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.

Impact Assessment Act

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Minister of Environment and Climate Change]

moved that Bill C-69, 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, be read the third time and passed.

Madam Speaker, before I begin, I wish to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Algonquin and Anishinabe peoples.

I am very pleased to once again address the House in support of Bill C-69. This is a key priority of our government. With the bill, we are keeping our promise to put in place better rules to protect our environment and build a stronger economy. It reflects our view that the economy and the environment must go hand in hand and that Canada works best when Canadians work together.

I am going to speak about why our government introduced the bill, and why there is a clear need for better rules to protect our environment and govern how decisions about resource development are made. I will talk about how the bill's balanced approach addresses the priorities of indigenous peoples, stakeholders, and Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and how it delivers what Canadians expect.

I will also describe how our better rules will benefit all Canadians, how they will lead to a cleaner environment for our children, more investment as good projects go ahead, and more jobs and economic opportunities for the middle class and those working hard to join it.

We made a commitment when we formed government to regain public trust and help get Canada's resources to market. We committed to put in place new, fair processes that would ensure major project approvals are based on science and indigenous knowledge, that serve the public interest, and that allow good projects to proceed.

Why is this so important? Madam Speaker, $500 billion in major resource projects are being planned across Canada over the next decade. We need rules and processes in place that will allow these projects to move forward. Under the previous system, people lost confidence in Canada's environmental assessment processes.

Since participation in the review of major projects was limited, some Canadians were not able to contribute their knowledge and expertise.

The decision-making process was opaque, and Canadians began to fear that decisions on projects were being made based on political considerations, not on science and evidence.

Furthermore, after amendments were made to the Fisheries Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act, Canadians discovered that major protections had been lost, leaving Canada's fish, waterways, and communities at risk.

The changes made by the previous government eroded public trust and without public trust, it became very difficult for good projects to move forward. Weaker rules hurt both our environment and our economy.

All these changes eroded public trust, and without public trust, it became very difficult for good projects to move forward. Weaker rules hurt both our environment and our economy. If Canada wants to capitalize on the next wave of resource development, we need better rules that reflect Canadians' priorities and concerns, provide certainty, and foster the competitiveness of proponents operating in Canada, while respecting our responsibility to protect the environment.

Knowing this, we introduced interim principles in 2016 to guide our government in reviewing major projects until we could put the better rules in place.

To rebuild trust in the environmental assessment process, our government launched a 14-month review involving two expert panels and two parliamentary committees. Input from provinces and territories, indigenous peoples, companies, environmental groups, and Canadians from across the country informed a discussion paper released in June 2017 and, ultimately, helped shape the approach set out in this bill. What we heard through those panels and committees is that Canadians want a modern environmental assessment and regulatory system that protects the environment, supports reconciliation with indigenous peoples, attracts investment, and ensures that good projects go ahead in a timely way to create new jobs and economic opportunities for the middle class. We have also heard from industry about the importance of a clear and predictable process.

Bill C-69 would put in place the better rules that Canadians and companies expect. Thanks to indigenous peoples, stakeholders, and Canadians who contributed their knowledge and perspectives, this bill would help rebuild public trust through key improvements that include decisions that are transparent and guided by robust science and indigenous knowledge; project reviews that consider a wide range of positive and negative impacts on the economy, health, indigenous rights, and communities, in addition to the environment; more timely and predictable review processes; measures to advance reconciliation and partnership with indigenous peoples; reduced duplication and red tape through a one project-one review approach; and through amendments to the current Navigation Protection Act, restored protection for every navigable waterway in Canada. It also complements Bill C-68, which proposes changes to the Fisheries Act to ensure it provides strong and meaningful protection for our fish and waters.

As I said, we made a commitment to restore public trust in Canada's environmental assessment system, to restore the protections that were lost, and to make sure that Canadians can trust the review process and its results.

It is essential that we ensure that all decisions are transparent and serve the public interest in order to restore trust. That is exactly what Bill C-69 would accomplish.

Under the previous system, Canadians had no idea how decisions were made. Under our new rules, Canadians can rest assured that all major project reviews are done fairly and based on evidence, that all decisions serve the public interest, and that good projects will go ahead.

Bill C-69 would clarify that project approval would be based on the impact assessment report. Decisions would also have to fully consider the factors that informed the review, as well as key public interest factors, including the project's contribution to sustainability and impacts on indigenous rights. That means all final decisions would need to have a clear basis in facts and evidence.

That alone is a major advance over the previous system, but even this important step is not enough to restore trust if Canadians are not informed about how final decisions have been made. To build that trust whenever a final decision is made on a project, a public statement of the rationale for that decision would be issued. That statement would clearly demonstrate to Canadians how the assessment report formed the basis for the decision and how factors like sustainability were taken into account.

To make good decisions, we need good processes that take into account a broad range of considerations. Bill C-69 provides clarity on the factors that would guide project reviews. We know that the impacts of major projects go beyond the environment alone. Projects also affect Canada's economy, our health, and our communities. They can also affect indigenous peoples and their rights.

Our government also recognizes that not all effects of major projects are negative. They also have positive impacts, like creating well-paying jobs for local communities. That is why under our new rules, both positive and negative consequences, economic, environmental, social, and health, would be taken into account. At the same time, tailored guidelines for project reviews would ensure they focus on factors relevant to the specific project.

These improvements will help improve the decision-making process and enhance public trust. Indigenous people, businesses, and the general public will know ahead of time what factors will guide project reviews. These reviews and the resulting assessment reports will the provide the basis for the final decisions.

Public decision statements will provide Canadians with the assurance that key factors were properly taken into consideration and that all decisions serve the public interest.

Without the support and partnership of indigenous peoples, there is no way to move forward with major resource projects. This is not optional. It is integral to ensuring that indigenous peoples, and all Canadians, can benefit from increased jobs and investment.

That is why Bill C-69 fully reflects our government's commitment to a renewed relationship with indigenous peoples based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership. This has been a focus of our government from the very beginning. We have taken important steps to put that commitment into action.

For example, we announced our full support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, we are working in partnership with indigenous peoples to develop a new recognition and implementation of rights framework, and we are making major new investments in education, health, infrastructure, and indigenous communities.

This bill puts our commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People at the forefront, in the preambles of impact assessment act and the Canadian energy regulator act.

It also states that, when exercising their powers under the impact assessment act, the government, the minister, the agency, and federal authorities must respect the government’s commitments with regard to the rights of the indigenous peoples of Canada.

The new Canadian energy regulator's mandate will specify that it is to exercise its powers and perform its duties in the same manner.

Indigenous peoples, as well as stakeholders and the public, would have meaningful opportunities to participate in project reviews from the start and throughout the process. Recognizing the important contributions that indigenous knowledge makes to project reviews, our bill would make it mandatory to consider this knowledge alongside science and other evidence in every assessment, and would require transparency about how it was taken into account and used. At the same time, it would provide strong protection for the confidentiality of indigenous knowledge across all parts of the bill.

I have said that our better rules are designed to help good projects move forward to get Canada's resources to market. Companies have told us what they need to make sure that happens: clear, timely, and predictable processes that provide certainty at every stage.

Under our proposed legislation, one agency, the proposed impact assessment agency of Canada, would be the federal lead for all major project reviews. This would mean more consistent, more predictable reviews for all projects. At the same time, the agency would work closely with regulatory bodies so that their valuable expertise could continue to inform assessments.

A revised project list would provide clarity for companies, indigenous communities, environmental groups, municipalities, and all citizens on how our new rules would apply. We have consulted with Canadians on the criteria that would guide that revised list, and we will be consulting again in the fall on the proposed list itself.

Our bill would require a new early planning and engagement phase before an impact assessment could begin. This new phase would help companies identify and address issues early on. It would result in a clear set of products to guide the impact assessment. These would include tailored impact statement guidelines that are scoped to reflect the scale and complexity of the project, a co-operation plan, an indigenous engagement and partnership plan, a public participation plan, and a permitting plan.

While a broad set of factors would be considered in early planning, the tailored guidelines would reflect only those that are relevant to the specific project. Following early planning, proponents would be notified if a project is likely to have unacceptable impacts. This would not stop the process. Instead, it would allow the company to make an informed decision about whether, or how, to go forward with the project in the impact assessment process.

As I have said, companies would have a clear understanding of what would be taken into account in the review itself, including positive and negative effects on the environment, the economy, health, and communities. Companies could also be certain about how final decisions are made. They would be based on the assessment report, and on consideration of key public interest factors, including the project's contribution to sustainability. This would be clearly demonstrated through public decision statements.

To provide the timely decisions and reviews companies expect, Bill C-69 sets out clear time limits for each stage of the process, including the new early planning phase. That includes 300 days for reviews carried out by a review panel with input from a life cycle regulator. When justified, more complex projects may take up to 600 days. This is a major improvement over the 2012 Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the CEAA, which allowed up to 120 days for all reviews carried out by review panels.

This bill will also reduce red tape and prevent duplication through opportunities to collaborate with the provinces. It provides for joint assessments in which a single assessment process can meet the requirements of several levels of government. The bill also provides for substitution should a process carried out by another level of government satisfy the federal government's requirements.

Bill C-69 will facilitate a smooth transition toward the new impact assessment system. The bill would set objective criteria to determine which projects will continue to be reviewed under the 2012 CEAA, give companies the option to go through the new process, and confirm that nobody will ever be sent back to square one.

This bill would also provide certainty and help restore public trust by providing opportunities for public participation at every stage of the review process.

When it comes to resource development, public trust and support are essential for projects to move forward. That will not happen if Canadians are not able to take part in project reviews. Bill C-69 would remove the “standing test” imposed by CEAA 2012, so that a broader range of Canadians could contribute their knowledge and perspectives.

With the new early planning and engagement phase, Canadians would be able to make their voices heard from the beginning.

Bill C-69 would provide for the public and for indigenous peoples to participate in a meaningful manner, and would ensure that they have the information and tools they need and the ability to share their thoughts and expertise.

The bill would strike a balance between allowing for meaningful participation and the need for assessments to be completed in a timely manner.

Canadians want projects to be approved based on scientific facts and indigenous knowledge. Our government is committed to adopting policies based on evidence, and Bill C-69 is proof of that.

This bill includes a clear commitment to implementing the act in a way that respects the principles of scientific integrity, honesty, objectivity, rigour, and accuracy. This is perfectly in line with our strong commitment to science and shows that we intend to implement this act.

Bill C-69 also provides for regional and strategic assessments. These studies would inform project reviews by looking at crosscutting issues and cumulative impacts, those that go beyond any one project. To ensure they can play an important role in our impact assessment system, these reviews would benefit from the best available advice and fully take into account indigenous knowledge. We are committed to moving forward with these assessments, beginning with a strategic assessment on climate change.

As we transition to the new system, we will invest up to just over $1 billion over five years to support the proposed new impact assessment regime and Canadian energy regulator; increased scientific capacity in federal departments and agencies; changes required to protect water, fish and navigation; and increased indigenous and public participation.

I am extremely proud of our government's work on this bill. It is the result of extensive public engagement and fulfills the commitment we made when we formed government: to rebuild public trust and get Canada's resources to market sustainably.

I want to acknowledge that many people have contributed to the development of this bill. Of course, I want to recognize the indigenous peoples, stakeholders, and Canadians who participated in our 14-month review process, as well as those who have continued to engage after we introduced the bill.

I also want to recognize the members of this House who have contributed to debate on Bill C-69 and its further development. In particular I want to express my appreciation for the members of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. Their efforts in hearing from witnesses and amending the bill have resulted in important changes that have strengthened the legislation.

Throughout this process, the government and the standing committee worked on adopting a balanced approach that addresses the priorities of indigenous peoples, the industry, environmental groups, and other stakeholders. I think that, together, we succeeded.

Through this balanced approach, our better rules will protect Canada's environment, help good projects move forward, and recognize and uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. I think all of us in the House can support that.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, if there is anything Bill C-69 speaks of, it is another broken promise by the Liberals, given the fact this is again another omnibus bill. However, it really does fulfill a prophecy that has been stated widely by the Prime Minister. He said it in Peterborough and Paris about moving to an alternate based economy. In fact, his inside operatives, the de facto prime minister in the country, Gerald Butts, has said that it is not about alternative pipelines; it is about an alternative economy.

What is most disturbing in the bill is the consolidation of power, a consolidation that would give power to the environment minister and to cabinet to basically destroy any project that comes forward. It gives them unilateral control of this.

Will the Minister of Environment and Climate Change stand in the House and finally admit that it is your intent to destroy the oil and gas industry in the country and not to protect it?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

I remind hon. members to place their question through the Chair. I want to ensure the hon. member knows that I have no intention whatsoever. I am perfectly neutral.

The hon. Minister of Environment.

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am always surprised when I hear the other side talking about politicizing processes. That is why we are here. Canadians allot trust in the way we do environmental assessments because of the previous government. Through CEAA, 2012, it gutted the process. It did not make decisions based on evidence, science, or looking at climate change impacts. Nor did it ever get projects going ahead. Without public trust, we cannot get projects going ahead in the 21st century.

We have created better rules that will ensure we make decisions based on science, evidence, that are made in a transparent way, and that ensure good projects go ahead. As I have mentioned, $500 billion in projects are planned over the next decades. We need to have a robust system that ensures we make good decisions and that good projects go ahead in a sustainable way.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for her speech. Sometimes I have trouble following the Liberals' logic. The minister just reminded us that previous Conservative governments gutted the environmental assessment process, that they broke the trust of Canadians, and that they removed science from the process. Then, all of a sudden, as soon as they took office the Liberals used the very environmental assessment process they are criticizing to approve the Trans Mountain expansion.

The Liberals will say that they tried to fix it up, but no one believes them. It was the same thing. Bill C-69 was introduced a year and a half later, after the Trans Mountain project was approved using the Conservative approach that the Liberals are criticizing. That makes no sense whatsoever.

The question I would like to ask the minister is this. Let's say I give the Liberals the benefit of the doubt and that the process really is better than it was before, even though we have our doubts. How is it that Bill C-69 does not include a list of projects that will be assessed and does not contain any clear and definitive criteria for determining which projects will be assessed? Why do we not know how that will be decided?

It is all well and good to have a good process, but if no projects are ever assessed, then it is useless.

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I want to clarify that we have a process to determine which projects will be assessed. Now we have a process for the list of projects.

We have a regulatory process to evaluate what factors we should look at to determine what projects belong on the project list. That is critically important. It was not done in a transparent way under the previous government. That is what we are doing. We are receiving input. The member opposite and others are encouraged to provide their views.

We know we need to have a process that provides certainty, that has clear factors on which we base the review, that we make decisions based on science, evidence, and fact, that we consider the climate impacts, and that we also make decisions in a timely fashion. We have done all of those. That is why we think we have a very good bill, and we would encourage everyone to support it.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the Minister of Environment and Climate Change for her kind words for the members of the environment committee. We did sit for hours and hours to debate the bill. We moved many amendments and worked very hard at trying to make the bill better.

The minister spoke about how important it was that good projects get the go ahead. What factors go into determining if a project is in the public interest?

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to repeat my thanks to the members of the committee. I know they worked extremely hard. They went through a large number of amendments and they accepted amendments. That is the way to do things. We listen, and if we can do things better, then that is great. That is what we will always do, whether it is from environmentalists, indigenous peoples, or business. The committee considered this and we think got into a good spot.

It is important to know what factors will be considered, which is critical to a robust process, both in ensuring we are evaluating the right things and also providing clarity to business. Therefore, we will be looking at factors that include positive and negative effects on the environment, the economy, health, and communities.

Before, the focus was on the environment. However, we think it is also important to look at the negative and positive impacts, including on the jobs associated with the project, the health impacts, and the impacts on communities. These would be in the assessment report. We would also consider public interest factors, including how the project would contribute to sustainability. These will be clearly reflected in decisions.

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting listening to the minister talk about science-based decisions. The government loves to talk about science-based decisions but only when it agrees with its ideology.

I would like to ask the minister this. If she is so proud of the bill, how would she respond to the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, which said that because of the legislation, “there will never be another pipeline” built in Canada? It is interesting because the government is now owners of a pipeline.

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are doing what the previous government was unable to do, which is get a pipeline built to tidewater.

We need to ensure we have a process that is robust, a process that makes decisions based on science, fact, and evidence. What is our ideology? It is that facts and evidence matter in decisions. That is how we will make decisions.

I have had many discussions with industry, pipeline association members of CAPP, and from energy companies, and we have listened to their concerns. This is why we have a process that is transparent. We have a process that is shorter in timelines.

We know we can get good projects going ahead in a sustainable way, which will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars to the Canadian economy and create good jobs.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, while I was in Vancouver in the 2015 election, basically the epicentre for Kinder Morgan, unfortunately for the minister, the Prime Minister came into B.C.. He was asked squarely if he accepted that the Kinder Morgan pipeline did not go through a proper environmental assessment. He said that he accepted that. He was also asked squarely whether he would commit to putting Kinder Morgan through a new environmental assessment process, not just one with some additional consultation. He said that he would. He broke that promise to British Columbians.

With respect to the review, my hon. colleague has talked about what first nations say. They have called the subsequent review paternalistic, unrealistic, and inadequate.

The minister just said that her government would take into account climate impacts of projects. What is the climate impact of the Kinder Morgan pipeline that will triple to 900,000 barrels of bitumen a day? What is the climate impact of that expansion?

[Catherine McKenna, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly agree with the member opposite that we need to make decisions based on science and we need to look at climate impacts.

When we came into office, the first thing we did in January 2016 was introduce interim principles. What did those interim principles say? They said that we would make decisions based on science, facts, and evidence; that we would work in partnership with indigenous peoples and incorporate indigenous knowledge; and that we would look at climate impacts, which is critically important. This is what we have incorporated. When we look at the new legislation, that is clearly there.

When it comes to the project to which the member refers, it went through a robust environmental assessment. We included additional consultations. We looked at the climate impact. The member should know that it fits within the NDP Government of Alberta's climate plan, which includes the first-ever hard cap on emissions in the oil sands. Therefore, it went through a good process.

We are now here talking about how we are going to ensure we have a proper process to ensure good projects go ahead, while taking serious action on climate change and protect our environment.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, here we are again speaking to Bill C-69. The minister pretends the bill is going to wonderfully restore trust in Canada's impact assessment program. That is a myth. In fact, she spent a lot of time talking about the process we needed to establish that would restore this trust.

Let us talk about the process that the minister embarked upon to get the bill through the House of Commons. Rather than consulting broadly, rather than allowing the committee and the House to do its work in the time required to do it well, she and her government invoked closure in the House again and again.

The Liberals introduced a bill they claimed they would never introduce, an omnibus bill. It is a bill that touches on a whole raft of different pieces of legislation, including the Environmental Assessment Act, the National Energy Board Act, and the Navigation Protection Act. Before they were in government, the Liberals said they would never use omnibus bills. Then they present us with one, try to ram this through the committee, and ram it through the House, invoking closure.

I sit on that committee as vice-chair. I know the minister spoke well of the committee. That is because she got her way. The majority of the members on that committee are Liberals. They rushed the bill through. It got so bad that hundreds of witnesses wanted to appear on the bill because it was important to their industries or their environmental movement.

We had heard about 24 witnesses out of the hundreds that wanted to appear, and suddenly, the Liberals on the committee introduced what is called a programming motion. Basically, the programming motion gives a set number of days to hear witnesses, review all the amendments, pass the legislation and send it back to the House. That programming motion was so inadequate. It did not provide anywhere close to the amount of time required to actually evaluate the legislation. It is very serious legislation and it is absolutely critical to Canada's national prosperity and our ability to get Canada's resources to world markets. They could not even spend the appropriate time doing the review.

Over 400 amendments came forward at committee, and over 100 amendments were Liberal amendments. This is the Liberal government bringing forward legislation. It rushes it forward, saying, it has to get this done, that it needs to restore trust, that it will ram it through, but it will introduce some of its own amendments because it got it wrong and it wants its Liberal members to fix the mistakes. One hundred Liberal amendments were introduced, so that was 100 mistakes in the legislation.

That is symptomatic of a failed Liberal government. Of course every Liberal amendment passed. How many Conservative amendments passed? Not one. These were common sense amendments that improved the legislation, to the degree it could be improved because it is deeply flawed legislation.

Here is something else, and I think Canadians need to hear this. It is the hypocrisy of the Liberal government. The government has said that it supports the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and has said it will implement that in Canadian law. Members of the NDP and Green Party who were at committee brought forward 25 different amendments where UNDRIP would be incorporated into the legislation, the way the Prime Minister promised when he ran for government.

How many times do members think the Liberals on a committee voted in favour of UNDRIP being incorporated into the legislation? Zero. Is that hypocrisy? I think we can all agree that he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. That is the whip coming from Gerald Butts and his team, who were sitting behind the Liberals telling them exactly how they should vote at committee.

This was the process that was supposed to restore trust in our impact assessment review process. This legislation went through a process that was a sham. The stakeholders across Canada who expected to be heard on it were not heard. We, as members of the committee, were not allowed to speak and debate many of the amendments that were brought forward, because we were cut off by this programming motion.

That is just the context of Bill C-69, the supposed efforts by the government to introduce Bill C-69, which was to restore trust in our environmental review process. It has done nothing of the sort.

Let me talk about the bill itself. We have talked about the flawed process that was followed to actually get this bill through. I am assuming the same rushed process will be imposed in the Senate. This bill has three main parts. It addresses the environmental assessment approval process. It also creates a new Canadian energy regulator to replace the former National Energy Board, and it also fixes what the government believes are flaws in the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

Let me talk about the last one first. In 2012, the former Conservative government identified that the Navigable Waters Protection Act had not been reviewed or amended for 150 years, basically going back to the time of Confederation. This was legislation that was so antiquated. Now the environmental movement had taken the Navigable Waters Protection Act and had treated it as an environmental piece of legislation. They would always trot it out and say the Navigable Waters Protection Act prevents one from doing this and this, and this. “We are protecting the environment.”

