Kyle Seeback

[Business of Supply, June 17th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I will trust the estimates by the Canadian Journal of Economics over those of the company that the member cited with respect to economic loss. The fact of the matter is this. There is an old expression, “putting the cart before the horse”, and this is what is happening here. We do not have a plan for the electric generation. We do not have a plan for transmission of electricity. We do not have a plan for local electricity transmission. We do not have a plan for charging networks.

When we do not have any of that stuff, which is required for a mandate, how can we proceed with the mandates? That is the problem. There has been no thinking, no thought done by the government on how to implement the mandates. The only result of this would be increased suffering for Canadians, who are already suffering as a result of the economic policies of the Liberal government for the last 10 years.

[Business of Supply, June 17th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, it is amazing. The member has the opportunity to respond to the real, valid criticisms that have been raised: we do not have the electric generating capacity, we do not have the transmission capacity, we do not have the local transmission capacity, we do not have the EV charging network in place and the CEOs of the companies are also saying they cannot reach the mandates. The member's answer is to say that there were some other issues that were dealt with a generation ago, so why can we not deal with this?

Deal with the facts. What is the cost of doing this? You have no idea. What is the cost of the transmission network? You have no idea. What is the cost of the charging network? You have no idea. Will you reach any of these things before the mandates come in? No. They have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. It is ideology over reality.

[Business of Supply, June 17th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, when we think about the terrible policy initiatives put forward by the Liberal government over the last decade, this banning of gasoline vehicles ranks in the top five.

I will explain exactly why. In law, we would call this gross negligence because the Liberals know what they are doing is wrong, and that it is negligent, but they continue to do it anyway. If we could take them to court over this, they would absolutely lose on a charge of gross negligence.

I am going to point out and explain exactly why. When we look at where we are in Canada right now, we see we that about 8% to 10% of new vehicles being purchased are EVs. That is, of course, with the subsidies that have been in place. My colleague just explained that those subsidies have dried up, yet next year, in 2026, Canadians are expected to go to 20%, so increasing by more than double in one year. That is an enormous challenge right now, given that the average EV is about $20,000 more than its comparable gas-powered vehicle.

We are at a time of an unprecedented cost of living crisis, where we have a million Ontarians regularly using the food bank, which is three times more than it was a decade ago. That is the economic record of the Liberal government. Now the government is going to say that Canadians have to spend $20,000 more just to get a new vehicle. That is just for next year, but it gets worse.

By 2030, which is a mere five years away, it is going to be 60%. We are going to go from 8% to 10% this year to 60% by 2030, six times the previous amount. How is that even remotely possible? The government knows it is not possible, yet it is continuing to drive forward on this. This is because the Prime Minister is just as obsessed as Justin Trudeau was with this impossible agenda on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Let us break down a couple of things. This is the epitome of ideology over fact and ideology over reality. First, it is going to cost, in an estimate from the Canadian Journal of Economics, 38,000 manufacturing jobs in the auto sector. That is a devastating blow that would happen as a result of a policy that the Liberals know is not possible but are driving ahead with anyway. It is as though they are saying, “Damn the torpedoes, we are going ahead”. The Liberals are ideologically obsessed with this, and the consequences to Canadians just do not matter. It does not even factor in it for them. Then it is to be 100% by 2035, a mere decade away.

The consequence of this for Canadians is that we are not going to be able to buy a gas-powered vehicle. When we go to 60% in a mere five years, if Canadians go to that dealership and say, “I am a farmer, and I want to replace my diesel pickup truck.” The dealer will say, “Sorry, we have sold all the diesel pickup trucks we are allowed to sell this year.” That farmer will not be able to get one. Can members imagine that that will be the consequence?

Now, if there were a readily available charging network in Canada, people might say that this makes sense, but, one, there is not; two, the government has no plan to create a charging network; and three, who is going to pay for it?

There was a report put out by RBC called “The $2 Trillion Transition: Canada’s Road to Net Zero”. The government is ideologically obsessed with net zero, no matter what the harmful consequences are to Canadians. I had the privilege of being the shadow minister for the environment at the time the report came out. I asked the deputy minister of environment at committee how much would it cost to build out the charging network in Canada, electric generation in Canada and increases to electric transmission in Canada to get to these zero-emission vehicle mandates. The answer was that they had no idea, that they had not calculated it. When we talk about gross negligence, that is the example.

The Liberals are driving forward with an ideologically driven mandate that is going to be harmful for Canadians. They do not know how they are going to get there, and they do not know how much it is going to cost. This is the direct definition of negligence, and they do not care. They are driving forward with it.

