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.

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

Thank you, all, for being here this morning, including the presenters before we broke for the vote.

My colleague Ms. Block represents a Saskatchewan riding, and I represent an Alberta riding. To say that transportation and access through ports like the Port of Vancouver are critical is an understatement.

I listened to all three of your presentations, and there was a lot of emphasis around the need for taxpayer-funded investing. Among the concerns I think I have—and certainly our party has—are that some of the actions that have been taken are detrimental to long-term private sector investment.

Mr. Xotta, we had the opportunity as a committee to travel to and tour the Port of Vancouver recently. We had the opportunity to see about $2 billion in investment, I think, currently under way in Vancouver port, both in grain and other private sector investment.

I was privately told by one of the very senior people with your authority—so I'd like to get the discussion on the record—that if Bill C-69, which I think you're probably familiar with, had been in place two years ago, none of those private sector dollars would be invested in the Port of Vancouver today. Could you comment on that, please?

Report Stage

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have been here for over 23 years, and I have always spoken to budget bills, whether the Conservatives were in opposition or on the government side. That is because a budget is what defines our economy; a budget is what defines where Canada's economy will move.

My colleagues on this side have highlighted, in very great detail, what is wrong with this budget bill put forward by the Liberal government. Let me start by saying certain things. I have been sitting here and listening to the Liberals when they get up. They like to attack us, calling out Mr. Harper's name all the time. The Liberal members have used Mr. Harper's name more than anybody I have ever heard. Somehow it is in their psyche that the former prime minister should be used to highlight their deficiencies.

Let me just show, using facts, why they are wrong. The international Institute for Management Development puts together a yearly world competitiveness ranking. Within one year, Canada has fallen three spots on the world competitiveness ranking, from 10th in 2018 to 13th this year. We are the lowest of the G7 countries. In 2018-19, the Liberals were in power. We fell from 10th to 13th.

Let me say this. In the same report, previously, from 2007 to 2015, Canada rose from 10th place to 5th place. That was under the Conservative government of former prime minister Harper. Let me repeat that for the Liberals who speak from their points. Under their regime we dropped in the ranking, going from 10th to 13th, the lowest of the G7 countries. During the period when we were in power under former prime minister Harper, which was 2007 to 2015, we rose from 10th place to fifth place. This is something they should take into account every time they talk about it.

When it comes to economic performance, government officials, business efficiency or infrastructure, the institute says we are not in the top five countries in this index. This is terrible management. Business investment in Canada under the Liberal government has fallen by an annualized rate of 10.9%. This is the second time it has fallen by over 10%. What a shame. This is the management record of the Liberal government.

The Liberal government seems totally oblivious to economic conditions. I come from Alberta. We have seen the devastating impact the government has had on my province. In my city of Calgary, the downtown is completely empty. Right now, businesses in the suburban area are suffering from tax hikes, because the downtown, which used to be the core economic sector in Calgary, has half its buildings empty. That is since the Liberals came into power. They had the opportunity to fix that.

The Liberals bought the Trans Mountain pipeline, but even if they started construction on it, what about Bill C-69, and what about Bill C-48, the tanker bill? Those bills are a direct attack on Alberta.

Albertans are now reeling from the disastrous management of the government. When the father of our current Prime Minister was there, that was the first time Alberta was suffering. I was there at that time. The government tried to seize the oil royalties. The finance minister was Marc Lalonde. It was a disastrous result. Since then, the Liberals have never recovered in Alberta. During the election of 2015, the current Prime Minister said that he would do business differently than his father in Alberta. Lo and behold, those sunny days are gone. This is something that, again, he has not fulfilled.

I am talking about Alberta and the energy sector. The energy sector benefits the whole country. It is not only Alberta's sector. It is British Columbia's, Quebec's, Ontario's, the Maritimes', everyone. It is one of our key sectors.

What is very important is that our companies have spent billions of dollars on clean technology. I will give one example. I was on the foreign affairs committee in the opposition. At that time, in the oil fields of Sudan, Talisman, a Canadian company, had a percentage of the operation in Sudan. All these NGOs that are based in western Canada found that it was easy to target a Canadian company, so they went after the Canadian company, accusing it of all kinds of crimes committed against the environment. The ultimate result was that Talisman sold its shares to China and to India. The next day, all the protests were over.

Has oil stopped? No, it has not. Who will they target? They will target Canadians. Why will they target them? It is an easy way to do it for these environmentalists. All of a sudden, they disappeared. That shows that the targets of these environmentalists are where they are doing it right now.

I want to go on to another issue, which is the media outlets these guys are giving money to. I can tell members why it is going to be a problem. What about the ethnic media? There are a huge number of ethnic media in the country. Are the Liberals going to give money to the ethnic media, or are they only going to give money to the old Canadian media that are sitting here on the national scene? Are they the only ones who are going to benefit? This is a slippery slope. I will accuse them of discrimination if they do not give money to the ethnic media.

On the panel, there sits a guy who is absolutely anti-Conservative. He said the day before yesterday that he has a right to speak freely. Absolutely. We in the Conservative caucus warn their labour union that he is absolutely right that he can speak, but he is not going to sit on an independent panel and decide which media are going to get money. That goes against democracy. That goes against the principles of democracy. It puts all journalists under a cloud. These journalists had better wake up, because they are going to be under a cloud. Can we trust them when they are getting money from the government? Any time anyone else gets money, they oppose that. How can I believe that what these journalists are writing is unbiased? All indications are that the government is using the money it has to buy votes and to buy publicity. It is a slippery road. It is best not to get involved. The whole country has media, so it is easier for the Liberals not to do that.

In my conclusion, let me say clearly that this is an absolute economic disaster by the government.

Bill C-97—Time Allocation Motion

[Mélanie Joly, Liberal, Ahuntsic-Cartierville, QC]

Mr. Speaker, since my colleague mentioned Bill C-69, I will gladly take this opportunity to talk to him about our action plan for the environment.

Canadians know that climate change is real and that we have to be prepared to deal with it and to start engaging in an energy transition. That is why our government introduced a new action plan that includes putting a price on pollution. It is high time that we recognized the polluter pay principle in Canada and, ultimately, ensured that polluters are penalized, because pollution has an impact on society as a whole and on our children.

In the meantime, it goes without saying that putting a price on pollution does not mean that Canadians should end up paying more than polluters. That is why our plan helps put money in the pockets of eight out of 10 families while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot but stand when the government denies it has tabled omnibus bills. What about the 800-clause Bill C-69? This bill was so huge that it should have gone to three committees: the environment and sustainable development committee, the transport committee and the natural resources committee.

Instead, our committee, the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, had to deal with the 800-clause bill. The Liberals cut off the number of witnesses we could hear. I could choose only three of the 600 first nations to testify. The bill would impact almost every one of them.

Then, when the committee went through clause by clause, we had to end the review half way through because there was not enough time to review it as it was so urgent to pass it.

The world will be watching what the government does with Bill C-69, which the Senate has shredded.

I cannot believe that a member on that side would say the government has never tabled an omnibus bill.

Equalization

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, I will convey that to my new spouse.

I am here today to table a petition on behalf of my community. Many people have expressed their extreme displeasure, which I share, with the state of the equalization formula in Canada. Given that the government has tabled punitive legislation against Alberta's energy sector, many people feel the equalization formula is no longer justified in its current state.

The petitioners therefore ask the government to cancel Bill C-69 and to launch a study into the economic impact of the equalization formula.

Natural Resources

[Amarjeet Sohi, Liberal, Minister of Natural Resources]

Mr. Speaker, the purpose of Bill C-69 is to replace a broken system that we inherited from the Harper government. Bill C-69 will allow good projects to move forward. It will allow Canadians to participate in the regulatory process. It will allow us to protect other environments.

We have always said we are open to amendments that will strengthen and improve this legislation and we look forward to the work being done by the senators.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals will not meet the targets and they do not have an environmental plan. They just have a tax plan.

For months, businesses, municipal and provincial governments and indigenous communities have called on the Liberals to kill Bill C-69. The Senate energy committee made amendments in consultation with impacted industries, amendments supported by the provinces, to fix the worst of this bill to give some certainty to job creators.

Will the Liberals confirm today that they will accept 100% of those amendments in the House of Commons?

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

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government is opposed to Canadian energy.

The Prime Minister said that he wanted to shut the oil sands down. The Liberals' no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, will be devastating to any future development. They promised to build the Trans Mountain expansion immediately, but there are still no shovels in the ground. Now they are threatening a war on plastics.

Well, half the jobs in my riding of Sarnia—Lambton depend on Canadian energy, pipelines and plastics. Why are the Liberals attacking the hard-working people of Sarnia—Lambton?

Resuming debate

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I also find it a bit rich when we hear the Liberals talking about the opposition delaying bills. I will provide a concrete example.

When the House was debating Bill C-69, our colleague from Edmonton Strathcona, who worked so diligently at committee on that bill, proposed many amendments seeking to bring that environmental review legislation in line with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These amendments were moved at committee only days after the Liberals had voted in favour of Bill C-262.

It is wrong for us to be accused of holding up the legislation. We were doing the hard work of listening to witnesses at committee and bringing forward amendments to make the bill more in line with indigenous rights, for which the government had already signalled its support.

For my friend from New Westminster—Burnaby, that is just another example of where we have tried our best. We listened to those witnesses at committee. Time and again we tried to insert those amendments that were directly attributable to concrete evidence heard at committee only to see it fail both at the committee stage and when the bill was reported to the House.

Could my colleague comment a bit further on our efforts through this 42nd Parliament to improve those bills that have been backed up by solid witness testimony every step of the way?

The Environment

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to our government's motion about climate change, brought forward by the hon. Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Louis.

