Bill C-5

One Canadian Economy Act

An Act to enact the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act and the Building Canada Act

Part 1 enacts the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act , which establishes a statutory framework to remove federal barriers to the interprovincial trade of goods and services and to improve labour mobility within Canada. In the case of goods and services, that Act provides that a good or service that meets provincial or territorial requirements is considered to meet comparable federal requirements that pertain to the interprovincial movement of the good or provision of the service. In the case of workers, it provides for the recognition of provincial and territorial authorizations to practise occupations and for the issuance of comparable federal authorizations to holders of such provincial and territorial authorizations. It also provides the Governor in Council with the power to make regulations respecting federal barriers to the interprovincial movement of goods and provision of services and to the movement of labour within Canada.
Part 2 enacts the Building Canada Act , which, among other things,
(a) authorizes the Governor in Council to add the name of a project and a brief description of it to a schedule to that Act if the Governor in Council is of the opinion, having regard to certain factors, that the project is in the national interest;
(b) provides that determinations and findings that have to be made and opinions that have to be formed under certain Acts of Parliament and regulations for an authorization to be granted in respect of a project that is named in Schedule 1 to that Act are deemed to have been made or formed, as the case may be, in favour of permitting the project to be carried out in whole or in part;
(c) requires the minister who is designated under that Act to issue to the proponent of a project, if certain conditions are met, a document that sets out conditions that apply in respect of the project and that is deemed to be the authorizations, required under certain Acts of Parliament and regulations, that are specified in the document; and
(d) requires that minister, each year, to cause an independent review to be conducted of the status of each national interest project.

Strong Borders Act

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will start out with a very simple principle that I think all of us would agree with. Certainly, science would agree with it: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Extending grace to those on the other side, I think we all want to get to a point where we have safe, secure borders, borders where we do not have fentanyl flowing, where we do not have the flowing of illegal guns and where we do not have illegal products crossing our borders. I think we would all agree on that.

My question is, why has the government decided to obstruct its own legislation by putting through a number of things that are spurious and really do not have anything to do with the core mission I talked about? We all want to get to the same point. We want to get to a destination where Canada has safe, secure borders.

We know that the men and women at the CBSA work hard every day. However, we also know that, over the last 10 years in this chamber, the Liberals have not given them the tools they need for maximum success. Instead of talking about various issues, why do we not have a laser-focused piece of legislation that focuses on some of the core mandate issues, things we can all agree upon, and pass the legislation? I will talk about why these things are concerns to us.

I will give an example of how we could do this. Bill C-5 is deeply flawed. It is meant to be a band-aid solution for the past 10 years of terrible legislation, such as the cap on oil and gas and Bill C-69. I could go on. It is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for certain projects. We saw that at least it would get some projects done. My team and I worked personally and closely with the minister's team to work with that legislation to make it better. Conservatives passed over 20 different constructive amendments to improve that legislation and ended up voting for it. I do not understand why the Liberals did not adopt the same model for Bill C-2. Instead they decided to digress on a number of strange paths.

I will talk first of all about the ability for the government to obtain documents and important, critical information, such as medical information, from ISP providers, from banks and from other institutions without a warrant. That is dangerous. That is not the type of power the government needs. I agree that the member made an excellent point. As a parent of a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old, I want to make sure, to the fullest extent possible, that my children and all Canadian children are protected from the predators who are out there. I am open to discussions on that, but why not have a narrow piece of legislation that is focused on that? Why not use age verification, as in Bill S-209, which would protect children from some of these predators who are online?

The scope of data that would be available to the government is incredible. I do not think the member for Winnipeg North would have gone on a dating app recently, so this is probably not a concern to him. However, millions of Canadians have. I think they would be shocked to know that a border security bill would give the government the ability to access their Tinder profile.

What a digression that was. Once again, I will get back to my original point. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Why would we not have legislation to put that in place?

Then there are restrictions on cash. As I said, there are definitely areas where cash is misused in our economy. It can be used for crimes, such as extortion, blackmail and drug dealing. If someone can name it, it is used for that on the black market. As legislators, we have to be cognizant of this. We want to protect Canadians from being victims of crime.

