Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today to speak to our opposition day motion on the reintroduction of a Canadian sovereignty act.
Before I get to the act, I would like to talk about the change in the political landscape between its first introduction and today. Canada is at a precipice. We are facing a very real economic threat. The proposed Canadian sovereignty act is a strong step in the right direction. It would remove barriers and red tape that have held Canada back. It calls on the Prime Minister to promote investments by removing capital gains tax on reinvestments in Canada, entice provincial governments to open their markets up, build pipelines, improve access to the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario and start at least one new Greenfield LNG project.
Numerous ministers have stood up in this place signalling their willingness to work with the opposition. It is time to make good on that promise, and it needs to happen as soon as possible because Canadian industry and jobs are suffering. For nearly a year, Canada has been at the receiving end of unprovoked and unjustifiable tariffs. The rationale behind why Washington decided to implement these taxes can be debated ad nauseam, but functionally, the answer to that question is irrelevant. The decisions of the President are out of our hands, but how we as elected representatives, and more importantly, Canadians as a society, respond is not.
There are two pieces of advice that should be obvious to anyone looking in from the outside of the negotiations that even the most casual of observers will conclude. First, we are stronger together than we are apart. That applies to the negotiating table just as much as it does to the floor of the House of Commons. Second, patience is wearing thin. Offering at least some form of openness and transparency to stakeholders, opposition parties and, more importantly, the families and business owners suffering under these tariffs would go an extremely long way in dispersing the fog and noise surrounding the negotiations.
Before going any further, I need to reiterate that the tariffs the President of the United States has implemented are unjustified, unfair, unprovoked and, most importantly, unnecessary. They are causing untold levels of harm in strategic sectors on both sides of the border. They are shuttering plants and foundries. Their immediate effects on the Canadian economy are paralyzing.
The response of Canadian workers and voters is predictable and more than understandable. Canada is responding. The government is making efforts, as is the opposition. We are doing that through our proposed Canadian sovereignty act, which would allow Canada to build more, extract more, import more and, most importantly, to thrive more.
Canada's Conservatives, despite the claims of certain members on the other side, have shown a willingness to work with the government when the government proposes sensible, results-oriented policies like Bill C-5. A Canadian sovereignty act would build on that economic stewardship by giving the government the tools to help spur on private sector development across the nation by removing the regulatory shackles the Prime Minister's predecessor bound the government with.
The legacy of the unfair, unjust Trump tariffs will be an extremely painful but valuable lesson for Canadian policy-makers. The importance of diversification and self-reliance is an increasingly unstable global threat environment.
While the outlook is bleak, there has been a noticeable shift in at least the rhetoric coming from the other side of the House since the previous election. For a decade we had a government that was staunchly anti-pipeline. Any resource development project posed an immediate and direct existential threat to the planet. Defence spending was seen as unnecessary and abrasive, ironically enough because our geography and proximity to the United States meant we did not have a need for an efficient independent military. Multilateral dialogue with despots in Iran and China were the approach of the world's most recent postnational state.
Despite having largely the same caucus and much of the same cabinet, the Prime Minister, who campaigned on acting as a foil to what he calls “unstable and unpredictable” actors, has committed verbally to adopting some of the positions we have championed, at least in principle.
The government worked with the Conservative opposition to pass Bill C-5, which gives the government the capacity to fast-track natural resource projects in the national interest. The government, after a decade of pressure, finally agreed to the Conservative-led push to increase defence spending and increase border security, coupled with reduced immigration targets. In my mind, this sizable shift in direction from the government, its cabinet and caucus can be explained by only one thing: U.S. tariffs.
Having campaigned myself on many of these issues, I will not fault the Prime Minister for coming to his senses, even if it took crippling tariffs from a foreign government to prompt a moment of clarity that I highly doubt his predecessor was ever willing to entertain. Once again, I would like to reiterate that these tariffs on Canadian goods and services are unjustified, unfair, unprovoked and unnecessary, but they have forced Canada to make difficult decisions that it should have made a decade ago. I applaud the government for making those select few difficult decisions in principle, which have caused a rupture in his caucus that we are seeing play out in real time.
The Prime Minister's speech at Davos was well written, trading in Ted and Samantha on main street with Thucydides and President Havel. However, writing a speech and delivering a speech are the easy parts. What is difficult is actually delivering on those promises.
To that end, to achieve that goal of diversifying trade and kick-starting our domestic supply chains and building independence and economic sovereignty here at home, the Conservatives have introduced a Canadian sovereignty act. It calls for a battery of changes to the Liberal government's decade of stifling economic growth by repealing unnecessary regulatory and statutory caps like the oil and gas cap, the industrial carbon tax, the EV mandate, the plastic bans, Bill C-69 and Bill C-48. It calls for serious investment in our natural resource sectors by fast-tracking projects that create Canadian goods with Canadian resources by Canadian companies creating Canadian jobs.
The Prime Minister would do well to follow in the footsteps of his former boss and continue the generational trade diversification carried out by former prime minister Stephen Harper. His prowess serves as an excellent blueprint to follow as he and his cabinet navigate the treacherous waters of international trade and relations in 2026. The best time to continue diversification was a decade ago. The second best time to diversify is now.
Canada, Canadians and especially policy-makers need to remember that the relationship between Canada and the United States will go past the President and the Prime Minister. The current occupants of 24 Sussex and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are minor actors in a much larger, deeper and historic relationship. We need to remember that. Trade is not finite. We can and should aim not only to increase trade with our European and Asian allies but also to seek new emerging markets in Africa and on the subcontinent, and most importantly to repair, renew and reinvigorate our trade relationship with the United States.
During his lauded Davos speech, the Prime Minister glibly dismissed “this aphorism of Thucydides” on the international order by simply countering the Greek historian's observations with a powerful and deeply insightful quote. It will not. The Prime Minister assured us that his dealings with petro-dictators and autocrats in Qatar and China instead of like-minded democracies is not naive multilateralism. I will leave Parliament with this quote from that same Greek polymath:
...and their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.