44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 27, 2024 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, since I have some time this evening, as the spouse of a U.S. Army combat veteran and as the stepmother of someone who is currently active within the U.S. Army, I would like to extend my gratitude to the United States of America for its strong allyship towards our country. I do so as the United States observes Memorial Day today.
It is about to get technical in here. Are members ready?
My colleague from Provencher just noted that we are debating an amendment to Bill C-69. I want to read the amendment and then make arguments to colleagues in here, as well as potentially any legislative staff from affected departments who might be listening to this, on why I think the House should avail itself of the opportunity to accept this amendment and do what the amendment says it should do. The amendment reads:
Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Canada—Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Act and the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Resources Accord Implementation Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be not now read a third time, but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Natural Resources for the purpose of reconsidering Clauses 61, 62, 169, and 170 with the view to prevent uncertainty and a lack of clarity caused by the inclusion of similar provisions contained in Bill C-69, An Act to enact the Impact Assessment Act and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, to amend the Navigation Protection Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, which would insert unanticipated conditions and requirements beyond existing legislation and regulations...
The reason Conservative members have put the amendment forward is that a substantive part of Bill C-49, which this amendment refers to, contains sections of Bill C-69, which were deemed largely unconstitutional.
There is something I do not think anyone has raised in debate in this place, as to why this amendment should go forward. Bill C-49, the substantive bill, was tabled on May 30, 2023. The Supreme Court ruling on the relevant sections in Bill C-49, which could be impacted by the relevant sections in Bill C-69, happened in October of last year.
Something else happened since this was put forward. The government tabled the budget implementation act, which we have been debating. In the budget implementation act, on page 552 through page 577, there are amendments to Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, that the government says are in response to the Supreme Court ruling, in an attempt to bring that piece of legislation into alignment with the Supreme Court's decision. The district I represent is in Alberta. The Government of Alberta does not think that the amendments will be constitutional.
However, there is a problem. Everyone needs to consider supporting the amendment for this reason: Although the amendments to the Impact Assessment Act are in the budget implementation act, I cannot find any coordinating or harmonizing amendments between those amendments and what is in Bill C-49. There is a problem with that. Let us put all the debate on the topic aside for a minute. If the budget implementation act is rammed through without our going back and reconsidering the clauses that are in Bill C-49, what is going to happen to the bill? Everybody should do the math on this. It is going to be unconstitutional.
What happens in that circumstance, where there has not been a harmonization of one set of amendments to another? What happens to anybody who is looking at potentially investing in these projects? What would they say? They would say that this is a huge risk and that it is going to be held up in litigation. Therefore, this is the reason the House should support the amendment.
Everybody should put their feelings on the topic of the bill aside and think about House procedure for a second. Unless the bill goes back to committee to consider harmonizing two things, we are going to be in a battle. These things are, first, whether the bill actually captures the spirit of what is in the budget implementation act and, second, whether the provinces deem it constitutional. The government is going to be in a battle over this, and that is antithetical to what the bill is supposed to do, which is to attract investment in these projects.
What has happened here, I think, is that the government members did not think that the Supreme Court was going to rule against the government; that is why they tabled Bill C-49 in May 2023 with the same type of language that was deemed unconstitutional in the original bill, Bill C-69. However, the Liberals are now trying to fast-track the bill through the House of Commons without its going back to committee to consider that harmonization, and that is a huge problem. At the very least, the government members should be doing a technical briefing to show how the amendments they have proposed in the budget implementation bill would impact the relevant sections that are mentioned in the amendment. That is the bare minimum that they should be doing. I am not sure about anyone else in here, but I did not get the invitation to that briefing. I do not think it happened, because I do not think that the Liberals have actually done this work.