Canada is known as a haven for money launderers. There is actually a term for it: snow washing. We need to fight money laundering. My colleague, the member for Simcoe North, put forward a great private member's bill that sought to fight money laundering. However, the government refused to support it and eventually it died on the Order Paper, which is unfortunate.

This is always about a conflict of rights. There are very few cases where one person is right and one person is wrong, so when we are dealing with different rights, we need to act like a surgeon. We cannot just go in with a cannon and blow things up. Why not be surgical about our approach? Instead of putting in these massive restrictions, these dragnets around past transactions, let us be surgical. Let us look at the details. Let us make sure that we are not, for example, as a member stated earlier, accidentally bringing in gurdwaras, temples, mosques, churches and synagogues, where often cash is part of transactions. There are many cultural and social activities that still rely on cash, and to have cash included is not the right idea.

At the end of the day, we can see the ideological divide. Conservatives fundamentally believe in the Canadian public. We believe in Canadians. We want to give them every opportunity to do the right thing. It is not to say that there cannot be some restrictions and there should not be restrictions, but on that side of the aisle, the new government and the old government are the same on this principle. The Liberals believe that more government is better government, that the more intrusion in our lives, the better. They believe that government can do no wrong.

We have seen, over the last decade, that the government can do lots of things wrong. We saw it invoke the Emergencies Act and debank Canadians, and it used such broad powers. I have put on the record before that the use of those provisions was fairly narrow, and very few people were debanked. I want to make that clear because that is the truth and I am here to speak the truth. However, the problem was that the proclamation the Liberals used, the emergency measures proclamation, was broad. These are not my words, but one of the expert witnesses we had before the finance committee said they were so broad that the government could have debanked someone who simply sold a pack of gum to someone who participated in the protest movement. That is not from me. Members can check the finance committee records from a couple of years back.

I am not saying that all government is bad and that government workers are bad. I am saying the opposite, as 99% are great people who do great work 99% of the time. The challenge is that we need oversight over everyone, because humans are innately flawed and will not always do the right thing. That is why we have judicial oversight. It is why we should have carefully crafted legislation that uses a laser target to get at the people we want to get at.

Instead of making a straight line, the government has decided to wander all over various places, from restricting cash transactions to getting warrantless access to the records held by ISPs and banks. This is opening up Canadians to abuse at the hands of perhaps an incompetent or worse government official. We want to make sure there is oversight of the government, such as with a search that requires a warrant.

In conclusion, while the Conservatives will always be the party of law and order and we will always stand for a strong border, we are very confused by this legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is my first opportunity to address the new member for North Island—Powell River.

The Conservatives, who backed the Liberal measures through May and June, seem to have decided that now is the time to draw the line. I am glad it is on Bill C-2, because Bill C-2 should be completely withdrawn and rethought. I would like to ask the hon. member if he thinks the Conservative Party would ever again back a programming motion such as the one used on Bill C-5, which denied us a chance to properly study the bill.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague on his speech. I have a question for him.

I was a bit taken aback during the spring parliamentary session. We were used to the Conservatives being hyper aggressive all the time, raring for a fight, when suddenly they became the muscle for the Liberal government in the context of Bill C‑5. Closure was imposed and we barely had any time to study the bill in committee. Today, all sorts of developments and consequences have come out of adopting Bill C‑5, which has become law.

Can my colleague tell me wether the Conservatives plan a repeat of what they did with Bill C‑5 or are they thinking of following the Bloc Québécois's lead and acting like responsible parliamentarians who properly study bills that fundamentally change our society, before working for the Liberals?

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people from Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola.

The Liberals often talk about the Harper years, and they talk about where we legislated, especially with respect to minimums: drugs, guns, sex offences. The Liberals have legislated on guns; they actually weakened sentences on guns in Bill C-5. They have legislated on drugs. They have not touched sex offences once. They have not touched sex offences.

They have refused to legislate on sex offences, the most pernicious and often the most insidious type of offence, with victims serving psychological life sentences, and now they are going to tell us about how they are dealing with sex offences here and that this bill is a panacea? Give me a break.

What does my hon. colleague think?