Let us think about how we get there. First of all, the government has set the charging network at a capacity that is higher per car usage than California or the EU. It has calculated the number of charging stations needed for a vehicle. The government has said that in Canada, a cold country, we need fewer chargers per vehicle than California does. This, in and of itself, is negligence.

Then, we look at where they are regarding the build-out of the charging network. Even with the Liberals' modest goals, which would not create the charging network that Canadians need, they are at about 10% of their goals. Are they changing the mandates? No, they are not. This is gross negligence. It would have catastrophic consequences for Canadians who are would be forced to buy these vehicles and then have nowhere to charge them.

How can a government continue like this? How can members of the Liberal Party support this? Many of them have rural ridings where there will be no charging network, and their constituents, their voters, the people they are supposed to represent, would be forced to buy these vehicles.

This is not a zero-emissions vehicle mandate; it is a ban on gasoline vehicles. Let us call it what it is: a ban on buying a gasoline vehicle regardless of the consequences. If someone does not have a charging network that they can go to, that is too bad; they would still have to buy an electric vehicle. These are the consequences of the kinds of things the Liberals are talking about.

Look at number one: We do not have the electric generating capacity to do this across the country. It takes 10 to 15 years to permit and develop new electricity generation, so somehow we have to massively increase our electricity demand for all the electric vehicles that would have to be charged, plus heat pumps, but there is no plan to actually increase the amount of electricity we generate. Again, this is gross negligence, or it is an absolute denial of reality.

Then we go the issue of the cost, which no one knows. I asked the deputy minister of the environment at committee how much it would cost, and he said, basically, that they have no idea and have not calculated that out to the end point.

Let us move to the issue of electricity transmission, and there are two aspects to that. There is transmission across the country, which would have to be massively increased. How much would that cost? They have no idea. Does the ministry of the environment have an idea? No, because I asked, and it does not know.

Then we get to local transmission. If everybody on my street in the town of Orangeville were to decide they were going to install an electric vehicle charger, because remember, in five years, 60% of the people on my street would have to have an electric vehicle, the local transmission cannot handle that capacity. Again, it does not just get downloaded from the federal government. That means there would have to be improvements made to Orangeville Hydro for local transmission. How much is that going to cost? Nobody knows. Do the Liberals know? No, they do not. Do they seem to care? No, they do not.

Therefore, the gasoline-powered vehicle bans that the Liberals are coming forward with are completely ideologically driven, with no plan. I have seen the Liberals come up with things for which they have a plan on the back of a napkin, but at least it is a plan. It is a terrible plan that they drew up in about 10 seconds, and that is often how they govern, but on this, there is absolutely no plan. There is no plan to build the electric generation capacity, no plan to build the electric transmission capacity and no plan to build the local electricity generation capacity. This is where we are.

What have some of the CEOs of the auto companies said about this? Bev Goodman, CEO of Ford Motor Company of Canada, called for the EV mandates to be repealed. Kristian Aquilina, president of General Motors, urged the Liberals to scrap the EV mandates, saying, “It's unrealistic to believe that the country is going to go from 5 or 6 per cent to 20 per cent by [2026], which starts now.”

The auto manufacturers have said that the mandates are unrealistic and are impossible to achieve. The Liberals do not know the cost of the electricity generation or how they are going to get there. They do not know how they are going to get there on transmission or on local transmission. They have set the EV charging network standards way lower than in California and way lower than in the EU. There are more cars per charger for chargers that they have not built, yet the Liberals are refusing to cancel the gas vehicle bans. Why is that? It is because they are about ideology over reality.

The only people who are going to be hurt by this are Canadians who are already suffering from a cost of living crisis, an inflationary crisis and a housing crisis. They cannot afford it. Conservatives would cancel the mandates. Why will the Liberals not get onside?

[Housing, June 16th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, the minister is in compliance with his multi-million dollar real estate empire. That is the only thing he is in compliance with, while people are living in tent cities. The minister has said the housing market is working just fine. This is from a real estate tycoon, while he has a $2.4-million penthouse in Vancouver, a $5.6-million lakefront property and a $3-million estate in Tofino. Do we think housing prices are going to go down? There is no way. It is not in in his financial interest for them to go down.

How can anyone believe the minister will do anything for housing when it is in his vested interest to keep his real estate portfolio high and Canadians in tents?

[Government Business No. 1—Proceedings on Bill C-5, June 13th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the member was not listening to my speech. I was highly critical of this particular piece of legislation because of its effects on unions and skilled trades and the opportunity for government corruption and graft, which there is a well-documented history of.

