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.

[Lucie Perreault]

I can't particularly speak to Bill C-69. I'm sorry; it would be a different department.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to move over to FedNor for a minute.

You talked about the Ring of Fire. I met with the Mining Association of Canada this past week, and they talked a little bit about the approval process. Can you speak specifically to Bill C-69? Has that increased or decreased the speed at which approvals can be granted to small and medium-sized prospectors and miners?

Natural Resources

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, on June 3, I asked the Minister of Natural Resources a question about Canada's role in providing the world with energy solutions. I pointed out the government's failures in having Canadian resources delivered to world markets. My question was one about long-term impact, the result of the government's constrictive policies on Canadian resource development and delivery to world markets, and Canada's role in providing the world with energy security.

The minister told me I was wrong, that I was wrong in pointing out that hundreds of billions of dollars of investment projects have left this country since the government was elected. He said I was wrong that government-funded delays on resource development projects have left Canada with a reputation as an unreliable place to invest. He said I was wrong in indicating that their flagship Impact Assessment Act, the famous Bill C-69, has led to more uncertainty in the process of having projects approved. He said I was wrong in protesting the constraints on Canada's signature contribution to reducing worldwide CO2 emissions by exporting the world's cleanest natural gas to world markets and, in the process, displacing coal burning for electricity production in the developing world. He said I was wrong in actively working to get Canadian resources to world markets like Germany, which were thrust into the arms of Russia, as it filled the void left by Canada these past seven years. This led to a transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from democratic countries to authoritarian regimes, the most problematic, of course, being the funds that flow to Russia to wage war against our friends in Ukraine.

The government has made this bed and now it is saying that it would take too long for Canada to provide solutions to the obvious problem.

Well, I am not wrong.

The government has failed the world by constraining clean Canadian energy development for the past seven years. It has failed the developing world in providing clean Canadian energy to a growing world demanding more energy. It has failed the environment by keeping Canadian natural gas from markets that have had to burn more coal and emit more CO2. It has failed the democratic nations around the world by forcing them to source their energy at great expense from the world's most authoritarian regimes. We should have developed these resources for the world seven years ago. It is true. These are great policy failures for Canada and for the world.

The best time to move forward was seven years ago, then six years ago, then five years ago, then four years ago, then three years ago. The best time to move forward is right now. Let us get these things off the building blocks and let us get some things going in Canada.

Let us talk about the supply disruptions. I know one of the excuses I am going to hear is that these are global supply disruptions. Well, who is causing the global supply disruptions? It is Canada. We cannot get projects built.

On inflation, if we think about the mounting cost of energy around the world, it is because Canada has not been there to provide energy to a growing world. This past summer alone, energy was $60 per thousand cubic feet in Europe and $10 per thousand cubic feet in the United States. That is a big difference. It was worth negative at times in Canada.

We have to get our resources to market.

Government Business No. 22—Extension of Sitting Hours and Conduct of Extended Proceedings

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to the NDP-Liberal attack on parliamentary committees in the form of Government Business No. 22.

This undemocratic motion is a crass attempt at frustrating the work of committees by further limiting their resources. On the face of it, the motion allows the government House leader to extend the hours of any sitting of the House to midnight until June 2023. The Liberals say they are simply seeking more time to debate their legislation, but we must look at the broader implications of the adopting this motion.

With the persistence of virtual Parliament, workplace injuries for interpretation staff have increased ninefold. Since 2019, there has been a 25% decline in the number of interpreters employed by the translation bureau and nearly 40% fewer freelance interpreters available to the House. These unionized professionals work each day to ensure that our business is conducted in both official languages.

The Liberals and NDP dismiss the plight of these workers, demanding that our work continue in a hybrid fashion against the objections of interpretation staff. Due to the lack of interpreters, there is a strict limit on how many parliamentary activities the House administration can facilitate in any given sitting week. As a result, every time the hours are extended in the House, two committee meetings must be cancelled. Put simply, more time for the House equals less time for committees.

Let us keep in mind the government is in complete control of the House agenda. It determines the business each and every day, including which of its bills will be debated. It has tools at its disposal to cut off debate as it deems appropriate. It even designates which days will be allotted for opposition days. With the blind support of the hapless NDP, the Liberals have the votes to pass their legislation.

In other words, the Liberals are in complete control of the House, propped up by the NDP. However, they do not control committees in the same way. Conservatives have secured several committee investigations that are holding the Liberals accountable for their failures. For example, the government operations committee is digging into the $54-million ArriveCAN app, including Liberal misinformation reported to the House that contractors were paid millions when they did not receive a dime. That committee is tasked with answering two key questions: Where is the money and who got rich?

The heritage committee is investigating the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion for providing funding to known racist and anti-Semite Laith Marouf. The procedure and House affairs committee is investigating the Prime Minister who has known for over a year about foreign interference in our elections and has yet to act. The public safety committee is investigating allegations made against the Minister of Emergency Preparedness for political interference in the investigation into the mass killings in Nova Scotia. It is shameful.

The veterans affairs committee is looking into allegations that a government employee recommended medically assisted suicide for a veteran struggling with mental health. The declaration of a public order emergency committee has heard considerable testimony that contradicts the Liberal rationale for invoking the Emergencies Act. The transport committee recommended the repeal of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, a Liberal-made organization that has failed to get any infrastructure built. Conservatives on the foreign affairs committee continue to advocate for the listing of the IRGC as a terrorist entity, so that this brutal regime about to execute 15,000 of its own citizens cannot fundraise and organize in Canada anymore.

These are just some examples of how Conservatives are making parliamentary committees work for Canadians. Under Government Business No. 22, this and all work of committees would be restricted and constrained. The motivation for this motion is clear, the Liberals want Parliament to serve only their purposes. To them, Parliament is only useful when they can control it.

Canadians expect Parliament to hold the government to account, and Conservatives will fight to maintain the dignity of this institution.

There was a time, if we can believe it, when Liberals believed that committee work was essential. In the 2015 election, they made the following promise:

We will strengthen Parliamentary committees so that they can better scrutinize legislation.

Better government starts with better ideas. We will ensure that Parliamentary committees are properly resourced to bring in expert witnesses, and are sufficiently staffed to continue to provide reliable, non-partisan research.

The Liberals made that promise when they still believed they were the party of sunny ways, but after seven years of corruption and cover-ups, the mirage of an open, transparent and accountable government has been exposed.

Last week, in mainstream media, the government House leader justified his motion, claiming that Conservatives were employing tactics that amounted to “parliamentary obstruction by stealth.” The irony of this claim is not lost on me. He is the one, under the pretext of expanding debate in the House, who is attacking committees by stealth. I will address his claim directly.