Citizenship Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin my remarks by thanking the hon. member who preceded me. It is one thing for a member to say they have championed the bill, Bill C-3, and repairing the rights for lost Canadians, but as a leader of a different party, I want to say that the hon. member for Vancouver East is absolutely right. She has championed this and championed this and not stepped back for one minute. It has not been easy.

We have had various versions of the bill come to us. We had a court decision that made it very clear that our citizenship laws are not charter-compliant. As I have, she has worked with a citizen, Don Chapman, who has championed this, who has brought forward the concerns. He wrote a book on lost Canadians to get people to see what has happened with citizenship, which used to be seen as a right passed down from parent to child. This is not new. I learned this in conflict of laws in law school, as I am sure, Mr. Speaker, you may recall. These kinds of things are not innovative. It is just very strange and disturbing for Canadians when our citizenship laws get contaminated with innovations, and citizenship is not treated as a right. That is one piece that is missing in Bill C-3. Should we have an amendment in Bill C-3 that says citizenship is a right?

However, there have been a lot of partisan jabs across the floor, even in the brief time that we have been debating this since question period. I want to take some of them up, because this is important for Canadians to know. There is another person, not in my party, whom I want to thank and make it really clear to our friends across the way in the Conservative Party. Another champion for the bill, mentioned by my hon. colleague for Vancouver East, is a Conservative, Senator Yonah Martin. She tried really hard to fix the bill. She has Korean ancestry. She has been a champion for the Canadian Korean community in many ways, including for those who suffered through the war. She is a friend of mine too, so I will admit that. Senator Yonah Martin brought this forward as a private member's bill out of the Senate to try to fix this, and as the hon. member for Vancouver East mentioned, there was a non-partisan effort among NDP members, Conservative members, Liberal members, the Bloc and the Greens to get this thing done. We were so close.

When Bill C-71 was tabled for first reading in June 2024, we gathered in the foyer with the former minister of immigration and members of families deeply affected by the unfairness of the way our citizenship laws are currently drafted. We were almost euphoric, and we were grateful to the former minister of immigration, who took this forward, who made the difference to having Bill C-71 brought forward. We were not, as an hon. member mentioned earlier, just propping up Liberals or cheering whenever Liberals did something. Again, this was the ultimate non-partisan effort led by a Conservative senator, supported by an NDP member and supported by all of us on all sides of the House. We thought we had it solved. Unfortunately, 25 bills then died on the Order Paper on January 6.

Now, it would have been nice to see the current government pick up on a suggestion I made in a written communication to the Prime Minister to please recover those bills, especially the ones that had broad, non-partisan support and had gotten this close to the finish line. Regarding the amount of waste, I imagine that millions of hours of work went into those 25 bills, many of them so close, such as Bill C-61 on first nations water sovereignty or Bill C-33 on rail safety and ports.

Let us celebrate this: The deceased Bill C-71 is back as Bill C-3. Let us hope we can have collaboration now. The Liberals here in the House today celebrate the collaboration they had in June; I have to say, that was not collaboration. That was the Greens, the Bloc and the NDP being bulldozed, with a new person driving the bulldozer in our new Prime Minister. I would say it was not just an unpleasant experience; it was an anti-democratic experience that was deeply troubling, and it was a bulldozer driver. It was a new coalition, the Liberals and the Conservatives, driving through a very anti-democratic piece, and the process was particularly anti-democratic. I hope we will not see that again.

I go back to Bill C-3.

If we are going to see this bill pass, and I hope we will see it passed expeditiously, I want to deal with some of the substantive charges that have been made in the House today in debate and put them to rest, I hope forever, so that we can return to our purpose in this place, to restore justice, to act for our constituents and to make sure we do the right thing.

This is not a partisan issue. It is about doing the right thing right now. We have a new bill before us, Bill C‑3. It is almost the same as former Bill C‑71, which died on the Order Paper because of the decision to prorogue Parliament on January 6.