I am not sure I agree with the member's analysis of the election results, but the voter is always right, and this is where we are. We will continue to attack what I perceive as—

[Government Business No. 1—Proceedings on Bill C-5, June 13th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, the jokes on this write themselves.

We are talking about a bill that gives ministers the ability to pick and choose who gets these billion dollar projects with a government whose record on this is absolutely deplorable, whether it is GC Strategies or the green slush fund. Now the Liberals are pushing modular housing. Of course, Brookfield has a major interest in this.

The Prime Minister has not disclosed his assets that he still has from Brookfield. Let me ask this: Is it shocking that a Prime Minister who probably still owns shares and options, etc., in Brookfield is pushing for modular housing that would improve the profitability of Brookfield? I am not surprised at all, and I do not think Canadians are either.

[Government Business No. 1—Proceedings on Bill C-5, June 13th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I spent a good deal of my speech talking about the opportunity for continued ministerial corruption from a corrupt Liberal government, and the parliamentary secretary's push-back is that Pierre Poilievre built six houses.

That tells us exactly what is going to go on with the corruption, with respect to this particular piece of legislation. His push-back on the skilled trades was that there would not be any skills involved in building a modular house. Of course there would; factory workers have lots of skills. I talked about skilled trades.

Unionized skilled tradespeople will not be building modular houses, which is also why we do not have a minister of labour; we have the kids' table Secretary of State for Labour, which every union in the country has criticized. They know exactly what direction the government is going in. It is going to eliminate unionized skilled trades with this kind of budgeting and with this kind of bill.

[Government Business No. 1—Proceedings on Bill C-5, June 13th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the fantastic member for Northumberland—Clarke.

Before I talk about the actual merits of Bill C-5, I want to set the stage a little. The so-called one Canadian economy act is being brought in allegedly in response to the threats from the south, from President Trump, but it is disingenuous, at best, to say that that is what this is about. The crisis that is facing Canada is really a result of the last 10 years of a pretty incompetent Liberal government, and I will just talk about a few facts to back that up.

Let us talk about housing. Housing prices have become completely unaffordable. Most young people do not believe that they will ever own a home in their entire lifetime. In Ontario, my home province, we now have one million people regularly using food banks. This is a shocking increase from what it was a mere 10 years ago, when the number of people using a food bank in Ontario was about 350,000. Over the course of a decade of Liberal government management of the economy, the number of Canadians who are using a food bank has more than tripled. It gets worse because, again, 10 years ago, the number of people who were full-time employed and using a food bank was about 8% of those using the food bank. It is now 25%, so that has also tripled.

This is the backdrop of what has been going on in Canada after 10 years of the Liberal government. The Liberals like to say that they are a new government, but in fact they are not. The government is almost entirely composed of the ministers who were responsible for the files that created the challenges that exist today.

Now, the so-called one Canadian economy act talks about labour mobility, which is a critical issue. For a tradesperson in Canada, it is very difficult to go from New Brunswick or Newfoundland over to Alberta, where there may be work, or from Alberta over to New Brunswick or Newfoundland, if they are looking for work. This is because there is no standard set of safety standards across the country. Each province has its own safety standards, whether it is about working in confined spaces or working from heights. People may have certifications in their home province, but those certifications would not be recognized when they move to another province for work. That is a problem, because it could take them three, four or five days to meet these allegedly different standards within their trade, and therefore people would be going three, four or five days without pay. I know. I have travelled across the country. I have met with skilled tradespeople in the unionized sector, and this is a huge problem. It is a big disincentive for people to actually travel across the country to go where the work is.

When the Liberals talk about how we need to remove these interprovincial trade barriers, labour mobility is a huge part, and there is a simple solution. It is one that we actually proposed in the election. We said we would create a blue seal standard for these things across the country, so if people are certified to work from heights in Ontario, if they met that standard, they could go from Ontario to B.C., because they would have met this new standard.

The problem that we have is that the government did not do that in this alleged labour mobility bill. The Liberals are not taking the real step. It is just another example of a lot of talk. It sounds good that they are going to improve labour mobility, but when we actually look at the bill, it would not actually do anything it says. It promises to improve labour mobility by recognizing provincial occupation certificates federally. That would not help the plumber who is trying to go from Ontario to B.C. for work. That actually would not do anything for them. It is the same thing with any other skilled trades. The Liberals had a real opportunity to do something to make the lives of working Canadians better and to make labour mobility easier, but of course they declined to do that, so this is a major miss.

