Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to rise and speak to Bill C-344 about amending the Department of Public Works and Government Services Act regarding the issue of putting in community benefit agreements.
I am very interested in the proposal. I want to speak to it from a rural perspective, from a northern industrial perspective, and then from an urban perspective. We are dealing with differing issues.
In terms of rural issues, and I represent a region that is bigger than Great Britain, infrastructure investments by the federal government are extremely important. Over the last number of years, our region has been left to fall behind, as the government has not kept up its commitments at the federal level.
I am very pleased that since 2015, my region of Timmins—James Bay was the third-largest in the country in terms of the number of projects that were approved. These are good investments. Whether it was Timmins Transit or investing in local bridges, these kinds of investments have a clear community benefit. In a rural region, in some of our small northern communities, putting another layer on an analysis coming forward on why a project is important could be difficult. These are legitimate questions, because many of our small municipalities have to outsource. They do not have the in-house engineering. This would be a question.
In terms of when we do development in the north, we have a number of major infrastructure projects that require government investment. An example is the four-laning of Highway 11-17, which is the major trucker route across Canada. All goods across this country travel through northern Ontario on winding two-lane roads that are often very dangerous, particularly in winter. The federal government treats this as local. They treat it as provincial. However, this is part of national infrastructure, and we need to see an investment there.
I represent regions that are very involved in the mining sector. In the last 12 years, there has been a complete transformation of how mining agreements are put together. The mining sector understands that if it is going to have development in the north, it needs social license. It needs to have a clear commitment to indigenous communities, so impact benefit agreements have become the norm.
When I was working for the Algonquin nation in Quebec, in 2001-02, companies refused to meet. There was a lot of confrontation in the forest, because the right of communities to benefit from the resources on their traditional territory was a principle that had to be understood. I can say that from my talks with the mining sector and indigenous communities now, these agreements are starting to transform, economically, many communities that had been left on the margins.
My good friend, Chief Walter Naveau, of the Mattagami First Nation, said that the government always talks about their sitting at the table, but for all their lives, they were not even allowed to look in the window. That has changed, but government is still not at the table most of the time. I will say that industry will come to the table much sooner than government will ever come to the table in terms of developing a coherent plan for the development of resources and the development of communities in the indigenous territories in my region of Treaty No. 9.
I want to talk about the benefit of this in larger urban areas. If we are looking at major investments, such as in public transit, a community benefit agreement should be fundamental to the discussion. We can talk about the Eglinton LRT. That is a massive investment in a city that has been choked with traffic, where people are being forced out of neighbourhoods because of high prices. Many of the people I know who grew up in Toronto cannot even afford to live in the city where they work anymore. They have to commute back to their own cites, because they cannot afford livable neighbourhoods. My old neighbourhood of Riverdale, which was a beautiful mixed working-class neighbourhood, has become a neighbourhood very much for the super-rich, particularly closer to the Don Valley.
When we are looking at the government putting $1 billion or $2 billion into an LRT or a subway in any city across Canada, we can ask who is going to benefit. Right off the bat, real estate speculators will be along that line, because they know that if they have real estate there, that real estate will dramatically bump in value, because there is good access to good urban transit. We could say to a city like Toronto that we will invest at the federal government level in a plan like the LRT. However, there will need to be some set aside so that we can have community housing and mixed-income housing.
That would be a fair trade-off for the massive investments the federal government makes to ensure that there is some kind of quid pro quo so that it is not just the speculators and the real estate developers who are going to make out from this infrastructure. Working families could still have access to neighbourhoods that are liveable and have access to good-quality public transit. That is where a community benefit agreement would be a very reasonable thing to bring to the table. It would not be onerous, because we are dealing with urban areas and a much larger size, where this kind of planning could be done in a coherent manner.
However, I have a number of concerns about the bill in terms of the lack of clarity and where we would need much clearer reporting mechanisms and transparency. If we are going to have a credible community benefit agreement plan, it cannot be just tick the box. Whenever a company just has to tick the box, or a large municipality just has to say that it did it and it is done, we do not know what that benefit is.
If we are looking at economies of scale, such as for a major investment in urban public transit, we are going to need clear accountability mechanisms to say that it is a credible community benefit agreement. Part of that requires consultation. I am very worried about the lack of obligation for consultation, because the consultation process would involve a community. An investment in, say, a major bridge in an urban area may have an impact on the community. Does the community have a credible response? Can we do this in a reasonable manner?
I think we would be looking at much more progressive notions of urban development if we had a strong, transparent, usable community benefit system in place. That being said, we would have to also look at the economies of scale in terms of smaller communities. For example, the federal government may invest in the community of Iroquois Falls in changing its sewage and water. Would we need to put an extra level of negotiation on that? We probably would not, because the benefit would be clear. Building that community infrastructure would benefit that community.
The other argument we could bring to this, of course, is the question of whether communities need more control over how they utilize federal investment. Federal investment can be very limited and very targeted to meet federal criteria but not necessarily municipal criteria.
For example, in the city of Timmins, there has been a plan to build an aquatic centre to serve the needs of people who will move to the city to meet a growing city need, but there is no federal program to deal with programs like building an aquatic centre. All that cost would be put on the ratepayers, which is an enormous cost for a mid-sized municipality to undertake. There would be a clear community benefit. In the case of the city of Timmins, if the city believed that it was in the city's interest to build that aquatic centre, and it could work with the feds and the province on it, there would be a long-term benefit for the community. This is something we should look at.
Having looked at the bill, there are some very interesting aspects of it. I think we need to look at it going forward. We need to have a little bit of flexibility between rural and mid-sized communities and large, urban municipalities. We need to be able to put a lens on it in terms of whether it is an indigenous community or not.
Public works has been an institution that has been very reluctant to apply a community lens to projects that would have a major community impact. There are a number of projects that could move forward with new kinds of partnerships, such as indigenous and municipal, working together to build community infrastructure.
When we talk about community benefits, that lens should be applied to those kinds of federal projects. If they were under the municipalities, I would leave mid-sized and smaller municipalities to handle what they know how to do. For larger urban municipalities, if we were doing major investments, we would talk about how it would benefit the whole region, because that would be a major financial investment. How would we do this with indigenous communities? It is possible. I am very interested in this bill going forward.