House of Commons Hansard #163 of the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was cbc.

Topics

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Robert Sopuck Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure there was a question.

Again, I am still firmly convinced that it would introduce uncertainty into the resource development review process. If I look at provinces like Manitoba, where the mining engine is starting to get revved up, I see that Manitoba has a very good regulatory process. We will see what happens in the Yukon, because the proof is in the pudding.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:25 p.m.

NDP

Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC

Mr. Speaker, one thing I heard loud and clear in my riding of North Island—Powell River during the last election campaign was that consultation was at the very heart of building a relationship with indigenous communities, and that simply did not happen with the last government.

It was very clear with regard to Bill S-6 that the Conservatives felt very strongly that they had consulted appropriately. My question to the member is this: if that proper process happened, why did Council of Yukon First Nations Grand Chief Ruth Massie say that there was not adequate consultation, and why was legal action taken?

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Robert Sopuck Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB

Mr. Speaker, I take issue very strongly with the member's view that there was no consultation on the changes Conservatives made. Very conveniently, the NDP always forgets about farmers, municipalities, and rural communities. There were extensive consultations with farm communities and rural municipalities on the Fisheries Act. To a person and to an organization, all of those groups very strongly supported the changes Conservatives made to that particular act, and similarly with the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

In terms of whether an individual was not happy with the consultation process, I would like to see any consultation process in which 100% of the groups and people were happy with the process or the outcome.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:25 p.m.

Green

Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by accepting the gracious apology from my friend from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa and move to some of the topics that were a focus of his speech.

The member suggested that Bill C-38, the omnibus budget bill of spring 2012, merely amended the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. It actually repealed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act as crafted and passed under the previous administration of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and replaced it with an entirely new act, and that act did include timelines.

I am wondering if the member has read the recent expert assessment of the new act, which found that it completely failed to meet the objectives. The review committee was chaired by the former commissioner of the environment, Johanne Gélinas. The report was released last week, and tellingly, it said that Enbridge found that under the new act, the Harper-era environmental assessment act with timelines, the timelines worked against it and the process took longer.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Robert Sopuck Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB

Mr. Speaker, as I said in this speech and many other speeches, the critics of what we did as a government never talk about the environment. The environment improved under our Conservative government. The map shows that sulphur dioxide went down and nitrous oxide went down. Canada was considered as having the second-best water quality in the world in 2010 by the United Nations. The sockeye salmon run in 2014 in the Fraser River was a record in history. Even I am not crass enough to take credit for that, but it happened.

During the review of the Fisheries Act, we asked witnesses who were dead set against what we did with the Fisheries Act what changes in the fish population they could see as a result of the changes we made and whether they could give us some specific examples. They could not.

Focusing on process often takes away from real environmental improvements, such as putting waste water treatment plants near paper mills. That is what real environmentalism is and that is what environmental debates should be about. They should be about creating a clean and healthy environment.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:30 p.m.

Conservative

Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB

Mr. Speaker, I always like it when a member speaks from the perspective of technical understanding. My colleague is a biologist and a returning member to the House who has quite a bit of experience both in the field and in this place.

Perhaps the member could elaborate a bit on the principles of conservative environmentalism. It is a principle that he has spoken of a lot in the House, and he has had speaking engagements on it. I think it goes to the very heart of the bill, which is that we can be good stewards of the environment as well as good stewards of the economy. The Minister of Environment is always making the case that the two go hand in hand, but the Liberals ignore the economy. It is the side of the coin that never gets looked at. It is the side of the coin the government continues to ignore. I would really appreciate it if the member could elaborate on the principles of conservative environmentalism.

I agree that the economy and the environment go hand in hand, but it is actually an inverse relationship. Wealthier and richer countries have better environments, and a country gets richer and wealthier by adopting conservative economic principles. We believe in free trade. We believe in open markets. We believe in property rights. We have all of the factors in place to create wealth, and once wealth is created, we can then implement the technology to improve the environment.

I will give the House a specific example.

In 1989, the Brian Mulroney government implemented pulp and paper effluent regulations that mandated all pulp and paper plants in this country to install $25-million waste water treatment plants. This was the average cost. I had the honour of running one of those plants after it was built. Does the member think a poor country, such as the socialistic Venezuela that so many left-wing Canadians praise, would ever put in a waste water treatment plant? Has anybody ever been to China to look at the environmental quality there?

