Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in this place on behalf of the residents of Portage—Lisgar, those who proudly call south central Manitoba home.
I would like to start today with a glaring example of Liberal incompetence buried in the budget implementation act. The government is sheepishly backtracking on its so-called anti-greenwashing rules in the Competition Act, rules that it rammed through the House just last year in Bill C-59. Do members remember those?
In their ideological zeal to police every environmental claim, the Liberals demanded businesses back up statements with “internationally recognized methodology”, imposing rigid tests that invited frivolous lawsuits. What happened? Reality happened, and it hit hard.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board rolled back its own net-zero portfolio commitment, with experts linking it to these changes. The Royal Bank of Canada ditched its $500-billion sustainable finance pledge and stopped disclosing key green metrics, fearing penalties. The rules created a chilling effect as businesses halted legitimate green claims to avoid the red tape nightmare. Even the Competition Bureau's guidelines could not save this mess, as industry feedback poured in about the unworkable burden.
Now the Liberals are quietly relaxing it to “adequate and proper substantiation” and banning private lawsuits, admitting their overreach without any apology. We were yet again handed another policy straight from the activist ivory tower, which was so divorced from real-world consequences that it is quietly getting tossed in this bill.
The worst part is that these are not harmless daydreams. Every time government chases one of these activist-crafted fantasies, real people are the ones paying the price. While the activists congratulate themselves for a job well done, Canadians are left to deal with higher costs, fewer choices and a government that seems allergic to anything resembling common sense.
Personally, as a strong proponent of getting big projects built in this country, a place where it unfortunately has become next to impossible to get anything done, I am quite upset there were no changes in this legislation to the broken impact assessment process the Liberals created in the first place. Instead of fixing their mess, the Liberals have created a new bureaucracy with the Major Projects Office. It is still too early to tell if this office will succeed in any way, and so far it has only announced projects that basically have already been approved or are already under construction. Out of those 11 projects, the office thinks only two will be deemed projects in the national interest.
At its core, what this office is doing is providing a “concierge” service for the cherry-picked projects the Prime Minister has decided to move forward on. The mere fact that the Liberals need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hire countless new bureaucrats and probably a bunch of consultants to shepherd projects through this maze of regulations is indicative of how bad things have become in this country.
Make no mistake: The government is picking winners and losers. Whoever has the best lobbyists or friends in the PMO can get their project referred to the Major Projects Office and get it sent to the front of the line. It is basically the Air Canada super elite program, where a select few stroll down the red carpet, breeze through their own priority security line and sail past check-in, while everyone else gets bumped, stranded on the terminal floor and stuck on hold for hours hoping somebody, anybody, just picks up. This is because the Liberals have made it so impossible to get projects built.
If we step back for a second, we will quickly see that hundreds of billions of dollars or over half a trillion dollars of investment has fled the country over the past 10 years. The outflow of capital is simply remarkable and sad. We saw how the Liberals' ill-thought-out emissions cap, which was very much a production cap, was abandoned. We saw their ludicrous EV mandate get put on ice to buy them some time to figure out how to get themselves out of that mess. We have seen ideology trump reality time and time again.
Now we see a Liberal caucus that seems to be ripping apart at the seams as its members struggle to reorient themselves. I will admit that it has been something to watch former Liberal environment ministers get a little hot and bothered as their once-sacred flagship policies are quietly tossed overboard. To be fair, the one who just resigned at least had the decency to walk away from the chauffeured car and the extra salary instead of twisting himself into a pretzel trying to defend all the recent backflips.
Just yesterday, I asked the new Minister of Environment a straightforward question. I asked her if they have given up on meeting their emissions reduction target. Her answer was pure bureaucratic gibberish that was so tangled that members would need a map and compass to navigate their way out of it. She could not bring herself to say what everybody already knows: After a decade of failed policies, they are nowhere near hitting these targets. It has been all pain for no gain.
Members do not have to take my word for it. The environment commissioner himself said that the Liberals now boast the worst record in the entire G7. Just as the Liberals have chased away hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, and nickelled and dimed families for heating their homes and filling up their cars, their policies still fail spectactularly.
Now, the new minister tells us that they will unveil new measures to meet the targets sometime next month. Forgive me for not popping the champagne on this one. We have all seen this movie before, and the sequel is never better than the original. Chances are that this will be yet another round of environmental policies destined for the same shelf, where all their other failures go to die. Let us be honest. When a government this far behind suddenly insists it is still on track, what it is really signalling is a whole heap of new regulations and taxes so heavy-handed that they could bring our economy to a halt.
We know about one of the ideas the Liberals support: the UN's new net-zero carbon tax on shipping. The Liberal Minister of the Environment insisted just yesterday that imposing this UN-backed net-zero shipping tax, potentially hitting $500 per tonne, will not drive up the cost of everyday items for Canadians. Think about that in a Canadian context, where we were not even at $100 per tonne. I live in the real world where businesses do not just eat these taxes out of the goodness of their hearts. They pass them straight down to every Canadian.
If I were expected to take the minister at her word that the Liberals have not abandoned their 2030 targets, whatever else they are cooking up must be an absolute doozy because, my goodness, they have a lot of ground to make up. I ask this not rhetorically but earnestly: What is the point of having a Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act when absolutely no minister, department or government will ever be held accountable for any of their failures?
To move on from the environmental failures of this government, equally important is what has been excluded from this legislation. Fortunately, the Liberal government decided not to proceed with its disastrous idea to strip faith-based organizations of their charitable status. That this idea was even proposed is extremely concerning. I have had hundreds of my constituents write to me and agree with the idea that the government should never be stripping faith-based organizations of their charitable status. These charities support the most vulnerable in our society, filling a crucial gap the state simply cannot. The economic benefit is clear. Cardus Institute research shows that, for every dollar a congregation spends, the local community receives $3.39 in economic benefit. Why even raise the prospect of revoking their charitable status? It is clearly not for fiscal reasons.
The best explanation seems to be that the Liberals want to divide Canadians for political gain. This has become an extremely common trend under this government, and it is happening in real time. Just this week, we learned the Liberals have secured the Bloc's support for their proposed combatting hate act, which is yet another attempt to police the thoughts of Canadians. What is the deal they struck in making amendments to criminalize sections of sacred texts? This is completely unnecessary. The government already has the tools it needs to prosecute those who promote violence and genocide. Adding insult to injury, the same member who proposed policing biblical verses was just now made the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
I say this to my Liberal colleagues: Stop attacking our inheritance from our ancestors for their political gain. Canadians are tired of it. Whether it be the Liberals' tacit support of tearing down statues and belittling symbols of national importance or the general pursuit of shaming our heritage, Canadians do not want a government that wages war on their values, their faith and their heritage. They want a government that supports the vulnerable, respects the contributions of charities and unites Canadians rather than dividing them. They want a responsible government that acts with common sense. They are not getting it with the Liberal government. Canadians deserve better.