Madam Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise in this place and speak on behalf of the good people of Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna. I will be splitting my time with the hon. member of Parliament for Mirabel.
For the record, Bill C-5 is not perfect and, with respect, there are a few concerns I must point out. Let me start with the glaringly obvious. This bill is dubbed as the “one Canadian economy act”, and yet one of the first things we learn is that provinces and territories must provide consent on major projects. In other words, they have a veto. When a veto is provided to 13 different provinces and territories, we are not creating one Canadian economy. If anything, it is completely the opposite. In fact, a cynic might suggest that parts of this bill are designed to fail because the Prime Minister just spent an entire election making big promises that he had no intention of fulfilling. Why did he not get anything built, someone might ask the Prime Minister, who could then reply that there was no agreement on what to build. There, I submit by design, is a huge flaw within this bill.
However, we also know this bill contains other measures, in particular, under “Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada”, taking action or, in this case, legislatively proposing to take action on internal trade barriers, which have long been a passion of mine. I will expand on that point. When I was first elected to this place as someone totally wet behind the ears and a rookie MP, I was fortunate to draw quite highly in the private members' lottery order of precedence. Back in 2011, before the NDP was in power in British Columbia, tourism was not under attack and, indeed, there were a great many Canadian visitors in my riding every summer. Visiting local wineries, even in those days, with over 200 of them, has always been an immensely popular thing to do. Unfortunately, for visiting tourists from other provinces, they could not buy wine at those wineries to take back home with them. Why? Because there was an archaic Prohibition-era federal law that made it illegal to transport wine in person or to have it shipped across the provincial border.
Long-time members of this place might recall that I proposed a private member's bill to remedy this and create true free trade in Canadian wine, or so I had hoped. In those days, the NDP was our official opposition, hard to believe now, I know, which looked to slow down my bill. However, with the help of some Liberals, in particular, former Liberal MP Scott Brison, my bill was accelerated and passed in this House and the other place. Immediately after, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and British Columbia adopted the spirit of my bill; other provinces, not so much. One actually made regulatory changes to block what my bill had achieved.
I mention this because the Prime Minister has, unfortunately, made some outlandish statements, promises really. One was that there will be no interprovincial trade barriers by July 1. He also suggested that the elimination of these internal trade barriers will create another $200 billion of economic activity into our Canadian economy. I am not certain if this is wishful thinking or wilful political misrepresentation as a result of the recent election. Either way, I submit that expectations have been created that Bill C-5 will just not live up to.
This is not to say that the federal government should not do everything it can to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers. To some extent, this part of Bill C‑5 certainly does propose that, and that is why I am prepared to support it.
However, I must also return to the need for consensus found in the other part of Bill C-5. While the Liberal government will allow provinces and territories to veto major projects, we also have to recognize that many interprovincial trade barriers are erected in exactly the same way when one province essentially refuses to come to an agreement with the others. That is what frustrates me about this bill, because it contains a certain amount of double-talk and mixed messages.
I must also point out the obvious. Since 2015, the Liberals have passed several bills, such as Bill C‑69 and Bill C‑48, that have killed many Canadian energy projects. The Liberals know this, of course, but they are too arrogant to admit the obvious.
Fundamentally, the Liberals have created a regulatory environment that is no longer accessible to the private sector. Instead of fixing this, which would be the obvious solution, the Liberals created Bill C‑5, which proposes to circumvent and accelerate these regulatory hurdles through a new political process, subject to everyone's agreement, of course.
The exact mechanism of this political process is an enigma. I would like to point out that, in the past, our former Liberal government kept trying to try to buy jobs in the electric vehicle battery sector. As we now know, many of these investments, as the Liberals call them, completely failed, as is often the case when governments pick winners and losers by using politics as a criterion.
I also have to come back to another point that concerns me.
A few months ago, when campaigning to become the new Liberal leader, our now Prime Minister flew into Kelowna, and while there he told supporters that he would use emergency government powers to build energy projects. A part of that was the “build baby build” thing we heard so much during the election. Of course, in Bill C-5, there is no such language about using emergency government powers to build anything. Instead, what they say here is that there must be consensus, and of course, the NDP Premier of B.C., David Eby, has already said “no”. He will not support any new Canadian pipelines built with Canadian steel that export Canadian oil and gas by getting it to tidewater. He will, however, say yes to B.C. ferries built with Chinese steel by Chinese workers in a Chinese state-owned shipyard.
I mention that last part, because none of the Chinese steel is subject to any industrial carbon tax, unlike here in Canada, where Canadian steel remains subject to the Liberals' industrial carbon tax. On an interview with CTV Atlantic, the Prime Minister was clear that steel made by industry would be targeted for increases to offset his political 180° turn on the consumer carbon tax. This, of course, makes our Canadian steel more expensive and less competitive against Chinese steel with no carbon tax.
If this Liberal government was truly serious about building one Canadian economy, why ignore the fact that Canadian industries need a regulatory environment that is competitive and that creates incentives for investment that would lead to great-paying Canadian jobs?
Bill C‑5 completely misses the mark on those points. We are left with rather modest steps, despite huge promises to the contrary. At least those steps are in the right direction, but this bill could and should have been much more ambitious.
I would like to sincerely thank all members for taking the time to listen to my comments and concerns today.
