44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 27, 2024 11:00AM
- May/27/24 1:28:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, our desire in committee was to ensure that we passed a bill that was constitutional. When the bill came to us, it had over 35 direct references to the unconstitutional Impact Assessment Act, and the government gave us no timeline as to when it would deal with that. Therefore, to us, it seemed absolutely pressing and urgent to ensure that we passed a bill that was constitutional.
The Liberals and the NDP wanted none of it, so we ensured that we would set out to get a bill that would be constitutional so that investors in the wind industry would have absolute certainty and confidence when they looked to make proposals on building their industry.
Also, we want to ensure that the current users of the waters, the fishers, have the certainty they need so that their industry can continue and flourish. We do not need these two industries combatting each other. There needs to be a way to figure out if they can coexist, and this bill would provide no certainty for that.
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Madam Speaker, this divide-and-conquer approach seems very typical of the Liberal government. The Liberals say one thing, do another and it pits group against group and region against region. I wonder if my colleague could comment further on whether Bill C-49 is about that; not about building prosperity, but rather playing politics with our federation.
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- May/27/24 1:30:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is absolutely true that we continue to see the divide-and-conquer approach, and it goes no further than with the Impact Assessment Act. We know how much devastation that has brought entirely across the country, and the Liberals continue to hide behind that and use that as a way to divide people on this bill as well.
I know the government said that it fixed that now in the budget, but there really was no effort for committees to get involved and for people to come to talk about what these changes needed to be. The Liberals are continuing to take a sledgehammer approach to a very important part of not just the renewable sector, but also the entire energy system and our nationwide economy as a whole. The Liberals are choosing to divide people over that.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years of the Prime Minister, life is unaffordable. With energy bills through the roof, Canadians are struggling to afford to heat their homes and keep the lights on. Not only has the carbon tax driven up the cost of energy, but the government has launched a war on Canada's natural resources and energy sectors.
Bill C-69, which was deemed largely unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada last October, created burdensome red tape, drastically increased approval times and drove away resource exploration and extraction projects. Now the Liberals seek to revive parts of that unconstitutional bill through this attack on both traditional and renewable offshore energy projects in Atlantic Canada. Bill C-49 will drive away investment through more uncertainty, red tape and longer timelines.
In 2022, the environment minister reluctantly approved the Bay du Nord offshore oil project, calling it one of the most difficult decisions the government had ever made. This project will create more than 13,000 jobs: 8,900 in Newfoundland and Labrador, 2,200 in Ontario, 900 in Quebec and 700 in Alberta. It will also add about $97 billion and change to our national GDP. However, thanks to the government's reckless deficit spending, costs have increased, and burdensome red tape has created uncertainty. Thanks to these factors, the project was delayed by three years, and it is still unclear whether the project will ever be completed at all.
In Nova Scotia, a private company was set to generate electricity from the massive tides in the Bay of Fundy. However, the project was eventually cancelled due to the mountainous red tape. That company shut down its operations in Canada entirely, costing jobs for workers and affordable renewable energy for Nova Scotians.
Over the last couple of years, multiple countries have pleaded for Canada to provide them with LNG to help end their reliance on Russian gas. What did the Prime Minister say to those countries? He told them that there was no business case for Canada to export LNG from our east coast. Germany went on to sign an LNG deal with Qatar and built a massive receiving port in just a matter of months. What could have been powerful paycheques for Atlantic Canadians turned into more dollars for dictators. That is shameful.
Of course, as a British Columbian, I would be remiss if I did not talk about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which Kinder Morgan at the beginning was prepared to complete on its own, without taxpayer funding. After the government made the project unfeasible, Kinder Morgan pulled out, and the government bought the pipeline. From there, costs exploded and taxpayers have now spent more than $30 billion on a project that was estimated to cost just $7 billion only a few years ago. This is the NDP-Liberal government's record on energy and resource projects: Delay, drive up costs, and eventually drive projects away.
I have talked a lot about the woeful lack of productivity in Canada's economy recently, because it is truly an emergency. Even the Bank of Canada said that. Canada produces just 79% of what the United States does per hour. That ranks us behind all of our G7 peers, maybe save for Italy right now. Adjusted for inflation, Canada's GDP per capita now sits lower than it did in 2014. Meanwhile, businesses are closing at an alarming rate, and the data does not even capture the full story for small businesses.