The sulphur dioxide case is another one. An economist named Kuznets established a relationship between a country's income and its environmental quality. When the United States, for example, was getting richer in the early 1970s, an inflection point was reached. The country kept getting richer and sulphur dioxide emissions kept going down.

Let us all get rich and save the environment.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Assistant Deputy Speaker Liberal Anthony Rota

It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable, Rail Transportation; the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, Foreign Affairs; the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, Indigenous Affairs.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:30 p.m.

Conservative

Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB

Mr. Speaker, it was great to hear from my colleague, the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa. Hopefully I have pronounced that correctly. I always struggle with it. This House has some interesting riding names; many of them I avoid saying. Again, that speaks to the fact that in this House we have many members who have a great deal of technical knowledge who bring it to the House in order to explain their viewpoints on the value of a particular bill, either based on the clause-by-clause assessment they bring to it or because they have, perhaps, concerns of principle and differ on principle with the direction the government is taking.

I am pleased to rise on Bill C-17, an act to amend the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act and to make a consequential amendment to another act. Obviously I do not entirely agree with all of the content, but I want to bring up a few points, perhaps, on clause-by-clause issues that I have with the bill, the intent of the bill, and the possible consequences of it.

With that in mind, I do have a Yiddish proverb. Many members know I care much for the Yiddish language, especially the proverbs, and this one is “A fool says what he knows and a wise man knows what he says.” What I hope to live up to in this speech is very much the latter instead of the former, so judge me based on when I am done at the end of it.

I think the bill again represents the positive and sunny attitude the government has taken on, the sunny agenda of just taking the entire accomplishments of the previous government and wrecking them, whether it is the economy, the low-tax environment, the success in the economy in more general terms and also specific sectors that did so well, and then the legislative initiatives that actually made it easier to create jobs, made it easier to develop an approach, and gave us the certainty that if we put a project forward, we were going to get an answer, a yes or a no, and some type of content so that we could decide as a shareholder, a company owner, or a worker whether it was worth pursuing or not. That simply does not exist anymore if we go ahead with this particular piece of legislation.

Revoking everything that our government has done is not a positive agenda. I want to make that point, because that is consistently what I see here. A bill that was passed by a private member in this House before, the member for Foothills, was torn apart by the government.

Again, this is another continuation of that positive sunny attitude, and I say that with a great deal of sarcasm in this House.

It is typical of a government, I feel, that has no clear or credible plan, whether it comes to the economy or whether it comes to ensuring jobs are created by the private sector. It does not really have a plan. We saw that in the budget as well. It just went all over the place. It did not have a focus to it, and now we are spending a Monday debating a bill that would make it more difficult to grow the economy in the Yukon.

That is my personal belief, of course. The member for Yukon is here, and he sits on the opposite benches, which is most unfortunate, because I do appreciate his chairing the House procedures committee and I have been there many times now. I am so glad we are able to have a debate here, he and I, and that he can listen to me debate Bill C-17 during daytime hours as opposed to midnight hours.

Again, I really do believe that Bill C-17 would make it more difficult for companies, workers, and shareholders to move forward with some type of understanding that they will have the project assessed in a reasonable amount of time and have a decision rendered upon it.

One of the reasons I have for opposing the bill is that it is a step backwards for the self-determination of Yukoners. It takes away northern control over northern resources.

Members will disagree with me, but I still think it is that “Ottawa knows best” attitude. I feel that is the vein in this bill. As someone from Alberta, representing a constituency full of people from all across Canada who have made Alberta their home, who have chosen Alberta, we have this strong attitude that Ottawa has this kind of vibe that it knows best. They come to our city, to our province, pretending they can fix all of our problems. The best thing they could ever do is simply stay out of our province. We can handle things ourselves. I think many people in the territories and the other provinces would feel the same way.

Another reason to oppose the bill is that it introduces unnecessary delays and a potential for delays. I think it's the potential for delays, the uncertainty that the bill continues to create and aggravate, that is far more critical to this debate.

I will bring forward my experience. I actually worked for the ministry for sustainable resource development in Alberta, which took care of fish and wildlife, lands, water, biodiversity, forestry, so it was very much the ministry responsible for an entire landscape of Alberta and the industrial development happening on it, whether people like it or not. I know there are many members in different parts of this House who do not like industrial development. They do not like timber. They do not seem to like oil and gas. They do not seem to like the products and the fruits of the labour of individuals who create wealth, and then we get to put up buildings such as this. We get to renovate buildings. We get to grow the economy. The jobs created are created, again, by the private sector. They allow us to create that wealth and to trade and find opportunities to meet each other's needs.