We speak of things dying on the Order Paper; it is nice to see that every now and then we can have a resurrection. We have gotten Bill C-3 back, and it is close. I would love to have proper hearings and make sure that concerns that are being raised are dealt with by experts, with the ability for Canadians to see that we do not pass things with a gun to our head. That was Bill C-5. No committee was in in place when Bill C-5 went to second reading on Monday, June 16. No committee was yet started. On Tuesday, June 17, the committee was put in place at 3:30 in the afternoon. All amendments were due the next day, June 18, by noon, and concerns from groups like the Canadian Cancer Society could not be heard before amendments were due. We were in a hurry.

This place should be about getting things done efficiently, but not being in such a hurry that we do not do our jobs, so let us have a proper committee review of this legislation, which I think would put to bed some concerns, for instance, the idea of costs. There are Canadians who, just through peculiarities of mistakes made in the legislative process, have been denied their citizenship. We can get through this and get the actual numbers through a committee hearing process, but most of these lost Canadians live in Canada. They are not coming here as new people, just off a boat, where we wonder who they are. Most of these people have deep ties to Canada. Most of these people are already paying taxes in Canada and getting their health care in Canada. They have just been denied citizenship through the most egregious set of quite obscure and bizarre mistakes in law.

We can fix those. We can fix them now. We can fix them for good. The remaining question, I suppose, is this: Do we want to add an amendment that says citizenship is a right? Normally, I would not think we would have to say this, but when I look south of the border and hear that Donald Trump would like to take away Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship, I think maybe we ought to be concerned and make sure that we in Canada assert what is internationally understood law, that citizenship rights are rights.

People who are citizens cannot have their right to be a citizen taken away because someone in power has an obscure whim. Never mind. Citizenship should be a right. Under Bill C-3, we would be redressing the mistakes of many years and responding to the requirement of the court that we fix our citizenship laws to be charter-compliant.

With that, I know I still have about 90 seconds on the clock. I just want to make sure I plead with all of my colleagues, regardless of party, to take a step back and look at who the champions of this bill have been: a leading Conservative senator; a leading NDP member in this House; and all of us together, Green, Liberal, Conservative, Bloc and New Democrat, which is still a party in this House, by the way. Members can check the seating chart.

We are here to do the right thing and do it together.

The Environment

[Patrick Bonin, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the major government projects that Bill C‑5 covers. Bill C‑5 takes an inappropriately top-down approach that sullies projects, even good ones.

Good projects do not need to bypass environmental assessments. They do not need to be able to break 12 federal laws. They do not need to spurn social acceptability. If they really need to do all those things, they are not actually good projects.

Will the government promise that all these major projects will abide by environmental assessments, laws and the will of Quebeckers?

[Patrick Bonin, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in just one summer, 10 years of progress on the environment has been wiped out.

The Prime Minister adopted Bill C‑5 to approve projects that disregard legislation and social acceptability. He says he is open to pipelines circumventing environmental assessments. He has not renewed the incentives for purchasing zero-emission vehicles. He even backtracked on the mandatory sales targets for those vehicles. Last week, he went even further, refusing to commit to meeting his greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Will the government meet its own reduction targets for 2030 in the middle of a climate crisis?

Economic Development

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians still pay the price for the lost, anti-development Liberal decade. Six months ago, to get elected, the Prime Minister promised to put shovels in the ground on big projects at unimaginable speeds, but what Canadians got was the same old Liberal bait and switch, photo ops and more bureaucracy, because the PM is just another Liberal.

The Liberals say five projects have made their secret list so far, some already approved and some already being built, but there is not a single pipeline to create Canadian jobs with Canadian steel and pay for programs that all Canadians want.

Conservatives worked to improve and pass Bill C-5, but it is not enough to get back the $60 billion that left Canada due to Liberal red tape. Bill C-5 admits that the Liberals' own laws blocked building. They must scrap the “no new pipelines, never build anything anywhere” Bill C-69; the shipping ban, Bill C-48; Canadian energy censorship; the Liberal oil and gas cap; and the federal industrial carbon tax so Canada can compete.

Conservatives want to unleash natural resources to make a strong, united Canada self-reliant, affordable—

The Application of Standing Order 69.1 to Bill C‑5—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Francis Scarpaleggia]

The Chair is now prepared to rule on the point of order raised earlier today by the member for Vancouver East regarding the application of Standing Order 69.1 to Bill C-5, an act to enact the free trade and labour mobility in Canada act and the building Canada act.

