//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1415)[Translation]I wish to inform the House that pursuant to Standing Order 28(4) I have recalled the House this day for the sole purpose of granting royal assent to certain bills.Sitting for the sole purpose of attending Royal assentBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoyal AssentInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1420)[Translation]Order, please. I have the honour to inform the House that a communication has been received as follows:Government HouseOttawaJune 21, 2019Mr. Speaker:I have the honour to inform you that the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada, will proceed to the Senate chamber today, the 21st day of June, 2019, at 2 p.m. for the purpose of giving royal assent to certain bills.Yours sincerely,Assunta Di LorenzoSecretary to the Governor General and Herald ChancellorMessages from the Governor GeneralRoyal assentBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoyal AssentMessage from the SenateInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1420)[Translation]I have the honour to inform the House that a message has been received from the Senate informing this House that the Senate has passed the following bills: C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coast; 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; C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other Acts; C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another Act; C-91, An Act respecting Indigenous languages; C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families; C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measures; C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act; C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020.Aboriginal languagesAboriginal peoplesBritish ColumbiaBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActC-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsC-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsC-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActC-91, An Act respecting Indigenous languagesC-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and familiesC-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresCare for childrenCoastal areasCorrectional servicesCriminal justice systemCustoms tariff and customs dutiesEnvironmental assessmentFamilies and childrenGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersInternational tradeMain estimates 2019-2020Messages from SenateOil tankersBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoyal AssentInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1450)[Translation]I have the honour to inform the House that when this House did attend Her Excellency this day in the Senate chamber, Her Excellency the Governor General was pleased to give, in Her Majesty's name, the royal assent to the following bills:C-71, An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearms—Chapter 9.C-81, An Act to ensure a barrier-free Canada—Chapter 10.S-203, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts (ending the captivity of whales and dolphins)—Chapter 11.C-82, An Act to implement a multilateral convention to implement tax treaty related measures to prevent base erosion and profit shifting—Chapter 12.C-59, An Act respecting national security matters—Chapter 13.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequence—Chapter 14.C-77, An Act to amend the National Defence Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts—Chapter 15.C-78, An Act to amend the Divorce Act, the Family Orders and Agreements Enforcement Assistance Act and the Garnishment, Attachment and Pension Diversion Act and to make consequential amendments to another Act—Chapter 16.C-84, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (bestiality and animal fighting)—Chapter 17.C-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts—Chapter 18.C-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts—Chapter 19.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabis—Chapter 20.C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020—Chapter 21.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act—Chapter 22.C-91, An Act respecting Indigenous languages—Chapter 23.C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families—Chapter 24.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other Acts—Chapter 25.C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coast—Chapter 26.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another Act—Chapter 27.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—Chapter 28.C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measures—Chapter 29.(1455)[English]It being 2:55 p.m., the House stands adjourned until Monday, September 16, 2019, at 11 a.m., pursuant to Standing Orders 28(2) and 24(1).(The House adjourned at 2:55 p.m.)The 42nd Parliament was dissolved by Royal Proclamation on September 11, 2019.Aboriginal languagesAboriginal peoplesAccess for disabled peopleAccess to informationAdjournmentAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesBritish ColumbiaBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActC-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceC-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 ActsC-71, An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearmsC-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsC-77, An Act to amend the National Defence Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other ActsC-78, An Act to amend the Divorce Act, the Family Orders and Agreements Enforcement Assistance Act and the Garnishment, Attachment and Pension Diversion Act and to make consequential amendments to another ActC-81, An Act to ensure a barrier-free CanadaC-82, An Act to implement a multilateral convention to implement tax treaty related measures to prevent base erosion and profit shiftingC-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActC-84, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (bestiality and animal fighting)C-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsC-91, An Act respecting Indigenous languagesC-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and familiesC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisC-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresCannabisCare for childrenCetaceansCoastal areasCorrectional servicesCriminal justice systemCriminal record suspensionCruelty to animalsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesEnvironmental assessmentFamilies and childrenFirearmsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersInternational tradeMackenzie ValleyMain estimates 2019-2020Marriage and divorceMilitary justice systemMultinationalsNational securityOil tankersPersons with disabilitiesPossession of a controlled substancePrivate Members' BillsRoyal assentS-203, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts (ending the captivity of whales and dolphins)Senate billsTax avoidanceBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgBusiness of the House [Mark Warawa]InterventionHon. Candice Bergen (House Leader of the Official Opposition, CPC): (1000)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.We have just received the sad news that our colleague Mark Warawa, the member for Langley—Aldergrove, has passed away. I believe that if you seek it, you will receive unanimous consent to go through Routine Proceedings and then to suspend the House until 12 noon.MotionsSuspending a sittingGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsRoyal Canadian Mounted Police Day ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC)(1010)[English]Bill C-467. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-467, An Act to establish Royal Canadian Mounted Police Day. He said: Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to have the opportunity to present this private member's bill today, seconded by my good friend and colleague, the member for Yellowhead. This initiative was started by a small group of constituents in my riding of North Okanagan—Shuswap and the support has grown exponentially across the region, the province and now the country.February 1, 2020, will mark the 100th anniversary of the forming of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For almost a century, they have been defending the law, “Maintiens le droit”. This bill would designate February 1 each year as Royal Canadian Mounted Police day. I recognize that it is the end of this 42nd Parliament, but I look forward to returning in the 43rd Parliament to ensure our national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, are recognized for their 100th anniversary.I want to thank members in my riding, Martin von Holst and Guy Bailey, for their incredible work on this and I look forward to moving this forward when we return in the fall.(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)C-467, An Act to establish Royal Canadian Mounted Police DayIntroduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceRoyal Canadian Mounted Police DayJohnMcKayHon.Scarborough—GuildwoodCelinaCaesar-ChavannesWhitby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Equalization]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to present a petition on behalf of my constituents in Calgary Nose Hill. I thank them deeply for the privilege and honour of serving them for the last four years.The petitioners are calling on the Government of Canada to cancel Bill C-69 and launch a study into the economic impact of equalization, including examining the formula; examining how renewable and non-renewable resources, including energy resources, both developed and underdeveloped, are treated in the formula; and issuing a report to Canadians on the fairness, effectiveness and outcomes of the equalization program.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 ActsEnergy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04842KarineTrudelJonquièreLindaDuncanEdmonton Strathcona//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPlastic PollutionInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1020)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to table this morning.The first was drafted by grade-six students in Ms. Mylène Potvin's class at Harfand-des-neiges elementary school. These children showed great initiative in writing to their government. Together, they are calling on the government to curb the use of plastic bags and excess packaging.I urge them to continue this fight. They will always be able to count on me.Packaging and labellingPetition 421-04849PlasticsPaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithJoëlGodinPortneuf—Jacques-Cartier//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsTelecommunicationsInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1020)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the second petition was prepared by the residents of the municipality of Saint-Thuribe.They are calling on the government to provide broadband Internet so that, like all Canadians, they can have access to the modern communications of the coming decade.I am tabling this petition in support of the residents who signed it, who are from the municipality of Saint-Thuribe, in the beautiful riding of Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.In closing, I would like to wish all parliamentarians, you, Mr. Speaker, support staff and the table staff a great summer. You have all made the 42nd Parliament an extraordinary one.Broadband Internet servicesPetition 421-04850Saint-ThuribeJoëlGodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsMark WarawaInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, my dear friend, our dear friend, Mark Warawa, died this morning. He passed away after a brief but valiant battle against cancer. He died peacefully, with his loving wife, Diane, by his side at Langley Hospice.Members will know that Mark announced his retirement from politics in January of this year, well before his cancer diagnosis in April. He had planned, in his retirement, to continue a community service as chaplain to seniors, something that was very close to his heart. By the way, he was not going to be paid for that service; he was just going to contribute back to his community. Sadly, he did not live long enough to embark upon that new adventure.On May 7, Mark found enough strength to deliver his farewell speech in this House, which was received with a standing ovation and many tears from his fellow MPs from every party in the House. On May 21, Mark made his last public appearance, waving from his car and greeting well-wishers at the Fort Langley May Day Parade.For those who do not know, Mark began his public life as an Abbotsford city councillor, serving for 14 years under the tutelage of George Ferguson, Abbotsford's legendary and longest-serving mayor. Mark and I served on city council together. Along with former councillor Simon Gibson, we were called the three horsemen, because of our tendency to vote the same way on many issues. Mark and I thoroughly enjoyed our time on council, and we became lifelong friends, as did our wives, Annette and Diane. Mark then moved to federal politics, winning the election as a Conservative candidate for the newly formed electoral district of Langley back in June 2004. He was re-elected five times, the last time in October 2015. As MPs, we love to socialize together. What the public sees in this House is actually quite different from what happens outside of this House. We are all colleagues; we are all friends, and a lot of us socialize together. On our side, there were five of us who called ourselves the MP5. We are all very interested in music and singing gospel music. As I mentioned in my earlier comments, the MP5 had the chance to sing at the National Arts Centre. That went okay, but members should know that of all our repertoire, there was one song that was Mark's favourite, and it began with the line, “I woke up this morning feeling fine.” This morning, Mark Warawa woke up feeling extra fine.Mark loved this place and what this place represents, the heart of our democracy and the place where serious national issues are debated without fear of recrimination. He also loved his MP colleagues and respected the role we all play in defending a free and democratic society. Indeed, he loved to promote these values around the world. It was actually only a few months ago that Mark, as a Ukrainian Canadian, served as an official election monitor in the Ukrainian elections. Sadly, he had to return to Canada early because of his illness. I know he was dearly loved by those who work in this House. In fact, if there was an award for the kindest MP in the House, I am guessing he would have won that award. However, if we had asked Mark what the most important thing in his life was, he would have said it was his deep and abiding faith in God's providence and hand on his life.(1210)Mark embraced his journey with cancer as he did most things, with dignity and grace, with courage and hope, with an open heart and lots of prayer. He was a passionate Christ follower and loved Jesus with all his heart and soul. That is what he would have wanted us to have known and remembered him for.Mark was a devoted husband to his wife of 46 years, Diane, and father to their five children: Jonathan, Ryan, Nathan, Eric and Kristen. He was a grandparent as well to 10 grandchildren. Together we grieve with all of them, but not as those without hope. Mark knew where he was going and what his final glorious destination would be.To all of the Warawa family, we say thank you. You shared Mark with us for so many years. Thank you for his service to Canada and for his commitment to promoting the values that all of us hold so dear. Mark will be missed, but I know he is rejoicing in the presence of his Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.Mark, from all of us in the House, especially from your Conservative family, Godspeed, till we meet again.Deaths and funeralsReferences to membersTributesWarawa, MarkGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJohnAldagCloverdale—Langley City//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25462BradTrostBrad-TrostSaskatoon—UniversityConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/TrostBrad_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersDominion DayInterventionMr. Brad Trost (Saskatoon—University, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, this July 1, millions of Canadians will wish each other a happy Canada Day. I will join them by wishing them a happy Dominion Day. Drawing its inspiration from Psalm 72:8, “And he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth”, the term “dominion” has a distinctly Canadian origin. It was proposed by Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick, and it is a beautiful term to describe this vast land we call Canada. The loss of Dominion Day, to quote former Senator Hartland Molson, was “another very small step in the process of obscuring our heritage.” Dominion is a term of dignity, beauty and poetry. It signified that Canadian origins were different from the republics and kingdoms of the world. It is a term and a day that needs to be brought back. Therefore, let me wish my fellow Canadians, this July 1, happy Dominion Day.Canada DayStatements by MembersMarwanTabbaraKitchener South—HespelerStevenMacKinnonGatineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersRetirement CongratulationsInterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, as we close out this session and go into another election, we often celebrate the contributions of MPs who have decided to retire from this place. It is also important to take some time to acknowledge the incredible work done by people who serve around the parliamentary precinct. That is why I would like to recognize Marguerite Charlebois.Marguerite has worked in the parliamentary restaurant since January 21, 1981, close to four decades. She will be retiring at the end of this week. Imagine trying to manage all of the different political parties, people and personalities and making sure they end up in the right place and at the right table so their conversations are kept private as much as possible. Since my first days in Ottawa in 2004, Marguerite has been exceptionally pleasant, welcoming and friendly. I am not sure people realize how difficult it is for the parliamentary restaurant staff to manage their personal and professional lives around a challenging parliamentary calendar. I think I can speak for all members in the House and our Wednesday crew, who have had the pleasure to get to know her, in wishing Marguerite all the best in everything she does in the next chapter of her life.I thank Marguerite. I hope our paths will cross again. Marguerite is always welcome to my home town of Niagara, where I look forward to serving her.Charlebois, MargueriteHouse of Commons staffParliamentary Dining RoomRetirement from workStatements by MembersRenéArseneaultMadawaska—RestigoucheAlainaLockhartFundy Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersEvents on June 19InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a historic day. On June 19, the Hillcrest mine explosion in Alberta killed 189 miners. It was Canada's worst mining disaster. lt was also the day that Hungarians threw out Soviet troops, thus ending Soviet occupation, restoring their democracy and restoring their freedoms. June 19 was also the day that the comic strip Garfield appeared in print for the first time. Today Canadians are also learning that according to the PBO, the Liberal carbon tax will need to increase to a minimum of $102 per tonne, adding 23 cents to a litre of gas, to meet the Paris targets. Canadians now see that the Liberal carbon tax is a revenue plan, not an environmental plan. Another reason today is a historic day is that at 5:00 p.m., the leader of Canada's Conservatives will unveil the first credible environmental plan that has the best chance of achieving our Paris commitments, exposing the Liberal carbon tax plan as a fraud and that this Liberal Prime Minister is not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxStatements by MembersFrankBaylisPierrefonds—DollardEmmanuelDubourgBourassa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, after announcing a climate emergency, the Liberals have not been able to identify any specific or immediate actions they would take. They do not have a climate plan; they have a tax plan. While our leader will roll out a real environment plan today that will help the planet, the Liberals are putting all their eggs in the carbon tax basket. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, as well as environmental experts, have said the carbon tax will not work. We see that already in B.C. and Quebec, where there has been a price on carbon for a decade and their emissions have gone up. Experts say the carbon tax would have to increase by five times to do anything. That means a painful 23¢ a litre more for gasoline, as well as higher costs for home heating and groceries. However, the Liberals are not telling Canadians this before the election; they will wait until after the election, when they no longer need their votes but still need their money. The carbon tax is not a climate plan. It is a tax plan, and it is definitely not as advertised. Carbon pricingCarbon taxStatements by MembersAndrewLeslieHon.OrléansFrancisDrouinGlengarry—Prescott—Russell//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgStatements by Members2019 General ElectionInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, in 2015, the Prime Minister promised an open and transparent government, modest deficits and a balanced budget in 2019, electoral reform and real change. What did the Prime Minister actually deliver? A government branded by his four ethics violations, astronomical deficits and attempts to influence the election. He did deliver one real change. Unlike the Conservatives, who want to make life more affordable, he raised taxes on all Canadians. He promised an environmental plan, but he gave us a tax plan instead. The only thing he knows how to do is tax all Canadians without being able to deliver results. What is more, the government's true intentions have been revealed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who calculated that the carbon tax will have to be five times higher than announced in order to meet the Paris targets. All Canadians, even Quebeckers, will have to pay more, since everything will get more expensive because of this Liberal government. We know now that it wants to raise taxes more and more. The environmental tax, or environmental plan on taxable paper is not what was promised. On October 21, Canadians will send the Liberals packing.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGovernment performanceStatements by MembersSheriBensonSaskatoon WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, it has been a year since the Prime Minister promised that construction on Trans Mountain would begin.Not one ounce of dirt has been moved so far. Canada's entire economy is suffering as a result. Every day of delay is costing Canadians $40 million. The Prime Minister promised that Trans Mountain would be built and operational in 2019.Why did he mislead Canadians by making a promise he could not keep?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, again, he keeps saying things that are just not true. The previous Conservative government saw the private sector build four major pipelines, including one to tidewater, increasing our capacity to foreign markets. It is under the Liberal government that major pipeline proponents have pulled out of Canada. In fact, the C.D. Howe Institute estimates that 100 billion dollars' worth of energy projects have been killed by the government.The Prime Minister committed to Trans Mountain being completed and in operation this year, but it is over a year later, and there is still no start date. His failure is costing Canadians. Why did he not say so?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, all the Prime Minister has done is buy a pipeline with taxpayers' money that he still does not have a plan to build. It is a terrible indictment of his record that in Canada, under his prime ministership, the government must nationalize a project to get it built. Under the Conservatives, the private sector did that. We should not be surprised. After all, this is the Prime Minister who wants to phase out the energy sector and who has a senior minister who tweeted that they want to landlock Alberta's energy. Why does the Prime Minister keep hurting our energy sector and the thousands of Canadians who work in it?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, we know what to do to get these projects built, starting with replacing the Prime Minister, scrapping the carbon tax, repealing Bill C-69 and giving our investors certainty that when they meet those standards, they can actually get it built.The Prime Minister is great at saying yes. He just cannot get it done. Yesterday was another approval without a plan. Canadians did not want to see a photo op yesterday. They wanted a date on which this project would start. Why did he fail to do that?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister can take great comfort in knowing that a real plan for the environment is coming at five o'clock. What it will not include is special deals for Liberal insiders. Under the Prime Minister, well-connected friends of the Prime Minister have done very well. He rewards his well-connected billionaire friends with taxpayer handouts, like $12 million to Loblaws. He interfered in a criminal court case to help his corporate friends at SNC. He targeted entrepreneurs and small business owners while protecting his vast family fortune. Why do the well-connected Liberals and the wealthy always get a better deal under Liberals?Government accountabilityOral questionsPartisanshipJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, breaking ethics rules is par for the course for the Liberals. There have been so many ethics investigations of the Prime Minister and his caucus that there is probably a speed dial from the commissioner's office to the Prime Minister's. The Prime Minister himself has been found guilty of breaking four laws with his illegal vacation.Could the Prime Minister tell us, with all of these scandals, exactly how many times he has been interviewed by the Ethics Commissioner. Is he proud of his legacy of scandal, corruption and entitlement?Ethics and ethical issuesOral questionsPrime MinisterReferences to membersTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister believes that there is one set of rules for him and his friends and one set for everyone else in this country. For example, there are his well-connected friends at SNC-Lavalin. They have given over $100,000 in illegal donations to the Liberals, and they got unprecedented access to the Prime Minister and his office.Will the Prime Minister admit that he inappropriately pressured the former attorney general just to help his buddies at SNC-Lavalin?Attorney General of CanadaCriminal prosecutionsOral questionsPolitical influencePrime MinisterReferences to membersSNC-Lavalin Group Inc.Trudeau, JustinWilson-Raybould, JodyJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1435)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, this Prime Minister is the first in Canadian history to be found guilty of violating the Conflict of Interest Act not once, but four times. He took $215,000 of taxpayer money to travel illegally with his family and friends to the Aga Khan's private island. These offences could constitute a violation of subsection 121(1) of the Criminal Code.I have one simple question for the Prime Minister. How many times did he meet with the RCMP and the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner?Ethics and ethical issuesOral questionsPrime MinisterReferences to membersTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, let's talk about the SNC-Lavalin affair and Vice-Admiral Norman.The Prime Minister tried to cancel Davie's contract to help his Liberal Party friends. The Prime Minister did everything in his power to destroy the reputation of Vice-Admiral Norman, an honest and conscientious man of integrity, just as he did to the former justice minister and the former president of the Treasury Board.Why did the Prime Minister try to ruin the careers of these honest people who simply wanted to stand up for the interests of Canadians?Oral questionsPolitical influencePrime MinisterReferences to membersTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the work of the opposition on this side is to simply hold the Prime Minister to account for his own actions. He broke the Conflict of Interest Act, so did a number of his cabinet ministers. When two female cabinet ministers spoke truth to power, they were shoved out of caucus.When the Minister of Finance, the former minister of fisheries and the Prime Minister himself broke conflict of interest laws, with a little wink and a nod, they were forgiven. I am wondering if the Prime Minister can tell us if the reason for this is simply, “Well, it's 2019”.Ethics and ethical issuesOral questionsPrime MinisterReferences to membersTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, sadly, the Prime Minister seems to want to run on the notion that the means, no matter how bad they are, justify the ends and I would caution that is an inappropriate way to continue with the Canadian public. However, I am going to give him one chance to do something really appropriate on his last day today.Admiral Mark Norman was put through hell for the last three years because of the concerted efforts of the government to ensure that he was put on the spot. We apologized to the House. Will the Prime Minister stand in his place today and apologize—Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Canadian ForcesLegal proceedingsNorman, MarkOral questionsPolitical influencePrime MinisterReferences to membersTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1445)[English]The memory lane hits keep coming, Mr. Speaker. Who can forget the Prime Minister's disastrous India trip, the many days of answers from the PM, the public safety minister and others blaming the Liberal member for Surrey Centre for inviting a convicted terrorist on that bhangra-dancing, diplomatic train wreck. In the end, we will recall the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians report revealed it was the Prime Minister's Office that put the convicted terrorist on the guest list.Can the Prime Minister tell us when he last spoke with Jaspal Atwal? Atwal, Jaspal SinghIndiaNational securityOffendersOral questionsPrime MinisterReferences to membersSecurity intelligenceTravelTrudeau, JustinJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPublic SafetyInterventionHon. Steven Blaney (Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, Corporal Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent were killed in terrorist attacks inspired by radical Islamism here in Canada. Global News reported that the Liberals want to bring 30 ISIS terrorists to Canada and give them poetry and podcasts instead of throwing them in prison.Why is the Prime Minister rolling out the red carpet for terrorists who fought against our values, our soldiers and Canadian values?Canadians in foreign countriesIslamic State of Iraq and the LevantNational securityOral questionsTerrorism and terroristsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodVeterans AffairsInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister made a convicted terrorist a multi-millionaire when he paid the murderer of U.S. army medic Christopher Speer ten and a half million dollars. The Supreme Court did not order any monetary compensation for Omar Khadr, but the Prime Minister said that because of the actions of the previous Martin Liberal government, he just had to write the cheque. Why has the Prime Minister spent over $40 million to fight Canadian veterans in court, but decided to pay 10 and a half million dollars to a convicted terrorist without putting up a fight?Government compensationKhadr, OmarLegal proceedingsOral questionsVeteransJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35539PhilMcColemanPhil-McColemanBrantford—BrantConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McColemanPhil_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodVeterans AffairsInterventionMr. Phil McColeman (Brantford—Brant, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister gave $10 million to Omar Khadr because he did not want to fight him in court. However, he spent over $40 million fighting our veterans in court. He refused to revoke the veterans benefits going to convicted cop murderer, Christopher Garnier. When did the Prime Minister decide that veterans were asking for too much?Government compensationKhadr, OmarLegal proceedingsOral questionsVeteransJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, unfortunately I have some very bad news for our friend the Prime Minister of Canada.Sadly, we all remember when he suggested that budgets balance themselves. I have bad news for him, but especially for Canadians: in the four years he has been Prime Minister, there have been four budgets and four consecutive deficits. That is the hallmark of this Prime Minister.Since he promised exactly the opposite four years ago, could he stand in his place, on this last day when we can ask him questions, look Canadians in the eye and tell them, “I was wrong”?Balanced budgetBudget deficitOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I would like to refresh the memories of the Prime Minister and all his Liberal henchmen.Four years ago, he promised that they would run three small deficits and then balance the budget in 2019. Four years later, we know what really happened: They ran three big deficits and then a $20-billion deficit in their so-called zero-deficit year.Again, I ask the Prime Minister: Will he stand in his place, look Canadians in the eye and tell them, “I lied to you”, since that is what he did?Balanced budgetBudget deficitOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I am sorry.Unparliamentary languageGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, remember this great hit: “I'm looking Canadians straight in the eye and being honest, the way I always have. We are committed to balanced budgets, and we are. We will balance that budget in 2019.” The Prime Minister only missed that promise by $20 billion.When he looks Canadians in the eye in the next election and promises not to raise their taxes again, why should anyone believe what he says?Balanced budgetBudget deficitOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, when the previous Conservative government was fighting the great global recession, that member said that we should spend more, spend now, spend faster. His only complaint was that the deficits were not big enough. We left him with a balanced budget. He promised that in 2019 the budget would balance itself. He is off by just $20 billion, on top of the taxes he raised on the middle class.The Prime Minister broke that promise. Which other promises will he break if he is re-elected?Balanced budgetBudget deficitOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, here are some sobering numbers: 48% of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency and 24% cannot meet their monthly obligations. To make life harder, the Prime Minister has stepped on the throats of Canadians by imposing a carbon tax on the necessities of life in Canada. The carbon tax is not an environmental plan; it is a tax plan. How could he raise taxes on those who can least afford it, like seniors, but give advantages to the wealthiest by giving $12 million to his billionaire friends at Loblaws for fridges?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1505)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, here is another one of the Prime Minister's shining moments.Many will recall his infamous January 2017 tweet, which said “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you.... #WelcomeToCanada”. Since that day, more than 45,000 people have come from New York, seeking asylum at Roxham Road. Meanwhile, genuine refugees continue to suffer in UN camps.Will the Prime Minister admit that he made a huge mistake in January 2017?Agreements and contractsBordersCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementIllegal migrantsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, a law firm that the member for Steveston—Richmond East owns had been implicated in a scheme that allegedly laundered money in the Vancouver area for a foreign drug lord. Today, the member is at the Prime Minister's right hand. He is front and centre. Compare that to another Vancouver area MP who got kicked out of his caucus simply for standing up to him and doing what was right. This begs the question, if he is such a feminist, why the obvious, on display, double standard? British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodGovernment PrioritiesInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, right now in Cape Breton we are seeing a story as old as time. The Liberals are taking $18 million from taxpayers to fund a private airport at the elite Cabot Links golf resort for their millionaire friends to park their private jets. This Liberal decision is decimating the Allan J. MacEachen Port Hawkesbury Airport and small businesses like Celtic Air Services.Will the Prime Minister put small businesses ahead of his millionaire Liberal golf buddies and stop any funding for a competing private airport in Inverness?AirportsCape BretonGovernment assistanceOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1515)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister put a values test on the Canada summer jobs grants, targeting groups that do not agree with him. More than a week ago, it was brought to the attention of the Liberals that the member for Mississauga—Lakeshore awarded funding to a group with links to terrorism. It has been more than a week since the minister said that she would do a so-called review of this matter. The CRA has already suspended this group's charitable status, and the government is well aware of its current links to terrorism.My question is this. Since the minister cannot seem to get the job done, will the Prime Minister step in and do the job?Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35539PhilMcColemanPhil-McColemanBrantford—BrantConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McColemanPhil_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsVeterans AffairsInterventionMr. Phil McColeman (Brantford—Brant, CPC): (1550)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the issue that this report addresses, which is mefloquine, and point out that part of the report is a supplemental dissenting report requesting that the government take immediate action so that the veterans who are currently suing the government over this toxic medication they were forced to take while in service will not go any further forward and that the government will not fight these veterans in court.8510-421-633 "Effects of Mefloquine Use Among Canadian Veterans"Dissenting or supplementary opinionsMefloquineStanding Committee on Veterans AffairsVeteransNeilEllisBay of QuinteNickWhalenSt. John's East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCitizenship and ImmigrationInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1550)[English]Mr. Speaker, we will be tabling a dissenting opinion. We do not feel the report that was issued by the government members adequately addresses the strain on resettlement services that has been created by well over 40,000 people who have been allowed to illegally enter the country and claim asylum status in Canada. We know that many of these people do not have valid claims and yet are able to access language training services. We also do not feel that the report dealt with some of the recommendations coming out of the resettlement services communities to make these services more effective for people who need them to integrate into the Canadian economic and social fabric. 8510-421-634 "Improving Settlement Services Across Canada"Dissenting or supplementary opinionsSettlement of immigrantsStanding Committee on Citizenship and ImmigrationNickWhalenSt. John's EastStephenFuhrKelowna—Lake Country//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPublic AccountsInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1550)[English]Mr. Speaker, these will be the last reports I ever table in Parliament, so I want to thank the public accounts committee for its good work in this Parliament. As well, I would like to thank our clerk, Angela, and our analysts, Dillan and Sara, for the work they have done.I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the following two reports of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts: the 69th report, entitled “Processing of Asylum Claims, Report 2 of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada; and the 70th report, entitled “Call Centres, Report 1 of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada”.Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to these two reports.8510-421-637 "Processing of Asylum Claims, Report 2 of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada"8510-421-638 "Call Centres, Report 1 of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada"AsylumCall centresGovernment servicesRefugeesReport 1, Call Centres, of the Spring 2019 Reports of the Auditor General of CanadaReport 2, Processing of Asylum Claims, of the Spring 2019 Reports of the Auditor General of CanadaStanding Committee on Public AccountsLarryBagnellHon.YukonLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPutting Victims First ActInterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC)(1555)[English]Bill C-463. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-463, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (orders of prohibition and orders restricting publication).He said: Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to introduce Bill C-463, putting victims first. While the Criminal Code guides our justice system, sometimes it does not necessarily put victims at the heart of it.With this bill, we would like to change section 161 to protect children up to age 17. Currently, it only protects them to age 15.We would also like to establish a method to allow a victim to remove the publication ban on his or her own name. I am thinking in particular of the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, a young girl from the east coast who committed suicide and was subsequently the subject of an investigation. Later on, after it was cleared up, her family was unable to speak about the case because there was a publication ban. The bill would allow her family to lift the publication ban without having to go to court.The last piece of the bill would put a reverse onus bail restriction on people who have trafficked other people.I think all three proposals are common sense. I look forward to reintroducing the bill in the upcoming Parliament and to seeing it pass forthwith.(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)C-463, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (orders of prohibition and orders restricting publication)Introduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsSexual abuse and exploitationBillCaseyCumberland—ColchesterRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—Maskinongé//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC)(1605)[English]Bill C-466. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-466, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (disclosure of information to victims).She said: Mr. Speaker, this is the first time in 11 years I have had the honour of being able to table a private member's bill in this place. I thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to do so. Today I am introducing a private member's bill because very often, victims of crime, such as Lisa Freeman and her family in Oshawa, Ontario, are caught off guard when they are notified that an offender is eligible for forms of parole before the 25 years indicated on the certificate of conviction. I believe that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that victims of crime are treated with the utmost respect and dignity. This legislation would require that information regarding review and eligibility for all forms of parole be communicated, in writing, to the offender's victims. The written documentation would also require an explanation of how those dates had been determined.(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed) C-466, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (disclosure of information to victims)Conditional releaseInformation disseminationIntroduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsVictims of crimeGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35539PhilMcColemanPhil-McColemanBrantford—BrantConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McColemanPhil_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsMilitary Family Appreciation DayInterventionMr. Phil McColeman (Brantford—Brant, CPC): (1610)[English]Mr. Speaker, there have been consultations among the parties, and if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for the following motion. I move:Motion That, in the opinion of the House, the government should recognize the sacrifices Canadian military families make on a daily basis, the contributions of these families to the fabric of our society, and show appreciation for their ongoing commitment to the safety and security of Canada by designating the third Friday in September of each year “Military Family Appreciation Day”. Canadian ForcesFamilies and childrenLeave to propose a motionMilitary Family Appreciation DayResolutionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1610)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am presenting three petitions to the House today from the constituents of the Yorkton—Melville area, as today is the very last day I will be in the House to do so before the summer break and ensuing federal election.The first petition is signed by 85 petitioners who are calling on the government to establish a national strategy on palliative care.Assisted suicideEuthanasiaMedical assistance in dyingPalliative carePetition 421-04552CarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCathayWagantallYorkton—Melville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsFirearmsInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1615)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition holds 550 signatures of petitioners who are calling on the House of Commons to scrap Bill C-71, the firearms legislation that would do nothing to provide the resources to front-line police forces to tackle the true source of firearms violence, gangs and organized criminal enterprises, and instead targets law-abiding gun owners.C-71, An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearmsFirearmsPetition 421-04553Police servicesCathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleCathayWagantallYorkton—Melville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsSex SelectionInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1615)[English]Mr. Speaker, the third petition I wish to present contains 75 signatures of petitioners who are calling on the government to condemn discrimination against girls occurring through sex-selected pregnancy termination and the use of ultrasound for this purpose.AbortionPetition 421-04554Sexual discriminationCathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleYasminRatansiDon Valley East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1615)[English]Mr. Speaker, this will be the last time I ever present a petition in the House. I want to thank you for your services as Chair.I rise today to present a number of petitions on behalf of my colleague, my seatmate and my friend, the member for Langley—Aldergrove.In the first, the petitioners call upon Parliament to enshrine in the Criminal Code the protection of conscience for physicians and health care institutions from coercion or intimidation to provide or refer for assisted suicide or euthanasia.Assisted suicideDoctorsEuthanasiaFreedom of conscience and religionHospitalsMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04598Petition 421-04599Petition 421-04600Petition 421-04601Petition 421-04602Petition 421-04603Petition 421-04604Petition 421-04605Petition 421-04606Petition 421-04607Petition 421-04608Petition 421-04609Petition 421-04610Petition 421-04611GeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—Crowfoot//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsImpaired DrivingInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1615)[English]Madam Speaker, the second petition is signed by approximately 1,000 people, who are asking the Government of Canada to make a number of changes to the current drinking and driving laws in Canada.Impaired drivingMandatory sentencingPetition 421-04612Petition 421-04613Petition 421-04614Petition 421-04615Petition 421-04616Petition 421-04617Petition 421-04618Petition 421-04619Petition 421-04620Petition 421-04621Petition 421-04622Petition 421-04623Petition 421-04624Petition 421-04625Petition 421-04626Petition 421-04627Petition 421-04628Petition 421-04629Petition 421-04630Petition 421-04631Petition 421-04632Petition 421-04633Petition 421-04634Petition 421-04635Petition 421-04636Petition 421-04637Petition 421-04638Petition 421-04639Petition 421-04640Petition 421-04641Petition 421-04642Petition 421-04643Petition 421-04644Petition 421-04645Petition 421-04646Petition 421-04647Petition 421-04648Petition 421-04649Petition 421-04650Petition 421-04651Petition 421-04652Petition 421-04653Petition 421-04654Petition 421-04655Petition 421-04656Petition 421-04657Vehicular homicideKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—Crowfoot//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1615)[English]Madam Speaker, the third petition is signed by a group of petitioners who are calling on the House of Commons to specifically identify hospice palliative care as a defined medicinal service covered under the Canada Health Act.In the speech given by the member for Langley—Aldergrove, he spoke a lot about palliative care.End-of-life careHealth care systemPalliative carePetition 421-04558Petition 421-04559Petition 421-04560Petition 421-04561Petition 421-04562Petition 421-04563Petition 421-04564Petition 421-04565KevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—Crowfoot//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsSex SelectionInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1615)[English]Madam Speaker, lastly, I present a petition calling on all members of Parliament to condemn discrimination against girls occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.I would like to take one minute to let our friend and colleague the member for Langley—Aldergrove know that our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.AbortionPetition 421-04566Petition 421-04567Petition 421-04568Petition 421-04569Petition 421-04570Petition 421-04571Petition 421-04572Petition 421-04573Petition 421-04574Petition 421-04575Petition 421-04576Petition 421-04577Petition 421-04578Petition 421-04579Petition 421-04580Petition 421-04581Petition 421-04582Petition 421-04583Petition 421-04584Petition 421-04585Petition 421-04586Petition 421-04587Petition 421-04588Petition 421-04589Petition 421-04590Petition 421-04591Petition 421-04592Petition 421-04593Petition 421-04594Petition 421-04595Petition 421-04596Petition 421-04597Sexual discriminationKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, I have a number of petitions on two subjects.The first consists of eight petitions, including an electronic petition, with almost 4,000 signatures. The petitioners call on the government to ensure that conscience rights of medical personnel are protected by passing Bill C-418.Caregivers and health care professionalsFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04673Petition 421-04674Petition 421-04675Petition 421-04676Petition 421-04677Petition 421-04678Petition 421-04679Petition 421-04680SalmaZahidScarborough CentreDavidAndersonCypress Hills—Grasslands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsJusticeInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, the second petition references that on April 7, 2017, Arianna Goberdhan and her unborn child Assara were murdered in a brutal act of domestic violence. At the time of the murder, she was nine months pregnant with her soon-to-be-born daughter. Assara and other preborn children in similar circumstances deserve to be recognized as victims of a crime and should be entitled to justice and legal recourse. Therefore, petitioners call upon the House of Commons to pass legislation that recognizes that when an assailant in the commission of a crime attacks a pregnant woman and injures or kills her preborn child, the assailant may be charged with an offence on behalf of that child.Fetus and embryoPetition 421-04681Victims of crimeViolence against womenDavidAndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsMichelleRempelHon.Calgary Nose Hill//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsTrans Mountain PipelineInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, especially in light of the announcement yesterday by the Prime Minister on the Trans Mountain pipeline, which re-announced the project, which had absolutely no start date or any sort of plan to actually build the thing, I am presenting a petition on behalf of my constituents who would like Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” bill, repealed, as well as for the government to review the equalization formula, given the punitive positions that the government has taken against Canada's energy sector. I support this petition.Energy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04682DavidAndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAccess to InformationInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1625)[English]Madam Speaker, I am tabling a petition on behalf of a constituent, who has collected over 800 signatures from Canadians in all provinces and territories. The petitioners call on the government to review the records under the control of the Privy Council Office and to transfer all historical records to Library and Archives Canada. Researchers and historians rely on this information to write Canada's history. Historical records that do not threaten national security should be open and accessible by default.Information archivingLibrary and Archives of CanadaPetition 421-04693Privy Council OfficeGaryAnandasangareeScarborough—Rouge ParkAliceWongHon.Richmond Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (1625)[English]Madam Speaker, I hereby present 103 petitions on two different subjects, and especially on behalf of the member for Langley—Aldergrove, who now needs a lot of care. I would take this opportunity to extend our best wishes, our prayers and thoughts.The petitioners request that the House of Commons in Parliament specifically identify hospice palliative care as a defined medical service covered under the Canada Health Act.The second petition notes that in the 41st Parliament, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion calling on the government to create a national strategy on palliative care to ensure every Canadian would have access to high-quality palliative care at the end of life.End-of-life careHealth care systemPalliative carePetition 421-04694Petition 421-04695Petition 421-04696Petition 421-04697Petition 421-04698Petition 421-04699Petition 421-04700Petition 421-04701Petition 421-04702Petition 421-04703Petition 421-04704Petition 421-04705Petition 421-04706Petition 421-04707Petition 421-04708Petition 421-04709Petition 421-04710Petition 421-04711Petition 421-04712Petition 421-04713Petition 421-04714Petition 421-04715Petition 421-04716Petition 421-04717Petition 421-04718Petition 421-04719Petition 421-04720Petition 421-04721Petition 421-04722Petition 421-04723Petition 421-04724Petition 421-04725Petition 421-04726Petition 421-04727Petition 421-04728Petition 421-04729Petition 421-04730Petition 421-04731Petition 421-04732Petition 421-04733Petition 421-04734Petition 421-04735Petition 421-04736Petition 421-04737Petition 421-04738Petition 421-04739Petition 421-04740Petition 421-04741Petition 421-04742Petition 421-04743Petition 421-04744Petition 421-04745Petition 421-04746Petition 421-04747Petition 421-04748Petition 421-04749Petition 421-04750Petition 421-04751Petition 421-04752Petition 421-04753Petition 421-04754Petition 421-04755Petition 421-04756Petition 421-04757Petition 421-04758Petition 421-04759Petition 421-04760Petition 421-04761Petition 421-04762Petition 421-04763Petition 421-04764Petition 421-04765Petition 421-04766Petition 421-04767Petition 421-04768Petition 421-04770Petition 421-04771Petition 421-04772Petition 421-04773Petition 421-04774Petition 421-04775Petition 421-04776Petition 421-04777Petition 421-04779Petition 421-04781Petition 421-04783Petition 421-04784Petition 421-04785Petition 421-04786Petition 421-04787Petition 421-04788Petition 421-04789Petition 421-04790Petition 421-04791Petition 421-04792Petition 421-04793PierrePoilievreHon.CarletonPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35607HaroldAlbrechtHarold-AlbrechtKitchener—ConestogaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AlbrechtHarold_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPublic SafetyInterventionMr. Harold Albrecht (Kitchener—Conestoga, CPC): (1630)[English]Madam Speaker, I have a petition to present signed by a number of residents from Cambridge, Ontario, pointing out the dangers of consumption and treatment services sites and safe injection sites.The petitioners point to a notable escalation in overdose, drug trade, visible prostitution, damage to property and other activities. They state that these sites are also in conflict with children's charter of rights, particularly article 33, to protect children from the illicit use of narcotic drugs and so on. They also contribute to significant and dangerous conditions, causing environmental contamination and increasing public health hazards.The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to decline any and all applications for exemptions to operate safe consumption sites or overdose prevention sites, permanent, temporary or mobile, under the section 56(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, within the city of Cambridge, Ontario.City of CambridgeDrug treatment centresPetition 421-04802ElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be tabling seven petitions in the House.The first petition is in support of Bill S-240, currently before the Senate, dealing with the heinous practice of organ harvesting and trafficking. It seeks to end Canadian complicity in that practice.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04803S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)HaroldAlbrechtKitchener—ConestogaGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsFalun GongInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, my second petition particularly highlights the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China.The petitioners call for the Canadian Parliament to be actively engaged in defending the rights of Falun Gong practitioners and other minorities in China.ChinaCivil and human rightsFalun GongHuman organs and other body parts traffickingPetition 421-04804GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHealth CareInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, the third petition highlights the fact that our concept of health care should include disease prevention and health promotion, not merely the management of disease. It highlights the importance of self-care options as part of health care.The petitioners call on the Standing Committee on Health to undertake a comprehensive study of the impact of uninsured self-care products and wellness services and of the barriers that exist for those wishing to access them.Health care systemNatural health productsOver the counter drugsPetition 421-04805GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, the fourth petition highlights the persecution of and the challenges faced by Sikh and Hindu minority in Afghanistan.The petitioners call on the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to use the powers granted to him to create a special program to help persecuted minorities in Afghanistan. They also call on the Minister of Foreign Affairs to be actively engaged with her Afghan counterparts on this issue.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04806Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman RightsInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, the sixth petition highlights challenges and violence faced by the Coptic minority in Egypt.The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to prioritize principles of universal human rights and religious freedom in their foreign policy and particularly to act in support of Copts.The final petition I am going to present in this Parliament highlights the persecution and challenges faced by Pakistani Christians, and in particular Pakistani Christians asylum seekers who find themselves in Thailand.The petitioners urge the Government of Canada to take up this matter urgently with the Government of Thailand and urge for the protection and humane treatment of Pakistani asylum seekers. They also say that these asylum seekers must be provided the opportunity to apply for refugee status with the UNHCR and for resettlement without being arrested, detained or deported.AsylumCoptic ChristiansEgyptForeign policyFreedom of conscience and religionPakistanPetition 421-04807Petition 421-04808RefugeesReligious minoritiesThailandGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1640)[English]Madam Speaker, let me say, as I probably rise for the last time in this Parliament, how honoured I am to represent the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, how much I have learned from my colleagues here, but also how invigorated I am by the greatness of this country and my commitment to work hard for the people I represent.As I join this debate today, I feel compelled to make a few observations. To be clear, Canada did not ask to be put in this position. However, as we know, the U.S. election resulted in a new administration, with a mandate, among other things, to renegotiate NAFTA. That is where all of this started.I think we can all agree that this particular renegotiated agreement resulted in an outcome that is less than ideal, but of course, it could have been much worse. Many concessions were made, and we still have unresolved issues, such as the lack of a deal for Canadian softwood lumber, something that is critically important to my riding.Ultimately, it is not a secret that the official opposition will be supporting this deal. Unlike the third party, we do believe it is better than no deal. However, that does not mean that there are not some lessons to be learned here.To me, it is deeply troubling that the Prime Minister went into these negotiations with his usual theme of demanding things that are all about building his brand and appealing to his base of supporters. In other words, the Prime Minister thought he saw an opportunity to score some political points and feed the brand. This is not unlike what he tried to do when he approached China. In both cases, he failed miserably. Why would he not fail miserably? Would we as Canadians accept another leader trying to push his or her own values onto us? We simply would not accept that. What nation would? However, that is precisely what the Prime Minister attempted to to. Some may call this arrogance. Whatever we call it, it was easily foreseeable that it was a path to failure. However, the Prime Minister did not care and went about his virtue-signalling anyway, so we ended up on the sidelines: Canada, a world leader, on the sidelines. There we were, on the sidelines with our biggest trading partner, while Mexico was in the driver's seat, getting the deal done.Here is the thing. Mexico did get it done. Let us look at its approach. Mexico did not use the trade negotiations as some sort of domestic political opportunity to score points. Mexico did not use this as an opportunity for virtue-signalling. Mexico did not have a lead minister giving a speech within the United States of America that took veiled potshots at the U.S. administration. Mexico discussed issues related to trade and did so professionally. It is easy to see why that approach worked so well for it.Our approach, led by the Prime Minister, was a complete failure. It did not have to be that way. I can tell colleagues that, on this side of the House, we would have taken a much different approach. I am actually quite confident that there are members on the government side of the House, whom I have worked with at various committees, who I suspect would have also taken a much different approach. I believe it is important to reflect on these things so that we can learn from them. Canada should never again be in a situation where we are sitting on the sidelines with our greatest trading partner, while Mexico is driving the bus. I hope that is one thing we can all agree on. Perhaps that is why we are now hearing the name of Mark Carney, because there are other Liberals who feel the same way.Now we have a new deal. Whether it is called the new NAFTA, NAFTA 0.5, USMCA, CUSMA, or whatever, there is something we should all think about. Recently, Jack Mintz wrote a very good piece on investment fleeing Canada. Members who have read the article would know that it debunks some Liberal talking points that had been carefully cherry-picked. As an example, yes, investment in Canada was up in 2018. However, that sounds good until we consider that it was up from 2017, and 2017 was an absolute disaster of a year. Even in 2018, it was still below where things were in 2015. Yes, I mean that 2015.(1645)Yes, investment in the U.S.A. is down, but that is outside investment. There is a large increase in U.S. domestic capital now staying in the United States. This means it is not coming to Canada.Why should we care about that? Let us look at our automotive sector. Yes, there is still some investment in Canada, but there is considerably more occurring in the United States and Mexico. Mexico, in particular, has been a hot spot for automotive investment. Let us think about that. Mexico has no carbon tax. It has no new and enhanced CPP causing premiums and payroll taxes to increase every month. Much of its industrial power is cheap, and I would even say it is dirty.CUSMA does more to address some of those issues than the NAFTA deal it replaces, but we also have to recognize that foreign investment in Canada is not the rose garden the Liberals are trying to suggest it is. This is a deal among three countries. If we become the most expensive, most regulated and most inefficient country to do business in, we lose collectively as a country.The Prime Minister can continue to be virtuous. He can continue to ask people to pay just a little bit more. He can continue to lecture others for not sharing his values. However, at the end of the day, none of those things are going to attract the investment we need to make the most of this deal.While we are on the subject of trade, I note that last week, during question period in this place, the Prime Minister vilified former prime minister Harper close to a dozen times. As the Liberals' good friend Warren Kinsella recently pointed out, the Prime Minister is looking “for an enemy to demonize”.I mention that because the former Conservative government of Mr. Harper concluded more free trade agreements than any prime minister in the modern era. It is not as if the Liberals, or the Prime Minister, would be unaware of this, because they sat in this place during the last Parliament and voted in support of all those new trade agreements, yet the Prime Minister turns around and vilifies the former prime minister, who has a demonstrably more successful record on trade agreements.However, perhaps that is preferable to talking about the lack of progress on Canadian softwood. I looked up on the Open Parliament website how many times the Prime Minister has even mentioned the word “softwood”. The answer is 18 times since 2016. The vast majority of those times were only because he was answering questions on softwood lumber asked by the opposition.How many times has he referenced Stephen Harper? It is 190 times, and it will probably be more than 200 after today's question period. With the Prime Minister's priorities so focused on vilifying Mr. Harper instead of focusing on softwood lumber, is it any wonder he has made zero progress on this file?Why do I point this out? I point this out because lumber mills are closing all across British Columbia at an alarming rate. My riding has lost lumber mills. I know first-hand what that does to a small rural community. It is devastating. However, there is complete silence from the Prime Minister regarding softwood lumber unless he is asked about it by the opposition in this place. Why? Maybe it is because he is too busy vilifying Mr. Harper. In my view, that is not acceptable. B.C. forest workers deserve better. They deserve to know that they have a prime minister in Ottawa working to reach a softwood lumber deal.I sometimes wonder whether, if Mexico had a vibrant softwood lumber sector, we would now have a deal done by extension as well. It is clear that Mexico has a more effective track record in these negotiations than the brand-first approach of the Prime Minister.To summarize, we did not ask to be in this situation, clearly. However, I believe the approach taken by the Prime Minister to try to use this as a political opportunity was deeply flawed and made a bad situation worse.(1650)Again, as evidence of that, I say to look no further than the approach taken by Mexico and the success that it had while we sat on the sidelines. I have raised this point with ministers of the Crown. They told us that the meetings between the United States and Mexico were simply on bilateral issues that had nothing to do with Canada. However, they came out with a trilateral agreement, and Canada had a take-it-or-leave-it moment. Despite the many concessions that the Prime Minister has made on this file, we can still make the most of it, but only if we recognize that we need to be more competitive. We have a regulatory environment in which things can get done in Canada. Many people have raised alarm bells, particularly the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and not just about the lack of investment but also the ability to get things done. The Leader of the Opposition today clearly asked the Prime Minister several times for the date for the Trans Mountain pipeline. The Prime Minister promised the Trans Mountain pipeline, one of the most important projects on the deck and one of the only ones on the deck, would go forward to help build the national interest, but the Prime Minister cannot give a date. Originally, the Liberals said that it would be operating this calendar year. Again, I would submit that one need to look no further than the Trans Mountain pipeline as evidence as to where the challenges are. It has been four years, and still there is not a shovel in the ground. The fact that the Liberal government had to buy the project to save Kinder Morgan from the embarrassment of not being able to build it in a timely manner is all part of the problem. The fact that today even the government has serious challenges in trying to navigate the process to get it done is telling. Does anyone seriously believe that Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 will make it easier to invest in Canada? The Prime Minister says that tankers can operate totally safely in one part of British Columbia and in other parts of Canada, but are so dangerous in another part of British Columbia that they must be banned. Does anyone seriously think that makes sense? In fact, a number of the senators in the other place have commented on the lack of scientific evidence on Bill C-48. The committee that studied it in depth recommended that the bill not proceed.The approaches of the current government do not reconcile. These are the types of mixed messages that are just not helpful. However, I remain hopeful that we can become more competitive and that as we move forward, we can ultimately try to fully capitalize on this agreement despite the many concessions. I would like to close on a more positive note, and I will add a few positive observations.As we have established many times and in many areas, Canada and Canadians can compete and succeed against the very best in the world. As legislators, it is our job to ensure that they have a level playing field and unrestricted market access to do so. Therefore, I will vote in favour of this agreement as, ultimately, it will provide these opportunities. However, I must say one more time that until we have full, unfettered free trade within Canada's borders, we are, as a country, not owning up to the promise of Confederation, and that falls on us. It falls upon the provinces that have not allowed Canada to become not just a political union but an economic one. This will be my last speech in the 42nd Parliament, and I would like to share a few words on a personal note. We all share the collective honour of being elected members of this place, and our families all share the sacrifice for the many times that we cannot be there for them. It is my hope that our families, particularly our young ones, understand that in this place our collective desire to build a better country starts and ends with them. I would like thank all families of parliamentarians for their understanding and support.(1655)I would also like to share a word with other members of this place. It is so unfortunate that much of the work we do here is often summarized by many Canadians as what transpires in question period. Much of the most important work that we do collectively happens at committee. On that note, I would like to sincerely thank the many members I have worked with on various committees. Everyone I have worked with shares the same commitment to help ensure that the federal government provides the best level of governance possible. We may disagree on programs, projects and approaches, but I have found that we share a commitment to making these programs work best for Canadians.A final point I would like to make should not be lost by any of us. The former Conservative government introduced a program to provide supports for kids directly to their parents. At the time, the Liberal opposition mocked it, ridiculed it, and suggested that parents would simply blow the money they received on beer and popcorn, but when the Liberals formed their majority government in 2015, they did not kill that program. Liberals saw the merits of it and saw that it was working so they made improvements to it, and now it is working even more effectively. I wish to commend them yet again for that. That is an example of two very different governments coming up with a program and finding ways to improve it to ensure that it helps support Canadian families. Trade is similar. After all, we are a nation of traders. We need to have these things that make us collectively prosper, that allow us to build stronger ties and relationships and provide the security and the sense of certainty that it takes for someone to start a business or for a country to get behind a new program. These are great examples of the work that we do when we are here on behalf of Canadians.Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the time you spend in the chair. I am sure there are many different ways you would rather spend your time than listening to me, but I do appreciate the work you do and I am sure my constituents do as well. I look forward to the challenges in the upcoming months and in the questions and comments I will hear from my fellow colleagues.Automotive industryBritish ColumbiaC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementChild tax benefitCoastal areasForeign investments in CanadaGovernment billsInvestmentMexicoNationalizationOil and gasOil tankersPipeline transportationSecond readingSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsTrans Mountain pipelineCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1700)[English]Madam Speaker, in my speech I pointed out that this is obviously a three-way agreement and that trade is influenced by many different things: the ease of transport, the tax regime, and tariffs, obviously, because that is what a free trade deal is supposed to deal with. As I mentioned in my speech, Mexico has seen a rise in the development of its automotive sector because Mexico is not subject to many of the costs that are associated with doing business in Canada, such as the enhanced CPP, for which employers have to pay higher premiums, and the carbon tax, which increases the price of everything, particularly for processes that require a tremendous amount of energy, such as those in the automotive sector.We must remain competitive if Canada, a nation of traders, is to compete in trade. We cannot take our products and services to other countries if we are priced out of the market because of our input costs. That is an area where we cannot allow Canada to fall back. I hope that when the time comes, the member will advocate for a new government to deal with the red tape and excessive taxation that the government has put on this country.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMexicoSecond readingTrade agreementsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelaga//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1700)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to reiterate my thanks to the member for her kind words, and to say the same. We all should respect members who work so very hard for our constituents. I thank her for her service.One thing I have learned as an elected official, both at the city council level and now as a member of Parliament, is that business asks for just one thing from government: certainty. While the negotiations kept going on, I heard right across the country at business round tables that people felt they could not make those once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation investments in their businesses on the Canadian side. Often the reason people chose to go south with those investment choices was that we did not have trade certainty.I am fully cognizant that this deal is a sub-par deal that the government's approach led us to this position. I will support this only because the business owners I speak to and the people they employ are asking for that basic certainty. However, we need to make sure that our entrepreneurs, our producers and ultimately our employees have a level playing field. Right now, I am very concerned about the competitiveness aspects of our country. While we maintain trade ties with Mexico and the United States, competitiveness is going to become more and more important. It is something that we should never take our eyes off of.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelagaOmarAlghabraMississauga Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1705)[English]Madam Speaker, I will just go back to my speech.Again, it is about putting forward values that may be important to the Prime Minister, that may be important to Canadians. He tried the same approach with China. China rejected that. I would just ask it the other way around. If the leader of China came to Canada and said, “We want a free trade agreement, but here is what we want to see” and put values in it that are contrary to Canadian values, Canadians would rightly say that we were not in support.In the case of Mexico, Mexico was laser-focused on where it could win. When we asked the government where it got any wins, the Liberals said that we kept chapter 19. If they cannot say where their wins are and can only say that they kept one component, it is not much of a win.There was concession after concession, not to mention the steel and aluminum tariffs that kneecapped many in our industry. That was the wrong approach.In my speech, I gave an alternative view. We should not have allowed Mexico to isolate Canada in those bilateral talks that ended up being trilateral ones. That was a key error, regardless of what the government says. I know there are Liberals on that side who would agree with that assessment.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsOmarAlghabraMississauga CentrePaulManlyNanaimo—Ladysmith//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1705)[English]Madam Speaker, the member seemed most offended by the Canada-China FIPA, so I will address that straight away. First of all, the member should review the Constitution. It is the executive, in this case the Prime Minister and cabinet, that has the authority to enter into agreements with other countries. It was actually the Harper government that made changes that allowed those agreements to be tabled for 21 days here so that parliamentarians could review them. If the member and his leader want to win enough seats to form an official party, they can make that the question on their opposition day.When we push Canadian companies to sell their products and services abroad, and they choose to enter a place like China, they may not feel that they are going to be treated the same way they are in a rule-of-law country like Canada, like the United States and like many in the European Union, where there is due process and similar values in that due process. They would ask how they were going to protect themselves in case there was confiscation without compensation. Having that process in place in places like China allows some protection. I would be happy to speak with the member further about his views.Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the People's Republic of China for the Promotion and Reciprocal Protection of InvestmentsC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsInvestor-state dispute settlementSecond readingTrade agreementsPaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithOmarAlghabraMississauga Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (1715)[English]Madam Speaker, I need to straighten out the record. The parliamentary secretary said that his government saved the TPP. The reality is that it was signed, and if we had passed it, we would not have had to renegotiate NAFTA. What happened? The government stalled. The Liberals dragged their feet. They kept hesitating. They kept making it impossible for the U.S. to move forward. If the Liberal government had embraced it and ratified it, we would not be talking about NAFTA today. That is the reality.The Liberals have upset many of our trade partners around the world: China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines. Which country has the Prime Minister travelled to where he has not upset someone?The reality is that this agreement is not perfect, but it would provide stability, and business communities want stability.Our structural steel is going to face tariffs in August. Our softwood lumber has tariffs right now. What are the Liberals going to do to solve those problems once they ratify this deal?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsTrans-Pacific PartnershipOmarAlghabraMississauga CentreOmarAlghabraMississauga Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1720)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to ask the same question my colleague asked. He was quite right. I am going to read from an article by Bill Curry on November 19, 2015. This was 13 or 14 months before Mr. Trump was even sworn in. Mr. Obama was in Manila and stated, “We are both soon to be signatories of the TPP agreement.” In other words, as my colleague said, we would not have had these problems if the Liberals had actually moved ahead on it. Mr. Obama was the most progressive president around and now, by doing this, there seems to be no leverage for the outstanding issues, like my colleague said, on steel, softwood lumber and the Buy American clause. Could the parliamentary secretary please let us know how he is going to resolve those issues now that he has given away this leverage?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsOmarAlghabraMississauga CentreOmarAlghabraMississauga Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessParole SystemInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC)(1730)[English] moved: MotionThat, in the opinion of the House: (a) rights of victims deserve proper consideration in our criminal justice system; (b) the parole system must avoid unnecessary revictimization; and (c) the government should amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act prior to the next election, so as to provide victims with an explanation of how dates are determined for offenders’ eligibility for temporary absences, releases and parole.She said: Mr. Speaker, in the interest of how important it is to advance the rights of victims in a timely manner, I will be very brief in my intervention today, given the fact that we are in the last hours of this House sitting in this session.Earlier today, I introduced a bill that would make it a requirement that victims be provided with an explanation of how dates are determined for their offender's eligibility for temporary absences, for release or for parole. This is a simple change that would ensure victims are given information up front, rather than finding out through some other channel that their offender was returned to society. Mr. Speaker, I should be clear that I introduced a bill, and that today we are debating a motion.This simple change could save a lot of heartache and unnecessary revictimization for the victims of crime. As such, I would suggest that if the government wants to demonstrate that it cares about victims, it can adopt the bill as its own. The official opposition is prepared to support it, at all stages, before this House rises, to ensure that victims are provided with the information that they need.I have waited 11 years to be able to stand here and introduce my very first private member's bill and my first motion on the floor of the House of Commons. This is an issue of victims rights that is very near and dear to my heart. I am grateful for the opportunity and for the support of my colleague, the member of Parliament for Oshawa, in bringing this moment to today's floor.Conditional releaseInformation disseminationM-229Private Members' MotionsVictims of crimeAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingColinCarrieOshawa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessParole SystemInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1730)[English]Mr. Speaker, Lisa Freeman is a constituent of mine who has worked years to advance this motion about the parole system. To provide a bit of background, Lisa's father was brutally murdered. At the age of 21, she had to identify her father's body. His murderer was sentenced to 25 years without parole. Lisa, like many victims, found out that he was going to be let go early. This happened out of the blue. There was no transparency.Passing this motion is a very simply thing the government could do to give more transparency to the system. It would treat victims with dignity and give them timely and accurate information.I cannot overemphasize that the system is rigged toward the rights of criminals versus the rights of victims. To give an example of how bad this is, Lisa's father's murderer was transferred to a correctional facility within 10 miles of where Lisa's sister lived. She only found out about it 24 hours after he was transferred.The motion proposes a very simple change and it would give more transparency. The government has run on transparency. Does the member see any reason that an initiative like this could not get unanimous consent of the House?Conditional releaseInformation disseminationM-229Private Members' MotionsVictims of crimeLisaRaittHon.MiltonLisaRaittHon.Milton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessParole SystemInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt: (1735)[English]Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate all the work the hon. member for Oshawa has done on this file and for bringing Lisa Freeman's story to our attention and to my attention in the House.Fundamentally, he government and the rest of the House could pass pass this motion very quickly, as we stand here today. It is a very simple amendment. It would add one single line, asking for an explanation as to why parole would be given parole in a certain way.Transparency for victims in these matters is incredibly important. It helps them to understand how the system works.In the case of Lisa Freeman, they were part of the system for at least 20 years. They should have the ability to understand, at the very end of their journey through the system, exactly what happened. It is an ask for the government from this family, and many other families in Canada, that makes sense and can easily be done.I would ask that the government consider this so we can give some comfort to families like Lisa Freeman's and other families experiencing the same confusion and lack of transparency with respect to dealing with the corrections system as it currently stands.Conditional releaseInformation disseminationM-229Private Members' MotionsVictims of crimeColinCarrieOshawaKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessParole SystemInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt: (1735)[English]Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's question relates to a broader and larger discussion that we will probably have in the next Parliament, should we be so lucky to be returned to this place by our constituents.That being said, one concrete thing we can do to prevent re-victimization is to have the government adopt the motion and ensure it passes here and makes it to the other place. People become victims in the moment and the instant that horrendous crimes happen to them. However, they are re-victimized and they continue to be victims for the rest of their lives, as the process unfolds through incarceration, corrections and then further into parole.This one tiny aspect of at least understanding the reason parole is being granted at early stages would be extremely helpful for the Freeman family in particular, and I am convinced for the rest of Canadians as well. I hope the government continues to consider it.Conditional releaseInformation disseminationM-229Private Members' MotionsVictims of crimeKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKarenMcCrimmonKanata—Carleton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessParole SystemInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1755)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to start this evening by thanking Lisa Freeman of Oshawa for the creation of this bill. I have known Lisa now for many years, and her public advocacy, which has led to this bill being introduced today, cannot be overstated.Before I delve into Lisa's story and her contributions to this bill, I want to make it clear that I will not be mentioning the name of the man who took the life of her father in 1991. It is our job not to give notoriety to people willing to take the innocent life of another.Lisa's father, Roland Slingerland, was brutally attacked and murdered in 1991. Lisa was but a mere 21-year-old at the time, and she was tasked with identifying her father after the attack. As a result, the murderer was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 25 years, the standard practice for violent crimes such as this one.However, 20 years into that sentence, the man responsible for tearing Lisa's life apart became eligible for early parole, for reasons that were never made clear to Lisa or her family. She was not told what her father's murderer had done to earn the possibility of early parole. She was not told why the Parole Board was considering releasing the murderer who had taken away the life of an innocent man, her innocent man. She was not told why her government would provide leniency to a criminal more than deserving of his punishment.The fact is that Lisa Freeman was never even given a single piece of justification for why her country's justice system was willing to turn its back on the people it is designed to protect.In the Criminal Code's current state, there is no legislation that requires the Parole Board to provide any reasoning to victims and victims' families for why the criminal who committed a crime against them is eligible for early parole. Many pieces of legislation protect the rights of victims. As this House knows, there is quite literally a Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, for the sole purpose of ensuring that the protection of victims' rights remains a top priority for the justice system. However, the laws that we currently have on the books simply do not provide the right of victims to know: the right to know why those who have harmed them are eligible to be released. When a court of law convicts an individual, the justice system is not just punishing or rehabilitating a person; it is providing justice on behalf of the victim, too. However, when a convicted felon not meant to be even eligible for parole for another five years is provided with the opportunity to walk freely in public, it is not fair to the victim's family to be kept in the dark as to why or how. Another example of victims in Canada not having the right to be informed is the fact that Mr. Slingerland's killer was transferred to a prison in British Columbia that was only 10 kilometres from the home of Lisa's sister. Lisa was not made aware of this transfer until 24 hours after it occurred. This is just another example of Lisa being in the same situation that many others find themselves in every day: uninformed. Since then, the killer has been transferred to a minimum-security prison on Vancouver Island. This facility has even been nicknamed “Club Fed” because of its lax restrictions on inmates.This sheer institutional injustice influenced Lisa to become an outspoken advocate for victims' rights, specifically regarding the rights of victims to know why those who have inflicted pain upon them and the public as a whole are eligible to be released. She has not only been an outspoken advocate in my community on victims' rights, but has even gone so far as penning her own book to speak about her experiences throughout the entire Parole Board process, titled She Won't Be Silenced. It is people like Lisa Freeman who make Canada the greatest country in the world. In the face of utter shock at the early parole announcement, she took a stand to ensure that other people just like her would never have to face the same treatment, the same neglect and the darkness that she was forced to endure as a result of the Parole Board's sudden and mysterious announcement. I would like to take the time to read aloud a statement made by Lisa regarding this private member's bill: “Families such as mine are plunged unasked into unfathomable situations, and then further demoralized and re-traumatized by the actions of a government: i.e, the Parole Board of Canada, Correctional Services Canada, institutions that say they are supportive of victims of crime, which is, at best, an illusion.(1800)“After dealing with Corrections since 2011, when I questioned why my father's killer was granted multiple day passes a full four years before his parole eligibility date, I quickly tired of the scripted lip service and virtue signalling of the Correctional Service of Canada, which purportedly assists victims but in reality does the opposite.“Under the guise of rehabilitation, victims of crime often have to stand back and watch while violent offenders exercise their rights, which, as most victims of crime find, is nothing more than a mockery of justice and basic common sense. It was a quick realization on my part that any access to rights by the offender was in fact taking away from my rights, which has been proven time and time again. “It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that victims of crime are treated with dignity and respect and to provide timely and accurate information in a transparent manner. With this legislation, it will avoid providing a sense of false comfort. Families like mine and indeed families coast to coast who find themselves trying to navigate the system at what is already a very trying time deserve more—and for the very least they deserve accurate information.” It is because of Lisa Freeman that I stand here in the House today to speak to this private member's bill that is proposing amendments to the Criminal Code that would ensure that all victims and their families are aware of how parole dates and eligibility are determined, because the current laws on the books fall short in doing so.While getting tough on crime, in my opinion, is key to creating a safer Canada, victims of crime—especially of violent ones, such as the murder of Lisa's father—must not be forgotten. In every criminal case, the two opposing sides are the Crown and the defence. However, it is right and just that the victims not be forgotten. They are the ones who truly suffer at the hands of criminals. In cases such as Lisa's, victims suffer not only at the hands of criminals but also at the hands of the government when they are kept in the dark.The Parole Board grants 79% of day parole requests it comes across. For victims of crimes committed by people eligible for early parole, it is only logical and compassionate that they be made aware as to how those who have harmed them have a very high probability of being released into the public before the end of their sentence.This is truly a non-partisan issue. Providing a reasonable explanation is not only logical but feasible as well. At this time, when the Parole Board determines a convicted criminal's date for parole eligibility, it sends a document to the victim who was harmed by the criminal's crime. All that is required under this bill is that the Parole Board clarify why the specified date for parole eligibility was chosen. The potential financial and procedural considerations are very limited, verging on non-existent.This legislation would require that information regarding review and eligibility for all forms of parole be communicated in writing to the offender's victims. As such, victims and families would not have to feel uninformed about those who have harmed them. An explanation of how the dates for parole eligibility are determined would also be required in the written documentation. It is a simple matter of transparency. Victims deserve accurate and timely information regarding the parole process.For every day we do not pass legislation on transparency for parole decisions, another victim and another family have to come to the realization that their government has neglected them.This bill would avoid providing the sense of false comfort that comes to victims when they are misled about parole eligibility. Its purpose is to make Parole Board procedures more transparent and more accommodating to the rights of victims and their families.This legislation has been applauded by advocates as giving a stronger voice to victims of crime. They will no longer be drowned out by the focus on the convicted. This legislation offers victims the ability to fully understand how and why the justice system is making decisions on their cases.It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that victims of crime are treated with the utmost respect and dignity. To this point, the government has failed to protect the most vulnerable. It is about time this House takes a step forward to fix that situation.In closing, above all, Canadians who have suffered as a result of an offender's action do not deserve to be re-victimized by the parole system. The current parole system is guilty of failing to be transparent. It is the duty of lawmakers in this House to repair the broken system. That is why I stand today. I call on my colleagues in this House to support this bill.I would also like to thank my colleague, the member for Milton, for spearheading this initiative to provide transparency for the most vulnerable in our judicial system. It has been an honour to work with her, and this private member's bill is evidence of her hard work for her constituents and all Canadians.Conditional releaseInformation disseminationM-229Private Members' MotionsVictims of crimeMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyChrisBittleSt. Catharines//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Code [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (1830)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am very alarmed that here we go again with the Liberal government, through an omnibus bill, Bill C-75, watering down criminal penalties for serious crimes. What really irks me terribly is that impaired driving causes bodily harm. Statistics in Canada today state that impaired driving offences are going up. Impaired driving is a leading cause of death in Canada, whether from consuming alcohol or drugs, and here is that government trying to include a softening of the sentences for it through Bill C-75.I wonder if the government could answer this. What is it really trying to do here? Statistics are going up and penalties are going to be reduced. How is that going to help make Canada safer for people driving on the roads?C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Code [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1835)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minister's being in the House and the opportunity to question him. I tabled a bill recently in regard to human trafficking. I know we all think this is a very serious offence. I would like the minister's honest opinion here. He mentioned the hybridization of offences: in other words, taking things that were indictable offences and turning them into summary convictions. For example, in some cases of human trafficking, it would be taking it from a high level down to two years less a day or a $5,000 fine. The reason I want him to answer is that, in Oshawa and Durham Region, human trafficking has actually doubled. I know the minister's intention, but there is a reality here. Two years less a day or a $5,000 fine is very lenient when a person who traffics one individual can make $300,000 a year. That is only for one person, but many of these guys are trafficking 10 to 20 young girls in our communities. The challenge is that Canada is becoming a country where this crime is being perpetrated because the system here is so lenient. Two years minus a day or a $5,000 fine is just the price of doing business for these guys.Does the minister think that two years minus a day or a $5,000 fine for a serious crime like human trafficking is going to stop somebody from victimizing our young people, especially young women for sex trafficking and things like that? Could he please comment? I do not think it is realistic, and advocates think this is ridiculous.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Code [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1845)[English]Mr. Speaker, we are in the last few days of Parliament, and it seems like every day the government is saying it is going to invoke closure and bring forward time allocation to shut down debate.Contrary to what the minister has just said, the process we go through here is this: Our committees look at these justice bills, and then we debate them here and send them to the Senate. Sometimes the Senate will send a bill back to us with amendments. Indeed, the Senate has sent this bill back with a number of amendments, at least 13 or 14, from what we hear tonight. However, we are not given the ability to debate those amendments. Our constituents expect us to do our due diligence. We debated the bill prior to this, but the Senate has sent it back, and now the Liberal government is going to invoke closure. This is not just about closure and time allocation; it is about another promise of an omnibus bill. Bill C-75 is a 300-page bill that is an omnibus bill. The government has thrown everything in here, and now we are asked to shut down debate and get ready to vote on it.The question that came from the Liberal side hit the nail on the head. That member said that one of the things we are concerned about is long delays in the courts. This bill is not just hybridizing many offences, but showing the failure of the Liberals to appoint judges throughout this country so these cases can be heard in the court system. Therefore, the Liberals bring this forward to basically push things through quickly, like a revolving door.This is how the Liberals drew this up. Originally, offences like leaving Canada to join a terrorist group were part of this bill. It is basically allowing them to water down serious offences, such as advocating genocide, using a date rape drug and human trafficking. Yes, some of those may not be in there now, but that is the Liberal philosophy of criminal justice reforms.I am sorry, but we are skeptical of the kinds of measures the current government brings forward, and we are very skeptical of the closure the minister is invoking.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsPublic consultationDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Code [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Kevin Waugh (Saskatoon—Grasswood, CPC): (1855)[English]Mr. Speaker, what the minister did not say is that they never consulted the victims of crime in this country. On the second to last day of Parliament, Bill C-75 comes to us. It does not show that they are taking the safety and security of Canadians seriously. We have seen this. They are attempting to water down serious offences in this bill, such as impaired driving causing bodily harm. The province of Saskatchewan has the worst record in the Dominion of drunk driving charges. I have talked to many victims, and they are upset with this bill, because they have not had chance to address it. Many of them have lost loved ones. When they look at this flawed bill, it is all about criminal rights and nothing about the victims in this country.I would like the minister to answer that. What is the government doing for the victims in this bill, because they are upset with this?C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Code [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Colin Carrie: (1900)[English]Mr. Speaker, I introduced a private member's bill that would change the Criminal Code on human trafficking. Right now it is extremely difficult to get a conviction in Canada, because we have to prove fear. The bill would align our definition with the Palermo protocol. In other words, it would allow easier convictions of human traffickers and also allow for training judges on human trafficking. Right now, it is extremely difficult to get a conviction. I was wondering if the Minister of Justice could let all Canadians know if he would be supporting my private member's bill, or at least the initiatives the bill intends to provide for Canadians, especially victims of human trafficking.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1940)[English]Mr. Speaker, today in the House we are discussing Bill C-75. The bill is supposed to strengthen the justice system. It is meant to better protect Canadians. It is meant to reduce delays and it is meant to modernize the criminal justice system.In part, it does this by facilitating the administration of justice down to the provinces. However, the reality is the bill is yet another example of the current government's dirty habit of saying one thing but doing another. It is known as Liberal hypocrisy, or sometimes people refer to it as Liberal logic.At the end of the day, this will in fact severely damage Canadian society and our justice system as a whole. Despite the rhetoric from across the way and despite the current heckles, the Liberals decided that they would not properly consult with stakeholders. They rammed the bill through without giving it careful consideration, without paying attention to the call for further discussion and certainly without adequate debate in this place.As a result, Canadians are stuck with a piece of legislation that has a number of flaws that are very significant in nature. One of the flaws has to do with hybridization. Putting aside the issue of reducing the penalty of very serious crimes for just a moment, which I will come back to, hybridization also results in many crimes being moved from Federal Court into provincial court. The Canadian Bar Association had this to say with regard to hybridization. It said this“would likely mean more cases would be heard in provincial court. This could result in further delays in those courts”. In other words, we already have a backlog within our justice system and the Canadian Bar Association is saying that Bill C-75 would result in an even further backlog, which is problematic because these individuals do need to go to trial. These cases do need to proceed, so holding them up even further is actually an injustice to the victim.Furthermore, it should be noted that it is the government's chief responsibility to care for the safety and well-being of its citizens, to defend the vulnerable, to create laws that put the rights of victims first, which is why it is extremely alarming to see that the Prime Minister is actually pandering more to criminals than standing up for victims.Bill C-75 reduces penalties for some very heinous crimes including participating in a terrorist group, trafficking women and girls, committing violence against a clergy member, murdering a child within one year of birth, abducting a child, forced marriage, advocating for genocide or participating in organized crime.The members opposite do not like it when I say those things, it is an inconvenient truth for them, so their heckling gets louder and louder, but the truth cannot be concealed. These heinous, unthinkable acts would have a reduced sentence under Bill C-75.Conservatives believe in the safety of Canadians being put first. They believe that it should be the number one priority of any government. We will continue to speak up on behalf of victims and we will continue to advocate for them to come first in our justice system. It is very important for me to stand here today and to speak to this piece of legislation because the rights of victims and the rights of communities must come first.We have a Prime Minister who is much more concerned about pursuing his own agenda than he is about acting in the best interests of Canadians. It is not just with Bill C-75, it is with other pieces of legislation and other decisions being made by the government as well.Bill C-71, which is the firearms legislation, was rammed through by the government earlier this spring. This was an attack on law-abiding firearms owners. Bill C-71 was rammed through without the government taking concern for the advice of law enforcement agents. It was rammed through without them actually consulting with legislative experts. It was rammed through without the Liberals taking the time to consult with and listen to Canadians.When those in power turn a deaf ear to the people that they represent, arrogance incapacitates any ability for them to exercise logical thought or common sense. That is exactly what has happened under the current government.(1945)The irony in all of this is that while the Liberals are letting criminals off the hook for committing atrocious crimes such as forced marriage, trafficking, terrorist activity and genocide, they insist on demonizing those who hunt or use their rifles for sport shooting. It is absolutely ludicrous. In what world does this make sense?From the start, the Liberals did not want to debate Bill C-71. They did not want to consult, because that would mean they would need to listen and then would be held accountable to act on the things that they heard. Instead, the Liberals decided to push Bill C-71, the firearms legislation, through the House. They told Canadians that the bill is for their safety and protection, but it does nothing of the sort. It fails to address gang violence, it fails to address illegal firearm acquisition and use and it fails to address rural crime and violence. Bill C-71 simply goes after those who are already following the law, while rewarding criminals with shorter sentences or allowing them to walk away altogether.It is very clear that what the current government likes to do more than anything is deceive Canadians. It is less about the safety, well-being and security of our country and more about appearing to be doing something good. If the government took Canadians seriously and really took the position of honour that has been bestowed upon it seriously, then it would genuinely want to strengthen our justice system and our borders. It would genuinely want to invest in front-line responders and make sure that illegal firearms are taken off the street and that people are kept safe in this country, but the current government is not interested in actually governing well. The current government under the current Prime Minister is more interested in its appearance, its image.The Prime Minister told veterans that they cost too much. Meanwhile, he handed $10 million over to a convicted terrorist, Omar Khadr. An hon. member: Shame.Ms. Rachael Harder: It is shameful. I'm glad you recognize it.The Prime Minister insists consistently on putting criminals before victims. This is wrong, because Canadians elect a government to look after their safety, security and well-being, to ensure that this country is running on all cylinders, that Canadians have a vibrant future that they can dream for, work toward and step into and be excited about for their children and grandchildren. The bill we are discussing today, Bill C-75, which makes changes to the criminal justice system, actually puts this country at risk and victims in serious danger. It rewards criminals.The role of every government is to keep citizens safe. It is to facilitate an environment of economic prosperity in which people are free to use their time, their talent and their energy to build wealth and achieve the financial outcomes they desire. This means protecting our borders, investing in necessary infrastructure, decreasing taxes, exercising fiscal restraint and scrapping unnecessary regulations. It means respecting the rights and freedoms of Canadians and celebrating the contributions of those who work hard, rather than turning them into criminals. I am talking about the retired widow who lives next door to me, the local business owner who serves coffee when I go there, the medical practitioners who look after our health, the students who dream for a vibrant future and the veterans who have faithfully served this country. These are the faces that government should be looking into when it makes decisions to rule this country.During his time as prime minister, John Diefenbaker told party members, “I was criticized for being too much concerned with the average Canadians. I can't help that; I am one”, and so it is today. Just as the Right Hon. John Diefenbaker did all those years ago, my colleagues and I on this side of the House are committed to standing up for everyday Canadians, those who work hard and want a vibrant future not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren.(1950)When we mess around with the justice system with a bill like Bill C-75 and when we reward criminals who commit some of the most heinous crimes imaginable and allow them to go free or we diminish their sentence to a mere fine, we depreciate the value of our country and we fail to look after the well-being of Canadian citizens.In this place, there are 338 of us who were elected to do far better than that. I would expect much more from the current Prime Minister and much more from the members who govern with him. There is no greater honour than to serve in this place, to be elected by the people of Canada and to have the opportunity to function as a voice on their behalf. I would call upon this House to steward that honour and to vote this bill down.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsHybrid offencesPublic consultationSafetySummary convictionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKimRuddNorthumberland—Peterborough South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would invite that member to have her hearing checked, because there was clear heckling in this place.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsKimRuddNorthumberland—Peterborough SouthArifViraniParkdale—High Park//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (1955)[English]Mr. Speaker, I respect the hon. member's question. Certainly any act that advocates on behalf of victims is noble. Any act that would put the well-being of women and children first and foremost is absolutely to be commended.However, there are allowances made within this bill that would in fact allow people off with very small fines or penalties after committing extremely heinous crimes. I would also like to add that if the member opposite and his colleagues are interested in the well-being of victims, it probably would have been a good idea to consult with them in the creation of this bill. That was not adequately done.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsHybrid offencesArifViraniParkdale—High ParkPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (1955)[English]Mr. Speaker, Conservatives have always had a policy of standing up for victims and placing them as our first priority. We have always had a policy of advocating for Canadians who live everyday lives. We have always had a policy of making sure that our justice system is strengthened and that the most vulnerable among us are advocated for. We will continue that legacy when we form government in October.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrookeAnthonyHousefatherMount Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (1955)[English]Mr. Speaker, certainly when this bill was first brought forward, terrorism and genocide were included within hybridization. However, due to pressure that was applied by the Conservative members in this House as well as by members of the Canadian public, the Liberals did walk those two back, so I will give them credit for that.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsHybrid offencesAnthonyHousefatherMount RoyalToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (2000)[English]Mr. Speaker, Cody Legebokoff is Canada's youngest serial killer. He heinously killed four young women in my riding. He just started serving his time, but recently he was transferred to medium security. I want to ask our hon. colleague what she feels about the current government's lack of priority for victims' rights. Cody Legebokoff should be behind bars—C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsSerious crimeRachaelHarderLethbridgeGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (2000)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think the bottom line is this: Those who find themselves elected in this place find themselves in a very honoured position and have every responsibility to stand up for the rights of victims first and foremost. Bill C-75 fails to do that.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2115)[English]Order. It is the second instance, not for this particular member, but we have had a couple of occasions just in recent minutes. I am sure members are not doing it on purpose, but they should just watch that they do not cite actual given names or family names of other hon. members. Just switch it to their title, or their riding name works as well.The hon. member for Willowdale.Designation of Members by the name of their constituency or titleAliEhsassiWillowdaleAliEhsassiWillowdale//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2135)[English]Order. I will let the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs know that there are about five to six minutes remaining in the time for Government Orders on this particular bill. I will give him the signal at the usual time.Resuming debate, the hon. parliamentary secretary.TraceyRamseyEssexRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2145)[Translation]It being 9:43 p.m., pursuant to an order made on Thursday, June 13, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the second reading stage of the bill now before the House.[English] The question is on the amendment. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment? Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay. Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion, the nays have it. And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to an order made on Tuesday, May 28, the division stands deferred until Thursday, June 20, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.Division on amendment deferredC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementDeferred divisionsGovernment billsReasoned amendmentsSecond readingTrade agreementsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestKarenMcCrimmonKanata—Carleton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2155)[English]Order. The government House leader is rising on a point of order.KarenMcCrimmonKanata—CarletonBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of the HouseInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2155)[English]Does the hon. government House leader have the unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed.The Deputy Speaker: The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed.(Motion agreed to)Aboriginal languagesAboriginal peoplesAdjournmentC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActC-91, An Act respecting Indigenous languagesC-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and familiesC-98, An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act and the Canada Border Services Agency Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCare for childrenComplaintsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesDecisions of the HouseDivisionsFamilies and childrenGovernment billsHouse deemed to have satInternational tradeLeave to propose a motionMotionsReport stageSafetyThird reading and adoptionBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooKarenMcCrimmonKanata—Carleton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (2215)[English]Mr. Speaker, I chair the public accounts committee. There are some significant changes in this bill.When we look at the supplementary estimates, $448 million were given to CSC. However, when we have tried to find out what the financial implications are, the cost of all the measures in the bill, we can not get an answer from the government.The parliamentary secretary is privy to those briefings with the department. I know that typically those answers are given by the department.If we have scanners, and the parliamentary secretary talked about limited, I wonder, and I think Canadians wonder as well, what the costs of the bill would be.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsGovernment expendituresImprisonment and prisonersKarenMcCrimmonKanata—CarletonKarenMcCrimmonKanata—Carleton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (2220)[English]Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I would like to seek unanimous consent for this speaking slot to be a regular 20-and-10 speaking slot, rather than unlimited time, and to split the time with the member for Yellowhead. We have unlimited time slots and would ask for unanimous consent to split the time so my friend from Yellowhead can share some of his stories of the Correctional Service.