I also think, as a last reason to oppose this, that it puts Yukon at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of Canada because, again, the system of approvals will differ from some of the provinces to some of the territories, and I think that is an error. I think, as much as possible—because companies in Canada operate throughout all jurisdictions; the really large ones are interested in large energy or mining infrastructure projects—we should ensure that they have the same rules apply to them wherever they go because it is much simpler for their technical staff, the workers who are there, to understand the rules and make sure they can comply with them.

Bill C-17 shows, yet again, a deep disdain for natural resources and energy workers. This is something that many constituents of mine have expressed, through email, in phone calls, and at open houses that I have had. There is this continued kind of dislike. Being in mining and energy development is just not trendy or, as was in the budget, innovative. The word “innovative” was used 212 times in the budget. I think “small business” was used six times. It is a supercluster of innovation. I do not know what these buzzwords in the budget really mean. They were just slammed together. I think it was called a “word salad” at one point.

The resource industry and the mining industry are some of the most innovative industries. The workers there spend years upon years getting a technical education that allows them to develop these resources responsibly, which is what they want to do, very much. They are hearing that the government is making it more difficult to develop mining and energy projects, that there is even just the potential for extra difficulty. There is the potential for projects not being approved within 18 months or 24 months, or for being denied with no explanation. It concerns them, because some of them have put two years of their life into trying to find a way to meet the approval requirements. Now they may be faced with potential changes again, and there might be more changes down the line that the government may want to make.

In the budget we saw changes to some of the ways mining tax credits and the exploration tax credits work. All of those things add up. It has a cumulative impact on industry. We always hear about cumulative impacts on the environment, but the decisions being made by the government are having a cumulative impact on industry. It will affect jobs, GDP growth, and child poverty rates. The government is paying itself through these metrics that it will have to meet some day. Again, it likely will not be able to.

Without clear and predictable timelines, it is impossible for companies and their workers, as I said, to plan anything. We have had the pipeline debate in Canada. I know there were some approvals that the government went through, but there was also cancellation of the northern gateway. That had a big impact on Calgary. It had a big impact on companies, and the certainty they had that a process that was followed to a T by companies would actually end with an approval and the jobs that come with it. Even though there was an approval, it did not mean the company would be able to go ahead and build, if they thought the government would change the rules and arm the opponents of the project with extra judicial or legal tools to try to delay the project. All of these things matter.

As we have seen over the past weeks, many international companies are leaving Calgary, leaving their head offices, selling off their assets, and basically abandoning Alberta, because they do not feel they can make a good enough return.

The energy industry in Alberta, western Canada, and in the northern territories and Yukon is still hurting. I am still hearing from my constituents who are still considering work outside of Canada or in one of the eastern provinces, because they just cannot find work in the sector that they have trained for their entire lives. Alberta spent a generation trying to find the requisite human resources, the workers who we desperately needed to fill the jobs. It was the same for Yukon. People from the Yukon travelled to Calgary. I used to work in human resources; we had people travelling.

Companies were actively recruiting workers in Calgary with amazing compensation packages, just trying to bring them to Yukon and trying to convince them that it was worth taking two, three, or four years making incredible pay, making an incredible contribution to the economy there. Now it is not happening anymore.

I believe Bill C-17 will only make things worse. What the Liberal government is doing through this specific piece of legislation is just spreading that joy and sunny ways all across western Canada and into the north now. We have seen what it has done to the economy in western Canada with two consecutive budgets. There is a pittance, in terms of job creation. There is no business confidence that good times will return. There is no certainty in the regulatory environment that a project put forward today will receive approval within 18 or 24 months.

That is what many of these companies want. It is not just for the companies, not just for the shareholders, but it is for the workers. If individuals are going to spend two years of their life trying to meet the regulatory requirements of the government, that is two years of what I would call red tape.

One person's red tape is another person's responsible accountability, but two years, three years, four years? What about the Mackenzie gas pipeline? What about the millions of hours of worker time spent on a project that never ever went ahead?

I am not a biologist. I am also, thankfully, not a lawyer, with all due respect to the lawyers in this House. I am just speaking a bit from my time working for the minister of sustainable resource development, because it informs how I view the bill specifically.