I applaud the minister for bringing forward the motion. I and my constituents know that climate change and its effect on the environment is the most pressing issue facing our planet, as do the courts of the country. About three weeks ago, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal called it an “existential threat”.

This motion declares, rightfully, that Canada is in a national climate emergency and it should be supported in a non-partisan manner by every member of the chamber.

We know that climate change is real and that it is a product of human activity. We understand the urgency of the situation, an urgency that was underscored by the IPCC report released in October 2018, which prompted an emergency debate in this chamber. We know from that report that we have 11 years to limit a climate change catastrophe. A recent report from officials within the Government of Canada at Environment and Climate Change Canada tells us that Canada is actually warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and I will return to this point later. Therefore, urgent change is needed to limit the risk of extreme weather events, some of which we have already begun to see happen at home and around the world, and the repercussions that follow them.

These repercussions are many. They can range from extreme poverty to an impact on the physical health of Canadians to even the movement of people with respect to fuelling a migrant crisis. The motion before the House is about that. It is about addressing these situations, and this needs to be done as a matter of urgency.

The motion also acknowledges the fact that climate change especially impacts coastal, northern and indigenous communities. These groups are often the first to experience the effects of climate change because of the heavy reliance on the lands they live on in order to sustain themselves. Whether it is the alteration of animal migration routes, the dwindling numbers of certain species of animals in provinces like B.C., Alberta and the territories, such as moose or caribou, or the degradation of habitat in coastal communities leading to marine ecosystems disappearing, these communities on the front line of climate change feel the brunt of its devastating effects.

Since 2015, our government has consistently invested in measures that will shore up protections against climate change. We have invested $500 million in the Canada nature fund, which is available to the provinces, territories, not-for-profits, corporate and other partners, that allow us to secure private lands, support environmental species protection efforts and help build indigenous capacity to conserve land and species.

We have invested $1.5 billion in the oceans protections plan, the largest of its kind in the world, helping to restore marine ecosystems and creating innovative cleanup methods. As well, we have made a $1.4 billion investment in the low carbon economy leadership fund which will support clean growth and reduce greenhouse gases.

We are putting this money on the table and co-operating with provinces that want to co-operate. We have made that funding available to municipalities, universities, schools, hospitals and organizations even where provincial governments do not want to co-operate with the low carbon economy leadership fund initiative. I am speaking specifically about the province I represent in the chamber. The government of Doug Ford has clearly stepped out of the battle against climate change, which I will address later on in my comments.

In last year's budget, we also invested $1.3 billion for land conservation, the largest such investment in Canadian history, which will more than double the amount of protected areas in the country.

There are $20 million to support a pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change.

Also, Bill C-69 is geared at addressing the environmental assessment system and ensuring that consultation with indigenous communities is at the forefront, as well as protecting our marine species and waterways when we are considering energy projects.

However, members on this side of the aisle are under no illusions, and I will be crystal clear on this. We know that despite the initiatives I have mentioned, despite the real progress we have made, there is still much more to be done to ensure a cleaner future for our children and our grandchildren. The motion recognizes this.

The motion talks about working harder to meet the emission targets under the Paris climate agreement. It also talks about making even deeper reductions in line with the effort to keep global warming below 1.5° C. I have heard about this in my riding, in Toronto, in Ontario and throughout the country in the travel I have undertaken for my parliamentary duties.

I have heard it in my riding from entities such as Green 13 and the Greenest City. I have heard that from significant stakeholders like environmental defence and the leadership of Keith Brooks. I have heard that from people like Catherine Abreu at Climate Action Network. They are saying that the writing is on the wall and we need more ambition. This motion addresses the need for more ambition.

The single most important step is the economic step that was raised in the previous contribution to this debate about putting a price on pollution. Therefore, let me say a few things about the price on pollution.

First, this was initiated by Stéphane Dion when he was the leader of the Liberal Party back in 2008. Then it was vilified as a green shift and a completely abhorrent policy by then leader Stephen Harper. That was inaccurate then and it remains inaccurate now. Unfortunately, the vilification continues with inaccuracies, untruths and outright falsehoods being propagated about this policy. Let us list them, because they are numerous.

First, we are working on a policy that came into place in January against businesses. The plan does include businesses. This is falsehood number one which has been perpetrated by the side opposite.

Second, it is a very basic concept that pollution should not be free. When it is free, we have more of it. When it is not free, we have less of it. The logic is that simple. Basically, elementary kids understand it. They are the kids who are leaving schools on Fridays for Future because they are trying to convince adults, some of whom are in this chamber, about that very simple logic.

Another important aspect is that it has somehow been labelled as a tax. I am trying not to be a constitutional lawyer about this, but allow me one point here. A tax is something collected that goes to general revenue. It is money collected through something like a GST that can be spent on streetcars in Toronto or bridges in Halifax. It is spent as the government of the day sees fit.

A regulatory charge is revenue neutral. One collects money, attributes it and spends all of it on one particular program. That is exactly what this is. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal found exactly that. This is a revenue neutral regulatory charge. I am stupefied by the inability of the members opposite to grasp this, because they voted on this issue and it is entrenched in the bill. They did not support it, but hopefully they would have read it.

Fourth is that no one is getting anything back. That is just false on its face. There is something called a climate action rebate incentive that is being returned to people. It is $307 for a family of four in Ontario. It is larger in places that are more rural. In fact, there is even a rural top-up. Money is going back into people's pockets. It is not being taken from them. Eighty per cent of people in the country will be better off because of this process. It is a process that has been shown to work. Where has it been shown to work? Places like British Columbia have had this process in place for the longest amount of time.

This is one that I absolutely adore, that we do not have the jurisdiction to act. Again, let us take it back to that grade three elementary logic. Air pollution and water pollution traverse provincial borders. Ergo, the national government has jurisdiction to act. That is exactly what we are doing. That is exactly what the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal validated.

What I find most troubling is that underpinning all of this is some sort of skewed logic. When one goes to the climate change conference, which I did in Poland last year, one sees the United Nations literally begging the nation states of the world to take action on what is not just a national problem; it is an international problem. Nevertheless people like Jason Kenney, Scott Moe, Brian Pallister and Doug Ford are saying that the Government of Canada does not have the jurisdiction to act. That is false on its face. It has been shown to be false in law. It is also fallacious logic and it is unbecoming of people in the chamber to perpetuate it.

All of this information is readily available to discerning people. We try not to patronize, but try to elevate the level of debate, not only for the people in the chamber but for Canadians who can grasp these issues.

Some of those Canadians are stakeholders in my riding. I want to outline some of the important advocacy they have done, like Cycle Toronto that advocates for active transport. We have delivered that with more bike share stations. There are people in organizations like Roncy Reduces in my riding. It talks about addressing the need for plastics by curbing the demand for plastics and by encouraging people to take things like Tupperware into stores in Roncesvalles Village so they are not using styrofoam containers. That is leadership and it starts at the grassroots level. It is organizations like Roncy Reduces. It is organizations like Cycle Toronto. Organizations like Green 13, Green Parkdale and the Greenest City are pushing this forward. They are educating me. They are educating other parliamentarians. They are educating all of us, of all ages to get tough with this issue. It is an existential threat. We need to call it an emergency because that is what it is.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand in the House today to talk about this motion. It gives me an opportunity to highlight some of the discrepancies in some of the Liberal policies when it comes to talking about issues and important crises around the world, and certainly in Canada, and to highlight the failures of the Liberals becoming very much apparent when it comes to addressing these crises, instead of just talking about them.

As we discuss this motion that was brought forward last week, and then talk about the amendments put forward by my colleague, the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, it really highlights some of the differences we are trying to put forward. When I talk to Canadians, and certainly constituents in my riding of Foothills, they understand that climate change is an issue. It is something that we all agree we need to do our best to address. However, we also need to look at this as a global problem and not put the onus only on Canadians. The solution certainly is not just simply taxing Canadians, that is, coming up with a tax solution rather than an environmental and climate solution.

The amendment put forward by my colleague from Abbotsford and seconded by my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill reads:

the House recognize that:

(a) climate change is a real and urgent global problem requiring real global solutions, and that Canada can and must take a leadership role in developing those global solutions;

It is very important to recognize that this is a global issue, and we must look at it in that context. The amendment continues:

(b) human activity has an impact on climate change, and its effects impact communities across the country and the world;

(c) Canada and the world must take urgent action to mitigate global climate change and combat its impacts on the environment;

(d) the government’s own “Clean Canada” report shows the government is falling short of the Paris targets by 79 million tonnes;

and, therefore, as an alternative to its current proposal to tackle climate change involving a non-binding declaration, the House call upon the government to produce a real climate change plan that will enable Canada to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions according to the targets of the Paris agreement.

Something I really want to focus on in my intervention today is the difference between talking about something and taking definitive action to resolve a problem. What we see in this motion brought forward by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, once again, is nothing more than an empty gesture and more rhetoric by the Liberal government, which is very good at window dressing, virtue signalling and talking about the problem but very ineffective and falling short when it comes to governing and doing the heavy lifting needed to try to resolve these issues.

When we look at this motion, we see that the Liberal government is defying logic when it says that imposing a carbon tax on Canadians will somehow resolve our GHG and global emissions problems. I have brought this up many times as I have heard the rhetoric of my Liberal colleagues become more and more heated over the last couple of months. I think that was highlighted by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change when she said that if she stuck to her talking points and said it loudly enough, people would really buy this.

We keep hearing about climate change and forest fires, floods and these types of things. I grew up in the community of High River, which had a devastating flood in 2013. However, that community has had many floods over my lifetime, as well as floods that go back generations. I find it a bit disingenuous to go back to my constituents and tell them that if they just pay a carbon tax, they will never have to worry about flooding again. That is a bit of a reach and far-fetched, but it is exactly the argument the Liberal government is putting forward. The government is saying that if people pay a carbon tax, they will somehow get the money back, which I do not think any Canadian believes, and that they are never going to have any of these natural weather phenomena. I do not think that is a fair argument.

