44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 21, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House today on Bill C-33.
I hope members had productive summers in their ridings. It is good to be back to reconnect with my colleagues on all sides of the House.
Bill C-33, on the face of it, deals with the technical subject matter of port and railway systems in Canada, but I think this bill also exposes a philosophical gulf that exists between those of us in the Conservative Party and, frankly, those in the other three parties, in how they act and vote, if not how they always sound. The Liberals and their coalition partners in the NDP have an approach that emphasizes a big, centralized government that is constantly seeking to weaken the decision-making powers, not only of private individuals, but also of the institutions that are supposed to hold delegated authority and respond to local circumstances and independent economic factors. Their agenda is a centralizing one, pulling that authority away from individuals, with losses of their freedom, and pulling that authority away from institutions that are supposed to be able to operate independently.
We have the Bloc, and I think this was demonstrated by the speaker before me, wanting to rhetorically position itself as being a decentralizer, but in fact, if we look at the way Bloc members vote, we see their support, for example, for the Liberal carbon taxes, in particular the second carbon tax, and it boggles the mind that a party that, on the one hand, says it wants to divide the country and make Quebec its own country, is on the other hand, supporting these kinds of from-Ottawa measures that impose additional costs on Quebeckers.
It is becoming clear that Conservatives stand alone when it comes to offering a different vision, which recognizes the role, yes, of the federal government, but also the richness and diversity of experience and capacity that exists across this country and, therefore, supports affirming the decision-making responsibility of other institutions, provinces, municipalities and, in this case, port authorities and recognizes the importance of having a multiplicity of different institutions making decisions that respond to those local circumstances.
This is an important bill in its policy implications. However, it is also an important bill in the way that it demonstrates a Conservative vision of emphasizing strong institutions, respect for arm's-length institutions and divisions of power, our belief in big citizens as an alternative to big government, and the role of mediating institutions.
Bill C-33 is entitled “strengthening the port system and railway safety in Canada act”. My preferred alternative title is, “strengthening Liberal control of the port system”. It is not strengthening the port system, but strengthening Liberal control of the port system. It is on that basis, and for some of the reasons I have already indicated, that we do not support it.
I do, though, in passing, want to extend my best wishes to the outgoing minister, who tabled this bill and has since, from what I understand, announced his intention not to seek re-election. I know that he has been in public life for a long time. I wish him very well.
Those who are not as familiar may ask how ports function in Canada. Each port has its own board, and that board is able to act relatively autonomously. It is supposed to act at arm's length from the government, which includes electing its own chair. It is also supposed to be able to look at the best interests of the port. It is supposed to be able to look at what is in the economic interests of the country, but also of that particular region, taking those local factors into account. It is also supposed to be able to develop structures for engagement and consultation that, while reflecting broad, unifying principles, are appropriate to the particular local circumstances.
The way, for instance, indigenous consultation happens at a port may vary depending on the particular local circumstances, such as the proximity of indigenous nations and so forth. This ability of ports to act at arm's length recognizes that one size does not fit all. It recognizes that expertise, local decision-making and an understanding of local factors are very important in the case of port management and in general when it comes to government decision-making. Creating institutions that can be responsive to particulars of local circumstances is important. This existing structure of ports is a reflection of that reality, and it stands in contrast with the Liberal centralizing vision held, if not officially then certainly enacted by all of the other parties in this place, save for the Conservatives.
This bill seeks to make changes that bring ports, to a greater extent, under the domination of the central government. This is where we obviously part company with the direction.
On the structure of ports, members of the ports are appointed by the federal government. There is a federal role in making these appointments, and that does provide tools for influencing the direction of ports, but it creates a balance that allows autonomous, arm's-length action on a day-to-day level. However, the federal government is still selecting the individuals it believes to be appropriate.
The bill would change the authority structure in a number of ways. It would make the boards subject to ministerial direction and would also allow the minister to appoint the chair. The previous structure was that the minister appointed members of the board, but the board would then elect its own chair, which again still involves a substantial role for the government but gives the board more autonomy in identifying the person who is best positioned to lead the board. The new structure would involve the minister appointing the board members and also the board members appointing the chair. It would also make the board subject to ministerial direction and would mandate certain structures around environmental and indigenous consultations.
Those considerations and consultations are obviously very important, but the specific structures that may be appropriate can legitimately vary depending on the size of the port and the local circumstances. They could well be matters subject to innovation and exchange of information rather than the requirement of standardization.