That department took care of public lands, grazing leases, forestry, mining, energy leases, fish and wildlife, wildlife management areas, wildlife protection, and provincial parks. It took care of forestry, the economics, the leases, the public lands associated with it, the regulations governing the industry. It was what I would call almost like a hodgepodge of different types of sectors of what the government is so-called responsible for, setting the rules of the game for different companies and different individuals who want to participate in it.

I will be the first to say that I am a city boy. I have lived all my life in big cities. I was born in a large city, Danzig, in Poland. My parents came to Montreal. That was the city I grew up in. I have lived in Calgary. I have lived in Edmonton. I have lived in Ottawa. I have lived in many great, large urban centres, but working for this department gave me a much greater appreciation for the breadth of activity across Alberta and the breadth of industrial activity and what industrial activity actually means to the people on the ground, to the jobs, the families, the incomes that it creates. How can government make it simpler for industrial activity to happen in a responsible way?

I do not think Bill C-17 accomplishes that. I think it takes a step backward. I think it makes it more complicated to meet the requirements that the government might support. Again, it is a lack of confidence. There is a general lack of confidence with people here that this government actually has it right, that it actually knows what it is doing.

We look at things like the economics of development, the certainty of decision-making, that when one puts forward one's project, it would be approved, or not approved, with very clear reasons why it would not go ahead.

Many workers I speak to, energy workers and mining workers, take an immense amount of pride in the work they do, and it goes from worker to management. It really does not matter. Even the families take pride in this too. More often than not, what they are looking for is ensuring that the industrial footprint of the projects they are connected to, they are working on, becomes kind of exemplary. We could almost think of that as a postcard. This is how we do development.

That is true for Alberta. That is true for Saskatchewan. That is true for every single western province. It is true for everywhere in Canada. Nobody goes out there with the intention of wrecking the environment. That is just the point. I think we have it inverted in Bill C-17. I think it comes with the presupposition that industrial development is automatically wrong and we should not move ahead with it.

That is fundamentally an issues of principles. That is not how it works. It should not be thought of in that way. I think, with the vast majority of energy workers, mining workers, what they are looking forward to is having the best possible stewardship rules that they can apply, and the certainty that their projects will go ahead or not, but with very clear reasons why they cannot go ahead, so they can try to meet them in the future. They do not need the government hanging over their shoulder telling them what to do every which way. They can do it themselves. They are the experts in the field. They are the ones who accumulate decades of traditional knowledge on the ground, working with aboriginal groups, working with different companies, because they may switch companies as well. They are also working in those communities, getting a better understanding of the lay of the land and the impacts that industrial development will have.

Albertans have fought ardently for that good stewardship concept. The minister I used to work for was known as a kind of right-wing environmentalist. At the time, Ted Morton was well respected in the environmental community, because he did quite a bit of work on land-use management on the forestry industry side, but especially on fish and wildlife, ensuring that the resource was well looked after, but that the rules of the game were consistent and certain. Consistency and certainty were the main things that both the political staff and the civil servants were responsible for, and again, with Bill C-17, it worries me that we just may not see that.

On Bill C-17, just to refer back to a few points I made before and why I think it is an error and why I oppose a great deal of the bill, I think it does take away northern independence. I do think it is an attack on natural resources development, mining, energy, and forestry, potentially. I think it does add uncertainty into the review process. I think the removal of the timelines and the option for exempting renewals fits well with the ongoing narrative on that side.

Introducing unnecessary delays and uncertainty into our regulatory process is not the right way to go when we are trying to induce or convince companies that they should be creating jobs. We are creating quite the opposite. Multinational companies are very much leaving Canada or leaving the jurisdictions in Canada where they are working right now because they do not think they can earn a return on their investment.

Many domestic companies, good Alberta-based, B.C.-based, Yukon-based companies, which would like to take a chance and be entrepreneurial and take a risk, are uncertain what is going to happen. These rules change today and perhaps the rules will change again in a year or two years down the line. If innovation is the name of the game, then maybe we should call all these mining projects superclusters and just call it the supercluster diamond mine, the supercluster energy development, the supercluster pipeline. If the name of the game is the buzzword, then maybe they could meet it if they are just told which buzzwords to use.

Also, I fear the impact to the economy. Bill S-6, the original bill that made those amendments, was reasonable. I was not a member at the time, but I remember some of those debates and I have gone through Hansard to see what leading members of the business community in Yukon were saying about it at the time.

