Bill C-69 (Historical)

An Act to enact the Impact Assessment Act and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, to amend the Navigation Protection Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

Part 1 enacts the Impact Assessment Act and repeals the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012. Among other things, the Impact Assessment Act
(a) names the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada as the authority responsible for impact assessments;
(b) provides for a process for assessing the environmental, health, social and economic effects of designated projects with a view to preventing certain adverse effects and fostering sustainability;
(c) prohibits proponents, subject to certain conditions, from carrying out a designated project if the designated project is likely to cause certain environmental, health, social or economic effects, unless the Minister of the Environment or Governor in Council determines that those effects are in the public interest, taking into account the impacts on the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada, all effects that may be caused by the carrying out of the project, the extent to which the project contributes to sustainability and other factors;
(d) establishes a planning phase for a possible impact assessment of a designated project, which includes requirements to cooperate with and consult certain persons and entities and requirements with respect to public participation;
(e) authorizes the Minister to refer an impact assessment of a designated project to a review panel if he or she considers it in the public interest to do so, and requires that an impact assessment be referred to a review panel if the designated project includes physical activities that are regulated under the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Resources Accord Implementation Act and the Canada–Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Act;
(f) establishes time limits with respect to the planning phase, to impact assessments and to certain decisions, in order to ensure that impact assessments are conducted in a timely manner;
(g) provides for public participation and for funding to allow the public to participate in a meaningful manner;
(h) sets out the factors to be taken into account in conducting an impact assessment, including the impacts on the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada;
(i) provides for cooperation with certain jurisdictions, including Indigenous governing bodies, through the delegation of any part of an impact assessment, the joint establishment of a review panel or the substitution of another process for the impact assessment;
(j) provides for transparency in decision-making by requiring that the scientific and other information taken into account in an impact assessment, as well as the reasons for decisions, be made available to the public through a registry that is accessible via the Internet;
(k) provides that the Minister may set conditions, including with respect to mitigation measures, that must be implemented by the proponent of a designated project;
(l) provides for the assessment of cumulative effects of existing or future activities in a specific region through regional assessments and of federal policies, plans and programs, and of issues, that are relevant to the impact assessment of designated projects through strategic assessments; and
(m) sets out requirements for an assessment of environmental effects of non-designated projects that are on federal lands or that are to be carried out outside Canada.
Part 2 enacts the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, which establishes the Canadian Energy Regulator and sets out its composition, mandate and powers. The role of the Regulator is to regulate the exploitation, development and transportation of energy within Parliament’s jurisdiction.
The Canadian Energy Regulator Act, among other things,
(a) provides for the establishment of a Commission that is responsible for the adjudicative functions of the Regulator;
(b) ensures the safety and security of persons, energy facilities and abandoned facilities and the protection of property and the environment;
(c) provides for the regulation of pipelines, abandoned pipelines, and traffic, tolls and tariffs relating to the transmission of oil or gas through pipelines;
(d) provides for the regulation of international power lines and certain interprovincial power lines;
(e) provides for the regulation of renewable energy projects and power lines in Canada’s offshore;
(f) provides for the regulation of access to lands;
(g) provides for the regulation of the exportation of oil, gas and electricity and the interprovincial oil and gas trade; and
(h) sets out the process the Commission must follow before making, amending or revoking a declaration of a significant discovery or a commercial discovery under the Canada Oil and Gas Operations Act and the process for appealing a decision made by the Chief Conservation Officer or the Chief Safety Officer under that Act.
Part 2 also repeals the National Energy Board Act.
Part 3 amends the Navigation Protection Act to, among other things,
(a) rename it the Canadian Navigable Waters Act;
(b) provide a comprehensive definition of navigable water;
(c) require that, when making a decision under that Act, the Minister must consider any adverse effects that the decision may have on the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada;
(d) require that an owner apply for an approval for a major work in any navigable water if the work may interfere with navigation;
(e)  set out the factors that the Minister must consider when deciding whether to issue an approval;
(f) provide a process for addressing navigation-related concerns when an owner proposes to carry out a work in navigable waters that are not listed in the schedule;
(g) provide the Minister with powers to address obstructions in any navigable water;
(h) amend the criteria and process for adding a reference to a navigable water to the schedule;
(i) require that the Minister establish a registry; and
(j) provide for new measures for the administration and enforcement of the Act.
Part 4 makes consequential amendments to Acts of Parliament and regulations.

Consideration of Government Business No. 31

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, what a thing to witness this coalition collude to cover-up and take a top-down action to force through a top-down bill. The Conservatives will not stop the fight for the people we represent and for the best interests of all Canadians.

To review, the Liberals rammed through first the Atlantic offshore bill, Bill C-49, which includes 33 references to the five-year-old unconstitutional law, Bill C-69, that the Liberals have not fixed yet. By the way, Bill C-49 would triple the timeline for offshore renewables in the Atlantic provinces. Then was the just transition bill, Bill C-50. This was after fewer than nine hours and eight hours of total debate from all MPs on each.

On October 30, the NDP-Liberals tried to dictate every aspect of how the committee would deal with those bills. They reversed their own order to hold back Bill C-49 and spent a month preoccupied with censorship and exclusion of Conservatives like the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and the member for Peace River—Westlock.

The extraordinary motion being debated and the debate shutdown today mean the committee will be limited to less than two hours of scrutiny on Bill C-50. We will hear from no witnesses, no impacted workers or businesses, no experts, no provincial or regional representatives, no economists, no indigenous communities, no ministers and no officials, and MPs will only have one partial day each to review and debate this bill at the next two stages.

I never thought I would spend so much of the last eight years having to count on senators to really do the full scrutiny that the NPD-Liberals' bills require after the fact because the coalition circumvents elected MPs on the front end so many times. One would think after the Supreme Court absolutely skewered them all on Bill C-69, which both the NDPs and the Liberals supported, that we would see a change of behaviour and attitude, but no, not these guys. They are reckless and ever undaunted in their top-down authority.

The NDP-Liberals will say that the government has been working on it for years, that it has engaged unions all the time and ask what the hold up is. We heard that from the member for Timmins—James Bay earlier, even though what he did not admit was that at the time the committee was studying the concept of the just transition and the NDP-Liberals moved forward with announcing their legislation before it reported anyway. They will say that we should just get this done so Bill C-50 can give the reskilling, upskilling and job training workers need and want when they all lose their jobs because of government mandates.

I have a couple of points to make. First, it sure is clear the NDP-Liberals have been working together on something for a while since they were all together to announce the bill. Second, everybody needs to know there is not actually a single skills or job program anywhere in this bill at all. Third, cooking up something behind closed doors then being outraged and cracking down on the official opposition when we suggest we should all actually do our jobs, speak to represent our constituents, and most importantly, let Canadians speak so we can actually hear from them on the actual bill, and then analyze it comprehensively and propose changes and improvements, is a top-down central planning approach that sounds an awful lot like the way we have characterized Bill C-50, the just transition itself that has caused some outrage in the last few days.

Bill C-50, the just transition, aims to centrally plan the top-down restructuring of the fundamentals and the foundations of Canada's economy. It aims to redistribute wealth. It is a globally conceived, planned and imposed agenda. It is, in fact, a major focus of a globalist gathering going on right now, the same kind of gathering where it started years ago.

I confess, I do not really get all the consternation about stating that fact since the definition of globalism is “the operation or planning of economic informed policy on a global basis.” That is of course what is happening with the just transition and the many international bodies that bring together politicians, policy advocates and wealthy elites from around the world to plan economic and foreign policy globally. That is while they all contribute significantly to increasing global emissions to get there and back, while they dream up more schemes to tell the folks back home that they cannot drive; live in a house, on any land or farm; or, for those who can afford it, fly. We will all have to eat insects while they all do the exact opposite, even while they bring home agendas that will make essentials and daily life so expensive for all the rest of us that we will have no choice.

Globalism is literally the function of numerous organizations all explicitly heavily focused on imposing the just transition for years. Today, it is linked to the concept of the global citizen and of postnational states with no independent identities, just like the current Prime Minister said of Canada when he was elected.

That is what is happening at COP28 right now. It is in the UN 2030 plan. It is the top priority of lots of many well-known and respected gatherings, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization and others. It is bizarre that the NDP-Liberals deny and attack all this now, when globalism is obviously implicit in its ideology. I thought they were proud of that. They have all been outraged about this, but the truth hurts. Anger is often a cover for hurt, so maybe that is what all their rage is about.

Maybe their issue is that I call it Soviet-style central planning, except for this: Bill C-50 really would create a government-appointed committee to advise the minister. The minister would then appoint another committee to plan the economy. This bill would not mandate that any of that would happen through openness and transparency. Neither of the committees would report either to Parliament or directly to Canadians along the way. I guess the coalition members want to say that it is a win that the reports would be tabled in the House of Commons, but that would not guarantee any kind of debate or accountability. The members are proving their true colours through how they are handling the bill now, especially since it is clear that they want to impose it all with little challenge and almost no scrutiny from beginning to end.

Oh right, it is there in the summary, in black and white for all the world to see. When would those plans from the government committees for Canada's economy be imposed? It would be every five years. That is literally the time frame for central planning that Soviets preferred. However, the NDP-Liberals are somehow shocked and outraged, even though the lead NDP-Liberal minister is a guy who is a self-declared “proud socialist”, as came out of his own mouth in this very chamber. Right now, he is at a conference about the progress of the global just transition.

There are no costs outlined in this bill either, even though it would obviously cost taxpayers, just as the NDP-Liberals' mega sole-source contracts for their buddies; infrastructure banks and housing funds that cost billions of tax dollars and build neither infrastructure nor houses, only bureaucracy; and hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to tell the government to use fewer consultants. There would be a cost to create and maintain the just transition partnership council, on pages six to 10, that would advise the minister and then the secretariat that the minister would have to create. However, this bill does not tell Canadians about any of the cost that taxpayers would have to pay for all that, up front and after.

It is quite something to see the inclusion of the words “accountability” and “transparency” in the long title of Bill C-50, since it is all actually about government-appointed committees meeting behind closed doors and a minister who would cook up central plan after central plan. It would mandate neither transparency nor accountability at all, whether directly to Canadians or through their MPs, and it would not include an actual outline for one or any kind of skills- or job-training program.