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersKarenMcCrimmonKanata—CarletonBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2225)[English]Does the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot have the unanimous consent of the House to regard this time slot as a 20 and 10 for the purpose of splitting his time?Some hon. members: Agreed.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesDecisions of the HouseGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersSplitting speaking timeKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—Crowfoot//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson: (2225)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank the chamber for doing that.This undoubtedly will be the last time I ever speak in this place. As I rise on this night, I want to thank the throng of people that have come out to hear this speech.I rise this evening to speak to Bill C-83, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another act.This legislation seeks to eliminate administrative segregation in correctional facilities; replace these facilities with new structured intervention units, or SIUs; introduce body scanners for inmates; set parameters for access to health care; and formalize exceptions for indigenous offenders, female offenders and offenders with diagnosed mental health issues. Just as we fundamentally opposed the bill in its original form, we oppose the government's motion respecting the Senate amendments.We on this side of the House believe that this legislation has the potential of making prisons more dangerous both for offenders and for correctional officers. I will get into that in a bit. Drumheller Institution, a medium security facility, is located within my riding of Battle River—Crowfoot. Over the many years I have represented this riding, I have developed a very good rapport with many of the good people who work there.Correctional officers contact my constituency office on a regular basis, asking for assistance in resolving cases and issues they have within and with their institution. I would never support a bill that could potentially endanger their lives any more than they already are, given that they are employed in an inherently hazardous occupation. Currently, my office has 20 active files and 50 inactive files, but also unresolved files from Drumheller correctional workers with respect to pay issues due to the Phoenix pay system, as well as other issues. They are not alone. Nearly two-thirds of public servants have unresolved pay issues more than three years after the Phoenix system was launched.Now the national union president representing correctional officers is raising serious concerns about the very real possibility of some new measures taking place within the institution. One of them is the first supervised drug injection site for prisoners. The Correctional Service of Canada has neither confirmed nor denied this is about to happen by the end of the month.As National President Jeff Wilkins told the National Post in an article that appeared on June 9, “The correctional officers are dead set against the prison needle-exchange and the current way it's being rolled out.” It is a program that he says is unsafe for guards, as they are responsible for distributing needles to prisoners in their cells, a scheme that has done nothing to stop needle sharing and defies reason in that people in prison should not have access to those drugs.One of my constituents wrote me, “As a Correctional Officer, I am opposed to the proposed Needle Exchange program, which is definitely defeating the purpose of the whole anti-drug thing that we were shooting for in jail. Is there any way that I and other co-workers can express our concerns with our MP?”l told him that I was definitely open to hearing and discussing these concerns with him and his colleagues. I could not assure him, however, that the Liberal government would listen. I did in fact tell him that I would bring his concerns to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness but was not at all confident that he would be receptive to those concerns.After 19 years in this place and a number of years as our party's public safety critic for the official opposition in 2001 until about 2005, I have learned that when it comes to justice, under Liberal governments inmates and their rights take precedence over victims and correctional officers' rights.For the 19 years that I have been in this place, I have repeatedly stood in the House fighting for victims' rights, fighting for changes to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to end such things as statutory release and promoting the idea of protection of society as a guiding principle in our justice system.(2230)I oppose conditional sentences as originally prescribed by the Liberals, which saw rapists and other violent offenders serve their sentences at home. My constituents back me up on that. I am equally opposed to needle exchange programs in our correctional institutions, and I am opposed to injection sites. I wholeheartedly agree with the union president that rather than providing needle exchanges and designated sites within prisons for inmates to shoot up, we should perhaps have medical facilities closer to these prisons to deal with the drug overdoses that may result.So much more should and can be done to stop the drug trade within the correctional facilities, which is leading to overdose, to death and to the continued gang wars that take place within our prisons. Canadians would agree that it defies reason that drugs make their way into the prisons, not to mention the huge amount of drugs and number of needles that circulate. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for years. The Liberals' only solution is to give the inmates what they want. I disagree.I fully understand that many inmates are drug addicts and that many of them are in prison as a result of criminal behaviour related to their addiction. They need help. They do not need more drugs, especially drugs that are bought or bartered for within prison. The fact that drugs cannot be stopped from entering our prisons certainly is a blight on the reputation of the Correctional Service of Canada.As I pointed out this year when I last spoke to this bill, the Correctional Service of Canada certainly has been the subject of much criticism over the last number of years. In that speech, I mentioned one of the fall reports of the Auditor General of Canada, in 2017. It was entitled “Preparing Women Offenders for Release”. The objective of the Auditor General's report was this:[to determine] whether Correctional Service Canada assigned and delivered correctional programs, interventions, and mental health services to women offenders in federal custody—including Indigenous women offenders—that responded appropriately to their unique needs and helped them successfully reintegrate into the community.We heard our parliamentary secretary talk about correctional programs tonight, and this bill also deals with indigenous women offenders.As noted by the Auditor General:Under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, Correctional Service Canada is required to provide programs and services that respond to the needs of women offenders.The report states:Overall, we found that Correctional Service Canada had not implemented an initial security classification process designed specifically for women offenders.... As a result, some women offenders risked being held at inappropriate security levels....Furthermore, and most relevant to our debate here this evening, the Auditor General concluded: We found that Correctional Service Canada had not confirmed whether its tools correctly identified women offenders with mental health issues or assigned them the appropriate level of care.I also spoke about report 6 of the fall 2018 Auditor General report on community supervision of offenders, in which the Auditor General found that while the number of offenders released into community supervision had grown and was expected to keep growing, the Correctional Service of Canada had reached the limit of how many offenders it could house in the community. Despite the growing backlog and despite research that showed that a gradual supervised release gave offenders a better chance of successful reintegration, the Correctional Service of Canada did not have a long-term plan to respond to its housing pressures.The Auditor General also found that the Correctional Service of Canada did not properly manage offenders under community supervision. Parole officers did not always meet with offenders as often as they should have, nor did parole officers always monitor offenders' compliance with special conditions imposed by the Parole Board of Canada.I continue today to implore the Liberal government to focus on ensuring that the Correctional Service of Canada fully meets its mandate. The safety and security of Canadians depends on the successful rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders into society upon their release. Given the findings of the Office of the Auditor General, I believe that uneasiness with respect to safety and security of Canadians extends well beyond Bill C-83.(2235)I implore the current government to start thinking about those who find themselves in danger's way daily by implementing measures and policies to protect them. If it only took the time to consult them, I am confident their ideas, based on years of experience, would ensure Correctional Services Canada would be able to fulfill its mandate.I am thankful for the opportunity to speak tonight. I look forward to any questions.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional officersCorrectional servicesCriminal rehabilitationDrug use and abuseGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMaximum security institutionsMental healthNeedle exchange programParole supervisionPublic consultationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthPamDamoffOakville North—Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson: (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, with respect to the consultations, let me quote what Jason Godin, president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, said. This is partly involving the costing of the bill. He stated, “Unfortunately, due to cabinet confidentiality, as our commissioner often tells us, we weren't really consulted.” That is what the union said. When I speak to my officers, they are not consulted about a whole host of issues. A member of the committee said she spoke to a number of people. However, it should not just be a chat with someone on the sideline of a committee meeting, but deep consultations with not just the union but correctional officers.Godin continues, “The bill was as much a surprise to us as it was to anybody. I don't see the bill before it comes onto the table, so we weren't officially consulted on Bill C-83.”Here is our problem. I asked the parliamentary secretary tonight about the costing of the bill. She gave us a line item, but she did not specify what the costs would be for the scanners or the change to the integration system and no longer having the administrative segregation. We do not have those answers. This is another one of these bills where we moved into tonight's last few hours of debate after the government invoked closure and time allocation. I will go into some of what Senator Pate said. She stated, “If there have been no meaningful consultations to this point on this process, then I would not have faith that those mechanisms would be put in place within the prison setting”. Although the Senate has brought forth amendments, the senator is saying she recognizes there is a lack of consultation.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional officersCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersPublic consultationPamDamoffOakville North—BurlingtonRachaelHarderLethbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, talking about consultation, interestingly, two weeks ago there were several hundred correctional officers who gathered on the lawn here on Parliament Hill to protest the current government and its decision to introduce a needle exchange program within the federal prisons. Officers would say they were not consulted on this decision and that they very much feel they have been put in harm's way by the installation of this program.I am wondering if the hon. member could comment on this further and highlight the importance of consulting with those who are on the front lines, day in and day out. C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional officersCorrectional servicesDrug use and abuseGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersNeedle exchange programPublic consultationKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—Crowfoot//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson: (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, I served in government. I know consultations. For me, it was budget consultations across the country, meeting with as many as we could, meeting with people in every community and every chamber. There were consultations online, as well as in person.The hon. member is correct. When I spoke to my correctional officers, they said they were not consulted. When we speak to the union, it said there was inadequate consultation. In the case the member is referring to, which is a little different than what the scope of the bill is, on the needle exchanges the officers are very concerned about their safety. We know that the needle that was maybe used to shoot up a drug could also be used as a weapon in the hands of that offender against other offenders and against correctional officers. It is one thing to say they are employed in an inherently dangerous surrounding, and another for governments to say they had better consult and make sure that what they are doing is the right thing. Unfortunately, the current government fails on consultation every time.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional officersCorrectional servicesDrug use and abuseGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersNeedle exchange programPublic consultationRachaelHarderLethbridgeJimEglinskiYellowhead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (2240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join my partner from Battle River—Crowfoot in speaking to Bill C-83. I have stood in the House a number of times to speak to it, and I was on the committee that studied Bill C-83, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another act.This has been a bad bill right from the beginning. The Liberals did not listen to very many people. They wrote the bill, brought it before committee and forced it upon it, as they are doing today, forcing us in the second-to-last day Parliament is sitting to speak to the amendments that have been brought in by the Senate. The Liberals do not like the amendments, but they want to push this through.From the beginning, when we started studying Bill C-83 at committee, a number of witnesses came forward. The John Howard Society said it was bad. The Elizabeth Fry Society said it was bad. We had a 19-year prisoner who admitted to being a pretty bad guy, and he said parts of the bill were bad. He was the type of person who needed to be put into a segregation unit to protect the guards and other prisoners, and even himself. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association said it was a bad bill. The Native Women's Association said it was a bad bill. There were a number of organizations. Now we have it brought before us, as I said, on the second-to-last day before the House rises for the summer.My friend from Battle River—Crowfoot just mentioned the corrections union and that his union was not spoken to. Very much like the institution in his riding at Drumheller, which is medium-security, I have a medium-security facility in the town of Grande Cache, in the great riding of Yellowhead. It is probably one of the most beautiful jail settings in North America. It is on top of a mountain overlooking the Rocky Mountains. There are a large number of aboriginal prisoners there. I know some of the guards there very well; some of them went to school with my daughter years ago. They are very concerned that they were not consulted properly and that Bill C-83, if enacted the way it is, will make it dangerous for the guards. That is totally unacceptable.The change would make prisoners more dangerous for the guards, as they will have to deal with the worst of the worst and the most volatile being out and about from their cells for four hours a day.I totally agree that things need to change and we need to be civil and human in how we treat prisoners. Many years ago, I had the privilege to be on what the RCMP called provost duty. I escorted prisoners throughout British Columbia and western Canada back and forth from remand centres and detachments to prisons, etc. I came to know many of these individuals on a personal basis and many times I travelled 200 or 300 miles with three prisoners by myself.One could be a real dick and those guys would hate it by the time they got to the destination, or one could be a decent individual, have a conversation with them, treat them decently, with respect and dignity, and have a 200- or 300-mile drive with three prisoners.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional officersCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersStructured intervention unitKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski: (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my last speech, and I do apologize. It was just the terminology that slipped out.Years ago we learned that we had to give respect to the prisoners. They had to be treated properly. That is no different today. I realize that Bill C-83 is trying to do that in a number of areas. As our colleagues in the Senate have said, there are some things that need to be corrected. I hate to say it, but the Liberals are not listening again.My primary purpose in getting up today is to say that the women and men who work in our institutions do a great job for our country. They are a fantastic group of people. In many cases, maybe even more than police officers who are out on the street or our military who might be defending some country somewhere, these guys are right on the front lines. A lot of our prisoners are everyday common people. We do not need to worry too much about them. They are civil. We can have great conversations with them. We can joke around with them. However, we do have some real bad apples there. Some have mental health problems. Some are just downright mean. Some can be rehabilitated. Some, and I am going back to 50 years of experience, cannot be rehabilitated or do not want to be rehabilitated, and that is where the problem comes with segregation.I know that the Supreme Court has ruled that we need to change our policies. We need to give prisoners more rights, but that will come at a cost to the country. I guess we will have to accept that, because that is what it has ruled.However, the primary thing is that I want my friends and my constituents who work at Grande Cache Institution to be safe. I want the average prisoner who is there, who maybe was picked up for impaired driving or maybe something minor, who is not really a bad person, to be very safe in our institutions. That is my primary concern.My colleagues across have been given a number of recommendations from the Senate that I think need to be addressed and cannot be ignored. I did not pick up on all of them, and I am not going to deal with all of them. However there is one I thought I would spend a little time talking about. The Senate said that the authority should be left with the institutions as to the movement of a prisoner to a provincial institution. That is only rational, good, common sense. I am not knocking professional health people. They do a great job for us, but we have some great con artists in our jails who could sweet talk the Speaker into letting them sit up there while the Speaker took their place. That is how good they are. I know that the Speaker would never be conned. However, that is where my fear comes in. The institution staff know these people. They are dealing with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They know how slick the prisoners can be.A medical professional coming in, maybe for an hour or two or maybe three hours a week, could be baffled. That is why I think it was a very wise decision that came back from the Senate. It was a common-sense correction, yet it is being ignored.I appreciate being given the time to stand up here to defend the institutional guards at Grande Cache and others across the country. They are doing a great job for us.(2250)Get rid of the needles. I am not going any further with that. It is the biggest mistake we ever made.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsHospitalsImprisonment and prisonersMental healthAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingPamDamoffOakville North—Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski: (2250)[English]Mr. Speaker, I hate to rush anything unless it is correct. The Senate has studied this bill, as has the committee, and we have heard from many witnesses. If we just bring it forward because we are threatened by the possibility that the courts might take action, we should have thought of that right off the bat and got at it a little more quickly than we did. We are here on the last day. Again, the issue goes back to the safety of the people. Yes, I agree with a psychiatric review when a person comes in, but if we bring these measures forward, is that going to make it very difficult to correct them afterward, and is it going to put a guard's safety in jeopardy in the next month or two before we come back to help correct it in the fall?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMental healthPamDamoffOakville North—BurlingtonMatthewDubéBeloeil—Chambly//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski: (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely correct. None of the witnesses really agreed with this bill. We were given this bill as written by the senior management of Canada's institutional system, but with no consultation with the unions or stakeholders. The committee was to get it through as fast as possible and get it passed. The Senate saw the mistakes. We could see the mistakes. The witnesses could see the mistakes.We are going to make a bigger mistake if we go and vote for it with the errors or with the Senate submissions being omitted.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyMatthewDubéBeloeil—Chambly//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (2345)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her service in this place. I know we have disagreed from time to time on certain issues, but I do know she has the pleasure of representing my in-laws. I do not know that I can say they are Liberal supporters, but I am sure they appreciate her efforts in this place.I want to pick up on something the member said at the end of her speech. She said that we need to recognize the rights of people, even those who have committed heinous crimes. I agree with that. I fundamentally agree that we need to affirm the rights and dignity of all people, regardless of what they have done in their life, at a fundamental level.We often talk in this place about rights. We use the word “rights” very often. I do not think we are going to disagree on this. I wonder if the member could talk a bit more about how we explain the origins of those rights at a core level. In other words, how would the member explain this to somebody who disagrees? On what basis should we say definitively that all people have rights regardless of their circumstances?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActCivil and human rightsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersPamDamoffOakville North—BurlingtonPamDamoffOakville North—Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (2350)[English]Mr. Speaker, currently, correctional officers do not even have enough resources to allow prisoners out of their cells for two hours a day. How is the government going to ensure that the monetary resources are in place to ensure that these inmates can come out of their cells for four hours a day? Some of these individuals are what we might call the worst of the worst. They have committed some very atrocious crimes. These individuals, then, need to be monitored during their time out of their cells, and correctional officers need to be kept safe during this time. Their security is put at risk in the process of them doing their job. What is the government going to do to ensure their safety and well-being, and where is the monetary investment?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersStructured intervention unitPamDamoffOakville North—BurlingtonPamDamoffOakville North—Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release ActInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (2350)[English]Mr. Speaker, I suspect that this will be my last speech in the 42nd Parliament. I hope to be able to continue after the next election, but, as Forrest Gump says, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.”I will take advantage of this opportunity before I launch into my specific remarks on this bill to do a couple of things. One is to thank my colleagues, my constituents, my staff and especially my family for their support and the opportunity to serve.I did want to make a point of paying particular tribute to my friend, the member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands, who is retiring. He is a champion of justice and human rights and someone who has been a great mentor to me as I have sought to engage on many of the same issues that he has been championing for years. I look forward to seeing the ways in which he will continue with these important issues in whatever role he takes on afterwards.It has been a pleasure to work with members on all sides. I certainly wish my friends on the Liberal side well as they prepare to transition to the private sector. I do plan to campaign in their ridings and I hope they do not take it personally. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to go for a drink afterwards, and I will even bring the Solo cups.This is the one other point that I wanted to make to honour a promise I made to a particular community. It is that I want to briefly highlight the Zoroastrian community in Canada. The ancient Zoroastrian religion is one of the oldest religions in the world. Members of this community have been migrating to Canada for many decades, yet they still remain relatively unknown to Canadians, so I thought it would be important to acknowledge their community and their contributions. The Zoroastrian religion is based on three key principles: good thoughts, good words and good deeds. These are principles that align with Canadian values and represent traits that all Canadians should aspire to have. These teachings were passed on by their prophet, Lord Zoroaster, and through the Zoroastrian religious text, the Avesta. Zoroastrians believe there is one creator god. The primary symbol of Zoroastrianism is fire, which is seen as a conduit for wisdom and spiritual knowledge. Zoroastrianism originated in what is now modern-day Iran, but because of persecution, the community had to emigrate to other parts of the world. Zoroastrians, like so many communities, have often come to Canada to escape persecution. There are 100,000 Zoroastrians around the world and 7,000 of them reside in Canada. Zoroastrians are a peaceful and well-educated community, and we celebrate their work and their contributions.I am speaking today on Bill C-83, which proposes to replace administrative segregation with so-called structured intervention units.During its tenure in office, the government has put a big emphasis on the naming of things. “Foreign Affairs” became “Global Affairs”. The universal child care benefit became the Canadian child care benefit, and administrative segregation becomes structured intervention units. When it comes to the name changes, to this bill, and to the record of the government in general, by this point in the mandate, people are asking that all-important question whenever they hear of a name change, “Where's the beef?” As Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, would administrative segregation by any other name be of the same nature?Parenthetically, Confucius speaks in The Analects about the importance of naming things correctly. He said the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. He also said:If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.So much of politics, so much of what we have seen here in the last four years, involves effort by government to change the names of things and to re-engineer language. It becomes increasingly difficult to have dialogue and to know the difference between justice and injustice if things are not called by their proper names.We often bemoan political polarization and the decline of meaningful dialogue. Perhaps we should consider how this is born out of the breakdown of meaning in language, how leaders and elites so often try to name things based on political objectives exogenous to the substance of the thing, rather than simply calling a thing what it is.(2355)The vast majority of stakeholders oppose this legislation because they see it principally as a renaming exercise as opposed to a substantive one. In practical terms, the legislation requires a person in this new form of administrative segregation to have a minimum of four hours out per day, as well as legislated meaningful human contact. This raises questions about the capacity of the government to respond in terms of providing the resources necessary to operationalize this new framework.In our judgment, the resources are not there to do this safely and effectively, and the distinctions made are not meaningful. This raises further questions in terms of the strength of the drafting of this legislation and the planning that went into it. We also have residual questions of what constitutes meaningful contact and how that can be defined.On that basis, and recognizing that my time is running short, I will conclude. I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to spend so much time with members in the House. I encourage members of the government caucus to get away, enjoy the summer, go on vacation, travel and spend time in the Caribbean islands.I will of course be working hard in my riding. In particular, I hope to spend a lot of time in the beautiful riding of Spadina—Fort York. Maybe the member and I can start an Alasdair MacIntyre discussion group. The member can share with me from his reading of Ayn Rand and I can share more with him about Alasdair MacIntyre and Aristotle.It has been a pleasure. I wish all members the best, including yourself, Mr. Speaker. I hope to be able to come back in the next Parliament.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersReligionAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25520TomLukiwskiTom-LukiwskiMoose Jaw—Lake Centre—LaniganConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/LukiwskiTom_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Government Operations and Estimates]InterventionMr. Tom Lukiwski (Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, CPC): (1005)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the 19th report of Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, entitled “Veterans: A Valuable Resource for the Federal Public Service”.Furthermore, pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report.Lastly, since this will be the final time I have an opportunity to speak on committee business before this Parliament dissolves, I want to thank, once again, all of those important people who assisted our committee over the last four years. In particular I want to point out one of analysts, as they say in Ottawa, who is with us today, Raphaëlle, who has been with this committee for four years and who has done an exemplary job. Frankly, without her assistance and her guidance, at times our committee would not have been able to perform the duties that it did.Once again, I thank not only Raphaëlle but all those officials, translators, interpreters, clerks and others who made our committee as efficient as it was.8510-421-625 "Veterans: A Valuable Resource for the Federal Public Service"Public Service and public servantsStaffingStanding Committee on Government Operations and EstimatesVeteransYasminRatansiDon Valley EastGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72035BobZimmerBob-ZimmerPrince George—Peace River—Northern RockiesConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ZimmerBob_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAccess to Information, Privacy and EthicsInterventionMr. Bob Zimmer (Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, CPC): (1005)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 20th report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, entitled “International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy”. Indeed, it was an honour to host 10 countries representing over 400 million people in Ottawa. The first meeting was held in London, a co-effort with my co-chair Damian Collins from London. I want to thank everyone who pulled it together and made it such a great event and also all the witnesses who travelled such long distances to make it the International Grand Committee that it was. I also have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 19th report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, entitled “Privacy of Digital Government Services”. Mr. Speaker, thank you for your services over the last four years and have a great summer.8510-421-628 "Privacy and Digital Government Services"8510-421-629 "International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy"Democracye-GovernmentInternational Grand CommitteeInternetPrivacy and data protectionStanding Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and EthicsLarryBagnellHon.YukonGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Firearms]InterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition signed by Canadians from the ridings of Kanata—Carleton, Ottawa—Vanier, Nepean, Elgin—Middlesex—London and London—Fanshawe. They call on the House of Commons to respect the rights of law-abiding firearms owners and reject the Prime Minister's plan to waste taxpayers' money on a ban on guns that are already banned.FirearmsPetition 421-04506Petition 421-04507SentencingGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition in support of Bill S-240, on organ harvesting.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04511S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)ElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is in support of vulnerable minorities in Afghanistan. It calls on the government to offer them support.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04512Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman RightsInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]The third petition, Mr. Speaker, raises the issue of the plight of Pakistani Christians, many of whom are stuck in Thailand. The petitioners call on the government to allow private sponsorships to help them respond to that situation.AsylumPakistanPetition 421-04513RefugeesReligious minoritiesThailandGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsFalun GongInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the fourth petition highlights the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China.ChinaCivil and human rightsFalun GongOrgansPetition 421-04514GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanMoniquePauzéRepentigny//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to present petitions from people who live in my riding of Portage—Lisgar. These petitioners are asking that medical practitioners, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, etc., would have protection of freedom of conscience when they are administering health services.Caregivers and health care professionalsFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04520Petition 421-04521AnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelaga//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsEqualizationInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1025)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of the hundreds of people who have signed this petition and are so frustrated with the government's policy to destroy Canada's energy sector through bills like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48. The petitioners are calling on the government to review the equalization formula, given the punitive policies against the Alberta energy sector. This is a petition that I support. They are also calling on the government to scrap Bill C-69. It is crazy.Energy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04523Petition 421-04524Petition 421-04525Petition 421-04526Petition 421-04527Petition 421-04528Petition 421-04529Petition 421-04530Petition 421-04531Petition 421-04532Petition 421-04533Petition 421-04534Petition 421-04535Petition 421-04536MarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelagaKarineTrudelJonquière//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC)(1030)[English] moved: MotionThat, given that the carbon tax will not reduce emissions at its current rate and it is already making life more expensive for Canadians, the House call on the government to repeal the carbon tax and replace it with a real environment plan. He said: Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, a beautiful riding in British Columbia.The motion before us says that the Liberal climate plan, which is effectively a tax plan, should be replaced by a real plan that will move Canada forward to address its emission challenges, addresses the global challenge of green gas emissions and climate change and does it in a way that is respectful to Canadian taxpayers.The reality is this. Right now the Liberals have brought forward something they call a climate plan. However, it is not a climate plan; it is a tax plan. How do we know it is a tax plan? If members remember back to when they rolled out this plan, a briefing was held by departmental officials from Environment Canada. The minister's own officials said that the foundational element of the government's so-called climate change plan was the carbon tax. Therefore, they admitted right off the bat that this was a tax plan. Of course, today the Liberals are denying that. I think Canadians understand that this is all about taxes.There is another reason why Canadians have good reason to believe that this is nothing more than a craven tax plan to raise revenues for the government. The minister often gets up in the House and talks about the 50 different elements within her tool kit that the government is deploying to address climate change in Canada. It has a program of 50 different elements and it will let the provinces pick whatever elements they choose to meet their own targets, except for one tool. What is that tool? It is the carbon tax. Out of 50 tools, the one tool that the Liberals are going to ram down the throats of the provinces and territories, ram it down the throats of consumers and taxpayers across the country is the carbon tax.We have to ask ourselves why this is the only tool the Liberals have made mandatory across the country. The only conclusion Canadians can draw is that this tax is an essential element in the Liberal government raising more revenues, tax revenues, in the future to spend on its own political priorities rather than on the priorities of Canadians. This is what we are left with. It is one of the reasons why we brought forward this motion, clarifying for Canadians that the Liberal climate change plan is nothing but a craven tax plan. Today, Canadians are already paying the price for that plan.This is a cash grab from Canadians and they understand that this is on top of all the other tax increases they pay because of the Liberal government.Members may recall that under the previous Conservative government, taxes on Canadians reached an all-time low, the lowest tax burden on Canadians for over 50 years. Today, Canadians pay, on average, $800 more in taxes than they did back in 2015. On top of that, the carbon tax is being layered on families. Fifty per cent of those families are within $200 of being insolvent. Along with the challenges Canadians have to face, where they struggle day to day to meet their mortgage payments, take care of their kids' educations, buy groceries and put gas in their cars, the Liberals are laying a carbon tax on top of that.What is worse, and what the Liberals did not come out and confess, is the fact that there is GST layered on top of that carbon tax. Therefore, Canadians are paying a tax on tax. I think a lot of Canadians watching right now are wondering whether I am serious about this.(1035)The price at the pump has gone up dramatically already and the government is charging GST on top of that. The Liberals claim that all this money will go back to the taxpayer, which is not true of course. It is a tax on everything. It will cost Canadians more when they fill up their cars with gas, heat their homes and buy their groceries.The plan right now calls for this tax to move from today's $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions to $50 per tonne by 2022. Last week, the Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with a report that said that in order for the Liberals to reach their Paris agreement targets, they would have to jack up that tax to over $100 per tonne of emissions, more than doubling what it would be in 2022 and more than five times greater than what that carbon tax is today. This is a craven tax plan. The Prime Minister has said that when it came to gas prices, higher gas prices was exactly what he wants. That is a statement from our own Prime Minister. He said that this extra tax burden on already overtaxed Canadians was exactly what he wanted.Let me talk a bit about the Paris targets. We must remember that this carbon tax is a foundational element of a plan to meet the Paris emissions targets that Canada signed onto. Is the government actually meeting its Paris targets? The answer is, no it is not. The government is far off. We know from internal environment ministry reports that in 2016, the government had already fallen 44 megatons short of its Paris agreement targets. In 2017, it had fallen 66 megatons short of its targets. In 2018, it fell 79 megatons short of its targets. However, it gets worse.Last year, when the government calculated that 79 megaton shortfall, it had already created something out of thin air called the land use and land use change in forestry component. The acronym is LULUCF. It essentially says that Canada sequesters carbon in its natural landscape, forests, grasslands, wetlands and farmlands. We are sequestering this carbon. The reality is that the government has not done the science to prove that, in fact, a net sequestration is taking place. Available science, which is spotty at best, indicates that since about 2000-01, Canada has been a net contributor toward emissions from our natural landscape. The government has said that the science may not be there, that the Paris agreement does not allow Canada to account for this 24 extra megatons of emission reductions, but it will take it anyway. It says that Canada is only 79 megatons short. If we factor in this unsubstantiated claim that the government will reduce emissions through natural landscape, it is actually 103 megatons short.Is the government meeting its Paris targets, which was the goal of the carbon tax, the foundational element of the Liberal climate change plan? The Liberals are not even meeting those targets and they are falling further behind every year.Is the Liberal plan a failure? Absolutely, and members will have to agree with me. If we look at what is being measured and accountability for what we are delivering for the plan, the Liberals are way off the mark.(1040)Very briefly, we are going to be rolling out our own environment plan tomorrow. It is going to give Canada a better chance, the best chance, to meet its Paris targets. Therefore, I strongly support the motion before us, replacing the Liberal carbon tax plan with a real plan to address climate change.Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGasolineGoods and services taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsPan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate ChangeSplitting speaking timeTax policyAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, actually, Mr. Harper does not support a carbon tax and I can tell the member why. Mr. Mark Gerretsen: I will send you the link. There's a video.Hon. Ed Fast: Mr. Speaker, we have a perfect example in Canada of a failed carbon tax policy, which is in my home province of British Columbia. It introduced a carbon tax back in 2008 with three promises. Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Like you did.Hon. Ed Fast: Mr. Speaker, he is heckling me. Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Carbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingOpposition motionsMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank you for that admonishment. In 2008, the British Columbia government of the day, which was a Liberal government by the way, made three promises about the carbon tax in B.C. First, it would be revenue neutral. In other words, we would take one dollar out of one pocket and put it back in the other pocket of the taxpayer. For a law that was in place, what is to date? Is the tax revenue neutral? No, it was eliminated, and it is now a cash cow for the government. The second promise that was broken was that it would be capped at $30 per tonne of emissions. That promise was broken. Today that tax is $40 per tonne and going up every year. The third promise was that it would reduce overall carbon emissions in B.C., but today those emissions continue to go up and up. These three broken promises prove the point that carbon taxation does not work.British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxGovernment revenuesGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAlexandreBoulericeRosemont—La Petite-Patrie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, one more sleep and the member will be able to see our climate change plan, our environment plan, writ large. We believe it will give Canada the best chance of meeting the Paris targets. Am I going to scoop our leader with that announcement? Of course, I am not. However, I believe the member is genuine in wanting to make progress in addressing our emissions. They are global emissions, by the way, because this is a global challenge that requires a global response. Canada is perfectly positioned to deliver on that response.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsAlexandreBoulericeRosemont—La Petite-PatrieDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Abbotsford for his contribution to our country and to our debate today by putting forward his motion, one I am happy to speak to and support. To me, this is an important subject, and I will explain why.Climate change has had a serious impact on my riding and on British Columbia in general. I would like to give an example. The science shows us that our winters are not as cold as they once were. Because our winters are not as cold, the mountain pine beetle has managed to survive through the winter months and not be killed off. This, in turn, has allowed the pine beetle to thrive, and in turn, it has devastated our forests. That has created two problems. One is an economic problem. Throughout B.C. and my riding, we have had a number of lumber mill closures. This can have a devastating impact on small rural communities. It is simply devastating. One of the reasons for these mill closures is a lack of fibre. Because too much forest has been killed off by the pine beetle, there is not enough supply for timber. That is one major problem.The second major problem is that all this dead timber, combined with our hot summers, has basically created a powder keg of fuel for a wildfire. Make no mistake. Be the cause lightning or humans, when there is a forest fire, this dead beetle wood is producing wildfire activity the likes of which British Columbia has never seen. This not only hurts tourism but can also harm human health. Those with respiratory issues have serious problems dealing with all the smoke and ash. There is also a loss of homes and small businesses and a massive cost for fighting those fires. It is all part of a serious problem.However, here is the thing: the carbon tax does not stop this. It does nothing to help relieve the situation. The Liberals like to pretend otherwise, but after 10 years of having the carbon tax in British Columbia, our forest fire situation only looks more dire. Let us overlook that fact for a moment and see if the carbon tax is working otherwise in British Columbia. Total greenhouse gas emissions in B.C. fell in the period between 2004 and 2008. Much of this paralleled what happened nationally with greenhouse gas emissions, and this was mainly attributed to the worldwide economic meltdown that occurred during the later part of that time frame.In the summer of 2008, former premier Gordon Campbell introduced Canada's first carbon tax in the run-up to the 2009 B.C. general election. The B.C. NDP opposed the carbon tax at that time.What has happened in B.C. since the carbon tax was introduced in late 2008? It is a great question. I hate to break this fact to the Liberal government, but total greenhouse emissions in British Columbia have gone up. Yes, they have gone up. In fact, there has been a 1.5% increase in emissions in B.C. since 2015 alone. Let me repeat that for the benefit of the Minister of Environment. Since 2015, there has been a 1.5% increase in emissions in British Columbia, despite its having a carbon tax. In other words, the carbon tax is not working.We have also discovered something else. It is called carbon leakage. What is carbon leakage? Let me give members an example. In 2008, when the carbon tax was first introduced in British Columbia, basically 100%, of all cement used in British Columbia was manufactured in British Columbia. Well, why not? Concrete is not exactly a lightweight, inexpensive product to import and then transport to other jurisdictions. What happened when B.C.-produced concrete became subject to a carbon tax in 2008? Naturally, it became more expensive. By 2014, B.C.-produced concrete accounted for roughly 65% of all concrete used in British Columbia, because cheaper concrete was being imported from jurisdictions with no carbon tax. That is a 35% loss of market share in B.C.'s own market.Of course, our federal Liberal government knows all about this. That is why, quietly last summer, the Liberals started giving carbon tax exemptions to some of Canada's biggest polluters. However, there is no exemption for small business in their plan, or in my home province, for the average middle-class family. In fact, in B.C., the NDP has now turned the carbon tax into a billion-dollar tax grab that hits families and small business owners hard.(1050)Ironically, the B.C. government is intervening in the carbon tax jurisdictional litigation, arguing that if other provinces do not have a carbon tax, B.C.'s competitiveness will be harmed. Of course, the same principle applies to Canada, where we try to compete with some of our major trading partners that do not have a carbon tax. This is how carbon leakage is defined in British Columbia:industries that compete with industry in countries that may have low or no carbon price. If BC industry loses market share to more polluting competitors, known as carbon leakage, it affects our economy and does not reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.To recap what we know from the British Columbia example, after 10 years of having a carbon tax, it has done nothing to prevent the serious climate-change-related problems we are facing in British Columbia. Worse yet, the evidence also shows that it has done nothing to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions. They have actually increased since the B.C. carbon tax was created. It makes British Columbia less competitive, all the while letting major polluters off the hook. Basically, all the carbon tax has done in British Columbia is act as a giant tax grab for the NDP government.Here is another fact I will share on this point. The B.C. LNG project we often hear the Liberal government boast about, which, by the way, was first approved by the previous government, has been totally exempted from carbon tax increases. The only way this went forward was that it was totally exempted from future carbon tax increases, and it will be a major contributor to increasing B.C. greenhouse gas emissions. Honestly, none of this reconciles, and the facts clearly show that.If members doubt the facts and evidence from British Columbia, look no further than our very own Parliamentary Budget Officer, who last week made it very clear that the present course of the Liberal government will completely and totally fail to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets it has set, unless, of course, the Liberal government desires to massively increase the carbon tax load for everyday citizens. That point could not have been made any clearer.We are seeing mixed messages from the Liberal government on this. Will the Liberals or will they not massively raise the carbon tax if re-elected? We do not get clear answers. Where does that leave us? It leaves us here with this motion, because it states the obvious. The carbon tax is not working. It continues to fail, so let us do away with this carbon tax so that we can focus on and find other ways to reduce our emissions. We have a collective responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint. We cannot sit back, watch this carbon tax continue to fail and try to pretend that we are taking action on reducing emissions, when in reality, we are not. If anything, we are taking action to provide more carbon tax exemptions to major polluters, and much like the B.C. LNG project, to major projects.We can pretend that this is not occurring, but it is. Why did the Liberal government provide a 95.5% carbon-tax discount on dirty coal power in the province of New Brunswick? Does anyone seriously believe that making coal power cheaper is any way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? It is a total farce, and we sell ourselves and our future short if we continue to play that charade.I care about our children's future as much as the members opposite, so let us stop the charade today. Let us admit that the carbon tax has failed. Not only has it failed, but it continues to fail. Yes, it may work in theory if everyone were on the same page, but carbon leakage is proof that we are not. Let us do away with the carbon tax and instead let us work together and focus on real, tangible ways to reduce our emissions and lower our carbon footprint.That is why I am going to be voting in support of this motion today. Again, I thank the member for Abbotsford for his leadership on this file.British ColumbiaBrush, prairie and forest firesCarbon pricingCarbon taxCoal-fired generating stationsCompetitionConcrete industryElectric powerExemption provisionsGreenhouse gasesInvasive speciesNatural gasOpposition motionsPine beetlesSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSoftwood lumber industryEdFastHon.AbbotsfordLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1055)[English]Mr. Speaker, many of us here have had the experience of raising children. It is a difficult situation. It is best left to individual parents to raise their children. That is something Conservatives believe parents can do best.However, when we come to this place, we should be prepared to talk about what works and what does not. We have a Parliamentary Budget Officer who has said that with the tools that have been presented so far by the current government, particularly the so-called price on carbon the Liberals continue to talk about, we will not meet the Paris targets by 79 million megatonnes. That is a failure of the government.We will be presenting our full plan. I am mindful that the member in his “Real Change” platform had a single paragraph about working with provinces to deal with an international problem. We have provinces that are taking the government to court. We have provinces that are pushing back. The current government has done nothing to work with the provinces. We cannot afford to simply continue to say that father knows best and push on the provinces and not find ways to work together to deal with this issue. The provinces have the majority of the policy levers when it comes to energy, transportation and housing. This member should realize that.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsPan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate ChangeLloydLongfieldGuelphDonDaviesVancouver Kingsway//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1100)[English]Mr. Speaker, when one of the NDP members rose on this debate a few weeks ago, I quoted specifically from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in British Columbia. It actually said that the last year of data we had indicated a 1.5% increase in emissions. It is on the B.C. government website. I suggest that the member look at it and he can inform himself. Obviously, during the economic recession post-2008, we saw a decline in industrial activity. The member might want to familiarize himself with the latest part of the cycle we are in.When it comes to the plan, the Parliamentary Budget Officer evaluated the current government's plan and found it wanting. That is where we need to have the starting point. We will be presenting our plan, and the member can choose which plan he thinks is best.British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsDonDaviesVancouver KingswaySeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1120)[English]Mr. Speaker, the government in its first two years before introducing its so-called price on carbon, gave places like Nova Scotia large exemptions from their coal-fired facilities so they could go much longer than was originally brought into place by the previous government.The second thing that group has done, with its so-called price on carbon, is to exempt 95.5% for coal-fired production, dirty coal, in New Brunswick. The member says that somehow the Liberals are the white knights who will deal with these issues. They are actually the government that is giving massive exemptions to large emitters. How do they square that?Carbon pricingCarbon taxCoal-fired generating stationsExemption provisionsOpposition motionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1145)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his remarks.Obviously, we disagree with about 95% of what he said, but we do agree with the remaining 5%, specifically, when he so rightly pointed out that the Conservatives are logical and consistent, and they are too.The question I have for my colleague is very simple. We do not believe that putting a price on pollution reduces emissions. That is why we are opposed to the Liberal carbon tax, which has been imposed right across the country, regardless of what the provinces want. That is not right, and at the very least, is shows the government's outrageous disregard for jurisdictional boundaries.On November 29, the Premier of Quebec tabled in the Quebec National Assembly a document prepared by the Quebec ministry of the environment on greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2016. That document indicates that, even though the carbon exchange was in place, and I know what I am talking about since I voted on it when I was a member of the National Assembly, GHG emissions did not drop in 2014, 2015 or 2016. In fact, they actually increased.I would like the hon. member to explain to us why he thinks the carbon tax, the tax on pollution, does not lower greenhouse gas emissions, as proven by science and the real and tangible experience of Quebec.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsAlexandreBoulericeRosemont—La Petite-PatrieAlexandreBoulericeRosemont—La Petite-Patrie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (1200)[English]Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed working with my friend on biosphere reserve issues, but I disagree with pretty much everything he says. I find the NDP strangely hilarious. On one hand, it tries to defend the steel industry in Hamilton and talks about how important those jobs are, yet it works like crazy to stop pipelines that are made of steel.I used to have a lot of time for the old NDP and members like Ed Schreyer, the party of the working person and so on. This new NDP is finished when it comes to dealing with the working person. The only party that cares about working people in this country is the Conservative Party.Today's poll showed what working people have to say. They do not want to pay a carbon tax. The Conservative environmental plan to be released tomorrow will be a groundbreaking plan.The member talked about electrifying this country. This country will be electrified when that man in that chair is the Prime Minister of this country.I have two questions for my friend. One, how high does he want the carbon tax to go? I notice that he did not give a number. Two, given that the NDP rails away against the oil and gas industry all the time, will he put his money where his mouth is and recommend every union pension fund and the Canada pension plan divest themselves completely of every single oil and gas investment?Carbon pricingCarbon taxOil and gasOpposition motionsRegistered pension plansGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1200)[English]Mr. Speaker, since the NDP purports to be for the working man, there are a number of people in Skeena—Bulkley Valley who want to know where the NDP stands on the B.C. LNG, which would not have gone forward if the B.C. NDP government had not lowered the taxes on the previous regime established by the B.C. Liberals he purports to dislike so much.Second, in addition to that tax relief, his party has been completely off the radar on whether it supports it. I can look Greta in the eyes and say that we are reducing global emissions with clean LNG to replace dirty coal. I would hope that she would support that on the science.British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxNatural gasOpposition motionsGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, today we are debating the following motion that Conservatives have put forward:That, given that the carbon tax will not reduce emissions at its current rate and it is already making life more expensive for Canadians, the House call on the government to repeal the carbon tax and replace it with a real environment plan. As part of debate on this motion today, I would like to break down what climate change is, what causes it, and then show why the Liberals' carbon tax scheme, which is currently at $40 a tonne, will not reduce emissions in Canada, why it exacerbates global climate change and why it is harmful to our economy, but I will do so in the following context. Earlier in debate today, the member for Kingston and the Islands said that by raising this motion, the Conservatives were “playing with the lives of future generations”. Recently, something awesome happened to me. I became a stepmom and a step-grandmother. To one tiny, very sticky human being, I am known as nana. My stepson Kepi is watching the debate today and my stepdaughter Tori really cares about this issue because she has a son. This one is for them, not for the member for Kingston and the Islands.What is climate change and what causes it? Climate change can be broadly described by global or regional climate patterns, in particular a change apparent from the mid- to late 20th century onward and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels. Climate change is caused by changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, for example industrial emissions, cars, volcanoes, forest fires; deforestation and land use changes; sulfate aerosols; and soot particles or black carbon. If that is what it is and what it is caused by, then how do we reduce it?Let us start with the Liberal plan, which is the subject of the motion today. To the member for Kingston and the Islands and everyone who has mentioned children as the reason for debate on this issue, Liberals have staked their children's future on a $40-a-tonne price on carbon. If we know what the causes of climate change are, as I read them out, then the policy objective should be to put in place a policy instrument that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. That is what we are managing to, to save the planet for our children. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us as legislators to ask, given the severity and gravity of this, if the Liberals' purported plan would work.Those who have a background in economics will know that there is a concept called price elasticity. I am oversimplifying this, but it means that if a price changes on a good, people will buy more or less of it. When the price changes on goods and people buy more or less of them, those are highly price-elastic goods. When the price of goods increases but people still have to buy them and their consumption does not change, those goods are called price-inelastic. I am raising this because this concept is super important when we talk about whether a carbon tax would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If an additional price is put on carbon, and I mean things like gas in our tanks, what we use to heat our homes or electricity, if it is produced by fossil fuels, if the government is going to put a price on that and that is its purported way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in theory, Liberals are hoping and praying that people will buy less carbon because the price has increased.The government has refused to table or make public any sort of data that it has from modelling the price elasticity of carbon. That is really unfortunate, because it does not allow us as legislators, given what is at stake for our kids, to look at whether this is actually going to work. (1210)The reality is that, in Canada, where it is very cold and we have to use fossil fuels to heat our homes and to drive around, as we do not have the same sort of transit infrastructure that a small European country would have, there really is not a substitute good for carbon. In Canada, carbon is price-inelastic, which means that putting a price of $40 a tonne on carbon, as the Liberals have done, is not actually going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.The reason this motion is before the House today is that this is an important issue, but if we want to save the planet for our kids and we know that it is not going to work, then we have to talk about other solutions, not just cling to it out of political expediency.Members do not have to take my word for it. This year, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, a non-partisan agent of Parliament whose job it is to do this type of modelling, said that the Liberals' carbon tax would need to be $102 per tonne in every province and territory in order to meet the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the government, which it is purportedly managing to.When asked if she would raise the tax to this level, the environment minister said no. Praise the Lord the answer was no. Essentially, the Liberals have said that they are setting a $40-per-tonne price on carbon. They know it is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and they are not going to raise it to a higher level. What have we done in four years? The Liberals' own released report this year shows that Canada is actually further from the Paris target than last year. New numbers released by Environment Canada show that Canada is on track to fall 79 megatonnes short of its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target, and that is up from 66 megatonnes last year.These guys are standing here doing something that I like to call apocalypse porn. It is where people stand and talk about all the terrible things that are happening and focus on that to deflect any sort of legislative inquiry into the efficacy of their policies. We know it is not going to work. That is why the motion is in front of us today. Liberals shut down debate when any of their climate plans are questioned. If they know that their plan will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions and they will not raise the tax, then why have they put this forward?I could speculate at length about that. I think this is a cash grab for the Liberals' out-of-control spending. This is a way for some of the senior cabinet ministers to get on speaking tours and perhaps position themselves for jobs in the industry of people who do not really have plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but make a lot as environmental consultants. I think that is what they are managing to, and that is really unfortunate, given that the member for Kingston and the Islands appealed to the children. I do not want my kids to see a Liberal carbon plan where what the Liberals are managing to, instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is jobs after politics, because they have said the right things but have done nothing.I want to debunk some of the talking points that the Liberals have been throwing out today in opposition to the motion. First of all, they are citing the Nobel Prize-winning economist who said that this is the way to fight climate change. Let us go through some of the work that Dr. Nordhaus actually did. He acknowledges that the carbon tax raises many practical design and implementation questions. There are issues with cross-border taxes on carbon emissions and issues with administrative inefficiencies. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that the cost of administering the carbon tax in Canada, which, as I have shown, is ineffective and does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is $174 million, outside of the cost to Canadians in their pocketbooks. There is no price elasticity data by the Liberals to show that the $40 per tonne would actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For comparison, the United Nations report the Liberals often cite actually estimates that the government would need to impose effective carbon prices of $135 to $5,500 per tonne of carbon dioxide by 2030. This does not take into account any sort of economic growth modelling or what would happen to the growth of the Canadian or global economy at this point in time. There are other things that this professor talks about in terms of some of the inefficiencies and uncertainties that could be applied to the Liberals' ineffective plan.(1215)In one of his books, he writes, “The exact pace and extent of future CO2-induced warming are highly uncertain, particularly beyond the next few decades.” Yes, there might be a consensus view, but he notes, “Science does not proceed by majority vote.”He notes that costs are key:People want to be assured...that [carbon emissions] targets are not simply the result of overly concerned environmentalists who are intent on saving their ecosystems at the expense of humans.... People want to compare costs and benefits.... It will not be sufficient to say: “Ecosystems are priceless”, or “We must pay any cost to save the polar bears.”He also notes that modelling is hard. The Financial Post said:Of his own computer exercises looking into the implications of climate tipping points, he emphasizes that the assumptions he makes “are at the outer limit of what seems plausible and have no solid basis in empirical estimates of damages”. This is a complex issue with complex economic modelling, which the Liberals have not explained to Canadians. They have not talked about the fact that the $40-a-tonne price on carbon will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet they are asking Canadians to pay a very high cost for that. It is morally bankrupt and it is wrong.Nordhaus also notes that all countries, the poorest countries included, need to be included in globally binding emissions structures in order for this to have any effect. However, the Liberals are not doing any of the things cited by this economist, absolutely zero.A few other things have been raised in debate today. The member for Vancouver Kingsway cited B.C.'s carbon tax. He cited this 2.2% emissions reduction as if it were a victory. However, he is looking at data in the context of the Lower Mainland, B.C. It is warmer there, and there is more public transit. The price elasticity for carbon there might be different from that in rural Saskatchewan. If we are looking for a solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, it has to be a solution that applies to the entire country without harming our economy.Members opposite brought up Preston Manning. I think Preston Manning's approach on this is absolutely wrong. I question why Preston Manning is doing this. I would even go as far as to speculate that he is doing this to raise funds for his think tank, not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I would be happy to debate Preston Manning, on any stage, on the same data I have put forward, because this is not right and it will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.Members opposite have also cited the Pope. Members cannot stand in the House of Commons and say that we need a science-based, empirical response to climate change, not produce their own data and then cite religion, from a man who would not even meet the litmus test to run as a Liberal candidate.Members opposite have talked about revenue neutrality. I will explain this concept for those listening and for my stepson, Kepi. According to the government, and only a Liberal would say that, revenue neutrality means paying a tax and getting an equal amount of money for it. That is crazy, because, as members know, it costs money to take money away. People are paid from the $174-million administrative cost. People will not get the same amount of money back in a cascading tax that affects every single level of production. This has been borne out by data reports in British Columbia, which have shown that the tax has become regressive. It is not revenue-neutral anymore. Furthermore, with respect to the purported rebate that is going to Canadians, which the government said was factually correct, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, in an announcement, showed that the average carbon tax rebate Canadians received in 2018 was significantly lower than the amount the Liberals claimed Canadians would receive.If it is not reducing greenhouse gas emissions, people are paying more and it is not revenue-neutral, why would we accept this as the status quo when talking about what we are doing for the children? It is just crazy.In addition, the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens all say that this will not affect the economy. That is bunk. I will tie this into the concept that the Liberal carbon tax actually exacerbates climate change globally, because when we tax goods that are produced under high environmental standards, such as we have in Canada, we actually displace them with goods coming from higher-carbon jurisdictions. A perfect example of this is steel production in Canada.(1220)When our steel producers in Ontario were subject to a carbon tax and Chinese steel was not, and the Chinese government was able to dump steel in Canada at lower prices, that was actually displacing goods in Canada that were produced under lower emissions standards.We, as a country, can put a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions until the cows come home, but as long as we are buying goods from China, India, Brazil and the United States, we are not going to tackle the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. There needs to be a globally binding system that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, with binding targets, for this to work.What should we do? Tomorrow, my leader is going to announce a very comprehensive plan that addresses many of these issues. Again, I do not want to scoop him. We need a made-in-Canada solution that addresses the fact that we have a regionalized economy. It is cold here. There are not a lot of substitutes for our products. We have a wealth of technology that needs the right incentives to be adopted. We need energy efficiency standards. This is just me thinking up things.Our global climate action cannot be the Minister of Environment going on a photo op tour where the most environmentally friendly thing she did was sit at a table covered in grass and drink cocktails. That was not Canada using its role on the world stage to incent climate action.I want to speak to the Conservative record. The Liberals can say that the Conservatives do not have a plan until the cows come home, but there is one inconvenient truth: there is only one time in Canada's history when we saw a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions while the economy grew. It was under Stephen Harper's government, when we imposed regulations on passenger vehicles. I would also argue with the member for Vancouver Kingsway about any reductions they saw in B.C. What about the passenger vehicle reductions we put in place?The coal-fired regulations on Canada's coal-fired sector came in under a Conservative government, because we believe, and here is the underlying point, that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without undermining the Canadian economy. I am standing here as an Alberta MP, because these guys have used their apocalypse porn to put my riding out of work. The Liberals have done nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They have stood here and railed, “What about the children?” The Liberals have done nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and they have put my riding out of work. That is morally bankrupt. That is crass politics. Members should be concerned about what political party they stand for after this debate. It is partisan. The Liberals stand here, apocalypse porn and all, behind policy instruments that do not work, and then they want me to look at my children and my grandchild and say, “Yeah, it was great. It was non-partisan. We did nothing.” That is wrong.I was actually at an event with Al Gore, and I debated Al Gore. I wish that event had been public, because it was a lot of fun. There is a lot of inconvenient truth about the buzzwords that come out of these communities that do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.We have a responsibility to take action in Canada. Conservatives have done that. In fact, the last Liberal government saw greenhouse gas emissions rise by 30% when it was in government. The Liberals are probably on track to do the same here. This should be partisan, because these guys have made this all about falsehoods, all about policy, and have done nothing to materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change said that it is time to be debating solutions and implementing those solutions. The kids are all right. They want us to take action. They do. However, a price on carbon that does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and puts people out of work in this country, and allows countries like China to get away with producing goods in a high-carbon jurisdiction while we buy them, is not action. That is politics. That is morally bankrupt.Since this might be one of the last times I speak in this House in this Parliament, I want to thank all my constituents in Calgary Nose Hill for giving me the opportunity to fight for them. It is important. I would just say to them that we fought hard. We fought the Liberal government at every turn, and we have had great success in holding it to account and making it step back on some of the policies.Now the time to fight goes to my constituents, so I ask them to join us. British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingCoal-fired generating stationsCostsFossil fuelsGreenhouse gasesInternational tradeOpposition motionsTax refundsGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel: (1225)[English]Mr. Speaker, a price on carbon at $40 a tonne does not magically change the fact that the most efficient way of getting energy is from a carbon molecule. When we look at Canada, what the member is trying to spin here is that there is a substitute good for gas in a combine or for driving to work in a city that does not have public transit.Let us talk about what a carbon tax will do to incent substitute goods and the adoption of clean tech. What that $40 a tonne would do is chase investment capital away from Canada in areas where we could be developing receptor capacity for these types of initiatives. For example, in the energy sector, we are seeing capital leave the country, when we should be putting regulations in place to ensure that there is adoption of that technology without pricing us out of competitiveness with the United States. The member talks about this magical structure, which his own policy upends and uproots and makes impossible to achieve. That is why this is so damaging. That $40 a tonne puts Canada out of the game with respect to adopting clean tech and the development and adoption of substitute goods.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsRenewable energy and fuelMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel: (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is the member who just stood up and said that it was a non-partisan issue, and now he is bringing up partisan politics. I spent an entire component of my speech talking about the fact that B.C.'s carbon tax has been shown to be regressive. It is not revenue neutral. His own colleague cited that it only had a 2.2% impact. I also went through the fact that Vancouver is not as cold as the rest of the country. It has trains that take people everywhere. That is not the same as rural Saskatchewan. That is why we need to look at a national policy that recognizes that we are a natural resources-based, agriculture-based, very large, cold country. With respect to solutions, I literally spent the last half of my speech talking about that in very detailed terms. If my colleague wants some further reading to edify himself, I wrote a detailed article in the National Post in 2016 outlining this, which has been shared and re-tweeted many times.British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel: (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, that guy treats this like a joke, and it is not. He is building his argument on a premise, which I completely debunked for over 20 minutes. A $40-a-tonne price on carbon is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Former premier Clark, in 2016, talked about the fact that B.C. might be paying the carbon tax twice under the Liberal government's scheme. That is inappropriate. The fact that so many premiers in this country won mandates to scrap carbon taxes underscores that a punitive tax like this is going to have disproportional effects in different regions of the country, because we have regional economies that have different needs in terms of energy use and energy profiles. That is why we need to move away from a unilateral tax that harms our economy and does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Notice how many times that man mentioned the names of different premiers. That is because we are going into a federal election, and the Liberals are desperately doing everything they can to try to get away from the fact that Canadians are calling them on their lies on this stuff. Canadians are concerned about climate change. We have had enough. Canadians have had enough. I am more than proud to stand against a failed, do-nothing, empty, virtue-signalling, paper water-box sort of policy that will not reduce climate change in this country.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthCathayWagantallYorkton—Melville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciated hearing my colleague's perspective on the answer given to me by the minister to a question I posed on behalf of an energy-efficient home builder in my riding who is concerned about the increased cost of his products as a result of the carbon tax.Her response to me was about a company named VeriForm that is doing remarkable things. It reduced its greenhouse gases by 80% and increased its bottom line by $1 million. What she failed to mention was that this happened in 2014, under the Harper government.Building and construction industryCarbon pricingCarbon taxGreen buildingsOpposition motionsMichelleRempelHon.Calgary Nose HillMichelleRempelHon.Calgary Nose Hill//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel: (1235)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am so glad that my colleague brought this up. We need to have an economic environment in which we are incenting the adoption and development of clean alternatives. When we have a high-price jurisdiction, where intellectual capital and actual fiscal capital leaves because of punitive policies that do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we are not going to see that sort of thing happen. The member is spot on.I just want to build on the point of empty virtue signalling. The Liberal government dumped millions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River. It has cut funding for lake cleanup. My friend Sarah Fischer made a nine-second video last week mocking the Prime Minister's paper box water bottle thing. He could not even name what he was doing to reduce plastic waste in the country. I wonder when he last pumped a tank of gas or went grocery shopping. He is so out of touch. Her video closed with “doesn't work”. To me, there could not have been a more concise, accurate summary of the empty virtue-signalling, do-nothing, environmentally damaging, self-aggrandizing, self-promoting hogwash that we have seen from the Liberal government when it comes to the environment and the economy.I am so proud to stand up to fight this and fight for better.Building and construction industryCarbon pricingCarbon taxGreen buildingsOpposition motionsCathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1300)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think the member opposite is following the advice of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, “if you say it louder...people will totally believe it.”He should know that over the past year and a half, every single provincial government that has pushed headlong into this consumer-directed carbon tax has been defeated at the polls. Canadians are repeatedly saying that enough is enough. They are tired of being nickel-and-dimed.The parliamentary secretary will know that the Alberta government got rid of its carbon tax, but it does have a price on the largest emitters in the province. The member just said that basically the federal backstop is only meant to impose a carbon tax on those jurisdictions that are not pricing it. Alberta is, and we have been told by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change that, as of January 1, we will be paying two taxes, one for the largest emitters based in Alberta, which is our jurisdiction, in our province, and now this revenue-generating carbon tax that Albertans have said they do not want.What does the parliamentary secretary have to say to that? Let us say goodbye to the member for Edmonton Centre, too.Carbon pricingCarbon taxFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOpposition motionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Larry Maguire (Brandon—Souris, CPC): (1305)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thought all along that the member for Winnipeg North just liked to debate so he could hear himself. However, I digress.I am pleased to speak today to the Conservative Party of Canada's opposition motion on the topic of climate change and the environment. I will be sharing my time with the member for Perth—Wellington.I want to say that only the Liberal government could talk about the environment for four years, break its promise to meet the Paris accord on climate change and end up taxing Canadians to cover up its incompetence, overspending and environmental management.As I get into my presentation, for those who know me and my background, I have always strived to put forward ideas and solutions to the many issues facing my constituency and our nation. While I am not as good as giving one-liners or the pithy comments of social media that seem to attract the most attention, in my own way I have tried to reach out and build consensus to get things done.Today, I want to apply that attitude to the larger issue of the environment, conservation and climate change. Like many members in the chamber, I represent a constituency that is geographically large. All across Westman, farms and communities dot the prairie landscape, as they have for many generations. Almost half of the people I represent live outside the city of Brandon in the 20-plus municipalities located in the riding.These are some of the most hard-working, down to earth and determined people we will meet anywhere in this great country of ours. Living in rural Canada has its unique challenges. With those challenges also comes a way of life like none other. Our connection to the land, air and water is strong, because our livelihoods quite literally depend on it. As someone who farmed for most of my life, I firmly believe that if we take care of the land, it will take care of us. My father raised my brother and me on those words, and I have lived by them. I want to immediately dispel any notion that farmers or rural folks who oppose the carbon tax do not care about the environment. They do care. They care about it immensely. They just have a serious issue about being forced to pay a new tax imposed on provinces that will disproportionately impact rural people.Let us put ourselves in their boots for a moment. Many families must drive long distances to get to work. Many seniors have to drive into Brandon to go to either the doctor or the optician. Parents have to drive their kids to various towns for sports or choir practice.Let us never forget students at Brandon University and Assiniboine Community College who still live on the farm or in their rural community and make the daily commute to the city to attend classes. These are not optional things that people can just decide not to do or do less. There are no subways or bus routes for their purposes. Trust me; if people did not have to drive in our blustery winters, they would not.From the very beginning, I believe the government has mishandled the rollout of the carbon tax. First and foremost, many Canadians, particularly many of the people I represent, have trepidations about the federal government's priorities at the best of times. Saying the federal government is about to impose a new tax but not to worry because people will not feel the pinch, while at the same time it will combat climate change, is not the best way to get buy-in from those who have skepticism.Second, when we tried in vain to get the financial data out of the Minister of Finance, it was so heavily blacked out that it was meaningless. Third, when the Province of Manitoba put forward a plan that would have reduced carbon emissions, the federal government rejected it. Officials were told that no matter how many tonnes of CO2 their plan would reduce, it had to include a $50 a tonne carbon tax.My province tried to work in good faith with the federal government and was told to go pound sand. No wonder it has decided to launch its own court case. If that is the way federalism now works in this country, it is not hard to understand why premiers are concerned about the Liberal government's other initiatives, such as Bill C-48 and Bill C-69.It also troubles me that, in Canadian politics, the litmus test on one's commitment to the environment is now centred on supporting a $50 a tonne carbon tax. While that may be the case in some circles, I can assure MPs that everyday Canadians do not use this lens when talking with their family and friends. It is not that my Conservative colleagues or people who oppose the carbon tax do not care about the changing climate; it is that we do not believe the carbon tax is the best way of addressing it.(1310)Tomorrow, our leader will outline the vision and present an alternative to what is being imposed by the current federal government. Due to the already challenging political discourse on this issue, I can only imagine the over-the-top language being drafted now in response. I want to urge the Liberals to hold off on issuing their canned response before the speech has even been given. The Liberals have been waiting ever so patiently, so I fully expect that they will be paying close attention. I want the government to recognize that there are more ways to deal with climate change than applying a tax on the fuel that families put in their minivans. I want the Liberals to recognize that applying a carbon tax on the energy used to drive farmers' grain only adds further cost to the industry that is already facing challenging commodity prices and markets that slam shut. I want them to start listening to farmers who have ideas that can reduce and sequester carbon without applying a new tax. The agricultural industry has made great strides in environmental management that benefit society, virtually by its own innovation at its own cost. There are proven models out there that have had tangible and meaningful results. I have always been a proponent, as examples, of implementing an alternative land use services program and the expansion of wetland restoration programs. For those who have not listened to the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, I can assure them his message about eating more beef and how it is good for the environment is grounded in empirical science. Over the years as a farm leader, an MLA and now an MP, I have dealt with many issues that impact our environment. Back home, people do not apply a litmus test to determine our commitment to an issue. We focus on bringing people together to work on solutions. Perhaps one day those values will rub off on all of us in this chamber when we must wade through our differences.I want to give just one example from which we can learn. Manitoba has been prone to floods for as long as history has been recorded. Being at the bottom of the basin, we have had to deal with spring runoff and localized flooding that has impacted communities for generations. It was a Progressive Conservative premier, Duff Roblin, who implemented a series of public works projects that protected communities in the Assiniboine and Red River basins, and particularly impacted the flooding that would have occurred in the city of Winnipeg in 1997. Since then, there have been significant enhancements to flood protection up and down the Souris, Red and Assiniboine rivers. I want to say that this issue in Manitoba is non-partisan.Our previous federal Conservative and provincial NDP governments both invested in projects that protected the city of Brandon and the towns of Melita, Reston, Souris, Deloraine, Elkhorn and Wawanesa. We also expanded the Red River Floodway, which was completed under budget. It was after the most recent flood that many people in the Assiniboine River basin decided that we needed to work together. Under the leadership of Allan Preston and Wanda McFadyen, they spearheaded an initiative that brought the governments of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and North Dakota under one organization, alongside municipalities, farmers and conservation districts. We all live within the same watershed, and we had to stop working in silos.We know a one-size-fits-all approach to water management does not work, and that is why a one-size-fits-all approach will not work with a carbon tax. That is why it was so frustrating to see how the federal government tossed aside the climate change plan put forward by Manitoba. Without a change in attitude, more and more Canadians will look at the rigid position taken by some in the government and tune out. We also know that climate change is a global problem that requires global solutions. The current approach does not reflect that reality.I firmly believe that Canada is well positioned to provide these solutions. Tomorrow we will start outlining our alternative to the carbon tax and begin the conversation on what will replace it. I encourage my Liberal colleagues, particularly those who represent rural areas, to join me in supporting this motion. I ask them to please stand up for their constituents, repeal the carbon tax and replace it with a real environmental plan.Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxFarming and farmersFloodsOpposition motionsRetention pondsRural communitiesSplitting speaking timeTransportationKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1315)[English]Before we go to questions and comments, I want to thank the hon. member for Burnaby North—Seymour for stopping that inadvertent sound from a device near him. It was not his, but I appreciate his efforts in that respect.Questions and comments, the hon. member for Toronto—Danforth.LarryMaguireBrandon—SourisJulieDabrusinToronto—Danforth//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Larry Maguire: (1320)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her very pertinent question. However, coming from a government that has missed its Paris target by 79 megatonnes, it is not sound management.We also know the tax package the Liberal government has come up with has fallen very short. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was very clear about the decrease that would be required in greenhouse gas emissions in order for Canada to meet the Paris climate target. He also said we would need a tax of about $102 a tonne to meet that target, versus the $50 a tonne the government is talking about today. Therefore, the current government does not have a real plan for environmental management; rather, it has a tax plan, and that tax plan has failed, which I thank my colleague for pointing out. It has failed in all the provinces in which the government said people would be better off with the tax than without it. The best thing to do is leave the money in people's pockets, so they can make environmental management changes in their own operations, as the agricultural industry has done over the past 50 or 100 years.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsPan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate ChangeJulieDabrusinToronto—DanforthElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Larry Maguire: (1320)[English]Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge the fact that we have the ability to be a leader in the world with respect to the management of our climate. As a Conservative member who is sitting on the Arctic climate change committee, I am very aware of the changes that are taking place in that part of the world, and in all areas. The member mentioned Sweden and Norway. From my experience in those two countries, I know that because the Gulf Stream goes right up the coast of Norway, its average temperatures in the winter are 0°C to -6°C. This winter, we hit -50°C six times in Manitoba. There is a difference in the temperatures and in the climates we have to deal with in these areas. The whole process of the Paris accord is something the government has adopted. We voted in favour of it. The levels the present government is targeting are those the Conservative government brought forward. Certainly, at the time we brought them in, they were obtainable targets. However, the government has missed the mark by a mile, and is still adding a tax on people that is not going to benefit them.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsJohnNaterPerth—Wellington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. John Nater (Perth—Wellington, CPC): (1320)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to this motion. Canadians do care about the environment. Canadians care about the environment, and they care about climate change. Constituents in my riding of Perth—Wellington care about the environment and climate change. They tell me that. Small businesses, families and the agricultural community care about the environment. After all, farmers are the original conservationists. They are closest to the ground, closest to the natural resources and closest to the natural environment that they depend on for their livelihoods and way of life, so they care about this. They care about what we as a country and we as a Parliament are doing for the environment and to combat climate change.I also hear from my constituents about the negative impact the policies of the Liberal government are having on their families, their communities and small businesses in Perth—Wellington. They tell me on their doorsteps, write to my office and send emails, and I see it on social media. They are concerned about the rising cost of living. They are concerned about the impact and effect the carbon tax is having on the cost of taking their kids to soccer practice, driving to a part-time job, running their businesses and caring for their families. They are concerned about this. They are concerned that they are being taxed and taxed again, and seeing no tangible impact of those changes. Today's motion is very simple. It calls on the House to express its opinion that we should repeal the carbon tax, which it has been shown will not meet the Paris targets. In fact, it will fall far short of meeting those targets. The motion calls on the House to endorse a real environment plan. I am proud to say that tomorrow Canadians will see what a real environment plan looks like. The government fails to understand that people in my riding and Canadians across the country are not wasteful people. They care about the environment, and they care about their communities. They do not waste. They are already making changes where they can. They have made their best efforts and are continuing to make their best efforts, because they care.I recently came across a comment by a small business owner just outside of St. Marys, Ontario. She wrote that as she listened to our Prime Minister stumble over the question regarding how his family were changing their lifestyle to help the environment, she thought of her husband, whom she called the unintentional environmentalist. He has flown on an airplane once in his life, in 1991, to attend a friend's wedding in B.C. His idea of a holiday is a day trip to a local museum or pioneer village, or a train ride to Toronto to watch a ball game. A fun Saturday night is staying home watching the game on TV. He has never used a fast-food drive-through. He does not even drink coffee. On the rare occasion that he goes out for something to eat, he always goes into the restaurant to dine. When he goes to work, he packs a lunch in a reusable container and fills his water jug from the tap. His favourite drink, milk, is purchased from the local variety store in recyclable jugs. He shops locally, and the limited clothing in his closet comes from work, the township or sports team sources. His little Honda only leaves the driveway when there is a purpose, and he does multiple errands where possible. Christmas and birthday gifts are books, given and received, not trinkets from offshore. One can see his footprint is quite small.That is reflective of so many Canadians, so many of my constituents and so many Canadians across the country who are making an effort. Then they see the Liberal government taxing them more, and they see a Prime Minister who, when asked the very simple question of what he personally and his family are doing, stumbled over his own words and made some incoherent comment about a “drink box-water bottle-sort of thing”. That is not good enough for Canadians. It is not good enough for Canadians who are making a real effort to reduce their carbon footprint. It is not good enough for Canadians who are struggling to get by because of the cost of having the Liberals in office.Rural communities like mine are struggling because of these costs. They do not have the benefit of mass transit systems that our urban cousins have. Someone who works in Atwood but lives in Listowel cannot take a bus to work; someone who lives in Stratford cannot take a subway to St. Marys to visit family, and a person in Arthur cannot take a transit bus to Mount Forest for appointments. It is not possible, yet this carbon tax is putting an added burden on these Canadians.(1325)I often hear about the cost of heating people's homes, and of course the carbon tax is increasing the cost of heating homes. Luckily, the Conservative Party has proposed to lower the cost of heating homes by removing the GST portion of the HST from home heating to help families get ahead.The problem we see is that the Liberals are not talking about an environment plan. It is a tax plan. It is a tax plan that they claim takes with one hand and gives back with the other hand, but we see them reaching into both pockets. Their rebate plan was clearly not as advertised: We saw Canadians in Ontario being told they would receive $307 back, yet the vast majority received far less than promised.We see the Liberals, at every opportunity they get, fearmongering. They say that anyone who is opposed to the carbon tax is somehow a climate change denier. They use strong-man arguments to try to paint hard-working Canadians and the opposition as climate change deniers. However, at the end of the day, we know that the Liberals are just using empty, symbolic gestures rather than taking real action. Real action is what Conservatives take.Real action is what Conservatives will take once again in October when we are given the honour, hopefully, of serving this great country. It was a Conservative government, under Brian Mulroney, that introduced, signed and ratified the acid rain treaty. Contrast that with the Liberal government, which signed the Kyoto protocol and then did nothing. I am proud to be a member of the Conservative government that, during its time in office, actually saw emissions decrease. We often talk about coal-fired power plants. In fact, it was a Conservative government in 2001 in Ontario that began the process of phasing out coal in Ontario, having a meaningful and real impact on emissions in Perth—Wellington and across Canada. In my riding, many people heat their homes with natural gas. It is fascinating that the Liberal carbon tax gives a more favourable rate to coal than it does to natural gas, which is a far cleaner use of electricity and energy. Once again, the Liberals do not care about that. They care about revenues and money, and that is exactly what the Liberal plan is: a tax plan. Yesterday we saw the Liberals vote in favour of declaring a climate change emergency, which is a symbolic gesture but has no meaningful or tangible impact. The NDP member for New Westminster—Burnaby said, “I have to comment on what just transpired. The Liberals are slapping each other on the back because they passed a motion that is meaningless.”That is exactly what we are seeing with the Liberals: meaningless gestures rather than taking real action. Real action is what we will see tomorrow, when the Conservatives unveil our plan.I realize that my time is running short, but I want to make a few final comments. The carbon tax is not benefiting our environment. In fact, in 2016 Canada was 44 megatonnes over its Paris target. In 2017, that number rose to 66 megatonnes. Last year, it was 103 megatonnes above the Paris commitment.Then we find out from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that the only way the Liberals will even come close to hitting their Paris targets is if they increase by five times the cost of the carbon tax, from $20 today to $102. That means people in ridings across Ontario and Canada could be paying as much as 23¢ per litre of gasoline more into the coffers of the Liberal government.Under the Conservative plan, we will have the best chance of meeting our Paris targets. Under the Conservative plan, we will have a meaningful commitment to the environment, a meaningful plan to combat climate change and a meaningful plan that will benefit all Canadians, rather than the tax plan that we see from the Liberals.Carbon pricingCarbon taxCoal-fired generating stationsGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsLarryMaguireBrandon—SourisTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. John Nater: (1335)[English]Mr. Speaker, first of all, yesterday the Liberals voted in favour of a motion declaring a climate emergency, but the real emergency is a political emergency. The Liberals saw their votes seeping to other parties. They saw a Green seepage and an NDP seepage, so they used a political emergency to have a debate. The Liberals introduced that motion and let it sit for nearly a month. Let us talk about British Columbia. The member says that there was a per capita emissions reduction, but what we see is that emissions have steadily risen in jurisdictions where there was a carbon tax. It did not reduce emissions.Today we hear from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that for Canada to even come close to meeting its Paris targets, it has to increase fivefold from what it is today. Let us talk about the provinces. We have provinces across Canada where the federal government has said that Ottawa knows best. The provincial plans are not good enough, in its opinion. Even if they reduce emissions, it is not good enough in the Liberal government's opinion. The government will only accept a tax.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. John Nater: (1335)[English]Mr. Speaker, the right thing is to take real action in support of the environment, rather than introducing more taxes on Canadians who are already struggling to get by.The member talked about urban centres. Let us talk about rural communities, which I am proud to represent. Our rural communities are going to be the hardest hit by the carbon tax, and they are going to see the least amount of benefit from the carbon tax. What is going to happen is that businesses are going to be impacted, families are going to be impacted, and we are not going to see the benefit for the environment.The member mentioned that tomorrow we will be unveiling our Conservative plan for the environment. It is going to acknowledge and recognize that this is a global challenge and that it is going to take global action to address the concerns of climate change here in Canada and around the world. We need to take action in Canada, but we also need to be a leader in the world when it comes to this. That is why I am proud of our plan. I will be proud to see it unveiled tomorrow.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1345)[English]Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to acknowledge today that Bombardier Patrick Labrie of the 2nd Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, was killed in an operation in Bulgaria. As a veteran, as the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, and as a Canadian, my thoughts and prayers are with Bombardier Patrick Labrie's family, his regimental family and his Canadian Armed Forces family. I would ask my colleague across the way, if he could comment on how much per litre he thinks the market is willing to bear. How much can Canadians afford in terms of the carbon tax increase on the price at the pump?Carbon pricingCarbon taxGasolineOpposition motionsMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89095RobertKitchenRobert-KitchenSouris—Moose MountainConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KitchenRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Robert Kitchen (Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC): (1350)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member talked about how he did not want to call it a tax. However, what we do know is the government put a GST on the carbon tax. In 2017, 43.6 billion litres of gasoline were used in Canada and $2.6 billion were collected in GST. The Liberals said that they would give 100% of this money back. Surprisingly, the GST money will not be given back. We found after the fact that actually only 90% would go be given back. Therefore, any way we look at it, this is a tax.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGasolineGoods and services taxOpposition motionsMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1350)[Translation]The hon. member for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles has about eight minutes until we begin statements by members. I will let her know when her time is up.MarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89167MattJenerouxMatt-JenerouxEdmonton RiverbendConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/JenerouxMatt_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersAlbertaInterventionMr. Matt Jeneroux (Edmonton Riverbend, CPC): (1400)[English]Mr. Speaker, two years ago, the Prime Minister forgot to mention Alberta in his Canada 150 speech. We were of course offended but did not think it was more than an innocent omission. However, the Prime Minister's actions have lived up to this omission, as it appears he wishes he could forget Alberta altogether.His policies, like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, are deliberate attempts to destroy our energy sector. Bill C-69 would impose onerous new regulations around pipeline construction. Bill C-48 would ban tankers from parts of B.C.'s coast. As a result of these bills, thousands of hard-working Canadians will continue to lose jobs in our province. The government also wants to impose a new carbon tax on Alberta on January 1. Talk about kicking us while we are down.Approving the Trans Mountain expansion project is not enough. The Liberals must put forward a concrete plan to get the project built and tell Canadians when construction will start in Burnaby.A Conservative government will stand up for Alberta, as a strong Alberta is a strong Canada.AlbertaOil and gasPipeline transportationStatements by MembersChrisBittleSt. CatharinesPamDamoffOakville North—Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, last summer, the Liberals defended funding anti-oil and gas groups because of “free speech” while they shut down church-run summer camps because of their “values” test. The Liberals showed their values this year, once again using taxpayer dollars to fund groups that want to block the Trans Mountain expansion and shut down Canadian oil and gas. The list includes Tides Canada running a decade-long, foreign-funded smear campaign against the oil sands; the Pembina Institute working with American groups to “landlock” Canadian oil; the Dogwood Initiative campaigning against politicians who support Canadian oil and gas, specifically against the Trans Mountain expansion; the Sierra Club running a campaign right now against the Senate amendments to Bill C-69 that indigenous communities and nine provinces and all territories want; and the West Coast Environmental Law Association that took foreign money to push the oil shipping ban in 2015 that led to Bill C-48 and has already promised new legal challenges to the Trans Mountain expansion. MPs review and approve the funding. It is all in Liberal and NDP ridings. When it comes to Liberals' claims to support oil and gas workers, the Prime Minister is not as advertised.Oil and gasPipeline transportationStatements by MembersTrans Mountain pipelineAnthonyHousefatherMount RoyalFrancisScarpaleggiaLac-Saint-Louis//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCanada–U.S. RelationsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, it has become obvious the Prime Minister is not taken seriously on the world stage. While the Liberals try to justify his disastrous foreign diplomacy, the Prime Minister inevitably makes another misstep that further erodes Canada's reputation. The result is that Canada has never been more alone. Canada's economy and prosperity depend on trade and trade is all about relationships. Failed diplomacy is failed trade. That is why this meeting with the U.S. President this week is important. It is an opportunity for the Prime Minister to repair a strained relationship and advance Canada's interests. Canadians imprisoned in China, softwood lumber, a guarantee of no new U.S. national security tariffs, improved defence and security, and Canada's Arctic sovereignty must all be addressed. Canada and the United States must resolve our differences and unite to face the common threats to our freedom and democracy. Canada needs a Prime Minister who will rise to the challenge in Washington. There is much at stake.Canada-United States relationsStatements by MembersTrade agreementsGudieHutchingsLong Range MountainsRubySahotaBrampton North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, while the Prime Minister enjoys the life of being in the world's top 1%, and the use of taxpayer-funded carbon-spewing government jets, most Canadians have to budget to get by. It is no wonder there is a disconnect between the current Prime Minister's policies and the impacts they will have on middle-class Canadians. A carbon tax raises the price of everything. Food, flights, gas and all household items are more expensive because of it. This week we learned that the Liberal carbon tax will fail in its alleged purpose of helping Canada reach its Paris Agreement targets. This is further evidence that the Liberal carbon tax is a tax plan, not an environmental plan. Canadians cannot afford this tax. When something does not work, we replace it with something else that does. On October 21, Canadians will have the opportunity to exchange the current defective Liberal government for a Conservative government that will work for them.Carbon pricingCarbon taxStatements by MembersKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthColinFraserWest Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, let us look back to 2015 and some of the promises that were made by the Prime Minister.There would be modest deficits and the budget would balance itself in 2019. That was false. The deficit is at $22 billion this year and mounting. Then there was the reinstatement of life-long pensions for veterans. That was false again. We have seen multiple ethics scandals, a disastrous India trip, the payment to Omar Khadr, the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Mark Norman affair, and threats to our security and sovereignty. The 2015 election was going to be the last election under first past the post.Shall I dispense? Members obviously agree.The Prime Minister said that Canada was back, but Canada was not back. The Liberals were back to their scandal-plagued days of backroom deals and backroom operatives, looking after their well-connected and well-heeled friends and working on two sets of rules: one for the Liberals and one for the rest of us.The number of first-time Liberal MPs not reoffering this October is the most since 1997. For all the reasons I have stated, and much more, these members have come to realize, like many who voted for them in 2015, that the current Prime Minister is not as advertised.Political programsPrime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersTrudeau, JustinNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley ValleyMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and Addington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, we know that the Prime Minister and his cabinet are going to approve the TMX pipeline project today. This is not a big surprise. However, what is very unclear is whether or not this pipeline will ever get built. I have a very simple question for the Prime Minister. When will construction of the TMX pipeline commence in Burnaby this summer?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and AddingtonPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, there is no comfort there. I spent this weekend in Milton talking to people on Main Street. I spent the last two days in Toronto talking to senior bankers and business people. The one thing they all have in common is that not a single one of them believes that the Prime Minister will get this pipeline built, and we will not believe it until we see shovels in the ground.I ask again, what day will this pipeline commence construction in Burnaby, British Columbia?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelinePattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, one would think that a government that is seeking to be re-elected by the Canadian public would actually care about the fact that nobody believes it will build this pipeline. The Liberals can dredge up past stories of their own narratives, but the reality is that they have to live with their actions now. Nobody believes they will build the pipeline.However, here is the thing. They can tell us now exactly when they are going to commence construction. When will they commence construction in Burnaby this summer?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelinePattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have some nerve talking about lack of respect. The Liberal Party and the Liberal leader have little respect for Canadian energy and none at all for oil industry workers.The Prime Minister has no respect for people who work on pipelines. He wants to eliminate oil and he wants it to be expensive, as well. That is what the Liberals want. We know that the government will be giving the Trans Mountain expansion the green light a few hours from now.The question is, when will the shovels actually be in the ground?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, I just want to say to the member to be patient: four months and it will be done.[Translation]As everyone knows, the government has not done a single thing since announcing Trans Mountain. Not one spadeful of soil has been turned, not one inch of pipeline has been built. The government has not built a thing, but it has taken a 2,500 kilometre detour by sending Canadians' money to Houston, which is 2,500 kilometres away from here. That is the only thing the Liberals have done.In a couple of hours, they will announce that Trans Mountain is going ahead. When will shovels be in the ground?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelinePattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer sent a clear message last week.The Liberal government's carbon tax will cost Canadians even more. The Prime Minister does not want to tell us that, in addition to being twice as high as was originally announced, the carbon tax will go up. The Prime Minister will raise the price of gas by 23¢ per litre.I have a simple question for the Prime Minister. Why does he want to raise the price of gas by another 23¢? That will have an impact on people's grocery bills, heating costs and everything they consume. Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have an abysmal record when it comes to the environment and their past four budgets. They have managed Canadians' finances irresponsibly and ineffectively, which led to four years of deficits.Who will pay for that? Our children, our grandchildren and Canadians who work hard for their money, that's who.What is this government trying to do? Clearly, to make life even more expensive for Canadians.Why do this government and this Prime Minister want to increase the price of gas yet again—Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, two years ago, almost to the day, the finance minister unleashed an attack on small businesses. He tried to raise taxes on their investment up to 73% and double the tax on parents selling their businesses to their children. He backed down, partially and temporarily, after a massive uprising.I have two questions. First, will he admit that this attack on small businesses was wrong? Second, will he promise never to try it again?Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestBillMorneauHon.Toronto Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, we just heard it right there. Small businesses across the land will notice that the minister had an opportunity to rule out bringing back his original tax increases that he proposed in the summer of 2017 and he refused to rule it out. We know what is coming after the election, just like the carbon tax. We have found out from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that the government will raise gas prices 23¢ a litre.Why does the government not honestly admit that now, before the election? Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesBillMorneauHon.Toronto CentreBillMorneauHon.Toronto Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have just given two opportunities for the minister to admit that his original attack on small business people in the summer of 2017 was wrong and that he would never try it again. We know he is running out of other people's money and he will be looking for more of it if he is re-elected. Now we find out that he is open to reintroducing his 73% tax on small business investment and he is open to doubling the tax on families selling from parent to child.Why does he not just admit that is exactly what he will do if re-elected?Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesBillMorneauHon.Toronto CentreBillMorneauHon.Toronto Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, scare tactics? The Prime Minister said that our small businesses were nothing more than tax cheats. The finance minister tried to impose a 73% tax on small business investment. This is a government that attempted to double the tax on parents selling their businesses to children, so it would have a tax advantage in selling it to foreign multinationals. Scare tactics? The government scared the hell out of small business right across the country.The Liberals could put some of those fears to rest if they would promise now that they will never do it again.Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesBillMorneauHon.Toronto CentreBillMorneauHon.Toronto Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/100521RichardMartelRichard-MartelChicoutimi—Le FjordConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MartelRichard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Richard Martel (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, under Bill C-69, all natural resource development in this country will grind to a halt. Even Quebec opposes this legislation. The Quebec environment minister has said the bill “perpetuates the duplication of environmental procedures” and “expands federal government control”.Bill C-69 will put the brakes on electricity exports, which are an essential opportunity for Quebec's economy. Why are the Liberals undermining Quebec's economic development?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsPaulLefebvreSudburyCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, nine provinces are opposed to the Prime Minister's attack on resource development in Canada. The Liberals stifled debate and rammed through bills that would block oil exports and kill energy projects. Twenty-one industry leaders announced that this is the end of future growth, and those investors have abandoned this important sector.When will the Prime Minister finally admit that his no more pipelines bill and oil export ban bill are part of his plan to phase out Canada's energy sector?Environmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPaulLefebvreSudbury//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister dismissed six premiers' calls for changes to Bill C-69 as partisan, but he also rejected requests from the Liberal premiers of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador for offshore oil and gas. The Liberals have already killed over $100 billion in major projects, and the Bank of Canada predicts no new energy investment after 2019.The Liberals' shipping ban bill, Bill C-48, blocks the west coast. Their poison pill in Bill C-86 would allow the same thing on every other coast. Bill C-69 would harm the whole country.Will the Liberals kill these anti-energy bills before it is too late?C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsC-86, A second Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 27, 2018 and other measuresEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationPaulLefebvreSudburyCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, businesses, municipalities and indigenous communities say the Liberals' anti-pipeline, anti-rail, anti-hydro, anti-business bill, Bill C-69, would hurt all of Canada.Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters said it will make it “in some cases, impossible...[for]...nationally significant natural resource development”. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce said “the impacts will be severe across Canada”. Nine provinces and all territories want major changes to Bill C-69. Quebec calls it a “veto” over economic development.Will the Liberals stop Bill C-69?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPaulLefebvreSudbury//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1445)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the government has no credibility on environmental matters. It says its plan will enable Canada to uphold its commitment to the Paris Agreement targets.Experts, scientists, environmental groups and government officials unanimously agree that Canada is not going to meet its targets. Only the Liberals think they know better, and their refusal to tell Canadians the truth is hypocritical. The Liberals need to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.Why is this Liberal government not telling the truth?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have fallen far short of their Paris targets, and that should come as no surprise. They do not have a climate plan. They have a tax plan. Whether pretending that they will not raise the carbon tax past $50 per tonne or trotting out ministers to criticize a climate plan they have not even seen yet, the Liberals are increasingly desperate to distract from their own climate failures.When will the minister tell the truth and finally admit that they will not meet their Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the China crisis is going from bad to worse. Canada's international reputation is in tatters because of this Prime Minister. China is not even taking his calls.Like China, it is time the Liberal leader stopped making excuses. First it was canola and soy, and now China is targeting the pork sector even though it desperately needs Canadian pork. Standing up for photo ops is one thing, but standing up for our producers is quite another.Why is the Prime Minister incapable of standing up to China?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, for months the government has defended its lack of progress with China by claiming that it has built a coalition of countries who support freeing two Canadians from a Chinese prison. While a consensus among friends is helpful, the Prime Minister has yet to translate this global support into action. It rests with the Prime Minister to step up himself and demonstrate we are serious when dealing with China.When will the Prime Minister act to break this deadlock with China and free our wrongfully imprisoned Canadians?Canadians in foreign countriesChinaImprisonment and prisonersInternational relationsOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionHon. Steven Blaney (Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Canada summer jobs program is supposed to get young people working, but we learned that the Liberals are using it to fund organizations that are linked with terrorist entities.The Islamic Society of North America, in the riding of Mississauga—Lakeshore, has been banned by the Canada Revenue Agency for its ties to certain organizations. It cannot even take a cheque, yet the Liberals are giving it money.Do they take the threat of terrorism seriously? If so, when will the minister revoke the grant?Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentDianeLebouthillierHon.Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-MadeleinePattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the problem is that charter rights are granted to those who call Canada home. We are talking about terrorist activities that are taking place in Pakistan.The question is simple. The number one responsibility of any government is to uphold the rule of law. It is particularly problematic then that the money in this case went to where it did. Here is the thing. To receive Canada jobs funding, organizations have to pass the Liberals' autocratic values test. Did this organization in fact pass the Liberals' test on this?Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, clearly, the minister is scared to answer the actual question.The Liberals have given $26,000 in Canada summer jobs funding to a group linked to terrorism. The activities of that group, the Islamic Society of North America-Canada, are known to the government because the Canada Revenue Agency already suspended its charitable status because of its connection to militant extremists. That did not stop the Liberal MP for Mississauga—Lakeshore from signing off on the funding.The minister has had this file on her desk for a week. It should have taken her five minutes. Why does she not cancel the funding today?Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, last week, the Prime Minister claimed the Liberal MP for Steveston—Richmond East had addressed allegations of his law firm's handling of a Chinese drug boss's real estate deal. This week, faced by details of another suspicious deal, revealed by B.C.'s money laundering inquiry, the Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction would not address unproven allegations.The Prime Minister attacks small business owners as tax cheats without evidence, but in this latest emerging Liberal scandal, no action. Why is there one set of rules for Liberals and another for everyone else?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersGinettePetitpas TaylorHon.Moncton—Riverview—DieppeBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSoftwood LumberInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, in March 2016, the Prime Minister promised to resolve the softwood lumber dispute. He said, “I’m confident that we are on a track towards resolving this irritant in the coming weeks and month.” That was three years ago. Yesterday, the third mill in my riding in two weeks closed its doors. The Liberals have lots of time for their millionaire friends, but when it comes to B.C. workers, they cannot lift a finger. Will the Prime Minister finally make good on his promise to resolve the softwood lumber dispute and save jobs?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementLayoffs and job lossesOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1520)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Cariboo—Prince George, and what a debate it will be. After all, the cat is out of the bag. Earlier today, I asked the finance minister if he would rule out bringing back his small business tax increases. Members will remember them, the ones he ruled out in the summer of 2017, after the Prime Minister had said that small businesses are typically just wealthy tax cheats. The minister went out and tried to impose tax increases that would cost 73% on the dollar for every small business investment, and then he increased taxes on income and work shared among members of a family business.We remember when the Liberals tried to double the tax paid when a parent sells a business to a child. We remember when they put forward a proposal that would allow foreign multinationals to pay half the tax if they bought a Canadian family business, and then the kids of that family business would pay. We remember how our farmers feared that this would mean that within a generation we would have nothing but foreign-owned farms where farm kids would be turned into tenants to foreign landlords on their own ancestral lands. That was the shock and dismay that Canadian entrepreneurs felt when the finance minister struck out and attacked them in the summer of 2017.Then Canadians fought back. Local chambers of commerce, shopkeepers, pizza shop owners, plumbers, farmers, people who had never met all locked arms and said that was enough. For far too long, the government had been picking their pockets and they just quietly went on their way, showing the typical Canadian culture of deference.However, when this tax increase struck, it went too far, and entrepreneurs decided that they were going to unite and defeat these tax changes. They were only partially successful. The minister then agreed to put some of the most egregious parts of his original proposal on hold. There was a great sigh of relief, but I think people were under a misconception that the government had backed down. In fact, headlines screamed out that the finance minister had backed down from small business tax changes. The truth is that he never backed down. He simply put those changes on hold, leaving open the possibility that they might one day come back. He never once admitted that the proposals were flawed or wrong. He simply said they were politically impossible so close to an election. He made the pragmatic calculation to put them on hold. On hold until when, one might ask. The answer is quite simple: until after the election, when the Liberals no longer need voters but still need their money.Of course, the Liberals are running out of other people's money. The deficit is $20 billion. The budget has not balanced itself. In fact, the deficit is growing year after year, and the government needs a way to pay for its insatiable spending habit. What Liberals hope now is that Canadians will not ask them how they will pay for it until after the election is over, when voters cannot do anything about it because it will be four more years until the subsequent election—Carbon pricingCarbon taxCorporate income taxOpposition motionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSplitting speaking timeTransfer of propertyGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre: (1525)[English]Mr. Speaker, the government hopes that people will not ask any questions about where all the money will come from. The Prime Minister will just take out a fire hose and spray cash in all directions in the hopes that a grateful population will re-elect him and put him back in the Prime Minister's Office. Only days later, he will spring upon them a whole series of tax increases that they did not anticipate and that he did not mention. That is why I rose to my feet today to ask the finance minister if he would simply commit that his original tax increases on small businesses were flawed and that they will never be introduced again. He could have just stood up and said that it was a mistake and he would not do it again; that we have his word that if they are re-elected there would be no new tax increases on small businesses. He could have just said that and sat down. Frankly, I would have been quite deflated. I do not know what else I could have asked at that point. Instead, when he stood up, he refused to answer the question at all. He rattled off a bunch of governmental talking points that had been handed to him by junior staffers in the Prime Minister's Office, but he did not rule out bringing back those tax increases. Therefore, the message for small business owners is not to tell us they were not warned. It is clear what the current government will do.In fact, the original small business tax increases that small business owners fought in town halls and in street protests and in thousands of letters will probably be law by Christmas Day if this Prime Minister is re-elected. The election is in late October. There will be a short session before Christmas. A Liberal government will want to do its most unpopular decisions between its return and Christmas so that it can hope everyone will forget about it four years later when they go back to the polls in 2023. Therefore, we know that is the window when this will happen. For small business persons out there somewhere working away, the warning goes out now that they have only four months to help stop the reintroduction of those tax increases that were devastating and even existential to their businesses.This is consistent with everything the government has done. Already the average Canadian family is paying about $800 more in income tax alone. In fairness, people who are very wealthy are paying less. Wealthy taxpayers paid about $4.5 billion less in taxes in the year after the Prime Minister introduced his income tax changes, but everyone else is paying more. They lost their children's fitness tax credit, their public transit tax credit and their education and textbook tax credits. Small business owners now pay new penalties for saving within the companies, for sharing work and earnings with family members. They pay a carbon tax, for which there is no small business rebate. Payroll taxes are now on the rise.Despite all of these Liberal tax increases on the middle class and on small businesses, there is still a shortfall. This is in an environment where real estate has boomed and the world economy has been on fire, all of which has caused a flood of unexpected revenues into government coffers. The Prime Minister blew every penny of those additional revenues and billions of dollars more.Here we are in 2019, the year in which the budget was going to balance itself, and we have another $20-billion deficit. He put his hand on his heart and said he was looking Canadians in the eye and speaking truthfully to them as he always has, and that they would balance the budget in 2019. Those were the words of the Prime Minister at the Maclean's debate in the last election. He smashed that promise to smithereens. Thereafter, we cannot believe a single thing he says about money.(1530)As the pressure mounts, the Liberals will start to deny it. They will deny it until they are red in the face, but the reality is that if the government is re-elected, there will be massive and crippling tax increases targeted on the working class and small businesses to fund ongoing, out-of-control spending. By contrast, Conservatives will put forward a plan that requires that the government live within its means, leave more in people's pockets and let them get ahead, and a free market economy that rewards merit rather than political connections and that puts people before government.Carbon pricingCarbon taxCorporate income taxOpposition motionsPersonal income taxSmall and medium-sized enterprisesTax policyAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingFrancescoSorbaraVaughan—Woodbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre: (1530)[English]One more sleep, Mr. Speaker, and we will have a plan that lowers emissions and taxes, just like we did last time, unlike the Liberal government, which has raised emissions and taxes. Let us go through the tax policy issues for small businesses that he mentioned. One is the small business tax rate. The previous Conservative government reduced the small business tax rate from 13% down to 11% and then 11% down to 9%. One of the first things the Liberal finance minister did is raise it back to 11% from 9%. Then, in the midst of a tax revolt, while he and the Prime Minister were running away with their tails between their legs in full retreat, they reinstated the tax increase that they had repealed when they first took office. That is the reality of the small business tax reduction.As for the carbon tax, there is no rebate for small businesses. They bear the full brunt of the extra heating, transportation, cooling and other energy costs that they must bear. Only those businesses that can pump 50,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases through their chimneys are able to get an exemption from the carbon tax, but normal mom-and-pop shops, small construction companies and pizza shops pay the full tax, with no rebate and no support whatsoever. That is not a climate plan; it is a tax plan.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre: (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, under the previous Conservative government, we did introduce sector-by-sector rules to reduce emissions at an industrial level. We also brought in improved standards for tailpipe emissions. Along with other measures that I do not have time to mention because of the time limit, we actually saw, for the first time in measured history in Canada, a reduction in overall greenhouse gases in absolute terms.All of that proves that taxes are not the best way to reduce emissions, technology is. We need to increase the technology and the advancement of our economy, so we can deliver an improved quality of life with lower energy consumption at the same time.Carbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingOpposition motionsElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our hon. colleague from Carleton. As a new father, I know that he considers this a very important debate. I know he takes this matter very seriously.It is all about a better future for our children. The Minister of Environment has said that lots of times in this House, very loudly and very passionately. We all strive to leave our country better off for those who will come after us. This debate is about the future. It is about ensuring our children have a better future.It has been interesting over the last three and a half years and indeed over the last couple weeks as we debate Bill C-48, Bill C-68, Bill C-69 and Bill C-88. Again, on the virtue-signalling motion that we had last night, Motion No. 29, everybody wants to know how everybody voted. I was travelling, I landed and all of a sudden the media wanted to know how we voted on it. Motion No. 29 does nothing. It declares that we all agree there is a climate emergency, but there is nothing behind it. There are no critical steps behind it to actually make things better. We have a carbon tax that the Liberal government implemented that does nothing but punish Canadians who live in rural communities.I want to read something into the record:“...to constrain the growth of...production by increasing the perception of financial risks by potential investors and by choking off the necessary infrastructure (inputs and outputs)...[the campaign’s original strategy states]. We will accomplish this by raising the visibility of the negatives associated with...[the production]; initiating legal challenges in order to force government and corporate decision-makers to take steps that raise the costs of production and block delivery infrastructure; and by generating support for federal and state legislation that pre-empts future demand for tar sands oil.It also says this: How are we going to do that? Demarketing, raise the negatives, raise the costs, slow down and stop the infrastructure, enrol key decision-makers, goals, we want to influence debate, a moratorium, strategy, stop or limit pipelines, refineries, significantly reduce future demand for Canadian oil, leverage debate for policy victories in the U.S. and Canada, resources required, first nations and other legal challenges, public mobilization in Ontario and Quebec.Members would be forgiven if they thought that was the mandate letter for the Minister of Environment. That is exactly what we are up against, the dogma that we hear, that is spread, the language that we hear time and again. Bill C-68, Bill C-69, Bill C-48, Bill C-88, and Motion No. 29 are all aimed at our natural resources, and somehow Canada produces dirty products and our producers are going the way of just polluting our world.It is interesting that the carbon tax targets soccer moms and small businesses, but does not go up against the very same polluters of the campaigns, Greenpeace, TIDES, the World Wildlife Fund and all these groups that now have executives or members who are former executives in the highest offices of the Liberal government. It does nothing. It gives those very same polluters a pass.There is no denying that climate change is real. Humans contribute to the problem. We all must do our part to address the problem, but a carbon tax is not a climate plan. The Prime Minister does not have a climate plan, he has a tax plan.Time and again it has been said that my province of British Columbia is seen as a success, yet we have had a carbon tax for over 10 years. When it was first introduced, it was supposed to be revenue-neutral, and now it is not. It goes in one hand and stays in the government coffers. It was supposed to lower emissions, and we know that that is not the case.Over the last two summers, we have had some of the worst wildfires in our province's history. In my riding alone, we have had the worst fire season, the largest mass evacuation in our province's history.(1540)I have stood in this House and asked how high the carbon tax has to be before we start to see those wildfires and natural disasters mitigated and lessened. I cannot seem to get an answer. As a matter of fact, I was laughed at when I asked that question.The Liberals have pandered to the environmental lobbyists for the last four years. As a matter of fact, what we are seeing today with the legislation and all this virtue signalling they are doing with their hands on their hearts is payback for the 2015 election. Leading into this next election, they want to make sure that they are solidly behind them. They have had four years to come out with a real plan, and the best they can do is a carbon tax. The Minister of Environment stands up here and shouts loudly so that we will all believe her, yet time and again, she has approved the dumping of millions of litres of raw sewage into our waterways.A great Senate amendment came forward regarding third-party habitat banking, and I will go back to Bill C-68, where we talked about that. Where there is displacement of fish or fish habitat because of a project, it would allow the government to enlist people who are experts to create fish habitat. However, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and his department turned that down, and we heard testimony that they were the only people around the table who did not seem interested in creating fish habitat.The Liberals like to stand up there, with all their environmental credits and their peeps behind them, saying that what they are doing is for the good of the country. We know that all they are doing is making things less affordable for those of us who live in rural communities.I do not know if there is a fuel available that can power a logging truck or a freight truck. Our forestry sector has taken a massive hit since the current government has been in power, because we do not have a softwood lumber agreement. I will not put all the forestry downturn on the current government. However, it could have taken some major steps forward in assisting our forestry industry by securing a softwood lumber agreement.We live in rural areas. Many of our first nations live off-grid. They have to power their communities with diesel. What has the government done to lift any of those first nations off their dependency on diesel and fossil fuels? What about rural communities? At one point, we were a resource-driven economy. However, we know from the Prime Minister's very first speech that, under his government, our country has become known more for our resourcefulness than our natural resources. I guess that was a promise he has kept, because we have seen the government attack our natural resources sector time and again. As we speak, there are forestry families who are receiving more layoff notices in my riding and in my home province of British Columbia. They do not have other projects or other opportunities to go to. What will they do? What is it that our Minister of Environment said? There is $500 million worth of opportunity. Where is it? It is not in our rural communities. In some of our northern climates, we cannot plug any of our school buses in. We cannot plug logging trucks or freight trucks in. We need them to get our goods to market. Everything this carbon tax does makes the way of life in rural communities more expensive. This is not an environmental plan. It is a revenue plan, and it is on the backs of rural communities and rural Canadians. That is shameful.Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsRural communitiesPierrePoilievreHon.CarletonTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1545)[English]Mr. Speaker, our hon. colleague is being disingenuous. British Columbia has the highest fuel prices in all of North America. We know that under the Liberal government, if the Liberals are re-elected in October, those gas prices are going to have to go up at least another 23¢ a litre. That is punishing those in our province who live in rural communities, and in particular, those in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George. British ColumbiaCarbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourScottDuvallHamilton Mountain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1545)[English]Mr. Speaker, I should turn the tables on our hon. NDP colleague and ask him what he thinks of the poll that came out today that says that the Green Party is ahead of the NDP. Polls are polls. I would say that as much as the Liberals and the NDP want to say that the Conservatives are not for the environment but are against the environment, we are first and foremost ranchers, farmers, hunters and anglers. We are for the environment. We are conservationists at heart. I cannot wait until our colleagues, and indeed Canadians, see the environmental plan our leader is unveiling tomorrow. Carbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsPublic opinion pollsScottDuvallHamilton MountainPaulManlyNanaimo—Ladysmith//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1550)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to welcome our hon. colleague to the House. This is the first time I have had a chance to address him. However, I believe he flew here. I do not think he walked here. Therefore, my challenge is that as we move away from fossil fuels, what are we going to go to? The reality is that we have to drive to work in rural communities. In my community, we have to drive for services. We have to fly. We have to ship our goods. How do we do that? Until we have a viable option for fossil fuels, it is not possible. I would agree with my hon. colleague that we have to have a whole host of programs to fix the environment, but a carbon tax is not one of them, because it does nothing. It is a revenue plan for the government.Carbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingOpposition motionsPaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithAlexandraMendèsBrossard—Saint-Lambert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1600)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think it is unanimous in the House that we all care about climate change. The challenge is the way that the current government is implementing things. It is causing challenges that no one foresaw. For example, the hospital in my community is Lakeridge in Oshawa. The estimate for the carbon tax, because there will be an increase in costs to heat its facilities, is going to be $278,000 in 2019-20. By 2022-23, it is going to be $700,000. Hospitals that are on a strict budget are going to see increased costs. It is the same with our schools. Educational facilities, municipal governments with municipal buildings, sports facilities and bus and transportation systems are going to be seeing increased costs, and there are no details on how that is going to be compensated for through the carbon tax program that the Liberals have instituted.What does the member say to hospitals that are going to be faced with these unexpected increased budgetary costs in regard to the carbon tax?Carbon pricingCarbon taxCostsOpposition motionsAlexandraMendèsBrossard—Saint-LambertAlexandraMendèsBrossard—Saint-Lambert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89095RobertKitchenRobert-KitchenSouris—Moose MountainConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KitchenRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Robert Kitchen (Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC): (1615)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member talked about helping the oil and gas industry reduce its emissions. Putting a carbon tax on small businesses is not going to help those people, but there is something that is. The member is probably well aware that in the Paris accord, three of the four recommendations on progressing were about using carbon capture and sequestration, which were talked about and signed off on. This innovation already exists in Canada. Not only does it exist in Canada, but it takes the emissions captured and puts them underground, which helps the enhanced oil recovery. In fact, just the other week, Mr. Michal Kurtyka, from the Ministry of the Environment for Poland, stated, “Carbon capture and sequestration will be important to make an advance to carbon neutrality”. Mr. Pawel Leszczynski, the COP24 presidency bureau chief, was also there.My question is very simple. Why are you not championing this?Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxOpposition motionsRajSainiKitchener CentreAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC): (1620)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the member for Red Deer—Mountain View.Before I launch into debate today, I just want to recognize Bombardier Patrick Labrie, who died tragically this week while serving his country in Bulgaria. As a serving soldier in Canada's armed forces reserves and as a parliamentarian, I know that the thoughts and prayers of this House go out to the Labrie family. We thank Patrick for his service. I appreciate that we can all come together in this House to support the men and women of our armed forces. It is very important. It is not a partisan issue.Getting into the debate, it is my pleasure to rise and talk about this opposition day motion on carbon taxes and the environment. It is not an issue that we as Conservatives are afraid to talk about, because we have a very strong record on this issue. At the beginning of the previous Conservative mandate in 2007, greenhouse gas emissions in this country were 744 million megatonnes. By the end of our mandate in 2015, we had brought that number down significantly, below the 744 million megatonnes, while also growing our economy. That is a significant feat that we should be very proud of.It is all very clear that this was done without the imposition of a carbon tax on Canadians. The government has a clear framework, an example given to it by previous governments, of what can be done to lower greenhouse gas emissions while not putting taxes on hard-working families when they fill up at the pump, when they are heating homes in these cold Canadian winters and when they go to buy groceries or anything that gets trucked in.I rose today because this debate is important for our country and for the world, but it is also very important for my constituency. The reason is that my constituency, along with the constituency of the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, is the home of Alberta's industrial heartland region. This is a hub in Canada for carbon capture and sequestration technology.Under the previous government, significant investments were made to partner with industry to find ways to tangibly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This technology has been recognized by the International Energy Agency as one of the key pillars in ensuring sustainable and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.On the other side of my riding, it is an important issue because Parkland County is home to a significant number, I believe over one-third, of Canada's remaining coal-fired generation plants. Decisions by the federal Liberals and the previous provincial NDP government in Alberta on carbon taxes and red tape have had serious consequences in my community, including job losses in the thousands and the loss of tens of millions of dollars in assessed tax revenues for municipal and county governments.My remarks today are going to highlight the consequences of these policies, but I also want to highlight the opportunities and tangible things we can do to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and support our industries.Going over the history of this, in 2015 the NDP government came to power in Alberta, and subsequently there was a federal government decision to unilaterally end coal power by 2030. These events presented significant challenges to my community, as well as undermining the livelihoods of my constituents and putting into doubt our ability to supply affordable power.Under the previous Conservative government, Canada took a responsible, continent-wide approach with our closest ally and neighbour, the United States, to begin phasing out coal power. I recognize that coal has high CO2 emissions and that we need significant action in order to meet our Paris climate change targets. However, I could not disagree more with the path the government has taken on this issue.Going back to the previous Conservative policy, we would have phased out most coal-fired power plants in this country before 2030. Now, not a lot of that is different from the current government's policies, but this is where the bulk of greenhouse gas emission reductions are going to take place, mostly from plants that were already ending their life cycle before 2030 anyway. There would have been no major cost to taxpayers, no unexpected job losses, and no unexpected revenue losses for communities.(1625)We also allowed for some of the newest and latest coal facilities, one of which was built as recently as 2012, to run through their life cycles, up until 2045. This would have resulted in significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions, while ensuring that taxpayers would not be put on the line for billions of dollars to bail out companies for transitioning from coal to natural gas, which is what many were doing anyways. I will talk about the specific penalties later.I am proud of the investments of the previous Conservative government, to the tune of billions of dollars, to support industries in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through carbon capture and sequestration. I want to highlight a couple of projects in this country.We have Shell's Quest refinery, which has just celebrated its fourth megatonne. Four million tonnes of CO2 have been sequestered at its facility and put into deep saline aquifers. That is four million tonnes of CO2 that is not in our atmosphere today because of an investment by the previous, Conservative government. We also have the North West Redwater refinery project, which is in my riding of Sturgeon River—Parkland. When this, the newest refinery in Canada, becomes fully operational, it will sequester an estimated 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 a year. These are tangible emissions levels.As the government is falling short of its Paris climate change agreement by 79 million tonnes, facilities in my riding are, on their own, processing over a million tonnes, with facilities next to my riding already achieving four million tonnes. These are not just chump change numbers. These are significant numbers that, if replicated across the country and across industries, can have a massive effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This can be done with very little support from the government and without imposing a carbon tax on hard-working families.These projects were the result of partnerships with the federal government. They were expensive when they were first implemented, but we have to remember that with technology there are often high barriers to entry. We certainly saw this with a lot of our renewable industries, including with solar and wind power. We know that the consequences of government decisions have raised the cost of power for everyone in the province of Ontario.There are high costs to doing this, but we know that once this technology is put in place and we learn from it, it will come down significantly in price. Comments from Shell have indicated that it could replicate the Quest refinery project for 30% less than Quest cost. It was about a $700-million project, and Shell could do it for 30% cheaper. This is an investment that we should be replicating in this country moving forward.That is why I find it disappointing that with respect to CCS in this country, we have not really seen a lot of progress over the last four years. I just checked out the National Energy Board website today. It indicated that there are four major projects in this country. We have the Redwater refinery; Shell's Quest project, which I mentioned; the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, which is also in my riding; and a project in Fort Nelson, northern B.C., which, at full capacity, could sequester an estimated 2.2 million tonnes of CO2. However, since 2015, we have heard nothing about this project. There was previous government support of about $30 million from the B.C. government and the federal Conservative government, but the current government has taken no action.How can the government be leaving a project like this on the shelf? We are talking about 2.2 million tonnes of CO2. That is over 2% of what we need in this country to achieve our climate change goals, yet the government, which I believe is ideologically opposed to carbon capture and sequestration, has refused to support projects like this.I am going to be pushing for the next Conservative government to take up these opportunities and increase Canada's investment in carbon capture and sequestration so we can come up with tangible results on greenhouse gas emissions. I feel very strongly that this will be the case.I also want to quickly talk about carbon pricing. The government has talked about increasing gas by 23¢ a litre after the election, but Canadians already pay. Up to 30% of the price of a litre of gas is federal levy, provincial levy, the GST and, in some provinces, the HST. We are already paying carbon taxes, and we are talking about 23¢ more per litre. That is going to be nearly 50% of the cost of a litre of fuel. It is just a tax plan; it is not an environment plan, plain and simple.Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxCoalCoal-fired generating stationsGasolineGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsRenewable energy and fuelSplitting speaking timeRajSainiKitchener CentreMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dane Lloyd: (1630)[English]That is an extremely easy question to answer, Mr. Speaker. I do believe in climate change; it is obvious. However, it is quite funny to hear the member across the way talking about political and rhetorical ways, because his question was completely political and rhetorical. However, I will try to get to one of the most substantial answers.Of course large oil companies are looking into these things, because when taxes get put on all businesses, it is often the large companies that are the most capable of absorbing the taxes and the small companies that suffer. We saw this in Alberta. When the NDP government imposed carbon taxes, it was the small and medium-sized enterprises that went out of business, and it was the large companies that bought those companies for pennies on the dollar. When we talk about these carbon taxes, they are going after small and medium-sized enterprises. Some of these large multinational organizations that do not pay carbon taxes in their home countries are more than happy to let these companies suffer and reap the benefits.Carbon pricingCarbon taxNatural disastersOil and gasOpposition motionsMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsAnne Minh-ThuQuachSalaberry—Suroît//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Dane Lloyd: (1630)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member obviously has a very strong viewpoint on this matter, and we disagree on the approach we need to take, but in the end we want to achieve the same goal.In terms of our positive Conservative vision, I just need to point to our previous 10 years in government, when we implemented significant reforms for tailpipe emissions for automobiles. This meant that all new vehicles used in Canada had to be cleaner and have lower emissions, and this has had a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is ironic, because the NDP would probably, and I think has, called the government's investments in carbon capture and sequestration a subsidy for fossil fuel industries. When money is given to fossil fuel industries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, there is a really big benefit to the economy and the environment. When we talk about investing in CCS, we should not be labelling it as a bad thing. We should be labelling it as an opportunity to grow our economy and significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsAnne Minh-ThuQuachSalaberry—SuroîtAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59226EarlDreeshenEarl-DreeshenRed Deer—Mountain ViewConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DreeshenEarl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Earl Dreeshen (Red Deer—Mountain View, CPC): (1635)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on behalf of my constituents of Red Deer—Mountain View.The motion before us today states: That, given that the carbon tax will not reduce emissions at its current rate and it is already making life more expensive for Canadians, the House call on the government to repeal the carbon tax and replace it with a real environment plan.How do we know that the carbon tax is not reducing emissions at its current rate? That information comes from the most recent report of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The PBO chose a figure of $102 per tonne, which is five times the current rate. If one is to believe the numbers being thrown around by the government, the projections are that the figure would need to be even higher. Apparently, this does not matter to the Liberal government. Nor does it matter to the Liberals that Australia has realized that introducing a carbon tax is a failed plan and has repealed its tax.If we are going to be competitive in the North American market, we should be working in harmony with the U.S. on environmental policies, not saddling ourselves with yet another barrier to our economic well-being. This is not what is happening today. The U.S. has no such plan and has lowered its taxes for businesses, and their total emissions have fallen. In Canada, the Liberal government is forging ahead with its ill-conceived tax increases, while emissions are continuing to rise.This leads me to the next point, which speaks to making life more expensive for Canadians.The shell game the Liberal government is playing with carbon tax dollars and refunds is simply not logical. For starters, the plan itself is certainly not revenue neutral. Those numbers have been widely discredited as well. However, that is just part of the story. Canadian farmers will be especially hard hit with this plan. Statistics Canada estimates that the average costs per farm will be in the tens of thousands of dollars as the tax goes from $10 to $50 per tonne. The worst part is that farmers do not have the chance to pass those costs on to their customers.The second part of the motion before us asks all Canadians to look ahead. We need to look ahead to a brighter future, a future without the Liberal government's carbon tax grab. We need to look ahead to a future with a real plan for the environment, one based on Canadian know-how and Canadian expertise.We are already moving in the right direction. Look at the dairy sector as one case in point. Today in Canada it takes 65% fewer dairy cows to produce the same volume of milk as it did 50 years ago. Improvements to cow comfort and feed efficiency have also helped to make our dairy industry more sustainable.By embracing innovation and new ideas, furthering research and infusing old wisdom into modern practices, Canada's agricultural sector is continually reducing its environmental impact, while looking for ways to improve its practices on a national scale.There is a lot of work to do to set the record straight about the cattle industry and about farming in general. We have all heard the story that cattle farming is a major source of greenhouse gases. However, at the Alberta Beef Conference in my home town of Red Deer, we heard from experts such as Dr. Frank Mitloehner who debunked this myth and noted that new processes, new efficiencies and proper management meant that beef cattle methane emissions were effectively zero.On this and many other issues, it is our challenge to ensure that Canadians have science-based information and science-based facts about cattle farming and about farming in general. We need to continue to use our Canadian expertise to ensure that all our products get to the global market in the safest and most environmentally responsible way possible. We need a government that will enable industry to do more to help the environment, not a government that will hobble businesses and burden Canadians with huge tax increases.Canadians have so many things of which to be proud. We are proud of our amazing Olympic athletes, our talented artists and the NBA trophy coming home to basketball's birthplace. These are a few highlights, but there are so many others.(1640)We can be proud of Canada's world-class oil and gas industry, which is the best regulated and the most environmentally friendly in the world. Canadians can be proud of our dynamic forestry industry, which has state-of-the-art rejuvenation projects. How about our farmers and our ranchers? Canadian agriculture produces the safest, most environmentally friendly products in the world. However, even in this case, vested interests are doing their very best to knock us down. However, a true environmental plan will do the opposite. It will build us up and it will enhance our efforts to protect and preserve the environment.Let us look at this as far as the Liberal track record is concerned. In 2016, Canada was 44 megatonnes of CO2 over its Paris target. In 2017, that number rose to 66. Last year, it was 103 megatonnes. The Liberal approach just is not getting the results as advertised.The same is true for the Liberals' arguments about social license. Three pipeline projects, northern gateway, the west to east pipeline and Kinder Morgan, all to be built by the private sector, never got a fair hearing from the Liberal government. We all paid the bill, but got nothing in return. However, enough about the failures of the Liberal government. When we talk about an environmental plan, the Conservatives want to talk about things that matter, things like the amazing carbon sequestration projects that have been developed, whether it be in coal technology, oil and gas development or natural gas processing. These are major breakthroughs that Canada's business leaders and their research teams are gearing up to export around the world. Would members not say that championing our expertise on the world stage is better than wringing our hands and apologizing for the fact that Canada has abundant resources in order to score points with the environmental elites? Of course we will develop our resources and we will do it in a manner that investors will see as the new global industry environmental standard. It will be our energy that will replace foreign tankers coming to our shores. If we proudly embrace our innovations, it will be our oil demanded by climate-conscious nations around the world. We will also be championing our other major resource sector, agriculture. As I said before, Canadian beef and dairy producers are the most efficient managers of greenhouse gases in the world. By using technologies developed by amazing Canadian minds, we will not only be helping our soil and producing world-class products, but we will be managing greenhouse emissions in a way well above the global standard. For the last four years, Canada has had a leader who grandstands around the world and uses every opportunity to apologize for what Canada is and for what we do. Under a Conservative government, we will have a leader who is proud not just to be a Canadian, but also proud to stand up for all of us and to champion our successes. The incompetence of the Liberal government was plain for all of us to see last week. Just a few nights ago, Canadians witnessed the spectacle of their own government choosing to support the interest of competing oil-producing nations over the interests of Canadians. As many editorials noted, the Liberal government is the only one in the world trying to shut down its own resource sector. The government ignored the pleas of nine provincial premiers, first nation leaders, territorial governments as well as millions of Canadians by shutting down debate on Bill C-69, the no more pipelines bill. Now, by ignoring further pleas to not move forward with Bill C-48, the Liberal government is creating even more uncertainty in the energy sector. It is a shame when the government's only fallback plan, the TMX pipeline expansion project, is only going forward thanks to billions of taxpayer dollars transferred to pipeline builders in the United States. With the Liberal government, we know that the whole process is a crass political one, not a responsible financial one. How many hospitals will be built in Canada through our purchase of Saudi oil? How many social programs will be financed from our friends in Nigeria? How many environmental causes and human rights efforts that Canadians hold dear will be jeopardized by the Liberals shutting in the resource expertise of the world's most responsible energy producers? By following the misguided dogma of the Prime Minister, the Liberals will be following him into the political abyss. The only way to truly protect our environment, to give certainty to job creators and to ensure Canadians' strong social fabric is to make the divisive Liberal leader is a single-use prime minister. Canada-United States relationsCarbon pricingCarbon taxCattle farmingDairy farmingDairy industryFarming and farmersOil and gasOpposition motionsPipeline transportationAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59226EarlDreeshenEarl-DreeshenRed Deer—Mountain ViewConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DreeshenEarl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Earl Dreeshen: (1645)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think everybody understands that the climate emergency was a political emergency for the Liberal government, which is obvious when we look at what is happening around the country right now. Let us talk about some of the things the Liberals talk about, such as subsidies for Tesla cars—Carbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingOpposition motionsMarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59226EarlDreeshenEarl-DreeshenRed Deer—Mountain ViewConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DreeshenEarl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Earl Dreeshen: (1645)[English]Mr. Speaker, let me go back to a different point. I remember a number of years ago when the neighbouring kids came to the farm. They said they were selling compact florescent light bulbs on behalf of the school to replace the incandescent ones. These were projects that helped the school. The kids were advocating for this because the environmental activists promoted this green energy product, something for which we should be so happy. We did our thing and bought a whole bunch of them. Then we realized there were five milligrams of mercury in every one of them, and about 15 million of them were sold. Therefore, we now have an environmental crisis because of those types of activities. When the member talked about science-based ideas and the like, sometimes the science and the arguments are more related to money in somebody else's pocket than they are about really doing something to help the environment.Carbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingOpposition motionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—Langford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59226EarlDreeshenEarl-DreeshenRed Deer—Mountain ViewConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DreeshenEarl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Earl Dreeshen: (1650)[English]Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from B.C. and I have had some great conversations. Although we look at things sometimes from a different perspective, nevertheless we have learned a lot from each other, and for that I am thankful.When I look at the situation as far as agriculture is concerned, there are amazing new technologies there. We have amazing tools that can make Canadian farmers and world farmers do a much better job. The key thing for us in the future is to ensure we do not allow outside forces to take those tools away from our farmers so they can do an amazing job with respect to the environment.Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxFarming and farmersOpposition motionsAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—LangfordAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1700)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will work to make more frequent interventions in the future. There is no doubt there.I want to ask my colleague about questions of social justice, in particular for low-income people, in the context of a climate plan. When we have a carbon tax that imposes particular costs on those who do not have a choice, who do not have the capital necessary to adapt, they end up paying the cost without being able to adapt their lifestyles in any way. Meanwhile, there are large emitters that get a break from this.Of course, there are a range of different programs to provide direct government support to people in these situations, but it remains the case that the way the carbon tax applies, it imposes a particular burden on those who do not have the capital or the ability or the circumstances that would allow them to adapt.Would the member agree, in principle at least, that a better alternative, a more just alternative, is one that provides the support and the mechanisms for people who want to do things like retrofits to ensure that they have the capital and resources, rather than punishing them for what may be their inability to make the kinds of changes that ostensibly this is supposed to incentivize?Carbon pricingCarbon taxLow incomeOpposition motionsAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—LangfordAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—Langford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (1715)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am surrounded by skeptics here. The Prime Minister just announced that TMX is going to be built this summer, or at least shovels will be in the ground. That is what he is saying, and none of my colleagues seem to believe that.What does my hon. colleague think about the approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline?Carbon pricingCarbon taxNationalizationOil and gasOpposition motionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineRandallGarrisonEsquimalt—Saanich—SookeRandallGarrisonEsquimalt—Saanich—Sooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89095RobertKitchenRobert-KitchenSouris—Moose MountainConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KitchenRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—The Environment]InterventionMr. Robert Kitchen (Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC): (1720)[English]Mr. Speaker, as we prepare to leave the House and the 42nd Parliament for the summer, I am happy to have a chance to speak to today's motion, which reads as follows: That, given that the carbon tax will not reduce emissions at its current rate and it is already making life more expensive for Canadians, the House call on the government to repeal the carbon tax and replace it with a real environment plan. This is an initiative that I am passionate about, which I have spoken about here many times. In fact, when I am back in the riding, my constituents continually talk to me about the carbon tax, how we are going to get rid of it and how quickly can can get rid of it. The carbon tax is something that has resonated particularly strongly with the people in my riding, and not in a positive way. I have been privileged to serve the people of Souris—Moose Mountain for the last four years, and part of why I am speaking to today's motion is due to the commitment I made upon becoming an MP. I promised that I would represent the interests of all my constituents at every possible opportunity, and I am proud to stand here today to denounce the ineffective Liberal carbon tax and the negative impact it is having on Canadians across the country.The fact of the matter, as stated in today's motion, is that the Liberals' carbon tax is not effective in reducing emissions, and it makes life more expensive for hard-working Canadians. The Liberals seem to think that all of Canada is urban. I say this because the majority of their policies, and especially those tied to reducing emissions, are targeted toward urban areas, with almost nothing for those living in rural Canada. When a major city gets new environmentally friendly buses, how does that benefit the people in my riding? Guess what: it does not. Furthermore, Canadians living in rural areas are going to be hit hard by the carbon tax and in some ways more so than those who are living in urban areas. It is a normal and acceptable thing for people in southeast Saskatchewan to drive 30-plus miles just to get groceries. Driving 50 miles or more to see a doctor is the status quo, and nobody complains about it, because that is just the way it has always been done. Small businesses have no avenue to rebate the carbon tax. They end up eating it or increasing their overhead or passing it on to their customers, and risk losing their customers. What does make people frustrated and angry is when a government swoops in and unilaterally decides that Canadians now have to pay more to go about their usual day-to-day lives, and with none of the benefits that those living in urban areas receive. The Liberal carbon tax is not helping the environment, but rather it is hurting Canadians through the increased price on things like gasoline, groceries and home heating. I would like to share the experiences of some of my constituents that touch on how ill thought out and ineffective the carbon tax really is. As members know, under the carbon tax, fuel used for farm purposes is meant to be exempt, but this is not the case here. Due to the Liberals leaving a loophole in their legislation, farmers who obtain their fuel at pump locations and not designated cardlocks are paying the carbon tax when they should not be. There is no mechanism to rectify this, and it is creating some big issues for farmers. While I have written letters to the minister, I have not heard one response.Many farmers are not able to have fuel delivered directly to their farms, because they do not have the ability to store it, and so pump locations are necessary for them to do their jobs. There are huge increases in cost to secure storage areas and to protect storage areas from environmental issues, not to mention the security and protection of this resource. Furthermore, there is no cardlock station within a reasonable distance of these farmers, and a pump location is their only option. For example, farmers on acreages that are 20 miles east of a pump location have to travel to fill up their vehicles and their equipment, and they are not even getting the promised exemption. They may farm acreages another 30 kilometres in the other direction or west of where they are coming from. We are now at the end of the spring seeding season, and farmers are still having to fight for their government to make good on the commitments it made to not charge farmers a carbon tax. It is yet another example of how the Liberal carbon tax continues to fail Canadians time and time again.Unfortunately, Canadians have become accustomed to the Liberals misleading them and providing them with misinformation, especially when it comes to the carbon tax. When it was introduced, the minister said that 100% of the revenues from the carbon tax would go back to Canadians and that it would end up being revenue neutral. When asked specifically if that figure included the GST, the Liberals said no, that the GST would stay in our pockets. We have now found out that this is patently untrue and that the GST is being charged on top of the carbon tax, essentially a tax on a tax. (1725)Here are some simple figures when it comes to the carbon tax and the GST on that. In 2017, the number of litres of gasoline used in Canada was 43.6 billion litres. The carbon tax at 4¢ per litre amounts to $1.7 billion that is collected. The Liberals are refusing to tell Canadians how high this tax will go as we move forward. This means that people living in this country are unable to make concrete plans for their future. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Liberals would need to hike the carbon tax up to at least $100 per tonne to meet the Paris targets that they committed to. The PBO has also stated that in order to meet the Paris targets, gasoline prices would need to increase by 23¢ per litre. Despite their claims that they are on track to meet these targets, there is clear evidence to the contrary. It is yet another example of the Liberals attempting to mislead Canadians so that they can save face when it comes to their failed and ineffective carbon tax that has done nothing to reduce emissions.I would like to highlight some of the innovative work that is happening right here in Canada with respect to reducing emissions. That is the utilization of CCS, carbon capture and storage, technology. The CCS technology is installed on unit 3 of Boundary Dam, the power station in my riding. CCS allows for the CO2 emissions of that unit to be captured and stored three to four kilometres underground, preventing these emissions from being released into the atmosphere. The stored CO2 is then used by the oil industry for things like EOR, which is enhanced oil recovery. The by-product of this process is also fly ash, which is a saleable product that is used in the production of cement. The EOR helps the oil industry reduce its emissions, and the fly ash helps the cement-production companies in reducing their carbon emissions.While retrofitting power plants with CCS can be expensive, a recent study done by the International CCS Knowledge Centre found that the cost of retrofitting the Shand Power Station would be 67% cheaper per tonne of CO2 captured, compared to the Boundary Dam that is built today.According to the Paris agreement, CCS is mentioned in three or four potential pathways to reducing emissions. In fact, the secretary of state in the ministry of the environment of Poland, Mr. Michal Kurtyka, and the COP24 presidency bureau director, Mr. Pawel Leszczynski, were visiting the Boundary Dam and they basically said that carbon capture and sequestration will be important and make an advance to carbon neutrality.Carbon capture, utilization and storageCarbon pricingCarbon taxDiesel fuelFarming and farmersGasolineGoods and services taxGreenhouse gasesOpposition motionsPetroleum productsPower plantsRural communitiesRandallGarrisonEsquimalt—Saanich—SookeCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionMr. Mark Strahl: (1820)[English]Mr. Speaker, we will agree to apply, and Conservatives will be voting no.C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020Government billsMain estimates 2019-2020Recorded divisionsSecond readingSupply billsMarkHollandHon.AjaxRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—Maskinongé//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1825)[Translation]Mr. Chair, my question is for the President of the Treasury Board.Can she assure the House that the bill is definitely in its usual form?C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020Clause-by-clause studyConsideration in a Committee of the WholeForm of billsGovernment billsMain estimates 2019-2020Supply billsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver Quadra//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionThe Chair: (1825)[English]Shall clause 2 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 2 agreed to)The Chair: Shall clause 3 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 3 agreed to)[Translation]The Chair: Shall clause 4 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 4 agreed to)The Chair: Shall clause 5 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 5 agreed to)[English]The Chair: Shall clause 6 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 6 agreed to)The Chair: Shall schedule 1 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Schedule 1 agreed to)The Chair: Shall schedule 2 carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Schedule 2 agreed to)[Translation]The Chair: Shall clause 1, the short title, carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Clause 1 agreed to)The Chair: Shall the preamble carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Preamble agreed to)[English]The Chair: Shall the title carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Title agreed to)The Chair: Shall the bill carry?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Bill agreed to)The Chair: Shall I rise and report the bill?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: On division.(Bill reported)C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020Clause-by-clause studyConsideration in a Committee of the WholeDecisions of the HouseGovernment billsMain estimates 2019-2020Supply billsJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver QuadraGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionMr. Mark Strahl: (1825)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives agree to apply and will vote no.C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020Consideration in a Committee of the WholeGovernment billsMain estimates 2019-2020Recorded divisionsReport stageSupply billsMarkHollandHon.AjaxRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—Maskinongé//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionMr. Mark Strahl: (1830)[English]Mr. Speaker, we agree to apply and of course we will be voting no.C-102, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020Government billsMain estimates 2019-2020Recorded divisionsSupply billsThird reading and adoptionMarkHollandHon.AjaxRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—Maskinongé//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1835)[English]Mr. Speaker, while I welcome the opportunity to ask these questions of the minister, it bears repeating that it is quite shameful that the government is imposing yet another closure on very important legislation.Currently, there is a voluntary moratorium on tanker traffic in the area that would be affected by this bill. Regardless of whether one philosophically agrees with this voluntary moratorium or not, it has been working for over 30 years. Since Bill C-48 would do nothing to change the current situation in regard to tanker traffic on B.C.'s coast, how is this bill anything more than empty symbolism?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1835)[English]Mr. Speaker, there are approximately 1,400 inbound tankers on the west coast per year. Conversely, there are about 4,000 tankers on the east coast per year. When can Canadians expect the same type of moratorium on the east coast from the transportation minister?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72035BobZimmerBob-ZimmerPrince George—Peace River—Northern RockiesConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ZimmerBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Bob Zimmer (Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, CPC): (1835)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to the attention of the hon. minister that Bill C-48 is opposed by many indigenous groups in British Columbia that want to benefit from the economic activity from oil and gas. Eagle Spirit, Calvin Helin and that project would see huge benefits to local indigenous groups.What does the minister say to those indigenous groups in B.C. that are going to be left out in the cold as a result of this bill?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1840)[English]Madam Speaker, there are two key elements we need to discuss at this moment. The first is with respect to the closure of this debate. It undermines our democracy on something of this nature of significance. Over 10% of our GDP comes from the resource industry, of which oil and gas is critical. This debate is on how we get our oil and gas to market. Therefore, I would like to understand how we can justify limiting a debate on such a significant issue.The second point has to do with the bill itself. We have two standards for either ends of the coasts. We have the most environmentally friendly oil practices in the world, yet the government is allowing all kinds of jurisdictions to send oil that is far less environmentally friendly by tanker to our east coast. However, the Liberals are putting a ban on how our west coast would get our environmentally friendly oil to market. I want to understand how the Liberals are justifying shutting down the debate on something that has such a significant impact on Canada and why—British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (1845)[English]Madam Speaker, this debate is nothing but a blatant attack on Alberta.My question for the transport minister is this. Transport Canada just commissioned a company to do a report to prove that the risk of oil spills in the Arctic was next to none in order for Canada to continue to oppose the ban on carrying HFO in the Arctic, which has been proposed by the IMO. Why the hypocrisy? Why is Canada paying to prove the risk of oil spills in the Arctic as low enough to oppose the IMO, but is banning tanker traffic off of B.C. and punishing Alberta?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1850)[English]Madam Speaker, Bill C-48 is a direct attack on Canada's economy. It will tie up or prevent tanker traffic from travelling in northern B.C. The problem with this is the hypocrisy at the core, which is this. Venezuelan oil is accepted in Quebec and Saudi Arabian oil is accepted on the east coast. Both of these countries have very few, if any, environmental regulations. Both of these countries treat their citizens with absolute disrespect. Human rights barely, if at all, exist within these countries. Meanwhile, within our own country, we have a government that wants to tie up the responsible development of the oil industry, thus harming our overall economy and our place on the world stage. Why the hypocrisy?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1855)[English]Madam Speaker, the government's environmental plan is all show and no go. Yesterday, we saw a climate emergency declaration that is all show and no go. That is on top of the fact that today the Liberals brought in a pipeline approval that is all show and absolutely no go. Now, we are dealing with Bill C-48, which is all show and no go. That is on top of the foundation of the Liberals' climate plan, which is a tax plan and not a climate change plan; again, it is all show and no go. Does the minister realize how much of a joke Canadians realize his environmental program actually is?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1855)[English]Madam Speaker, when the government cancelled the northern gateway pipeline project and brought in the tanker ban, the Liberals tore $2 billion in equity away from the Aboriginal Equity Partners, $2 billion for aboriginal communities in northern B.C. where there is not much economic development. When we asked Liberals about it, they said they did not even consult them before they brought this in.There is another project, the Eagle Spirit pipeline, completely indigenous owned, that has been shut down by Bill C-48 and the northern tanker ban. The Nisga'a Nation has expressed interest in having a port for a future pipeline, and the government has shut it down.Why has the government shut down and torn away so much economic opportunity from indigenous Canadians in northern British Columbia?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (1900)[English]Madam Speaker, I would suggest that the minister's reference to the products on the schedule confirms what we know about the Liberals' willingness and desire to phase out the oil sands.The second amendment put forward by the other place to Bill C-48 would have added a new section to the end of the bill. Even though it was not very substantive, at least it was a tip of the hat to the regions that would be most affected by the bill. However, the Liberals gutted this amendment.Could the minister explain to the House why the rules and regulations that govern the loading and off-loading of oil on Canada's east coast are not good enough for the loading and off-loading of oil on Canada's west coast? Will you simply admit that the bill—British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium Act [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1900)[English]Madam Speaker, let us be very clear. This is not a tanker ban; this is a product ban. This is geared solely toward the products that are developed and produced in Alberta.Thirty-five first nations have signed on to share in $2 billion of equity. What is the government's plan for those 35 first nations communities, which are basing their communities' economic hopes on this plan?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastClosureCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1915)[English]Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise to continue my response to the government's motion on the Senate amendments to Bill C-48. As I said yesterday, I, along with millions of other Canadians, would rather that Bill C-48 be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. I read aloud the letter from six premiers that highlights the damage Bill C-48 and Bill C-69 are doing to our national unity. I left off quoting testimony from indigenous leaders and elected representatives on this and other bills, which underscored the hypocrisy of the government's claim to consult. I will pick up there, considering the backdrop of Liberal attacks on the Canadian oil and gas industry, and share some of the testimony, much from first nations leaders, that the transport committee heard when we studied this bill. These are not my words. These are not the words of the Leader of the Opposition or any of my colleagues. These are the words of Canadians who, day in and day out, are working hard to provide good jobs and economic growth while maintaining a healthy environment.Ms. Nancy Bérard-Brown, manager of oil markets and transportation with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said:CAPP did not support the proposed moratorium because it is not based on facts or science. There were no science-based gaps identified in safety or environmental protection that might justify a moratorium. Mr. Chris Bloomer, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said:The proposed oil tanker moratorium act, Bill C-48, is yet another change that will compound uncertainty and negatively impact investor confidence in Canada....In conclusion, the consequences of potentially drastic policy changes for future energy projects have instilled uncertainty within the regulatory system, adding additional risks, costs, and delays for a sector that the Prime Minister publicly acknowledged has built Canada's prosperity and directly employs more than 270,000 Canadians.The approach to policy-making represented by the development of Bill C-48 contributes to this uncertainty and erodes Canada's competitiveness.Commenting on the practical, or rather impractical, ramifications of this bill, Mr. Peter Xotta, vice-president of planning and operations for the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, said the following on what this bill could mean for the west coast transportation corridor:With regard to Bill C-48, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority assumes that government understands the potential economic impact for such a moratorium, given that there are very few suitable locations, particularly on the west coast, for movement of petroleum products, as was articulated by my associate from Prince Rupert.Notwithstanding the fact that any future proposals would be subject to government's rigorous environmental and regulatory review process, this moratorium could create pressure on the southwest coast of British Columbia to develop capacity for future energy projects.As I said earlier, there were many first nations representatives who gave testimony at committee. Ms. Eva Clayton, president of Nisga'a Lisims Government, said: In the weeks that preceded the introduction of Bill C-48, we urged that the moratorium not be enforced before further consultation took place and that the moratorium should not cover our treaty area. Much to our surprise, Bill C-48 was introduced before we had been offered an opportunity to review the detailed approach that the government decided to take, nor were we able to comment on the implications of the proposed legislation on the terms and shared objectives of our treaty even though the area subject to the moratorium includes all of Nisga'a Lands, all of the Nass area, and all coastal areas of our treaty....We aspire to become a prosperous and self-sustaining nation that can provide meaningful economic opportunities for our people. This aspiration is reflected in our treaty, which sets out the parties' shared commitment to reduce the Nisga'a Nation's reliance on federal transfers over time. The Nisga'a Nation takes this goal very seriously. However, it stands to be undermined by Bill C-48.(1920)Mr. Calvin Helin, chairman and president of Eagle Spirit Energy Holding Ltd., stated:In that context, first nations people, particularly the 30-plus communities that have supported our project, have told us that they do not like outsiders, particularly those they view as trust-fund babies coming into the traditional territories they've governed and looked after for over 10,000 years and dictating government policy in their territory.Mr. Dale Swampy, coordinator of Aboriginal Equity Partners, stated:We are here to oppose the tanker ban. We have worked hard and diligently. Our 31 first nation chiefs and Métis leaders invested a lot of time and resources to negotiate with northern gateway with the prospect of being able to benefit from the project, to be able to get our communities out of poverty. Please listen to how Mr. John Helin, mayor of the Lax Kw'alaams Band, identified those who support the oil tanker ban. He said:What we're asking is, what is consultation? It has to be meaningful. It can't be a blanket moratorium.If you look at our traditional territory and the Great Bear Rainforest, that was established without consultation with members from my community. The picture that was taken when they announced that, it was NGOs from America standing there trumpeting that accomplishment. We can't let people from outside our communities, NGOs and well-funded organizations that are against oil and gas or whatever they're against come in and dictate in our territories what we should and should not do.In contrast to Mr. Helin's comments, Ms. Caitlyn Vernon, campaigns director for the Sierra Club of British Columbia, a witness who supports this bill, actually let the cat out of the bag in response to a question, when she said:on the south coast, tankers pose a huge risk to the economy, communities, wildlife, the southern residents, and endangered orca whales that live in the Salish Sea.... Absolutely, I would support a full-coast moratorium.Mr. Ken Veldman, director of public affairs for the Prince Rupert Port Authority put the views of Ms. Vernon, and others like her, including, I would point out, members of this House in the NDP, the Bloc, the Green Party and likely even the Liberal Party, in perspective when he said:As you may imagine, there are a wide variety of opinions as to what's acceptable risk and what isn't. However, the reality is that risk can be quantified, and if you're looking to achieve zero risk, then you're correct that zero transportation is really the only way to achieve that.That said, if our appetite for risk is zero, that has very broad ramifications for shipping off the coast in general. When speaking to our committee this spring, Captain Sean Griffiths, chief executive officer of the Atlantic Pilotage Authority, also reflected on the impact of an oil tanker moratorium on the Atlantic Canadian economy. He stated:Twelve of our 17 ports in Atlantic Canada ship large volumes of oil and petroleum products in and out of port. I can imagine it's a way of life back in the east, and it has been for quite some time. We move a lot of oil in and out of our ports. Placentia Bay alone, for instance, has 1,000 to 1,100 tanker movements every year on average, so a moratorium would, I'm sure, devastate the region.Bill C-48, along with Bill C-88, and the “no more pipelines” bill, Bill C-69, paint a pattern of a government and a Prime Minister obsessed with politicizing and undermining our energy resources sector at every turn. Whether it be through legislation, the carbon tax, the cancellation of the northern gateway and energy east pipelines or the continued bungling of the Trans Mountain expansion, which we heard today the Liberals have approved yet again, the current Prime Minister has proven, at every turn, that he is an opponent of our natural resources sector. If the government was serious about the environment and the economy going hand in hand, it would implement real changes. (1925)Hypothetically speaking, let us look at some the changes the government might make. It could use scientific independent studies to further strengthen our world-leading tanker safety system by making changes that would not only protect our domestic waters but the waters of any country with which we trade. It could require all large crude oil tankers operating in Canadian waters to have a double hull, since a double hull has two complete watertight layers of surface and is much safer. It could even go a step further and inspect every foreign tanker on its first visit to a Canadian port and annually thereafter, holding those tankers to the same standards as Canadian-flagged vessels. This hypothetical government could also expand the national aerial surveillance program and extend long-term funding. It could increase surveillance efforts in coastal areas, including in northern British Columbia. It could ensure that the aerial surveillance program was given access to remote sensing equipment capable of identifying potential spills from satellite images.This theoretical government could give more power to the Canadian Coast Guard to respond to incidents and establish an incident command system. It could amend legislation to provide alternate response measures, such as the use of chemical dispersants and burning spilled oil during emergencies, and could clarify the Canadian Coast Guard's authority to use and authorize these measures when there was likely to be a net environmental benefit. It could create an independent tanker safety expert panel to receive input from provincial governments, aboriginal groups and marine stakeholders and then implement the changes recommended by this panel. It could focus on preventing spills in the first place and cleaning them up quickly if they did occur, while making sure that polluters pay.Hypothetically, the government could modernize Canada's marine navigation system and have Canada take a leadership role in implementing e-navigation in our tankers while supporting its implementation worldwide. This is doubly important, since e-navigation reduces the risk of an oil spill by providing accurate real-time information on navigation hazards, weather and ocean conditions to vessel operators and marine authorities, thereby minimizing the potential for incidents.It could establish new response planning partnerships for regions that have or are expected to have high levels of tanker traffic, such as the southern portion of British Columbia, Saint John and the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Port Hawkesbury in Nova Scotia, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec. It could work to develop a close partnership with each of these regions, including with local aboriginal communities, to develop responses to the unique challenges facing their tanker traffic.This theoretical government could strengthen the polluter pay regime by introducing legislative and regulatory amendments that would remove the ship-source oil pollution fund per incident liability limit and ensure that the full amount was available for any incident. It could ensure that compensation was provided to eligible claimants while recovering these costs from industry through a levy. As well, it could extend compensation so that those who lost earnings due to an oil spill would be compensated even if their property had not been directly affected. All these changes could be done by a government that actually cared about protecting the environment and continuing to grow the economy. Wait a minute. We are not talking about a hypothetical government. Every single one of the changes I just mentioned was brought in by the previous Conservative government. Unlike the Liberal government, we listened to the experts, which empowered us to make real, practical changes that made a difference. While Liberals vacillate between paralysis and empty, economically damaging, virtue-signalling legislation, Conservatives look for real solutions. Case in point, the Liberal government is so preoccupied with appearances that it just finished its third round of approving a pipeline supported by over 60% of British Columbia residents. I read the quote earlier by some who support this legislation. Some would like to see a complete prohibition on oil movement. (1930)This ideological oil tanker moratorium, as I have said, is not based on science. We know that. That is why, frankly, we did not propose any amendments when this bill was before the transport committee. We did not believe that this bill was redeemable, and I still do not. There was a brief moment of hope for me when the Senate committee recommended that the bill not proceed. Sadly, that hope was short-lived. This brings us to today and the motion that is the basis of our debate. I will take a few minutes to outline my thoughts on the government's response to the Senate's amendments to the Liberals' terrible bill. Last week, the Senate voted on three amendments to Bill C-48. One, by a Conservative senator, which would have given the Minister of Transport the authority to adjust the northern boundary of the tanker moratorium, would have been an improvement to the bill. Regrettably, it was narrowly defeated.The amendment in the other place that did pass cannot be called an improvement to this bill. While somewhat noble in its intent, it is a thin attempt to mask the fact that this entire bill is an affront to indigenous people's rights. The inclusion of these clauses in the bill does not change that fact. Regarding the second part of the amendment passed by the Senate, I acknowledge that it is at least an attempt to recognize that this bill is an assault on a particular region of the country, namely, the oil-producing prairie provinces. This second part of the amendment passed by the Senate calls for a statutory review of the act as well as a review of the regional impact this act would have. The government's motion, which we are debating today, amended certain elements of this Senate amendment. No one will guess which section of this amendment the government kept and which section it rejected. Those who guessed that it rejected the section that, at the very least, acknowledged indirectly that this bill was an attack on western Canada, would be correct. This further demonstrates that when the Prime Minister or one of his ministers claims that others are threatening national unity with their opposition to certain pieces of legislation by the government, it is the ultimate doublespeak. Hon. senators who support this bill had the decency to propose and pass an amendment that was at least a tip of the hat to the alienation felt by western Canadians brought on by the Liberal government's actions. The motion we are debating today has stripped these sections from the bill, proving once again that this is just another step in the Prime Minister's plan to phase out the oil sands, regardless of the impact on Canada's economic well-being. It is for these reasons that my colleagues and I oppose the government's motion on the Senate amendments to Bill C-48. We on the Conservative side will always stand up for Canada. We support Canada's natural resource sector, which contributes billions to our economy and economic growth. We support Canada's environment with practical, science-based policies that have a real and positive impact on our country's, and indeed the whole world's, environment. We support Canadians in their hope and desire for sustainable, well-paying jobs so that they can support their families, support each other and contribute to a happy and healthy Canada.Conservatives support legislation that is based on science, research and the facts, and this bill is none of the above. Aboriginal rightsBritish ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsEconomic developmentEmergency preparednessEnvironmental protectionFreight transportationGovernment billsMaritime safetyOil and gasOil tankersRegional and strategic assessmentsTank vesselsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (1935)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am not sure what my hon. colleague's question has to do with the bill or Senate amendments before us. I absolutely reject the premise of his question.British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (1935)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would suggest there have been consultations along the way with first nations. Consulting with first nations is very important. We know there is considerable support among first nations on B.C.'s coast for energy development opportunities. We even heard support at committee for these opportunities. We recognize, just as the minister did earlier, that there are varying views, whether first nations support the bill or not. However, what we heard in committee is that they were not consulted.I would suggest that the government is only consulting when it believes it will get the answer it wants. When it knows it is not going to get the answer it wants, it does not consult.I would remind the House that this directive was put in the minister's mandate letter long before he had any opportunity to consult. I would ask the hon. member to reflect on what the current government is doing with respect to consultation.Aboriginal rightsBritish ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley Valley//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (1940)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would remind my hon. colleague that there were 31 first nations that were equity partners. They held a 30% financial position in the northern gateway pipeline project. I am pretty sure that there was consultation that took place in regard to that project with first nations communities that were were going to be directly affected by the project.I would also remind my hon. colleague that it was the previous Conservative government that created the Major Projects Management Office - West, which was bringing together provincial governments, federal governments and first nations leaders to talk about resource development and resource projects in their territories and in those provinces.I would also quote the Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde. He said that we know that 500 of the 630 first nations across Canada are open to pipelines and petroleum development on their land. We definitely need to create partnerships to have these conversations to ensure that they have every opportunity to succeed economically as the rest of Canadians do.Aboriginal rightsBritish ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley ValleyNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley Valley//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (1940)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have travelled throughout this entire country and recognize that there are extraordinary, beautiful places across this country that we all want to see stewarded carefully. When it comes to the environment, when it comes to this bill and when we are talking about the impact this bill will have on the environment, Bill C-48 will do nothing more to preserve the area off the northwest coast of British Columbia than is already being done. Ships, including U.S. tankers travelling from Alaska to Washington state, will still continue to be able to travel up and down the coast just outside of the 100 kilometre limit. There already is a voluntary moratorium in place. It is being observed. It has been there for three decades. The bill is nothing but symbolism. It is not going to preserve that northwest coast any more than what is already being done through the voluntary moratorium. All it is doing is putting a moratorium on Canada's Alberta oil sands.British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsEnvironmental protectionGovernment billsOil tankersNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley ValleyNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley Valley//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2005)[English]It being 8:05 p.m., pursuant to an order made earlier today, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the consideration of the Senate amendments to Bill C-48 now before the House.The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay. Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members. C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastNathanCullenSkeena—Bulkley ValleyBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2045)[English]I declare the motion carried.(Motion agreed to)British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsDecisions of the HouseGovernment billsOil tankersBruceStantonSimcoe NorthLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2045)[Translation]Order. I would ask the hon. members to continue their conversations outside the House.The hon. member for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles.Noise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (2100)[English]Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-100. I want to start my remarks by recognizing that we are ending the session shortly and this could very well be my last speech in the 42nd Parliament. That will no doubt delight my Liberal friends, but if they stay to listen to the content of my final remarks, they will have no delight because they will outline their failures.I want to also send special thanks to a couple of exceptional Canadians, Dr. David Stevens and Dr. Bill Plaxton in Kitchener Waterloo. I have been away the last week with my wife who had surgery. She was in the hands of those amazing medical professionals at Grand River Hospital. I want to thank them and I want to thank her for allowing me to come and speak tonight to NAFTA. I have been trying to help at home a little this last week.All of us in the House rely on exceptional spouses, partners and families. If these are my last remarks of this Parliament, I think all of us do not thank our families enough. I love Rebecca and I love my family. The sacrifices we make in the House lead to reflection at this time of year. It has been good for me to spend time with my wife who is my partner in this adventure. I want to thank Dr. Stevens in particular for his exceptional care.I will now proceed to upset my Liberal friends in discussing Bill C-100, back to my normal approach. I hope a lot of Canadians are watching. I doubt they are, but I will push this out because we have to break this narrative that the government has approached the U.S. trade relationship and NAFTA renegotiations in any form of strategic fashion, because that has not been the case.Much like almost every foreign relations approach under the Prime Minister, Canada has suffered, our sectors have suffered, employers, job creators, employees have suffered. The Liberal Party always puts the Prime Minister's brand and their own electoral fortune ahead of the national interest. Nothing highlights that more than the famous state visit to India. However, if we look at all the strained relationships Canada has around the world right now, we have never had so many. Almost all of these diplomatic entanglements are attributable to the Prime Minister's own approach, style and obsession with his image and electoral prospects.We saw that with photographs from the India trip, but we have also seen it in flawed trade relations with China, where we are in the biggest dispute since we have had relations with China in the 1970s, with Saudi Arabia, with the Philippines. Countries like Italy have imposed tariffs on durum wheat. We are losing track of the number of countries that have a serious problem with Canada on trade, on security or in other relations because of the Prime Minister's government. As much as I have some admiration for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, she is presiding over probably the worst period of modern diplomatic relations of Canada. I do not think 10 more magazine covers of Maclean's will correct that record. Nothing should concern Canadians more than the situation with NAFTA. Two-thirds of our economy relies on trade with the United States. I have said this many times. Canada became lazy for the last half century, relying on the fact that we lived just north to the largest, most voracious free market economy in the world. In the post-world cycle, Canada traded, produced, were drawers of water and hewers of wood for the largest market just south of us.Until the Harper government, we did not look much beyond our shores to enhance free trade and develop partnerships to diversify our trade relationships. We were so reliant, but we were also pioneers in free trade. We can go back to the Harper and Mulroney governments, even back to Pearson with the auto pact of the mid-1960s when there was free trade in automobiles for the first time between two modern industrial countries. An automobile assembled in Oshawa by people like my father and his colleagues who worked in Oshawa where I grew up, or an automobile assembled in Windsor, or Oakville or Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec was considered just the same as if it had been assembled in Michigan.(2105)Over the subsequent decades, we saw a Great Lakes free trade based in auto. It was the epicentre of the global auto industry. With just-in-time manufacturing, a part could be made in Aurora, put on final assembly in Oshawa and 70% of the vehicles produced in our Ontario auto plants were for sale in the United States anyway. Therefore, our free trade with the United States was built upon the auto industry.I say this for two reasons. The first is because representing Oshawa and that industry, the retirees and the workers there now is a priority for me. The second reason is because it should trouble Canadians that the minister did not mention the auto industry in her priority speech on NAFTA, despite the fact the Liberals' best friend, Jerry Dias, was on the NAFTA advisory committee. I was pushing for auto to be a priority. whereas Jerry Dias was applauding the Prime Minister for an agenda that did not mention the auto industry.Let us do a recap. President Trump was elected, and before his inauguration, before he was president, the Prime Minister volunteered to renegotiate NAFTA. There have been so many mistakes between now and then, we forget that our Prime Minister inserted us into something that was likely going to be focused on modernization with Mexico. Later on, the U.S. outlined what it wanted. In July 2017, a United States trade representative laid out a series of priorities for the U.S. It spelled them out in detail, including things related to state-owned enterprises and non-market economy-type structures, which were a surprise to people at the end. The U.S. laid it out in July 2017 in detail, rules of origin, part content and the fact it wanted to go after what it perceived to be subsidies in the agriculture sector in Canada, despite the fact the U.S. spends more on agricultural subsidies than we spend on our military. However, it laid out what it wanted to talk about. What did the Liberal Party lay out a few months later in August 2017 at the University of Ottawa? The minister launched her vaunted progressive agenda speech. There was no response to what the U.S. had already put out on trade. That is how a negotiation is supposed to work. The U.S. talks about the priorities it wants to talk about at the table and we put forward a contrary position. We should have pushed back and said that the U.S. had to stop subsidizing its agriculture sector before it could lecture us. However, the Liberals did not do that. They proceeded to make it all about the Prime Minister again. The “progressive agenda” they called it. I invite Canadians to look at the speech. The core objectives of the minister's speech were laid out in detail and they were failures across the board. I know the minister has a high degree of education, but if she was getting marked on her paper, her speech, she would have failed.Let me take the House through the core objectives laid out by the Liberal Party at the beginning of NAFTA.The first objective was to modernize NAFTA for the digital revolution. That did not happen. In fact, there are concerns with respect to data transfer and localized storage of digital information that Canada was not able to negotiate into the new NAFTA. Therefore, the first core objective was a failure.The second objective was the progressive section within NAFTA, where the minister, and later on the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and others, said that the government wanted clear, new chapters on climate change, gender rights, indigenous issues regarding reconciliation, those sorts of things. At the time, I said it was hard to be critical of things that were very important social programming and policy issues, particularly reconciliation. I take that responsibility very seriously. However, I also recognize that NAFTA is a trade agreement. There is not even a constitutional alignment between first nations and indigenous peoples, between Mexico, the United States and Canada, so how could we ever negotiate a trade agreement with a chapter on indigenous issues, for example? It was impossible.(2110)Why were those elements the second prong of Canada's NAFTA strategy? Because it was the Prime Minister's brand. That could have been ripped out of the 2015 Liberal election platform.When we are putting up policies to ensure we guarantee almost two-thirds of our economic activity as a nation, we should not be doing the posturing that the Liberals do on all these relationships. It leads to bad outcomes.The third core objective the Liberal Party outlined was harmonizing regulations. That did not happen either. In fact, the last government had regulatory co-operation in the western hemispheric travel initiative, beyond the border initiatives. We have gone way back. We are not harmonizing any regulations.The fourth core objective was government procurement and eliminating local content and buy American provisions. The Liberals failed on that one too. There remain buy America provisions, and the trend is getting worse.The fifth core objective was to make the movement of professionals easier with respect to allowing Canadian professionals or people transferred to work in the United States. They failed on that front too. They did not secure that. That should have been low hanging fruit.The sixth core objective was supply management, which the Liberals caved on as well. What I never heard the government say was the fact that the supply management system was criticized relentlessly. We heard President Trump talk about high tariff rates. I never heard a Liberal minister push back on the United States and say that its collection of direct agriculture subsidies amounted to more subsidization of the agricultural sector in the United States than in Canada by a country mile. In fact, the Americans spend more on agricultural subsidies on average each year than we spend on our military. We should have been pushing back at this narrative.Those were the six core objectives of the minister's speech at the University of Ottawa. I would invite Canadians to look at it. We did not achieve a single objective. If that is not failure of colossal proportions, I do not know what is.At the same time, we had section 232 speculation about steel and aluminum tariffs. The Conservatives said at the time that we needed to talk security, that we needed to talk trade, that we needed to ensure we could use NORAD and other relationships that were unique to Canada as a way to ensure we did not have section 232 tariffs applied.The Prime Minister did a steel town tour when the government gained a one month exemption from tariffs. A month later the tariffs applied and they hurt Canada hard for a year. If we look at the statements by Secretary Ross in the United States, we could have avoided it. Bill C-101 that is before the House now on safeguards is what the U.S. had been asking for. Had we aligned on concerns about oversupply of steel from China, had we aligned on security provisions, we could have avoided section 232 tariffs and we could have had a better NAFTA.At the time, the Conservatives publicly told the minister to use the North American defence relationship to distinguish Canada. Only Canada has a defence and homeland security partnership with the United States. Mexico does not. Europe does not. NAFTA does not. Only Canada does, and we have had that since the 1950s.When we are talking trade, or security, or oversupply of commodities from China, we should have been aligned. Oversupply of Chinese steel was something the Obama administration started taking on in the early days of the Liberal government, as the administration was winding down. This was not all about it being hard to align with Trump. No attempt was made by the Liberal government.The damage the so-called progressive agenda did allowed Mexico to negotiate an agreement before Canada. It should astound Canadians to know that in the final months of negotiations, Canada was not at the table but Mexico was. Mexico had 85 direct meetings with administration officials even though it was starting in a much worse position. The border relationship with Mexico was part of the U.S. presidential election. However, Mexico was strategic. It did not posture. It did not virtue signal. It did not try and run its next election using NAFTA negotiations as the stage.(2115)I cannot stress enough that on almost every major diplomatic entanglement we have had under the current government, it has been the result of the Liberal Party putting its own election fortunes ahead of our national interests, ahead of steelworkers, ahead auto workers and ahead of the softwood lumber industry, which was hardly even mentioned by the government. We have seen those sectors, agriculture and others, let down time after time because of the Prime Minister's particular agenda and his desire to make this all about him. In this Parliament, we should be serving Canadians and not the electoral fortunes of that party.What has Mexico done? It has surpassed us under the Liberals. In fact, Mexico is now the largest bilateral trade partner with the United States at $97.4 billion in the first two months of this year. That was ahead of our $92.4 billion, even though it is caught in the trade disruption. Mexico has been smarter than the current government has, so much so that it reached an agreement, and Canada was given an option to join it. There were no further negotiations, despite the minister's frequent trips to Washington and storming into the building. The deal was done, and if members go to Washington, everyone knows that. The deal was done, and Canada was given the ability to sign on. Now we hear the Liberals holding on to things like culture, which was exempted. Culture was never mentioned by the U.S. once. It was not a priority in the minister's speech, and the Prime Minister never mentioned it. The Liberals are now trying to cobble together things they try to say they saved. We already had chapter 19. They are saying that culture was not changed. The Americans were not trying to change it. I read through the six core objectives in the minister's speech. The Liberals failed on every single one. We have tried to work with them. In fact, the relief from the section 232 tariffs was initiated by the Conservative caucus going down there and saying that we would work with the government on ratification, and the member for Malpeque knows that. He and many people are leaving, because they do not like the way the Prime Minister approached it. I have lost track of how many more Liberal first-timers have resigned today. They do not agree with his approach. We went down and said that we would try to use the dying days of Parliament to pass a new NAFTA, even though we think it is a step back. Our leader has called it NAFTA 0.5, because we wanted those steel and aluminum tariffs off. They were hurting manufacturers in Ontario. They were hurting people in my riding, like Ranfar Steel, and steel plants in Prince Edward Island that I visited last summer. They were being hurt in Quebec. Therefore, we made an agreement to say that we would try to work with the government on ratifying a deal, which we think is a step back, just to get trade certainty. Businesses want some certainty, even if it means taking a worse deal. This will be a priority for us. I want to end with remarks that are etched on the walls of the U.S. embassy in Canada. We can let personalities get in the way on both sides, but it will be a priority for the Conservative government to get this relationship back on track. In 1961 in this chamber, John F. Kennedy said this: Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunderHe said that in this chamber, and that is a challenge to us. These are our closest allies, trade partners and familial connections going back to the origins of our country. We have to be able to fight for our interests and co-operate on security and trade. To do that, the Conservatives wanted to work with the government to get the tariffs done and work with the NAFTA agreement as we have it. We will fix the gaps after a change in government, sector by sector, including auto, softwood and agriculture. To get the certainty, we were prepared to try to work with the government, even though we would have taken a very different approach. I look forward to questions, including from my friend, the MP for Malpeque. Automotive industryC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementDumping of importsForeign policyGovernment billsGovernment performanceSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesBrianMasseWindsor West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2120)[English]Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question from the member for Windsor West. As he recognized, I mentioned the Auto Pact in my remarks as the first example of sectoral free trade between two large industrial countries.Canada did benefit in a large way. His area of Windsor, my area of Oshawa, places like Oakville, Sainte-Thérèse, Mississauga and Aurora grew what became a Great Lakes basin of auto parts, auto supply and assembly.There are a number of reasons we have seen Canadian competitiveness erode in the last few years. This negotiation is one of them. In fact, some of the best years, when that member was working in the auto industry, came in the early nineties, when we had record levels of assembly with the United States. I know the member was part of that at the time.What we are seeing now is protectionism with the U.S. We should have made sure that auto was our priority from the start. The fact that our minister did not mention auto as a priority in her core objectives speech should concern Canadians. It should concern Jerry Dias, who was on the committee. Where was Jerry? That is a good question. Now the Liberals are putting him on other advisory committees, at least for the next few months.Automotive industryC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsBrianMasseWindsor WestKellyMcCauleyEdmonton West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (2125)[English]Madam Speaker, my colleague made a comment about how the tariffs have been hitting our steel industry hard.I was looking at the PBO report, and two things stuck out. Last year, the Liberals collected $1.1 billion more in tariffs than they actually delivered to our suffering steel companies. In the fall economic statement, the Liberals further forecast that the Liberal government would bank an additional $3.54 billion in tariffs instead of actually using that money to help our suffering steel industry.I wonder if my friend could comment on the duplicity of the Liberal government, saying that it stands behind our steelworkers when it is actually just taking the money and putting it right in the bank.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementDuty remissionGovernment billsSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsErinO'TooleHon.DurhamErinO'TooleHon.Durham//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2125)[English]Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague from Edmonton West for his work. In fact, he and his office knew the last budget and the errors in it better than the Minister of Finance and his entire department. I think the people of Edmonton should be very proud of the team we have there. It will be growing by two in a few months.The $3.5 billion in tariffs is part of our push-back on Bill C-101. The government promised certain things in terms of tariff relief. When it imposed the retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., it knew that it was having an adverse effect on Canadian producers and suppliers. In fact, I called some of them dumb, because the minister had promised me that she would adjust if those retaliatory tariffs were having virtually no impact in the U.S. but a huge impact in our community. We all know boat sellers across the country, like the Junkin family in my riding. They have received no relief. They now have stranded inventory. As part of our support for the safeguard bill the Liberals are rushing through at the end, we have asked for a plan to get rid of that $3.5 billion. That is tax they collected that is in government revenues. It should go out to the small steel fabricators. It should go out to the boat retailers. It should go out to the SMEs impacted by Liberal trade disruption.When are the Liberals going to dispense the money these Canadian enterprises, particularly in western Canada, need so much?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementDuty remissionGovernment billsSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsKellyMcCauleyEdmonton WestWayneEasterHon.Malpeque//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2125)[English]Madam Speaker, I am glad I provoked my friend from Malpeque to stand. We are going to miss him when he retires shortly.I would direct him to MacDougall Steel Erectors in Borden-Carleton. They are great people. They know the member well, and they know he has been frustrated. MacDougall is a great example of a supplier that has worked with companies in Quebec that are working on buildings in Manhattan. It is amazing. They can get specialized steel products made on Prince Edward Island into a Quebec company's bid for a Manhattan high-rise. What the tariffs were doing, under the Liberals' watch, when they allowed them to happen, was pricing the Quebec steel company and the P.E.I. company out of North American supply chains. We could not have another year of companies like MacDougall stuck out of these supply chains. That is why Conservatives are working with the government to get the tariffs off, and if it means a NAFTA 0.5, we will fix it after the election.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSupply managementTrade agreementsWayneEasterHon.MalpequeGabrielSte-MarieJoliette//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2130)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.Free trade agreements like NAFTA, the TPP and CETA are very important to our future, because we need to seek out new markets around the world. Trade between Canada and the United States is currently being disrupted, especially with respect to steel and aluminum. The Conservative Party will work with the government if we have a normal agreement and if there are no tariffs going forward.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsGabrielSte-MarieJolietteGabrielSte-MarieJoliette//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (2200)[English]Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Davenport for her valiant attempt to defend something that is indefensible. She talked for 20 minutes trying to extol the virtues of this agreement, yet in that 20 minutes she never once mentioned the softwood lumber agreement.In March 2016, her Prime Minister and her trade minister promised to have a deal framework within 100 days. We are now years past that 100 days and nothing has ever been done by the government on the softwood lumber agreement between Canada and the U.S.Currently, in my home province, British Columbia, and in my riding of North Okanagan—Shuswap, we have mills shutting down because of the difficulties in the market, because there is no certainty created for them out of this trade deal whatsoever. The Liberals have completely abandoned the softwood lumber agreement and left those mills in limbo.Could the member explain why she did not even mention that in her 20-minute intervention?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsJulieDzerowiczDavenportJulieDzerowiczDavenport//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (2205)[English]Madam Speaker, my question for the member across the way has to do with competitiveness. I have heard from businesses in my riding and across Canada that small and medium-sized enterprises really got hammered with the tariffs and counter-tariffs. Government coffers swelled with the money collected, while these businesses suffered, not being able to fairly compete with our trading partner, the United States. The government put on retaliatory tariffs, with no pain to the United States but great pain to our SMEs. The ones that survived are looking for relief, but this comes at the same time that a punishing carbon tax has been put on these businesses, which do not get a $300 cheque in the mail. They are the ones funding the money going back to families in this pyramid scheme that the Liberals have cooked up.The anti-competitive Liberal government is really harming Canadians and small and medium-sized enterprises. I wonder if the member could tell us when the government will flow the money from the tariffs that it collected as relief to those businesses.