However, the Navigable Waters Protection Act had nothing to do with the environment. It was all about transportation on Canadian waters, and making sure that navigation was free and open across Canada. Think about going back 150 years and how transportation has changed. Think about that. This legislation had not been changed.

Therefore, the Conservative government went about modernizing that legislation and it was excellent legislation. It improved the process in which we address navigation issues, especially as they relate to areas of our country that are subject to farming, and farmers, who could not get work done on their lands because of antiquated navigation laws.

However, there is a second piece. That was the Canadian energy regulator. Think about this. This is what the Liberals do. This characterizes the Liberals. They took the National Energy Board, one of the most competent and capable boards of its kind in the world, in fact noted around the world, and sought out for its expertise in the world, and created a whole new Canadian national energy regulator. Imagine that. Was it necessary? Of course not. It is another make-work project for the Liberal government, more costs, hundreds of millions of dollars of additional costs to create this new organization to implement a new environmental review process. Who pays for that? It is the taxpayers.

The government promised that this legislation, Bill C-69, was going to shorten the timelines in which resource projects would be reviewed and approved. Okay. People took them at their word. What came out of the sausage maker? Wow, what a mess, just like sausages look like quite a mess as they are being made. This legislation was the same.

The government said that these new timelines shortened the actual environmental review process, the assessment. However, it tacked on 180 days at the beginning called the “planning phase”, which of course has extended the time frames involved far beyond what people expected.

Beyond that, within the legislation itself, the government incorporated numerous opportunities for the minister to exercise her discretion to extend or suspend a timeline. Therefore, throughout this process that a proponent goes through there are opportunities for the minister to say, “I want to suspend the process right now because I have some concerns about that and that”, and the proponent has no power to prevent that. The minister also has a right to say, “I'm going to extend the timelines. Notwithstanding our government's promise that it was going to be a shorter assessment process, I'm going to extend it. I have the power in this new legislation to do that.” Therefore, the time frames are actually longer, and the certainty is much less because of the amount of discretion given to the minister in this legislation, contrary to what the government had promised.

At the end of this process, the planning phase and the environmental review process, one would think that decisions would be based on science, and that would be it, we have moved to a fully science-based process. No. The government has reserved unto the minister the right to veto a project at any point along the line, including at the end of the environmental review process, again undermining certainty for the investment community, which is shopping its money and investments around the world saying, “Where is there a warm and welcoming environment in which we can do business, where we drive prosperity for the people of that nation, and we are able to build critical resource projects and infrastructure that gets those resources to market?”

This bill does not live up to its billing at all. The timelines are longer and the discretion is greater, as is the uncertainty for the people who want to move forward with resource projects.

It gets worse. Do members remember the minister saying that the government wants this process to be more streamlined, more welcoming, and with certainty for proponents of research projects in Canada? Bill C-69 includes a host of new criteria that will now be applied to those who want to get projects approved, including upstream and downstream impacts of things such as pipelines.

It gets worse. On top of that, the government has included a provision that says that every project must take into account the impact that project will have on Canada's greenhouse gas emission targets under the Paris Agreement. If we were thinking of sending a message to the world that we are open for business again, this would be the wrong way of doing it. Bill C-69 does not do that in any way. We have heard some of my colleagues quote organizations in Canada that are focused on resource projects and that have lamented the fact that Bill C-69 is a huge step backward, and that no further pipelines will ever be approved in Canada based on the legislation as it is.

We tried to improve the legislation at committee. It is not like we sat on our hands and said that it was a fait accompli. We worked very hard. We brought forward about 100 amendments that would have improved this legislation, made it more timely, made it more certain, and made it a vehicle that would attract investment to Canada. What did our Liberal friends across the table do? They voted against every single one of those amendments. That is what we are dealing with, with the Liberal Party.

It gets worse. Let us talk about the precautionary principle, which is also incorporated into this legislation. A lot of people do not understand what the precautionary principle is. Effectively, what it is saying is better safe than sorry.

In other words, if there is anybody, whether it is the minister or someone on the minister's staff or someone in industry or someone in the environmental movement, who says that they think this project, before it has ever been assessed based on the science, it could be a danger to Canadians' health or the environment, the precautionary principle would dictate that the project would not go ahead.

The minister has the power to use the precautionary principle to simply say, “I am not allowing this project to go ahead.” The proponent could say, “Well, Madam Minister, we have all this evidence, scientific evidence that we have paid millions and millions of dollars to secure. This scientific information will prove to you that this project can be built and operated in an environmentally sustainable way.” The minister could say, “No. Precautionary principle. Better safe than sorry. Bye, bye.” That is what is included here.

Members may recall that there was a lot of complaining by the Liberals during the last election that somehow the environmental review process did not allow for enough people to become engaged in the process. What did the Liberal government do? It changed what is called the “standing test”. The standing test is very simply the rules under which Canadians and others are entitled to appear as intervenors before an impact assessment review.

Members can imagine what this would be like, if we had no control over who could be an intervenor. If any Tom, Dick, or Harry in the world wants to appear before an environmental review process but has no direct nexus to the project, or cannot prove that they have an interest in that project, why would we allow that individual to line up in this queue of people wanting to intervene?

What the Liberals have said is, “We are going to open this wide up. We don't care how many people come to be intervenors. If special interest groups use large numbers of intervenors to basically slow down the process, drag it out, and discourage investment, so be it.” That is what we are left with now in Bill C-69, a deeply flawed piece of legislation that has introduced numerous new opportunities for special interest groups to delay and obstruct projects that are of a national interest.

Let us talk about projects of a national interest. The government says that this legislation is going to attract all kinds of investment. We know industry is saying, “Absolutely not. There will not be one more pipeline built in Canada.” Now we have a pipeline, the TMX pipeline, the Kinder Morgan pipeline, which was approved in Canada, which was ready to be built, but, as usual, there are special interest groups that say, “Notwithstanding that there is a process, like Bill C-69, a process that is supposed to be legal, supposed to be fair, we will disagree with the decision, and we are going to fight this all the way. We are going to protest, lay our bodies down in front of the bulldozers.” On and on it goes. That is what we have with Kinder Morgan.

We have a Prime Minister who does have some options. He is, after all, the Prime Minister and has constitutional powers. One of those is the declaratory power under the Constitution. He has the ability to state that a project is in the national interest, and that supersedes provincial powers. Under the BNA Act, interprovincial pipelines are considered federal projects. The federal government has a right to intervene and promote. Rather than doing that, our Prime Minister says, “I am not going to exercise my constitutional powers. I am going to see if somebody else out there in the world will buy this pipeline, because TMX wants to sell it, wants to get out of it.”

Did he find any takers? None. What he says to taxpayers is, “I want you to pay this bill. I am going to pay $4.5 billion for this pipeline, even though its book value is only $2.5 billion.”

The cost is $2 billion more than the book value of that pipeline. That is what Canadians now have from the government. We have bought ourselves a pipeline, where all of the risk now falls on the shoulders of Canadian taxpayers.

This is awful legislation and we were never given the time to properly assess, review, and amend it. That should be a shame on this Liberal government.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague across the aisle spent the first few minutes of his remarks talking about the process by which this legislation was developed. I will remind him that there were about 14 months' worth of consultation with industry, the public, and indigenous peoples, and a review was conducted by several committees to review the pieces of legislation that are being altered by this bill. I had the good pleasure of sitting on the transport committee, which looked at the Navigation Protection Act.

My question for the hon. member relates to the process that was followed in 2012 when the different pieces of legislation were jammed into an omnibus budget bill. The transport committee, without consultation with indigenous peoples, had about a two hours to review the piece of legislation, which he described as one of the very first on the books in the history of this country.

Did the hon. member choose to leave out these details, or was it an honest mistake and he simply forgot?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, all I can say is poppycock. He talks about consultation with the public, but he left out the members of the House, who Canadians have elected to review this kind of legislation. A government can have all the consultation it wants across Canada, but if it does not provide the elected members of Parliament the opportunity to do their work, that is a scandal. That is why Bill C-69 is a scandal of a process. It has been short-circuited.

The member refers to the process by which the former government introduced bills, which is very similar to the process we have here, where the Prime Minister introduces omnibus bills and he then invokes closure and cuts off debate in the House. Where were the 14 months of consultations and work that the House could do on this bill? Where were they? We were cut short here. Is that the kind of government the Prime Minister leads?

If one were to review the mandate letter that the Minister of Environment received, one would see that there are numerous references to raising the bar on the relationship between the minister and the committees that review her legislation, and on how she relates to the members of the House. None of those mandate requirements were complied with in this case. Again, it is a true shock and scandal to the House.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech, his energy, and his passion.

I also really liked that he explained all the details of the amendments. The members of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development worked so hard, and the government is willing to accept some amendments—yes, but only Liberal amendments. When it comes to opposition party amendments, however, the government turns a deaf ear and loses all interest.

Our position is perhaps a little different with respect to the minister's decision, as the minister will be able to turn down any new project. For our part, we have a problem with the fact that the minister could accept any new project, regardless of the recommendations. I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on the discretionary power the Liberals are giving the minister who happens to be in office and the fact that the minister is not bound by the recommendations made by the impact assessment agency.

Really now, what is the point of having an assessment process if, at the end of the day, the minister can do as he or she pleases anyway?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as I articulated in my speech, the minister certainly would have the power under this legislation, in Bill C-69, to do pretty well anything she pleases because she would have broad discretionary powers to suspend, extend, and then veto projects, which is the exact opposite of what industry expected the current government to do. People in industry expected there would be more certainty in the process, the process would be science-based, and instead it is something quite different.

To the member's earlier comment on amendments, as I mentioned, every single amendment of the over 100 amendments that the Liberal members of the committee brought forward was passed. None of the Conservative amendments were passed because the committee was not interested in getting this legislation right. It was interested in ramming through legislation that the minister wanted to have through.

By the way, I move, seconded by the member for Barrie—Innisfil, that the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that”, and substituting the following: Bill C-69, 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, be not now read a third time but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development for the purpose of reconsidering all of its clauses.

Mr. Speaker, you will understand why we are doing this. It is because of the sham of a process that the Liberal government undertook to address amendments that were brought forward in good faith by my Green friends in the corner, by the NDP, and by our Conservative members of the committee, most of which were disregarded and treated in a very cavalier manner. This is intended to rectify that and give the House another opportunity to get this bill right.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

I just want to inform the hon. member that he can move an amendment during his speech, but not during questions and answers. I am afraid he will have to get someone from his party or another member to propose that amendment during their speech.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Barrie—Innisfil.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding a minor hiccup at the end there, Canadians saw in the hon. member for Abbotsford's passion and heard tonight in his speech the truth about Bill C-69 and not the platitudes, rhetoric, and buzzwords used by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

He spoke about the committee. I was there. I actually saw this sham of a committee meeting go on, where every single amendment that the Liberal members of the committee tried to put through was adopted. When the Conservative side tried to move amendments forward to make this bill better, and even when the NDP member for Edmonton Centre tried to move amendments to make this bill better, all of them were lost. They were not accepted by the Liberal members of the committee.

The one thing that is really disturbing about this bill, and I mentioned this when the Minister of Environment and Climate Change was here, is the fact that this consolidates power. It actually would bring the decision-making into the minister and into the cabinet, which effectively means that the potential exists that no further projects would occur in this country. I wonder if the member shares that same assessment.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Barrie—Innisfil is a very valuable member in the House and brings a very interesting perspective to the issues that we debate here.

He suggested that the Liberal government has consolidated power in the Office of the Prime Minister and that is certainly true. As an anecdote, what happens at committee is that the minister's representative, I will not name him because he is actually a decent person, but he is tasked with being in the room and as we are discussing amendments, he walks behind the Liberal members of the committee and tells them how to vote, how not to vote. If it is a Conservative amendment, do not touch it. He does not care what it says, do not touch it.

This consolidation of power is in the minister's office and now beyond, because we know who runs the Prime Minister's Office. Who is it? It is Mr. Gerald Butts, the de facto prime minister who rules the roost and basically pulls all the strings and the policy initiatives of the government. Because that power is so consolidated in the Prime Minister's Office, individual Liberal members of the House, who are well-meaning people, have no opportunity to bring their expertise or their judgment to bear at committee. That is a shame.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, again, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-69 on a new impact assessment and environmental assessment process.

I must begin by saying a few words about the approach to adopting this new process. Cloaked in righteousness, the Liberal government set to defending democratic institutions. It sought to give MPs their power and their voice back, respect the work of Parliament, and break from the Conservatives' despicable practice of cutting debates short. The Liberals said they wanted to give MPs time to do their work in order to represent their constituents well.

However, bad habits die hard, and closure has been imposed more than 40 times already. These are what we call time allocation motions that seek to limit the time for debate.

It seems that this bill is important to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change. However, the Liberals imposed closure at every stage. At first reading, at report stage, and now at third reading, they gave parliamentarians a maximum of four or five hours before closing debate. We were promised, hand on heart, that a Liberal government would never do such despicable, undemocratic things. It has now become routine.

My Conservative colleague, who is a member of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development, said that the government was bragging about having collaborated, studied amendments in committee, and listened to the opposition. It also brags about the fact that about 100 amendments were adopted in committee to improve the bill. Congratulations. I just want to point out that 99% of the amendments adopted were Liberal amendments. I have no doubt that that makes things easier.

It is mind-boggling to think that the bill was so poorly drafted and cobbled together, right from the start, that the Liberals were forced to present about 100 amendments in committee to try to patch it up and repair the damage. The bill lacked clarity and was poorly crafted, so it needed a lot of clarifications. That gives you an idea of the process, since government members are almost never required to fix a lousy job from the minister's office.

I would now like to talk about timeframes. It took the government 28 months to come up with a bill for a new environmental impact assessment process. During the campaign, the Liberals said that it was a priority because Canadians lost confidence in the process when it was destroyed and dismantled in the previous Parliament. They claimed that the Conservatives' process turned away from science and that we urgently needed to restore a transparent, valid, and scientific process that people could rely on. It took 28 months to come up with this bill.

During these 28 months, the government continued to sit back and to use the previous Parliament's process, a process that was supposed to be terrible.

What did the government do in the meantime? For one thing, it authorized the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which was Kinder Morgan's priority. How convenient that is for the government. When it wants a project to go ahead, it holds off on establishing a more serious, more credible, more scientific, and more rigorous process. The government used the tool left behind by the Conservatives, a means of fast-tracking and rubber-stamping projects, and was thus able to approve everything and anything.

The Liberals go through the motions of sticking a few bandaids on so it appears different, but they are not fooling anyone. Once again, the government used what it once criticized. This is more proof of the Liberals' hypocrisy.

The Trans Mountain expansion was approved in November 2016. It is now June 2018, and we are once again discussing the new environmental assessment process. Halfway through their mandate, the Liberals still have not passed a bill because they keep dragging their feet, citing consultations. The Liberals had no problem speeding some things through; a more rigorous process would have gotten in their way.

They broke their promise to assess the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion under a new environmental assessment process. While in British Columbia during the election campaign, the Prime Minister swore that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion would never be assessed under the Conservatives' rules, yet that is exactly what happened. He also promised to change the voting system and institute democratic reform. It seems to be a bad habit of his. When he solemnly swears something, look out because he is about to flip-flop.

We have a new agency that is based on the old environmental assessment agency, but with more powers and a bigger role. It will be above certain commissions, like the National Energy Board, which will become a commission. That is a step in the right direction we had been waiting for, but we are still concerned about the fact that two organizations we have heard little about, which will exist alongside the new impact assessment agency of Canada, will be getting much more authority and a bigger role. I am referring to the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board and the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

These two boards are separate, independent assessment committees that are responsible for assessing any drilling that may occur in marine environments, in the oceans, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, potentially, or off the coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. That troubles us, because the mission of these two boards is to promote offshore oil and gas development. Their job is not to protect the environment, the seabed, ecosystems, or endangered species. It is to promote oil and gas development off the coast of certain provinces.

This flies in the face of everything the government says about how much it cares about the environment and its claims that it is here to protect our oceans, our natural resources, and our ecosystems. In itself, that is a total contradiction. We in the NDP find this really troubling, and I doubt we are the only ones, judging by the spontaneous reaction of the Green Party leader, who is just behind me.

When you tell a story, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is not complicated. That is what kids learn in school. I want to talk about those three stages in the context of Bill C-69. In the beginning, a decision has to be made as to which projects will be submitted to the new agency for assessment, because all of this has to be good for something. If it is decided that the project will not be assessed because it is not worth it, everything in Bill C-69 and everything that was said about public consultations, indigenous consultations, and considering reports from climate change experts—all of that goes out the window.

As things now stand, and the minister confirmed it in her speech, Bill C-69 does not establish a list of projects. It also does not set out any clear, definitive, and verifiable criteria that would allow us to determine which projects require an environmental assessment. There is nothing about that at all.

From the start, there has been a very serious grey area. The agency can arbitrarily decide for itself what it considers to be important or unimportant.

It is all well and good to have a good process, which as we will see is not as good as all that, but if that process is never used, then it does not do anything more to protect us as Canadians, as people who are concerned about the environment, ecosystems, and global warming.

Take the following oddity, for example. The bill states that if the project is deemed to be a major project, it will fall under the responsibility of the new assessment agency. If it is deemed minor, then it can be reviewed by a commission, such as the National Energy Board. What is the difference between major and minor? There is nothing in the bill about that, so we do not know.

There are things like the steam-based oil sands development technology called “in situ”, which has been completely left out of the scope of the bill and any new environmental assessment. The government says it will not look at it even though it is an increasingly common technology that could have serious impacts. Those impacts could be relatively minor, but for the people living in the indigenous community or the town involved, it does not necessarily take a thousand-litre spill or a huge amount of pollution to jeopardize their health, pollute their environment, or cause a public health issue.

There is no clear explanation for why in situ bitumen extraction was excluded. Knowing what gets assessed and what does not is just the beginning. There are a lot of vague and arbitrary elements. There is very little clarity, and that is what worries us. That is the first problem.

The second problem is with the middle part, the public consultations, the dialogue with indigenous communities, and the appointment of review panels to do the scientific environmental assessment.

Consultations are another novelty of the Liberal process, and on that topic, assessment timeframes are being shortened. Depending on the size of the project, they will drop from 365 days to 300 days. That means that we will lose 65 assessment days. For major projects, the process will drop from 720 days to 600 days, for a loss of 120 days. This Liberal decision was taken in direct response to the demands from investors and private companies.

The decision worried many environmental, indigenous, and citizen groups. They do not understand, if we want a credible, serious process we can trust, why the government is adopting an attitude where it seems to want to expedite things as quickly as possible and satisfy the desires and needs of the industry first and foremost.

The Liberal government is also saying that first nations will have a greater role to play in the assessment process. Connect the dots to what I just said. If we greatly shorten the timeframes of a project and process, it is rather unlikely that there will be enough time to conduct extensive consultations with first nations. Again, they say one thing, but in fact there is a good chance that nothing will come of it or that the process will be flawed or absolutely incomplete.

That is what we know about the duration, the timeframe of the process.

The second aspect is the appointment of these experts we have been talking about to the panels that will carry out these ostensibly scientific, environmental impact assessments. There are many groups, including the Quebec Environmental Law Centre, that are concerned about the fact that the Liberal plan has no mechanisms to ensure that these will not be partisan appointments, that Liberals will not appoint their cronies, and that panel members will not be prone to making recommendations or a report that merely reflects what the government wanted from the start.

It is a simple process that is already in place in other jurisdictions. I am thinking of BAPE in Quebec, which is well regarded and credible, and has this type of mechanism. Here, we get the feeling that the Liberal government would allow the appointment of people who will not really care or who will listen to what the government says and wants.

It is really not that surprising. If I have time, I will come back to Kinder Morgan and the absolutely ridiculous purchase made recently.

While public consultations were being held on the Trans Mountain expansion, while first nations were being told that they were being listened to, that it was important, that they really wanted to hear their perspective, it became apparent that a decision had already been made. The government was already looking for excuses and reasons to legally say that the decision was made and that it would be approved.

Phony consultations were held very recently, and I believe that people should be concerned about the possibility of these partisan appointments to the expert panel.

After the beginning and the middle, we get to the end. Let us say the project has been assessed. Let us say the consultations lasted long enough and were sufficiently credible, although perhaps a bit limited. Let us say the experts really were independent, they did their job diligently, and they prepared a report with recommendations based on science, social licence, the impact on climate change, our ecosystems, and so on. After all that, it is completely up to the minister if he or she wants to dismiss all the recommendations of the impact assessment agency. All of that good work, even if it is perfect—and we already have some misgivings about that—could very well be taken and tossed into the trash, and the project could be deemed in the national interest and approved.

The national interest is being tossed around a lot these days. It can be made to mean pretty much anything. A majority government can simply declare something to be in the national interest since it knows that it can force it through the House either way, and everyone else will have to deal with it. I think it would be in the national interest to listen to experts, scientists, Canadians, and first nations. When the minister of the day has all of this discretionary power, the process can become arbitrary. Say that you like the current Liberal government, and that you trust its environment minister. That is fine, and I am sure there are people out there who feel that way, but once a bill passes, it will not change with every cabinet shuffle, with every federal election, or with every change in government. Things could turn pretty quickly under someone who has a different style or vision of development. I am really being very kind to the sitting minister, who has the instincts of an industry minister rather than those of an environment and climate change minister. Incidentally, anyone claiming to champion environmental protection and the fight against climate change should not go out and buy a 65-year-old pipeline that is already leaking everywhere.

