Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères.
We are dealing with one of the most significant, if not the most significant, moves toward centralization, encroachment and “franchising” of the provinces and Quebec for the benefit of the Prime Minister's business plan. It all began when Donald Trump was elected. Fear became a reality and a political tool that was used to tell people to be afraid and to rally behind the former head of the Bank of England. It worked, and we have an obligation to listen to popular opinion. We understood that people were afraid of Donald Trump. In Quebec, however, they quickly stopped talking about Mr. Trump. Rightly or wrongly, people started talking about the Conservative leader. This is not a value judgment, but the message we received was that people did not want the Conservatives and were afraid of the Conservative leader, because the party and its leader were associated with ideas similar to Mr. Trump's. Once people realized the Conservative leader was unlikely to win the election, it was a bit late, but many people came back to us. We still have a clear influence in this Parliament today, which will become obvious in the House over time.
To steal votes from the Conservatives, the Liberal leader stole their platform. The Liberals are talking about tax cuts, “drill, baby, drill”, an impossible budget, and a financial framework that makes no sense. Even today, Canadians got $4 billion in handouts without a penny going to Quebeckers. The Liberals have proposed $6 billion or more in tax cuts. Nobody knows anymore how many billions of dollars are involved in the cancelled countertariffs, because the countertariff dance is a bit hard to follow. The government is talking about $9 billion that will go not toward strengthening our military, but toward absorbing the F‑35 cost overruns. All this is on top of the promise to increase spending, lower revenues and rebalance the budget with 2% growth. Many people have tried this before, but none have succeeded. The math simply does not add up.
Regardless, the government is going full speed ahead on projects of pharaonic proportions. A key component is oil and gas, including pipelines. That is not the only component, but it is part of the plan. It is clear that, in the short term, for most, if not all, of the pipelines, the private sector will not act alone. The government will have to pay. The public will have to pay. Apparently, according to the Minister of Industry, the government is disinclined to pay for hydroelectricity. The Liberals will be able to make up their own minds, because they just recruited the Prime Minister's pal, who was in charge of Hydro-Québec. They brought him in, they are going to have a little get-together so he can help them sort out everyone's money issues, and he will be privy to all their secrets. That alone is a question worth asking.
However, it will be years before all those projects generate revenue for the government, and with all the spending I have already mentioned, which will make Justin Trudeau seem like a frugal mom, the deficits will be astronomical. The government is going to act as though climate change does not exist. The people and families of Quebec and Canada are going to pay thousands of dollars a year for repairs and adaptations for damage caused by climate change, which everyone is suddenly pretending no longer exists. They are going to be saddled with projects that will encroach on laws, powers and regulations enacted over the years in relation to the environment, indigenous rights, biodiversity, language and taxation. The government will make that happen by giving a minister who is not very far from the Prime Minister, and who will probably be at the dinner with Mr. Sabia, totally discretionary powers, something countries that are not particularly democratic can only dream of.
However, the government's hasty actions quickly turn into improvisation. Improvising with government affairs is a risky business. It is quite literally reckless, regardless of one's political affiliation.
That is not what Quebeckers voted for. I can already hear someone saying that there are 44 Liberal members from Quebec. It is true that there are 44 Liberal members from Quebec. There are also 11 Conservative members from Quebec, and God only knows who would consider joining the other party. The Liberals did not present a platform; they barely presented a business plan. Quebeckers voted Liberal out of fear, rightly or wrongly, of the Trump-Poilievre duo. Now the Liberals are adopting the Conservatives' ideas in an attempt to align themselves with the Conservatives and carry out the Conservative agenda. No one can convince me that this is what Quebeckers voted for. This is just what Quebeckers voted against.
The Liberals are kicking off their term by imposing time allocation on a Parliament where they were elected by the will of the people to serve as a minority government. I do not think that the government is going to get away with this so easily. I would like to believe that the Conservatives will refuse to sell their souls to the Liberals, because this is not what Quebeckers voted for. They voted for a Parliament that works for them and respects them. The size, breadth, and unprecedented scope of this bill demand comprehensive analysis. This bill needs to be exhaustively studied in committee, not skimmed on the fly one fine, sunny June 12.
If the government had nothing to hide, it would let us send this bill to committee and preferably split it up, in keeping with its true nature. All of us have been elected to work in a transparent manner. We have all been elected to carry out a mandate given to us by the people. The MPs who are not members of the government have been elected to provide careful oversight and, at the very least, to ensure, before they throw their support behind the government, that bills have been carefully scrutinized and found to serve the common good.
Today, nothing could be less certain. I therefore urge everyone to forget about making deals, carry out the responsibility entrusted to them by the citizens of Quebec and Canada and refer this bill to committee for study by members of the House. We are willing to contribute to that study. That is how the House is meant to function.