Conservatives do not obstruct for the sake of obstruction. In recent weeks, we have allowed several bills to proceed in a reasonable time frame. We supported the swift passage of Bill C-30, which provided GST tax relief for low-income Canadians. The government did not need to use time allocation to shepherd that legislation through the House.

On September 29, the Conservative member for Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, with whom I am splitting my time, secured the unanimous consent of the House to pass the national council for reconciliation act at second reading and send it for study at the indigenous and northern affairs committee.

We allowed for Bill C-22, the disability benefit act, to be sent to the human resources committee after just two days of debate. Again, time allocation was not required.

Just before the last constituency week, Conservatives supported Bill S-5, which will strengthen environmental protection in Canada. No time allocation was required.

Conservatives can be counted on when the government brings forward proposals on which common ground can be found. The government House leader's accusation about obstruction is simply not true.

Having said that, Conservatives are openly opposed to the Liberal agenda. There is no “stealth” about it. We use every tool available in the parliamentary tool box to both expose Liberal failure and corruption and propose our ideas for Canadians to consider as an alternative.

If the government House leader had been paying attention, he would know that the new Conservative leader and our Conservative team are putting the people first: their paycheques, their savings, their homes and their country. We are against deficit-driven inflation. Instead, we demand that all new spending be matched with savings found somewhere else. We are opposed to payroll and carbon tax hikes in the middle of this cost of living crisis.

We defend energy workers against the Prime Minister's attacks on their livelihoods. We would repeal anti-energy laws like Bill C-69 and remove other Liberal-made barriers to producing our natural resources. We oppose the failed climate change plan of this government, which has not achieved a single emissions reduction target. We say no to the oppressive carbon tax and yes to technology in the fight against climate change.

We abhor $6,000-a-night hotel stays for the Prime Minister while Canadians are visiting food banks in record numbers, like 1.5 million in one month. We oppose wasteful spending and the $54-million “arrive scam” app that did not work. We did not need it, and it could have been designed over a weekend for about $250,000.

We are vocal when the Prime Minister is silent about foreign actors interfering in our elections. We reject Liberal inaction while shelves that should be stocked with children's medication sit empty. We stand with victims, not criminals, as the rates of violent crime have spiked in our cities under this government's soft-on-crime policies, and we oppose this outrageous attempt at seizing control of parliamentary committees.

There is no “stealth” about our opposition to the NDP-Liberal government. We proudly oppose the costly coalition on all these fronts, in broad daylight, for all to see.

Fall Economic Statement

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not allowed to mention the presence or absence of the Prime Minister, but I will just say that some people bring happiness wherever they go and others bring happiness whenever they go.

Conservatives are going to cap government spending. We are going to get the Bank of Canada back to its core mandate. For 25 years, the Bank of Canada had a very simple mandate of 2% inflation, brought in by the Mulroney government. It was to stick to 2%. Interest rates and money supply were all governed to that purpose, and it worked. It worked until the current Prime Minister came along and pushed the bank to print cash to pay for his spending. We are going to have no more of that.

Conservatives will fund our programs with real money, rather than printed cash, because we know that there are no freebies in this world and we know that, ultimately, the taxpayer and the consumer pay for everything. We will reinstate that mandate and we will audit the central bank through the Auditor General to make sure that never again is there such a horrendous abuse of our money as we have seen over the last couple of years.

Instead of creating more cash, we are going to create more of what cash buys. We are going to grow more food, build more houses and produce more resources right here in Canada, and here is how we will do it. We will incentivize our municipalities to remove their gatekeepers so that we can build more houses. We will remove the gatekeepers off the backs of our farmers by cancelling the tariffs and taxes on their fertilizers and fuel so they can produce more in this country. We will remove the government gatekeepers that stand in the way of our resource sector.

Do members know that Canada today has the second-slowest time for building permits of any country in the OECD? The only other country that is worse is the Slovak Republic. In Canada, if we take all the types of building permits that exist, everything from a renovation permit on a house all the way up to a full uranium mine, and we average it out, the average permit time is 250 days. In South Korea, it is 28 days.

We wonder why investors are taking their money to places like South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland. It is because they can actually get things built in those countries. That is what Conservatives are going to do in this country. We are going to compress the timelines and speed up approvals. We are going to challenge all levels of government to meet the goal of Canada being the fastest place to deliver a building permit anywhere in the developed world.

The minister said today she is going to pitch the world on our critical minerals. The problem is that she cannot get them out of the ground. She is going to tell everyone that they exist. Out there in that field there is some lithium, copper and nickel, but companies have to wait seven years for us to give a permit for anyone to dig that mine. She says she is going to give out a bunch of corporate welfare to mining companies, which can fill their bank accounts with taxpayers' cash. If they cannot get a permit to dig the mine, they will not be able to turn it into anything other than big, fat boondoggles for taxpayers.

Conservatives will repeal the anti-energy law, Bill C-69, so that we can build Canadian pipelines with Canadian steel to take Canadian energy to Canadian marketplaces and around the world. We are going to eliminate the anti-investment taxes that pile on the backs of our entrepreneurs so that it is actually rewarding to build things in this country. We are going to axe the carbon tax so that it is possible for our industries to compete and for our people to afford energy in this country.

As for energy, there are two very different approaches. Across the aisle, they believe that we should tackle climate change by making traditional energy that Canadians rely on more expensive. Conservatives believe in tackling climate change by making new alternatives more affordable. We will do that by incentivizing and speeding up permits to mine lithium, copper, cobalt, graphite and other necessary minerals that will eventually go into Canadian-made electric cars and other forms of renewable energy. We will incentivize the production of these energies here in Canada. We will incentivize nuclear energy here on Canadian soil so that we can power our economy emissions-free.

We will also get rid of the red tape to get dams built in Quebec. We know that in Quebec, there will not be enough electricity in the future to charge electric cars and to meet all the needs of a green future.

Their solution is to build dams. However, the Prime Minister wants to prevent or delay the construction of those dams with duplicate processes.

We agree with the Government of Quebec. It is not necessary to add three or four years to the time frame for these projects since the Government of Quebec already has processes in place to protect the environment. Quebeckers are capable of protecting the environment, and we are going to help them by approving the construction of hydroelectric dams.

Finally, we will make this a country where work pays again. It does not pay to work for a lot of people. Let us look at someone on disability who recovers to a point or arrives at a point in their life where they realize they can work 10 or 15 hours and they want to get out into the world and contribute. The clawbacks right now mean many people on disability lose more than a dollar for every extra dollar they earn.

