Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to stand in this place for the first time in the fall session of Parliament to speak to a piece of the government’s legislation, Bill C-39, the building Canada strong act. I spoke to Bill C-5 a year ago, which was the Building Canada Act. I am probably going to speak 12 months from now to the building Canada very strong act, and then 12 months after that, it will be the building Canada very, very strong act, but we will see how this goes. It has taken a year and a half, but we are finally here. We have finally made it to the Prime Minister’s legislative calling card, where he finally plans to deliver on a promise he made a year and a half ago to build Canada strong. Many of my colleagues have now spoken to the bill, pointing out faults and shortcomings, of which there are many. However, over these next 10 minutes, I would like to focus on a very tiny part of the bill that I do not think has gotten a lot of attention. It has big implications on conservation in Canada, primarily through changes made to the Fisheries Act. As the bill reads, division 7 of part 1 would amend the Fisheries Act to do the following: (a) modify the fish habitat bank regime to allow for the use of habitat credits by third parties; Have we ever heard of habitat credits? Have the folks watching at home heard of carbon credits? Have we heard of biodiversity credits? This is what I am going to talk about. The bill continues: (b) authorize the making of regulations respecting the circumstances in which a person who is authorized to carry on a work, undertaking or activity may pay a fee to offset adverse effects on fish and fish habitat and provide for these fees to be credited to the Environmental Damages Fund; and (c) transfer certain regulation-making powers from the Governor in Council to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. I want to be clear that as Conservatives, we totally believe in conservation. We totally believe in protecting our biodiversity. We agree wholeheartedly with these notions and premises of clean air, clean land and clean water for current generations and generations to come, but I want to talk a bit about the new way that I think things will be going in the environmental world. I am going to talk about biodiversity credits, or habitat credits, which is what the government calls them in the legislation. Division 7 would allow the use of habitat credits by third parties. Let us dive into that. Habitat credits, or biodiversity credits, are a market-based approach to conservation. If a landowner or an organization restores, creates, enhances or protects a habitat area, they have effectively created a habitat bank. Under division 7, this would allow the owner to earn credits for the ecological value that the bank creates. These credits could then be sold to others, who must compensate for any number of unrelated environmental impacts elsewhere in Canada. This sounds good. If a bit of activity over here wrecks something, a bit of habitat banking over there would offset it. It sounds good, but the devil is in the details. The idea for this model is that it would allow conservation to be funded up front and would ensure that habitat is protected before impacts occur. I do not disagree with the idea of biodiversity credits as a method of conservation, but given the Prime Minister’s affinity for global asset management groups, I am concerned about who really benefits from these credits. In fact, I do not even know who is going to own some of these credits. Is it the government? It is, after all, the body that appears to provide the credit to the landowner in the first place. Is it the landowners? Are they the owners of the land in which the habitat bank has been licensed and organized? What if a landowner sells that credit? Do the credits transfer from the seller to the buyer? Are there any oversight bodies? Who defines the value of a habitat credit? It is easy to measure a tonne of CO2. How do we measure a credit on biodiversity, and who gets to make that decision? Would it be, perhaps, an asset manager running a global company out of, say, New York City? What happens when the asset manager wants to increase the value of their assets? Does the asset manager have to advocate for zero fishing to make the value of these fish habitat banks worth more? This is happening now. If members do not believe me, they can look it up. In August, the government launched its new expert task force on natural capital accounting and nature financing, which seeks to impact climate regulation and biodiversity conservation. Is this yet another carbon credit system? After all, the last one, with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, worked out so well, did it not? This task force is made up entirely of big NGOs, corporations and academics. There is no one from Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited or any type of local conservation group. There are just bureaucrats in Toronto and Ottawa boardrooms dictating how farmers, ranchers and acreage owners need to operate on their own private land. The government is making these decisions, but landowners, frankly, I do not think know much about it at all. Why are government bureaucrats running this agenda while local conservationists, guides and outfitters, salmon enhancement organizations, and conservation authorities are seemingly sidelined and marginalized when it comes to defining how these credits are actually applied? Are the Liberals contracting this work out to the Prime Minister’s global asset management friends at BlackRock and Brookfield, headquartered out of Donald Trump’s New York City? It looks that way. I am not opposed to conservation. I am actually the shadow minister for conservation, but conservation is done best by local groups on the ground that understand the practicality of the environment in which everything lives, not unelected international bureaucrats who are