44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 19, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the pearl-clutching.
If the members on the other side had not moved concurrence, maybe we could have been debating this last night. However, they used procedural games to avoid debate, and here we are happy to take questions on a very important matter.
I would also take issue with the fact that the Supreme Court, in its opinion, did a slam dunk or that a fulsome 100% judgment was rendered from the other side. It did not. It actually gave a very thoughtful opinion on where the federal government and the provincial governments should work together on matters of jurisdiction.
I can say that we took it, as we should, very seriously and will be looking at amendments we can making in order to make sure it complies with the rendering that came from the Supreme Court last week.
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Mr. Speaker, as I have said many times in this House, there seems to be two block parties in the House of Commons: the Bloc Québécois and the block everything party. That party is the Conservatives, who block every piece of legislation and refuse to move them forward. They blocked dental care. They blocked everything that provides supports for Canadians.
In this case, of course, I guess there is some weird logic, because they hate clean energy. We have certainly seen that in Alberta where Danielle Smith has ripped up the clean energy sector, costing thousands of jobs. Therefore, legislation that actually helps to support that clean energy sector, creates new jobs for workers and also ensures that workers have a seat at the table is anathema to the Conservatives. Of course, they love bankers and CEOs, but they seem to hate workers, seniors and anybody who really benefits.
Through you to my colleague, is that really why the Conservatives, yet again, have blocked this type of legislation that actually benefits workers and Canadians?
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Mr. Speaker, I do not want to enter into the psychology of the Conservative Party. Therefore, I thank the hon. member for the question, but I will refuse the attempt.
Let me just say this. I would like to comment on his last point, if I could, as that is really what is at the heart of what we are proposing to do here.
Energy workers, oil and gas workers, should not just have a seat at the table, but should be leading that table. The problem is that for far too long concurrent governments, and I would argue ours, have left them out of the debate. They need to not just be a part of that debate, but to lead it.
I have skin in the game. My constituents are oil and gas workers. We have built a very proud offshore industry off the coast of Newfoundland. When they hear talk about change, tumult, and things that are exaggerated on social media like there is some master plan that is being made up in some star chamber, they get nervous necessarily. What we are saying with this legislation is that we are putting them at the table as decisions are made to best prepare them for a future that is happening now.
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Mr. Speaker, I was supposed to rise today to debate Bill C‑50, an important bill that, in fact, was originally to have been named the “just transition act”. For reasons unknown to me, the government seems to be afraid of using this expression, even though it is recognized internationally. It was created by the unions and approved by the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and even the European Union. Everyone in the transition, biodiversity protection and other fields uses the expression.
We have questions. The Bloc Québécois has had only one opportunity to speak, and here we are on day two of the debate. Why is the government unwilling to let us debate Bill C‑50?
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Mr. Speaker, let me speak to the hon. member's mentioning of the phrase “just transition.” There is a very simple reason why I do not like using “just transition” and it is because workers hate the phrase “just transition”.
I do recognize that the International Labour Organization created it. I understand that it did come from the labour movement. However, it does not speak to the people who I represent, and it does not speak to the people who work in the oil and gas industry or the energy industry as a whole. It does not speak to them.
We need these workers onside. We need them to lower emissions in the oil and gas industry because they are the only ones who know how to do it. We need them to build the renewables because they are the only ones who know how to do it. There may be certain phrases that get in the way of them doing that work or continuing to work in that industry, and building those things and doing those things is way more important to me than complying with the conjecture or the phraseology of Geneva.
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Mr. Speaker, this is such important legislation for sustainable jobs. It is about building our economic future as a country.
I was wondering if the Minister of Labour could talk to us a little about the importance of making sure that workers are at the centre of the work that we are doing, and how we have made sure, through this bill and the work that we have been doing generally with labour, that workers' voices are being heard, listened to and included.
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Mr. Speaker, this is very much a process, and process can be incredibly important.
I do not want to presuppose what workers are going to say about how they want to get this done. I have talked to a lot of oil and gas workers, both in my constituency and in my time as natural resources minister. Even through COVID, I still spent a lot of time talking to oil and gas workers in Alberta and Saskatchewan, even if it was by Zoom. They all said the same thing. There was a great nervousness about plans being made and them not being at the table.
I made it very clear that, with this legislation, the whole point of the bill is to make sure that they are at the table, to make sure that they can lead the table, and that we are working with them to make sure that the training opportunities are there for them to avail themselves of all sorts of things. There is carbon capture sequestration, for instance, within the oil and gas industry, even on pipelines themselves. It is so important that we know where and when to tighten the nuts and bolts on a pipeline to make sure the methane does not leak. These are all very important things.
