44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 26, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, like the province of Quebec, the province of Manitoba has a very healthy aerospace industry. The technology is absolutely incredible. When we start to take a look at things such as computer components and the whole area of AI, I suspect there are companies outside Canada that would dearly love to be able to get their hands on some of this information, and they may not necessarily want to keep those good-quality jobs in communities. That is one of the reasons it was important we bring forward legislation of this nature. Again, I am a bit reluctant to provide comment on the real details of it. If the member has some very specific questions, he might be best advised to check with the minister in question.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague has been on this committee and others as well. His question is a really good one, and I really appreciate it.
We can look at national security and a number of different things through the lens of Stelco in Hamilton, which was bought up by U.S. Steel. It actually moved some of the operations to Zug Island in Detroit, where its operations caused what was then called the Windsor hum, even though it came from Detroit. The operations there made vibrations and problems.
I will conclude by saying it is a great example, because we gave up the capacity to grow and expand our steel and aluminum industry, and then the company pulled it out because they wanted less competition. The end result was that we had a painful exercise with workers who lost pensions, jobs and so forth.
That is why I appreciate this question, because it is about national security, and it is also about personal security for our workers who are actually in these sectors.
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Mr. Speaker, I will start where the last comment left off. I should remind the hon. member for Northumberland—Peterborough South that it was the Harper government that saw 40,000 auto sector jobs leave this country over a 10-year period. That was 40,000 people and their families who had to make very difficult decisions about what to do next.
Since then, the government has been working with other partners throughout the world to attract investment here, and now we have attracted new investments to this country. This is what I will get to in why this legislation is so important, but in the process of attracting investment, we are now seeing, in a riding neighbouring both his and mine, a brand new manufacturing facility for raw minerals, to make electric vehicle batteries. It will produce enough materials to make 800,000 cars a year. There will be a piece of my riding, his riding and, indeed, Hastings—Lennox and Addington and a couple of other neighbouring Conservative ridings in every vehicle in North America in the future. This is great not just for our ridings but also for our country.
Therefore, I took great exception when the member said in his speech earlier that jobs are leaving. On the contrary. Despite the fact that some other members of the House think they are all going to catch on fire, with respect to manufacturing specifically and the vehicles of the future, we are going to see, in the future, that Canada is a leader in those manufacturing jobs. That is why bills like this are so important, because what we are talking about is protecting the interests of Canadians at the forefront. The bill is about modernizing the legislation, to give the minister and those responsible the tools they need to be always watching out for the best interests of Canadians.
This is another one of those bills where I would think it would go without saying that all members of the House would support it, and the indication I am starting to get is that they will. I am lost, because I was actually supposed to speak to this much earlier in the day but did not get the opportunity because, instead of talking about very important things like this, once again we saw the same old Conservative delay tactic of introducing a concurrence motion on a report. Again, these reports from committees come in abundance to this place. Typically, they are just tabled and dealt with, but Conservative members thought that this would be a great way to burn three hours of government time today. I am forced to speak to this later, and they know what they are doing; they are basically pushing everything down the line. The next time my good friends from the Bloc or the NDP stand up and ask why we need a time allocation motion, this is why; it is because of what is happening in the House today.
The legislation before us is so critically important in order for us to be able to protect intellectual property, investments and, quite frankly, Canadians. What the bill would do, specifically, is authorize the Minister of Industry, after consultation with the Minister of Public Safety, to impose interim conditions on investments in order to prevent potential national security injury from taking place during the review. It would also authorize the Minister of Industry, where they consider that the investment could be injurious to national security, to make an order for further review of the investments under the national security provisions of the act.
I think that why this legislation is so important now is that we are getting to a point where investments are flowing freely in and out of countries and where this government has brought in more trade agreements than every other government in the past, in terms of working and trading with other nations. There was a time, many decades ago, when, believe it or not, Liberals were not in favour of trade. Where have we gotten to now? We have gotten to the point where it is now Conservatives who are questioning trade.
Before our eyes, we are seeing exactly what is going on in the United States of America. Republicans who are supposed to be pro-economy and pro-trade have now turned into isolationists. I hear Conservatives heckling me, but it was just yesterday or the day before that the member for Cumberland—Colchester asked me a question and referred to the trade agreement with Ukraine as woke legislation and questioned whether or not Canada was taking advantage of Ukraine.
All the Conservatives who are currently heckling me are going to have to explain to me why a party that is in favour of trade so much would start questioning a basic trade relationship with a country that we see as an ally, a country that we are supporting during a war. They are going to have to explain that to me, because I can say with a great degree of confidence that we will not hear that MAGA terminology used on this side of the House.
I know we will not hear it from my Bloc colleagues and I know we will not hear from my NDP colleagues, but now we are getting a new faction of the Conservative Party that is openly questioning why we are supporting Ukraine and why we would even think about trading with Ukraine. That is where we have gotten to in this country. That is where we are now. This is not the Brian Mulroney Conservative Party. This is the new MAGA of the north. That is what we are looking at across the way.
I am not saying all Conservatives are like that. They are? Some of them are nodding. I could be wrong, but they come into this House and start making wild claims, like electric car batteries spontaneously burst into fire, like we heard a couple of days ago. The member tried to substantiate that claim on a number of points of order, as she is trying to do now.
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