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesTrade agreementsJulieDzerowiczDavenportJulieDzerowiczDavenport//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, what to say after that speech? Winston Churchill once said that a man was about as big as the things that made him angry. Certainly, the member for Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook was quite angry tonight, trying to defend the government's record on trade, which is not a good one. It reminds me a little bit of the advice he was given by the minister for climate change when she said that if we wanted people to believe something, just keep saying it, yell it, get angry and then they would totally believe it.I would ask the member this. He talked a lot about how the Prime Minister fought for the progressive agenda in the U.S. trade deal. Of course, in the last two months of this trade deal, which is represented in Bill C-100, Canada was not even at the negotiating table. Mexico got the deal. We had to be added to it. The member talked about the signature of the progressive agenda and he mentioned the gender lens. I would like that member to refer me to the chapter in the agreement on gender. Here is a hint for Canadians watching: There is no chapter. None of the items the government laid out in their objectives were met.I know the member worked a lot in education. I think he will be going back to that in the fall. Could he tell me something? In the six core objectives, when the Liberals got zero out of six, would he fail a student with that mark?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—ChezzetcookDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—Chezzetcook//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, I do not know how you could have possibly heard the member for Barrie—Innisfil over that. If the good people of Winnipeg North ever come to their senses and elect a Conservative MP and the Liberals are looking for another MP to stand and rage incoherently on demand, I think we have our winner.The member talked a lot about job growth. I want to point out that according to the Library of Parliament, the participation of women in the workforce as a percentage has actually dropped under the current government. He talked about unemployment dropping in Canada, and it is great that it has, but I want to point out again some information, again from the Library of Parliament.There is a great bumper sticker that says, “Trigger a Liberal: use facts and logic”, so here is a trigger warning right now. Since the Liberals were elected, in Germany unemployment has dropped 27%. In England, with all the problems with Brexit, unemployment has dropped 24%. In Japan, with its massively aging workforce, unemployment has dropped 19%. In the United States, unemployment has dropped 28%, and under the Liberal government, unemployment has dropped 16%. The high tide is lifting all boats, but the Liberals are sitting on the dock while their boat is drifting away.Why has the government so underperformed compared to the rest of the booming world in the creation of jobs and dropping unemployment?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsLabour forceSecond readingTrade agreementsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—Chezzetcook//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (2305)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am not quite sure how to follow my friend from Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook. I will try to do so with facts, as opposed to volume. He knows that my family, who live in Fall River in his riding, have a great deal of respect for him, as I do. Unfortunately, the speech he was given tonight with respect to NAFTA does not reflect what really happened in the negotiations and the deal. As a Nova Scotia MP, the member would know that the future of economic development in Nova Scotia, the success being had right now, is attributable to two things. First is the amazing potential of institutions and entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada, and Nova Scotia in particular. Second was the strategic focus on trade and infrastructure that took place during the Harper government. Specifically, Atlantic Canada has never seen a larger investment than the awarding of the shipbuilding contract to the Halifax shipyard. The largest investment in the history of Atlantic Canada is attributable to the Conservatives. I am very proud of that, having served on board one of the frigates bought previously by the last majority Conservative governments of Mulroney. When Conservative governments are in, they have to modernize and update the Canadian Armed Forces every generation. We see the current government buying 40-year-old used aircraft from Australia and being parodied on the world stage, but the investment at the Halifax shipyard is impressive. In fact, I will be going to see it again this summer.What is interesting as well for the Halifax Regional Municipality, an area that the member for Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook should know well, as his riding abuts the Halifax airport, is that Peter MacKay made it a priority for the runways at the Robert Stanfield airport to be extended. Longer runways allowed for more cargo flights to take Atlantic Canadian exports around the world, exports like lobster to South Korea. As parliamentary secretary in the Harper government, I was proud to visit the cargo terminal at Stanfield International in Halifax to see one of the first few months' worth of flights taking Nova Scotia lobster, fished from Cape Breton right down through to the south shore and to Yarmouth, to new markets in Asia, to secure a better price for the products. In fact, the CETA trade deal was particularly beneficial to a number of key industries in Atlantic Canada, particularly on the seafood side, as was the bilateral trade deal with South Korea, which I was involved in.If we do the rundown, at Cape Breton, the tar ponds that were talked about for generations, when I was in law school at Dalhousie or serving at Shearwater, were finally cleaned up under the Conservatives. The trouble is that by the time we get these projects done, we have done the heavy lifting and we do not get to cut some of the ribbons that the new people do. However, I would like the member to spend a few moments researching that. At the moment, I cannot point to one major investment by the current government. In fact, when the minister in charge of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency is based out of Mississauga, and when the Liberals tried to break with 80-year tradition to block an Atlantic Canadian jurist from the Supreme Court of Canada, defying constitutional precedent, I would suggest Atlantic Canadians have seen that there is zero priority for their needs with the government. There are lots of photo ops and selfies, but that is wearing thin on them. I would like the member to do some research on the items I have just spoken about. I would like anyone to bring it to the floor of the House of Commons if I am wrong about the shipbuilding investment in the Halifax shipyard being the largest single public procurement infrastructure project ever in Atlantic Canadian history. As someone who lived, served and studied in Atlantic Canada, I am very proud of that track record.(2310)I am now speaking on a continued debate on Bill C-100 and the amendment offered by the NDP. I might as well get to the crunch of the challenge we face here.As Conservatives, we negotiated 98% of Canada's export access; 98% were deals negotiated by the Conservatives. That included the U.S. free trade agreement, NAFTA, CETA and the trans-Pacific partnership, which basically was agreed upon in the middle of the 2015 election, but then the U.S. pulled out and there were some changes made. There was the agreement with South Korea and a tonne of bilateral agreements. There are really only two or three free trade agreements that were not negotiated by Conservative governments: the Israel free trade agreement, which we modernized, and I think maybe the Chile agreement. However, by and large, 98% of our export access was negotiated by Conservatives. Therefore, we have been frustrated in this process, seeing a lack of attention on trade, exports and key market sectors to be put forward in the renegotiation of NAFTA. This amendment raises a range of issues. Core to the problems with the NAFTA negotiation were not the outcomes on labour, because the U.S. was concerned basically about labour rates in Mexico. In fact, Canada is a signatory to more ILO treaties than the U.S. is. What is interesting is that, just today, in front of Congress, the USTR, Ambassador Lighthizer, viewed it as a success that Mexico is going to have a secret ballot in the union elections, something the Liberals oppose as a democratic approach to elections for union representation. They likely oppose it because Jerry Dias appears to be a senior advisor to the Prime Minister, advising now on how to spend the $600 million media fund. That should trouble Canadians.However, the problem was the focus in the NAFTA negotiations, which was softwood lumber, our eternal irritant with the U.S. relationship. In fact, Canadian softwood allows home ownership in the United States to be available to more people. The only reason the tariffs on our softwood lumber, which were agreed upon by the current government, are not having as big an impact as they could is the voracious appetite in the United States right now for construction and softwood in general. Therefore, the price and demand are strong enough that they are living with the tariff that has been imposed.Members may recall that when the Harper government came in, it made the unusual decision of asking David Emerson to switch parties to help drive toward a deal on softwood. That was the last agreement we were able to lock down with the United States. Therefore, it has been a perpetual irritant in the trade relationship with Canada, which is largely due to a few stakeholders in the U.S. who have a lot of influence in Washington holding back affordability for millions of Americans. The Liberals should have used this opportunity of opening up NAFTA to get resolution on a core irritant of trade. If we are going to modernize, let us fix something that we are always fighting with the Americans on. It was not even mentioned in the priorities of the Liberals, nor was auto. As I said earlier, the Auto Pact of 1965 was the first free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. We would not have NAFTA, nor the USFTA, were it not for the Auto Pact. That was not mentioned as a priority.Most of the agriculture sector is not mentioned. In fairness, the minister did mention supply management but did not push back at any of President Trump's inflated rhetoric on 200% tariff quotas. The U.S. spends more on agricultural subsidies than we spend on our military. When were we pushing back on that? There is no level playing field in agriculture if the U.S. is spending billions in direct subsidies. We ignored agriculture, auto and softwood. We literally left out most of the areas that we should have been focused on right from the start. That is what the Conservatives said. That is what our leader said. That is what I said. That is what many of our members said.(2315)We also urged them to look at ballistic missile defence, modernizing NORAD as a way to remind Americans that if they are going to impose section 232 tariffs because of security grounds, they do not do that with their one partner on homeland defence and security, Canada. They did not do that. In fact they took positions antithetical to the U.S. Canada pulled out our jets in the fight against ISIS. When France and the U.S. were asking us to do more in security, the Prime Minister in a second vote in this Parliament, whipped by the former head of our army, I would note he is retiring. He was the whip. I know how difficult that must have been to withdraw from a battle when our allies are trying to step up.The Obama presidency, the bromance the Prime Minister brags about all the time, wanted us to stay in. We were not seen as a trusted, reliable security partner under the Prime Minister. When section 232 tariffs were being talked about on security grounds, we were not making our case. Here is something else I recommended and I would recommend the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, who informed us how they try and fool Canadians by being persistent, yelling, being loud and then Canadians will totally believe them. The big myth we have in modernizing NAFTA was modernizing trucking and transportation in North America. We knew that President Trump had issues with Mexican trucking and some of the border rules in terms of states on the border and trucking regulations.When the Mulroney government negotiated the U.S. Free Trade Agreement, concluded in the 1988 election, Canada still owned Air Canada. We had not liberalized passenger airline travel. It was still a Crown corporation. Fast-forward to today in 2017, 2018, 2019, we see efficiencies for more open skies. I would like to see even more. We see efficiencies in the North American railroads where Canadian companies like CP and CN have done very well with liberalized transportation rules. We urged the government, if it wants a game-changer, to truly modernize NAFTA, modernize trucking because in many cases because of state or provincial rules, if we send goods from Quebec to California, or from Ontario to Massachusetts, those trucking resources often have to come back empty or do not have the ability to transport interstate. What is interesting about that, and I know my friend, the leader of the Green Party is listening intently, is that, had we brought cabotage and trucking into it, it would have been the single largest reduction in greenhouse gases in the history of North America, by modernizing trucking.I recommended that and when David Emerson, a former transportation minister, someone very well regarded in the industry as well, appeared at transport committee, I asked him would that not have been a win on both the trade front and the environment front. He agreed it would have been the single largest way to reduce greenhouse gases.Despite the rhetoric, the government's greenhouse gas emission reduction plan is a tax. We could have worked this into NAFTA. The timing was there. As I said, liberalizing trucking regulations was not even forecast in the eighties because there was still state ownership of airlines and so on. Today with air liberalized to a large degree to rail, to short sea shipping in many cases, we could have added trucking. Not only would it reduce greenhouse gases, it would have made businesses more efficient, would have potentially reduced costs and maximized the utility of our trucking infrastructure. That is something we recommended for the agreement, particularly with a president who likes to tell everyone that he is a business leader. That would have been a way to say we can have a win for the customer, a win for competitiveness, fewer trucks on the road and fewer emissions. Let us modernize that in NAFTA.(2320)No, we did not mention that either. We did not mention our core industries, like auto, softwood or key agriculture sectors. We did not even get modernized professional work abilities in the United States. We did not get digital modernization. We did not get security and certainty with respect to where data and data storage would be for privacy reasons. We really did not get anything in this agreement, because we did not go into the negotiations in a strategic fashion.The Liberal government underestimated what the negotiations would amount to, and they went in with the sort of posturing image of the Prime Minister, his much vaunted progressive agenda. Liberals kind of said that they would work with Mexico, too. The Prime Minister went down to Mexico to say that we would work together. Then, what did Mexico do? It had 85 direct meetings with White House administration officials.By the end, the last two months, we had negotiated ourselves away from the table, and the member for Fredericton should know, because the exporters in New Brunswick have been let down by him, remarkably, on this file, that when Canada is not present at the negotiation of a trilateral agreement, when there are only two parties present, it is a failure of the third party.I understand why the member for Fredericton is frustrated. He might be the next first-term Liberal to announce his retirement. I am losing track of how many. Today it was the member for Pierrefonds—Dollard. We had a few others, I think. I would love to have the Library of Parliament research this fact because I am not 100% sure, but maybe the member for Fredericton could research it too. I think that a majority government has never seen more first-time MPs leave than the current government.Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Atlantic CanadaC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesFreight transportationGovernment billsGreenhouse gasesLabour relationsMarket accessMexicoNegotiations and negotiatorsSecond readingSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsTrucking and truckersDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—ChezzetcookGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2325)[English]Mr. Speaker, if only we had seen that passion from the member for Fredericton a few years ago, we might have been able to avoid some of the disastrous results we have had on the trade front.On nights like this, I wonder if he is reflecting on that fact and on what he is going to say when he goes back to Fredericton. He will have to say that we are rushing through bills like Bill C-100 and Bill C-101 in the final hours of Parliament because we were not able to secure good outcomes for Canada. This is despite the fact that we were able to join a deal that Mexico and the United States had signed.As I was saying before he had his outburst, if there is a trilateral agreement being negotiated and one of the three parties is no longer at the table, we should ask how we let that happen. As I said in my remarks on Bill C-100, this year is the first year that Mexico has surpassed Canada as the number one bilateral trade partner for the first two months of this year. Mexico surpassed us, negotiating the USMCA. It had a deal on section 232 tariffs before Canada, despite the fact we are NORAD partners and we have had free trade with the U.S. for years before Mexico did.We have to work with what the government has been able to table. We have to make sure that we do not have the tariffs come back on, because steel fabricators in Fredericton and MacDougall Steel in Prince Edward Island cannot afford another year of tariffs.In fact, I can summarize and conclude with this. Canadians cannot afford another four years of the Liberals.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsNegotiations and negotiatorsSecond readingTrade agreementsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestWayneEasterHon.Malpeque//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2330)[English]Mr. Speaker, with the interventions tonight from the member for Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, the member for Fredericton and the member for Malpeque, there must have been a really good Atlantic reception tonight in Ottawa these members were attending before late night debate.I talked about how impressed I was when I toured the MacDougall Steel facility in Borden-Carleton. I know that the member from there is proud. He knows that they were hurting under the tariffs, which is why we are trying to work with the government.I refer the member for Fredericton to Tek Steel, L&A Metalworks and Ocean Steel in St. John, which does work across the region. They were hurting because they were being boxed out of North American bidding opportunities. In fact, in this trade deal, we still see buy American provisions in the United States.I invite that member for Fredericton to meet me this year at Tek Steel, and let us talk to them about the damage that has been done with tariffs, with trade uncertainty and with taxes. Remember, Tek Steel and MacDougall Steel are run by the people the Prime Minister thinks run small businesses to avoid paying taxes. The Liberals already had their war on small business two years ago. Canadian businesses have had enough. On October 21, they can choose the Conservatives.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMarcoMendicinoEglinton—Lawrence//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2330)[English]Mr. Speaker, if Canadians are still watching, I want them to know that we have lots of respect and friendships across the aisle, and I am friends with the member for Eglinton—Lawrence. I will try to tone down my partisanship. I would like to thank him for asking his last question in the House of Commons. I find it interesting that a lot of members keep quoting elements of this deal that are not in the deal. We know the Liberals made really big news about the progressive agenda, but there is no chapter on gender. In the Chilean deal, in which they updated an appendix, it was non-binding provisions. They are pointing to things that are not even in the deal but are still in the brand talking points of the Prime Minister, and that is the problem with the Liberal approach to trade. It is the problem with the trip to India. It is the problem with China. It is the problem with Saudi Arabia. It is the problem with the Philippines. It is the problem with Italy, which has imposed tariffs on durum wheat.Right now, Canada is not seen as being serious under the Liberal Prime Minister, because he puts electoral prospects in certain parts of the country and his own brand and image in photographs ahead of our trade, ahead of our economic future and ahead of our security. When France asked us after the Bataclan attack to step up our fight against ISIS, the Prime Minister was the only western leader to pull back, and countries noticed. As the foreign affairs critic, I meet with them, and near the end of the meeting it is clear they are wondering what has happened to Canada. We do not need more photographs or hashtags. We need more principled Canadian leadership in the world, and that is what the world will get with a Conservative government.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsMarcoMendicinoEglinton—LawrencePaulManlyNanaimo—Ladysmith//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (2335)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith. It is my first time responding to his question.I share his concern about the loss we had on data protection with respect to biologics. I have seen the impact of those drugs, personalized medicine, and I think that was one of many losses. ISDS is one, as his leader would know. However, it is interesting that the Liberals do not seem to recognize that foreign companies operating here can already use our court system, which is the most fair in the world when they are not interfering with it like in the SNC-Lavalin affair. We need that certainty in other countries. With the FIPA with China, we were giving Canadian exporters the right to sue there. C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsInvestor-state dispute settlementSecond readingTrade agreementsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPeterFonsecaMississauga East—Cooksville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (2345)[English]Mr. Speaker, I know the member served in the Ontario legislature with my father, and my father had good things to say about him. He got off the HMCS Titanic before the Wynne government took down the Liberals in Ontario, in many ways because they made the Ontario economy less competitive. A high-tax, high regulatory environment was driving investment to the U.S. and other jurisdictions. Added to that competitiveness challenge that our PC cousins in Ontario inherited after 15 years of the Liberals, we now see trade uncertainty, tariffs and potentially reduced market access around the world, further complicating Ontario, Mississauga and the GTA as a place for investment.It is not lost on many people that the retreat of the auto industry, hitting the auto parts industry in Durham, is the culmination of the three Ts, high taxes, tariffs and trade uncertainty, all things brought in by Liberal governments provincially and federally. Does he see the threat of the reimposition of steel and aluminum tariffs as a serious competitive threat for Ontario?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsPeterFonsecaMississauga East—CooksvillePeterFonsecaMississauga East—Cooksville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessDiabetes Awareness MonthInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1120)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Motion No. 173, which seeks to declare November as diabetes awareness month.Conservatives support the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Health that Canada implement a national strategy, like the diabetes 360° plan. The Liberals, on the other hand, have rejected the diabetes 360° plan put forward by Diabetes Canada. This is simply shameful. The Liberal government leaves the member's motion as nothing but another empty gesture. In just 10 years, this plan would have helped prevent more than one million cases of type 2 diabetes and saved Canada's health care system and economy billions of dollars.Eleven million Canadians are currently living with or are at risk of diabetes and pre-diabetes. There are three types of diabetes: type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes.Type 1 diabetes is caused by an autoimmune reaction that causes the body to kill its insulin-producing cells. This variation of the disease is still not fully understood. People with type 1 diabetes produce very little or no insulin, causing an abnormal amount of glucose to accumulate in the blood. To keep glucose levels under control, people with type 1 diabetes must administer insulin daily and carefully monitor their lifestyle habits. If those with type 1 diabetes do not have access to insulin, they will die. Between 5% and 10% of people with diabetes possess the type 1 variation. About 90% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes. It is most prevalent in adults, but alarmingly the incidence in children has been on the rise in recent years. Although individuals who develop type 2 diabetes are also genetically susceptible to this condition, it is largely the result of poor nutrition and a lack of physical activity, driven by environmental and socio-economic factors. Type 2 diabetes occurs when blood glucose levels increase because the body does not make enough insulin or cannot properly use the insulin that is produced. Type 2 diabetes can often be prevented by a high-quality diet and by regular physical activity. It can be treated with lifestyle measures with or without medications, including insulin.Gestational diabetes is a temporary condition that occurs during pregnancy. It affects approximately 2% to 4% of all pregnancies in the non-indigenous population. It involves an increased risk of developing diabetes for both mother and child. Poorly managed gestational diabetes can mean serious health consequences, again for both mother and child.Many patients take between three and 12 prescription medications and find the cost of equipment and supplies to be in excess of $15,000 a year. For those who require insulin pumps or continuous glucose monitoring, that cost runs to $15,000, in addition to the cost of medicine. Every day, more than 20 Canadians die of complications from diabetes, and 14 have lower limb amputations. The World Health Organization has called for all countries to implement a national diabetes strategy. Despite having one of the highest diabetes rates in the world, Canada is still without a national strategy. This motion being brought forward by the member is undercut by Liberal hypocrisy on this issue. Diabetes Canada came up with the diabetes 360° plan to achieve what the World Health Organization was calling for. That plan would have called for 90% of Canadians living in an environment that prevents diabetes; 90% would have been aware of their diabetes status; 90% would have been engaged in preventing complications from their diabetes; and 90% would have had a very strong possibility of achieving improved health outcomes. Despite committing to support Diabetes Canada, the Liberals again came up short, and they come up short again today, showing just how out of touch they are on issues affecting the health and well-being of Canadians. Not only did the Liberals not support the diabetes 360° plan, but Diabetes Canada asked for $150 million and was left with zero dollars from the current government in budget 2019. We send billions of dollars abroad, yet we refuse to help our own people.(1125)Another failure of the Liberal government on the diabetes file was the rejection of 80% of people living with type 2 diabetes from collecting the disability tax credit to help pay for these costs. When this first came to light, in May 2017, the government maintained that it had not changed the criteria or the process of approval. For months, it denied that anything had changed. However, evidence was finally produced that it had misrepresented the facts. The process had indeed been changed to discount the time spent preparing food. The 80% of individuals who were receiving the credit became the 80% denied.After repeated Conservative challenges in question period, 58% were subsequently reapproved. However, 42% of them were later denied again, and without notice. The reason the Liberals were so keen to refuse people with diabetes from getting the disability tax credit was that one needs to qualify for the tax credit before one can access the disability pension. Of the folks with type 2 diabetes who were denied the DTC, many had $150,000 accumulated in their pension plan that the Liberals were attempting to claw back. This is unacceptable. The Liberals' out-of-control spending caused them to attempt to victimize the disabled. It is important to support people living with diabetes by making their lives more affordable. While Conservatives support the proposal to make November diabetes awareness month, we know that Canadians need more than the Liberals' proposed lip service that “a month of recognition” would provide. Canadians living with diabetes need tangible solutions and plans for themselves, their families and loved ones who are suffering from the various variations of this disease. Canadians expect us to be a leader in diabetes awareness, but this will not happen through photo ops and self-congratulation; it will happen only when real solutions, like the diabetes 360° plan, are implemented.The $150 million requested by Diabetes Canada will save $20 billion in prevention alone, with 770,000 fewer cases of type 2 diabetes, 245,000 fewer hospitalizations for diabetes and an estimated 34,000 fewer lower limb amputations because of this terrible disease. That is a real-world solution that makes common sense. In conclusion, I believe it is time that the government step up and do what is right and fully implement the plan, as the health committee recommended. Canadians expect the current government to do better. While we will support the motion before us today, we call on the Liberal government to stand up and do the right thing for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians suffering from diabetes.DiabetesDiabetes Awareness MonthDiabetes CanadaDisability tax creditM-173Private Members' MotionsNickWhalenSt. John's EastRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessDiabetes Awareness MonthInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1155)[English]Resuming debate. Accordingly, I invite the hon. member for Brampton South for her right of reply. The hon. member has up to five minutes. Right of replyEvaNassifVimySoniaSidhuBrampton South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessDiabetes Awareness MonthInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1200)[English] The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay. Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen:Division on Motion No. 173 deferredThe Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to an order made on Tuesday, May 28, the recorded division stands deferred until Wednesday, June 19, at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions. Deferred divisionsDiabetesDiabetes Awareness MonthM-173Private Members' MotionsSoniaSidhuBrampton SouthBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1205)[English]Pursuant to Standing Order 67.1, there will be a 30-minute question period. I ask hon. members who wish to participate in the 30 minutes to rise so I can get an indication of how many want to speak.As is the usual case, I ask hon. members to keep their interventions to approximately one minute. That will allow all members who wish to speak the opportunity to do so. Members can be recognized more than once. I remind hon. members that most of the question time in the 30 minutes is reserved for opposition members. However, members from the government side are certainly welcome to participate as well.We will begin now with questions. The hon. member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsQuestions and comments periodTime allocationBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, in 2015, the government said that it would do things differently, that it would respect Parliament and would move away from motions that did not allow appropriate time for debate.I want to point out something very unique and interesting about this bill. It took you, Mr. Speaker, approximately 11 minutes to read the amendments to the bill. Within four minutes of debate, the government gave notice of a motion of closure. Not many speakers had the opportunity to debate the bill before that.How is this consistent with the promises the minister made in 2015 to do things differently?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, this morning proves that the Liberals will do anything and say anything to get elected. In the last election, they promised they were not going to use closure motions as often as we had in the last parliament. They are also saying that they are not going to raise taxes after the next election, even though their spending is way out of control. There has only been four minutes of debate on this bill prior to this closure motion being moved. Does the minister think that is appropriate?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1215)[English]Mr. Speaker, unfortunately here we go again. We see time allocation being moved by the current government. The Liberals have been lax throughout this Parliament. They are coming down to the last few days of Parliament and we see this modus operandi of the government to start pushing debates and halting debate to get this legislation through regardless. Again, it is not simply that the Liberals are invoking this measure; this is the measure they said they would not be invoking. This is the measure on which the current Prime Minister stood and said it is the kind of thing that Canadians lose confidence in a government on, and that the Liberals would not do this kind of thing. It is exactly what we have seen more and more, especially in the last few weeks.The parliamentary secretary said that this prevents a filibuster by the government, and debate and debate and debate. We have had four minutes at this stage to even talk about this. Canadians expect that when issues like this come through, good healthy debate takes place here and it has not. Neither has consultation. I have a penitentiary in my riding. Not only is it the well-being and safety of offenders that Canadians question, but also of the guards and the correctional officers.There are two points. We have legislation that needs to be debated and we have another promise broken by the current government as to time allocation.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25475JamesBezanJames-BezanSelkirk—Interlake—EastmanConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BezanJames_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC): (1220)[English]Mr. Speaker, here we go again. It is over 100 times now that the government has used closure or has limited the amount of debate we can have any time on these bills. This stands in stark contrast to what the minister used to say when he was in the third party. The member for Winnipeg North used to stand and holler every time there was a closure motion or anything to limit the debate we were having on any motions before the House.We only had four minutes on Friday to start the debate on the amendments that were proposed by the Senate. I still have to go back and talk to my UCCO members who work at Stony Mountain Institution in my riding to ensure that the health and safety provisions that are in the bill are going to be properly enforced and how that is going to occur. They still have those questions.However, because the Liberals are stifling debate here in the House, I will not have the time to go and consult, and discuss this with UCCO members and with penitentiary staff on how this will impact our riding and how it is going to impact the care and incarceration of those who are currently serving sentences.There are still so many questions out there. The hypocrisy that we are seeing from the Liberals continues to amaze all of us, because when they were in the third party, they used to scream and holler at the top of their lungs every time the previous government tried to do this.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1225)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to pose a couple of questions to the minister on this time allocation motion.He has stated numerous times in the last few minutes of debate that there will be another five hours of debate. I would like to ask the minister this. Has he confirmed with his government House leader that there will be no closure declared on that debate, similar to what the government did on Bill C-69 last week? It closed off debate on that. It closed off discussion on Bill C-69 at the committee stage when there were hundreds of amendments, hundreds even from their own Liberal Party on their own poorly drafted bill. The government closed off debate. It does it time and time again, because it simply does not want to hear the truth. Will the minister confirm again that there will be no closure and there will be five hours of debate on this bill?C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is terminology that the hon. gentleman likes to use quite often in the House. I count eight substantive amendments that the government is accepting or has modified from the Senate. The minister said that the government has considered this and is satisfied with it, and therefore it is moving time allocation, which provides us with only five hours. Several members who have penitentiaries in their ridings have risen on our side of the House. They would like to go back to their constituents and get their opinion on this, and I would like to go back to former prison guards who live in my riding. However, today we are being told there are five more hours and that is it. The member for Peace River—Westlock mentioned this was four minutes at this stage of debate. How many members can speak in four minutes? Very few could provide substantive feedback. The time allocation being moved today by the government is shutting down debate. I have seen this time and again, both at standing committees of the House and on other legislation.I spoke to Bill C-83 before and mentioned all my concerns and worries that constituents had explained to me over the distinct sections and technicalities of the bill. The issue now is that, with only five hours left, it gives us literally no time to return to our constituents to get their feedback on these eight substantive amendments.C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another ActConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorrectional servicesGovernment billsImprisonment and prisonersMotionsTime allocationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCorrections and Conditional Release Act [Bill C-83—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1235)[English]It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings at this time and put forthwith the question on the motion now before the House. The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.Some hon. members: Yea.The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay.The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it.And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members.RalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium ActInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1330)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would note that this bill actually was created as a result of a directive that was given by the Prime Minister to the Minister of Transport through a mandate letter. When we were studying the bill in committee, to a witness, none of the witnesses were consulted when it came to it, especially when it came to first nations communities.Would the member care to comment on why no first nations communities were consulted before the bill was introduced?Aboriginal peoplesBritish ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersPublic consultationTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1335)[English]I note there is a lot of people standing for questions and comments. I will ask members to keep their comments and input concise, so we can get to everyone who wishes to speak.Noise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary why his government has chosen to cause a division across the country. The bill does not ban the transit of tankers, as the government would like the headlines to read. It really just bans the loading and unloading of those tankers in Canadian waters, which limits our western oil producers from getting their product to market. It is basically regional discrimination against one region of the country over another. Why would his government choose to divide the country in the way it has?British ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsOil tankersTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium ActInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to respond to the government's motion on the Senate amendments to Bill C-48. While I do appreciate the opportunity to speak to the motion, what I do not appreciate, what millions of other Canadians do not appreciate, is that we have to respond to the bill at all. I want to recap what the bill would do. First, this legislation was created as a result of a directive in the Prime Minister's mandate letter to the Minister of Transport dated November 2015.If passed, this legislation would enact an oil tanker moratorium on B.C.'s northwest coast. The proposed moratorium would be in effect from the Canada-U.S. Alaska border to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.The legislation would prohibit oil tankers carrying crude and persistent oil as cargo from stopping, loading and unloading at ports or marine installations in the moratorium area. Vessels carrying less than 12,500 metric tons of crude oil would be exempted from the moratorium.I would suggest that this bill is an open, sneering attack on our oil and gas sector, an anti-pipeline bill poorly masquerading as an environment bill.Environmental legislation is supposed to be based on science. Bill C-48 is not. It is not science but rather politics and ideology that inform this legislation: Liberal ideology that is as damaging to national unity as it is cynical.Afer reviewing the bill, which included travelling across the country to hear from witnesses from coast to coast, the Senate transport committee recommended that it not proceed. While the Senate as a whole rescued Bill C-48, the Prime Minister should have taken the hint and withdrawn this anti-energy legislation.Six premiers, including Premier Scott Moe from my province of Saskatchewan, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister outlining their legitimate concerns about the anti-oil, anti-energy legislation pushed by the Liberal government here in Ottawa, in particular Bill C-69 and Bill C-48.The premiers explained the damage that these two pieces of legislation would do to the economy, but more importantly, they warned of the damage this legislation has done and will continue to do to our national unity.This was not a threat. This was not spiteful. These six premiers were pointing to a real and growing sense of alienation, alienation on a scale not seen since the Prime Minister's father was in office.Rather than listening to their concerns, the Prime Minister lashed out at the premiers, calling them irresponsible and accusing them of threatening our national unity if they did not get their way.The premiers are not threatening our national unity; it is in fact the Prime Minister's radical, anti-science, anti-energy agenda that is, but he is refusing to listen.Since the Prime Minister is refusing to heed these warnings on Bill C-48 and Bill C-69, I am going to take this opportunity to read them into the record now:Dear Prime Minister, We are writing on behalf of the Governments of Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Collectively, our five provinces and territory represent 59 per cent of the Canadian population and 63 per cent of Canada's GDP. We are central to Canada's economy and prosperity, and it is of the utmost importance that you consider our concerns with bills C-69 and C-48. Canadians across the country are unified in their concern about the economic impacts of the legislation such as it was proposed by the House of Commons. In this form, the damage it would do to the economy, jobs and investment will echo from one coast to the other. Provincial and territorial jurisdiction must be respected. Provinces and territories have clear and sole jurisdiction over the development of their non-renewable natural resources, forestry resources, and the generation and production of electricity. Bill C-69 upsets the balance struck by the constitutional division of powers by ignoring the exclusive provincial powers over projects relating to these resources. The federal government must recognize the exclusive role provinces and territories have over the management of our non-renewable natural resource development or risk creating a Constitutional crisis.(1345)Bill C-69, as originally drafted, would make it virtually impossible to develop critical infrastructure, depriving Canada of much needed investment. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, between 2017 and 2018, the planned investment value of major resource sector projects in Canada plunged by $100 billion – an amount equivalent to 4.5 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. To protect Canada’s economic future, we, collectively, cannot afford to overlook the uncertainty and risk to future investment created by Bill C-69. Our five provinces and territory stand united and strongly urge the government to accept Bill C69 as amended by the Senate, in order to minimize the damage to the Canadian economy. We would encourage the Government of Canada and all members of the House of Commons to accept the full slate of amendments to the bill. The Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment, and Natural Resources heard 38 days of testimony from 277 witnesses including indigenous communities, industry, Premiers, and independent experts. Based on that comprehensive testimony, the committee recommended significant amendments to the bill, which were accepted by the Senate as a whole. We urge you to respect that process, the committee’s expertise, and the Senate’s vote. If the Senate’s amendments are not respected, the bill should be rejected, as it will present insurmountable roadblocks for major infrastructure projects across the country and will further jeopardize jobs, growth and investor confidence. Similarly, Bill C-48 threatens investor confidence, and the tanker moratorium discriminates against western Canadian crude products. We were very disappointed that the Senate did not accept the recommendation to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications that the bill not be reported. We would urge the government to stop pressing for the passage of this bill which will have detrimental effects on national unity and for the Canadian economy as a whole. Our governments are deeply concerned with the federal government’s disregard, so far, of the concerns raised by our provinces and territory related to these bills. As it stands, the federal government appears indifferent to the economic hardships faced by provinces and territories. Immediate action to refine or eliminate these bills is needed to avoid further alienating provinces and territories and their citizens and focus on uniting the country in support of Canada’s economic prosperity. Perhaps having heard the letter read aloud, the Prime Minister will acknowledge that it contains no threats, but rather it is an appeal from leaders who have listened to their constituents. The Prime Minister needs to understand that simply saying things louder is not going to make them go away. Shouting will not put food in the stomachs of the laid-off construction workers' children. Chanting talking points will not pay the gas bill in the middle of winter.If this were the only piece of legislation that the government had introduced, one might argue that this is an overreaction, but it is not just one piece of legislation, it is a targeted, cynical, ongoing political attack of our resource sector. The Prime Minister has filled his cabinet with vocal opponents of the oil sands. In 2012, the now Minister of Democratic Institutions posted a tweet that read, “It's time to landlock Alberta's tar sands - call on BC Premier @christyclarkbc to reject the #Enbridge pipeline now!”Then there is the President of the Treasury Board, who said publicly that the approval of the Trans Mountain extension was deeply disappointing and who celebrated when the Prime Minister killed the northern gateway pipeline project. Here I should pause and point out the ridiculous theatrics surrounding the TMX project. (1350)In 2016, the government approved TMX, yet tomorrow, we are told, the government will decide on whether to approve the project all over again. It is like we are in a terrible remake of Groundhog Day. Meanwhile, not an inch of pipeline has been built since the government nationalized Trans Mountain.However, it is not only the cabinet that the Prime Minister has filled with anti-oil activists, but senior staff positions as well. Here I quote an article from the March 14 edition of the Financial Post: Prior to ascending to the most powerful post in the Prime Minister’s Office, from 2008 to 2012 Gerald Butts was president and CEO of World Wildlife Fund Canada...an important Tides campaign partner. Butts would use his new powerful position to bring other former campaigners with him: Marlo Reynolds, chief of staff to the Environment Minister...is past executive director of the Tides-backed Pembina Institute. Zoë Caron, chief of staff to Natural Resource Minister...is also a former WWF Canada official. Sarah Goodman, on the prime minister’s staff, is a former vice-president of Tides Canada. With these anti-oil activists at the epicentre of federal power, it’s no wonder the oil industry, and hundreds of thousands of workers, have plummeted into political and policy purgatory.Why should we be surprised? The Prime Minister is no friend of the oil sands. The Prime Minister stated that he wants to phase out the oil sands and during the election loudly proclaimed, “If I am elected Prime Minister, the Northern Gateway Pipeline won't become a reality”.The Prime Minister has spent his time in office attempting to do just that and he has been willing to trample on not only the rights of the provinces, but the rights of aboriginal peoples as well to get his way. When the Prime Minister used an order in council to cancel the northern gateway pipeline, he stole the future of 30 first nations that would have benefited enormously from it. This very bill is facing a lawsuit from Laxkw'alaams Indian band for unjustly infringing on their rights and titles.Bill C-48 will prevent the proposed first nations-owned and operated Eagle Spirit pipeline project from being built as the proposed route to tidewater ends within the area wherein this bill bans tanker traffic. It was done without any consultation with first nations communities. Again, this should come as no surprise. Just last week I spoke against another anti-energy bill, Bill C-88. As I said then, C-88 makes a mockery of the government's claim to seriously consult with indigenous and Inuit peoples. Without any consultation with Inuit peoples or the territorial governments, the Prime Minister unilaterally announced a five-year ban on offshore oil and gas development. Not only did the Prime Minister refuse to consult the premiers of the territories, he gave some of them less than an hour's notice that he would be making that announcement.Does that sound like a Prime Minister who wants to listen, consult and work with aboriginal Canadians? Does it reflect the Prime Minister's declaration that his government's relationship with indigenous peoples is their most important relationship or does it sound like a Prime Minister who says what he believes people want to hear and then does the exact opposite by imposing his own will on them? If he had consulted, this is what he would have heard: Minister Wally Schumann of the Northwest Territories, on how they found out about the ban and the impact it will have on our north, stated:When it first came out, we never got very much notice on the whole issue of the moratorium and the potential that was in the Beaufort Sea. There were millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars in bid deposits and land leases up there. That took away any hope we had of developing the Beaufort Sea. Councillor Jackie Jacobson of Tuktoyaktuk said:It’s so easy to sit down here and make judgments on people and lives that are 3,500 klicks away, and make decisions on our behalf, especially with that moratorium on the Beaufort. That should be taken away, lifted, please and thank you. That is going to open up and give jobs to our people – training and all the stuff we’re wishing for.Then premier of Nunavut, Peter Taptuna stated, “ We do want to be getting to a state where we can make our own determination of our priorities, and the way to do that is gain meaningful revenue from resource development.”(1355)Mr. Speaker, I note that you are indicating that my time is up. I assume that I will be able to continue at another time.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesBritish ColumbiaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsEconomic impactEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyMoratoriumOil tankersPetroleumPipeline transportationPublic consultationTerryBeechBurnaby North—SeymourBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersOil Tanker Moratorium ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1355)[English]I thank the hon. member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek. The time signal is to signal that we are going to switch into another mode for Statements by Members. Indeed, she will be able to resume her remarks when the House next debates the question before the House.KellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekLucThériaultMontcalm//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88679AlexanderNuttallAlexander-NuttallBarrie—Springwater—Oro-MedonteConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/NuttallAlex_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersBarrie—Springwater—Oro—MedonteInterventionMr. Alexander Nuttall (Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, CPC): (1400)[English]Mr. Speaker, after eight years on Barrie city council, a year of campaigning and a three-week re-count, I was afforded what will forever be one of the greatest honours of my life, being elected the member of Parliament for Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte. I want to thank my staff; my wife, Erica; my children; all my extended family; supporters; and especially the incredible people of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte for this incredible honour.As a Conservative, I know that I have fought for freedom, hope and opportunity, and that will never ever cease. It is the reason, even after this election, we will continue to partner with PIE restaurant providing backpacks to children in central Ontario through PIE Education and with the newly announced Boots and Hearts Barn Burner hockey game on August 7 to raise money for the RVH and many other local charities.I look forward to seeing everyone there, and I am so very thankful for the honour.Barrie—Springwater—Oro-MedonteCharitable donations and donorsPIE EducationStatements by MembersSoniaSidhuBrampton SouthWayneLongSaint John—Rothesay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersMember for Dauphin—Swan River—NeepawaInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is clearly a bittersweet moment as I rise to give the last member's statement of my political career as a member of Parliament for the great constituency of Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa. For three elections, the voters of this wonderful constituency have returned me to Ottawa to work on their behalf. The trust they have placed in me is truly humbling, and I hope that I have lived up to their expectations. My passion to do what I can to protect and defend our rural way of life remains undiminished. I would be remiss if I did not mention my political idol, the great Duff Roblin, former premier of Manitoba. His achievements on behalf of all Manitobans have stood the test of time, and he inspired me with his vision and accomplishments. He proved to me that government can be a force for good. To my beloved wife, Caroline, and my beautiful family, I thank them for the love, support and guidance over these years. All I can say is that I love them all. To my beautiful grandchildren, Eden, Esmee and Senon, who love nature, our farm and the outdoors as much as I do, all I can say is Papa's coming home.Members of ParliamentRetirement from workStatements by MembersPeterFragiskatosLondon North CentreTerrySheehanSault Ste. Marie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister pretends he has a plan for the environment. He says his carbon tax will achieve the carbon emissions reduction targets under the Paris accord. However, his own government figures confirm that this is simply not true.Just last week, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a new report, which found that the Liberal carbon tax would have to increase to $102 per tonne to achieve Canada's Paris accord climate targets. That is five times more expensive than it is today. This means that Canadians would pay more for groceries and home heating, and it would add 23¢ per litre to the cost of gas.Saying things louder about carbon tax does not make them true, despite what the Minister of Environment says. The fact is that the Liberal carbon tax is simply not a plan to lower emissions; it is just another cash grab that is hurting already overtaxed Canadians. Let us make no mistake: A Conservative government will scrap the carbon tax, leave more money in the pockets of Canadians and help all Canadians get ahead.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineStatements by MembersJohnOliverOakvillePeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35397JacquesGourdeJacques-GourdeLévis—LotbinièreConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GourdeJacques_CPC.jpgStatements by Members2019 General ElectionInterventionMr. Jacques Gourde (Lévis—Lotbinière, CPC): (1410)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government's plan for the environment is an unprecedented failure.The Prime Minister claims to have a plan to combat climate change and that the carbon tax will allow us to meet our emission targets under the Paris Agreement, even though his government's own figures show that such is not the case.The Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed that the Liberal carbon tax would have to be $102 per tonne in every province and territory in order for Canada to meet the Paris targets. The carbon tax would have to be five times higher than it is now, which means that Canadians would have to pay more for groceries, transported goods and home heating and gas would cost them 23¢ more a litre.On October 21, Canadians will choose the most credible, rational and achievable plan that will benefit everyone. They will vote for the Conservative Party.Carbon pricingCarbon taxGasolineStatements by MembersMaryAnnMihychukHon.Kildonan—St. PaulDavid de BurghGrahamLaurentides—Labelle//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals insist on making life more expensive for Canadians from coast to coast.The PBO just confirmed that the carbon tax will need to be $102 per tonne in order to reach the Paris accord targets. Now, that is five times what the current carbon tax costs. This will increase the cost of groceries and the cost of home heating, and it will increase the cost of gasoline by 23¢ per litre. Canadians cannot afford this.The Prime Minister makes the false claim that this is an environmental plan, but it has nothing to do with the environment. It has everything to do with lining his pockets. If it truly were an environmental plan, then he would go after the biggest emitters, but they get let off the hook. Meanwhile, soccer moms are left paying the bill.British Columbia has the longest-standing carbon tax, and we see the amount of emission actually going up rather than coming down. The carbon tax will not reduce pollution, but it will certainly cost Canadians a whole lot of money.It is time for a real environmental plan, and that environmental plan is on this side of the House. It will be announced on June 19. We look forward to bringing that—Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, when it comes to pipelines, four years have proven that no matter what side of the issue people are on, nobody can trust the Liberals.We fully expect them to approve Trans Mountain later this week, just so they can say they did. Then we fully expect them to do absolutely nothing to get it built, because they do not want to upset voters in Burnaby.Why will the Liberals not just admit that they do not want pipelines and that Trans Mountain will never actually get built under their watch?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, a year ago the Prime Minister promised that construction would start on TMX, and a year later not an ounce of dirt has been moved. The Prime Minister says one thing in one part of the country, and he says something completely different in another part, because, just like on everything else, he speaks out of both sides of his mouth.The Prime Minister does not support pipelines and the jobs that come with them. Now he could try to prove us wrong, so will he tell us right now when construction on TMX will start in Burnaby?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, four major pipelines were built under the Conservatives' watch, with not one dollar of taxpayers' money used. Over the last four years, though, the Prime Minister has done everything in his power to destroy jobs in Canada's energy sectors. He is forcing through devastating bills, like Bill C-48 and the no-more-pipelines bill, Bill C-69. Right now, he is playing political games with the TMX pipeline.Will the Prime Minister finally be honest with our energy workers and admit he has no intention for construction to start in Burnaby?C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Trans Mountain project is essential to the economy of all Canadians, and above all, it is good for all of Canada. Unfortunately, since announcing the project a year ago, the Liberals have not done a single thing. Not a shovel has hit the ground. All they have done is take $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money and send it to Houston. They have also passed two bills, Bill C-48 and Bill C-69, that fly in the face of the principle of sound energy development.Could the Liberals finally do what is right for Canadians by approving this project tomorrow and, most importantly, by announcing when Trans Mountain will be built?C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, Canadians all know full well whose side the Liberal Party is on. The Liberals have nothing but contempt for energy sector workers in western Canada. In fact, the is on the record as saying that he hopes to phase out oil and that high gas prices are exactly what he wants. What is worse, he has insulted pipeline workers. That is how the Liberal Party really thinks.We, the Conservatives, are in favour of the Trans Mountain project because it is good for Canada and for all Canadians.Could the Liberal government show the same respect for Canadians and tell us when it is going to build it?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed last week that the Liberal government's plan just does not cut it. He has proven that under their plan, the Liberals will have to increase fuel prices by more than 23¢ per litre, because of their carbon tax. Only the Liberals believe that raising taxes could be an effective plan.My question for the Prime Minister is simple. Why do he and his colleagues here in the House want to increase fuel prices by 23¢ per litre on the backs of Canadians?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsBillMorneauHon.Toronto CentreSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, since this Liberal government came to power, the cost of living for Canadians has skyrocketed. That is quite the coincidence, much like the deficit. Eighty per cent of Canadian families started paying more taxes since the Liberal government came to power. Every year, $800 more is coming out of their pockets.I would therefore like to repeat my question to the Prime Minister. Why does he want to burden Canadians even more and increase fuel prices by 23¢ per litre?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the facts speak for themselves: The Liberals cut the public transit tax credit and the children's fitness and arts tax credit. What is more, the Prime Minister created a deficit on the backs of our grandchildren, who will end up paying the bill one day.Once again Canadians, honest workers, will end up paying more taxes because of this government.Why is this Prime Minister increasing the price of gas by another 23¢ with his lousy carbon tax?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, speaking of the pope, it is time they made a confession over there.They have been keeping a deep dark secret. If the Liberal government is re-elected, as the PBO has pointed out, the carbon tax will add a full 23¢ to the cost of gas. This is the PBO, whose word is much more reliable than that of a government that is missing its day to balance the budget by two decades.Will the member unburden his soul and confess to Canadians the real price that he will add to a litre of gas if re-elected?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member still would not answer the simple question of how much gas prices will go up when the Liberal carbon tax is fully and finally implemented.The PBO went on CTV last week and said that the Liberals' plan for the carbon tax would have to be twice as high as they now admit and five times as high as it now is, leading to gas prices that would rise 23¢ a litre. If the PBO is wrong, then how much will gas prices go up under the Liberal plan?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, there we have it: 23¢ a litre is the minimum cost that the Liberals would impose on Canadian motorists. I think Canadians would like to know the maximum cost of the Liberal carbon tax. He is right. The PBO did say that the Liberal carbon tax could actually be higher than the $100 a tonne. It speaks about provincial politics. We know that Kathleen Wynne is their model. She lied in four elections about coming tax increases. She increased the cost of energy. If they are following that model, why will they not come clean before the election and tell us how much it will cost in higher gas prices if the Liberals are re-elected? Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, when six premiers expressed their serious concerns about the Liberals ramming the anti-energy Bill C-69 through the House, the Prime Minister attacked them and accused them of threatening national unity. When respected economist Dr. Jack Mintz raised concerns with the damaging impact of the Liberals' energy policies, the Minister of Natural Resources attacked him and accused him of undermining Canada.Why is it that whenever legitimate concerns about the energy sector are raised with the Liberals, their response is always “shut your mouth, Ottawa knows best”?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGinettePetitpas TaylorHon.Moncton—Riverview—DieppeSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, if he wanted to see Ottawa Liberal arrogance, there it was.Nine provinces have expressed their concern about Bill C-69. Indigenous leaders from across the country have expressed their concerns about Bill C-69. The government has ignored them every step of the way, because the Liberals believe when it comes to energy, they are the only ones who know anything. How can the government come off saying that it knows best when it has been the worst government in Canadian history when it comes to Canadian energy workers?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals must approve the Trans Mountain expansion tomorrow, which they already did before, in 2016, except this time it actually has to get built. The Liberals are blocking all new pipelines with their anti-energy, anti-business Bill C-69, which nine out of 10 provinces and all three territories oppose this.The Nisga'a, Lax Kw'alaams and hundreds of other indigenous communities are against the Liberals shipping ban, Bill C-48, and they have been against it from day one. Instead of cancelling it, the Liberals are steamrolling opposition and indigenous communities to force it through before summer. Will the Liberals kill these anti-energy bills before it is too late?C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationSeanFraserCentral NovaTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that member would answer the question. He is the one from Burnaby who opposes the Trans Mountain expansion. However, other changes to the Liberals' no-more-pipelines Bill C-69 would actually have increased the voices of locally impacted indigenous communities in resource reviews, but the Liberals rejected them. Manufacturers, chambers, economists, provinces and municipalities are outraged too. Quebec warns that Bill C-69 “ gives the federal government the equivalent of a veto over Quebec's economic development”. Ontario says that it is the worst possible news at the worst possible time which “hinders natural resource related economic development” in Canada.Again, will the Liberals kill Bill C-69 before it is too late?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, in the past few weeks, the communities of Vavenby and 100 Mile House have been devastated by sawmill closures. We have an industry in crisis and it is moving en masse to the United States. Despite this urgency, the government failed to even consider it as part of the NAFTA negotiations. The Prime Minister is heading to Washington next week to meet with the U.S. President. Will he commit to addressing the softwood lumber dispute with President Trump?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—ChamplainRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, we have been asking the Prime Minister for two years to take appropriate action to deal with the border crisis. For two years, he has been spending millions of dollars to welcome illegal migrants but has done nothing to put an end to that migration.On Thursday, the Prime Minister will be meeting with President Trump. Will he have the courage to stand up and address the subject of the illegal migrants who are entering Canada through the United States?BordersCanada-United States relationsIllegal migrantsOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25475JamesBezanJames-BezanSelkirk—Interlake—EastmanConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BezanJames_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canada's Arctic sovereignty is under threat. The United States refuses to recognize our sovereignty over our Arctic waters. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, called our claim to the Northwest Passage “illegitimate”. The Arctic has never been a priority to the Liberals, and the Prime Minister has never stood up for our Arctic sovereignty. The Prime Minister is meeting with President Trump on Thursday. Does the Prime Minister plan to continue his policy of giving away our sovereignty to Trump or will he finally fight for Arctic?ArcticCanada-United States relationsCanadian Arctic sovereigntyOral questionsBillBlairHon.Scarborough SouthwestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, when will we see the Prime Minister stand for our sovereignty?Canadians are concerned about the Prime Minister's ability to convince the U.S. President when he meets with him this week to act with Canada to free two Canadians from a Chinese prison. The Prime Minister consistently fails Canadians in our global relationships and, in particular, with China to the point where the Chinese President has said that he will not meet with the Prime Minister during the G20.With lives hanging in the balance, will the Prime Minister secure the support of the U.S. President to help release our imprisoned Canadians in China?Canadians in foreign countriesChinaImprisonment and prisonersInternational relationsOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are falling far short of their Paris targets, yet the minister continues to pretend that she is on track, trying to distract from her own climate failures.Now she asks Canadians to believe that the Liberals will not hike the carbon tax past $50 per tonne. Right. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that, for the carbon tax to have any effect, it would need to be doubled to meet the Paris targets. The Liberals cannot have it both ways. When will the minister admit she will not meet the Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeRobertOliphantDon Valley WestSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionHon. Steven Blaney (Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, can someone tell me why the Liberals are giving more than $25,000 to an organization the CRA banned because of its links to terrorist entities?The Islamic Society of North America is on the CRA's blacklist. An audit revealed that funds supposedly meant for charitable works were making their way to extremist entities that India, the United States and the EU consider to be terrorist organizations.Terrorism and extremism. Why did the minister and the member for Mississauga—Lakeshore approve this funding?What further proof does the minister need to revoke the funding immediately instead of conducting bogus reviews? Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentSeanFraserCentral NovaRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals cannot stand up and say that they do not support terrorism and then give funding to an organization that was proven to have given money to terrorists. It is ridiculous.The Liberals rejected funding to organizations that do things like support women who are single moms and support poverty reductions in our community, because these organizations would not sign their others' values test.When are the Liberals going to do the right thing and revoke the funding to this organization? This is a no-brainer.Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentRodgerCuznerCape Breton—CansoRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, last week, the Prime Minister claimed the Liberal member for Steveston—Richmond East had addressed allegations that the MP's law firm was used by a notorious Chinese drug boss to launder money. We now learn that the B.C. inquiry into money laundering has discovered that the same member was directly involved in another suspicious deal. The purported deal involved a wealthy gambler, hidden investors and an unexplained $1-million transfer in and out of the MP's law firm.Will the Prime Minister act, or is this just another case of one set of rules for Liberals and another for everyone else?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersHarjit S.SajjanHon.Vancouver SouthBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, nearly two million people in Hong Kong have taken to the streets to protest the draconian new extradition law that would have seen residents and visitors, including Canadians, sent to China to face trial in communist-controlled courts. They are on the streets to defend their hard-earned democracy. The extradition law is a clear assault on Hong Kong's autonomy. There is mounting pressure for Hong Kong's PRC-controlled leader, Carrie Lam, to resign after trying to ram through this law and silence peaceful protestors with violence.What action is the government taking to support the people of Hong Kong and the 300,000 Canadians living there?Canadians in foreign countriesChinaInternational relationsOral questionsBillMorneauHon.Toronto CentreRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Citizenship and Immigration]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives find this response to be wholly inadequate. We have appended a supplementary report, given the government's failures to manage a fair, orderly and compassionate immigration system during the course of this Parliament.8510-421-608 "Adapting Canada's Immigration Policies to Today's Realities"Dissenting or supplementary opinionsImmigration and immigrantsStanding Committee on Citizenship and ImmigrationNickWhalenSt. John's EastDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsJustice and Human RightsInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, while Conservatives accept testimony that although deliberately attempting to infect one's partner is infrequent, it still occurs. Victims must have recourse and law enforcement must have tools in these situations. Repealing criminal consequences for the deliberate, negligent or reckless attempts to spread HIV is not something that we can support. I am pleased to table our dissenting report and recommendations.While I am on my feet, I would like to thank all those who appeared before the committee to give a wide range of diverse views on the important topic of online hate. While tackling the proliferation of extremist violence is of the utmost importance, it cannot come at the expense of fundamental freedoms of Canadians. The report tabled by the Liberal majority on this committee does not strike an appropriate balance. Measures like the restoration of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act are an unacceptable violation of the freedom of speech of Canadians. Therefore, I am proud to table the Conservative Party's dissenting report and recommendations.8510-421-613 "The Criminalization of HIV Non-Disclosure in Canada"AIDS and HIVCriminalizationDissenting or supplementary opinionsInformation disseminationSexually transmitted diseasesStanding Committee on Justice and Human RightsAnthonyHousefatherMount RoyalBillCaseyCumberland—Colchester//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPublic AccountsInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the following two reports of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts: the 67th report, entitled “Report 5, Equipping Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada”; and the 68th report, entitled “Do Service Well: the Standing Committee on Public Accounts of the Forty-Second Parliament”.Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to these two reports.8510-421-617 "Report 5, Equipping Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, of the 2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada"8510-421-618 "Do Service Well: the Standing Committee on Public Accounts of the Forty-Second Parliament"Mandates of committeesReport 5, Equipping Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, of the Spring 2019 Reports of the Auditor General of CanadaRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceStanding Committee on Public AccountsBillCaseyCumberland—ColchesterTomLukiwskiMoose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25520TomLukiwskiTom-LukiwskiMoose Jaw—Lake Centre—LaniganConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/LukiwskiTom_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsGovernment Operations and EstimatesInterventionMr. Tom Lukiwski (Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 18th report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, entitled “An Even Greener Government: Improving the Greening Government Strategy to Maximize its Impact”.Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report. Also, since this may be my last opportunity in this Parliament to say a few words on behalf of our committee, I want to congratulate and thank all our clerks, analysts, interpreters and translators, who helped our committee achieve, I think, some very worthy and laudatory work on a number of reports. I also want to thank all the members of the committee. As members know, many times in committee, discussions can get quite heated and quite partisan. I was fortunate enough to chair a committee on which all the members acted with great professionalism and respect for one another. I look forward to once again returning to Parliament in the fall, hopefully to have the same response from future committees.8510-421-619 "An Even Greener Government: Improving the Greening Government Strategy to Maximize its Impact "Environmental protectionFederal governmentGreening Government StrategyStanding Committee on Government Operations and EstimatesKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootKellyMcCauleyEdmonton West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsGovernment Operations and EstimatesInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives are pleased to present a supplementary report on a green government.While the OGGO report highlighted many failures of the Liberal government in greening government, the biggest oversight was that we did not, in this report, look at national defence emissions, which account for 50% of the entire government's emissions. It is because of this, unfortunately, that the report issued by OGGO has little value.8510-421-619 "An Even Greener Government: Improving the Greening Government Strategy to Maximize its Impact "Dissenting or supplementary opinionsEnvironmental protectionFederal governmentGreening Government StrategyStanding Committee on Government Operations and EstimatesTomLukiwskiMoose Jaw—Lake Centre—LaniganMaryAnnMihychukHon.Kildonan—St. Paul//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsStatus of WomenInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1545)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, two reports of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. The first is the 17th report, entitled “A Lifetime of Dedication: Helping Senior Women Benefit from their Lifelong Contributions to Canadian Society today”. The committee was able to hear from 54 witnesses, including 11 from departments, 10 individuals and 18 organizations. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to the report. The second is the 18th report, entitled “A Force for Change: Creating a Culture of Equality for Women in the Canadian Armed Forces”. The committee heard from nine independent witnesses, four organizations and seven individuals from DND. This was a fantastic opportunity for us to do the work. I want to mention the work done by our analysts, Dominique and Clare, and our fantastic clerk, Kenza, who were able to get all of this done in the last few weeks. We were able to get a report done and tabled. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report.8510-421-623 "A Lifetime of Dedication: Helping Senior Women Benefit from their Lifelong Contributions to Canadian Society"8510-421-624 "A Force for Change: Creating a Culture of Equality for Women in the Canadian Armed Forces"Canadian ForcesDepartment of National DefencePovertySenior citizensStanding Committee on the Status of WomenWomenJamesMaloneyEtobicoke—LakeshoreRachaelHarderLethbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsStatus of WomenInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1545)[English]Mr. Speaker, we submitted two dissenting reports, the first having to do with seniors. The focus was seniors who find themselves in financially vulnerable situations. Interestingly, under the Liberal government, there are more seniors who live in poverty now than there were up to 15 years ago, according to Statistics Canada data that came out within the last couple of weeks. When Conservatives were in power, the rate of female seniors living in poverty was about 11%. Under the current government, it is over 16%, so that number has increased drastically.The reason I raise this is that one of the concerns we heard from women who appeared at committee was that not enough is being done to support them, in particular those who choose to spend part or all of their working years at home looking after children and the well-being of the home as a whole. The government does not respect that choice, so in our report, we call on it to respect a woman's autonomy and economic choice in life.The other dissenting report I am tabling has to do with women in the Canadian Armed Forces. The reason this study was initiated was that the government promised that 25% of those in the Canadian Armed Forces would be women. It has not reached that target. It has also failed to respond to problems taking place within Operation Honour. Liberals also made a campaign promise that they would not take veterans to court, but they have. It is important for us to highlight the places where they have failed to meet their promises to Canadians and to make sure that we act as a voice advocating for these women who are part of the Canadian Armed Forces.8510-421-623 "A Lifetime of Dedication: Helping Senior Women Benefit from their Lifelong Contributions to Canadian Society"8510-421-624 "A Force for Change: Creating a Culture of Equality for Women in the Canadian Armed Forces"Canadian ForcesDepartment of National DefenceDissenting or supplementary opinionsPovertySenior citizensStanding Committee on the Status of WomenWomenKarenVecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonNathanielErskine-SmithBeaches—East York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCriminal CodeInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC)(1550)[English]Bill C-461. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-461, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Judges Act (trafficking in persons). He said: Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the many advocates and community partners that helped us in the creation of this bill. The issue was brought to my attention by a constituent of mine, Darla, who, as a survivor of human trafficking herself, notes how dire the situation is. As my colleague, the member for Peace River—Westlock, has stated before, human trafficking is happening within 10 blocks of where one lives.This private member's bill is a product of meaningful consultation with many of our community partners from Oshawa, including the Durham Region Human Trafficking Coalition, Durham Regional Police and its human trafficking unit, Victim Services of Durham Region and many more.I want to introduce this to my fellow colleagues as an non-partisan issue. Many ridings along the border and our highways are facing a rise in human trafficking. This is an issue on which we all agree we can do better as a country. Human trafficking does not discriminate, and as a father, I want to ensure that our country is a safer place for our children.(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)C-461, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Judges Act (trafficking in persons)Human traffickingIntroduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsNathanielErskine-SmithBeaches—East YorkMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1555)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege of presenting two petitions today.The first petition is on behalf of hundreds of Canadians who believe that the conscience rights of health care workers are not being protected when they are forced or coerced to become parties in assisted suicide. Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, yet the current government has done nothing to defend these rights in its euthanasia legislation. These citizens are calling on the Government of Canada to enshrine in the Criminal Code protection of conscience for physicians and health care workers. I trust that the government will urgently deal with these concerns and defend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Assisted suicideDoctorsEuthanasiaFreedom of conscience and religionHospitalsMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04493MarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle Creek//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1555)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is on behalf of hundreds of Saskatchewan residents who believe that the Government of Canada must defend the rights of all Canadians, regardless of whether the Liberal Party of Canada agrees with their individual views. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identifies freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of belief as fundamental freedoms. These citizens believe that the current government requiring Canada summer jobs program applicants to hold the same views as the Liberal government is in contravention of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The petitioners call upon the Prime Minister to defend the charter and withdraw this requirement from the Canada summer jobs program. I hope the government will deal with the concerns of these citizens.Canada Summer JobsDiscriminationEmployersFreedom of conscience and religionPetition 421-04494Student summer employmentKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekPeterJulianNew Westminster—Burnaby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsEqualizationInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1555)[English]Mr. Speaker, there is frustration among members of my community who have watched the government present draconian legislation against the energy sector. Members of my community are calling upon the government to immediately scrap Bill C-69, as well as to examine the equalization formula, which petitioners believe has been made untenable and unfair given the Prime Minister's ideological opposition to jobs in our community.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 ActsEnergy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04498JohnOliverOakvilleTerrySheehanSault Ste. Marie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsTransportation SafetyInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1600)[English]Mr. Speaker, many Canadians from coast to coast are calling on the government to put the safety and well-being of children first and foremost. They call on the federal government to consider the placement of three-point seat belts within school buses across the country. I am tabling a petition on this today.Petition 421-04500School busesSeat beltsTerrySheehanSault Ste. MarieLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions on the Order PaperHansard Insert[Text]Question No. 2458--Mr. Colin Carrie:With regard to Health Canada’s regulation of natural health products and non-prescription drugs: (a) what specific regulatory changes have been proposed or are currently under consideration by Health Canada; (b) for each proposed change, what is the stage, status, and timeline of the proposed change; and (c) is Health Canada proposing or considering bringing natural health products under direct regulation and, if so, what are the details, including timeline of such a proposal?Ms. Pam Damoff (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, in response to parts (a), (b) and (c), natural health products have been regulated under the natural health products regulations since 2004, and Canadians now have access to more than 150,000 licensed natural health products. The government is committed to preserving access to a wide range of health products, while making sure that Canadians have the information they need on the product labels to make informed health choices. Health Canada is dedicated to being reasonable, thoughtful and deliberate in how it develops its policy proposals and how it implements any changes.Since fall 2016, departmental officials have conducted extensive consultations with a diverse range of stakeholders to gain their perspectives and concerns on proposed changes to the natural health products regulations to improve the labelling of natural health products, and the food and drug regulations to modernize the oversight approach for non-prescription drugs. Health Canada has received input from over 4,500 consumers, industry, health care professionals, academia and many other interested stakeholders. This engagement will continue as proposals advance over the coming months to further seek stakeholders’ perspectives and collaboratively work with them on potential solutions. With regard to the natural health products regulations, Health Canada is proposing changes to improve the labelling of natural health products to make labels easier to read and understand, help consumers make informed decisions about their health and the health of their families, and reduce avoidable harms associated with confusing or illegible labels. Under this new proposal, labels would require a standardized product facts table, a minimum font size and appropriate colour contrast. This proposal is targeting spring 2020 for pre-publication in the Canada Gazette, part I. To support this proposal and its implementation, Health Canada has been engaging stakeholders extensively and has been meeting individual companies representing tens of thousands of natural health products on the Canadian market, to identify any challenges with implementing the proposed labelling changes and working in collaboration with stakeholders to identify potential solutions. Furthermore, Health Canada will publish its proposed guidance on labelling changes in June 2019 to seek additional feedback on the proposed changes prior to formal consultation in Canada Gazette, part I. In April 2019, Health Canada published its findings from public opinion research on improving self-care product labelling during in-person public consultations held across Canada in 2018: “Consulting Consumers on Self-Care Product Labelling: A Report on What We Heard”, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/topics/self-care-products/what-we-heard-product-labelling.html. With regard to the food and drug regulations, Health Canada is proposing changes to modernize the oversight approach for non-prescription drugs, which range from cosmetic-like topical products to higher-risk products such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. This proposal would introduce simplified market access pathways for lower-risk products and reduce regulatory burden for industry. This proposal is targeting spring 2020 for pre-publication in Canada Gazette, part I. The regulatory modernization proposals, as described above, are outlined in Health Canada’s “Forward Regulatory Plan 2019-2021”: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/corporate/about-health-canada/legislation-guidelines/acts-regulations/forward-regulatory-plan/plan/self-care-framework.html. More information on the proposed regulatory changes and how stakeholders can get involved can be found in “Next steps on the self-care products initiative”, at https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/self-care-framework.html. Health Canada remains committed to continue to engage stakeholders throughout the regulatory modernization process.Question No. 2469--Mr. Tom Kmiec:With regard to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, since January 1, 2016: (a) how many Canadian businesses are investing in projects in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, broken down by year; (b) how much Canadian money is spent on projects in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, broken down by year; and (c) of the projects listed in (a), how many of these businesses are operating through, either directly or indirectly, the Canadian government?Mr. Joël Lightbound (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, in response to part (a), the Department of Finance has been informed that one Canadian firm, Hatch, is providing consulting services on an AIIB-financed project. In addition, the Department of Finance understands that Canadian firms and consultants are engaged with core functions of the bank. For example, TD Securities helped manage AIIB’s first bond issuance in May 2019, among other financial services firms. The AIIB publishes details of investors who invest alongside the AIIB in a project. This information can be found on the AIIB website in project documents of both proposed and approved projects, at the following links: https://www.aiib.org/en/projects/approved/index.html and https://www.aiib.org/en/projects/proposed/index.html. In response to part (b), Canada purchased a 0.995% shareholding in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank at a cost of $199 million U.S. This amount, which is payable over a five-year period in equal proportions, starting in 2017-18, is pooled with that of other member countries and used to finance AIIB projects over multiple years. In response to part (c), businesses win procurement contracts independently and do not operate through the Government of Canada. Question No. 2470--Ms. Lisa Raitt:With regard to the 2016 compliance agreement signed by SNC-Lavalin and Elections Canada: did Elections Canada receive any communication from the government, including from any minister’s office, about SNC-Lavalin since November 4, 2015, and, if so, what are the details of all communication, including (i) date, (ii) sender, (iii) recipient, (iv) form (email, letter, telephone, etc.), (v) subject matter, (vi) summary of contents?Mr. Arif Virani (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and to the Minister of Democratic Institutions, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada has not received any communication from the government, including from any minister’s office, about the 2016 compliance agreement signed by SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and the Commissioner of Canada Elections, CCE. The CCE is responsible to ensure that the Canada Elections Act and the Referendum Act are complied with and enforced, including the negotiation of compliance agreements. In the exercise of that role, he acts independently of the Chief Electoral Officer. Agreements and contractsAsian Infrastructure Investment BankCanadian investments abroadCarrie, ColinConservative CaucusDamoff, PamElections CanadaFundraising and fundraisersInfrastructureKmiec, TomLiberal CaucusLightbound, JoëlNatural health productsParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of FinanceParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of HealthParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and to the Minister of Democratic InstitutionsPharmaceuticalsPolitical partiesQ-2458Q-2469Q-2470Raitt, LisaRegulationSNC-Lavalin Group Inc.Virani, ArifWritten questionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1600)[English]Is that agreed?Some hon. members: Agreed.Decisions of the HouseOrders for return to written questionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsHansard Insert[Text]Question No. 2454--Mr. Murray Rankin:With regard to the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik and his claims that Canada violated his rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, since June 1, 2018: how much has it cost the government to litigate the case, broken down by (i) the value of all legal services, (ii) disbursements and costs awards for Federal Court file numbers T-727-08 and T-1580-09?(Return tabled)Question No. 2455--Mr. Todd Doherty:With regard to the restrictions announced in April 2019 by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on Chinook salmon fishing in British Columbia: (a) did the government do an economic analysis of the impact of the recreational fishery restrictions on the fishing tourism industry for 2019, and, if so, what were the findings of the analysis; and (b) did the government do an economic analysis of the impact of the restrictions, both recreational and commercial, on the various communities and regions of British Columbia impacted by the restrictions and, if so, what were the findings of the analysis?(Return tabled)Question No. 2456--Mr. Larry Maguire:With regard to the procurement, deployment, usage and maintenance of all new and existing information and communications techonolgies (ICT) and all related costs incurred by the government in fiscal year 2018-19: (a) what was the total level of overall spending by each federal department, agency, Crown corporation, and other governement entities; (b) what are the details of all these expenditures and related costs, including salaries and commercial purchases; (c) how many full-time employees, part-time employees, indeterminate appointments, term employees, contractors and consultants were employed to manage, maintain and improve ICT systems and infrasturcture in each federal department, agency, Crown corporation or other government entities; and (d) what is the ratio of all ICT support workers (full-time, part-time, indeterminate, term employees, contractors and consultants) to non-ICT employees in each federal department, agency, Crown corporation, and other government entities?(Return tabled)Question No. 2457--Mr. Todd Doherty:With regard to the caribou recovery agreements negotiated, proposed, or entered into by the government since November 4, 2015, including those currently under negotiation or consultation: (a) for each agreement, has an economic impact study been conducted and, if so, what are the details, including findings of each study; (b) for each agreement, what is the total projected economic impact, broken down by (i) industry (tourism, logging, transportation, etc.), (ii) region or municipality; and (c) what are the details of all organizations consulted in relation to the economic impact of such agreements, including (i) name of organization, (ii) date, (iii) form of consultation?(Return tabled)Question No. 2459--Mr. Pierre-Luc Dusseault:With regard to the Canada Infrastructure Bank, since its creation: (a) what is the number of meetings held with Canadian and foreign investors, broken down by (i) month, (ii) country, (iii) investor class; (b) what is the complete list of investors met; (c) what are the details of the contracts awarded by the Canada Infrastructure Bank, including (i) date of contract, (ii) value of contract, (iii) vendor name, (iv) file number, (v) description of services provided; (d) what are the details of all travel expenses incurred, including for each expenditure the (i) traveller’s name, (ii) purpose of the travel, (iii) travel dates, (iv) airfare, (v) other transportation costs, (vi) accommodation costs, (vii) meals and incidentals, (viii) other expenses, (ix) total amount; and (e) what are the details of all hospitality expenses incurred by the Bank, including for each expenditure the (i) guest’s name, (ii) event location, (iii) service vendor, (iv) total amount, (v) event description, (vi) date, (vii) number of attendees, (viii) number of government employees in attendance, (ix) number of guests?(Return tabled)Question No. 2460--Mr. Guy Lauzon:With regard to ongoing or planned government IT projects over $1 million: (a) what is the list of each project, including a brief description; and (b) for each project listed in (a), what is the (i) total budget, (ii) estimated completion date?(Return tabled)Question No. 2461--Mr. Guy Lauzon:With regard to international trips taken by the Prime Minister since January 1, 2016: (a) what are the details of each trip, including (i) dates, (ii) destination, (iii) purpose; (b) for each trip in (a), how many guests who were not members of the Prime Minister’s family, employees of the government, or elected officials, were on each trip; and (c) what are the details of each guest in (b), including (i) name, (ii) title, (iii) reason for being on the trip, (iv) dates individual was on the trip?(Return tabled)Question No. 2462--Mr. Guy Lauzon:With regard to government expenditures on gala, concert or sporting event tickets since January 1, 2018: what was the (i) date, (ii) location, (iii) total cost, (iv) cost per ticket, (v) number of tickets, (vi) title of persons using the tickets, (vii) name or title of event for tickets purchased by, or billed to, any department, agency, Crown corporation, or other government entity?(Return tabled)Question No. 2463--Mr. Dave Van Kesteren:With regard to Minister’s regional offices (MROs): (a) what are the current locations of each MRO; (b) how many government employees, excluding Ministerial exempt staff, are currently working in each office; and (c) how many Ministerial exempt staff are currently working in each office?(Return tabled)Question No. 2464--Mrs. Cathy McLeod:With regard to the statement by the Minister of Indigenous Services on April 30, 2019, that “Kashechewan will be relocated”: (a) where will the community be located; and (b) what is the projected timeline for the relocation?(Return tabled)Question No. 2465--Mr. Luc Berthold:With regard to the government’s response to the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in certain parts of the world: (a) what specific new measures has the government taken since January 1, 2019, in order to prevent ASF from coming to Canada; and (b) what new restrictions have been put in place on imports in order to prevent ASF from coming to Canada, broken down by country?(Return tabled)Question No. 2466--Mr. Dean Allison:With regard to usage of the government's fleet of Challenger aircraft, since January 1, 2019: what are the details of the legs of each flight, including (i) date, (ii) point of departure, (iii) destination, (iv) number of passengers, (v) names and titles of passengers, excluding security or Canadian Armed Forces members, (vi) total catering bill related to the flight?(Return tabled)Question No. 2467--Mr. Dave MacKenzie:With regard to all government contracts awarded for public relation services since January 1, 2018, broken down by department, agency, Crown corporation, or other government entity: what are the details of these contracts, including (i) date of contract, (ii) value of contract, (iii) vendor name, (iv) file number, (v) description of services provided, (vi) start and end dates of services provided?(Return tabled)Question No. 2468--Mr. Tom Lukiwski:With regard to Service Canada’s national in-person service delivery network, for each Service Canada Centre: (a) how many centres were operational as of November 4, 2015; (b) what were the locations and number of full-time employees (FTEs) at each location, as of November 4, 2015; (c) how many centres are currently operational; (d) what are the current locations and number of FTEs at each location; (e) which offices have changed their hours of service between November 4, 2015, and present; and (f) for each office which has changed their hours, what were the hours of service as of (i) November 4, 2015, (ii) May 1, 2019?(Return tabled)Question No. 2471--Mr. Dan Albas:With regard to the government’s Connect to Innovate Program first announced in the 2016 Budget: (a) what is the total of all expenditures to date under the program; (b) what are the details of all projects funded to date under the program, including (i) recipient of funding, (ii) name of the project, (iii) location, (iv) project start date, (v) projected completion date, (vi) amount of funding pledged, (vii) amount of funding actually provided to date, (viii) description of the project; (c) which of the projected listed in (b) have agreements signed, and which ones do not yet have a signed agreement; and (d) which of the details in (a) through (c) are available on the Connect to Innovate section of Industry Canada’s website and what is the specific website location where each such detail is located, broken down by detail requested in (a) through (c), including the subparts of each question?(Return tabled)Question No. 2472--Mr. Dan Albas:With regard to concerns that infrastructure funding has been announced, but not delivered, in Kelowna, British Columbia, since November 4, 2015: (a) what is the total amount of funding committed in Kelowna; (b) what is the total amount of funding paid out in relation to the funding committed in (a); and (c) what are the details of all projects, including (i) date of announcement, (ii) amount committed, (iii) amount actually paid out to date, (iv) project description?(Return tabled)Question No. 2473--Mr. Dan Albas:With regard to the Connect to Innovate Program and specifically the project to close the Canadian North Fibre Loop between Dawson City and Inuvik: (a) what is the current status of the project; (b) what are the details of any contracts signed in relation to the project, including the date each contract was signed; (c) what amount has the government committed to the project; (d) of the funding commitment in (c), what amount has been delivered; (e) what is the start date of the project; (f) what is the projected completion date of the project; (g) what are the details of any tender issued in relation to the project; (h) has a contractor been selected for the project and, if so, which contractor was selected and when was the selection made; and (i) which of the details in (a) through (h) are available on the Connect to Innovate section of Industry Canada’s website and what is the specific website location where each such detail is located, broken down by detail requested in (a) through (h)?(Return tabled)Question No. 2474--Mr. Kerry Diotte:With regard to all expenditures on hospitality since January 1, 2019, broken down by department or agency: what are the details of all expenditures, including (i) vendor, (ii) amount, (iii) date of expenditure, (iv) start and end date of contract, (v) description of goods or services provided, including quantity, if applicable, (vi) file number, (vii) number of government employees in attendance, (viii) number of other attendees, (ix) location?(Return tabled)Question No. 2475--Ms. Sheri Benson:With regard to the Non-Insured Health Benefit (NIHB) Program, and the provision of medical transportation benefits in Saskatchewan for each fiscal year from 2012-13 to the current : (a) what is the number of clients served; (b) what is the number of approved trips; (c) what were the approved transportation service providers and the number of trips approved for each; (d) what were the approved modes of transportation and the number of trips per mode; (e) what was the average wait time for approval of applications; (f) what was the number of trips that required lodging, accommodations, or other expenses unrelated to the provision of the treatment being sought; (g) what were the reasons why additional expenses in (f) were approved and the number of applications or trips approved for each; and (h) what was the number of appeals launched as a result of rejected applications, the average length of the appeals process, and the aggregate results?(Return tabled)Question No. 2476--Ms. Sheri Benson:With regard to the 2019-20 federal budget presentation of March 19, 2019, and issues related to the Phoenix pay system for public servants, as of today: (a) what is the total number of affected clients; and (b) what is the total number of affected clients in each electoral district?(Return tabled)8555-421-2454 Abousfian Abdelrazik8555-421-2455 Restrictions on Chinook salmon fishing8555-421-2456 Information and communications technologies (ICT)8555-421-2457 Caribou recovery agreements8555-421-2459 Canada Infrastructure Bank8555-421-2460 Government IT projects8555-421-2461 International trips taken by the Prime Minister8555-421-2462 Government expenditures on gala, concert or sporting event tickets8555-421-2463 Ministers' regional offices8555-421-2464 Statement by the Minister of Indigenous Services8555-421-2465 Outbreak of African Swine Fever8555-421-2466 Usage of the government's fleet of Challenger aircraft8555-421-2467 Government contracts awarded for public relation services8555-421-2468 Service Canada's national in-person service delivery network8555-421-2471 Connect to Innovate Program8555-421-2472 Infrastructure funding in Kelowna, British Columbia8555-421-2473 Connect to Innovate Program and project to close the Canadian North Fibre Loop8555-421-2474 Expenditures on hospitality8555-421-2475 Non-Insured Health Benefit Program8555-421-2476 2019-20 federal budget presentation and Phoenix pay systemAbdelrazik, AbousfianAboriginal peoplesAccommodation and hospitality servicesAfrican swine feverAgreements and contractsAlbas, DanAllison, DeanBacklogsBenson, SheriBerthold, LucBritish ColumbiaBroadband Internet servicesBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)Cabinet ministersCanada Infrastructure BankCaribouChinook salmonCivil and human rightsCommunity relocationComputer systemsConnect to InnovateConservative CaucusDiotte, KerryDoherty, ToddDusseault, Pierre-LucEventsFisheries policyFloodsGovernment aircraftGovernment contractsGovernment expendituresGovernment servicesHealth care systemHousingImportsIncome and wagesInformation technologyInfrastructureInvestmentKashechewan First NationKelownaLauzon, GuyLegal proceedingsLukiwski, TomMacKenzie, DaveMaguire, LarryMcLeod, CathyNew Democratic Party CaucusNon-Insured Health Benefits ProgramNorthern CanadaPhoenixPorkPrime MinisterPublic relationsPublic Service and public servantsQ-2454Q-2455Q-2456Q-2457Q-2459Q-2460Q-2461Q-2462Q-2463Q-2464Q-2465Q-2466Q-2467Q-2468Q-2471Q-2472Q-2473Q-2474Q-2475Q-2476Rankin, MurrayReferences to membersRegional officesRemote communitiesRural communitiesSaskatchewanService CanadaSudanTortureTravelTrudeau, JustinVan Kesteren, DaveWildlife conservationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1600)[English]Is that agreed?Some hon. members: Agreed.KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1605)[English]In accordance with Standing Order 67.1, we will now proceed to a 30-minute question period. Members will recall that the preference for questions during the 30 minutes is provided to the opposition, but not to the exclusion of some members from the government side. I ask all members who wish to participate in the 30 minutes to now rise, to indicate how much time will be afforded. If members could keep their interventions to approximately one and a half minutes, that will get through the members who wish to participate.A final reminder is that members can speak more than once, should the need arise or it be necessary in the course of the 30 minutes.We will now proceed to questions, with the hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill.Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29BardishChaggerHon.WaterlooMichelleRempelHon.Calgary Nose Hill//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1605)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to take note of the fact that the government introduced this motion over a month ago. The government House leader has not put this back on the agenda, which, for one, kind of belies what the Liberal government actually thinks constitutes an emergency. Two, the Parliamentary Budget Officer this week panned the government's carbon tax, saying that it would not work. Then the environment minister said that the Liberals were not going to increase the price of carbon, so they admitted that their carbon tax is a cash grab. She is responsible for dumping millions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence. As well, the Prime Minister could not even answer to Canadians what he was doing to reduce plastics use.If it is such an emergency, why is the Prime Minister jetting back and forth today from the Raptors parade, creating a big carbon footprint?Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29BruceStantonSimcoe NorthCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1605)[English]Mr. Speaker, as has been mentioned, this motion was first introduced just over a week ago. Here we are today, and it is being pushed through.There is some hypocrisy entangled within the motion that is being brought forward by the Liberals. I will comment a little on that. The government says that its so-called climate action plan is to impose a carbon tax on Canadians, but then it is allowing the largest emitters in Canada to get off scot-free. They are off the hook. Meanwhile, everyday Canadians, small business owners, moms and dads who are driving their kids around to sports games, are paying top dollar on the fuel that they use as well as the natural gas they use to heat their homes in Canada. That is not really an option, especially for those in my constituency, Lethbridge, where our winters are -30°C or -35°C.The idea of a carbon tax is a theory, but it does not work in reality. Instead, we should be focusing on looking after our rivers and waterways, on conserving our land and making sure that wildlife is protected. We should be making sure that we are making investments in green technologies.Let us talk about the hypocrisy with regard to the St. Lawrence River, the waste that is being dumped in it and the government having done absolutely nothing to stop that. If we are going to talk about the environment, then let us have a real conversation about the environment, and let us make real changes for it, rather than speaking out of one side of our mouth and doing something different, which is exactly what the Liberals are doing.Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel: (1610)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think we can all agree that when it comes to addressing climate change, we need policy that is based on fact and scientific evidence. When we hear the Parliamentary Budget Officer say that the $40 per tonne price on carbon is not going to allow the government to meet its Paris targets, that is something we should digest, internalize and perhaps change course on.For the minister to now go from saying we need a scientific-based approach to making this about religion, is hypocritical. Is she going to quote religion on other areas of policy? We have to get away from zealotry and dogma, which is what the minister has made her whole career on. It is the church of climate change and policies that will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.If the minister really cares about climate, why is she making this about religious dogma as opposed to putting forward a plan that would actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Why is the government invoking closure on a debate where we could be discussing these exact things and sussing out a policy that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change in a meaningful way?Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. John Nater (Perth—Wellington, CPC): (1620)[English]Mr. Speaker, according to the Prime Minister's itinerary today, he started the morning in Ottawa. He then flew to Toronto. He will then fly to Ottawa. After that, he will fly to Montreal. After he is done in Montreal, he will fly back to Ottawa for the climate emergency vote tonight. What does the Challenger jet fly on? Does it fly on good intentions or is it just that the Prime Minister is a high-carbon hypocrite?Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1620)[English]Order, please. I would ask the hon. member for Perth—Wellington to consider the use of those kinds of characterizations. As the members have seen, they lead to disorder. I really ask hon. members to think about how they phrase things, especially when they are talking about characterizing or assigning adjectives to other hon. members in the House.The hon. Minister of Environment and Climate Change.Members' remarksJohnNaterPerth—WellingtonCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (1625)[English]Mr. Speaker, talking about thoughtful transitioning, it would be interesting to see if the Prime Minister would show some leadership on this issue. It is interesting to note his itinerary for today. He started out his morning in Ottawa. He is now in Toronto and he is coming back to Ottawa. He is going to end his day in Montreal and we expect him to be back in Ottawa for tomorrow. How does he propose to tour around the country in this manner without a carbon economy?Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86260DavidYurdigaDavid-YurdigaFort McMurray—Cold LakeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/YurdigaDavid_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. David Yurdiga (Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, CPC): (1630)[English]Mr. Speaker, it was interesting to hear the minister mention that she wants to phase out coal. Does that include our exports? As she is aware, Vancouver exports 36.8 million tonnes of coal a year. Are we going to phase out coal exports also?Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1630)[English]Mr. Speaker, there are really two points we are looking at, the environment package and the closure motion. This is the second time I have been up. The first time was for time allocation. Here we go again. The government is saying it is going to shut down debate on a very important topic.However, over and over, the minister slams the Conservatives by saying she hopes we do this and she hopes we do that. Then she says that the Liberals have a very serious environmental plan. We know their plan. It is the Kathleen Wynne plan. It is the plan that saw much of our manufacturing leave Canada. It is the plan that saw high energy prices here in Ontario going through the roof so that jobs were lost. That is the plan. Who else did the minister attack? She attacked the premiers of Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. She has attacked everyone who does not believe in her points as she sees them. That is why we need more debate, but the government is closing it down again.It is unfortunate that we have a minister who lives in her own little bubble, in her own little circle, and everyone else is demonized. She brings in the Pope's comments to support her, but she demonizes everybody else.Climate change and global warmingClosureGovernment Business No. 29CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThe Environment [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1635)[Translation]It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the motion before the House.