“I do not support this bill because it does not fix our slow project approval system. Canada is losing business investment to other countries. This bill says reviews will take one year, but that clock starts late and the government can pause it anytime. We need to scrap the Impact Assessment Act, cut red tape, and make project approvals fast and predictable.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in this House and speak on behalf of the residents of Calgary Signal Hill. It is an unfortunate fact that Canada’s economy is stagnating. There has been 0% growth reported for July 2026, with manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade pulling back in our country. Unemployment is above 6%, with youth unemployment more than double that. Projections for Canada’s national economic performance are the worst in the OECD. We know that Canada needs investment. We know inherently, and through data, statistics and analysis, that our economy requires investment as the foundation for growing gross domestic product, GDP. Unfortunately, in the last decade of the Liberal government, for every dollar of inward foreign direct investment, two dollars has exited. That is not the basis on which we grow our country. The reality is it is a significant contributor to Canada’s productivity crisis. In such dire circumstances, Canada remains a land of great promise. It is a country of strong people and communities. It is a country that possesses great resilience, which has never been more important than now. What we need most is a government that does not seek to determine what is best, does not seek to pick winners and losers in matters of business and industry, but rather facilitates the abilities and capacities of our great nation. There is much more that the government can do to unleash Canada’s potential. All of this starts with recognizing that the first job of government is to facilitate, and to do that it must stay out of the way to the greatest extent possible. Industry and business have been clear to the government that doing business in Canada has become too difficult and too hard to undertake. In particular, the first step in major economic projects is permits and approvals, which are too uncertain to justify the work required to obtain them. It may be a fact some would like to ignore, but investment capital is mobile, and it will go where the opportunity is the best. Over the last 11 years, that has not been Canada. The first effort of the Liberal government to change directions from its prior 10 years of governance has been the Major Projects Office created under Bill C-5. Projects are not, however, getting approved. To date, there have been zero projects approved by the Major Projects Office, despite more than a year since the creation of this new bureaucracy. Everyone does remember the words, “speeds not seen in generations.” Those words were spoken by the Prime Minister, and they remain hollow today. The path forward is a clear and unambiguous framework for project permitting and approvals that is transparent to all Canadians and allows businesses to plan and to build. Let me say here that I am not suggesting that our country cut corners. We need not sacrifice health and safety or environmental standards and practices in order to grow and develop our economy. As all members of the House know well, Canadian industry leads the world in many areas, including environmental practices, and we must continue to do so. What we need are reasonable processes that are not in and of themselves the reason projects do not go forward. I think of the northern gateway pipeline project, a project that was very important to my home province of Alberta and indeed to our country as a whole. It was an $8-billion pipeline project that died 10 years ago due to a lack of support from the government. The proponent of that pipeline, Enbridge, spent in excess of $500 million on that project and lost that money. While the press conferences and announcements of today on this subject from the government have been much improved, the anti-business Liberal legacy is large and still overshadows our country. We need to take politics out of the project approval process when our industry and its expert regulators are doing what they know how to do and what they are expert in. Political approvals are uncertain and a barrier to economic development. We need projects to benefit from a clear, transparent and predictable approval process, not just those projects the government likes. There needs to be a simple harmonization of existing regulations. The one-year time frame or target that has been put in place is not a complete answer to the uncertainty that is holding back our businesses. With the ability of the government to extend that statutory time frame, we end up in the same place, which is political process, political approval and political favouritism. This is not a basis on which we can go forward. We need more than a process that is a workaround designed to avoid the impacts of bad legislation. We need to remove the bad legislation. We need to fix the foundation on which our economy is built, and that means repealing Bill C-69. We all remember the Impact Assessment Act, known in my part of Canada as the “no more pipelines” act. There is a need as well for a massive overhaul of the regulations that are stifling investment all across the approval framework. These small steps forward, as in this legislation, do not get us to the point we need to get to. A problem with this legislation is that the year-long time frame only begins once a comprehensive application has been completed. It remains uncertain at what point that approval or that step in the process will be secured. Industry and business have been clear with the government that red tape, the regulatory burden of undertaking business in Canada, is a major barrier to doing business in our country. No reductions in the regulations, pre-approvals and studies required will improve the situation. There is no guarantee these changes are going to have success with business. The pause on the timeline that the government could put in place is also a recurring problem, as there is no limit on this aspect of the approval process. Business needs to be assured that projects will move forward. We need certainty around timelines so that business has the ability to invest. The creation of zones of national interest is very similar to identifying projects as being in the national interest. Again, it is an uncertainty and a political process, and it is not going to be helpful in moving things forward. Fundamentally, we need greater transportation infrastructure to support trade. Over the last year, I have served on the international trade committee and we have heard from businesses across all economic sectors that the need for improved transportation infrastructure is critical in Canada. It is going to be one of those things that we will not move forward without. While there are some indications that changes may be made, the bill does not go far enough in that respect. We have much more that we need to do with respect to this process. An example of transportation missteps is the effort of the government to sell off interests in our airports. That alone, a simple transfer of ownership, like foreign direct investment that comes into Canada to purchase existing assets, does nothing in and of itself to increase business capital available for growth, expansion and development. That is yet another thought that makes me think more of a portfolio manager and less of a Prime Minister, in terms of the disposition of our leadership and the Liberal government. Going forward, Canada needs an improved foundation for doing business. Conservatives would make those foundational changes and bring in legislation that makes an approval and permitting process clear and certain. I emphasize again that we need cut no corners. We simply need a clear process.”

