Bill C-57 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Federal Sustainable Development Act

This enactment amends the Federal Sustainable Development Act to make decision making related to sustainable development more transparent and subject to accountability to Parliament.

Federal Sustainable Development Act

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

The hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

In short, Mr. Speaker, I would say they have a government that is listening to what Canadians are saying.

The Prime Minister has mandated and constantly reminded members, at least on this side of the House—and we would encourage all members to do what the member said he did—to work with constituents to get a better sense of what their constituents expect from Ottawa and then bring that information to Ottawa. When that has happened, at least on the Liberal benches we have seen the development and enhancement of programs that have made a difference.

How can the member not recognize that the Canada child benefit program has lifted literally hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty? How can the member not recognize that the enhancement to the guaranteed income supplement for seniors has lifted literally thousands of people out of poverty, including the poorest seniors? As I alluded to a few minutes ago, Winnipeg North gets approximately $9 million every month because of the children who live there, and that money enhances their living. This is a government that truly cares, and that is why we are developing positive, progressive social policies.

[Kim Rudd, Liberal, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I very much support my colleague's remarks.

We have heard a lot about deficits and we cannot forget that in nine years, Stephen Harper added $160 billion to Canada's debt when we had the lowest growth since the 1930s, and in addition to that deficit, he left a huge infrastructure deficit, as my colleague mentioned. As the minister announced today in question period, there are over 4,000 infrastructure projects under way in this country. My riding happens to have two of them, in waste-water treatment, one just completed and the other under way, worth $2 million. It is allowing businesses like Danby and Weston to grow and expand and allowing rural communities to grow.

I would like the member to respond to the infrastructure deficit and the opportunities that we are providing communities by answering that deficit.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague and friend is right on with regard to the importance of infrastructure, and she cited some very specific files within her own riding. Infrastructure has been enhanced in all regions of our country, again because this government, even going into the election, recognized the serious infrastructure deficit that Canada is facing, primarily as a direct result of the policies of Stephen Harper. That is why we had to make the types of investment and commitment that we made. If we invest in infrastructure and in Canadians, we will have a much healthier environment for all.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not agree with what the member opposite said about seniors. Yes, Liberals increased something, but they took a lot away from them. Seniors no longer have a tax credit to take buses. Also, the carbon tax increases the cost of their groceries, heating, everything.

When I visited a seniors home last week, a very important thing they told me is that their grandkids and kids are going to suffer because the government is going to make them pay for all the debt and mistakes the Liberal government has made.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a few quick points. First and foremost, I recognize that it was this government, within months of being in government, that dramatically increased the guaranteed income supplement, lifting tens of thousands of the poorest seniors in all regions of Canada out of poverty. It was this government, within months, that reversed the Harper decision and returned the age of retirement from 67 to 65. Independent reports commented on how many seniors would have been put in poverty had we not made that change. We could talk about the CPP agreement between Ottawa and the provinces, ensuring that future seniors will have better retirements.

This government has done so much, and we will continue to look at ways to improve the quality of life for seniors. After all, this is the Prime Minister who appointed the first Minister of Seniors.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I really enjoyed listening to the speech of the member for Winnipeg North. It was all about spending, and the Liberals talk about that a lot. They spend, spend, spend. There was nothing about fiscal control. There was nothing about economic sustainability, being able to afford the things we paid for. There was nothing about reducing the tax burden on Canadians.

Therefore, it is a real pleasure to talk about the Federal Sustainable Development Act and the amendments that have been proposed. When we actually compare the provisions of the act and what the act requires against the performance of the Liberal government, we will find that this tax-and-spend Liberal government has been found wanting.

The underlying purpose of the act is to find the appropriate balance between our natural environment, our social environment and economic environment. Unfortunately, the current Liberal government does not understand where that balance should lie. In fact, if the Liberals went to section 5(b) of the act, they would find that there is a notion of intergenerational equity that requires current governments to take into account the welfare of future generations. Intergenerational equity, one of the key principles of the act, requires governments not to steal from future generations to pay for their current needs or demands.

However, when we look at the performance of the Liberal government, what does it do? It praises the Federal Sustainable Development Act, but then it incurs huge deficits when it promised not to.

