Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, it is a strange thing to find myself more shocked now than I was by things that the Harper government tried. We saw bills pushed through before, but I have never seen an omnibus bill with such breadth and such impact on multiple laws that dictates future decision-making. Again, the use of a time machine would be handy. It violates the basic precepts of study, exploration, hearing from…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party also agrees to apply the vote and will be voting no.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Greens agree to apply the vote, voting yes.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the bill cries out for amendments and improvements to ensure that the projects chosen to be in the national interest meet some kind of binding set of criteria. It needs to create a system. Why have a law in place, as opposed to a wonderful declaration that everyone signs? If it is a law, it should have accountability mechanisms. It should be reviewable by a federal court if the promis…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party agrees to apply the vote, voting yes.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary, with whom I enjoy a good relationship. This legislation is an abomination, and one that will be a stain on the the reputation of the government and our Prime Minister. As a first effort to lead this country, it is a bad effort, and I am very sad to say that this legislation could have been improved if it had been studied at all, if the voices that …
Read full speech →Government Orders
moved, seconded by the member for Courtenay—Alberni: That Bill C-5, in Clause 4, be amended by replacing line 13 on page 13 with the following: “participation of the affected Indigenous peoples and the public and that”
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from the Bloc Québécois for the rigorous work he did in committee, particularly by moving amendments and focusing his efforts on improving the bill. I am a sovereignist myself, but for planet Earth. I work tirelessly for our future and the future of our grandchildren, but today I am afraid. It is not yet too late for the Earth or for us here, on this planet, …
Read full speech →Government Orders
moved, seconded by the member for Courtenay—Alberni: That Bill C-5, in Clause 4, be amended by adding after line 15 on page 19 the following: “(m.1) the Species at Risk Act;”
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I thank my dear friend from Northumberland—Clarke. We worked together in an informal rail caucus to promote the use of passenger rail. It should be linked with affordable bus transportation. Most Canadians cannot afford to get from place to place on public transit, because it is so limited. There are many great projects; I grant him that, and I would love to see them move ahead: an ea…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I rise with deep sadness. As I see it, this debate on Bill C‑5 is a huge tragedy. While the Liberals say they achieved the mandate in an election, we worked together, the leaders of the opposition parties, previously, with Justin Trudeau. We said we were team Canada, that we would to work together, push back on what Trump wants to do and defend Canada's economic sovereignty. However, …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I agree to apply the vote, and I vote yes.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party also agrees to apply the vote and will be voting in favour.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party agrees to apply the vote, voting no.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the member of Parliament for Nunavut, for her extraordinary courage, her championing of indigenous rights and her consistently calling out the importance of intergenerational love. There has been a lot of trauma visited on indigenous peoples, and I do not know anyone who has been clearer than the hon. member for Nunavut. The offences done to indigenous rights in the…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I agree to apply the vote and am voting in favour.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party also agrees to apply the vote and will be voting yes.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I will recognize the territory from which I speak today: I am at the annual general meeting of Friends of Nature, a wonderful small group in Nova Scotia on the territory of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy. When I accepted the invitation, I foolishly thought we would be having an election on the fixed election date, but here we are on June 20, the last day of the very short ses…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to speak virtually this morning. I am honoured to present a petition that was initially sponsored by former member of Parliament Mike Morrice. The petitioners in the Kitchener-Waterloo region note that they have been promised for more than a decade a daily two-way GO train service between Kitchener and Toronto. This promise has not been realized. The petitioners are as…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, the Green Party also agrees to apply the vote and will be voting yes.
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I am not disputing the need for Canada to fortify defences and defence spending, but the arbitrary 2% of our GNI for NATO stands in stark contrast to another goal long forgotten: 0.7% of GNI for development assistance. Poverty and failed states fuel terrorism and warlords, and fuel wars. Now that we are investing in the war machine, will the government commit to upping our investment …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the minister has mentioned in the media nuclear projects. The only time in the history of this country that a debate was scheduled to discuss nuclear energy, its pluses and minuses, was under the former minister of energy, Ray Hnatyshyn, in the government of Joe Clark. Would the minister care to commit to having an open debate on nuclear energy in the House of Commons?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, is the minister aware that the former SNC-Lavalin, now AtkinsRéalis, is behind the small modular reactor projects?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the minister should understand his own legislation. Most of what has been said in the media about this bill, most of what the minister has said, constitutes unenforceable promises and press releases.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, I have questions for the Minister of Natural Resources. I do not want to appear rude, but I have been hearing what the minister has been saying. I need to ask him whether he has read the one Canadian economy act.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, we could commit to ensuring not what Canadians generally agree on but what the department and CMHC will stick to as the unified definition: that affordability and deeply affordable housing is 30% of before-tax household income.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, is the minister aware that none of what he just said would have any force in law under Bill C-5?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, I am asking because I took notes of the minister's saying, “politicians do not pick the projects.”
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, on the fundamental basis on which the legislation works, I refer the minister to clause 5 of the act, which shows that the decision-maker is the cabinet, and the cabinet is made up of politicians. Does he not agree?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre. I want to start with my questions to the Minister of Housing, and welcome him, a fellow British Columbian member of Parliament, to the House of Commons. I want to ask him whether he is aware of the work of Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, who found that CMHC has six different definitions of affordable housing, and whether he would…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, the minister refers repeatedly to the criteria as if they have some force in law. Does he not understand his own act, in that there could be no reference to any of those factors and still follow the law?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, none of what he has just said is actually what Bill C-5 says. There is no requirement for consensus, nor is there any legal requirement that any of the factors that are listed are actually considered by cabinet.
