Pierre Poilievre

Mr. Speaker, there are times in Canada's national life when families experience terrible tragedies. The Prime Minister has just brought one of those tragedies to my attention. He would like to speak on behalf of all Canadians to offer his condolences to a treasured member of the public service who tragically lost her life. I would invite him to stand in his place and share his love, affection and prayers with the family.

Mr. Speaker, we Conservatives also offer our condolences to the family of Ms. Ben Salem. We are fighting to save Canadians money. The Liberals are costing Canadians more. Canada is facing a serious diesel price crisis. The national average price is now $2.74 a litre, which is going to drive up the cost of everything. One farmer in Bruce County had to spend $3,000 on one day's fuel. We are now paying 30¢ a litre more here in Canada than in the United States. Will the Prime Minister remove his taxes and other government costs to lower the cost of diesel now?

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives are here to save Canadians money while Liberals are costing Canadians more. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are now facing a full-scale diesel price crisis. Right now, diesel prices are around $2.76 a litre, an all-time high. One farmer in Bruce County had to spend $3,000 on one day's fuel. The Prime Minister loves to blame foreign factors, but Canadians are paying 32¢ a litre more than are Americans. If it is really a global issue, why are we paying so much north of the border?

Mr. Speaker, it is all talk, no results, and more excuses after broken promises. Let us convert diesel prices around the world, in the U.S. and here in Canada into Canadian dollars. Diesel prices in the U.S. are $2.44 a litre. The global average diesel price is $2.33 a litre. Here in Canada, it is $2.76 a litre. Canadians are paying 41¢ more than the world and 32¢ more than the U.S. With the fourth biggest supply of oil on earth, why do we not have the lowest prices anywhere in the world?

Mr. Speaker, how totally out of touch. He blames the provinces for inflation under his leadership. He highlights a bill that has been in place for a year and a half and has not built a single project. He did not answer the question. There are three reasons why Canadians are paying more for diesel in the world. One, the Prime Minister has given us a weak dollar despite high oil prices. Two, by his very admission in this House, we do not have the refining capacity because his government will not get out of the way and let Canadians build. Three, he continues to tax fuel with the GST and the fuel standard tax. Will the Prime Minister stop pretending to be so powerless and get prices down for Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, he is literally bragging about promises that he has made and broken. Now the U.S. President is blustering ridiculously about a diesel export plan. Even if that bluster is meaningless, we should not have to rely on the Americans to give us diesel that comes out of our own ground. That is why Conservatives are acting today. We are calling for an emergency diesel price relief plan to, one, eliminate all diesel taxes until at least Canada Day and, two, have emergency pre-permitting and tax relief for the construction of diesel transportation and refining. Will he take up our plan to lower prices for Canadians?

Again, he is talking about projects that were approved long before he got here, Mr. Speaker. To protect us from President Trump's threats, make Canada affordable and independent and save money, the Conservatives are calling for a diesel price relief plan that involves eliminating all diesel taxes until July 1, 2027, and having emergency pre-permitting and tax relief to accelerate investment in diesel refining and transportation. Will the Prime Minister take our plan to lower prices and make Canada more independent?

Mr. Speaker, the other day, the Prime Minister said that his fuel standard tax added zero cost at the pump. Today he claimed that there were no federal taxes. Again, this is the Liberal tradition of telling Canadians that Liberal taxes will make them richer. I have here a study from his own environment department that has the impact of the clean fuel standard on gasoline and diesel prices. It shows that this year it is seven cents, and next year it will be eight cents, then 10¢, then 13¢ and then 17¢ a litre. Why did the Prime Minister mislead the House? Was it to cover up the cost of his tax or because he did not do his homework?

Mr. Speaker, I am sure if he were a farmer, he would be out standing in his field, scratching his head about why he is forced to pay $5,000 a day for diesel costs, diesel costs that are made worse by the Prime Minister's additional taxes. Earlier this week, he said that the clean fuel standard would cost nothing. I quoted documents from his own department showing that it will rise to as much as 17¢ a litre. Should the farmers who are actually out in the field believe the Prime Minister, or should they believe his own department documents, which show that his tax will cost them more?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister cannot stand and answer a question once his statements collide with the facts from his own government. He claimed that his tax would cost nothing. Then he claimed hilariously, as Liberals often do, that taxes would make people even better off. When I confronted him with the facts, showing that the tax he has imposed is seven cents a litre now, rising to 17¢ a litre in just over three years, he would not even stand and take accountability. If the Prime Minister is so proud of his latest tax increase and if it is so good for farmers, why can he not stand up and defend the tax that he is making them pay?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister told the House on March 25 of this year that “Affordability is the best it has been in over a decade.” Markita might disagree. She wrote me a letter recently saying that she is on chemotherapy, but she is going to have to stop her cancer treatments so that she can go back to work because she cannot afford to pay her bills. She cannot afford her rent and her groceries. Will the Prime Minister look into the camera now and tell Markita that affordability is the best it has been for her in over a decade?