I have an article I want to refer to before I go into those comments from the debates at the time. It is called “Feds table legislation to repeal parts of Bill S-6” on June 10, 2016. We are debating the bill today in April, so obviously this was not a huge rush in terms of coming up for debate, but one of the comments I want to refer to here says, “he claimed his government would 'not be a barrier' if the new Liberal government did repeal the four provisions”. This was Yukon Premier Darrell Pasloski, a good name of eastern or central European descent. The article went on to say:

...during a campaign visit to Whitehorse last fall, former prime minister Stephen Harper said it was the territorial government that requested the changes to the assessment act laid out in Bill S-6.

The Yukon government has also spoken out against [this particular piece of legislation] more recently, after oil-and-gas exploration company Northern Cross filed for a judicial review of the board’s decision to refer its Eagle Plain drilling project to a higher level of assessment.

Now we can differ perhaps on these quotes being related accurately, but it shows there was industrial development and energy development going on and now uncertainty is starting to get into the whole process: judicial uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty, and now perhaps legislative uncertainty is being added onto it.

Bill S-6 was the final legislative step in the previous Conservative government's plan to approve northern regulatory regimes. I do not think we can talk about Bill C-17 without talking about Bill S-6, because from 2011 to 2013, Yukon was rated the single most desirable place in the world for mining companies to conduct business. Bill S-6 was improving upon that goal because Yukon had started to fall. Other jurisdictions were catching up. It was not so much that they were falling behind, but other jurisdictions were making the necessary amendments.

I will finish by mentioning those people who were for Bill S-6 at the time. Samson Hartland, executive director of the Yukon Chamber of Mines, described the introduction of time limits as “probably the most important aspect of this bill to our membership”.

At the time also David Morrison, president and CEO of Yukon Energy Corporation, agreed:

Having screening processes that don't have defined timelines, and strictly defined timelines, makes it very difficult for people who are investing millions and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Clynton Nauman, president and CEO of Alexco Resource Corporation, also told the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, Environment and Natural Resources on September 30, 2014:

The current uncertainty has had a negative impact on our ability to efficiently plan and operate our business, and by extension, it impairs the competitiveness of Yukon as a jurisdiction to assert certainty in the mine development and production process.

This is a very important matter in very many important matters, especially as the PROC committee filibuster continues. I look forward to seeing the chair, the member for Yukon, there at midnight hopefully next time. As long as he wishes to continue, I will be there participating in those debates.

I move:

Motion

That the debate be now adjourned.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Assistant Deputy Speaker Liberal Anthony Rota

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.

No.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Assistant Deputy Speaker Liberal Anthony Rota

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

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Some hon. members

Yea.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Assistant Deputy Speaker Liberal Anthony Rota

All those opposed will please say nay.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Some hon. members

Nay.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Assistant Deputy Speaker Liberal Anthony Rota

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And five or more members having risen:

Call in the members.

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

Vote #253

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Speaker Liberal Geoff Regan

I declare the motion lost.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:30 p.m.

Conservative

Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, there were several members who came in late. I noticed the member for Brampton North came in late and she also voted.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:30 p.m.

Liberal

Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON

Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond on the point of order. I did come in late, so I will withdraw my vote. I was with members from my community because today we are celebrating Vaisakhi on the Hill.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Speaker Liberal Geoff Regan

This should prove a good reminder, I hope, to members. If they are going to come in late, they should not be voting, because it is important to hear the question on which the members are voting.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-17, An Act to amend the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act and to make a consequential amendment to another Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee, of the amendment, and of the amendment to the amendment.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:35 p.m.

Liberal

Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT

Mr. Speaker, I quite enjoy the member. I enjoy debating with him on PROC, and it is great to debate with him in the House. His speech would have been a perfect speech to bring forward Bill S-6, because all the things he talked about were what Bill S-6 hurt in our economy. Therefore, it was a bit of an anachronistic speech.

Economic development, for instance, has been slowed down. Companies cannot move forward. As we know, the environmental assessment is tied up in the courts, which has slowed down the assessment.

He talked about northern control over northern resources, and that is exactly what the complaint was. That is why this is coming forward. I am not sure if the member was here when I mentioned earlier that there were two very large public gatherings of people pretty upset with the federal government because it had taken northern control and imposed these items on northern resources. That led to the great uncertainty we have right now with environmental assessments, which will be reduced once Bill C-17 is passed.