The government published a report showing that if a single mother with three kids who earns $55,000 a year earns another dollar, she loses 80¢ of that dollar. She earns about $25 an hour. She loses in clawbacks of her benefits and taxes on her income 20 of those dollars, so her real wage on that extra hour of work is five dollars an hour. Nobody in Canada should be expected to work for five dollars an hour. That is an outrage. That is why my government will reform the tax and benefit system to ensure that whenever somebody works an extra hour, takes an extra shift, or earns an extra bonus, they are always better off and they always keep more of that dollar.

We will do this to restore the Canadian promise. I look around this chamber and I see many inspiring stories, like my finance critic, who rose today to ask the first question. He is the son of immigrants. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood and had a difficult childhood, but he was able to get a diploma in accounting, which he is putting to very good use in this House. He started a business, built homes and was elected to serve in a G7 Parliament.

I, myself, am the son of a 16-year-old unwed mother who had to put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They always taught me it did not matter where I came from, that it mattered where I was going, and it did not matter who I knew, that it mattered what I could do. That is the country I want my children to inherit, and that is the country we will fight for every single day in this House.

Strengthening Environmental Protection for a Healthier Canada Act

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by wishing you a belated happy birthday.

I am pleased to rise on Bill S-5. I have not spoken in the House for a while. I have been too busy covering committees. It is nice to be back.

Of all the hundreds of bills I have debated, this one has to have the sexiest title: an act to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, to make related amendments to the Food and Drugs Act, and to repeal a couple of words that I cannot pronounce Virtual Elimination Act. This bill basically replaces Bill C-28, which the government brought in during a previous Parliament.

When introducing this bill, the environment minister talked up the usual propaganda. He talked about Canadians knowing the urgency of the need for this bill and said that the government is responding to this urgency. I have to laugh, because, again, this bill existed in the previous Parliament, but the environment minister was part of the government that called an early election and effectively killed the bill, using crass political opportunism to take advantage of what were favourable polls at the time and also to kill the Winnipeg lab inquiry. Basically, it killed the bill, the same one that is so urgent that the government was seized with it but decided to waste a year by killing it with a cynical election.

Generally, as my colleague from Oshawa commented before me, we support Bill S-5. Our chemical management plan is probably the best in the world, along with our chemical engineers, especially in Alberta at DuPont. I used to work in Fort Saskatchewan, at a chemical plant there, with lots of great jobs, lots of very strong investment and high-paying jobs, which is very good for Canada.

This bill will also modernize the CEPA and ensure it sticks with a risk-based approach to management, as opposed to the more burdensome red tape and growing hazards-based approach.

The bill also recognizes a right to a healthy environment, which I generally support. I mean, who would not support a right to a healthy environment? However, I have to say I have great concerns that it does not define what that is in this bill, and it gives the government two years to do this. The failure to define this issue can have great implications in the future. I am very wary of a bill from the Liberal government that says, “Just trust us on this issue and we will get back to you.” There were five years of consultations on this specific issue, and the government is asking for two more.

Of course, I have to say that five years late from this government is not bad. The government is seven years behind on icebreakers; seven years behind on joint supply ships; seven years behind on fighter plane replacements; seven years behind on the offshore patrol ships; six or seven years behind on fixing the Phoenix pay fiasco; years late on buying handguns for our armed forces; years late on the frigate program, which has gone from $92 billion to $306 billion; years late on introducing whistle-blower protection; years late in getting ATIPs processed. I actually have some ATIPs that are so late and so old that they could have gone through a graduate program at university in the time it has taken for them still not to have been brought before this House. That is just to give colleagues the idea.

Those are just the examples that I am dealing with out of the operations and estimates committee. I imagine every single person in this House has further examples. While I fear outright malfeasance from the Liberals in leaving this issue open, I generally accept it, knowing that given the incompetence of the government, it will never get done.

Speaking of not getting stuff done on the environment, we have had lots of big announcements from the government. As I mentioned, the environment minister, when introducing Bill S-5, talked about the urgency of getting it done. He said Canadians have an urgency; the government has an urgency.

The Liberal government talks a lot but delivers very little. At the same time, we have the same environment minister in the paper this week, with a headline saying something about the environment minister slamming oil companies for sitting idle on the climate. That is from the government that killed Bill C-28, this bill, the urgent bill that was before the last Parliament, yet it is blaming the oil companies for not taking action.

We have some Alberta oil companies and transmission companies that are working on the environment, not sitting idle.

TransCanada PipeLines is investing in solar and wind for both its customers and to power its ops. Enbridge is building green energy to power its products. It is investing in 24 wind farms, five waste-heat recovery facilities and hydrogen facilities as well. These are companies that are investing in green technology, despite the government planning to phase them out and despite getting slammed by the environment minister for doing nothing. Both these companies, as well, have committed to zero carbon emissions by 2050, or neutral anyway. Suncor, CNRL and others, since 2012, have spent $10 billion on green energy R and D. Suncor, CNRL and Synovus have spent over a billion dollars in 2020 alone in green R and D.

If members remember, in 2020, during the worst of COVID, oil had a negative price. Oil companies and people had to pay to store the oil. CNRL lost a quarter of a billion dollars in 2020, Imperial Oil lost $1.3 billion and Suncor lost $3.2 billion, yet they were still investing in green energy R and D. Those are the same people the environment minister is slamming for sitting on the sidelines. They are actually getting stuff done while the government is not. That was $5 billion in losses just for those three companies, yet they still invested a billion dollars. It was $10 billion alone in the last decade.

This is from an industry that has had to weather the downturn in 2014 in oil, the 2020 crash and the Alberta provincial NDP trying to block the pipeline. The former NDP premier actually went on TV and said that she would block northern gateway. Of course, we also had the Liberal government with Bill C-69, which was the “no more pipelines” bill; Bill C-48; and everything else it has been trying to do to destroy that industry, which is investing in green R and D.

The environment minister attacks the companies for not doing enough, but they are doing their part for Canada. I would suggest to the environment minister, when he attacks these people for not doing enough, that people in glass houses should not be throwing rocks, or in his case people in glass greenhouses should not be throwing rocks.

I am going to look at the minister's own department results. These are numbers from the Treasury Board. These are not my numbers. These are not made-up numbers. This is from GC InfoBase, from the departmental results. In 2021, the environment minister achieved, with his department, 14% of its targets. That is one out of every seven. In 2020, it was 27%. In 2019, it was 23%. In the department's best year in the last three years, it barely got to 25% or one-quarter of its targets.