Mr. Speaker, when Conservatives hear stories of suffering Canadians, we stand up, and the Prime Minister sits down. He cannot answer to Markita, who cannot pay her bills a year and a half after he promised to make life affordable, but maybe he can answer to Robin. She measures affordability by whether she can afford the three-dollar snack that her children ask for, or whether she has to tell them that this week is rent week. All the spending and promises and programs in the world have not helped her. Will the Prime Minister stand up now, look her in the eye and tell her that affordability is the best it has been in a decade?

Mr. Speaker, if the Prime Minister does not want to answer to Robin or Markita, maybe he will answer to Mike, who is working as a small businessman and a firefighter, on top of his wife's job. They had to pay $879,000 for a home. They wrote to say they are barely keeping their heads above water as homebuilding declines and housing costs become more out of reach for Canadians. Will the Prime Minister look Mike in the eye and make his ridiculous claim that affordability has never been better in the last decade?

Mr. Speaker, if only the government did not inflate food costs and deprive kids of the ability to eat, if only a record number of kids were not lined up at food banks, maybe Liberal promises and bureaucracy would mean something. I think of Jennifer. Jennifer says she has to make up recipes at the end of the month because she is living on her four final dollars to get through to her final paycheque. The Prime Minister is out of touch and Jennifer is out of money. Instead of sitting there and doing nothing, will he stand up and tell Jennifer how she is going to pay the bills?

Mr. Speaker, it is déjà vu all over again. A year and a half ago, the Prime Minister came storming into the House of Commons with a cape on his back, saying that he had a new bill, Bill C-5, which was going to bring in sweeping legislative changes to build at speeds not seen in generations. The media declared that we would build the unimaginable with this bill. Here we are, 18 months later, and how many projects has it built?

Mr. Speaker, did I hear “zero”? Is there any dispute on the other side? They are dead quiet on the other side. The answer is “zero”. How many permits have been issued by the new office? Zero. How many employees are working on those projects? It is zero, zip, nada, nothing, after 18 months, but do not worry. Today the Liberals have come in and announced another sweeping bill, which the media has regurgitated unfiltered, as though it were gospel truth, and this time the Liberals are repeating exactly the same promises. It is not just that the Liberals have approved and built nothing. There are 500 projects, at least, waiting on the Prime Minister's desk. I say 500, because the Impact Assessment Agency has that number of significant projects, but there are also countless other projects at other departments, which are too dispersed among too many agencies for anyone to tell us how many projects the federal government is waiting to approve. Still, 18 months later, none of them are approved. Not a single Trudeau-era, antidevelopment law or tax has been removed. Not a single inch of oil pipeline has been built. Remember, the Prime Minister said that we are in an existential crisis. That is to say that if we do not get it right, we will not even exist in his terms, that we are in a “war”. Is this the speed of war? Imagine this: If we had travelled at this speed back in the Second World War, we would not have gotten the Lancaster built in two years. In fact, the plane would not be off the ground even today. There have been dozens of announcements, summits, speeches, signing ceremonies and other illusions. We have heard lots about this project or that, which will be designated, declared or listed. Pipelines do not go on lists; they go in the ground. Shovels do not go on designations; they go in the ground. Energy does not go in an MOU; it goes in a tanker to another market. Unfortunately, none of those things are happening. It is all talk, no results; all show, no go; and all theatre, no reality. Here is the reality and the result: Gushing media headlines aside, there has been nothing in 18 months. The previous bill was called the Building Canada Act. It built nothing. Today we have a bill called the building Canada strong act, so in 18 months, the Liberals have managed to add one word. One word on a piece of paper is 18 months' worth of achievement. The only thing the Prime Minister has built is 14 new government agencies. Now, here we go again. We have another bill, and it would not repeal Bill C-69, Justin Trudeau's antidevelopment law. It would not eliminate the industrial carbon tax, and it would not ultimately change the obstacles that are in the existing legal framework. For example, let us take the administrative burden created by Liberal Bill C-69, Trudeau's antidevelopment law. Even if the bill before the House were to pass today, we would still have on the books requirements that anybody who applies for a project include analysis on “the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors”, as if that has anything to do with mines, pipelines or marine ports. My favourite is that projects, even if the bill before the House today were to pass, would still have to take into account “any other matter relevant to the impact assessment that the Agency requires to be taken into account.” That means there is no limit on the number of things that the bureaucracy would consider before a project were approved. How can the Liberals even talk about regulatory certainty with that kind of ambiguity? The Liberals are claiming that it will help get things built, but they promised this the last time, so we should not hold our breath. Does it reduce the number of vexatious or irrelevant obstructions from hard-core foreign-funded interest groups that have been killing projects for over 10 years? Well, the bill maintains a wide-open approach to consultation about projects that would allow literally anyone to have their comments and testimony included in hearings before a project can actually occur, so we could have American interests that want to keep Canada down, the ones that helped Justin Trudeau get elected with massive foreign funding in the 2015 election, fund antidevelopment groups against the interests of Canada to block things from happening. It is elbows up, indeed. That would not change under this law. Mr. Speaker, I am just wondering if I can ask for a favour. Could you pause the clock so that I can speak for longer than 10 minutes but still come in under the 10-minute limit?

