Costas Menegakis

Mr. Speaker, about 18 months ago, the government introduced the One Canadian Economy Act, Bill C-5. Since then, a whole slew of bureaucratic offices and agencies have been opened up by the government. Today we are debating Bill C-39, promising more and more of the same. I wonder if the member opposite can point to where the shovel has hit the ground for just one project in Canada since the government took over 18 months ago.

Mr. Speaker, I spent many years in the private sector running my own business. I can tell members that being out there in the real economy, meeting payroll, selling and delivering goods and services, one learns a very fundamental and simple lesson very quickly: Absolutely nobody pays people for announcements, nobody writes them a cheque for a press release, and customers certainly do not reward them for empty photo ops. They are judged strictly, fairly and ruthlessly by what they deliver. The Prime Minister came into office making grand promises. He promised Canadians that he would build at speeds not seen in years, if not generations, yet here we are 18 months later, and still not one single shovel is in the ground. I will take some time today to look deeper into why this paralysis persists and why more broken legislation from a worn-out government will never fix legislation that it broke in the first place. Just a year and a half ago, the Prime Minister marched into the chamber championing Bill C-5. He told Canadians that he would finally unleash construction speeds not seen in generations. The headlines were glowing, the announcement ceremonies were lavish and grand, and the promises were astronomical, but as Canadians have come to learn all too well, they were just empty words. After all the endless talk, all the international summits, the luxury travel abroad, the expensive catering and the state photo ops, how many actual projects has this new government office built? Zero. How many permits has it successfully issued? Zero. How many hard-working Canadians are on a job site earning a living because of it? There are zero, zip, nada, rien, tipota. What the government managed to build is an even more bloated bureaucracy and an unprecedented centralization of power in the minister's and Prime Minister's offices. In the last 18 months, the Prime Minister has somehow managed to create 14 brand new government agencies, which brings us squarely to where we find ourselves today: endless manufacturing urgency yet absolutely nothing accomplished. People are judged by what they deliver. Look at the Pacific link pipeline. The Prime Minister grandly designated it a project of national interest. Let me share a news flash with my Liberal friends across the aisle: Another vital pipeline heading to our Pacific coast has always been a matter of critical national interest, and construction should have broken many years ago. Due to layer upon layer of punishing Liberal regulations, red tape and suffocating bureaucracy, no private proponent would step forward. No pipeline was ever built. Fast-forward to today, and the private sector still has zero confidence in the government's ability to provide regulatory certainty. That leaves taxpayers on the hook to own and build their own pipeline. How does the Prime Minister propose to provide such much-needed certainty to private investors now? It is by proposing another bill, a legislative text that is supposed to fix what the last bill, passed 18 months ago, was supposed to fix. This new piece of legislation clocks in at a staggering 250 pages, and we are expected to believe that it would magically cure all the systematic problems the Liberals themselves engineered over the last 11 years. Let us be clear about what is missing from the bill. It would not repeal Bill C-69, Justin Trudeau's notorious antidevelopment law. It would not repeal Bill C-48, the Liberal job-killing ban on shipping oil off our west coast. It would not eliminate the punishing industrial carbon tax. All the structural obstacles that have systematically chased investment capital and talent out of this country for a decade would remain entirely untouched. The bill would still force project proponents to address “any other matter relevant to the impact assessment that the [agency] requires to be taken into account.” How can the Liberals stand up and lecture us about regulatory certainty, when their checklist of arbitrary demands has no end? Is it just the Prime Minister who gets to decide who wins and who loses? The government's big selling point for this legislation is the magical one-year timeline: one project, one decision and one year. It sounds wonderful in a sound bite, but let us look closely at the fine print. I cannot tell the Speaker to pause the clock on my speaking time and allow me to speak for 20 minutes today. Under this new bill, the government would be able to do precisely that. The official clock could be stopped. The bureaucracy could hit the pause button for a multitude of reasons, and the suspended time would simply vanish from the calculation. A company could spend years wrapped up in red tape and the Liberals would still claim that it all happened within one year. If that loophole is not wide enough, the minister could unilaterally tack on 90-day extensions. If that is not enough, the government could run behind closed doors to cabinet and extend the timeline yet again, with absolutely no hard limit whatsoever. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of a serious investor for a moment. Would we allocate billions of dollars of capital knowing full well that a Liberal cabinet that has spent the last 10 years actively blocking major projects retains the absolute legal power to delay our money and our project's decision indefinitely? Here is the critical part the Liberals deliberately avoid talking about. The famous one-year clock would not even start ticking until the proponent has completed all preplanning, finished every single consultation and submitted exhaustive engineering and scientific data for a full assessment on every secondary permit along the way. Let us be completely honest with Canadians about what this legislation actually is. There is no real enforceable one-year timeline in the bill. It is pure smoke and mirrors. There are shiny headlines without deadlines. There are devastating real-world consequences when the government chooses endless talk over actual building. The Prime Minister grandly promised Canadians the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Instead, the OECD places Canada well deep in the pack, with our economic growth forecast slashed all the way down to a miserable 0.9 per cent. Canadian households are now among the most heavily indebted in the entire industrialized world. Let us think of that for a moment. Families across our country watch their mortgage renewal approach with sheer dread and look at their grocery bill with absolute disbelief from week to week. International investors are noticing this dysfunction. Representatives from the U.A.E. came to this country looking to invest a staggering $90 billion. Just six months later, they returned and stated publicly that they could not find a single approved shovel-ready project to put that capital into. What is the alternative? We as Conservatives have a clear, pragmatic plan that is beautifully simple: one project, one review and one approval within one year. We know it can be done, because it has been done. During the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, our minister John Baird told his department officials that he wanted the application form for infrastructure projects brought down to a single page. After significant back and forth, they delivered a clean, functional, one-page application form. What was the remarkable result? Roughly 23,500 projects went swiftly from concept to completion in under two years. Other people warned at the time that it would be an unmitigated disaster for safety and environmental standards. However, when the environmental commissioners subsequently audited those exact projects, what did they find? Not a single one came back with a safety and environmental problem. That tells us something critically important: All the mountains of paperwork, all the endless procedural hoops and all the deliberate delays have everything to do with feeding a bloated, self-serving bureaucracy that thrives entirely by getting in the way of progress. Here is what Conservatives will do: repeal Bill C-69, repeal Bill C-48, scrap the punishing industrial carbon tax once and for all, approve hundreds of projects currently languishing and put a real, hard, binding cap on approval times, not a fake timeline that can be paused, extended and stretched into infinity. Canada should be the fastest place to secure a building permit, but we will certainly not take the government's word for anything it is saying, because Canadians have heard these exact hollow promises far too many times before. The blunt truth is that the Prime Minister does not need to do more announcements. He needs to stop blocking, stop taxing, stop obstructing, and stop signing meaningless memoranda of understanding that yield zero results. He needs to get out of the way and let our builders build, let our workers work, let our investors invest, and get projects built for the prosperity of all Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member should be reminded that we are talking about Bill C-39, the build Canada act for major projects across the country of major significance. The current government has done none of that. It has not put a shovel in the ground. It is all talk and no action. The Prime Minister is flying all over the world, making agreements and signing things. He brings nothing into the House to be discussed and there is no debate whatsoever in committee, yet, here we are now talking about Bill C-39, a rehash of Bill C-5 of 18 months ago. I commend the member for his question and I hope that he actually does see some action in his riding.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the colleague for recalling a time when the government actually took these projects seriously and when a minister took action. Minister Baird, at the time in charge of infrastructure, sat down with his colleagues in the ministry. He gave them a directive to fast-track the approval process down to a one-page application and that resulted in 23,500 projects being built. The current government and this Prime Minister have built 14 new offices. Can members believe it? They built 14 new centres for people to make decisions, just bloating and bloating the democracy with zero results for Canadians and not a single shovel in the ground.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's very intelligent and informed question. What this bill would do, as we have seen in previous bills that the tired Liberal government has brought forth, is centralize more and more power in the hands of the minister and the Prime Minister. What we have seen from the current government is a lack of respect for the people's voice, a lack of respect for Parliament. Arbitrarily, the Liberals can make decisions, and we know where we will find out about it: in news stories and news headlines. It is totally wrong. As parliamentarians, we have no confidence that the government should be given the full authority to make these decisions and then simply inform us through the media. This is the place to bring the legislation in and debate it properly in committee and in the House of Commons.