Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in this place to participate in debate, particularly when the official opposition has the opportunity to apply serious scrutiny to legislation that asks Parliament to hand broad authority away from itself and to the executive. Bill C-28 deals with space launch and re-entry. It is not ideological. Most Canadians support the idea of Canada having a domestic space capability. They understand its importance to innovation, economic growth and, increasingly, national security. I support that goal as well, but ambition does not excuse poor design. Supporting the objective does not mean giving the government a blank cheque, especially in a sector that involves public safety, national security and potentially significant taxpayer exposure. We are entering a period of rapid growth in space-based activity. Satellite deployment, re-entry technologies and launch infrastructure are expanding quickly. Canada does not want to be left behind, and it should not be. The government argues that Bill C-28 is needed because Canada lacks a clear legislative framework for space launch and re-entry. That is true. These activities have been managed through aviation law and ad hoc decisions. That approach is no longer adequate. What is troubling is that Bill C-28 would not replace uncertainty with a clear law. It would replace it with discretion. Rather than having Parliament define rules, the bill asks Parliament to approve a framework and trust that the real decisions would be made later through regulation and ministerial judgment. The hardest questions are deferred. The risks are obscured. Parliamentary control is weakened. When one reads this bill carefully, the pattern is unmistakable. Launch permits, re-entry approvals, site certification, emergency stop powers, land use restrictions, financial responsibility requirements, exemptions from those requirements and the indemnification of private operators would all be placed within the discretion of the Minister of Transport. This is where the bill starts to drift from concerning to almost surreal. This entire regime assumes that the minister would personally oversee permits, exemptions, indemnification decisions, emergency stop orders, land use restrictions and national security judgments in one of the most complex and high-risk emerging sectors of the economy. That might sound reassuring until we remember that as of this moment, Canada does not even have a full-time Minister of Transport. We are being asked to believe that a part-time minister already juggling multiple portfolios would somehow have the time, the capacity and the sustained focus to personally weigh launch permits, re-entry approvals, liability thresholds, indemnification decisions and national security considerations, sometimes under time pressure, sometimes under political pressure, while taxpayers carry the downside risk. This is not a governance model. This is wishful thinking dressed up as legislation, which leads to a very practical question that the government has not answered and cannot avoid. When this industry scales up, and the government insists that it will, who exactly is supposed to manage all of this? Who is reviewing each permit? Who is assessing each re-entry? Who is recalibrating liability exposure? Who is deciding whether an operator qualifies for indemnification and when it does not? Under this bill, almost all the responsibility would flow upward to one political office, not to an independent regulator, not to a transparent statutory process, but to the discretion of the minister. Good policy depends on systems, not personalities. Bill C-28 gives us neither. Nowhere in this design flaw is that more serious than in the indemnification and liability provisions of the bill. Bill C-28 would remove space launch and re-entry activities, which, by the way, are not even defined in the act. It would take those activities from a normal aviation insurance framework and replace them with a new concept called “financial responsibility”. Parliament would not be told what those minimum levels would be. They obviously would be left to regulation, to be answered by the minister and his officials at their discretion. The bill then goes much further. It would allow the minister to reduce or waive those requirements and to indemnify private operators against third party liability, entirely at ministerial discretion. Let us be clear about exactly what that means. Indemnification is not a technical detail. It is government-backed insurance. It transfers risk from private companies onto taxpayers. If one operator is indemnified and another is not, the indemnified operator enjoys a powerful competitive advantage. Its risk profile drops, its financing costs fall, and its tolerance for failure increases. Its competitor, facing full commercial exposure, is placed at a structural disadvantage. Nothing in this bill would require indemnification to be offered on equal terms. Nothing would require similar risks to receive similar treatment. Nothing would require advanced disclosure to Parliament. Nothing would require public reporting afterward. This is not flexibility. That is state‑authorized market distortion. The political consequences of that structure are enormous. We already have a company operating in this space that has demonstrated financial instability and operational uncertainty. Under Bill C‑28, the same company could benefit enormously if indemnification is loosened or be severely harmed if that protection is tightened or withdrawn. In either case, the impact would be dramatic, but the decision would not be governed by rules set by Parliament. It would be by the politics of the day. If indemnification is loosened, taxpayers could be exposed to substantial and unquantified liability without ever knowing or realizing it. If it is withdrawn, a company could become commercially unviable almost overnight. In both cases, the consequences would be profound, yet the decision would occur behind closed doors. Taxpayers would not know what risks they were carrying. Parliament would not know what exposure it had approved. Only the minister would know. This is not transparency and accountability, and it is not responsible governance in a strategic sector involving public safety, national security and public money. When indemnification decisions are left entirely to ministerial discretion, they inevitably become political decisions. They are influenced by timing, urgency, pressure and optics. None of those is a substitute for law. This bill would effectively ask Parliament to assume that every minister under every political circumstance would exercise his or her power perfectly. History suggests otherwise. Laws exist precisely because judgment is imperfect and