The government is trying to sell Canadians a bill of goods. We have talked about these issues for quite some time. The government has to start being honest and doing the heavy lifting when it comes to addressing our environmental goals.

Instead of the government imposing a carbon tax on Canadians, why do we not go out of our way to embrace the technological advancements and innovation that we have across Canada and create new technologies and innovation that will help the Canadian economy while also addressing environmental goals not just here in Canada but around the world? This is something we absolutely have to do.

As we have seen over the last several weeks through polling and Canadians talking about this, they are sick and tired of the political posturing. They do not want to hear the rhetoric of impending doom. They want to talk about real solutions and real ideas when it comes to addressing climate change and measurable reductions in our emissions.

This motion highlights the Liberal approach to just about anything when it comes to government. When a crisis arises, the Liberal response is always to tax it or talk about it, but not actually to do anything about it. They want to make sure they get a photo op. They want to make sure they get out in the community and fill one sandbag and carry on, but not do anything to address the situation.

Another great example this week, which also came up in question period, is the sudden issue of obesity. What is the solution? The Liberal solution is a sugary drink tax. Whenever there seems to be a problem, the Liberal government, for whatever reason, thinks the solution is to tax it and the problem will go away. A carbon tax. A sugary drink tax. A mortgage tax, which is supposed to address the housing crisis. It just seems to be an ongoing broken record that does not resolve the problem. The Liberals have to get their hands dirty. They have to come up with solutions. They have to come up with ideas.

There is no question about that if we compare it with a couple of other issues that we have seen in the energy sector and agriculture. I want to compare the Liberal response to these issues.

When the Liberal government feels there is an issue with climate change, it puts out this flowery motion. But when there is an issue in our energy sector, what has it done? Can anyone give me an example of a definitive action the government has taken to try to resolve this? Almost 200,000 people have lost their jobs in the energy sector, and I do not recall the Liberal government putting forward a motion saying it is a national emergency. When $80 billion in capital investment leaves Canada to go to other jurisdictions, I do not recall a motion calling it a national emergency, let alone the government taking any action to address the issue.

I toured some facilities last week, including a lodge of the Building Trades of Alberta, which cover boilermakers and pipefitters as well. Seventy per cent of its members are out of work. I do not recall that being a national crisis, but it is, and we need to have definitive action to address it, action such as the Leader of the Opposition has talked about, a national energy corridor. This would be a definitive solution toward addressing what is a national emergency. Embracing our energy sector would very likely address the issue we are talking about today, our environment and our global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of putting up every obstacle possible, like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 do, blocking the development and export of Canadian energy or talking about phasing out Canada's natural resource sector, just imagine we were exporting our innovation and our technology as well as our natural resources that are developed under the highest standards of environmental and human rights in the entire world. Imagine we were exporting those initiatives to countries around the world that are not developing their resources to the same Canadian standard. We would be addressing our global GHG emission targets while at the same time creating good quality middle-class jobs right here in Canada.

The world needs more Canada. The world needs more Canadian energy. The world needs more of the innovation and technology that is developed right here in this country, such as in situ mining, horizontal drilling, carbon capture and storage. These are incredible technologies and innovations that have been developed right here in Canada and that we could be exporting and sharing with other countries around the world, allowing us to definitively meet the targets and the goals that we have set for ourselves when it comes to our global emissions.

The current government is doing none of those things. It is listening to a very small group of environmental activists and foreign actors and doing everything it can to try to shut down our energy sector. If we really looked at it, that sector is likely one of the main potential solutions to addressing the problem this motion is allegedly talking about. Imagine if we were able to develop an energy corridor that would make Canada energy self-sufficient by 2030 and displace the foreign oil that is being shipped thousands of miles to Canada from other countries like Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. We could develop our own resources right here at home with world-class standards, and cut our reliance on those other sources. That would address our global GHG emission targets.

Another example we talked about is our canola crisis. I would say that our producers in western Canada, in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, are certainly facing a crisis. What is the Liberal solution to this crisis? The Liberals are keeping their heads down and hoping it will resolve itself. We asked the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of International Trade and the Minister of Foreign Affairs to take some very strong action to try to address this with our colleagues from China. Thus far, there has been nothing.

The one initiative the Liberals tried was the advance payments program. Late last week, when approached by producers who said they had filled out the applications and put the paperwork in but could not get the funds, the response from the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food was that it could be several months before those payments are rolled out the door. Several months? Our farmers are having to pay their input costs right now. When they harvest in the fall, they are going to have a significant amount of canola, 27 million tonnes, with nowhere to go. They do not have storage. Many producers I have spoken with were going to use that advance payments program as an opportunity to buy additional storage bins. Now they cannot even do that. Once again, we asked the minister for another solution, such as filing a complaint with the WTO against China regarding canola. The response was that the government does not think now is the right time. When is the right time? Is it when our farmers are bankrupt and insolvent, or when they harvest in the fall and have nowhere to put their canola because they have not been able to sell last year's crop?

Once again, this goes to show that when there is a real crisis, the Liberal solution to everything is to talk about it, get that photo op and bring forward a motion in the House. The Liberals had three and a half years to try to do something about the environment and our emissions. Clearly, they have not done anything. They are going to miss their own Paris targets by 79 million tonnes. However, at the very last minute they are going to try to do something. It has been the same with our energy sector, and certainly when it comes to agriculture. How can we compare the two? On the canola issue, we are talking about 43,000 producers and 120,000 jobs across Canada relying on that industry. Not addressing the canola issue has expanded the problem. Now, 95% of our soybeans that were previously exported to China are no longer being exported to China, which is one of our critical markets. We have two pork processors that have had their export permits revoked. Certainly, we have to wonder what is next. Is it going to be B.C. fruit, beef or seafood? What is the next target?

Our producers are wondering what qualifies as a crisis. We cannot send our canola and soybeans to China. We cannot send our pulses and lentils to India. We cannot send our wheat to Italy. We cannot send our barley to Saudi Arabia. Vietnam is also blocking Canadian commodities. As a producer, that is very thin pickings, yet I have not seen a motion by the Liberal government saying it is an emergency. In fact, Conservative members got up in the House eight times asking for an emergency debate on the canola crisis, and eight times the Liberals said no.

Conservative members of the official opposition have recognized this as a crisis and put forward definitive solutions or potential solutions to try to address this: name an ambassador to China, file a WTO complaint on the canola issue and withdraw the funding of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. These are all things that Liberals have chosen not to do.

We have even asked that the government, at the very least, send a high-level delegation to China to start addressing this issue. Again, the government has not even done that. If we were able to file a WTO challenge, it would ensure that the science question, which the Liberals continue to say this is all about, would be addressed in a formal process. Both parties would be forced to find a mutually agreed-upon solution. During the consultation phase, there would be consultation between the parties, adjudication by different panels, and there would be an implementation of a ruling. We would have this resolved. However, so far, nothing.

When producers are asked, they say they do not want aid; they want trade. Having the advance payment program is a solution to the problem: try to throw some money at it and hopefully it resolves itself. That would allow our producers to go further in debt. However, they will not get out of debt if they do not have a market to sell their product in next fall.

The comment from the ambassador to China last week was that the relationship between Canada and China is at rock bottom; it is frozen. That certainly does not give our producers and constituents any encouragement that this issue will be resolved any time soon.

I know that this is not necessarily talking about climate and environment, but I wanted to highlight the similarities to what we are talking about here, the similarities between the various issues that have come up during the Liberal mandate over the last three and a half years. Whenever there is a crisis or an emergency, their solution is to put something in the window to try to show Canadians they are working to resolve the problem.

However, when it comes to actual governance, to putting forward legislation and making the tough decisions to ensure these issues are resolved, the Liberals have failed. They have failed our energy workers, and they have certainly failed our agriculture producers. They are failing when it comes to our emissions goals and our targets for our environment.

What Canadians are looking for is a definitive solution to these problems. That is exactly what our leader, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, the Leader of the Opposition is going to be offering Canadians. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to be unveiling our own environment policy. It is going to be the most comprehensive environment policy ever tabled by an opposition party in the House of Commons.

I am very proud of the program we are going to be putting forward. We are going to be standing with Canadians, ensuring that we create solid jobs here in Canada, without putting the burden of that on Canadians or small businesses. We are going to ensure that we use our technology and innovation to address the global issue of climate change and emissions.

I hope that the members of this House will take a very hard look at the amendment to this motion that we have put forward, which talks about this issue as a global problem, not one that is on the backs of Canadians. It certainly puts forward definitive actions to try to address and maintain our goals when it comes to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to speak to the government motion that would, among other things, extend the hours we would be sitting in this place until we have completed this Parliament on June 21. It would also take away a lot of the tools we have as the opposition to hold the government to account.

As we listened to some of the answers by the government House leader, it is no surprise that in the dying days of the scandal ridden, promise breaking, tax raising and very severely ethically challenged disaster of a Liberal government, we are seeing Liberals use disrespectful, draconian and bully-like mannerisms to get their agenda accomplished.

It was quite interesting and telling when the government House leader was answering questions and referring to a couple of things. First of all, when I asked her about our opposition day and whether she was going to make those days short, she stood and said to my colleague, the House leader for the NDP, as well as to me, that somehow our behaviour earlier in this Parliament was the reason she was going to punish us with shorter days.

