Elizabeth May
Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on something the member said, because it gets repeated so often in this place, that somehow the current Liberal government has hurt investment in the energy sector.
That is not the case. We have to look globally, and what we find is that investors are fleeing fossil fuel investments. They are divesting. We can look at the many speeches by Mark Carney, who used to be the Governor of the Bank of Canada and is now the Governor of the Bank of England, where he says there is a carbon bubble, and smart companies want to avoid having stranded assets in the oil sands.
That is why ConocoPhillips has left; that is why Shell left; that is why Statoil left; that is why Total left. At the height of the oil sands, it amounted to 2% of our GDP. Large multinationals are leaving because they are investing in renewable energy, because that is where the profits are.
Tony Clement – Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka
Mr. Speaker, I do concede that there has been some investment in renewable energy, and that is, of course, a good thing. Certainly, if business leaders see that as a growth area, far be it for me to second guess that.
However, the fact of the matter is that there has been a lot of uncertainty in the Canadian marketplace, which has seen a disproportionate number of companies fleeing it because of the uncertainty and red tape over the last couple of years. That point is undeniable. When we see a 70% drop in a two-year period of that kind of investment in Canada, that is not a worldwide trend. There is no worldwide 70% drop.
It is clear that it is the actions of the current government and its policies, of its saying one thing and doing something very different, that have caused this crisis in natural resources development. It can be a sustainable development, but not when the government puts so many onerous preconditions on this kind of development.