I remember the last election when the Prime Minister went across the country saying he was going to run small deficits of $10 billion. By the way, he went on to promise he was going to balance the budget by 2019, which happens to be this year. However, we know that today, in 2019, there is no balanced budget and we know that it is going to take over 20 years to balance our budget based on the direction the government is going. That does not take into account additional spending that the Liberal government is going to undertake during the election year.

What happens? There is no intergenerational equity. What the Prime Minister is asking us to do is to pay for his mistakes.

Then we have a Liberal government that is hell-bent on phasing-out Canada's oil and gas industry. The Prime Minister has deliberately wiped out projects like the northern gateway pipeline and the energy east pipeline. He has imposed additional regulatory burdens, upstream and downstream impact requirements with which foreign oil does not have to comply. Therefore, these investments are fleeing the country. Over $100 billion of investment has fled our country over the last couple of years. Again, the Prime Minister is asking us to pay for his mistakes.

We remember the small business fiasco. We are talking about economic sustainability, social and environmental sustainability. Let us talk about small businesses. It was the Liberal government that introduced a policy that was going to harm small businesses by increasing the tax rate on those businesses to 73%. There was no apology in the House for suggesting that was what small businesses could bear. In fact, it got so bad that the Prime Minister referred to our small business sector as tax cheats. We have one million small businesses across the country and all the Prime Minister could do was to call them tax cheats. I have spoken to hundreds of them and they are angry at a prime minister who is asking them to pay for his mistakes.

I will talk a little about trade policy, because trade policy is about sustainability. It is about providing an environment in which Canadian companies can thrive within the global marketplace.

When our Conservative government finally left office in 2015, we turned over the reins to the Liberal government. At that time, Canada had strong diplomatic and trade relationships around the world.

As trade minister, I could pick up the phone and call my counterpart in pretty well any country to say we have a problem and ask if we could sit down and fix it. We could have that discussion. What does that look like today? Today, we have a trade agenda wasteland. Our diplomatic relationships around the world are in tatters. When did it start? Let us talk about it.

In Vietnam, where the Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be signed, 12 countries agreed to expand trade. Eleven countries showed up in Vietnam. Everybody promised they were going to sign that agreement there. Who did not show up? There were two chairs that were empty at that meeting. Canada's trade minister did not show up. Canada's Prime Minister did not show up. What an embarrassment. Can the Prime Minister go back to Vietnam? It would be very difficult. It does not want him back there. None of the partners in the TPP want him back.

Then we see the Prime Minister travelling to China. He was going to start trade negotiations with China. Do members remember that? Unfortunately for Canada, the Prime Minister went there with a bunch of preconditions that had nothing to do with trade and told China that it was going to have to comply with these preconditions, otherwise we were not interested. China was very upset. It basically gave him a swift kick in the rear and sent him packing with his tail between his legs. What an embarrassment that was.

It did not stop there. Let us remember when he travelled to the Philippines. Canada is not a member of the East Asia Summit. The East Asia Summit was taking place in the Philippines. Our government asked to be invited, so the Prime Minister got an invitation from the President of the Philippines. He arrived on the ground there and the first thing our Prime Minister did was embarrass the Philippine president in his own country. Rather than using traditional diplomacy to raise the very serious issue of human rights, he embarrassed the president of that country in front of his own people. Do members think he is welcome in the Philippines now? That diplomatic relationship was torn asunder.

It goes on. Do members remember the Twitter diplomacy that founded our relationship with Saudi Arabia? At that time, we had tens of thousands of Saudi Arabian students studying in Canada, many of them for four and five years. While they lived here, what did they do? They would pick up many of the principles of freedom, democracy and human rights. When those students would go back to Saudi Arabia, many of them became great proponents and champions of human rights, democracy and freedom.

The Prime Minister thought it was a great idea to attack Saudi Arabia on its human rights record, and it does have a shabby human rights record, but he chose Twitter to do it, unlike our previous government, which used traditional diplomacy and tact in doing it. That relationship was torn asunder. It is costing our economy billions of dollars a year in lost revenue. The current Prime Minister wants to make you, Mr. Speaker, and all of the other Canadians across this country, pay for those mistakes.

It got worse. Do members remember the NAFTA negotiations? The Prime Minister embraced Donald Trump's offer of renegotiating NAFTA when in fact Donald Trump's ire was directed at Mexico, not Canada. Then the Prime Minister had the audacity to promise Canadians that when he was done renegotiating NAFTA we would have a better deal than we had before. What happened? The Prime Minister totally failed us. All the experts now acknowledge that the NAFTA deal that we have today is a much lesser deal than we had before the Prime Minister got started.