I would like our Liberal colleagues to take out their 2015 electoral platform and show me the part where they told voters they wanted a pipeline so badly that they were prepared to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to buy one if necessary and that Canadians would have to assume all the risks associated with such a project. Let us be clear, Kinder Morgan deemed the project was too high risk. The current Prime Minister even acknowledged that no private company wanted to take on these risks because legal challenges have been filed by British Columbia and many of its first nations.

There are difficulties and challenges with respect to our international commitments under the Paris Agreement and our greenhouse gas reduction targets. The project simply does not make sense. We will be spending at least $12 billion on infrastructure that might be worthless in 25 or 30 years. On top of taking a huge financial hit, we will have invested in the energy source and jobs of the past, when we could have been investing in renewable energy. Those types of investments create six to eight times more jobs. The Prime Minister would have become a leader with a vision for the environment and for sustainable development. Sadly, that will never happen.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to my hon. colleague's speech.

The environment and respect for the environment are very important to my constituents. In my riding, people care about protecting our river and our land and have worked very hard to strike a balance between that and developing the land and the fact that we have agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. All of these things add to the quality of life of everyone in our region. We are very proud of that.

It is clear that people are very worried about the environment. We know that greenhouse gases are having an impact, and we have seen just how detrimental to our environment this past decade's policies have been. We know that our country has done very little to mitigate the effects of pollution and climate change. That is why people voted for a government that has a policy to address all that.

Here is my question for my colleague across the way. What would he have done about this? The fact is that my constituents are very happy with the steps our government has taken.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her comment.

I have two things to say in response to her remarks. I know she represents a riding on the south shore of Montreal. We had quite the debate in Quebec over the past few years about the energy east pipeline. We saw the current Liberal government's imperialist attitude when it decided to dismiss all of the concerns put forward by British Columbians and first nations.

In light of this, as a Quebecker and the Quebec lieutenant for the NDP, I am wondering whether the Liberal government could do the same thing with a project similar to energy east. It could decide not to listen to Quebec, the BAPE, or Montreal's elected officials and impose a pipeline that would cross Quebec, cross hundreds of rivers, likely including the St. Lawrence, and jeopardize our ecosystems, and not think there was anything wrong with that. If the government can do it in British Columbia, then I do not see why it would hesitate to do the same thing in Quebec, particularly since the Liberals have a very broad definition of what constitutes the national interest.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, one of the consequences of the process of Bill C-69 going through the committee was the unfortunate loss of the member for Edmonton Strathcona. She became frustrated with the process because of what she saw as the top-down approach of the PMO and a lot of the committee members having their strings pulled.

I wonder if the hon. colleague could comment on the frustration felt by the member for Edmonton Strathcona as we went through the committee process.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his concern for the member for Edmonton Strathcona.

She accomplished a massive amount of work. She is very knowledgeable, thorough, and detail-oriented, and she truly cares about working with other parliamentarians to improve bills that are important to the future, like Bill C-69. She went to committee in good faith and listened to experts and people familiar with the topic. She worked in this field for years. She is familiar with it. She wanted to make this bill as good as possible.

Unfortunately, she was told that they did not want to hear from her. The Liberal government does not listen to the opposition parties. I think the leader of the Green Party had the same experience. Very few of her amendments were adopted. This is quite unfortunate, because we are trying to do a good job, but, once again, the government is not listening.

[Tracey Ramsey, NDP, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague, the MP for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, for his fantastic work and his wonderful speech here in the House.

This bill could have been something incredible that reflected where we need to go as a country. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where it falls far short of where we need to be.

I want to focus on one particular area, and that is navigable waters. In 2012, Bill C-45 came to this House, causing a loss of key protections for navigable waters in Canada. One of the strongest critics of this bill and of the removal and stripping of protections at the time was the Liberal Party. We went from 2.5 million navigable rivers and lakes down to 159. There was a promise made by the Liberals during the campaign that they would return these strong protections to our waterways.

In my riding of Essex, I am surrounded by fresh water. We have Lake Erie on one side and Lake St. Clair on the other. The rivers, tributaries, and small lakes we have need protection under our government. Unfortunately, the Liberal government is breaking a promise it made to Canadians and is not returning those protections. As a matter of fact, the Liberals have gone further than that. They are narrowing the scope of the definition that was set by our courts to define any river or lake that is deep enough to float a boat as being a navigable water. They have changed that definition and narrowed it. They have exempted pipelines and transmission lines. They are allowing the minister or developers to bypass requirements for a transparent approval process.

I would like to ask my colleague how this failure, this broken promise, will impact the health of our navigable waters in Canada.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Essex for her very good question.

I find it interesting that she is raising the issue of the changes to navigable waters because, once again, the Liberals wanted to muddy the waters, if you will pardon the pun. The debate on the assessment process garnered all the attention, but it is indeed another broken promise that will continue to put our lakes and rivers at risk. The previous government removed 97% of Canada's many lakes and rivers from the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The protections that existed before the Conservative government gutted the bill have not been restored. We were promised that the former system, which helped our communities, would be restored. That is not the case.

Before the Conservatives' changes, the act protected both current and future use of waters, from both an environmental and a social perspective. That is no longer in the act, which is too technical and too narrow and ignores the overall social and environmental benefits of navigable waters. Once again, the Liberal government has not done its homework, has failed, and has broken another promise.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking the hon. member for his speech.

We believe it is possible to grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time. The NDP seems to be allergic to economic development.

If the hon. member could design his own process, is there a project that the NDP would support? Is there at least one?

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very important question. There is a geothermal project in an alley in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. I support that excellent project.

I just want to say that $4.5 billion to buy an old pipeline is not a good investment. It is the public that is assuming the risk. What is more, it is going to cost $7.4 billion to expand the pipeline, which will triple pollution because production will increase to 900,000 barrels a day of raw bitumen, which does not float on water when there is a spill. It sinks to the bottom. We do not know how we are going to clean up a spill when it happens. Make no mistake, it will happen.

I will give my Liberal colleague the chance to consider what we might do with that $12 billion. We could invest in renewable energies that would create good jobs for today and tomorrow. That would be a vision for the future. That would be a vision of economic development and sustainable development.

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I would first and foremost like to thank the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development for its careful study of Bill C-69. I would also like to thank the witnesses and those who have made written submissions for having taken the time to make their views heard. This work has strengthened the bill and has been an important step in getting us to where we are today.

I would like to speak particularly about part 3 of Bill C-69, which would create a new Canadian navigable waters act.

Our country is bordered by three oceans, giving us the world’s longest coastline, and we are internally connected by thousands of rivers and countless lakes and canals.

Canadians rely on our navigable waters. They are vital to our economy and to our way of life. We have a profound relationship with our waters. That relationship is part of what it means to be Canadian.

We need to protect navigation on these waters for our use and enjoyment today, and for the benefit of generations to come.

When the previous government introduced the Navigation Protection Act, many Canadians were concerned that most of Canada's navigable waters were left unprotected. In response to these concerns, the minister was asked to review the changes made by the previous government to restore lost protections and incorporate modern safeguards.

In June 2016, the review of the Navigation Protection Act was launched. As a first step in this process, the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities examined the act. The committee reported its findings and recommendations in March 2017.

I would like to take this opportunity to also thank this standing committee, the witnesses and those who made written submissions for their early input. This input provided the foundation for the new Canadian navigable waters act that was eventually tabled as part of Bill C-69.

During its first year of review, the work of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities was complemented by consultations with recreational boaters, as well as other levels of government, indigenous groups, industry, and environmental organizations. What did they tell us? Many of them told us they wanted all navigable waters protected, and that is what we are doing.

Under the existing legislation, the minister has the power to review new projects and deal with obstruction to navigation only if they are on the navigable waters listed in the schedule. However, we believe that all navigable waters should be protected. We promised to restore lost protections, and we are delivering on that promise.

What would this legislation do? The act would include, for the first time, a comprehensive definition of navigable waters. It would provide oversight for all works on those navigable waters in Canada, whether those works are minor, requiring approval, or are subject to the new resolution process.

It would give communities and recreational waterway users more chances to have their say on infrastructure and resource projects that could affect their right to navigation. It would deliver a new level of transparency by creating a new online registry that would make information about projects easily accessible. It would extend the powers to address obstructions to all navigable waters in Canada, not just those waters listed on a schedule.

Finally, the act would advance reconciliation with indigenous peoples, consider their rights and knowledge, and give them the opportunity to partner with the government to manage the navigable waters that would be important to them.

Let me discuss some of these improvements in more detail. As I said, this legislation would include a comprehensive definition of “navigable water”.

The new definition includes bodies of water with public access or multiple shoreline owners that are used for transport or travel for commercial or recreational purposes or by indigenous groups to exercise their constitutionally protected rights.

This new definition strikes the right balance: it is not so broad as to capture any ditch or irrigation canal that could float a canoe, nor is it so narrow as to exclude bodies of water that are important to Canadians.

All works in navigable waters in Canada will be under the oversight of the new act, regardless of whether the navigable water is listed on a schedule or not. Someone building a minor work, such as a cottage dock or a boat ramp, in a navigable water could proceed, provided they build and maintain the work in accordance with the requirements set out in the minor works order.

There will also be some works that will always require approval because of their potential impact on navigation. These are major works on any navigable waters in Canada as well as works on scheduled waters.

I strongly believe users of navigable waters and local communities have a right to express their views about projects that may impact navigation. The proposed act meets a new standard of transparency by requiring owners to notify the public of their project and to seek feedback before beginning construction on any navigable water. In some circumstances, owners could be required to post notice of their project in community centres, marinas, local newspapers, or other appropriate places.

Further, the new Canadian navigable waters act will require the creation of a new online public registry that will make project information more accessible than ever before. For millennia, the indigenous people of Canada have used navigable waters to fish, hunt, trade, and travel, and they continue to do so today. Indigenous peoples played an active role of the review of the Navigation Protection Act.

Transport Canada participated in more than 90 meetings with indigenous groups and received close to 150 submissions. What did we hear from indigenous peoples? We heard that they wanted a say in what happened within their traditional territories.

This past February, the Prime Minister announced his commitment to reconciliation through the recognition and implementation of rights framework. The Government of Canada recognizes that reconciliation is a long-term undertaking. Rebuilding relationships will require sustained government-wide action.

A strengthened crown-indigenous relationship is at the heart of the proposed approach. This new relationship with indigenous peoples is based on respect, cooperation, and partnership.

The act would also provide new opportunities for indigenous peoples to partner with the Government of Canada to protect navigation in their traditional territories. Indigenous peoples have helped to shape the proposed legislation, and I am very proud of the work we have done together.

Whether they are tourists on a river cruise, or cottagers taking the boat out to do some fishing, or kayakers exploring secluded bays, Canadians get a lot of pleasure out of our waterways. However, under the existing legislation, these navigable waters may not be protected for recreational purposes.

Under the new Canadian navigable waters act, a more inclusive schedule will provide a greater level of oversight for navigable waters that are important to Canadians and that are vulnerable to development. The new act proposes a process for adding navigable waters to the schedule that will take into consideration recreational uses, not just commercial ones.

The proposed changes to the navigation legislation will offer better navigation protections for recreational boaters on every navigable water in Canada.

Bill C-69 would not only restore navigation protection for every navigable water in Canada, but it would also position the new Canadian navigable waters act to play an important role in the proposed new impact assessment system.

Bill C-69 would establish the impact assessment agency of Canada to lead all federal reviews of designated projects. The impact assessment agency would work with other bodies, such as the new Canadian energy regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and off shore boards, and in co-operation with the provinces and territories, and indigenous jurisdictions.

The impact assessment agency of Canada would identify the types of projects and areas of federal jurisdiction that could pose major risks to the environment, and would therefore require a review.

A whole range of potential impacts would be considered, not just the project's impact on the environment, but also the impact on communities, health, indigenous peoples, jobs, and the economy in general.

We are finding better ways to measure the potential impact of designated projects to make sure only good ones go forward.

The new Canadian navigable waters act will be transformational. It will restore protection for navigation on all navigable waters in Canada, and it will create a new standard of transparency. It will restore public confidence and it will provide new opportunities for indigenous peoples to partner with the Government of Canada to protect navigation in their traditional territories.

As I wrap up, I move:

That this question be now put.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, as I listened to the parliamentary secretary's speech, she talked mostly about the navigable waters act, but I want to bring it back to the standing test the NEB used to have. It will be eliminated in this act. Section 183(3), specifically deals with the standing test. The practice of the NEB had been, and I think it was the right one, that persons directly affected by a project that ran through a community should be the ones before the National Energy Board in order to present their views on any proposed project and how it would impact them directly.

I think it was said by the Prime Minister that only communities could give consent, so why not allow those people most locally affected by it to have a direct say in it?

This bill will eliminate that test, and that is actually two steps backwards. As an example, during the Enbridge Line 9B reversal and the Line 9 capacity expansion, the NEB received 177 applications to participate, of which 158 were granted, 11 received an opportunity for a written submission, and only eight were denied. The reason those were denied because they were not directly affected by it.

However, under the model proposed in Bill C-69, even international individuals can come before the new regulator and basically say that they are affected by it directly and therefore permission should not be granted. I think in a great deal of cases Canadians will support local projects because of the jobs and the shared prosperity they benefit from it directly. Therefore, this is two steps backwards.

Does the parliamentary secretary agree with me?

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, during this entire process, we wanted to hear from as many Canadians as possible. We did not want to limit who had the opportunity to come and give their input to this process. In my opinion and in my background, the more people who can contribute to something, the stronger it will be.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, before I became an MP, I worked for six years as the chair of an environmental advisory committee in my capacity as a city councillor, so I know that the people I represent are very concerned about the environment.

I was listening to my colleague talk about navigable waters, and that made me think of the people who wrote a brief to BAPE that was thousands of pages long. They have a very comprehensive view of their environmental concerns. When they think about our navigable waters, they also see the social and environmental benefits that go along with that. As I listened to my colleague talk about very technical matters, including posting notices, I thought to myself that her view is too narrow to satisfy the people I represent.

Could my colleague tell us about the Canadian navigable waters act? Beyond the technical considerations, what social and environmental benefits were considered when drafting the bill?

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her work in this field. It is really important that we look at water in that context. It is so critical to our lives and to our Canadian experience. Whether it is kayaking or fishing or canoeing, it is something very near and dear to Canadians' hearts. In the past all that was looked at as part of this process was a very narrow lens. What we are trying to do now is to make sure it takes into consideration health, the needs of communities, recreation, and how it is going to affect those communities. That is a huge step forward when it comes to this kind of legislation.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it was one of my great fears when the first draft consultation paper was put out about repairing the damage and restoring the original Navigable Waters Protection Act that it looked as though we might just hold to a schedule only. I was very gratified to find the definition had changed to say that navigable waters means “a body of water...that is used or where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be used by vessels, in full or in part, for any part of the year as a means of transport...”. This is a much broader definition, so it does not go back to the one we had from 1881. Under Bill C-45, in fall of 2012, we lost protection on over 98 point something per cent of the interior waterways of Canada.

My question for the hon. parliamentary secretary is this. This is a good definition. We probably got protection back on something like 89% of all the interior waters in Canada, but the nature of the protection is different, because the impact assessment legislation in part 1 of this omnibus bill did not restore the requirement that the minister of transportation would have to have an impact evaluation, an environmental assessment, and impact assessment before granting a permit to interfere with navigation on these waters. What is the nature of the protection, given that that gap was not replaced?

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, what was behind this was that we saw a need as well to increase the number of navigable waters that were protected. We found that if all we did was protect what was on the schedule that was not near enough. I think the number I have seen is almost 100,000 named waterways in Canada, and to expand that protection to those waterways is so very critical.

There are some minor works we felt could move ahead, that would not have to be so controlled as in the past. That is what we have tried to do, allow perhaps a cottage dock, or some small repair to a seawall to be done without triggering a full environmental assessment. We tried to find that balance.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I was going to say that there is a stranger in the House, but I believe I recognize the hon. member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is very kind. You have a good eye and a kind heart after all.

I would like to thank my colleague from Kanata—Carleton who gave an interesting speech. I respect her because she is a parliamentarian, but it bothers me to hear her say in the House that she allowed many stakeholders to participate in the drafting process in order to improve the bill.

I have the privilege of sitting on the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development, but I have to say that the government ran roughshod over us, as parliamentarians, as it did with many organizations across the country.

Can the member assure the House that the process was open and transparent and that many interested stakeholders were able to come and share their opinions with the House of Commons?

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was looking for the number. I think it was probably 70 or 90 sessions where we met with people. We tried our best to do a consultation on the navigable waters because we understood just how critical it was for Canadians. It was so important that we reached out to all those communities and gave them the opportunity to participate in this process.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of Lakeland, I oppose Bill C-69, which would have wide-ranging, significant impacts on Canada's oil and gas, nuclear, and mining sectors, and by extension on every other sector in the country.

Bill C-69 does not involve minor tweaks. It is a major overhaul of multiple laws and regulations related to Canada's assessment processes, and it would damage Canada's capacity to attract investment that benefits everyone. Canada is a resource-based economy and is a world leader on responsible resource development.

Those facts are among Canada's greatest strengths and contributions to the world. Canada's exploration and mining sector is a major driver of the economy. In 2016, it contributed $60.3 billion directly to Canada's GDP, 19% of Canada's total domestic exports worth $92 billion, and the employment of nearly 600,000 Canadians. As a sector, it is the largest private employer of indigenous people in Canada, often where jobs and opportunities are scarce, in remote and northern regions.

At the end of 2015, the value of Canadian mining assets at home and abroad totalled $171 billion across 102 countries. From remote and indigenous communities to large cities across Canada, and the Toronto Stock Exchange, the mining sector generates significant economic and social benefits for Canadians. Of course, the oil and gas sector is also a key generator of middle-class jobs and Canada's high standard of living.

The International Energy Agency projects global oil demand will continue to grow, with oil maintaining the largest share of any energy fuel source in the global energy market for decades. The average energy demand is predicted to increase approximately 30% by 2040. For context, that is the equivalent of adding another China or India, the most populous countries in the world, to the current level of global energy consumption.

Canada is home to the third largest oil reserves in the world, with recoverable reserves of 171 billion barrels. Canada is the fifth largest producer of natural gas and has the 19th largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, enough to supply consumers with natural gas for more than 300 years.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute says that every job in Canadian upstream oil and gas creates two indirect and three induced jobs in other sectors across the country. Scholar Kevin Milligan notes that without income derived from the resource boom, Canadian inequality and the well-being of Canada's middle class would be much worse.

The Liberals talk a big game about making life better for middle-class Canadians, but, in fact, the Prime Minister has turned his back on the hard-working men and women who have given so much to our country through responsible resource development. Last year, the Prime Minister talked about phasing out the oil sands, and a couple of months ago, he told the world he regrets that Canada cannot get off oil “tomorrow”. The cumulative impacts of the Liberal-caused uncertainty and their imposition of layers of cost and red tape are driving investment out of Canada.

The Liberals have imposed a carbon tax on everything, which is something that major oil and gas producers are not imposing on themselves around the world, and the anti-energy legislation and policies like removing the tax credit for new exploratory oil and gas drilling last year was at a time when more than 100,000 energy workers had lost their jobs after the Prime Minister chased more energy investment out of Canada than in any other two-year period in 70 years, more than half a century.

The Liberals killed the nation-building energy east pipeline with last-minute rule changes and a double standard of upstream and downstream emissions assessments that they would now formally be imposing on all pipeline reviews with Bill C-69. The Liberals outright vetoed the already approved northern gateway pipeline. Both of those were the only actual new stand-alone proposals for exports to markets other than the U.S. in recent history. They are forcing a tanker ban on B.C.'s northern coast, which is really just a ban on the oil sands and on pipelines, and they have imposed an offshore drilling ban in the north.

Even before Bill C-69 has been implemented, the Montreal Economic Institute says that “The message being conveyed to investors is: ‘Don’t come here to do business. Even if you fulfill all regulatory requirements, you’ll still face many obstacles.” That is exactly what happened to the Trans Mountain expansion because of the Liberals' failures and the Prime Minister's response was to pay $14.5 billion tax dollars for Kinder Morgan to take its $7.4-billion private investment plans out of Canada. It is clear, the Prime Minister's anti-energy policies are chasing energy investment away at historic rates.

Now, the Liberals would pile on even more regulatory uncertainty for investors in Bill C-69. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association said that “If the goal is curtail oil and gas production, and to have no more pipelines built, this legislation may have hit the mark.”

In a recent letter to Alberta MLA, Prasad Panda, several associations directly impacted by Bill C-69 outlined the following criteria essential to attract investment to Canada: “Certainty in regulations, in order to plan capital investments of large magnitudes and reach final investment decisions in Canada's favour. Permanence, because if programs or policies are temporary or have an expiry date, they will be deemed too high risk to factor into capital planning life cycles, which span approximately 6-8 years. Certainty in the form of timelines. Performance-based policies, ensuring benefits to communities by tying incentives to performance-based measures such as job creation, research and development, innovation and capital investment.”

These criteria were hallmarks of Canada's regulatory framework for decades, with the most rigorous assessment, comprehensive consultation, highest standards, and strongest environmental protections in the world.

A 2016 WorleyParsons study echoes conclusions of the 2014 benchmark analysis of Canada against the top major oil and gas producing jurisdictions in the world. It confirmed: “Canada is a global leader in environment, Aboriginal relations, and governance of resource use, with state of the art processes, practices, and legislation. Canada is recognized internationally as a nation that has contributed significantly to the development and advancement of regional and strategic environmental assessment since the introduction of the Canadian Directive in 1990 requiring federal departments and agencies to consider environmental concerns at the strategic level of policies, plans, and programs.”