That is how this whole thing was baked in the first place. Their rushed, top-down schedule today is to ram it through with as little analysis from MPs and input from Canadians as possible. It is a little silly for all the NDP-Liberals to be mad now that the official opposition actually wants MPs to do our jobs to debate, consult, amend and improve legislation, especially with such a wide-ranging and significant one such as Bill C-50 and the economic transition it would impose.

What about the tens of thousands of Canadians whose jobs were devastated by the NDP-Liberals' fast-tracked coal transition? The environment commissioner said this was a total failure. It left 3,400 Canadian workers in about a dozen communities completely behind. However, the government members say to just trust them to engineer an economic transition for 2.7 million Canadians and the entire country.

What about the nearly 40,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador who were all put out of work completely when they were promised that the government would help them transition from cod? It was the largest industrial shutdown in Canadian history at the time. It was a disaster for all of them: their loved ones, their communities and their province. I hope they see Bill C-50 as the end of oil and gas in Canada bill that it is, because the impact of the oil and gas sector in Newfoundland and Labrador is a quarter of the province's total GDP. It is higher than that in Alberta. It is 40% of Newfoundland and Labrador's exports, and 6,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador in the oil and gas service and supply sector have lost their jobs already, just in the last three years, because of the uncertainty and the NDP-Liberals' anti-energy policies.

The government's intent now, through Bill C-50, is like nothing Canada has ever seen before. Canadians could be forgiven for knowing that this would not go well.

A truly bizarre point about all this that should be noted, though, is as follows: Despite the collusion between the NDP and Liberals on the bill for about two years, other opposition MPs such as Conservatives do not actually get to see the bills until the government tables them. Despite what I hear really were some round tables and consultation meetings, there is not actually any tangible delivery of what the bill's own proponents say that it does for skills and job training.

It is not in here anywhere, which is one of the many reasons Conservatives say that the natural resources committee must actually do its job and, most importantly, must hear from all the Canadians it would impact. Both union and non-union workers, as well as union leaders, should be outraged about it.

What really did happen with all the time, effort and money that was apparently sunk into developing it behind closed doors between 2021 and 2023? Since the bill sets up committees to plan to set up committees to plan from on high, why the heck did all this require a law in the first place?

Government, unions and businesses consult, develop plans and report. Okay, what is holding this up from going ahead? Why is Bill C-50 even required for that work to happen if they all want it to? How is this actually all the Liberal-NDP government has come up with?

How is any Canadian supposed to trust these guys to deliver on anything, when it took all this time and all these meetings and tax dollars, but there is not even an actual plan or program? They would not even get a recommendation for two years. It is sort of like the ITCs that the NDP-Liberals keep talking and bragging about, as if they are doing anything in our economy right now. Actually, they do not even exist at all in Canada yet.

Of course, Conservatives and more and more Canadians know that Bill C-50 really is all about the just transition and ending oil and gas in Canada as fast as they possibly can. The NDP-Liberals have shown this repeatedly after eight years. A government, of course, that did not want to kill the sector and all the livelihoods it sustains really would not do anything differently from what these guys have done and continue to do.

Everyone can read it. In the 11 pages and 21 clauses of Bill C-50, there is not one single instance of a skills- or job-training program. That is the truth.

Now, because of the NDP-Liberals, neither union nor non-union workers will be able to speak or be heard by MPs at any remaining stage of the top-down agenda for this bill. In fact, nobody will: no workers, contractors, business owners, investors or indigenous owners, partners, workers or contractors. Therefore, I will talk about some of those workers now. I have a few points.

First, the reality is that the biggest growth of well-paying union jobs in Canada right now is actually created by the big multinational oil and gas companies expanding and ramping up new oil, gas and petrochemical projects in Alberta. These are the same companies that made Alberta, by far and away, Canada’s leader in clean tech, renewable and alternative energy for at least 30 years.

For the record, today, Alberta is again Canada’s leader in renewable energy. In fact, the investment commitments for renewables and future fuel development in Alberta have doubled to nearly $50 billion of private sector money planned and ready to invest, since the premier paused to set the conditions, to guarantee consultation, certainty and confidence for all Albertans, while the regulator keeps taking applications. However, the NDP-Liberals will not admit that to us either.

Second, where we are at is that the major oil and gas companies are leading the creation of new union jobs in Canada. However, this is actually the very sector that the just transition agenda would shut down first. The main thing every union worker needs is a job. That is what is at risk.

Third, the anti-energy coalition also refuses to admit the fact that, in Canada, traditional oil and gas, oil sands and pipeline companies have been, far and away, the top investors in the private sector for decades and, today, in clean tech, environmental innovation and renewables among all the private sectors in Canada, excluding governments and utilities. Likewise, oil and gas is still, right now, the top private sector investor and top export in Canada’s economy. The truth is that nothing is poised to match or beat it any time soon. Nothing comes close. The stakes of the anti-energy agenda imposed by the costly coalition for Canada are exceptionally grave.

Here are some facts about the businesses and workers that would be hurt the most by the just transition agenda, Bill C-50. In Canada’s oil and gas sector, 93% of companies only have up to 99 employees. They are small businesses, and 63% of those businesses are considered micro-businesses, with fewer than five employees.

That is the truth about workers and businesses in Canada’s oil and gas sector, especially the homegrown, Canadian-based ones. They are not union businesses, although their jobs are also sustainable; they are also higher paying, with reliable long-term benefits, than jobs in most sectors.

Large employers, with over 500 people on payroll, account for just over 1%, not 2%, of the total oil and gas extraction businesses in Canada; that is it. Those businesses are mostly union workplaces and support more union jobs than the rest of the sector. However, they are also among the first businesses that Bill C-50’s agenda would kill and that, after eight years, the NDP-Liberals have been incrementally damaging. Again, there would be no oil and gas sector, no businesses and no jobs, union or otherwise. That is the truth. It also means higher costs and less reliable power, especially where most Canadians have no affordable options, as in rural, remote, northern, prairie, Atlantic and indigenous communities, with fewer businesses and jobs. There would be less money for government programs, since the oil and gas sector currently pays the most to all three levels of government, and less private sector money for clean tech and innovation.

Which workers do the NDP-Liberals already know that their unfair, unjust transition in Bill C-50 would hurt the most? If colleagues can believe this, it would be visible minority and indigenous Canadians. Both ethnically diverse and indigenous Canadians are more highly represented in the energy sector than they are in any other sector in Canada’s economy, but the internal government-leaked memo that I am assuming colleagues have seen says they are expected to face higher job disruptions than any other workers. They would also have more trouble finding new opportunities. They would end up in lower-paying, more precarious jobs, as would be the case for all workers who lose their livelihoods to this radical, anti-energy global agenda.

Canadians will know instantly, of course, from these numbers that the top targets to be crushed by Bill C-50 are the 93% and 63% of Canadian businesses, the small- and micro-businesses, their workers and all their contractors. Bill C-50 does not contemplate them at all. There is no consideration about all the non-union workers who will lose their jobs in the just transition agenda. These are the homegrown, Canadian-based and owned businesses with Canadian workers who have been doing their part for environmental stewardship, innovation, clean tech, actual emissions reductions and indigenous partnerships to the highest standards in Canada and, therefore, in the entire world, just like the big guys here.

Since the NDP-Liberals refused to allow this, my office spoke with one of those union workers last week, a worker from Saskatchewan. He said, “I am not happy with the fact that I will be displaced out of a job from a federal mandate.” No matter what the NDP-Liberals try to call this or say about it now, he had it right. That is exactly what would happen to that union worker.

There is nothing, not a single thing, about all the non-union workers, who would obviously lose their jobs first, nor is there any space for union workers who do not want the transition accelerated by the anti-energy, anti-private sector NDP-Liberals. There is nothing about the communities and the people who would be damaged the most, nothing about what sector actually can and will replace the jobs and economic contributions of the oil and gas sector. Of course, right now, there is no such sector. There is nothing about all those hundreds of thousands of oil and gas union workers whose employers would also be put out of work quickly, as is the actual aim of Bill C-50. It is no wonder that the NDP-Liberals want to silence Canadians, so they can do this quickly and behind closed doors. They too must know that common-sense Canadians can see right through them, and they are running out of time.

I have a last point about the chair of the natural resources committee, the member for Calgary Skyview. When I congratulated him on his recent appointment, I told him the Liberals have done him no favours by putting him there to help impose their agenda. The people of Calgary Skyview will render their decision in the next election, as is their right, like it is for all Canadians.

I warned a former natural resources minister from Alberta that his constituents would see his betrayal. I said this in our last emergency committee meeting about the TMX, which has still not been built, in the summer heading into the 2019 election. Colleagues will notice that this member was not sent back here. I suspect that the people of Calgary Skyview will feel the same in this instance. In hindsight, I suspect this will not be worth it for the member for Calgary Skyview, but we all make choices and face the consequences.

I move:

That the motion be amended by:

(a) replacing paragraph (a) with the following:

“(a) during the consideration of the bill by the Standing Committee on Natural Resources;

(i) the Minister of Natural Resources and its officials be ordered to appear as witnesses for no less than two hours;

(ii) members of the committee submit their lists of suggested witnesses concerning the bill, to the clerk, and that the Chair and clerk create witness panels which reflect the representation of the parties on the committee, and, once complete, that the Chair begin scheduling those meetings;

(iii) a press release be issued for the study of the bill inviting written submissions from the public and establishing a deadline for those submissions,”; and

(b) deleting paragraphs (b) and (c).

Every member of the chamber has an ability to prove that they actually support democracy by supporting our amendment.

Alleged Limiting of Members' Ability to Speak at Committee

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am doing my best but I am constantly interrupted.

Standing Order 116 directs us to bring these matters to the attention of the House. I believe the member for Winnipeg North supported the addition of Standing Order 116(2)(a) and (b). This was a proposal from the previous government House leader, I believe. He could propose further changes to the Standing Orders, if he does not believe that members should be able to bring these matters to the House.

Here is what happened at 4:25 p.m. on October 31, at the natural resources committee. I began to speak. I was given the floor. The chair said that he was going to ask all members; there was myself and then the member for Timmins—James Bay. I began to speak. At the time I said that I would seek to move a privilege motion at committee regarding the breach of privilege for the member for Peace River—Westlock. I said that the chair had breached his privileges by refusing to allow him to speak on Bill C-69.

I would ask the Speaker to review the record regarding the breach of privilege as it pertains to the member for Peace River—Westlock.

