Madam Speaker, I respect the hon. member across the way. We have worked together in the past and what I am trying to do is make the case that if Bill C-4 is going to pass and every party in this building wants to help Canadians, but I want to provide the other argument that if this is going to get a yes to supporting the bill we need to explain to Canadians how we are going to pay for it. That is what I am trying to do right now.
I am talking about indigenous companies in my neck of the woods and the signals that the government does not give in the Speech from the Throne, and we see this increase in protected areas. Again, that is not really favourable to any resource sector. If anything, it restricts the resource sector a lot. It is tightening the resource sector up when we need to be giving it our blessing to keep going. We need logging companies to keep logging. We need the oil and gas sector to keep going, in a good way, but to keep going.
I know my time is short, but an article in the Macdonald-Laurier Institute talks about how indigenous people should be allowed to make their own decisions. In a response to the Speech from the Throne, Chief Theresa Tait-Day from the Wet'suwet'en says, “Most unusually, the intervention of the Governments of Canada and British Columbia have made a difficult situation much worse. The two governments [the Liberal government and the NDP government in B.C.], perhaps to avoid an escalation of environmentalist-led conflict, opted to negotiate only with some of the Hereditary Chiefs.”
She continues, “The communities were not consulted, and the negotiations were not endorsed or supported by the Wet'suwet'en Nation.... Remarkably, the governments chose to meet only with a self-selected group of Hereditary Chiefs, even though any final agreement must be ratified by members in...[a] transparent and inclusive manner by Wet'suwet'en members”.
The governments could have talked to 99% of the Wet'suwet'en community to see this project go ahead, but instead they only talked to the ones who were against the project. Again, we are talking about signals here. Are they really going to get one million jobs going while all the efforts and the Speech from the Throne signal the exact opposite?