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“The government should not control the economy or fund projects that businesses can pay for themselves. Businesses will build our economy and create wealth if the government gets out of the way.”

“Mr. Speaker, the question, or, really, the statement with a wee little question tucked on the end of it, really belies a fundamental philosophical difference between that side of the aisle and this side, that the government should be directing our economy and that no project should go forward without government approval, political approval and government investment. I do not believe that projects that can be financed and undertaken by the private sector require government money. The private sector will build economic projects in our country. It will build prosperity in our country. What it needs, what we need and what Canada needs is for the government to get out of the way.”

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“Everyone in Canada should have a home, but this government is bad at building them. This is the fourth time they have tried and failed. The Prime Minister promised 500,000 homes, but the budget officer says his plan will only build about 5,000 a year.”

“Mr. Speaker, certainly, no person in Canada who wishes to be housed should be unhoused. However, what is clear in Canada is that the federal government has among the worst ways to try to deliver housing effectively in Canada. We are now on our fourth major Liberal effort to bring in housing improvements in Canada, without success. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has projected that roughly 5,000 homes at a maximum will be built under the current Liberal government program. That is 5,000 per year for five years. This is a far cry from the 500,000 homes that our Prime Minister stated he would deliver.”

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“Expert panels should make decisions about major projects, not a single minister. These panels work well because they include all the groups involved.”

“Mr. Speaker, we employ in Canada, in various aspects, expert panels that regulate different aspects of our industrial base. That expertise does, in my understanding, and should include representation across all stakeholders within economic development projects and status. We have a system in that respect that works. As I indicated previously, that is where our decision-making should be. It should not be located with a single political minister.”

