Madam Speaker, about a year and a half ago, the Liberal government told Canadians that Bill C-5 would fundamentally change the way major projects were approved and built in this country. Canada was going to build “at speeds not seen in generations”. We Conservatives allowed Bill C-5 to go through because we thought that the grandiose promises we were hearing would improve things even a bit. We were wrong, because the only thing of any importance that has been produced has been a cloud of MOUs and bucketloads of promises.
Eighteen months later, here we are again discussing another bill promising to do the same thing. What exactly has changed? There are a couple of projects that Bill C-5 was supposed to speed up. The Pacific link oil pipeline has not been built. The LNG Canada phase two expansion has not been done. The Coastal GasLink phase two construction has not even started.
Then I looked up projects around the world that had been finished in 18 months, and not just the building portion, but all the way from planning to completion. First of all, there was the Space Needle in 1962. There was also the Empire State Building in 1930, the Pentagon in 1941, the Alaska Highway in 1942, Tesla's gigafactory in Shanghai in 2019, and the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. Even the Eiffel Tower took less than two years from planning to completion. Why did these projects get built? It was because people actually wanted them to get built. They all shared a hard completion date, and on that date they were complete.
Unlike builders that want things to get built, the Liberal government seems to measure progress by announcements and handouts. By that measure, the Liberals clap themselves on their backs and announce that they stand behind Canadian workers, but Canadian workers and businesses measure progress by construction sites and paycheques. They want a society where people can succeed without depending on government handouts. They would prefer that the Liberal government not stand behind them if it means that the government will have its hand in their wallets.
At some point, loud media announcements have to become construction projects, and so far we have seen very few. Investors can manage even Liberal red tape when the rules are clear and predictable, but it is an impossible minefield with this degree of uncertainty. A company considering a multi-billion-dollar investment needs to know what information will be required, who will make the decision, how the federal and provincial processes will interact, and when the process will actually end. If Canada cannot provide that certainty, investors have other choices. We are competing for capital with jurisdictions around the world, and having enormous resources is not enough if companies will not invest because it will take too long or cost too much to develop projects.
Let us look at the Trans Mountain expansion. It was first proposed in 2012, received federal approval in 2016, had that approval quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal and was finally purchased by the federal government in 2018. The expansion itself did not get rolling until two years ago, in 2024. Until the Liberal government gets serious, projects will spend years navigating regulatory processes and government decisions before Canadians actually see shovels in the ground, if they ever do.
Let us take a look at one false promise. Bill C-39 promises a one-year period once an investor has submitted the required information and studies. This is sheer nonsense. I have been around government bureaucracies long enough to know that the step Liberals are promising in Bill C-39 should take no more than a week because the bottleneck is not there. The bottleneck comes long before that.
Do members remember the phrase “once an investor has submitted the required information and studies”? Those steps, the expensive studies, the arbitrary interpretations by bureaucratic middle managers in government, the lost reports, the forgotten files and the endless red tape are where the bottleneck is, long before the final step comes. That collection of documents, reports and permissions can take years and millions of dollars for any large project, and in a climate of grudging and self-sabotaging “hurry up and wait”, it is not looking promising.
In this political climate of overpromising and underdelivering, if the project ever does start, it will be in spite of the government, because so far, the speeds not seen in generations, the speeds promised by the Liberal government, have turned out to be speeds so slow that they have not been seen since the last ice age. Here we are again, lighting the fuse to a promised Liberal rocket ship of economic activity a year after the last one sputtered out in an ashtray.
I want to be optimistic. I want to think that this time, in spite of all the very real drawbacks, in spite of history and in spite of common sense, Bill C-39 will magically succeed where Bill C-5 failed so dismally, but it is a faint hope.
I want to give an analogy. We have a drought back home in my riding. One proposed solution is to raise the local dam by two metres to retain the freshet in the spring so the supply lasts all summer. The regional district argued that since no water has spilled over the top of the existing dam for the last couple of years, raising it will not actually help. On the face of it, this is reasonable logic. If the water does not even come up to the top of the existing dam, what is the point of raising the dam even higher?
That common sense leads me to ask, if the Building Canada Act, which gave the Liberal cabinet almost unprecedented power, did not manage to build anything, why should Canadians think for a minute that giving the Prime Minister's Office even more power with the building Canada strong act would work any better? Is this really about getting Canada working, or is it more about gathering power in the Prime Minister's Office?
Here is the thing. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Harper government introduced measures intended to do much the same thing, with the stated objective of shortening approval times for major projects. That proposal was much less hyped than Bill C-39 and much more effective. Back then, when Canada faced another economic crisis, the very idea of speeding things up set Liberal hair on fire. To take just one example, my very esteemed colleague, the Minister of Defence, at that time the Liberal environment critic, described the Conservative government as a “far-right Reform, Republican, Conservative regime...undermining the very environmental assessment that Brian Mulroney brought into this country in 1992”.
Apparently the minister is now not bothered by that prospect and has no concerns whatsoever, nor is any single member of the Liberal caucus concerned about a concentration of economic power or decision-making power almost oligarchic in scope. Does the minister now believe that his own Liberal government is aligned with the far-right Republican government in another country, the very country that his party blames for the dismal economy in Canada?
We have gone from the Building Canada Act to the building Canada strong act. I sincerely hope the second one works better than the first, but if we are back here in another year, debating another bill with “build Canada” in the title, Canadians are going to be disgusted, as they should be. Ultimately the test should be results. Canadians do not need handouts and school lunch programs, and loud announcements cannot replace jobs and the self-respect that comes with providing for a family.
I will approach the legislation with an open mind but also with the skepticism that comes from having heard promises before about accelerating major projects. The government has said it wants Canada to build at speeds not seen in generations. That is an ambitious standard, but ultimately Canadians should not judge this legislation by the number of announcements it kicks off. They should judge by what they can actually see being built, and so far it is not looking good.