This is a centralizing Ottawa-knows-best type of Liberal bill, and Conservatives are opposed to it. In many respects, this bill is a missed opportunity insofar as there are things that are important about how we could be strengthening our port and rail system, but instead, the Liberal approach to strengthening anything is to try to strengthen their control or involvement in that particular thing.
We are opposed to this expansion of direct government control over the ports for four main reasons, which I will now proceed to discuss. There is, first of all, a general conviction about the importance of subsidiarity; second, a concern about the current government in particular expanding its management of things; third, the Liberal record on appointments raising some concerns about why the Liberals are trying to pass legislation to give themselves more control and ability to shape direction through appointment; and finally, highlighting how scale differences matter at the port level, and there are particular reasons in this case why having a diversity of structures for how certain issues are engaged with is quite worthwhile.
First, on the principle of subsidiarity in general, I subscribe to the general principle of subsidiarity, which means that decisions should be made at the level closest to the people affected as possible. Better decisions are made when the local experiences of the people affected are harnessed. This comes from a basic recognition of universal human potential for responsibility and creativity. If they harness the views and experiences of more people who are directly involved a situation, they will get better outcomes than if there were a smaller number of people with less immediate experience involved in that decision. A belief in subsidiarity flows naturally from a belief in human dignity and human potential for creativity.
Our constitutional framework is designed to recognize the value of that subsidiarity, which is why not every decision is made by the federal government. We have areas of responsibility of provincial jurisdiction. We have strong municipalities, and we also have arm's-length institutions that act within the federal government. Subsidiarity is not incompatible with the belief that there are also certain kinds of decisions that are of a scale and a nature that do require larger levels of coordination or action by a larger entity, such as, let us say, the national government. The impulse to subsidiarity is not to say that no decisions should be made collectively because there are certain kinds of things where the nature of the scale requires that action.
I want to point out in particular that, in this context, our Conservative plan on housing does involve recognizing the need to push municipalities to do more in getting housing built. This is completely compatible with the principle of subsidiarity because we see a situation in Canada right now where we are so far behind in getting homes built that there is an urgency that requires more pressure to move forward. There has also been a lack of appropriate scale in considering the response to this.
Members will notice in the discussion on this that the Prime Minister has tried, at certain points, to say that this is not really his responsibility and this is not something that he is going to get involved in. However, the Prime Minister has a housing minister. The government seeks to create policy on this. It is just that the government's policy has been ineffective. In the plan that Conservatives have put forward, it is about pushing municipalities, setting targets for them and tying federal funding to commitments to move forward. However, it is not about taking away that authority from municipalities or trying to micromanage specific decisions. Rather, it is about using the tools we have to create incentives, define what a national objective should be and reward them for moving toward that objective.
This is just to illustrate that obviously, on certain areas, there is a vital role for the federal government to engage in, but there has to be a healthy interplay. With the Liberals, the irony has been that, on some areas where the federal government needed to engage, they have tried to avoid responsibility. However, the Liberals have, at the same time, tried to intervene, rhetorically if not directly, in areas that are very clearly not their jurisdiction, butting in on things that very obviously have nothing to do with the decision-making power of the federal government.
Again, as it applies in the case of ports, we can see the importance of local decision-making and the impulse of the government to ignore the role of local decision-makers and to move counter to this principle of subsidiarity, which is a principle that, sadly, the Liberals do not believe in.
In their ideal vision of the world, all of the decisions that are of significance to this country would be made by a small group of people inside the Prime Minister's Office, without even harnessing the full energies of our national parliamentary democracy. I think that has had some dire consequences in many obvious cases, and on this point I will move to the next, which is the challenges with the government's centralizing impulse in particular, in a context where the government has demonstrated profound incompetence in all aspects of our national life.
I will not have time to detail all of these points, but in a context where the government is failing to do its job, is failing to make life more affordable for Canadians and has failed on environmental policy, on housing and on many other fronts, it is nonetheless persistent in saying that it wants more control of people's lives and that it wants to be able to exercise more control and direction over previously independent bodies. I will point out as an obvious example, in one particular case, the on-again-off-again labour disruptions, or the back-and-forth associated with that, the harm that was done and the failure of the minister to resolve that situation.
Environmental policy is something that, rhetorically, we hear a lot about from the government, yet the government is missing all of its environmental targets while using environmental policy as an excuse to impose new taxes. The way the Liberals talk about it, if one does not support their tax plan, one is against taking action on the environment.