“I do not support this bill. The government's rules have created red tape, cost taxpayers money, and failed to get major projects built. Instead, we should approve projects in six months, end the carbon tax and clean fuel rules, and cancel laws that block pipelines and oil tankers. We also need to cut taxes on diesel so food and shipping cost less.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to stand up in this House and speak on behalf of the residents of Saskatoon West. Today, we are speaking about Bill C-39, the building Canada strong act. I think everybody in our country, including those in the Liberal government, agrees that 11 years of the current government has left Canada lacking when it comes to investment, lacking when it comes to jobs and the economy and lacking when it comes to GDP per person. We need to do everything we can to get more business activity and more investment in this country. The building Canada strong act sounds very familiar to me. If we go back about a year and a half to the last election, what happened right after? We heard these words: We need to build at speeds never seen before. It is much like we are hearing today. There is a lot of déjà vu. Members will recall that at that time, the government came forward with Bill C-5. The government’s website, even today, says this about Bill C-5: Canada must build critical new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations. This includes the infrastructure to diversify our trading relationships and to become an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energies. That is great. The government needed, at that time, to get this bill through the House and pass it immediately so we could create the Major Projects Office and create projects of national interest, because this was urgent for “speeds not seen in generations”. This House did that. This House debated the bill relatively quickly and passed it. We rushed it through. What was accomplished? We have bureaucrats in place. They are all getting paid and probably getting bonuses too. Five hundred projects have been submitted, so people in the industries stepped up with lots of ideas. However, while the member across the aisle said there were 24 projects, I saw 18 on the website that have been considered by the office. Just last week, the very first one squeaked its way through the office, but it has not started yet. The actual results of this office are that zero projects have been built. I find it kind of amusing that the solution is another bill. Last year, we had the Building Canada Act. This is the building Canada strong act, and I can only assume that next year we are going to have the building Canada even stronger act to fix all the problems that have not been fixed here. The government is about talk, not results, and Canadians need actual construction jobs, need actual work and need money so they can pay their bills. As I said, with respect to Bill C-5, there were 500 project applications, and only one cleared. I want to talk about the difference between a Conservative approach and a Liberal approach. The Liberal approach is all about control. The Liberals will not let the private sector do its thing. The Liberals want the private sector to come to them. They want people in the private sector to come begging to their offices, saying, “Please, sir, we would like to build this project.” They like the view of control. They like the ability to say yes and no. They like it when people come to them essentially begging to do things, and they like to be able to say no, yes, no, yes, to basically pick the projects. The Conservative approach is very different. Our approach is to get government out of the way and level the playing field. We need to let the private sector do what it does best. People in the private sector analyze projects. They look at the benefits, look at the costs and look at the implications on the environment and other things, and they make their decisions. Those decisions actually benefit all Canadians, because they create jobs, they create work and they create paycheques. We need to put guardrails in place, obviously, so there have to be environmental protections and there has to be a taxation system that works, but it needs to be predictable, fair and timely. If people meet the standards as laid out by the guardrails, then their project should be approved. They do not need to come begging to the government to get it approved; they can just go ahead and do it. The result of that is that more projects get built. The Liberals like to pick winners and losers. Conservatives want everyone to win. As a result, the Liberals have one project now slowly moving its way through the system. Conservatives would have hundreds of projects by now that would be moving forward. How would we do that? We have said it many times. We would repeal Bill C-69, the no more pipelines act. We would repeal Bill C-48, the tanker ban. We would repeal the industrial carbon tax and the clean fuel standard. We would establish predictable, time-limited assessment reviews with a one-and-done approach. The one-and-done approach is really important to this because it is one project, one review. It is a simple application, a firm decision timeline and predictable milestones, with a six-month approval or, in some cases, when there is an extremely complicated case, a one-year approval. We would maintain our safety and environmental standards, but we would put a predictable process in place for businesses so that they know what they are up against. What we need is private investor confidence. That is what is lacking in our country right now. We need permanent fixes to the bureaucracy and red tape that have been created by this 11-year-old government. We need to create stability and predictability so that investors can make their decisions knowing what the future will hold. There are potentially billions of dollars in projects waiting to be done in Canada. We need them, and our workers need them. We need our national income to grow so that as the cost of everything goes up, our paycheques rise with it. They have not. We see that. All of us were in our ridings last week. I am sure members talked to many people who struggle from day to day, more people than ever before and people we would not expect. This is part of the answer, to have construction and have investment, but that is not happening under the government, and it will not happen under Bill C-39. We have capital on the sidelines because of uncertainty. Businesses have money to spend, but they are not spending it in Canada. We also need private proponents for commercially viable projects, and I will talk more about that in a second. We do not need taxpayer subsidies. We need investor confidence. Let us talk about the Pacific link pipeline announcement. This is the very first project of national interest out of the Major Projects Office. Guess what it does not have. It does not have a private proponent. Who is paying for it? It is the taxpayer. Who is taking the risk on the project? It is the taxpayer. How can it be that the Prime Minister himself has encouraged it to get built and has supposedly cleared the pathway, yet there is no private proponent? That tells us that something is definitely not right in the system, and that the bureaucracy and red tape have not been eliminated. It is government money that is going to be spent on this much-needed project. Do not get me wrong; we need this project for the sake of our country to grow our country, but it is the taxpayers taking all the risks, and that should not be. We need to get government out of the way and let builders do the building. In Saskatchewan, these impacts are very real. Our economy in Saskatchewan is based on resources. I just want to single out food production. We produce grain and potash in Saskatchewan, and this directly impacts people at the grocery store. It impacts Canadians and people all around the world. What is critical in those two industries, grain and potash, is railways, roads and ports. Any bottlenecks become a problem for our customers. What is needed in order to make farms, railways, roads and ports work? It is diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is consumed in farming, trucking and railways, in everything. Higher fuel costs result directly in higher costs to the consumer. That is why we have put forward the emergency fuel relief plan. We want to eliminate all federal taxes on diesel sales until at least Canada Day next year. We want to scrap diesel production taxes by permanently eliminating the federal industrial carbon tax and the clean fuel standard. We want to eliminate the diesel price gap between the United States and Canada within five years. We also need to create emergency permits for diesel refineries, storage and transportation. We need to get the industry going. We need to allow businesses to deduct that and build a strategic refined petroleum reserve to protect Canadians during supply reductions. The strategic fuel reserve is important because as the price of oil skyrockets, we need stability for Canadians. Canada is the only country in the G7 that does not have an oil stockpile to release from. The Prime Minister has explicitly rejected our calls for this. It is funny, because earlier this year, the Liberals promised 23 million additional barrels of oil, but we do not have them to give. We do not have a stockpile. There is no way that we can give that. In fact, Canada’s energy production actually dropped by five million barrels after the Prime Minister made that announcement. Now the G7 is going to release another 100 million barrels over the next four months, including diesel, and Canada cannot play. We cannot play in that game, because we do not have the fuel to be able to do that. We should be the solution. We have the third- or fourth-largest oil reserves in the world. We should be the solution to energy instability, not be held victim to it. I just want to highlight a couple of things. The Liberal plan is bureaucracy and red tape. That is the plan we are seeing here today. There are no tangible results. There is lots of talk about this, that and the other thing, but no actual jobs. Canadians need jobs and paycheques, and they are not getting that from this plan. The Conservative plan is to have one project, one review and six-month approvals and to eliminate Bill C-69, repeal Bill C-48, end the industrial carbon tax and get rid of the clean fuel standard. These are real, practical solutions that could be made to get government out of the way, eliminate bureaucracy and bring stability back to the private sector. It is investing in war zones right now. It is investing its money elsewhere. It is not coming to Canada. We need that money to come into Canada so that it can take the risks, invest in these projects and create the jobs. Hopefully, in a year we will not be talking about a building Canada even stronger act.”