However, every time the Liberals attack the last 10 years of Canada's energy and environmental assessment and evaluation for politics, trying to keep the NDP and Green voters who helped them win in 2015, they empower foreign and domestic anti-Canadian energy activists who are fighting to shut down Canadian resources. It is becoming a crisis, and this debate is a critical policy question for the future of our country. Canada must be able to compete.

Of the top 10 most attractive jurisdictions for oil and gas investment, six U.S. states rank at the top 10 global jurisdictions: Texas, Okalahoma, North Dakota, West Virginia, Kansas, and Wyoming. According to a 2017 World Bank report, Canada ranked 34 out of 35 OECD countries in the time required to obtain a permit for a new general construction project. There are real impacts of falling behind in competitiveness.

In committee, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers representative said:

Canada is attracting more uncertainty, not more capital, and we will continue to lose investment and jobs if we do not have a system of clear rules and decisions that are final and can be relied upon.

...Unfortunately, CAPP and the investment community today see very little in Bill C-69 that will improve that status.

Suncor said, “The competitiveness improvements that we're achieving as an industry through ongoing innovation are being largely negated by the continuously increasing cost of new regulations.”

Paul Tepsich, founder of High Rock Capital Management Inc., said, “I'm not crazy about Canada. We've got taxes going up and regulations going up.”

In committee, the president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada said, “Proponents making billion-dollar investments need to know what the rules are and how they will be implemented. You can't have this certainty knowing that the rules may change midstream in some way.”

The Liberals have already caused a regulatory vacuum for major resource developers since January 2016, and they have exacerbated uncertainty for investors and for workers. With Bill C-69, the Liberals might as well hang a sign in the window that says, “Canada is not open for business”.

Clear timelines and requirements, and predictable rules and responsibilities provide certainty. The Liberals claim Bill C-69 would implement short and clear timelines for reviews, but that is not true. The planning phase, during which the impact assessment agency would determine whether a project is in the public interest, for which Bill C-69 sets some guidelines but leaves wide arbitrary discretion for the minister to define, would add an extra 180 days, which could be extended by 90 days at the request of the minister or Governor in Council. That is before a project can even get approved to start an impact assessment. Bill C-69 also does not establish criteria that a project must meet, or what constitutes a complete application for it to be granted an assessment in the first place.

The bill has been amended so the minister would no longer have the power to veto a project before it can move on to the impact assessment stage, which I support. However, under proposed paragraph 17(1), the minister could still interject opinions about the potential environmental impacts of a project that may or may not influence the impact assessment agency's decision to review. So much for objective, independent, expert-based decisions. Even after the Liberals pass Bill C-69, the parameters of the project list would not even be revealed to the public until fall, and regulations would not be fully implemented until 2019.

When the Liberals ram through this legislation, there will still be ongoing uncertainty for potential proponents of long-term, capital-intensive, multi-billion dollar, major resource projects, following almost three years of the same.

If a project is granted an assessment, there are still no concrete timelines in Bill C-69. Proposed subsection 37(6) states, “The Minister may suspend the time limit within which the review panel must submit the report until any activity that is prescribed by regulations made under paragraph 112(c) is completed.” Bill C-69 would allow the assessment to be stopped and started, and for timelines to be extended indefinitely. Obviously, there would be yet more uncertainty for potential proponents and investors.

In committee, the director of environmental services at Nova Scotia Power, Terry Toner, stated, “while the timelines in the bill provide some guidance for project proponents, the government's goal of process predictability is significantly diluted by provisions in the acts that permit limitless extensions and suspensions.”

Time is of critical value, and it can make the difference between a project built and a project abandoned. We accept that there must be some flexibility, but there must also be discipline and transparency in order to ensure investor confidence in Canadian infrastructure projects.

In committee, the president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission stated, “It is important that we all know, from the get-go, the length of time to get project approval. From our experience, industry can accept a quick 'yes' or 'no' decision. What is unreasonable is to get a 'maybe'.”

Unfortunately, Bill C-69 is ripe for a swath of “maybes” on project applications, because of the potential for suspensions, delays, and uncertainty about measures for applications and outcomes. Clearly, Bill C-69 will not deliver on discipline and transparency in all aspects of the assessment of major resource projects.

According to proposed subsection 183(5) in part 2 of the bill, the regulator may exclude any period of time from the time limit calculations so long as reasons are provided. If resource development proponents have a choice between multiple “maybes” over years of review in Canada and a timely “yes” south of the border, where do the Liberals think their investments will go? Unfortunately, the answer is already obvious in the flight of investment capital from Canada, with U.S. investment in Canada falling by nearly half and Canadian investment in the U.S. going up two-thirds.

While the Liberals claim that Bill C-69 would streamline and clarify the approval of major federal resource projects, its requirements create confusion and unanswered questions. For example, Bill C-69 mandates that proponents must demonstrate “health, social and economic effects, including with respect to the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors”.

Obviously, job creation, research and development, innovation, and capital investment from resource development reduce poverty, benefit the economy, and provide revenue for governments and public services such as health, education, and social services, as well as funds for academic and charitable organizations, but I think proponents can be forgiven for uncertainty around how their investments and initiatives relate to identity factors.

It is rich for the Liberals to argue that Bill C-69 would enhance scientific evidence in reviews, beyond what has already been done in Canada's regulatory system. In fact, during committee, Mr. Martin Olszynski of the University of Calgary pointed out that the terms “science” and “scientific” are mentioned only five times in all the 400 pages of this major omnibus bill that the Liberals are using all procedural tools to push through, while rejecting the vast majority of the over 400 amendments submitted by opposition members.

In the process of issuing certificates, the Canadian energy regulator is tasked with establishing a commission and undertaking public consultation. At committee, one of my amendments was adopted, which requires the commissions to make public any reasons for holding a hearing about the consideration of issuing a certificate. However, there still remains uncertainty around the assessment, and Bill C-69 would open the door to foreign influence in these public hearings.

Bill C-69 would enable increased foreign influence on Canadian resource development decisions because of the removal of the previous standing test, which ensured that intervenors in the process either were impacted directly by the project under review, or had specific knowledge or expertise that would contribute to the assessment.

Some claim that foreign groups have always been allowed to participate in Canada's environmental assessment processes, but that is just not true. This has only rightfully been the case for projects that cross international borders. Canada has never permitted foreign interference in the environmental assessment process for interprovincial pipelines or other resource projects in federal jurisdiction that do not cross international borders. However, the removal of the standing test now opens up this process to groups that are either directly or indirectly backed by foreign dollars or by Canada's competitors.

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association warned that “[t]here are recent examples in Canada where the absence of a standing requirement has led to highly inappropriate participation that had no probative value with respect to the issues to be decided in the review” and that the elimination of the standing requirement could “be used to clog the hearing process in an attempt to delay projects to the point that they are abandoned”.

Foreign interference in Canadian resources is already growing, to the detriment of all of Canada. Millions in foreign money is funding opposition to the Trans Mountain expansion. It was used to challenge Canadian LNG development opportunities, too, and it is growing as a barrier to Canadian mining.

The Financial Post recently revealed that “Tides has granted $40 million to 100 Canadian anti-pipeline organizations”, which, in return, fight to stop Canadian energy development and access to export markets, disadvantaging Canada against the U.S., its most significant energy competitor and primary energy customer.

Foreign funds are interfering in and influencing electoral outcomes in Canada, too. A report to Elections Canada and Senator Frum has highlighted foreign funding funnelled to third party groups, such as the Dogwood initiative and Leadnow, to defeat incumbent Conservative MPs in certain ridings in the 2015 election, and to fight Canadian resource development.

I support Senator Frum's bill, Bill S-239, which would define foreign contributors, add classifications of foreign contributions, and make it an offence for any third party to accept foreign dollars “for any purposes related to an election”.

However, the Prime Minister defends using Canadian tax dollars to fund jobs specifically for activists to stop the approved Trans Mountain expansion, and he is resisting Conservatives' calls to ban foreign funding in Canada's elections, too, which makes the case that he seems to welcome foreign influences to deliver on his stated objective of phasing out Canadian energy.

Bill C-69 would put Canada's economic future at risk.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers warns that Bill C-69 would harm Canada's reputation as a transparent, stable, predictable, and fair place to do business, and this would risk Canada's ability to be a supplier of choice for world demand of responsible energy in the future.

Suncor's CEO warns that “Canada needs to up its game” to attract investment and to compete with the United States. Instead of upping its game, Bill C-69 is the equivalent of the Liberals folding Canada's hand.

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association warns that Bill C-69 would damage Canada's reputation as a priority choice for energy investment. It says:

[I]t is difficult to imagine that a new major pipeline could be built in Canada under the impact assessment act, much less attract energy investment to Canada.

Investment in oil and gas is projected to drop 12% this year from 2017, and the Bank of Canada already says that there will be no new energy investment in Canada after next year, 2019. In the last two years, at least seven multinational companies have divested from Canada's energy sector completely, and many more have frozen existing operations or shelved future plans.

CEPA's CEO says:

Currently there is profound uncertainty in advancing new major pipeline projects. We now have a significant problem as a sector and as a country in accessing new markets for our products around the world. The development of new projects is grinding to a halt. CEPA member companies that have material assets in other countries are actively pursuing those opportunities because of the uncertainty and potential implications of further potentially seismic regulatory changes that will directly impact the pipeline sector. Our sector is suffocating because of it.

It is clear that Liberal red tape and uncertainty are already forcing investors and developers to seek out other markets, causing hundreds of thousands of Canadians to lose their jobs. Bill C-69 would make it worse. The Prime Minister must stop sacrificing Canada's interests to the rest of the world. Canada already has the highest environmental standards in the world and the most responsibly produced oil and gas.

Canada will continue to do so long into the future, if only governments would allow energy, and all responsible resource development, to continue to fuel Canada's economy and contribute public revenue for all levels of government.

Resource jobs are middle-class jobs, so if the Prime Minister truly cares about the middle class, he will stop increasing red tape and imposing policies that drive out investment and the hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs in every corner of the country that go with it.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I particularly appreciated that the member had a number of well-researched facts in her speech.

A couple of those were about natural gas reserves for 300 years, and a 40% increase in energy use in the future. I think those statistics make it even more cogent and urgent to do something about reducing greenhouse gases, which are causing so much devastation now and, with those increases, would be even worse in the future if there was no strategy.

What steps is the member recommending to her party to curb greenhouse gas production?

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, Canada's track record on oil sands development, energy development, and resource development is one of reducing emissions through innovation, not just because it makes environmental sense but because it makes economic sense. It fulfills the long-term track record of having responsible resource developers as partners in economic development and all the social benefits that the development of those resources provide.

This is where the Liberals and the left confuse me when they impose policies and take positions that shut down Canadian energy in particular. Estimates indicate that Canada produces less than 2% of emissions globally. The worst thing the Liberals and left can do is hammer Canadian energy with red tape and unnecessary regulation and additional costs and higher taxes that make it unable to compete in Canada and against the world.

It is those kinds of policies that actually stop Canadian energy from continuing its long-standing track record of innovation, which reduce emissions and also lead the front line on development of alternative and renewable energy technologies long into the future. In Canada, the major private sector energy investors in those technologies are conventional oil and gas companies, oil sands companies, pipeline companies, and utility companies.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, like my colleague, I will oppose this bill, but certainly not for the same reasons. In her speech, she mentioned her concerns that the minister's discretionary power would allow her to veto projects. I think that this discretionary power discredits the entire process, because for Canadians and organizations to have confidence in a process, the process needs to be clear from start to finish. This political power, at the end of the process, discredits everything that comes before, and makes the outcome of the process uncertain and unclear.

I would like to know whether my colleague agrees that, regardless of who will be environment minister, and regardless of which party will form the government in the years to come, having politicians wield such discretionary power is detrimental to the process.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleague that we likely approach the legislation from different world views and ideological perspectives. Regardless of that, I was dismayed to see the Liberals reject the vast majority of the 400 amendments put forward in good faith, after the hard work done in an almost impossible committee situation created by the Liberals.

From our different perspectives and on behalf of the diverse constituents we represent, we wanted to improve the legislation and participate meaningfully in this omnibus bills, which will have a serious impact on the entire Canadian economy and on our future as a country.

I agree completely with the member about her concerns with respect to the multiple areas in which either the minister or commissioners are granted wide discretion, from deciding what a completed application looks like; to when a project gets into the assessment process; to whether more information is required, which enables the minister and the commissioner to stop and start the timeline; and to suspend the timeline for review as many times as they want and indefinitely.

This is reflective of a key thing about the Liberals. They so often say one thing and then do another. Their key argument is that they are in favour of objective, independent science and expert-based decision-making. However, it is clear, with Bill C-69, that they have allowed multiple political influences, and the influence of non-Canadians, on Canadian resource projects that are important to every community in the country.

[Deb Schulte, Liberal, King—Vaughan, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to my colleague's comments. Could she rationalize something for me? She mentioned that Liberal programs and policies were harming the economy of Canada, resulting in hundreds of thousands of job losses. In fact, Canada has the best economic growth in the G7. Its unemployment rate is at an all-time record low at 5.8%. It has helped generate over 600,000 net new jobs since 2015, 89% of which are full time.

I have been trying to rationalize the rhetoric coming from the other side with the reality and the facts. I would be very interested to hear the facts and where your data comes from to justify your comments.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I have to remind the hon. member for King—Vaughan that when she says “your”, she is referring to the Speaker, and I do not think she means to do that.

The hon. member for Lakeland.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not altogether surprised that a member from Toronto would be unaware of the scale of job losses and devastation to communities that are energy based, in rural regions across Canada, particularly in Alberta. I would invite her to come to my riding of Lakeland, for example, which is approximately 32,000 square kilometres. All of the communities and families are fuelled by thriving oil sands, heavy oil, natural gas, and pipeline operations. She will find thousands of Canadians who have lost their jobs under the Liberals' watch since the 2015 election.

The reality is that in the first two years after the 2015 election, more energy investment left Canada than in any other two-year period in 70 years. The collateral damage of that was that more than 100,000 energy workers were out of jobs, but those are only the numbers that Statistics Canada picks up. That does not include individual small and medium-sized private sector entrepreneurs or contractors. The numbers are likely even bigger than that.

I would invite the member to get out of Toronto and travel through communities, including indigenous communities, that live next door and side by side with energy development, to see all the benefits it provides. The job losses as a direct result of the Liberals' anti-energy policies and ongoing uncertainty has devastated families and communities.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague relating to the social licence that the Prime Minister promised Alberta if it implemented a carbon tax. I would ask the member to comment on whether that social licence was granted when Alberta implemented that harmful carbon tax.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is clear that the argument by the Liberals and from the left that the carbon tax would buy social licence, which would then give permission for pipelines to go ahead, is utterly and completely false and empty. The Trans Mountain expansion is the perfect example. Now the Liberals' only solution is to nationalize a pipeline and probably the energy sector, in general, which has never had to be done before.

Given some of the changes happening in provincial governments, and I hope there will be more to come, maybe the Liberals will reassess their imposition of the carbon tax, which will disproportionately harm the working poor, low-income Canadians, and energy-based, resource-based, and agriculture-based communities, and put Canada at a severe disadvantage compared with major oil and gas—

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Calgary Shepard.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be rejoining the debate on Bill C-69. I have a tough job. I am following the member for Lakeland, who has probably contributed more in this House, in the last two and a half to almost three years, to defending Alberta and Canada's energy industry than any other member of the House. In fact, she has a very long history of defending Canada's energy sector and Alberta's energy workers in her private sector experience before.

She provided us with an overview of the damage that Bill C-69 would do to Canada's economic sector related to the energy industry, and the depth of how much damage would be caused to the energy workers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.

I cannot match those numbers, but I have seven points I want to go through with respect to Bill C-69, and the different parts of the bill that I think will be very damaging to investments and the future jobs in the energy sector, and to Canada's GDP growth and how much it will be reduced by.

One of the things we often hear about in the House is how strong Canada's growth is. It is often said that we are leading the G7. In fact, that is not even true. We are not leading the G7. The projections by the OECD, and in the PBO's own economic update, has us in the middle, at number four, especially for 2018, with a 1.9% growth. We are actually behind the United States, and we know why. It is because it does not have a carbon tax, which will damage Canada's economy with up to 0.4% less GDP growth.

When I was at the finance committee and I asked the parliamentary budget office officials if ever they had seen a government policy that was intentionally damaging to Canada's economy the way the carbon tax is going to be, they had no answer for me. They could not come up with a response to it because there simply is not one. It is a damaging policy that is being introduced and forced down the throats of provinces that do not want it, including the electorate of Ontario, which last week rejected the damaging policies of the federal Liberal government.

We also know that the natural resource sector in 2016 accounted for 16% of Canada's economic activity. Therefore, 16% of Canada's economic engine is related to the natural resources, and 38% of non-residential capital investment is related to this one sector.

We also know, because the member for Lakeland did a good job of itemizing it, how much foreign investment has fled the country. Again, we know why. It is because we are not as competitive with our main trading partner, the United States, as we used to be. It has introduced drastic tax changes and reforms to its system that make its companies much more competitive. I cannot tell members how many of my constituents, friends, and supporters have moved down to Texas, which I often call “Alberta south”, to work in its energy sector. We know that next year the state of Texas will become the number one producer of oil in the world. It is going to exceed even large producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela. It will be producing more oil than any one of them. This is just one state in the United States of America.

We also know that Texas, for instance, does not have a personal income tax system. It has a sales tax instead. However, the offering it provides to workers and to companies is that it will get out of the way. It provides a simple to understand regulatory system that typically does not change from government to government. It provides stability, whereas the current Liberal government is providing more instability.

These are the seven points that I want to raise, and they are in no particular order: moving away from science-based decision-making; the timelines for a final decision will be changed; there are self-processes that will be stopping the clock; we will have open questions about what constitutes a major or minor project; the concentration of power in this legislation; the restoring of the public trust concept, which is highly politically charged; and finally, a question that I asked previously to one of the parliamentary secretaries with respect who would have standing to appear before the renamed NEB regulator to have their voices and their issues heard. Those are the seven points I want to raise in my intervention tonight on this issue.

This legislation has been referred to in the National Post, and this is how it was described. It said, “This new process repeats the mistake in believing that those groups dedicated to the destruction of our oil industry can be reasoned with”.

I, like many other Albertans, did not work directly in the energy industry but was related to it in ways. I worked in human resources. I was a registrar for a profession, and many members worked for organizations that participated in providing HR advice, recruitment, benefits, pension plans. Therefore, it was not directly related to it, but they worked in companies but also provided ancillary services to them. They believed that there is simply no way to satisfy those who are ardently opposed to large-scale industrial energy development of any kind. We can never create a system that will satisfy any of them. No matter how complex the labyrinth becomes, it will never satisfy those who are opposed to development, period.

Social licence does not exist. There is no way to reach the end point where there is broad consensus. In fact, one of the reasons the carbon tax was introduced in Alberta was so that we could get a pipeline built of some sort. Since then we have lost northern gateway. Since then we have lost energy east. Since then LNG projects have been cancelled all over British Columbia. Oftentimes this would have been an outlet for a lot of the natural gas production in Alberta and in British Columbia to world markets. We often do not talk about those, but they are just as important as oil pipelines.

Now Trans Mountain finds itself in the hands of the Liberal government. The Liberals truly have the ability to follow through on the dream of the Prime Minister's father, and I think of many supporters of the Liberal Party today, to phase out the oil sands, to phase out Alberta's energy industry. Twice that has been said by the Prime Minister. The first time he apologized and we all believed that he had misspoken, but the second time he said it at the National Assembly in Paris, France.

Many Albertans, even those who are not directly in the energy industry simply do not believe the Liberal government when it says it will get this pipeline built, because there is no plan going forward. Liberals have not itemized how they are going to get it done. They have simply talked about a very specific purchase agreement that they have successfully negotiated with Kinder Morgan, because it is looking to flee. It is fleeing because of things like Bill C-69, which add more complexity and do not make it simpler to go from a project application to a project completion.

I do not mean the application process being finished. I mean construction actually being completed on the ground. That should be the measure of success and the very minimum expected by the House. If we are going to spend $4.5 billion of taxpayer funds, a contract should be provided to the House so that we can judge the quality of it, who is getting and receiving payment, but also a plan attached to it that has an itemized detailed timeline of when construction will begin, when construction will be finished on particular components of it, and when it will be operating. Again, something we will not see anytime soon, at least not in my mind.

In terms of the moving away from science-based decision-making in this piece of legislation, the Liberals are adding in a lot more qualitative factors over quantitative factors. It has been said by the GMP FirstEnergy Research team:

The qualitative factors look to be nearly impossible to measure or assess. Additionally, certain quantitative measures such as gender-based analysis may be almost impossible to implement in practice.

This has a huge implication for a company with a large-scale industrial project when it is preparing to apply at the beginning. Just as with any application there will be a bunch of boxes to fill in and information to provide. If companies do not know how to meet the test, if the multiple choice question does not have any multiple choices to pick, how are they supposed to satisfy the government on what it is trying to get? This is where the complexity increases. This is where a lot of energy companies will struggle to satisfy the government's want for more information.

Second, on the timelines for a final decision a lot has been said in the House by members that in fact the supposed timelines provided for Bill C-69 are not true timelines. What will happen instead is that there are ample opportunities for it to be blocked and ample opportunities for it to be deviated.

Third, the sub-processes are stopping the clock. Again, GMP FirstEnergy noted that included allowing for additional studies and submissions by interested parties and “other delaying tactics such as the Governor in Council having an unlimited ability to extend a pending decision by the minister for as long as desired and suspending the time limit under which the notice of the commencement of assessment begins.” These are issues itemized by researchers who work for energy companies, who advise energy companies on how to comply with regulatory complexity, which is increasing under Bill C-69.