lining their pockets. Conservation needs to be done practically, not ideologically. Ideological decisions bring around the concept of preservation, which is sometimes masked and sold as conservation. Preservation brings sterilization. It is conservation that actually works. It is conservation that we as Conservatives support. There are so many questions introduced in the bill, yet there are few, if any, answers at all, so let us try to find answers on our own. On the 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 agendas and the land sterilization, my suspicion is that the proposed amendments to the Fisheries Act play into the Liberals’ plans. As many members know, in 2022, the Liberals signed Canada onto the 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 initiative at COP15 in Montreal, which seeks to preserve up to half of Canada’s terrestrial and marine environments by 2050. By the way, half of Canada’s land mass is bigger than 187 of the 196 countries in the world. The rationale is to ensure habitat protection to maintain biological diversity. That sounds good. I think everybody wants biodiversity and habitat protection. It is not just a random percentage of Canada. This also applies to each ecological zone. This means mountain areas, Canadian Shield, prairie grasslands where all the farms and ranches are, parkland forest, Arctic tundra and so on. In much of these areas, significant portions of the land are privately owned or privately held property, which is where biodiversity credits in Bill C-39 would come into play. The government needs a mechanism to turn this privately owned land into recognizable conservation land. By the way, 89% of Canada is Crown land. Of the other 11%, 7% is agricultural land and the other 4% is what the rest of us live on. The government needs a mechanism to turn this privately owned land, which is the vast minority of the land in Canada, into recognizable conservation land with rules and all kinds of regulations on it. Amending the Fisheries Act to include biodiversity credits is the mechanism for how they would get that kind of control. It remains a stumbling point because the Liberals just signed Canada onto 30 by 30 and 50 by 50, and the House has never actually voted to approve the agenda that Canada signed onto at COP15. We have not even had the debate in the House of Commons. In the previous Parliament, the minister of environment, who has since resigned due to the MOU signed between Canada and Alberta, tried to table a bill to give the government a mechanism to implement this preservationist agenda, but that bill never passed, and there was no vote. The government simply signed on and has begun implementation without consulting Canadians. Now it would be implementing a biodiversity credit mechanism without consulting landowners. The Liberals would be doing so through the Fisheries Act powers, national park creation and agreements with first nations called indigenous protected and conserved areas. The whole point of this particular speech is this: What would they be doing with the Fisheries Act? The Fisheries Act is one of the most powerful pieces of legislation we have in Canada, the same Fisheries Act that would be amended by this very bill, Bill C-39, to offer biodiversity credit for fish habitat. This would suggest to me that my assertion at the beginning of the speech is correct: The Liberals would use these habitat and biodiversity credits as they relate to fish banking as a way of expediting their global 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 agenda. How would these habitat banks fall into part of the government’s conservation plan? We know that its $3.8 billion nature announcement in March is what it says it is going to take, or require, to get to the 30% preservation target. Are these proposed amendments to the Fisheries Act intended to bring Canada closer to its 50% goal? Why are the Liberals so hell-bent on preserving Canada as a national park? This is not conservation. It is preservation: preservation from hunting, fishing, angling, trapping, guiding, outfitting, recreational sports, hiking, energy development and resource development. Is sterilizing half of Canada’s land and water really considered building Canada strong? I do not think so. These policies would lock up land and water, and throw away the key. It is all about actual control, central control for a central banker, for a government that the Toronto Star has now indicated is all centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office. Last week, the Prime Minister made the west coast pipeline, now Pacific link, a project of national importance. I strongly echo the thoughts and concerns of my leader, who told the National Post last week, “Wake me up when there’s a steel pipe going in the dirt.” Why are Conservatives doubtful? It is because of preservation policies such as this. How can the Liberals build a pipeline when they have sterilized so much of our Crown land and are now offering incentives to sterilize even more of that land and the water? How can we build Canada strong if 50% of Canada’s land and water is cordoned off under conservation easements or a protected status? If we cannot access the land and cannot access the water, then we sure cannot build energy infrastructure on the land or sail ships through the water. The world needs Canadian energy and natural resources. Sterilizing Canada and turning it into a park would mean that these resources would stay in the ground. The Prime Minister said something last week at the Pacific link announcement: “The Canadian taxpayer is going to make a lot of money off this pipeline.” Well, that is good. I want that. Conservatives want that. However, we cannot build a pipeline or a shipping lane, much less a profitable one, if we cordon off our land and water. It is completely unrealistic and irresponsible to say that we can. Are we building Canada, or are we sectioning off? We cannot do both.
