Blaine Calkins

[Points of Order, April 28th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order in regard to government Motion No. 11, and in particular paragraph (b)(ii) of the motion, which states:

after 6:30 p.m. the Speaker shall not receive any quorum calls or dilatory motions, and shall only accept a request for unanimous consent after receiving a notice from the House leaders or whips of all recognized parties stating that they are in agreement with such a request.

My point of order will challenge the admissibility of the motion, since the quorum in this House is a requirement of the Constitution Act, section 48.

Some may point out that certain proceedings in this chamber have proceeded under the unanimous agreement of the House that quorum calls not be heard, but I would like to point out that in those instances, such as late shows, emergency debates and take-note debates, these debates do not result in decisions of this House. The current motion is an unprecedented departure from this usual practice, in that it seeks to remove the quorum requirement for the debate of government legislation on items that could become law should the House vote to support them.

The requirement for quorum has never been challenged before, and the quorum requirement of the House is a fundamental component of our rules entrenched in the Constitution. In fact, page 598 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, says clearly, “Nothing done by unanimous consent constitutes a precedent.”

I also recognize that the quorum necessity of 20 members is not altered directly. The inability to bring to the attention of the Chair the lack of quorum in this House indirectly waives the constitutional and procedural requirement of quorum. Since a quorum call is the only means by which quorum is enforced during the sitting, the inability to call a quorum is, in essence, the same as waiving the quorum requirement. Mr. Speaker, as you and your predecessors have reminded this House numerous and countless times, we cannot do indirectly what we cannot do directly.

If the House were to adopt Motion No. 11, it would adopt procedures that go beyond the powers conferred upon it by the Constitution. There are similar precedents regarding committees that ought to be considered. On June 20, 1994 and November 7, 1996, the Speaker ruled that:

While it is a tradition of this House that committees are masters of their own proceedings, they cannot establish procedures which go beyond the powers conferred upon them by the House.

If we are to be consistent, I would point out that while the House is a master of its own proceedings, it cannot establish procedures that go beyond the powers conferred upon it by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1985 that the requirements of section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867 and of section 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870, respecting the use of both the English and French languages in the records and journals of the Houses of the Parliament of Canada, are mandatory and must be obeyed. Accordingly, the House can no longer depart from its own code of procedure when considering procedure entrenched in the Constitution.

On page 295 of the second edition of Joseph Maingot's Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, in reference to the 1985 case, he lists those constitutional requirements regarding parliamentary procedure that must be obeyed and includes in that list section 48, which deals with the quorum of the House of Commons.

While these requirements are amendable by the Parliament of Canada, they cannot be amended only by one House of Parliament. This House cannot unilaterally change or suspend the quorum requirement by a majority decision. While it is said that the Speaker does not normally rule on constitutional matters, the constitutional matter of quorum is also stated in our Standing Orders, as are the financial privileges of this House. It is our responsibility to ensure that procedural requirements are observed before a bill leaves this place to become law, since the courts have the legal power to inquire into the procedural history of a bill that has been assented to. On page 186 of Joseph Maingot's second edition of Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, there is the claim that “the courts might be effective in ensuring the observance of procedural requirements imposed by the constitution with respect to the enactment of legislation.”

The official opposition rejects this procedure being forced upon the minority by the majority in this House. If the House were to adopt this motion without the unanimous consent of the members, and I have my doubts whether we should have been circumventing this rule in the past by unanimous consent, we could be casting doubt upon the legitimacy of our proceedings and placing the entire institution under a cloud.

Among the first principles of our democracy is that legislation should be tested through rigorous debate. Allowing for significant portions of debate on government legislation that could become law without requiring a single government or coalition member to be present to contest and debate the legislation is a fundamental abdication of duty on behalf of the government.

As many Speakers have stated numerous times in this place, the Speaker is the servant of this chamber and the guardian of the members' rights and privileges. I implore you to find out of order the provision that would remove the ability of the Speaker to ensure quorum present in this chamber.

[Government Response to Petitions, April 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, we respectfully request a recorded division.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I am at a loss at the lack of knowledge that my hon. colleague has when it comes to the oil and gas sector.

This is clean sweet crude that is in carbon capture, utilization and storage technology. This is going into reservoirs that have long since been abandoned, after the water flood and everything else that has happened, to recover oil, because liquefied carbon dioxide actually unbinds that oil from the porous structures deep in the ground and releases that easy energy that we already have from all those years ago. This is the cleanest oil that we have.

