Corey Hogan

Madam Speaker, as this is my last chance before Alberta votes on October 19, I wanted to start by saying that, if we say we are going to “stand on guard for thee”, we can stand in line to vote and make sure we vote when the referendum comes. On the question the member asked, I want to identify that, in Alberta, we created 83,000 jobs in the last year. Rents are down, and housing prices are down. Affordability is a concern. There is more to do, and we will do it with that member's support.

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in support of the proposed building Canada strong act. I was next to the Prime Minister when, in my home city of Calgary last spring, he announced our party's intention to speed up approval timelines while maintaining the robust environmental and social standards of which Canada is rightly proud. He talked about needing political decisions to come at the start of the regulatory process rather than lurking out there as question marks until the very end. He talked about departments working through reviews concurrently and getting promptly to a yes or a no. He talked about certainty and clarity for businesses, workers, communities, indigenous partners and governments. He talked about pragmatism. The Prime Minister's stated aim, then as now, is to make Canada the best-performing country among the 38 members of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. At the time, that meant reducing approval timelines to two years. However, the world will not wait for us. We have learned valuable lessons from the work of the Major Projects Office, for example. As Wayne Gretzky famously said, we must skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. We must continue to push ourselves. We must uphold the standards and ambitions that define us as Canadians, while acting quickly enough to attract investment, both from here and abroad. By doing so, we are contributing to our country's success. We are supporting good jobs, we are supporting strong communities, we are diversifying our trade and we are fostering the development of our industries here in Canada. It would be one project, one decision and one year. If we do this right, and we will, we would set the conditions for a generation of smart prosperity. The bill would find faster and better ways to reach the same objectives. We want to continue being a world leader in environmental and social standards, and we must continue to respect treaty rights and advance economic reconciliation, but we know we can do those things faster and better. In any large organization, decisions inevitably accumulate over time. A rule is created in response to a new technology. A new rule is introduced to address an emerging technology. A court decision changes an established process. An event alters our understanding of an issue or exposes a weakness that we move quickly to correct. A new manager introduces a new approach, which is layered onto existing practices. It goes on like that, often for years. Viewed individually, each decision makes sense. It meets a need. It is appropriate. However, we do not always take the time to assess the cumulative effect of all these decisions. Processes can become complicated, frustrating and slow, sometimes even redundant and counterproductive. Let us consider the expansion of consultation, which is a very good thing, and how it has intersected with our current system of reviews that occur one after the other: CER reviews, then DFO reviews, then ECCC reviews, and so on through all of the relevant departments, and at each step, a consultation occurs. While a billion-dollar company may be equipped to do four or five consultations, a concerned father of three, a first nation of 300 people or a rural municipality with a yearly budget of $10 million might not be. Consultation fatigue sets in and consultation quality suffers. Participants in early stages do not benefit from understanding the accumulated benefits and impacts that are only apparent when all the reviews have occurred. We can all agree, I am sure, that a better approach is to have all stakeholders at the table and all considerations on the table, to respect everyone's time and capacity. That is better, and that is also faster. This bill would also create regions of national interest. If we know that a region is important for critical minerals, clean energy, transportation or any other priority, regional planning allows us to look at the whole picture. That includes cumulative environmental impacts, indigenous peoples' rights and consultations, infrastructure needs, and areas where development should or should not take place. This way, we can establish common conditions, rather than starting the federal process from scratch for each new project. More planning up front means less duplication down the road. Regional planning is not a new idea. Municipalities and provinces are doing it. As in those cases, regions of national interest provide clearer rules and greater certainty for investors. They also make it possible to better coordinate projects and have a coherent strategy. Imagine, for example, several mines using the same regional roads and power lines. That infrastructure would have already been considered for expansion in the planning process. Once again, it is a better approach and, once again, it is a faster one. All Canadians want faster and better, but those who are considering investing billions have additional considerations and weigh projects against projects all over the world. Companies base investments on two criteria: return and risk. Faster decisions get projects to production sooner and in doing so increase return, and when they build in a Canadian way, they put Canadians to work. They strengthen our economy, they strengthen our communities and they strengthen economic reconciliation. Faster decisions also reduce risk. They mean we are not foregoing opportunities and investing for years with no guarantee of return at all. Through shaping our policies, we can further reduce risk. The proposed building Canada strong act would move political reviews by cabinet from the end of the process to the start of the process, and in doing so, it would give companies the confidence that they will have political support if they can meet the regulatory rules. This is better, it attracts capital and it costs nothing. It simply moves one gate from the end of a process to the start. It would reduce no standard and would lessen no protection. This bill contains many such amendments: thoughtful, practical and, in some cases, fairly self-evident. They are highly concrete measures, such as extending certain permits, starting negotiations earlier, making greater use of mediation and assigning primary responsibility to the department that already possesses the relevant expertise. These are practical solutions to specific problems. All of these provisions, along with many others I have not discussed, pursue the same objective: improving our processes in practical ways while maintaining the high standards Canadians expect. This is a well-designed, comprehensive bill that is targeted at the specific barriers holding back investment and growth, at a time when the world sees extraordinary opportunities in Canada. I have a final thought. As a country, we are doing big things. The bill would support doing big things. We have transportation goals and electrification goals. We have trade diversification goals. Our ambition is to be a conventional energy superpower and a renewable energy superpower. Our ambition is to maintain our global lead in mining, nuclear, forestry and so much more. I am aware of a study that shows that since 2006, federal regulatory burden has increased slowly but steadily. Through the Harper years and the Trudeau years, there was an unbroken increase to 37%. To be clear, it did not increase senselessly. It increased in response to events, challenges, evolved understandings and opportunities. It served a purpose. However, in aggregate, this increase is estimated to have lowered GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points and employment growth by 1.3 percentage points in the business sector. We have created another opportunity now, one I hope all members of the House embrace. A rationalization of our processes and regulations is a healthy process any organization should do regularly. The proposed building Canada strong act is that rationalization for the federal government. It would let us build faster, build better and do that while maintaining and promoting the values that we hold dear as Canadians.

Madam Speaker, I think the member opposite will also appreciate that there are different considerations, both in transportation because of the nature and the concentration that exists, and also in linear infrastructure and the challenges that are presented there as well. I certainly welcome the member's comments, and I hope that at committee we can flesh this out. Perhaps there are opportunities to meet his concerns as we advance on this.

Madam Speaker, I want to be precise, so I will respond in my mother tongue. It is a question of where we put a political approval. It is not saying that we have purchased the car. In fact, it is saying that we will purchase the car if it looks like it did in the advertisement. What we see with this particular approach is that we would be removing the uncertainty that comes from politics but saying that approval would be conditional upon all the other regulatory approvals' being met by the decision document at the end of the process.

Madam Speaker, I am very happy to. I think we can all appreciate, as we have grown in understanding about the complexity of projects, the impact on the environment and the impact on communities, that more federal departments have been brought into the conversation. Those conversations have become more robust. The challenge, however, has become that our organization as a government has presented additional stacking of consultations and demand on the communities that we are hoping to support through these initiatives. What Bill C-39 would do is bring all that to one table and allow a robust conversation to occur that would take into consideration all the benefits, all the drawbacks, all the challenges and all the opportunities, and do so in a way that would be much more respectful of time. There are many horror stories of people having to be subjected to five or six consultations. Let us get it down to one and make it a better one.