The minister has the gall to attack Alberta's oil industry for not doing its part. He attacks Canada's largest exporter of goods. The minister attacks the largest industrial employer in Canada of indigenous people. The largest investor in green R and D in the private sector, he attacks for not doing enough, yet he presides over the abysmal failure in his own department of just 14%. I am wondering if the environment minister would have stopped at scaling just 14% of the stairs at the CN Tower when he was illegally doing his protest and consider 14% a success.

There are other failures from the current government. The Auditor General reports in the “Greening Government Strategy” report that the government has failed on its results. Those are the exact words from the Auditor General. The report states:

...government decision makers, parliamentarians, and Canadians do not...know...whether the government will meet its...target.

It actually gets worse. The Treasury Board requires, as part of the greening government strategy, that assistant deputy ministers sign off on the integrity of the government's emissions reduction reports. Seventy-four per cent of the bureaucrats have refused to sign off on their mission targets.

We will support Bill S-5, but we actually need action and not just talk from the government.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I first want to say happy Bandi Chhor Divas and happy Diwali as well.

I have sat through the Bill S-5 debate, which has been riveting. I think the pages are wide awake, maybe not so much after my time.

Bill S-5 deals with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which has not been significantly updated since it was passed in 1999. Bill S-5 is the first major update since 1999.

We agree that this outdated act needs to be updated, but we have some concerns. Throughout the course of my 20 minutes, I will speak to that. First off, it is hard for us to take lessons from a government that has failed at every step of the way in the last seven years. It has promised a lot and talk a big game, yet it has failed every step of the way. Earlier on, I mentioned that the government likes to fly the flag and say that it is here for reconciliation and that it is the environmental steward of our economy and our country, yet it is still approving billions upon billions of litres of raw sewage being dumped into our waterways right across the country.

I do not need to remind the House, although I will, that this is also a government that has waged war on our natural resource sector from day one. The Prime Minister apologized. He said that under his tenure Canada would be known more for its resourcefulness than its natural resources. That is not true. He has absolutely waged war.

I will remind the House that it was the government that brought in the no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, which absolutely punishes Canadian producers. The government has waged war. It has sided with these third-party groups that helped the Liberals get elected in 2015. I will remind the House of that. Over 105 different organizations waged war against the Conservatives and sided with the Liberal Party to get it into power, and now it is paying them back. These organizations have infiltrated even the highest offices of the PMO.

Bill C-68 was an act to amend the Fisheries Act. I debated and studied that. I stood in the House and talked about it for hours on end. That is the act to amend the Fisheries Act where we looked at the harmful alteration or destruction of fish habitats, which we showed and proved. Not one government scientist or biologist could prove that any of the changes that were done by the previous government resulted in or had harmful alteration or destruction of fish habitats.

Bill C-48, the oil tanker moratorium act, is another one where the government waged war on our natural resources and energy sector. It essentially said that any tankers coming to the west coast to get Canadian products would be banned, yet American or other foreign vessels could come. Nothing similar was done on the east coast, where hundreds and hundreds of tankers each week are bringing in foreign dirty oil into our country.

I know that we have just a short time before we get into a riveting session of question period. I am excited about that, too. I know the gallery is, and so are my colleagues. We have a lot of concerns about this, notwithstanding the 24 amendments that were passed, 11 of which I will get into when I have more time after question period.

The government talks a good game on climate change, yet it has failed to reach any of its targets in the seven years since it was elected. It really has no plan. It was the member for Timmins—James Bay who mentioned this. My colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands said she has many concerns about what is in this bill and that amendments need to be addressed.

However, we have heard the government say over the last seven years to just trust it and that it will deal with it in committee, yet it failed to do that. Trust is earned; it is not just given. Time and again, the government continues to burn that trust and any goodwill with not only the opposition, but also Canadians.

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

Has the bill that my colleague Mr. Kram referred to earlier—known most publicly as Bill C-69—lengthened the process and increased the number of hurdles your company has to go through?

Climate Change

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Minister of Environment and Climate Change]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his question and remind him that we have one of the most rigorous environmental assessment processes. It is a process, by the way, that the Conservatives opposed with Bill C-69.

We are also committed to supplying clean, renewable energy to European countries. That is why the German chancellor came to Canada to sign an agreement on hydrogen that will be produced with wind power. This is exactly what we are doing in Canada: supporting Canadians and Canadian businesses and fighting climate change.

[Bronwyn Eyre, Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Government of Saskatchewan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Hello. It is a great pleasure to be here with you, this morning, virtually.

Thank you, committee members, for having me today, and to MP Michael Kram. Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee.

Mr. Kram, you are right to pay attention to this proposed bill and what it represents. It really isn't quite clear where it fits in and what gap it's supposed to be filling. It's frankly hard to keep track.

I'm going to start with its name, which is what really jumped out at me initially—an act respecting the building of a green economy in the Prairies—except that, of course, no one bothered to ask the Prairies, and of course we're already building a green economy, as are our sector partners.

By NRCan's own figures, emissions from the Canadian oil and gas sector have been more or less flat for over two decades. If every oil- and gas-producing nation on the planet extracted and produced oil and gas the way we do in Canada—the way we do in western Canada—energy-produced GHGs globally would instantly fall by 25%. That's according to Dr. Joule Bergerson at the University of Calgary. She was looking particularly at the strides we've made in methane reduction.

This bill would require federal ministers “to develop a framework for...the implementation of federal programs”, which to us in Saskatchewan sounds pretty top-down, pretty definitive language, and what we call here “assertive federalism”. It really goes to another deeper tendency on display from this government, which we see again and again, which is to veer into sections 92 and 92A and the exclusive jurisdiction that provinces have over property and civil rights and over natural resources.

Whether it's this or the federal regional tables on critical minerals or the federal low carbon economy leadership fund, they're always saying, “There's nothing to see here.” They're just integrating or prioritizing or fostering whatever it is into what are provincial areas such as forestry, such as energy; or they're retraining, or they're establishing programs or preparing infrastructure projects, but the thing is that all of these, committee members, come with strings attached for the provinces, and right now we have some pretty big strings.

If we take, for example, the coming federal fuel standard, you could say it's just a bit of ethanol conversion, but the reality is it will result in the import of billions of dollars per year of mainly American-produced biofuels. We're going as fast as we can with infrastructure, but that is still the reality. It will result in millions in new cost increases in Saskatchewan—on gas, $300 million, and on diesel, $400 million—which will impact residents and sectors that rely on these fuels as a production input or to transport products to market, particularly in the agriculture, rail and trucking sectors. That is the economic reality.