It is another failure, another mistake the Prime Minister wants us to pay for. The sad thing is this. The Prime Minister had an opportunity to address the steel and aluminum tariffs that Donald Trump had imposed on Canada through these negotiations on NAFTA. Do members think he got that done? No. Those tariffs are still in place, costing Canadians hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars a year.

Was the softwood lumber agreement resolved in those NAFTA negotiations? The Prime Minister had that opportunity. It never got done. It was a failure, a mistake the Prime Minister wants Canadians to pay for. What a shame.

Let me return to China. We have seen the China relationship deteriorate to the point that it is the worst it has ever been over the last 40 years. We have a Prime Minister who cannot manage this relationship. He sends his own friend, John McCallum, to be the ambassador there, and then Mr. McCallum embarrasses Canadians by interfering in what should be an arm's-length legal extradition process for Meng Wanzhou, a Huawei executive. Our ambassador in China undermined the rule of law in Canada and undermined our ability to defend that rule of law here at home and abroad. Who suffers? It is people like Michael Kovrig, who is in prison in China for bogus reasons.

I know my friend here from P.E.I. is mocking us, but my own constituent, Robert Schellenberg, who is on death row in China, is the one who is going to have to pay for the Prime Minister's mistakes. It is all the same: failure after failure.

I could talk about our immigration system, because that is part of the social sustainability piece of this legislation. What do we have in our immigration system? We have eroded public confidence, because the Prime Minister will not enforce the law. What has happened here is those who obey the law are waiting in line while others jump the queue, costing the federal, provincial and municipal governments—for example, the City of Toronto—millions upon millions of dollars in additional housing, law enforcement and other costs, and the Prime Minister wants us to pay for his mistakes.

Let us talk about the environment. The Prime Minister was elected on a platform that said he was going to come forward with a pan-Canadian climate change plan. I remember being in Vancouver. The Vancouver declaration was signed by everyone except Brad Wall. The Prime Minister promised we would meet the Paris targets. By the way, I was in Paris too when that agreement was signed. People were expecting the Prime Minister to meet those targets. Today we know that the Liberal government is nowhere close to meeting its Paris targets. It talks a big game on the environment. Our environment minister gets up pretty regularly in the House and proclaims what a great job the Liberals are doing on the environment and that they are going to meet their Paris targets, when the Parliamentary Budget Officer says they will not meet the targets, when Canada's Commissioner of the Environment says they will not meet the targets, when the United Nations itself says Canada will not meet the targets. It is a failure, and who pays for that? We pay for the Prime Minister's mistakes.

I say all of this because this is of course an election year. Sustainability is a critical piece of what we do in Canada. We do have to find the right balance between our social environment, our natural environment and the economic environment in which we all operate and on which our families depend.

We cannot afford another four years of this Liberal government's failures. We saw what happened in Ontario with 15 years of the Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty governments driving their economy into the ground and driving up electricity costs to the highest level in North America. Is that what we want to repeat in Canada? No, we do not. That is why we cannot afford another four years.

What a lot of Canadians do not know is that the same crew who ran Ontario for 15 years and ran Ontario into the ground, many of that same crew are in the Prime Minister's office today, starting with Gerald Butts. Do we trust him to get our economy right? Do we trust him to get sustainability right? No, we do not. The problem is, if we have four more years of failure and four more years of a Prime Minister who wants us to pay for his mistakes, we will have a disaster.

We have not had a government as incompetent as this for many, many decades. Canadians should expect more. They should expect better.

I say this to Canadians: As we approach October, measure the Prime Minister against the promises he made. Did he actually deliver on his promises or is the road littered with broken promises? Balanced budgets was a broken promise. What about electoral reform? Remember how the last election was going to be the last one under first past the post? How did that go? It was a broken promise.

As we approach this election in October, Canadians need to take note of what the Prime Minister has actually done in this country to undermine our economic prosperity. He has effectively shut down our oil and gas sector. He has effectively shut down our pipeline construction. We have seen General Motors bailing out of Canada, and General Electric bailing out of Canada. What is happening? Why does the rest of the world not have confidence in Canada the way it used to under the former Conservative government? We had lots of investment coming into Canada.