[English]Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay.The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members. CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1735)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member's government in its first two years exempted places like Nova Scotia from having to phase out coal. The government exempted it a full 10 years further into the future and then it brought in its carbon tax.The member talked about needing to understand something before acting upon it. The Premier of Nunavut said at finance committee that 80% of the diesel fuel that was burned in his communities for home heating and whatnot was subsidized by the government. The national carbon tax the Liberal government has implemented basically increases the price of living.I would like the member to explain to us how does a community innovate using the so-called price on carbon when 80% of it is being paid for by the same taxpayer? How does that work?Carbon pricingClimate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29SeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1745)[English]The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment.Robert-FalconOuelletteWinnipeg CentreSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1825)[English]Madam Speaker, the Liberals have said that climate change is an emergency. Therefore, I am wondering why, in the dying days of this Parliament, we have not heard anything about the specific and immediate actions the government is going to take if it thinks it is an emergency. Perhaps the member could elaborate.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29DarrenFisherDartmouth—Cole HarbourDarrenFisherDartmouth—Cole Harbour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1840)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to be clear on what the Green Party would do in this light. My understanding is that the Green Party is opposed to fossil fuels, that it would oppose building additional pipelines, that it is in favour of the carbon tax and against the use of plastics. Is that correct?Carbon pricingClimate change and global warmingFossil fuelsGovernment Business No. 29Pipeline transportationPlasticsElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1845)[English]Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis.“It is an emergency”, the government realized on May 6, the day the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith was elected, doubling the Green Party caucus. “It is an emergency”, the Liberal government said on May 16, over a month ago. In that month, have all the business items the House has dealt with been an emergency? Suddenly, it is an emergency today. The Liberals have moved closure on it and we will vote on the emergency motion introduced four years into their mandate. Only now do they suddenly realize this is an emergency.If there is an emergency, is it that the Liberals did not realize they would not meet their Paris targets? Is it that they are not in a position to be calling for more ambitious targets?I remember very well that in 2015, the Liberal government said that the targets of the Conservatives were the floor, not the ceiling, and they were not even on the same story of the building; they were in the basement. The Liberals have declared a climate emergency, but the Conservatives see it for what it is. It is a cynical ploy by the Liberals, who are desperate to distract from not only their own climate failures, but from their many scandals.This spring has been a rough one for Canadians and for the trust and confidence we have in our institutions. We have the SNC-Lavalin scandal. We have the coordinated and sustained attempt to interfere in the judicial process in Canada. We have the undermining of the rule of law with the concerted effort to destroy Vice-Admiral Mark Norman and his reputation as a way to protect Liberal insiders, which is a trend in both the SNC and the shipbuilding gerrymandering we have seen.There are a lot of emergencies the Liberals are faced with, but the climate is not one. Certainly their actions demonstrate that to us. We know that real efforts need to be made. We know we need an environmental plan. However, that is not what we got from the Liberal government. We got a tax plan from it.We know the Liberals will put an unmanageable burden on Canadians. We know from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that this burden is going to increase greatly. We know that the price of gas we see at pumps today, which Canadians are struggling to pay, will need to go up almost another 25¢ a litre for the Liberals to hit the Paris targets, which they said were the floor not the ceiling, even though they cannot even come close to them.There is a lot of flailing coming from the government side of the House, but Canadians should fear not, as help is on the way. A credible environmental plan will be put forward by the Leader of the Opposition this Wednesday. We are very excited. Canadians will be able to see what a credible plan on the environment looks like. They will be able to see what real leadership looks like, not virtue signalling and jet setting. It is an emergency.The Toronto Raptors won the NBA finals. Carbon footprint aside, the Prime Minister is going to address the emergency in person this very day while we debate the emergency motion? He flew by chartered aircraft to Toronto. Then he flew back. I think he is also flying to Montreal today and then he is going to fly back.I hear from the government side—Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29Greenhouse gasesSplitting speaking timeElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1850)[English]Madam Speaker, it is very unfortunate that the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader drew to your attention that the Prime Minister was absent. I was in my riding this morning and not here, but here I am now.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29CarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1850)[English]Madam Speaker, as I said, I was in my riding this morning; I am back. We can be in more than one place over the course of a day.Let us talk about a different day for the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader. Let us talk about the Prime Minister's famed trip, his illegal vacation to the island of the Aga Khan. The Prime Minister travelled there by private aircraft, and if that was not enough, he took a private helicopter too. I am pretty sure he is not allowed to do that. It might be more egregious than a frivolous point of order in the House. It is actually against the law.We have a Prime Minister who, in one vacation, emitted more CO2 and his carbon footprint was bigger than that of the average Canadian in a whole year. We have two sets of rules with the Prime Minister. We have one set of rules for him, and we have one set of rules for everybody else. We have a Prime Minister who took a vacation, which is great, because who does not deserve a vacation? However, instead of enjoying something a little closer to home and doing his part to reduce his carbon footprint, he flew to Florida. That is great, beautiful, and I hope the weather was nice. However, there was a photo op in Ottawa, so he flew back by private aircraft. When the photo op was complete, he flew back to Florida. What does one do at the end of a trip? One flies back home again.He is entitled to one vacation a year. However, I hear the waves were pretty gnarly in B.C., so off to Tofino the Prime Minister goes, on a surfing vacation across the country, and then he flies back to Ottawa. We have two sets of rules, and we deserve better than that.As I mentioned, Canadians can look forward to the credible plan that our Conservative leader will put forward this Wednesday, one that does not have two sets of rules, one that Canadians can count on and one where Canadians know they are not going to be taxed for heating their homes and driving their kids to soccer. It is a plan where Canadians who are within $200 of insolvency are not going to have to look at tax after successive tax after tax, as they do with the current government.Now, the Liberals have said they are not going to raise the carbon tax. However, this is from the same government that promised, when the Prime Minister looked Canadians right in the eye, that the government was going to balance the budget in 2019. The government's own documents now say that the budget will not be balanced until after 2040. Canadians deserve better, and they will get that. They will get a credible plan from the Conservatives, and they will be able to see real leadership in action when they elect a Conservative government in October. Action is required, but we do not have an emergency, except the political emergency that has come from the failures of the Liberal government.Carbon pricingClimate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29CarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1855)[English]Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague will note that, as I mentioned more than once in my speech, on Wednesday of this week we are going to hear the plan that a Conservative government will implement to protect our environment. It will be real vision and real leadership.Will I support a motion that there is an emergency? If the motion were that there is a political emergency that the government is facing, I could agree with that. That is what I will say.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29CarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—Langford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1855)[English]Madam Speaker, members will recall that it was a Conservative government that put forward great incentives for Canadians to be able to make changes in their life, invest in their home and use more sustainable and innovative ways of heating their homes, for example. I owned a home that had a geothermal system in it, and it was fantastic. It was the best heat. On the Internet, we see charts of which type of heat is hottest in a house. The most consistent heat we had in our home was geothermal. The Conservatives were able to put forward this plan through which Canadians were able to invest and receive a rebate from government, but they did not get taxed, and we saw a positive outcome as a result of it.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29AlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—LangfordPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1900)[English]Madam Speaker, I would love the opportunity to knock on some doors for a strong Conservative candidate in the member opposite's riding, where we can share with residents the strong Conservative vision on how we can protect our environment without taxing Canadians. I would love the opportunity to do just that.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29PeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—SoulangesStevenBlaneyHon.Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionHon. Steven Blaney (Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC): (1900)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to commend my colleague from Ontario, who embraced the “think globally, act locally” movement by installing a geothermal system in his home. That is an excellent way to heat a home and reduce our carbon footprint. He took advantage of financial support from the previous government through the eco-energy retrofit program. I will have a hard time staying within my speaking time for such an important and critical issue that affects the environment, sustainable development and, of course, climate change.I want to tell those watching that in 2015, Canada made a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, relative to 2005 levels, by 2030.I will start with some very good news. Between 2005 and 2015, Canada reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 2.2%. This shows that when the provinces, federal government, municipalities and citizens work together, we can achieve real results and make progress towards achieving our target.Indeed, this target was reached back then by Stephen Harper's government. I have a story about this that I would like to share. When I was elected in 2006, the previous environment minister, Stéphane Dion—I would like to say hello to him, if he is listening—and the provincial environment minister at the time, Thomas Mulcair, were at loggerheads. Quebec was unable to get federal money to implement its green plan. What did our Conservative government do? It put in place the EcoTrust fund. Not only did Quebec receive the money it requested, but $1.5 billion was allocated to the provinces so they could implement their green plans. The result was, as I mentioned earlier, a 2.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during that decade. This work requires collaboration, partnerships and investments in technologies.I would remind my colleague who spoke about measures earlier, that it was a Conservative government that gradually brought to an end the accelerated capital cost allowance for the oil sands. It also encouraged natural resource businesses by giving them tax incentives to operate in an environmentally friendly way and to reduce their carbon footprint. That is just one example among many others. Unfortunately, this stands in sharp contrast to our situation since 2015.According to all the experts, including Mr. Suzuki, the commissioner of the environment and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Canada is going to miss the targets. What is unfortunate is that the Liberals currently have no structure or tools in place to reach our targets. On the contrary, there are mechanisms in place to make it look like the targets will be met. What is the best way of making it look like you are doing something? Obviously, it is to tax the middle class. That is exactly what the Liberals are doing.Whenever we ask them about the repercussions of the tax they are going to impose on taxpayers, the carbon tax, as they call it, they refuse to answer. They are incapable of telling us how effective their tax will be. They cannot even tell us how much it will contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.What we do know, however, and what all the experts are saying, is that they are off the mark. It is unfortunate, because the people listening to us want effective action.Before they get even more depressed over the disaster that the Liberals are steering us into, I want to talk about an initiative in my riding called the Coop FA. For those who like a little more background, I can add that the full name of this well-known organization is Coopérative Forêt d'Arden. This social economy enterprise won a Pléiades award of excellence in 2018. I want to commend this organization for realizing that what was needed was local action. This co-operative carries out environmental outreach with students, members of the public and organizations to inspire environmentally responsible behaviour. (1905)To date, it has educated over 5,000 young people on the importance of being environmentally responsible and shrinking their carbon footprint. Statistics show that actions taken by children aged six to nine can be equivalent to taking several hundred cars off the road. That shows that the Coop FA is planting the right seed, because the next generation will be keenly aware of these issues and the importance of individual and collective action.I also want to note that the Paris Agreement is based on targets that were set by our government. We could even go back as far as the first Rio Summit, in 1992, where we were represented by former Conservative minister Jean Charest. I think it has been clearly demonstrated that the Liberals' record is abysmal. The carbon tax is a failure. They are going to miss the targets and the middle class is going to pay the price. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that 92% of the total revenue from the carbon tax will come from middle-class families, leaving just 8% for big polluters, who also have access to mechanisms for reducing their taxes.I would like to quote something Mr. Charest said at the Rio summit. At the time, Mr. Mulroney's Conservative government was in power and the Progressive Conservatives had a very good environmental record, just as we do. In retrospect, Mr. Charest realized we needed to act faster because climate phenomena were intensifying. Here is what he said: I think we have made major progress, but we have not reached the goal we set for ourselves in 1992, which was to help the economy shift toward truly sustainable development.... That's the kind of development we want, development that will enable us to construct policies that really push us toward better choices. Plus, that work has to be sustained for many years.There is no denying the climate emergency has been around for decades. As far back as 1972, the Club of Rome and the Brundtland report sounded the alarm. This issue is too important to let politicians use it as a bargaining chip. That is why we plan to keep going in the same direction, which means implementing concrete, proven measures that have enabled Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions without burdening the middle class. That is the plan we will put forward, and it will have three pillars.First, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Second, we need to adapt to climate change and implement mitigation measures. Third, we need to make our communities more resilient to potential disasters, which we did when I was public safety minister. We made investments in that regard.In closing, I want to say that we have a responsible approach to climate change, unlike some political parties that are hiding their heads in the sand. We need oil to make the transition to renewable energy. We believe that it is better to use Canadian energy sources ethically and responsibly than to use foreign energy sources that are not developed safely and responsibly from countries whose values are often the complete opposite of Canada's.Carbon pricingClimate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29Greenhouse gasesMichaelBarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionHon. Steven Blaney: (1910)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question.The issue is so important that we cannot allow the Liberals to squander Canada's opportunities to take a leadership role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Canada's emissions represent less than 2% of global emissions. That is why it is important to be a leader by taking an international approach. The Liberals, however, are failing miserably, both on the domestic and international fronts. I would tell my colleague to stay tuned because the plan is coming. I can assure her that it will be based on our many success stories. She need only look at the Conservatives' budgets during the Harper decade. She will see many measures that were put in place and were successful in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29LindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesWayneStetskiKootenay—Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionHon. Steven Blaney: (1910)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding.[English]The carbon tax has been tried, and it is not working. Actually, it is a tax grab. The only one to benefit is the government, which gets more money in its pocket. Unfortunately, in a province like mine, we see some of the initiatives being put forward with this tax grab as a total failure, and the Liberals have just given us an example. They were subsidizing fridges for a national company, while our small grocery retailers have to pay for this themselves and have to pay the same carbon tax. We agree on the goal. Obviously, the Liberal plan is a failure. It has been demonstrated in the past that we can get there without a tax grab. That is what we have done in the past and what we intend to continue to do.Carbon pricingClimate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29WayneStetskiKootenay—ColumbiaMoniquePauzéRepentigny//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionHon. Steven Blaney: (1915)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague for having a fully electric vehicle. Based on my recent conversations with her, it is working really well.Unfortunately, we still need oil. The best-selling vehicle in Quebec is the Ford F-150. It is all well and good to attack the oil sands, but gas use is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. I prefer to use Canadian oil rather than unethical oil from another country. This allows us to reinvest in our social services and in our community.Bituminous sandsClimate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29Oil and gasMoniquePauzéRepentignyLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35607HaroldAlbrechtHarold-AlbrechtKitchener—ConestogaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AlbrechtHarold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMr. Harold Albrecht (Kitchener—Conestoga, CPC): (1925)[English]Madam Speaker, at the beginning of my colleague's speech she talked about preserving our water. In my riding, we have great programs, a very small incentive, to help farmers and agricultural workers preserve our streams. By putting a buffer alongside the streams, keeping cattle and other livestock out of the streams, the streams are new being unbelievably renewed. We have trees starting to grow in the buffer stream, shading and cooling the water, and now we have fish stocks returning to streams that were empty for years.However, it is very discouraging when farmers in my area and other areas of Canada are taking these initiatives on their own to improve our water quality and at the same time to have the Liberal government authorize the dumping of billions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River. In November 2015, just shortly after the government was elected, it authorized the dumping of eight billion litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence. That is very discouraging to individual Canadians who are trying to do their part. Here we have what the Liberals are calling an environmental plan and all it is is a tax plan. It sounds great, a price on pollution, it is a catchy phrase, it is a great sound bite, but it is not doing anything to preserve the environment. Does my colleague not agree—Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29LindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35320SylvieBoucherSylvie-BoucherBeauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—CharlevoixConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/BoucherSylvie_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMrs. Sylvie Boucher (Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix, CPC): (1930)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I have a very simple question for my colleague, who just gave a wonderful campaign speech.The Liberals have been in power for four years. They have been here for four years, and all of sudden, there is an urgent need to talk about climate change. We have been talking about it for 25 years.Did the Liberals just wake up?Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29LindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35320SylvieBoucherSylvie-BoucherBeauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—CharlevoixConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/BoucherSylvie_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersResumption of DebateInterventionMrs. Sylvie Boucher (Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix, CPC): (1940)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I thank my NDP colleague for her heartfelt speech. Although I am much older than her, I am very proud to see that, despite her youth, she has the courage to be herself even though we do not always agree. We sometimes do disagree, but, even so, I was very touched when she said we must have the courage of our convictions. She has that courage, and I certainly hope that all the women and all the young women who run in the next election will not try to fit into a mould. We should be loud and proud about who we are and about standing for what we believe in. I thank the member for her friendship. I had a chance to get to know her, woman to woman, and it was a pleasure serving with her, despite our differences of opinion. I will miss this sparkling and truly unique young woman very much.Climate change and global warmingGovernment Business No. 29ChristineMooreAbitibi—TémiscamingueChristineMooreAbitibi—Témiscamingue//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (2120)[English]Mr. Speaker, I fail to see how this legislation is going to improve the existing situation, which is that many of the access to information requests are not being completed within the specified timeline and that the government has put any number of gag orders on government employees to prevent them from ever releasing information. I wonder if the member could comment on what would actually be helpful to add to this legislation to address the gap that exists today.Access to informationAccess to information requestsBacklogsC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsDanielBlaikieElmwood—TransconaDanielBlaikieElmwood—Transcona//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (2220)[English]Mr. Speaker, one thing about the Conservatives is we stand for the rights and concerns of the victims over the concerns of the criminals. I would ask the minister this. How can he justify the watering-down of offences such as impaired driving that causes bodily harm, the use of the date-rape drug or human trafficking? How can he justify the changes in these areas that make it less offensive or less of a consequence for people to participate in these types of crimes?C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCrime and criminalityCriminal justice systemGovernment billsDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (2230)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak. This could quite possibly be the last speech I make in the 42nd Parliament. I certainly have a number of things to say about Bill C-75.Bill C-75 amends criminal law. It is a justice bill. When we look at bills that fall into this area, it is important to remember what we are trying to achieve with bills in the criminal justice system. The first thing we are trying to do is define for Canadians what unacceptable behaviour is. Once we have set that standard, then we are trying to assign penalties suitable to deter people from committing that crime. In Canadian federal prisons, we do not do a lot of rehabilitation, so really the main part of the criminal justice system is to assign a penalty that both is commensurate with the crime that was committed and also is a deterrent to keep people from committing that crime, and then to prosecute that charge in court with a fair and due process.I would like to look at Bill C-75 and compare it to those criteria to see how it measures up.First, I will talk about defining unacceptable behaviour. I am not sure that the Liberals understand what unacceptable behaviour is. I say that because we are talking about a Prime Minister who is the first prime minister to break a law, which he did when he took a private helicopter to billionaire island. The member for Brampton East was involved in allegations of money laundering. We are currently seeing the member for Steveston—Richmond East in several instances of money laundering, as well as being disbarred. There have been multiple ethical lapses and cases of sexual harassment that caused some members to be out of the caucus, but I would argue there are still some members within the caucus. There is a tolerance for things that, in the minds of Canadians, shows that maybe there is not a good moral compass in the Liberal Party to define what unacceptable behaviour is.With respect to assigning penalties suitable to deter people from committing the crime, one of the most egregious things about the changes in Bill C-75 is that the Liberals have taken a number of crimes that Canadians would consider to be very heinous and reduced them to a summary conviction of two years or a fine. It is important to look at the list of the kinds of crimes we are talking about, so that people can convince themselves whether this is appropriate.The most heinous crime on the list has to be the forcible confinement of a minor. In the minds of all Canadians, we value our children and we want to protect our children. If somebody kidnapped and forcibly confined a child, I do not think most Canadians would think it is okay to get off with a fine for doing that. That is unacceptable. Also on the list is forced marriage and forced marriage of children. I am not sure this should be allowed at all in Canada, but I know one thing. If we are talking about forced marriage and marriage for people who are under 16, that is rape. It is clear that it is rape. Therefore, to put that as a summary conviction of less than two years or a fine is unacceptable. We can see in this country that rape is on the increase. One in three women will experience sexual violence in her lifetime. Therefore, it is clear that we do not have the right deterrent to reduce the crime that is happening.I was the chair of the status of women committee when we studied violence against women and girls in Canada. We had testimony from quite a number of countries, and I was interested to look around and see which countries were doing a better job in the area of rape. There are countries that do not have a big issue with rape. I asked the witnesses why that was, and they said the penalty for the crime was 10 to 15 years in prison, so they have a deterrent for people not to commit that crime. There is also an awareness of the fact that it is illegal. We have a lot of people coming to Canada from places that have a different culture in many cases and have a different tolerance for things like rape. It is important that we educate people who come to this country about those issues. We should be setting punishment for this crime that is commensurate with it, and a fine is not acceptable.(2235)Assault with a weapon is on the list. We sadly saw what happened today at the Raptors parade with people getting shot. This seems to be an event that is on the rise. I think about the Danforth shooting. I think about a number of shootings that have happened. Assault with a weapon should not be less than two years in prison or a fine. That is not acceptable. That is not a deterrent, and I think most Canadians would agree with that.Originally, there were a number of items on the list that had to do with participating in terrorism activities, or leaving Canada to participate in the activities of terrorist groups. There was some walk-back within Bill C-75 on that issue, but we are still not in the place we need to be on that. Canadians are concerned about terrorism. A number of events happen but we do not receive any information. I am thinking about the two fellows in Ontario who were caught with explosives and the FBI was investigating. Everyone says there is nothing to see here; all is fine. There is the Danforth shooting, the guy who drove a van and killed multiple people in Toronto. There is the return of ISIS fighters and people not knowing what is happening with them. Are they walking around? How do we know that the public is safe? There is a concern among Canadians that we should take a hard line on terrorism. I am glad to see some walk-back on that, but I want to keep an eye on it.Another thing on the list is municipal corruption. Corruption in government of any kind is not something that should ever be reduced to a fine. We have seen lots of corruption in the existing Liberal government, lots of scandal. The fact that the Liberals have reduced the severity of the crimes on this list is indicative of the lack of moral compass on the other side.Maybe “assisting prisoner of war to escape” is not a current issue, but how about “obstructing or violence to or arrest of an officiating clergyman”? This one is particularly egregious to me. I remember when Bill C-51 came from the Liberal government and tried to take what is today considered a crime, to attack or threaten a clergyperson, and remove that altogether. I remember the concern from churches in Sarnia—Lambton and across the country. They wondered why the Liberals wanted to take a protection away from the clergy, especially when cases of that nature had been prosecuted. As a result of the public outcry and a swing in the polls, the Liberals backed off that, but here it is, showing up again, and this should be a flag to people who are watching tonight. What we see with the Liberals again and again is that they try something and when there is a public outcry, they back off, but as soon as they get another chance to sneak it in, it comes back.A number of things have been like that. I am thinking of the tax that the Liberals were going to put on dental and health care. They backed off, but I bet it will reappear. It is the same thing with the small business tax on passive assets. As soon as there was an outcry, the Liberals backed off, but this is something to watch for if they get another chance.Impaired driving causing bodily harm is on the list. This is quite concerning as well. We can think about the amount of work that organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have done to raise awareness, to try to get stiffer penalties for impaired driving causing bodily harm. We can think of the tragedy of many parents who have lost children or loved ones who have been killed by somebody driving impaired. To reduce this to a conviction of less than two years or a fine is totally unacceptable, especially from a government that legalized marijuana, knowing that Colorado and Washington saw a doubling of traffic deaths due to impaired driving. This is a step in the wrong direction and should be reconsidered.(2240)There is another one in the bill that talks about polygamy, and I am not sure why this one made the list. Polygamy has been illegal in Canada for quite some time and culturally, we would like to preserve that. I am not sure why we would want to lessen the severity of the crime for that.There is arson for fraudulent purposes. These acts are clearly serious crimes. If I go back to the original premise that says the reason we have a criminal justice system is to assign penalties suitable to deter people from committing a crime, I think we could admit that diluting the penalty in the way Bill C-75 does is not going to help us move forward or deter crime in this country.I want to read quotes of what people have said about Bill C-75. Ms. Markita Kaulius, the president of Families for Justice, said, “Bill C-75 is a terrible bill for victims and for public safety.” Stephanie DiGiuseppe, a litigation lawyer in Toronto specializing in criminal and constitutional law, said, “Bill C-75 is a massive step backwards for justice reform in Canada.” Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, said, “the signal that [Bill C-75 is] sending is that these offences are no longer as serious as they were before.” It has been recognized across the country that this bill is not going to be good for the criminal justice system and it is not going to accomplish what we need to accomplish. If I were a criminal in Canada, I would be saying it is a great time to be a criminal with the Liberal government in place because it always protects the rights of criminals instead of the rights of victims. There is a move to decrease punishments. We talk about some of the things that Bill C-75 was hoping to accomplish. One was that the court system is overloaded right now. One way of offloading the courts is to get rid of all the people in line by fining them instead of making them go through the court process. One way to prevent the courts from being clogged up is to hire enough judges to adjudicate the cases. In the four years the Liberal government has been in place, the court is missing about 60 judges, at last count. That never happened under the previous Conservative government. There was always an adequate number of judges to process the cases in the courts. Therefore, reducing sentences and letting everybody off the hook is not the answer. We do not say that since there are too many people in line, we should allow the murderers and rapists go free, but that is essentially what is happening now because there are cases are waiting too long. According to Jordan's principle, after two years, those cases are thrown out of court. During the reign of the Liberals, murderers and rapists have gone free in Canada. Clearly, understaffing the judiciary is part of the problem and part of the solution is replacing them.When it comes to enforcing punishments, there has been a bit of a lackadaisical attitude. I remember when we first heard that Terri-Lynne McClintic had been sent to a healing lodge that had no security. She had been convicted of brutally murdering a child and was supposed to be imprisoned with a lot of security until 2030. When we raised the issue, those on the other side did not understand why we were raising it because they thought it was no big deal. It took a public outcry for the government to recognize that this was a big mistake and people who commit serious crimes, like murdering a child, need to be behind bars. The punishment needs to fit the crime. Again, there is lack of a moral compass on the other side.However, there are lots of protections for people in prison. Mental health supports were announced in the budget for folks in prison. I am not saying that criminals do not deserve mental health supports. I am just saying that since mental health supports are very much lacking for the rest of Canadians, why are we putting prisoners first? There is a program to provide free needles and we are moving to providing free illegal drugs to prisoners. I am not sure why the government is in the business of doling out illegal drugs; we do not provide free syringes and drugs to people with diabetes or everyone who has cancer.(2245)I would certainly argue that when it comes to priorities, the government appears to be putting a priority on criminals, instead of victims and the rest of Canadians. I do not think that is the right priority, and the government should re-evaluate it.The current Minister of Justice talked about the Senate amendments and the ones that should be included. He talked about the victim surcharge in one of the amendments. The victims surcharge was put in place because victims services were expensive. This was a way of recouping some of the costs, people who had done the harm had to do some remediation of the harm.I am not sure, then, why the government would remove the requirement to have this victims service charge and to leave it to the discretion of judges. First, they have to remember that they can apply a victims surcharge. Then we leave it to their discretion as to whether they will apply it.My experience has always been that when it is left to the discretion of judges, we see sentences becoming smaller and smaller over time. It is heartbreaking to me. I think about some of the stories I have heard of rape and been involved with them. In Sarnia—Lambton, for example, there was a case recently, where a 13-year-old girl was gang raped by two men who received prison sentences of months. We absolutely cannot have this kind of thing.I think of Rehtaeh Parsons who was raped by multiple people. As a result of the ensuing shame that was put on her for over a year and a half, she took her life. It was a wrist slap for the people who were involved in that crime. We do not have the right balance, and Bill C-75 does nothing to address it. I want to talk about the previous Conservative government and its record on crime. The Conservatives are known, in general, to uphold criminal justice, to take the rights of the victim, rather than the rights of the criminal, and to try to impose stiff penalties for violent and heinous crimes. People will have a choice in the fall election. They will have a choice to move away from protecting the criminals' rights and move into the space of protecting the victims' rights. That will be important.One of the interesting parts of the Senate amendments was the Senate trying to add different offences. The Senate decided it would add neglect or interference with a dead body to the list of things we might want to give a fine for or a summary conviction. The Senate wanted to make infanticide, killing a baby, a less than two years sentence or a fine. I do not think that is where Canadians are.Setting traps, obtaining credit from false pretense, stock manipulation, gaming, fraud, falsification of documents, dealing in counterfeit money, on all of these things, the everyday Canadian would say they are crimes and people should go to prison when they do these things. They should not be given a fine or a summary conviction. I do not think it is right.The government promised to uphold the rights of Canadians and to protect them. This is another example of where the government has not kept its promise to Canadians. It promised a lot of things. The Liberals promised small deficits. They promised to balance the budget by 2019, and here we are in 2019. They promised open and transparent government, but we have seen gag orders and cover-ups. The privacy legislation, which we just talked about, clearly is not hitting the mark.We were told 2015 would be the last election under first past the post, another broken promise. We were told there would be no omnibus bills, another broken promise. We were told they would restore home mail delivery. The Liberals have broken 75% of their promises. When people are listening to what Liberals are promising this year, they should keep that in mind, that three-quarters of what is going to be said is never going to happen. We have seen that with the pharmacare promise. The Liberals promised that in 1997, 2004 election and again in the last election.(2250)Then there is the wrong approach to guns. Assault with a weapon has been added to the list in Bill C-75 that will get a slap on the wrist. However, we see an increasing number of crimes involving guns. In fact, 95% of the gun crime in Canada is caused by illegal guns or guns used illegally. The government has not come up with a plan to address that. Our leader has come with a comprehensive plan that will address the real problem, which is guns used illegally by gangs, and bring the right penalties to deter bad behaviour. However, the Liberals are not on that page. They are as always taking the side of the criminals on these things, and we see a further move to decriminalize other behaviours. I know there is a real push on for the Liberals to decriminalize all drugs. We just did a study at the health committee on the meth problem. We visited across the country. When we went to Winnipeg, we saw the problem with methamphetamine addiction. The response of the Liberals was to decriminalize it and give people free methamphetamine. Police officers are saying that these people are committing a lot of crimes, they are breaking into people's houses and there are all kinds of violent acts going on. Therefore, we have to be doing something that balances the protection of Canadians with the care that we have for folks who are addicted. However, that has not been addressed.On Bill C-75, I received numerous petitions. I know people across the country are paying attention to this. I received a lot of information from the member for Niagara Falls, who was a former justice minister, as well as the member for Milton, who is very educated in these areas. I heard the current Minister of Justice talk about indigenous people being overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and that is true. We need to get to the root cause of that, but I do not think reducing penalties for serious crime is the way to go about it. I looked at some of the points that were made on reducing intimate partner violence. It is a great thing to reduce intimate partner violence, but forced marriage is intimate partner violence, especially when it is a child. There is a bit of hypocrisy in the way the bill was brought forward. I did not hear a lot of conversation from the Minister of Justice on the modernization and simplification of the bail system and I would like to hear more. There is definitely room for improvement, but, again, modernization and simplification cannot mean abdication of responsibility in the criminal justice system.On allowing a preliminary inquiry, which originally was allowed for serious crimes that carried life imprisonment, and I believe 70 infractions would meet that criteria, the bill would open that up to another 393 that could have access to a preliminary inquiry if one party or the other demanded it. Again, this will take more court resources. If the whole purpose of Bill C-75 is to try to help offload the courts and if the Liberals would let some more serious crimes go with a less than two-year conviction or a fine but then load up the court system again with a bunch of preliminary inquiries for a greater realm of offences, I am not sure that would achieve what they want to achieve. Overall, when I look back to what we want to do in the criminal justice system, we want to define unacceptable behaviour, and certainly there is a good list, but we also want to assign penalties suitable to deter people from committing the crime. The Liberals missed the mark on that with Bill C-75. We want to prosecute in court with a fair and due process. I do not think Bill C-75 would do that. I do not think it is fair to the victims to have these very serious crimes punished with a slap on the wrist, which is essentially what a fine or a less than two year summary conviction is. I do not think we will increase the cycle time through the courts, because, again, judges are still missing, which is a key part of it. Now the bill would increase the number of preliminary inquiries. Therefore, I do not believe Bill C-75 will hit the target. The bill should not go forward. I know the government is rushing it through in the dying days of of the 42nd Parliament, but I will not support Bill C-75 and I know my constituents and those across the country will not support the bill or the government.(2255)BailC-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsChildrenConsideration of Senate amendmentsCorruptionCrime and criminalityCriminal investigations and hearingsCriminal justice systemDomestic violenceDrug use and abuseEthics and ethical issuesFederal judgesForced marriagesForcible confinementFreedom of conscience and religionGovernment billsGovernment performanceImpaired drivingImprisonment and prisonersLaw enforcementMunicipal governmentPolitical behaviourPolygamyRapeSentencingShootings with firearmsSummary convictionsTaxationTerrorism and terroristsVictim surchargeYoung peopleDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunArifViraniParkdale—High Park//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, there was quite a bit to that question. With respect to it being a great time to be a criminal under the Liberals, I am sure many people have seen on Facebook the comparison that says would it not be great if we put seniors in prison because then they would receive the medical care, the food, the shelter and the attention they need. In some cases, we are treating criminals better than we are treating seniors.This move to focus on less punishment for the criminals and to ignore the victims rights or to take away the funding for victims services is a disservice.With respect to equality under the law, I absolutely believe in equality under the law and we need to do what we can, but we need to address the root causes of why we have overrepresentation from some groups in prison.On intimate partner violence, although I want to see intimate partner violence reduced, we see this increasing. Many people coming into the country are coming from places where intimate partner violence is very common and considered part of everyday life. We need to educate those people so we can prevent this from happening. However, we need to recognize that in Bill C-75 there is a total discrepancy between working on intimate partner violence, but allowing forced marriage, especially forced marriage of children.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsVictims of crimeArifViraniParkdale—High ParkColinFraserWest Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the sentencing, I can only see what comes out in different cases in the news and what we have studied. I will give the member an example from the study we did on violence against women and girls. We found out that 40% of women who present themselves to the police department and claim they have been raped are not taken seriously and no report is written. Of the 60% who had a report written, of 1,000 different complaints, there is a very small percentage, less than 5%, that make it to court. From that, there is a very small percentage that get a conviction, and the prison sentences are measured in months, not years. That is not equity. While the member is probably more experienced in the area of law, and I understand he is returning to that practice, what I see is not justice for the crimes that are being committed in our country.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsSentencingColinFraserWest NovaRandyHobackPrince Albert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is interesting when we start comparing the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberals tend to come in here and say they know best. They will do what they think is best and what people should understand is best. The Conservatives talk to people. We talk to them about what they would like to see in regard to legislation, how criminals are treated and how victims are treated. Could the member inform this House on the difference between how the Conservatives approach this versus the Liberals? The reality is, they are preaching and we are listening.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsSentencingMarilynGladuSarnia—LambtonMarilynGladuSarnia—Lambton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, I find that the Liberals are always consulting but never listening, where the Conservatives are consulting and listening to what people are saying. As I posted the information on Bill C-75, I saw huge activity on social media. There were a huge number of petitions and letters and emails from Canadians saying that was not what they wanted. When people have committed serious crimes, they need them to be put in jail and kept there. They want the prison sentence to fit the crime. They do not want murderers and rapists walking away because their case has been before the court for too long. Therefore, I think Canadians recognize there is a problem. This bill does not address the problem. That is the point I was making tonight.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsSentencingRandyHobackPrince AlbertAnthonyHousefatherMount Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2305)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his question. He knows, as well, how much I respect the work he has done, especially at the justice committee.The proof is always in the pudding. I do not think Canadians look at the decisions that judges have made and think that criminals are getting an adequate punishment for the crime. While not every single crime is identical, and I am not opposed to judges having some leeway, it looks to me that the leeway is so big that, in many cases, we are coming to the minimum sentence instead of something that is more standard. Keep in mind that when people receive their sentence and have gone to prison, that sentence is often reduced for good behaviour or a lot of other reasons. They end up getting a much shorter sentence anyway.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsSentencingAnthonyHousefatherMount RoyalMurrayRankinVictoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2310)[English]Order. I can hear a device somewhere making a lot of background noise. I would ask hon. members who have a device, computer or otherwise, with the volume on to switch to headphones or to turn it down.Sorry to interrupt the hon. member for Victoria. If he could pick up where he left off, that would be great.Noise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingMurrayRankinVictoriaMurrayRankinVictoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal CodeInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (2325)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his input and for analyzing the bill that is under debate right now into the late evening, and pretty soon to be early morning.Elder abuse is on the rise. Seniors are being physically, mentally and sexually abused. Could the member comment on how this bill could help to deter those criminals, as well as how it could protect our vulnerable seniors?C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemElder abuseGovernment billsMurrayRankinVictoriaMurrayRankinVictoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (2345)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I will be getting up again in Parliament. We are coming to the end of this time and I will not be back in the fall, so I want to take a moment to recognize the staff members who spend so much of their time trying to get us ready so that we can come into the House and do our job. I want to particularly acknowledge my present staff, Anita Hindley, Anna-Marie Young, Joycelin Mosey and Tristan McLaughlin, for the work that they do.In the House we often find ourselves at odds in terms of perspectives on issues and certainly that has been the case with the bill. Liberals have failed in so many areas in terms of justice bills. I think of Bill C-45, when they were told they were going to end up in court over their drunk driving provisions. That certainly is happening.This bill lessens sentences for dozens of different offences in spite of what the Liberals are saying tonight. I am wondering if the member opposite could tell us why all of their conversation about justice issues is focused basically on giving criminals a break and so little of it is focused on protecting the public and victims of those crimes.C-75, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsCriminal justice systemGovernment billsVictims of crimeColinFraserWest NovaColinFraserWest Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2350)[English]Before we go to resuming debate and the hon. member for Mount Royal, I will let him know that we do not have quite enough time for his 10 minutes, but we probably have around eight minutes. Of course, he will have his remaining time when the House next gets back to debate on the question.The hon. member for Mount Royal.ColinFraserWest NovaAnthonyHousefatherMount Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2400)[English]The hon. member for Mount Royal will have two minutes remaining for his remarks when the House next gets back to debate on the question, and the usual five minutes for questions and comments following that.It being 12 a.m., pursuant to an order made on Tuesday, May 28, the House stands adjourned until later this day at 10 a.m pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).(The House adjourned at 12 a.m.)AnthonyHousefatherMount Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1000)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to once again be here to talk about the Senate amendments to Bill C-68. I would be remiss if I did not talk about what we have witnessed over the last three and a half years, this week and last night, with the egregious affront to our democracy. It is pertinent to this discussion, because what we have seen with Bill C-68, Bill C-69, Bill C-48 and Bill C-88 is the government's attempt to subvert democracy to pass legislation that is really payback for the assistance the Liberals received in the 2015 election. Last night, we had the debate, or the lack of debate, on Bill C-69. There were hundreds of amendments from the Senate, and the government forced closure on that debate without any debate whatsoever. Even the Green Party, in its entirety, stood in solidarity with the official opposition to vote against the government on this. That says something. Bill C-68 is the government's attempt, in its members' words, to right the wrongs of the former Conservative government in amending the Fisheries Act in 2012. The Liberals said that the Conservatives gutted the Fisheries Act. The bill would replace the wording for HADD, the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat. However, we studied this. We consulted on this, and not one example was given. When pressured yesterday, throughout the last week and throughout the last year, not the minister nor anyone from the government was able to provide one example of where the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act by the previous Conservative government led to the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat. As a matter of fact, despite the government's assertions that changes to the Fisheries Act are necessary to restore the lost protections for fish and fish habitat, the government's response to Order Paper Question No. 626 showed that the government had no record of harm or proof of harm to fish or fish habitat resulting from the 2012 changes. On November 2, 2016, the then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans appeared before the fisheries committee and stated that “Indigenous people have expressed serious concerns with the amendments made to the [Fisheries Act]” and that his department was “holding face-to-face meetings with various indigenous groups and providing funding so that they can attend these meetings and share their views on the matter”. However, according to the government's response to Order Paper Question No. 943, DFO did not undertake any face-to-face consultation sessions in relation to the review of the changes to the Fisheries Act in the 2016-17 fiscal year. The Liberals have stood before Canadians in the House and have been disingenuous. They continue to use the same eco-warrior talking points we see from Tides, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, which is essentially an attack on our natural resource sector, whether that be forestry, fisheries, oil and gas, mining or agriculture. That is what Bill C-68, Bill C-88, Bill C-48 and Bill C-69 are attempting to do. They want to shut down anything to do with natural resources.In the Senate right now, Bill C-48 is being debated. It deals with the tanker moratorium on the west coast, yet we have double and triple the number of tankers on the east coast, but it does not matter. We do not see groups like Greenpeace, Tides and the WWF protesting those ships and oil tankers from foreign nations that have far more egregious human rights issues than what we have here in our country. (1005)Dirty oil is flowing through our eastern seaport, but there has not been one mention of that by the government. Instead, it wants to shut down anything to do with western Canada's economic opportunities, and that is egregious and shameful, and that is why we are here today.The Senate amendments with respect to Bill C-68 were decent amendments. They folded into Bill S-203, the cetaceans in captivity bill, and Bill S-238, the shark finning bill.For those who are not aware of the shark finning bill, it would ban the importation of shark fins, with the exception that they must be attached to the carcass. Shark fin is a delicacy in some Asian cultures and is used in soup and medicinal products. We asked officials at committee if shark fin in any form could be imported into our country, and they replied that it could be imported in soup. That was their testimony. When pressed further on this, they said, “soup is soup”.The whole intent of Bill S-238 is to stop the importation of shark fins so that shark fin soup may be stopped or that at least the fins would be imported into the country with the entire carcass used. That is a fairly reasonable thing to ask.The other Senate amendments to Bill C-68 that are important are with respect to the inshore fishery. We heard time and again that the inshore fishery is important to Atlantic fishermen. Adjacency and the inshore fishery are the same thing, but the language is different on either coast. It is important to our coastal communities and fishermen who depend on fishing for their livelihood.Another important Senate amendment is with respect to third-party habitat banking. I went into great detail about what third party habitat banking means in terms of fish habitat. That was a reasonable amendment put forward by a Conservative, and all senators agreed with it. Interestingly enough, before the Senate finished studying the bill, the minister directed our fisheries committee to study third-party habitat banking. Prior to the fisheries committee getting a chance to study it, the Liberals scrapped any of the third party habitat banking amendments brought forth by the Conservative Party and agreed to by independent senators. It was an exercise in futility. Senator Wells, who appeared before committee just the other day, said that by all accounts, it appeared that the only people who were interested in protecting fish and fish habitat were those around the table, and the only people who were against protecting fish and fish habitat with respect to third party habitat banking were the officials. That is odd.I want to talk again about why we are here. I spoke at length about the influence of third party groups at the highest levels of our offices. I will remind the House that the former chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, was the president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund. The Prime Minister's new director of policy is a former top executive at Tides Canada.Why is this important? It is important because these are the very organizations whose mandate is to shut down Canada's resources every step of the way and to tarnish Canada's natural resource sector on the world stage.(1010)It says right on their own websites that they were going to use celebrities, their media and their influence to tarnish Canada's oil and gas and forestry to attack and landlock our resources. They have now permeated every office in this government.In 2015, 114 third parties poured $6 million into influencing the election outcome, and many of those parties were funded by the U.S.-based Tides foundation. The World Wildlife Fund is deciding fisheries policy on the east coast. As the shadow minister for Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, I went to meetings with the former fisheries minister, and there were no fisheries stakeholders there. The table was surrounded by environmental groups. We are placing a higher priority on these environmental groups than we are on the stakeholders who make their living and depend on our natural resources for their economic well-being.Late last night, I took another phone call about another mill closure in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George. I know that colleagues understand our economic plight in western Canada. We have seen a lot of emotion over the last weeks and months about the plight of the west. The reality is that we are losing our jobs, and we do not have other opportunities. It is not that we are against the environment, unlike what a parliamentary secretary said yesterday, in response to Bill C-88, which is that the Conservatives blame the Liberals for putting such a high priority on the environment. That is not true. We blame the Liberals for putting such a high priority on environmental groups, not on the stakeholders, indigenous peoples and our local communities that depend on our natural resources for well-paying jobs to provide for their families.There are hundreds of workers in my riding and adjacent ridings, and thousands of workers across the province of British Columbia, who are waking up today to more work curtailment and job closures. That is shameful.When the House hears our emotion and concern when we raise the issues, it is not that we are against the environment, as much as the Minister of Environment would like people to believe that. It is that these policies the government has put forth have shaken the confidence of industry. They have a real impact. They may not impact those members of Parliament from downtown Toronto or in major urban centres, but they impact rural Canadians, and that is the truth.I am going to close by reminding the House that this House does not belong to any of us who are in here. We are merely vehicles to be the voices of the electors. There are 338 members of Parliament in this House. Last night, we saw one courageous Liberal who stood against what her government was doing. We have been placed here to be the voices of those who elected us. Despite saying in 2015 that they would let debate reign, the Liberals have time and again forced closure and time allocation on pieces of legislation. In doing so, they have silenced the voices of the electors who have put us here. (1015)I would like to move the following motion, seconded by the member for North Okanagan—Shuswap:AmendmentThat the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:“the amendments made by the Senate to Bill C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequence, be now read a second time and concurred in.”Aboriginal peoplesBritish ColumbiaC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceCetaceansCoastal areasConsideration of Senate amendmentsEnvironmental assessmentFisheries and fishersFundraising and fundraisersGovernment billsHabitat conservationInshore fisheryLayoffs and job lossesOil tankersPlant closuresPublic consultationReasoned amendmentsSharkAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, who is being divisive now?At committee, we had scientists, academics, environmental groups and industry. People from all over our country came before committee, even groups that one would think would not be friendly to Conservatives, as apparently we waged a war on scientists, but we had the very same scientists before our committee. When they were asked, time and again, to provide examples that the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act resulted in any harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish or fish habitat, none were given.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsScientific research and scientistsWilliamAmosPontiacGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, our hon. colleague is sorely mistaken. Perhaps I would ask that the volume be turned up on that side so he can hear me a bit more clearly. When I talked about jobs being lost, I referenced thousands of jobs being lost across our province right now because of the forestry policies and the lack of securing a softwood lumber agreement. The member knows full well that we can turn on the TV or look at the newspaper every day, and there is another mill closure. There is work curtailment going on throughout our province. Our forestry sector has been under attack from the very beginning of the current government.With respect to third party habitat banking and the testimony, we heard that there were indigenous representatives on the Senate side who supported this wholeheartedly. As a matter of fact, there were indigenous groups that rode in and provided feedback to the Senate. That is why the Conservative senator was able to garner support from the independent senators across the way so that this amendment would be included and not gutted, as we usually see in Liberal-led committees.Aboriginal peoplesC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsPublic consultationGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniMelArnoldNorth Okanagan—Shuswap//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1025)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Cariboo—Prince George for his speech on this topic, the Senate amendments to Bill C-68. We have sat together on the fisheries committee for years now. We have seen a government that has totally ignored the restoration of fish stocks across the country. Time and again, recommendations from our committee have called on the current government to take action. It failed to do so.I also want to speak briefly on comments I got from a fisheries officer, who said that the changes we made in 2012 made it much easier for fisheries officers to do their job. Rather than having to gather incredible amounts of evidence, convince Crown prosecutors and then take cases to court, which would take years to prosecute, with the changes made in 2012 fisheries officers are able to immediately demand restoration where damage has been done. There has been no indication that habitat has been lost or damaged in any of the evidence ever produced by the government or in testimony at committee.I would like the member to comment further on why the government fails to do anything to restore fish stocks, whether Atlantic salmon or salmon on the west coast, and why it continues to push this ill-conceived bill through the House.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1025)[English]Mr. Speaker, our colleague from North Okanagan—Shuswap is former president of the Canadian Wildlife Association. Our colleague from Red Deer—Lacombe is a former Parks employee and I believe has a degree in zoology. Our former colleague on the fisheries committee, the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, is a marine biologist. I would put our bench up against the Liberals' bench any time. I am proud to serve with these colleagues.When we met with DFO front-line officers on the ground, they told us that, previous to the 2012 changes, it was onerous for them to regulate and enforce. As a matter of fact, because it was too challenging, they received directives not to bother doing it, which made it hard. The changes in 2012 made it very clear. It was black and white: this is right and this is wrong. It set in motion a clear course and a schedule for proponents so they knew where they overstepped their boundaries, when they were in the right and when they were in the wrong.As a matter of fact, a witness stated that the 2012 changes “have in practice broadened the circumstances in which the section 35 prohibitions apply and increased the circumstances in which an authorization and offsets are required.”It gave the tools that our front-line officers needed to enforce the rules. It made it clear when proponents were offside and when they were following the rules. It did not make it easier, and it did not gut the Fisheries Act.I will offer this. Time and again, including today, we have asked for evidence that the 2012 changes resulted in any harmful alteration, disruption or destruction, and none could be provided.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsMelArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1030)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comment from my hon. colleague, but I will again offer this. At committee, when officials, academics, environmentalists and scientists were pressed, there was not one piece of evidence that the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act by the former Conservative government led to any harmful alteration, disruption or destruction.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1040)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will forgive the member for falling off topic here. What we are debating today are the Senate amendments to Bill C-68, and he did not touch on those, not that I can pick out, at any point during his intervention. Therefore, I would like to bring him back to that. I forgive the member for it, because he has only been part-time on this committee over the past three and a half, four years.Why would the Liberal government reject sensible amendments from a Senate committee that would actually see a net gain in fish habitat and fish habitat values, from the third party habitat banking? The Liberal government seems to refuse to do anything that would increase or improve fish habitat. That is the amendments that the government is kicking aside.The member for Courtenay—Alberni seems to have ignored all of that in his intervention. Why?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsHabitat conservationGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins (Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC): (1055)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am very saddened to hear the rhetoric around fisheries that I have heard in this debate. Nothing has happened that is catastrophic in the world of fisheries as a result of the changes that were made to the Fisheries Act in 2012. Nobody anywhere in this country can point to a single incident of anything directly related to the changes in that bill. Everybody wanted those changes. Counties wanted them and even fisheries officers wanted those changes so that they could more effectively enforce the law.I remember issues where farmers whose fields were flooded actually drained their fields and were charged because the old language in the act interpreted a flooded field as a fisheries habitat, even though it was only flooded for a couple of days. People faced ridiculous charges for things like that. There is nothing actually done for fish by changing the legislation in a way that actually prevents restoration and habitat projects from going ahead. What we actually need are amendments that will do things like habitat banking which, for some reason, the government does not want to do anything about by increasing spawning channels. Rather than stopping all activity, we should enhance things, do offsets and increase the productivity of the natural environment. That is not done by changing legislation that gets in the way of all of these things. The continually stumbling and bumbling of the left-hand side arguments that somehow we need legislation that pretends humans do not exist in the world is what is actually causing the environmental degradation that we have right now. We need enhancement. We need the ability to intervene and to work hard on behalf of fisheries. These changes are not doing it. C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West KootenayRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25501DianeFinleyHon.Diane-FinleyHaldimand—NorfolkConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/FinleyDiane_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersThyroid DiseaseInterventionHon. Diane Finley (Haldimand—Norfolk, CPC): (1100)[English]Mr. Speaker, June is Thyroid Awareness Month in Canada. Thyroid disease affects roughly four in 10 Canadians from all walks of life and from all political stripes. Many notable men and women have been diagnosed with the disease, including former U.S. president George H. W. Bush, former first lady Barbara Bush and their dog Maggie; U.S. senators Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders; John F. Kennedy Jr.; and the former member for Trinity—Spadina, Olivia Chow.I have been vocal about my own experience with Grave's disease to encourage Canadians to get to know the early warning signs, because only half of those with thyroid disease ever get properly diagnosed. If treated early, thyroid disease has a very high cure rate, but if untreated, it can lead to very serious health complications, including severe vision impairment and joint problems.I encourage Canadians to visit thyroid.ca, educate themselves on the early warning signs and visit their doctors to confirm a diagnosis.Human diseases and disordersStatements by MembersThyroid Awareness MonthThyroid glandJean-ClaudePoissantLa PrairieDanVandalSaint Boniface—Saint Vital//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89156ZiadAboultaifZiad-AboultaifEdmonton ManningConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AboultaifZiad_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC): (1105)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister continues to fearmonger to Canadians by picking fights with the provinces over national unity. What he does not understand is that he is the threat to Canadian unity. Whether it is Pierre Elliott Trudeau or our current Prime Minister, history tells us that whenever there is a prime minister from this family in office, our nation is at risk. Canadians deserve more than the current Prime Minister, someone who will not divide Canadians by killing pipeline projects and forcing Canadians to pay a job-killing carbon tax.Canada's Conservatives will not support Bill C-69. Instead, a government under our Conservative leader will repeal the bill when we form government in October, unite Canadians and get Canada's energy sector back to work, all while helping all Canadians get ahead. 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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsStatements by MembersDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—ChezzetcookJeanYipScarborough—Agincourt//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59226EarlDreeshenEarl-DreeshenRed Deer—Mountain ViewConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DreeshenEarl_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Earl Dreeshen (Red Deer—Mountain View, CPC): (1105)[English]Mr. Speaker, last night Canadians witnessed the spectacle of the Liberal government choosing to support competing oil-producing nations over Canadian resource developers. The Liberals ignored the pleas of nine provincial premiers, first nations and territorial leaders and millions of Canadians by shutting down debate on Bill C-69. How many hospitals will be built in Canada through our purchases of Saudi oil? How many social programs will be financed by our friends in Nigeria? How many environmental causes and human rights efforts Canadians hold dear will be jeopardized by these Liberals shutting in the resource expertise of the world's most responsible energy producers? By following the misguided dogma of the Prime Minister, the Liberals will be following him into the political abyss. The only way to truly protect our environment, to give certainty to job creators and to ensure Canada's strong social fabric is to make this divisive Liberal leader a single-use prime minister. On October 21, Canadians will make that choice.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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsStatements by MembersJeanRiouxSaint-JeanDarrenFisherDartmouth—Cole Harbour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1110)[English]Mr. Speaker, Alberta is starting to see some relief, with the lowest fuel prices in the country, because it no longer has a carbon tax. Meanwhile, in B.C., we are hammered with a carbon tax, driving fuel prices so high that people are actually burning more fuel. They are driving longer distances to cross the border, often idling at long border-crossing lineups just to buy cheaper U.S. gas, and at the same time are creating a safety hazard by filling up jerry cans and putting them in the backs of passenger vehicles, basically converting SUVs into fuel tankers. This is all to avoid paying into the Liberals' carbon tax plan.Now the Parliamentary Budget Officer reports that the carbon tax would need to increase in some provinces by five times the current punishing rate, to over $100 per tonne, driving up fuel prices another 23¢ per litre. When will the Prime Minister and his environment minister stop punishing Canadians for just trying to get to work and admit that they do not have an environmental plan but they only have a tax plan?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineStatements by MembersStéphaneLauzonArgenteuil—La Petite-NationRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1115)[English]Mr. Speaker, one of the most common complaints I hear from my constituents is about the rising cost of fuel. All across this country, Canadians are struggling to pay the government's carbon tax while trying to avoid insolvency. Parents are having to make hard choices between heating their homes and after-school activities for their kids. Now the Parliamentary Budget Officer is reporting that it is going to get a lot worse for families. To meet Paris targets, all Canadians, no matter where they live, will have to pay five times what they pay now. If they think gas prices are high now, try adding another 23¢ of Liberal carbon taxes on top of that. The Prime Minister never came clean on the true cost of his carbon scheme, and now we know why. The Prime Minister has no plan to lower emissions. His only plan is another cash grab, which is already hurting over-taxed Canadians. When will the Prime Minister admit that he made a mistake, kill the carbon tax and take real action on climate change?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineStatements by MembersRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—MaskinongéArifViraniParkdale—High Park//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1115)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer proved yesterday that the Liberals' carbon tax cannot achieve what is promised unless it is twice as high as they have admitted: “$50 per tonne after 2022, there will be a shortfall. We won't be able to meet the country's targets for greenhouse gas reduction.” The only way to do it is to double the promised price to over $100 a tonne, which translates into an increase of 23¢ a litre for the price of gas. Will the government admit that its carbon tax, while it makes no sense, costs 23¢?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsArifViraniParkdale—High ParkSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1115)[English]Mr. Speaker, actually, the Parliamentary Budget Officer took into consideration every single policy lever that the current government is using and said that with those policies the country will miss its Paris targets by 80 million megatonnes per year, and that the only way to change that is to increase the carbon tax five times what it is now and twice what the government has admitted, at a cost of 23 painful cents more per litre for gasoline.Why were the Liberals attempting to hide this higher tax until after the election?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1120)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' promise that the cheque was in the mail was never kept. It was not as advertised. We now know that the rebates were a third smaller and the tax will be twice as high as advertised, so smaller rebates than promised and higher taxes than admitted. These facts are now known to us. We now know that, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, for the Liberals to keep their own promises, they would have to increase the tax to a rate that would cost the average family over a thousand dollars a year in Ontario, including gas prices that are 23¢ higher.Why did they try to cover it up before the election?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1120)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, we know full well that the Liberals have spent the past three years trying to convince Canadians that the Liberal carbon tax would allow them to meet the Paris targets and, more importantly, reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That is false on all counts.The Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed yesterday that Canada would not meet its Paris targets and, worse still, that the Liberals would have to raise the Liberal carbon tax to five times what it is now in order to meet those targets.Will the Liberals be honest with Canadians and tell them exactly how much they plan to increase the tax if, heaven forbid, they are re-elected in six months?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1120)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will ask it in English this time.Based on the Quebec experience, yes, we have a cap-and-trade system in Quebec, but what are the results? There is zero reduction of emissions. This is the result when we tax people: no reduction of emissions. This is the Quebec experience. This is the truth. These are the facts. This is the science.Will the minister be clear with Canadians for once? Can the Liberals explain how much they will raise taxes?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1130)[English]However, Mr. Speaker, he is not going to actually meet the targets.The Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed what the Conservatives have been saying all along; that the Liberal carbon tax is a cash grab, not a climate change plan. The Prime Minister has tried to hide the real cost of his carbon tax, but the PBO has laid out the truth. The cost of gasoline would rise by at least 25¢ per litre. When Canadians are trying to get ahead, not just get by, will the Prime Minister tell Canadians how much the full and final cost of this carbon tax will be?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1130)[English]That is simply not true, Mr. Speaker.Half of Canadians are about $200 away from being able to pay their bills each month, yet the Liberals carbon tax will put a painful 23¢ per litre increase in the price of gasoline, and that will do nothing to help climate change.The Liberals have said they want to help the middle class, but they are punishing it and those hoping to join it. Why?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1130)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are the ones telling untruths.This government is not telling the truth. After discrediting the United Nations it continues to undermine the findings of scientists and a number of relevant authorities, including the commissioner of the environment. Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer, an independent officer of the House of Commons, said yesterday that the Liberals' plan was insufficient to meet the Paris targets.When it comes to the environment, the Liberals are misleading Canadians.Once again, why is this Liberal government incapable of telling the truth?Greenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1130)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate to hear that from the Liberals. This government is out of touch and has no credibility on environmental matters. What planet is it living on?The Liberals are the only ones who believe that Canada will meet its Paris targets with their plan. I invite the Liberals to come back to planet Earth and do something now to protect it.The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that Canadians will have to get poorer and pay five times more than the current carbon tax if we want to meet the Paris targets. Canadians deserve the truth.Why is the government hiding the truth?Greenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC): (1135)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has released a scathing report that the Liberals will not meet their Paris climate change targets, that is, unless they raise the price at the pump by 23¢ a litre. The Liberals have promised that they will not raise this until after the election. No kidding. They will wait until after the election when they no longer need Canadian votes, but still need their money.When will the Liberals finally come clean and tell Canadians the true cost of their carbon tax plan?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1135)[English]Mr. Speaker, the environment minister said that she would make her Paris targets, but the PBO has confirmed that the only way the Liberals' carbon tax will work is if they charge 23¢ a litre more for gasoline. Life is already too expensive. Canadians are already struggling to pay their heating bills and buy groceries. Clearly, this punishing tax plan will severely hurt families and seniors, particularly those on fixed incomes.When will the Liberals finally admit that their carbon tax is not an environmental plan but a tax plan?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1140)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal attack on the energy sector has crippled Alberta and is impacting B.C. After 50 years, a houseboat company in Sicamous has announced it is shutting down, affecting 150 employees. The mayor of Sicamous has blamed the downturn in the Alberta economy and the pipeline dispute for having taken a toll on the community. Today, the Liberals are announcing a western economic growth strategy, as if they have not done enough damage already. When will the Liberals end their attack on the west?AlbertaOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGinettePetitpas TaylorHon.Moncton—Riverview—DieppeAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35886ChrisWarkentinChris-WarkentinGrande Prairie—MackenzieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WarkentinChris_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Chris Warkentin (Grande Prairie—Mackenzie, CPC): (1140)[English]Mr. Speaker, it has been a tough week for Alberta here in Ottawa. The Prime Minister has rammed through his anti-pipeline, anti-energy bills, Bills C-69 and C-48, and announced a carbon tax for the province of Alberta. These attacks are driving investment and opportunity out of the province.Without a hint of irony, this very morning those same Liberals announced their western Canada job strategy. It is like hiring the arsonists to rebuild the house after they lit the fire. When will the Liberals realize that the only growth strategy that will work is if they end their attack on Canada's energy sector? AlbertaC-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins (Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC): (1140)[English]Mr. Speaker, Alberta has been shown nothing but disdain from the Liberal government for the last three and a half years. The Liberals continue their assault on the energy sector. Last night they shut down debate on Bill C-69, which has devastated many of my constituents.People have lost their businesses, their jobs and their homes. They have lost hope. Some have even taken their own lives.When everyone is telling the environment minister that her plan is a disaster, she chooses to ignore this advice. Everyone has been repeating it so long and saying it so loud. Why will she not listen?AlbertaC-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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1145)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have put hundreds of thousands of Albertans out of work, with brutal consequences: rising bankruptcies, family breakdowns, substance abuse, crime, suicides and a loss of hope and dreams. That hurts all of Canada.The Liberals are ramming through laws to block oil exports and kill resource projects, and will make everything more expensive with their carbon tax. After only one hour of debate on hundreds of amendments, the Liberals forced through their no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, even though nine provinces and all territories want major changes.Why are the Liberals so relentless in their attacks on Albertans?AlbertaC-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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1150)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister will meet with the President of the United States next week and I am certain that President Trump has no time to waste on small talk.The U.S. President also has a problem with illegal migrants at his border. He understands the situation.The Prime Minister has done nothing so far to renegotiate the safe third country agreement, but the meeting with Mr. Trump is a golden opportunity to do so.Will the Prime Minister renegotiate the safe third country agreement, yes or no?Agreements and contractsAsylumCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementCanada-United States relationsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaJean-YvesDuclosHon.QuébecPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1150)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, if his Prime Minister had not created the problem with his infamous tweet, far fewer people would be showing up at Roxham Road.What is more, the people who come to the United States from various countries around the world show up with a passport. People need a passport to get into the United States. Then, all of a sudden, when they get to Roxham Road, they no longer have any identification. No one can tell me that those people are not taking advantage of the system.When will the Prime Minister show some backbone, talk to Mr. Trump and resolve the problem with the safe third country agreement?Agreements and contractsAsylumCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementCanada-United States relationsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1150)[English]Mr. Speaker, last night, I received more notices of job losses and mill closures in my riding in northern B.C. The Liberals' inaction on softwood and their failed policy is leading to thousands of job losses right across our province of British ColumbiaWe already have the highest gas prices in North America. Another 25¢ a litre will be the final nail in the coffin. An increase in the gas tax will only fuel more job losses for our forestry industry.These are real people and real jobs. Why do the Liberals continue to pound Canadians with a job-killing carbon tax that will not even reduce emissions?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingChrystiaFreelandHon.University—Rosedale//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAir TransportationInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1150)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am not sure they are going to want to hear this one.The Liberals are reportedly giving $18 million, tax dollars, to build an exclusive airport runway near Cabot Cliffs golf course in Cape Breton even though the Port Hawkesbury airport is only an hour away. Many in the community, including the mayor, are concerned this would bankrupt the company that runs their community airport and the small businesses that depend upon it.Instead of pandering to millionaires who, God forbid, have to drive an hour to get to the golf course after landing in their private jets, why is the Prime Minister putting this community asset at risk to accommodate his elite millionaire friends?AirportsCape BretonOral questionsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1155)[English]Mr. Speaker, last year, thousands of Canadian organizations offering kids summer camps and helping out seniors were ineligible for Canada summer jobs because of the Liberals' values test, but now the Liberals have decided to fund a group that has terrorist links, a group that paid $550,000 in fines and lost its charitable status from CRA. Yesterday, the minister said she would review the decision.Can the minister confirm that this group with terrorist links does not meet the Liberals values test? Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentRémiMasséAvignon—La Mitis—Matane—MatapédiaRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35389StevenBlaneyHon.Steven-BlaneyBellechasse—Les Etchemins—LévisConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/BlaneySteven_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionHon. Steven Blaney (Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC): (1200)[Translation] What outcome, Mr. Speaker? The CRA took away the Islamic Society of North America's charitable organization status over a year ago. We condemned the situation. They talk and talk but have not actually done anything. Meanwhile, the Liberals are giving $25,000 to an entity that is directly or indirectly linked to terrorist activities.When will the minister cancel the cheque and take that grant away from an organization that does not reflect Canadian values?Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentRodgerCuznerCape Breton—CansoRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89167MattJenerouxMatt-JenerouxEdmonton RiverbendConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/JenerouxMatt_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMr. Matt Jeneroux (Edmonton Riverbend, CPC): (1200)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is a group that funded terrorism. Just revoke the grant.The Prime Minister put a values test on the summer jobs program targeting groups that did not agree with him. Fast forward to this week, and we find out that the government gave $25,000 to an organization that funded terrorism overseas. Now he says that he is checking to see if the organization meets the terms and conditions of the summer jobs program. I think the government is the one that needs to check its values.Again, just revoke the grant.Application processCanada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentRodgerCuznerCape Breton—CansoRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTransportInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1200)[English]Mr. Speaker, Oshawa's port is an economic driver in my community. The Liberals ignored the GM plant closure, and now they are trying to take away our right to manage our own port. The Minister of Transport actually claimed that this is going to be good for Oshawa, but now he is trying to impose a management board that will likely have zero representation from the people of Oshawa. That is right: zero say in the management of our own port. This is what happens when they do not have any meaningful consultation.My ask is this: When will these top-down Liberals actually and finally listen to local stakeholders and commit to having local representation on this board?Oral questionsPort of OshawaPorts and harboursTerryDuguidWinnipeg SouthTerryBeechBurnaby North—Seymour//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35607HaroldAlbrechtHarold-AlbrechtKitchener—ConestogaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AlbrechtHarold_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. Harold Albrecht (Kitchener—Conestoga, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians are very concerned about the escalating violence against Christians in Nigeria and about the Liberal government's decision to close the office of religious freedom at a time when it was effectively working in Nigeria.The former parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs said that the office had “successfully developed a community-based mechanism to help defuse tensions between different religious and ethnic groups”, including Christians and Muslims. Why did the Liberal government close an office that it knew was effectively reducing violence and deaths?Freedom of conscience and religionNigeriaOral questionsKateYoungLondon WestChrystiaFreelandHon.University—Rosedale//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPoints of Order [Oral Questions]InterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, while I understand that things do get heated in this House of Commons, the member for Cape Breton—Canso, whom I have respect for, showed indignation that a member from Ontario would dare to ask a question about Cape Breton and stand up for those residents. I will remind the member as well that the minister for ACOA is from Ontario. Therefore, if the member would like to apologize to me, I will accept that.AirportsCape BretonContents of speechesOral questionsPoints of orderSeanFraserCentral NovaRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPoints of Order [Oral Questions]InterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1210)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I believe you will be overjoyed to find unanimous consent for the tabling of a document entitled “Inventaire québécois des émissions de gaz à effet de serre en 2016 et leur évolution depuis 1990”. This science-based document from Quebec's environment ministry found that, between 2014 and 2016, there was no reduction in GHG emissions. Carbon pricingCarbon taxProvince of QuebecRequesting tabling of documentsRodgerCuznerCape Breton—CansoAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89167MattJenerouxMatt-JenerouxEdmonton RiverbendConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/JenerouxMatt_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Transport, Infrastructure and Communities]InterventionMr. Matt Jeneroux (Edmonton Riverbend, CPC): (1215)[English]Mr. Speaker, Conservative members of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities support the committee's report that was just tabled, as transportation corridors are integral to the safe and efficient flow of goods in and out of Canada. However, we felt it necessary to supply a complementary report as the main report does not include three important recommendations that we heard loud and clear. Those recommendations are the following: that the government of Canada eliminate the federal carbon tax and work co-operatively with individual provinces on the carbon reduction plan; that the Government of Canada withdraw Bill C-69, because it will create delays and uncertainty for proponents of projects related to transportation corridors; and that the Government of Canada withdraw Bill C-48, because it will have a negative impact on Canada's reputation and is not based in science or navigation practices.During our brief study, we heard testimony by witnesses from Quebec and the Maritimes on the negative impact these Liberal policies would have on Canada's transportation corridors. I encourage the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Environment and Climate Change to read our supplementary report, but if they do not have time for that, I hope they will simply adopt our recommendations. We believe that doing this will greatly support Canada's transportation system and our vitally important trade corridors.8510-421-606 "Establishing a Canadian Transportation and Logistics Strategy: Part 2"C-48, An Act respecting the regulation of vessels that transport crude oil or persistent oil to or from ports or marine installations located along British Columbia's north coastC-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 ActsDissenting or supplementary opinionsStanding Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and CommunitiesTransportationChurenceRogersBonavista—Burin—TrinityWayneEasterHon.Malpeque//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCriminal CodeInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins (Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC)(1215)[English]Bill C-458. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-458, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing principles – remote emergency medical or police services). He said: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Red Deer—Mountain View for seconding my bill. My bill seeks to amend the Criminal Code by providing for changes that evidence that an offence was directed at a person or property that was vulnerable because of the remoteness from emergency or medical or police services be a factor when considering sentencing. Rural Canadians are particularly vulnerable right now. Statistics Canada, police reports, all the information points to the fact that rural Canadians are specifically being targeted by criminals. If my bill is passed it would ensure that criminals will face longer times in jail for purposely targeting rural areas, contrary to Bill C-75, which would just speed up the revolving door, which is a hot button issue in my riding and for all rural Canadians, many of whom are tired of being repeat victims. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)C-458, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing principles - remote emergency medical or police services)Emergency servicesIntroduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsRemote communitiesSentencingWayneEasterHon.MalpequeGuyCaronRimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPensionsInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1225)[English]Mr. Speaker, today I am presenting two petitions from constituents in my riding of North Okanagan—Shuswap. Both petitions are calling on the government to withdraw Bill C-27, an act to amend the Pension Benefits Standards Act, 1985. C-27, An Act to amend the Pension Benefits Standards Act, 1985Pension Benefits Standards ActPensions and pensionersPetition 421-04475Petition 421-04476PaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC): (1225)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of many of my constituents, who are calling on the government to support the passage of Bill C-418, a bill that seeks to reaffirm our fundamental rights found in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, those being the rights to conscience and religious freedom. They are calling for these changes because in the wake of the passage of Bill C-14 regarding medical assistance in dying, there is a lack of clarity on what the rights are of medical professionals and medical institutions regarding conscience rights on these very contentious social issues.C-14, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts (medical assistance in dying)C-418, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying)Caregivers and health care professionalsFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04480ElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsIreneMathyssenLondon—Fanshawe//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments from the hon. member.I would like to ask the member how he feels about the recommendations that have come from the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, known as FOPO within these walls. There have been continuous recommendations from that committee on how we could have already started to rebuild Canada's fish stocks. We did studies early on in this parliamentary session on the northern Atlantic cod, on the Atlantic salmon. There were many recommendations, unanimous recommendations that were agreed to by every member on that committee, no matter which political party members came from.However, the Liberal Party, his minister and the department have absolutely refused to take steps on any of those measures to restore the endangered or declining fish stocks.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionThe Acting Speaker (Mr. Todd Doherty): (1245)[English]Order, please. I ask the hon. colleague to direct his comments to the Chair.The hon. member.Remarks addressed to the ChairDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold: (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, when I questioned him earlier, the member talked about our needing to undertake new measures to restore our fish stocks. New measures are proposed in these amendments from the Senate through this third party habitat banking that could immediately be put to use to restore fish stocks, which is badly needed across the country from coast to coast to coast. Why is his government refusing to adopt these amendments from the Senate that could be the new tools that we need?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, we all want to see healthy fish stocks, prosperous fisheries and a thriving economy, and I believe all those are possible at the same time. We can achieve that by using Canadian technology, Canadian ingenuity and Canadian investment. We can do all that and rebuild our declining fish stocks.We have national conservation organizations, like Ducks Unlimited, the Canadian Wildlife Federation, local fishing game clubs and stream keeper organizations ready to create and improve fish habitat. Using Canadian technology, Canadian ingenuity and Canadian investment in proactive ways that would actually see fish habitat increased and improved in advance of projects would ensure prosperous fisheries and a thriving economy. This could all be made possible under the third-party habitat banking amendments being put forward by the Senate. Before the Senate had even voted on sending these amendments to Bill C-68 back to this House of Parliament, the fisheries minister basically gave a directive to the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, FOPO, to do a study on third party habitat banking. Imagine that. I say it was a directive, because although the parliamentary committees are supposed to be free to set their own agenda, that committee has a majority of Liberal members who would dare not deny a request from their own minister. Therefore, on June 10, as a directive from the fisheries minister, we began a study of third party habitat banking. Also on June 10, we finished a study on third party habitat banking. We started and finished in one day, in two hours. It was an abomination of a study, with no mention of a report back to the minister and no report to the House of Commons. It was of almost of no use at all other than perhaps being able to say “we consulted”, part of the fake consultation I have seen with the government time and again over the past three and a half years. However, I say almost nothing out of that study, except what we heard from witnesses that day. They spoke about third party habitat banking, saying that it would be a good thing to incorporate, that the difficult details around third party habitat banking could be worked out through the regulations and orders in council. The regulations need not be fully ironed out in order for Bill C-68 to be amended and passed. We also heard testimony from multiple witnesses that third party habitat banking could create net gains to habitat. Imagine, conservation organizations and local angling clubs being able to work proactively to create an enhanced fish habitat. It should be the dream and goal of any fisheries minister to increase and improve fisheries habitat. However, as we have seen so many times over the past three and a half years, Liberal fisheries ministers fail to do what is right and instead give deals to their buddies and relatives, getting caught up in scandal. They fail to deliver and fund restoring fish stocks.We also heard in testimony during that short “but we can say we consulted” meeting on June 10, that during the Senate study of Bill C-68, the only witnesses who spoke against third party habitat banking were the minister and DFO staff, undoubtedly under the direction of the fisheries minister.(1250) Why would every other witness support third party habitat banking and the minister's department oppose it? Why would a minister not want to see net gains to fish habitat? Why would a minister ignore and cast aside testimony, ideas and proposals that would be good for fish, fisheries and the economy? I can only surmise that it is because the fisheries minister, like his Liberal predecessors, are out of touch with Canadian fisheries and the Canadian way.I also want to point out the fake and disingenuous consultations by the former fisheries minister from Beauséjour undertaken during his tenure. I do wish to send best wishes to the former fisheries minister regarding his health. While he was minister, the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, FOPO, undertook a study on changes to the Fisheries Act. While that study was on the book, three different news releases went out on the consultation process, three conflicting news releases under that minister's watch.The first one, on October 16, 2016, stated that all briefs received during the consultations would be provided to the committee for its study. The next one, on November 16, 2016, again stated the feedback heard would be shared with the committee for its study. However, that feedback never reached the committee in time.After multiple requests from indigenous groups and committee members to extend the timeline of the study, the Liberal members refused to extend that time so we could incorporate the briefs solicited and paid for with taxpayer dollars.In the end, over $2 million was spent for indigenous groups to provide briefs to the committee for study. Over $1.2 million of those briefs for consultation and input for the review were not received before the Liberals closed off the study. Those taxpayer dollars were not received by the committee in time for the study. Imagine what $1.2 million could have done for fish habitat in the hands of conservation groups and organizations. I can imagine that because my background is in conservation. My first interest in this was with fish and game clubs, putting boots on and getting in the streams creating spawning habitat. What our clubs could have done with $1.2 million, which the Liberal government wasted because it could not get that information to the committee on time.Now here we are up against time. The government has called time allocation on debate on these Senate amendments after minimum time back in the House. It has taken the government three and a half years to get the bill this far and it is still not right.Dozens of amendments came from the Senate on Bill C-68, most of them tossed aside by the Liberal government, amendments that really could make a difference in the streams, creating more fish habitat, creating more fish, creating more opportunities for fishermen and creating a strong and vibrant economy.It is really disappointing to have debate cut short. Ten minutes for me to speak to this is really less than half the time I would have liked in a full speaking time of 20 minutes. I have talked about how the FOPO study was denied extensions. We have talked about briefs being received after the report deadline. We have heard testimony many times that there was no proof of any harm to fish habitat from the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act.(1255)One of the first things I did in this parliamentary session was to put in an Order Paper question asking for any proof of harm or loss of habitat as a result of the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act. More than three years later, not one piece of evidence has been provided. Therefore, the fisheries minister and the current government are being deceitful, if I can use that word, to the Canadian public and this Parliament. I have lost respect for them because of that.I thank the House for the time to be able to discuss these amendments, and I will welcome questions.Aboriginal peoplesC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsHabitat conservationPublic consultationDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold: (1300)[English]Mr. Speaker, as I stated, my background is in conservation. I see what conservation organizations can do with a few dollars provided and the many hours of volunteer time that they put in at the streams to create fish habitat and to improve hatcheries to make sure we have fish in the streams. A lot of the time, it is not for their own benefit. They do not get to fish for those fish. They do not get to catch anything or reap any harvest from it. They simply are doing it because it is the right thing to do. That is what these amendments from the Senate were aimed to do. It was to increase the ability of non-profit organizations, including fish and game clubs and conservation organizations, to get into the streams and do some work proactively and create and improve fish habitat. Here we have a government that is scrapping these amendments from the Senate and blocking the possibility for that to happen.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthTerryDuguidWinnipeg South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold: (1300)[English]Mr. Speaker, not being part of the previous government, I will not comment on that. However, I will comment on the government that I have been in opposition to since I arrived here in this House. What I have seen is a government that claims to be doing everything for the science and the fisheries, and yet it continues to ignore that science. When we take a look at what is happening on the west coast with our west coast salmon fisheries, we see it is shutting down the recreational fisheries, blocking or destroying the jobs of hundreds of west coast fishermen, fish guides and angling tackle shops with no regard to what the science really says.We know there are bigger issues out there, but the government refuses to look at the science and where it could make the biggest difference in increasing the number of chinook stocks on the west coast. Rather, it is punishing the fishermen who make the smallest impact.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsScientific research and scientistsTerryDuguidWinnipeg SouthCherylGallantRenfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1305)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on the Senate amendments to Bill C-68, an act to amend the Fisheries Act, a terribly flawed piece of legislation that erodes the rights of Canadians.I wish to acknowledge and thank, on behalf of all Canadians, the research team of the Ontario Landowners Association for the work done by the group on Bill C-68, particularly Elizabeth Marshall and Tom Black. The report they prepared but were not able to present to the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans has been highly informative. Canadians will understand, after my remarks are finished, that when we are working with bad legislation, all the tinkering in the world will not fix the wrong assumptions that are at the heart of this bill.The Liberal Party is attempting to violate the Constitution by artificially extending its jurisdiction in contradiction to its constitutional limits. It is also trying to do indirectly what it cannot do directly, which has been struck down in the Canadian courts. The federal government does not have the constitutional jurisdiction to expand environmental protection through the Fisheries Act, as this is in violation of provincial jurisdiction, as well as in violation of private rights established under common law, the Constitution Act, 1867, and the letters patent/Crown grant.Though many laws regulate water and water use, the Fisheries Act remains the only legislation that directly addresses the protection and conservation of fish and fish habitat. Enacted in 1868, the act is one of Canada's oldest pieces of legislation. In 2012, the Fisheries Act was significantly amended.I am now going to turn to the Senate testimony. We had the OPG, Ontario Power Generation, look at its generation portfolio on hydro power. It determined that it would take an up to 80% increase in instantaneous passage of flow as a principle for meeting the objectives of the new definition of “fish habitat”, and that it would no longer be peaking and holding back water or meeting grid demands, outside of the greenhouse gas emissions impact, which would bear out. That was very important. The amendments of the Senate involved a move from protecting fish generally to focusing on only prohibiting serious harm to fish that were part of a commercial or aboriginal fishery. That is what the 2012 amendments did. These amendments were common sense in application and were done after listening and acting on the concerns of stakeholders.The 2012 Conservative amendments respected the Canadian Constitution. It was my pleasure to recommend to the committee reviewing the Conservative amendments a witness to provide practical observations as to why the Fisheries Act needed to be amended. Jack Maclaren is a multi-generational orchard farmer from my riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. Jack had the unfortunate experience of having a ditch, hand dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather to collect and direct water to their orchard, declared a navigable waterway after he started to clear a blocked culvert that was flooding the road to his farmhouse.Needless to say, Jack and many other farmers just like him welcomed the Conservative common sense amendments passed by our government in 2012. The Liberal Party, under the guise of protection of so-called “fish habitat” in unlikely places like Jack's ditch, is actually looking to use the Fisheries Act as environmental legislation, when the federal government has already protections established under the Canada Shipping Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.What really caught my attention on Bill C-68 was the addition in committee of a new concept in Canadian law, the concept of water flow or, as it is referred to in other documents, environmental flow. It was added in proposed subsection 2(2) to amend the act.Water flow is a hot topic in my riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. The spring of 2019 now has the dubious distinction of being the worst in recent memory for flooding along the Ottawa River. My constituents are skeptical when the Prime Minister and the member from Ottawa blame every significant weather event on climate change.They do not believe the Liberal Party leader when he claims a new tax on Canadians, the Liberal carbon tax, will stop the Ottawa River from flooding. The residents of the Ottawa Valley have a suspicion that recent flooding has been caused by either government policy or human error, or some combination of both. They want answers.The question now being asked is whether the federal government caused the flooding. Were the dam operators instructed to hold back water when they should have been releasing water to meet the federal government's new definitions of fish habitat? These are questions my constituents feel can only be answered by an independent inquiry, an external review.