On the federal clean electricity regulations, again one could say that's just about integrating more clean power and clean energy, except that it's also about banning any power generated by fossil fuels by 2035. The way those regulations are envisaged right now equals Saskatchewan freezing in the dark. It is literally impossible—and this is SaskPower saying this—to transition that quickly.

Our premier released a white paper last week that put a dollar figure generated by the Ministry of Finance on federal initiatives to our economy, and that dollar figure is $111 billion. All these initiatives are not free, and the types of initiatives now envisaged by Bill C-235 are paid for by federal taxpayers, and there's an enormous economic impact.

The reason Saskatchewan is weathering the challenging economic time as well as we are is that we've invested in and fostered our natural resource sector, our forestry sector and our agriculture sector. Because we've been energy self-sufficient—unlike Germany, for example, as we're seeing—we can balance our budget because of resource revenues.

On the speed of transition, TD came out with a report a couple of years ago that said a green transition that is carried out too glibly, too quickly and too politically will impact some 450,000 Canadians, and 450,000 Canadians could lose their jobs. This bill doesn't talk about that. It also doesn't talk about the eye-popping cost of transitioning to an export-based hydrogen market, which is what the federal government is proposing, or green hydrogen, or geothermal.

On Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Freeland talked about how now LNG apparently is a transition fuel. Of course, it's a shame that we didn't think of that sooner, before Bill C-69 helped to shut down the Saguenay LNG project and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway group walked away from that project.

Of course, most recently, we also saw Germany walk away. Foreign investment has dropped at least 25% in Canada over the last five years, and yet apparently we're on this great cusp of innovation and investment. The Deputy Prime Minister said that the green transition is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Say what you will about the Industrial Revolution, it did lead people out of poverty. It modernized. It didn't antiquate. It didn't go backwards, shutting off the lights or diminishing choice or increasing costs.

There's green innovation happening in the energy sector, of course, but unfortunately those who hate the energy sector are wilfully blind to that innovation, so when it comes to the federal support that has been trial-ballooned in this proposed bill and in so many others, we're left with only the costliest experiments out there, and we're left pretending that there will be no effect on workers, which isn't transition at all.

I'll leave it there.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm certainly happy to move into questions.

[Raymond Orb]

The environmental Impact Assessment Act—I think that's the bill you're referring to, Bill C-69—does have implications for rural municipalities and our rural economy. Part of that is actually the Navigable Waters Act. SARM was really concerned about that, about the federal government making a new bill and bringing in amendments that would affect how municipalities do business from day to day. It has to do with transportation on rivers and streams and being able to build bridges in some places. It would be very expensive to do that because of the bureaucratic red tape created by that bill. That's a big concern to us as well.

The tanker ban, the moratorium in Bill C-48, was something that we were concerned about because we saw that it was taking away from our western transportation system for the movement of oil. We're satisfying part of our country, but we're hurting another part of our country. We had a big concern about that as well. We testified on a few occasions that we were opposed to that act.

The carbon tax is something that we have been working on with our province to try to figure out how we could come up with something that would appease Ottawa. It's something that hurts our farmers right now, even as far as trying to convince the federal government that we need rebates for grain drying, for propane especially. We still haven't seen any meaningful action on that file. I think that's something that hurts agriculture, because it puts our farmers in Saskatchewan at a disadvantage compared to American farmers, who are our competitors. It's really unfair that the federal government is not acting sooner on some kind of rebate plan.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

This bill is not the first time that the federal Liberal government has waded into the debate about oil and gas in western Canada. We've had Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” bill; we've had Bill C-48, the west coast oil tanker ban; and, of course, we've had the ever-increasing carbon taxes.

I was wondering, Mr. Orb, if you could comment on the effects of these policies on Saskatchewan.

[Bill Bewick]

Sure. Thank you.

I get the sense that the bill is trying to ensure that the west gets its share of spending and attention in the decarbonization efforts, but the direction of the spending is problematic.

When anybody hears “retraining workers”, whether it's the cod fisheries or various sectors in the past, that basically means the government is saying, “We're going to regulate your company or industry out of business, but we'll retrain some of your workers and hopefully they'll be okay.” Prairie communities know this will hurt them. It shouldn't be in this bill. Look at the cod fishers in Newfoundland or even the coal workers in Alberta right now. You can't just retrain people to jump into new jobs that will last for 20 years. If you announced that you're going to retrain auto workers in Ontario or dairy farmers in Quebec, you wouldn't get a thank you in response; you would get a panic.

As I've explained, the world really needs our valuable resources more than ever. In addition to the direction being misguided, because it's trying to transition away from this super valuable resource that the world needs more than ever, it also intrudes on our provincial management of resources. It's not just that the federal policies are misguided; it's that they really shouldn't be the ones making some of these decisions. Our Constitution makes it clear that the provinces have the jurisdiction over their resources. These policies are severely impacting our ability to develop them. Provinces recently unanimously joined a challenge of Bill C-69, and the carbon tax was hotly contested in the courts by many provinces.

I did a political philosophy Ph.D. There's a famous change that happened in the Enlightenment. Thomas Hobbes said that the government's role is to keep you safe, and you should obey it as long as it's keeping you safe. Then John Locke came in and said, well, unless the government's taking your property and making it so that you can't make a living. That's also grounds for speaking up and demanding better.

This isn't just a difference of opinion on a political issue; it's a clear attempt to throttle the largest economic sector in the Prairies. That will impoverish us in particular, but it will also impoverish all of Canada. We have to stop talking about transitioning away from oil and gas and start talking about the opportunities for oil and gas to provide immense prosperity for Canadians, help with energy security and help our European allies get out from being under the thumb of Vladimir Putin and Middle East dictators.

If you really care about the environment, the single greatest thing Canada can do to reduce emissions is to get LNG flowing in copious amounts off our west coast so that China isn't producing...all these coal plants it's building. China has announced new coal that will double the oil sands emissions. They announced that in 2020. That's just their new coal. If they were doing LNG instead of that, it would be 50% less in emissions, and much less in other things that are emitted by coal. In particular, the emissions would be reduced by 50%. That would save the entire oil sands, if we could replace their coal with our LNG.

It's becoming more obvious. It's obvious to lots of western Canadians. As I said, 60% of Quebeckers agree that we should be doing LNG. This whole notion that we should be transitioning away from gas is wrong. It's offensive, and it is leading to people wanting to say, “If we can't even produce our resources, why should we be in this country?” We're trying to prevent that. It is an understandable sentiment, and people need to take it seriously.