This is not the only instance. At 4:25 on October 31, I took the floor and spoke to the matter of privilege. There were various repeated interruptions as I sought to make the argument. I, nonetheless, continued to make the argument in the midst of those various efforts to silence those arguments regarding the privilege.

The chair did not, at the time, issue a specific ruling about whether or not this was, in his view, a matter pertaining to privilege. As members know, if a question of privilege is raised at committee, the chair then makes a determination, if he sees it as being a matter relating to privilege. If he deems it to be so, then a debate ensues on privilege.

The chair did not specifically say that he considered it a matter pertaining to privilege, although my understanding at the time was that it was a matter pertaining to privilege and he had deemed it so, because he allowed the debate to continue.

Again, I go to, at 5:05, the chair, the member for Calgary Skyview saying that I had the floor, where I left off. At that point I continued and the debate continued. Actually, it continued through until the end of the meeting on October 31, and then it resumed, the same meeting of the natural resources committee resumed on November 1. I still had the floor.

The chair said that when we concluded the last meeting, I had the floor and he wanted to provide me the opportunity, and asked whether I would like to cede the floor or continue. I said that upon serious reflection of the matter, I had decided I would like to keep the floor because I had more to say and would do so.

Thus, I continued on the point. This was on November 1. Subsequently, the chair, I gather having maybe learned some rules that he had not previously been aware of, and of which there are a good many, said much later—

Government Business No. 31—Proceedings on Bill C-50

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Madam Speaker, that was a spectacle. I would suggest that, if the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources cannot understand the connection between plastic straws and fuels for vehicles that Canadians like and want to drive, then that says all we need to know about the Liberals' understanding of oil and gas development and how this all works in Canada and the world. Does it not?

Make no mistake, today is a dark day for Canada's democracy. Unfortunately, these darks days are increasingly frequent under the NDP-Liberal coalition government. After eight years, I, like a growing number of Canadians, cannot help but reflect on how far away, quiet, dim and so obviously empty the promises of sunny days were. There were promises of sunlight being the best disinfectant, of being open by default, and of collaboration with other parties, provinces and all Canadians, no matter where they live or who they are.

The truth is that, after eight years, the Information Commissioner says transparency is not a top priority for the NDP-Liberal government. She says that systems for transparency have declined steadily since the Prime Minister took office in 2015 and that the government is the most opaque government ever. She sounded ever-increasing alarms about the closed-by-default reality of the NDP-Liberal government over the last couple of years.

Back in 2017, an audit done independently by a Halifax journalist and his team for News Media Canada, which represents more than 800 print and digital titles, pointed out that the Liberals were failing in breaking their promises and that the previous Conservative government had been more responsive, open and transparent, including during the latter majority years. Everyone can remember when the now Prime Minister made a lot of verifiably baseless claims. Today, the NDP-Liberals want to ram through a bill that their own internal briefings warn would kill 170,000 Canadian oil and gas jobs and hurt the jobs of 2.7 million other Canadians employed in other sectors in every corner of this country. I will say more on that later.

Canadians deserve to know what transparency has to do with this. I will explain, but first, members must also know this: The motion the NDP-Liberals have forced us all to debate today, with as little time as possible, is extraordinary. It is a measure usually invoked only for emergencies, and to be clear, it was used twice in nine years of the former Conservative government, but it is happening almost every other day with the NDP-Liberals.

Now, I will give the background. Last week, Conservatives and so many horrified Canadians challenged the Liberals on their approach to crime, being hard on victims and soft on criminals, which, at the time, was made obvious by the decision to send Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison. As usual, the Liberals claimed to be bystanders that day, as they do with almost all things happening in the Government of Canada, which they have been ruling over eight long years. The minister responsible really had nothing to do with it. He was removed from that position in late July, so evidently, someone over there thought he was. However, I digress.

To change the channel during the last weeks of that session, the Liberals dumped a number of bills in the House of Commons with promises to those they impacted, which they must have never intended to keep, including Bill C-53 about recognizing Métis people, which they put forward on the last sitting day of the session. They told people it would be all done at once, a claim they had no business to make, and they knew it.

Before that, on May 30, the Liberals introduced Bill C-49, a bill to functionally end Atlantic offshore oil and to establish a framework for offshore renewable development that, get this, would triple the already endless NDP-Liberal timelines. There would also be uncertainty around offshore renewable project assessments and approvals. The bill would invite court challenges on the allowable anti-development zones and the potential delegation of indigenous consultation to the regulators, which has been drafted, never mind the 33 references to Bill C-69, which the Supreme Court said nearly two months ago was largely unconstitutional over the last half decade.

That claim may end up to be okay in the context of offshore development, but surely we can be forgiven for refusing to just trust them this time, since both the Supreme Court and the Federal Court have recently ruled against the NDP-Liberal government and affirmed every single jurisdictional point that Conservatives and I made about both Bill C-69 and their ridiculous top-down, plastics-as-toxins decree.

On May 30, there was no debate on Bill C-49. The NDP-Liberals brought it back to the House of Commons on September 19. They permitted a total of 8.5 hours of debate over two partial days. It is important for Canadians to know that the government, not the official opposition, controls every aspect of the scheduling of all bills and motions in the House of Commons. The government did not put Bill C-49 back on the agenda to allow MPs to speak to it on behalf of the constituents the bill would impact exclusively, such as, for example, every single MP from every party represented in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Instead, a month later, within two days, the NDP-Liberals brought forward a motion to shut down debate and send the bill to committee.

No fewer than seven Liberals and two NDP MPs argued to fast-track Bill C-49 to justify their shutdown of the debate, and they accused Conservatives of holding it up. This is about all the groups and people who must be heard. This is important because of what they then proposed at committee, which was not a concurrence study, as the parliamentary secretary claimed today.

When it comes to the last-minute name change to Bill C-50, which is still the globally planned just transition no matter what the NDP-Liberals spin to Canadians now. The Liberals first announced plans to legislate this in July 2021.

They introduced Bill C-50 with no debate on June 15, just a week before MPs headed to work in our ridings until September. They brought in Bill C-50 on September 29. They permitted only 7.5 hours of total debate over two months, and about a month later, over two days, shut it down and sent it to committee.

Bill C-50, which represents the last step and the final solution in the anti-energy, anti-development agenda that has been promoted internationally and incrementally imposed by the NDP-Liberals in Canada, and which they know would damage millions of Canadian workers in energy, agriculture, construction, transportation and manufacturing, just as their internal memos show it, was rammed through the first stages in a total of three business days.

Government bills go to committee and are prioritized over everything else. At committee, MPs analyze the details of the bills, line by line, and also, most importantly, hear from Canadians about the intended, and sometimes even more imperative unintended, consequences. They then propose and debate changes to improve it before it goes back to the House of Commons for more debate and comments from MPs on behalf of the diverse people in the communities we represent across this big country. That is literally Canadian democracy.

However, on October 30, the Liberals brought in a detailed top-down scheduling motion for the natural resources committee and changed the order of the bills to be considered, which was not concurrent. Their motion was to deal with Bill C-50, the just transition, first. This was a reversal of the way they brought them in. They also shut down debate on each, delaying Bill C-49, the Atlantic offshore bill they said they wanted to fast-track, even though they actually control every part of the agenda themselves.

Their motion limited the time to hear from witnesses to only four meetings, and there were four meetings to go through each line and propose changes, but they limited each of those meetings to three hours each for both bills.

On behalf of Conservatives, I proposed an amendment that would help MPs on the natural resources committee do our due diligence on Bill C-49 to send it to the next stages first, exactly as the NDP-Liberals said they wanted to do. I proposed that the committee would have to deal with the problem of the half decade old law Bill C-69, which was found to be unconstitutional two weeks earlier, because so many of its sections are in Bill C-49, and then move to Bill C-50, the just transition.

Conservatives have always said that both of these bills are important with disproportionate impacts in certain communities and regions, but ultimately very consequential for all Canadians. The NDP-Liberals had the temerity to say, that day and since, that they wanted to collaborate on the schedule, as we heard here today, and work together to pass these bills.

Let us talk about what that actually looked like. It looked like a dictatorial scheduling motion to the committee with no real consideration of the proposed schedule by Conservatives, and then there was a preoccupation to silence Conservative MPs' participation. They even suggested kicking a couple of them out, such as the MP for Peace River—Westlock and the MP for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, who, like me and every Conservative Alberta MP, represent the hundreds of thousands of constituents that Bill C-50 would harm directly. They do have a right to speak and participate at any committee, like it is in all committees for all MPs and all parties here. Believe me, we have spent every single day fighting for workers, and we will not stop.

For an entire month, as of yesterday, the NDP-Liberals have claimed that they want to collaborate on the schedule for this important work, but other than a text message from the natural resources parliamentary secretary, which received no response when I replied with the very same suggestions Conservatives proposed in public and otherwise, and ironically, in the very order that they rammed it all through, they really have not dealt with us in any measure of collaboration or good faith at all.

I guess now would be an awkward time to put a fine point on it to remind the ever-increasing top-down NDP-Liberal government that Canadians actually gave Conservatives more votes individually in both of the last two elections, and they are a minority government, which most people hope or claim means more compromises and more collaboration. However, these NDP-Liberals do the exact opposite. Whatever happened to all those words long ago about respecting everyone, inclusion and working together? I guess we can never mind that.

That brings us to today, Friday, December 1. Close to midnight on Wednesday, Conservatives received notice of this motion. As usual, there is a lot of parliamentary procedure and legalese here, but I will explain exactly what it proposes to do about Bill C-50.

The motion would limit Bill C-50 to less than two hours of debate. The committee would hear no witnesses, so none of the affected workers, experts or economists would be heard. The committee would not hear from anybody. MPs would only have one day to review the bill at report stage and one day of debate at third reading. Given that debate at second reading was limited to less than eight hours, this is absolutely unacceptable for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose livelihoods this bill would destroy.

I want to make the following point clearly. Because of the NDP-Liberals' actions to date, no Canadian would be able to speak about the actual bill, Bill C-50. No MP would be able to hear from any Canadian in any part of the country about it. Of course, this is just like the Liberals' censorship of Canadian media, and now they are all howling that we have to communicate directly on the only option they have left us.