(1310)Expert testimony before the standing committee, which I referred to before, certainly seemed to confirm that the Government of Canada was planning to make flooding on the Ottawa River an annual occurrence, judging by the question asked by a senator to a representative of Ontario Power Generation, which operates the dams on the river. The expert said:When OPG, Ontario Power Generation, looked at our generation portfolio on hydro power, we determined that we would take an 80 per cent instantaneous passage of flow as a principle for meeting the objectives of the new definition of “fish habitat.” We would no longer be peaking and holding back water or meeting grid demands, outside of the greenhouse gas emissions impact which would bear out.... Everyone can remember the spring of 2017 in Ontario and the Ottawa Valley. We had a once in a generation flood event. We had the capacity to hold water on the watershed with our water management plans. We have detailed some impacts. One of the outcomes was that the city of Montreal would have been under a metre more of water if we had not had the ability to store water on the watershed because of flooding in the Great Lakes. The first thing that jumped out at me was the comment that Montreal would have been under an additional metre of water had Bill C-68, as it was voted on and passed in the House of Commons by the Liberal Party, been enacted.The next thing that jumped out while listening to the expert testimony given to that Senate committee on the decision by the Liberal Party to bring forward legislation like Bill C-68 was the limitations that would be placed on one of the cleanest, most renewable and most reliable sources of electricity. It produces almost no greenhouse gases. Canadian hydroelectricity is the envy of the world. Why would Canadians want to throw away that advantage?A representative from Quebec, who is the president of WaterPower Canada, an organization that represents more than 60% of all electricity produced in Canada, stated: If Bill C-68 is passed in its current form, its impact on our industry’s ability to operate its current stations and build new ones will be catastrophic.This led me to do some research on who was lobbying for proposed subsection 2(2) in Bill C-68, and I then discovered that the controversial clause added during committee was proposed by the Green Party. It was then supported by the Liberal majority to be included in the legislation. Why was the Liberal Party on the House of Commons committee voting in favour of an amendment put forward by the Green Party that would be so disastrous for Canada? Is the Liberal Party really so afraid of losing votes to the Green Party that it would shift that far left?I was then introduced to the name of a lobbyist who was on the payroll of the controversial Tides foundation. These foundations are recognized as threats to Canadian democracy. The Tides foundation is a foreign-funded organization that has been identified, among other activities, as funding a campaign to block Canadian pipelines.Canadians lost $20 billion last year by being held a captive seller to American big oil interests. Tides Canada's American parent foundation, the Tides foundation, from which it receives funding, has been funding dam busting in the western United States, so it is no surprise that the U.S. foundation would fund similar activities in Canada. Registered as a lobbyist for Tides Canada, Tony Maas could count on some powerful friends in the Liberal Party, starting with the now disgraced former principal secretary to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts. Tony Maas worked for Gerald Butts when Butts was at the World Wildlife Fund. With the puppet master on his side, Maas figured he could get anything he wanted. Maas had moved from the World Wildlife Fund to run a project funded by Tides Canada on water. In that capacity, the decision was made to use the Liberal campaign promise to make amendments to the Fisheries Act to move forward with a radical agenda on water by introducing a totally new concept in Canadian law on water flow. This was done by avoiding fisheries departmental scrutiny when Bill C-68 was first introduced to the House of Commons and waiting until committee, after second reading, to inject proposed subsection 2(2) into the bill. By doing this, checks and balances that normally occur in a department before legislation is introduced could be avoided. The concept of water flows, or environmental flows, comes from the 2007 globalist document the Brisbane declaration. Like many globalist documents, the words written do not match with reality. While it is next to impossible to build any new hydroelectric power dams, as identified by the president of WaterPower Canada, the declaration envisages the eventual removal of existing dams in favour of flood plain restoration and the return of free-flowing rivers. C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFloodsGovernment billsHabitat conservationHydroelectric powerJurisdictionLobbying and lobbyistsOttawa RiverWater flowMelArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsGovernment Response to PetitionsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1005)[English]Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay.The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen: The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members. KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1045)[English]Pursuant to Standing Order 67.1, there will now be a 30-minute question period. I would invite all hon. members who wish to participate in the 30-minute question period to please rise.Accordingly, I would ask all hon. members to limit their interventions to approximately one minute. That includes the minister responding to the questions. Opposition members are given preference during the 30-minute period, but some questions will be taken from the government side as well.We will now proceed to questions. The hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George.Questions and comments periodBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, here we have it, time allocation once again being put on a bill by a government that said it would let debate reign.Could the minister table in the House any evidence where the changes that were made to the Fisheries Act under the previous government resulted in any harmful alteration, destruction or disruption of fish or fish habitat?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsMotionsTime allocationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, the minister is being very disingenuous here. I sat in on the hearings of Bill C-68. Not a single opponent of what we did in 2012 could prove, in any way, shape or form, that those changes had any effect on fish populations or fish communities. Colleagues can look at the record.Under our former Conservative government, in 2010, for example, the Pacific salmon run in the Fraser River was a record. In 2014, that run was even higher. Under the Liberal government's watch, Pacific salmon stocks are collapsing and the Chinook salmon stock is the poster boy for that.Our committee produced a unanimous report on Atlantic salmon, with a number of recommendations. We saw the minister's response. Not a single part of that letter dealt with the 17 unanimous recommendations, such as smallmouth bass in Miramichi Lake, overfishing by Greenland and excessive predation by seals and striped bass. The response did not deal with any of that.Why is this department so inept and uncaring for fisheries communities and fish stocks?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksGovernment billsMotionsSalmonTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1050)[English]Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I would remind our hon. colleague from Winnipeg Centre that the independent senators control the other House. I would challenge—C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsMembers' remarksMotionsPoints of orderTime allocationRobert-FalconOuelletteWinnipeg CentreBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1050)[English]We have a maximum of 30 minutes. That comment was mostly to do with debate. With respect to relevance, this is the second time it has been mentioned, so I ask members to stay on the question before the House.The hon. Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.Decisions of the SpeakerMembers' remarksPoints of orderRelevancyToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1055)[English]Mr. Speaker, I sat in on all of the debates in the House and at committee on the House side. Time and time again, there were requests from first nations and from our side for extended consultations and study time, yet the government members at committee shut them down. It is just like the fake consultation they are doing here.I hope the minister will set aside his talking points and actually speak about what we heard, especially yesterday at committee when we studied the Senate amendments to Bill C-68. We heard that the only people opposed to third party habitat banking were DFO staff, as directed by the fisheries minister.Why is it that the fisheries minister and his staff are the only ones opposed to the third party habitat banking amendments? Why can the minister not accept that we could create net habitat gains through third party habitat banking? Here he is, trying to shut down debate on it.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationMotionsTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1055)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are trying to use the Fisheries Act as environmental legislation, when the federal government already has protections established under the Canada Shipping Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. This is the federal government creating legislation with Bill C-68 to interfere with provincial legislation as well as the constitutionally protected private property rights.Liberals slipped in a section after third reading, so we were unable to debate it in the House. At the Senate committee, testimony from OPG said, “One of the outcomes was that the city of Montreal would have been under a metre more of water if we had not had the ability to store water on the watershed because of flooding in the Great Lakes.”Furthermore, we would like to know whether the government will try to do through regulation what it cannot do through legislation.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsMotionsProperty lawRegulationTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold: (1100)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would ask the minister to step away from his talking points. He talked about 39 days. Many of those days the committee was studying the bill for only a few hours. We heard time and again from first nations that they wanted to provide briefs. Over $2 million were provided for first nations to provide briefs to the committee on the study of the Fisheries Act back in 2016. However, $1.2 million were paid out for a compilation of the briefs received by the committee after the study date and the committee had made recommendations on the bill, because Liberal members on that committee would not extend the study. Why is the minister again shutting down debate on an important bill?Aboriginal peoplesC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsMotionsPublic consultationTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1100)[English]Mr. Speaker, both the hon. minister and his hon. colleague from Avalon are being disingenuous in their comments. Time and again in witness testimony, not one witness could provide any examples of where the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act led to any harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish or fish habitat. Standing before the House and Canadians and making disingenuous comments like that is unparliamentary.I would ask the minister once again to provide one example of where the changes to the Fisheries Act in 2012 resulted in any harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish or fish habitat as provided by any witnesses through consultation or committee work.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationMotionsTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Robert Sopuck: (1105)[English]Mr. Speaker, again, the minister cannot provide a single example of any harm to a fish population from the Fisheries Act of 2012. However, his government caused harm to fisheries. I remember early in the Liberals' mandate when Denis Coderre, who is a former Liberal member and was then the mayor of Montreal, begged and pleaded when we were in government to allow the dumping of millions of litres of raw sewage. Our Conservative government said no. As soon as the Liberal government came in, it allowed the dumping into the St. Lawrence of millions of litres of raw sewage. Was there a Fisheries Act charge? Absolutely not.Recently, the Liberals introduced the new marine mammal regulations, which will throttle the economy of Churchill, Manitoba, where whale watching is an integral part of that struggling economy. I have contacted the minister on a number of occasions about this and he simply does not care about communities. He only cares about his cronies in the Liberal Party, who do their best to destroy fish habitat, without him even caring. Why is that?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationMotionsTime allocationWater treatmentJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold: (1110)[English]Mr. Speaker, again, the minister is misleading the House and misleading Canadians. He claims 39 days, but those days were not full days by any means. Many times, even the debate at the committee stage and even though it was only partial hours, those debates were interrupted by votes in the House, similar to this, where the minister is shutting down debate again.We have asked the minister multiple times to provide any proof of any harm, alteration or destruction of fish habitat resulting from the 2012 changes to the act, and the government has provided absolutely none. Again, the minister is misleading the House and misleading Canadians by claiming the loss of protection. Those claims are absolutely false. I would ask the minister to apologize, not just to the House but to Canadians, for misleading them with such false information.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationMotionsTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1115)[English]I would just remind the hon. minister and other members to direct their comments to the Chair.Remarks addressed to the ChairJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJennyKwanVancouver East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1115)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is the pot calling the kettle black. It is shameful that the government is bringing out all its Atlantic MPs to stand up for the east coast and for the fisheries out there, when during the corrupt surf clam decision, not one of them said a single word. Not one of them stood up for Grand Bank. Not one of them stood up for our friend Edgar, who was at risk of losing his job. There was not one peep from any of the Atlantic Canada MPs. I hope that Atlantic Canadians are listening in right now, because the only people who are standing up for them are the Conservatives in the opposition. I will ask our hon. colleague this question one more time. Can he prove, and table with this House, any examples of where the changes to the 2012 Fisheries Act resulted in any harmful alteration or disruption or destruction of fish or fish habitat?Atlantic CanadaC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationMotionsTime allocationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1115)[English]Order. Shouting across the aisle is not permitted. One member has been recognized to speak in the House. I would ask the hon. Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to wrap up in five or six seconds, and then we will get going with the question.The hon. minister.Noise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries Act [Bill C-68—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1115)[English]I want to compliment hon. members, by the way, for keeping their interventions very succinct. We got in almost 20 questions in a 30-minute round, so that is very good.It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings at this time and put forthwith the question on the motion now before the House.(1120)[Translation]The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.Some hon. members: Yea.The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay.The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it.And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members.JonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1200)[Translation] Pursuant to Standing Order 67.1, there will now be a 30-minute period for questions.I invite hon. members who wish to ask questions to rise in their places so the Chair will have some idea of the number of members who wish to participate in this question period.I would also ask hon. members to keep their interventions to approximately one minute. In this 30-minute question period, questions by members of the opposition are given preference, but the government side may ask a few questions as well.Questions and comments periodSpeaking orderBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooDeanAllisonNiagara West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1200)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals said they would do things differently, that they would not bring in closure and that they would not rush debate, yet here they are, breaking a promise they made in the last election campaign.The Liberals indicated to us that they did not want to move too far ahead of the U.S. in terms of ratification, but how are they going to move in tandem with the U.S.? They want to make sure we are lockstep with the Americans, but we have heard on numerous occasions that the Democrats are not really prepared to move this forward.Do the Liberals plan on bringing the House back this summer in order to ratify this agreement before the next election?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMotionsSecond readingTime allocationTrade agreementsBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, while Conservatives support stability, let me point out that we have heard the government say before that everything is fine. The Mexican government met with the Americans to discuss trilateral issues that they originally said were all bilateral. By the time the Liberal government had woken up, smelled the coffee and realized it had been played, it ended up getting handed a NAFTA 0.5, which is this agreement that is now being referred to as CUSMA.The Government House Leader has said that she heard specifically that the Canadian process will be in tandem with the American process. The Liberal government has been played before. What evidence does the Government House Leader have from either Congress or the administration that the government will not be played again?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMotionsSecond readingTime allocationTrade agreementsBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1210)[English]Madam Speaker, the most important question at this moment is around the exact roles of Parliament and of debate in this House of Commons. It sounds like the government House leader is trying to convince us that because we have known about it, because it was available to the public and because it has been on the table, we in the House of Commons have absolutely no role, so we do not need to have a debate in the House of Commons. That is egregious.Eighty per cent of Canada's GDP is trade; 70% of that trade is with the United States, and this is the most significant trade agreement we have with the United States. It is not a free trade agreement; it is a managed trade agreement. It is now compromising our sovereignty, and this bill is going to give unlimited access to the Prime Minister to do whatever he wants and further undermine the role and responsibility of this House of Commons.We are in a majority situation; members do not always have the opportunity to vote the government down, but we do have the opportunity to debate in this House. The more the Liberals constrain us, the more they undermine Parliament and everything about this deal.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMotionsParliamentary democracySecond readingTime allocationTrade agreementsBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (1220)[English]Madam Speaker, the Liberals make things so tough for themselves, it is unreal. The hon. government House leader said it was tabled in the House in December. She could have actually brought the legislation forward in plenty enough time for us to have a good debate here in the House and plenty enough time for the committee to do a thorough review of the bill.I have two questions for the government House leader. One, will she assure us that if it goes to committee, the committee can hear from as many witnesses and take as much time that it needs to actually go through this legislation? Two, will she also assure us that if any changes in this legislation should happen in the U.S. this summer, the committee will have a chance to look at them before it finally votes on it and bring it back to the House?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMotionsSecond readingTime allocationTrade agreementsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/820RobNicholsonHon.Rob-NicholsonNiagara FallsConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/NicholsonRob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act [Bill C-100—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionHon. Rob Nicholson (Niagara Falls, CPC): (1225)[English]Madam Speaker, I have to agree on one point that the Liberals made with respect to the NDP. I do not know if there is any party in any western democracy that has had such a consistent record of opposing trade deals. To be fair, it is not just something recent. This goes back to the 1960s when the NDP did not like the Auto Pact. The NDP did not like the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The NDP did not like NAFTA. New Democrats do not like CETA or the TPP. They do not like anything, but to be fair, I guess they have supported one agreement. At least with the Liberals, they support trade agreements when they are in office, but of course not when they are in opposition like they were in 1988. They were passionately against the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. They were going to the wall on that one. They were going to challenge it.That being said, would the hon. member like a list of all the trade deals that the Harper government agreed to and put into effect? It was a considerable record. I appreciate she is not the trade minister or the foreign affairs minister, but if she likes, I will—C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsMotionsSecond readingTime allocationTrade agreementsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1310)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order with respect to a tweet claiming that I did not support Motion No. 225 and that I was preventing it in the House, as well as the fact that I voted against it. This claim is categorically false. I want the House to know that I was one of the seconders of the motion and spoke favourably to the proposal.Further, I would like to seek unanimous consent of the House for the following motion:MotionThat Motion M-225 be deemed adopted.Homelessness and homelessLeave to propose a motionM-225MotionsPrivate Members' MotionsVeteransGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1335)[English]Madam Speaker, I have a few comments, and then I will have a question.My first comment is, here we are. Four years ago, the Liberals said they had a problem, and the bill has been sitting in the House for months and months. Finally, with their lack of proper House planning, the Liberals deem it an emergency to get this through. Quite frankly, it has been the inadequate planning of the Liberals' legislative agenda that has created this challenge. Second, in spite of all the criticisms we might have heard of the former bill, I would like to point out that the Liberals actually voted for it. If they thought it was that bad, they certainly did not exhibit that in their vote.The third point, which will lead to a question, is this. The Liberals do not talk much about the moratorium built into this in the national interest. The last time they did that, the Premier of the Northwest Territories called it the result of eco-terrorism. The mayor of Tuktoyaktuk had many comments, such as “They shut down our offshore gasification and put a moratorium right across the whole freaking Arctic without even consulting us.”The Liberals have embedded in this legislation the ability to do that again. How does the parliamentary secretary align that with her talk of consultation? Aboriginal policyAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionYvonneJonesLabradorYvonneJonesLabrador//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (1340)[English]Madam Speaker, I would remind the member opposite that this was a great concern of John Diefenbaker, who gave indigenous people the vote. Most of the ugly residential school experiences were under the Liberal government of Mackenzie King. Let us not point fingers when it is not required.I should also make a point for my colleague from Manitoba. The agreement he referred to was by Manitoba Hydro, not by the Manitoba government.The crocodile tears of all the members opposite crying for indigenous people are truly sickening. All they talk about is process, process, process. There has not been a single major development in this country that has helped aboriginal people, ever.I am going to make a prediction right now. If all the socio-economic indicators of indigenous communities were measured when the Liberal government took office and when it is going to leave office on October 21, I absolutely guarantee that not a single socio-economic indicator will have improved.Aboriginal policyAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingYvonneJonesLabrador//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1340)[English]Madam Speaker, what is sad is that the term “reconciliation” has become a buzzword under the government. I take this to heart. Many members know I have stood in the House, time and again, and have said that my wife and children are first nations. It is troubling for me when some members stand in the House, put their hands on their hearts and say that it is in the best interests of reconciliation, not just with respect to Bill C-88 but also Bills C-69, C-48, C-68 as well as the surf clam scam that took place earlier in this session.The only part I will agree with in the hon. parliamentary secretary's intervention was when at she said there was enough blame to go around. Nobody should be pointing fingers, saying one group is better than another group. Reconciliation is about creating a path forward. It is not about pitting a first nation against a first nation or a first nation against a non-first nation. It is about how we walk together moving forward.What I am about to say is not related to all members on both sides of the House. Some members truly understand this. However, time and again some Liberals will stand in the House and say that they support reconciliation or that this is all about reconciliation. Then a heavy-handed policy comes down or words are said, which we call “bozo eruptions”, and there is regret afterward. I will go back to how we started the spring session. The first female indigenous Attorney General in our country spoke truth to power, and we saw what happened to her. Bill C-88 is interesting, because it looks to reverse the incredible work our previous government did in putting together Bill C-15. I will read a quote from our hon. colleague across the way when she voted for Bill C-15. She stated: As Liberals, we want to see the Northwest Territories have the kind of independence it has sought. We want it to have the ability to make decisions regarding the environment, resource development, business management, growth, and opportunity, which arise within their own lands.The parliamentary secretary has offered a lot of excuses today as to why she voted for it, such as she was tricked or voted for it for a specific reason. It is easy for members to stand after the fact and say, “I could have, would have, should have” or “This is the reason; my arm was twisted.” However, if we do not stand for something, we will fall for anything. That is what we have seen with the government taking up the eco-warrior agenda to pay back for the 2015 election. That is why we have Bills C-68, C-69, C-48 and C-88. The parliamentary secretary wants to talk about how Bill C-88 would empower our first nations. Let me offer the House a few quotes.Mr. Merven Gruben, the mayor of the Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, stated:Tuk has long been an oil and gas town. Since the first oil boom, or the whalers hunting whales in the late 1800 and early 1900s, we have grown up side by side with industry. We have not had any bad environmental effects from the oil and gas work in our region, and we have benefited from the jobs, training and business opportunities that have been available when the industry has worked in Tuk and throughout the north, the entire region.(1345)Never in 100-plus years has the economy of our region, and the whole north, looked so bleak for the oil and gas industry, and for economic development, generally. All the tree huggers and green people are happy, but come and take a look. Come and see what you're doing to our people. The government has turned our region into a social assistance state. We are Inuvialuit who are proud people and who like to work and look after ourselves, not depend on welfare. I thank God we worked very closely with the Harper government and had the all-weather highway built into Tuk. It opened in November 2017, if some of you haven't heard, and now we are learning to work with tourism. We all know that's not the money and work that we were used to in the oil and gas days that we liked.Aboriginal policyAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesBusiness and industryC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsDownload responsibilityGovernment billsGovernment performanceLand managementLand useMackenzie ValleyNorthwest TerritoriesThird reading and adoptionYvonneJonesLabradorToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1350)[English]He further states: Nobody's going to be going up and doing any exploration or work up there. We were really looking forward to this. There was a $1.2-billion deal here that Imperial Oil and BP did not that far out of Tuk, and we were looking forward to them exploring that and possibly drilling, because we have the all-weather highway there. What better place to be located? The Hon. Bob McLeod, the premier from the Northwest Territories, said that the moratorium was “result of eco-colonialism”. Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesBusiness and industryC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyNorthwest TerritoriesThird reading and adoptionToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1350)[English]I speak of the moratorium. The Liberals want to talk about all the work they are doing in standing up for the north and the indigenous peoples in the north. It was just before Christmas when Prime Minister travelled to Washington, D.C. to make the announcement with the then United State President, Barack Obama. There had been zero consultation with northerners, despite consistent rhetoric about consulting with Canada's indigenous peoples. Prior to decision making, the resolution was made unilaterally from the Prime Minister's Office.The indigenous peoples and the people from the Northwest Territories had about an hour's notice with that. Wally Schumann, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Investment, Minister of Infrastructure for the Northwest Territories, stated: I guess we can be very frank because we're in front of the committee. When it first came out, we never got very much notice on the whole issue of the moratorium and the potential that was in the Beaufort Sea. There were millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars in bid deposits and land leases up there. That took away any hope we had of developing the Beaufort Sea.Merven Gruben said:I agree the Liberals should be helping us. They shut down our offshore gasification and put a moratorium right across the whole freaking Arctic without even consulting us. They never said a word....Our hon. colleague, the parliamentary secretary, in response and to pre-empt my speech, called us the government on the other side. We are the government in waiting. We will be government in October. She said that the guys across the way would criticize the Liberals for caring too much about the environment. That is incorrect. We criticize them because they put the priorities of the environmental groups like Tides, World Wildlife Fund and like Greenpeace ahead of the local stakeholder, the indigenous peoples who are saying that they are tired of being poster boys for these eco-groups.If my colleagues do not believe me, I will read some quotes. Calvin Helin, chair of Eagle Spirit Chiefs Council, said “What the chiefs are starting to see a lot now is that there is a lot of underhanded tactics and where certain people are paid in communities and they are used as spokespersons.” He also said, “Essentially (they are) puppets and props for environmental groups to kill resource development” and “It’s outrageous and people should be upset about that…the chiefs are....”Also, Stephen Buffalo, president and CO of the Indian Resource Council said, “Since his government was elected in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly—Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCoastal areasGovernment billsGovernment performanceMackenzie ValleyOil and gasPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1355)[English]Madam Speaker, I am merely reading a quote from a concerned indigenous leader, who the Liberals say stand up for. Clearly they do not, which is probably why they take offence. Stephen Buffalo, president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council, said:Since his government was elected in 2015, [the] Prime Minister...has repeatedly spoken about his personal commitment to a new relationship with Indigenous people in Canada. In action, however, he has clearly privileged those Indigenous peoples, our friends and relatives, whose perspective aligns with the more radical environmental movement.Stephen Buffalo also said:When pipeline opponents use the courts to slow or stop pipelines, they undermine our businesses, eliminate jobs in our communities and reduce the amount of money flowing to our governments.Why do I bring that up? Over the last four years, time and again the Liberals have stood and have said that only they no better. They point fingers and say that a certain government did this or that and that they know the NDP will not do this. The Liberals had four years, and Canadians are now learning that it was all just talk; all show, no go.Bill C-88 is nothing more than an all talk, all show and no go type of bill. It is shameful to have bills such as Bill C-69, Bill C-48 and Bill C-88. Bill C-88 would give the minister the authority to shut down the north and essentially turn it into a park, taking away any economic opportunity for indigenous peoples and those who live there. That is the worry.Members can sit here and listen to all the talking points of the Liberals, but the reality is that they are being disingenuous. They will stand here, as I said earlier, with their hands on their hearts and say that it is all about reconciliation. We know that it is the opposite because they have proven it time and again.In the 2015 election, on day 10, the member for Papineau, who is now the Prime Minister, told Canadians that he would not resort to such parliamentary tricks as omnibus bills. He told Canadians that he would balance the budget by 2019. He also told Canadians that he would let the debate reign. What did he mean? It means that he would not invoke closure or time allocation on bills.I remind those in the House, in the gallery as well as those listening that this is your House. You have elected the 338 members of Parliament to be your voice. When the government invokes closure, it silences your voice. It is silencing the electors who elected the opposition. Aboriginal policyAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsGovernment performanceMackenzie ValleyParliamentary democracyThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersHunsdeep RangarInterventionMr. Bob Saroya (Markham—Unionville, CPC): (1400)[English]Mr. Speaker, last Friday, I lost a great friend. Hunsdeep Rangar was a friend to many of us here in this place and his recent and sudden passing touches so many in the greater Ottawa region. Huns was a champion of the South Asian community and the primary organizer of Ottawa's annual South Asian Fest. Huns was also a businessman, a public servant and the host of Mirch Masala Mix and Bhangra Nation on CHIN 97.9 FM. He had a deep passion for sharing South Asian culture and was always looking for new ways to put Ottawa on the map, but most importantly, he was a devoted husband to his wife Oshima and the very proud father of their daughter Neela. Huns also leaves behind his brother Bundeep and his mother Vinnie, who I know miss him very much. Huns always had a big smile on his face and made time for everyone. Huns was a great friend to all of us and will be greatly missed.Deaths and funeralsRangar, HunsdeepStatements by MembersKimRuddNorthumberland—Peterborough SouthGengTanDon Valley North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89167MattJenerouxMatt-JenerouxEdmonton RiverbendConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/JenerouxMatt_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionMr. Matt Jeneroux (Edmonton Riverbend, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, as shadow minister for infrastructure, I have been travelling across the country. I recently visited the ridings of Malpeque, Charlottetown, South Shore—St. Margarets, Halifax and St. John's East. Many people have told me how much Canada needs a Conservative government. They are not happy with how the current government and its MPs have performed and the many 2015 campaign promises they have broken. People are seeing delays in getting infrastructure built. They are seeing less money in their pockets at the end of the month, and their government representatives are missing in action. Actually, a number of them told me how their member of Parliament will not even return their phone calls. A lot of the people I spoke with are excited for the Conservatives' vision for Canada, which includes working with local communities to develop infrastructure programs that give them more autonomy. Under a Conservative government, east coasters and all Canadians will finally see their priorities reflected in their government because the current government is not as advertised.InfrastructureStatements by MembersMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesRémiMasséAvignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersExcellence AwardsInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate Lindsay native and St. Louis Blues defenceman Vince Dunn on winning the Stanley Cup last night. It was a remarkable ending to a season that certainly had its share of bumps for the 22-year-old and his teammates. In the spirit of recognizing organizations and individuals who improve our community, the Lindsay and District Chamber of Commerce recently held its annual Evening of Excellence. I would like to congratulate all award nominees and recipients including: Kawartha Care Wellness Centre for marketing excellence; Integrated Care Pharmacy for health and wellness excellence; BTW Electronic Parts for youth excellence; PKA SoftTouch for innovation excellence; Fresh Fuell for customer service excellence; Horizons Family Dentistry for design excellence; and Soroptimist International of Kawartha Lakes for not-for-profit excellence. Employer of the year went to WARDS Lawyers. New business of the year went to The Lindsay Advocate. Don Brown was named business leader of the year. This year's coveted citizen of the year award went to Claus Reuter.Finally, I extend a special thanks to all the sponsors, staff, board of directors, president Bob Armstrong and executive director Colleen Collins for organizing the spectacular event.Awards presentationsLindsayStatements by MembersKarenMcCrimmonKanata—CarletonGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersSeniorsInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, June 15 is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. Seniors from all walks of life across gender, culture and socio-economic status are vulnerable to elder abuse: physical, financial, sexual or emotional. These crimes result in distress and harm to the victims, who need to be protected. That is why the last Conservative government passed the Victims Bill of Rights and included age as an aggravating factor for sentencing. I am so proud that my motion to combat seniors fraud passed in the House recently.Conservatives created the position of minister for seniors. The Liberals cut it. It took them more than three years to appoint one. When it comes to caring for seniors, the Liberals are not as advertised.Senior citizensStatements by MembersWorld Elder Abuse Awareness DaySvenSpengemannMississauga—LakeshoreRachelBendayanOutremont//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, throughout this past winter a record number of my constituents shared their home heating bills with me. They did this because in British Columbia, which has signed on to the Liberals' pan-Canadian agreement to raise carbon taxes, the price of the carbon tax can be higher than the commodity cost of the gas. For an 87-year-old senior on a fixed income, a $150 monthly power bill hits hard. Today we learn from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that the Liberals' carbon tax is a total failure. It will not meet the Paris targets the government likes to boast about. We are told the carbon tax will need to be massively increased. lt will literally need to be five times higher.I have constituents who cannot afford the current carbon tax. A massive carbon tax increase will cause serious hardship. I implore the Liberals to come clean and tell Canadians how much more carbon tax they will impose if re-elected. Canadians have a right to know.Carbon pricingCarbon taxCost of livingStatements by MembersAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—LangfordMichaelLevittYork Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, we now know the Liberal carbon tax is so ineffective that it would have to rise by 400%, or double what the Liberals have publicly projected, in order to do what it promises. That is according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. That would mean a painful 25¢ a litre of new tax on gas.Will the government come clean before the election, and admit that it is indeed planning a 25¢ a litre tax on gas?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsMichaelLevittYork CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, the minister is doing exactly what she said she would do. She will just repeat and repeat something, even if it is not true, so people will totally believe it.The facts are out. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says the carbon tax would have to be 400% higher than the Liberals have admitted. The reality is that would mean a painful 25¢ a litre tax on gas.I am asking a simple yes or no question. Are the Liberals planning a painful 25¢ a litre tax on gas?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, it comes directly out of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report. If we simply take his numbers, we arrive at a 25¢ a litre tax on gas. That is the plan, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has laid it out, and it works out to $1,000 for an Ontario family, far more than the tiny, smaller than advertised rebate cheques that the Liberals sent out prior to the election.If the minister wants to deny it, why does she not just tell us how much the price of gas will go up when the carbon tax applies at $100 a tonne?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the cat is out of the bag. Yesterday, once again, the Prime Minister stood in his place and misled Canadians, saying that he would meet the Paris targets. That is not true.The Parliamentary Budget Officer concluded today that Canada will not meet those targets and, worse still, that the Liberals will have to raise their Liberal tax from $20 to $100 if they want to meet those targets. That is five times higher than the current Liberal tax.Can the Minister of Environment tell us how much Canadians will have to pay with the Liberal carbon tax?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased and honoured to stand in the House with a document prepared by the Quebec ministry of the environment, which indicates that between 2014 and 2016 the carbon exchange did not lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. I cannot say in the House that the minister lied, but she did not tell the truth.I have a simple question for the minister: how much more will Canadians have to pay for gas?Will gas go up by 25¢ per litre, yes or no?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, just like everything else the Prime Minister touches, his “no more pipelines” bill, Bill C-69, has turned into a dumpster fire, ticking off and alienating the majority of provinces. National unity is at stake, but instead of taking the premiers' concerns seriously, the Prime Minister keeps insulting them with his “I am the boss and I know best” attitude.Does the Prime Minister realize the harm he is doing and what is at stake? He is putting his ego and his own political interests ahead of national unity.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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and the environment minister are doing everything they can to destroy Canada's energy sector. Their “no more pipelines” bill, Bill C-69, would be devastating to hard-working families in the oil and gas sector, and they know it.Sadly, the Liberals will be shutting down debate on this bill later today, forcing this destructive legislation on Canadians. Nine premiers have raised concerns, but the Prime Minister is ignoring them.Will the Prime Minister finally stop attacking our natural resources sector, listen to the premiers and withdraw this horrible 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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, what she is saying is absurd. This centralizing government, which is a hallmark of the Liberals, has no respect for the provinces and territories. The Prime Minister does not even listen to the provincial premiers, who were duly elected by Canadians. The Premier of Quebec is also saying he is disappointed that the current federal government refused to accept the amendments to Bill C-69 on the environment. Rather than being constructive, the Liberals' provocative approach is undermining national unity.Why does the Prime Minister think he has a monopoly on truth?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, his plan is not working. The Prime Minister is just insulting Canadian taxpayers. He claimed that Canada would meet the Paris Agreement targets by 2030. That was a half-truth, if not a certain word that I am not allowed to say in the House.Following the lead of the United Nations and the environment commissioner, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report this morning explicitly stating that Canada is not going to meet the Paris targets with its current plan. To meet the targets, the government would have to to raise the carbon tax to five times what it is now.Why the lack of transparency? Why are the Liberals being such hypocrites?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians are being impacted by the Liberal carbon tax. Every day we are paying more for the necessities of life in Canada. On top of that, Canadians did not receive the carbon tax rebate they were promised. Ontarians received 30% less than what was advertised. Earlier today, the PBO said that for the Liberal carbon tax to be effective, it would have to rise by 400%. This will add more than a painful 25¢ a litre in new taxes just for the price of a litre of gas.When will the Prime Minister just admit that his plan is to cost Canadians more for the gas they put in their cars?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am thinking the minister should run for Ontario Liberal leader.We also heard the PBO confirm today that the Liberal government will not meet its Paris targets by 2030. In order to meet these targets, the PBO says the carbon tax would have to rise by 400%. Guess what? Fifty percent of Canadian families are $200 away from bankruptcy. They cannot afford the Prime Minister's carbon taxes.When will the Prime Minister just admit that his plan all along has been to raise the price on the necessities of life in Canada, like putting gas in our cars and heating our homes?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Larry Maguire (Brandon—Souris, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Manitoba-Minnesota transmission project would bring clean, green Manitoba energy to coal-burning Minnesota. After five years of consultations, and approval from both Manitoba's Clean Environment Commission and the National Energy Board, the Prime Minister still refuses to approve this project. He is too proud to approve a project from a Conservative provincial government that is better for the environment than anything he can come up with. When will the Prime Minister put aside his ego, get out of the way of clean, green Manitoba energy and approve this project?ExportsHydroelectric powerManitobaMinnesotaOral questionsGinettePetitpas TaylorHon.Moncton—Riverview—DieppeAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, if the current government was serious about getting the Trans Mountain pipeline built, it would have done so three and a half years ago. Instead, the Prime Minister told Canadians he plans to phase out oil and gas. He confirmed that with anti-energy bills, by vetoing northern gateway and by regulating to death the west-to-east pipeline. On killing Canadian oil and gas, he is exactly as advertised. What is the plan to start construction on the TMX in Burnaby this June 19?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]No answer, Mr. Speaker, so we will try again.In five days, Canadians expect the Liberals to approve the Trans Mountain expansion for the second time, but big questions remain. How will they handle new court challenges? When will it be in service? Who will own and operate it? What will be the cost to taxpayers? It was supposed to be done this year, but it has not even started because of three and a half years of the Liberals' failure to exert federal jurisdiction and their mistakes on indigenous consultation. Approval is one thing, and getting it built is another. What exactly is the plan this time to ensure that construction starts in Burnaby on June 19?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is the Liberal failures that have held up the TMX.However, after only one hour last night, the Liberals said that they would shut down debate on their decision to reject 187 Senate amendments that attempted to fix their no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69. Nine provinces and every territory are demanding major changes. It will harm the entire Canadian economy. The Liberals rushed this bill through the House last year. That is why the Senate was forced to try to repair it and rewrite it completely. Will the Liberals allow MPs to actually bring the voices of Canadians to this debate or will they shut it down and ram it through again?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the media is reporting that the daily illegal crossings at Roxham Road have practically doubled. After the Prime Minister's infamous tweet, more than 23,000 people sought asylum in Quebec in 2017. In 2018, the number of asylum claims exceeded 36,000.What is more, the vast majority of these claims are made by people leaving the United States, a country where there is no civil war or famine and that has comparable social services.Why is the Prime Minister trying to have Canadians believe that these people are true refugees?Agreements and contractsBordersCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementIllegal migrantsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I believe that Canadians are well aware of what is happening. The parliamentary secretary's facts are wrong. He need only consult the statistics from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; they are available.Next week, the Prime Minister is going to meet with the President of the United States and one of the subjects on the agenda will be security and defence.Is the Prime Minister prepared to ask the U.S. President to renegotiate the safe third country agreement?Agreements and contractsAsylumCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementCanada-United States relationsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—SoulangesPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—Soulanges//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, only a Liberal would get up and say that spending more money was a good excuse for getting worse results. That is exactly what that guy is doing. He is standing and saying that the Liberals spent more money. However, we found out today, through TVA, that the number of people illegally crossing the border had doubled. That is ridiculous. It is unfair, it is uncompassionate, and spending money is not a metric. This has to stop.When will the government close the loophole in the safe third country agreement?Agreements and contractsAsylumCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementCanada-United States relationsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—SoulangesGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodImmigration, Refugees and CitizenshipInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the reality is that when we are spending that much money, we should be prioritizing the world's most vulnerable. People who are illegally crossing the border from the U.S. to claim asylum do not have the same level of need as someone languishing in a refugee camp in northern Iraq. Also, when we are talking about spending money, the Liberals have spent billions of dollars on people who likely do not have a valid asylum claim, on health care, on education and on affordable housing. Then they look at veterans and tell them they have nothing more to give. There is a choice to make. When will the government close the loophole in the safe third country agreement?Agreements and contractsAsylumCanada–U.S. Safe Third Country AgreementCanada-United States relationsOral questionsThird countryUnited States of AmericaPeterSchiefkeVaudreuil—SoulangesMattDeCourceyFredericton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1455)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, yesterday I asked the Prime Minister to commit to meeting with the Chinese president at the G20 meeting. I now understand why I did not get a response.The Chinese premier has been ignoring him since January, and the Prime Minister was hiding this embarrassing failure from the Canadian public. That is pathetic. The Canadians being detained in China and our canola, soy and pork producers need action. If the Liberal leader cannot even phone the Chinese premier, how does he plan to meet with the Chinese president at the G20?Will the Prime Minister finally admit that his foreign policy is a total failure?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsMaryamMonsefHon.Peterborough—KawarthaRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor remain illegally detained by the Chinese government for entirely political reasons. Canadian shipments of canola and meat to China are being arbitrarily blocked, putting farmers in a dire situation. News reports state that China's premier has even rejected phone calls from the Prime Minister. Tensions between our two countries continue to escalate due to the failures of the Prime Minister.With Destination Canada sponsoring a Canada Day gala in China, could the Minister of Tourism please explain how this gala will concretely address the ongoing issues that we have with China?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-Cartierville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, what about the safety of Canadians? Human rights and the rule of law are under attack in Hong Kong. Proposed changes to the extradition law would allow China to extradite anyone in Hong Kong to the mainland, including Canadians. Peaceful protestors against these changes are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. There are 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong, and another half million Canadians with relatives there. In the midst of this chaos, can the government inform us if it is issuing any advisories to Canadians currently in Hong Kong?Canadians in foreign countriesChinaInternational relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, it has been two and a half years since Mark Norman was suspended from his position as vice chief of the defence staff. It has been two years since the Prime Minister put his thumb on the scale of justice, saying that Mark Norman would end up in court. It has been five weeks since the Crown stayed the charges after receiving evidence that the government was trying to block. All this time, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman has still not been reinstated. When will the Prime Minister do the right thing and reinstate him as second in command of the Canadian Armed Forces?Canadian ForcesNorman, MarkOral questionsReintegration into working lifeMattDeCourceyFrederictonHarjit S.SajjanHon.Vancouver South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCanada Summer Jobs ProgramInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, a Toronto-area organization lost its charitable status and was fined $550,000 for funding militants in Pakistan, but it was given a Liberal Canada summer job grant worth more than $25,000. Meanwhile, 1,500 groups were denied summer jobs funding, and summer camps in Ontario and Nova Scotia are in court fighting the Prime Minister over the Liberals' values test.Will the Prime Minister commit to revoking this grant to assure Canadians that their tax dollars are not being used to fund terrorist organizations?Canada Summer JobsOral questionsStudent summer employmentMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-CartiervillePattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPresence in GalleryInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1510)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I believe you will find unanimous consent for the tabling of a document entitled “Inventaire québécois des émissions de gaz à effet de serre en 2016 et leur évolution depuis 1990”, which was prepared by Quebec's environment and climate change ministry and tabled in the Quebec National Assembly on November 29 by the Premier of Quebec. I seek unanimous consent to table this evidence-based document.Carbon pricingCarbon taxProvince of QuebecRequesting tabling of documentsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPresence in GalleryInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1510)[Translation]Does the hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent have the unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: There is no unanimous consent.The hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert.Carbon pricingCarbon taxDecisions of the HouseProvince of QuebecRequesting tabling of documentsGérardDeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentPierreNantelLongueuil—Saint-Hubert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPresence in GalleryInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1515)[Translation]I thank the hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert.The hon. member for Vancouver East is rising on a point of order.PierreNantelLongueuil—Saint-HubertJennyKwanVancouver East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPresence in GalleryInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1515)[English]As the hon. member for Vancouver East may know, the decision as to which minister responds to questions in question period is of course left to the government.We will now move to the usual Thursday question.The hon. opposition House leader.Decisions of the SpeakerOral questionsPoints of orderJennyKwanVancouver EastCandiceBergenHon.Portage—Lisgar//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodBusiness of the HouseInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (House Leader of the Official Opposition, CPC): (1515)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the government House leader if she could inform us of the business for the rest of this week and next week. Next week is our last scheduled week, so we would like to know what the House leader has scheduled.I am particularly interested in the climate emergency motion that the government brought forward, Motion No. 29. It seems odd to us that the Liberals do not want to talk about it, although maybe it is because they do not have a plan to combat climate change. We on this side of the House want to continue to debate and discuss this important motion.We are all wondering if at some point this week or next week we will be discussing Motion No. 29.Weekly Business StatementBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodHouse of CommonsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1520)[Translation]I have the honour to lay upon the table the House of Commons report to Canadians for 2019.8563-421-342 Performance Report of House of Commons: Report to Canadians for the year 2019House of Commons administrationBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1545)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, first of all, I salute and congratulate my colleague from Gatineau.When I am here in Ottawa I live in Quebec, like many members of Parliament from Quebec. He is my representative, so I always pay close attention to what he says and to the mailings he sends out fairly frequently.I also want to congratulate him on his new position as Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board. As the official opposition's Treasury Board critic, I am happy to know that I will be debating my colleague in the days we have left in the House. We are getting this started off right.It will soon be my turn to speak and to explain some of our serious concerns about this bill. For this reason, I have a question for the parliamentary secretary. The Senate's 12th proposed amendment is as follows:(b.1) use any code, moniker or contrived word or phrase in a record in place of the name of any person, corporation, entity, third party or organization;”This proposed amendment from the Senate is very important. It would mean that the government could not use monikers or codes in communications with others.I would like to know why the government rejected this amendment, which we think is very important and crucial. I will explain why shortly in my speech.Access to informationAccess to information requestsC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsInformationGregFergusHull—AylmerGregFergusHull—Aylmer//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1550)[English] Order. Questions and comments, the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.GregFergusHull—AylmerElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1555)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased and proud to speak to Bill C-58 as the official opposition critic for the Treasury Board.Let us put things in perspective. The bill was debated and passed in the House. Then it was sent to the Senate, which proposed amendments. In accordance with our legislative and parliamentary procedure, once the Senate made its proposals, these must be brought back to the House for analysis, and the House must accept or reject the proposals. The government calls the shots in that regard.Essentially, the government has decided to accept most of the Senate's amendments, but it opposed four proposals, two of which are particularly interesting.In the time I have, I will take an in-depth look and clearly explain why those four proposals should be in the act. Unfortunately, the government rejected them. That attitude has led to the one of the worst crises of public confidence in the government, especially when it comes to the respect that the government should have for the responsibilities of the Canadian army. In fact, just a few minutes ago, here in the House, we honoured some of our bravest men and women in uniform. Bill C-58 is a tricky bill. It is tricky yet essential, since it concerns privacy protection and the disclosure of information. We basically need to strike a balance between the public's right to information and privacy.I know what I am talking about, having had the good fortune and privilege of being a journalist for more than 20 years. On July 17, 1989, I was officially hired as a journalist by the TQS television station in Quebec City. That was the start of a 20-year career. Actually, the year before that, I was hired by the Canadian Press to fill in as a parliamentary reporter covering the National Assembly of Quebec. During the 1988 general election, Michel Dolbec, who was a journalist at NTR and the Canadian Press, left. I replaced him for six weeks. That was my first experience as a journalist. I am not going to get into my entire life story. My point is that this is very important to me. [English]This issue is quite important, because we are talking about the balance we have to protect, as parliamentarians, between the right to information, which means that we protect the good work of the free press in our democracy, and on the other hand, making sure that people have their privacy respected. It is not a very easy thing to address, but this is what democracy is all about. It is about letting the press do its job while making sure that people are well protected with regard to their privacy, and especially their private lives. (1600)[Translation]It has been quite a while since this legislation was first brought forward and all the political parties committed to reviewing it. It is important to remember that the first Privacy Act dates back to 1983.If we look back 36 years, we were entering a new world. Certain rules were needed. Year after year, successive governments thought that the rules would need to be updated one day to ensure that the approach taken in 1983 was still relevant. In 2006, the Conservative government initiated the first update to that legislation.As mentioned earlier by the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board and member for Hull—Aylmer, who is also my MP when I am in Ottawa, the fact is that in 1983, the World Wide Web, the system that led to the Internet, was not nearly as widely used as it is today. It was basically restricted to very small scientific and military circles.To get back to what I was saying, in 2006, the Conservatives laid the foundation for a much-needed update. From one government to the next, election after election, everyone committed to reviewing the legislation to adapt it to the realities of the 21st century, such as the advent of social media and greater access to information. This dramatically changed how journalists and investigators do their jobs, as well as the information to which everyone has access.Members will also recall that in 2016, in the last Parliament, a report was tabled that included 32 recommendations. Most of them made their way into the legislation and have been implemented to various degrees. Some of the recommendations that were not included in the legislation were subsequently proposed by the Senate and were either implemented or rejected by the government, which is part of the legislative process.[English]This piece of legislation is quite important, because since 1983, we have had a law here in Canada on the protection of personal information. It has been a long ride since then, but we have to understand that in 1983, there was no World Wide Web, aside from in some laboratories, universities and the military. People in general did not have access to this new reality of the 21st century. That is why, when my party was in office in 2006, we touched up that legislation, and finally, in this Parliament, the government tabled Bill C-58.[Translation]The first version of this bill was introduced a while back. That may come as a bit of a surprise, since this bill was the next logical step after the Liberal Party's election promise to address the dire need for more democratic privacy legislation. This promise appeared in the Liberals' infamous election platform, along with a number of other broken promises. For instance, they promised to run three modest deficits. Instead, they have posted three huge deficits in the last three years. In 2015, the Liberal Party also promised a zero deficit by 2019, but we now have a $19.8-billion deficit. The government has not kept its word, and Canadians will pay the price.The Liberals' election platform also included a promise to update the privacy legislation, which led to Bill C-58. That is why I am talking about it in this speech. Obviously, when we talk about something, we must get to the point, lay out the facts and stay focused. I just felt it was important to remind the House that the Liberal Party's 2015 election platform said that they would introduce legislation on this issue, and the result was Bill C-58. Their platform also included a string of broken promises that the Liberals will have to answer for on October 21.I would like to table the document in question, that is, the election platform. Over the past three years, I probably tried to do so 150 times, which is barely an exaggeration, but my requests are always denied. Again today, after question period, I asked for leave to table an official document of the Government of Quebec's environment ministry, which was tabled in the National Assembly by the Quebec premier on November 29. Unfortunately, once again, the government refused to let Canadians have access, here in the House, to serious, rigorous, scientific and official data on the environment compiled by the Government of Quebec. We will definitely have an opportunity to come back to this. In short, this was an important piece of legislation for the government.When the new cabinet was sworn in at Rideau Hall, in November 2015, after the November 19 election, the Prime Minister gave each new minister a mandate letter. The Minister of Democratic Institutions' mandate letter stated, “Work with the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Justice to enhance the openness of government, including supporting a review of the Access to Information Act.” Then, there is the Minister of Justice; he, too, was called upon to work collaboratively in his mandate letter. Actually, back then, the position was held by a woman. I apologize for misleading the House. The fact of the matter is that the individual who once held the position of justice minister resigned and was ejected from caucus. She now sits as an independent.(1605) This unfortunately happened in the wake of a situation considered to be shameful and outrageous by any Canadian who understands that politics and the judicial process must be kept separate. I will talk more about this later.The justice minister's mandate letter stated the following:Work with the President of the Treasury Board to enhance the openness of government, including supporting his review of the Access to Information Act to ensure that Canadians have easier access to their own personal information, that the Information Commissioner is empowered to order government information to be released and that the Act applies appropriately to the Prime Minister’s and Ministers’ Offices, as well as administrative institutions that support Parliament and the courts.I should also point out that the president of the treasury board in question also resigned. The Prime Minister claimed that he was behind all of this government's misfortunes in 2019. I will talk more about this later.That is no small task that the Prime Minister gave his former justice minister, whom he later ousted from his caucus. Many of the tasks outlined in that letter did not even come close to being accomplished, but that is another story. Canadians will have their say on October 21, just four months and a few days from now.In June 2017, after two years in office, the government introduced Bill C-58. I would like to recognize the outstanding work of my colleague in the upper chamber, Quebec Senator Claude Carignan. I believe I am allowed to say his name. Here in the House, we cannot identify MPs by their names, but I think I am allowed to do so when referring to a parliamentarian from the upper chamber.Senator Carignan is a lawyer and the one responsible for the extraordinary legislation to protect whistleblowers. Members will recall that, two years ago, Senator Carignan introduced a bill in the Senate to provide better protection for whistleblowers. I had the great honour and privilege to sponsor that bill here in the House of Commons. We would therefore like to recognize Senator Carignan's outstanding work to protect access to information, freedom of the press and journalists' ability to do their job properly.[English]Senator Carignan played a major role in the analysis of this bill. Senator Carignan is a lawyer and a well-known parliamentarian who was nominated 10 years ago by Prime Minister Harper. He is doing a tremendous job with respect to protecting whistle-blowers. He tabled a bill two years ago in the Senate. I had the privilege of being the sponsor here in the House of Commons of this great piece of legislation. I want to pay my respects to Senator Carignan, who played a major role in the study of Bill C-58 in the Senate of Canada.(1610)[Translation]In a speech he gave in the upper chamber on May 3, Senator Carignan noted that former information commissioner Suzanne Legault had expressed serious reservations in her report about Bill C-58, which had been tabled in the Senate in September 2017, writing:Rather than advancing access to information rights, Bill C-58 would instead result in a regression of existing rights.Later in his speech, Senator Carignan made the following remark:Senator Pate spoke about this. A number of Indigenous groups have asked that Bill C-58 be simply withdrawn. Former information commissioners have spoken out against it. Several commentators hope it will not be passed. Senator McCoy pointed out that Bill C-58 makes a mockery of the very essence of access to information, and I share her opinion. She wanted the Senate to block the bill, but she dares not do it now.Senator Carignan was warning of a very valid and relevant issue that had been raised by many commentators and journalists. Many professional journalists' associations felt that, although the government got elected by vaunting its lofty principles, the very essence of Bill C-58 fell well short of those goals. As former information commissioner Suzanne Legault said, this was not a step forward, it was a step back. That is why the Senate did its work. Members will recall that the official opposition voted against the bill. Since we are now at the stage following the upper chamber's study of the bill and the tabling of amendments, let us focus on what the senators did.That is why the amendments were tabled and voted for by a majority of senators. As I said, we are now studying the proposed amendments.[English]In the big picture, the government accepted most of the amendments tabled by the Senate, but unfortunately decided to put aside what we consider to be four key elements of this legislation and the amendment tabled by the the Senate.The government said, in a very respectful way in the words that were read a few minutes ago, that it put aside amendments 3 and 12 and will also put aside paragraph 6. It also put aside amendment 15(c).[Translation]Now let us talk about two Senate amendments that we believe should be included in the legislation. Unfortunately, the current government is rejecting those amendments. I will now look at amendment 12, which I mentioned earlier in my question to the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board. The amendment proposes:12. New clause 30.2, page 17: Add the following after line 37:“30.2 Subsection 67.1(1) of the Act is amended by adding the following after paragraph (b): (b.1) use any code, moniker or contrived word or phrase in a record in place of the name of any person, corporation, entity, third party or organization;”.This is a key element that I will have a chance to debate later. I will also provide a specific example that we believe justifies keeping this subsection. Unfortunately, this amendment was rejected by the current government.In the next few minutes, I will go over the tragic ordeal our country went through because of this government's arrogant attitude. I am referring to the sad affair of Vice-Admiral Norman.The other amendment that we believe should have been accepted is amendment 3, which reads:3. New clause 6.2, page 4: Add the following after line 4:“6.2 Subsection 9(2) of the Act is replaced by the following:(2) An extension of a time limit under paragraph (1)(a) or (b) may not be for more than 30 days except with the prior written consent of the Information Commissioner.”.Before getting to the topic at hand, I want to commend the outstanding work of the legislative drafters. When we read clauses of bills, they can seem arduous and hard to understand. They are especially difficult to follow since the language is very technical. I would like to commend the outstanding work of the legislative drafters of the Parliament of Canada, who check, word for word, line by line—Access to informationAccess to information requestsC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsInformationGregFergusHull—AylmerBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1615)[Translation]The member for Cariboo—Prince George on a point of order.GérardDeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1615)[English] Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I do not think we have quorum.Points of orderQuorumBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1615)[English]We do not have quorum. I would ask for the bells to ring. And the bells having rung:Decisions of the SpeakerDivision bellsPoints of orderQuorumToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1615)[English]We now have a quorum.The hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.QuorumBruceStantonSimcoe NorthGérardDeltellLouis-Saint-Laurent//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1615)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I thank my B.C. colleague for reminding us about the respect that we, as parliamentarians, should have for rules and customs. It is not because we are full of ourselves that we want to have a lot of people here listening to the person who has the floor, who just so happens to be me right now.I want to recognize the outstanding work done by the people who draft bills for Canada's Parliament, because that is an extremely difficult job. It takes years of practice and, above all, dedication to doing things right, down to the last detail. I very much appreciate their work.In December 2004, if memory serves, I did a story on the legislative specialists working for Quebec's revenue ministry. They are the people who write budget implementation bills, which are extremely intricate. I would just like to pay tribute to the Hon. Lawrence Bergman, Quebec's revenue minister under the Hon. Jean Charest. Mr. Charest was well known here in the House of Commons from 1984 to 1997 as an MP, minister, deputy prime minister, party leader and deputy speaker of the House of Commons.That said, we think it is important to include those four elements in the legislation, which is exactly what the Liberal government did not do. I mentioned that we Conservatives were particularly concerned about the issue of monikers. In the Norman affair, unfortunately, people with bad intentions—and I can say this with the protection of the House—started a witch hunt. I will prove this over the new few minutes. That is completely unacceptable in our democratic system, especially when we consider the respect that the political branch needs to show for the legal system and the military system. Unfortunately, there were attempts to lump everything all together, without talking about the financial repercussions it could have on Canada's shipping industry.The people conducting the investigations used code names to cover up their work. In our view, that practice should be harshly condemned. We applauded the fact that the Senate adopted amendment 3, which would put an end to that practice. As the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board announced, it is their right and their prerogative, and I respect that. I am a parliamentarian first and foremost, and a champion of democracy above all else. However, we believe that the government is wrong to reject that amendment, because it pertains to an abhorrent practice and one of the most direct attacks by political authority on judicial authority and military authority, all for financial gain and dishonourable purposes.I am going to talk about what happened with the Asterix, since that is what this is all about, as well as Vice-Admiral Norman and the contract awarded by the Government of Canada in 2015 for the construction of that supply ship. The contract was awarded to a shipyard in Lévis called Davie. Meanwhile, pressure was being applied by a competing shipyard, Irving, which interfered in the executive process of our parliamentary system by lobbying some of the most senior cabinet members directly.We should first talk about Vice-Admiral Norman, one of the most decorated and honourable members of the Canadian military. His dedication, professionalism and sense of duty led him to accomplish great things. He is the son of an army officer and grandson of a First World War veteran; honour runs in his blood. Vice-Admiral Norman studied in Kingston before joining the naval reserve and pursuing a career in the navy. He is a specialist in above water warfare and has held a number of posts, including on the maiden operational deployment of HMCS Halifax, and as executive officer of HMCS Iroquois, commanding officer of the frigate HMCS St. Johns and, more recently, commander of Canadian Fleet Atlantic.(1620)At every step of his career, from his days in the naval reserve to his promotion to one of the highest ranks in the navy, that of vice-admiral, he always acted with a level of honour befitting his rank, never betraying the faith placed in him by his peers.Sadly, history will show that this government dragged an honourable man through the mud for their own, purely self-serving, financial purposes. The government disgraced itself. Incidentally, let's hope the Canadian public voices its extreme displeasure over this issue on October 21.Let's not forget that all of this happened because, during the 41st Parliament, the previous government, a Conservative government, contracted the Davie shipyard in Lévis to build a supply ship.As soon as the Conservative government was defeated and the new Liberal government took over, Irving immediately started pressuring the newly elected government to review the decision. This resulted in a judicial inquiry, which led to the vice-admiral, an honourable man, being dismissed and dragged through the mud by the current government, including the Prime Minister, who made some unfortunate comments. Heads of state need to choose their words carefully. Unfortunately, on two separate occasions, the Prime Minister said that there would be a trial, even though nothing had been announced. This was some utterly unacceptable political interference in the judicial system, not unlike what we saw with the SNC-Lavalin scandal. It is worth remembering all of this.Since my time is limited, I will be brief, but I do want to remind members about the unfortunate Vice-Admiral Norman affair, which runs deep and which will leave a permanent scar on this government.Paul Martin's Liberal government looked at the possibility of replacing some supply ships in 2004, but the decision was ultimately made in 2015.There had been talk of the need for a new supply ship since 2004 and a number of steps were taken. Finally, on November 18, 2014, Vice-Admiral Norman informed the Standing Committee on National Defence that Canada needed new supply ships.In 2004, Paul Martin's Liberal government announced that Canada would need a new supply ship. Then, on November 18, 2014, in front of a parliamentary committee, Vice-Admiral Norman stated that Canada was indeed in need of a new supply ship. In January 2015, the federal government decided that it needed to follow through on that request. On June 23, 2015, the current Premier of Alberta, the Hon. Jason Kenney, who was the defence minister at the time, announced that the government was in discussions with Davie shipyard in Lévis about a temporary supply ship.This announcement was made on June 23, on the eve of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, Quebec's national holiday or, as some call it, the summer solstice, but that is another story. This happened just a few hours before Quebec's national holiday.On June 23, 2015, the defence minister, on behalf of the Conservative government, announced that it was initiating talks with Davie. On August 1, 2015, the Conservative government announced, a few hours before the election was called, that the Government of Canada had signed a letter of intent with Davie shipyard for the construction of a supply ship. Everything was going well up to that point. However, on October 19, 2015, Canadians cast their ballots, and the Liberal Party came to power. We are democrats and we respect the people's decision.On October 8, 2015, the MV Asterix, which was chosen by Davie to be refitted as a supply ship, arrived at the shipyard in Quebec City. (1625)November 17, 2015, is when the political interference in the entirely appropriate process initiated by the former government began.I want to remind members that that is no small thing. I represent a riding in Quebec City, where the issue attracts considerable attention. Once again, for the third time, I would remind members, because this does in fact relate to Bill C-58, that in my 20 years as a journalist in Quebec City, I reported on the Davie shipyard between 150 to 200 times.Of those 150 to 200 news reports, maybe three of them were positive because, unfortunately, as I recall, things were never going well for Davie. Our government granted funding to this shipyard, which was established in 1880. That is no small thing, and this is no small shipyard that we are talking about. It is the biggest shipyard we have with two huge dry docks where these sorts of big jobs can be done.Some members will likely wonder why the Conservative government did not do anything about that in 2011. I will say two things. First, the government announcement in 2011 was based on the recommendations of a neutral and independent committee. Second, it is important to remember that, sadly, the Davie shipyard was technically bankrupt in 2011. No one takes any joy in that, but facts are facts. I would invite members to ask themselves whether they would be prepared to hire a company that is technically bankrupt to build their house. I am not so sure anyone would. That is what happened in 2011.However, in 2015, under our government, Canada granted Davie a contract to build a supply ship and we all know now how well that turned out. I can confirm that the ship was indeed delivered on time and on budget. That does not happen very often. Davie workers and managers, the union leaders, and the new head and owner of the Davie shipyard all deserve our warmest congratulations and salutations for delivering this important part of Canada's arsenal, the Asterix, on time and on budget.I was there on July 20, 2017, when Pauline Théberge, wife of the Hon. Michel Doyon, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, broke a sacrificial bottle on the ship for good luck. We were there. I was very pleased and honoured to attend the ceremony along with a number of MPs and former Conservative ministers. Unfortunately, the current government was conspicuously absent from what was an important, positive and exciting event for Canada. That absence spoke volumes.Getting back to our story about Mr. Norman and the contract for the Asterix, on November 17, 2015, just a few days after the Liberal government's cabinet was sworn in at Rideau Hall, James Irving, Irving's co-CEO, sent a letter to four Liberal ministers, namely the Minister of National Defence, the Minister of Finance, the former minister of public services and procurement, and the former Treasury Board president, Scott Brison. We have heard that name a lot over the past few months, and as we will see, there may be something of a connection with what happened here.Mr. Irving went to bat for his shipyard, which is basically his job, and communicated directly with four of this government's senior ministers, including the Treasury Board president, the Minister of Defence and the Minister of Finance. They might not be the three aces, but they are pretty close. They are at the top of the federal government hierarchy. Mr. Irving wanted to revisit the contract awarded by the previous government.Then, as it turns out, on November 19, 2015, during a federal cabinet meeting that Vice-Admiral Norman did not attend, the Treasury Board president shelved the Asterix project for two months to review the contract that had been awarded.It was not until later that we found out why. Cabinet confidences were leaked to CBC journalist James Cudmore, who, on November 20, 2015, reported that the letter was not signed by November 30 as it should have been.(1630)That is where the problems in this story all began. On November 16, 2016, the RCMP started putting Vice-Admiral Norman under surveillance. There was a police car in front of his house in Orleans, a suburb of Ottawa. As I was saying, he was dragged through the mud, and it was despicable. On January 9, 2017, seven police officers conducted a raid of Vice-Admiral Norman's home.[English] Let me quote some information. The seven police officers arrived at Vice-Admiral Mark Norman's home. They “stayed [in the house] for six hours, and seized a desktop computer, a laptop, two cell phones and three iPads, one owned by [Norman's wife].” Norman's defence would later argue that the RCMP, which had a warrant to seize “DND files and related material”, overstepped “by also seizing thousands of pieces of personal effects from the Norman family.”This is totally unacceptable and outrageous. We are talking about one of the top soldiers in the Canadian Army. We are talking about the number two person in the Canadian Army, and the Liberals did not treat this honourable man as highly as they should treat a man who was so honourable in his career and in his personal life.[Translation]Other reprehensible events followed. The vice-admiral was relieved of his duties. On November 20, 2017, the Canadian government refused Vice-Admiral Norman's request for financial assistance for the legal expenses stemming from this crisis.The Asterix was officially christened by the wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec in July 2017. On December 23, 2017, the supply ship Asterix left Davie shipyard, near Quebec City, to commence operations. Over the past two years, the supply ship Asterix has distinguished itself as one of the best, if not the best, ship of all of Canada's allies. The contract our government awarded to the Davie shipyard was completed impeccably, not only in terms of budgets and deadlines, but also in terms of our military's needs.Everything was going well until the political interference began. When asked about it, the Prime Minister twice said that Vice-Admiral Norman would be charged with a crime. He said that before any suit was officially filed in court. That is despicable. We are talking about clear interference by the Prime Minister of Canada, who is the head of the government, and therefore the head of the executive branch and, to some extent, the head of the legislative branch, in the judicial process.This is not the only time he did this. We all remember the terrible SNC-Lavalin scandal, which led to the resignation of two senior government ministers, namely the former justice minister and the former president of the Treasury Board. Such political interference in the justice system is despicable.The Prime Minister did not have to publicly announce that the Norman case would go to trial. We should let the courts and the justice system do their work. We cannot start predicting that certain cases will go to trial, unless we are talking about a backdoor deal, which we are not, even if it almost seems that way. That is what is despicable here.What happened next? Vice-Admiral Norman was relieved of his duties under a cloud of deep suspicion. Police searched his home and confiscated his family's personal property. They went through his wife's iPad looking for information. Vice-Admiral Norman eventually requested access to evidence, emails and other records he needed to mount a full and complete defence. The government's lawyers continuously refused to grant him access to this important information, which was vital to mounting a full and complete defence of a man as honourable as the vice-admiral. (1635)When the Canadian military's second-in-command is implicated in a case, we would at least expect the government to remain at arm's length. On the contrary, day after day, this government wanted to ensure that Mr. Norman did not have access to a full and complete defence. It refused to grant the financial assistance that would normally be provided to a man of his rank under such circumstances. Even when the charges were dropped, the government continued to refuse him this financial assistance, even though it had spent almost $15 million prosecuting him. The government steadfastly refused his request for financial assistance. At the beginning of the court case, a request was made for access to important records, and there again, the government refused. Fortunately, the judicial system worked. A judge gave Mr. Norman access to certain pieces of evidence. Once everyone had access to this information, it suddenly became clear that there was no case and that this man should never have been dragged through the courts and the mud. This case will long be remembered by every Canadian as a shameful incident. Politicians interfered in a court case that was without merit.Vice-Admiral Norman suffered for months and was left to defend himself alone and unaided. On May 8, the government realized that it might not have a case. It therefore dropped the charges against Mr. Norman and finally decided to pay his legal fees. My goodness, that is the least it could do. The government created this whole problem for nothing.Once the government was forced by the court to disclose all of the evidence Mr. Norman was entitled to see, and once Canadian legal experts had access to this evidence, suddenly, there was no more story. What did this evidence include? Here is where I will make the connection to Bill C-58 and the Senate's third amendment, which was rejected by this government.On December 18, 2018, Vice-Admiral Norman's team called two surprise witnesses, who provided evidence proving that Vice-Admiral Norman had the right to see names that had been redacted. The people in power had avoided using his name in their emails, specifically to avoid identifying him. This is a fundamental point. Furthermore, on January 29, 2019, a list was released showing acronyms and other military terms that had been used to refer to Vice-Admiral Norman.[English]Let me quote this in English because, in the proof, the important element was all written in English. Instead of talking about Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, they referred to him as “the boss,” “N3” and “C34”. The list was compiled by DND. Under questioning, the chief of the defence staff, General Jonathan Vance, said that “unless officials were specifically instructed to use these as search terms, subpoenas from Norman’s defence team may not have turned up documents that used those phrases.”(1640)[Translation]That is precisely why the Senate's third amendment must be maintained. The use of code names, especially in cases like this one, is completely unacceptable in our view. Mr. Speaker, let me correct something I just said. It is not amendment 3, but rather amendment 12. In my conversations with my colleagues, I have always called it the Norman amendment. This change aims to ensure that no one gets in the bad habit of identifying key people in criminal cases by code names. Incidentally, this was not actually a criminal case.In the end, they realized that this man was more of a victim of the obnoxious attitude adopted by this government for purposes that I dare not even mention here in the House. The Liberals wanted to please certain friends here and there, rather than all Canadians. In our view, this use of code names should be stopped.I know this brings up bad memories for the government. If I were a Liberal, I would definitely feel uncomfortable about this situation, the terrible Norman scandal, which has the Liberal government's fingerprints all over it.This soldier dedicated his professional life to defending Canada with honour and dignity. He came from the humblest naval beginnings to rise through the ranks of the Royal Canadian Navy. At the peak of his career and his art, this man made sure that we could trust Canadian industry and the workers at the Davie shipyard in Lévis. Yes, everything was going well, yes, it was a success, and yes, it could be completed on time and on budget.Access to informationAccess to information requestsC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCanadian ForcesChantier Davie Canada Inc.Consideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsGovernment contractsInformationInformation leaksIrving Shipbuilding Inc.Legal proceedingsNorman, MarkShipbuilding industryBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1640)[Translation]I will take a minute to announce the questions for the adjournment debate this evening.It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni, The Environment; the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, Justice; the hon. member for Bow River, International Trade.The hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.GérardDeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentGérardDeltellLouis-Saint-Laurent//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1640)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I always have great respect for your role, and the information you shared a few moments ago was entirely relevant.[English]I just want to emphasize the fact that the bill, which is about privacy, is important legislation. It is a refresh of something that was done in 1983 and touched up in 2006. Now it is time to refresh it and address the issue of the World Wide Web and the new realities of the 21st century.I recognize and appreciate the fact that the bill would be reviewed in five years from now, which is good. However, there are issues that could have been addressed more correctly by the Liberal government. In our parliamentary system, we have the privilege of another House, the Senate, which is there to review every element without the political agenda of members of Parliament. Great senators, like Senator Claude Carignan from Quebec, did a tremendous job to upgrade the bill. They tabled some very important amendments, especially amendment 12, which states that we should not use nicknames or other indications when identifying people, businesses or groups. We have to be clear. The government was wrong when it decided not to accept amendment 12. It should have kept it in the bill. Unfortunately, an example of something the Liberal government will have to live with forever was its attack on an honourable man, Vice-Admiral Norman, without any proof. He was put in a very tough situation. The government put him out of his office and nearly put him out of his house when the RCMP arrived at the family home and grabbed hundreds of the family's personal effects. It was a disgrace what the government did. The court decided to allow the delivery of key information and then suddenly there was no more case, even when the Prime Minister had said twice before any charges were filed that it would finish in court. This is totally unacceptable.As I explained in the last hour, this is why we have really big concerns with the bill as tabled by the government, especially because the government refused to address important amendments tabled by the Senate.Access to informationAccess to information requestsC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCanadian ForcesConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsInformationInformation leaksNorman, MarkBruceStantonSimcoe NorthGregFergusHull—Aylmer//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1645)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his kind words, saying I had been a good journalist for 20 years. I will not repeat that I won four national awards when I was a journalist. This was for the private sector of industry.[Translation]Sometimes my colleague refers to me as the member for Louis-Hébert, when I am actually the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent. Sometimes I say he is the member for Gatineau, when he is actually the member for Hull—Aylmer. Soon there will be a member for Louis-Hébert from my party. My party is currently the official opposition, but that is only temporary. In four months, we will be on the government side, if that is what Canadians want, of course.It is rather strange to hear the member trying to lecture the Conservative government. Need I remind him that his leader, the Prime Minister, is the only prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking the ethics rules? He did so not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. What is more, he is currently under investigation for a fifth incident.The member dared to mention the Auditor General. Need I remind him that, for the first time in history, the Auditor General has informed Parliament and the government that he does not have enough money to carry out two major investigations? That is why he needs to have the necessary funding. When we asked the entire Canadian government to help us deal with the worst economic crisis in the history of the 20th century since the Great Depression in the 1930s, and even when all of the institutions made the necessary efforts, the Auditor General never had to set aside any investigations that were under way. Never. However, that is what is happening under this government. I therefore encourage the member to get the facts.Access to informationC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsGregFergusHull—AylmerMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelaga//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1650)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, everyone has their own strategy or approach to studying a bill. In this case, we looked at the bill in its entirety. In our view, there were so many aspects to be analyzed that the whole bill would have had to be rewritten. That is why we were very cautious. Once the bill had gone through the parliamentary process, that is, once it had gone through all three stages in the House and been studied in the Senate, and the Senate amendments had been submitted to the House, we felt it made sense to analyze each element of the bill. We are sad to see that the government has decided to reject amendment 12 as proposed and adopted by the Senate.Access to informationC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelagaKellyMcCauleyEdmonton West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (1650)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent for highlighting many of the issues we have with Bill C-58, and a lot of the failings of the government when it comes to transparency.My colleague joined us recently on the operations committee, beating out 98 other Conservatives who were desperate to join me on that committee. Before he joined us, the committee put together a report on whistleblowers. Canada has some of the weakest whistleblower protections for public servants in the OECD.The committee put together a unanimous report on how we could better protect public servants. We heard story after story, very similar to that of Vice-Admiral Norman, of public servants who came forward and had their lives destroyed by the government for daring to expose corruption and negligence, almost identical to Vice-Admiral Norman's story.We put together a unanimous report, submitted it to the government. The then Treasury Board president, Scott Brison, took the report, promptly threw it in the garbage and did nothing. Later, we summoned him to the committee and he refused to return to the committee to report on why he was doing nothing to protect whistleblowers.We have seen the Liberal government time and again refuse to be transparent. Are these the actions of a government that is trying to be open and transparent?Access to informationC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDisclosure of wrongdoing in the workplaceGovernment accountabilityGovernment billsGérardDeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentGérardDeltellLouis-Saint-Laurent//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1650)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have been on the OGGO, the government operations and estimates committee, with the member for the last year. I have learned a lot from his experiences.I would remind the House that he was the one who highlighted the fact that in the last budget, the government did not calculate correctly. That was not a big surprise for us. The Liberals were elected by talking about a zero deficit in 2019. The reality is exactly the reverse of that. There is a huge deficit of nearly $20 billion.The member raised a very serious issue. Civil servants should have the protection necessary to blow the whistle when things are not going well, as far as they are concerned. Those are the first witnesses. Civil servants are the first witnesses to how things could go wrong and how we could fix it. For that, they should have all the protection necessary. Hopefully, those civil servants will have all the protection they need and also will not have to suffer attacks from other people, especially those driven by a political agenda, as happened, unfortunately, to one of the bravest soldiers we have in the Canadian Army, Vice-Admiral Norman. He had to suffer for the last two years because of the Liberal government.Access to informationC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDisclosure of wrongdoing in the workplaceGovernment accountabilityGovernment billsKellyMcCauleyEdmonton WestKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell: (1655)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to listen to the speeches from my colleague for Winnipeg North. If I do not have a chance to see him before the weekend, I know he will be at Macdonald's or Tim Hortons, having a coffee with constituents this weekend. One day I will go there and surprise him.The hon. member brings up an important issue. It is true that in 1983, the government of the Prime Minister's father tabled a bill that was a first part of the story. However, in 2006, a government elected by the people, led by the Right Hon. Stephen Harper, touched up this bill. Yes, we did achieve something.Unfortunately, the member seems to have forgotten the fact that in 2006, under a Conservative government, we addressed this issue. Did we address it as he would have preferred? Maybe not, but democracy is all about that.We were elected three times to achieve our goal.Access to informationC-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthMurrayRankinVictoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersAccess to Information ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1720)[English]Before resuming debate, I will let the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby know we are just shy of the 10 minutes that are remaining in the time for debate at this particular juncture of the day. We will have to interrupt at 5:30 p.m. for the usual hour for Private Members' Business, but I will give him an indication ahead of the interruption in the usual fashion.Resuming debate, the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby.MurrayRankinVictoriaPeterJulianNew Westminster—Burnaby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessFederal Courts ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1730)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to Bill C-331, which was brought forward by the member for New Westminster—Burnaby.I will talk about the bill and what it purports to do, and then I want to talk about the state of the nation in terms of the Federal Court system, because this bill proposes to make changes there.The bill's intent is “[to amend] the Federal Courts Act to provide for the jurisdiction of the Federal Court over civil claims brought by non-Canadians in respect of alleged violations outside Canada of international law or a treaty to which Canada is party.”The intent of the member who brought forward this private member's business was to address instances where, for example, Canadian companies operating in other jurisdictions are not being good corporate citizens and are violating in some way the human rights of individuals there. In the member's speech, which I reviewed, he had a number of examples of companies. A lot of them were mining companies, such a Nevsun Resources, which had a gold, zinc and copper mine in Eritrea, where there were allegations of forced labour, slavery and torture of workers. Another case was the one of Hudbay Minerals in Guatemala, where people were shot and killed. The intent of this bill is to allow people who may not be Canadians and who have had things happen to them outside of Canada to come and use the Canadian Federal Court system to pursue civil actions.The issue I have with that, first of all, is that the Federal Court system, as it is today, under the current Liberal government, is in tatters. The former justice minister did not appoint a sufficient number of judges, so court cases were backed up and there was a huge logjam. As a result of that, many murder cases and rape cases were being tossed out of court because they had been in the queue for more than two years, and according to Jordan's principle, these people, guilty of heinous crimes, have gone free.The government has continually eroded the execution of justice in Canada with a weakening of the rules. The government introduced legislation such as C-75, which took some very serious crimes, such as the forcible confinement of a minor, and reduced them to summary convictions, which means a penalty of less than two years or a fine. There was a whole list of charges in that bill that took serious crimes and brought them back to something that was minor in nature. I would argue that a fine for the forcible confinement of a minor is like a slap on the wrist for something that I think all Canadians would agree is heinous.We also saw the situation with Tori Stafford's killer, Terri-Lynne McClintic, who, even though she viciously participated in the murder of a child, was allowed to go to a healing lodge, where there was no security and she was in the presence of parents who had their children with them when they came to work. I am concerned that we need to strengthen our Federal Court system as it stands today, not weaken it, and the Liberal government has not done that. I am concerned that if we open it up to non-Canadians in other countries, they would come and bring an extra caseload of court cases to a court system that is arguably already under stress and not delivering. There are Canadian crimes that we are not able to adequately prosecute on time. That is a real difficulty.Within the bill, there are 17 different types of cases that could be brought forward. I will go through a few of these and talk about incidents that have occurred during the 42nd Parliament, to give members an idea of the volume of these cases that could come before the Federal Court.(1735)First on the list is “genocide”, which everyone knows is a very serious crime. If we think about some of the genocides that have happened during this Parliament, the Yazidis come to mind. Yazidi women were brought to Canada after the genocide where those people were exterminated by ISIS terrorists. That is one. There are still outstanding actions to be taken on Rwanda. That is another genocide that could come our way.Another item on the list is “slavery or slave trading”. Human trafficking of someone under 18 is also on the list. Human trafficking is a huge issue in Canada. In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, which is a border city, we see a huge amount of human trafficking happening. There is an actual network between Sarnia and Toronto that couriers people, and not just people from out of the country. Young Canadian boys and girls are lured into this and trapped in that lifestyle for years. There is no doubt that it is a heinous crime, but when I think about the number of these cases in Canada today and the fact that we do not have the resources to adequately prosecute our own, I am concerned about opening that up to the rest of the world.Any “extrajudicial killing or the enforced disappearance of a person” is on the list. Let us think about the Saudi Arabian journalist who was exterminated. Let us think about the two Canadian men who were killed in the Philippines.Also on the list is “systemic discrimination”. This opens it way up. When I was the chair of the status of women committee, we had visits of people from countries all over the world where women were being systematically discriminated against. They came to see what we were doing here in Canada. Some would argue that we are still seeing systemic discrimination within our own country. LGBTQ is another group that sees a lot of systemic discrimination across the world. If all of those cases came and flooded our courts, we would be very busy indeed.The human rights violations that we are seeing right now in Hong Kong come to mind. There are 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong, and the Chinese government is trying to bring in extradition rules that would allow it to take anyone from Hong Kong and bring him or her to China. I am very concerned that if this bill came into force, there might be a lot of non-Canadians who would want to take advantage of the Canadian court system to pursue some civil charges there as well.Child soldiers are another item on the list. We know that in every battle we are seeing from ISIS, child soldiers are being raised up. We see that in a bunch of the wars that are happening in Africa and similar places. That would open it up to a huge number of people, as well, who may want to take action and get some civil reward from the Canadian court.“Rape” is also on the list. Rape is rampant in Canada. The data says that one in three Canadian women will experience sexual violence during her life. When we think about how many cases we have, and how many of those are being kicked out of court, we really do not have the capacity to take others on.“Forced abortion” and “forced sterilization” are on the list. We heard testimony today at the health committee about forced sterilization and the thousands of women in Canada who are undergoing this. It is horrible, but, once again, there are lots of cases of our own to take care of.Issues like pollution have been put on the list. Let us think about plastics pollution by non-Canadians. We know that 95% of ocean pollution is happening from eight rivers in Asia and two in Africa. Again, that is a huge volume of complaints that could be brought forward.“Environmental emergency” has been added. That could be like the climate emergency that the Liberals brought in debate. The debate was never brought back, so it must have been a non-urgent emergency. Climate emergencies and environmental emergencies like that could also make the list. I know the member was well-intentioned in bringing the bill forward and wanting to address those Canadian corporations, for example, but the bill needs to be narrower in scope, and I do not think we have the capacity in the Federal Court system. I would encourage the government of the day, or, on October 21, the Conservative government, to restore the federal justice system.C-331, An Act to amend the Federal Courts Act (international promotion and protection of human rights)Civil and human rightsForeign countriesMining industryPrivate Members' BillsSecond readingAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—Langford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1830)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this incredible disrespect for Canadians across the country, that the Liberals would shut down debate on probably one of the most controversial pieces of legislation that the Liberal government has put forward. Six premiers have signed a letter, stating that the legislation would devastate their natural resources development and economic opportunities. The Prime Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change have said that the letter from these premiers, who were duly elected by their constituents, by a vast majority I may add, is pandering to a small and disgruntled portion of the population. These premiers represent about 60% of Canada's population, more than 60% of our GDP. It is absolutely disrespectful for the Prime Minister and the parliamentary secretary to say that they are pandering and are a challenge to national unity. Then, as a response to that, the Liberals have come here this evening and have shut down debate on the consideration of 187 amendments from the Senate, of which they have thrown aside the majority. This is an incredible disservice. The Liberals said that they would be doing government differently, that they were going to be open and transparent and that there were going to be sunny ways. The Senate went across the country and listened to thousands of stakeholders. The majority of those stakeholders brought forward very real concerns about what the legislation would do to their economic opportunities not only in their provinces but in their communities. I am talking about nine different provinces, and the premiers have voiced concerns with the legislation.It is not just Conservative premiers. The NDP former premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, the former Liberal premier of B.C., Christy Clark, and the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador have all voiced concerns.How, in good conscience, can the minister shut down debate on legislation that nine premiers and tens of thousands of Canadians have said would be devastating, without even listening or having any regard for their input on the legislation? How, in good conscience, can she ignore the feelings of Canadians?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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89167MattJenerouxMatt-JenerouxEdmonton RiverbendConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/JenerouxMatt_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Matt Jeneroux (Edmonton Riverbend, CPC): (1840)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a comment. This is from Cenovus Energy, a major employer in my home province of Alberta:[Bill C-69] is a devastating blow to the future of the Canadian economy.It's important to stress that our industry has never asked for a free or easy ride. We expect rigorous regulation and oversight. But when projects meet all reasonable regulatory requirements, proponents and their investors need a level of certainty that those projects will be built. Our industry undertook an unprecedented level of engagement with the government on Bill C-69. We are deeply disappointed that the changes we proposed in good faith, and were told were workable, were not accepted. The amendments we proposed were the bare minimum required for the Bill to be workable. And those recommendations were based on the input of Canadians, including many Indigenous leaders.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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1845)[English]Mr. Speaker, earlier today in question period, the minister, in a response to one of my colleague's question on the bill, said that the Senate had travelled across the country. Yet, the minister who is citing this feedback is standing here and shutting down debate on this bill that industry has said will ensure there is no more investment in the energy sector for years to come.Everything the minister has said today is talking points and hogwash. When we talk about real change, on a bill that has such detrimental impacts for our economy, why are we not debating a major, extreme package of amendments from the Senate on this? The Liberals are trying to ram this bill through in the dying days of Parliament to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of workers, not just today but for the future of our country.The minister has never reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Her carbon tax is a cash grab. The Liberals have no environmental plan, and now the minister is shutting down debate on an amendment package that has a material impact on my constituents and virtually everybody else's who is sitting on this side of the aisle. That is wrong and it is divisive. It is that minister who is starting a national unity debate in the country. If she is any modicum of respect for this place or for Canadians who work in the energy sector, she would at least allow debate on the Senate amendments. By shutting it down, she is abrogating her responsibility to this place and to Canadian democracy. She is ashamed, and she should not be speaking in support of this amendment to shut down debate.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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsParliamentary democracyCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1855)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is challenging. The emotion that our colleagues are hearing is because we are experiencing job losses in our ridings. I literally just got off the phone with another major employer in my riding that announced a major closure this morning and is announcing another one tonight. Why is that? It is because of the inconsistent messages and the shaky policies that the government is putting forward.The minister wants to stand there and say that we should be getting together and developing policy that everybody can agree with. However, the challenge is that when people offer their insight, the Liberals do not listen. She is spewing the talking points that environmental groups, such as Tides, Greenpeace and WWF have all used to tarnish our natural resource sector. In October, when Canadians put the minister out of work, which environmental group is she going to go to, Tides, WWF or Greenpeace?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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1855)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is really disappointing to be here tonight. I happened to sit in on the committee when Bill C-69 was being studied clause by clause. I sat in that night until the late hours of the evening and watched the government decide to lump all of the amendments together and vote on them as an entire group, with no discussion on each amendment, clause by clause. It was absolutely disgusting. There were over 600 amendments proposed at that stage. Over 300 of them came from the government's own Liberal Party. It is truly a bill that was so poorly drafted it should have been thrown out at that time.Now we see 229 amendments from the Senate. Most of them have been thrown out by the Liberal government. We have six premiers, representing over 60% of Canadians, who are opposed to this bill saying it should be thrown out. How can the minister stand there and say that the government has truly consulted with Canadians and actually listened to them when 60% are saying it should be thrown out?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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsPublic consultationAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1900)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister went to New York and spoke to some young graduates and said, “Respect people who don't look or think like you.” However, when a group of premiers do precisely that, and express concerns that the federal government is pushing into their provincial jurisdictions, he casts that aside and accuses them of being irresponsible game players against national unity.I remember reading about the national energy program and the distain that westerners had toward eastern Canada. It took generations to be able to get on a level playing field where people felt that Ottawa was at least trying to be fair by being equally unfair to everyone. The current government is demonizing, and that pain is being felt not just in Alberta but in provinces where premiers are asking the government to stay out of their jurisdiction. Why the disdain? I understand the disdain on this side of the House. I understand the Liberals think they will get closure from here, but you will get no closure from the provinces that you are getting into, not one bit.