That speaks volumes, and not in a positive way, to the utter lack of respect the Liberals, under the leadership of the Prime Minister and the government House leader, have for the work we do in the opposition. We are not doing anything on this side of the House outside of the rules. We are using the rules, mechanisms and the tools we have to hold the government to account. What is the answer from the government to that? It is going to punish the opposition because it can. It is going to punish the opposition by giving us a very short day and not extend our hours of opposition. That answer was very indicative of the attitude of the Liberal government and the Liberal Party in general to this House of Commons and Parliament.

Secondly, when the government House leader was giving answers about debate, she talked about members of Parliament repeating themselves or speaking about partisan issues. She felt that that was when she should tell her members not to speak quite as long and that they should shut down their comments. Are we now in a new day and age when the Liberal House leader will tell duly elected members of Parliament that they should not use all of their time, and that she is going to shut down the opposition as well because she thinks that what we are saying is not relevant and that we are repeating ourselves?

When the Prime Minister appointed the House leader to her position three years ago, a lot of us had concerns because she was a very newly elected MP. She had not been in the House as a backbencher or sat on committees. She had been in her role for I think 70 days or so. She has really done a commendable job in that time with the hand she has been dealt. However, I do believe that with her comments that I mentioned, it is clear that is the message she is getting from the top. That is what she is hearing from the Prime Minister and the people at the top who direct her. She has been told by them to shut the backbenchers down. If members are talking too much on our side, she is to shut them down, as well as do whatever she can to shut down the opposition.

At the end of the day, the Liberals are in charge and are the bosses, so they are going to tell people what to think and members of Parliament what they can and cannot say. If they are talk too much or for too long, or the Liberals think their remarks are repetitive or partisan, because God forbid, Conservatives act like Conservatives and New Democrats act like NDP, they must be shut down. The Liberals are clearly partisan, but the Liberal belief is that if something does not align with what they think, then it must be dismissed and shut down. We have seen that on a number of occasions.

Sadly, the House leader's comments in the last few minutes regarding opposition days and that she is going to punish us, as well as telling her own members not to speak because it would be repetitive, are absolutely unbelievable and a very sad reflection of what we have seen over the last four years.

Now here we are. We have all returned from another May constituency week to another Liberal motion to extend our sitting hours. I have already acknowledged, and will say for the record, that our previous Conservative government did the same thing in 2013 and 2014.

In the last election year, 2015, however, we did not have to extend our sitting hours, because we managed the House in an efficient, respectful way. Stephen Harper's government had a well-managed parliamentary agenda. His House leader, my former colleague, the very well-respected Peter Van Loan, would often remind the House of the ambition to have a hard-working, orderly and productive Parliament. That is what Canadians enjoyed up until the 2015 election.

Since then, things have changed, and they have changed drastically. That change is where the seeds for today's motion were planted. In came a new Prime Minister in late 2015, heavy on charm and light on substance, as it would turn out. One government, ours, with a track record of delivering, was replaced by a government obsessed with something called “deliverology”. Do members remember those days? I think my colleagues opposite were also kind of interested in what deliverology meant and where it was going to take us.

Deliverology was like a lot of things from the government. There are a lot of buzzwords. No matter how many buzzwords the failed Liberal government has repeated, it has conjured up pretty well zero results.

Let us go through some of those buzzwords, because they really are interesting to reflect on. Let us look at what was presented to Canadians, what was advertised and what was actually delivered, which was not as advertised.

Let us begin with the buzzwords “hope” and “hard work”. I am afraid the Liberals put way too much emphasis on a lot of hope and very little emphasis on hard work.

There were some things they worked hard on. The Liberals worked very hard on mastering government by Instagram and Twitter. They worked hard on posturing and, unfortunately, on dividing Canadians. The Liberals worked hard on finding ways to run endless deficits, to the point where it would take decades for the budget to balance itself, as our Prime Minister said. The Liberals have also worked hard on virtue signalling. In fact, they have that one down to an art form.

What about actual hard work and actual accomplishments here in the House of Commons? So far in this Parliament, 48 government bills, other than routine appropriation bills approving spending, have received royal assent, with 17 more passed by the House. Some of these bills were simply matters initiated by us, the previous Conservative government, such as a number of the bills related to the border. Those were bills we initially brought forward.

There were also free trade agreements, such as with the European Union and the Trans Pacific Partnership, as well as bills on victims' rights in the military justice system. Obviously, we agreed with those bills. We basically brought the government to the one yard line, and it took it across the finish line. The Conservatives know that we did the heavy lifting, but we were in agreement with those bills. Those are among the bills the government passed.

These numbers are also in spite of the government regularly using time allocation and relying on omnibus bills, even though that flies in the face of all the sanctimony the Liberals have thrown our way. Let us remember that. Let us remember that during the 2015 election, the Conservatives were preached at by the then-Liberal candidate, soon to be the Prime Minister, about how Parliament was going to be respected. He was not going to use time allocation. The Liberals would not be using omnibus bills, and they would allow parliamentarians to have their say. Let us remember the sanctimony.

By comparison, when the 41st Parliament drew to a close, a total of 95 government bills, other than appropriation bills, had received royal assent. That was under the Conservative government.

The contrast gets no better for the Liberals when it comes to private members' bills. Since the 2105 election, 20 private members' bills have received royal assent. At the close of the previous Parliament, 41 private members' bills had become law. That is why the previous Conservative government was able to claim that it had posted the strongest legislative results in a generation. No matter how many midnight sittings the Liberals plan, they simply will not be able to match our record.

I think of all the time the Liberal government has wasted. I think back to a year and a half ago when the Liberal government tried to bring forward changes to the Standing Orders. Those changes would have given us a four-day work week, when the rest of Canadians work all week long. The Liberals wanted us to get Fridays off. The Liberals wanted to make changes so that the Prime Minister would not have to come and answer questions in this place.

The Liberals wanted to make a number of massive changes, and they fought tooth and nail for them. Thankfully, between the NDP and the Conservatives, we were able to put a halt to that. With the small tools we had that they had not tried to take away, we were able to stop that.

We have seen, again, the lack of hard work on matters of substance that needed to be completed in the House of Commons on the legislative agenda. It never really happened. That is one buzzword we heard.

Here is another buzzword we were all really interested in. That was “Canada is back”. Do members remember that one? Boy oh boy. That one has not turned out well at all.

Right now, under the present Prime Minister, Canada has probably fewer friends than ever. The Prime Minister has managed to tick off and offend just about every one of our major friends and allies. It has been shameful to watch. We know that we will have our work cut out for us when the Conservatives win government in October. We will once again restore respectful, principles-based foreign policy on the world stage so that countries around the world know that they can respect us. They will know that we are not just lecturing them. We will have a relationship with our trusted allies, and we will build on those relationships.

The Liberals first talked a big game on peacekeeping, then they stalled and dithered. Then, when the rubber had to hit the road, they put forward a token effort, limited in time and scale, yet quite dangerous and misaligned with Canada's national interests.

In the NAFTA talks, the Prime Minister capitulated and failed to get Canada a better deal. Instead of negotiating, the Liberals focused on opportunistic leaks, photo ops and sound bites.

The Liberal leader, in the presence of the Japanese Prime Minister, twice mistook him as a representative of China. Do members remember that? That was only a few weeks ago. I am still shocked by that.

Then there was the strident, knee-jerk virtual signalling tweet sparking a diplomatic standoff with Saudi Arabia, with ramifications in a range of areas, including front-line health care in Canada.

Speaking of social media, the Prime Minister's infamous “Welcome to Canada” tweet sparked a massive, unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings into Canada.

In foreign relations, we were told what wonderful doors would open in China for Canada with the arrival of the new Liberal government. Tell that today to canola farmers. Tell that to our pork farmers. Tell that to any number of Canadian businesses, large or small, trying to do business in China. Tell that to individual Canadians who have been harassed by the Chinese government, denied visas, detained and arrested on political grounds.

Of course, there was the Prime Minister's unforgettable trip to India. It was a seven-day trip with half a day of government meetings. Each outfit was more colourful than the last; each development was more embarrassing than the previous one. The Prime Minister spent tens of thousands of dollars flying in a celebrity chef to cook supper, a celebrity chef who happens to be on his hand-picked Senate selection panel.

However, that was hardly the worst. The Prime Minister invited a convicted attempted murderer to hobnob with him at two receptions, and when that was discovered, the fingers started pointing. Wow. Of all the things that happened in the Liberal government, when we look back at the India trip, it was probably one of the most embarrassing for Canadians, not only because of what their Prime Minister did in India but because of the aftermath and the blame that was levelled. It started with it being a backbencher's fault. The Prime Minister threw one of his own backbenchers under the bus. He does that quite often.

Then it was an Indian government plot, then maybe it was someone else. In the end, Daniel Jean announced his retirement. In no circumstance would the Prime Minister fess up and acknowledge that he had blown it and that his office had blown it with a bad decision and bad judgment.

God forbid that the Prime Minister would actually apologize for something he did. He will apologize for all kinds of things, but there have been so many opportunities, as we have seen in the last four years, when he has done things that are wrong, when he has done things that are unethical and when he has done things that are on the borderline of illegal. That remains to be seen. He has fired people. He has treated people disrespectfully. He has done things that have shocked and appalled us.

The India trip was one of those where the Prime Minister could have stood up and said, “I am sorry. I made a mistake. I have issues with bad judgment. I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. All of you are paying for it, but I am human. I err a lot." He should have said that, but no, he did not. Everyone else got the blame.

Saying “Canada is back” really has not panned out very well, has it? It certainly did not help the Liberals advance their agenda here in Parliament.

Let just try another one on for size. How about “Sunny ways, my friends. Sunny ways”? Do members remember that one?