The carbon dioxide that is going down into the well stays down there. The only carbon that is coming up is from the oil that it has recovered through enhanced oil recovery. That money actually reduces the cost of the sequestration, because it is, in and of itself, providing for the cost of the sequestration. What the Liberals are doing with this budget is simply spending more money only on sequestration. There is no return on the investment at all, so it actually costs everybody more money, money that we could be investing in research and development for other clean technologies.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I am a proud Albertan. I am an MP who used to work in the patch. I was a roughneck. I worked on directional drilling rigs as an MWD hand. I am very familiar with the oil and gas sector, so I am able to explain it. I apologize if it offends some people that I actually have that experience.

Nobody in Alberta and nobody in the energy sector is accusing the Liberal government and the NDP coalition partners of being beneficial in any way, shape or form. I do not even understand the context of the member's question, because not a single oil and gas company in Alberta or anywhere in this country is actually applauding, other than under duress or just trying to keep the government of the day at least reasonably happy, to do as little damage as possible.

The reality is that this government oversaw the loss of well over 200,000 jobs in the western Canadian energy sector economy. That is what it has done. If it had done that to any other part of the economy, killed 200,000 jobs in the auto sector, killed several hundred thousand jobs in the aerospace sector, killed several hundred thousand jobs off the coast in the fishing industry, this country would have been in an uproar. However, because it is just Alberta, and Alberta-bashing is popular with the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberals, it seems to somehow be okay. It is not.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it never ceases to amaze me that the Bloc Québécois is actually here to tell Albertans how to live their lives. They seem to be more obsessed with the industries and businesses in Alberta than they are with the industries and businesses in their own province.

If the member was actually listening to my speech, I talked about carbon capture, utilization and storage. This is not oil sands development at all. This is putting liquefied carbon dioxide down into a well, a sweet crude well, to recover sweet crude. The fact that the Bloc Québécois member does not even understand these basic elements of the oil and gas sector leads me to believe that I should not be taking her advice at all on how Alberta's economy should work.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I will just call it the “ethically challenged government”, as witnessed in “The Trudeau Report” and “Trudeau II Report”.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I am pretty sure, when we look at the budget, that the dental care plan is for people under the age of 12, and the member who asked me the question just asked it for seniors, so I do not even think she understands her own budget.

The reality is that not a single province was asking for dental care transfers from the federal government. What that actually is is a promise made to the NDP for continued support of a corrupt, tired government that does not have any idea how to get its spending under control.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from the NDP for reminding us of the napkin budget brought in a few years ago. That was with the Liberals as well.

Unfortunately, the government treated this rationale as an opportunity to spend wildly and recklessly on policies that did nothing to support Canadians through the pandemic or that would help create sustainable economic growth in the future to help pay for their spending.

This budget continues this practice, with a deficit of $52.8 billion and no plan to reach a balanced budget. At the end of the 2014-15 fiscal year, the federal debt was just over $612 billion with a budgetary surplus of $1.9 billion.

Now, the federal debt is almost $1.2 trillion, and is anticipated to reach $1.3 trillion in the next couple of years. The cost to service our debt this year alone will be $26.9 billion. Inflation has reached a 31-year high, and we have just seen the largest rate hike in decades by the Bank of Canada: a full half a percentage point, bringing the overnight rate to 1% in order to deal with government spending-driven inflation. We know that the Bank of Canada will continue to aggressively raise interest rates, making this spending even less sustainable. In fact, one of the reasons why the Bank of Canada had to increase it so aggressively was because of this unsustainable spending, something the NDP-Liberals would realize if they were not all following the Prime Minister’s example and not thinking at all about monetary policy.

We are all aware of the devastating impact that inflation is having across Canada. Too many people who have been just getting by for the past couple of years, or even longer in some cases, now find themselves in a situation where they no longer can get by. Groceries, fuel and pretty much everything else we can think of is getting more expensive. Housing costs have skyrocketed, with the price of the average house doubling since the Prime Minister came into office and increasing 30% in the last year alone.

Young Canadians, who have seen their dream of home ownership evaporate under the government, were hoping for some sort of inspired measure in this budget: something that showed the NDP-Liberal coalition understood the issue and was actually trying to fix it. Instead of hope, the government doubled down on more of the same failed policies that have not helped young people get homes in the past six years. Nothing in the budget will help get homes built this year. In fact, the solution that the coalition government has put forward seems to be a plan to increase the size of the bureaucracy, not the supply of houses.

The budget almost acknowledges that the government is not even trying to help young people get into their own homes. Instead of a serious plan to cut red tape, cut costs and build homes, the government decided that a multi-generational home renovation tax credit was the way to go. Families are the cornerstone of our society, and supporting our loved ones as they age or when they are facing hard times is admirable. I am sure we would do it for our families, and most Canadians would want to do the same if they were able to do so. However, considering the housing crisis, this tax credit, which gives up to $7,500 for renovations to make a secondary suite, is not a nice social policy to help support strong families. It is an admission of failure by the NDP-Liberals.

