Discussion · Government Orders
Garnett Genuis Conservative
“This bill creates more government offices instead of actually building things. We need fewer rules and simpler reviews for all projects, not just the ones the government likes. I want to send this bill to a committee so we can fix it and get real results.”
“Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House this evening, as always. When I was growing up, I had four siblings. Members will be shocked to know that, as my desk often is today, my room was very messy growing up. My parents would, from time to time, insist that I clean it and then conduct a thorough inspection to ensure the room had been cleaned. I mastered the technique of cleaning my room. It involved picking up all my stuff and moving it into my sister’s room across the hall. Following the inspection, I would move the items back. I say this to demonstrate to members that I know well the difference between getting something done and feverishly moving things around in order to create the impression of activity and results when nothing is actually changing. That brings me to the bill before the House today, Bill C-39. The government is very fond of describing itself as a new government, of all the same people, more or less. Nonetheless, we are starting to get a bit of a sense of the character of this new government of the same people. Frankly, they are a bit slippery. They pride themselves on their slipperiness. I will give some examples. A year ago, before the House, we had the Build Canada Act, which was supposed to be transformational. It was going to make it so much easier to build things, and it was going to be transformational. It created the Major Projects Office. It did not create major projects, but it created a Major Projects Office. It was so successful that a year later, the Liberals decided they needed a new bill. This is not the Build Canada Act; it is the building Canada strong act. The sequel is always a little worse. The bill would have even more offices. We would have the transportation projects office. We would have a national transportation council. We would have all kinds of new bodies and offices. I hate to imagine what the name of the bill will be this time next year. Maybe all those watching CPAC at home can send their suggestions in to the Prime Minister. Maybe it will be the “build Canada even stronger act” or “the build Canada the strongest yet act”. It will keep going as long as they have a chance, with the proliferation of new offices. However, the reality is that they are calling Bill C-39 the building Canada strong act. It is the building Canada strong act in more ways than one. It is the building Canada strong act instead of the building Canada strong reality, because the government is continually talking about how this is really going to be the big one that actually gets it done. The government is just going to create five or six more offices. It is going to have more councils of different bureaucrats, and that will be the game-changer for now. We can see the political utility of this. It is to constantly be putting in the window this new sense of engaging in feverish activity. The government is putting in place more instruments and more mechanisms. As I hope the anecdote I shared at the beginning established, that feverish activity is not the same as results. Generally speaking, we need fewer offices, not more offices. We need less bureaucratic intervention, not more bureaucratic intervention. We need government to get out of the way so that major projects can move forward. We do not need to add to the number of offices and bureaucrats. We need to simplify the process. We very much support the principle of one project, one review; of having efficient timelines for all projects to move forward. The approach the government takes is cherry-picking: “Okay, this is a major project we like and we are going to give it special treatment.” The approach was better than nothing in the midst of the regulatory pile-on that Canadian companies have dealt with for so long, but we favour an approach that simplifies the approval processes for all companies, large and small, for all kinds of projects, and we favour processes that are focused on results. It is time to have a government that actually focuses on the results instead of the appearance of activity, and that asks to be measured by the results that are produced. Increasingly, what we hear from Canadians is the challenging results in their lives. We are going to see job numbers later this week, but already, even before the escalation of the trade war with the United States, we had a significant increase in job losses. There was another big increase in youth unemployment last month. We continue to hear from people whose businesses are struggling as a result of overtaxation and over-regulation. Again, we need simplified processes. We need policies that actually deliver on the promises of this legislation. Canadians, in general, welcome a certain change in tone that we have seen from the Liberals. At one time in the past, the Liberals were more explicitly antidevelopment. Now they talk in ways that sound like they are more supportive of development, but what really matters are the results. Again, we see the slipperiness of the current government, putting forward big acts with big names and repeatedly doing that year after year, but we are not seeing the results. Canadians will not long be fooled by a slippery government. They will demand a reality in this country that flows from the big claims and the big rhetoric. We saw another demonstration today of the slipperiness of the government, in bizarre and tragic terms. We had a colleague from the Conservative Party put forward an excellent bill to protect Canadians by ending the possibility of MAID for those with mental health challenges. The government, on the one hand, said it agrees with the principle of ending MAID for those with mental health challenges, and then almost universally voted against the bill. The Liberals voted to kill a bill that would have done something that they said they wanted to do, but they said that if they did it, they would do it with their own legislation, which has yet to be drafted and which would be paired with another further expansion of MAID, an expansion that raises all kinds of significant concerns at a time when Canadians are increasingly alarmed by the extreme and dangerous nature of the MAID regime in Canada. The government hears those concerns and is therefore trying to pretend that it is responding to them, while at the same time voting against a bill that would actually address the issue. It is a slippery government that is saying one thing but trying to bury the reality in the midst of what it is saying. Our vision in the Conservative Party is for action that is genuinely pro-development; that unleashes the potential of this country’s economy, of its people and of its natural resources; that creates review processes that are clear and are simple. Our vision does not use these kinds of moments as excuses for the greater proliferation of bureaucracy and administration, but zeroes in on the changes that would actually produce results. There is some of the rhetoric around Bill C-39 and some of the stated objectives that we can certainly get behind, but I will believe it when I see it. We will believe it when we are no longer seeing year after year of bills with nice-sounding names that promise this is going to be the one that does it, and yet we never actually see those results. People want to see major projects and big investments built, and able to move forward in this country as used to happen in the past. They want to see jobs, opportunity and prosperity flow from that. That is what we are going to be fighting for on this side of the House as we move this bill forward, as we study it at committee and we scrutinize the provisions to try to push the government to actually deliver on the promise.”