In the member's view, Bill C-5 is an omnibus bill with two distinct parts, and on that basis, she asked the Chair to apply Standing Order 69.1(1), which provides as follows:

In the case where a government bill seeks to repeal, amend or enact more than one act, and where there is not a common element connecting the various provisions or where unrelated matters are linked, the Speaker shall have the power to divide the questions, for the purposes of voting, on the motion for second reading and reference to a committee and the motion for third reading and passage of the bill. The Speaker shall have the power to combine clauses of the bill thematically and to put the aforementioned questions on each of these groups of clauses separately, provided that there will be a single debate at each stage.

At the outset, the Chair wishes to note that the member for Vancouver East has waited until quite late in the legislative process to raise this point of order. Speaker Regan, in a ruling delivered on November 7, 2017, noted that the analysis and division of the bill can be complex, so he encouraged members to raise their arguments as early as possible. He said, at page 15095 of the Debates:

Where members believe that the Standing Order should apply, I would encourage them to raise their arguments as early as possible in the process, especially given that the length of debate at a particular stage can be unpredictable. If an objection is raised too late in the process, the Chair may have no choice but to allow the matter to go to a single vote at second reading or third reading, as the case may be.

In this case, the member for Vancouver East has waited until the day on which the House will vote on the bill at third reading, mere hours before the Chair is required to put the question to the House. It seems clear to the Chair that she would have had an opportunity to do so earlier. The Chair wishes to reiterate the caution issued by Speaker Regan that members risk having points of order on the application of Standing Order 69.1 rejected by the Chair if they do not raise their arguments at an early opportunity. Legislation is often complex, and decisions on potentially splitting the votes may require careful analysis that is difficult to accomplish within a few hours.

In the case before us, the Chair is prepared to examine the substance of the argument presented by the member for Vancouver East only because this bill is relatively straightforward to analyze. Faced with a more complicated bill, the Chair would have been inclined to conclude that there was insufficient time to reach a considered decision.

The Chair has carefully reviewed the provisions of Bill C-5 and taken into account members' statements on the issue of dividing it for voting purposes.

Bill C‑5 has two parts. The first part enacts the free trade and labour mobility in Canada act. Part 2 enacts the building Canada act.

The first part of Bill C‑5, as its purpose clause describes, would implement mechanisms to:

...promote free trade and labour mobility by removing federal barriers to the interprovincial movement of goods and provision of services and to the movement of labour within Canada while continuing to protect the health, safety and security of Canadians, their social and economic well-being and the environment.

The second part of Bill C-5 is intended to, and I quote:

…enhance Canada’s prosperity, national security, economic security, national defence and national autonomy by ensuring that projects that are in the national interest are advanced through an accelerated process that enhances regulatory certainty and investor confidence, while protecting the environment and respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples.

A close reading of these two parts does not provide a clear common element. While part 1 deals with free trade and labour mobility, and part 2 concerns the accelerated advancement of projects that are in the national interest, the purpose of each of these parts could quite easily be achieved separately. While they are ultimately designed to strengthen the Canadian economy, they deal with different issues and could very well stand independently from one another. Moreover, there is no direct relationship or cross-reference between the two parts of the bill.

The Chair is therefore willing to divide the question for voting. Accordingly, two votes will take place at the third reading stage for Bill C-5. The first vote will deal with part 1 and the short title. The second vote will be for part 2, including the schedule, which belongs to part 2. The Chair will remind members of this division of the bill once debate has concluded, when it is time to put these questions.

I thank all members for their attention.

Voting Pattern for Report Stage of Bill C-5—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Francis Scarpaleggia]

The Chair is now prepared to rule on the points of order raised by the members for Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères and Northumberland—Clarke.

The hon. member for Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères rose on a point of order concerning the Chair's decision not to select some of his of motions in amendment at report stage of Bill C-5, as they could have been presented in committee. In his remarks, the member pointed out that he would not have been able to present his amendments in committee because the deadline set by the House in the order made on Monday, June 16, 2025, had passed. For this reason, these motions should have been selected.