No, it turns out we cannot. However, Mr. Speaker, under this bill, the one-year time limit could be paused at any time. The regulator could stop the clock so that it would not count within the one-year time limit. We could waste seven or eight years and still claim that it all happened under one. Under this bill, the bureaucrats could use three or four different excuses to hit the pause button on the clock, meaning that the famous one-year turnaround time on the decision that the minister advertised to the media is nothing in reality except an illusion. On top of that, the minister sitting before me could actually add 90-day extensions to the time it takes to get a permit for a project. If that is still not enough for government bureaucrats, they could go to cabinet and get a permanent extension on the consideration of a bill. Who in their right mind, as a company, would put aside billions of dollars for a major project knowing that a Liberal cabinet, which has spent the last decade blocking projects, would have the legal power to delay the approval of or even a decision on a project forever? Under the current system, the legislative timeline does not start until the proponent has done lengthy mandatory preplanning and consultations. That does not even come into the existing legislative time frames. Under Bill C-39, the proponent would have to gather and produce even more information, all the detailed engineering and scientific data necessary not only for the impact assessment, but also for whatever permitting processes apply to the project. That would all happen before the clock starts running on the one-year limit. Mr. Speaker, if you would like me to stand up and speak for an hour before the clock starts on my 10-minute speech, I am sure the Liberals would love for that to happen. However, in reality, there is no one-year timeline for a project. In sum, this is once again all talk and no action. The one-year timeline is smoke and mirrors, another illusion. The reality is that there would still be many years before concept can lead to construction. There is ultimately no limit whatsoever. This bill appears once again to be all talk and no results, headlines without deadlines. Meanwhile, there are real consequences for the Prime Minister to continue along with the same policies of the Liberal government of the prior decade. Despite him claiming in the House of Commons that affordability is the best it has been in more than a decade, all he proved by saying that is that he is out of touch while Canadians are out of money. The Prime Minister promised the fastest-growing economy in the G7. It was all talk and no results. Instead, today we got information from the OECD that we will be fourth out of seven, and our economic growth for the present year was downgraded by a quarter, down to a pathetic 0.9%. Inflation is outgrowing wages, meaning Canadians are getting poorer in real time. Liberals are costing us more. Canadian households are now the most indebted in the G7, as interest rates rise on their mortgages, and rising prices at the grocery store ultimately leave our people behind. We have a better way, and that is for the government to get out of the way and pass our economic action plan, which would scrap Bill C-69, the antidevelopment law. It would repeal the ban on shipping oil off the west coast of British Columbia. It would eliminate the industrial carbon tax. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have? It is unlimited. It is kind of like the timing on the Liberal approval for projects: It is unlimited. They can take as much time as they want. We can see why the Emiratis, who wanted to invest $90 billion in Canadians, came back six months later and said they could not find a project that was approved for them to invest in under the government. The Conservatives have a way to fix that. It is called the “one and done” plan. It is very simple: one project, one approval, one year, and better yet, one page. Members may say that it is impossible, but it has been done. Under Prime Minister Harper's government, in the 2008-09 world financial crisis, then minister John Baird told his bureaucrats that he wanted to get the application form for a project down to one page. They said they could never do it, that it was impossible. They came back saying that he would be very happy because they got it down to 100 pages. He said that he wanted one page, and he told them to get out of his office. They came back, saying that the minister was going to be thrilled because they got it down to 50 pages, which had never been done. He told them to get out of his office and said that he wanted one page. They came back, saying that the minister was going to be thrilled because they got it down to 10 pages. He told them to get out of his office and said that he wanted one page. Finally they came back and told him it was one page. Then he told them he wanted one approval for each project. They came back and delivered one approval. Guess what happened. We finished 23,500 projects, from concept to