Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, we have a Conservative colleague who has come right out and asked us here in the House why it is easier for a company in southern Quebec to do business with New York state than with British Columbia. I think there is a reason why geography must remain a compulsory course for high school students. It is very important. The answer is that there is a continent separating Quebec and B.C. and, when it comes to interprovincial barriers to trade, some members of my colleague’s party have described bilingual signage and French-language signage as barriers to interprovincial trade. When I hear the Conservatives saying that the Prime Minister should threaten the provinces, that he should tell them to get rid of anything that people in western Canada see as a barrier or else the provinces will face the Prime Minister’s wrath, I think we have heard better arguments in the House. Members can see that the lights are out behind me, and there is a reason for that. It is because this is a dark afternoon for Parliament, because we are seized with Bill C-31, a very technical 300‑page bill with many amendments that are questionable or that need to be clearly debated in the House. However, the government is asking for carte blanche. It is telling us that it is going to impose time allocation and rush through this debate. Why is the government doing that? It is because this government has become arrogant. It secured a majority with 50% plus one, because that is enough for the Liberals here. This government is imposing closure motion after closure motion. It is shutting down committee work and ordering in camera proceedings on the Driver Inc. issue, when the chair of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities has been attending events put on by some of the organizations behind this scandal. What the Liberals are choosing to do is to put an end to debate. In addition, in terms of what happened with Bill C‑31, I consider it to be an injustice to parliamentarians. We had requested a technical briefing on this 300‑page bill. It is a lot of work for the party critics, because it is a bill that discusses everything and nothing, not only the budget, as the Speaker confirmed in his ruling on the point of order I had raised regarding division 17. We asked for a technical briefing. We did not get a response. A week went by. Two weeks went by. Three weeks went by. We finally got an answer last Thursday, with a technical briefing organized at the last minute, when a number of critics could not even participate because their committees were sitting. Today, we are told that we are going to rush through debating this bill, even though parliamentarians have not been given the tools they need to study it. When we were debating time allocation earlier, the heritage minister was here. He was the one doing the government’s dirty work for today. The heritage minister is the one discussing the budget today. That seems to be the arrangement. The heritage minister told us that we did not need a technical briefing. People can go look at the blues. They will be outraged that this is happening in the House of Commons. He told us that we did not need a technical briefing, that 300 pages is a long read and that three weeks is not enough time to read it. Today, he comes back and tells us that the government is going to impose time allocation, that we are going to debate all of this within a few hours and that that is plenty of time for us. I know that the heritage minister is smarter than some of the things he says in the House make him seem, but that does not mean he is entitled to treat us like idiots. That is a problem. What is the problem with this bill? We could spend hours discussing that. This bill expands subsidies to the oil industry and allows hydrogen produced from methane to be classified as clean hydrogen, whereas in Quebec, for example, hydrogen must be produced from renewable resources to be classified as clean. We recently had industry experts in to testify during the pre-budget consultations, and they clearly explained to us that—from a scientific perspective, as accepted by the industry—hydrogen produced from methane does not qualify as clean. Why is the government hiding this in a 300‑page document that will see virtually zero debate in the House? It is because it is in cahoots with the oil companies and is subsidizing them. The member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie just quit over this, and now here it is in Bill C-31. It deserves some debate, at the very least, especially because we know this bill is going to pass now that the Liberals have a majority. All we are asking for is a debate to share the views of those who elected us and who disagree with this, but we are being denied that debate in a democracy. Some measures are designed to give the government more power and allow for less transparency. Some measures limit who can file complaints with the procurement ombudsman and restrict the complaints that can be reviewed, at a time when spending, particularly military spending, is set to reach record levels and procurement will play a greater role than ever before. What does that mean? It means that the government does not care about protecting citizens, which is the whole point of having an ombudsman. For the government, an ombudsman is a problem. Obviously, the Liberals are not going to abolish the position, but it is like they are plucking every feather from a duck’s wings and telling it that it should still try to fly. That is what they are doing. That is exactly what they are doing. That is a problem, and it deserves to be debated. Division 17 will be voted on separately and has nothing to do with the budget. It was not in the budget speech. It was not in any document. To reduce the backlog of air passenger complaints, the Liberals are allowing the minister to have complaints handled by private companies that could potentially be chosen by the airlines. There may be an issue of parliamentary privilege here, because we hear that Air Canada was getting ready to select companies before we parliamentarians even saw the bill. The issue here is no longer just about moving closure, cutting off debate or bypassing committees. The issue is that airlines may have seen a bill before we, the elected members, did. I understand the seriousness of what I am saying, but that is what we suspect. Here is the context: President Trump increased tariffs based on a new formula in early April. They now stand at 25% on a wide range of goods, and 25% of Quebec’s exports are affected. Quebec is the hardest-hit province. However, when the Liberals tabled the budget update, they failed to take that into account. They used the wrong figures and calculations. They announced no measures to help the businesses that would be affected by this new tariff formula. We had to wait weeks, and the Prime Minister actually learned about it from us, during question period. I am not joking. We were the ones who informed the Prime Minister, in April, that the formula had been revised. The first time, he was taken aback. The second time, he told us he would provide a response during the budget statement. There was nothing when the budget statement was tabled, and we had to wait. There is nothing in any of this about enabling companies that will have to temporarily halt production due to these tariffs to keep their workers on the payroll. These workers will end up relying on employment insurance. Given the fund’s actuarial rules, EI cannot withstand two shocks at once. That is why we are calling for a measure that costs the same amount, namely, wage subsidies, which will ensure that EI can continue to be appropriately managed without raising contributions for businesses that need something other than higher taxes these days. We have been ignored. There is nothing about EI reform. We are just lurching from one temporary measure to the next. There is nothing for seniors. There is nothing for the forestry industry, nothing about buying back the countervailing duties that are paid to the United States in advance and that will eventually result in a victory for our timber exporters years from now. During those years, our forestry companies have no cash flow. We are asking the government to purchase this asset, which is money tied up in the United States in the form of countervailing duties, to give them some breathing room. It is an asset. It does not even count toward the deficit. It is an asset. There is nothing about this. There is nothing about Quebec’s request for $733 million for the influx of asylum seekers. There is nothing about the $814 million stolen from Quebec. There is only more and more subsidies to oil companies. What is this bill, then? It is an incomplete and ill-conceived bill with so much potential for controversy that the government wants to avoid debate. There is no clear indication that it will be passed before we leave. This bill could be passed in the fall, so there was no need for a closure motion. We have a government that is being run like a business and that is trying to reduce government accountability and transparency. I stand with all those who think that Parliament deserves better than what the Liberals are currently doing.