Today, as I said earlier, we have lost about hundred billion dollars of investment, just over a period of a couple of years. That flow of investment out of Canada into places like the United States and elsewhere around the world is going to hurt job creation in this country. We are going to see that happen. It is going to require governments to raise taxes. Who pays those taxes? It is not only this generation. If we have deficits and if we have debts, future governments are going to have to continue to raise taxes to pay off those debts and deficits, and the interest on those debts.

I am coming right back, full circle, to the notion of intergenerational equity. It is something that is basically the linchpin of the Federal Sustainable Development Act. It ensures that future generations will continue to have the opportunity for prosperity and a clean environment that our current generation has had. The Prime Minister is undermining all of that through high taxes, high deficits and high debts. Who is going to pay for those mistakes? The Prime Minister wants us to pay for those mistakes.

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I hear some chirping from the corner here from P.E.I. The Liberal members continue to do this. At the end of the day, who suffers from all of this heckling from the Liberal side? It is Canadians. It is future generations of Canadians. That is the sad choice that we have before us.

Let me wind up by saying this. Canadians do have an opportunity to get sustainability right. They will not get it right under the Liberal government but they will have an opportunity to make a decision in October whether they want to elect a Conservative government that is going to take seriously the fiscal challenges, economic challenges and competitiveness challenges that face our companies, including our small businesses, take seriously the environment challenges that face our country and face the globe, and take seriously the social challenges that this Liberal government is not addressing in any way.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, one would think that was an election speech, because what we heard from the Conservatives was a lot of misinformation. If that party wants to talk about facts, Stephen Harper added $150 billion to the national debt.

In terms of small business, look at the last fall economic statement, whereby we faced head on the challenges from the United States and increased capital cost allowances so that businesses in this country could move ahead.

The member talked about the CPTPP. I would ask the member this. Who signed and negotiated it at the end of the day? Who did the final agreement on the CPTPP to accept that agreement and negotiate a good agreement, which the Conservatives failed to negotiate? It was the minister on this side of the House who did that.

The future in this country is going to be a result of the Liberal government. Do not listen to the malarky we hear from the members on the other side, because they are just playing politics and giving false information, which I am surprised to hear from that member.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is pretty rich coming from the member for Malpeque. I was the trade minister when the TPP was negotiated. All the key elements of the original TPP were incorporated into the final agreement. When the United States bailed out, the other 11 parties said it was worthwhile moving ahead and finalizing it.

The Liberals want to challenge us on trade. When our former Conservative government was elected in 2006, how many trade agreements did we have with countries around the world? We had trade agreements with five countries: the United States, Mexico, Israel, Costa Rica and Chile. When we were finished 10 years later, we had completed the most ambitious and successful trade agenda this country had ever seen. We had trade agreements with 51 countries around the world, including CETA and including the TPP, which was a Conservative negotiation that took place successfully.

We will not take any lessons from the Liberals on trade.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have been following this debate and the level of hypocrisy is over the top. I recall all those trade deals that the Conservatives signed. What did they erase? All of the environmental provisions. I worked for the original environment commission in Montreal. I will note that in the new trade deal with the U.S., the Liberals undermined the environment in that deal too. There is a lot of hypocrisy here about genuinely acting on the words.

I would actually like to speak to Bill C-57. I know it might come as a surprise, as everybody is doing his or her electioneering here. What is important is that it is one thing to bring forward a bill and it is another thing to enact it. However, it is another thing to actually deliver the mandate and responsibilities under that bill.

The previous Liberal government and the previous Conservative government, as well as the present Liberal government, have all abjectly failed to deliver on the responsibilities of sustainable development. It is not me saying this. It is the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, who is appointed and retained in that position by the current Liberal government to review how well the government is delivering on its responsibilities.

It is also important to point out that in addition to the Sustainable Development Act, there is a second law. I would remind this place that a cabinet directive is binding law. We proved that with the Friends of the Oldman decision which involved a directive by cabinet on environmental assessment before we had the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. We proved in the Supreme Court that cabinet directives were legally binding.

There has been a cabinet directive in place on environmental assessment of policy, plan and programs for decades. However, successive Conservative and Liberal governments have abjectly failed to deliver on that as well. That comes in the reports from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

The Liberals, of course, signed on, yet again. They love to go to these international meetings. They signed on to the sustainable development agenda 2030, with 17 goals. They signed onto that in September 2015. Maybe it was the Conservatives who did that. They committed to 169 targets and 230 indicators.