If the goal was never to have another major industrial project be built in Canada, then the Liberal government has achieved its goal, but I just do not think that was the goal.

We have the CEO of Suncor Energy who has said that no new major industrial projects will come forward. We have the CEO of Sierra Energy, a smaller player in the field, but still a very important one, saying that under this legislation, no new large-scale industrial projects will be proposed to the regulator. I can understand why. It will become way more complex to get anything done.

I mentioned the problem identifying what is a major or a minor project. That is not clarified in this piece of legislation. It would still be difficult to determine that, and again, researchers said that this was a problem.

There would be an immense concentration of power, which many members have issues with, especially on the Conservative side. We have itemized our concern that the minister is getting too involved in the decision-making around projects. There are paths projects could be redirected to that would add to the complexity and add to the burden on the company to try to prove things with information and criteria that might be difficult to collect.

This would not help energy workers in any way. This would not help us get to the “yes” side. This would not help us get to a project being completed and Canada yielding additional prosperity with wealth generated.

At the end of the day, I am convinced that the government wants more revenue. The government wants people to generate income. It wants projects to be undertaken and built. It wants to see that to have an opportunity to levy income tax and sales tax. That cannot be done without having wealth generated.

If the CEO of Suncor Energy is saying that no new major industrial project is going to go ahead, we have serious issues.

The concept of restoring public trust is highly politically charged. It is a manufactured narrative that before there was no trust, but now there is trust. That is interesting. Perhaps that should be told directly to those who are protesting the Trans Mountain pipeline. Maybe that should have been told to those protesting the energy east pipeline, when it was still on the table before the Liberal government killed it off by introducing new regulatory rules.

In its news release at the time, Trans Canada said that it was the decision to introduce new regulatory rules that led to its cancellation. This false concept about restoring the public trust is not helpful in any way. It somehow speaks again to this idea of social licence, which again does not exist. It has been proven over the past few years that nothing will satisfy those who are opposed to energy development of any sort.

Finally, who can be involved in NEB hearings? That was a question I asked before. Subclause 183(3) would eliminate the NEB standing test, which is very important to narrow the scope of the determination of who could appear before the NEB to make the case that they are impacted, beneficially or not, and could make the case that the project should be modified in a certain way to meet their personal or local community needs. Now there would be the opportunity for international groups to appear before the regulator and make a case that they would be somehow impacted directly.

If communities are the ones that can say yes, then it can only be the local community directly related to the project that should have a role in saying how it would be impacted. It should be individuals in those communities who should have the greatest role. It should not be spokespeople who are self-appointed saying that they speak on behalf of a certain group. It should be people locally who can go before the NEB to make their case, as they were able to do before. Now there would be the potential situation where foreigners or people from different parts of Canada, totally unrelated to the project, would make submissions and appearances, slowing down the process and adding more complexity and further delays to the regulatory process to try to meet their demands and their goals.

There are some in the legal community who have offered their opinions, such as Jean Piette, an environmental lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright, in The Lawyer's Daily, on February 9, 2018. This was very early on, before some of the amendments were made. He said, “I think there are going to be delays inherent to this new process which are going to be of concern to proponents.”

Martin Ignasiak, national co-chair of Osler's regulatory, environmental, Aboriginal and land group, again in The Lawyer's Daily, on February 9, 2018, said, “there is nothing in these legislative proposals that suggests future assessments...will be in any way streamlined, more efficient, or more effective.” In fact, they will not be.

We know that to be true. We know that to be a fact, having seen the final bill that was jammed through the natural resources committee without even a single amendment from the Conservative side accepted as reasonable being added to the docket.

I often hear members of the government caucus say that the committee worked collaboratively. “Collaboratively” gives the false impression that somehow it was a multi-party process, where amendments from each side were considered and included in the final version of the bill that was reported back to the House of Commons. In fact, we know that not to be true. Not a single Conservative amendment was approved on this particular piece of legislation, and often on other pieces of legislation. I hope this will not be a trend that will continue from now until election time, but it speaks to the type of work that is being done on committees. There is a lot of talk and a lot of rhetoric, but the reality is that very few, if any, Conservative amendments are given their full due so that we can consider them in amending government legislation. It does happen, but it is a rare occurrence.

I know I do this quite often, but I want to end on a couple of points, because I know certain points are made by government caucus members about the record of the previous government and how many pipelines were approved and the concept of the economy and the environment going hand in hand. The Yiddish proverb I would like to use on this one is “One cross word brings on a quarrel.” I want to start a quarrel, not directly, but maybe verbally in the House. My quarrel is that we talk about the environment and the economy going hand in hand, but too often, the rhetoric I hear is as if one unit of the economy has to be lost for a unit of the environment to be gained. That is not the case. Why is it that every time the Liberals talk about the environment and the economy going hand in hand, what they mean is that taxpayers pay more and more every single time? They pay more in carbon taxes and more in CPP premiums and payroll taxes and a higher tax on the goods they purchase. On and on it goes. Every single time, small businesses are paying more because of tax changes the Liberals are introducing, despite lowering the small business tax after they rediscovered their promise. It goes on an on.

The second point I want to make is on the record of the previous government. There were countless pipelines, both oil and gas, that were approved: the Melita to Cromer oil pipeline capacity expansion, the TMX-Anchor Loop oil pipeline, the Cochin oil pipeline, the Keystone oil pipeline, the Alberta Clipper oil pipeline expansion—Line 67, the Bakken oil pipeline, the Line 9B oil pipeline to Edmonton, the Hardisty oil pipeline, the Deep Panuke offshore natural gas pipeline, and the South Peace pipeline, and it goes on and on.

There was an immense record of success in the previous system that existed to approve large-scale projects. These pipelines I mentioned are operational today. We know that the government has overseen the cancellation of the most kilometres of pipeline of any government in recent memory. Thousands of kilometres of pipeline have been cancelled or not approved under its watch. I do not see very many new projects going ahead, aside from Trans Mountain, and being put before the regulator for consideration, that would have a meaningful impact on either the differential or on bringing our natural gas to new markets and ensuring that they reach different parts of the United States and international markets.

This is my concern. The rhetoric does not match the reality. The president and CEO of Suncor and other major energy companies, such as Sierra Energy, are right. There will be no new major industrial energy projects proposed under Bill C-69. It is a flawed piece of legislation. It does not address the underlying need to ensure that the rule of law is respected in Canada. That is the fault and defect in the current Liberal government. It is refusing to apply the Constitution. It is refusing to apply the rule of law and to ensure that the permit that was provided in the case of Trans Mountain is actually followed through on. A permit from a regulator is not worth the paper it is written on if it is not backed up by the rule of law, with the courts ensuring that those who continue to obstruct a project illegally face the judicial system. That is the way it should be done. It should also have clear support from the government that does not involve nationalizing a pipeline in the name of trying, in vain, to get it built, when in fact, it is simply bringing it under the control of the government so it can set the timelines on what happens in the future.

Albertans do not trust the government. Alberta energy workers do not trust it controlling the Trans Mountain pipeline, and because of that, I will be voting against the bill.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I suppose we agree that the bill is flawed, but I want to correct a few things.

There were at least two opposition amendments accepted. I still cannot vote for Bill C-69, but I want to make sure that people know that, on the recommendation of Professor Martin Olszynski, who was referenced in my friend's speech, we amended proposed subsection 6(3) to say, “The Government...must, in the administration of this Act, exercise their powers in a manner that adheres to the principles of scientific integrity, honesty, objectivity, thoroughness and accuracy.”

I would rather see more about science in the bill. I would rather see less ministerial discretion. However, this debate, repeatedly, for weeks now, has singled out large oil companies leaving Alberta, as if the only reason these large oil companies have left has something to do with pipelines. The reality is global.

Globally, to give some context, investment in fossil fuels is shrinking. Globally, investment in renewables is growing like Topsy. In fact, in 2017, solar investment alone eclipsed investment in coal, nuclear, and all the renewables. The price of solar has been plummeting. Globally, greenhouse gases fell last year in the U.S., Russia, Brazil, China, throughout the EU, and, of course, in the U.K. They dropped infinitesimally in Canada. It was a 1.4% drop.

We are part of a global transition right now, which is why large companies like Statoil, from Norway, Royal Dutch Shell, France's Total, and ConocoPhillips, when they left the oil sands, said that they were leaving because they did not want stranded assets. In the words of Mark Carney, current president of the Bank of England, they did not want “unburnable carbon”, because there are assets in oil and gas that will be left in the ground, which represent a financial liability.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her question. She is always very precise with the types of questions she asks, especially when it comes to the energy industry. However, if we look at the IEA numbers on upstream capital spending, it shows that in 2016, 2017, and 2018, spending has been going up, not down. Therefore, I would challenge the drop in investment. It is going up.

When we are looking at markets like Alberta versus Texas, I mentioned that energy workers are heading to Texas to work. Because of the regulatory system and the way Texas has established its tax system, which is very competitive, we have energy companies moving investment there, so its investments are going up, not down. It is one of our competitor markets. As much as we would like to think it is one of our purchasers, it is also a big seller of oil these days.

To the point about the world international market situation, we know that oil demand is going up, not down. Again, the IEA has these numbers showing very clearly that demand for oil is heading upwards. It is not heading down. As much as we may champion that investment that is being made by many private sector companies in solar power, it does not mean that we should be undermining in some way the development of energy through the oil sands or through regular horizontal drilling and natural gas in Canada. We can do both, and the private sector is typically leading the way.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. Speaker, essentially the member is saying that the previous environmental assessment was better under the Harper regime. I am looking at numbers here, and in 2015, under the Harper government, the unemployment rate went up 2% in Alberta. I wonder where environmental assessment under the Harper regime was so much better for investment, when the unemployment rate went up 2%.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I can answer very simply that in May 2015, an NDP government was elected provincially, and it proceeded to punish energy workers and the energy sector for simply doing their business. The government made it more complicated for companies to merge. It made it more complicated for companies to be acquired by others. It made it more complicated for junior oil and gas companies to bulk up their assets to join together to merge their operations so that they could make sure that they could be competitive in a market that had a low price point. That is a very easy answer to a very simple question.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

The bill we are currently rushing through at third reading has many flaws. The process for determining which projects will be reviewed, and the criteria upon which they will be reviewed, is arbitrary and unclear. There are also many arbitrary provisions at the end of the bill giving the minister discretionary powers to decide whether to follow the recommendations.

The Liberal government promised a new environmental assessment process to restore public trust, enhance credibility, and ensure openness and transparency.

Does my colleague think that the Liberals have achieved their goal?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the question. There is a proverb that says that one cross word brings on a quarrel. That is where I have a serious problem with this bill.

If the government's goal is to stop development in the energy sector and economic growth in Alberta, then it is succeeding, since several large energy companies in Alberta have said they will not propose any large projects as long as this bill is being considered.

As the hon. member for Lakeland said earlier, and it is true, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost because many workers will be forced to go to the United States to keep working in this sector of the economy.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, energy is the number one private sector in Canada's economy, in response to a member opposite who earlier questioned the job losses in the energy sector. I should have pointed out that for every one oil and gas job in Alberta, seven manufacturing jobs are created in Ontario.

I want to invite the member to talk about the experiences he sees in Calgary with respect to vacancies and job losses. Maybe he could also expand on the ways a thriving oil and gas sector contributes to the rest of the country and to jobs in every corner of Canada.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. Speaker, there are many parts I could answer, but I will focus just on what happened in Calgary's commercial market when the downturn came.

I have experienced this in every part when I have travelled through different rural communities and major cities. Everybody is ready for the price downturn. Albertans are just used to it. We know prices go up and down, so everybody prepares. Companies prepare, workers prepare. However, this past downturn was much deeper, much longer than it needed to be, made worse by provincial and then federal government decision-making that prolonged the pain.

On the commercial real estate market in Calgary, when I was looking for a constituency office space, it was free. A person could get rent-free commercial space. The one condition was the person had to pay the operating costs. Large towers in downtown Calgary were completely emptied of workers. People were sent home because there was nothing to do.

In an area of my riding called Quarry Park, after Imperial Oil moved its headquarters out of downtown, there were massive cement pads where other parts of the downtown campus and other companies were supposed to move in. They are still standing there. Years afterwards, there is the fire escape shaft has been built out of concrete. The rig and the cranes are still sitting there, two and a half to three years later, with no movement and no construction. There is no use for them. We still have excessive vacancies of “A” grade commercial space, mostly owned by large energy companies.

I was at a meeting with a geothermal association in Calgary, which subleases space from the energy company, Shell. When Shell left its space, it subleased it to the association. It is rampant. It is a huge loss to the city in taxes. It is a huge loss to the downtown businesses. All those energy workers, who are earning a great income, would have been spending it downtown in restaurants. They would have been spending it on parking. They would have been contributing to the local economy, but they are not doing that. Underemployment continues. Again, commercial vacancy continues to be extremely high in Calgary.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to stand this evening to debate Bill C-69. I would like to say a number of things at the outset. The most obvious one is that the Liberals broke their promise with the bill. It has nothing to do with the wording of the bill and everything to do with the size of it.

First, the government said it would not have omnibus legislation and, as my colleagues mentioned earlier this evening, this is a 370-page bill. It cannot be put in any other context than it is an omnibus bill.

The second broken promise is that the bill is not very environmentally supportive by its very voluminous weight. It could have helped, in spite of its size, if it really would improve our environment, but this bill fails to do that.

A number of things have been said about the bill this evening and I will come back to those. However, a whole host of events has taken place around the rhetoric the government has put in this bill. The Liberals talk about trying to improve the environment, to create more jobs, and to improve those jobs, but they have ended up killing two pipelines already. One was the northern gateway pipeline across northern British Columbia to get oil in Alberta over to the west coast. The other one was the eastern access line to move oil to the New Brunswick area for refining purposes in that part of Canada.

Before I elaborate on that, I should inform the House that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Edmonton West. I know he will have much to say about the situation taking place in Alberta.

My perspective comes from the small amount of oil in southwest Manitoba, which happens to all be in my constituency. This is a very important issue to the communities, maybe not to Winnipeg as much, though it is impacted because a lot of income comes out of that area from this oil, and to the people who live in those communities and on the farms in that region as well. A great deal of work is being done by the oil industry in the southwest region, from trucking to the building of lines to the building of batteries to the moving oil from the wells to the batteries to the tracks to the loading facilities. We also have a major pipeline running right through the middle of my constituency, which moves the oil east and down through the United States.

There are thousands of jobs in my little southwest corner of Manitoba because of this industry. That is why it is so important to have certainty in this industry. It impacts the lives of individuals on farms as well. I went through the downturn in the farm economy, particularly BSE in 2003, droughts in 2003, and flooding in 2005, 2011, and 2014. Therefore, off-farm jobs in the oil industry have been a stabilizing factor in many of the family operations in southwest Manitoba.

It is pretty important to ensure there are sound rules so investors in the economy, not just in my area but more particularly in Alberta, Saskatchewan and, to a certain extent in Newfoundland, have the assurance they can make investments and know they will get returns from those investments.

I will refer to my colleague from Carleton when this debate started. He had a good economics lesson, I thought it was Economics 101, about whether the government learned anything from the lesson he was trying to teach about how important it was to have a sound investment process. We know that comes with great difficulty in Canada right now, and there is a lot of concern about it. As he pointed out, and as we all know, the country's debt is three times higher than it was supposed to be this year.

One thing I did not know, and it is worth repeating, is there are overpayments in Ontario's hydro of $176 billion over the last 30 years. That is a tremendous amount of money, when we consider that is a quarter of Canada's debt. The other number we need to bear in mind is that we have already lost $88 billion worth of investment in our oil industry. It has moved out of the country. It has gone south, as my colleague from Calgary Shepard just indicated. Thousands of jobs have gone south, 101,000 jobs in Alberta alone.

There is a little more drilling going on right now in our area of southwest Manitoba, but the bill would not help that economy survive. Bill C-69, this omnibus legislation, and the amount of regulations in it would not make it easier to grow our economy, which puts people to work.

I was the environment critic for seven of the 14 years I was in the Manitoba legislature. I want to put a few things into perspective. When we look at a situation where infrastructure and investment is required, the government always talks about how we can have both, the economy and the environment. That is not new. It is certainly not foreign to anybody in the House or to any Canadian for that matter.

This is about ensuring that Canadians know that the environment and the economy have gone hand in hand probably since oil was found in Canada in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Anyone who does not abide by those rules of trying to ensure the environment is kept as pristine as we possibly can is not paying attention. My colleagues have already stated tonight that we have the cleanest rules for dealing with environmental packages of anywhere in the world, particularly in our oil industry.

Rules have been brought, and not just in Bill C-69 or Bill C-68, the Fisheries Act. We know full that the efforts in Bill C-69 will not help the economy in any way. They certainly will not make jobs.

As I said, I was asked to become the environment shadow minister in Manitoba when I was first elected in 1999. It was either conservation or the environment. As the representative for Arthur-Virden, the constituency receives water from all of eastern Saskatchewan, southeastern Saskatchewan as well as northeastern Saskatchewan, and all of it comes into the Souris River, coming down the Assiniboine, and even through the Qu'Appelle in central Saskatchewan.

We know the impacts of what the environment can do to our province. The current provincial government is spending its infrastructure dollars rather responsibly. It is using them to protect cities like Brandon and Winnipeg particularly, Portage la Prairie, and the shorelines of Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. This is responsible management. Why? It is because the provincial government is spending the money on infrastructure to prevent flooding, instead of paying billions out after the fact in flood damages and devastation.

The Liberals need to heed that example and respect investments, instead of killing investment opportunities like the eastern access and northern gateway. These are important issues.

I could go on about a lot of other shortfalls in the bill. Changes to the National Energy Board is just one of them. It may have needed tweaking, but the government decided it knew best and threw out the baby with the bathwater.

My colleague, the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, certainly has more experience, having a master's in biology, and he has certainly hit the nail on the head with respect to the Fisheries Act and Bill C-68. I have spoken to him about this bill as well.

I just want to wrap up by saying that I will not be supporting Bill C-69 for a number of reasons outlined, particularly by my colleague from Abbotsford today, as well—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Order, please. I have allowed a bit more time so maybe the member will be able to add additional information during questions and comments.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Yukon.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Madam Speaker, I will help you in your suggestion by allowing the member to finish his speech. He is on the committee of the eight Arctic nations with me, and we work very co-operatively with those other nations. The group includes Russia and the United States. For any parliamentarians who have anything to say to those eight nations, we go to the meetings four times a year, so they can let the member or me know.

From his experience in those other nations similar to ours, could the member add anything that would support his points, such as his point about the economy and the environment going together?

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Madam Speaker, when we look at all of the issues in these other countries, one of the things I did not get to say as I was finishing was that my father had a saying back in the days of his early farming career, and that is that if they look after the land it will look after them. I do not think there is anybody in this chamber right now or any member of Parliament who does not believe we need to have a strong environmental care package for future generations.

My colleague from Yukon, when we have travelled together, has certainly pointed out many of the cases of the work that we are doing here in Canada. There is the Cambridge Bay issue. The building of the scientific work that is being done up there is tremendous for our science-based issues in the Arctic. I commend the government for some of the work it has done on roads in some of those areas. We are working on communications development in those regions of the world as well. There is no denying that there is change taking place, and our job is to make sure we deal with it and try to have the least amount of impact on the lives of those who live there on a regular basis.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, in the past I practised environmental law for a while and I have worked in the environmental field for a long time and I am quite familiar with laws in other countries. It is unlikely that the hon. member will take my word for it, but Canada does not have the best environmental assessment process, the toughest regulations, and the best endangered species law at all. That was the case even before Bill C-38 in the spring of 2012. After the changes to environmental assessment by the Harper government in Bill C-38, we had one of the worst, weakest, and most inconsistent and incoherent environmental assessment processes in the industrialized world. Sadly, tragically, Bill C-69 would not restore the consistent, predictable process we had that ensured that anything within federal jurisdiction would be reviewed.

Just so the hon. member knows what countries to which I refer, anything in the European Union is stronger, the United States is much stronger, and New Zealand is much stronger in their anticipatory environmental assessments, which is why it is such a tragedy that Canada, which knows how to do this better, is failing to do so now.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Madam Speaker, I think there was a question there from my colleague. I appreciate her experience in the law end of environmental science as well.

One of the main concerns that I have with the government's bill coming forward the way it has is the fact that people have lost confidence in some of the principles that were there before. If they have, and to my colleague's point, why in the world did the government set targets for its greenhouse gas emission reductions exactly the same as what the Harper government set, except the Liberals have not been as successful at it? The Harper government was the only government in Canadian history to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I take my colleague at her word for the work that she has done in other countries. I note that some of the European countries are certainly in the Arctic circle that my colleague across the way and I have had the opportunity to see.

As a result of the amount of rhetoric in the 370-page bill, it is hard to discern what the government's intentions are.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight at this late hour to speak to Bill C-69, 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, also known as an omnibus bill. I also like to call this bill the let us never build another pipeline or major energy project in Canada bill, or we could call it the labyrinth act, after the David Bowie movie Labyrinth, with its never-ending maze, which is what our regulatory process is going to be.

According to the Liberal government, the main purpose of this bill is to create an environmental assessment process that increases consultation, broadens a number of social economic criteria for approval, and decreases legislative timelines. At a lengthy 350 pages, this bill has so many proposed changes, it is tough to digest them all at once. Here is one clear takeaway. It will ensure the private sector pipelines will never see the light of day in Canada again.

This comes straight from the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association that these introduced amendments or “Regulatory 'poisons' are 'suffocating' oil industry by driving investors away”.

At committee we heard this from a witness, “The impact assessment does not address the pipeline sector's most fundamental concern: a process that is expensive, lengthy, polarizing, and ends with a discretionary political decision.”

