Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is with great joy and pleasure that I rise to take part in today’s debate on Bill C-39, introduced by the government. I am also very pleased to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the Conservative member for Tobique—Mactaquac. As Conservatives, we have one primary objective here in the House, and that is to save Canadians money. There are ways the government can do just that. For example, it could cut taxes or even eliminate them. What we have been proposing for months is to eliminate taxes on natural resources, such as oil, to speed up the process of getting projects built. That would leave Canadians with more money in their pockets. That is the quickest way of getting this done. Unfortunately, the Liberals are only partially implementing this idea. Another thing the government could do is get out of the way and let entrepreneurs and Canadians develop our natural resources to their full potential and create wealth in the process. Canada is the envy of the world because our country has every natural resource and every kind of energy. For the past 10 years, however, we have seen successive Liberal governments stop at nothing to keep Canada’s incredible natural resource and energy potential from being fully realized. No discussion of natural resources and energy can be considered complete unless it encompasses both sides. We cannot rely purely on traditional energy sources like fossil fuels or purely on green energy. We need a combination of both. Achieving that will take willingness, openness and most of all, an end to the contempt that Canadians have witnessed and experienced over the past 10 years. Successive Liberal governments have treated certain so-called “traditional” natural resources, such as gasoline and so on, with contempt. Let us not forget that a new government was elected in 2015. Prime Minister Trudeau said loud and proud that “Canada is back”. Some will recall that he was very proud to say that in Davos, and everyone applauded him. He was the new global star. That reminds me of certain things that are happening right now. The people in Davos were delighted to hear Prime Minister Trudeau say that the Canadian economy, and I am paraphrasing here, would no longer rely solely on what is beneath our feet, but also on what is between our ears. That was so disrespectful to Canadians, as if there had been nothing between people’s ears since Confederation, or even long before that. That was the essence of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal policy: contempt for what lies beneath our feet, namely our energy resources and all the potential they represent. As we saw, regulations and laws were enacted that were truly intended to hinder economic development and undermine the potential of our natural resources. Examples include Bill C-48 and Bill C-69. I will come back to that a little later, because, unfortunately, nothing has changed. Some would have us believe that a new tone has been set in the past 18 months with the arrival of the new Prime Minister. We must tread lightly here. The current government deserves a global award for all their announcements, summits, ceremonies, statements and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. That is truly impressive, but where are the concrete results? During the election campaign, the Liberals were going on about Build Canada Homes. We had a good laugh at the time. Let me just say that the French title “bâtir Maisons Canada” sounded a bit like something out of the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Where are these houses? Where were they built? What concrete results have Liberal policies produced over the past 18 months? There are none. I would remind members that one of the first bills the government tabled was Bill C‑5, whose objective—yes, I said “objective”—was to speed up the process of integrating practices. We, the Conservatives, did not oppose that approach. We even voted in favour of a closure motion so we could move forward. However, 18 months later, where are the concrete results? That is the issue. The Liberals put on a big show and make nice announcements, but there are no concrete results. The proof is that, at this very moment, the Prime Minister has a pile of documents on his desk. Some 500 projects are ready to move forward, and those projects are currently being held up. If the government truly intends to advance Canada’s economic development, it should green-light those 500 projects. While 500 projects await action on the Prime Minister’s desk, his government has created 14 new government agencies. Bill C‑69 and Bill C‑48 remain in effect. Our leader said something yesterday that is worth repeating because it goes to the heart of the matter. He quoted Bill C‑69 and said that anyone seeking to proceed with a project must still provide an analysis of “the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors”, as if that had anything to do with mines, pipelines and seaports. We thought the Trudeau era was behind us, but it is still alive and well. These are left-wing policies. The Liberals go on and on about their lofty principles. Woke policies remain in place because of Bill C‑69 and Bill C‑48. That applies to something else, too. As mentioned yesterday, proponents must still consider “any other matter relevant to the impact assessment that the responsible authority requires to be taken into account”. The government wants to do it, wants to move forward, or at least that is what it is saying, but everything is open to all sorts of analyses. That is fine. We understand that. However, if we are talking about taking real action to reach our full potential, that is not what the government is doing. We have been debating the government’s Bill C-39 for the past two days. If we understood the government correctly, this bill seeks to do what the government has not done for 18 months, despite Bill C-5. That is basically what this is. I have to say that it is rather ridiculous how these people were boasting about how Bill C-5 was a new approach. Now, here we are, 18 months later, and they are introducing another bill that takes a very similar approach, when we have yet to see any results. That is proof that the Liberals did not do their job properly on this. We are talking about an omnibus bill that is nearly 250 pages long and contains hundreds and hundreds of provisions that we need to examine. Of course, as with all parliamentary work, the devil is in the details. We understand that there is a time limit. Earlier, I heard my colleague say that projects can begin after a one-year review period, but that is not the case because the government is giving itself the power to suspend that time limit at any time. Imagine a foreign investor who sees Canada’s immense potential and decides to take the plunge, thinking everything will work out. I wonder what will happen when that investor realizes that one very important detail will change once Bill C-39 is passed: The government will get the power to suspend this one-year time limit. That is not a good thing. Obviously, a good way to reduce delays is to require only one environmental assessment per project. Two years ago, on behalf of the official opposition party, I was extremely proud to introduce Bill C-375, which sought to do exactly that: have just one environmental assessment, not two, per project. We worked with the provinces to move the bill along. I even managed to get the Bloc Québécois members to support the principle and vote with us at second reading. Unfortunately, the Liberals and the NDP voted against the bill, so it died. It is no stretch of the imagination to assume that, if we had passed that bill two years ago, our actions would have worked proactively in Canada’s favour. In the Speech from the Throne given 18 months ago, the King himself repeated what I had said in the House, that one project requires just one assessment. The King said so himself in the Speech from the Throne, which is no small thing, yet 18 months later, things are still not moving, and the “one project, one review” principle has still not been implemented across Canada from coast to coast to coast. Our message to the government is that it should take some inspiration from what the Harper government did during the economic crisis we had to grapple with in 2008 and 2009. The process was streamlined. Every project had to be analyzed on a single page rather than pages and pages. It worked, because 23,500 projects were put forward under the Harper government. As Conservatives, we value efficiency. We want the government to be efficient and to take inspiration from what we did back then, not from the inaction of the past 18 months. Unfortunately, the government is slow to deliver any real results.