Therefore, the rationale that I just set out here is poor planning on the part of the minister. Beyond that, the reason I would like to implore some of my colleagues from the Bloc, perhaps the NDP and perhaps even members of the Liberal Party is that the minister and their parliamentary secretary should never have let it get to this stage. This is a failure in their parliamentary affairs component. Beyond that, there is another component, which is that now we are going to gear up for another fight with the provinces. This is not just about Alberta; we know that all the provinces had concerns with Bill C-69.
In fact, in debate on the Bloc opposition motion earlier this week, Bloc members talked about the fact that they wanted clarity on ensuring that the government was not going to reach into the jurisdictional area of Quebec and of other provinces. I want to read to members a statement from the government of my province of Alberta on what was in the budget implementation bill. This is the statement, titled “Impact Assessment Act remains unconstitutional: Joint Statement”:
Premier Danielle Smith, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz and Minister of Justice Mickey Amery issued the following statement on the federal government’s amendments to the Impact Assessment Act:
Alberta has completed its review of the federal government’s recently tabled amendments to the Impact Assessment Act.
For colleagues who are following along, that is what is in the budget implementation bill. It starts on page 552; that is what they are referring to in the statement. The statement continues:
Even with these amendments, the act is still unconstitutional.
The [federal] Minister of Environment and Climate Change...still has the ability to meddle in projects that are within provincial jurisdiction.
That is how they are describing the amendments. They do not find that constitutionality. It continues:
This will put projects [and they list a bunch of different resource projects and highways] at risk.... This is simply unacceptable and Alberta, when it comes to intra-provincial projects, will not recognize the Impact Assessment Act as valid law.
The situation could have been avoided if, following Alberta’s Supreme Court victory, the federal government agreed to meaningfully consult with the province, rather than sending vague letters and blank templates. The federal government did not even inform Alberta when they were tabling these amendments in the House of Commons.
This failure to work collaboratively with Alberta is a choice made by [the] Prime Minister...and [the environment minister].
Choices have consequences. Alberta has won in court twice in the past year and we are ready to win again.
We are not at a point or a juncture in our nation's history where we can afford to be purposefully and knowingly picking battles with the provinces when our economy is barely sputtering along on life support.
We need investment into major natural resource projects. We need clarity in this type of legislation. We do not need more fights with the provinces.
What I see here is a hot mess that has not been adequately vetted by the parliamentary affairs people of the minister, and it has clearly not gone through cabinet with this type of scrutiny. When I was a cabinet minister, one of the things I always thought about when considering proposals for new legislation was how it would impact other areas of proposed legislation so that we would not get into harmonization issues that would create instability for investment.
That is exactly what we have here. Again, I know that people have issues with the Alberta energy sector. Members can park all of that for a second and put that aside. If this was the Government of Quebec or any other province, I would still feel the same way because it is counterproductive for the government to ram legislation forward knowing that there is going to be a fight on their hands, particularly when the province likely has a valid case.
I will just back it up to explain why this amendment to send it back to committee should be supported. If Bill C-49 is sent back to committee, it could be reviewed very quickly in coordination with the amendments that are in the budget implementation bill to ask if they harmonize. Does one equal the other?
We can argue whether or not they are good amendments, but the reality is that I do not think that exercise, in and of itself, has happened in any substantive way. Certainly, Parliament has not had the opportunity to do that, which is crazy. It is actually crazy that these are changing. If people have never sat around a board table, if they have never evaluated political risk in terms of making a major capital investment, this is the exact type of instability that people look at and say, “No, the capital is not going there.”
Number one, Parliament should have the right to scrutinize whether or not these major pieces of regulatory changes actually harmonize with one another. Number two, to the case that my colleagues from the Bloc just made, we should be discussing whether or not they are good.
The budget implementation bill is also being rammed through the House of Commons by the Liberals and the NDP. This is a major substantive piece of legislation. There are so many other pieces in here that there is no possible way that the finance committee is going to be able to get into the granular details of this component of the legislation to see if they harmonize with each other.