The most recent statistics from the superintendent of bankruptcy showed a 66.2% year-over-year increase in business insolvencies for the year ending March 31, 2024. A recent article in The Globe and Mail highlighted that many small business insolvencies are not even captured under business insolvencies, as many small business owners have to take personal liability on leases and loans. When they go bankrupt, it is considered a consumer bankruptcy, of which Canada saw 33,885 in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 14% year-over-year during the same period.
Driving away investment and development of energy and resource projects will only make things worse. In a time when businesses are struggling and Canadians cannot afford to pay their bills because their paycheques do not go far enough, the government is chugging ahead with another attack on energy, jobs, economic growth and even the Constitution.
Clause 19 of Bill C-49 would open the door to more red tape and lengthy delays. It would shift decision-making powers on licence approvals to the federal and provincial ministers, while tripling the amount of time that decision can take. Clause 28 would give the federal minister, with the approval of the provincial minister, the power to outright ban drilling in certain areas and even halt projects that are already approved and in progress. If this bill were to pass with clause 28 as written, it could put an end to offshore petroleum drilling in Atlantic Canada, killing good-paying jobs for workers and further strengthening eastern Canada's dependence on foreign oil imports from dictatorships like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Clauses 61 and 62 bring the unconstitutional Bill C-69 into the review process, allowing the minister to attach any conditions they see fit to approval. I would be remiss if I did not mention that, back in 2016, I was a political staffer, and I went over this bill at the environment committee. At that time, it was very clear that the intention of the government with this legislation was to give the minister unilateral power. It was to give the government more control over the private sector. It was to give the government the ability to halt projects through delay tactics. We have seen that now, and we are living it now. The last thing we need to do is to include those measures in this legislation.
We have seen how the government treats resource projects in this country. Clauses 61 and 62 will invariably be abused by the government to attach so many strings to approvals that projects will indeed become unfeasible, as we have witnessed. Canadians simply cannot afford any more of the current government and its anti-energy, anti-job and anti-economic growth policies. The government has shown time and time again that it is dead set on killing Canada's natural resource sector. If the environment minister had his way, not a single resource would ever be extracted in this country again. He would take away people's right to have a gasoline car as well.
While the government is focused on killing jobs and increasing our dependence on foreign sources of oil, Conservatives are focused on creating powerful paycheques for Canadians and getting Canada's bountiful resources to market so that our people can prosper.
I will be joining my Conservative colleagues in voting against this NDP-Liberal attack on Canada's resource industries.
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- May/27/24 1:38:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will say from the outset, because my colleague mentioned the oil industry, that I have family members who work in the oil industry in Newfoundland as well. I support the oil industry wholeheartedly.
He mentioned “powerful paycheques”. Could you please give this House your definition of a powerful paycheque?
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- May/27/24 1:39:07 p.m.
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The hon. member knows that he is to address questions and comments through the Chair and not directly to the member.
The hon. member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
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- May/27/24 1:39:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what does a powerful paycheque mean? It means that more of the money one earns stays in one's pocket and not in the hands of Ottawa. There is not a single Canadian who does not agree with that. That is what the Conservatives are set on doing by winning the next federal election.
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- May/27/24 1:39:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that was a hilarious way to spend my morning in the rabbit hole world of the Conservatives, who have spent weeks trying to shut down a bill about creating jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as Nova Scotia, and who do not want any clean energy jobs offshore, even though the whole world is moving to clean energy jobs. Maybe the member does not understand the words “Atlantic Accord”. If he knew anything about the Atlantic Accord, he would know that his leader tried to attack the Atlantic Accord, and Bill Casey had to stand up and leave the Conservative Party. Bill Casey was a dignified Conservative; of course he left the party.
However, here we see these guys once again attacking Newfoundland, attacking Labrador, attacking Nova Scotia, attacking the Atlantic Accord, all so they can shut down energy jobs. The Conservatives have the gall to come in here and say they are going to defend energy jobs. Like heck they are.
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Madam Speaker, my ears are burning with nonsense.
