Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, let us talk about Bill C-39, the building Canada strong act, not to be confused with the Building Canada Act or whatever act was before that. Nearly 18 months ago, the Prime Minister promised that we would build “at speeds not seen in generations”. A year and a half later, the situation is dire, and I think most Canadians would agree. Not a single major project has gone from announcement to shovels in the ground. Antidevelopment laws like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 are still on the books, and they are stifling investment and innovation in this country. The tanker ban and the industrial carbon tax remain, as does the stack of regulations and red tape that makes it next to impossible to build in this country. All of that remains despite Bill C-5. I know those watching at home are confused by the numbers. The Liberals brought Bill C-5 through this place almost 18 months ago. They said it was revolutionary legislation that was going to have projects built. We passed it through the House in a record five days. They called it a catalyst, one of the Prime Minister’s favourite words. They said it would let them do bigger things and do it faster with a brand new Major Projects Office to lead the way. Today, there are zero shovels in the ground, zero new major projects moving forward, and that office has spent more on bureaucracy and hiring people than it has on building a single project. Once again, the words outrun the results. We have to ask if Bill C-39, the legislation that we are discussing today, which is absolutely needed after the Liberals got the legislation passed that they initially needed, is the solution that members opposite have been claiming it is or if it is another announcement, another press release, another sort of time stamp in the road so they can restart the clock, saying this is the thing that they need to move forward. Before, they said that was the last thing we needed to move forward. I am inclined to believe it is the latter, because past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, and Canadians should not forget that. Over 10 years, the government has driven investment out of Canada. It threw up roadblocks. It called anyone who wanted to build a pipeline a climate change denier. It discouraged risk-taking in this country with punitive taxes, and they picked winners and losers. The result was $1 trillion of capital leaving this country and going elsewhere. Our productivity stagnated. Our standard of living declined. If productivity had kept pace even with the United Nations since 2015, every Canadian would be roughly $11,000 richer, $11,000 better off than today. Instead, half of full-time workers are spending their income or more on their living expenses, and half are living paycheque to paycheque. This is in a country that only a few years ago had the richest middle class in the developed world. We do not need to look at the past to suspect that the sizzle of this bill, Bill C-39, is bigger than the steak. We have seen this before. The present tells the exact same story. The Prime Minister likes to say we should control what we can control, and I agree. Let us look at what he controls. Right now, there are over 500 proposals sitting on his desk, and all they need is a signature. They do not need a new slogan. They do not need a new bill. They do not need a new trade mission. They do not need a new photo op. He just has to sign them. That is his choice. Even the signature is no guarantee because we have seen investment summits, memorandums of understanding, agreements, press conferences and just yesterday, we saw the OECD downgrade Canada’s growth outlook while peer countries saw theirs upgraded. The people now promising to fix this are, in many cases, the same ministers and MPs whose high-tax, anti-growth agenda caused this problem in the first place. If we were to look outside this place, we could forgive people for being skeptical. The results keep being pushed down the road with a new piece of legislation, a new MOU or a new announcement, but the results have not arrived. Nowhere is the gap between promise and delivery wider than it is in resource development here in this country. I want to speak directly to the members of the left flank of the Liberal caucus. For a decade, they told Canadians that resource development was a moral question. To them, it was not about economics or engineering, and it was not about trade-offs. It was truly, in their eyes, a test of character. If we wanted a pipeline, we were deniers. If we wanted a mine, we did not care about our planet or our children’s future. If we wanted to sell our energy to other markets, which would buy them from somebody else anyway, we were on the wrong side of history. They enforced that standard relentlessly on everybody who disagreed with them. They enforced it against the opposition, against premiers and against members of their own party who sometimes asked whether all of that was working. Now, members can read Bill C-39. They can read what it would do to the federal review permitting. They can read about the exemption powers. They can read the section on labour. What would they have said if a Conservative government tabled a 246-page piece of omnibus legislation that would do nothing for workers and would build nothing? The bill claims to fast-track the very projects those Liberals once called a moral failure in the House, and that was not that long ago, but it even fails at that. They would have called it a betrayal. They would have used exactly that word. The question is not whether they have changed their position. We know they did. The question is what that left flank of the Liberal Party got for it. They spent their political capital. They asked their most loyal supporters, people who believed this was about the planet, to accept their reversal, and 18 months in, with a Major Projects Office and legislation on the move, not one of these projects’ delivery is under way. They burned all of that political capital passing these pieces of legislation without having a single shovel in the ground. They made the trade. They just did not get anything for it. If they now believe that the last decade was too rigid and this country needs to build, then they should get up out of their seats to say so plainly, acknowledge that the cost was measured in projects that died and that investment went elsewhere outside of the country. That would at least be honest. However, what we are going to see over and over again is the left flank of the Liberal Party hiding behind rhetoric that just is not true, and they traded it away for nothing. It is the same pattern with big announcements, with there being little to show for them. After last week’s investment summit, the Prime Minister came away promising a half a trillion dollars of investment, and we welcome that. The problem is that people are filling their gas tanks, which were already empty, half full. A trillion dollars of investment left this country. That is why the skepticism runs high. The skepticism runs high when people look at the government and see it acting one way for 11 years. It had 18 months to change everything, but it is yet another piece of legislation, one that has produced no results. I am going to end with this: I do not want members to take away that we are going to dismiss the bill before us. Conservatives are not rejecting Bill C-39, but we will study it, press for details, scrutinize it and work to improve it to make sure it actually builds something. That is our job as the official opposition, and that is how we are going to hold the government to account on what it brings before the chamber. However, we will not simply take the government’s word and accept all the promises the Liberals have made. Canada has everything it needs to succeed. We have fields of crops. We are rich in minerals. We have resources, oceans full of fish and the people with the talent to make it all happen. What we need is a government that will get out of the way, and one that will talk about repealing legislation already on the books, but everything we have seen until now tells us that is not this government.