This bill would impact Canada and the livelihoods of millions of Canadians. As if the NDP-Liberals have not done enough damage already by driving hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs out of this country. They definitely do not want to hear from anyone about it. It is bad enough that they did a last-minute copy-and-paste job to switch all the references from “just transition” to “sustainable jobs”, even though no one had actually ever called it that before.

There was a National Post column in February entitled, “Most Canadians don't trust Liberals' plan for 'just transition' away from oil: poll”. The column says, “84 per cent of Canadians do not know what the 'just transition' plan actually is.” It also states, “40 per cent believe it will hurt the oil and gas sector; 36 per cent believe it will lead to lost jobs,” and, “Fifty-six per cent of Canadians are 'not confident' the government will be able to deliver, and 26 per cent of those people are 'not at all confident'.”

The article says, “About one quarter...of Canadians think the government is moving too fast to transition Canada’s economy,” which is what this is really all about. About 60 per cent of Canadians “don’t want to pay any additional taxes to support the transition and just 14 per cent were willing to pay one or two per cent more.” That is bad news for those who are pro quadrupling the carbon tax in the NDP-Liberal-Bloc coalition.

The article continues, “57 per cent of Canadians worry about the impact of lost tax revenue to governments should the economy transition away from natural resources. And 40 per cent believe that the plan to transition away from fossil fuels will make Canada less competitive in the global economy.” A whopping “60 per cent of all Canadians think we shouldn’t make major changes before larger global polluters make serious efforts to reduce carbon emissions”. Of course, and luckily, common-sense Conservatives agree with all of those Canadians.

For the record, I believe all of those Canadians will be proven to be correct if Canadians let the NDP-Liberals advance the rest of this destructive agenda, but I am hopeful more Canadians than ever will see right through the Liberals now and will have a chance to stop it. It does look like it will come down to that since, despite all the NDP-Liberals' big talk, they really are not interested in adjusting their anti-energy agenda at all. They are only interested in escalating it to what would be more major costs and more brutal losses for the vast majority of everyday Canadians, whom they prove everyday they do not really care about.

Canadians can stop this attack on our country from our own government, this attack on our standard of living, our quality of life and our ability to buy and thrive here in our Canadian home. However, because of the NDP propping up the Liberals, Canadians have no choice, but they will have to deal with it in the next election. Luckily, they have a common-sense Conservative Party that is ready and able to bring our great home, our country of Canada, back up and away from this cliff.

The NDP has abandoned its traditional, and often admirable, position of being a principled and plucky opposition party because it cries outrage everyday while it props up the Liberals, apparently with the co-operation of the Bloc now too, to keep them in power and to prevent Canadians from having a say in an election sooner than later. The NDP-Liberals are clearly parties of power at any price now, so it is logical to conclude that the truth-telling Canadians featured the February column about the polls on the just transition are exactly what caused the crass and obviously last-minute name change to cover up the facts and try to fool Canadians that Bill C-50 is not exactly what they fear and exactly what they do not trust the government to do. That is with good cause, after eight years, but it is the just transition.

I would also mention here that Alberta NDP leader, Rachel Notley, has also called on the NDP-Liberals to scrap this just transition plan, but they are not listening to her either, even though the NDP's federal and provincial parties are formally related, unlike, for example, the federal common-sense Conservatives, which is a federal party in its own right with no official ties with any similar free enterprise Conservative provincial parties.

The NDP-Liberals will say that this is all much ado about nothing. They will say, as the member did, that it went through committee last year. Of course, the bill itself absolutely did not. It was a study on the general concept.

I must note that, between April and September, we had 64 witnesses and 23 written submissions, and not a single witness, except for one lonely government witness at the very end, ever called them “sustainable jobs”. They all said “just transition”. However, the NDP-Liberals announced the Bill C-50 just transition before the committee even issued its report and recommendations, so that was all a bad charade too.

It is ridiculous that they are claiming this is not about what it plainly is, because of course, if there was no plan to kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and disrupt millions more, there would be no need for anything called a “transition” at all.

Canada Labour Code

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster.

It is always a privilege to stand in the House to speak on behalf of the constituents of Kelowna—Lake Country. Today, I rise to speak to the government's legislation, Bill C-58, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code and the Canada Industrial Relations Board regulations. The bill has two main elements. First, it would affect the use of replacement workers only in those workplaces that fall under federal regulation. To be clear, this is not for federal public sector workers. Second, the bill would amend the maintenance of activities process. Again, to be clear, this is not for federal public sector workers. This is only for companies that fall within federal regulation.

If this legislation is so fantastic for workers, as the labour minister and other Liberal members say, it is extremely curious that the Liberals did not implement it into the contracts it negotiated just recently in the federal public sector. The Liberals plan to enforce legislation for the private sector that they themselves will not be held to. The golden rule of doing unto others as one would have them do unto oneself does not exist for the NDP-Liberal government.

One of the most interesting parts of this legislation is that, if it were to pass through the House of Commons and the Senate, and receive royal assent, it would not come into effect until after the next election. Here we have another example of the Liberal government promising sunny ways now and pushing off the effects its policies would have until after an election.

One of the great privileges of serving as the shadow minister for employment and workforce development is the number of meetings and conversations I have with workers, including unionized workers. I have talked with many workers from many different industries across many provinces in the country, in Yukon, and in my community.

Most workers whom I have talked to have top priorities in their concerns with tax increases, inflation and interest rates eating away at their paycheques. These are the top issues they bring up with me. I have had workers talk to me about concerns with stable EI programs, access to training, temporary foreign workers, better access to professional testing, and the ability for people working in the trades to expense items such as tools.

I was recently speaking to a young man who is a construction worker who told me that he has a place to sleep, but it is not a home. Even though he has a good job, he does not feel like he will ever own a home. We know it now takes 25 years to save for a home in Canada. There are so many good jobs that either have left the country or have evaporated, but the NDP-Liberal government does not want to talk about that.

Let us look at the forestry sector. Thousands of good-paying jobs have been lost in my home province of British Columbia alone. These were good-paying jobs supporting families. It is not like there was less of a need for softwood lumber or pulp, but due to the Liberal government's not negotiating a softwood lumber agreement with the U.S., a lack of business confidence and an unfriendly business regime created by the government, the jobs have gone south of the border. The Prime Minister promised a new softwood lumber agreement within 100 days of his first election in 2015. We are now thousands of days past this, three U.S. presidents later and no closer to that agreement.

Mills have shut and thousands of jobs have been lost in B.C. alone. This is another broken promise. Two hundred workers whose livelihoods supported their families in my community of Kelowna—Lake Country lost their jobs when the mill closed. The Liberals were not successful in negotiating a softwood lumber section into CUSMA either. They left it up to negotiating a separate agreement, and this has not happened.

In the energy sector, over $100 billion in investments evaporated with project cancellations under the NDP-Liberal government, and tens of thousands of jobs have either been lost, or there were lost opportunities. Many cited Canada's red-tape regulatory regime as a major barrier. There used to be direct flights to Fort Mac from Kelowna International Airport, with families living in Kelowna or Lake Country. When there were massive layoffs in the energy sector early in the Liberal government's time, the flights stopped.

Around this time, I recall speaking to a family where the husband had a good job working for an oil and gas company, and his company laid off a lot of its workforce. The only work he could find at the time was cutting lawns, and he and his wife had to make the tough family decision for the wife to go back to work, even though, with two young children, she did not want to. Even with them both working, they were making less than his one previous job in the energy sector. She was also no longer able to volunteer at the kids' school, and it created a lot of coordinating challenges with activities in the family. These are the tough decisions parents make every day. If the government were truly concerned about workers, as it says it is, it should focus on making sure there is investment in Canada and removing red tape and bureaucracy. It should stop stifling business and focus on creating well-paying jobs.

The anti-energy Prime Minister and radical activist environment minister have shrunk Canada’s energy workforce while promising a “just transition” that cannot guarantee workers the same pay or benefits. The government’s own document on the just transition refers to affecting 2.7 million workers' jobs within the energy, manufacturing, construction, transportation and agriculture sectors. Let us not forget the anti-energy industry bill, Bill C-69, parts of which have now been deemed unconstitutional.

The Prime Minister said there is no business case for LNG, yet the U.S. has become a major exporter in the world in just a few years. This is another lost opportunity for Canadian workers. If the NDP-Liberal government is so concerned about replacement workers, why did it seemingly negotiate an agreement in Windsor, Ontario, which will include foreign replacement workers? The Liberals originally called this disinformation, but we now know and have confirmation from the very company hiring the workers that at least 900 taxpayer-funded foreign replacement workers from South Korea would be brought in to work on that plant, which would be subsidized by 15 billion taxpayer dollars.

The executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions has called the decision to allow foreign replacement workers to replace Canadian jobs at the EV battery manufacturing facility in Windsor “a slap in the face” and an “insult to Canadian taxpayers.” We now know that the Northvolt project in Quebec will bring in taxpayer-funded foreign replacement workers as well.

The government needs to make public copies of all contracts, memorandums of understanding or any other agreement between any minister, department, agency or Crown corporation of the Government of Canada, as well as all companies it has announced tax breaks and subsidies to in relation to battery production. When the Liberals put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, the jobs those subsidies pay for should go to Canadian workers, not foreign replacement workers. Common-sense Conservatives are calling on the Prime Minister to release the documents for all these taxpayer-funded battery plants, so Canadians can see if the Liberal government did anything to secure guarantees for Canadian workers.

Let us talk about another recent broken promise of the Liberal government, with the announcement that it will now be raising EI premiums on every paycheque of workers in Canada in 2024. Just seven months ago, in budget 2023, it said that premiums would not be increased. The government’s inflationary deficits have crushed the purchasing power of workers' paycheques. Inflation increases the costs of basic necessities, and food inflation has been even higher. Despite the finance minister’s victory statement in September, inflation is still high; the Prime Minister's promise of bringing down food costs by Thanksgiving has come and gone. We know there is a record number of two million Canadians using a food bank each month. Rents have doubled, and taxes such as the carbon tax keep increasing. Families of all generations are being squeezed; they are on the edge of not being able to fulfill their financial commitments and pay their bills.

After eight years, inflation and interest rates at generational highs are impacting workers and their families everywhere they turn. Only a Conservative government will focus on making life more affordable and removing red tape and bureaucracy so Canadians can bring home powerful paycheques once again.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, since I was elected in 2015, I have spent most of my energy speaking up for the workers I represent in Calgary. They have been systematically crushed by the government, its NDP coalition partner and, sadly, from 2015 to 2019, by a short-lived NDP government in Alberta. Therefore, this bill is not one that is going to be a great prescriptive answer for workers in my riding. They have been punished by the government and it appears they will continue to be so.

