Alexis Deschênes

“Mr. Speaker, Bill C-39 is a 231-page omnibus bill. It is legislation that claims to build Canada faster, but beneath the language are serious questions about who gets power, who gets certainty and who bears the risk. The government says this bill respects indigenous rights, protects workers and maintains environmental standards, but the details tell a different story. On indigenous rights, consultation is being compressed into a process designed to meet the government’s one-year timeline, as though section 35 rights and treaty obligations can simply be fit into a project management schedule. On the environment, economic development is being prioritized in the name of speed, while safeguards are being weakened. On workers’ rights, the bill preserves significant federal power to unfairly intervene in labour disputes after workers have exercised their constitutionally protected right to strike. We have to ask ourselves a simple question: For whom is it faster, and who benefits from that speed? This legislation is about much more than construction timelines. It is about power: power for corporations, power for investors, power for government ministers and increasingly power over workers. Let me begin with workers. The government says this bill would provide greater protection for workers, yet section 107 of the Labour Code preserves a significant federal power to intervene in labour disputes after workers have exercised their right to strike. The government describes the changes in Bill C-39 as putting guardrails around that power, but organized labour condemns the legislation and has described it as trampling on the rights of workers. CUPE national president Mark Hancock put it plainly: Gutting hard-won rights and protections for workers will not create certainty; it will do the opposite. Workers are not an obstacle to building Canada. Workers are team Canada. The people who operate our ports are team Canada. The people who move our railways are team Canada. Flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, telecommunications workers, postal workers and countless others are team Canada. They are the people who make our economy possible. The right to strike exists because workers need leverage. An individual worker cannot negotiate with a multinational corporation on equal terms. Collective bargaining changes that balance, and the right to strike gives collective bargaining real economic force. Most workers do not strike because it is convenient. They lose wages. They put pressure on their families. They take real economic risks. A strike is generally a last resort, and that is precisely why it is effective. The government’s own briefing says that approximately 95% of labour disputes in federally regulated sectors are resolved without a work stoppage. If the system already resolves the overwhelming majority of disputes without strikes, why should the answer be to expand extraordinary government intervention for the remaining 5%? The government has already used section 107 in disputes involving Air Canada, WestJet, ports, rail and postal workers. This bill risks turning exceptional government intervention into an increasingly normalized part of collective bargaining, and that changes the bargaining relationship. If an employer knows that the government may intervene when a strike creates significant economic pressure, the employer has less incentive to reach a deal at the bargaining table. That weakens workers’ leverage, and it raises a fundamental question about the phrase “national interest”. A strike at a port disrupts cargo. A railway strike may disrupt supply chains. An airline strike may disrupt travel. Economic disruption is also the mechanism through which workers gain bargaining leverage. If economic disruption becomes the basis for the government’s intervention, then the more effective a strike is, the greater the pressure to intervene. That is precisely why this provision would remove the incentive for management to bargain fairly at the negotiating table. This supposed safeguard would not eliminate the underlying power. This is not simply a labour issue. It is a question about democracy, because democracy does not stop at the door of the workplace. Workers deserve rights and meaningful power at the bargaining table. They deserve safe workplaces, protection from misclassification and wage theft, strong labour standards and a properly resourced Canada Industrial Relations Board. They also deserve a right to strike that is meaningful in practice, not simply protected in principle. No union leader called for this. In fact, they are demanding that the government repeal section 107. Instead of moving forward with this, the government should support the member for Winnipeg Centre’s private member’s bill, Bill C-247, to repeal section 107. Let me now turn to the environment. The government says Canada needs to build faster. We agree. Canada needs housing, renewable energy, transmission and grid infrastructure, public transit and clean manufacturing, but environmental laws are not red tape. They are the safeguards that allow governments to determine whether a project is actually in the public interest before irreversible damage occurs. An impact assessment asks basic questions: What happens to the water? What happens to wildlife? What happens to communities? What happens to indigenous rights? What happens to human health? What happens to the climate? Those are not bureaucratic obstacles. They are the due diligence of a responsible government. Bill C-39 would impose a one-year timeline on major project approvals, create regions of national interest, shift responsibility for pipeline assessments to the Canada Energy Regulator, allow certain preparatory construction activities before final approval and give ministers a greater ability to amend project conditions. The government says environmental standards would remain in place, but a complex project does not become less complex because the government puts a 12-month deadline on it, and an environmental risk does not disappear because the approval process has been pushed through a 12-month deadline. The government cannot make nature move faster. It cannot make a damaged ecosystem recover faster, and it cannot reverse ecological destruction once it happens. There is no undo button for extinction, contaminated water or a destroyed ecosystem. That is why the precautionary principle matters. Consider the Roberts Bank terminal 2 example. The project went through a federal review with conditions intended to mitigate impacts on the southern resident killer whale. Environmental organizations have raised concerns that the new framework could permit conditions on projects of national interest to be modified or removed. That should make every member of the House ask this: If a condition was imposed to protect an endangered population, under what circumstances should a minister be able to remove it after approval? Who bears the risk if that protection is weakened? It would not be the minister or the corporation sitting in the boardroom. The risk would be borne by ecosystems, communities and future generations. This is not responsible nation building. It is transferring risk from powerful economic actors to the public. The same concern applies to allowing certain preparatory work before the final project decision. Why begin altering the landscape before we have determined whether the project should proceed? Once construction begins, the political and economic pressure to finish becomes enormous. An assessment that is supposed to determine whether a project should proceed risks becoming an exercise in managing a project that has already begun. That is not simply speeding up decision-making. It risks changing the nature of the decision itself. Then there are indigenous rights. The government says consultation requirements remain in place and that a Crown consultation hub would coordinate the process, but there is an enormous difference between streamlining administration and compressing rights. Indigenous rights cannot be reduced to another item on a project management timeline. Free, prior and informed consent cannot mean that we have 12 months, so please get on with it. Consultation must be meaningful, must be informed and must happen before decisions are locked in. Indigenous nations must have a meaningful role in decisions affecting their lands, rights and territories. This is not an obstacle to building Canada. It is part of building Canada properly. If the government is serious about reconciliation, indigenous consultation cannot be treated as another regulatory hurdle that gets in the way and is called red tape.”