Opposition Motion—Moratorium on New Taxes

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton Mill Woods, AB]

Mr. Speaker, my father has worked very hard ever since he immigrated to this country. He has worked in sawmills and in coal mines in Alberta and B.C., and to this day he continues to drive a taxi, because he just cannot stay at home, so he would rather go out and work. He has always said that in Canada, if people work, they can pay their bills and provide for their families, and if they work hard, they can buy really nice things, too. That is the reason so many people, like my father and many others, have come to this country. They came to Canada for the opportunities and to be able to provide for their families.

However, the Liberal government has created a Canada that many Canadians struggle to recognize now, where working hard no longer means people will be able to pay for fuel, heat their homes or even own a home at all. Affordability is a top concern for Canadians across the country. When asked in a recent survey what issues we should focus on during this parliamentary session, almost every response listed the cost of living as a top concern.

Now in Canada we have college students living in homeless shelters, single mothers who cannot afford to buy nutritious food for their children, and seniors turning to food banks as a last resort. Even in recent reports, those same food banks are saying that they are struggling to even stay open, that they do not have enough food to provide to those who show up for help and support.

We have a generation of young Canadians living in their parents' basements without the hope of ever moving out. Young families who were once saving up for a down payment are now having to use that down payment to buy groceries and pay for gas. Grandparents watch as their adult children struggle to provide for their own children, despite having jobs. There is much pain and struggle among Canadians. They did everything we asked them to do, yet the government is failing them.

When the Prime Minister took office, Canadians were paying 32% of their income, on average, to maintain a mid-size house. Now the average family has to pay 50% of its income just to keep that house. Canadians are putting themselves in debt to cover their basic expenses and repaying this borrowed money at an unpredictable and growing interest rate. The government told Canadians that rates would remain low for a long time, but now we can see interest rates rising every few months and Canadians just cannot keep up. Instead of providing relief to Canadians, the government is increasing taxes on those who are already struggling.

I have heard from many people across my riding, single mothers, small business owners and families in Edmonton Mill Woods, who cannot afford the government's spending agenda, a spending agenda that the government itself cannot afford. As one constituent said to me, we need a government that works for Canadians, not the other way around. I could not agree more.

My riding of Edmonton Mill Woods is very much a multicultural community. Many immigrants have come to this beautiful place to make their lives here. I know many hard-working immigrant families that work long hours, trying to provide a good life for their children, but still fall short of meeting the inflationary demands created by the government.

A constituent of mine, Abdul, is a local business owner and a new immigrant from Nigeria. Like most small business owners, he works a lot more than the usual eight hours per day. This is a person who is driven, hard-working and passionate about his business, yet he struggles to make ends meet. He confided in me that he cannot afford to put his children in hockey or put his daughter in dance. Unlike the government, he cannot spend money he does not have.

Kim, another constituent, is a single mother and the sole provider for her children. She continues to struggle to afford to put gas in her car in order just to get to her job. Unlike the government, she has to save up money in order to spend it on her children. She had to save up just to buy school supplies this year, which, of course, cost more because of the government-created inflation crisis right now. I believe single mothers like Kim and many other Canadians have something to teach the government. It must find a dollar to spend a dollar. It must have the money to spend the money.

Now the government is making things worse for Canadians. The government must scrap its planned tax hikes on Canadian families and Canadian businesses. Canadians cannot keep up with this out-of-control spending, which is driving interest rates and inflation. Instead of just printing more money, we need to produce more things we can buy. We need to produce affordable food, energy and natural resources right here in Canada.

Our farmers are the best in the world. By removing the barriers the government has placed on them, we would increase our food production and make food more affordable. We must scrap these taxes on farmers, scrap the government's plan to reduce the use of fertilizer, and eliminate even the red tape that makes it more expensive for farmers. Let our farmers do what they do best, which is to grow our food.

In fact, if the government would just get out of way, farmers would not only be able to provide more food for Canadians, but could also help in this looming food shortage crisis around the world.

I would also suggest the government go out and speak to Canadians and hear from them. I suggest the government speak to my constituents and other constituents across the country about what is actually happening to them, their families and their businesses. I recently sat down with a group of truckers, and I was astonished to hear that some trucking companies are actually finding it cheaper and saving money by parking their trucks. Diesel and the cost of paying for and finding a driver have become so expensive that they are saving money by not working.

We must ensure Canadians keep more of their paycheques in their pockets and that energy, gas, heating and other costs become more affordable. Instead of importing foreign energy, we must get rid of laws like the ones arising out of Bill C-69 and allow energy to be produced here in Canada. Bill C-69 itself was a major roadblock for bringing new investments and projects into Canada.

Canada currently imports over 130,000 barrels of overseas oil daily, mostly from dictator countries. This is despite the fact we have the third-largest supply of energy right here in Canada, with much of it in Alberta. That is all because the government prefers dirty dictator oil to responsible Canadian energy.

We will repeal the government's anti-energy laws and replace them with laws that protect our environment, consult our first nations and actually get projects done. That will mean more jobs for Canadians and more ethical Canadian energy for the world. This will also help the value of our dollar.

It is never the right time to raise taxes on working Canadians, yet that is exactly what the government is doing. We continue to call on the government to cancel all planned tax hikes, including payroll taxes planned for January 1 and tax hikes on gas, groceries and home heating on April 1. I hope the government and all other members of the House will support our motion today.

Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Madam Speaker, in my 18 years in politics, I have never seen Canadians suffer as much as they are suffering now. I just criss-crossed the country and met a lot of people. In fact, 93,000 people registered for my events. I make a point of listening to all their stories, and I never leave the room until I have spoken to everyone who wants to meet me. I heard some heartbreaking stories.

We are talking about young people, 35-year-olds, who have done everything they were supposed to do. They earned a degree and they are working hard, yet they are still living in their parents' basement or in a small, 400-square-foot apartment because the price of housing has doubled since this Prime Minister took office. Our housing bubble is the second largest in the world. Yesterday we learned that the percentage of Canadians who own their own home is at its lowest level in over 30 years.

When the Prime Minister took office, Canadians were paying 32% of their income on average to maintain a mid-size house. Now, the average family has to pay 50% of their income just to keep their house. This increase is due to higher costs, but also to an increase in interest rates, which this government had promised Canadians would not happen for a long time. It told Canadians not to worry, to go ahead and take out big loans, since interest rates would remain low for a long time, and there would never be any negative consequences. Now we are seeing interest rates rises 300 basis points, or 3% in simple terms.