I am passionate about the freedom of workers in my riding to work, about their freedom to organize and to bargain collectively through union membership. I am passionate about freedom of association. It is an essential and foundational freedom on which our country was built. Let there be no doubt about that.

Also, let there be no doubt that there is only one party in the House of Commons that supports worker, which is this party. The other three parties in the House have never supported the workers in my community. Everything the NDP-Liberal government and its fellow travellers in the Bloc do, every instinct they possess runs counter to the interests of the workers in my riding.

Let us examine the track record of the NDP-Liberal government as it relates to the workers in my community. The very first thing the government did, even before Parliament met for the first time, was to cancel the northern gateway pipeline by an order in council. This decision instantly killed thousands of jobs, union jobs, non-union jobs, indigenous community jobs, every kind of job one can imagine.

The people who would have been employed by that project were among the highest-paid workers in the Canadian economy. Had that critical infrastructure actually been built, it would have led to thousands of new jobs in extraction projects that never materialized for the lack of infrastructure that the government deliberately killed. It was literally the first thing it did when it took office.

It also denied the world access to Canada's energy products, leaving it vulnerable to dictator oil, much to our folly and what we see tragically happening in the world today as Putin funds his war machine with energy exports that could have been displaced by Canadian exports.

The Liberals passed Bill C-69, which ensured that no major project would ever be approved again. They used to have talking points that tried to deny that was case, but when the Minister of Environment was a candidate, he let the mask slip and admitted that killing the energy industry was exactly the purpose of Bill C-69. Who is paying for this? It is the workers who are paying for the destruction to the Canadian economy that has happened in this sector under the government. That bill ruined the lives of thousands of workers and their families. Under the NDP-Liberal government, 200,000 energy workers lost their job. I say that deliberately.

Let us not forget that before the federal NDP-Liberal coalition took place, there was a different alliance between the NDP and the Liberals, and that was the Alberta NDP and the federal government. Together they destroyed thousands of jobs and the lives that depended on them.

Again, these were union jobs, non-union jobs and indigenous community jobs. The callous way in which the NDP and the Liberals threw away all these jobs and made sure they would not come back is shameful. Therefore, we will take no lessons from them on protecting jobs for workers, whether they belong to a union or not.

I have said before in the House, especially between 2015 and 2018, that I had grown men in their fifties reduced to tears in my office over the loss of their livelihoods. These are highly paid, professional, proud people. Some of them were old enough that they had entered the workforce when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. They told me that they had even managed to survive the NEP, but now they did not have a job. Women, who had reached the senior levels of corporate Calgary, were suddenly without a job.

I have knocked on doors. I knocked on one door where a mom said their family came to Canada 20 years ago. Her husband was working in the Middle East and her son was working in Texas. They had to leave the country for work in the energy industry. I will take nothing from the government on jobs.

What are the Liberals doing now? They are subsidizing replacement workers from foreign countries to come and take work away that should be given to Canadians. There was $7 billion for the Northvolt project with foreign replacement workers. There was $15 billion to Stellantis for foreign replacement workers. It is disgraceful and it is shameful the way the Liberals come here and try to lecture Conservatives on supporting workers.

We are now at the end of the year. The NDP-Liberal government tabled this bill banning replacement workers in federally regulated industries as per the demand put upon the government by the NDP. This is not what the Liberals campaigned on. This is something the Liberals voted against. The NDP has tabled this very policy in the House through private members' business.

The same Liberals who are speaking this morning in debate, who voted against this, would now have people believe that this is somehow part of their policy and what they ran on. This is clearly a long-standing NDP policy, but this is nothing more than the NDP tail wagging the Liberal dog. That is exactly why we call it the NDP-Liberal government.

The bill would ban workers from working in federally regulated industries if the workers who belong to a union go on strike. It is a bill that risks pitting workers against each other. Workers who choose not to join a union are workers too. Workers across picket lines are workers too, but not to the NDP-Liberals.

I even heard this morning the use of dehumanizing language. The Liberals referred to these workers as “scabs”. Let us think about that. It is a degrading, humiliating and dehumanizing word they used, not because this is about power for workers. It is not. It is about control and that is why they use this type of language.

The market is an amazing and undeniable force of nature, and it does tend to sort things out quickly. It allows the best decisions to be made at the bargaining table and incentivizes agreements. The government is presiding over a cost-of-living crisis where rent has doubled, mortgage payments are up 150% and a generation of young Canadian workers have given up on the dream of home ownership because they cannot afford to live in this country. We have seen food inflation. We have seen every kind of inflation fuelled by taxes paid by workers.

The NDP-Liberal government has nothing to teach Conservatives or tell Canadians about supporting workers. There is only one party that is supporting workers, the one party that stands for powerful paycheques that can be used to buy homes that people can afford in safe communities. That is what the Conservative vision is for this country. It is not spending billions of tax dollars, paid for by workers, to pay foreign workers to come and take their jobs away from them and bid up the price of homes in their communities. It is shameful.

I will take no lessons from the Liberal-NDP government on support for workers. The workers in my riding have seen the sharp end of the Liberal government. I saw desperation at people's doors, especially in the 2019 election. The community I represent is full of talented, hard-working, ambitious workers who have been crushed by the government.

The good news is they see hope. They know workers are increasingly turning to the Conservative Party, and it is the workers in Canada who are going to elect a Conservative government that will deliver powerful paycheques that Canadians need to be able to afford to live, and rein in the wasteful spending and corporate welfare that has become endemic under the government.

It is only the Conservatives in this place who are standing up for workers in Canada.

Foreign Affairs and International Development

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on the discussion about the report from the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade entitled, “The Russian State's Illegal War of Aggression Against Ukraine”.

As Canadians know, Conservatives have always stood with Ukraine. Those who have had the pleasure of hearing at committee some stories from my personal history will have heard that, back in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, I was the senior adviser to Canada's foreign minister.

I can remember the weekend that I spent on the phone with the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council Office and former deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski, the first Ukrainian deputy prime minister of Canada, discussing what we should do. The Soviet Union had not quite collapsed, and Mikhail Gorbachev was trying to institute his glasnost reforms. It looked like, within a few weeks, there would be a collapse.

We had a long discussion about recognizing Ukraine first. We were the party that recognized Ukraine on that weekend, December 2, and we were the first country in the world to recognize Ukraine as an independent country, separate from the old Soviet Union. That was a momentous thing because, of course, we have a large diaspora of Ukrainians in Canada. I am proud to have played a very small and minor role as a senior adviser to the then minister of foreign affairs, Hon. Barbara McDougall, when we did that.

We do support all of the recommendations in this report, but I would like to draw attention to a couple of particular interest to us. The previous speaker spoke about recommendations 12 and 13, and I will come to that, but I would like to focus a little on recommendation 8, which says:

That the Government of Canada work with its international and domestic partners to improve the coordinated implementation and enforcement of sanctions against Russia, by working to identify all assets connected to designated persons and closing any loopholes that may exist.

There are a lot of loopholes that still exist today. Not to toot my own horn, but I worked on creating the legislation the Government of Canada still uses today back in 1991, when there was the coup in Haiti. We wanted to impose economic sanctions, globally through the OAS and then through the UN, on Haiti and the illegal coup of Haiti's first democratically elected president.

There was no power to quickly impose economic sanctions. We quickly created within about four days a piece of legislation that was introduced and passed unanimously through the House and Senate within about 48 hours to create a bill that gave the Governor in Council the power to quickly move and impose economic sanctions.

We know these sanctions are leaking, and I have raised this before in committee. I said it as a member of the fisheries committee. While the government has targeted specific individuals, and all of those are justified, what it has not done is looked at the leakiness of the sanctions overall. I have an example that has had a very large impact on Atlantic Canada. The snow crab fishery is a very big fishery off Newfoundland, and 52% of the crab fishery caught in Newfoundland was, until this war happened last year, bought by Japan, through contracts.

When the war broke out and Russia was desperate for cash, it started to sell their snow crab at a much cheaper price on the global markets. Most countries respected the fact that that money would be used for fuelling Putin's illegal war and did not bite. Japan did bite, broke every contract in Newfoundland and stopped buying all their snow crab from Newfoundland. Now Japan buys most of their snow crab from Russia, helping to fund their war.

The minister and the Liberal government have never raised those kinds of issues with counterparts. We have raised them with the minister, and the minister was totally unaware that this had happened.

It is not unusual for a Liberal minister to be unaware, but one would think that, when we are dealing with sanctions in a war, it is not just about the individuals but is about the flow of cash that is going in by buying goods of our G7 allies.

I would also like to comment on recommendation 12, which reads, “That the Government of Canada not grant a sanctions waiver to Siemens Energy Canada Limited for Nord Stream 1 pipeline turbines....”

Remember, with the turbine, Russia did this fake thing about needing the turbine for the pipeline that brought natural gas and oil into Europe. It brought in a need for repair, and the government said it was no problem, to bring it in here and we would repair it. Then the war broke out and Russia said it wanted it back in order to facilitate the continued supply of that oil and natural gas, supposedly. The government acquiesced, granted a waiver, sent it back to Russia and allowed it to continue to ship oil and natural gas to fund its war.

In fact, if we look at some of the testimony in this report, it quite clearly shows that a number of witnesses were flabbergasted the Government of Canada would allow such fakery to happen.

In addition, in a rare moment of clarity on the liquefied natural gas issue, the Minister of Natural Resources said at the time, and this is from page 31 of the unanimous report, that he could not “overemphasize the depth of concern on the part of the Germans, but also on the part of the European Union, with respect to the potential implications associated with their effectively not being able to access natural gas.”

The report goes on:

In addition to the concerns expressed by Germany and the EU, the Minister [of Natural Resources] noted that, in conversations had with the United States, “they reflected and shared the concerns about the divisions that could end up undermining support for Ukraine....”

That was the Liberal minister, but yet when the Chancellor of Germany came to Canada and Germany was begging for our natural gas to deal with the issue of the impact on energy supply in Europe because of this illegal war, the Prime Minister said that there was no business case to ship it oil.