To start with, I think this is one of the things that has disturbed Canadians across the board, even those who voted for the Prime Minister. There were a lot of people, obviously millions of Canadians, who voted for the Prime Minister, believing him, believing his promises, believing that he was a fresh face who was going to do things differently. One of the things that is so frustrating and disappointing is his lack of ability to really embrace diversity. People may wonder how I can say that, because the Prime Minister always says that diversity is our strength. Just like everything with the Prime Minister, he says one thing with his words, but his actions are completely different.

The Prime Minister has very little tolerance for diversity of thought and different opinions. He wants to embrace diversity when it is easy for him and when it might help him score some political points. However, if an individual dares to disagree with him, that is when his real character seems to be exposed.

One of those items became very clear when illegal border crossers started crossing into Canada. There were a lot of concerns. A lot of Canadians, including in my riding, have been doing a wonderful job helping refugees who are coming into this country who need solace, who need protection and who need to be able to be in a country where they can live, worship and raise their families. Canada is welcoming them. We have so many private sponsors and Canadians across the country who are helping them, but there have been concerns raised about people coming across the border illegally. However, the minute these concerns were expressed, the Prime Minister, Prime Minister “Sunny Ways”, began the reckless name-calling, calling people racist, or, as his minister said, “un-Canadian”. It is un-Canadian if someone dares to ask questions of the government.

We will remember the Canada summer jobs attestation, where if one disagreed with the government on matters of conscience, one would not be allowed to have government funding. So much for diversity, again.

We should have seen this from the very early days and early months of this Parliament, when the Prime Minister almost lost a vote, and certainly lost his temper. Everyone will remember, after his legislation to help his friends at Air Canada squeaked through on the Speaker casting a vote, the Liberals proceeded with the draconian and outrageous Motion No. 6. Does everyone remember Motion No. 6? I think we all remember Motion No. 6, an outrageous and scandalous power play to silence the opposition and sideline critics.

In the midst of the uproar over Motion No. 6, the Prime Minister, as everyone will recall, stormed across the floor of the House, jostled some MPs who were slowing down his day and fiercely elbowed one of my colleagues. It was clear then that this was a prime minister who would have his way when he wanted it. We understood those words just recently with respect to the SNC-Lavalin scandal and how the Prime Minister would ensure he would get his way. We saw this tactic coming, foreshadowed by Motion No. 6.

Then, a year later, the government House leader released the so-called discussion paper, which I alluded to earlier, about standing order changes. It was a naked power grab that her colleagues on the procedure and House affairs committee were keen to rush through.

I also remember the government noting that committees were free to do what they wanted to do. That has become the biggest punchline around this place. Committees are not free to do what they want to do. They are completely directed by the Prime Minister. We saw that at the procedure and House affairs committee regarding the Standing Orders.

This would have eliminated 20% of question periods, would have the Prime Minister show up once a week, would have silenced the opposition at committees and would have created a new time allocation on steroid procedure. Thanks to the efforts of the opposition, the Liberals would back down some six week later on the worst parts of their proposal. That did not represent a very sunny ways type of government.

With respect to name-calling, I want to mention something particularly disturbing. We heard the finance minister call our deputy leader a “neanderthal” because she dared challenge him on some of the policies he was bringing forward. Then the Prime Minister called her an “ambulance chaser”. I think that was during the time when we were asking why in the world Terri-Lynne McClintic was being moved to a healing lodge. At around that time, the Prime Minister called the Conservatives ambulance chasers.

Not only are the Liberals trying to shut us down in what we do in the House of Commons, but they are trying to shut down Canadians through this name-calling. We have been specifically called names by the Prime Minister, again, with no apologies at all. I think the former attorney general has also been victim to the same kind of thing. She has been accused of things, called names, maligned and has not been able to defend herself. She not only has not received an apology from the Prime Minister, but has not been able to defend herself.

This brings to mind somebody else who needs an apology from the Prime Minister. In all honesty, this man more than anybody deserves an apology from the Prime Minister, and it is Vice-Admiral Mark Norman.

All of us on this side are used to these kinds of attacks from the Liberals and the Prime Minister, but not Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who has served his country with such distinction. Before any charges were even brought against him, the Prime Minister was already saying the issue would go before a court. It looked as if the Prime Minister and the PMO tried to bankrupt him. They accused him of things and put him and his family through such an emotional ordeal. I am sure it affected his family's physical health, financial, mental health and reputation. It is absolutely disgusting to see what the Prime Minister and his minions did to Vice-Admiral Mark Norman.

I do not like that the Conservatives were called neanderthals and ambulance chasers and that Canadians were called racists and un-Canadian, but above anyone, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman deserves an apology from the Prime Minister. All of us, including those on this side, need to remind the Prime Minister that before he writes up any more apologies to anybody else, for whatever reason he thinks might do him well politically, he needs to apologize to that man, this honourable Canadian. He needs to show the courage that he should have as a prime minister and apologize to Vice-Admiral Mark Norman.

The actions and this attitude reflected in the Liberals' relationship with Parliament have only served the paralyze the House, not facilitate the passage of an agenda. As I said, so much for sunny ways.

I have given a few examples of all these empty gestures and slogans, but I want to highlight a few of them.

The next one is, “better is always possible”. That was another one from the government. After watching how the Liberal government has approached the criminal justice system, I cannot help but think this. After the Liberals leave office, things will get better for Canadians on a lot of fronts. Better will definitely be possible.

For example, the Prime Minister sees the criminal justice system as a toy. We saw the Prime Minister weigh in and condemn a unanimous jury verdict that he did not like in Saskatchewan. However, that was just small potatoes, as we would learn later.

As I said, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman would be charged with the breach of trust. That was his interference in that case. The charge was not a surprise, of course. The Prime Minister had been musing for months, a year actually, that Mark Norman would end up before the courts. How could he have known that?

He had demanded an investigation into an embarrassing leak that some members in the Liberal cabinet were looking to do the bidding of well-connected friends. The RCMP had clear signals from the very top that something must be done. Therefore, once before the courts, the government denied the vice-admiral access to the material he needed to defend himself. He was not even allowed access to his own emails. Things kept getting worse and worse for the Liberals. Finally, a well-respected MP, the Prime Minister's former chief whip, announced he would testify against the government. Days later, the charges were withdrawn.

I refer back to that case because I want to link it to the SNC-Lavalin affair. Even though a lot has been said, again it very much shows the disrespect of the Prime Minister.

In short, the Prime Minister wanted yet another friendly corporation to enjoy the blessings of its well-groomed Liberal connections. Amendments to the Criminal Code, as members will recall, to let SNC-Lavalin off the hook from a trial for foreign corruption and a ban on government contracts were shoved into a mammoth omnibus budget bill, the very thing Liberals swore off, and whisked through Parliament last spring. However, the Liberals were stumped, even though they got this bill passed. The director of public prosecutions was simply not going to do what the Liberals expected her to do.

Therefore, the Prime Minister set all kinds of pressure from various angles upon the former attorney general to get her to overrule the Public Prosecution Service, but she was not going to do it. She said no to the Prime Minister. How dare she, but she did. She said no not only to the Prime Minister, she told the finance minister that he and his staff needed to back off. She told the Prime Minister, his chief of staff and the clerk of the Privy Council, as we all heard on that tape, to back off, that they were interfering.

However, let us remember that the Prime Minister is used to having his way all the time. Some people who feel they are entitled and have never had to go through a hardship in their life and have a lot of privilege are used to getting their way. Clearly, the Prime Minister is one of those. When the former attorney general stood up to him and stood by her respect for the rule of law in Canada, she stood up to political interference in the criminal justice system. For that, she got fired. Sadly, we have not been able to hear her full story because the Prime Minister has not waived that privilege, but we have seen enough that we can connect the dots. We can see that when she was fired as attorney general and moved to Veterans Affairs, that was the reason why.

Thankfully, courageously, all of this has been exposed. Although we still do not have the full truth of what the Prime Minister has done, again it has shown Canadians that the Prime Minister is not at all as advertised. So much for hope and hard work, so much for sunny ways, so much for diversity, so much for tolerance, all of that is a sham under the Prime Minister.

We do hope the Prime Minister will one day lift the gag order. If he will not, the next prime minister probably will, and I think there will be an opportunity for that to happen. Canadians will hear the truth at one point or another.

What happened? Both the former attorney general and the former president of the Treasury Board stood up to the Prime Minister. and not only did they get fired and resign from their positions, they got kicked out of the Liberal caucus in violation of the Reform Act, again in violation of the law. That is a day in the life of the Prime Minister.

How many laws did he break with respect to conflict of interest and ethics? Four. He is the first Prime Minister in the history of Canada to break those laws. Then he broke the rules and the law regarding the Reform Act.

That entire episode gripped this entire House and paralyzed the government. It was in chaos. I think it had 10 cabinet shuffles in three weeks. The government was in absolute chaos. While there were all kinds of issues going on across the country, the Liberal government and the Prime Minister could only focus on one thing. It lost the clerk of the Privy Council. The principal adviser, Mr. Butts, resigned. It lost a number of cabinet ministers. It was in absolute chaos and shambles. We were gripped with this in the House of Commons as well.

In fact, it is the continuing mismanagement by the government that has brought the need for it to propose government Motion No. 30, which we are debating right now. It is the mismanagement that comes from the very top.

The Prime Minister is so infatuated with his own image and so focused on being a celebrity that he overlooks the substance and hard work of leading a government. That is a very sad reflection of the government and where we are in the country today. This is a prime minister who does not understand that being a prime minister is not a ceremonial role, not something just for a celebrity, but the top job in the country. It is governing not only the people of the country but the budget, the economy and foreign affairs. All of these aspects of a country like Canada should be at the forefront in the mind of the Prime Minister. Instead, he is focused on his celebrity status and getting on the pages of Vanity Fair or Vogue. Perhaps it is GQ, People or TigerBeat, if it is still a magazine. Imagine Donny Osmond and the Prime Minister on the cover of TigerBeat. He is sadly overlooking the substance and hard work of leading a government.

