Kelly McCauley

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise on Bill C-39, another cynical Liberal bill. Do members remember years back when the Liberal government campaigned to end all government practice of using omnibus bills to reduce scrutiny of legislative measures? This was part of their campaign for a “real change” plan for restoring democracy. What do we have here? We have another massive omnibus bill, one of many introduced by a Liberal government that promised to do away with omnibus bills. It is the same Liberal government that promised to increase transparency, and it has done the opposite. It is the same Liberal government that said there would be more accountability for its legislation, yet we have the opposite. We have the same Liberal government creating side departments to circumvent Parliament and accountability, such as the Defence Investment Agency, which is called the DIA. It is actually more like the DOA because it is still being debated. It was created as part of the budget implementation act, but before it has even been officially created, the Liberals are already killing it off and trying to turn it into a Crown corporation, which would allow even less scrutiny and accountability. However, I digress. As I mentioned, here we go again with another omnibus bill from the Liberals. I am sure when they were putting this bill together, the Liberal PMO and other advisers were chortling about what a great wedge bill this is, because while it has legislation in it to increase economic growth, at the same time, there is a bit of a poison pill around labour so that if the Conservatives oppose the bill, they can say the Conservatives are opposing growth. If we support the bill, they will turn around and say the Conservatives are stabbing labour in the back. It is the same thing they are doing to my NDP colleagues. If the NDP does not support it, we know full well it is going to be a Liberal talking point to say the NDP is antidevelopment. If the NDP does support it, we know full well they will be saying the NDP supported all of their back-to-work legislation. It is a cynical wedge bill that could only be put forward by the government. It is unfortunate, but here we have it. Why, I have to ask, another piece of legislation? Over a year ago in this House, the Conservatives supported the Liberals in passing Bill C-5 and gave unprecedented powers to the government to push through projects at speeds we have never seen before, of course. What happened? Nothing. Nothing has been done or approved, except that the Major Projects Office and the DIA were created, but they have not moved at the speed of anything. The finance minister, when Bill C-5 was introduced, stated it was aimed at “accelerating transformative projects of national interest”. Where have we heard that? We have heard a lot lately about needing Bill C-39 to push through items of national interest. The Minister of Energy and Natural Resources said that Bill C-5 would remove barriers, leverage resources and help Canada become an energy superpower. That was for Bill C-5, so why is it repeated for Bill C-39? In this House, we gave the Liberals unprecedented powers to get projects built, to build the economy, to perhaps get a pipeline built, to develop the energy industry and to develop the mining industry, and nothing was done. They brought in the Major Projects Office to sidestep their own regulations. The question I have is, why does the government not just fix its broken regulatory regime? Why do we have all these bills and regulations on the books? Why do the Liberals have to create legislation such as Bill C-5 to get around their own bad laws and regulations, Bill C-39 to do the same thing and the Major Projects Office to do the same thing? With defence procurement, there is the DIA, which they are now killing off to create a Crown corporation. Why do we need cabinet or bureaucrats deciding what is deemed worthy of special treatment? That is what this is. It is the government picking winners and losers. It is no different from what the Liberals did a couple of years ago with piling taxpayers' money into EV battery projects around the country for billions and billions of dollars. We saw it with Brampton. The Liberals gave Stellantis hundreds of millions of dollars. When we tried to investigate the money given to it, the deputy minister said that it was Stellantis that was refusing to release the documents about what happened with the money for Brampton. Stellantis came forward and said that this was not true, gave the documents and said the deputy minister was lying. Again, it goes back to the question of why the government is picking winners and losers. Why not clear up the regulatory regime, the 300,000 some-odd regulations that are on the books, so that private capital can decide what is a winner and what is a loser? How is it that we have a pipeline to the Lower Mainland, for which taxpayers are going to pay the bill of probably $50 billion, and $10 billion, give or take, to dredge up Roberts Bank, with more public money probably going into bailing out carbon capture? How is that in the public interest, with all the public money going into it, when we could just change our rules and allow the private sector to get that work done, as with northern gateway, originally proposed to a deepwater port, which did not need taxpayers' money to dredge out? We did not need taxpayers' money to build the pipeline. I support pipelines. We certainly need them. We saw today the gap between West Texas Intermediate and WCS, which is $25 a barrel because of the constrictions of exports caused by the government killing off northern gateway and killing off energy east. How is it in the public interest to spend billions and billions to do the pipeline when private capital could be doing it? Why not create a regulatory environment that is welcoming to capital and investment? The International Energy Agency calls the current energy crisis “the largest supply disruption in history”. Canada has the fourth-largest oil reserves. We are the only one in the top four that is a democracy, the only one that follows the rule of law. We would think people would be begging to develop our oil and gas and begging to get pipelines built to get oil. Instead, because of the Liberals and the regulatory regime, we have to have public money doing it. Why is the government doing this instead of just getting out of the way? According to a recent study, Canada has fallen from ninth to 18th on economic freedom. The factors in deciding this ranking include sound money, size of government and regulations. Under “Size of Government”, a thing that reads into our drop from ninth to 18th on freedom, is “Government consumption without interest payments”, which is very high under the government. “Government consumption with interest payments” is, again, very high. As for “Top marginal income tax rate and the threshold at which it applies”, the first thing the government did upon getting elected in 2015 was jack up the top marginal tax rate, followed by Premier Eby, it seems, right now. On “State ownership of assets”, having too much state ownership of assets causes us to drop lower in the ranking. What are we seeing? The government is going to be owning Pacific link on top of TransCanada because the Liberals have created a regulatory environment where no one is investing in Canada. Under “Sound Money” is “Money growth”. We saw the government printing hundreds of billions of dollars, with inflation. Under “Regulation” is “Regulatory burden”, which adds to our low ranking. There is “Bureaucracy costs” and “Impartial public administration”. It goes on and on. The government needs to get out of the way of private capital. It needs to get out of the way of business. It needs to reduce the regulatory burden. It needs to stop coming forward with all this legislation that is supposed to do so much but does nothing. The government just needs to get out of the way.

Mr. Speaker, I quite enjoy working with my hon. colleague on the operations committee. I think we have a mutual respect for each other. The legislation clearly proposes a one-year approval period, but it would not be one year as, perhaps, the government is pretending or creating propaganda about. It would be one year after the approval process gets through, and the minister could still step in and extend that one-year period. It is kind of a fake one year that the government is pushing out. Before the member spoke, we were debating with the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, who was pushing for an oil and gas cap and could not even answer the question of whether he supported the very pipeline the government wants to build at taxpayers' expense. This is the issue. There is the paperwork, but members of his own government are opposing the oil and gas that Bill C-39 is supposed to be helping.

Mr. Speaker, I do not have a lot of faith in this process the government is creating. There would be too much power in the hands of the minister and too much power with the bureaucrats. Part of the bill, and I wish I had more time to get to it, is changes to the Labour Code, wherein an adjudicator appointed by the government would decide or help to decide whether to end a labour issue, not the House, as has been done traditionally. We would perhaps have a conflicted facilitator advising the government, and the minister alone deciding whether to order a stoppage. There would be no accountability to the House or to Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, there is a very simple solution: get rid of Bill C-69, the “no new pipelines” bill, and get rid of Bill C-48, which bans Alberta oil off the northern B.C. coast. These two pieces of government legislation are responsible for the killing of more investment in this country than anything else Trudeau or anyone else in the government could have thought of.