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“The government's plan is not working. We have lost a trillion dollars in business investment, and companies still refuse to build new projects here. There is too much red tape.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is one thing to say half a trillion dollars was talked about, but we have lost a trillion dollars. If we lost a trillion and we get a half a trillion back, I do not know if that is a very good deal. I do not think I would want that deal. I think the proof is in the pudding. The Prime Minister talked about this new pipeline project. The Liberals removed all the barriers. They went to industry and said, “Please come and build this. Put your money on the table. Let’s build this project”, but it did not happen, because there are still too many barriers. Sure, there is lots of talk. Of course, people want to do things. I would say to the member that hope is not a strategy. We all want all kinds of things, but we only get the things we deserve. With our bureaucracy, with our red tape right now, we are getting what we deserve, and that is a lack of investment.”

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“I oppose this bill. It gives too much power to the government in Ottawa instead of helping businesses. Life has gotten harder and more expensive for Canadians under this government.”

“Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt, as I have said many times, that this government is all about talk. When we speak with constituents, with regular Canadians, we will, time and again, find that their life is actually worse. If we ask, “Has you life gotten better in the last year?”, their is answer is, “No.” Things are more expensive, their paycheque does not go as far and that is a direct indictment on this 11-year-old government’s record. Also, so much of what is talked about here in Bill C-39 is centralizing power again in Ottawa, centralizing power in the government, rather than creating a level playing field, which would be the way we would want to do this: create the environment so that businesses can do what they want, rather than concentrating all of that power in Ottawa.”

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“Under the last Conservative government, companies built mines and energy projects that employed thousands of Canadians. Today, the current government is not building things like that.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would ask the member to compare the situation we saw in Canada 12, 15, 18 years ago under the Conservative government when energy companies were building infrastructure, mining companies were building mines and we were employing thousands of Canadians, to now, which is building at speeds, of course, not seen in generations, but apparently not the case.”

“The Liberals build homes too slowly. When the Conservatives were in power, home building was booming and creating good jobs. That boom ended when the Liberals took over.”

“Mr. Speaker, the Liberals thought that building at speeds never seen before was a good thing, but what we have seen is that it is actually a very bad thing. They are correct that these are speeds we have never seen before, but it is a turtle pace. The best way to answer the member’s question about what it was like under the Conservatives, is that, at the time, I was building homes in Saskatchewan. The home building business was booming. There were projects going, people were working hard, paycheques were flowing, jobs were created, and everybody was building and buying houses. The Liberal government got elected, and guess what? The market started to go down and that was the end of the boom times, and we have been in that for the last 11 years.”

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