Madam Speaker, it is always an honour for me to rise in the House to represent the people of Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, who entrusted me with a fourth term on April 28. As is always the case in the Saguenay region, the election campaign was difficult, first because there was a bit of a Liberal wave and, second, because it is a fertile riding for the Bloc Québécois. It was a struggle every day.
Once again, I would like to thank the people who put their trust in me. I would also like to thank my team, which worked very hard during the election campaign. They supported me and gave me so much motivation to power through when the going was rough. During an election campaign, we work every day. We go door to door and talk with citizens. I really want to thank my team, because it would be very difficult to do this all by ourselves. We always need people around us, and we will certainly work hard for our riding on the challenges that will arise.
Today, I am going to speak frankly because the time for rhetoric is over. The Saguenay region deserves results, not empty promises. It deserves concrete projects, not bureaucratic gridlock. It deserves a real recovery, not token half measures.
During the last election campaign, the Prime Minister promised repeatedly that there would be free trade across Canada by July 1. That would require interprovincial trade barriers to be eliminated, but that has not yet been done. We will wait. Those are certainly fine words, but we will see if the Prime Minister puts them into practice. He promised to kick-start the Canadian economy with billions of dollars in strategic investments to stimulate regional development, create jobs and give hope back to communities like ours, because it has been a long time since any major projects came our way. Every time projects are mentioned, we do not see them come to fruition.
Today, we are talking about a hastily tabled bill that purports to fix the problem. In reality, it is only a tiny step in the right direction, and not many details are provided. Once again, we see that this government lacks transparency. As always, it gives itself some leeway to tell people that projects will go ahead when in fact they will not.
Nevertheless, the bill represents an important acknowledgement. It basically admits that the Liberals themselves blocked everything with their laws, which created major obstacles to development and prevented foreign investors from coming here. The government seems to be finally realizing what we in the Saguenay region have known for a long time, namely that projects that could stimulate our economy are being stifled, not by a lack of local will, but by Ottawa's complex, poorly designed rules. This bill provides for the creation of exceptions, rather than dealing with the real problem of over-regulation. We are not going to get anywhere with a hypothetical proposal. First and foremost, the Saguenay region needs consistency and a real building plan.
Let us take a very concrete example that everyone is familiar with. We talked about the GNL Québec project many times and raised it again recently. This project could have injected $14 billion into our economy, created thousands of jobs and made the Saguenay region a world leader in clean energy exports. A number of elected officials and business owners have stressed that the rejection of GNL Québec left a void in our local economy.
What blocked the GNL Québec project? It was blocked by anti-development bills and regulations that impose such cumbersome and inconsistent assessment processes that they discourage any major investment. The people of Saguenay did not reject the project. It was buried by Ottawa, by a highly ideological government that drives away major investments, a government that often stands in the way of entrepreneurs, a government that does not stand up for its industries and workers, a government that must itself buy a major project like Trans Mountain to ensure it will be completed.
Canada needs consistency. The government developed a critical minerals policy that omitted phosphate and high-purity iron. It then listed a number of identified minerals that are not consistent with its own policy. There is also the Climate Institute of Canada, which said last week that domestic production will drop by 56.5% if Canada does not increase its investments in critical mineral development. That is quite something.
That is why I want to make it clear today that the best way to speed up nation-building projects is to repeal the well-known Liberal anti-development laws, such Bill C-69 and Bill C-48.
That is what needs to be done to spur investment in Canada and to get homegrown projects like Ariane Phosphate, First Phosphate and Strategic Resources off the ground. Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean is positioned as a region with a promising future and everything that it needs to prosper. It has a skilled workforce, a strong industrial culture, and access to global markets through the port of Grande-Anse, which leads to the St. Lawrence River and ultimately Europe. It has expertise in aluminum processing, with four clean energy aluminum smelters.
We are ready. It is not the region that is lagging behind; but instead—
My cell phone alarm just went off, and I apologize to the House.