This phenomenon is not only affecting the housing sector, it is also affecting the price of food. I will take this opportunity to read out some headlines, because even the media is starting to notice a problem. “Rents are so high in Toronto that students are living in homeless shelters.” “Inflation: Child hunger a major concern in Canada amid skyrocketing food prices.” “GTA food banks say they're facing the highest demand in their history.” “Nearly 6 million people in Canada experienced food insecurity in 2021, U of T study says.” People can no longer pay for food. Some single mothers are even watering down their children's milk because they cannot afford food.

As for gas prices, I met a young man who works in the mines in northern Ontario, and he told me that he could not go see his dying parents in Thunder Bay because diesel was over $2 a litre. He was not able to say goodbye to his own parents.

What is the Prime Minister doing to respond to this crisis? First, he is trying to divide people by attacking them because he thinks that if Canadians are afraid of one another, then they will forget that they cannot pay their bills. The Prime Minister is keeping in place vaccine mandates that every other country has lifted. He is still insisting on the use of the ArriveCAN app, which really does not work. He is trying to divert people's attention away from the cost of living by dividing Canadians and creating problems and division.

The next part of his plan involves increasing income taxes and taxes on gas, heating and food. The first thing the official opposition has called for since I became leader is for the government to do away with the tax hikes so that Canadians can keep more of their paycheques in their pockets and so that energy, gas, heating and other costs become more affordable.

That is our role, here in Parliament, to turn pain into hope. Canadians need hope. The comment I heard most from the people who attended my events was “Thank you for giving us hope”. For the first time, people believe that things can improve, and they will. We can change things.

The first thing we need to do is axe all the tax hikes, but we also need to control spending. Today's inflation is the result of a spendthrift government. The government's spending is increasing the cost of living. The $500-billion inflationary deficit increased the cost of what we buy and the interest that we pay. Inflationary taxes are increasing costs related to our businesses and our workers who provide products and services. The more the government spends, the more things cost. That is “Justinflation”.

We can reverse this trend by introducing legislation to limit government spending. This will subject politicians to the same economic rules that families have to follow. When a family increases spending in one column of their budget, they have to cut spending elsewhere. They have to find a dollar to spend a dollar. The same principle should apply to governments. During the Clinton years, the United States passed a law that helped Americans balance their budget and pay down $400 billion in debt. It was, at the time, the largest debt repayment in the United States. As soon as the law was struck down, Americans were plunged back into a deficit. This is proof that we need to put legal limits on politicians' spending and that politicians should have to follow the same spending rules as single mothers and small business owners.

Furthermore, instead of just printing more money, we need to produce more of the things that money buys, produce affordable food, energy and natural resources here in Canada, and we need to build more houses. We need to remove the barriers that the Prime Minister has put in place.

Let us start with food. The Prime Minister increased farmers' taxes. That increases the cost of fertilizer and of the energy needed to produce food. Now he wants to limit the use of fertilizer. That will require farming more land to produce the same quantity of food. Tractors and other equipment will have to cover a larger area, burning more diesel and other fuels. More food will have to be imported. Bringing this food from other countries to Canada will again require using more energy.

Did we not learn during the COVID-19 crisis that it is irresponsible to rely on other countries for what we need?

We should be able to grow our own food here, in Canada. Our farmers are the best in the world. We should remove the barriers that the government has put in place. We will cancel these taxes on farmers, scrap the government's plans to reduce the use of fertilizer and eliminate the paperwork that is so expensive for our farmers.

Second, we will provide incentives to our municipalities to cut their red tape. At present, Canada has the lowest housing units per capita in the G7, even though we have the largest land area. That is ridiculous. That is why housing prices in Canada are the second highest in the world relative to household income. With regard to home ownership, Vancouver is the third most expensive market in the world, and Toronto is the sixth. A Conservative government will tie the dollar amount for infrastructure in big cities where housing prices are too high to the number of houses built.

This will encourage them to cut red tape and reduce the cost of building permits so that more housing can be built. Every time a federal government funds a public transit station, we will make sure there is intensive densification in the surrounding areas so that young people can live in homes and apartments next to public transit.

Third, we will sell 15% of the 37,000 federal buildings so that they can be converted into housing and create millions of homes that our young people could buy in order to start a family.

Instead of importing foreign energy, we will get rid of laws like the ones arising from Bill C‑69 and others to allow energy to be produced here in Canada. This will create jobs and make the cost of energy more affordable. It will increase Canadians' purchasing power by raising the value of our dollar. When our energy sector is strong, our dollar goes up. The value of the dollar is tied to our purchasing power. When the dollar is low, it costs more to buy anything on international markets. Let us strengthen our dollar, produce our own energy and end oil imports.

By the way, where are the Liberal and NDP environmentalists to protest the foreign oil we are importing? Why are we funding dictators? We should be funding Canadians' paycheques here at home.

Finally, we want to give Canadians back control of their lives, in the freest country in the world, where the dollar keeps its value so that Canadians can have the life they work so hard to build. We should be a country that rewards hard work, a country where people can keep more of their money. We need to reform the tax system so that hard-working Canadians who contribute to the economy can keep their hard-earned money and provide better for their families. We should be a country that encourages and supports those who work hard, take risks and help build our country.

It is good to be back in the House, but would it not be nice if our young people could have a home? That is what we should be working towards. Unfortunately, yesterday we learned that the rates of home ownership are at their lowest levels in a generation. House prices have doubled under this Prime Minister. In fact, when this Prime Minister took office, the average family could afford their monthly housing costs with 32% of their paycheque. That has rocketed up to almost 50%. Vancouver is the third-most overpriced housing market on planet Earth. Toronto is the sixth. We have the second-worst housing bubble on planet Earth. No wonder nine in 10 young Canadians say that they cannot even dream of affording a house.

Now, from housing to food, we see the headlines. Even the media has noticed: “Rents are so high in Toronto that students are living in homeless shelters”; “Child hunger a major concern in Canada amid skyrocketing food prices”; “GTA food banks say they're facing the highest demand in their history”; and “Nearly 6 million people in Canada experienced food insecurity in 2021, U of T study says”.

Then there is energy. I met a young man in northern Ontario who said that he could not afford to put the diesel in his car to go and see his dying relatives one last time, who are hundreds of miles away in Thunder Bay. I met a working man, an energy worker ironically, in St. John's, Newfoundland, who said that the rising cost of gas meant he could not afford to replace his boots so he was taping them up with duct tape.

Canadians are suffering, and why is this happening? The cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits means more dollars chasing fewer goods, leading to higher prices, bidding up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes drive up the cost of businesses and workers to make our goods. The more Liberals spend, the more things cost. It is just inflation, and Canadians are paying the price for it.

