Pat Kelly

Mr. Speaker, the member identified many of the challenges and problems within the Canadian economy, one being a lack of investment in basic infrastructure across the country. I wonder if he would remind Canadians which party has been in government for the last 11 years and presided over this deficit in infrastructure despite the promises it made in each of its four elections.

Mr. Speaker, if the United States wants to raise costs on its businesses, we must respond by lowering them on ours so that we can out-compete them, not out-tax them. Conservatives believe in the ingenuity of Canadian businesses to create, invent, produce, expand and hire Canadians, but businesses need the Liberal government to repeal its antidevelopment laws, its capital gains taxes on reinvestment in Canada, and the industrial carbon tax on aluminum, steel, fertilizers, energy and everything else. When will the Liberals adopt our plan and do so?

Mr. Speaker, he must be really upset with the government that has been in power for the last 11 years. Canadians need results. Hundreds of projects and their applications are waiting for federal approval because the government spent the last 11 years piling on red tape and bad laws that kill high-paying jobs. Last year, the Liberals asked Parliament for extraordinary powers to exempt major projects from its own laws so that projects could be built at unimaginable speeds, and yet nothing has happened and there are no results. When will the Liberals clear the backlog, approve projects, get shovels in the ground and save Canadian jobs?

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back in the House of Commons debating legislation. That is what we are elected to do. That is what we are in the House for. It is good to be here and talking about Bill C-39. The Liberals call it the building Canada strong act, which rings similar to a similar bill we dealt with about a year ago. I will maybe have time to come back to that, but I will start by saying that of course we agree, or that I agree, with the stated premise of the bill, which is to enable Canada to build things, to build Canada stronger. That is certainly something that I not only very deeply believe needs to be done but also that is pretty consistent with what I have spent the last 11 years talking about. At the moment, to be sure, we are confronted with an unprovoked, unjustified, deeply damaging and unnecessary trade war with the United States. We did not choose it. It is not something that Canada chose, but it is the moment we find ourselves in. However, the issues around this, around the necessity of building major projects and building our country back up again, have very deep roots. We have been talking about this for 11 years. We have spent the last 11 years being unprepared for this moment. Before I go too much further, I will say that I am going to share my time with the member for Edmonton Southeast. As I said, we did not choose to be in a trade war with the United States. We did not choose to have our country economically attacked, but for the last 11 years, the government has left us unprepared for the moment. I was elected in 2015, and that year, the very first thing the government did was cancel the northern gateway pipeline. The Liberals are saying today, “If only we had a west coast pipeline.” There was a west coast pipeline approved and already on their desk the minute they took office. The first thing they did, by ministerial order, was cancel it: 525,000 barrels a day. At today's price, that is $50 million a day in economic activity, $20 billion a year.

Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled by the member for Winnipeg North, who says that there was something misleading in that statement. There is nothing misleading. That is exactly what happened. There was a conditional approval that the Liberals rescinded by ministerial order, so here we are today without that pipeline. It would have been built years ago. In 2016, the Liberals introduced the carbon tax. They also spent 2016 failing to champion the Keystone XL pipeline, another one that has not been built. It was cancelled by Biden later on. The government did not champion it and did not see it through to get it built when it had the chance. In 2016, the Liberals chased off TransCanada PipeLines, which wanted to build the energy east pipeline. Not only did it abandon that pipeline because of changing regulatory goalposts, but it also changed its name to TC Energy because “TransCanada PipeLines” did not fit what it was doing. It had to move its business to build pipelines in Mexico and the United States, where the opportunities were. That is the legacy of the government. I am up only to 2016. In 2017, the Liberals brought in the clean fuel regulations, which is a misnomer. It is really just a tax on fuel. In 2018, they brought in Bill C-48, which banned shipping traffic on the northwest B.C. coast. Again, we are talking about wishing we could export our products to the Asian market at full global price. The Liberals passed a law banning the shipping traffic to be able to do that. In 2019, Bill C-69 became law. We all know what Bill C-69 is. It is the “no more pipelines” bill. That was what they passed. There have been no major pipeline applications under that law. They even made changes to the Fisheries Act that made it impossible to get a hydro project approved. We heard about that at the natural resources committee yesterday. The head of WaterPower Canada told the committee that under the 2019 changes to the Fisheries Act, it is impossible to get a hydro project approved in Canada. The Liberals will not even allow hydro projects to go forward under the current government. In 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau told the world that there was no business case for Canadian LNG to Europe. In a way, he was right, but the reason there was no business case was because of all the red tape and regulation, which the government imposed, that killed the business case. So, yes, we need to build Canada. If only we had spent the last 11 years building Canada, we would not be in such a precarious position today. We agree with the government that we need to build things. Major projects need to be built, and it is not just oil and gas. I have spent a lot of time talking about pipelines, which is a really important one, but there are terrible deficiencies in our ports. We have among the worst ports in the world for efficiency. We have everything from ports to rail, airports, electrical transmission lines, etc. We have a need for major projects, and so we do support this stated purpose to build Canada. It is funny that the fanfare with which the bill before us was tabled rings familiar, which is because the Liberals said many of the same things they said about 18 months ago when Parliament first sat following the last election. It was last spring, in June, that they passed Bill C-5. It was a bill that Conservatives supported a little reluctantly, because it granted extraordinary powers to ministers to interfere politically and cherry-pick and decide politically which projects they wanted to exempt from their own laws that they had passed. It was not quite the approach for us. We would rather they stripped away all these bad laws, but we said, “Look, we have to build something. If this is a way to get something done, we will support it”, and we did. Here we are, a year later, no major projects approved and no shovels in the ground. It did not seem to make any difference. Now, we have this latest bill that is more about bureaucratic structures than getting shovels in the ground. This is a 250-page bill the Liberals dumped on Tuesday afternoon, a little less than 72 hours ago, and so I have not gone through all 250 pages with a fine-tooth comb. We are going to take the time to make sure that we understand the bill fully, but part of what I understand about it is the movement from the Impact Assessment Act to the Canadian Energy Regulator on certain projects, which is probably not a bad idea. The structure of Bill C-69 was there to kill projects. The idea that the bill before us would give certainty to industry is quite misleading. The bill would give ministers the power, but would not compel them to make a decision within a year. It would give them the latitude to hit the pause button on how long that year takes. It would give them the power to extend the year. It would give the power to say, “No, I'm going to take extra time.” This is not going to give the certainty that industry needs. We heard yesterday at the natural resources committee about how important it is to have regulatory certainty. Regulatory uncertainty makes the country uninvestable, and we have seen investment flee this country under this government. We do not need new laws. We do not need summits. We do not need announcements. We do not need speeches. We do not need vague MOUs. We do not need photo op signings. We do not need slush funds under political control. We do not need corporate welfare. We simply need to undo the approach that, for 11 years, has prevented major projects from going ahead in Canada. We need major projects. We need pipelines. We needed pipelines 10 years ago, 11 years ago, and we need them now. We need better roads. We need better ports. We need better infrastructure. We need all these things, and we are still waiting.