Hence, the the labyrinth act.

I was pleased to quote Ozzy Osbourne in an earlier speech today on Bill C-344, which is another act from the Liberals that will create another regulatory burden. I am glad I was able to mention the late David Bowie as well.

We have seen the Trans Mountain pipeline put on life-support worth $4.5 billion because of the Liberals' action and inaction. However, knowing the Liberals' spin machine, they are going to say that this $4.5 billion life-support system is actually a health care investment.

The Liberals want to introduce this bill to ensure that we never see another pipeline built in Canada again. In this bill, we can clearly see that this regulatory process is designed for political influence and intervention. The minister can step in any time she wants and kill any major energy resource project at any time. This even includes the various stages where there is no formal ministerial approval required. It is going to be energy east all over again. It does not clarify or streamline an objective evidence-based process where decisions will be made by experts.

The Liberals can scrap entire pipeline projects for purely political reasons, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Of course members are sitting there saying that surely the Liberals would not kill something like an energy project, like a billion dollar gas plant for political reasons? I know that it was the Ontario Liberals, but where do people think most of the current Liberal PMO staffers come from? Of course, they come from Queen's Park.

Placing this kind of power in the hands of the minister will reduce transparency and give industry no guarantee that sensible projects will move forward. This planning phase is also concerning because, under the proposed bill, an environmental advocacy group from Sweden has as much right to be heard as a Canadian energy industry advocacy group.

I suppose we should give even more ministerial powers to the Liberals. After all, what could go wrong? We have had ad scam, the sponsorship scandal, the gun registry, Shawinigate, HRDC under the previous Liberal government, and of course the clam scam, where the fisheries minister personally intervened to give a lucrative clam fishing quota to, now get this, a brother of a sitting Liberal MP, a former Liberal MP, and a family member of the current fisheries minister. A Gordie Howe hat trick is described as a hockey game where one gets into a fight, scores a goal, and gets an assist. This is a Gordie Howe hat trick of corruption: a brother of a Liberal MP, a former Liberal MP, and to top it off, a family member of the deciding and interfering Liberal minister.

I could mention more Liberal scandals, but I should not talk about that if I want to finish by midnight. However, if people at home who are watching on CPAC are bored and want a more fulsome understanding of some of the Liberal scandals, they should take a look at https://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/4466-199-liberal-scandals.

I will return back to the bill. Steve Williams, the CEO of Canada's leading integrated oil and gas company, Suncor Energy, said that this legislation will effectively end his corporation's ability to invest in major Canadian projects. Suncor is worried about Canada's lack of competitiveness because, as he said, “other jurisdictions are doing much more to attract business”. The Liberal government just gave $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money to Kinder Morgan to invest back in the U.S. No offence to Mr. Williams and his comment, but he is incorrect. With the current government, other jurisdictions do not have to do more to attract business, because it will give money to companies to invest in other jurisdictions.

Canada's largest developer in the oil industry says it will not be able to invest in Canada, will not be able to create jobs in Canada, will not be able to pay more taxes in Canada, or create more wealth for Canadians. Suncor is a valued employer in Alberta, and provides thousands of well-paying jobs to indigenous people, youth, and new Canadians. Maybe if we change the name to Suncorbardier, then the Liberals would not try to phase out Suncor and our oil sands, but here we are.

We are talking about billions of dollars in investment going straight to the U.S. and other energy producing jurisdictions. This combined with higher taxes and more government uncertainty makes Canada a more difficult place to invest capital.

Bill C-69 completely fails to improve our ability to compete. In fact, it is only going to make matters worse. GMP FirstEnergy has also criticized Bill C-69 because it has “increased complexity, subjectivity and open-ended timelines”. The company sees “nothing in these proposed changes that will attract incremental energy investment to Canada.”

These statements do not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement for Bill C-69. We have some of the strongest and most stringent environmental regulations and standards in the entire world, so why are we introducing even more regulations when our system is world renowned?

We have seasoned experts telling us that over the years the ability of these major resource projects to get completed has become exceedingly difficult and is now almost impossible, and the Liberals want to introduce even more regulations to effectively put these projects six feet under.

Unfortunately, six feet under will refer to Alberta's economy and not the placement of a pipeline. Of course, the Liberals believe that adding increasingly complex legal frameworks and indeterminate regulatory methods will somehow expedite the process. The environment minister says we need a process with no surprises and no drama. I think what she meant to say is that she wants a process with no surprises, no drama, and no development, and perhaps no future for the young workers in Alberta.

I am sure members have heard this many times before. The Liberals love to talk about how the environment and the economy go hand in hand. However, Bill C-69 does not even live up to their own shaky standards in this regard. This policy puts red tape and the interests of foreigners first and the economy, jobs, and prosperity of Canadians dead last.

Energy development is crucial to jobs and economic opportunity in this country and Bill C-69 will only make it more difficult for private companies to receive approval for critical infrastructure projects.

I will remind the Prime Minister that many Albertans are still struggling to find work and pay their bills. His policies will only cause further harm to them and kick them while they are down.

Former premier Frank McKenna announced in mid-February that Canada has lost $117 billion due to pipeline woes. How does this legislation address that issue? I will answer that question: it does not. It does absolutely nothing. I would argue that the $117-billion loss is only going to climb higher in the future.

Bill C-69 will decrease Canada's economic competitiveness, without resulting in any meaningful environmental protection. While the United States scraps excessive regulations and cuts taxes for its citizens, the Liberal government has chosen to impose more unnecessary red tape, longer project timelines, and higher taxes for middle-class families. Bill C-69 will make it increasingly difficult to compete with countries around the world and grow our economy. The approval process will become even longer, more tedious, and completely unappealing to the private sector.

Seriously, what company wants to come forward and invest billions in Canada when they see the government actively kills energy projects and their only hope to get something done after the Liberal action is to nationalize it?

Venezuela is a mess right now because of nationalizing its oil industry. Experts are saying the way for Venezuela to get out of the hellhole it has created is to un-nationalize its oil industry. What are we doing? We are nationalizing our pipeline. We cannot afford to add uncertainty for companies who want to invest in Canada.

The Liberal government has managed to consistently decrease investor confidence with each and every passing day. It should be more cautious with its legislation. Liberals continuously outdo themselves and are setting the bar for failure as a government. We already have $20 billion in deficits every year, so what could possibly go wrong as investor confidence reaches new lows?

I cannot support a bill that would kill jobs in Edmonton, that would kill jobs in Alberta, and that would chase away energy investment at the same time as doing nothing for the environment.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would ask the member for Edmonton West about the issue of standing in Bill C-69. Peeling that back to the last election, we saw an unprecedented assault on Canadian democracy with U.S. money funnelled to third parties that, in turn, backed the Liberal Party. Now we have Bill C-69, which opens standing up to foreign anti-oil sands activists. The government has now introduced Bill C-76, which leaves a major loophole with respect to foreign funding of third parties, which essentially says that it is open season for foreign entities to fund registered third parties if the monies are transferred before June 30.

Does the hon. member for Edmonton West think that this is all a coincidence or is this just a case of the Liberal Party trying to benefit from foreign funding to help it during elections and to advance its activist radical agenda to keep Alberta energy in the ground?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Madam Speaker, if only the Liberals were as efficient in governing as they are in skullduggery around such issues, Canada would be a much better place.

My colleague brings up some very valuable points. The U.S. treasury department is, right now, investigating Russian interference in its energy industry. Russia views the U.S. and Canada as major energy competitors. Without its energy industry, Russia would be bankrupt, so it is against the interests of the U.S. and Canada to grow their energy industries. Russia is funnelling money, as the U.S. treasury department says, into Tides U.S.A. Tides U.S.A. sends its money to Tides Canada, which then funnels it to Leadnow, which campaigns on behalf of the Liberal government of Canada.

Now the government is introducing Bill C-76 that will open the floodgates for more foreign money coming into Canada and Bill C-69 would also allow equal standing for radical environmentalists from the U.S., Russian activists, and a Canadian appearing before the regulatory regime.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Madam Speaker, the Minister of Environment stated that one of the objectives of Bill C-69 is to increase investor confidence. The hon. member for Edmonton West pointed out that under Bill C-69, the Minister of Environment has the discretion to cancel a project at any point, including during the planning stage before any environmental assessment is conducted, before any economic impact is studied, and before any scientific analysis is done. How does that square with increasing public confidence and investor confidence? It seems to me to be some kind of joke.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Madam Speaker, the member brings up very valid points about investment in Canada.

I will read from an article from Bloomberg today, which states, “Unlike portfolio investment, foreign direct investment is considered a stable source of funding that comes with the additional benefits of a transfer of know-how. Instead, an increasing amount of Canada’s funding needs are being met by short-term funds denominated in foreign currencies”, meaning loans, “which makes the country more vulnerable to a sudden loss of interest from foreign investors.” Bloomberg is saying that Canada is relying on debt for growth and not foreign investment.

It notes in this article that the amount that the Government of Canada is giving Kinder Morgan to buy Trans Mountain is greater than the entire investment in Canada in the last quarter of last year. Bill C-69 is only going to pile on the flight of capital from Canada.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, Bill C-69, in front of us today, has a lot of different changes to current acts of Parliament, but also introduces new acts of Parliament. While I support one of the principles in the bill, which is the “one project, one assessment” process for major natural resource projects, there are too many problems with this bill for me to support it.

In particular, I want to focus on the new impact assessment act that the bill creates. First and foremost, the bill will not streamline, and make quicker, assessments for projects designated to be included in the project list. While the government says that the proposed impact assessment act would reduce the current legislated timelines for reviewing projects from 365 days to a maximum of 300 days for assessments led by the new review agency, and from 720 days to a maximum of 600 days for assessments led by a review panel, it is failing to acknowledge that while these timelines are shorter, the new legislation also introduces a planning phase ahead of an assessment led by either the review agency or the review panel. That planning phase can last up to 180 days.

In fact, this legislation will actually increase the amount of time that it takes for major natural resource projects to be reviewed under a federal environmental assessment. Furthermore, while the timelines put in place for the actual impact assessment are shorter, the timelines in the current legislation in front of the House can be extended by the Minister of Environment and by the cabinet, repeatedly.

There is nothing in this legislation to suggest that the process by which we review proposed projects will be shorter, in fact it suggests that it is actually going to be longer. The legislation in front of us will not actually lead to more efficient and less costly assessments for companies looking to invest in Canada's natural resource sector. In fact, the evidence in the bill is that it is going to be much more expensive for companies to make these applications, because the government has proposed to substantially expand the number of criteria that the review agency or review panel has to take into consideration when it is assessing a project. It does not just have to take into account environmental factors. It now also has to take into account health, social, and economic impacts, as well as impacts on other issues, and these impacts over the long term.

When we take into account this vastly expanded criteria and that it is vastly expanded over the long term, it is clear that companies are going to have to spend a lot more money preparing for these applications and working through the application process.

Proposed subsection 22 of the impact assessment act lists more than 20 factors that have to be considered in assessing the impact of a designated project. For example, there is a reference to sustainability and to the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors. These are just some of the added criteria that the government has added to the process, which is just going to increase the cost and complexity for proponents. It is not only going to be a much longer process for proponents to go through; it is also going to be a much costlier process.

This is a big problem, because we have a problem in Canada with attracting, not just domestic but foreign investment for natural resource projects. In fact, Statistics Canada recently, this past spring, highlighted that there has been the biggest drop in foreign direct investment into this country in eight years. Last year saw the deepest plunge in foreign investment in this country since the deep, dark days of 2010, when we were just coming out of the recession of 2009 caused by the global financial crisis of 2008.

We have seen a massive plunge in foreign direct investment, a massive drop in investors willing to invest in Canadian companies. In fact, last year, for the second year in a row, we saw more foreign selling of Canadian companies than purchasing of Canadian companies. This has led to a drop in investments, particularly in the oil sector, with the commensurate drop in jobs and growth.

However, there is another problem with the bill that I want to highlight, which has to do with the designated project list. In other words, there is a problem in how certain projects get designated for an environmental assessment and how other projects do not. It remains to be seen with the proposed legislation whether or not the government will get it right in regulation.

Earlier this year, the government announced that it was going to undertake consultations with a view to help revise the regulations concerning the designated projects list. The Liberals said they would be coming forward with new regulations under the proposed act, and I hope they read the Hansard transcript tonight of the debates here in the House of Commons to ensure that our input is incorporated if the bill does pass in these new regulations.

The problem is one of inequity and unfairness from a whole range of perspectives. If a mine is proposed in western Canada, let us say in Alberta, under both the pre-2012 rules and the current 2012 rules, and potentially under the proposed legislation, it would undergo a federal environmental assessment. However, if that same mine was proposed in southern Ontario, mines that we often call “gravel pits” or “quarries”, it would not undergo a federal environmental assessment.

I will give members an example of this. In 2011, a mega-quarry was proposed in southern Ontario by an American company that had acquired over 2,500 acres of prime farmland in Dufferin County. That American company had acquired the equivalent of 10 square kilometres of land to build an open pit mine. Under the pre-2012 rules and the 2012 rules, and potentially under this proposed legislation, the federal government said that it did not require a federal environmental assessment, yet if that same 10 square kilometre mine was proposed in Alberta, let us say an open pit bitumen mine, a federal environmental assessment most certainly would have been required. This is an example of the unfairness of the current and potentially the proposed system the federal government has.

If one builds a mine to extract iron ore or bitumen in western Canada, one would undergo a federal environmental assessment, but if the same mine is proposed in southern Ontario, then do not worry, the government will turn a blind eye and not have it undergo that federal environmental assessment. Therefore, it is not just treating one sector of the economy different from another, the oil and gas sector, or the iron ore sector compared with the aggregate sector, but it is also treating one region of the country differently from another, and that is not fair. I hope that the government, in undertaking these consultations, takes that into account.

It is also not fair to the environment when a 10 square kilometre open pit mega-quarry is proposed for southern Ontario, which would have plunged 200 feet deep and pumped 600 million litres of fresh water out of the pit each and every day. It should undergo the same federal environmental assessment that a mine of similar size would undergo in western Canada. It should undergo that, because in southern Ontario we have the most dense biosphere in the entire country. There is all the more need to protect this dense biosphere, which is under greater threat than any other part of the country largely due to the growing urban populations we see in the Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Windsor, and Toronto corridor.

I hope the government's yet to be created project list, whether it is based on the current legislation or the proposed legislation, treats all sectors of the economy and all regions of the country fairly, and I hope the department is incorporating this input as it comes forward with new regulations.

There is yet another problem with the proposed legislation before the House, and it plays into a broader pattern of the government, and that is of political interference. As the member for St. Albert—Edmonton just pointed out, the proposed legislation would allow the minister a veto power over natural resource project applications. This is unprecedented in this country. Until the Liberal government came to power, not a single natural resource project had been rejected or approved by the federal cabinet before the federal environmental assessment process had been completed, and not a single federal environmental assessment process had been overruled by federal cabinet.

In other words, up until this government, the federal cabinet accepted every single recommendation coming out of a federal environmental review process over the many decades that it was in place. The current government's rejection of the northern gateway pipeline was the first time the federal cabinet had stopped the process for the review of a major natural resource project before allowing that process to be completed and before allowing the cabinet to accept fully the recommendations of that process.

Here, in this legislation, we see a repeat of that pattern. They are proposing to give the minister a veto power. Before an impact assessment can begin, the minister will have the power not to conduct an assessment if the minister believes the proposed project would cause unacceptable effects. That is so broad a criteria that a person could drive a Mack truck through that. There again we see the politicization of processes that were once arm's length, quasi-judicial, and left to the professional public service.

Another example of this politicization of what was once performed by the professional public service, by quasi-judicial entities is Bill C-49. Bill C-49 gives the Minister of Transport a political veto over a review of joint ventures by an airline. Up to Bill C-49, and for many years, any airline that wanted to enter into a joint venture had to undergo a review by one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the world, the Competition Bureau, to ensure that there were no anti-competitive results from a joint venture. In fact, when Air Canada proposed a joint venture with United Airlines some years ago, the Competition Bureau said no to the original proposal for that joint venture and said they had to pull out of that joint venture a number of cross-border routes because they would be deleterious to competition, and because it would increase prices for consumers and for businesses across Canada.

What the current government has done through Bill C-49, which it rammed through the House and Senate, is it has given the Minister of Transport the ability to veto that process through a broad definition of public interest to bypass the Competition Bureau's review of a joint venture, and to rubber-stamp a joint venture in the interests of the airline and against the competition interests of consumers in this country. With the recent passage of Bill C-49, Air Canada has announced a joint venture with Air China. I do not think that is any coincidence.

Thus, there are just a few examples of how the government is politicizing the process for law enforcement of our competition laws for the review of major natural resource projects that no previous government has ever done.

Finally, I want to critique the Liberal government's general approach to environmental issues. The Liberals have created a climate of uncertainty. On pipeline approvals, they have created uncertainty. That is why Kinder Morgan has announced that it is pulling out of Canada and why it sold its assets to the Government of Canada. They have created a climate of uncertainty in the business community. That is why, as I previously mentioned, Statistics Canada, this spring, reported that foreign investment into Canada plunged last year to its lowest level in eight years. There has been an exodus of capital from the country's oil and gas sector. Statistics Canada reports that capital flows dropped for a second year in a row last year, and are down by more than half since 2015. Net foreign purchases by foreign businesses of Canadian businesses are now less than sales by those foreign businesses, meaning that foreign companies sold more Canadian businesses than they bought.

On climate change, they have created a great deal of uncertainty.

The Liberals came with big fanfare with their price on carbon, but they have only priced it out to $50 per tonne to 2022. They have not announced what happens after 2022. We are four short years away from 2022, and businesses and consumers need the certainty of what happens after 2022.

Furthermore, the Liberals have created uncertainty because $50 per tonne does not get us to our Paris accord targets. In fact, last autumn the Auditor General came forward with a report saying that Canada will not meet its Paris accord targets of a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 with the $50-per-tonne target. He estimated that we are some 45 megatonnes short of the target.

The Liberals have created uncertainty with their climate change policy because they have been inconsistent on climate change policy. They are inconsistent with how they treat one sector of the economy versus another. For example, they demand that projects in the oil and gas sector take into account both upstream and downstream emissions, while not requiring projects in other sectors of the economy to do the same.

They are inconsistent with climate change policy in the way they treat one region of the country versus another. The Auditor General's report from a week ago, report 4, highlights the inconsistency in the way they treat central Canadians versus the way they treat westerners.

For example, the Liberals tell western Canadian oil and gas producers that climate change impacts need to be part of the approval process of any major natural resource project, and yet they turn around and one of the first decisions they make as a government is to waive the tolls on the new federal bridge in Montreal, a $4-billion-plus bridge. The Auditor General reported, in report 4 last week, that waiving the tolls will result in a 20% increase in vehicular traffic over that bridge, from 50 million to 60 million cars and trucks a year, an additional 10 million vehicles crossing that bridge every year, with the attendant greenhouse gases and pollution that this entails.

The Liberals tell companies and Canadians on one side of the country that they have to take into account greenhouse gas emissions when they propose a new project in the oil and gas sector, but when the government builds a brand new federal bridge in Montreal for $4 billion-plus, it is not going to take into account those greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, it will waive the tolls, which is going to lead to a 20% jump in traffic, with the attendant greenhouse gas emissions that this entails.

Finally, the Liberals have created a climate of uncertainty by their failure to realize that our income taxes are too high. The government talks a good game about the environment and the economy, but the facts speak otherwise. They blew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reduce corporate and personal income taxes. They failed to seize the opportunity of using the revenues generated by the price of carbon to drive down our high corporate and personal income taxes. They also failed to seize the opportunity to reform our income tax system to reduce its complexity and its distortive nature.

Our system was reformed in 1971 by the government of Pierre Trudeau. It was reformed again in 1986 by the government of Brian Mulroney. It has been over 30 years since we have had any significant income tax reform to our personal income tax system or our corporate income tax system, and the Liberals blew the chance to do it, even though they promised to take a look at tax reform in their very first budget.

The government talks a good game on the environment and the economy, but the facts say otherwise. It is a story of a missed opportunity, and that is why I cannot support this bill.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Madam Speaker, I always enjoy the member's speeches. He is very thoughtful, insightful, and deep. However, I do have some concerns with several of his points.

The member said that we failed on income tax reductions. Actually, the first item we put in the budget when we took power was a reduction in income tax for many Canadians. Unfortunately, it was the member who failed, because he voted against it. Subsequent to that, we put in an income tax reduction for 90% of families through the family tax credit, and again it was the member who failed, not us, because we provided the reduction.

The member talked about investment fleeing Canada, resulting in jobs fleeing Canada. Canada has the highest rate of employment in years, as well as the highest rate of growth in the G7. It is the bottom line that counts.

The member said that our government was giving only four years of certainty on pricing related to greenhouse gas emissions, but the Conservatives have given zero years of certainty to industry on what their plans would be. What are the member's plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that industry can have the certainty that he suggested it should have?

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, first, the government did not reduce income taxes in aggregate. It robbed Peter to pay Paul. It increased the upper marginal rate from some 29% to 33%, four percentage points, in order to pay for its middle bracket tax plan. Therefore, it did not reduce the overall income tax burden. In fact, income taxes are too high in Canada. Two-thirds of the federal budget's revenues come from income taxes, approximately $200 billion a year: about $170 billion a year from personal income tax and about $30 billion or $40 billion a year from corporate income tax. It did not reduce the overall income tax burden on the Canadian economy, and it blew the opportunity to do that. Hiking income taxes on one bracket of income earners to pay for income tax cuts on another bracket of income earners is not my idea of significant income tax cuts.

