by the Trudeau government that likes to espouse that we can, that they are in favor of both environmental design and economic activity, that we can be an environmental country and be economically successful.
00:09:34.900We know their policies on the environment, and quite frankly, their lack of success on that.
00:09:40.440But without this pipeline going through, they have shown nothing in terms of actually getting the job done to get a product to market, which they themselves claim they are in favor of.
00:09:51.380So I think one of the things I like to talk about, everybody keeps focusing on like Shell and the really big companies.
00:09:57.300But the biggest impact will be on the medium-sized oil and gas, the homegrown, you know, up-by-the-bootstraps type of companies that were little maybe 10, 15 years ago.
00:10:21.520We want them to stop in Edmonton in our smaller communities to come and work here.
00:10:25.320It's worth your time, and a generation of people now can't find work.
00:10:29.900And it's these small, medium-sized oil and gas companies which are looking at, you know, the end of the tunnel, and there's no light there.
00:10:37.260They can't just move to another jurisdiction to keep sustaining their operations.
00:10:41.680They're looking at basically cutting off a lot of people locally.
00:10:44.400The homegrown industry is going to die if they can't move their product to market.
00:10:48.220Are people starting to lose faith with Justin Trudeau's promises on this file?
00:10:54.560But some of the biggest rallies that have been held, promoting pipelines, promoting energy, the responsible use of our energy, how ethical and sustainable it is,
00:11:03.860it's attracted thousands of people to Edmonton legislature and at the government building in Calgary.
00:11:09.940So it's a big deal, and there's a lot more people that I see now.
00:11:13.080People I haven't seen involved in politics in the past 15 years are coming out now, and they're saying, this has an impact on me.
00:11:19.580And they're from all over the country.
00:11:47.360Tell us a little bit about the impact of these pipeline decisions or non-decisions when it comes to the broader economy and even from an Ontario perspective.
00:11:55.480Yeah, I think many Canadians that are just tuning into this believe it's just an Alberta problem, and it really isn't, as you mentioned, Tony.
00:12:02.620So when the Liberals decided to change the rules halfway through the process and Energy East Pipeline was cancelled,
00:12:10.420General Electric in Peterborough, a company that has been in that city since the 1800s, it actually was named the Electric City, shut its doors.
00:12:18.320They had a contract to build motors for the Energy East Pipeline.
00:12:21.140That's 300 jobs out, 300 families without a paycheck now gone.
00:13:02.620But if this pipeline gets cancelled, the last available opportunity that we have right now to get our oil to proper market,
00:13:12.320I think investment within every sector will take a hit.
00:13:17.160People will not want to park their money here, will not see opportunity, will not see a process,
00:13:21.540which I don't know if you talked about Bill C-69, a bill that reduces any certainty in an application process for a massive project like mining or oil and gas.