I'm sorry. I'll repeat myself.
My name is Catherine Swift. I'm the president of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. We're a group of a lot of manufacturers—but not exclusively—and we are an advocacy organization that supports solid economic policy, relatively small government and good use of taxpayer dollars.
First of all, with regard to this bill, I know a lot of other people have said this, but I want to reinforce that the consultation period has been too brief. This is an enormously powerful bill and it needs more consideration than it's been given.
Basically, the second part of the bill gives the Liberals the ability to override a number of very important pieces of legislation that they put in place over the last decade or so. It seems a little ironic, I guess, that they suddenly want the power to override this very Liberal collection of legislation.
Here's what I think would be preferable if the legislation is in place. With things like the emissions cap on the oil and gas industry, the industrial carbon tax in particular, the tanker ban in northern B.C. and even proposed things such as a carbon border adjustment mechanism, which has been discussed, it would be better to remove them or not introduce them in the first place, rather than to give this power to override them. The main reason is that investors....
We know foreign and domestic investment has plummeted in Canada over the last decade because of bad policies that have discouraged investment and created uncertainty. Why not get rid of these pieces of legislation? If I were an investor, I'd be saying, “Okay, they have the power to override, yet all those legislative initiatives stay on the books.” Why not just get rid of them, if they're so problematic, and not just override them or give yourselves the power to override them occasionally?
Another issue is the potential for massive spending. We know infrastructure is hugely expensive. There has been a massive spending of tax dollars in the way this Liberal government spent money in the last decade on Liberal friends and cronies. There's also been the very visible incompetence of the federal bureaucracy to spend taxpayer dollars efficiently. There are a million examples of that, with ArriveCan being one of the most recent scandalous ones, but there are many examples, especially during the pandemic, of when money flowed like water and very little was often produced for it.
The wording of the bill is also too vague. Others have brought this up as well. Dominic LeBlanc is being given primacy in decision-making power. He's been a member of the Liberal government for the last decade and presumably supported the introduction of lots of the legislation this bill is intended to override. This does not inspire confidence among the business community.
You're rushing this through so quickly. The House is sitting for only a few weeks and then it's taking the summer off. The secretive nature of this gives people a great number of concerns. There were things in the past, like the green slush fund, the election interference issue and the WE fiasco. There are a whole lot of problems that this government...and many of the people elected today were members of that government. There's no trust, and rushing this through does not help the matter at all.
I think the five-year sunset period is too brief for a bill that permits enormous powers to any government, whoever it may happen to be. I think the bill should be split into two parts. The interprovincial trade stuff is a very different kettle of fish and something that's very much supported by the business community compared to the second part of the bill, which would change the powers of the government.
We are very supportive as an organization of getting on with projects that are going to help our economy enormously and get it out of the hole it's been in for the last decade—it's abysmal what's been happening with our economy in Canada—but also of boosting the standard of living for average Canadians. However, this shouldn't mean having to give any government the kind of poorly defined, loose powers that we see in Bill C-5.
Finally, we need pipelines. We need oil and gas pipelines in this country to develop our wealth of oil and gas resources. If there was one policy that this government could introduce which would have the fastest impact on boosting our economy and getting ourselves out of the doldrums we've been in for so long, it would be to build pipelines and export our natural gas—notably, liquid natural gas. The irony is that it would also help the world economy enormously as the less developed countries would be able to get off more polluting sources of energy.
Since the Liberal government seems to be in a big hurry, only sitting for three weeks during this period now and having very little consultation on such a great big bill, we need to prioritize the oil and gas sector if we really want something that will have an impact as quickly and as massively as possible, and not something like, say, an electricity grid corridor across the country that would greatly increase power to Canadians and would also be very difficult to achieve and have unreliable energy sources.
Thank you very much. I'm happy to answer any questions.