When the Liberals are talking about how we need to get the economy moving, they should have taken real steps to improve labour mobility, especially in the skilled trades. Those of us who spend time meeting with our tradespeople, the people who build and maintain this country, know that there is often a boom-bust cycle to that. The projects may be booming in Ontario when they are not necessarily booming in Manitoba, so the ability to move from one jurisdiction to another in order to be gainfully employed is critical.

This is not a new issue. This has been talked about for almost a decade, but the Liberals have lacked the political will to actually create a standard that would be recognized by all provinces, a new federal standard in the skilled trades for those types of safety things, as I said, like working in confined spaces or working from heights. If the Liberals did that, they would open up labour mobility for our tradespeople at a time when they absolutely need it.

Projects that the Liberals say are going to be spurred along by this piece of legislation have been delayed for a long time; they are not moving forward. Many people in the skilled trades are finding it hard to be employed, but they could be employed if they could move from one province to another. This is an absolute failure by the government, which says it is a new government that will take on new challenges. The Liberals have absolutely walked away from the challenge of labour mobility with this piece of legislation.

While we talk about the challenges with people in skilled trades, I would be remiss, as the shadow minister for labour, if I did not talk about the Liberal plan for modular housing. The Liberals now tout this as the big solution to housing, which, of course, it will not be, but one thing it would do for sure is take away jobs from our skilled tradespeople, especially our unionized tradespeople involved in housing construction: the plumbers, the carpenters, the pipefitters. They are the ones doing all the work to build houses, and now the Liberals want to take that away and have modular houses built in factories where there will be no skilled trades. This is going to have a disastrous effect. We are not going to have Red Seal carpenters working in a factory to build modular homes. The members across are laughing, which displays their ignorance on how the trades work and the general disregard the Liberal government has had for trades, especially for unionized tradespeople.

This brings me to another point, which is that for the first time in Canadian history, there is no minister of labour. This is a pretty shocking discovery. The Liberals are going to say they have a guy; he is the Secretary of State for Labour. However, it is like the person who sits at the kids' table at the wedding. They are kind of there, but they do not really matter that much. They are not at the big person table, which is the cabinet table.

What have unions said when they describe this? Joseph Mancinelli from LiUNA said, “if the Canadian government wants respect from labourers, perhaps let's start with a Minister of Labour”. He went on to call it a “slap in the face”. This is what it has been described as. Even CUPE said that it is “not just disappointing, but frankly insulting.” When we look at the lack of labour mobility in the bill, which is allegedly supposed to help; when we look at the Liberals pushing for modular housing, which will push out the trades; and when we look at the fact that there is no minister of labour, people in the labour movement know exactly where the Liberal government stands. Do not even get me started on taking away the right to strike through section 107 referrals. This is a government that has absolutely no respect for labourers and unions in this country, and the labour unions know it.

Now, let us talk about the one aspect of the bill that I find particularly troubling, which is the ministerial designation. The minister would get to pick the proponents of these projects. How could we ever think this is going to go well from a government that was responsible for the green slush fund and GC Strategies? Now the Liberals would get to pick the people who get these billion-dollar projects.

Imagine the corruption and graft that will go on with a government that has been awash in nothing but corruption and graft for the last 10 years. This will be corruption unlike we have ever seen. The minister is going to say he is going to pick one company to do a project. Can members imagine the corruption that is going to go on? If GC Strategies was able to turn $60,000 into $64 million, what is going to happen with a $1-billion project that a minister gets to pick? The green slush fund was Liberal insiders giving money to other Liberals while the minister stood there and did nothing. Actually, no, that is not true; the minister got promoted. The ministers responsible for GC Strategies got promoted too.

What did the Liberals learn? It is that turning a blind eye to corruption gets rewarded, and now they say this is how they are going to create the one Canadian economy. Yes, it is going to be one Canadian economy for Liberal insiders who get to line each other's pockets with these big fat contracts, just as they did with the green slush fund and just as they did with GC Strategies.

The bill would unleash a tidal wave of corruption and graft that the Liberals will hand out to all of their friends. It is not what Canadians need. It is not what unionized workers need. It is not what tradespeople need. It is another big, fat failure by a corrupt Liberal government, not a new Liberal government but the same old Liberal government that is going to reward its same old buddies with these big fat contracts.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2025]

Madam Chair, the minister knows that grocery prices have gone up every single month since he made that statement.

He either misled Canadians or was completely incompetent in his job to bring down grocery prices. Which one was it?

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2025]

Madam Chair, the minister said in 2023 that he was going to work hard at making groceries more affordable. Did grocery prices go up or down after he made that statement?