Let me recount a story from British Columbia. One of the first decisions of the NDP-Liberal government was to approve LNG in Canada. Why did the government rush to approve LNG off the coast of British Columbia? It was because it would not be subject to the constitutional discrepancies in the bill before us today. Bill C-69 effectively shut down resource exploration, development and exportation in Canada. That is why the NDP-Liberal government did not include the carbon tax when they approved that bill. That is why they did not subject the largest private sector investment to their unconstitutional laws.
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- May/27/24 1:41:25 p.m.
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Order. On both sides of the House, members are having discussions or heckling, and it is really inappropriate. I would ask members to please wait until it is the proper time to speak.
Rising on a point of order is the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.
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- May/27/24 1:41:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am concerned because it is impossible not to have nonsense in your ears if nonsense comes out of a member's mouth.
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- May/27/24 1:41:50 p.m.
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That is not a point of order.
I want to remind members, again, that it was on both sides of the House, even before the hon. member asked the question. I would ask members to please be respectful and allow for questions and answers to be asked and answered without disruption.
Questions and comments, the hon. member for South Shore—St. Margarets.
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Madam Speaker, what Bill C-49 would do, which the member articulated very well, is bring the no capital bill, Bill C-69, into offshore energy in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. To give an example, every summer, as the member for Avalon would know, the Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board puts out a call for exploratory licences, and every summer it gets applications. This past summer, four weeks after this bill was tabled in the House, how many applications did Newfoundland get? It got zero, because of the provisions in this bill already on the IAA, which is driving capital into the Gulf of Mexico, where all of those capital investments went.
I would like the member to tell us a bit about the experience he has had with how the IAA elements, the environmental review elements, of Bill C-69, which are now in this bill, have shut down jobs in his part of the world.
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Madam Speaker, when Bill C-69 was in the House a few Parliaments ago, the Mining Association of Canada came out very strongly in favour of the bill. I questioned the Mining Association of Canada in advance of the 2019 election as to why it would support this legislation. It has since rescinded its support for the approach taken by the NDP-Liberal government. It did that primarily because what the unconstitutional Bill C-69 does, and by extension its provisions in Bill C-49, is provide opportunities for the minister to make unilateral decisions that would create a level of uncertainty that most Canadian and foreign capital companies that want to invest in Canada are not willing to take a risk on.
What we need to do, and what this bill has shown us, is that we need to provide certainty. We do need to have strong environmental reviews, but that needs to be coupled with a degree of certainty to allow investment.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing time with the member for Nepean.
I am very happy to speak on Bill C-49. As an Atlantic Canadian, I am, of course, a strong supporter of this bill, which talks directly to the Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic accord and the Nova Scotia petroleum resource accord.
The first question I ask myself is: Why is the Conservative Party still, today, against Atlantic Canadians, against prosperity and against sustainable jobs for Atlantic Canadians?
I think of my colleague, Bill Casey, who was a Progressive Conservative, and not a Conservative that we see today. He defended Atlantic Canadians and the Atlantic accord. I will read what Mr. Casey, who was elected in 1988, said in an interview at the end of his career. The article said that “a rather significant hitch disrupted his career when, in 2007, he voted against the budget tabled by the Stephen Harper government,” progressive conservative government, “saying it broke the Atlantic Accord.” It was “the most unforgettable moment of his time in Parliament.”
He said, “I managed to get my vote in and a second later I was thrown out” of the party. He was expelled from their party. He had to sit, of course, as an independent and continue to fight for Atlantic Canadians as an independent.
Again I ask, why is the Conservative Party against Atlantic Canadians? Why is it against Nova Scotia? Why is it against Newfoundland and Labrador? It is because the Conservatives are doing the exact same thing. Here we are three days away from a year since the introduction and first reading of this bill, and still we are not able to get this bill done. Why? It is because the Conservatives spent seven weeks talking about everything else except the bill that was to be debated in committee. It was seven weeks wasted in filibustering, which is pretty sad when we think about the importance of getting legislation across to help Atlantic Canadians.
Why is this offshore renewable energy so important? It is important on many fronts. First, we are seeing emerging growth, twentyfold since 2010. Clean energy is the way to the future, and the world is moving toward that future. Where is Canada? We need to get there.