These are the only people who know how to do this work. Consecutive governments have spent too much time putting them in the margins of this debate, putting them in the margins of the hard work that needs to be done when they have to be at the centre of it because they are the only ones who know how to do it.
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Mr. Speaker, one thing that is abundantly clear after eight years is that the Liberal government loves to build bureaucracy but not actually build jobs and options for workers.
When we look at this bill, we have a stable jobs partnership council, a sustainable jobs secretariat and a sustainable jobs action plan. We lost a couple of years because of COVID. The government did nothing with that. We see in the bill that all the government would do is create another process where it could reward more of their friends with positions on councils and secretariats with fancy titles. It is not going to be the people working in Coronach, Rockglen or Kindersley, Saskatchewan, in Alberta or in the places that actually matter, those who are actually going to be impacted and affected by this.
What assurance is the government going to give people that it will get it right, and make sure it is only people in the sector, and not people from the Laurentian elite or the downtown Toronto core, who are going to be sitting on the secretariat?
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Mr. Speaker, when I look at the other side, I am looking at the kings of red tape when it comes to energy production. One of the first things I was so happy to do was with respect to exploratory well environmental assessments on our offshore, off Newfoundland. The assessments were at 300 days per exploratory well until the Conservatives got in power and somehow magically found a way to triple that time to 900 days to make an exploratory well, which is a simple drill that goes into the sea bed to see if there is oil there. They put it in the same category as Hibernia and as Hebron, both full platforms. The Conservatives did not even get time to amend it. Maybe they did not care.
We did not want mistakes like that. One of the best parts of the much-maligned Environmental Assessment Agency is that it is able to do regional assessments. We were able to do one for the Newfoundland offshore, and we were able to reduce that time, as a result of looking at the entire basin, from the Conservatives' 900 days to our 90 days, as it should be.
That is because we paid attention to what people are doing on the ground, and it is one of those few occasions where, in 90 days instead of 900 days, we increased environmental oversight because we were looking at the entire basin and not just one item after another after another, consecutive duplicative red tape that the Conservatives managed to put in the way of our offshore.
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Mr. Speaker, on October 5, 2023, for the second reading of Bill S-12, an act to amend the Criminal Code, the Sex Offender Information Registration Act and the International Transfer of Offenders Act, I voted on the voting app. The voting app sent me a confirmation whereas the picture had not gone through. Therefore, I ask the House to give unanimous consent to vote yea.
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Is it agreed?
Some hon. members: Agreed
Continuing with questions and comments, the hon. member for Jonquière has the floor.
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Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe what I heard from the minister's mouth. He told my colleague earlier that workers did not want to use the term “just transition”.
However, this is coming specifically from the unions. I have had so many meetings with unions to talk about the just transition, and the folks representing workers do want to talk about a just transition. The minister says that workers do not like that term. I think it is the government that does not like that term.
No one in the western world uses the term “sustainable jobs” except in Canada. Someone will have to explain that to us at some point. I think it comes down to fear. The government is afraid of how Albertans and people in the oil and gas industry will react to the just transition, so it prefers to use a wishy-washy term like “sustainable jobs”. If the government cannot even call it what it is, we cannot expect it to take courageous action to lead the energy transition.
There will always be people who do not want the energy transition. Should the term “energy transition” be changed to “power alteration” or whatever? It is nonsense.
I wonder if the minister could explain to me why the terminology changed from “just transition” to “sustainable jobs”?
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Mr. Speaker, I would say to the hon. member, “Believe it.” I am a lot less interested in using phraseology that appeals to Geneva or others, and there has been some consistency in phrases that the member likes or perhaps some union leadership likes. I am interested in the membership of the those unions. I am interested in talking to the people who do that work.
If the member talks to the people who represent them, they will acknowledge that, when we talk among ourselves, we say “just transition” just so we know what we are talking about. What are we talking about? We are talking about training workers for opportunities in the future. That is really all it is. It is a nice way to say it.
They can call it whatever they like. At the end of the day, what we are saying here is that we are listening to the workers themselves. We are using words that they would prefer to use, and we actually prefer using fewer words and doing more things. That is what this is about: making people feel included, and not just any people but the people who will actually do the work of lowering emissions.
The point is not the phraseology. I do not care about that. What matters is that workers are given the dignity for the work that they do, for what they have done, for what they have built, what they are building and what they are about to build for all of us.
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Mr. Speaker, where I come from, in my riding of Courtenay—Alberni, we see it as a duty and responsibility to build a diverse economy and build resilience in our communities. I think about the Port Alberni Port Authority wanting a floating dry dock. There are the Coulson Group, which is a global leader in firefighting aviation, wanting to expand and do more work here, and there is Nova Harvest in Barkley Sound wanting to expand. I also think of Tla-o-qui-aht, which is building run-of-the-river and clean energy projects. We see it as a duty. We would see it as irresponsible to not be fighting for the creation of more jobs when it comes to clean energy.
