Kevin Lamoureux

“Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour and a privilege to rise on behalf of the great people of southwest and west-central Saskatchewan. I want to start off my speech by saying a big thanks to all the farmers across Saskatchewan and back home for all the work they have put in this year through seeding, through summer and now through harvest. Quite a few farmers are done for the season, but there are still some who have a little way to go thanks to the late rains we had. We will never say no to rain. We will always take more of it. It would have been nice if it had come earlier in the year. Nevertheless, we will take it whenever we get it. It did cause a bit of a delay, but I want to say, again, a big thanks to the farmers for all the hard work they do. That provides a bit of context to the bill we have here today. We have heard the government talk about how it would improve trade corridors. The Liberals talk about how the bill would improve labour relations. Especially in the spirit of the harvest happening and it wrapping up back home, I am hearing that people are concerned that the bill would anger the people who are responsible for making sure that our farmers get their product out to the coast and to market. If the government was truly trying to do something to help our farmers, it could have chosen to use the bill as a means to improve port infrastructure. For example, the Liberals could have had covered grain loading or expanded rail capacity to make sure we could get more railcars out to the ports in a timely manner. That way, farmers would not have to face the merge and issues with boats waiting in water, things that are completely out of their control but that they have to pay for, causing headaches for them. A lot of people are skeptical about what the bill would do for the labour side of things. The government calls this omnibus legislation the building Canada strong act, and I forgive people for wondering if they have heard this before, because the Liberals have used it in their campaign slogans. They have used it for Liberal Party fundraising. I see it on TV in the Government of Canada ads that are going on. In fact, the government also used it in last year’s budget. It also had the Building Canada Act, Bill C-5, which was one of the first government bills introduced. The budget was a year ago, and Bill C-5 was passed a year and a half ago, and here we are again with yet another bill with basically the same name trying to accomplish the same thing. Canadians are left wondering what exactly the bill would do. Canadians are starting to wonder and rightly ask the question, “What have the Liberals built and what are they going to get built?” Without seeing results, it seems more and more like the government keeps making empty promises to Canadians that they either cannot keep or do not even bother trying to keep. As I said, we have already had the Building Canada Act and now we have the building Canada strong act. As time goes on, it has started to sound like we are going back to square one. The Liberals have another slogan that they love to use, and that is, “We are just getting started.” It has been 11 years of just getting started, with nothing happening except for the destruction of industry. What do we have to show for fast-tracking Bill C-5 in the first place? This was the bill the government said it needed, with urgency, to get things going. It was introduced last year. It was supposed to be a quick fix, by creating a new bureaucracy for major projects to circumvent the laws the Liberals had put in place previously. At the time, Conservatives questioned how effective it would turn out to be, and we pointed out that instead they needed to do a lot more to repeal many of the disastrous policies from under Justin Trudeau. However, they were unwilling to go that far and admit that they needed to deal with the deeper issues they had created. Here we are, close to the end of 2026, and nothing has been built. Construction has not started. Instead, we see the government bring forward yet another bill with its favourite slogan: “build Canada strong”. No matter who is prime minister, it is the same Liberal Party running the government, and Liberals always love to play political games. They did not stop playing games after Justin Trudeau left, but they are playing a different game now. For a long time, the Liberals decided to use Canadian oil and gas as a political scapegoat. They were constantly looking for ways to treat development as a wedge issue for electoral gain. All of this caused deep division between different regions of Canada, but things have gotten so bad that the government cannot get away with doing that anymore. Now the Liberals see public opinion and tell people what they want to hear. They are saying some of the right things and pretending the last decade never happened. Meanwhile, Canadians know that we desperately need to rebuild our economy, and they strongly support building major projects. This means they expect new projects to actually get started if they have not been built already. After losing an entire decade, there is no time left to waste, but the Liberals did not understand that before, and apparently they still do not understand it now. As our debate continues on Bill C-39, it will become pretty clear that this bill is overhyped. The Liberals are caught in a bind because they have to to deal with the consequences of the regulatory mess they created, but they are only willing to make some small tweaks to their own flawed system rather than do what is necessary to deliver substantive and structural change that would benefit every Canadian business. Despite the Liberal attempts to phase it out, our Canadian oil and gas sector has always been a leading contributor to our national economy as a whole. More than anything, regulatory uncertainty has been absolutely devastating for the energy sector and for all Canadian resource industries. Uncertainty has chased away billions of investment dollars, and over time, it has significantly worsened Canada’s business reputation around the world. One of the worst examples of this has been the Impact Assessment Act. We saw death by delay with cases like Teck Frontier or the Trans Mountain pipeline, where the project’s proponent in the private sector eventually gave up and walked away because the review process was too slow and inconsistent. Proponents had to follow required processes, but the bureaucracy did not have the same pressure with meeting deadlines and it had further options for dragging out the process. There has been a broad consensus for years that we cannot move forward until the government overhauls the impact assessment process. Major reforms are long overdue. Conservatives have been demanding it forever, and I have lost count how many times my colleagues and I have stood in this place and called for change. The Liberals have refused to repair their broken system, and even now with Bill C-39, they continue to pursue mostly performative changes. All their big talk about one project, one review, one year is mainly stuck at the surface level. Of course streamlining the project approval process is helpful, but there are so many other things that need to go along with doing that. Once again, Bill C-39 would fail to do the fundamental work of creating the strongest possible regulatory environment built on consistency and certainty. The one-year timeline would apply to completed applications, but proponents for new projects would also be dealing with an open-ended preparatory phase without a hard deadline. That would cost millions and millions of dollars. I will give the example of Teck Frontier again. It had a writedown of $1.13 billion while it waited for the government to make an approval, and that is what it walked away from. That was the cost for Teck. Extensions could also be granted with Bill C-39, especially for consultation purposes. If this mechanism were applied to allow for some reasonable flexibility, it is true that there could be a benefit to industry in some cases, but right now we have no idea how it would play out and if it would be consistent. We still have uncertainty hanging over everyone’s heads, and because this is such a big and complex omnibus bill, it is tough to find clarity on some important points. If proponents missed a deadline, the application could be declined, but what would happen if the government missed the one-year deadline? Where is the accountability and the transparency for government to support industry? Could this put us right back in the same spot where projects run into death by delay all over again? The bill would allow cabinet to designate certain projects or regions in the national interest, but this might not be as promising as it sounds. Again, where is the consistency? The government would still have too much control over the process, where it could pick winners and losers. There would still plenty of room for having unhealthy favouritism between industries or for political priorities getting in the way of our economic recovery. We are still way too close to comfort to the way things were under Justin Trudeau and the same problems remain in place here. In a weird way, the Liberals are reinforcing the uncertainty and setting things up for it to become worse by proposing to centralize the process and opening it up for more politicization. While this is going on, global investors would still see that energy production remains subject to other priorities while uncompetitive policies remain in place, like the Liberals’ fuel regulations or an industrial carbon tax scheduled to increase. Canadian industry talks about a lost decade, and it is not because it is living in the past or crying over spilled milk. It is forced to make up for that lost time while facing global competitors and jurisdictions that do not punish their industries the same way that these Liberals do. It is not good enough for the government to take its sweet time and tinker with amendments to Trudeau’s policies. Bold and decisive action is the only answer. Canadians are running out of patience and they are tired of hearing excuses from the Liberals. Canada needs to build major projects to strengthen the economy, improve energy security and defend our national sovereignty. Success does not come from passing a bunch of Liberal government bills. We have to measure success by how many projects are built by the private sector and how many pipelines will move Canadian energy to market. Canadians need clear answers and strong action from the government. Like they say, it is time to get started. It has had 11 years. When will it get started?”