I have been here for almost 11 years and it really has been quite a privilege. I started as a backbencher. Backbenchers are underrated. They do such tremendous work.

I was on a committee for a number of years and learned so much about how committees worked. I was then privileged to chair a committee. That also helped me understand the rules of this place. I chaired a committee during a minority parliament. Even more so, when chairing the committee, I had to ensure I was impartial and applied the rules equally to both sides, the government members as well as the opposition, which at that point was a smaller Liberal opposition, the NDP and the Bloc. It was such a privilege to learn and work with colleagues. Then I was privileged to be a parliamentary secretary. In 2013, a number of years later, I became a minister. I believe that experience really helped me become a good minister, and now the opposition House leader.

Many of us on both sides have worked our way up from being backbench MPs to maybe working on committees and into other offices.

As I watched, I was inspired by the example set by our former prime minister, Stephen Harper, an exact opposite of the current Prime Minister. Stephen Harper knew every file backward and forward. He was not concerned about celebrity status. He wanted to connect with Canadians to know what their concerns were and to govern in a responsible way. He was an example of tireless devotion and hard work on behalf of Canadians.

The current Prime Minister has not helped his case by building a PMO where everything is reportedly bottlenecked through just one or two staff. We are hearing a lot about that. Even current Liberal MPs are very concerned with what is going on in the PMO and how decisions are being made there. As the House leader just confirmed, she tells her backbenchers whether they should shorten or lengthen their speeches.

Another example, and I already mentioned that, is the government House leader's early appointment. As I said, the hon. member for Waterloo had been here 70-some days when she was appointed as the government House leader. I felt that it sent a message. This is with respect to the House leader. She and I work well together. We certainly disagree, and I am certainly not happy that she is giving us more short opposition days, but as I said earlier, I think she has done the best she could with the hand that was dealt to her.

When the Prime Minister appoints as a House leader an individual who has been here only for 75 days, it tells all of us that he really is not very serious about getting things done. Maybe he thinks her position is just a ceremonial role as well. We certainly have seen her have to carry a lot of very difficult answers and non-answers to questions for the government. She has been put in a position where unfortunately she has lost a lot of credibility. While the Prime Minister is sitting there silently or signing autographs, she is having to defend his trip to billionaire island. While he is sitting in question period staring off into space or thinking about things, she is the one who is standing and answering or not answering very difficult questions. It is sad because I feel that the Prime Minister set her up to fail, and it is very disappointing to see that he has done that.

I did give a longer speech about this point previously. It was a speech around the Prime Minister's so-called approach to feminism, which I find to be fake. It is a lot of signalling and not true respect for the equality of women, and for us as women in this place being able to be where we are based on merit, based on our ability and our strength, being able to speak truth to power, being able to stand in this place knowing that we got here absolutely on our merit. When the Prime Minister appoints people just because they are women and then does not even respect them and listen to them, as he did with the former attorney general, we have seen time and time again that his approach to feminism is a lot of words and no action.

I am going back to the power of the PMO. I imagine the House leader has had a lot of struggles with the PMO behind the scenes trying to line up a legislative agenda and trying to get departments to hustle and bring their long-overdue proposals to the cabinet table and convert them into bills, and trying to get her colleagues to meet what a coordinated plan requires of them. However, it sounds like she is basically just telling her colleagues what to do.

News flash for them, that is not the way it happens. In the previous government, not only did we pass many private members' bills, but we had more government MPs vote against the government's position. We had more free votes than any other government. It was really quite remarkable.

I would never betray caucus confidentiality, but I will say this. I think this is a departure for the Liberals and it might be a good thing for them to think about when they are the third party again or maybe opposition after the next election, which remains to be seen, but they may want to allow their caucus members to speak their minds freely and not have to set their agenda ahead of time or allow the Prime Minister and his minions to tell them if they can speak. It is wonderful in caucus to be able to stand and not get permission, but be able to speak to the leader freely. He or she listens, and sometimes decisions are changed.

That actually happened in our previous government, and it is wonderful to be able to speak freely in our caucus to each other and to our leader. That would be a nice thing. Maybe those who have served under previous leaders like Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or Michael Ignatieff were able to speak freely, but it does not appear that they are able to do that with the current government.

It is the Prime Minister's way, or they are out. Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more members of Parliament who were Liberals and who, under various circumstances, were disrespected and did not feel welcome anymore in the Liberal caucus. That is very sad to see.

Let us get to the next mess that the Prime Minister has made, and that is in the Senate. It is quite something to see what is happening in the Senate. The Prime Minister has a leader of the government in the Senate whom he tries to disavow. The Prime Minister has, however, done an excellent job appointing ideological fellow travellers to the Senate, though he likes to call them “independent”. At the end of the day, though, when something comes to a vote, the Prime Minister has always been able to count on his so-called independent senators' votes. However, getting there has not always been very pretty. I have to say it is a bit entertaining to watch on this side.

The real litmus test for his so-called independent Senate will be whether it heeds Liberal political imperatives in an election year, follows the spirit of Motion No. 30 and passes all of the Prime Minister's bills in the way that he wants. I guess time will tell.

In the meantime, it means that we have seen a number of Senate amendments to current legislation. Of course, at the end of the day, the Senate has backed down to the government's opinion every single time. It is quite interesting. While there is something generally reassuring about an elected House, even under the thumb of a majority government carrying the day, it has nonetheless meant that the House spends an extra two days or more on every government bill that gets bounced back from the Senate.

It is also a reflection of the government's lack of consultation with Canadians over many of its pieces of legislation. Bill C-69, Bill C-48 and Bill C-71 are all bills where, had the government just taken a little time to listen to Canadians, had it admitted that maybe it made some mistakes and had it made those adjustments, it might not be seeing the problems it is seeing with the current legislation in the Senate. However, that is what the government is getting.

The Prime Minister's mismanagement of the Senate has directly contributed to the mismanagement of the House of Commons, hence the need for government Motion No. 30. Here is the present scene: a scandal-ridden, disastrous Liberal government flailing about in the dying days of this Parliament in a rush to just do something, to get something done, something other than making pot legal. That is about the only thing the government has done, and it has actually done that pretty poorly. The legalization of cannabis is really the only notable accomplishment of the government to date. Even with that, it turned out to be a disaster.

What does the government have left to do, which it is in such a hurry to achieve? The government has horribly failed in meeting any of its lofty commitments to indigenous peoples. Now it is in a panic to rush through Bill C-91 and Bill C-92, the indigenous languages and indigenous family services legislation, so that it can say, “Look, we have done something.”

There is, of course, yet another omnibus budget bill that it is ramming through the House at this moment. The government will no doubt want to see that piece of legislation and all of its provisions to implement another promise-breaking, deficit budget through Parliament. Rumours have also started to fly that the government will seek to implement, before the election, the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement, the new NAFTA, where the Liberals capitulated to the American administration on replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

On the NAFTA negotiations, the Prime Minister wasted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a better deal. However, Conservatives worked hard to get tariffs removed, and we recognize how important free trade with the United States is. We will be voting to ratify the deal in Parliament, but the Liberals cannot take this as a licence to abuse Parliament. We are already well into the 11th hour for this Parliament. I can confidently predict that the House will not be a happy place if the implementation legislation is brought forward at the very last minute and then we are called to rush through the bill with little or no scrutiny to make fundamental changes to the world's most important bilateral economic relationship.

Again, we need the government, at this very late hour, to show some responsibility and let Canadians know, let members know, what it is planning to do with this agreement and with the ratification.

Turning to other priorities the government will seek to advance this spring, we see other economic legislation that is really hurting our economy. The government is the proud owner of a $4.5-billion pipeline, which has not even started to be built. Government members are scrambling to shore up the support of environmental activists, whose votes they heavily courted in 2015 but clearly are losing. Today we are going to be seeing the welcoming of a new member of Parliament from the Green Party. I think when the Liberals talk about an emergency, that is an emergency they are very much seized with, the emergency of their losing their so-called environmentalist vote.

However, there is some legislation that is really problematic, such as Bill C-88, which is a bill that would restrict pipeline and resource development in Canada's north. Bill C-68 would make negative changes to fisheries laws, which would result in economic activity being hampered. Bill C-48, and it is quite interesting to see what is happening in the Senate with that one, is a symbolic gesture; well, it is more than a gesture, as this bill would ban tanker traffic from part of the B.C. coast, which is where many first nations are calling for greater pipeline development and economic opportunity. At the same time, there is no proposed tanker ban on the east coast, where Saudi Arabian and Venezuelan oil is coming to Canada.

Of course, there is Bill C-69, the no-more-pipelines bill, which would absolutely stop any energy infrastructure development in Canada. We have heard from experts, stakeholders, provinces and first nation groups that Bill C-69 is an absolute disaster for this country. We would not have any more pipelines built. They will be built in other countries. Canada will miss this window of opportunity. Again, the government does not seem to understand the consequences of its actions. However, I understand there have been many amendments by the Senate, up to 200 amendments, so it will be interesting to see if those are overturned by the Liberals, who are hoping to regain their environmentalist votes.

In Canada, majority government policies are usually assured of being put into place. Therefore, the shadow cast by these bills has, unfortunately, already done a huge amount of damage in our resource sector and in other parts of our country, putting a chill on investment and development long ahead of these bills becoming law.

