Brad Redekopp

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to stand up in this House and speak on behalf of the residents of Saskatoon West. Today, we are speaking about Bill C-39, the building Canada strong act. I think everybody in our country, including those in the Liberal government, agrees that 11 years of the current government has left Canada lacking when it comes to investment, lacking when it comes to jobs and the economy and lacking when it comes to GDP per person. We need to do everything we can to get more business activity and more investment in this country. The building Canada strong act sounds very familiar to me. If we go back about a year and a half to the last election, what happened right after? We heard these words: We need to build at speeds never seen before. It is much like we are hearing today. There is a lot of déjà vu. Members will recall that at that time, the government came forward with Bill C-5. The government's website, even today, says this about Bill C-5: Canada must build critical new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations. This includes the infrastructure to diversify our trading relationships and to become an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energies. That is great. The government needed, at that time, to get this bill through the House and pass it immediately so we could create the Major Projects Office and create projects of national interest, because this was urgent for “speeds not seen in generations”. This House did that. This House debated the bill relatively quickly and passed it. We rushed it through. What was accomplished? We have bureaucrats in place. They are all getting paid and probably getting bonuses too. Five hundred projects have been submitted, so people in the industries stepped up with lots of ideas. However, while the member across the aisle said there were 24 projects, I saw 18 on the website that have been considered by the office. Just last week, the very first one squeaked its way through the office, but it has not started yet. The actual results of this office are that zero projects have been built. I find it kind of amusing that the solution is another bill. Last year, we had the Building Canada Act. This is the building Canada strong act, and I can only assume that next year we are going to have the building Canada even stronger act to fix all the problems that have not been fixed here. The government is about talk, not results, and Canadians need actual construction jobs, need actual work and need money so they can pay their bills. As I said, with respect to Bill C-5, there were 500 project applications, and only one cleared. I want to talk about the difference between a Conservative approach and a Liberal approach. The Liberal approach is all about control. The Liberals will not let the private sector do its thing. The Liberals want the private sector to come to them. They want people in the private sector to come begging to their offices, saying, “Please, sir, we would like to build this project.” They like the view of control. They like the ability to say yes and no. They like it when people come to them essentially begging to do things, and they like to be able to say no, yes, no, yes, to basically pick the projects. The Conservative approach is very different. Our approach is to get government out of the way and level the playing field. We need to let the private sector do what it does best. People in the private sector analyze projects. They look at the benefits, look at the costs and look at the implications on the environment and other things, and they make their decisions. Those decisions actually benefit all Canadians, because they create jobs, they create work and they create paycheques. We need to put guardrails in place, obviously, so there have to be environmental protections and there has to be a taxation system that works, but it needs to be predictable, fair and timely. If people meet the standards as laid out by the guardrails, then their project should be approved. They do not need to come begging to the government to get it approved; they can just go ahead and do it. The result of that is that more projects get built. The Liberals like to pick winners and losers. Conservatives want everyone to win. As a result, the Liberals have one project now slowly moving its way through the system. Conservatives would have hundreds of projects by now that would be moving forward. How would we do that? We have said it many times. We would repeal Bill C-69, the no more pipelines act. We would repeal Bill C-48, the tanker ban. We would repeal the industrial carbon tax and the clean fuel standard. We would establish predictable, time-limited assessment reviews with a one-and-done approach. The one-and-done approach is really important to this because it is one project, one review. It is a simple application, a firm decision timeline and predictable milestones, with a six-month approval or, in some cases, when there is an extremely complicated case, a one-year approval. We would maintain our safety and environmental standards, but we would put a predictable process in place for businesses so that they know what they are up against. What we need is private investor confidence. That is what is lacking in our country right now. We need permanent fixes to the bureaucracy and red tape that have been created by this 11-year-old government. We need to create stability and predictability so that investors can make their decisions knowing what the future will hold. There are potentially billions of dollars in projects waiting to be done in Canada. We need them, and our workers need them. We need our national income to grow so that as the cost of everything goes up, our paycheques rise with it. They have not. We see that. All of us were in our ridings last week. I am sure members talked to many people who struggle from day to day, more people than ever before and people we would not expect. This is part of the answer, to have construction and have investment, but that is not happening under the government, and it will not happen under Bill C-39. We have capital on the sidelines because of uncertainty. Businesses have money to spend, but they are not spending it in Canada. We also need private proponents for commercially viable projects, and I will talk more about that in a second. We do not need taxpayer subsidies. We need investor confidence. Let us talk about the Pacific link pipeline announcement. This is the very first project of national interest out of the Major Projects Office. Guess what it does not have. It does not have a private proponent. Who is paying for it? It is the taxpayer. Who is taking the risk on the project? It is the taxpayer. How can it be that the Prime Minister himself has encouraged it to get built and has supposedly cleared the pathway, yet there is no private proponent? That tells us that something is definitely not right in the system, and that the bureaucracy and red tape have not been eliminated. It is government money that is going to be spent on this much-needed project. Do not get me wrong; we need this project for the sake of our country to grow our country, but it is the taxpayers taking all the risks, and that should not be. We need to get government out of the way and let builders do the building. In Saskatchewan, these impacts are very real. Our economy in Saskatchewan is based on resources. I just want to single out food production. We produce grain and potash in Saskatchewan, and this directly impacts people at the grocery store. It impacts Canadians and people all around the world. What is critical in those two industries, grain and potash, is railways, roads and ports. Any bottlenecks become a problem for our customers. What is needed in order to make farms, railways, roads and ports work? It is diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is consumed in farming, trucking and railways, in everything. Higher fuel costs result directly in higher costs to the consumer. That is why we have put forward the emergency fuel relief plan. We want to eliminate all federal taxes on diesel sales until at least Canada Day next year. We want to scrap diesel production taxes by permanently eliminating the federal industrial carbon tax and the clean fuel standard. We want to eliminate the diesel price gap between the United States and Canada within five years. We also need to create emergency permits for diesel refineries, storage and transportation. We need to get the industry going. We need to allow businesses to deduct that and build a strategic refined petroleum reserve to protect Canadians during supply reductions. The strategic fuel reserve is important because as the price of oil skyrockets, we need stability for Canadians. Canada is the only country in the G7 that does not have an oil stockpile to release from. The Prime Minister has explicitly rejected our calls for this. It is funny, because earlier this year, the Liberals promised 23 million additional barrels of oil, but we do not have them to give. We do not have a stockpile. There is no way that we can give that. In fact, Canada's energy production actually dropped by five million barrels after the Prime Minister made that announcement. Now the G7 is going to release another 100 million barrels over the next four months, including diesel, and Canada cannot play. We cannot play in that game, because we do not have the fuel to be able to do that. We should be the solution. We have the third- or fourth-largest oil reserves in the world. We should be the solution to energy instability, not be held victim to it. I just want to highlight a couple of things. The Liberal plan is bureaucracy and red tape. That is the plan we are seeing here today. There are no tangible results. There is lots of talk about this, that and the other thing, but no actual jobs. Canadians need jobs and paycheques, and they are not getting that from this plan. The Conservative plan is to have one project, one review and six-month approvals and to eliminate Bill C-69, repeal Bill C-48, end the industrial carbon tax and get rid of the clean fuel standard. These are real, practical solutions that could be made to get government out of the way, eliminate bureaucracy and bring stability back to the private sector. It is investing in war zones right now. It is investing its money elsewhere. It is not coming to Canada. We need that money to come into Canada so that it can take the risks, invest in these projects and create the jobs. Hopefully, in a year we will not be talking about a building Canada even stronger act.