politics change. Taxpayers should never bear catastrophic risk as the result of decisions they cannot see, cannot measure and cannot challenge. The weakness in this bill extends beyond indemnification. The government speaks often about sovereignty and security when promoting Bill C‑28, yet the legislation fails to embed basic national security safeguards in statute. There would be no statutory requirement for foreign ownership or control screening of launch operators or payloads. There would be no requirement for beneficial ownership transparency. There would be no statutory test for payload mission profiles or end use. There would be no mandatory integration of intelligence or national security assessments into the approval process. Instead, these issues would be left to regulation or the discretion of the minister in the public interest. I have served on the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations, and we have seen, time after time, what happens when the use of the term “public interest” is exercised without any details from Parliament as to what is in the public interest in this narrow set of circumstances. What happens is uncertainty. What would happen under this bill? That uncertainty would be either a yes or a no from the minister, with no explanation given other than a denial. The minister could say, “It is not in the public interest to give you this permit. I’m revoking it.” We could ask what the public interest is, but the minister would not have any responsibility to say what it is. Usually, in the Aeronautics Act, someone would go to an administrative tribunal that has a specialty in this, but guess what. The minister has exempted this act from that tribunal’s auspices. Essentially, a company would have a window, based on weather conditions, to get a payload through the atmosphere. Suddenly, it would have to go to court to challenge a decision, which would inevitably cost the taxpayer money because the justice department now would have to say what is in the public interest, but it is not defined by law. This is a recipe for uncertainty, and for the minister to say it would give certainty to a market that has yet to exist is a big warning sign flashing. I want to say, “Ottawa, we have a problem here.” The result here is a convergence of risk that includes broad executive power, opaque indemnification authority, reduced independent review, large financial commitments and no hard-wired national security screening. This, like space, is a vacuum, a vacuum of accountability. The reasons the minister could give to deny a permit would be as black as space. We would not be able to see transparently why it was denied. This is a problem, considering that there is so much to be said about the Liberal government’s penchant for insiders. We know of the MLS launch. We know of the public record, which has been widely distributed, about it not being a going concern, then 158 conversations with the PMO and different ministers later and, wow, suddenly there is a $200-million lease for a property that was previously leased from the Province of Nova Scotia for $13,500 a year. It is now $55,000 a day. Again, opaque processes, uncertainty and the discretion of one individual are not a recipe for the rule of law. It is a recipe for inside activity. I have said a lot about these things because I am concerned and because I am a proud Canadian. I believe in innovation. I believe in progress. I believe we have Canadian know-how, and we have proven it, time and time again, but this is not a bill for our times. This is a bill for insiders. Let me be very clear. I have not been speaking about Canadian space launch capacity. This is an argument against governing it badly. Canada needs domestic launch and re-entry infrastructure. I am sure we can all agree on that. We also need clear, predictable and competitive rules, or else we are only going to track businesses that we will end up identifying, and we will not innovate because there will not be a sphere of competition that drives innovation, reduces costs and sees new ways and approaches come forward. This is because, under this act, there would not be the incentive to do so. It would be more incentive to get a better lobbyist than to get a better rocket. That is not the rocket fuel this industry needs or wants. We need taxpayers protected from unknowable exposure. We need national security safeguards that are automatic and non-negotiable. Once a satellite is in orbit and it does not use Canadian spectrum, the government has no responsibility or power over that satellite. That satellite, as I said, could be at the behest of a state actor and, let us be mindful, the People’s Republic of China does require its companies, under its national security laws, to comply with whatever they are asked of by the authoritarian government in Beijing. The Russians also have an interest in the north and its surveillance of the north. These are questions that the official opposition members are asking for some accountability on and some better answers. With what I heard today from the minister in his responses to me on national security and indemnification, it is clear that he has either not done the work or is silent on purpose. We need Parliament, not a minister, setting the rules for this space. We do not need legislation that privatizes reward, nationalizes risk and leaves Canadians in the dark. Space policy, I would argue, is too important, too expensive and too sensitive to be governed this way. Again, capital flows to stability. The minister is right that Canada has some wonderful attributes. We are a country that is politically stable. We have, most of the time, the rule of law, but if a large company were looking to make a strategic investment in Canada and seize this regime, and unless they have an inside track with a lobbyist who has the ability to get them what they want, I question that this is the right approach. If the government is serious about our sovereignty, it should be serious about accountability. If it is serious about security, it should put it right into the statute, right into Bill C-28. If it is serious about market activity, it should stop designing laws that reward discretion over discipline. Parliament should not approve a framework that asks Canadians to trust what they cannot see. I would like to say that it is always a pleasure to be here and to debate these important topics on behalf of the good people of Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna. I urge my colleagues to take the time to look into Bill C-28 to see with their own eyes not only what is there, which is the fact that almost all of the power would be given to one person, but also the large gaps in the bill that this Parliament could and should address.