Adding to that is the sad, sorry spectacle of the duelling climate emergency motions before the House this month, which is another interesting thing to watch. Before Victoria Day, the New Democrats put forward an opposition day motion declaring a climate emergency, and the Liberals defeated it. Lo and behold, the very next day, the Liberals brought forward their own climate emergency motion, which we debated for just a few hours. Then, the day after, they were on to something else, and the Prime Minister was flying somewhere in his jet. Can members imagine that there is a climate emergency and the Prime Minister gets on his jet and flies away? It is pretty unbelievable. I call that a high-carbon hypocrite.

Here we are this morning, back from our constituency break. Where is the emergency debate? I do not see it. The government's emergency is worrying about what is happening on its left flank, worrying about the senators and worrying about getting legislation through. However, this morning we have this debate, which is something different still. This afternoon, the Liberals are going to squeeze in another two or three hours on their climate emergency, hoping that some of their environmentalists are listening and they can fool them into thinking they care about the environment, when in fact the only plan the Liberals have for the environment is a tax plan. Who knows? The motion goes back into the parliamentary ether under the who-knows-when category.

I think this is just a political emergency. As I mentioned, the Green Party won a by-election on Vancouver Island, with the Liberal candidate running fourth, which is really quite something. I think the Liberals are very worried. They have to be worried about what is going on in B.C. The Prime Minister, as I said, scrambled and stuck something in the window to look like he was doing something. It is sort of fun to watch them do this.

I know what the Liberals are going to do. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change actually mentioned it on the weekend. Their approach, according to the minister, is that if they stand in the House and say it loud enough, as well as yell it in question period, Canadians will just believe it. Now we know why the Prime Minister and that minister stand and yell. It is sad to say, but they believe that if they say it loud enough and yell it enough times in this place that Canadians will believe it. That is horrible. It is cynical, disrespectful and shameful. I certainly hope that maybe at their next caucus meeting, some of those Liberals will have the courage to speak up to their boss, the Prime Minister, and maybe a few of their ministers, and tell them that it is about time they respect this place and respect Canadians.

Here we are debating government Motion No. 30, because the Liberals claim they are working hard to pass legislation. Then we will turn to a virtue signalling motion that will not change one law or do one thing. It is really interesting to see what the Liberal government is doing.

Let us go back to Motion No. 30. Those were my opening remarks, and now I am getting into the real substance of my speech. I appreciate the encouragement. Motion No. 30 before us today calls us to sit until midnight on four days a week, as well as for most votes to take place after question period. These are understandable. We were in government and understand it, but we did not have to do it in 2015. We were able to manage things so efficiently under Peter Van Loan and Stephen Harper that we did not extend into night sittings in the summer of 2015. However, for all the reasons I have pointed out, the Liberals had to.

Some of these measures can be understood by us, as Conservatives, as they are things we have asked the House to do. There is one addition to the motion that is truly a nice one, and I am going to compliment the government on it. There is a provision in this motion to have a couple of evenings that are dedicated to statements by retiring members from all sides. We will have the opportunity to set aside partisanship for a short period of time to hear the farewell speeches by our departing colleagues. That is something we do not always get to enjoy when we have one-off statements made in the midst of one political battle or another. I am really glad to see that provision. There are members on every side of the House who are retiring and not running again for various reasons. In the last Parliament, we set aside a couple of evenings for those members, who could invite their families, friends and staff members. It is a really good thing and I am grateful. I thank the government for putting that provision into this motion.

However, the motion is not perfect. This is where I am going to discuss the parts of the motion that we do not like and believe are a greedy approach on behalf of the Liberals. I have already talked about 2017 and 2018 when the government motion proposed reducing opposition days to opposition half days. We objected then, and we object again.

This year's motion is very aggressive in some other ways also. The rules normally require report stage votes and third reading debate to occur on separate days. Under government Motion No. 30, that waiting period would be eliminated. Again, this is another way that the government can rush through legislation.

With regard to the way that the previous motion on extended hours worked, there was a one-day delay between a vote on the previous question and a vote on the main motion. That would be eliminated under government Motion No. 30. In previous years, all dilatory motions were banned after 6:30 p.m., but now ministers would be allowed to propose them. The government wants us to sit late every night, yet wants to keep for itself the power to send us home early.

On the last opposition day in each supply period, we vote on the estimates. That is when we go through the government spending plan line by line and approve the items. Unfortunately for the current government, these have often fallen at times when the government was being particularly arrogant, like in March when the Liberals were insisting on preventing the members for Vancouver Granville and Markham—Stouffville from speaking. Therefore, we did have to hold the government's feet to the fire and we triggered marathon voting, which is one of the very few devices left for us to make our disagreements felt.

Now, government Motion No. 30 would create a backdoor procedural trick to group and apply these votes. That is in an effort to spare the Liberals from standing and voting for their spending proposals, and that is if a voting marathon even happens this spring. Again, this is one of the small tools we have to hold the government to account and draw attention to what the government is doing. The Liberals have taken that away as well. It is shameful. The takeaway from this is that while the Liberals are setting long hours, they want to make light work. Again, it is a lot of hope but very little hard work.

There is also one small curious difference between this motion and those from the previous years. Normally, when a concurrence debate is interrupted, the government has 10 sitting days to reschedule the conclusion of that debate. Under past motions for extended hours, whether Liberal or Conservative, that 10 days has been increased to 20 days to avoid further extending some House sittings from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. Instead, the government motion proposes 31 sitting sitting days, not 20. It is an interesting little change, nuance, in this motion. Since there are only 20 scheduled sittings days left, that tells me one thing: The Liberal government now recognizes it has mismanaged its agenda so badly that it could be preparing for the House to have a summer sitting. I am wondering if all the Liberal members were aware of that little nugget. Again, it is going to be a matter of our watching this space to see what happens.

Finally, something that is not in the motion also has us concerned. That is the prospect of amendments to the Standing Orders getting rammed through this spring under the cover of midnight sittings. On one hand, there is a private member's motion, Motion No. 231, sponsored by the member for Pierrefonds—Dollard. It did not come through this morning, but many of us have had a chance to look at that private member's motion and have to wonder if it is not under the direction or the support of the Liberals. The Liberal government did—

The Environment

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, for those who are watching, today we are talking about how to ostensibly address the issue of climate change. At least that is what the Liberal government would have people watching believe. Unfortunately, the motion before the House of Commons that we are debating today does not talk about the economy and has absolutely no action in it whatsoever. More than anything, this gives the House an excellent opportunity to discuss the Liberal government's failures in the last three and a half years on both climate change and the economy. By quantitative metrics, the government has failed on both issues. That is what I want to lay out today. I also want to lay it out in the context of the amendment the Conservative Party has presented on this motion.

I want to start by reading an article from the National Post from August 9, 2016. The title is “Serious questions about GHG policy”, and the subheading is, “Those championing a carbon tax are positioning it as a silver bullet. But the fact remains that there are legitimate questions to be raised about Canada's approach to reducing greenhouse gases.” The article is from 2016, so the carbon tax was not fully implemented yet. It reads:

[The] Liberal government is developing a framework to implement a national price on carbon. Those championing this policy instrument are positioning it as a silver bullet. They offer a delicious premise: a carbon tax won’t cause any pain, while immediately reducing GHG emissions in Canada. But the fact remains that there are legitimate questions to be raised about Canada’s approach to reducing greenhouse gases.

First, Canadians have a right to know how much emissions the government wants to cut, on what timeline it plans to do it and why?

Why did it set those targets? What is it going to do on the issue of climate change?

The article continues:

What are the opportunity costs of us setting that target? It’s difficult to measure if a policy is working...if we don’t know what we hope for it to achieve. To date, the political exercise of setting emissions targets in Canada has mostly been about “my arbitrary target is bigger than yours,” rather than discussing what is achievable under different scenarios.

And what about other countries? Canada has a relatively low overall GHG-emissions profile. Even if we impose one of the most restrictive GHG-reduction frameworks in the world, what can we do to make major emitters like Brazil, India, China and the United States reduce their GHG profiles? What happens if we implement a framework that makes our industries less competitive than those located in developing countries? What evidence do we have that a given policy proposal will work? Have the billions of dollars that Canada has spent on global mitigation and adaption efforts made any impact? It will take more than just domestic policy to influence change.

In terms of putting a national price on carbon, we need to know whether that’s the best policy option to reduce GHG emissions.... At what price does demand for gasoline, heating fuel and other carbon products actually decrease in Canada, by how much and over what time period? What impact will it have on Canadian workers and lower-income Canadians? Will one region of the country be affected more than others?

Where would all of your carbon tax dollars go? Will revenue from this tax go into general government coffers to offset large operational spending deficits, will it be used to offset the economic impact of the tax or will it fund the development of new technologies? How would this process be managed and how much will it cost to manage?

Recent reports show that regulations on specific high-emission sectors, such as vehicles and the coal-fired electricity sector, have caused GHG emissions to grow at a slower rate. More importantly, this happened while the Canadian economy was growing.

Of course, that reference is to a policy that happened under the former Conservative government.

The article goes on:

The decoupling of economic growth in Canada’s natural resource intensive economy from GHG emissions growth is positive progress.

Any national GHG reduction policy framework should set achievable targets. It should be able to be transparently costed and measured. It should simultaneously reduce GHG emissions, protect the job security of Canadian workers and protect lower-income Canadians. If a proposed GHG policy fails to show that it can reduce GHG emissions, or if it will have a detrimental effect on the economy, we should reject it.

This likely means that presenting...[an idea that a carbon tax is]...a painless, standalone cure-all is a fallacy in the cold, natural resource-[driven]...economy that is Canada. Our GHG policy will likely need to consider phased-in, sector-[by-sector]...regulations (the current federal government isn’t talking about repealing regulations put in place by the previous government), developing and adopting new, more efficient technologies and other approaches.

The article talks about the carbon tax and asking Canadians to “make a financial sacrifice, and Canadians should have a say on whether or not they want to make it.” We are seeing that happen with the provinces right now.