completion, in under two years. Despite grave warnings from the Liberal opposition at the time that this would destroy safety and the environment, the environment commissioner did a full audit of 23,500 projects, and not one came back with a safety or environmental problem, so “one and done” can be done. What was funny was that the NDP got up and waved around a document saying that the environment commissioner had found a problem with a project that the feds had approved in Kanata, so we looked into it. It turned out that this project had not been part of the “one and done” plan but had taken seven years to approve and had the worst environmental outcome. That proves that all the paper, process and delays have nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with feeding an insatiable bureaucracy that creates work and money for itself by getting in the way, a bureaucracy that the government has allowed to metastasize over the last decade. We need a real bill that will truly cap the consideration time for a project at under a year and set a target of six months. A year should be the worst-case scenario. In fact, why not bring all the first ministers and all the mayors into a room to sign a document that we in Canada should be the fastest place on earth to get a building permit? No matter what someone wants to build, it should be faster to build it in Canada than anywhere else on earth. The Prime Minister could set the example today by granting permits for the 500 projects we have identified that are waiting in the impact assessment office. He could also get rid of the capital gains tax for reinvestments in Canada so we could bring back the trillion dollars of investment the Liberals have driven out of our country. That would be an avalanche of investment that would come pouring back into construction. It would be possibly one of the most patriotic tax cuts ever. We will look very carefully at this 250-page Liberal bill, but we are not going to believe all the rhetoric, the hype and the talking points, because we have heard it all before. The Liberals have been repeating the same promises since the Prime Minister took office. We are going to study the bill, but we have reservations about the outcome. The Liberals have made similar promises before. So far, they have not gotten rid of Liberal anti-development laws, Liberal anti-development taxes or Liberal anti-development bureaucracy. We want to remove these barriers so that we can build in earnest and make our country affordable, safe and independent here at home. We will study the bill, and we will do so based on the criteria of whether it meets our mission of a country that is affordable, safe and independent here at home. Our mission is to save Canadians money, save jobs and put Canada first. We have a real plan to do it. We ask the government to steal our plan. Perhaps what it should do is just take our plan and amend it over this bill. That way we would actually get some results. At the end of the day, the Prime Minister does not need to do, he needs to stop doing. He needs to stop blocking, stop taxing, stop obstructing and stop signing meaningless MOUs. He needs to get out of the way, get off the backs of our people and let our builders build, our workers work and our investors invest. We should be the richest, most affordable country on earth. We have been blessed with an abundance that is unmatched in the history of humanity in geography, oceans and resources and, of course, the best people on planet earth. Let us unleash their potential and let us fulfill the promise of this country that anybody who works hard gets a great life, an affordable home, a fridge full of groceries and a bank account that is overflowing at the same time. That is the promise this country made to every single person. That is our country's promise. That is what we are fighting for. That is the fight we are having on behalf of all Canadians, so let us get the job done. There has been enough talk. It is time for some action.

Mr. Speaker, I think the minister missed the speech. Maybe I should give it all over again, but before I do, let me just point out that he says they have “started” on five projects. They have started looking at five projects, not actually building anything, and that is the reality. The Liberals think that if they imagine something, that if they say something or that if the Prime Minister gives a speech or the media gives him gushing praise, it is the equivalent of that thing actually happening, when in fact single moms cannot eat the Prime Minister's speeches if they are low on money for groceries. People cannot pay their rent with the Prime Minister's fake MOUs. They cannot fill their tanks with Liberal rhetoric and promises. We need reality. Yes, I do have comments on the bill, and I will repeat them. The bill would actually allow the government to violate its own promised one-year time limitation by delays at the front, delays in the middle and delays at the end. That is just one of the many criticisms that this bill deserves.