It is an admission that they are going to give up on helping to get young people out of their parents’ basements and put them into their own homes. The government is telling young people that instead of trying to fix the mess it created and helping to get them into homes, it is going to help families fix up basement suites so that they feel like their own places.

Young Canadians want the pride of home ownership and the ability to build some equity, and they want to have the autonomy that comes with living on their own or with their partner or spouse. They do not want the government to help put a shower in the half-bath in mom and dad's basement and call it a day. Without a meaningful plan to increase supply, bring prices to a reasonable level and help new people enter the housing market, that is exactly how this tax credit is going to be interpreted by Canadians, and who could possibly blame them?

Another thing that was in this budget is the expected increase in the amount of equalization payments. Members will recall that in 2018, Bill “no more”, I mean Bill Morneau, quietly locked in the equalization formula until 2024 with virtually no consultation.

The Liberal government members of the day did not really care that Alberta and other western provinces were going through hard times; they just saw my whole province as a piggy bank that they were willing to shake every last dime out of while they could. After all these years of Liberals taking from that piggy bank without putting anything back in, there is not much left to give, but that will not stop the NDP-Liberal coalition from trying, and if that means smashing the bank open, they are going to be quite all right with that.

The feeling that the government does not understand Alberta or that it is actively trying to dismantle its economy and way of life is not new. Some held out hope that, with the finance minister being at least born in Alberta and the associate finance minister representing an Edmonton riding, there could have been some sort of consideration given to our province, but that certainly was not the case with this budget.

The attack on the energy sector continues, with the NDP-Liberal government doubling down on the plan to phase out the oil and gas sector. With this budget, the government will no longer allow the use of flow-through shares for the oil and gas industries, so smaller firms that rely on this important tool will find it that much harder. The government has asked them to reduce their emissions and navigate an ever more complicated regulatory system, and at the same time the Liberal-NDP government is working to ensure that oil and gas companies do not have the resources that they will need to accomplish either of those goals.

The budget did include, however, a tax credit for carbon capture and storage, but unfortunately it is deeply flawed. The budget suggests that there is a credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage, which means that the recovered oil can also be utilized, but in the case of the energy sector in my province, that is simply not true. The tax credit specifically rules out enhanced oil recovery, where the carbon that is being sequestered can be pumped back into the well to be permanently sequestered and in the process help extract oil that is at the bottom, which otherwise can no longer be accessed. This technology creates the lowest-emission oil possible and allows for wells to be fully utilized, resulting in jobs and royalties, and the CO2 is still sequestered.

Enhanced oil recovery sequestration is already taking place. There is already a process, a regulatory regime, and there are businesses operating in this space. In my riding, enhanced energy has used this method to sequester CO2 and recover the cleanest oil in North America. A year ago, they announced that they had reached the monumental milestone of sequestering one million tonnes of CO2, an equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the road.

If anyone is puzzled by the fact that the government is against this technology, so is absolutely everybody in Alberta. If the NDP and the Liberals want to see emissions reduced, they need to put their ideology aside, support the oil and gas sector and support CCUS.

[The Budget, April 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today and join in the debate on the 2022 budget. I would like to congratulate the government for having a string of two years in a row where it tabled a budget. It kind of broke that historical trend for a while.

In many ways, this is a historic budget, and one that may well be remembered for generations to come. It will be remembered as a budget that failed to rein in reckless spending and restore fiscal responsibility, a budget that has put the financial well-being and access to government services for future generations at risk, and a budget that doubled down on failed policies in the pursuit of ideology.

It will also be remembered as the New Democratic Party's first federal budget, which is no small feat for a party that officially won only 25 seats with less than 18% of the vote just six months ago. It is a government nobody voted for and was not even debated in the last election.

It has never been clearer that we have an NDP Prime Minister who just happened to be born into the Liberal Party. Instead of going his own way as a New Democrat, he decided it would be easier to turn the once fiscally reasonable Liberal Party of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Jean Chrétien into a mirror image of the NDP, complete with a coalition-style partnership, to avoid scrutiny and accountability. That reality is reflected in this budget, and it is future generations who are going to bear the burden of it.

It was necessary to engage in extraordinary spending in the early days of the pandemic in order to ensure that Canadians had the support they needed to make it through the incredibly difficult times brought on by the pandemic and the various public health measures brought in across the country by all levels of government to address it. Unfortunately, the government treated—

[Fisheries and Oceans, March 31st, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, after she was defeated in the last general election, the former minister of fisheries issued temporary moderate livelihood lobster licences to four first nations for the lobster season that ends in May. The former minister had the right and ability to impose conditions on the fishery in return for the issuing of these licences, which would sell in today's marketplace for over $1 million.

Did the former defeated minister put in place a condition that these licences were not to be fished outside the DFO's commercial regulated seasons for lobster fishing areas 33, 34 and 35, yes or no?