Maybe there is a case to get it done because there is a war on, but of course we were not ready to do that. When the Prime Minister and these Liberals came to power in 2015, there were 15 LNG plants on the books. As they progressed with their agenda, their no-pipelines bill, Bill C-69, or the “no capital bill”, as I call it, to drive capital out of Canada, we have how many? I am sure there are members here who could tell me how many have been built since those 15 were proposed and going through the environmental system.

I hear a colleague say zero. Maybe the true answer the Prime Minister should have given the Chancellor of Germany is that he messed up and that he was not ready to deal with the issue of making sure good, clean, ethical Canadian natural gas could be accessed by Europe, which has become totally dependent on Russia, in case of emergencies. Unfortunately, that was not his answer. He glibly said that there was no business case for it. I am not sure the Prime Minister has actually ever read a business plan, but he told the Chancellor that, and so Germany went and obtained the natural gas it needed from dirty dictatorships. That is the great foreign policy we have had.

My colleague mentioned the fact that if the Liberals were truly interested in supporting Ukraine, they would have put provisions in the free trade bill to enable and foster the ability of our country to supply more munitions to Ukraine and to manufacture them. In fact, if there is a gap in political risk insurance by the EDC, it is easy for the Government of Canada to show its commitment to Ukraine by using the Canada account to help Canadian munitions manufacturers located in Germany and deal with the risk insurance issue.

Have the Liberals used the Canada account to do that? No, so their commitment to Ukraine is, like all other things, fairly superficial and not done with the seriousness one would expect from an ally of an important democratic country in this world and of our diaspora of 1.5 million Ukrainians in Canada who expect more from the government.

Enhancing Transparency and Accountability in the Transportation System Act

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House and speak on behalf of the incredible constituents of Calgary Midnapore.

Before I begin my speech, I would like to state that I will be splitting my time with the member for Provencher. I look forward to his remarks following mine.

When I received the request from our shadow minister for transport, the member for Chilliwack—Hope, I was, in fact, very honoured. One of my greatest achievements in my time in the House of Commons was serving as the shadow minister for transport during the pandemic. I can certainly tell everyone that things did not function as they should have during that time. They did not function at all, in fact.

My experience, based upon that time, leads me to the conclusion that there is, in regard to the government, lots of regulation and no responsibility. This also summarizes my conclusion regarding Bill C-52.

I think that this is a theme we have seen with the government. We have seen this with some recent decisions made at different levels of government, as well as at higher courts, including with regard to Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” bill, as we called it here. There, they put in significant regulation against not only pipelines but also, actually, lots of other pieces of infrastructure. We see that this was, in fact, overturned.

Just this past week, as well, we were very happy to see, on this side of the House, the overruling of the single-use plastics legislation that was put in by the government. Again, the government imposes all this regulation on industry, on Canadians and on third parties without taking the responsibility for the regulations that it has imposed upon itself. I think we are seeing this again in this bill.

I am sure that we are aware that 2022 was a disastrous summer travel season, as well as a terrible holiday travel season through December. Really, if we look back at that, it was for the reason that I gave at the beginning of my speech, which was poor management of the transportation sector through the pandemic.

Frankly, they had no plan for the airline sector at that time. As the shadow minister of transport, I certainly tried to get them to produce a plan. They did no such thing. This had significant and widespread consequences not only for Canadians but also for workers across Canada, as well as for different communities and regions across Canada.

I implored them to come up with a plan for regional airlines at the time. Regional airport authorities were left to fend for themselves. I, along with my colleagues, made a very strong push for them to implement rapid testing and implement it sooner than they did, in an effort to more easily facilitate both travel and the travel sector. As well, I tried very hard to convince them not to use the supports for sectors for executive compensation. All these requests that I made as the shadow minister for transport fell upon deaf ears at that time.

In addition, of course, I was not alone in doing that. There were also my colleagues, the member of Parliament for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman and the member of Parliament for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley.

Sadly, in September 2020, we saw 14% of Nav Canada employees being laid off in centres in Winnipeg and Halifax. That is just another example of the lack of action of the government during the pandemic. At that time, 750 families had to go home and tell their families that they did not have a job anymore.

I said back in September 2020, before the throne speech, that our economy simply cannot function, let alone thrive, without major carriers and airport authorities. Ironically, I said that on mini-budget day, and here we are again today.

In 2020, the Calgary Airport Authority alone was expecting a 64% drop in passenger traffic from 2019 levels and projecting a loss of $245 million in revenue. Other airport authorities across the country were facing similar challenges at the time. Stakeholders also reported that some supply chains had been overloaded as a result of the pandemic, with demand for some products having increased by up to 500% and vulnerabilities having become apparent.

At that moment, I asked for the government to develop a plan with common-sense solutions. We continue to ask for such solutions today; again, they are not apparent in Bill C-52. Once again, we see a government that has lots of regulations, yet takes no responsibility.

I will turn my speech now to the point about complaints. Over the past year, the backlog of complaints with the CTA, the Canadian Transportation Agency, has grown to an average of 3,000 complaints per month, with a backlog of over 60,000 complaints now waiting to be adjudicated by the agency. In fact, the bill before us would set no service standards for the Canadian Transportation Agency and would do nothing to eliminate the backlog of 60,000 complaints. I have an example from my riding, where, as of July 2023, I had a constituent waiting two years for a response from the CTA to the complaint they had registered. In the same eight months when the CTA processed 4,085 complaints, the complaints grew by 12,000, doubling in that time. It is no wonder Canadians are dissatisfied with the current process in place, and the legislation would do little to improve it without said standards.

As well, it is not clear which entities would be covered by the bill as the bill would be left to future regulations. A theme we have heard on this side in discussing the bill today is there are lots of regulations. In fact, we have seen from the other side of the House that members take advantage of the regulations. They take advantage of Canadians in using these regulations. We might see something that is perhaps gazetted and then all of sudden brought into implementation, with both industry and Canadians being forced to respond and to pay the price for the use of regulation by the government.

Fundamentally, the bill remains a toothless bill that contains no specific remedies to the problems that have been plaguing the system since the pandemic. I will add that during the difficult time coming out of the pandemic, the then minister of transport blamed Canadians for forgetting how to travel. I talked about the government's shirking responsibility, and there we see it again with the minister of transport's not saying that it was his bad or that he should have come up with a plan during the pandemic, but rather blaming Canadians. He was not even addressing it through the complaint process, nor was he willing to fix the complaint process.

I have a quote from a significant air passenger rights advocate, Gabor Lukacs. Anyone who sits on the transport committee certainly will have communicated with him. He says, “There may be penalties, but even those powers are left to the government to create.” Since I am throwing out Gabor Lukacs's name, I would also like to mention Roy Grinshpan, who has also been an incredible advocate for passenger rights and passenger advocacy.

Even the pilots with whom I worked so closely during the pandemic are not in favour of the legislation. The president of ALPA Canada, Captain Tim Perry, for whom I have a lot of respect, brought to my attention that safety might be compromised as a result of the implementation of the bill to ensure that passengers are taken care of. This is simply another concern, which is that passengers are not being taken care of, and even the pilots who fly the planes are voicing their concern over this.

To conclude, I talked about the implementation of regulation, so much of it, but again there is no responsibility. The then minister of transport said that there would be consequences for service providers that do not meet the standards, but he did not disclose what they would be. Again, there is so much regulation and no responsibility. The government tells Canadians and industry time and time again that they have to do this and that, but it never takes responsibility for the legislation it implements.

In conclusion, Bill C-52 and the government are about lots of regulations but no responsibility.

Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 2023

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Madam Speaker, Bill C-69 is basically what the member was referring to. That is the “no more pipelines” bill that was imposed here in Canada on Canadian citizens.

As we look forward and work with Ukraine in developing their energy infrastructure, we need to take a very long look at what the Liberals have done for legislation on developing energy in our own country. We should be helping them instead of hindering Ukraine in moving forward with energy development.

Opposition Motion—Reducing Home Heating Costs

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, we agree that it is absolutely unparliamentary for someone to give the finger on the floor of the House of Commons. That is why we have called on the entire Liberal caucus to apologize for the conduct of one of its MPs. By the way, the Speaker did not say we were not allowed to address the incident. He did say he would come back, but we are free to speak, and we will not be censured.

We know that the Prime Minister now has a carbon tax coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois. We know that he did this because he could not maintain his existing coalition. The pressure the Conservatives mounted on the NDP forced the NDP to collapse and admit that it had been wrong all along.

I remind the House that there has been only one party that has been consistent throughout and will be consistent forever. We are the only common-sense party that would axe the tax for everything, for everybody and everywhere, forever.

I note that the NDP today has now performed yet another flip-flop. Originally, the New Democrats wanted to quadruple the tax. Yesterday, they said they wanted to pause the tax. Today, they will not take a position, because they have omitted mention of the Prime Minister's quadrupling of the carbon tax in the motion. They do not want to stick by their position. They think they will quietly sneak back into the carbon tax coalition and have nobody notice. Well, their constituents are noticing, and that is why working-class people across the country are abandoning the NDP in droves.

Even the NDP Premier of Manitoba has now said that the carbon tax represents an attack on working-class people and therefore cannot work as climate change policy. I will note that we are getting all pain and no gain from the Prime Minister on the carbon tax, because his own environment commissioner came out just today and confirmed that under the current policies, including the carbon tax, he will miss his 2030 climate targets. He has missed his Paris accord climate targets again and again. Emissions continue to rise under his leadership, which proves that the carbon tax was never an environmental policy. It was a tax policy designed to pick the pockets of people and put more money in the hands of politicians to spend. This is political and governmental greed at its worst. It is no wonder Canadians have never been worse off than they are after eight years of the Prime Minister.

What I find interesting is that the Bloc Québécois has announced a costly coalition with the Prime Minister. This was confirmed in an article in La Presse, where the Liberal ministers said they had an agreement with the Bloc Québécois to keep this Prime Minister in power for another two years. Yesterday, the leader of the Bloc Québécois saved the Prime Minister. We were going to adopt a motion to reduce the cost of heating for everyone, but the Bloc Québécois was there to prevent the motion from being adopted, to vote against working-class people who want to heat their homes, to vote against seniors, to vote against people who cannot pay their bills, and to prop up the Prime Minister.