Mr. Speaker, it is one thing to say half a trillion dollars was talked about, but we have lost a trillion dollars. If we lost a trillion and we get a half a trillion back, I do not know if that is a very good deal. I do not think I would want that deal. I think the proof is in the pudding. The Prime Minister talked about this new pipeline project. The Liberals removed all the barriers. They went to industry and said, “Please come and build this. Put your money on the table. Let's build this project”, but it did not happen, because there are still too many barriers. Sure, there is lots of talk. Of course, people want to do things. I would say to the member that hope is not a strategy. We all want all kinds of things, but we only get the things we deserve. With our bureaucracy, with our red tape right now, we are getting what we deserve, and that is a lack of investment.

Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt, as I have said many times, that this government is all about talk. When we speak with constituents, with regular Canadians, we will, time and again, find that their life is actually worse. If we ask, “Has you life gotten better in the last year?”, their is answer is, “No.” Things are more expensive, their paycheque does not go as far and that is a direct indictment on this 11-year-old government's record. Also, so much of what is talked about here in Bill C-39 is centralizing power again in Ottawa, centralizing power in the government, rather than creating a level playing field, which would be the way we would want to do this: create the environment so that businesses can do what they want, rather than concentrating all of that power in Ottawa.

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals thought that building at speeds never seen before was a good thing, but what we have seen is that it is actually a very bad thing. They are correct that these are speeds we have never seen before, but it is a turtle pace. The best way to answer the member's question about what it was like under the Conservatives, is that, at the time, I was building homes in Saskatchewan. The home building business was booming. There were projects going, people were working hard, paycheques were flowing, jobs were created, and everybody was building and buying houses. The Liberal government got elected, and guess what? The market started to go down and that was the end of the boom times, and we have been in that for the last 11 years.