The reality is that the government's tax plan has made life less affordable for Canadians and has not actually allowed it to achieve any of its targets. Sadly, we see the other parties in the House, the NDP and the Bloc, in lockstep with the government in its insistence on imposing new taxes. This is a space in which the government is trying to take more control for itself again, telling provinces that they have to have a carbon tax or it will impose one directly from Ottawa.
It has not worked on many fronts. We can talk about the government's approach to passports. We can talk about its policy failures during COVID and about the fact that fewer houses are being built today than decades ago, even when our population was smaller. We have a government that has, across the board, been either incompetent or malicious, yet it is seeking more control over institutional decision-making, through Bill C-33. We are not prepared to give them that control.
The third point I wanted to raise around this is that we have a particular concern about the government's desire to use this bill as a tool for strengthening its power of appointment, in terms of its ability to appoint chairs of boards. We have heard numerous stories about the flawed approach the government has taken to appointments, appointing donors or consulting supporter information before making important appointments, trying to whitewash issues by appointing people who have close relationships with the Prime Minister. This is the way the government has approached appointments, so it will not be surprising that there is no appetite on this side of the House to give the government more control over the appointment process when the current system, the election of a chair of a board by the existing members of the board, is working just fine.
I will quickly make my last point, which is that, obviously, in terms of important decision-making, scale matters. There are many different kinds of ports that have very different circumstances because of such massive variations in the amount of traffic that goes through them. We recognize the importance of all ports. We want them to thrive and succeed in ways that reflect their local circumstances and the expertise of those who are running the ports. That means avoiding Ottawa-knows-best, Liberals-know-best and one-size-fits-all approaches to this.
In conclusion, Conservatives recognize the importance of freedom, local autonomy and subsidiarity. We reject the centralizing we-know-best approach of the Prime Minister and of the other three parties in the House that are supporting his vision. I believe that our alternative approach in opposing the bill and emphasizing local autonomy, expertise and the importance of community-based decision making is a much better approach and one that would be much better received by the Canadian public.
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Mr. Speaker, I really liked the end of my colleague's speech. She referred to the “Ottawa knows best” approach that is often taken. In her speech, she also spoke about the centralizing power that the Liberal-NDP coalition is trying to develop. I completely agree with her.
However, her remarks are somewhat inconsistent with what I heard yesterday. Her leader said that he was going to make infrastructure support for cities conditional on them meeting their housing targets, even though we do not know what those targets are. Is that not an “Ottawa knows best” approach? Is that not just another form of centralization?
I would like my colleague to explain that.
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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to debate the important issues that Canadians face.
Before I jump into the subject matter of Bill C-33, I would note that yesterday represented the second anniversary of the 2021 election. In that regard, I would note my deep appreciation to the people of Battle River—Crowfoot for the opportunity to continue serving them in this place, to be their voice in Canada's Parliament. A big thanks goes to my wife, Danielle, my kids and my whole family for their support, as well as my staff, volunteers, campaign team and everybody it takes to make elections happen.
It is interesting that the Liberal Prime Minister, in the course of the last election, promised that if he were elected with a minority, he would call an election after two years. That is another broken promise by a Liberal who cares more about power than he does anything else. He also promised, I would note, after which I look forward to jumping into the substance of Bill C-33, that he would not join a coalition with the NDP, despite Conservatives suggesting that this would be an inevitable result. They laughed at us then. We turned out to be the ones who were telling the truth, and the Liberals were exposed for once again misleading us and holding on to power at any cost.
As we get into the debate on Bill C-33, once again we have before us a bill where, if we read the preamble, there is very little to disagree with. I have said this often when it comes to Liberal bills. The Liberals are great at making announcements, proposing things and saying they are doing things, but when we dig into the substance of what we have before us, it certainly falls short.
We have a bill that touches on a whole host of different things when it comes to our rail sector and our ports, including some of our deep sea ports. There are seven acts that would be affected. In Canada, as a country, both the rail and sea transport sectors are absolutely fundamental to the success of our nation. We have to be able to transport our goods and resources, whether the raw resources that come from the ground or the value-added resources in every segment of the economy that are produced everywhere across our nation. We need to have a transport sector that we can trust and that is reliable, safe and secure and that not only Canadians can trust, but also, when it comes to investment, our customers around the world can look at our system and know and trust that it is doing the right thing.
Concerns have been highlighted. Transport ministers seem to fall at an astonishing rate. In 2017, a few transport ministers ago, the now-retired Marc Garneau, who was then transport minister, launched the statutory review of the Railway Safety Act. Over the course of the last number of years, we have seen different steps in that process. It was in October of last year that the previous transport minister received the final report from the national supply chain task force; now we have this bill before us. However, when it comes to whether this bill deals with the concerns that have been highlighted, we are increasingly hearing that it does not, pure and simple.
