Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Finance Minister indicated the great urgency and support to get the Mackenzie gas pipeline built. I have been in support in a qualified way of this project. Mr. Speaker, last year Exxon boasted all-time record profits: $39.5 billion, the most in history. They would tell us and have us believe that the project in the Northwest Territories with its vast reserves, still with oil at $60 a barrel, is marginal. They have told that to us, to the people that would listen. They have made it sound like the federal government has to play a role to help them make this project a reality. Mr. Speaker, I am all for the federal government playing a role, but that role has to be clear: it has to be to help build the Mackenzie Valley
highway all the way up to Inuvik and to Tuk to assist in the development of the pipeline. I say...
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... an absolute and categorical no to any kind of corporate welfare for Exxon or Imperial Oil.
Mr. Speaker, we also have to recognize the doubling of the greenhouse gasses. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a recent report that makes it, to me, very clear that this is not a debatable issue. The North is heavily impacted, more than other parts of the country. It is very difficult for us to stand up and decry the impacts of climate change and global warming and all that it is doing to us if we are just going to let a project go ahead that is going to double our greenhouse gas emissions and have no kind of offsets planned. We have to come up with some way to do that. The diamond mines are working with us to get hydropower to their facilities. Imperial Oil, as far as I know and can see, has turned a blind eye to the whole issue and would prefer to ignore it, but we cannot as inhabitants of this land. Today in the paper it reported Canada is in last place of all G8 countries in terms of doing anything in terms of meeting greenhouse gas emission reductions. We are part of Canada so we have to take, I think, a proactive step. Imperial Oil has to take a proactive step. We are doing lots of things with hydro and those other types of initiatives...