I am looking for colleagues that are on the finance committee here. Are they going to have time to do this? No, of course not. It is not going to happen. That is a huge problem. By not having this happen, it is basically sending a message to the entire legal community and the entire investment community that we do not know what we are doing. We need to just back it up and take it to committee.
The last reason this exercise would be good is that it would be an opportunity to do meaningful consultation with the provinces on this very topic. Here we have a very heated statement from the premier and the environment minister of one of the top grossing economies in the province, and they are saying that the government did not talk to them. Instead, they sent “vague letters and blank templates.” Do members know what vague letters and blank templates say to the investment community? They say, “Do not invest here.”
There needs to be meaningful consultation with the provinces. Again, it should not be one province or another. Particularly if my colleagues from the Bloc are going to argue for provincial sovereignty within the area of their jurisdiction, then the principle of meaningful consultation with every province should apply. If this went back to committee, it would give an opportunity for meaningful consultation with the provinces on the areas where there needs to be harmonization and discussion, so that we do not end up in another protracted constitutional battle. This is what our job is.
The last thing I want to emphasize is that the clauses the amendment refers to are not minor clauses. It is not like the short title of the bill. These are substantive clauses that were already found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada. Clause 62 deals with “The Regulator may, on application containing any information required by the Regulator or prescribed, issue an authorization with respect to each work or activity proposed to be carried out in relation to an offshore renewable energy project.” These are substantive clauses that I am not satisfied, as a parliamentarian, are harmonized.
Often when I stand here in this place and talk about stuff like this, I feel like Cassandra, that Greek myth of the woman who is doomed to know the future and nobody believes her. I want to be proven wrong on this, but if we do not walk this back to committee and sort this out, I guarantee members that there will be a constitutional challenge on both of these bills, there will be less investment, and this is going to end up in the Supreme Court anyway. Why would we not just do our job as parliamentarians and get it right to begin with? That makes a lot of sense to me.
This does not have to take a lot of time. I mean, this is what parliamentary committees are for. It should be to consider these exact things. We should be getting the officials who wrote the relevant segments in the BIA into committee to ask, “Hey, do these jive with each other? Show me how. Walk me through this.” That would also give opportunity for the provinces to have input, and then consider it in clause by clause.
Now, why is getting this right so important? It is because the bureaucrats should not run Parliament. That is our job, right? What I have seen here is a lack when ministers do not do these sorts of things. Right now, the minister should be reaching out to party leaders or House leaders and saying, “Hey, you know what? Let's go do a quick study on this. Let's get this right.” However, what is happening is the ideologically rigid idea that we have to ram this through. I think that comes up through the bureaucracy because they are just not on top of parliamentary affairs, and procedure matters. The rule matters. At the end of the day, one of our key functions as members of Parliament is holding the government to account on technical things like this. When we do not show the public that we have the capacity to do this, they do not want to invest here. They do not have faith in us as parliamentarians.
That is why this amendment is common sense. We have gotten it to a certain point of debate in the House. There's various viewpoints on the subject matter and the outcomes, but at the end of the day, there is a legitimate Supreme Court ruling that Parliament needs to consider in the implementation of this bill, which may not have been considered.
If we do not do this, and this does end up in a fight with the provinces, and this does end up in a Supreme Court fight, and we do chase investment away, what does that mean? It means that our economy continues to shrink. It means that we are not getting on top of renewable energy projects. It means that we are not developing the economy at all, and we cannot afford to do that.
Our country is broke right now, right? We cannot afford to make mistakes, or allow the government to make mistakes like this, and that is why we have to support amendments for additional legislative scrutiny, which is exactly what this amendment is calling for. It is very neutrally worded. It is not even referring to the whole bill. It is referring to the specific clauses that could be impacted by the Supreme Court ruling on Bill C-69.
I ask members to please let sanity prevail. Let us take the bill back to committee. Let us show the legal and investment community that Parliament is serious, that we can do something that resembles work, and let us get this right.
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