I would note that one of the first issues that I dealt with, as did many of my colleagues after we were elected in 2019, was the rail strike just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. There were blockades and protests that had virtually ground our economy to a halt. In fact, it would have been very interesting to see what the impact on the economy of the Liberals' mismanagement of that situation would have been. We did not have the opportunity to see direct impacts of that. Of course, we know that in the aftermath, we immediately went into the COVID pandemic, and our focus for the last number of years obviously changed dramatically.
The bill we have before us would change aspects of railway safety, including security. There are prohibitions and some changes to the way that things would be classified. We need to ensure that railway companies are able to address security and, when it comes to ensuring that appropriate clearances for the staff of rail companies are provided, as well as that there are continual reviews.
I would just note that when it comes to the review portion, it is great to ask for statutory reviews but I am sure I am not alone, like many in this place, who would note that statutory reviews rarely happen when they are scheduled to. I will be asking the Library of Parliament to go through and look at all of the statutory reviews that are currently missing.
It is great to talk about a statutory review, but it is nothing more than boilerplate language. It does not do much good if one does not actually plan to review it.
I believe that some of these things are laudable in their intent but when it comes to the substance of whether they accomplish it, many Canadians do not realize that railway companies actually have their own police forces because of some of the history associated with the importance of that as a sector of our economy and the growth of our country. Some of the dynamics of that and, in some cases, legislation that is almost as old as the country itself needs to be reflective of present-day reality. These are important questions that have to be asked when it comes to committee.
This is the sort of bill that truly takes a huge amount of time to get into some of the substance so I will go very high-level here.
One of the challenges that has been brought to my attention is that there are two things that take place. One is that Ottawa gets a whole lot more authority which, interestingly enough, the Bloc supports, which is an irony, I would suggest.
At the same time, they are downloading a whole bunch of the work to port authorities that do not necessarily have the resources to accomplish the objectives that will be brought forward if this bill is passed unamended.
What I fear will be the case is that we will have more red tape and more bureaucracy slowing down the decision-making process when it comes to our ports. We know how essential that is. It was only months ago that we had a strike at the Port of Vancouver where it, certainly in western Canada, ground our economy virtually to a halt. I believe it was half a billion dollars a day in economic impact and it will take months to clear the backlog.
When it comes to products, whether it is dried commodities like agriculture, whether it is oil or the carbon-based products that are essential for so many economies around the world, which Canada has a strong record of being able to provide, we have to make sure we do this right.
I think that it is not the answer to increase bureaucracy and download responsibility without understanding the impacts that this will bring about on the people who are actually responsible for making sure that our economy is moving. I say “moving” very specifically.
I would bring up an example that emphasizes my point.
Today in question period, the Minister of Health brought up natural health products. I know all of us in this place have heard a lot about natural health products over the course of the summer.
The unfortunate trend is that this government is desperate to make changes on things that do not actually help, especially when one sees the irony that the government is making a whole bunch of regulatory and bureaucratic changes to natural health products that nobody asked for and certainly very few people I have spoken to, whether in the sector or outside it, support, yet it is pushing this down the throats of small business owners, of Canadians and one of Canada's most trusted sectors.
That same health minister supports the selling of hard drugs on our streets.
I bring this up because it highlights the irony that one has a government that seems to be quick to propose things, to look for ways that it can increase the size of government, the inefficiencies associated with that and the red tape that impacts the ability for the economy to function, but when it comes to actually delivering, it fails and its priorities always seem to be in the wrong place.
The questions I have asked certainly need to be addressed at committee. I hope that serious amendments can be made so that we do not allow that same trend to slow down a sector that is already being slowed down by a Liberal government that is simply out of touch.
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Madam Speaker, I opened my speech acknowledging that it has been two years since the last election. It was not long after that the NDP members broke their word to the people of this country, along with the Liberals. They suggested during the election that they would never form a coalition and they would never form a government with the Liberals.
We now have NDP members who seem to be regretting the fact that they have their own government, in actual fact and operational fact, in this place when it comes to being able to accomplish anything. They are now frustrated that their partners in crime, so to speak, are not doing what they want.
My suggestion is simply this: If the member is so concerned about the government they support not accomplishing what they want to bring forward, maybe they should have thought twice about entering an agreement they were not honest about in the first place, as they are not actually able to get anything out of it.
That is certainly a question I hear often. What does the NDP get out of it? Certainly—
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