The article continues:

The cost of GHG policy shouldn’t be hidden in bafflegab line items on their electricity bills, in order to avoid political scrutiny. Similarly, we should hold proponents of these policies to account for their GHG emission...targets, regardless of their political stripe....

this requires a non-dogmatic conversation about this issue. That, however, will take megatonnes of effort by all of us.

It is a pretty good article. Do members know who that was written by in 2016? It was written by me. This was in the National Post three years ago, and the government has done nothing on any of these questions.

Day after day, we sat in the House of Commons and asked the Liberals how much they were going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by. How much tax would the residents of High River have to pay to not flood again? What are the price elasticity assumptions of their carbon tax? None of these things have been answered. Every day they complain about what the Conservatives are doing. We have been asking these questions for three years, after the Conservatives presented a track record of reducing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions while seeing the economy grow. What we have seen under the current Liberal government is the opposite. If anything, greenhouse gas emissions are rising, because the Liberals have not put forward a plan that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They have just put forward a tax plan.

What have we seen? My riding is out of work. That is because the current government is not using a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It knows that it will not do anything. All it is doing is taking money out of the pockets of Canadians. That is wrong, because a carbon tax disproportionately affects low-income Canadians. It puts small businesses out of positions where they can hire more people. It is flawed public policy.

In the last three years, something very interesting has happened. Because there are people like me, and others, and yes, I have a degree in economics, economists have started backing off. The most militant pro-carbon-price economists have started backing off. When the Prime Minister first started talking about the carbon tax, he used reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the policy outcome.

Everyone around the world was saying that climate change is a problem. If climate change was not going to be a problem, what did we need to do? We needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I want to read this great quote. I love this quote. It was written on October 1, 2017, once the anger in this country starting mounting against the carbon tax. It is in Alberta Views magazine. It is an excellent article that is well researched. It is titled, “The Carbon Tax: Will it reduce pollution?” The author writes:

For many economists, the price increase is enough. “I don’t think we should actually care too much about what the specific effect on emissions will be,” says Trevor Tombe, assistant professor of economics at the University of Calgary.

I thought the whole point was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Do members notice the shift in dogmatic language? It went from, “We are going to reduce gas emissions” to “We have to somehow cover up and change the language, because we are stealing from people, and it is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Now, when the high priestess of the climate change cocktail circuit gets up here in the House and talks about a price on pollution, it is not a price on pollution. If the carbon tax is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, why are major emitters exempt from it?

She stood up in the House of Commons and said that all of these major oil and gas companies were standing behind Premier Rachel Notley and championing the carbon tax and saying that at $40 a ton it was great, it was wonderful. Of course those companies were standing there; they had already priced that into their production models. They did not have to do anything to reduce their greenhouse gas emission profile.

All that did was price the junior oil and gas companies out of competitiveness. These were companies that had profit margins that would not allow them to operate when that price was coming on top of Bill C-69 and Bill C-42, which had punitive detrimental impacts on investment in those companies. All it did was price them out of the market. Bigger companies could come in and consolidate the assets, and that is the only way there has been any profit growth in the energy sector.

Then fast-forward to today, and where are all those big companies? They are saying, “Bye. See you later.” Why would they possibly invest in a country where the government fails, day after day, to provide any sort of stability in the regulatory sector? Bill C-69 does not have any positive impact on the environment, except in the opinion of far-left activists who do not think we should have an energy sector. Why? It is because the only environmental outcome they want is no development in the energy sector. Bill C-69 and Bill C-42 make the regulatory process so uncertain that we cannot attract investment in Canada.

It is even worse when we look at this problem from a climate change perspective. Let us say we lose that investment to other countries. What happens? Does global demand for carbon decrease? No, we have seen global demand for carbon increase, and somebody is going to be supplying that demand.

When the Minister of Environment and the Prime Minister price Canadian energy out of competitiveness and those contracts go to the United States, which has no carbon tax and less regulation, or to Saudi Arabia, the bastion of environmental standards and women's equality, and those jobs and those products go to those countries and that demand is met by those countries, we are actually perpetuating the problem of climate change, because that energy production is not happening in a country where we already have some of the strictest environmental standards in the world.

There is no plan in this proposal. If the government were serious about addressing climate change, it could have read through every single one of the questions that I outlined in 2006. We do care about climate change, but if we are going to be serious about it, we cannot put forward policy that has no measurable outcome, outside of loss of jobs.

Let us talk about displacing the climate change burden.

It is such a bourgeois, champagne-Liberal philosophy to say, “I can afford a carbon tax, because I have my Bentley and my Grey Poupon and my trips to the Aga Khan island. It is great for me. I will just charge my grocery bill at the Whole Foods Market to the taxpayer here.” That is great for that person, the Prime Minister of Canada, but it is not great for somebody who is being punished.

Let us say it is a steelworker in Canada, someone who cares about climate change and cares about having a job. The government allows the Chinese to come in and dump steel, while our manufacturers are subject to a carbon tax that the Chinese are not subject to. Our steel is not competitive, so we lose jobs in that sector while we are benefiting an economy that has no rules on carbon emissions.

That is really the nub of the climate change issue. I have been to some of these meetings around the world, and nobody there actually cares about having the tough conversation. If someone reaches into their purse and pulls out a phone that was tariff-free from a country that has coal-fired electricity, has very bad labour laws and is able to produce that phone cheaply because of a lack of a carbon tax, that is where we are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. However, nobody wants to have that conversation, because it is the tough conversation. This is why the Kyoto protocol did not work. It was because there were no binding requirements on emissions.

The Liberal government is going on the climate change cocktail circuit day after day, having pictures taken and sitting around tables covered in grass that cost $50,000 and saying, “I am contributing to the environment with my paper straw.” That is not changing outcomes.

The government has had three and a half years to do the same hard work that we started. Kyoto did not work and the United States and China have to step up to the table, but those conversations do not happen under the Liberals. We know that. We know it because we see it with the rest of their trade policies.

Now, of course we have to take action here at home. Of course we do. However, Canada is a place where it is cold eight months out of the year. A lot of our country does not have the luxury of being able to access public transit. Those people having trouble accessing it have to drive to work in a lot of places. Even people who are watching from the Greater Toronto Area and are looking at the gas prices in Vancouver may wonder what they are going to do at $1.80 a litre when they have to sit in traffic for an hour and a half. Because of its ineptitude, the government has not even been able to get the money out that the former Conservative government committed to years ago. What is that going to do for me?

The only behaviour that the $1.80-a-litre gas price will change, as we have seen in province after province after province, is voting intention. Nobody is going to support a carbon tax, because the emperor has no clothes. A carbon tax does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions; it kills jobs and it is bad public policy. It is bourgeois public policy. It is elitist public policy. It says that if someone is a low-income mom, it does not matter that she has to fill up her gas tank. It does not matter that someone who works in the energy sector is going to lose his or her job to Oklahoma or Texas or somewhere in the U.S. that has a more competitive regime.

To anybody in Canada who cares about climate change, the government is out to lunch with this motion. I do care about climate change, and that is why I am presenting a viewpoint that is opposite to the virtue-signalling nonsense that the government is putting forth. Pictures in a Climate Crusader costume do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Giving $12 million to a privately funded rich corporation like Loblaws does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare handed out to whatever lobbyists can buy the environment minister the best steak dinner do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is going to take tough policy, like the policy we put in place with the coal-fired electricity sector and passenger vehicles, to reduce that curve over time.

With regard to the oil and gas sector, we cannot put in place a policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector by killing the oil and gas sector. I wish there were people with the political courage to stand up and say that this is the policy objective. Let us have that debate. I will win that debate; they will not.

There is a reason we did not put regulations in place on the oil and gas sector with regard to greenhouse gas emissions. Why? It was because of the Americans. I was there when people thought Barack Obama was the climate change champion. Does anyone really think that Barack Obama was going to put a carbon tax in place when he knew that the major industry in the U.S. was just coming on stream with a supply that was going to change them from a net energy importer to an energy-independent nation? Of course not. Then why would we regulate our industry out of competitiveness when we know that we can produce cleaner energy than they can with our own clean technology?

It is all about smart public policy that sets a sweet spot so that industry is incented to adopt clean technology—which a carbon tax is not going to do—while ensuring that people in my community do not lose their jobs and that we continue to attract foreign direct investment and capital so that there are incentives for adopting that clean technology. That is the type of public policy discussion that we need on climate change.

All that has been happening in the House of Commons this week was that the Liberals and the NDP were out-Liberalling and out-NDPing themselves on virtue-signalling, do-nothing motions in Captain Planet costumes. Anybody who cares about climate change in this country should vote against that and reject that. Anybody in this country who cares about jobs and the economy should ensure that the Leader of the Opposition becomes the prime minister of this country.

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you.

There was a question around intervenor funding. To clarify, in the north, in particular for the three territories, there is a separate program. It's a $10-million program over five years that allows for indigenous governments to have intervenor status in all environmental nature projects.

Because this bill was primarily in the north, whereas Bill C-69 is all across Canada, it allows for a different clause. I wanted to point that out. There's no reason to think that funding is not going to be there for the long term. That's the intention of it.

My next question, if there is time, is with regard to the changes to the resource development act. I live in a province where co-management of oil and gas has allowed our province to grow. While the moratorium might be seen by some as an impediment to development, what we've been able to accomplish because of taking the time to do it right, I see as being a true asset.

I would ask Premier McLeod if he could speak to the process that they're engaged in with the federal government to ensure that the Northwest Territories gets the appropriate royalties on resource development through oil and gas.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

In Bill C-69, there's intervenor funding included, but in Bill C-88, there is not.