Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to rise again in the House of Commons to represent the people of Peace River—Westlock. I thank them for putting me here again.
Today, we are debating the budget implementation act, Bill C-15. It is a monster of a bill. It has five major parts. Part 5 has 45 divisions. It is broad-ranging. It deals with removing the GST, getting rid of the carbon tax and getting rid of changes to housing infrastructure. It also has the piece I want to talk about first, which is big changes to the expropriation laws here in Canada. This is one of the things the Liberals tucked into the bill.
At the very end of the bill, there is something that the Liberals accuse us all the time of voting against, which is the school food program. That is the very last thing. The school food program is in division 44 of part 5. I am sure we will hear from the Liberals about how we voted against that. I just want to point out to everybody who is watching this back home that, indeed, that part is in the bill, but it is in division 44 of part 5 of this particular bill.
In division 1 of part 5 are the changes to the expropriation law. Members might be wondering why we have to change the laws around expropriation in this country. I do not know if people remember, but in the dying days of the Trudeau government, one of his last kicks at the can, so to speak, was an announcement of a high-speed rail line from Quebec City to Toronto. It is interesting to note that the majority of Canadians live in that corridor and that there is not a lot of public land in that corridor. Folks along that way would have their land expropriated in order to build this train line. We can imagine that folks would be concerned about how that is going to work. The bill lays out a bunch of the changes that would be made in order for the government to expropriate this land.
We do not have to look too far into the past to know about when the Liberals expropriated land for other vanity projects in the country. There was the Mirabel airport, for example. There is what is known today as the Rouge Park. These places were expropriated for grand visions the Liberal Party had, and neither has really come to fruition. We wonder in this case as well, while the government is taking on, perhaps, extraordinary powers in order to do these things, if we will ever see this project come to fruition.
Like many of the other things the government talks about, it is more than likely that it will do some of the harsh things it did in the past, such as with the Mirabel airport or Rouge Park, when it expropriated the land and ran over people's civil liberties, and, in the end, did not fulfill the project as was promised to Canadians. That is probably a very good analogy for many of the things the Liberal government has done. It generally talks a good game and it steals Conservative ideas, yet when it comes to implementation, it is scattershot and unfocused, and it basically stumbles from one crisis to another.
The other piece I want to talk about is another good Conservative idea. We had the idea to sell off public buildings and build housing, starting with the CBC headquarters. That would be after we shut it down. We would sell off the headquarters and put housing in there.
I did not know this, but apparently, we have an entire company, the Canada Lands Company, dedicated to selling off federal lands and managing some federal assets across the country. The company manages the Montréal Science Centre, the CN Tower and two other properties. It funds those operations by selling off other public lands the government wants to dispose off.
This was a program that we proposed in our platform. We were going to sell public lands and buildings. The Liberals have taken that idea.
What is very odd is that, I would suspect, selling lands and buildings would mean a net positive revenue for the government, yet the government is allocating $1.5 billion to this corporation. The government said that, on the one hand, it is going to be selling off lands and buildings in order to increase housing and that, on the other hand, it is going to be funding the corporation $1.5 billion.
I do not understand why that is the case, and there is no explanation in the bill as to why we need to allocate this much money. It just says that the government is going to allocate it in order to build more homes in this country. It is counterintuitive, and I do not understand. Hopefully the government can explain it to me later, in questions and comments. That piece of the bill seems very odd.
More broadly, and this is not specifically addressing Bill C-15 but more the budget in general, I mentioned earlier that the Liberals seem to just stumble from one crisis to another. There does not seem to be a clear direction. It feels as if each of the ministries is just off doing its own thing and in many cases is uncontrolled by its own minister. We probably see this no more alive than in the Algoma Steel situation or the softwood lumber situation. Both of these situations have been around for a very long time.
The production of steel has happened for a very long time in Canada, yet there has been the layering on of regulations and challenges to our trade agreements around the world. Whether it is putting in new environmental standards, putting a carbon tax on our industries while all our competitor countries do not have a carbon tax, or taking them off coal when all the other countries we compete with use coal to produce steel, all these things cause death by a thousand cuts to these industries.
I had the privilege of touring the tube plant in Sault Ste. Marie a number of years ago. Sault Ste. Marie is incredibly proud of its industry. I do not know if members know this, but some of the steel made in Sault Ste. Marie goes to the tube plant to make oil field production pipe, and 95% of it is shipped to Grande Prairie, Alberta, so the connections between Sault Ste. Marie and northern Alberta are very tight.
This brings me to the other topic of softwood lumber. Softwood lumber is another one of the issues where the fact that the Liberals just keep stumbling along and failing to come to an agreement is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems facing our industries. Access to fibre is a major concern. Access to the ability to transport product on the railway is another major problem.
All these things take focus and require the government to ask how it can support the industry, particularly because this is a trade irritant with the United States. We should be working to make sure companies can remain profitable around the tariffs and to get a deal. The Prime Minister said that he would get a deal by July 21. If he did not think he could do that, he should not have made that promise. He should not have made that promise, but he did make it during the election.
I want to finish off my comments by talking about the standard of living in Canada. A decade ago, Canada was number five in the rankings for standard of living in the world. It was one of the happiest places in the world to live. Today we are 27th in the rankings of standard of living in the world. It has taken us a decade to plummet from number five to number 27 in standard of living. That is an indictment of the Liberals.
The Liberals will say over and over again that it has never been better, but even their own policies talk about how this is happening. The very fact that they are touting their school food program is an indictment of them, because Canadians are relying on food banks more than ever in order to feed themselves. This means our standard of living has gone down significantly.