Madam Speaker, it gives me pleasure to rise to speak to this motion. What I see from this motion is the kind of attention-seeking hyperbole that is becoming the trademark of politics south of the border and the trademark of a certain presidential candidate south of the border. It is the kind of discourse that inserts phrases like, “best ever”, “worst economy”, “best market performance”, “nuclear winter”, “mass hunger”, “people never being able to leave their homes and having to turn their temperature down to 13°C” and that kind of hyperbole.
I could say that the phrase from the motion, “the most centralizing government in Canadian history”, forgot to add the superlatives “ever” and “entire”, to read, for example, “the most centralizing government ever in the entire Canadian history” or maybe “human history”. Why not? It is the language of the sloganeer.
What are the yardsticks for making such sweeping statements? Let us look at our Canadian history. Let us look at Conservative governments, policies and actions that could be seen as centralizing, even if we consider those past initiatives to be good nation-building initiatives of another, more constructive, brand of Canadian conservatism.
Let us go back in history. CN has been in the news quite a bit. Who created CN, a Crown corporation and national railway company that extended from sea to sea and could be seen as too centralizing by some today? It was Prime Minister Robert Borden.
Let us talk about the CBC, the Conservatives' bugbear. How did the CBC get started? It was started in some way with CN, because in the early days CN was looking for ways to keep its passengers entertained, so they created a kind of radio network, an entertainment system of the day, for their trains, and then that kind of morphed into an organization called CNR Radio. In 1932, on the heels of that, R.B. Bennett established CBC's predecessor, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission.
I have just been reminded that I will be sharing my time with the member for Winnipeg North, and I apologize for forgetting to say that at the beginning.
On the environment, which is a weak point for the Conservative opposition, it was the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney who created national, or so-called “centralizing”, environmental legislation. CEPA, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, was enacted in 1988 by Mr. Mulroney. It was designed to provide a systematic national approach to assessing and managing chemical substances in the environment, as well as to create criminal law offences for polluters.
Quebec probably saw that centralization as an unwelcome intrusion into provincial jurisdiction at the time. I would think that would be the case, because Hydro-Québec, a provincial Crown corporation, went up against the federal government in court to argue that the federal government had no jurisdiction and that it was essentially invading provincial jurisdiction, but the Supreme Court of Canada found that the federal government did have jurisdiction and that this was a matter of national interest, and therefore criminal law power was justified.
Let us look at national parks. The Canadian national park system began in November 1885, when the federal government of Sir John A. Macdonald set aside an area of approximately 26 square kilometres on the northern slopes of Alberta's Sulphur Mountain for public use. I suppose in today's terms it would be seen as an intrusion by the federal government into provincial jurisdiction.
Conservatives used to say that they liked to stand up for conserving our heritage, natural and otherwise, but today's Conservatives, to me here on this side of the House, seem to be more interested in upending the system by leveraging populist sentiment and by farming anger.
Let us look at, more recently, the unfair elections act, which is a perfect example of a heavy-handed approach by a federal government with a majority. As a matter of fact, the sponsor of the legislation was the current Leader of the Opposition. Of course, the government was using its majority's power to attempt to suppress votes in what was, as they say, a heavy-handed and top-down approach.
There has been some Liberal centralization too, for example with national medicare and the Canada pension plan. If I may say, partly in jest, because this is a good-natured debate, I think the Conservatives are envious that these were not their ideas, so envious that they are trying to dismantle them.
What is the most decentralizing form of human organization known to man, a mechanism so decentralized and so out of the government's reach, a vehicle of citizen agency synonymous with the words “freedom” and “democracy”, the very antidote to centralization? The answer is the market and its price mechanism, what we call the invisible hand that allows society to grow and prosper anonymously through trillions of individual relationships outside the purview and control of the state.
Since the motion mentions the price on carbon, let us be clear that there is no carbon tax; the Supreme Court has said so. We know that Conservatives do not respect the court much, but the Supreme Court has said the price on carbon is not a carbon tax because the money is returned. It is not a tax. That is not my opinion; that is the opinion of the justices of the Supreme Court.
Let me read a quote from a recent analysis by Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail, on the Conservative approach to environmental policy. We all know that Andrew Coyne is a clear-eyed, incisive journalist and certainly not a Liberal Party cheerleader. I think Andrew Coyne's is an extremely objective voice. This is what he says about Conservative environmental policy:
The Conservative position [is], as near anyone can make it out...that climate change should be fought, if at all, not by harnessing the power of the free market, but by central planning, a mix of command and control regulation and government subsidy...
How much more efficient is pricing carbon to the alternatives? Some years ago the Ecofiscal Commission, a group of environmental economists, estimated the economic costs of a carbon tax, sufficient to meet Canada's internationally agreed emissions-reduction targets, at 0.05% of GDP annually.
The cost of the regulation-first approach, by contrast, it put up to 0.8% of GDP: 16 times as much. At a time when growth is expected to average just 1.6%, it's huge.
What we see in the rejection of the price on carbon, a mechanism that Milton Friedman, the Leader of the Opposition's economic hero, his favourite economist, agreed with as the best way to fight pollution, is a rejection of the market approach. We see a government that is favouring instead, as Andrew Coyne said, a “command and control” system. That is about as centralizing and as top-down an approach as one can get. I think the party opposite should maybe look at itself in the mirror in that regard.
The Conservative Party claims it believes in provincial autonomy and staying out of provincial jurisdiction, yet the Leader of the Opposition tells cities that if they do not do what he says to solve the housing crisis, he will punish them. I think that Conservative policies and actions do not match the rhetoric of the motion.
