Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
Before I get into the details of the bill, it is important to look at the context of what has been happening over the past three years and what is starting to be a pattern of the Liberal government. The decisions it makes consistently increase red tape and bureaucracy and are mostly anti-resource development. This bill is no different.
I would like to talk about a few areas that show the context, which will then show that this follows a pattern that adds to what is becoming an increasing concern in the country, which is the ability to move our natural resources forward.
When the Prime Minister took office, there were three private companies willing to invest more than $30 billion to build three nation-building pipelines that would have generated tens of thousands of jobs and billions in economic opportunities. The Prime Minister and his cabinet killed two of them and put the Trans Mountain expansion on life support. Bill C-69 would block all future pipelines.
In addition, the government has made a number of arbitrary decisions regarding natural resource development, with absolutely no consultation with those impacted. Today, we only need to look at what is happening in Alberta with the hundreds of thousands of job losses. Who has ever heard of a premier having to decrease the production of a needed resource throughout the country and the world because we simply cannot get resources to the market? This is because of the government's failure.
The northern gateway project was approved by the former government in June 2014. It had a number of conditions on it, just like the current Trans Mountain project does. In November 2015, just one month after being elected, the Prime Minister killed the project without any hesitation. It was subject to a court challenge. When we finally heard what came out of that court challenge, to be frank, it was nothing that could not be overcome. We could have dealt with that.
The court decision told the Prime Minister to engage in consultation in a more appropriate and balanced way. The court really gave what I would call a recipe for perhaps fixing some problems with the process. Did he wait for the court decision? No. He went out and killed it flat. With this approved pipeline, he did not wait for a court decision or wait to see how it could move forward. He decided that he did not want that one.
I think we are all pretty aware of the Trans Mountain pipeline as it has been moving along for many years. We know that many first nations support it and hope to see it go through, as they see enormous opportunities for their communities. Of course, others are against it.
What happened in this case? When the Liberals formed government, they decided they had to have an additional consultation process. However, did they follow the directions of the court in the northern gateway decision, in which the court was very clear about what the government had to do in order to do consultations properly? Apparently not.
When the court decision came down, we learned otherwise. To be frank, it was much to my surprise, because the Liberals talked about how well they were consulting and that they were putting this additional process in place. The court said that the Liberals did not do the job. What they did was send a note-taker and not a decision-maker.
The fact that the Liberals did not consult properly on the Trans Mountain pipeline is strictly on their laps, as they had very clear guidance from the northern gateway decision, and they did not do what they needed to do. They should be ashamed of themselves. Had they done a proper process, they likely would not have had to buy the pipeline, the pipeline would be under construction right now and we would be in a lot better place as a country. With respect to the Trans Mountain pipeline, the blame for where we are on that pipeline lies strictly on the laps of the Liberals.
I also want to note, in spite of what people say, that the courts have said that the process was okay, so it had nothing to do with environmental legislation by the previous government or with anything the Conservatives put in place. It was—