Furthermore, with respect to what our plan would do, it will be forthcoming in the election, but I will say that whatever problems there were with the previous government's approach, the sector by sector regulatory approach put decades of certainty into the process. Rather than them layering on, in addition to regulation this price, which ends in 2022, it creates that uncertainty for Canadian consumers and businesses.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to return to this issue. It is obviously controversial in this chamber. Why is it that big oil has been exiting the oil sands? There is no question it has been. There is Marathon, Total, Statoil, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Imperial Oil. I want to read the hon. member two quotes. This is what two large companies from the industry say about their departure. This is what was reported in Reuters in May of this year.

Norway’s Statoil said it aims to cut its carbon footprint more aggressively as measures to reduce global warming could reduce the value of its assets, leaving some of its reserves stranded underground.

Fortune magazine, referring to Shell stated:

If Shell failed to prepare for this new energy landscape, it could wind up saddled with massive stranded assets: buried oil and gas that its shareholders paid billions to find, but that, because of softening demand, the company found itself unable to profitably drill and sell.

There is a real phenomenon happening globally of large corporations examining the threat of the carbon bubble and they could end up with stranded assets. Unfortunately, bitumen is about the most heavy carbon-intensive fossil fuel product out there in the petroleum area. I wonder if my hon. colleague has any comments on that.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, with respect to Norway, in some ways it is much easier for them to make the case for reducing emissions than it is for us, because Norway, granted through foresight, built up a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund and now has that asset to depend on its future interest and capital gains to fund all the programs that Norwegians have come to rely upon. We do not have that here in Canada, anywhere near that scale, so I think Statoil and Norway sovereign wealth fund are in some ways in an enviable position that we simply do not find ourselves in.

What I do know is this. I believe that every major resource project in the country should undergo a proper and full environmental assessment, but if we want to combat climate change and reduce emissions, the right way to do it is not by denying the construction of new pipelines, new highways, or things like that. It is to actually properly price carbon, either through a regulatory approach or other approaches that will actually result in a reduction in emissions, rather than targeting the method by which we transport those products.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Madam Speaker, there were some interesting points in my colleague's speech, but he seemed to be skating all over the place. I am trying to follow exactly where he is going, so let me see if I analyzed this correctly. He said we robbed Peter to pay Paul. I guess what he meant was we reduced the 7% taxes to the middle class and charged it to the highest 1%. I guess that is taking from Peter to Paul, if he wants to throw that at us.

The second point is, we heard it here today, they did not have a plan for 10 years on the environment, and now he said tonight that after 2019 he will have a plan. It would be 14 years before we even see a plan.

Talking about the pipeline, it was an interesting discussion, but again, 10 years in power and no pipeline.

Finally, my question to my colleague is: He said today that he was not happy, that $50 a tonne was not enough. How much would be enough carbon pricing for him and his party?

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, what the member opposite needs to realize is that the government's approach on income taxes will end in failure. We know how this has worked in the past.

From 1971 to 1986, the Government of Canada went to 10 federal income tax brackets and an upper marginal rate of 34%. What happened by the mid-1980s? The economy was in trouble, and it was why the government of 1984 won its mandate. The economy was in trouble, jobs were fleeing the country, foreign investment was fleeing, unemployment was high, and people were losing their jobs, their livelihoods, and their income.

Therefore, in 1980, the government of Brian Mulroney dropped the number of brackets from 10 to three and dropped the upper marginal rate from 34% to 29%. What did we have? We had 20-plus years of economic growth and prosperity and incomes.

We are now back up to five brackets and an upper marginal rate of 33%. It is not going to work, and some future government is going to have to undo it.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Madam Speaker, the member has provided us with a great overview of the many failings of the government when it comes to balancing. The Liberals often say that the environment and the economy go hand in hand.

I have one problem with what the member said, though. He said the Liberals robbed Peter to pay Paul. Actually they robbed Peter, they robbed Paul, then they robbed Mary, Thomas, and Matthew in a vain attempt to find a solution to their deficit problems and the massive amounts of debt. They are borrowing vast sums of money to pay for a lot of the government programs they are introducing. At the same time, they are choking off the sector of the economy that contributes 16% to Canada's GDP.

I would like to hear the member's comments on that.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, while the government has continued to further distort the income tax system, in introducing this new federal bracket of 33%, it was like squeezing the balloon. It created a problem in the small business tax sector, which was why the Liberals ham-fistedly tried to introduce reforms to the small business tax system.

At the end of the day, we want a system of much lower personal and corporate income taxes where the differentials between the rates are smaller than they are today. This will ensure people do not game the system and distort the system, leading to the inefficiencies we see today.

[Kim Rudd, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise again in the House to speak to a piece of legislation that represents a major turning point in how Canada develops its vast resources.

After listening to the discussions over the past while, it is important that we come back to a sense of reality. This is legislation that strengthens investor confidence, restores public trust, advances indigenous reconciliation, and enhances environmental performance, all while ensuring that good resource projects get built in a timely, transparent, and responsible way. It is legislation that has also been improved by committee review, the input of its witnesses, and the advice of its members.

Today, we have an amended bill that not only reflects, but confirms, our belief that Canada works best when Canadians work together. It is an even better bill that delivers on our government's vision for Canada in this clean growth century, and one that supports our goal of making Canada a leader in the global transition to a low-carbon economy.

This is critical because the world is at a pivotal moment when climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our generation, and when marrying the strength of prosperity with the protection of our environment is the new imperative.

Bill C-69 would do that. It recognizes that Canada was built, in large measure, through investments and innovation in the natural resource sectors. It addresses our need for a new and more effective approach to environmental assessments and regulatory reviews. It helps to ensure Canada capitalizes on a new wave of resource development that could top $500 billion over the next 10 years.

Canadians get that. They told us so through our extensive pre-consultations on Bill C-69, in response to our discussion paper, and again in committee. They also stepped forward in unprecedented numbers to join Generation Energy, our national discussion on Canada's energy future that culminated in a two-day forum in the minister's home city of Winnipeg just last fall.

What did we hear? Hundreds of thousands of Canadians made it clear to us that they want a thriving, low-carbon economy. They want Canada to be a leader in clean technology and innovation. They want an affordable and reliable energy system, one that provides equal opportunities to Canadians without harming the environment. They want smart cities with integrated energy systems, increased energy efficiency, and low-carbon transportation. They want rural and remote communities to have better options than diesel for generating electricity or for heating their homes.

They also told us they want regulatory reform that includes increased transparency and more communication with Canadians to restore public confidence. They want regulatory reform that ensures indigenous peoples are part of the decision-making, and that they benefit from the opportunities that resource development creates. They want regulatory reform that supports a competitive and sustainable resource sector, one that creates good jobs and shared wealth. They want regulatory reform that takes the politics out of decision-making so that science, facts, and evidence carry the day. We agree with all of that.

This is why we created a 14-member Generation Energy council, which came out of the two-day forum, to maintain the momentum and develop recommendations on how best to move forward on everything we had heard. That council is due to report shortly, but much of the optimism of Generation Energy, and many of the ideas from it, have already found their way into Bill C-69.

The amended bill also reflects what committee heard from indigenous peoples, and includes an even clearer commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by enshrining it in the bill's preamble and by providing greater transparency regarding the way indigenous knowledge is used and protected.

Other amendments respond to issues important to industry, including concerns that the length of a project review could cause uncertainty. The proposed amendments address this by establishing a baseline of 300 days for review panels involving federal regulators, and a timeline of 45 days to appoint panel members; by improving the transition provisions so that there are clear and objective measures to confirm our commitment that no project will go back to the starting line; by providing new incentives to encourage the proponents of existing projects to proceed under the new impact assessment regime; and by clarifying that final decisions on resource projects are based on, and do not just consider, the assessment report and other key factors set out in the legislation, including both positive and negative impacts.

As amended, Bill C-69 would also address concerns raised by environmental groups to strengthen public participation and transparency. These include placing additional emphasis on meaningful participation; ensuring opportunities for public comment are always part of the review process for projects on federal lands; posting a broader range of information online and for longer; fine-tuning the role of federal life cycle regulators on a review panel, while ensuring impact assessments continue to benefit from their expertise; and the list goes on.

The Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development has done excellent work, and its amendments only build on the legislation's strengths. The proposed changes capture the spirit of a bill that will not only improve the way Canada reviews major resource projects, but can ultimately redefine the way projects are even contemplate.

By providing project proponents with clearer rules, greater certainty, and more predictability, we also ensure local communities have more input and indigenous peoples have more opportunities in the resource sectors.

For example, Bill C-69 would help us ensure project proponents and their investors would know what was expected of them from the outset, by introducing an early engagement and planning phase to identify the priorities and concerns of each new project. This would allow resource companies to plan better, engage earlier, and develop smarter, all of which would bolster their competitiveness, enhance performance, and move Canada to the forefront of the clean growth economy.

At the same time, our new approach would rebuild public confidence by introducing greater transparency and stronger protections for the environment, while advancing reconciliation with indigenous peoples and giving Canadians a more meaningful say. Of course, none of this guarantees unanimity. We cannot legislate agreement with every decision a government makes. However, with Bill C-69 and its amendments, Canadians would always know their voices were heard, their evidence was considered, and the process was fair.

For Canadians tuning in for the first time, Bill C-69 would do all of this by taking a more comprehensive approach to resource development, starting with the principle of “one project, one assessment”. To support this, our legislation proposes the creation of a new government agency for impact assessments. The impact assessment agency of Canada would be responsible for a single integrated and consistent process that would include the specialized expertise of federal regulators, which is where our simultaneous creation of a new, modern, and world-class federal energy regulator would come in.

The Canadian energy regulator would replace the National Energy Board and would be given the required independence and proper accountability to oversee a strong, safe, and sustainable Canadian energy sector in this clean growth century, starting with five key changes: more modern and effective governance; increased certainty and timelier decisions for project proponents; enhanced public consultations; greater indigenous engagement and participation; and stronger safety and environmental protections. The amendments support these goals by proposing changes to respond to such things as the evolving landscape for indigenous rights and new technologies that promote greater transparency and broader public engagement.

Before I highlight some of the important ways the amended bill would do these things, it is useful to take a step back and talk about the motivations behind our plans for a new federal energy regulator.

When our government came to office, we started from the very simple premise that while the National Energy Board had served Canadians well, it needed modernization to reflect the fact that its structure, role, and mandate had remained relatively unchanged since the National Energy Board Act was first introduced in 1959.

That is what the Canadian energy regulator act would do. It proposes a new federal energy regulator with clearer responsibilities, greater independence, and more diversity. For example, we would separate the regulator's adjudicative function, which demands a high degree of independence, from its daily operations, where a high degree of accountability is required.

We would do this by creating a board of directors to provide oversight, strategic direction, and advice on operations, while a chief executive officer, separate from the board, would be responsible for day-to-day operations. In addition, there would be a group of independent commissioners responsible for timely, inclusive, and transparent project reviews and decision-making, the very things Canadians have been telling us and that witnesses told the committee.

The amended Bill C-69 also enhances the diversity and expertise of the new regulator's board of directors and commissioners, with a fair and transparent recruitment process to identify the most qualified candidates; a new emphasis on expertise in indigenous knowledge as well as municipal, engineering, and environmental issues; and a requirement for at least one member of the board of directors and one commissioner to be first nations, Métis, or Inuit.

The amended legislation proposes to restore investment certainty by making regulatory reviews more timely and predictable without compromising on public input, indigenous engagement, or environmental protection.

I have already touched on some of the key changes proposed by the committee: establishing a baseline of 300 days for review panels, ensuring panel members are appointed within 45 days, and confirming that no existing projects are sent back to the starting line.

These measures build on the bill's underlying principle of one project, one assessment and the new Impact Assessment Agency of Canada's responsibility for coordinating consultations with indigenous people.

Bill C-69 proposes that all of this work will be carried out in closer collaboration with the new Canadian energy regulator, making its reviews clearer, its powers more defined, and its timelines for decision shorter, more predictable, and better managed, with fewer opportunities to pause the ticking clock.

In addition, the new federal regulator would retain final decision-making authority for minor administrative functions such as certain certificate and licence variances, transfers, and the suspension of certificates or licences. The Canadian energy regulator act would also restore the regulators' pre-2012 decision-making authority to issue a certificate for major projects subject to cabinet approval. This change is important because it removes the federal cabinet's ability to overturn a negative decision from the CER, but maintains cabinet's right to ask commissioners to reconsider their decisions.

Other amendments in the bill would advance our commitments to greater public consultation and indigenous engagement. The CER act already featured more opportunities for Canadians to have their say including the elimination of the NEB's existing test for standing; explicit consideration of environmental, social, safety, health, and socio-economic issues, as well as gender-based impact on any effects on indigenous peoples; expanded participant funding is also extended to new activities; and more opportunities outside of the traditional hearing process for public debates and discussions.

The amendments to the Canadian energy regulatory act offer greater clarity.

On indigenous knowledge, for example, our new protections would be enhanced through a requirement for consultations before any details could be disclosed and the minister would be able to place conditions on their disclosure based on those consultations. The bill would now also require, rather than just provide, options for a committee to provide advice on enhancing indigenous peoples involvement under the Canadian energy regulator act. Other changes would ensure that public and indigenous participation is more meaningful and that Canadians have the information, tools, and capacity to contribute their perspectives and their expertise.

Finally, the amendments on Bill C-69 expand on our efforts to clarify ministerial discretion and ensure stronger safety and environmental protections. For example, through committee's proposed changes to the Canadian energy regulator act, the public decision statements would clearly demonstrate how a report formed the basis for the decision, and how key factors were considered. As well, future exemption orders would only be made to ensure safety and security, or for the protection of property or the environment.

These are in addition to existing provisions in the CER act, such as assigning new powers to federal inspection officers so they can act quickly and, if necessary, place a stop work order on any project that is operating unsafely or falling short of agreed to conditions, requiring that companies increase the protection of their infrastructure, clarifying the regulators oversight role to include enforcing standards related to cybersecurity, and authorizing the federal energy regulator to take action to safely cease the operation of pipelines in cases where the owner is in receivership, insolvent, or bankrupt.

Through Bill C-69 and its amendments, we see legislation designed for the Canada we have today and, indeed, the Canada we want tomorrow. The Canadian energy regulator act is an important piece of that, helping us to diversify Canada's energy markets, expand our energy infrastructure, and drive economic growth through timely decisions that reflect our common values as Canadians.

I hope all members of this House will support this important legislation as we seek to create the shared prosperity we all want, while protecting the planet we all cherish.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member opposite what she thinks of legislation, this one included, which gives a minister of the crown the veto over a quasi-judicial process before it has even begun, whether it is a veto over a competition law review of a joint venture for an airline in this country or whether it is a veto over a natural resource project application before the impact assessment has even begun.

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

Madam Speaker, the speculation and fearmongering that is coming from the other side is a bit rich.

As I said in my remarks, the opportunity for the minister to actually request that the panel reconsider their decision is not a veto. The word is “reconsider”. I think it is really important that as we go through this process, one of the things we heard, clearly, from Canadians is that Canadians want to have input. Canadians want to be involved. Canadians want this process to be transparent.

They do not want it behind closed doors, as it was under the previous government. We know what happened with northern gateway, where the courts clearly said no, because there was no consultation, not enough consultation with Canadians and indigenous peoples.

This is about opening the door, and making this process more inclusive and more transparent. I hope the member opposite will join us in seeing the value in that position.

[Sheri Benson, NDP, Saskatoon West, SK]

Madam Speaker, I do want to make the comment, to be clear, that by including UNDRIP in the preamble to this bill, it is included in the part of the bill that does not have anything binding.

The opportunity to include UNDRIP in the parts of the bill that would actually give it teeth and make it included were all voted down. My hon. colleague, the member for Edmonton Strathcona tried to get the government to align what it says in public with what would be in the bill, making sure that UNDRIP was respected.

I want to ask my hon. colleague why UNDRIP was only included in the non-binding part of the legislation, and not in the teeth of the legislation, which most people would think the government would have supported.

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

Madam Speaker, as the Prime Minister has said many times, there is no relationship more important to us than the relationship with indigenous peoples. When the Prime Minister stood in this House and talked about the recognition and rights framework and the importance of the opportunity for real reconciliation with indigenous peoples, that said volumes about our commitment to making this work.

For decades and decades, indigenous people in this country have not had an equal voice at the table. They have not had a say in resource development in this country, which Canadians believe they should, indeed, have. They have not had the opportunity for economic development that, indeed, they should have had.

In terms of the support for UNDRIP, as we know, this side of the House, the government, certainly supported the motion to support UNDRIP, and we are not suggesting anything different. We are saying that this is a holistic approach to ensuring that in all areas of government, in all areas of the economy, in all areas of the environment, and I could go on, indigenous peoples are key partners in this process as we move together.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on the question posed by my colleague, and it has to do with UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Implicit in that is free, prior, and informed consent. That is an element that we in the Conservative Party have some serious concerns about because of the possibility of it being interpreted as being an absolute veto right.

However, in the last election, the Prime Minister made it very clear that he would incorporate UNDRIP into all legislation in Canada. In fact, earlier this year, there was a vote in the House on Bill C-262, a bill from the NDP, which agreed that UNDRIP would be incorporated into all government legislation.

At the amendment stage of Bill C-69, the NDP and the Green Party brought forward 25 different amendments asking the Liberal government to incorporate UNDRIP in the legislation, as it promised during the election campaign. On 25 different occasions, the Liberal government and the Liberal members of that committee voted no. They opposed the inclusion of UNDRIP.

Why would Liberal members of the committee vote against UNDRIP 25 times, when the Liberal government made such a clear commitment to incorporate it?

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

Madam Speaker, I am confused. The member opposite voted against UNDRIP in the House when it was raised—

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I did. Why did you in committee? That's the question.

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

—so I am a bit confused. He is suggesting that in committee he would vote for UNDRIP, but in the House he would not. That is a bit rich, frankly.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

No, that's not what I said.

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

In terms of the work we have done through Generation Energy, as an example, 380,000 Canadians contributed to a conversation on Canada's energy future. It is about inclusivity. Conservatives forgot indigenous people. We did not.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Order. I know it is getting late, but I want to remind members that whoever has the floor needs respect. The hon. member for Abbotsford was not interrupted during his questioning, and I would ask that he respect the member speaking.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have looked up the mandate letter the Minister of Natural Resources received, dated November 12. It says that in relation to environmental assessment and working with the environment minister, he is to “restore robust oversight and thorough environmental assessments of areas under federal jurisdiction”.

I want to highlight that part, “federal jurisdiction”, because the expert panel the government mandated to look into environmental assessment, at a cost of over $1 million, came back with the clear advice that federal jurisdiction include, “at a minimum, federal lands, federal funding and federal government as proponent, as well as: Species at risk; Fish; Marine plants; Migratory birds; Indigenous Peoples...; Greenhouse gas emissions”, and the list goes on.

However, the government chose to ignore the mandate letter, to ignore its campaign promises, and to deliver in Bill C-69 not reviews of environmental assessments for areas of federal jurisdiction but only for major projects, which will be found on a list we can see later. The government explicitly said it does not include federal funding. It explicitly said that this is not about federal jurisdiction, for instance, for permits issued by the Minister of Transport under the Navigation Protection Act or permits issued by the Minister of Fisheries. Therefore, the undoing, the wrecking of environment assessment law by the previous government, is being entrenched by the current government.

Why did the Minister of Natural Resources ignore his mandate letter?

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

Madam Speaker, obviously I will agree to disagree with the hon. member.

I am very confident in saying that the Minister of Environment has lived up to her mandate letter and beyond. It is really about moving forward, and moving forward in the country means ensuring all Canadians get to come along with us. It is not just for those Canadians who have the ability to come and have a say, but those who do not are provided the opportunity to do that.

With respect to the consultation process, it provides supports to people who want to come and have a voice at those tables. It provides online consultation opportunities for people who cannot otherwise get there. It is about inclusivity. It is about listening. At the end of the day, when we hear from everyone who wants to have a say, we are building trust in Canadians. We will move projects forward in the country only by doing that.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

I would like to remind the next speaker that I will have to interrupt them in roughly 12 minutes.

The hon. member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Northumberland—Peterborough South claims to have heard from her minister that the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development discovered that many people were interested in the matter and wanted to get involved in this environmental issue. As a member of that committee, that is not what I saw.

I hope that we will be able to improve this bill, which is at third reading tonight, and that the government will listen to reason. In all sincerity, the goal of our interventions is to improve the bill, in order to make it more rigorous and more effective at improving our actions as citizens when it comes to the environment. I am speaking specifically about the 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.

Yes, I am a little out of breath after reading the bill's title. This government promised not to use omnibus or mammoth bills. The Liberals have proven once again that they do not keep their word. They are not fulfilling the campaign promises they made in 2015, and Canadians are realizing that more and more.

We will be talking about part 1 of the bill, which enacts the impact assessment act and repeals the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012.

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.

Part 3 amends the Navigation Protection Act. At 400 pages, the bill is very complex. Introducing a bill like this one undermines parliamentarians by preventing us from doing effective and rigorous work to ensure that Canadian legislation is well crafted.

The Liberals are determined to label us as the “big bad Conservatives” and the “anti-environment Conservatives”. Even though it is late, I would like to repeat in the House that no member of the official opposition gets up in the morning intent on destroying our planet. Quite the contrary.

I would like to review some of the concrete measures the previous Conservative government took. I would like to remind the House that we created the clean air regulatory agenda. We instituted new regulations to reduce emissions from cars and light trucks. We instituted new regulations to reduce emissions from heavy vehicles and their engines, and we announced our plans for stricter regulations for that sector. We proposed regulations to align ourselves with the U.S. Tier 3 standards for vehicle emissions and sulphur in gasoline. Our relationship with the United States was a good one. We set targets for hydrofluorocarbons, black carbon, and methane. We established new regulations to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants. We put in place measures to support the development of carbon capture technologies and alternative energy sources. We enhanced the annual report to government on main environmental indicators, including GHGs.