Does the minister not see that it is a duty of all members of the House to build resiliency, a cleaner future and a more sustainable future, especially for workers, who have been advocating for this very bill to be seen through?
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Mr. Speaker, Bea Bruske, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said that this would be a big win for workers and that workers have raised their voices and helped to make the sustainable jobs act a reality. We did not just come up with writing this off at committees. These are things we developed after a great deal of consultation with workers themselves, so these are the mechanisms that would give them a voice. They would be legislated through this place and have the authority of this place. The legislation would carry the weight of not just what is in here, but of the House saying to workers, firmly, that they are in charge of this and we are going to figure this out together.
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Mr. Speaker, I am afraid the hon. Minister of Labour's speech would have been well informed if there had been some reference to already broken promises to workers in the fossil fuels sector.
We talk about how workers do not like to hear this language. I was in Paris with the member's friend, the minister of the environment at the time, Catherine McKenna, was working with Canadian labour unions, and working hard, to get the language of exactly “just transition” into the Paris Agreement. At that point she came back to Canada and put in place a task force on coal sector workers.
The task force went into every coal sector worker community in Alberta and Saskatchewan, co-chaired by the head of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and co-chaired by the then head of the Canadian Labour Congress, who is now a senator. They went into every community, listened to coal sector workers and came up with 10 key principles that should be followed. They are gathering dust, these principles, under the title “A Just and Fair Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities”.
This morning, this debate is not about the bill itself. It is about everybody's right to speak to it. Here I am as Leader of the Green Party of Canada, and my first chance to speak to the bill is on the question of shutting down debate before we even talk about the work that is important to do and about using language. It is not phraseology or minimizing it and ridiculing it. It was hard work to get it into a legally binding agreement, to which Canada agreed to, signed and ratified, that uses the language “just transition”.
The emphasis there is not only on the transition, but also on the justice of it for the workers and the communities, who gave their time in full faith that their report would go somewhere and not just gather dust on a shelf.
I see the Speaker wants me to hurry up, but I have had it with being hurried up, shut up and kept off the floor because the bill is important, and now we are going to have time allocation. I do not know that I will get to speak to it.
I ask my dear friend, the Minister of Labour, to please not use time allocation on every single bill. It is insulting to democracy and it makes a mockery of the work to review important legislation in this place.
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- Oct/19/23 10:52:54 a.m.
- Watch
I am just trying to keep people to the topic at hand and to make sure everybody gets to participate.
The hon. Minister of Labour.
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Mr. Speaker, time is of the essence here. The Inflation Reduction Act has passed in the United States. It is perhaps the single greatest industrial policy, and probably the single greatest piece of legislation, that has been passed in any democracy in the world on the issue of energy transition. We have to move, and the way in which we move will determine whether how we move is sustainable and competitive in drawing investment, and we want to do it right. We want to do it with workers on side.
On the issue of time allocations, members can please tell me what in the bill is so bad about including workers in decisions. Members can tell me if there are larger issues that are unresolved, as there are in the House on issues of energy transition, but on the issue of whether workers should have a role here, let us get to work.
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Mr. Speaker, this flawed bill is a bill to basically create a committee to create a committee, and there would be no assurances within this committee that the 15 positions, other than bureaucracies, would actually represent those workers. They would not represent the worker who is on the dragline in Westmoreland Coal in Estevan or in Bienfait, Saskatchewan. The committee would not have that person there. It would have a bureaucrat or union person who is focused on that aspect, as opposed to knowing exactly what that job is. On top of that, you talked about wanting to listen to the workers. I quote you on that; you want to hear from them directly. Where in the legislation does it say we would have that worker there?
Furthermore, there is no mention in there about communities. You talked about the new sustainable jobs plan. It does not make any mention of sustainable communities or mitigating negative economic impacts. These are important things that would affect each and every one of those workers in Bienfait, in Coronach and around this country who would lose their jobs because of this.
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Mr. Speaker, Bea Bruske, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said that workers have raised their voices and have helped make the sustainable jobs act a reality, and that Canada's unions are proud to work with the government to develop legislation that focuses on workers. The International Union of Operating Engineers said that the act “puts the interests of energy workers at the forefront of a low-carbon economy.” The international vice president of the IBEW said that this act shows the government's “commitment to protecting good-paying, highly skilled jobs.” Canada's Building Trades Unions welcomes the bill, saying that the consultation built into this process would “ensure workers are front and centre during this transition.”
If there are issues with the people they elect, then you can take it up with them. However, to say that somehow these people who are there, whom these workers elect, are elites is to put us into question. What are we? Are we elites?
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