What has been the Prime Minister's response? His first response was to attack the people who were suffering, to call them horrible and disparaging names, to divide and distract. His strategy is simple. He thinks if people are afraid of their neighbours, they will forget that they cannot pay their bills, so he keeps in place divisive and unscientific vaccine mandates to shut truckers out of their ability to transport goods across the border and soldiers, who have served our country bravely and loyally, out of their jobs. He does this all to stigmatize and attack so a single mother who is putting water in her kid's milk might forget, he hopes, how badly she is suffering under his watch because she will be afraid of her fellow citizens. It is time to replace fear with freedom. It is time for us all to unite.

The Prime Minister's second approach has been ever predictable. He wants to raise taxes with a new tax hike on paycheques that will take effect on January 1, meaning that Canadians will take home less of what they earn. Small businesses will have to pay a higher cost for every single person they keep on the payroll, forcing many to make the painful choice of laying people off. A few months later, on April 1, April Fool's Day, he will continue to carry out his plan to triple the carbon tax. He wants to increase gas taxes, home heating taxes and, indirectly, food taxes because, of course, food requires energy. This is going to make things worse. The Conservatives have made the demand that the government must cancel all its tax increases on our workers and our seniors so that their paycheques go further and their energy becomes affordable.

We in this House have a duty to transform the hurt into hope. That is what Conservatives will do, because things can get better. There is nothing wrong with Canada, with our country, that cannot be cured by what is right with this country. We have the answers that will counter this inflation and reinforce the purchasing power of Canadians.

We will call for a cap on taxes so that Canadians pay no more to the government and can keep more for themselves. We will call for the government to cap its own spending, and it can do this by simply following the same rules that everyday families follow. If a family decides it wants to build a porch in front of their house, they cancel their vacation or, better yet, they go out and find a deal on lumber and look for a way to keep their vacation costs down so that they can do both but for the same budget. This is how small businesses function as well, but not government.

The great Thomas Sowell said that the number one law of economics is scarcity, that people always want more than there is to have and that the number one rule of politics is to ignore the number one rule of economics, because politicians are the only creatures in the universe who do not have to live with scarcity. The birds in the trees, the fish in the seas, all must make maximum use of limited resources, but the politician just passes the cost on to someone else in higher inflation, debt and taxes. A “pay-as-you-go” law would force politicians to make the same either-or trade-offs that everyday Canadians make in their lives.

The principle is very simple. If the government brings in a new dollar of spending, it should find a dollar of savings to pay for it. All of the existing spending that is in the budget goes ahead into the future, but when the government steps into this House to introduce a new measure, it should accompany it with savings to pay for it. The government did this in the United States during the 1990s and that allowed the American government to balance its budget, pay off $400 billion of debt, have booming job growth, record-low unemployment and a massive increase in prosperity, but as soon as it let the law lapse, it went right back into deficit, proving that politicians need the same legal limits on their spending that families follow every single day. Our families have been pinching their pennies long enough. It is time for government to pinch its pennies, too.

Instead of just creating more cash, why not create more of what cash buys? Why do we not grow more food, build more house and produce more Canadian resources right here in our country instead?

Let us start with houses. As I have said, we have the fewest houses per capita of any country in the entire G7, even though we have the most land on which to build. Why? Local government gatekeepers stand in the way.

In Vancouver, the cost of government gatekeepers, that is permitting, delays, consultants and taxes, is $600,000 for one unit of housing. It is about $350,000 in Toronto. This prevents people from owning a home.

I propose is this. The government should link the number of dollars big overpriced cities get for infrastructure to the number of houses that actually get built, so we have an incentive for them to remove the gatekeepers, lower the costs and increase the speed of building permits so we can get more houses.

Let us require every federally funded transit station be pre-approved for high-density housing around it, so our young people do not even need to own a car. They can live right next to transit. Let us sell off 15% of the underutilized and overpriced 37,000 federal buildings, so we can convert that into housing. Let us create millions of new homes, so our newcomers, immigrants, young people and working-class people can re-establish the dream of home ownership.

Let us put an end to importing overseas oil into this country. Where are the protesters? Where are the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberal protesters standing in Saint John, New Brunswick to greet all those big tankers coming from overseas? They say that they are against oil, but they have no problem if that oil comes from foreign dictatorships. There are 130,000 barrels of overseas oil every single day arriving at our shores and taking our money back to their countries at the same time.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister violates his own sanctions against Putin by sending back a turbine so the Russians can continue to pump gas into Germany, so the Germans can fund the Russian war against Ukraine. It is incredible. Those members are against pipelines in Canada, but in favour of maintaining the turbines for Russian pipelines that fund foreign wars.

Meanwhile, we have 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that could be used to free Europe from its dependency on Putin, meanwhile bringing back paycheques to this country. We have the ability to produce it cleaner than anywhere else on planet earth. In fact, the shortest shipping distances to both Asia and Europe from North America are right here in Canada.

What else do we have in Canada that allows us to liquify natural gas so it fits on a ship? Cold weather, which is our most abundant natural resource. That actually lowers the cost of liquefying natural gas by 25%. With Quebec, Newfoundland and British Columbia hydro, we can do it emissions-free. Why do we not ship our clean Canadian natural gas to Asia to shut down coal-fired plants there and ship it to Europe to break European dependence on Putin? Let us turn dollars for dictators into paycheques for Canadians.

Let us make work pay again in our country. Let us stop punishing people for the crime of getting up early in the morning and putting in a hard day's work. According to a Finance Canada document, if a single mother with three kids who earns $55,000 a year goes out and earns another dollar, she loses 80¢ of that dollar to government clawbacks and taxes. If she makes $25 an hour, she takes home $5 of that. No one should work for $5 an hour. That is below minimum wage, and yet our tax and benefits system punishes her for trying to work a little harder so maybe her kids can go to camp in the summer or maybe they can join the little league team.

We should reward hard work in our country. We should set out to reform our benefit and tax systems, so that every time someone works harder, takes another shift, earns a bonus and gets up a little earlier they keep more of what they earn.

My parents raised me to believe that it did not matter where I came from; it mattered where I was going. It did not matter who I knew, but what I could do. That is the country I want my kids to inherit. I want this to be a country again where it does not matter where people start off. If they work hard, if they take risks, if they study, if they learn, if they build and if they contribute, they can achieve anything they want. Right now, people do not feel that way, but hope is on the way.

We are going to bring change to our country. We are going to put change back in your pocket and we are going to make this the freest country on earth.