There were a lot of goals in that international agreement. We need to note here that despite an amendment that I tabled at committee, the government refused to incorporate any reference to the UN commitment in the bill we are discussing today, the sustainable development 2030 agenda. So much for the commitment.

I had wanted to raise this with a number of the speakers who stood, the Conservatives criticizing the Liberals, the Liberals criticizing the Conservatives. Since 2015, and I am only starting at 2015, the commissioner has delivered failing grades in her audits of government commitments to actually deliver on the responsibilities, both under the Sustainable Development Act and the cabinet directive.

In the fall of 2015, she found abject failure by four departments audited to even apply the cabinet directive, zero assessments delivered for 488 proposals to the fisheries minister and only one out of over a 1,000 proposals to the minister of agriculture. In 2016, she found only 23% of proposals audited had submitted the required strategic environmental assessment. In 2017, she found a mere 20% compliance by federal departments.

Last year, in 2018, the commissioner's latest report found that the Government of Canada, the Liberal government, had failed to even develop a formal approach to implementing the 2030 agenda and the goals, including a very narrow interpretation of sustainable development. We heard that today in the debate, a pretty narrow discussion of what was actually in there. There is no federal government structure, and we are not going to see it in the bill either.

Interestingly, the bill continues to give responsibility to the Minister of Environment and yet it is another minister who goes off to the UN to speak to the bill as if it is his responsibility. There is a lot of confusion out there among Canadians about who in the government is actually responsible for delivering on the responsibilities for sustainable development.

The commissioner found there was very limited national consultation and engagement, no national implementation plan, few national targets and no system in place to measure, monitor or report on national targets for sustainable development.

We have heard a lot of blathering in here today from the Liberals about how important the environment and the economy are. However, where is the commitment to actually deliver on those responsibilities?

Eventually we are going to have a debate on the bill. Interestingly, a good number of the amendments that are coming forward from the Senate to this place are exactly the same amendments that I put forward, which the Liberals rejected. So much for “we're all in this together” in committee.

I would note one amendment that is most interesting. The Senate presented to this place a series of three amendments, two of which were accepted. The third one the Green Party and I actually tabled as an amendment to the bill because the government, in its wisdom, talks about being environmentally thoughtful in its spending, in procurement, but it would remove the requirement that is in law right now that the government actually consider sustainable development when it is procuring.

Let us think about that. It was almost $5 billion to buy a pipeline. We might think that the government thought about whether it was a wise investment economically and environmentally. Where is the strategic environmental assessment for that purchase? How about the many infrastructure banks the government is setting up for private enterprise here and in other countries? Did it do a strategic environmental assessment as per the cabinet directive? No.

The question here is this: Where is the real commitment by the government of the day to generally deliver on these big promises it made to Canadians and the big promises it makes when going to UN meetings?

I attended the consultation at the UN, the big summit last summer. The government sent a big delegation. At the last second, it invited youth but there was only a handful who could afford to come. Therefore, we had a call for better consultation and engagement across Canada so that everybody can participate in this discussion. However, when we look at the goals, we are not just talking about the economy or the environment. When we look at those 17 goals, they cover everything. They cover indigenous rights, women's rights, agriculture and water. I am not hearing any debate in the House about the breadth of what we have committed to in the 2030 goals. The Liberals refused to reference those in the bill before us.

There is a second matter the Liberals refused to reference, despite the amendments I tabled at committee. They have refused to incorporate into the bill the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is one of the goals under the 2030 sustainable development goals. They abjectly refused to specifically reference that international commitment, despite the fact that the former justice minister and attorney general actually committed before the Assembly of First Nations that, going forward, her Liberal government would ensure that the United Nations declaration would be incorporated into every federal law. Therefore, they have broken that promise too.

It is all very nice that we have some amendments coming from the Senate, but they are basically pro forma. They are simply saying that we need to update the bill so that it is the same as the current Auditor General Act. However, when it comes to substantive measures, like being required to actually consider sustainable development when we are making major procurement decisions and when making major recommendations to cabinet, then no, they are abjectly failing. I would have liked to hear anybody in the government of the day stand up and say that, going forward, they were going to finally deliver on their responsibilities. However, I did not hear that once today.

To conclude, it was my honour to speak to the bill again. I remain committed to actually having a government in Canada that is sincere about delivering on its international commitments.

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?