No, it turns out we cannot.
However, Mr. Speaker, under this bill, the one-year time limit could be paused at any time. The regulator could stop the clock so that it would not count within the one-year time limit. We could waste seven or eight years and still claim that it all happened under one. Under this bill, the bureaucrats could use three or four different excuses to hit the pause button on the clock, meaning that the famous one-year turnaround time on the decision that the minister advertised to the media is nothing in reality except an illusion.
On top of that, the minister sitting before me could actually add 90-day extensions to the time it takes to get a permit for a project. If that is still not enough for government bureaucrats, they could go to cabinet and get a permanent extension on the consideration of a bill. Who in their right mind, as a company, would put aside billions of dollars for a major project knowing that a Liberal cabinet, which has spent the last decade blocking projects, would have the legal power to delay the approval of or even a decision on a project forever?
Under the current system, the legislative timeline does not start until the proponent has done lengthy mandatory preplanning and consultations. That does not even come into the existing legislative time frames. Under Bill C-39, the proponent would have to gather and produce even more information, all the detailed engineering and scientific data necessary not only for the impact assessment, but also for whatever permitting processes apply to the project. That would all happen before the clock starts running on the one-year limit.
Mr. Speaker, if you would like me to stand up and speak for an hour before the clock starts on my 10-minute speech, I am sure the Liberals would love for that to happen. However, in reality, there is no one-year timeline for a project.
In sum, this is once again all talk and no action. The one-year timeline is smoke and mirrors, another illusion. The reality is that there would still be many years before concept can lead to construction. There is ultimately no limit whatsoever. This bill appears once again to be all talk and no results, headlines without deadlines.
Meanwhile, there are real consequences for the Prime Minister to continue along with the same policies of the Liberal government of the prior decade. Despite him claiming in the House of Commons that affordability is the best it has been in more than a decade, all he proved by saying that is that he is out of touch while Canadians are out of money.
The Prime Minister promised the fastest-growing economy in the G7. It was all talk and no results. Instead, today we got information from the OECD that we will be fourth out of seven, and our economic growth for the present year was downgraded by a quarter, down to a pathetic 0.9%.
Inflation is outgrowing wages, meaning Canadians are getting poorer in real time. Liberals are costing us more. Canadian households are now the most indebted in the G7, as interest rates rise on their mortgages, and rising prices at the grocery store ultimately leave our people behind.
We have a better way, and that is for the government to get out of the way and pass our economic action plan, which would scrap Bill C-69, the antidevelopment law. It would repeal the ban on shipping oil off the west coast of British Columbia. It would eliminate the industrial carbon tax.
Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have? It is unlimited. It is kind of like the timing on the Liberal approval for projects: It is unlimited. They can take as much time as they want. We can see why the Emiratis, who wanted to invest $90 billion in Canadians, came back six months later and said they could not find a project that was approved for them to invest in under the government. The Conservatives have a way to fix that. It is called the “one and done” plan. It is very simple: one project, one approval, one year, and better yet, one page. Members may say that it is impossible, but it has been done.
Under Prime Minister Harper's government, in the 2008-09 world financial crisis, then minister John Baird told his bureaucrats that he wanted to get the application form for a project down to one page. They said they could never do it, that it was impossible. They came back saying that he would be very happy because they got it down to 100 pages. He said that he wanted one page, and he told them to get out of his office. They came back, saying that the minister was going to be thrilled because they got it down to 50 pages, which had never been done. He told them to get out of his office and said that he wanted one page. They came back, saying that the minister was going to be thrilled because they got it down to 10 pages. He told them to get out of his office and said that he wanted one page. Finally they came back and told him it was one page. Then he told them he wanted one approval for each project. They came back and delivered one approval.
Guess what happened. We finished 23,500 projects, from concept to completion, in under two years. Despite grave warnings from the Liberal opposition at the time that this would destroy safety and the environment, the environment commissioner did a full audit of 23,500 projects, and not one came back with a safety or environmental problem, so “one and done” can be done.
What was funny was that the NDP got up and waved around a document saying that the environment commissioner had found a problem with a project that the feds had approved in Kanata, so we looked into it. It turned out that this project had not been part of the “one and done” plan but had taken seven years to approve and had the worst environmental outcome. That proves that all the paper, process and delays have nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with feeding an insatiable bureaucracy that creates work and money for itself by getting in the way, a bureaucracy that the government has allowed to metastasize over the last decade.
We need a real bill that will truly cap the consideration time for a project at under a year and set a target of six months. A year should be the worst-case scenario. In fact, why not bring all the first ministers and all the mayors into a room to sign a document that we in Canada should be the fastest place on earth to get a building permit? No matter what someone wants to build, it should be faster to build it in Canada than anywhere else on earth.
The Prime Minister could set the example today by granting permits for the 500 projects we have identified that are waiting in the impact assessment office. He could also get rid of the capital gains tax for reinvestments in Canada so we could bring back the trillion dollars of investment the Liberals have driven out of our country. That would be an avalanche of investment that would come pouring back into construction. It would be possibly one of the most patriotic tax cuts ever.
We will look very carefully at this 250-page Liberal bill, but we are not going to believe all the rhetoric, the hype and the talking points, because we have heard it all before. The Liberals have been repeating the same promises since the Prime Minister took office.
We are going to study the bill, but we have reservations about the outcome. The Liberals have made similar promises before. So far, they have not gotten rid of Liberal anti-development laws, Liberal anti-development taxes or Liberal anti-development bureaucracy. We want to remove these barriers so that we can build in earnest and make our country affordable, safe and independent here at home.
We will study the bill, and we will do so based on the criteria of whether it meets our mission of a country that is affordable, safe and independent here at home. Our mission is to save Canadians money, save jobs and put Canada first. We have a real plan to do it.
We ask the government to steal our plan. Perhaps what it should do is just take our plan and amend it over this bill. That way we would actually get some results. At the end of the day, the Prime Minister does not need to do, he needs to stop doing. He needs to stop blocking, stop taxing, stop obstructing and stop signing meaningless MOUs. He needs to get out of the way, get off the backs of our people and let our builders build, our workers work and our investors invest.
We should be the richest, most affordable country on earth. We have been blessed with an abundance that is unmatched in the history of humanity in geography, oceans and resources and, of course, the best people on planet earth. Let us unleash their potential and let us fulfill the promise of this country that anybody who works hard gets a great life, an affordable home, a fridge full of groceries and a bank account that is overflowing at the same time. That is the promise this country made to every single person.
That is our country's promise. That is what we are fighting for.
That is the fight we are having on behalf of all Canadians, so let us get the job done. There has been enough talk. It is time for some action.