Pursuant to an order adopted by the House on Monday, June 16, 2025, members had the opportunity to submit amendments to Bill C-5 for consideration by the committee. Despite the time limit imposed by the order adopted by the House on the submission of amendments, members were able to exercise their rights, as evidenced by the more than 100 amendments considered by the committee. Therefore, although no amendments could be debated after midnight, all amendments submitted before the deadline indicated in the House's order were deemed moved and put to a vote, as the member for Northumberland—Clarke pointed out in his remarks on the same point of order.

The Chair understands the hon. member's concerns about the impact that expediting the consideration of bills could have on members' ability to study bills and present amendments. However, the Chair must also respect the decisions of the House with respect to the organization of its business.

The hon. member's motions that were not selected sought to amend parts of the bill that had not been amended in committee. Accordingly, these motions should have been presented in committee and the Chair maintains its decision not to select them for debate at report stage.

Furthermore, earlier this morning, the member for Northumberland—Clarke rose on a point of order requesting clarification concerning the voting pattern for Motions Nos. 18 and 19 at the report stage of Bill C-5. The member requested that each motion be subject to its own vote. The member for Côte-Nord—Kawawachikamach—Nitassinan also intervened to voice her support for this request.

The voting table provided this morning to the House indicated that the vote on Motion No. 18 would apply to Motion No. 19, as they both sought to further amend the same amendment that was adopted in committee.

I have reviewed the motions and considered the members' interventions, and, exceptionally, I am prepared to accept this request. For this reason, there will be one vote on Motion No. 18 and one vote on Motion No. 19. A revised voting pattern will be available at the table.

I thank all members for their attention and their contributions to the arrangement of the report stage of this bill.

Democratic Institutions

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, New Democrats want to build our economy and create family-sustaining jobs, but it must be done right. Today, the Liberals and the Conservatives are ramming Bill C-5 through Parliament with shockingly little debate or public input. This bill creates Henry VIII powers, letting the Prime Minister override laws by decree. It guts environmental protections, undermines workers and threatens indigenous rights. This bill will end up in court.

Why is the government violating democratic values and risking critical economic projects with tactics from Donald Trump's playbook?

Government Priorities

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in four short weeks, the Liberals have shown us their true face. It is Pierre Poilievre's face in a red tie. Many Quebeckers voted Liberal to be protected from the Conservatives, and yet we are faced with a government that wants to govern by decree and impose pipelines with Bill C‑5. This government stole $814 million from Quebeckers to buy votes from Canadians. All of that was done in four weeks.

That is the Liberals' true face. Do they realize that to many Quebeckers, they are two-faced?

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C‑5 perfectly sums up the new Liberal Prime Minister's approach. He wants to force pipelines on Quebec, he wants to impose projects by order in council without going through Parliament and he wants to be able to bypass pretty much all laws, also by order in council, to help developers. He wants to do all this by imposing closure, without debate or witnesses, with the support of the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, the 44 Liberal members from Quebec have been trying to fade into the woodwork. Do they realize that they did not vote the right way?

The Environment

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first it was the CSN, then first nations and then even a few Liberals, and now environmental groups are also speaking out against Bill C‑5.

Equiterre, Climate Action Network and Ecojustice: the list goes on. According to Greenpeace:

Bill C‑5 would...sidestep long-standing environmental protections, silence communities, and violate Indigenous rights in order to ram projects through to the benefit of multi-billion dollar corporations.

Everyone is telling the Liberals the same thing. We need to study Bill C‑5 as we normally would, not force it through on a time allocation. Will they listen?

Government Priorities

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Côte-Nord—Kawawachikamach—Nitassinan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the CSN is adding its voice to the Assembly of First Nations. It even joins a few Liberal MPs and, no doubt, a few ministers who prefer to remain silent. They are the ones we are addressing as the vote approaches.

Bill C‑5 makes it possible to circumvent all environmental measures and suspend nearly all legislation by order in council. It is the most authoritarian bill since the Emergencies Act.

Will the ministers who disagree have the courage to oppose it before it is too late?