Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually this evening to pursue a question I initially asked in question period on February 13. This was in advance of receiving our federal budget from the Minister of Finance. The Minister of Finance did respond, on the floor of the House, to the question I asked that day.

I have contrasted what Canada is doing to go after the excess profit garnered by particularly large oil corporations and fossil fuel companies to what is being done in the United States. I cited, at that point, what had been a recent state of the union address from U.S. President Joe Biden, who recently spoke in this very place, that called out big oil for its excessive profits.

The President of the United States called that “outrageous”. He pledged to quadruple the tax on corporate stock buybacks. Around the same time the Secretary-General of the United Nations called such excess profits “immoral”.

In Canada, the biggest oil and gas companies in this country amassed more than $66 billion in profits in one year. That is double what they accumulated in the previous decade.

I think of the call months ago from the business pages of The Globe and Mail, which is not generally a strong critic of excess profits. The Globe and Mail veteran journalist, Eric Reguly, commented that not only were these excess profits, but they amounted to, in his words, “war profiteering”.

My parents' generation did not tolerate war profiteering. War profiteers were not celebrated and rewarded. What Eric Reguly's column pointed out was that the excess profits of the fossil fuel sector, in the recent past, have nothing to do with business acumen or good planning for which corporations and their shareholders should be rewarded. It was entirely due to Putin's brutal attack on Ukraine, allowing some corporations to benefit, and I will again use the word of United Nation's Secretary-General Guterres, who called it “immoral”. This is almost unbelievable.

We just had, before the environment committee days ago, testimony from Mr. Brad Corson. He is the CEO of Imperial Oil, which is really an American company operating in Canada. It is a subsidiary of Exxon. I struggle to understand how the poor man made ends meet when just a year and a half ago he only made $8.5 million a year. This last year, his salary doubled, so he now makes more than $17 million a year.

This is the same company that did not divulge, and one could say “hid”, from first nations and Métis people in the vicinity of the oil sands, that toxic materials that were carcinogenics were leaking into the watershed and surrounding areas. He is rewarded with the doubling of his personal salary, but that is nothing compared to the profits received by these oil and gas companies in a period of time when their benefits have to do with Putin's attack on Ukraine. Surely we can do better.

The PBO estimates we could get $8 billion with a tax on excess profits. What are we waiting for?

Elizabeth May

$565,861.00