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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment Act [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionHon. Candice Bergen: (1900)[English]Mr. Speaker, here is what is happening. This is the most destructive bill to this country that has been proposed by any government and the debate has been shut down. Members of Parliament are not allowed to speak their constituents' concerns, so there has been a lot of heckling going on. I agree because Bill C-69 is the worst piece of legislation—Some hon. members: Oh, oh!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 ActsClosureEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsParliamentary democracyAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1945)[English]Motion agreed toI declare the motion carried.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 ActsClosureDecisions of the HouseEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1945)[English]The hon. member for Lakeland was in the midst of her speech and we will go to her now. The hon. member for Lakeland.BruceStantonSimcoe NorthShannonStubbsLakeland//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1945)[English]Mr. Speaker, words cannot begin to describe how alarming, outrageous and insane it is that the Liberals, after one hour of debate, are shutting it down and forcing a vote on their rejection of the majority of 187 necessary Senate amendments to Bill C-69.The Liberals are gutting all the substantive amendments that indigenous communities and businesses, nine out 10 provinces, all three territories and resource and other private sector proponents insisted must be included to prevent Bill C-69 from harming the whole Canadian economy, interfering with provinces and burdening municipalities with, for example, the rejection of 11 of the 15 amendments to part 3 of the bill. Instead of rising to the occasion and delivering their promise to work collaboratively with indigenous people and with other levels of government, the Liberals are ignoring most of their constructive suggestions for improvement and recklessly ramming it through, just as they did in the House of Commons a year ago—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 ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsGovernment performanceBruceStantonSimcoe NorthCandiceBergenHon.Portage—Lisgar//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen: (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I would ask that members please show some respect and stop talking on that side of the House.Noise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingPoints of orderShannonStubbsLakelandBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1950)[English]I thank the hon. opposition House leader for bringing attention to the fact that it is quite noisy in the chamber. I would ask hon. members, if they wish to carry on conversations, to please make their way to their respective lobbies.The hon. member for Lakeland has the floor.Decisions of the SpeakerNoise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingPoints of orderCandiceBergenHon.Portage—LisgarMarkEykingHon.Sydney—Victoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen: (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, day in and day out we have members who are wearing different buttons of various kinds for different causes. I look across the aisle, and I see dinosaurs on people's desks, and I see shirts of sports teams they support. I proudly wear this button, and my colleagues proudly wear this button, and I would say that it is my right to do so. We have less than 10 minutes left to debate this important motion before the government rams this destructive legislation across this aisle and to Canadians, so—Displays, exhibits and propsPoints of orderMarkEykingHon.Sydney—VictoriaBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1950)[English]I thank hon. members for their interventions on this. By tradition, the House has typically ruled, and the Chair has ruled, against the use of props in the House. The question then becomes what constitutes a prop. The members have mentioned that there are other pins and other such regalia members are given to wear from time to time. However, when the prop constitutes a specific message relating to the point or the message a member is wishing to express in the House of Commons, it is generally ruled to be a prop. Accordingly, I would say that this particular button meets the test of being a prop, and I would ask hon. members to honour that tradition and not have the props displayed when they are in the House.I see the hon. member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston rising on a point. Is it on this point of order? Decisions of the SpeakerDisplays, exhibits and propsPoints of orderCandiceBergenHon.Portage—LisgarScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMr. Scott Reid: (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, I had the button on, and I took it off to address you. I understand why the person addressing the Chair ought not to be wearing a button. However, everyone else is not actually addressing the Chair. In the same way that we have different standards of dress for those who are speaking and those who are merely present in the House, I think that is a reasonable distinction to make. Otherwise, effectively, the member can say that those who are doing something he does not like ought to leave the House. Let us enforce this in a reasonable way and not try to expand it at this time.Displays, exhibits and propsPoints of orderBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1950)[English]I thank the hon. member for his additional comments. I would ask again that hon. members not be presenting themselves in the House with a prop that expresses a specific position that they wish to express in the House. I have made the ruling, and I would ask hon. members, in the tradition of the House, that they abide by that.Let us go to the hon. member for Lakeland.Decisions of the SpeakerDisplays, exhibits and propsPoints of orderScottReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonShannonStubbsLakeland//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMotion in relation to Senate amendmentsInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs: (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, one would think the Liberals would have learned from their wrong a year ago, since Bill C-69 was so badly crafted and so seriously flawed that they had to make 200 of their own amendments at the last minute before they shut down debate in the House and at committee and rammed it through. That is why senators had to almost completely rewrite it. The Liberals refused to let MPs do their jobs on behalf of Canadians, and they have prevented all of us from doing that duty here today as well. Even though last night it took the Speaker over half an hour just to read all the changes we are debating today, the Liberals are doing it again and will ram through this bad bill.Canadians across the country are very concerned. Eric Nuttall, a Toronto-based senior portfolio manager with Ninepoint Partners who invests in Canadian oil and gas stocks, described what the Liberals are doing to Canada's oil and gas sector as “borderline treasonous”.A recent Financial Post op-ed said that Bill C-69 is a bill “written by economic ignoramuses who have no understanding as to why Canada enjoys high living standards”, and called it “sabotage”.Why is such a broad coalition of voices opposed to Bill C-69? It would damage all of Canada in different ways. It would seriously hinder the establishment of major energy infrastructure, and it is about whether Canada is a place where big-scale, capital-intensive major projects of many different kinds can be built. It is about whether Canada is competitive and can attract investments versus other jurisdictions around the world, often those with lower environmental, safety and labour standards, and fewer civil and human rights.The Liberals are already doing so much damage. This year, the IMD world competitiveness ranking removed Canada from the top 10 most competitive economies in the world. It puts Canada 13th out of 63 countries, our worst performance in the annual survey's history, which goes back to 1997.Bill C-69 would do so much more damage. The Liberal approach would introduce longer timelines with no maximum caps, despite the minister's claim, and vague criteria for assessments that would create more uncertainty and continue to drive money and jobs into other countries.Bill C-69, as the Liberals will pass it, would undermine every element that is key to attracting and retaining investments and jobs in Canada, like certainty on the timelines and permanence of the process to mitigate risk as a factor in capital planning life cycles that are several years long. There are also numerous ways Bill C-69 could create potential for delay and allow the Governor in Council to extend timelines arbitrarily without providing justification. The criteria for extensions would be defined in regulation, such that cabinet would be the only power to decide when cabinet delays a project. Project proponents, members of Parliament and Canadians would not know what the criteria are until after Bill C-69 is already law.Among the Senate amendments the Liberals rejected that would fix their open-ended timelines are changes that would mandate the provision of reasons for suspending timelines, remove the ability for the indefinite extension of timelines, and introduce a legislated maximum time frame for the impact assessment review and for reviews under the Canadian energy regulator. The Liberals are rejecting all of those amendments.Conservative measures in 2012 that gave certainty to the process led to dozens of oil and gas infrastructure approvals and builds, other resources projects, four major new pipelines, and the proposal of three major new pipeline projects focused almost exclusively on accessing new markets under the highest standards in the world, which Canadians expect and have always had. However, not one of these has been built, and all of them are gone because of the Liberal government.Bill C-69 would also undermine certainty in regulation, which is critical for large-scale capital plans and to reach final investment decisions in Canada's favour, as well as performance-based policies, which benefit communities by tying incentives to measures such as job creation, R and D, innovation and capital investment. Bill C-69 would also create all kinds of uncertainty around which projects would require a federal review and around the vague project criteria against which a project would be measured.This is one of the reasons the premiers are so angry. Planning for a provincial or federal review are two entirely different processes. The Liberals are including in the bill the power for a single minister to force any project to undergo a lengthy, costly, federal review, even if it has already gone through a provincial review. What proponent would want to take on the risk that assessment costs could double and a capital-intensive, long-term project could be delayed by years with zero warning?The Liberals are rejecting amendments that would ensure there is a minimum threshold for project designations that guides the decision of a single minister and that would require that a single minister is not the only one giving guidance on the impacts of a project within federal jurisdiction. Liberals are rejecting these changes in favour of the unilateral, centralized power of a single minister.(1955)Clear and concise criteria ensures predictability for all parties and that approved projects can get built, instead of having to repeat key parts of the process or spending years in court defending an approval. However, the Liberals rejected all attempts to clarify and specify criteria in Bill C-69, and are maintaining the requirement and discretion of the panel conducting the review to make determinations on subjective matters, on matters that are of public policy of any government of any given day and that are inherently political. For example, this bill mandates that proponents must demonstrate health, social and economic effects, including with respect to the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors. Obviously, job creation, R and D, innovation and capital investment from resource development reduce poverty, benefit the economy and provide revenue for governments and for social services like health care and education, as well as funds for academic and charitable organizations, but I think proponents can be forgiven for uncertainty around how their specific projects and investments impact identity factors.To make matters worse, the Liberals are rejecting Senate amendments requiring that the responsible minister publish guidelines on these vague criteria. Let me repeat that. The Liberals are voting against providing guidelines on their own criteria to explain what the Liberals mean with these vague criteria, which is why uncertainty appears to be a design principle of this legislation. It is an actual intention, a deliberate objective of Bill C-69 and not just a Liberal mistake. The Liberals cannot argue that Bill C-69 would enhance scientific evidence in reviews beyond what was already done in Canada's regulatory system. In fact, during committee, Mr. Martin Olszynski of the University of Calgary pointed out that the terms “science” and “scientific” are mentioned only five times in this 400-page bill. Another major concern with Bill C-69 is that offshore projects on Canada's east coast are targeted now for automatic panel review assessments regardless of project scope or scale. That will scare away future offshore exploration in Canada. That is why the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador raised specific concerns about the Liberals fully taking over an area that has, up until now, been a jointly administrated federal-provincial responsibility. So much for co-operative federalism, even with a Liberal premier. The Liberals talk a big game about making life better for middle-class Canadians, but this is the reality and why we see such passion, frustration and anger from my colleagues. The reality is that the Liberal Prime Minister has turned his back and is attacking the hard-working men and women who have given so much to every part of our country through responsible resource development. The Prime Minister talks about phasing out the oil sands and that he regrets Canada cannot get off oil tomorrow. His legislation proves that is exactly his objective.Kevin Milligan, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC makes the point why the debate about Bill C-69 really matters. He stated, “Nothing has contributed more than natural resources to buttressing the Canadian middle class against the rapidly changing global economy of the 21st century.” He went on to say that the “overall prosperity of the Canadian middle class depends much more on good jobs than small policy shifts around the edges. The resource sector has contributed substantially to the good jobs that underpin that middle-class resilience."Canada's responsible resource development is the major factor behind closing the gap between wealthy and vulnerable struggling Canadians. However, the Liberals keep attacking natural resource jobs across Canada in the forestry, minerals and energy sectors, which is killing jobs and making life more expensive for middle-class families. The Liberal and the left anti-energy and anti-resource agenda is extremely short-sighted economically and it is morally wrong. It is also bad for the environment, because Bill C-69 is based on an attack on Canada's reputation as the world's most environmentally and socially responsible resource producer, which is a fact. Since the 2015 election, and the minister did it last night, the Liberals have constantly denigrated and undermined confidence in the regulator and in Canada's reputation. They have created a vacuum for resource development in the past three and a half years. That is what has led us to where we are today with hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of work. What is really galling is that the Prime Minister is sacrificing Canada's interests to the rest of the world. Let us listen to the experts, because this is why this does not make any sense. In 2014, Worley Parsons issued a very comprehensive report benchmarking Canada against other major oil and gas producing countries around the world. It found that Canada already had the highest environmental standards in the world and the most responsibly produced resources. That was in 2014 before the last election, and it echoed a similar conclusion before.(2000)These are the report's conclusions, which measured performance in areas such as overall decision-making processes, cumulative assessments for regions with multiple projects, implementation of “early and meaningful consultation with stakeholders and Indigenous peoples”, including the real integration of traditional indigenous knowledge, and the implementation of effective social impact and health assessments.Here is the truth about Canada that the Liberals do not tell:The results of the current review re-emphasized that Canada's EA [environmental assessment] Processes are among the best in the world. Canada has state of the art guidelines for consultation, TK [traditional knowledge], and cumulative effects assessment, Canadian practitioners are among the leaders in the areas of Indigenous involvement, and social and health impact assessment. Canada has the existing frameworks, the global sharing of best practices, the government institutions and the capable people to make improvements to EA [environmental assessment] for the benefit of the country and for the benefit of the environment, communities and the economy.It continues:[T]he review found that EA [environmental assessment] cannot be everything to everyone. In Canada, however, it is a state of the art, global best process, with real opportunities for public input, transparency in both process and outcomes, and appeal processes involving independent scientists, stakeholders, panels and courts.However, the Liberals just stand up over and over again and attack Canada's reputation for their own partisan gain and to the detriment of every single one of us. Every time they are doing that, trying to keep their coalition of the left, the anti-energy, NDP and Green voters who voted for them in 2015, first of all, they are not being truthful, and second, they are actually empowering foreign and domestic anti-Canadian activists to shut down Canadian resources. Perversely, Bill C-69 would ensure that countries like Iran, Algeria, Russia and Venezuela are the ones that meet the growing global demand for energy. In doing so, the Liberals boost regimes that abuse human rights and take virtually no steps to protect the environment. The world is no better off with dangerous regimes that are able to ramp up their economies because Canada has vacated the market. The Liberal Prime Minister would rather the United States fill the void in the North American market and globally, ceding investment and jobs that should be ours to our biggest economic competitor.The fact is that Canada has more than enough energy sources of all kinds to be energy-independent. Canada is no better off when it allows its competitors to take the field uncontested, and neither is that good for the environment. An energy-independent Canada would be a Canada firing on all cylinders across all sectors and regions. The Liberals, therefore, need to accept 100% of the amendments made by the Senate. If they do not, this bill needs to die. Therefore, I would like to move the following amendment to the government message:AmendmentThat the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the words “the House:” and substituting the following:Agrees with amendments 1(a) to 1(y), 1(z)(ii) to (v), 1(aa) to 1(bc), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 made by the Senate;Proposes that amendment 1(z)(i) be amended by deleting the words “conducted by a review panel”;Proposes that amendment 2 be amended to read as follows:2. Clause 6, page 94:(a) replace line 19 with the following:“site—establish the panel's terms of reference in consultation with the Chairperson of the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board and ap-”; and(b) delete lines 34 and 35Proposes that amendment 3 be amended by adding the following: “(c) delete lines 23 and 24”That is the bare minimum that the Liberals must do for every single community in every corner of this country and for our long-term future, and to keep Canada proud, strong and free. Amendments and subamendmentsC-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 ActsCompetitionConsideration of Senate amendmentsDiscretionary powersEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsGovernment performanceLabour marketOil and gasPipeline transportationRegulationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2050)[English]Amendment negativedI declare the amendment defeated.The next question is on the main motion.[Translation]Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it.And five or more members having risen:Amendments and subamendmentsC-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 ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDecisions of the HouseEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2055)[English]Motion agreed toI declare the motion carried.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 ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDecisions of the HouseEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2100)[English]Resuming debate. Is the House ready for the question?Some hon. members: Question. The Deputy Speaker: The question is on the amendment. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. An hon. member: On division.The Deputy Speaker: I declare the amendment defeated. (Amendment negatived)The Deputy Speaker: The next question is on the main motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay. Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen:Division on motion deferredThe Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to order made on Tuesday, May 28, 2019, the division stands deferred until Monday, June 17, 2019, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsDecisions of the HouseDeferred divisionsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyRecommittal to CommitteeBruceStantonSimcoe NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2100)[English]Is that agreed? Some hon. members: Agreed.The Deputy Speaker: Accordingly, pursuant to an order made on May 28, this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1). (The House adjourned at 9:03 p.m.)Adjournment ProceedingsDecisions of the HouseProceeding to next item earlyKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersSummer in Banff—AirdrieInterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, this summer is a perfect time for people the world over to check out the most beautiful riding in Canada. Banff—Airdrie is home to natural beauty that is beyond compare and amazing communities that organize outstanding events. Throughout June, the world-renowned Banff Centre is hosting events celebrating indigenous peoples, including a drawing workshop, a choreography creation lab and singer Jay Gilday on June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day. Cochrane has the always popular RCMP Musical Ride this July. All proceeds will go to the Cochrane and Area Victim Services, the Cochrane Search and Rescue Association, the Lindsay Leigh Kimmett Memorial Foundation and the Cochrane Roping Club. Who could forget the Airdrie Pro Rodeo coming up on Canada Day weekend? As one of the largest rodeos in the country, it attracts over 10,000 visitors, volunteers and contestants from across North America. During the August long weekend, the Canmore Folk Music Festival is taking place. People can see live folk music from some of the best out there at the Stan Rogers, Grizzly Paw and Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge stages, all weekend long. We look forward to welcoming the world this summer.Banff—AirdrieEventsStatements by MembersFrancescoSorbaraVaughan—WoodbridgeAlexandraMendèsBrossard—Saint-Lambert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersAlberta Energy SectorInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to fight for the people of my riding of Calgary Nose Hill. They work hard and contribute much to the prosperity of Canada. For many, that means working in a job in the energy sector. However, they have suffered as the Prime Minister vetoed the northern gateway pipeline, purposefully mismanaged the still unbuilt TMX pipeline, chased away any hope of investment in the energy sector with Bill C-69, landlocked Canadian energy with Bill C-48, told the world that he wished he could phase out the energy sector faster, celebrated when his efforts killed the energy east pipeline and refused to reopen the equalization formula after killing our jobs. This is not nation-building policy. This is anti-Alberta policy. Here is a message to the Prime Minister and the anti-energy left on behalf of the people in my riding: We have had enough. If they continue on this path, they do so at the detriment of our confederation. AlbertaOil and gasStatements by MembersMarcSerréNickel BeltDeborahSchulteKing—Vaughan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgStatements by Members The EnvironmentInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1415)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the environment commissioner, the Auditor General, the United Nations and the Pembina Institute have all indicated that the Liberals will not meet the Paris targets. Even their own government's numbers confirm it.The Liberals' environmental plan is in shambles. They want to ban plastics, but they are investing millions in the industry. They are saying that polluters need to pay, but then they are allowing thousands of tonnes of untreated waste water and raw sewage to be dumped into the St. Lawrence River.Their carbon tax is not a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the big polluters will pay only 8% of the total revenue generated by the Liberal carbon tax, which means that families and small businesses will have to cover the remaining 92% by paying more for gas, groceries and home heating.In the next few days, our leader will unveil our plan for the environment. Unlike the Liberal plan, which is not an environmental plan but a plan to raise taxes for Canadians, our plan will contain practical measures to protect our environment while also protecting Canadian taxpayers.Carbon pricingCarbon taxStatements by MembersKenMcDonaldAvalonOmarAlghabraMississauga Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersForestry IndustryInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, as devastating job losses in the forestry industry continue to mount in our province, the Liberals' tone-deaf response shows just how out of touch they truly are. They could have ended this dispute with a renegotiated NAFTA, but failed, saying that it was not a priority.When asked what the Liberals were going to do for forestry families in British Columbia impacted by their poor decisions, they shamefully say, “Don't worry. It'll be okay”.Yesterday, the member of Parliament from Cloverdale—Langley City proudly proclaimed, “There's no problem, things are great, unemployment is down.”The Liberals say that they stand with the workers. Are they standing with them in the unemployment line? Are they standing with them as they struggle to get by? Are they standing with them when the bank is foreclosing? Canadians and hard-working forestry families deserve better. This October, they can cut the member for Papineau down to size, because he is just not as advertised.Forest products industryForestryStatements by MembersRandyBoissonnaultEdmonton CentreWilliamAmosPontiac//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersFederal-Provincial RelationsInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is taking our country down a dangerous path. Yesterday, in response to the united plea of six premiers urging him to accept amendments to Bills C-69 and C-48, he angrily accused the Conservatives of threatening national unity, as though the very real anger and anxiety over these two destructive bills are some kind of Conservative plot against him. This, from a Prime Minister who has made comments backing Quebec separatism if Conservatives stayed in power.These premiers are not making a threat. They are stating the facts and they are pleading their case. The Prime Minister is too partisan or too petulant to care. If he is so concerned about national unity, he should look in the mirror. If he does, he will see the greatest threat to national unity of the country staring right back at him. This is not about impressing celebrities or drinking boxed water; this is about doing what is best for Canada.Federal-provincial-territorial relationsNational unityPrime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersTrudeau, JustinIreneMathyssenLondon—FanshaweGudieHutchingsLong Range Mountains//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister received a letter yesterday from six provincial premiers who want him to accept the amendments to Bill C-69. What was the Prime Minister's response? He called them a threat to national unity. I would like to remind him that the only time Canadian unity is threatened is when the Liberals are in power.When will he finally show some respect for all the provinces?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsGudieHutchingsLong Range MountainsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister dismisses the legitimate concerns of premiers who are standing up for out-of-work men and women in the energy sector as playing political games. In fact, all provinces asked for amendments to Bill C-69. Even a letter from the Liberal Newfoundland and Labrador government stated that Bill C-69 would deter investment in the development of the resource sector without improving environmental protection. Therefore, the only person responsible for endangering national unity is the Prime Minister.When will he do the right thing and kill Bill C-69?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is not just Conservatives who recognize that his policies are killing Canada's energy sector. In fact, the former NDP Alberta premier, Rachel Notley, also vehemently opposed the Prime Minister's anti-energy bills and former Liberal B.C. premier, Christy Clark, said that the Prime Minister walks around thinking he is not first among equals, but the only one who has no equal when it comes to the premiers. We know how the Prime Minister gets when he is in a mood like that, when he publicly stated that if he did not win the last election, he would support Quebec separatism.Will the Prime Minister agree that the only threat to national unity is the Prime Minister?Federal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is causing the problem. He is the one causing divisions between regions and polarizing Canadians. He is acting like someone who sets fire to a house and then lashes out at the people calling the fire department. It is his policies that killed the northern gateway project, that killed energy east and now has had to use taxpayers' dollars to purchase a decades-old pipeline.When will he realize that it is his policies that are hurting the energy sector and leading to men and women being out of work?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, there he goes again just saying things that he knows are not true. The previous Conservative government saw four major pipelines completed and built, including one to tidewater, without taxpayers' dollars. It is his policies that have ignored indigenous concerns; indigenous communities that wanted to be partners in northern gateway. It is his policies that are condemning Canadians to always be reliant on foreign oil coming into our markets.When will he realize that his policies are phasing out the energy sector and all the jobs that go with it?Federal-provincial-territorial relationsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, here is what the Prime Minister does. If people raise concerns or disagree with him and what he is doing, he dismisses them, tries to discredit them and calls them names. Members can just ask the former attorney general about what happened to her.Now the Prime Minister is insulting and dismissing provinces that disagree with his “no more pipelines” Bill C-69. Does the Prime Minister realize that he, and no one else, is the biggest threat to Canada's unity?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is picking a fight with Manitobans by blocking the Manitoba-Minnesota hydro project. He is picking a fight with nine out of 10 provinces that have serious concerns with his “no more pipelines” bill. He is picking a fight with almost 60% of Canadians in provinces that reject his carbon tax.The Prime Minister's dismissal of provincial concerns is provoking a possible constitutional crisis. Does the Prime Minister not see that his divisive and hostile treatment of these premiers is what is causing the real threat to national unity?Federal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, this morning the Premier of Quebec, François Legault, said it was unfortunate that the Liberal Prime Minister rejected the Senate's amendments.Quebec's environment minister expressed concerns about Bill C-69, proposed an amendment and said that the Liberal government was not willing to talk.I have a simple question for the Prime Minister. How can we maintain good relations with provincial governments if we do not listen to them?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, we all recall when the Prime Minister stood in the House and used the word “pandering” when referring to the provinces. Yesterday, he did it again when he said that provincial premiers were being threatening. That is simply unacceptable.Does the Prime Minister seriously think that the provinces, municipalities, first nations, and Conservative and independent senators, whom he himself appointed, are being capricious and making threats when they disagree with him and propose amendments to Bill C-69?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, while the Prime Minister continues to stand in this House and indicate that his path is the way forward to get pipelines built, he is being told by six premiers in this country, representing 59% of the population, that it is simply not true. This is a very grave situation. The Premier of New Brunswick actually said yesterday that the Prime Minister is underestimating the urgency of this situation. Will he do the right thing, support Canadian investment, and ensure that every single one of these amendments passes?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, while the Prime Minister professes that Ottawa knows best, the reality is that the premiers are indicating very clearly that there is a significant problem with this legislation. There is a problem because it is going to scare away business investment. There is a greater problem, of which he was warned by former premier Notley back in February, which is that this is not a way to build a country. Will he do the right thing and make sure that every one of these amendments passes and give certainty to the provinces in this great country?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35320SylvieBoucherSylvie-BoucherBeauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—CharlevoixConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/BoucherSylvie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionMrs. Sylvie Boucher (Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix, CPC): (1445)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, we have finally reached the end of this government's first term in office. Unfortunately, it has cost taxpayers dearly. The Prime Minister has made the cost of living much too high for Canadian families, but he thinks they will forget all about that by October 21.In addition to raising taxes, he eliminated tax credits for public transit and children's fitness.Why do Canadians always have to pay more when the Liberals are in power?Cost of livingEconomic conditionsFamilies and childrenOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, when asked what his privileged family was personally doing to help protect the environment, the Prime Minister answered with nonsensical blather that could best be interpreted as, “Nothing really, but let them eat cake, from a box.”Canadians are tired of his ineffectual, carbon-taxing, drink-box, water-bottle expensive virtue signalling. When will the out-of-touch Prime Minister stop telling Canadians to do what he says but not what he does?Environmental protectionOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, the privileged Prime Minister is simply out of touch with everyday Canadians, which is why he found it so easy to cut their take-home pay by raising payroll taxes, take away their tax credits for textbooks, transit and kids' arts and sports, and slap a carbon tax on everything, making their gas, groceries and heating bills soar.Canadian families do not have a trust fund to fall back on, and under the Liberal government, they are struggling just to make ends meet.Why is the Prime Minister so hell-bent on making their lives more expensive?Cost of livingEconomic conditionsFamilies and childrenOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, the facts do not lie. Half of Canadian families are within $200 of not being able to pay their bills each month. One-third of Canadian families are unable to cover their payments and are falling further into debt.The Prime Minister has never had to worry about his own money, but Canadian families do. They do not have an extra $60 to pay for a pack of boxed water, and they certainly cannot afford $1.60 a litre for gas.When will the out-of-touch Prime Minister stop making life more expensive for Canadian families, which, under the Liberal government, are struggling just to get by?Cost of livingEconomic conditionsFamilies and childrenOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, after four years in office, the Liberals cannot even see a problem with the Paris Agreement targets. How can they find solutions when they cannot even see the problem? Let me sum up the Liberals' environmental record. They just announced a spur-of-the-moment decision to ban plastics by 2021. They talk about an environmental emergency, but they cannot bring themselves to admit that the Paris targets will not be met. They spent over $4 billion on a pipeline.When will the Prime Minister, the self-proclaimed champion of the environment, admit that Canada is not going to meet the Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodEthicsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, a sitting Liberal MP's law firm has been seized by the Law Society of British Columbia. This sitting Liberal member has been removed from the B.C. bar. This sitting Liberal MP's law firm was used by a notorious Chinese drug boss to launder money in a multi-million dollar real estate deal. When did the Prime Minister become aware of this latest Liberal scandal, and what is he going to do about it?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the public accounts committee sent a letter to the finance minister. The letter, signed by members of all parties, asked the Liberals to fund the Auditor General so that he can do his important work.It is not lost on anyone that the Prime Minister is muzzling the Auditor General as an election approaches. So much for accountability and transparency. What is the Prime Minister trying to hide?The Prime Minister cannot blame Stephen Harper for this one. Will he accept the demands of the committee, including Liberal members, and fund the Auditor General so that he can do his job?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1500)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, let us talk about facts.One fact is that never in the history of Canada has the Auditor General not been able to complete an investigation due to lack of funding. That has never happened. Another fact is that a parliamentary committee is calling on the government to properly fund the Auditor General. It is also a fact that the Auditor General is the watchdog who keeps an eye on government spending. Let us just say that the Auditor General has his work cut out for him these days, given the Liberal government's track record.Will the Liberal government make sure that the Auditor General has all the tools he needs to do his job, since it is a taxpayer-funded position?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the community of 100 Mile House received very difficult news about the closure of Norbord and the 160 jobs that will go with it. This is 10 days following Canfor in Vavenby, with 180 jobs, and the government is partly to blame. The Liberals had four years to resolve the softwood lumber issue, and they have had no progress. They could have attached it to the NAFTA negotiations, but they did not seem to care. Instead, we have an industry that is moving en masse to the United States. Can the Prime Minister tell us his plan to support these communities?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementLayoffs and job lossesOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1505)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, for five months the Prime Minister has shown complete indifference to the sort of canola and pork producers, denied that the crisis with China is first and foremost political and waited for it to resolve itself, and now he has finally said that he will think about speaking to the Chinese president at the G20 meeting.For the sake of Canadians detained in China and for the sake of Canada's canola, pork and soya producers, will the Prime Minister commit today to show some backbone and once and for all settle this matter with the Chinese president, yes or no?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, if the Prime Minister is serious, he needs to do something. With less than a week until the G20 summit, the Prime Minister continues to abandon Canadians by failing to ask for a meeting with the Chinese president. Canadians suffer in Chinese prisons, the farmers are facing financial harm, while tens of thousands protest in the streets of Hong Kong and in cities across Canada over dystopian Chinese extradition law.Will the Prime Minister finally decide to meet with the Chinese president? Why is he showing such weakness in the face of China?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNews Media IndustryInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, Engage Canada has made a $4 million ad buy to attack the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party has not had to spend a cent. Unifor has bragged about donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to Engage Canada and has even publicly asked its membership to donate to the group. This is the same Unifor that is on the panel that will decide which media outlets get $600 million in bailouts from the Liberal government. When will the Prime Minister stop stacking the deck in the Liberals' favour and hold a fair election?Electoral systemLobbying and lobbyistsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25454AndrewScheerHon.Andrew-ScheerRegina—Qu'AppelleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ScheerAndrew_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodJusticeInterventionHon. Andrew Scheer (Leader of the Opposition, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, it has been 73 days since the Prime Minister sent me a letter, threatening to sue me for my statements about his corruption and attempted interference in a criminal court case. He is going to get up in a moment and say that he sent the notice to warn me about saying things that he thought were not true. Here is the thing. I have not backed down. I have not apologized for them. In fact, I have repeated those statements, word for word, outside of the chamber.The Prime Minister knows that if he has to testify under oath, he will be charged with perjury for saying things that are not true. When will he see me in court?Criminal prosecutionsDefamatory libelOral questionsPolitical influencePrime MinisterReferences to membersSNC-Lavalin Group Inc.JustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPublic AccountsInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1520)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 65th report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, entitled “Special Examination Report—Report of the Joint Auditors to the Board of Directors of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, of the 2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada”.Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report. I also have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 66th report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, entitled “Report 2, Conserving Federal Heritage Properties, of the 2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada”.Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report.8510-421-604 "Special Examination Report - Report of the Joint Auditors to the Board of Directors of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, of the 2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada"8510-421-605 "Report 2, Conserving Federal Heritage Properties, of the 2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada"Canada Mortgage and Housing CorporationHeritage sites and buildingsReport 2, Conserving Federal Heritage Properties, of the Fall 2018 Reports of the Auditor General of CanadaSpecial Examination Report - Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, of the 2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of CanadaStanding Committee on Public AccountsJulieDabrusinToronto—DanforthRandallGarrisonEsquimalt—Saanich—Sooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsEmployment Equity ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1525)[English]Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to propose the motion?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.AccountabilityChristianity and ChristiansCivil warDecisions of the HouseGenocideInternational development and aidJudicial inquiriesLeave to propose a motionPeacekeeping and peacemakingReligious buildingsReligious minoritiesSri LankaTamilsTerrorism and terroristsVictims of terrorist actsVictims of violenceCherylHardcastleWindsor—TecumsehJudy A.SgroHon.Humber River—Black Creek//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1525)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am presenting today one more petition on behalf of the member for Langley—Aldergrove. As members know, the hon. member is extremely ill, and palliative care is a very important issue to him. Unfortunately, he finds himself in circumstances of being in need of it. He needs our prayers as well.The petitioners point out that hospice palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and assessment in the treatment of pain and other problems: physical, psychological and spiritual.The petitioners point out that hospice palliative care provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms, affirms life, regards dying as a normal process and intends neither to hasten nor postpone death. Hospice palliative care is not specifically mentioned in the Canada Health Act and is not accessible and available to all Canadians.The petitioners request that the House of Commons specifically identify hospice palliative care as a defined medical service covered under the Canada Health Act so that provincial and territorial governments would be entitled to funds under the Canada health transfer system to be used to provide accessible and available hospice palliative care for all residents of Canada in their respective provinces and territories.I know my colleagues—End-of-life careHealth care systemPalliative carePetition 421-04422Petition 421-04423Petition 421-04424Petition 421-04425Petition 421-04426Petition 421-04427Judy A.SgroHon.Humber River—Black CreekBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1530)[English]There are quite a few members rising on petitions today, and we have only 12 and a half minutes remaining. A brief summary of the petition would be great. If hon. members could do that, we should get through all of them.Presentation of petitionsCathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleSheriBensonSaskatoon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition today to supporting Bill S-240. This legislation would make it a criminal offence for Canadians to go abroad to receive an organ without the consent of the patient.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04429S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)SheriBensonSaskatoon WestMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have 17 petitions to present from seven provinces, including my own province of Saskatchewan. The petitions address the issue of Bill C-14, which prohibits compelling health care providers or institutions to provide medical assistance in dying but lacks clarity for effective enforcement. Bill C-418 would provide that protection and make it an offence to intimidate a health care professional for the purpose of compelling him or her to take part in the provision of assisted suicide or to affect his or her employment.The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to ensure that the conscience rights of medical personnel are protected by passing Bill C-418.C-14, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts (medical assistance in dying)C-418, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying)Caregivers and health care professionalsFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04431Petition 421-04432Petition 421-04433Petition 421-04434Petition 421-04435Petition 421-04436Petition 421-04437Petition 421-04438Petition 421-04439Petition 421-04440Petition 421-04441Petition 421-04442Petition 421-04443Petition 421-04444Petition 421-04445Petition 421-04446Petition 421-04447MarkGerretsenKingston and the IslandsLindaDuncanEdmonton Strathcona//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89116LenWebberLen-WebberCalgary ConfederationConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WebberLen_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsSmall BusinessInterventionMr. Len Webber (Calgary Confederation, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of petitions to present.The first is a petition from people in and around Calgary. These petitioners are very concerned about the way the Liberal government is taxing small businesses. They are concerned that current tax policies make it more difficult for small businesses to be profitable.Canada's small businesses are the primary job creators in Canada. The petitioners believe that Canada's small businesses are facing continual increases in payroll taxes and carbon taxes, and all this makes it harder and harder to run a successful business.They are asking that the government reconsider its tax changes that are targeting Canada's small businesses and the jobs they create.Corporate income taxPetition 421-04451Small and medium-sized enterprisesTax policyLindaDuncanEdmonton StrathconaLenWebberCalgary Confederation//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89116LenWebberLen-WebberCalgary ConfederationConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WebberLen_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAgricultureInterventionMr. Len Webber (Calgary Confederation, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, my second petition comes from residents throughout southern Alberta. The petitioners are asking that the government recognize the historical practice of allowing farmers to freely save, reuse, select, exchange, condition, store and sell seeds. The petitioners assert that restricting these activities is harmful to farmers and society alike. They are asking Parliament to enshrine these rights in legislation through their Save Our Seed campaign.Grain industryPatentsPetition 421-04452Seed growingLenWebberCalgary ConfederationMichelleRempelHon.Calgary Nose Hill//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsEqualizationInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, today, on the day the Prime Minister rejected the advice of six provinces and over 59% of the population to accept the amendments on Bill C-69, I am pleased to present a petition on behalf of people in my province. They ask the government to cancel Bill C-69 and launch a study into the economic impact of equalization and an examination of the formula.Others agree with these petitioners that the equalization formula cannot continue in its current form as long as the government keeps putting policy forward to kill the energy sector.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 ActsEnergy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04453LenWebberCalgary ConfederationHélèneLaverdièreLaurier—Sainte-Marie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present three petitions today.The first is in support of Bill S-240, on organ harvesting. Petitioners want to see that bill pass. It would make it a criminal offence for someone to go abroad to receive an organ for which there has not been consent. It would also deal with the issue of admissibility to Canada of someone who has been involved in the horrific practice of harvesting and trafficking in human organs.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04456S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)ElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition draws attention to the plight of religious minorities in Afghanistan, in particular the Hindu and Sikh communities, and calls on the government to take necessary action to support them.The petitioners call on the Minister of Immigration to use his powers to support the private sponsorship of these vulnerable minorities using a special program as the mechanism. It also calls on the Minister of Foreign Affairs to raise the persecution faced by this community with her Afghan counterparts and to strongly advocate for more to be done to protect them.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04458Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the third petition is also in support of Bill S-240.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04457S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCriminal CodeInterventionMr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of my constituents signed by over 1,600 Canadians. It calls on Parliament to enact Bill C-437.There are dozens of cases in this country in which killers have refused to disclose the location of their victims' remains. This includes the case of Lyle and Marie McCann of St. Albert, Alberta, who went missing in July 2010.The petitioners understand that this continued refusal to reveal the location of victims' remains is traumatic to families. They are calling on this Parliament to enact laws to bring justice to families and to help us find the remains of victims.C-437, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the Prisons and Reformatories ActHomicideHuman remainsPetition 421-04463SentencingTraceyRamseyEssexCherylHardcastleWindsor—Tecumseh//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions on the Order Paper Hansard Insert[Text]Question No. 2429--Ms. Linda Duncan: With regard to Canada’s Official Development Assistance (ODA): (a) what is the total ODA to gross national income (GNI) ratio arising from the 2019 budget; (b) what were Canada’s total ODA to GNI ratios for each of the last ten fiscal years; (c) what is the government’s position on delivering Canada’s outstanding commitment to deliver on the United Nations' target of 0.7% ODA to GNI; and (d) if the government is committed to delivering the 0.7% of GNI, what is the government’s timeline for delivering this commitment?Hon. Maryam Monsef (Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Lib.): In response to (a), the ratio of official development assistance, ODA, to gross national income, GNI, arising from budget 2019 is not yet available. Investments in ODA-eligible activities stemming from budget 2019 would only begin to be captured in Canada’s ODA/GNI ratio once 2019 preliminary figures are released in April 2020. In addition, budget 2019 announced commitments that may affect Canada’s ODA in the future, such as an additional $700 million in 2023-24 to the international assistance envelope. This builds upon budget 2018’s announcement of $2 billion to the international assistance envelope over a five-year period, starting in 2018-19.The ODA/GNI ratio is calculated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, annually on a calendar year basis. Preliminary figures for the previous calendar year are usually released in April, with final figures confirmed in December. The latest preliminary OECD figures, for 2018, were released in April 2019, and Canada was identified as having an ODA/GNI ratio of 0.28% for 2018. Canada’s 2018 preliminary ODA/GNI ratio, calculated by the Development Assistance Committee, DAC, of the OECD using a new grant equivalent methodology, was 0.28%. In 2018, the OECD-DAC began calculating ODA using a new “grant equivalent” methodology, which differs from the historical series, which was calculated on a cash basis. Canada is in the top 10 major DAC donor countries. In response to (b), Canada’s total ODA/GNI ratios for each of the last 10 years for which final figures are available, 2008-17, are the following: for 2008, 0.33%; for 2009, 0.30%; for 2010, 0.34%; for 2011, 0.32%; for 2012, 0.32%; for 2013, 0.27%; for 2014, 0.24%; for 2015, 0.28%; for 2016, 0.26%; for 2017, 0.26%. In response to (c) and (d), in 1970, UN member states, including Canada, agreed to UN General Assembly Resolution 2626 (XXV). Question No. 2431--Ms. Linda Duncan:With regard to the Global Fund’s sixth replenishment to step up the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria: (a) is the government committing $1 billion to the Global Fund’s sixth replenishment for 2020-2022; and (b) will this funding be in addition to the total official development assistance promised in the 2018 and 2019 budgets?Hon. Maryam Monsef (Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, the following reflects a consolidated response approved on behalf of Global Affairs Canada ministers. The global effort to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria remains a priority for the Government of Canada. The Global Fund is a key partner of Canada in tackling the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The Global Fund has achieved significant results with contributions from Canada and other international donors, helping to save more than 27 million lives since 2002.In 2016, Canada was pleased to host the Global Fund’s Fifth Replenishment Conference, where Canada’s leadership helped secure over $12 billion U.S. to support its work to end these epidemics, and where Canada pledged $804 million for the 2017-19 period, a 24% increase over the previous period, 2015-17.Canada is collaborating with France and other donors to help ensure that the upcoming Sixth Replenishment Conference in France will also be a success. The Government of Canada is still in the process of determining the level of the next pledge and expects being able to announce this pledge in advance of the Sixth Replenishment Conference in October 2019. The information about the source of the funding will depend on the final amount and will be made available following the announcement.Question No. 2432--Ms. Linda Duncan:With regard to Canada’s commitment to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the Feminist International Development Policy: (a) what portion of Canada’s official development assistance in 2019-20 will be committed to water, sanitation and hygiene as a foundation for women’s health; (b) does Canada intend to increase its investment in the global water, sanitation and hygiene sector; (c) will Canada join the 72 other countries working together to stimulate political dialogue and leadership through the Sanitation and Water for All partnership; and (d) is the Feminist International Assistance Policy now being applied to projects for global water, sanitation, and hygiene, and, if so, will there be additional funding to serve the priority needs of women and girls, and for consultation with women and girls on their needs?Hon. Maryam Monsef (Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, the following reflects a consolidated response approved on behalf of Global Affairs Canada ministers. In response to (a), funding for fiscal year 2019-20 has not yet been fully allocated at the sectoral level. For a complete listing of approved and currently operational projects related to water supply and sanitation, please refer to Project Browser: https://w05.international.gc.ca/projectbrowser-banqueprojets/?lang=eng.In response to (b), in light of competing priorities, Canada will likely not increase its investment in the global WASH sector. However, in addition to Canada’s direct investment in water and sanitation through development assistance, Canada’s support to the delivery of maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health services, and international humanitarian assistance often also includes the provision of WASH. In response to (c), Canada recognizes the importance of collaboration to tackle global issues, including water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Global Affairs Canada has not participated in the Sanitation and Water for All partnership in recent years due to competing priorities and commitments. Canada will be able to reassess our ability to participate when the next Sector Ministers’ Meeting is called.In response to (d), Canada’s feminist international assistance policy, FIAP, recognizes the importance of addressing water and sanitation issues, particularly as it relates to their disproportionate impact on women and girls. This includes investments in sustainable access to appropriate WASH systems, as well as integrated water resource management. Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is the core action area under the FIAP, which prioritizes gender equality for all sectors covered under the FIAP. As a result, gender equality considerations related to water and sanitation are systematically integrated into all WASH programming.2030 Agenda for Sustainable DevelopmentAIDS and HIVCanada's Feminist International Assistance PolicyDuncan, LindaGirlsGlobal Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and MalariaInternational development and aidLiberal CaucusMalariaMinister for Women and Gender EqualityMinister of International DevelopmentMonsef, MaryamNew Democratic Party CaucusOfficial Development AssistanceQ-2429Q-2431Q-2432Tuberculosis in humansWomenWritten questionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1540)[English]Is that agreed? Some hon. members: Agreed. Decisions of the HouseOrders for return to written questionsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsHansard Insert[Text]Question No. 2426--Mr. Arnold Viersen: With regard to the government’s CC-150 (Airbus), since July 1, 2017: what are the details of the legs of each flight, including (i) date, (ii) point of departure, (iii) destination, (iv) number of passengers, (v) names and titles of passengers, excluding security or Canadian Armed Forces members, (vi) total catering bill related to the flight?(Return tabled)Question No. 2427--Ms. Rachel Blaney: With regard to Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSA) in Canada, for the three most recent tax years available: (a) what is the total number of persons with at least one TFSA, broken down by age groups (i) 18 to 24, (ii) 25 to 34, (iii) 35 to 54, (iv) 55 to 64, (v) 65 and above; (b) what is the total number of persons with TFSAs, broken down by Fair Market Value Bracket (i) under $100,000, (ii) $100,000 to $250,000, (iii) $250,000 to $500,000, (iv) $500,000 to $1,000,000, (v) $1,000,000 and above; and (c) what is the total Fair Market Value of TFSAs, broken down by age groups (i) 18 to 24, (ii) 25 to 34, (iii) 35 to 54, (iv) 55 to 64, (v) 65 and above?(Return tabled)Question No. 2428--Mr. Mario Beaulieu: With regard to federal spending in the riding of La Pointe-de-l'Île since 2015: what was the total amount of federal investments, broken down by year, department and project in the riding?(Return tabled)Question No. 2430--Ms. Linda Duncan: With regard to Canada’s commitment in the Feminist International Assistance Policy to join global partnerships that promote sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) for women and girls: (a) what steps is the government taking to ensure support for this work is sustained and scaled up beyond 2020; (b) does the government intend to commit to the Future Planning Initiative’s call for $1.4 billion per year for ten years for SRHR initiatives, including $500 million per year for the neglected areas of SRHR; and (c) will this funding be in addition to the official development assistance promised in the 2018 and 2019 budgets?(Return tabled)Question No. 2433--Mr. John Barlow:With regard to the 2019 Canada Summer Jobs Program: (a) what was the total number of applications; (b) how many applications were (i) approved for funding, (ii) rejected or denied funding; and (c) what is the number of applications that were (i) approved for funding, (ii) rejected or denied funding, broken down by riding?(Return tabled)Question No. 2434--Mr. Alexandre Boulerice:With regard to the $450 million Champions stream of the Low Carbon Economy Fund: (a) how many potential applicants submitted an expression of interest to Environment and Climate Change Canada, broken down by (i) small and medium-sized businesses, (ii) large businesses, (iii) provinces and territories, (iv) potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; (b) how many organizations were invited to submit a formal proposal, broken down by (i) provinces and territories, (ii) municipalities, (iii) Indigenous communities and organizations, (iv) small and medium-sized businesses, (v) large businesses, (vi) not-for-profit organizations, (vii) potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and (c) how much has been spent to date, broken down by (i) business name, (ii) province and territory, (iii) potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for each business funded?(Return tabled)Question No. 2435--Mr. Alistair MacGregor:With regard to the Phoenix pay system, and specifically with respect to problems experienced by constituents in the riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford: (a) how many open cases currently exist in the riding, and has a case officer been assigned to each; (b) what is the length of time each case has been open; (c) how many cases have been resolved within the current prescribed service standards dating back to the introduction of the Phoenix pay system; and (d) how many cases have not been resolved within the current prescribed service standards dating back to the introduction of the Phoenix pay system?(Return tabled)Question No. 2436--Ms. Hélène Laverdière:With regard to the handling by Canada's National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines (NCP) of a Request for Review from the not-for-profit Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF) of Switzerland regarding the Ottawa-based multinational Sakto Corporation and the role of the Department of Justice in this case: (a) following receipt of the Request for Review from the BMF in January 2016, did any person who was a member of, or associated with in any capacity, the NCP committee receive written or verbal notification of potential legal action from Sakto against any members or persons associated with the NCP committee, the NCP as an institution, federal employees, Cabinet ministers or ministers’ staff, or the government as a whole, in regard to this Request for Review; (b) what are the names and institutional positions of the persons who received and are aware of such notifications of potential legal action, and what are the names and institutional positions of persons and institutions of the government, ministers, or federal employees against whom such potential legal action was directed; (c) what was the stated cause or basis of potential legal action for the Request for Review in (a); (d) what role did the threat of legal action play in the NCP change of position from its draft initial assessment of October 2016 to dismissal of the case in March 2017 in a draft final statement; (e) which Members of Parliament were implicated by Sakto, and who engaged these Members of Parliament on behalf of Sakto during the NCP assessment process; (f) what are the names and institutional positions of the persons, including any ministers, who were approached by these Members of Parliament, and what actions did those persons who were approached take, including details of written or verbal communications with the NCP committee and its staff, in particular; (g) were members of the NCP committee, their staff and associated civil servants urged, encouraged or instructed by any Member of Parliament or minister, or their staff, to dismiss or consider dismissing the Sakto case that was under review and, if so, by whom; (h) what are the names and positions of the persons who challenged the NCP's jurisdiction on behalf of Sakto, and what was the nature of this challenge, including actions and details of written or verbal communications with the NCP committee and its staff, or others, and what are the names and positions of the persons who were aware of Sakto's challenge of the NCP's jurisdiction; (i) what is the name of the Deputy Minister of Justice to which Sakto’s made submissions, including details of the submissions, and what action, verbal or written communication did the Deputy Minister of Justice undertake in response; (j) why did the NCP decide to take the decision of removing a published final statement that had been posted on its web site for ten months; (k) on what legal basis did the Department of Justice issue cease and desist letters regarding documents issued by the NCP related to the Sakto Request for Review to BMF and OECD Watch; (l) on what legal basis did the NCP issues a cease and desist letter to MiningWatch Canada; (m) why and at whose request did the Department of Justice and the NCP issues these letters; (n) how did the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities and the Minister of International Trade Diversification explain the process followed by the NCP in this case, and what are the details of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities’ and the Minister of International Trade Diversification’s written or verbal responses to the Secretary General of the OECD, or any other staff of the OECD; and (o) has the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities or the Minister of International Trade Diversification briefed or discussed the Sakto Request for Review with the Prime Minister, any staff now or previously employed in the Office of the Prime Minister, or any staff now or previously employed by the Privy Council Office, and, if so, what are the names and positions of these persons, what exactly was communicated to each of theses persons by the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities and the Minister of International Trade Diversification regarding the Sakto Request for Review and the topics raised in this question?(Return tabled)Question No. 2437--Ms. Hélène Laverdière:With regard to the Canada–Mexico Partnership, Canada's relationship with Mexico in the areas of mining, energy and the environment, and visits between both countries, since October 2018, with members of the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador: (a) what are the agreements reached between Canada and Mexico with regard to training, technical support, exchanges and other types of support pertaining to consultation of Indigenous peoples and other mining-affected communities and their participation in natural resource development projects; (b) what are the agreements reached between Canada and Mexico with regard to training, technical support, exchanges and other types of support pertaining to increasing public confidence in mining; (c) what are the agreements reached between Canada and Mexico with regard to training, technical support, exchanges and other types of support pertaining to good governance and best practices in the mining sector; (d) is there a guide, guidelines, model or other document that outlines what the government considers as good governance and best practices, used in this or other similar collaborations; (e) what are the agreements reached between Canada and Mexico with regard to training, technical support, exchanges and other types of support pertaining to security and human rights in mining and energy activities; (f) is there a guide, guidelines, model or other document that outlines what the government considers to be exemplary in terms of security and human rights in mining and energy development projects, used in this or other similar collaborations; (g) what are the agreements reached between Canada and Mexico with regard to training, technical support, exchanges and other types of support pertaining to sustainable mining; (h) is there a guide, guidelines, model or other document that outlines what the government considers to be sustainable mining, used in this or other similar collaborations; (i) have there been or will there be training or capacity building sessions between Canada and Mexico in the areas of consultation of Indigenous peoples and other mining­affected communities and their participation in natural resource development projects, increasing public confidence in mining, good governance and best practices in the mining sector, sustainable mining, or security and human rights in mining and energy activities and, if so, (i) when have these taken place during the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, (ii) when have these taken place with members of the incoming administration of President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, between October 1 and December 1, 2018, (iii) when have these taken place or are scheduled to occur after December 1, 2018; (j) what are the objectives of the training or capacity-building sessions being provided in the areas of consultation of Indigenous peoples and other mining-affected communities and their participation in natural resource development projects, increasing public confidence in mining, good governance and best practices in the mining sector, sustainable mining, or security and human rights in mining and energy activities; (k) what is the nature of the technical support or capacity building that Canada is providing or envisions providing to Mexico in the areas of consultation of Indigenous peoples and other mining-affected communities and their participation in natural resource development projects, increasing public confidence in mining, good governance and best practices in the mining sector, sustainable mining, or security and human rights in mining and energy activities, including (i) who is providing such training or capacity building, (ii) who is participating on the part of both countries, (iii) what funds have been allotted for this work, (iv) what is the source of these funds; (l) what exchanges have taken place or are planned or envisioned to take place between Canada and Mexico in the areas of consultation of Indigenous peoples and other mining­affected communities and their participation in natural resource development projects, increasing public confidence in mining, good governance and best practices in the mining sector, sustainable mining, or security and human rights in mining and energy activities, including (i) who is participating on the part of both countries, (ii) what funds have been allotted for this work, (iii) what is the source of these funds; (m) what was the program and related agenda of Mexican public officials from the Lopez Obrador administration who visited Canada in October and November of 2018, including (i) meetings held, (ii) mine sites visited, (iii) other events, (iv) guests present, (v) main takeaways and agreements reached, (vi) whether informal or formal; (n) what policies, norms or official guidelines do Canadian public officials need to respect with regard to security and human rights of communities affected by mining and energy projects when collaborating with the Mexican government in these areas; (o) what policies, norms or official guidelines do Canadian public officials need to respect with regard to security and human rights of communities affected by mining and energy projects when engaging with the private sector for related activities and investments or potential investments in Mexico; and (p) what mechanisms exist in the case where there are complaints as a result of violations on the part of Canadian public officials of the policies, norms or official guidelines delineated in (n) and (o)?(Return tabled)Question No. 2438--Ms. Irene Mathyssen:With regard to the decision of the Canadian Armed Forces to refuse to extend peer support services to survivors of military sexual trauma: (a) what are the research and resources the department used to make this decision; (b) what is the title and date of each report; and (c) what is the methodology used for each report?(Return tabled)8555-421-2426 CC-150 Airbus government flights8555-421-2427 Tax-Free Savings Accounts8555-421-2428 Federal spending in the riding of La Pointe-de-l'Île8555-421-2430 Promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights for women and girls8555-421-2433 Canada Summer Jobs Program8555-421-2434 Low Carbon Economy Fund8555-421-2435 Phoenix pay system8555-421-2436 Canada's National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines8555-421-2437 Canada-Mexico Partnership8555-421-2438 Peer support services to survivors of military sexual traumaBacklogsBarlow, JohnBeaulieu, MarioBlaney, RachelBloc Québécois CaucusBoulerice, AlexandreBruno Manser FondsCanada Summer JobsCanada's Feminist International Assistance PolicyCanadian ForcesCC-150 Polaris aircraftComputer systemsConservative CaucusConstituenciesCowichan—Malahat—LangfordDepartment of JusticeDuncan, LindaGirlsGovernment assistanceGreenhouse gasesIncome and wagesInternational development and aidInternational relationsLa Pointe-de-l'ÎleLaverdière, HélèneLegal proceedingsLow Carbon Economy FundMacGregor, AlistairMathyssen, IreneMexicoMining industryMultinationalsNew Democratic Party CaucusOil and gasOrders for return to written questionsPeer supportPublic Service and public servantsQ-2426Q-2427Q-2428Q-2430Q-2433Q-2434Q-2435Q-2436Q-2437Q-2438Reproductive healthSakto CorporationSex offencesStudent summer employmentTax Free Savings AccountTravelVictimsViersen, ArnoldWomenBruceStantonSimcoe NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions Passed as Orders for ReturnsInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1540)[English]Is that agreed? Some hon. members: Agreed. KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsMotions for Papers InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1540)[English]Is that agreed? Some hon. members: Agreed. KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthDavidSweetFlamborough—Glanbrook//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/31715DavidSweetDavid-SweetFlamborough—GlanbrookConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SweetDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPoints of Order [Use of Unanimous Consent Motions]InterventionMr. David Sweet (Flamborough—Glanbrook, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a point of order that I was considering researching for a question of privilege, but I am going to leave it in your worthy hands to research.I have noticed, over the last few months, an escalation in the requisition for unanimous consent motions. My concern is not with the request for a unanimous consent motion, but it is when a member stands up and says, “There have been consultations among all parties”. I am not pointing to any particular member in this case, but I have seen instances where it is either stated specifically or presumed that there have been consultations, and then a unanimous consent motion is requested on issues that are very important to everyone. The reason I was considering that it could possibly be a question of privilege is that when someone stands up and claims that there have been consultations, or says “If you seek it, you will find that there will be unanimous consent”, there is an assumption that there have been consultations. However, if I am not here and have not been able to hear that motion, but another colleague assumes that I might be in agreement with it, that binds the entire House, which means that I then have to answer for that unanimous consent motion to the constituents I represent. It is very troubling to me and very troubling to a number of colleagues that I have spoken to.Therefore, I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that you check on the actual Standing Orders in that regard to see, in those cases when someone says that there have been consultations directly or even when they say “If you seek it you will find unanimous consent”, if there should be reasonable efforts made.I go back to a judgment that was made earlier by the Chair in regards to voting, in that every member has a duty to be honourable when it comes to voting and to be truthful that they have actually been here for the question. I think this goes to the duty and honour of individual members that when they stand up they should have the good practice and decency to have actually consulted with other members. I will leave that in your worthy hands, Mr. Speaker, to get back to the House in that regard. Points of orderUnanimous consentBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPoints of Order [Use of Unanimous Consent Motions]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1540)[English]I thank the hon. member for Flamborough—Glanbrook for his comments on the issue. I will draw his attention to a decision that was given to the House on June 3 in respect of this very subject. In fact, earlier today, the hon. Speaker spoke of the manner in which unanimous consent motions would be considered by the House. I think his additional comments on the matter are helpful and we will get back to the House as necessary.Decisions of the HousePoints of orderUnanimous consentDavidSweetFlamborough—GlanbrookBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1545)[English]Before we proceed with the motion, as members know, before a motion can be considered, it must first be found to be in order. It must be moved and seconded, and after that, it is presented to the House by the Chair. Not unlike a circumstance we had a couple of weeks ago, when that motion is very long we put a question to the House to see if the House would be agreeable to dispensing with the reading of the motion, that last segment, if you will, before we actually begin debate on the motion.Today's Senate amendments on Bill C-69 are quite lengthy. I would draw attention to the fact that the motion itself, of course, is in its entirety on today's Order Paper. We can make available copies at the table, if members need it.I seek unanimous consent to dispense with the reading of the motion in its entirety.Is that agreed?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.[Chair read text of motion to House]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 ActsBruceStantonSimcoe NorthCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionMr. John Nater: (1615)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. There is no quorum. We see how seriously the Liberals take this subject.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 ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsPoints of orderQuorumCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1615)[English]I am not seeing quorum. And the count having been taken:Decisions of the SpeakerPoints of orderQuorumJohnNaterPerth—WellingtonBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1615)[English]We have quorum.The hon. Minister of Environment and Climate Change.Decisions of the SpeakerPoints of orderQuorumBruceStantonSimcoe NorthCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72035BobZimmerBob-ZimmerPrince George—Peace River—Northern RockiesConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ZimmerBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionMr. Bob Zimmer (Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, CPC): (1645)[English]Mr. Speaker, oil and natural gas is developed in my riding of Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies in an environmentally sound way, with some of the best practices in the world, frankly, to produce good energy for the global markets. The one thing that confuses constituents in my riding is the hypocrisy of the environment minister and the Prime Minister, with probably a bigger carbon footprint than any prime minister or environment minister before them.I have a simple question and I hope to get an answer, because often she responds with another question. I am asking a question and expect an answer. Would the minister explain her hypocrisy to Canadians?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 ActsClimate change and global warmingConsideration of Senate amendmentsEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1650)[English]Before we go to resuming debate, it is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member Elmwood—Transcona, Pensions; the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, Public Safety; and the hon. member for Kootenay—Columbia, Parks Canada.Resuming debate, the hon. member for Lakeland.CatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreShannonStubbsLakeland//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1655)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is with grave concern for the future of our whole country that, on behalf of the official opposition, I rise to address the Liberal government's response to the 187 Senate amendments to the Liberal's no-more-pipelines bill, Bill C-69. It is likely the last time I will debate this proposed legislation in the House of Commons on behalf of the residents of Lakeland and the provinces, territories, municipalities, indigenous communities, economists, public policy experts, business owners and workers across this country who oppose Bill C-69 and its many negative and widespread impacts on Canada.I will start by reviewing what has brought us to this day. I will say that Canadians can be forgiven for asking just the what the heck is going on here, because it is, frankly, unconscionable that within days of the House adjourning for the summer and five months away from an election, the Liberals are rushing through debate on their response to 187 amendments, which were also supported by Liberal-appointed senators. These amendments were an attempt to rescue such flawed but consequential legislation that it will have significant economic impacts and ramifications for the private sector in resource development, in construction, in manufacturing and all the spin-off impacts for related sectors, as well as for provincial and indigenous governments, for infrastructure and for municipalities. It is unbelievable that the Liberals have chosen to reject the majority of the substantive and meaningful amendments passed by the Senate that private sector proponents, provinces and indigenous leaders said would at least make this very significant legislation “workable”, which is not a ringing endorsement as it is.The response by the Liberals, tabled around midnight last night, will only exacerbate the uncertainty they have caused since 2015, which has driven nearly unprecedented levels of money, jobs, businesses, innovation and resource development out of Canada. Let us all remember, as the minister just reminded us, that the Liberals started consultations on the bill in January 2016, when they started the regulatory vacuum for major resource development in this country. They introduced it in the House of Commons and rushed it through a year and a half ago. However, at that time, they ignored the dire warnings from committee witnesses, ignored input from expert panels and then subsequently rejected every single amendment put forward by opposition members of all parties, except for one amendment from me that mandated transparency on the reasons for holding a public meeting on discretionary matters and one amendment from the NDP. They rammed it through the House in such a flawed, wrong-headed and disastrous state that it now faces near universal opposition across the country from a broad and diverse coalition and it requires all these amendments from the Senate, which, thankfully, was able to do a more thorough review and seek a wider scope of feedback and scrutiny than the Liberals allowed when they pushed the bill through the House of Commons so many months ago.So much for all that rhetoric, nearly four years ago, about the importance of consultation, basing decisions on facts and evidence, and working collaboratively with opposition MPs. Sunny ways have certainly turned into very dark days under the Liberals. The Leader of the Opposition and all Conservatives in both the House and the Senate have opposed Bill C-69 from the very beginning, because, just like the Prime Minister, the bill is not as advertised. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association already did warn a year and half ago that Bill C-69, in its original state, would ensure that no new pipeline was ever proposed in Canada again. However, it is clear today like never before, by the Liberals' response to the Senate amendments, that their objective always was and is to dramatically hinder energy development, to interfere in other jurisdictions on resource development by imposing federal reviews on municipal and provincial infrastructure projects, and to make things even more difficult for farmers, rural municipalities, villages and cities by imposing federal reviews on things like irrigation and infrastructure.To be clear, Bill C-69 is not only opposed by six Conservative premiers fighting to protect their jurisdiction, as the Prime Minister implies, but in fact, nine out of 10 provinces and the governments of all three territories have raised grave concerns with Bill C-69 in the past several months. It is opposed by private sector proponents across the economy in every corner of the country. Bill C-69 would not provide certainty or clarity for investors. It would actually create duplication between federal and provincial reviews. It would politicize decisions by granting extensive opportunities for political and ideological interference instead of grounding decisions on science, facts and evidence, and on the technical and economic merits of individual proposals. It would implement open-ended timelines and vague criteria for major resource projects and crucial infrastructure. It would potentially expose all kinds of resource development that is within provincial jurisdiction to federal reviews. It would drive jobs, businesses and investment out of Canada and into competing countries, like the United States, and so many other countries with much lower environmental standards and performance than Canada. (1700)Bill C-69 exposes major Canadian resource and infrastructure proposals within Canada to literally anyone, anywhere in the world, to intervene on those reviews. It removes all parameters for public participation, even reasonable limits like the requirement of a community or individual being locally impacted, and specific technical expertise or knowledge.That is something the Senate amendments actually improved, increasing the weight of testimony from indigenous communities for example directly impacted by the project, which the Liberals have rejected.Bill C-69 undermines the principles of fairness, predictability, certainty and clarity for major resource proponents with disproportionately harmful consequences for particular provinces and regions.All of these reasons are why the Senate had to propose 187 amendments. It is absolutely reckless for the Liberals to reject those key amendments proposed by senators from all regions and on both sides of the political spectrum.The proposed amendments taken together represent the bare minimum for private sector proponents to operate under, and 100% of those amendments proposed by the Senate to Bill C-69 must be accepted in their entirety. A failure to implement all of the amendments would hinder the entire Canadian economy from coast to coast to coast, which is why a future Conservative government would repeal and replace Bill C-69.The reality is that Bill C-69 is not only an attack on pipelines and on the energy sector. It is an attack on the economic well-being of the entire country.Canadians expect their Prime Minister and a federal government to unite and to be a champion for the best interests of all Canadians for oil and gas or refinery workers in western and Atlantic provinces and Ontario and the North, for assembly-line and manufacturing workers across central Canada and Quebec, and for hard-working Canadians and small businesses in all the other sectors that depend on the energy sector, the number one private sector investor in the Canadian economy and Canada's biggest exporter in every corner of the country.The Liberals pit Canadians against each other over resource development in a way that has not been done since the 1980s, and they have put the whole Canadian economy at risk.The losses in the energy sector are rippling through other sectors across Canada, whether it is manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, financial services and banking across the country, railroads, shipping, ports and all the indirect and induced jobs in other sectors. This Liberal attack will touch every corner of the country.The sad fact is that the Liberals are killing Canadian innovation and killing Canadian jobs. The economic and social consequences are immense: spikes in personal and business bankruptcies, foreclosures, increased food bank use, crime and substance abuse, family breakdowns, suicides, a loss of hope, and a loss of dreams and dignity. All of that is the result of the Liberals' attacks on Canada's natural resource sector and the thousands of good-paying jobs that have been killed by their anti-energy, anti-resources, anti-business policies and legislation. Through Bill C-69, the Liberals will steamroll the provinces, giving themselves unprecedented power over even highways, passenger trains, recycling plants; over the regulation of non-renewable resources like the oil sands under provincial jurisdiction and other developments like wind, hydro, solar and natural gas. They will take over joint responsibilities like offshore oil and gas exploration.Unbelievably, the Liberal Prime Minister dismisses provincial advocacy and concerns as being partisan. He says the outcries and the warnings are irresponsible, but that is just not true. The Liberal response of rejecting the majority of the Senate amendments today actually goes directly against requests from the Liberal premier of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Liberal premier of Nova Scotia. It is indicative of what the former Liberal premier of B.C. pointed out, that the “Ottawa knows best” Prime Minister considers himself not to be a first among equals, but to actually have no equals among the provinces, or anyone else for that matter.Nine out of 10 provinces and all three territories demanded major changes to this legislation, changes the Senate proposed, which the Liberals are rejecting today.The Liberals have given a single minister the ability to determine what projects require federal review without any prior notice or regulation. This means any future project in principal jurisdiction could require a lengthy and expensive federal review at the last minute without warning. That will not create certainty for investors and it will kill jobs in Canada.The Liberals are taking projects away from expert life-cycle regulators with a depth and breadth of experience and knowledge and putting them under a new federal regulator without the same level of expertise while expanding opportunities for political and ideological interference.(1705)What is really galling, and we heard it again here today, is that the Liberals have justified this legislation, while they deliberately undermine and attack Canada's reputation with ongoing and co-ordinated consistent attacks on confidence in Canada's formerly world-renowned regulator, on Canada's world-leading track record of independent science and evidence-based environmental reviews, and on Canada's leadership on indigenous consultation and the incorporation of traditional knowledge for which Canada has long been renowned, for decades.It is a pattern. The Liberals constantly divide Canadians, pitting regions and provinces against each other for Liberal partisan purposes at any and all costs, while they say one thing and do another. This time, the Liberals' cynical tactics have backfired. Canadians do not always agree on everything, and thank goodness for that. People across Canada are united in their opposition to this disastrous bill.On Monday, those premiers that the Prime Minister attacked yesterday, the premiers of the Northwest Territories, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, representing 59% of Canada's population and 63% of the GDP, called on the Prime Minister to seriously consider their concerns and accept all the Senate amendments in Bill C-69, because “the damage it would do to the economy, jobs and investment will echo from one coast to the other.”They say, “Bill C-69, as originally drafted, would make it virtually impossible to develop critical infrastructure, depriving Canada of much needed investment.”They talk about the fact that “the planned investment value of major resource sector projects in Canada plunged by $100 billion” between 2017 and 2018, “an amount equivalent to 4.5 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. To protect Canada’s economic future, we, collectively, cannot afford to overlook the uncertainty and risk to future investment created by Bill C-69.”The premiers also issued a stark public warning of the impact of Bill C-69, and its impact on national unity if it is passed without 100% of the Senate amendments. They say their “governments are deeply concerned with the federal government’s disregard, so far, of the concerns raised by our provinces and territory related to these bills.”Talking about Bill C-69, as well as Bill C-48, they say:As it stands, the federal government appears indifferent to the economic hardships faced by provinces and territories. Immediate action to refine or eliminate these bills is needed to avoid further alienating provinces and territories and their citizens and focus on uniting the country in support of Canada’s economic prosperity.They raised real concerns about the willingness of the Liberal government to trample on the provinces. They remind the Prime Minister: Provinces and territories have clear and sole jurisdiction over the development of their non-renewable natural resources, forestry resources, and the generation and production of electricity.They continue:Bill C-69 upsets the balance struck by the constitutional division of powers by ignoring the exclusive provincial powers over projects relating to these resources.The premiers call on the federal government to adopt all of these amendments or “risk creating a Constitutional crisis.”What is crazy about this is the Prime Minister's response to the premiers yesterday. That was a complete failure of leadership. He dismissed their concerns as partisan and attacked them for being irresponsible. The scale and the intensity of alienation and frustration captured in the premiers' cautions reflect the views and experiences of the people they represent. That is a direct consequence of this Prime Minister's divisive, calculated, regionalized and anti-energy, anti-resource development agenda.Let me remind the Prime Minister, again, it is not only those six premiers who have opposed Bill C-69 in recent months. The only government that did not speak out is an anti-energy, anti-resource NDP-Green coalition government that is not even representing the majority view of its citizens when it comes to pipelines, and oil and gas. It, of course, is no accident that provincial Liberal leaders request the Liberal Prime Minister to steer clear of their provinces during provincial elections, whether in Atlantic Canada or in western Canada.The provinces have been very clear about the economic consequences of the Liberals' Bill C-69. The Government of Saskatchewan, in talking about Bill C-69, said, “[T]he uncertainty and the non-transparency that it would introduce is really disastrous.”The Government of Quebec said, “Bill C-69 gives the federal government substantial powers, the equivalent of a veto over Quebec's economic development and the management of its natural resources.”The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador says Bill C-69 is an “unnecessary regulatory burden”, potentially undermining development opportunities and the global competitiveness of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador offshore area.The Government of Nunavut says Bill C-69 may “muddy or lengthen the processes, potentially leading to a reduction in investor confidence in Canada and Nunavut.” (1710)The Government of Nova Scotia says the new assessment criteria in Bill C-69 “raise significant uncertainty and there is risk that they may not be interpreted similarly in different offices across the country.” The Government of Ontario says Bill C-69 is “fundamentally contradictory to several of Canada’s long-term strategic goals and it effectively hinders natural resource related economic development within the country.”The Government of New Brunswick says Bill C-69 “represents an unacceptable risk, an unacceptable impediment to Atlantic Canada's and New Brunswicker's future prosperity.”The Government of Manitoba says Bill C-69 will “drive down investment, compound economic losses...and sacrifice jobs.”The Government of Alberta called Bill C-69 completely “unacceptable” and has announced it will launch a constitutional challenge against it.The premiers are speaking out because they must represent their provinces. They are simply voicing the rising alienation, frustration, anger, anxiety and experiences of the people whom they represent. They are making the plea to protect their jurisdictions with good reason. One of the amendments from the Senate that the Liberals are rejecting was the implementation of an exemption list of projects to ensure that projects under provincial jurisdiction would not be exposed to federal review. That is an amendment that the Liberals are rejecting. Let us talk about the areas that are potentially open for review, under Bill C-69 as the Liberals want to pass it: the construction, operation, decommissioning or abandonment or expansion of a new facility, plant, structure, or thing for recovering oil sands by drilling or other in situ recovery operations; the construction, operation, decommissioning, abandonment or expansion of existing or of new pipelines other than an offshore pipeline or other than pipelines across interprovincial jurisdictions; the construction, operation, decommissioning or abandonment or expansion of new or existing facilities, plants, structures or things for the generation of wind electric power or solar electric power; the same for a facility, plant, structure or thing for the refining, manufacturing or processing of natural gas, natural gas liquids or petroleum to produce refined products or other light hydrocarbon components or products; and the same for generating units that use natural gas as their primary fuel for coal-to-gas generation and for simple cycle turbines.This is the reason that premiers are speaking out and raising such grave concerns about this almost unprecedented intervention into provincial jurisdiction.However, the impact of Bill C-69 will not stop at the provinces. The Liberals' “Ottawa knows best” approach will even impose costly and time-consuming federal reviews on municipalities. The mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo and the mayor of the MD of Bonnyville lead a coalition of at least 20 municipalities that say Bill C-69 would impede municipal infrastructure projects and would fail to provide the necessary clarity on municipal land-use planning, waterway use, indigenous consultation and federal grants.The Federation of Canadian Municipalities says, “[T]he proposed Bill could result in more municipal infrastructure projects falling under federal review. This could add additional financial and administrative costs to municipal operations.”The Prime Minister committed to a “collaborative relationship“ with provinces and territories, and he promised Canadians that he would maintain an ongoing partnership with provincial, territorial and municipal governments. However, when those governments sent the Prime Minister a letter with a plea for due diligence and for serious consideration of their concerns and a warning about the consequences for Canada, he essentially told them to get bent. He patronized and condescended to them, dismissed the substance of what they said, and both ascribed and criticized their motivations and really all of the hundreds of thousands Canadians whom they represent. What a contrast it is to four years ago, and what a disheartening and bitter legacy.What is even more hypocritical is the intensely partisan use of separatism in the past by this very Liberal Prime Minister. In 2012, he threatened to become a Quebec separatist if Canadians did not do as he liked. He said, “I always say if there comes a point where I thought Canada really was Stephen Harper's Canada...maybe I'd consider making Quebec a country. Oh yes, absolutely. I know my values very well, even if I no longer recognize Canada.” That is why his response to nine out of 10 provinces and three territorial governments raising these very serious concerns, that they either do what he wants or they get kicked to the curb, is absolutely mind-boggling. For him to have the gall to suggest the premiers are being irresponsible and threatening national unity if they, in his words, “don't get their way” or “do not get everything they want” is unbelievable. What kind of a sorry, divisive, petulant, flippant response is that from a Prime Minister?(1715)In his case, and on this subject in particular, what profound hypocrisy. Canadians do and should expect more from their Prime Minister. The Prime Minister should be rising to the occasion and providing the leadership that Canadians so desperately need right now, but, again, he is not as advertised. Make no mistake, the actual clear and present danger, the real threat to national unity and the risk of a constitutional crisis, is the Liberal Prime Minister.There may be no better example of how he is not as advertised than how he treats indigenous communities. The Prime Minister likes to claim his most important relationship is with indigenous people, but even in that respect, he is divisive and, in turn, dismissive when it suits him. The Liberals claim Bill C-69 would improve consultation with indigenous people and somehow would expand the rights of indigenous people to consultation or would enhance the Crown's duty to consult and accommodate, but it does not. Hundreds of indigenous communities and indigenous business owners represented by the national chiefs council, the Indian Resource Council, the Eagle Spirit Chiefs Council, the Alberta Assembly of Treaty Chiefs and the majority of Treaty 7 First Nations oppose Bill C-69. Roy Fox, chief of the Blood Tribe First Nation, said, “ I don't have any confidence in Bill C- 69. I am fearful, and I am confident, that it will keep my people in poverty.” Steven Buffalo, the president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council, said, “Indigenous communities are on the verge of a major economic breakthrough, one that finally allows Indigenous people to share in Canada's economic prosperity. Bill C-69 will stop this progress in its tracks.” The 35 first nations in B.C. and Alberta involved in the Eagle Spirit Chiefs Council said that they would take the government to court over Bill C-69 because it could make it “impossible to complete a project” and because the removal of the standing test for participation and project reviews could lead to foreign interests “overriding the interests of aboriginal title holders.” Like most Canadians, indigenous leaders are concerned about the total lack of parameters that allows anyone anywhere in the world to intervene in impact assessment processes, significantly reducing the voices of local indigenous communities and risking the aspirations of local communities to be drowned out by distant and activist commentators. A lack of discretion to determine how different groups will participate in reviews will make processes more vulnerable to legal challenges in the case of any slight differentiation or disagreement between parties.Yesterday, the Prime Minister claimed that the Senate amendment made indigenous consultation “optional”. Not only is that completely false, but the Liberals' rejection of Senate amendments will have a detrimental impact on locally impacted indigenous communities that want to meaningfully participate and seek accommodation in consultations on major resource projects, for which the Crown has a rock solid, undisputed primary duty. The amendments the Senate made to Bill C-69 would have helped ensure that review panels, the agency and the Canadian energy regulator would have the discretion to hear from and prioritize those directly affected by a project and to consider the information, expertise and opinions of other experts as they would see appropriate.As a representative of nine indigenous communities, almost all of which are involved in oil and gas, as a person of Ojibway descent myself and as a Conservative who is more interested in action, concrete measures and actual positive outcomes in the lives and well-being of the indigenous and all Canadians, it is very frustrating to listen to the Liberals and the left talk about the real crippling poverty and the particular socio-economic challenges and barriers facing indigenous Canadians, while they impose policies and laws, like Bill C-69, Bill C-48 and others, that will block economic reconciliation and self-sufficiency through financial opportunities and that actively undermine years of efforts and work of those indigenous communities to secure agreements and build businesses through responsible resource development to benefit their communities' elders, youth and futures.Legal experts agree with the assessment that Bill C-69 would not enhance or enforce expanded meaningful consultation with indigenous communities on major resource projects. A University of British Columbia law professor, who specializes in indigenous law, says that there is nothing in Bill C-69 that improves meaningful dialogue with indigenous communities. He says, “the courts have said for 15 years that you need to have meaningful dialogue [and] there is nothing in [Bill C-69] that seems to do that.” For the Prime Minister to stand in the House and say that indigenous consultation is weakened or made optional by the Senate amendments demonstrates either his basic lack of knowledge on indigenous consultation or he is deliberately misleading Canadians for political purposes.(1720)Indigenous consultations are a constitutional requirement, a duty of the Crown. Nothing—Aboriginal peoplesBusiness and industrial sectorsC-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 ActsCanadian Energy RegulatorCities and townsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDiscretionary powersEnergy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsInfrastructurePublic consultationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1720)[English]I will remind the hon. member for Lakeland that the expression “deliberately misleading” has generally been found to be unparliamentary in that it essentially is saying indirectly what members otherwise could not say in the House in a direct fashion. Saying “deliberately misleading” crosses the line, and I ask the hon. member to perhaps rephrase that part of her text.The hon. member for Lakeland.Unparliamentary languageShannonStubbsLakelandShannonStubbsLakeland//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersImpact Assessment ActInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs: (1720)[English]Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I would say that it demonstrates his basic lack of knowledge on indigenous consultation and the impact of Bill C-69. Nothing in the legislation or Senate amendment package would change the current situation.For decades, Canada has been a world leader in the incorporation of indigenous knowledge and expertise in project reviews and partnerships with indigenous communities, particularly of the top 10 major oil-producing regions in the world. Without a doubt, governments must improve their execution of their duties in this regard. However, the Prime Minister is wrong about this issue and Bill C-69.The proposed Senate package and the specific amendments the Liberals rejected responded to the concerns of indigenous communities to elevate and amplify their locally impacted voices in early engagement and throughout the review process.Mark Wittrup, vice-president of environmental and regulatory affairs at Clifton Associates, reinforces that point. He says that Bill C-69 “will create significant delays, missed opportunities and likely impact those that need that economic development the most: northern and Indigenous communities.”The Liberals have caused uncertainty around resource development in the past three and a half years, with their imposition of layers of costs and red tape in policies like the carbon tax. Canada is the only country out of the top 10 oil producers in the world to adopt one.The Liberals' new fuel standard is a reckless experiment, with severe cost consequences for refining, petrochemical processing, manufacturing and others. Then there is their unilateral imposition of the offshore drilling ban and unilateral prohibitions of activity on wide swathes of land. Their shipping ban, Bill C-48, is a direct attack on a specific industry, particularly damaging to a specific region of the country. It has already driven jobs, businesses and capital out of Canada at a nearly historic rate, resulting in a complete failure to build a single new inch of in-service pipeline.The consequences of the Liberals' deliberate rejection of constructive suggestions from private sector proponents, economists, regulatory experts and various governments will be measured in more lost jobs, more cancelled projects, more missed contracts and more investment lost for a generation.Energy companies are warning about the devastating impact on their workers and operations. This is in light of the oil and gas sector, which has already lost more than 100,000 jobs. It is likely closer to 200,000, if the statistics reflected employed individuals in the south. Over $100 billion in energy projects have been cancelled since 2015.To put this in context, it is important to note that these numbers are the equivalent of losing the jobs created by the entire aerospace sector and almost all the auto sector. It is the equivalent of losing eight times the annual GDP generated by the aerospace sector and five times the GDP generated by the automotive sector.If either of those two sectors were to face the same job losses and collapse in investment, we can bet, as there ought to be and has been, that there would be full attention and action from the federal government. However, the response to the devastation of the energy sector, of oil and gas workers and of their families has been empty rhetoric and platitudes, as well as a piling on of policies and laws, like Bill C-69, that are out right hostile and make things so much worse.Concerns about Bill C-69 span sectors and regions. A joint letter from the Association of Canadian Port Authorities, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Gas Association, the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, The Explorers and Producers Association of Canada, the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of B.C. and the Petroleum Services Association of Canada says that Bill C-69 will: lead to greater uncertainty in the assessment and review processes [because it] requires assessment and decisions based on broad public policy questions that are beyond the scope of individual projects. It introduces longer timelines, and vague criteria that will increase the risk of legal challenges.This is what the private sector proponents are warning. They also take issue with the fact that Bill C-69 “gives the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada broad discretionary powers, which could further increase uncertainty for major infrastructure projects.” It also “put[s] at risk the investment needed for Canada to create the jobs and government revenues that support our quality of life.”Certain criteria are essential to attracting and retaining investment in Canada, such as certainty in regulations, permanence of regulations, certainty in the form of timelines, performance-based policies that ensure benefits to communities by tying incentives to performance-based measures, such as job creation, research and development, innovation and capital investment.(1725)Those criteria were hallmarks of Canada's regulatory framework for decades, with the most rigorous assessment, comprehensive consultation, high standards and strongest environmental protections in the world. However, from the beginning of the consideration of Bill C-69, starting when the Liberals rushed the bill through the House a year and a half ago, proponents raised major concerns on each of these key elements. One of those elements is timelines. Bill C-69, as it is going to be passed by the Liberals, would create a potential for a delay that would allow the Governor in Council to extend timelines without providing justification. There is no hard time cap for the overall process. The criteria for making such an extension will be defined in regulations. Even after the Liberals ram the bill through the House, there will still be uncertainty around timelines, which we developed after the fact. Literally, therefore, the cabinet will be the only power to decide when to delay a project. That is clear further politicization of the process and introduces further uncertainty for proponents considering a new project. That is why so many of the Senate amendments are dearly needed. They introduce legislative maximum time frames, they remove the ability for Governor in Council to extend timelines indefinitely and force the Governor in Council to provide reasons for suspending timelines. Maximum timelines set in law reduce uncertainty for investors, because time is money.The Liberals' rejection of the Senate amendments clearly shows their intention to return to open-ended timelines. According to their legislation, the federal cabinet can keep resetting the process, forcing proponents to go through the same stage multiple times. That is the definition of “death by delay” now being implemented in law by these Liberals, which is a term and a tactic that anti-resource activists call their campaigns to kill Canadian resource projects.Bill C-69, without accepting the amendments from the Senate, would also grant a single minister the power to refuse to undertake an assessment at all. It would grant a single minister complete discretion regarding whether to designate a project under Bill C-69's lengthy and uncertain assessment process. That would result in considerable uncertainty for proponents, even where proposed projects would not be included on the project list. They simply could be added to it by a single minister, the Minister of Environment. That sort of political uncertainty is unacceptable. Therefore, a single minister could kill a project by adding years of delay and hundreds of millions in additional costs. It does not really get any more political than that. This is why so many of the Senate amendments must be preserved to make this legislation workable.That is, of course, related to one of the major concerns from industry, provinces and municipalities, and the Conservatives have been warning about it, which is the uncertainty around vague project criteria. As originally worded by the Liberals, who are again intending to ram through Bill C-69, it would increase the length and the uncertainty of regulatory and judicial processes that already pose significant challenges to a timely completion on major resource projects.Regulatory reviews already require significant commitment and exceptional due diligence by proponents, communities, as should be the case, but they are often extremely complex, duplicative and expensive and sometimes result in deep divisions. Clear and concise criteria that projects are measured against ensures predictability for all parties and that ensures approved projects can actually get built, instead of having to repeat key parts of the process or spending years in court defending in approval.However, the Liberals' Bill C-69 would add numerous additional criteria that would not be within the direct control of the proponent and criteria that would be so vague that it would be difficult to determine what they even would involve precisely, never mind for proponents to be able to determine how to incorporate them or how to account for them in their project proposals. The Senate amendments, while not even as concise as the Conservatives would make them, are a vast improvement over the original Liberal wording. They would remove broad political debates from the formal review process and focus the fact and evidence-based review on criteria that would be measurable, quantifiable and predictable.The concern with the Liberals' criteria that they are proposing in Bill C-69 by rejecting all the Senate fixes is that they are requiring the panel conducting the review to make determinations on matters that are subjective, that relate to the subjective policy priorities of the government and are inherently political.