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House this evening, as always. When I was growing up, I had four siblings. Members will be shocked to know that, as my desk often is today, my room was very messy growing up. My parents would, from time to time, insist that I clean it and then conduct a thorough inspection to ensure the room had been cleaned. I mastered the technique of cleaning my room. It involved picking up all my stuff and moving it into my sister’s room across the hall. Following the inspection, I would move the items back. I say this to demonstrate to members that I know well the difference between getting something done and feverishly moving things around in order to create the impression of activity and results when nothing is actually changing. That brings me to the bill before the House today, Bill C-39. The government is very fond of describing itself as a new government, of all the same people, more or less. Nonetheless, we are starting to get a bit of a sense of the character of this new government of the same people. Frankly, they are a bit slippery. They pride themselves on their slipperiness. I will give some examples. A year ago, before the House, we had the Build Canada Act, which was supposed to be transformational. It was going to make it so much easier to build things, and it was going to be transformational. It created the Major Projects Office. It did not create major projects, but it created a Major Projects Office. It was so successful that a year later, the Liberals decided they needed a new bill. This is not the Build Canada Act; it is the building Canada strong act. The sequel is always a little worse. The bill would have even more offices. We would have the transportation projects office. We would have a national transportation council. We would have all kinds of new bodies and offices. I hate to imagine what the name of the bill will be this time next year. Maybe all those watching CPAC at home can send their suggestions in to the Prime Minister. Maybe it will be the “build Canada even stronger act” or “the build Canada the strongest yet act”. It will keep going as long as they have a chance, with the proliferation of new offices. However, the reality is that they are calling Bill C-39 the building Canada strong act. It is the building Canada strong act in more ways than one. It is the building Canada strong act instead of the building Canada strong reality, because the government is continually talking about how this is really going to be the big one that actually gets it done. The government is just going to create five or six more offices. It is going to have more councils of different bureaucrats, and that will be the game-changer for now. We can see the political utility of this. It is to constantly be putting in the window this new sense of engaging in feverish activity. The government is putting in place more instruments and more mechanisms. As I hope the anecdote I shared at the beginning established, that feverish activity is not the same as results. Generally speaking, we need fewer offices, not more offices. We need less bureaucratic intervention, not more bureaucratic intervention. We need government to get out of the way so that major projects can move forward. We do not need to add to the number of offices and bureaucrats. We need to simplify the process. We very much support the principle of one project, one review; of having efficient timelines for all projects to move forward. The approach the government takes is cherry-picking: “Okay, this is a major project we like and we are going to give it special treatment.” The approach was better than nothing in the midst of the regulatory pile-on that Canadian companies have dealt with for so long, but we favour an approach that simplifies the approval processes for all companies, large and small, for all kinds of projects, and we favour processes that are focused on results. It is time to have a government that actually focuses on the results instead of the appearance of activity, and that asks to be measured by the results that are produced. Increasingly, what we hear from Canadians is the challenging results in their lives. We are going to see job numbers later this week, but already, even before the escalation of the trade war with the United States, we had a significant increase in job losses. There was another big increase in youth unemployment last month. We continue to hear from people whose businesses are struggling as a result of overtaxation and over-regulation. Again, we need simplified processes. We need policies that actually deliver on the promises of this legislation. Canadians, in general, welcome a certain change in tone that we have seen from the Liberals. At one time in the past, the Liberals were more explicitly antidevelopment. Now they talk in ways that sound like they are more supportive of development, but what really matters are the results. Again, we see the slipperiness of the current government, putting forward big acts with big names and repeatedly doing that year after year, but we are not seeing the results. Canadians will not long be fooled by a slippery government. They will demand a reality in this country that flows from the big claims and the big rhetoric. We saw another demonstration today of the slipperiness of the government, in bizarre and tragic terms. We had a colleague from the Conservative Party put forward an excellent bill to protect Canadians by ending the possibility of MAID for those with mental health challenges. The government, on the one hand, said it agrees with the principle of ending MAID for those with mental health challenges, and then almost universally voted against the bill. The Liberals voted to kill a bill that would have done something that they said they wanted to do, but they said that if they did it, they would do it with their own legislation, which has yet to be drafted and which would be paired with another further expansion of MAID, an expansion that raises all kinds of significant concerns at a time when Canadians are increasingly alarmed by the extreme and dangerous nature of the MAID regime in Canada. The government hears those concerns and is therefore trying to pretend that it is responding to them, while at the same time voting against a bill that would actually address the issue. It is a slippery government that is saying one thing but trying to bury the reality in the midst of what it is saying. Our vision in the Conservative Party is for action that is genuinely pro-development; that unleashes the potential of this country’s economy, of its people and of its natural resources; that creates review processes that are clear and are simple. Our vision does not use these kinds of moments as excuses for the greater proliferation of bureaucracy and administration, but zeroes in on the changes that would actually produce results. There is some of the rhetoric around Bill C-39 and some of the stated objectives that we can certainly get behind, but I will believe it when I see it. We will believe it when we are no longer seeing year after year of bills with nice-sounding names that promise this is going to be the one that does it, and yet we never actually see those results. People want to see major projects and big investments built, and able to move forward in this country as used to happen in the past. They want to see jobs, opportunity and prosperity flow from that. That is what we are going to be fighting for on this side of the House as we move this bill forward, as we study it at committee and we scrutinize the provisions to try to push the government to actually deliver on the promise.