The International Energy Agency is saying that, from now until 2040, the sector is going to attract up to $1 trillion of investment. Canada has a major opportunity to be a leader in this renewable energy. Of course, it will also help us achieve our net-zero emissions by 2050, which is a very important piece of our work, but not the work of the Conservatives who are okay to let the planet burn. It is also going to give us good, sustainable jobs, which is very important to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada and my riding of Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook.
We want jobs. We have seen, with the Irving shipyard 30-year contract, that people are coming back home from various parts of the country. They know they can get good, sustainable jobs, which is really important for them to move back to Atlantic Canada.
It is also important because Canada has the longest coastlines in the world and the fastest wind speed in the world. This is the industry for Atlantic Canada. This is why we need to move quickly on this project. We are well positioned for local and international markets, and it is going to allow provinces to decarbonize the electricity grid. However, today, still, there is not a single offshore wind farm in Canada.
Is this a federal-led project or a provincial-led project? It is the provincial government asking us to move this bill forward as quickly as possible, because it represents economic growth. It is Nova Scotia's Premier Houston, and Houston of course is a Conservative, as well as the Liberal government in Newfoundland. They are asking us to move on this as quickly as possible.
The Premier of Nova Scotia, last year, said, that they are setting targets to offer leases to make sure that they are supporting offshore wind energy. He said, “Setting this target sends a clear signal to the world that Nova Scotia is open for business and becoming an international leader in offshore wind and green hydrogen development.”
Contrary to what the Conservatives are saying, we are taking every opportunity to develop our renewable energy market, not only to fight climate change, which Conservatives do not even believe exists, but also to create green jobs for Nova Scotians. Again, the provinces are asking us to move forward, and this government, working closely with provinces, intends to do just that.
It was not so long ago, last August, that I attended an announcement in Halifax about two companies, DP Energy and SBM Offshore. These global leaders in the world in this industry are set to establish Canada's first offshore wind farm, which is really important. Think about it; there are trillions of dollars to be had. It means great positioning in the world and an opportunity for sustainable jobs, and yet the Conservative Party is voting again against Atlantic Canadians. It is very difficult to understand. This bill—
An hon. member: Oh, oh!
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- May/27/24 1:52:12 p.m.
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Order, please.
There seem to be a lot of comments and questions being posed while the hon. member has the floor. I would ask members to please wait until the appropriate time. There will be a whole 10 minutes of questions and comments.
The hon. parliamentary secretary has the floor.
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Madam Speaker, it is simple: The truth hurts. When Conservatives hear the truth, it hits them and it hurts, because some of these individual members care about Atlantic Canada, but their leader does not, so they cannot. It is a simple game. This is what we are witnessing as they keep screaming on the other side and not supporting our government simply because their leader does not support our government and does not support Atlantic Canadians.
Our amendments are very clear and very straightforward. We can get this done very fast. As a matter of fact, tomorrow afternoon Conservatives are going to get their opportunity to show their colours. I am asking for at least the members on the other side who are from Atlantic Canada to do like the former member Bill Casey did. He stood up for his principles and stood up for Atlantic Canadians. That is what I am asking them to do. It is not complicated. We are asking to modernize and expand the mandate.
By passing Bill C-49, both provinces would follow mirror legislation. They are ready to go. Nova Scotia will launch a call for bids in 2025. The federal government and the provincial government are working together to support Canada, to support Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and the people of Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook.
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- May/27/24 1:54:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was very comical to hear that the Liberal government actually listens to provinces; that will be a first for them. Let us talk about Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and New Brunswick. All four premiers are asking the government to get rid of the carbon tax. It is not listening to them very much when it comes to that.
I would ask this member if he knows what the levelized cost of energy is for offshore wind without subsidies. It is 15¢ a kilowatt for offshore wind right now and it is 4.5¢ for coal in Nova Scotia. Who is going to pay that two-thirds difference, ratepayers?
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- May/27/24 1:54:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was sitting in a meeting about four months ago when my colleague from across the benches made that argument in front of the Premier, a Conservative premier, of Nova Scotia. He made that same argument, and the premier said he was talking baloney. His numbers are not correct, and we can get this done.
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- May/27/24 1:55:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order.
The premier of the province never appeared in the committee—
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