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Chair, it is very clear in the proposed act, and I refer the minister to the language of the act, which is, “Governor in Council may consider any factor that the Governor in Council considers relevant”. Does the minister understand the legal meaning of the word “may”?
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I want to point out that I have been here for this entire debate, but it is very difficult to get a chance to speak. As he said, there is concern about fossil fuel subsidies. I want to add that, during the election campaign, the Green Party asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to tell us how much these subsidies amounted to. We wanted to know how much money was being paid to busines…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, I am distressed that the member is happy the government's first act was to remove the one climate measure that was actually reducing emissions. I want to ask him if he is aware of when Canadians will be told what the new government plans to do to try to get on track to meeting our legal obligations under the Paris Agreement for the year 2030. We are far off target, and we just killed …
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, first, I want to say that I am sharing my time with the hon. member for Edmonton Strathcona. I will ask my questions, through you, Mr. Speaker, to the Minister of Finance. The International Energy Agency forecasts global oil demand will peak imminently and drop 25% by 2030. Before demand drops that far, OPEC intends to monetize its five-million-barrel-a-day spare capacity, threatening…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, in 2017, our current Prime Minister said that most fossil fuel reserves are “unburnable” under any reasonable climate targets. In 2022, he said that transitioning our economies to net zero is an enormous opportunity and that the transition is “capital-intensive” and “job-heavy”, and is what the world needs for the future and right now. Given that growth in solar, 25%, and batteries, 5…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, it is my great honour to rise to present a petition on the subject of public transit. The petitioners note that the 10-year transit plan that was funded will end in 2027 and that the funding was inadequate to meet the needs of a modern, industrialized country. They ask for a continuation and an expansion of the fund, and for all governments to pull together in order to ensure that Can…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, there is no way on God's green earth that Bill C-5 is ready for passage. Concerns and alarms have been raised by every environmental law association in Canada, by the Climate Action Network and now by the grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations. The Canadian Cancer Society has pointed out that the interprovincial barriers that come down may lead to a race to the bottom on health …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour for me to rise today to add my voice to those paying tribute to our dear friend Marc Garneau. It is a big shock that he is no longer with us today. It was a great honour to work with him. We had been friends for over 14 years. I worked with him here, in the House. When I was elected in 2011, the Conservative Party had a majority government on this side of the Hous…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, this is my first opportunity to get in on this debate. While Canadians, obviously, are looking to the government for a policy that addresses borders, there are a lot of details in this bill. It is an omnibus bill and changes 14 different laws. I am particularly concerned about the sections that would make it impossible for people who might have had refugee status to apply for it now…
Read full speech →Government Orders
Madam Speaker, one of the things I am concerned about is this. It is great to know that we are hiring more law enforcement officials, but has the government read the Mass Casualty Commission report on the Portapique shootings and the quite substantial recommendations that RCMP officers need more extensive and better training that lasts years? Are we going to see the implementation of the Mass Casu…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, we learn something new every day. I understood that there is an exemption to the rule on props if we are actually speaking to a document and holding it in our hand for reference. I thought that was acceptable, but perhaps we had better check the rules. The document has very little in it, despite its bulk, and there is almost nothing new. There is a pittance on housing and less than …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, we actually do not know what is meant by that, because to me, fixing the budget is to get a balanced budget. We know it will take some time, but the Greens have been advocating that if we want to balance our spending with our revenues, we should go for where the money is, which is the billionaire class, big banks, big oil and big grocery chains. They have been reaping excess profits…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I have one small factoid correction. It is true that the Prime Minister of this country has his security clearance, but he got it by right when he became Prime Minister. He never actually had to go through the process that I, or the leader of the New Democratic Party or the leader of the Bloc Québécois, had to go through. That is a good question, and a very important one. Why did th…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, we are a rich country. Thanks to my hon. friend for Kitchener Centre for reminding us that we have an obligation as a country to have essential fairness. People with disabilities have a disproportionate rate of poverty, but why do we have people living in tent cities? Why are we allowing people to live in conditions that are inhumane in a country that could afford a guaranteed livab…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, it is rare that the Green Party gets to put a question to the leader of the official opposition, so I will take this opportunity. I will start by saying there was nothing in his statement with which I could disagree, because it vaulted us into a frenzy of patriotism. I love this country. There is no place in the world I would rather live than in Canada, but the hon. leader of the offi…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, in my last question in 2024, I think of the IPCC sixth assessment report—
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, in my last question in 2024, I think of the IPCC sixth assessment report: that if we do not globally reduce emissions dramatically, peak before and see dramatic reductions “at the latest before 2025”, we will shoot way past the Paris Agreement targets, shoot way past 2°C and face climate disaster. I think of the words in that film The Age of Stupid: What were we thinking, to avoid the…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, this is not to make the same point as my hon. colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby, but given that there was a moment when the Speaker had to stop at four o'clock and seek the presentation, I suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that we are in a really difficult quandary here, as opposition party members. We were given access, on a confidential, embargoed lock-up basis, to read the document…
Read full speech →