The funny thing is that the Bloc Québécois is going against Quebec's position. The Quebec government joined the other provinces in opposing a federal carbon tax as part of the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Bill C-69 and as part of the lawsuit against the carbon tax. The Quebec government wanted to curb federal taxation powers, but the Bloc Québécois is on the federal government's side. This is a centralizing Bloc Québécois. Each time the federal government decides to impose a tax on Quebeckers, we can expect the Bloc Québécois to say yes. It said yes to bigger government in Ottawa, and no to Quebeckers. That is the Bloc Québécois's real record.

The leader of the Bloc Québécois is afraid of an election. He wants to hang onto his position as leader so he can go on big trips to Europe. He wants to fly there on a plane that burns fuel so he can talk about the sovereignty of various overseas groups that are far removed from with the concerns of Quebeckers. I doubt the people of Beloeil—Chambly who are struggling to pay the bills are all that interested in the European separatist causes that the Bloc Québécois is obsessed with. The Bloc Québécois has no common sense. It is not working for Quebeckers.

Only the Conservative Party has the common sense to take the second carbon tax off the backs of Quebeckers. Quebeckers do not want to pay the taxes that the Bloc and Liberals are imposing on their gas and food anymore. Quebeckers want lower taxes so that work pays again. Quebeckers want the federal government to encourage municipalities to cut the red tape so more affordable housing can be built. Only the Conservative Party can get those things done.

In the next election, Quebeckers will have two choices. The first is a costly Liberal-Bloc coalition that raises taxes, takes their money, sets criminals free and doubles the cost of housing. The second is the common-sense Conservative Party, which will bring home lower taxes and bigger paycheques that buy affordable food, gas and housing in safe communities.

The choice is between either the costly coalition that takes one's money, taxes one's food, doubles one's housing cost, punishes one's work and frees criminals into the street or the common-sense Conservatives who free one to bring home powerful paycheques that buy affordable food, gas and groceries in affordable communities.

That is why I move the following amendment to the motion, which would add section (d): “Extend the temporary three-year pause to the federal carbon tax on home heating oil to all forms of home heating.”

Oil and Gas Industry

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Mr. Speaker, today I rise in the House to ask a question I asked in this House just last week about the Impact Assessment Act and the Supreme Court's ruling that overturned the federal government's move on the Impact Assessment Act, Bill C-69. The government moved ahead despite everybody it could possibly consult with, including opposition parties, every provincial legislature, 100 first nation bands across Canada and many other parties, saying the Impact Assessment Act as written was unconstitutional and treaded on their rights. So many rights are expressed in legislation, yet this was ignored for so long.

The Government of Alberta was backed by nine provincial governments at various points in time throughout the process. It took four years because the reference case took two years to go through the appeal court system and then almost another two years to get to the Supreme Court of Canada. It was four years of lost economic activity and, effectively, constitutional strife in Canada. That is a long time.

How many projects were held up in Canada in that time? It was hundreds of billions of dollars in projects. Right now, 42 projects have not received an environmental assessment. About half of them are under the old regime, the one before the Impact Assessment Act, called the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which was passed by the previous government and effectively allowed a whole bunch of environmental assessments to be done.

What amazed me was the response I got from the parliamentary secretary for housing when I asked a question about the federal government's involvement in this. He said at that point in time that the previous government's legislation got nothing done and had a gutted process. We cannot have it both ways. I cannot say how many times I hear from the other side of the House that they have their cake and eat it too and that the old legislation they tried to fix did not get anything done and yet was gutless. We cannot have both those things at the same time, but that is the continued narrative I hear on this all the time. It bewilders me to some degree, because it contradicts itself in so many ways, but he said that.

This was supposed to deal with the fact that the Impact Assessment Act had to go back and get corrected as quickly as possible. Getting it corrected as quickly as possible would bring forward economic activity in Canada so we can get something done in this country again, including in all the provinces across Canada. This has to happen.

I think about all the economic activity that has been held up because of the uncertainty created by the Impact Assessment Act and how it has affected so many project proponents across Canada. It is an embarrassment. It is an international embarrassment too that so much capital, including Canadian investments, is being deployed elsewhere and not here in Canada. That includes the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. This is a travesty. We need to get over it as quickly as possible.

How do we do that? We could put forward legislation that is constitutional very quickly; stop sitting on our hands; take some lessons from some environmental advocates, environmental experts and constitutional experts; and listen to what they are saying: Stay in our lane, abide by our jurisdiction and get some proper legislation we can abide by in this country.

National Security Review of Investments Modernization Act

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to talk on the update to Bill C-34, an act to amend the Investment Canada Act.

When it comes to business investment, it is clear that, after eight years under the Prime Minister and the Liberals, the government is not worth the cost. Since coming into power, business investment per employee in Canada has actually dropped 20%. At the same time, business investment per employee in the U.S. has actually increased 14%. It puts things into perspective in terms of Canada's dropping productivity and, as we go forward, the fear of declining prosperity in our country. What is more shocking is that, in the very final year of the Harper government, Canada's business investment, as a percentage of GDP, was actually higher than that of the U.S. After eight years of the government, we are at about 15% lower.

According to the National Bank of Canada, for the first time ever, business investment is now lower in this country than housing investment is. We can think about all the manufacturing, oil production and everything else. The investment is actually lower than it is in housing.

Manufacturing capital stock is the lowest that we have had since 1988. Two-thirds of our 15 main industries experienced declines in business investments under the government, including wholesale trade, accommodation and food services, utilities, professional services and manufacturing. All these numbers fell prepandemic; this is not because of the pandemic.

The Business Council of B.C. has issued a report on investment in Canada, calling it “Stuck in the slow lane”. What better title is there for what is going on right now with investment in our country than being stuck in the slow lane? The report noted that, out of 38 members in the OECD, Canada is going to have the slowest economic growth over the next decades. We will have the lowest real GDP per capita growth in the OECD going forward. That has been brought up, I think, in previous speeches about Bill C-34 in this House. The report lists several reasons for this, among them, inefficient regulatory approvals. Does anyone remember Bill C-69? Of course, we have seen Bill C-69 ruled against by the Supreme Court. Hopefully, the government will recognize what the Supreme Court has said and eliminate Bill C-69; however, Bill C-69 was only one of many regulatory burdens added by the government that has chased away business investment in this country.

The Business Council of B.C. also noted punitive tax rates as companies grow; lack of relief for energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries under the carbon tax regime; and high internal trade restrictions. Something also noted in this report is that our anemic business investment would be all the worse if it backed Alberta out. Alberta has the highest per capita investment in the entire country. If we back out Alberta, our numbers are even worse. What do we get with the government? Every possible regulatory move, every possible attempt to strangle the growth in Alberta. Therefore, we have one province driving most of the business investment in this country, and the government is trying to destroy it.

There will be some members across the way, such as, perhaps, the member for Winnipeg North, who will get up to ask this: Are there not some things the government has done? Would we not agree that it is good? There are some things the government has done to spur business investment in Canada, such as green-lighting the purchase of ITF Technologies by a China-based company. This was a deal that the Harper Conservatives had kiboshed. The Liberals reversed it and allowed a China-based company to buy out ITF Technologies. ITF has done national security work with National Defence, and the government overrode the ban on a purchase by a China-based company. We should remember that China's national intelligence law of 2017 requires companies to “support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work”.

I will read that part again. It says Chinese companies “shall support, assist and co-operate with state intelligence work”, and we have the government approving the sale of a technology company that has done work for National Defence. It waived the security review of the Chinese takeover of Vancouver's Norsat, despite Norsat being involved in communication tech for Public Safety Canada, the defence department and the Coast Guard. Norsat had also done work for the Pentagon. The U.S. and our Five Eyes allies asked us not to allow the sale to go through, but it did.

When not allowing the sale of sensitive tech companies, the Liberals are going out of their way to bring Chinese regime companies into our security systems, such as Nuctech, which my colleague from Barrie—Innisfil talked about. Nuctech is called the Huawei of scanners. It is a Chinese-based company partially owned by the Chinese state. It has been fined, charged and convicted around the world over various fraud, regulatory and spying issues, and the government went out of its way to give it a contract to bring its technology into every embassy we have around the country.

The CBSA, which is meant to protect us, for some reason basically jury-rigged the RFP to ensure that only Nuctech, ahead of two Canadian companies, one in Quebec and one in Calgary, got the contract. It wrote in the requirements the exact specifications of a type of scanner, down to exactly how many inches across and how many inches high, and guess what. Only one company in all of the world happened to have a scanner that was 33 inches across and 21 inches high: Nuctech. Oddly enough, PSPC warned the government not to buy it, and the CBSA went ahead anyway.

When this was exposed, the government said it would hire an outside consulting company to do a review. Apparently, McKinsey was not available at the time, so it hired Deloitte, and for a quarter of a million dollars, Deloitte did what had been done at the mighty OGGO. Of course, I cannot make a speech without mentioning the operations and estimates committee. Deloitte exposed the fallacy of buying equipment from Chinese security companies. For a quarter of a million dollars, it came out with a four-page report that basically said Canada should not buy sensitive IT technology from despotic regimes.

I went to the West Edmonton Mall that week with the report and randomly asked kids and adults, strangers, about this, and they all laughed. Not one person said we should buy sensitive technology from despotic regimes.

I appreciate that the government is finally getting around to updating the issue with Bill C-34, but one major change the Conservatives would like to see is taking away the ability of a minister to make the final decision. We would like to see a minister bring it to cabinet so that cabinet is consulted. For an issue as important as our state security, too much power is left with the minister. The minister should be required to bring the purchase of a sensitive company elsewhere. Whether it is a mining company or a tech company, it should not be the role of the minister to decide. We have seen the government repeatedly bring bills to the House that would give ministerial power over such a thing, and we would like to see that change.

There were a couple of other amendments we brought up that were shut down, and I would like the government to reconsider them. One of them would modify the definition of a state-owned enterprise to include any company or entity headquartered in an authoritarian state. This goes back to my previous comment about the Chinese intelligence law that forces those companies to act and assist in concert with that regime.

I will just briefly bring up a couple of other amendments that we would like to see. One is listing specific sectors necessary to preserve our national security rather than a systematic approach. Another is exempting non-Canadian Five Eyes intelligence state-owned enterprises from the security review.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that was a good speech.

Before question period, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government said that Canada was a good place for investors.

However, investors keep leaving. There are a lot of rules, like those arising from the passage of Bill C‑69, the carbon tax is too high, and we have measures that do not exist in other countries.