There was talk about different approvals, and exactly why the YESAA process led the country. In other parts of the country they would have to go to different levels of government. The brilliance in the YESAA legislation is that for the first nations, the Yukon government, and the federal government, it goes through the one process, and that applies to all the governments, as to whose land it can be on.

I am glad he mentioned that we reinstated the mineral exploration tax credit. We fought hard for that. I thank the finance minister for putting that back in. Some of the members he quoted, particularly David Morrison and Samson Hartland, wholeheartedly support Bill C-17 now.

The last point I want to make is on the timelines. Virtually all the speakers in Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition have suggested there is a lack of timelines, but timelines exist now. They exist for the designated office, which is the office that makes the decision coming out of the recommendations of the YESAA board. It has timelines, and they are already in regulations.

For the other two processes on the assessments for the designated office, which is for the small projects, and the executive board, which is for the larger projects, those decisions are policy decisions. They are set in rules on the board.

I just wanted to make those points. This will ally all the fears the member talked about in his speech.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:35 p.m.

Conservative

Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB

Madam Speaker, there were a lot of comments, so I will try to keep my rebuttal brief.

As for clause 1, the delegation to territorial ministers, I do not think the member talked about that one. When an authority is delegated to a territorial minister, the decision is brought much closer to the population it affects. The presumption in the bill is basically that somehow the territorial ministers and the territorial government cannot make decisions, and the people there cannot keep them accountable. That is a worrisome change. I also do not think that delegation is somehow an abdication or surrender of responsibility.

Another significant change is clause 2, which would amend the act to repeal section 49.1. That removes an important pro-job amendment introduced by Bill S-6, although the member did not appreciate my commentary about Bill S-6 and called my remarks anachronistic. This piece of legislation is trying to overshadow the kind of desperate policy dives that the Liberals are doing in every single direction, trying to find something that will work to create jobs, anything, even if it is public service jobs, doing more regulatory work, overseeing more paperwork with more red tape, catching more companies, more people, and more projects, in this regulatory environment that they are creating.

No piece of legislation is perfect, and this is much more imperfect than the usual ones. I could go through clauses 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 about the time limits that the Liberals have introduced. I disagree with the member's characterization that there will still be some time limits. They are all fuzzy and washed out, and there is no certainty for companies. Those would be my comments to the member's commentary on the bill.

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:40 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Yukon for the presentation of Bill C-17. Coming from the second-prettiest riding in Canada, it is good that there is some inspired legislation coming forward.

I have a question for my friend about this notion of time limits. In my riding of Skeena, an idea was brought forward, not only by the Harper Conservatives, but also by the B.C. provincial Liberals, that if these time limits were brought in that forced regulatory decisions, it would make for greater certainty for companies and investors in particular. However, New Democrats noticed that the effect was in fact the opposite, particularly for the 48 or 49 first nations communities that I represent in my riding. When the time limit was brought in, oftentimes there were one or two full-time staffers working on seven or eight major mining proposals, three or four gas line proposals; there were warehouses full of scientific documentation.

The first nations would go to the federal government for support to try to get through the review and gain an understanding so that they could present it back to the first nations with some coherence, and they would get a $5,000 or $8,000 grant from the federal government to review nine mines. Each mining application could be 8,000 pages, 9,000 pages each.

My question to my friend is this. Imposing time limits without the resources to be able to comprehend the specificity of the project and the impact it might have for decades and decades to come seems to be a square peg in a round hole. Is that not something that would have been better off fixed?

Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment ActGovernment Orders

5:40 p.m.

Conservative

Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB

Madam Speaker, the Government of Canada does reimburse first nations for consultation, just like the Government of Alberta does. In the House of Commons debate, page 11997, on March 11, 2015, a Conservative member at the time said, “the Government of Canada has reimbursed those first nations up to $98,695 for those consultations that took place”. The issue he is speaking of is a staffing issue; it is not a legislative regulatory issue. That is always the problem with all forms of government, whether provincial, territorial, municipal, or federal. They make legislative and regulatory changes without providing the sufficient financial resources to ensure that the persons in the departments responsible for the regulations are able to deliver on the regulatory and legislative changes. That is important to remember as well. It is a staffing issue that he speaks of.

I remember, from my experience working for the Alberta government, the lands, fisheries, and forestry departments did a lot of aboriginal consultation. In that situation, the staffing issues were resources. The right rules and regulations were in place, just not always the right people in the correct numbers to do all of the work. There is nothing wrong with time limits, as long as they are resourced correctly. That would be my answer.