Mr. Speaker, I would like to open by saying what an honour it is to be back where I started, on the environment file. I was the environment critic for the Liberal Party back in British Columbia as an MLA. Back in 2003, my main goal was to remediate the environmental damage done to my territory by industrial development. That led me down different pathways. It led me to aboriginal rights and title, for example. It led me to economics, permitting and environmental assessments.
Some may remember that in my territory, we had an aluminum smelter plant, a pulp and paper mill and a methanol plant. Back in the fifties, sixties and seventies, environmental standards were not a priority, not just in Kitimat but all across Canada, and maybe even North America for that matter. In understanding what environmental standards meant and what environmental assessments were, I found there was a logical way to address environmental impacts, both past and proposed. Quite honestly, I found myself very ignorant of how that tied into our society, Canadian society, and aboriginals living in our region.
This is where I first came across the term “balance”, and the standard of living versus environmental issues. It has been a very tough battle over the years to try to maintain that balance, especially when we consider that first nations, for the last 100 or 150 years, have been excluded not only from the economy but, to a large extent, from the society of Canada. It has been a very long journey to try to rectify those two provisions of the Indian Act. Today is a 180° turnaround in the environmental considerations we are talking about versus what we were doing 20 or 40 years ago.
I heard my colleague from the government side talk about what Bill C-241 is not. It would not be an encroachment on provincial jurisdiction, for example, and it would not negatively affect aboriginal rights and title. Consultation would be carried out. First nations and Canadians have heard this before. It would not be right to not address this directly.
Like a lot of MPs in the chamber, I have gotten a lot of emails from and had a lot of Zoom calls and meetings with first nations that are specifically worried about Bill C-5, for example, and how it is going to be rushed through for major projects and ignore the case law that was established in the courts of B.C. and Canada, specifically the Haida court case of 2004. I just got off a call with the Ontario chiefs, who talked a lot about the chemical valley and Sarnia. They are clear that they do not want to oppose development, but they do not want the past to be repeated and they get ignored.
They feel that talks with the commercial sector were going fine until Bill C-5 was enacted, and now they are feeling ignored. They feel they are being ignored because there seems to be a way to get to the finish line without talking to these chiefs about their treaty rights and title or their aboriginal rights and titles, which are two distinctly different topics.
In terms of environmental issues, the point I would like to make is that this is not new for first nations. For many first nations, we have to address environmental issues first. I know we are talking about forecasting for floods and disasters, mainly for better insurance purposes. I have talked to different people about what this could mean. Everybody agrees that it is a good idea to do this, but it is a duplication.
Is the private sector already doing this, especially in terms of insurance for flood protection or farming? Can we do better? Yes, we can do better, and I sincerely hope we are going to do better, but it cannot be a top-down approach. It has to be inclusive. There are many people and organizations that are affected by these disasters, as my colleague pointed out. We are talking about indigenous people. We are talking about people who live close to rivers. We are talking about farmers.
Nobody is immune from environmental disasters, so I think what Canadians want is to ask whether this is going to be an open and transparent process, in terms of getting Canadians' interests into the bill and making sure it not only does what it says it is going to do, but that there is no government overreach, such as what we have seen in other measures carried out by the government. Is it going to be rolled out in a way that does not provide more cost to the Canadian taxpayer?
Most Canadian taxpayers are already limited out. They cannot afford any more taxes. We talk about the affordability issue in this chamber every day. We are talking about how mothers and dads cannot afford groceries. Even if someone works in a grocery store, they cannot afford groceries. As Conservatives, it is our strong belief that this can be done within existing entities using existing resources and that the government could do it more efficiently without adding more cost to the taxpayer and without increasing the affordability crisis we are facing right now.
More taxation is not the answer. I have listened to the answers and the questions coming out of this chamber regarding Bill C-241, and it has always been pointed out that we already have some of the strongest environmental standards in Canada, if not in North America, both provincially and federally. It seems to make sense that with this high level of expertise Canadians have, we should be able, with existing resources, to do a better job of predicting floods and droughts and to prepare not only our entities to actually combat this and deal with it, but also regular Canadians.
I agree that the impacts are stressful for Canadians, both mentally and with the cost attached to them. Anything we can do to actually limit that suffering is a good thing, as long as there is no overreach and as long as there is no extra taxation.
I have also heard the idea that somehow this would not encroach on provincial jurisdiction. I go back again to Bill C-5, which talked about how we would build major projects in a fast-tracked fashion, and they would be fast-tracked within two years. It was in the constitutional authority Canada has to actually get this done in the national interest, and everybody, to a certain degree, agreed. However, the very next day the government came around and said it would not do something without national consensus, without defining what “consensus” meant. They did not talk about whether they meant provincial or municipal. They did not talk about regional districts. They did not talk about any of that.
We always get mixed messaging with all the measures that come out of the government, and all the Conservatives want to make sure of is that we do this in a very common-sense fashion with fiscal responsibility and practical solutions, because Conservatives' goal is simple: We want to protect Canadians, strengthen our economy and preserve the natural beauty of this country for generations to come.