Quebec denies LNG plant
The Quebec government has refused to approve construction of a LNG facility (liquified natural gas) north of Quebec City. The natural gas would have come from Western Canada, mainly from hydraulic fracturing operations in British Columbia and Alberta.
Quebec’s choice is yet another blow which will further devastate our Canadian oil and gas sector while countries like Russia and Iran profit to fill the market with their dirty oil.
We need to be championing Canadian industry for what we do better than anyone else. This was a very wrong decision and yet another hit to Albertans at the worst possible time.
For many Albertans and Canadians, this is just the latest of what has been a repeated attack on Alberta energy and Canada’s economy. There is no question that when we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, our country will already be on rocky financial footing. Much of that was because of outof-control Liberal spending before the pandemic.
We are in a very difficult fiscal situation. According to the Canadian Energy Centre, between 2000 and 2018 the energy sector generated $672 billion in revenue for every level of government. That is $35 billion a year for municipalities, provinces and the federal government that cannot be replaced. In Alberta, we have felt the disdain for the energy sector, with over 200,000 lost jobs.
However, to come out of the pandemic and get Canada back on its financial feet, we are going to have to look at industries that we can rely on to be revenue generators. There are only a handful of those industries in Canada, and our energy sector is one of them. It is not just one of them, but the most important one, the one that creates the most jobs and the one that creates the most revenue for every level of government across this country.
Liberals continue to cripple this industry with bad policy, such as Bill C-69, the no pipelines bill, the tanker ban and a carbon tax, which is far beyond what any other country is putting on their economy, putting us further and further behind in terms of not being competitive.
What has this virtue signalling gotten us? Has this earned us any social license? Has this earned us any support from the activists? It has absolutely not.
We already have the most stringent environmental and human rights standards in the world in Canada’s energy sector. That is what we should be talking about, not phasing out our energy sector and not crippling it with bad policy just to try to appease someone else, who we know will never be appeased. Those goal posts will always move, and President Biden has proven that.
If the fight really is about climate change and emissions reductions, then these opponents of Canadian energy and Canadian pipelines would actually be speaking the truth in talking about exactly what we do here in Canada. We do it better, safer and cleaner than anybody else in the world. They should understand that and speak proudly about it.
Quebec should look inward and focus on cleaning their own dirty windows before throwing rocks at Alberta. A good first step would be to stop the dumping of raw sewage once and for all, if this was truly about environmental concerns.