Why is there nothing in this bill to deal with that problem?

Prevention of Government-Imposed Vaccination Mandates Act

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the debate we have had regarding this bill, although I do not agree with all my colleagues from the other parties.

As we conclude second reading, it is important to keep several things in mind. It was wrong to divide and discriminate against Canadians based on a personal medical decision. It was wrong for the government to demonize Canadians who did not agree with the heavy-handed approach of imposing unscientific mandates on compelling folks into a medical treatment. It was wrong for the Prime Minister to call more than six million Canadians nasty names. He called his fellow Canadians racists, misogynists and a fringe minority, and he dared to say they held unacceptable views. It was wrong for the Prime Minister to say that these Canadians should not be tolerated because of a personal medical decision. It was wrong for the Liberal government to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians who did nothing wrong.

More than six million Canadians disagreed with the Liberals’ heavy-handed approach. Tens of thousands went out to protest throughout the country when they had no other avenue for expressing their concerns. Many of these folks lost their jobs. That includes truckers, government workers, doctors, nurses, crown corporation workers, our very own military members and many others. Why did the Prime Minister do this? He did it because he saw a political opportunity and did what he does best: divide.

Last week we saw the same thing happen with the Prime Minister's anti-energy, anti-resource development bill, Bill C-69, punishing mostly our western provinces by trying to limit their economic abilities to grow their own economies. The Prime Minister’s divisive tactics based on Canadians’ health is just another example in his playbook, which we have seen for eight long and miserable years of his tenure.

I was happy to see that common sense prevailed earlier this year when a ruling by the Canadian Armed Forces grievance board found that the Canadian Armed Forces mandates violated the charter rights of a member who was released for choosing to remain unvaccinated. The board stated that the Canadian Armed Forces mandate infringed on the member’s right to liberty and security of the person, under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The board also found that the policy was arbitrary, overly broad and disproportionate. It was the right decision.

In addition to all of this, it was difficult to watch as other levels of government felt pressured by the Prime Minister’s rhetoric to implement more ridiculous and unscientific mandates. Municipal and provincial officials did not want to get ridiculed, so they reluctantly imposed their own mandates. These mandates, as everyone knew at the time, did nothing to prevent transmission or illness.

What the mandates did do, however, was damage our country like I have never seen before. Folks were fired. Folks lost their livelihoods. Folks were forbidden from travelling. I cannot believe this actually happened right here in Canada. Folks missed birthdays, funerals and other important events of friends and family across the country and abroad. It was sheer vindictiveness by the Liberals, plain and simple. They wanted to exact some sort of punishment on folks who did not agree with their stance on imposing unscientific mandates that drove a wedge with families, friends and neighbours. Families were torn apart because of the government’s stigmatization of Canadians.

This must never happen again, ever. My bill seeks to do that at the federal level, where we do have jurisdiction. We can never introduce such egregious and vindictive measures. We are not that country. We cannot do that to our people. We are Canadians. We show compassion and understanding for one another. We do not seek to get someone fired or to ban them from travelling because they think differently or want to handle their own medical decisions in their own particular way. They have every right to do so. It is their health.

How did the government ever think it was okay to overstep such a sensitive boundary? I have heard from thousands of Canadians first-hand. They are still disillusioned about what happened. They are still in shock from what their own government did to them. Many people who went along with the mandates realized, as time passed, the punitive methods used in this ordeal. Many have lost trust in government in general. Some will likely never trust government again, including many of those six million Canadians who were affected. I would also fully agree with the Leader of the Opposition that the imposition of the Emergencies Act to crush the civil liberties of Canadian citizens who protested for their freedoms was one of the most despicable acts we have seen under the Prime Minister’s government.

I hope we all make sure this never happens again. I do not believe we can move on from what took place until there is accountability. This bill is a step in the right direction. Let us start with Bill C-278, and let us continue to work until there is full accountability. I know I will.

Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 2023

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is my honour and privilege today to speak on behalf of the good people of Peace River—Westlock to Bill C-57, the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement implementation act, 2023.

I am a free trader. I believe in free market economies. I believe that Canada is a trading country, and I think that it is incumbent upon us to pursue free trade agreements around the world. Canada is blessed to have a huge amount of natural resources, a large land mass and resilient people, who are able to produce those natural resources. We are able to outproduce our own need by multiples of hundreds, whether that is the food production that happens in this country, our forestry or the oil and gas sector.

I want to just talk a little bit about the Supreme Court decision around Bill C-69. It is connected to this by the fact that, when Bill C-69 was brought into force, it ended the pursuit of 14 LNG projects in this country. Prior to the Liberal government coming into power, these projects were being pursued; after Bill C-69 was brought in, they were abandoned.

At the time when Bill C-69 was put on the Order Paper and we were discussing it here in this place, we said that the bill was unconstitutional and that it would have a marked effect on the pursuit of major projects in this country. We were right on both counts. We saw 14 projects just disappear. The proponents of those projects said that there was no longer the business case to do them. The business case was entirely impacted by government regulation. We also saw, after five years of that bill being in place, that the Supreme Court agreed with us, saying Bill C-69 was unconstitutional.

Why does that matter in the context of the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement? I would remind everybody that Ukraine is now in a war with Russia. Energy is the major export of Russia to the world. What is funding this war is the energy that people are buying, no matter where they are in the world.

We just heard the NDP talk about how we should pick and choose which countries we should do business with when it comes to oil and gas. I would argue that the world market for energy is the world market for energy. If we put good clean Canadian oil and gas on the world market and compete on that market, we could displace other oil and gas. When we just take our products off that market, somebody else will go in and fill that void. That might be Russia; in many cases, it is Russia.

Now we know that the Germans, for example, have come to Canada and specifically asked Canada to increase LNG production. They said that if they do not get more LNG coming to Europe, they will have to revert to coal mining. When our Prime Minister was asked about that, he said there was no business case. He failed to recognize, or perhaps purposefully did not say, that the business case that no longer was able to be made by LNG companies in this country was predicated entirely on the backs of the new bill, Bill C-69. Those projects were in the works until Bill C-69 came into place and then slowly, one by one, the businesses that were pursuing LNG projects said that there was no longer a business case for them. So we have seen that go away.

Another thing that I am excited about in terms of free trade and free trade agreements is just how our Canadian technology can then move around the world. Our leader has often said that we will fight climate change with technology and not taxes. Our ability to then export those technologies around the world comes from when we sign free trade agreements.

I am sitting in the House here next to the member for Abbotsford. I know that, when he was the trade minister, he pursued an aggressive free trade agenda under the previous Harper government. He signed over 40 free trade agreements, which allowed our Canadian technology to then be transferred around the world. That made Canadian companies wealthy. That gave Canadians jobs. It also did amazing things for other countries.

Canada is a leader in agricultural techniques and technology. We often lead the way when it comes to dryland farming and those kinds of things. We are able to export not only our equipment, but also our know-how around the world.

When it comes to energy production with our small nuclear reactors, it is a flagship Canadian technology. When I was in elementary school, our social studies bragged about the CANDU reactor and how we would power the world with this Canadian technology. Free trade agreements have had a great impact on allowing our technology to pursue other markets around the world.

Also, our ability to export our LNG products also allows our clean technology products to be transferred around the world.

We export other things such as coal, which is mined in the most ethically sourced manner. In most cases, it is extremely mechanized. There are very few people involved in the actual mining of coal, mostly equipment operators. The rates of injury compared to the tonnes of coal being produced are the lowest. We have some of the best labour practices in the world when it comes to coal production.

Therefore, when our coal ends up on the world market, although we do not necessarily know what the end result of that is, we can say with confidence that our coal, our oil, our lumber and our power are the most ethically sourced. We know that our labour and environmental standards are second to none around the world. When we are exporting these products, we know we are doing good in the world, because we are displacing products that may not have those same standards being enforced.

When it comes to free trade agreements, I want to talk about competitiveness. When we enter the free market, we do not necessarily know where our products are going to end up and we do not necessarily know with whom we are going to be competing. There are price signals that impact our ability to sell our products.

Over and again, representatives from many companies come to my office to talk to me about competitiveness. They say that they have the best technology and labour laws in the world, as well as great ideas, yet they are unable to attract investment in their products because of regulatory uncertainty, high labour costs, high interest rates, these kinds of things. Therefore, more companies are saying they need to be more competitive on the world stage. The Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement would not only allow our products to go to other places, but would also allow Ukrainian investment to come in our direction, and we are very excited about that.

I know more companies are saying that their competitiveness is being undermined specifically because of things like the carbon tax. I am not sure if Ukraine has a carbon tax in place, but it could be a major challenge. If Ukraine does not and we do, we could hamstring our own companies if we enter into a free trade agreement with Ukraine or other countries around the world. Our companies would be competing with other companies that do not have a carbon tax on their products.

Let us say we want to sell LNG. Maybe another reason why there is no market plan for these LNG projects is because of the carbon tax, which came in around the same time as Bill C-69. Companies may say that if they are being charged a carbon tax on the production work they do in Canada when an LNG project in Australia does not have that tax on it, it is an increased cost that their competitors do not have to bear. We have to be concerned about this as we enter into these free trade agreements. We need to ensure that we not only have the ability to send our products out, but we are also able to compete with those companies in those countries.

Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleague who is celebrating her eight anniversary as a member of Parliament here in the House of Commons today. I wish her a happy anniversary and to the rest of us too.

In answer to the specific question that my colleague asked, I would answer that I only spoke about the environment and that I am very proud of that. I am a bit surprised to hear my colleague from Repentigny say that I did not speak about Bill C‑50, when, on the contrary, I made the focus of my speech the environment, a subject that is very dear to her heart.

What the Conservatives want is to help Quebec in its development. We understand Quebec, and that is why we are strongly opposed to the law stemming from Bill C‑69, which gives the federal government veto power over hydroelectric projects. I will not hide the fact that we are in favour of these developments and that we want them to move forward as quickly as possible.

We need to regain the momentum that we had in the 1950s when we tripled the infrastructure at the Beauharnois power plant, built the Bersimis-1 and Bersimis-2 power stations and gave the green light to the fantastic Manicouagan-Outardes hydroelectric project and the Carillon generating station. In the 1950s, Quebec was really big on creating hydroelectric dams. Let us hope that we can see that again one day in Quebec.