I would call the members' attention to my next point. We, the Conservatives, got rid of tax breaks related to the oil sands. Anyone who thinks we did nothing for the nine years the Conservative Party was in power before the Liberals took office is absolutely wrong. The Liberals are spreading misinformation. Those were just some of our government's actions. Taken together, our measures secured a positive environmental record for Canada and led to a proven reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2014, the last full year of our government, we managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada by 15%. Yes, the Conservative government did that. We worked so hard, that when the Liberal government came to power and went parading about in Paris, it used the greenhouse gas reduction targets set by the big scary Conservatives, those anti-environmentalists who could not work with scientists. We set greenhouse gas reduction targets and this government used them. This confirms that we did a good job. The government should shut up and stop saying that the Conservatives are working against the environment.

More specifically, the environment is important within the Conservative Party's Quebec caucus, as it is to all Conservatives in the House. I would like to share some of specific actions that Conservative caucus members from Quebec have taken.

I hear one of my colleagues in the House laughing. I was trying to copy him by participating in the Shaved Head Challenge. It probably suits him better, but it is temporary in my case.

The member for Lévis—Lotbinière planted over 500 trees on his property. The member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, meanwhile, has a cottage. He is lucky, but he is an entrepreneur who worked very hard and added this cottage to his property before he was elected to the House of Commons. Guess what his cottage has? It has solar panels. Yes, he is a Conservative who is not polluting and who cares about the environment. He also has a wind turbine to produce energy.

Let us also not forget that our political lieutenant for Quebec gets around in an electric car. Well done. We are proud to show that we are fully aware of the importance of the environment. I would also like to add that, for my part, I formed a committee on the circular economy. We are people of action, and the environment is important to us.

I will now get back to the bill. The May 31 edition of Le Devoir ran an article by Louis-Gilles Francoeur under the headline “Political appointments undermine environmental assessment process”. Mr. Francoeur is a former vice-president of the Quebec Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement and former journalist at Le Devoir. Here is what he said:

Bill C-69, which will govern federal environmental assessment in coming years, has been proceeding through Parliament with striking media indifference.... One issue is the process of appointing members to the review panels responsible for assessing large projects under federal authority, like the recent Energy East oil pipeline project. Politics can be a main factor in choosing review panel members, as the proposed bill now stands. That is hardly compatible with the independence required in this function.

The Liberals said that they would govern without interference and that they would implement a system and take the necessary steps to ensure that everything was done in an impartial manner. However, clause 33 of the bill says:

The Minister may only approve a substitution if he or she is satisfied...

This is a privilege that is being given to the minister.

Subclause 39(1) says:

...he or she may enter into an agreement or arrangement with any jurisdiction referred to...

Subclause 75(2) mentions an exception:

The obligation does not apply with respect to any designated project for which the Minister has approved the substitution of a process...

Lastly, subclause 183(6) says:

The Minister may, by order, grant one or more extensions of the time limit specified under subsection (4).

I am not making this up. These are real clauses from the bill. In light of these provisions, how can the Liberals claim to have implemented transparent, impartial measures that will lead to a reputable process and restore public trust?

The House resumed from June 12 consideration of the motion that Bill C-69, 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, be read the third time and passed.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George.

The proposed legislation before us is very concerning for me, and I will tell members why.

I am a member of Parliament who is very fortunate to have grown up in my riding of Calgary Midnapore and to represent the place where I grew up. Calgary Midnapore is a beautiful riding in the south-central part of Calgary. It is home to five beautiful lakes. I was very fortunate to have grown up in one of these lake communities, called Lake Bonavista. In addition to Lake Bonavista, there is Lake Midnapore, Lake Chaparral, and Lake Sundance. We are so very fortunate to have come from these communities, which are lovely family environments. People grow up in the summer swimming in these lakes and in the winter skating on them. These communities really are the backbone of the riding.

These communities were built on the back of the energy sector, the oil and gas sector. It is something everyone in the community recognizes. Everyone is very proud that these lovely communities were built with the oil and gas sector. When we went to school in Calgary Midnapore, it was with the hope that one day, we would go on to high school and perhaps the University of Calgary, where we have prestigious business and engineering programs. I am a very proud graduate of the University of Calgary.

When I went to my niece Samantha's grade 4 graduation six years ago, all the students who were moving on to middle school went to the microphone and said what they hoped to do. Outside of many young people there wanting to be hockey players, so many said that they wanted to be accountants or engineers like their moms and go on to work in the oil and gas sector.

This was just part of who we were and our upbringing. We would grow up in these lovely communities and get an education with not only the hope but the confidence that we would have good jobs in the oil and gas sector when we were finished our education. We would get married, raise families, and have confidence that we would be able to provide for our families as a result of the oil and gas sector, which was so relied upon by this community for so long. It was such a backbone of not only Calgary Midnapore but of Calgary itself, Alberta, and beyond. It is similar, perhaps, to how people in our capital might reference the public sector.

In addition to that, there was an appreciation of the National Energy Board. It was seen as an institution in Calgary. It was well understood that the decisions that came out of the National Energy Board had gone through a rigorous process, with proper consideration of all the factors necessary to support a thriving oil and gas sector and a prudent oil and gas sector, one that took into account the many needs and considerations of project approval.

These are two sacred cows in the riding I represent and grew up in: the oil and gas sector, and the confidence within that sector; and the National Energy Board. Unfortunately, with Bill C-69, we are seeing these concepts, these things Calgarians count on, thrown out the window entirely. These things will not exist any longer as we knew them before.

It is because of these considerations that provide so much more uncertainty in this sector, not only for the citizens of Calgary Midnapore, but in Calgary and beyond. Of course, the considerations I am referring to are numerous, but they include health, social issues, gender issues, and indigenous rights.

Therefore, going forward, everything has changed as we know it in the oil and gas sector for my constituents of Calgary Midnapore. We are seeing this take place in a number of ways, and one is in the uncertainty of project approval. I have a quote from the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association.

CEPA is very concerned with the scope of the proposed new Impact Assessment process. From the outset, CEPA has stated that individual project reviews are not the appropriate place to resolve broad policy issues, such as climate change, which should be part of a Pan-Canadian Framework. Including these policy issues adds a new element of subjectivity that could continue to politicize the assessment process.

That is what I said when the NEB review came out last year. I said that the right hon. Prime Minister wrote the report he wanted, and he got the outcomes he wanted in regard to what I believe is essentially destroying the NEB. Everything certainly has changed.

We are hearing a lot of other things in regard to project approvals from industry members themselves, who are very concerned. Here is a quote from a land manager at Cona Resources, a foreign investment company that has left Canada. I will talk a little more about this later, but it is not alone in its exodus. It said, “To a certain extent, Canada will remain a higher cost country because of the social infrastructure that we have in place and our social licence to operate. While there is some opportunity to reduce some of those, the costs are not a net benefit to the country. I don't think that is what is deterring foreign investment. I think if we had greater consistency in both the royalties and taxation structure, people would be more comfortable. The uncertainty is what drives away project approval and foreign investment, and you have to sort of rely on your desire. If the project is a net benefit to Canada as a whole, you have to trust that the federal government will be able to enforce the decisions that were made, and trust that they are making the right decisions.”

Therefore, Bill C-69 is very concerning to industry members as well.

With regard to uncertainty to market access, we have seen that in a number of projects recently. Petronas LNG, a $36-billion project, has left Canada as a result of the uncertainty of project approval, and therefore market access. Keystone, with 830,000 barrels of oil a day, an $8-billion project, is at this time not going forward. Energy east, a $15.7-billion project, was abandoned, squarely on the NEB decision to consider direct and indirect greenhouse emissions. Northern gateway would have provided close to 4,000 jobs.

What else are we seeing? We are seeing foreign investment fleeing, as I mentioned previously. The corporations are too numerous to mention, but I will name a few of them. There is Royal Dutch Shell. It has gone. Growing up in Calgary Midnapore, I remember during the 1988 winter Olympics, people wearing their Shell jackets with pride. There is Statoil, a Norwegian company. We have heard a lot about Norway in our conversations here. Marathon Oil is out the door, as is ConocoPhillips. Investment is simply not attractive in Canada at this time, and we continue to see these investments leaving Canada.

I mentioned previously an event I went to called SelectUSA, where the U.S. consulates network is working very hard to attract even Canadian investment outside of Canada to the States. That is because that environment is providing a more competitive environment and better place for corporations to do business at this time.

In conclusion, I will say for Calgary Midnapore and Canadians that things will never be the same after Bill C-69.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Mr. Speaker, when I saw this bill, I happened to be sitting in on committee one night when the committee members were voting on over 300 amendments that were put forward, and half of the amendments came from the Liberals on their own bill. I could not believe it.

Does the member feel that the foreign investment and the investment fleeing from Canada is because of the extra regulation that this bill would put in place? Is investment fleeing because of the extra taxation that the Liberal government is putting in place? Is it because of the uncertainty that the Liberal government is putting in place? Is it all of the above? I give you a multiple-choice question; I am sure you will have multiple answers.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

Before we go to the hon. member, I want to remind everyone to place their questions through the Speaker and not directly, even if the person is right behind them. It just makes it that much easier if one goes through the Speaker.

The hon. member for Calgary Midnapore.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Sadly, Mr. Speaker, my colleague from North Okanagan—Shuswap knows that the response is “all of the above”. It is for a multitude of reasons that we are in fear of this piece of legislation, and for all of those reasons, the project approval, the uncertainty in regard to market access, the foreign investment that is in large exodus from Canada. The sad thing is that there are so many other reasons beyond those three, and as they relate specifically to Bill C-69, they are the carbon tax, red tape, taxation structures in general. It is a very unfortunate time for not only the oil and gas sector, but for Canadian industry in general. I am very worried for the future of not only my son, but for all the young inhabitants of Calgary Midnapore.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues have asked my colleague from Calgary Midnapore questions on a number of the packages that are contained in this bill. It also is relevant to Bill C-68 and the Fisheries Act. We noted that in our speeches last week as well. My colleague has talked about the number of businesses that have left Canada because of some of these regulations that are too onerous for them to be here and continue to work in the oil industry. One number we have heard is that $88 billion has left, and 110,000 jobs out of Alberta. I wonder if the member could expand on that.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly an incredible amount of investment that has fled, but the member reminds me of the irony of this situation. I believe that the Liberal government and the environment minister are doing this in an attempt to improve the environment. The irony is that in fact what will happen is carbon leakage. Canadians would be fortunate if these corporations decided to take their business to the U.S., compared to other jurisdictions where the environmental standards are far worse. However, that is what is going to happen if we do not create a better business environment for the natural resources sector to operate within. Not only is there fleeing investment, but the whole purpose of this piece of legislation is defeated. Corporations will move to the jurisdictions where it is the least expensive to do business, and frequently that will be nations that do not have the same high standards that the oil and gas sector in Canada has had for decades.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our colleague from Calgary Midnapore for a very heartfelt intervention. I think I have just scrapped my entire speech because of what our colleague has mentioned.

It brought me back to growing up in the Cariboo and what our thoughts and dreams were as kids. I was one of the those kids who wanted to be a hockey player and to move on. However, the reality was, we were probably going to become a logger or a farmer, because that is what we did, and that is what we do very well in the Cariboo.

Bill C-69 bring us back to yet another failed election promise of the Liberals and to some of what we have mentioned throughout this House over recent days, weeks, and months. When the member for Papineau was campaigning in 2015, he talked about letting debate reign, yet here we sit.

This is the 44th time allocation that has been imposed on this House, meaning that the members of Parliament on the opposition side, and the Canadians who elected them, have not had the full opportunity to present their feelings about what the government is doing, whether it is on Bill C-69, Bill C-59, Bill C-71, or Bill C-68.

Thank goodness that the Standing Orders dictate that private members' bills cannot be time allocated, and our late colleague, Senator Enverga's private member's bill, Bill S-218, has had the full breadth of comments and support.

Bill C-69 seeks to reverse the 2012 changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. I will bring us back again to the promise from the member for Papineau, or one of the Liberals, who said that the government would undertake a full review of laws, policies, and operational practices when it comes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

There are a number of people, groups, and organizations that have serious concerns over what Bill C-69 proposes. Our hon. colleague has mentioned, and it has been mentioned before, that most notably the legislation says it intends to decrease the timelines for both major and minor projects. Unfortunately, there are a myriad of ministerial and Governor in Council exemptions that can be exercised to slow down approvals.

What Bill C-69 represents is not a further clarification of the rules and regulations so that project proponents and those who are trying to enforce the act know where they stand, but rather it muddies the waters. What we have heard time and again, what the committee heard time and again, was that it was a wait and see. There was a lot of concern, and indeed those very groups, the environmental groups, that the Liberals campaigned to and got their vote are now saying that it does not meet the standards.

We have seen this over and over again with the government. It likes to say it has consulted with Canadians, and its Liberal members stand with their hand on their heart and talk about how important consultation is. Yet we know, time and again, as it is with the cannabis legislation, the Liberals are rushing legislation through without fully looking at some of the concerns that have been brought forward by the groups, the organizations, and the stakeholders who are going to be most impacted.

Let us talk about the Arctic surf clam in my file. I cannot stand up and do a speech nowadays without bringing up this injustice. The minister was given the authority and the discretion to go in and implement policy, without anybody checking how this would impact the stakeholders, and without the minister consulting about how that policy would impact those on the ground, the stakeholders, whose livelihoods truly depend on the Arctic surf clam fishery. These are some of the concerns that we have.

When the member for Papineau was campaigning, he said that omnibus bills were done for, and yet here we are again debating another 400-page piece of legislation.

He also talked about maybe having a small deficit of $10 billion. We now know that it will not be our children but our grandchildren who will see a balanced budget, because of the Liberal government's spending.

Bill C-69 represents more broken promises, and it does nothing to give confidence to industry. We know at this time that foreign investment is fleeing our nation at record levels. The CEO from Suncor recently spoke to Bill C-69 and said that it had absolutely put a nail in the coffin of Canadian investment in industry.

The government would like everyone to believe that it knows best and that the Ottawa-developed policies have the best intentions for Canadians, yet the Liberals are not listening when Canadians are speaking. They are not allowing members of Parliament to stand and bring the voices of Canadians to Parliament.

It would not be one of my speeches if I did not remind the House and Canadians that the House does not belong to me, and it sure as heck does not belong to those on the government side. It belongs to Canadians. All 338 members of Parliament and the Canadians who elected them deserve to have a say and to have their voices heard. When the government is forcing time allocation on pieces of legislation that fundamentally are going to have an impact on Canadians' lives, Canadians deserve to have a say.

Industry is shaken at the government's lack of consultation and lack of understanding on how we are moving forward. A good friend of mine, the hon. member for North Okanagan—Shuswap, asked our colleague from Calgary Midnapore about the industry's lack of confidence. Is it the carbon tax and the fact that the government refuses to tell Canadians how much it is going to be? Is it Bill C-69, the regulatory environment, that is shaking the confidence of the industry? Is it other legislation that is shaking the confidence of industry, or is it all of the above?

I would offer one more. The Prime Minister, in one of his earliest speeches to the world, spoke about how Canada was going to be known more for its resourcefulness than for its natural resources. The Liberals have waged war against our energy sector from day one. He said he wished the government could phase out the energy sector sooner and apologized for it.

Canadians and the energy sector, our natural resource industry, deserve a champion. The Minister of Natural Resources has said that it is about time our forestry producers and our energy producers got in line with what the world is doing in terms of technology and sustainable harvesting.

Whether it is our softwood lumber producers, our oil and gas producers, our fishermen on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, or our farmers, Canada has some of the best, if not the best, in terms of technology and harvesting. They are leading the way. They just need a champion. Guess what? They will have that in 2019, when the Conservatives regain the right side of the House.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Mr. Speaker, there are a few things the member and I have discussed that he did not bring up in his speech, and I would like him to elaborate on those if he could. He said that the Liberal government is not listening to Canadians. However, it is listening to foreign influence, which is being driven into our coastal communities and our resource sector. We have seen it time and again. It is having an incredibly negative effect on our economy and our resource sector.

Canada was built on our resource sector. We now have a cleaner resource sector than anywhere else in the world, yet the Liberal government is shutting it down due to influence from foreign operations that do not want to see Canada succeed as a resource country. I would like to ask the member if he could elaborate more on that foreign influence.

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

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from North Okanagan—Shuswap brings up a great point. I meant to bring it up, but I got so excited about all the other topics.

Bill C-69 and Bill C-68 are fluff pieces that kind of weighed into the 2015 campaign promises to the environmental groups. Fishermen groups have come to my office to tell me that when the Conservatives were in power, they could get in to see a minister, and now they need to go through an environmental group to see a minister. I have also heard that sitting around the table to develop this policy are more environmental groups than the actual stakeholders whom this is going to affect the most. We also know who is calling the shots at the highest level of government. It is Gerald Butts, who was the president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund prior to coming to his current office and calling the shots.

Bill C-69 represents another fluff piece of legislation that both sides have said does not go far enough. I have said it before: Canadians and industry deserve a champion, and they are going to get one in 2019.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I have a great amount of respect for my hon. colleague. However, there are a couple of minor things, minor to some and major to others, that I would like to bring up.

First, this is not particularly germane to the debate, but he talked about the surf clam issue. I was equally disappointed about the issue, to be quite honest. There was consultation beforehand. There was some interest in my riding, and people brought their issues forward. They were consulted with, and had contact.

I would like to touch on a second point, which is the fact that there were promises made and promises kept from a prior administration. The Conservatives promised custodial management of the nose and tail of the Grand Banks. The changes they made allowed foreigners to not only manage the outside, where they are now, but manage inside the 200-mile limit as well, an egregious mistake that some day we will pay for and try to make up for.

The member mentioned that in the past, under the Conservative regime, fishery stakeholders did meet with the minister. I would ask him to name one.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to correct the record. I have so much respect for my hon. colleague across the way. Perhaps he is now trying to ingratiate himself back into the good graces of the Prime Minister as he needs his papers signed, and that is why he has asked this question. Nobody else has asked that question or a question on this point.

I will answer his question on the surf clam issue. If he checks the record, he will find that I was not talking about consultation on the surf clam. I was talking about the minister's authority to arbitrarily take 25% of the quota and, I might add, award it to the brother of a sitting Liberal MP, the member of Parliament for Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, an egregious error and decision, all under the guise of reconciliation. We now know that the group he awarded it to had the lowest number of first nations people. How shameful is it that the Liberals are using the term “reconciliation”, which is supposed to bring first nations and non-first nations together rather than pit them against one another, as a reason for their ill will?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

It being 4:40 p.m., pursuant to an order made on Wednesday, June 6, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the third reading stage of the bill now before the House.

The question is on the motion that this question be now put. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Anthony Rota]

Pursuant to order made Tuesday, May 29, 2018, the division stands deferred until Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions.

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the question to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment is the following: the hon. member for Saskatoon West, Housing.

[For continuation of proceedings, see part B]

[Continuation of proceedings from part A]

The House resumed from June 18 consideration of the motion that Bill C-69, 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, be read the third time and passed, and of the motion that this question be now put.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

It being 3:10 p.m., pursuant to an order made on Tuesday, May 29, 2018, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded division on the previous question at the third reading stage of Bill C-69.

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #870

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I declare the motion carried.

Pursuant to Standing Order 69.1, the first question is on part 1 regarding the impact assessment act, part 2 regarding the Canadian energy regulator act, the title, the preamble, the schedule, and all clauses in part 4, except clauses 85, 186, 187, and 195.

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt these elements of the bill?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

All those in favour will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

The recorded division on these elements of the bill stands deferred.

The next question is on part 3 regarding the Navigation Protection Act, and clauses 85, 186, 187, and 195 of part 4.

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt these elements of the bill?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

All those in favour of these elements of the bill will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

The recorded division on these elements of the bill stands deferred.

Normally at this time the House would proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded divisions at third reading stage of the bill. However, pursuant to order made Tuesday, May 29, 2018, the divisions stand deferred until Wednesday, June 20, 2018, at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions.

The House resumed from June 19 consideration of the motion that Bill C-69, 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, be read the third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

Pursuant to order made on Tuesday, May 29, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded divisions at third reading of Bill C-69.

The question is on part 1 regarding the impact assessment act, part 2 regarding the Canadian energy regulator act, the title, the preamble, the schedule, and all clauses in part 4, except clauses 85, 186, 187, and 195.

(The House divided on the elements, which were agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #877

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I declare these elements carried.

The next question is on part 3 regarding the Navigation Protection Act, and clauses 85, 186, 187, and 195 of part 4.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I believe that if you seek it, you will find agreement to apply the result from the previous vote to this vote, with Liberal members voting in favour.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we agree to apply, with Conservatives voting no.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP also agrees to apply the vote and will vote no.

[Luc Thériault, Québec debout, Montcalm, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Québec Debout agrees to apply the vote and will vote no.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Québécois agrees to apply the vote and will vote no.

[Erin Weir, Independent, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the CCF agrees to apply and will vote no.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the Green Party agrees to apply and votes yes.

[Hunter Tootoo, Independent, Nunavut, NU]

Mr. Speaker, I agree to apply and will be voting in favour.

[Darshan Singh Kang, Independent, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I agree to apply and will be voting yes.

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

Is there agreement to proceed in this fashion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

(The House divided on part 3 and clauses 85, 186, 187, and 195 of part 4, which were agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #878

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I declare these elements carried.

The House passed Bill C-69, 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, in its entirety, at third reading.

(Bill read the third time and passed)