(1730)How can a project proponent proposing a physical project based on engineering realities and the technical, economic, environmental and safety merits of a specific project anticipate and account for the particular political objectives of the current government of any given day? The answer is that it cannot. That uncertainty will stop proponents from proposing big projects and crucial infrastructure in Canada.Aboriginal peoplesApplication processBacklogsC-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 ActsConsideration of Senate amendmentsDiscretionary powersEnvironmental assessmentForeign investments in CanadaGovernment billsInfrastructureLayoffs and job lossesOil and gasPublic consultationBruceStantonSimcoe NorthCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessFederal Trades StrategyInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1750)[English]Madam Speaker, I appreciate that my colleague from Niagara Centre brought this motion forward.If this was such a huge issue for him and his constituents and certainly for his region, earlier this year the member for Mississauga East—Cooksville brought up a similar motion to study the skilled labour shortage in the greater Toronto and Hamilton areas. At that time, Conservative members of the committee asked why we would not expand this study to include a Canada-wide study into the skilled labour shortage, and the Liberals at that time refused that amendment.If it is important now, why was it not just as important then? We could have started this study in committee in this session, had the Liberals supported that amendment.Labour shortageM-227Motion of instructionSkilled workers and skilled tradesStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesVanceBadaweyNiagara CentreVanceBadaweyNiagara Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessFederal Trades StrategyInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1750)[English]Madam Speaker, it is great to stand and speak about a very important issue tonight, and that is the lack of access or inability for some regions of this country to access the very important skilled labour they need to ensure that their businesses are successful and that Canada can build the important infrastructure it needs.I know I asked this question of my hon. colleague in the question and answer portion, but I want to highlight the frustration of Conservative and NDP colleagues at committee when, earlier this year, we were debating Motion No. 190, looking at labour shortages in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. We asked the sponsor of that motion, the Liberal member for Mississauga East—Cooksville, whether he would be open to an amendment to the motion that the HUMA committee study labour shortages and imbalances, especially in the skilled trades, not just in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, but in the entire country. I was really surprised that the Liberals continue to talk, and again tonight, about how critical this issue is, but at that time, the Liberal members of the committee and the sponsor of that motion said that the Liberal Party was not going to support that amendment, and it was refused.Had that amendment been approved at that time, we very likely could have had this study completed by the end of this session. Unfortunately, since my colleague from Niagara Centre has brought up this motion so late in this Parliament, it is very unlikely that any work will be done on this study. I am disappointed that something as important as this will not get addressed in this Parliament because his colleagues refused to expand on an earlier study at committee, which is truly unfortunate.There are labour shortages in the skilled trades that are more in demand, certainly as our population ages. I think all of us here would agree, and we know from meetings with stakeholders across the country, that our aging population is going to be putting a very real stress on our labour situation. From the numbers we have heard, over 400,000 jobs in Canada are unfilled. That is why I was really proud to see the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, bring forward a policy or a platform that we are going to be undertaking a government-wide initiative on addressing labour shortages, and a big part of that will be appointing a minister of internal trade. The focus of that will be to remove interprovincial trade barriers, which are really holding back our economy and our ability to grow our economy in Canada. From the statistics we have seen, this is costing our Canadian economy $130 billion in lost GDP, but it is also impacting the ability of skilled tradespeople to move from one province to another when their certifications are not recognized from one province to another. There have certainly been some issues with labour mobility that we also could have addressed as part of a study on a nationwide strategy.The idea of having a dedicated minister of internal trade also builds on the work of previous Conservative governments, which brought forward the apprenticeship incentive grant in 2009 and the apprenticeship completion grant, also in 2009. We provided funding for more than 530,000 apprenticeship grants, totalling almost $700 million, to ensure that Canadians could complete their training. I was really proud, in 2014, to be part of a government that created the Canada apprentice loan. I remember distinctly that at that time, as we were having the discussion in the House, we heard that more than 50% of Canadians who start an apprenticeship program never complete it. That was a huge void that we saw under our Conservative government, and we tried to address it by initiating the Canada apprentice loan program. It was there to provide Canadians with the opportunities to finish their programs.As my colleague mentioned in his intervention as well, we should not have more welders or pipefitters in Alberta right now. There is a surplus of these very skilled tradespeople. Earlier this year, I was in a training facility for the boilermakers and pipefitters union in Edmonton, and 70% of their members are out of work. I could discuss why that is the case, and certainly Bill C-69 and the tanker ban are very distinct reasons for why that is the case. Cancelling the northern gateway pipeline, bungling the Trans Mountain expansion and regulating energy east out of existence are three very big reasons why we are facing this job crunch in Alberta.(1755)That being the case, having these skilled tradespeople unemployed and not working in Alberta when they are desperately needed in other parts of the country, it just goes to show that we have some issues we should be addressing. I wonder if my colleague from Niagara Centre would be open to amending his motion. I do not want to read the entire motion, as we have a minimal amount of time, but I would like to add the word “imbalances” to his first bullet point so that it would read, “regional labour imbalances in the skilled trades”. I would also like to add a fourth section to his motion. I hope he would be amenable to approving this amendment. I would like to add:(iv) how interprovincial harmonization of professional and trades certifications and training could assist unemployed and underemployed workers in the skilled trades find work in other regions by encouraging greater labour mobility and portability of qualifications in Canada. I think that something all of us in this House could agree we have heard from many of our stakeholders is the inability to have the certifications of trades workers recognized from one province to another. The encouragement of labour mobility is a huge issue that I would like to see us try to address. We could have addressed it had we been able to do a study earlier, which is unfortunate.This goes to a larger narrative with the current Liberal government when it comes to doing what it says and saying what it does. To bring this up so late in this Parliament almost ensures there is not going to be any significant work done on it. However, it also brought out the Canada skilled training program. I was really interested to ask the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour about this program when she was at committee. One of the stipulations of this program, which is supposed to be part of the skilled trades strategy, is that it does not proceed unless there is an agreement with all the other provinces. The provinces would have to amend their leave provisions in their own labour code to ensure that the skilled training program would even work. When I asked the minister if she had these agreements in place, she could not answer that question. I asked the officials and they said they had not started those negotiations. Therefore, this pillar of the 2019 budget, which is supposed to address the skilled trades shortage across the country, very likely will not happen. Certainly, the discussions we have heard from the premiers over the last two days, and their relationship with the current Liberal government and the Prime Minister, is that he is calling them out as a threat to Canadian unity and confederation. I am very confident that a lot of these premiers are not going to be in a big rush to sign an agreement on a Liberal labour initiative when they have to change their own labour code. There is a lot of window dressing and things that come out that the Liberals want to try to address, but when it comes to the actual work of governing, they fall woefully short.In saying that, I want to assure my colleague from Niagara Centre, who has brought this motion forward, that even if he does not support the amendment I have proposed, we will be supporting this motion because I believe that addressing the issue of a lack of skilled trades is important.I toured the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and its new new construction campus and petroleum engineering campus last week. It is an incredible facility. It just shows the opportunities we have and that the training facilities are there. We just have to ensure Canadians understand that these are opportunities that are well paid. Going into the skilled trades is not a demeaning career choice. This is an outstanding career choice with incredible opportunities and very high incomes. We just have to ensure we change some of those misperceptions about what goes on there. One of the areas where we do have a real opportunity is in attracting more women into the skilled trades. One of the more interesting studies I have done here as a parliamentarian, when we were in government, was at the status of women committee on encouraging women to get into the skilled trades. I have read through that study. It had some outstanding testimony and recommendations from our stakeholders. Less than 5% of the participation in many of these skilled trades is by women. We have seen in northern Alberta where heavy-duty mechanics and the people driving that large equipment are women. Therefore, I think we have some great opportunities there. I wish we could have done this study and found some resolution to this.Adult education and trainingAgreements and contractsAlbertaApprenticeship Completion GrantApprenticeship Incentive GrantApprenticeshipsCanada Apprentice LoanCredentialsInterprovincial relationsInterprovincial tradeLabour shortageM-227Motion of instructionOil and gasSkilled workers and skilled tradesStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesWomenVanceBadaweyNiagara CentreNikiAshtonChurchill—Keewatinook Aski//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88404AlupaClarkeAlupa-ClarkeBeauport—LimoilouConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ClarkeAlupa_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessFederal Trades StrategyInterventionMr. Alupa Clarke (Beauport—Limoilou, CPC): (1820)[Translation]Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise in the House. As usual, I want to say hello to all the residents of Beauport—Limoilou who are watching right now. I had the honour of meeting thousands of them last weekend at the Grand bazar du Vieux-Limoilou, where I had a booth, as the local member of Parliament. It was a fantastic outdoor party, and the weather co-operated beautifully.Before I discuss the motion, I just want the people of Beauport—Limoilou to know that we will have plenty of opportunities to meet this summer at all the events and festivals being held in Beauport and Limoilou. As usual, I will be holding my annual summer party in August, where thousands of people come to meet me. We often eat hot dogs, chips and popcorn from Île d'Orléans together. It is a chance for me to get to know my constituents, talk about the issues affecting the riding, and share information about the services that my office can provide to Canadians dealing with the federal government.I also want to say that this may be the last speech I give in the House during the 42nd Parliament. It was a huge honour to be here, and I hope to again have that honour after election day, October 21.I plan to run in the upcoming election and I hope to represent my constituents for a long time to come. I am extremely proud of the work I have done over the past four years, including the work I did in my riding, on my portfolio, Canada's official languages, and during debates.I am asking my constituents to do me a favour and put their trust in me for another four years. I will be here every day to serve them.Today we are debating Motion No. 227, a Liberal motion to conduct a study in committee. It is commendable to do a study at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. This is a very important House of Commons committee. A Liberal Party MP is proposing to conduct a study on labour shortages in the skilled trades in Canada.As soon as I saw that I wanted to say a few words about this motion. Whether it be in Quebec City, Regina, Nanaimo, or elsewhere in Canada, there is a crisis right now. The labour shortage will affect us quite quickly.We have heard that, a few years from now, the greater Quebec City area will need an additional 150,000 workers. This remarkable shortage will be the result of baby boomers retiring. Baby boomers, including my parents, will enjoy a well-deserved retirement. This is a very important issue, and we must address it.I would like to remind the House that, in January, February and March, I asked the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour about the serious labour shortage problem in Canada. Each time, she made a mockery of my question by saying that the Liberals had created 600,000 new jobs. Today, they say one million. I am glad that this motion was moved, but it is more or less an exercise in virtue signalling. Actually, it is more of an exercise in public communications, although I am not questioning my colleague's sincere wish to look into the issue. In six or seven days, the 42nd Parliament will be dissolved. Well, the House will adjourn. Parliament will be dissolved in a few months, before the election.My colleague's committee will not be able to study the motion. My colleagues and I on the Standing Committee on Official Languages are finishing our study of the modernization of the Official Languages Act. We decided that we would finalize our recommendations tomorrow at noon, to ensure that we are able to table the report from the Standing Committee on Official Languages in the House.In essence, this is a public communications exercise, since the committee will not be able to study the issue. However, I think it would be good to talk about the labour shortages in the skilled trades with the Canadians who are watching us. What are skilled trades? We are talking about hairdressers, landscapers, cabinetmakers, electricians, machinists, mechanics, and crane or other equipment operators. Skilled trades also include painters, plumbers, welders and technicians.(1825)I will explain why the labour shortage in the skilled trades is worrisome. When people take a good look around they soon realize that these trades are very important. Skilled tradespeople build everything around us, such as highways, overpasses, waterworks, subways, transportation systems like the future Quebec streetcar line that we have talked about a lot lately, the railroads that cross the country, skyscrapers in major cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, factories in rural areas, tractors, equipment and the canals of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which were built in the 1950s. China, India and the United States are making huge investments in infrastructure. For example, in recent years, the U.S. government did not flinch at investing $5 billion to improve the infrastructure of the Port of New York and New Jersey, which was built by men and women in the trades. In Quebec, we are still waiting for the Liberals to approve a small $60-million envelope for the Beauport 2020 project, now called the Laurentia project, which will ensure the shipping competitiveness of the St. Lawrence for years to come.There has been a lack of infrastructure investment in Canada. The Liberals like to say that their infrastructure Canada plan is historic, but only $14 billion of the $190 billion announced have actually been allocated. That is not all. Even if the Liberals were releasing the funds and making massive investments to surpass other G20 and G7 countries, the world's largest economies, they would not be able to deliver on their incredible projects without skilled labour. Consider this: even Nigeria, with a population of 200 million, is catching up with us when it comes to infrastructure investments.It is about time that we, as legislators, dealt with this issue, but clearly that is not what the Liberals have been doing over the past few years, although I have heard some members talk about a few initiatives here and there in some provinces. The announcement of this study is late in coming.I would also remind the House that this is a provincial jurisdiction, given that provincial regulations govern the training of skilled workers. That said, the federal government can still be helpful by implementing various measures through federal transfers, such as apprenticeship grants and loans, tax credits and job training programs. This all requires a smooth, harmonious relationship between the provinces and the federal government. Not only do the political players have to get along well, but so do the politicians themselves.If, God forbid, the Liberals get another four-year term in office, taxes will increase dramatically, since they will want to make up for the huge deficits they racked up over the past four years. In 2016, they imposed conditions on health transfers. Then, they rushed ahead with the legalization of marijuana even though the provinces wanted more time. Then, they imposed the carbon tax on provinces like New Brunswick, which had already closed a number of coal-fired plants and significantly reduced its greenhouse gas emissions. The Liberals said that they still considered the province to be an offender and imposed the Liberal carbon tax. Finally, today, they are rushing through the study of Bill C-69, which seeks to implement regulations that are far too rigid and that will interfere with the development of natural resources in various provinces, even though six premiers have stated that this bill will stifle their local economies.(1830)How can we hope that this government will collaborate to come to an agreement seeking to address skilled trades shortages when it has such a poor track record on intergovernmental relations?Government performanceInfrastructureLabour shortageM-227Motion of instructionProvincial jurisdictionSkilled workers and skilled tradesStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesTerrySheehanSault Ste. MarieCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersRoyal Canadian Mounted Police ActInterventionMr. Glen Motz (Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, CPC): (1830)[English]Madam Speaker, it is a privilege, as always, to rise in the House and speak to legislation. As we near the end of this parliamentary session, one that precedes an election, we really should be wrapping up work rather than starting new work, as we all know. Bill C-98 proposes to repurpose and rename the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP to the “Public Complaints and Review Commission” and expand its mandate to review both the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency.In 2017, I began working as a member of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. In studies on the border agency and when the agency came up in discussions on another bill, Bill C-21, the issue of oversight and complaints was discussed. Professor Wesley Wark, from the University of Ottawa, who was previously a special adviser to the president of the Canadian border security agency said:[T] he committee should encourage the government to finalize its plans for an independent complaints mechanism for CBSA. There have been discussions under way about this for some considerable time now.We were told that the minister already had a plan back then, was already dealing with it and that we did not need to. During his appearance at the Senate committee regarding the border security's oversight, the minister said:The CBSA, however, does not have independent review of officer conduct, and that is a gap that definitely needs to be addressed....Mr. Chair, while I agree absolutely with the spirit behind Bill S-205, I cannot support its detail at this time for—C-98, An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act and the Canada Border Services Agency Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCanada Border Services AgencyComplaintsGovernment billsSafetySecond readingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersRoyal Canadian Mounted Police ActInterventionMr. Glen Motz: (1835)[English]Madam Speaker, I will continue with the public safety minister's comment at committee:[T]he government is launching, almost immediately, a public consultation process on our national security framework that will touch directly on the subject matter of this bill, and I need that consultation before I can commit to specific legislation.Well, that was almost three years ago. To say that the bill is late would obviously be an understatement. It has taken the minister over three years to bring forward this legislation. That is quite a long time for a minister who said he was already working on something in 2016.In keeping with his recent history on consultations, there appears to have been little or no external consultation in preparation for the bill. Hopefully, at committee, the government will be able to produce at least one group or organization outside of the government that will endorse the legislation. However, I am not holding my breath.The government even hired a former clerk of the Privy Council to conduct an independent report. Mel Cappe conducted a review and provided his recommendations in June 2017. It was only because of an access to information request by CBC News that Parliament even knows of this report. A CBC News article noted:The June 2017 report by former Privy Council Office chief Mel Cappe, now a professor at the University of Toronto, was obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act.... [A] spokesman for [the] Public Safety Minister...would not comment directly on Cappe’s recommendations, but said the government is working on legislation to create an “appropriate mechanism” to review CBSA officer conduct and handle complaints.The proposed body would roll in existing powers of the civilian review and complaints commission for the RCMP.The government and the minister had the recommendations two years ago, yet they are bringing this forward at the last minute. It appears to be an afterthought. Again, in February of this year, the minister said that they continue to work as fast as they can to bring forward legislation on oversight for the CBSA.Perhaps the Liberal government was just distracted by its many self-inflicted wounds. It created many challenges for Canadians, and now it is tabling legislation in the 11th hour that deals with real issues and asking parliamentarians to make up for the government's distraction and lack of focus on things that matter to Canada, Canadians and our democracy. These are things like public safety, national security, rural crime, trade, energy policies and lower taxes.There is an impact to mismanagement and bad decision-making. The Liberals' incompetence has had a trickle-down effect that is felt at every border crossing and also across many parts of the country.We know that RCMP officers had to be deployed and dedicated to dealing with illegal border crossings. When the Liberals set up a facility to act as a border crossing in Lacolle, Quebec, RCMP officers were there covering people entering into Canada. Those RCMP officers were not commissioned that day. They were pulled from details across the country. They were pulled from monitoring returned ISIS fighters and from monitoring and tackling organized crime. They were taken and redeployed, most likely, from rural detachments across the country. We know that in my province of Alberta, the RCMP is short-staffed by nearly 300 officers. It is not a surprise, then, that there was a rise in rural crime while this was going on. Rural crime is now rising faster than urban crime.However, it is not just the RCMP that has been impacted by the mismanagement at the border. It is also border officers, who will have the added oversight created through Bill C-98.CBSA officers told me and many other MPs about more shifts and about workers being transferred to Manitoba and Quebec. The media reported that students were taking the place of full-time, trained border officers at Pearson airport. This is the largest airport in Canada, and the impacts of having untrained and inexperienced officers monitoring potentially the top spot for smuggling and transfer of illegal goods are staggering.We have a serious issue in Canada at our borders, one that is getting worse. We know from testimony given during the committee's study of Bill C-71 that the vast majority of illegal firearms come from the U.S. They are smuggled in. At the guns and gangs summit, the RCMP showed all of Canada pictures of firearms being smuggled in as part of other packages. The minister's own department is saying there is a problem with smuggled goods, contraband tobacco and drugs coming across our borders.(1840)Rather than actually protect Canadians, we are looking into oversight. Do not get me wrong. Oversight is good, but it is not the most pressing issue of the day.The media is now reporting that because of the Liberals' decision to lift visas, there are many harmful and potentially dangerous criminals now operating in our country. This comes on the heels of reports that there are record-high numbers of ordered deportations of people who are a security threat. There were 25 in 2017. There are also record-low removals. Deportations were about or above 12,000 to 15,000 per year from 2010 to 2015, but that is not what we are seeing now. The Liberals, even with tens of thousands of people entering Canada illegally, are averaging half of that. We know that the CBSA is not ignoring these issues and security threats. It just lacks the resources, which are now dedicated to maintaining an illegal border crossing and monitoring tens of thousands more people.This failure is not just my opinion. It is the opinion of many Canadians. A Calgary Herald headline from last August read, “Confidence in [The Prime Minister's] handling of immigration is gone”. The Toronto Sun, on May 29 of this year, wrote, “AG report shows federal asylum processing system a mess”. Another reads, “Auditor General Calls out Liberal Failures”. The news headlines go on and on.This is not something the minister did when he implemented reforms in Bill C-59, the national security reforms. Under that bill, there would be three oversight agencies for our national security and intelligence teams: the new commissioner of intelligence, with expanded oversight of CSIS and CSE; the new national security and intelligence review agency, and with Bill C-22, the new parliamentary committee. This is in addition to the Prime Minister's national security adviser and the deputy ministers of National Defence, Foreign Affairs and Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.Oversight can be a good thing. Often, because of human nature, knowing it is there acts as a deterrent. From my career, knowing that police are nearby or ready to respond can deter criminals, and knowing that someone will review claims of misconduct will add credibility to an already reputable agency, the CBSA. It is probably too bad that this was not done earlier, because it could have gone through the House and the Senate quite easily. It could have been a law for a year or two already, perhaps even more. Sadly, the late tabling of the bill seems to make it a near certainty that if it reaches the Senate, it might be caught in the backlog of legislation there.The House and the committee can and should give the bill a great deal of scrutiny. While the idea seems sound, and the model is better than in other legislation, I am wary of anything the government does on borders. It has not managed our borders well and has not been up front with the House or Canadians about that. In 2017, the Liberals told us that there was nothing to worry about, with tens of thousands of people crossing our borders illegally. They said they did not need any new resources, security was going well and everything was fine.Well, the reality was that security was being cut to deal with the volume, provinces and cities were drowning in costs and overflowing shelters, border and RCMP agencies were stretched and refugee screenings were backing up. According to the ministers, everything was fine. Then, in the budget, came new funding, and in the next budget, and in the one after that. Billions in spending is now on the books, including for the RCMP, the CBSA and the Immigration and Refugee Board.What should we scrutinize? For one, I think we should make sure to hear from those people impacted by this decision, such as front-line RCMP and CBSA officers who will be subject to these evaluations.A CBC article had this to say: The union representing border officers has heard little about the proposal and was not consulted on the bill. Jean-Pierre Fortin, national president of the Customs and Immigration Union (CIU), said the president of the CBSA also was left in the dark and could not inform the union of any details of the legislation. How reliable is legislation when the agency it would actually impact and involve was left out of the loop?(1845)It seems odd that the Liberals would appoint one union, Unifor, to administer a $600-million media bailout fund just after they announce a campaign against Conservatives, and, yet, the border services officers union is not even consulted about legislation that impacts it. I would hope that consultations are not dependent on political donations and participation. That is why Parliament should be careful about who sits on this new agency. We do not need more activists; we need experienced professionals. We need subject matter experts. We need people with management expertise. We need to make sure that the people who work on these review organizations are appropriately skilled and resourced to do their work. We need to make sure that frivolous cases do not tie up resources, and that officers do not have frivolous and vexatious claims hanging over the heads. We need to make sure that Canadians do not need to hire lawyers to get access to the complaints commission and its process.We need to make sure that the minister and his staff, and other staffing leaders across the public safety spectrum cannot get their hands inside the processes and decisions of these bodies. We need the agency to have transparent, clear processes and systems that are fair to applicants and defendants alike. We need to make sure that these processes do not eat away resources from two agencies that are already strapped for bodies. I hope there is time to do this right. I hope there is the appropriate time to hear from all the relevant witnesses, that legal advice is obtained, and that we have the appropriate time to draft changes, changes that, based on the minister's track record, are almost certainly going to be needed. As the House begins its work on this legislation, I trust the minister and his staff would not be directing the chair of the public safety committee to meet their scripted timeline, which seems a little difficult to be done now with only a week remaining. Knowing that the chair is a scrupulous and honoured individual, he certainly would not suggest that legislation needs to be finished before we can hear the appropriate testimony.There is a lot of trust and faith needed for the House to work well on legislation like this and many other pieces, trust that is built through honest answers to legitimate questions, trust that is reinforced by following integrity and the need to get it right, rather than the need to just be right. I hope, perhaps just once in this legislative session, we could see the government try to broker such trust on Bill C-98, but I will not hold my breath.BordersC-98, An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act and the Canada Border Services Agency Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsComplaintsGovernment billsIllegal migrantsRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceSafetySecond readingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingPaulManlyNanaimo—Ladysmith//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25520TomLukiwskiTom-LukiwskiMoose Jaw—Lake Centre—LaniganConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/LukiwskiTom_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsGovernment Operations and EstimatesInterventionMr. Tom Lukiwski (Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, CPC): (1000)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to table, in both official languages, the 17th report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, entitled “Improving the Federal Public Service Hiring Process”.8510-421-601 "Improving the Federal Public Service Hiring Process"Public Service and public servantsStaffingStanding Committee on Government Operations and EstimatesKenHardieFleetwood—Port KellsDonDaviesVancouver Kingsway//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1005)[English]Mr. Speaker, I move that the 14th report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, presented on Thursday, February 7, 2019, be concurred in.As I rise today to seek concurrence in the 14th report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, entitled “Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child”, I have one message: The time for action is now. It is not time for further debate, for foot-dragging or for fancy political spin. We need action.We have been presented with a clear solution, a clear path forward. Anything less than action on the part of the government does a disservice to the parents who need our immediate help, our compassion and our assistance.The journey of Motion No. 110 began about four years ago, when a family in my constituency of Banff—Airdrie reached out to me to share their story and ask for help. It was a story of heartbreak. It is one that has remained firmly imprinted on me. It is one that no parent, no person, should ever have to experience.Sarah and Lee Cormier welcomed Quinn, a beautiful baby girl, into the world in 2014. Four short months later, heartbreak and grief struck the family when she passed away suddenly in her sleep. While they were experiencing any parent's worst nightmare, the grief, the shock, the pain that comes with that, they were were also being forced to deal immediately with cold, heartless, bureaucratic federal government processes.They would be required to immediately return to work. The parental benefit was cut off on the day Quinn passed. If they did not immediately inform the federal government of the loss and subsequently received payments, they would have been required to repay them. We can well imagine that in that period, this is not the first thing on a person's mind. Repayment would have to be done in person as well, as there is no other way to do it. It cannot be done online or any other way. Notifying the government could not even be done over the phone.After making many calls to Service Canada, waiting on hold and then explaining their painful story over and over again, they were informed that they were required, in the height of their grief, to drive down to a Service Canada office, stand in line and present their daughter's death certificate.Lee Cormier testified the following at committee:Quinn died on December 28. On January 3 we had her funeral and on January 5 we stood in line at Service Canada. The employee told us we were lucky that we didn't have to pay back the next week's benefit. The words she used were 'Your child ceases to exist, so therefore the benefits will cease to exist.'Let us think about those words and what it would mean to hear them when grieving the loss of a child: “Your child ceases to exist, so therefore the benefits will cease to exist.” This is what they were told by a federal government employee. No grieving parent should ever have to experience what the Cormiers did.Unfortunately, the Cormiers are not alone in their experience of this cold, heartless bureaucratic process. I have heard hundreds of parents with similar stories, who have bravely reached out to me over the last few years to tell me their stories.An example of that is the heart-wrenching story of an advocate from Nova Scotia named Paula Harmon, who lost her daughter Grace. She was forced to tell her story over and over again to a number of Service Canada officials, and was ultimately sent to a doctor to get a note to be able to qualify for sickness leave. One of the arguments the government has made is that people can qualify for sickness leave.The reason that the doctor put on the note was “bereavement of daughter”. When she presented that note to a federal official, she was told she would be ineligible for benefits. She was told, in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge way, that if she could get her doctor to put some other reason, she might be able to qualify.We should also think about the story of Rachel and Rob Samulack from here in Ottawa. Their son, Aaron Isaiah Robert Peters Samulack, was born on June 19, 2016, and spent 100 precious minutes with his family after his birth. He passed away surrounded by love in the arms of his parents.(1010) Rachel and Rob were also forced to tell their heartbreaking story many, many times, to numerous Service Canada agents, in fighting for the benefits to be able to have an opportunity to grieve. Rachel was ultimately forced to return to work well before she was ready to do so. There is also the story of Gillian Hato from Alberta. She was told by federal officials that she had to go in person to the bank to repay the benefits; she was not able to do that online. There was no other option than to go there in person while she was in the deepest throes of grief. She testified to the committee that she could not bear to go out in public. She was not near ready to do that yet. She was physically ill in the bank parking lot, thinking about the idea of having to go inside to repay those benefits. She was in a small town, and she knew that when she went inside, she would be asked where her newborn baby was.There is the story of Jens and Kerstin Locher, who lost their son Tobias. Jens testified at committee about this excruciating experience. They went into Service Canada; there was no way they could control the times and the terms of where they had to tell their story. I will quote from his testimony. He stated: After Tobias died, we had to make arrangements with Service Canada to organize my wife's maternity leave. During this difficult time, we had to leave our safe home where we could hide and venture out into the world to file some paperwork. We had to stand in the open-plan office and explain our situation. Not only that, but several years later...we received a letter from Service Canada stating that we had claimed too much money. It took multiple phone calls and letters over several months to clear up with staff that we had not committed any type of fraud for this overpayment. We had simply requested the time to start immediately after Tobias' death, which was on a weekend, and my wife did not go back to work on Monday.Due to some system settings, the EI system automatically adjusted the start date from the Monday that we had requested to the Monday of the following week. We didn't pick up on it, and my wife's employer started the week we had requested, so there was this one-week gap. We then had to explain over several months that we were entitled to the 15 weeks but that there was this discrepancy.Those are just a few of the hundreds of stories that I have heard from grieving parents.Sometimes, each of us in this place needs to step back from our partisanship and look at things from a purely human lens. This is clearly one of those times. This is not an issue that is partisan; it is an issue of human compassion. It needs to be fixed. Action needs to be taken now. This committee report gives us the solution through its seven recommendations. It gives us the path forward, but the government needs to implement them. What I have been most surprised with, through the journey of Motion No. 110, is to have been met with all of these hurdles and roadblocks every single step of the way from the Liberal government.I must give credit to many members of Parliament from all parties who have recognized the importance of taking action on this non-partisan issue: the Liberal members for Lac-Saint-Louis and Central Nova, who both gave impassioned speeches on this topic; the Liberal member for Edmonton Centre, who bravely shared his own personal experience with infant loss in his family at committee; and the NDP member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, who has also been very supportive throughout debate and the committee process. I also want to thank my Conservative colleagues, the members for Elgin—Middlesex—London, Flamborough—Glanbrook, Yorkton—Melville and Calgary Shepard, who have all been extremely supportive every step of the way through this parliamentary process.Despite the non-partisan nature of this topic, the first Liberal roadblock came during the very first debate. During that first hour of debate on April 27, 2018, the member for Kanata—Carleton got up and coldly read an obviously cut-and-paste, talking-point speech, which spoke of existing supports, rather than recognizing that there are in fact issues within the system. It appeared at the time that the Liberals were not going to support this motion, and I believe that was the case.(1015)However, there were affected parents watching that day in the gallery who were clearly very disappointed. They were there to hear the Liberal government, which so often preaches about helping parents, yet the Liberals got up and glibly claimed that there was no actual issue here. Instead, they pointed to things they had previously done that had absolutely no impact at all on the issue at hand. There were many parents all across the country who watched that speech, and it was their determination, the thousands of signatures on petitions and hundreds of emails and phone calls to Liberal MPs all across this country urging them to support this motion, that forced the government to have a change of heart. When it came time for the second reading, the Liberals would only agree to support the motion if I amended the wording of the motion from having the human resources committee be “instructed” to undertake a study to having it say “requested” to undertake a study. Now, this is despite the fact that motions that instruct committees are passed all the time in the House of Commons, but the Liberals were trying to claim that somehow this was improper. I was certainly concerned about that, because I was worried this would be something they would use as a way for the government to get out of having any committee meetings on this motion. However, of course, I was also happy that the Liberals were seeming to have an about-face on this. This issue needed to be studied, and I realize that sometimes one has to put a little water in the wine to be able to get to the finish line. Therefore, on June 8, 2018, Motion No. 110 was passed unanimously in this House, as amended.Then the “instructed” versus “requested” roadblocks started to come. Because the motion said only “requested”, the Liberal majority members on the committee decided they needed to have only four meetings with witnesses, instead of the six that the motion asked for. Because the motion said only “requested”, the Liberal majority on the committee decided that the report did not need to be tabled by December 8, 2018, the deadline that was asked for in the motion. If this was questioned by anyone at the committee, any debate was immediately shut down, usually by a motion by the Liberal member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, which was then forced through by the Liberal majority. One of these disgraceful Liberal displays even happened in front of the witnesses who were there to testify. Eventually, the committee report was tabled on February 7, 2019, two full months after it was supposed to have been tabled. However, there have been further roadblocks in trying to get the Liberal government to actually take action on the recommendations contained in the report. All Liberal MPs voted against the Conservative amendment to the budget implementation act, which would have given grieving parents the 12 weeks of bereavement leave after the loss of a child. That recommendation was actually contained in the committee report. Every other party in the House of Commons supported this amendment. When Conservative members recently asked for an update on the status of the implementation of the recommendations at the HUMA committee, once again, the Liberal member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge shut down the debate. What is worse is that the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, the one who is responsible for ensuring that these recommendations are implemented, sat there in that committee silently. He could have easily committed to ensuring that all those recommendations were enacted, or even offered an update on what the government was doing, but he sat there silently. Instead, the only response we have from the Liberals and from that minister is a flowery-worded letter in response to the report, three months later, that is not taking any concrete action that the grieving parents need. Instead of saying that we will implement the recommendations, the letter points to past actions and half measures that simply do not address the issue at hand. This report cannot sit on a shelf and just gather dust. This is a blueprint to ensure that grieving parents do not have to endure hardship or suffer any undue financial or emotional distress as a result of the design of government programming. Grieving parents deserve so much better than what they are getting from the current government. It is becoming increasingly clear that if action is actually going to be taken on this issue, it is not going to be through the Liberal government. The Liberals have had many opportunities to act. They have been given so many opportunities to do the right thing, and, frankly, they have expended considerable effort in ensuring that nothing actually gets done. While they are trying to appear compassionate, they have actually actively worked to undermine these efforts.(1020)I would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of so many parent advocates all across this country, without whose efforts we would never have been able to force the Liberals to even support this motion or to agree to the necessary recommendations in the committee report: people like Sarah and Lee Cormier of Quinn's Legacy Run in my home town; Cheryl Salter-Roberts and Baby Steps Walk to Remember in Edmonton-Sherwood Park; Nancy and Peter Slinn and Nicole Chadwick-Dunning from Empty Cradle BC; Annick Robinson and Cradles for Cuddles; Paula Harmon and Gardens for Grace in Nova Scotia; Jens Locher and October15.ca; Rob and Rachel Samulack, organizers of the Butterfly Run in Ottawa-Gatineau, as well as the organizers of the Butterfly Run in Brockville; Rachael Behie of Nova Scotia and Bria's Band; Jenita Naylor and Hope Box Canada; Michelle Lafontaine and the PAIL Network.I want to thank all of these courageous advocates and many more like them from across the country. It is their determination that has gotten us this far, and it is their determination that will get this job done.Now I must ask these advocates to once again demand action. This is a non-partisan issue, and asking for action is not a partisan request. Taking action is the only way forward. Do not fall for lip service. Do not fall for excuses. Only action is acceptable.We need to get solid commitments from candidates. They need to ask the tough questions. They need to ask Liberal MPs why no real action has been taken when there has been every opportunity to do so. They need to ask for and get solid commitments for the enactment of the recommendations from this report.Rest assured, when a Conservative government is elected come October, we will take action for grieving parents where the Liberals have failed.8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Committee studies and activitiesConcurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsLeave from workParentsStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesDonDaviesVancouver KingswayKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Blake Richards: (1025)[English]Madam Speaker, I cannot tell the House how disgusted I am by what I just heard. The Liberal government has had every opportunity to address these issues, but it put up roadblocks and hurdles all along the way. Then Liberal members get up and make the kind of statements that we just heard. The Liberals had the chance to fix this problem, to show the compassion that these parents and these families deserve, and then that member gets up and tries to make it about political points. If the Liberals wanted to do something, they could have done it. I demand that action be taken, and so do all of these parents and these families all across the country. What I just heard is disgusting. I certainly hope that “my heart goes out” does not fool anybody. The Liberals could have done something; they have done nothing. It is time for action.8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Concurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsParentsStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingPeterJulianNew Westminster—Burnaby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Blake Richards: (1025)[English]Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his support of this motion. I thank all members on this side of the House for their support. What does it mean if the government does not allow the ability for this to be debated and voted on, and for action to be taken on this issue? I think we all know what it means. We have seen it all along the way. We have seen the roadblocks, the hurdles, every attempt by the Liberals to try to somehow look like they care, but do nothing.I know there is commitment by all the other parties in the House of Commons to do something. If the government actually cares and wants to address these issues, it has the ability to do so. We can have this debate, concur in this report, and then the Liberals can actually take action. Anything less than taking action means nothing. Words mean nothing, but action does, and the government has the ability to do that. It has the ability to support this, and it has the ability to act on the recommendations that have been made. If the Liberals fail to do so, then it is time to replace them with someone who will.8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Concurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsParentsStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesPeterJulianNew Westminster—BurnabyTedFalkProvencher//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/84672TedFalkTed-FalkProvencherConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkTed_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Ted Falk (Provencher, CPC): (1025)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Banff—Airdrie for his advocacy for parents who are mourning and grieving the loss of a child. Owen Reimer is an individual from my riding. He is a businessman, a financial planner, and he works very hard. His wife, Stephanie, is an X-ray technician. She is also my niece, which makes Owen my nephew. They have one son living with them. They have had three sons die in their arms. I want to acknowledge this morning Kieran, Micah and Tobias, newborns, conceived in their mother's womb, nurtured as a mother would care as best she could, and then to have them born and to cradle them, but to have them pass away in their parents' arms. This bill would give grieving parents like them the proper time to grieve, without the government making life difficult. What the member for Winnipeg North has done with this outburst, with his yelling and the rant we have just witnessed here, is a poor display of parliamentarianship. I would ask the member for Banff—Airdrie to respond to that.8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Concurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsParentsStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesBlakeRichardsBanff—AirdrieBlakeRichardsBanff—Airdrie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Blake Richards: (1030)[English]Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his advocacy on this issue and for saying the names of those children who have been lost. That is one thing I have learned from these families. I did not understand the grieving process and can never identify with it, but I have learned that it is important for them to hear the names of those children and to have the opportunity to grieve.There are seven recommendations in the report. Some of them are as simple as helping to make sure that Service Canada understands the types of things that I and many of us have learned along the way with this motion, and deals with proper compassion with the families. One of the recommendations is that simple, to make sure that Service Canada agents are given proper training to ensure they can deal with these issues in a compassionate way. That is the kind of thing the Liberal government is refusing to do. All we have done is ask the Liberals to give us some kind of update on what they have done, and they refuse to even do that. It is that simple. We just need a few changes so parents and families can be dealt with with some compassion by their government. I cannot imagine why anyone in the House would not support that.8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Concurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsParentsService CanadaStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesWork-based trainingTedFalkProvencherKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities]InterventionMr. Blake Richards: (1030)[English]Again, Madam Speaker, we see the kinds of political partisan games being played here. This is just a matter of trying to address an issue for families grieving the loss of a child. We hear about an unholy alliance, political trickery and all these things. The government has had the chance to address these issues, no matter how much support there is, and there is support across all other party lines in the House of Commons. That clearly shows this is not a partisan issue.There is one hurdle to getting this done, and that is the Liberal government. I do not understand why the Liberals want to talk about political trickery and all the rest. They should just deal with it, fix it so these families can grieve the loss of a child and not have to deal with the cold, heartless government bureaucracy while trying to do so. Why does the member not spend some of his time doing that rather than all of these games?8510-421-513 "Supporting Families After the Loss of a Child"Concurrence in Committee Reports No. 30Deaths and funeralsInfantsParentsStanding Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with DisabilitiesKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1130)[English]Madam Speaker, the minister is talking about ratification. I would ask her to talk in a little more detail about what that may look like here in Canada, given what is going on in the U.S. right now. The Democrats do not seem that eager to move forward with ratification. What is the thought process of the government when it comes to ratification? Is this something we are looking at doing before we leave here for the summer? Given the fact that we are here for only two more weeks, it does not sound like we are in lockstep with the U.S. Is it something the government would consider calling Parliament back in the summertime to ratify?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsChrystiaFreelandHon.University—RosedaleChrystiaFreelandHon.University—Rosedale//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1140)[English]Madam Speaker, as has been mentioned before by my colleague from the NDP, I would caution the government to move prudently on this. We have already seen the Democrats not wanting to give Mr. Trump any kind of victory. Therefore, we have not seen a lot of co-operation from the U.S. If we get too far ahead of ourselves regarding ratification, that could be an issue. Therefore, I would echo the comments of my colleague from the NDP that as a result of the uncertainty we see in the U.S., we need to be cautious as we move forward with ratification.The government's legislation aims to implement the Canada-United States agreement. The government is calling it by its acronym CUSMA. The bill would reaffirm key NAFTA provisions, but it would also introduce new conditions on Canadian trade and economic strategy.Mexico and especially the United States are Canada's natural trading partners. A framework agreement that governs trade and other commercial issues between all three countries is essential.I would like to state from the beginning that the Conservatives will support the speedy ratification of CUSMA's implementing legislation. However, having said that, it is also important to say that the deal and how it came to be is not without significant flaws.In the beginning of negotiations, the Prime Minister pushed an agenda, including issues that were not on the radar of the Americans whatsoever. This nearly derailed the whole deal. It was very similar to what the Prime Minister did just months before negotiations of the trans-Pacific partnership with his erratic behaviour. The government pushed non-trade-related matters, which seemed to irritate the Americans, instead of seeking to find common ground on priorities and mutual interests.As a result of taking that type of tactic to negotiations, the Americans negotiated most of the steel provisions with the Mexicans and then brought Canada in at the eleventh hour to deal with some of the remaining issues that had not been dealt with. We had an opportunity to be at the table with our most important and significant trading partner, but we were talking about issues the Americans did not want to talk about. As a result, they decided that since we did not want to talk about trade and NAFTA, they would talk to Mexico. We should think about the implications of that. We were not even at the table at the time the agreement came into effect. That speaks volumes to how the government handled this process.As I said before, of course the Conservatives are going to support the bill. We reached out to stakeholders. I had a chance, like some of my colleagues, to talk to stakeholders across the country. They said that they needed certainty, that they needed a deal. There was no question about that. However, the concern is that the Liberal government talks about what a great deal it is, but that is definitely not the case as we move forward. What stakeholders and people have told us is that a deal is better than no deal. That is why Conservatives will be supporting the bill.The government did not fight for our own interests. Let us think about that. It talked about the interests that were important to the Liberal Party and its political brand. The Liberals were focused on non-trade issues instead of worrying about the national interests of Canadians. Let us consider auto manufacturing, agriculture and lumber. After four years, we still do not have a softwood lumber deal. I do not even know if the conversation has been brought up. Despite our many interests, which include auto manufacturing, agriculture, lumber and prescription drugs, the Prime Minister represents his own political interests. That should be very concerning for Canadians.In addition, during the negotiations, the Americans decided to impose devastating steel and aluminum tariffs for close to a year. This was after months of them asking the Liberals to fix the loopholes that allowed steel dumping into the United States via Canada.Now we have a bill before us that does not put safeguards in place. The Americans asked us to do this four years ago, but because the Liberals decided it was not important, we ended up with steel and aluminum tariffs. For years our manufacturing sector was under a bunch of uncertainty. We saw our jobs move to the states and a number of other things. Only now are the Liberals reacting. It it almost as though they created the crisis so they could point out they fixed it. That is what Canadians should really understand.Canadian businesses and producers are still reeling after this very difficult period. The imposition of these very avoidable tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum have served to erode our competitiveness and have impacted thousands across the supply chain. The Liberals announced a $2-billion assistance package for the steel and aluminum sector, but almost none of this money has gone to the workers.I talked to a number of businesses the other day. They said that before steel and aluminum tariffs were lifted, there was a big push from the government to get their applications in and it wanted to work with them. Then, all of a sudden, there was radio silence.(1145)Are all those companies left holding the bag with respect to not having money and not having access or is the government going to follow through? It is easy to announce and reannounce programs. It is more difficult to ensure the money gets out the door. This is a huge issue. The reality is that these tariffs were avoidable. There was no reason for those steel and aluminum tariffs and the pain that our manufacturing sector has had to endure over the last couple of years.Once again, the Liberals talk about all the money that has been collected, which I believe almost $2 billion. My point is that very few businesses have received any money. We studied this at committee for quite some time. Company after company said that the application process was difficult and that was hard to figure out how to make this thing work. They also said that they were not getting money. Once again, the announcement talked about the money, but the proof was whether the companies had the kind of help they required, and that was not the case.This was all avoidable if the government had acted when the Americans asked it to close the loophole that allowed cheap and dumped steel to flood the American market, using Canada as a transit country. The Liberals have lurched from crisis to crisis on trade and tariffs. They have been constantly out of step with Canadian workers and manufacturers. The government's negotiations of CUSMA also delivered no progress on buy American provisions with respect to government procurement.Another issue we have not talked about is buy American. It is concerning for our Canadian manufacturers. Are they going to have the ability to access some of those things? It is a major blow to Canadian businesses and jobs across the country.The Liberals also made concessions on the Canadian supply-managed agriculture sector, which the foreign affairs minister deemed to be key to our national interests. The Americans did not budge when it came to their use of agriculture subsidies. As a matter of fact, we have seen the subsidies grow over the last number of months. The government and the Prime Minister also made key concessions on intellectual property, which will see provinces burdened with higher costs for biological drugs. The government also restricted future trade deals, with unparalleled provisions granting Americans an indirect veto over Canadian trade partners. Think about this for one second. This is an issue of sovereignty. While the U.S. negotiates trade deals with China, basically it has told us that we need to get its permission if we want to move forward on any deal with China. This is huge. This was not discussed a whole lot in the general public, but has long-term consequences for our ability to do our job as Canadians and get our products to market.I will give credit where credit is due. One of the major achievements was to preserve chapter 19, the dispute resolution provisions. The minister mentioned that. It is fair to say that it was a concern if we did not have an independent third party to look at some of our challenges. Therefore, I will give credit to the Liberals on that one, but that will probably be it right now. However, that was definitely important.A trade deal is judged by what one has gained from the negotiations. In this deal, compared to previous versions, Canada lost a number of key sectors and gained absolutely nothing. However, the Liberals go on tour around the country like they are some kind of heroes and it makes no sense. They have lost ground from previous governments. We do not talk about it as a save, but it could have been a lot worse. However, to travel around the country and say somehow this is an amazing deal for Canadians is just not true.It has been very clear from the beginning that the Liberal government was unprepared to renegotiate the NAFTA deal. When the negotiations started, the Liberals kept stumbling and in the end, they were forced to take a deal where they lost on many fronts. As I mentioned earlier, we will support the bill because it is essential to provide our businesses and producers with certainty. We have heard that on the ground. They have also suffered enough under the government. The Liberals have mismanaged the economy and trade. They have created a lot of uncertainty as we move forward.Another thing we need to point out is that last year the U.S. grew its economy by 3.2%. That was after a government shutdown for the first quarter. In 2018, when the government was shut down for a large part of the first quarter in which it only had 2% growth, it still was able to notch up growth of over 3.2%.(1150)We need to compare our record with that. In the last quarter of 2018, we saw growth at 0.3%. This quarter it was 0.4%, which is not quite a third of that of the U.S. The U.S. economy is on fire right now and the best we can muster is a growth of 0.4%, with all the money we are spending and all the deficits we are creating. The comparative is important to understand.In order to compete with the United States and Mexico, our business environment needs to be more competitive or else we are setting up our businesses to fail in the face of strong competition from our counterparts to the south.How is Canada doing with respect to competitiveness? The government has managed to make things worse on this front as well. Let us start with the most important mistake first, and that is the carbon tax. First, let us just get this out of the way in the beginning. The carbon tax is not an environmental plan; it is a tax plan. It will do nothing for the environment. The Liberals are fully aware of this and Canadians know it as well.The Liberal carbon tax is not a plan to lower emissions. It is just another cash grab, which is hurting already overtaxed Canadians. Small businesses and their employers are already being overtaxed. The Liberals have increased CPP and EI premiums. They have increased personal income tax rates for entrepreneurs. They have made changes to the small business tax rate that will disqualify thousands of local businesses.Dan Kelly, president of Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said:Many small businesses want to take action on climate change, but the carbon tax is putting them further behind. In fact, 71 per cent have told us that the carbon tax makes it harder for them to make further investments to reduce their emissions.Seventy-one per cent of small businesses have said that the carbon tax makes it harder for them to make further investments to reduce their emissions. What more proof does the government need, when the ill-advised carbon tax makes no impact on the environment and makes our businesses uncompetitive.Last Friday, the Canadian Press reported that the average carbon tax rebate Canadians received in 2018 was significantly lower than the amount the Liberals had claimed they would receive. When announcing the carbon tax rebate program, the Liberals established the average payment would be $248 in New Brunswick, $307 in Ontario, $336 in Manitoba, and $598 in Saskatchewan. However, the actual average rebates have been much lower: $171 in New Brunswick, $203 in Ontario, $231 in Manitoba and $422 in Saskatchewan.Like the Prime Minister himself, these carbon tax rebates are simply not as advertised. The Liberals continue to cover up the true costs of the carbon tax. They still have not told Canadians how much more it will cost them for everyday essentials, like groceries, gasoline and home heating.With less money being returned to Canadians, they will have even less money in their pockets, thanks to the Prime Minister and his Liberal carbon tax. The Liberal carbon tax will go up, if he is re-elected in October. Environment Canada is already planning for $300 per tonne, which is 15 times more expensive than it is today.Make no mistake, a Conservative government will scrap the carbon tax, leave more money in the pockets of Canadians, let them get ahead and allow our businesses to stay competitive. How else is the government making Canada's business environment uncompetitive? It is a good question, because Canada recently fell to the lowest spot ever in competitiveness. Canada has fallen out of the top 10 in a ranking of the world's most competitive economies. We are now 13th. Let us think about that. In an age where we are competing with one of the largest and most successful economies in the world, the U.S., which is ranked at number three, not only are we not in the top 10 anymore, we have dropped to 13th.Competitiveness drives our economy. It helps us to compete when we have deals and when we try to move our goods and services across the border. This will only continue to make it tougher for Canadians to succeed financially in the coming years.As I mentioned, the United States is number three. We are trying to compete with the world's biggest economy and it is tough when we see it use tax reform and regulation reform. What we a doing is making it more difficult for Canada to compete as a country. If we look at the other things that are going on right now, and some of the things we talk about when it comes to competitiveness, there is the whole issue of pipelines. We have tanker moratoriums and things like that.(1155)Let us think about that. In a day and age when the U.S. is building more pipelines, we have bills like Bill C-69. I noticed in the paper this morning that six premiers have come together to say that if something is not done, this is going to create a potential national unity crisis. In terms of the investment that we have chased from this country, it is almost $100 billion in energy investment.Let us look at the things we are doing. We have a country south of the border that is looking for ways to reduce regulation and red tape. We have a government here that is barely chugging along in terms of its GDP. As I said, it is 0.3% in the last quarter and 0.4% in this quarter. That is without the new rules in this legislation that is before the House right now.If we look at bills like Bill C-69, which is to increase the regulatory reform when it comes to pipelines, and Bill C-48, where we are trying to get our goods to market around the world, this is one more thing that makes us uncompetitive as we move forward. One of the things we need to be on guard against is that as the U.S. and countries around the world are reducing and streamlining regulation, we are making these things more difficult.We need to look at what we are doing as a country. Trade deals are important. The U.S. is extremely important as a partner. As I said before, stakeholders have told us that it is more important to have a bad deal in place, for certainty, than it is to have no deal at all. Therefore, as we move forward on these issues, one of the things we need to be talking about is not just the trade deals we have right now, but how we are going to become more competitive in the future. Looking at the kind of money we are spending on deficits, the current government has racked up almost $80 billion in deficit spending, and yet we have very little to show for it when we start talking about GDP growth and some of these things. There was the tax on small businesses that we experienced two or three summers ago. How are these things helpful in terms of making us more competitive?As I look at what is going on around the world, I believe we are heading in the wrong direction. I believe we should be doing much better, given the fact that the U.S. economy is on fire south of the border. Yes, we need to do other things, like work on how we can get our goods and services across interprovincial borders and a number of these things. However, one of the things we need to constantly work on is how we streamline to reduce the burdens that business owners have to deal with.In looking at this bill before us today, we realize that it would create some certainty for some businesses. In the long term, the challenge will be how we deal with this issue in terms of competitiveness. How do we deal with the issue that we need to do a better job of getting our goods and services to market? How do we deal with the issues of trade infrastructure in this country? When we were in government, we spent a number of dollars on trade infrastructure, as it was very important to us. We have not seen a whole lot of money go out the door in terms of infrastructure. There has been some talk about an infrastructure bank, and yet in the three or four years, there has been very little money flowing out the door. We have somewhere in the neighbourhood of almost $80 billion in deficit spending and we do not have a lot to show for it. Sure, we have more programs, but at the end of the day, what do Canadians feel about that? I would say that Canadians are not feeling that they are any better off. As a matter of fact, we have seen it reported in the press that Canadians are feeling the pressure, in terms of what they have to take home at the end of every month.As we move forward, these trade deals are important, but we have to continually focus on competitiveness here at home. We have to figure out ways that we can reduce taxes, reduce regulations and streamline the process, and then we can move in a direction that helps us to compete around the world. We have a great opportunity, with what is going on around the world right now, to attract the best and the brightest. I would encourage the government to continue to move in that direction. I can assure members that when we have the opportunity to form government in October, some of the things we are going to be looking at are how we become more competitive as a country and how we compete with the U.S. and other countries around the world.In closing, the Conservatives will be supporting this deal. However, we have some concerns with how it was handled. We have concerns with some of the crises that were created that we believe did not need to happen. We will do our best to try to fix these things when we are elected with a strong, stable Conservative government in October of this year.Aluminum industryC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCarbon pricingCarbon taxCompetitionCustoms tariff and customs dutiesEconomic indicatorsGovernment assistanceGovernment billsSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryTrade agreementsChrystiaFreelandHon.University—RosedaleRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison: (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, as my colleague mentioned before, I already mentioned my favourite one, which is chapter 19. I am going to leave it at that. As I said, there was an opportunity right from the start for the government not to insert itself in the process. I really believe that at the end of the day, when Mr. Trump was concerned with tariffs, what he was really concerned about was China. If we look at what has happened recently with his involvement with China, when he was talking about unfair practices, I do not believe that was ever directed at us.It was mentioned by the minister, when she spoke earlier, that they welcomed the opportunity to jump into this thing. As a government, Conservatives would have done things differently. We would have been down there right away. We would have said that in terms of some of the issues around China, the issue is not one that they were targeting us on, but they were targeting other people around the world for their unfair practices. We would have been in there and had a conversation. We would have dealt with this in a way that it would not have formed a crisis manufactured by ourselves that then had to be fixed.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison: (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, we have worked on a number of files as they relate to trade and all these things. As I mentioned before in my remarks, there has been a lot of discussion back and forth in the Conservative caucus regarding their support and non-support. I had a chance to talk to stakeholders last summer. I spoke to over 150 myself, and I had a number of other colleagues who were on the road speaking to individuals as well. By and large, all those people said to me that we needed to make sure we had a deal done. The context in which they said that was in eliminating the steel and aluminum tariffs.When we signed the deal, which the Prime Minister said he would not sign unless steel and aluminum tariffs were done, and that he went ahead and signed anyway, the reality is that businesses needed certainty. Therefore, we were challenged, as the member mentioned. There are a number of issues that we have concerns with. Supply management is certainly one of those issues, in terms of the fact that we have given up the right to export some of the proteins, etc. However, there is also the fact that they have put provisions on what we are able to do in dealing with a non-market economy, or in this case, China. That will be a bigger issue in terms of sovereignty as we get down the road. The U.S. has said that if it does not like the deal we create that it can deal with this new deal itself, and that will cause problems.At the end of the day, we are challenged. We realize that this deal is not a good deal. However, it is what stakeholders, businesses and people have told us they need in order to have certainty so they can move forward with their relationships with the U.S.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsTraceyRamseyEssexKarenLudwigNew Brunswick Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison: (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from New Brunswick Southwest. She is correct that we sit on the trade committee. We have had a number of discussions about how we can help our SMEs do a better job and to access these things. We can never forget that it was the Conservative government that was the government of trade. It was the Conservative government that worked to get CETA down the road and implemented. I realize that the Liberals came along and helped with the ratification, which we appreciate. I think that is important. If we look at the TPP, we had a bow on it and it was gift-wrapped. All the Liberals needed to do was to take it across the finish line. However, for a couple of years, they were unsure whether they wanted to do anything. At the end of the day, we got a new deal. The new deal had a new name. Therefore, the only new thing we got was that it is now the CPTPP instead of the TPP. To answer the member for New Brunswick Southwest, one of the things we did as a government was to promote the trade agenda. We moved it forward to create and access more markets so that our SMEs and other businesses had more opportunities to sell around the world.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesTrade agreementsKarenLudwigNew Brunswick SouthwestLarryMaguireBrandon—Souris//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Larry Maguire (Brandon—Souris, CPC): (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, my Liberal colleague asked my colleague, the critic in this area and shadow cabinet minister in opposition regarding trade, about all the things he liked in the agreement. Of course, he mentioned chapter 19. However, the government has failed to mention another very important area, which is softwood lumber. There is still not an agreement in that area. I wonder if the member could comment on that.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsDeanAllisonNiagara WestDeanAllisonNiagara West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison: (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, as we look at the number of trade irritants we have with the United States, certainly softwood lumber is one that comes to mind. It was one of the things our former prime minister, Mr. Harper, dealt with. We had a deal in place that expired just after the current government came in. I have heard nothing from the government about its plan or what it would like to do with respect to softwood lumber. It has been languishing for these last three or four years on the issue. Let us look at some of the things that have been going on. Let us talk about pipelines for a second. The current government likes to talk about all the pipelines we did not build, which is categorically false. We twinned, and did a number of things with at least four pipelines. However, I have not seen anything go in the ground over the last three and a half years. When we talk about our forestry sector, our major concern is that there has been no action on softwood lumber. We thought that with the renegotiation of NAFTA, this would have been front and centre. The government would have recognized that it had to deal with that kind of thing. However, when I look at the way that these things have been handled—the fact that we had tariffs on steel and aluminum that we did not need to have, because if we had dealt with the issue of safeguards right from the start that would not have been the case—we have gone through pain and suffering. There has been no mention of what is going to happen with softwood lumber. We see a history of what has happened with this party. As I mentioned in my speech, we see a party that is not prepared to begin the conversation around the renegotiation of NAFTA.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsLarryMaguireBrandon—SourisTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25446DeanAllisonDean-AllisonNiagara WestConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AllisonDean_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Dean Allison (Niagara West, CPC): (1235)[English]Mr. Speaker, I take exception to some of my colleague's comments on wine. We are going to have to talk about that later. NAFTA caused the Canadian industry to step up its game in a big way and, with the help of the government, to pull out some of the stuff they called wine before and plant some newer vinifera varieties.I asked the minister about the ratification process and the timing. I agree with the member in terms of the confusion or the lack of direction in the U.S. around ratification, as it relates to the Democrats and Mr. Trump. I asked the minister whether something about ratification would happen now or later. My thoughts are that the Liberals should hold off until the U.S. is actually in a position to move forward so we do not play all our cards and box ourselves into a position.Does the member believe that the Liberals are looking to ratify this as a way to show in the window for the next election “Look at us; we've ratified it”, even though that is disingenuous, given the fact that there is so much uncertainty in the U.S. right now?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsTraceyRamseyEssexTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1240)[English]Questions and comments. The hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.TraceyRamseyEssexElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/84672TedFalkTed-FalkProvencherConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkTed_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Ted Falk (Provencher, CPC): (1255)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank the member across the way for demonstrating his passion and commitment and for recognizing the importance of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement. There was talk in the last minute or so of agreements needing improvements every once in a while, but we gave up on the auto sector, we gave up on pharmaceuticals, we gave up on supply management. We did not get a softwood lumber agreement and we did not get a steel and aluminum tariff removal as part of the package.Is there any area where we actually benefited in trade capacity from the previous agreement, and could the member tell me what the might be?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCompetitionGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsMarkEykingHon.Sydney—VictoriaMarkEykingHon.Sydney—Victoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (1310)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member and I sit on the trade committee and I thank her for the work she has done there. She has been very honourable on that committee. It is a committee that functions very well in this Parliament. On this file in particular, we see the value and importance of two billion dollars' worth of trade a day. We have been working together as best we can, and I think Canadians will be proud of us.However, there are some concerns. One of the concerns with respect to this agreement is the upheaval and the process in the U.S. of getting it ratified. Does the member have any insight from the Liberal government on what the process will be here in Canada as we ratify this agreement in step with the U.S.? We also cannot forget about the situation that is going on in Mexico. C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsKarenLudwigNew Brunswick SouthwestKarenLudwigNew Brunswick Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback (Prince Albert, CPC): (1315)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Calgary Forest Lawn.This deal has definitely been a rocky road for Canada. It has created a lot of tension, although “stress” may be a better word, for a lot of Canadians and Canadian businesses. In light of working with a president who was threatening to rip up NAFTA and with all sorts of other issues going on in the U.S. and the U.S. election, it definitely caught Canadians' attention these last four years. It is very important that we now talk about the rest of the story, how we have ended up where we are today and why we ended up being a target instead of having a deal that would make North America more competitive in the world marketplace. Two and a half years ago, the Prime Minister volunteered to renegotiate NAFTA, and that is fine. What was not clear was what his goal was. In his mind, I do not think he had a clear goal. I do not think he had a clear idea of what he wanted the outcome to look like, and that caused a lot of stress and failures as the negotiations progressed.We could look at the new NAFTA as a chance to make North America more competitive, to create an environment throughout North America and take advantage of all the strengths that Mexico, the U.S. and Canada have to offer, putting them together and competing strongly in the world marketplace. We had that opportunity and we lost it. That is frustrating for Canadian businesses and it is frustrating for businesses right across North America because it was there and we did not achieve it.Mexico calls it NAFTA 0.8. We call it NAFTA 0.5. The reality is this is not a good agreement. It is okay; it stinks, but the business community says it would rather take a bad agreement in this case than have no agreement, to have it ripped up and have nothing. After all, the U.S. is 70% of our business and we do some $2 billion in trade every day with the U.S. The reality is that we ended up with an agreement that the U.S. and Mexico negotiated and Canada signed onto afterward. How did that happen?I will talk about the inside baseball going on in D.C. while this was going on. When I went to D.C. the first time after the Trump election, I and the former leader of the Conservative Party, Rona Ambrose, visited Congress and very quickly we realized a couple of things. The first was that Canada was not the target in these deals. Members of the House of Representatives and Senate said they had problems with Mexico. We told them that if they were renegotiating NAFTA, they were also renegotiating with Canada. They said, “We have no issues with Canada. That is crazy.” They did not even understand the relationship between Canada and the U.S. They did not understand how important that relationship is and how much business is done.The former Conservative leader and I said we needed to help them on this deal because if they did not get this right, it would cost us a lot of jobs and our economy would suffer substantially. We worked closely with the Liberal Party. There is no question about it. We did not deny it. I did round tables right across Canada and spoke to Canadian businesses about what they wanted out of the agreement. The committee sat in the summer to give the minister a chance to talk about what she thought the agreement could look like when it was completed, and she did not. She sent some virtue-signalling ideas of what she would like to include in the agreement, ideas the Liberals knew the U.S. president would never accept, ideas that really did not do anything for competitiveness in Canada, but that was their starting point. We knew right then that we were in trouble.I will admit that members of the House from all parties worked very well together on this agreement. Whether it was the trade committee or the Canada-U.S. group, they worked well together. Where did it fall down? Where it fell down is very serious and shows how problematic things can get. It fell down in the PMO and the minister's office. Members did a great job educating members in the U.S. at the state level and the federal level on the importance of our relationship. When we go to the U.S., they quote our numbers back to us on how important that relationship is. How did it end up that Canada became the target instead of Mexico?During Trump's speeches in the U.S. during the election campaign, what did he talk about? He talked about building a wall. He said NAFTA was horrible and Mexico took all of the jobs. He said that trade with China is horrible and China took all the jobs. He said that the U.S. lost all their jobs. The only thing he mentioned about Canada was a bit about dairy. He wanted access to dairy into Canada. He did not like the fact that our dairy producers are profitable and the U.S. dairy producers were in a system that did not allow them to become profitable. In reality, they did not want to ship milk to Canada; they wanted the price that Canadians had for their milk in Ohio. (1320)What changed? I can remember sitting down with Secretary Ross, who said, “Canada and the U.S., everything is good here. In fact, there should be some changes here, maybe in the buy America provisions to include Canada like the 51st state.” I remember him saying, “We should also do a trade deal together with Japan.”We were invited to the table to go to Japan, if we wanted to choose that. We chose the TPP route, which I think is a better route. However, it shows how good the relationship was at that point and where it has ended up today. It comes back to how the PMO and the minister handled the relationship with the President of the United States.We said very publicly that the Prime Minister did not need to be his best friend, but he should not poke him. I said, “Do not poke him.” Making a speech in New York, in his backyard, criticizing the president is not a wise thing. It might get the Prime Minister on Saturday Night Live and all the left-wing media in the U.S. would love him for it, and the Prime Minister would enjoy himself because he is popular with the left-wing media in the U.S., but at what expense? Canadian jobs.After the Montreal summit, what did the comments the Prime Minister made about the president do? It led to the aluminum and steel tariffs. On those types of things, he could not help himself. He wanted to be a popular prime minister in the U.S. I needed a functional prime minister here in Canada, not a populist in the U.S.With the minister, it was the same thing. Some of her articles in the U.S. were insulting to the president. Why would she do that in the middle of negotiations with our biggest trading partner?Mr. Speaker, how would you feel if I insulted you right now? Would you cut me off and tell me to sit down, or would you let me keep going?That is what they were doing down there. That is what the Prime Minister and the minister were doing in the U.S. That is what was creating the problems we have here today. That is how we ended up with NAFTA 0.5. We would go down and actually build a strong relationship between the White House and Parliament, and they would destroy it over and over again. I am sure our ambassador down there must have been pulling out his hair, because some of the directions he was given to lobby on behalf of Canada were definitely anti-Trump or anti-Republican sentiments. Why would they do that in the middle of negotiations of our biggest trade deal? Why? It is just amazing.We saw that over and over again. That part of the story needs to be told here in Canada so that Canadians understand when we start losing jobs, so that Canadians understand why we gave up market access, and so that Canadians understand why we cannot expand another auto plant in Canada. It is not because we were the target at the start. It is because of the actions of these offices that created that problematic situation.We are going to support this deal. As I said, in this case a bad deal is better than no deal. Too many jobs are at stake.It is going to be interesting to watch this. As we watch the outcome and what is going on with Mexico and the U.S., and the battles they are having amongst themselves, it will be interesting to see if our Prime Minister can actually stay out of it. It will be interesting to see how the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, moves forward with legislation, and how we are going to handle that. Even though we think we have an agreement, and we have signed an agreement, until the Democrats put it through the House ways and means committee, we really do not have a 100% final agreement. I think it is important that we do that in sync with them. That is the route the committee is looking at.It did not have to be this way, if we had approached this in the right way with the president. When he said he had labour issues in Mexico, we could have said that we have labour issues in Mexico. When the president said he had steel being dumped from China, we could have said we have steel being dumped from China. Canada had a lot of the same issues the president was talking about during his campaign. We are not building a wall. We are not doing those crazy things. We do not need to. Mexico has been a good trading partner and a good friend. However, the reality is there were opportunities to build upon the same concerns the U.S. had, and to actually produce an agreement that would have made us even more competitive internationally.Another failure in this agreement has to be on softwood lumber. Canadians have to see that. The reality is there are lots of things in this agreement that we need to fix. On October 21, Canadians are going to change their government, and we are going to have the responsibility, again, of fixing all the discrepancies that the Liberals have left on the table. We will fix them. We will go back to the U.S. We will do it in a positive and approachable manner, and we will deal with them issue by issue. A government led by the Leader of the Opposition will fix these things. Canadians can take comfort in knowing that.In the meantime, this agreement will pass and hopefully will be ratified because, as I said, the instability created by not having an agreement is far worse than what we have right now.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsKarenLudwigNew Brunswick SouthwestSukhDhaliwalSurrey—Newton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback: (1325)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canada got what it took. The deal was arranged in Mexico between the U.S. and Mexico and we signed on after it was done. We did not add anything to it at that point in time. We vacated the responsibility of our negotiators to Mexico to do the final deal. That is where the breakdown in the minister's role in this deal was. The reality is that when the negotiators walked away and the U.S. and Mexico kept negotiating, without our even being in the room, this is what the Liberals got. If there had been leadership, they would never have allowed that happen. If there had been leadership, they would have recognized the issues right away and dealt with them. If there had been leadership, they would have focused the conversation, like every member of the House did, on competitiveness, on ensuring we would have a very vibrant North American economy and would deal with the issues that the U.S. had, Mexico had and we had and then get those issues dealt with in a positive manner so we could be even more competitive in the world. The Liberals did not do that. They did absolutely nothing. They just went along for the ride because they did not know what they wanted. That is the reality of what we have here today.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsSukhDhaliwalSurrey—NewtonWayneStetskiKootenay—Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback: (1330)[English]Mr. Speaker, before the trade agreement talks even started, one of the big issues in the U.S. was all the people who would be left behind. What about the people who are negatively impacted by a trade deal? What are we going to do to ensure they are made whole and are able to function in a very progressive manner in the new environment created by the trade deal? Dairy is another example of that. What are the Liberals going to do for the dairy sector to ensure people are properly compensated for the loss they have had in both TPP and in these NAFTA talks?There is nothing in the budget to help any of the sectors that are negatively impacted by this agreement. There is no game plan for them. The Liberals have not listened. They have not learned from people's complaints in the past. They have done nothing. Yes, people are going to feel the pain, unfortunately, and the Canadian economy will grow, but some people will be left out because the Liberals have not planned for that.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementDairy industryGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsWayneStetskiKootenay—ColumbiaRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59148RandyHobackRandy-HobackPrince AlbertConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/HobackRandy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Randy Hoback: (1330)[English]Mr. Speaker, when we talk to people in the business community, they say it is not a good deal but they want the stability. They tell us to plug our noses, get it done and get off its radar so they can keep on doing business and get investment in Canada. That is the reality and that is what we are dealing with.However, they have also say that we have to get rid of those guys. They say they cannot afford the Liberals anymore, that they have to go. They tell us that we need a clean plan for things like softwood lumber, for dealing their competitiveness factor in North America. We need a plan. Only the leader of the Conservative Party has that plan and it will change on October 21. The sun will shine again on Canada after October 21.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestDeepakObhraiHon.Calgary Forest Lawn//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1287DeepakObhraiHon.Deepak-ObhraiCalgary Forest LawnConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ObhraiDeepak_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Deepak Obhrai (Calgary Forest Lawn, CPC): (1330)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise once more in the House to talk about the NAFTA trade deal. I listened to the talking points of the Liberals. They talk about all the good things international trade and the free trade agreement do. They are the same old talking points. Once upon a time when we were in government, we said the same thing in support of free trade. However, I need to remind members on the other side that it was the Conservatives who were the party that pushed for free trade. NAFTA came about because of the Right Hon. Brian Mulroney. No one in the country would say that NAFTA was not a good deal for Canada.However, as my colleague from Prince Albert has just eloquently said, the problems are with NAFTA .5. When the parliamentary secretary says why 0.5 and not 0, simply and straightforwardly, we do not trust the Liberals to set up any kind of a good deal, knowing the results since they have come into power.I remember very clearly that it was the Liberal Prime Minister who shunned TPP in Vietnam. He was the only leader not to go. At that time, he had his own idea of free trade. Even the Chinese shut the door in his face. The point of this story is the reason why the Conservative Party supports this, despite all the flaws and everything here, because the business community needs this. The Conservative Party has always been a very proud free trade party. During the time of Prime Minister Harper, we signed a lot of free trade agreements around the world because we knew it is right.The biggest one for everyone was NAFTA. Today, we call it NAFTA 0.5. The Liberals want to call it NAFTA 2.0. Mexico calls it NAFTA 0.8. The fact is that, yes, the business community needs stability. The business community is looking for some kind of stability in this economy so it can move forward. This is one way in which we can bring that kind of stability.However, to remind all Canadians, since the Liberal government has taken power, five premiers have written to the Prime Minister today. They has said that under his regime, Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 will threaten national unity. That has never happened before, where five premiers have written to say that Liberals have created an environment in the country that is not conducive to business and actually threatens the security of national unity. It is unprecedented. That is the record the Liberals have for the economy, which is why we do not trust them to get NAFTA back.However, there is some hope in the sense that even with this flawed NAFTA deal, the business community will have some kind of confidence in the economy, forgetting about what the Liberals have done. The country needs to do it. We do not know where the Liberals are going with the Trans Mountain pipeline. Hopefully very soon we will have shovels in the ground.I come from a province that has taken a massive hit by the Liberals' economic policy, and it continues. Right now, confidence in Canada is declining under the government. Under Prime Minister Harper's government, confidence in Canada was going up. Under the current government, investor confidence in Canada is going down. We can talk to anyone out there, in London or New York and so on. If it comes to Canada, they slowly turn their heads away. The sunny days and sitting on the international stage by the Prime Minister has all evaporated in the air. He is no longer the darling of anything and if he continues the way he is, we could face serious economic poverty. Hopefully, on October 21, Canadians will have a choice and will send the Liberals packing on their economic record, which is one of the most important things that needs done, because jobs bring stability. (1335)I saw the most foolish ads yesterday when watching the Raptors. They were so-called third party advertisements against the leader of the official opposition. I have never seen a more idiotic advertisement. They will make Canadians more angry. Unifor, the so-called journalists' union, is absolutely at the forefront of this sentiment, making it very clear that it does not like the Conservative Party. What it seems to forget, however, is this is not about Unifor; it is about Canadians and jobs. Unifor keeps saying it wants to fight for jobs. However, if it wants to fight for jobs, it should be honest about it. It should work for all Canadians and not be partisan.Once more, I am standing in the House of Commons to stand up for free trade. We all know free trade has immense benefits for our country and for our jobs. If there were no tanker ban, no problematic Bill C-69, there would be such confidence in Canada. We would be a model country.We have been blessed with natural resources. We do not have just one natural resource, but multiple. We should develop them, although I agree 100% that this should be environmentally sound.Let us look at our oil production. We have one of the best systems in the world. We can compare it to those in countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, where there are no environmental standards. They are moving full steam ahead. Let us be honest. Let us work environmentally. It is time for the country to move forward with developing its natural resources. With respect to the new NAFTA that has just been signed, all my colleagues have, very eloquently, made it clear that it has serious flaws. We want confidence. It is the one piece of legislation the government has brought forward that can give some kind of confidence to the business community that Canada is a free trade country.Many people do not understand the amount of money Canadian businesses invest overseas. It is in the trillions of dollars. If it were not for free trade agreements, Canadian businesses would be unable to invest overseas. The Canadian investments of over $1 trillion will, in the longer term, help our country's economy, making businesses very strong.Free trade agreements go both ways. They are for us and the countries with which we sign. That is why so many are signing on to the TPP. I am glad that the government finally, after insulting the leaders of the TPP, came to its senses. This came after China told us to take a hike when Canada went to China to sign a free trade agreement.In the end, the Conservatives will support the bill because we believe Canadians need confidence, the economy needs confidence and the business community needs confidence so we can proceed forward and create jobs that will benefit each and every Canadian.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCompetitionGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsRandyHobackPrince AlbertJulieDabrusinToronto—Danforth//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1287DeepakObhraiHon.Deepak-ObhraiCalgary Forest LawnConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ObhraiDeepak_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Deepak Obhrai: (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, we are a small country. The U.S.A. is a very large country. Naturally, being a small country, we have to safeguard our cultural industries. Otherwise, we will be overpowered by big American companies.This is why we have stated that we will support the free trade agreement. However, we need to improve on it. There are finer details to note on the issues the member raised, but in the larger scheme of things, indeed Canadian culture is thriving.Governments do not have to give money for Canadian culture. Governments do not have to give money for newspapers to stay alive. Right across the country, wherever I go, Canadian culture is thriving.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCultural industryGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsJulieDabrusinToronto—DanforthMartinShieldsBow River//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89109MartinShieldsMartin-ShieldsBow RiverConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ShieldsMartin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionMr. Martin Shields (Bow River, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's knowledge and history in this chamber, and his understanding of many of the trade issues that have occurred. This particular situation seems to have arisen with the President of the United States talking about some trade issues he had with Mexico, and then the Prime Minister of Canada wanted to be involved. We are not sure why he did that. I know he would understand that some people might think the softwood trade agreement that we often hear about has something to do with British Columbia. However, it is not just British Columbia. He might be able to respond about how big an issue this is for Canada from coast to coast. Could my colleague respond with what he knows about the history of trade and other things that are important that are not in this agreement?C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsDeepakObhraiHon.Calgary Forest LawnDeepakObhraiHon.Calgary Forest Lawn//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1287DeepakObhraiHon.Deepak-ObhraiCalgary Forest LawnConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ObhraiDeepak_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Deepak Obhrai: (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, actually my hon. colleague is my member of Parliament, so he can ask me that question. However, he brought up a point rightly. We just said that we are resource rich across this country. Every region has its strengths and weaknesses. Every region has its own natural resources. Right now, there is fossil fuel in Alberta, softwood lumber, when we talk about British Columbia, and fisheries and lobster across the east.It is critically important that when we sign free trade agreements that we take all of that into account and do not just sign sector by sector by sector, which is why this is critically important. I have seen TPP in Australia and New Zealand and their issues. There is no question or doubt about the free trade agreement and natural resources. There is no question about being environmentally friendly. Climate change is there, and it is important that we take that into account now that we are developing our resources.I can assure my friend that when we were in power, we did well. When we are in power, we will do better.C-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementGovernment billsSecond readingTrade agreementsMartinShieldsBow RiverTerrySheehanSault Ste. Marie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1287DeepakObhraiHon.Deepak-ObhraiCalgary Forest LawnConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ObhraiDeepak_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionHon. Deepak Obhrai: (1345)[English]Mr. Speaker, it was very clear right from the first, when the tariffs were put here, that we took a very strong stand, which Jason Kenney has done. However, for the government to take credit for it is not right. As my colleague has said, all of us worked on it, including members of the trade committee, who went to the U.S. and lobbied everywhere. Let me put it this way: Irrespective, it was good for Canada.Aluminum industryC-100, An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican StatesCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsTerrySheehanSault Ste. MarieSukhDhaliwalSurrey—Newton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCanada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1355)[English]There will be two and a half minutes remaining for questions and comments for the member for Surrey—Newton when the House next gets back to debate on the question.SukhDhaliwalSurrey—NewtonMoniquePauzéRepentigny//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1400)[English]Mr. Speaker, the environment minister says that if someone repeats a talking point and says it louder, people will totally believe it. She has been misleading Canadians by telling them that they will get back all of the money they pay for the carbon tax, all the money totally back. I got my climate action rebate when I did my taxes this year. I received $169, but it is costing me $10 more every time I fill up with gas each week. If I add that up over a year, that is more than $500, and that is before I add in the increased costs of home heating, groceries, etc. Clearly, the Liberals are taking more from my pocket and the pockets of all other Canadians with this carbon tax and they definitely are not giving it back, not all the money, not totally back.This carbon tax is not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersKateYoungLondon WestWayneEasterHon.Malpeque//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersAutomated External DefibrillatorsInterventionMr. Scott Reid (Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, by an unhappy coincidence, it was four years ago today that I first urged the House to place automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, into all 5,600 RCMP cruisers. Based on the experience of other Canadian police forces, this would have saved the lives of over 300 heart attack victims a year, at a one-time cost of $5 million, plus maintenance.Four years have gone by and the RCMP has done nothing but invent excuses for its inaction. Therefore, 1,200 Canadians who would have been alive today are now dead. We could fill this room four times over with the bodies of those who died because we could not find the $5 million.On the other hand, we parliamentarians have had no trouble finding over 100 times as much, $500 million, to renovate the building in which we meet today, and if estimates are right, we will spend even more on Centre Block. Could we take just 1% of that to save 300 lives next year, the year after and the year after that, or do we just not care?DefibrillatorsPolice servicesRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceStatements by MembersLloydLongfieldGuelphGaryAnandasangareeScarborough—Rouge Park//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersDodgeballInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge. These are the five Ds of dodgeball.However, a group of meddlesome academics has now said that dodgeball is a tool of oppression. This is a game as old and storied as recess itself. Who here among us does not remember the sting of a well-placed shot, the thrill of that critical catch, or the shame of crossing the centre line?Dodgeball was an important part of phys ed, summer camp and recess, but now dodgeball in particular and fun in general are under attack. These ultra-woke busybodies are trying to throw a wrench in our fun.In the immortal words of Patches O'Houlihan, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” At Balgonie Elementary, I could dodge a wrench.Dodgeball is not a tool of oppression. It is not part of some secret plot to reinforce gender identity or to abuse students. This is a game, and it is fun. To the fun police, we say, “Keep your hands off our dodgeballs.”DodgeballStatements by MembersRandeepSaraiSurrey CentreFayçalEl-KhouryLaval—Les Îles//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgStatements by Members2019 General ElectionInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1410)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the election is just four months away and I am proud to say that the Conservative Party has almost finished recruiting its candidates. In Quebec alone, we have now chosen 85% of the 78 candidates. These men and women have backgrounds in various fields, including education, health, media, agriculture, municipal affairs, business and accounting, which God knows we are going to need to address the enormous deficit rung up by the Liberals and their Prime Minister. We have an inspiring leader and a skilled, engaged and determined team. I am convinced that the quality of our team together with our ambitious, rigorous and responsible platform will more than meet Canadians' expectations.We have never been more ready to resume governing. On October 21, we will start cleaning house. Election of 2019Electoral candidates and nominationsStatements by MembersBillCaseyCumberland—ColchesterJeanRiouxSaint-Jean//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins (Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians are getting hosed at the pumps, no thanks to this Prime Minister. Recently the Canadian press reported that rebates from the Liberal carbon tax are much lower across the country than had been promised. Canadians are feeling the increased costs on everyday essentials such as groceries, home heating and gasoline. That is a far cry from the Liberal leader's claim that eight out of 10 families will get more money back than they pay into his scheme.Between all the ums and ahs and the confusing world of water bottles, Canadians are realizing they cannot believe anything this Liberal Prime Minister says. The proof is in the pudding with his “Do as I say, not as I do” attitude, as he jets around the world on more taxpayer-funded vacations, with zero regard to his carbon emissions. What he says and what he does never match. It is hardly a surprise that the Liberals' carbon-tax rebates are much lower than expected. Much like the Liberal leader, they are not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersSheriBensonSaskatoon WestYvonneJonesLabrador//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister at the beginning of his term said that he would strive to have a better relationship with the provinces. Today we have heard from five premiers of provinces and one premier from a territory that they in fact have grave concerns about two bills that we are considering here. They have expressed their concerns with respect to investment in their provincial territories.I would like to know whether the Prime Minister will heed the concerns of the premiers and accept the amendments from the Senate.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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsYvonneJonesLabradorJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, with respect to relationships with premiers, regardless of political stripe, let us take a look at what the former Liberal premier of British Columbia has said about the Prime Minister: “When you're walking around thinking you're not first among equals but that you are the only one who has no equal, which is, I think, [the Prime Minister's] modus operandi when it comes to premiers, you've got a problem.”I would like to know from the Prime Minister if he will take the concerns of the premiers seriously regarding uncertainty in investment in their provinces and accept the full amendments from the Senate.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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, these premiers represent 59% of the Canadian population and 63% of Canada's GDP. They are warning that these two bills would produce insurmountable roadblocks for major infrastructure projects and will jeopardize jobs, growth and investor confidence—and yes, they are pointing to their concerns about whether or not the Prime Minister is bringing on a constitutional crisis in this country.Will the Prime Minister do the right thing, consider the amendments from the Senate and agree to every single one of them?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 ActsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsSenate and senatorsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, Ontario, New Brunswick, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and now the Northwest Territories have just written an urgent letter to the Liberal Prime Minister calling on him to amend or withdraw Bills C-48 and C-69. The provinces simply want to be respected as the valuable partners that they are.When will this centralist and paternalistic Prime Minister consider these democratically elected provincial premiers and their governments as he should?Federal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's relationships with provincial governments and premiers are disastrous, and that is a fact. This centralist, paternalistic government constantly attacks provincial premiers at every opportunity.As always, the Prime Minister's incompetence, sloppiness and stubbornness are a threat to national unity.That raises a simple question: Will this government finally listen to our democratically elected premiers and their governments?Federal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJustinTrudeauRight Hon.Papineau//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/100521RichardMartelRichard-MartelChicoutimi—Le FjordConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MartelRichard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Richard Martel (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, Canada's central bank says wage growth is sluggish. The people of Chicoutimi—Le Fjord feel like the cost of living is rising faster than their wages. They cannot afford a tax hike. The government is certainly not setting a good example by racking up mountains of debt. Everyone knows that, in order to finance their out-of-control spending, the Liberals are going to raise taxes. When will the Minister of Finance admit it?Budget deficitOral questionsPersonal income taxJustinTrudeauRight Hon.PapineauJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/100521RichardMartelRichard-MartelChicoutimi—Le FjordConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MartelRichard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Richard Martel (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, nearly half of Canadians are $200 or less away from financial insolvency. Many say they could work more, but it is not worth it. They say that every hour of overtime gets swallowed up by the government. The Liberals are running massive deficits, and those deficits will have to be paid off.What is the plan for balancing the budget?Balanced budgetBudget deficitOral questionsJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, middle-class tax increases under the Liberals are starting to take their effect. The reality is that Canadians now face higher delinquency rates as a result of the government's policies, and half of Canadians are within $200 every month of insolvency. Worse yet, the government will not rule out tax increases if it is re-elected. When will they admit that if elected, the Liberals will impose new and massive tax increases to pay for their out-of-control spending?Budget deficitOral questionsPersonal income taxJenniferO'ConnellPickering—UxbridgeJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]No, Mr. Speaker, they are taking marching orders from the Prime Minister's mentor, Kathleen Wynne, who doubled Ontario's debt, doubled electricity costs and lied in four elections about Liberal plans to raise taxes on Ontarians. That is exactly what the Prime Minister is doing: driving up power bills, driving up the debt, and I cannot say the word in the House of Commons, hiding the fact that he is going to raise taxes if re-elected.Why will he not admit those higher costs now, so Canadians can vote on whether they want to pay them?Oral questionsPersonal income taxJenniferO'ConnellPickering—UxbridgeJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Well, Mr. Speaker, the truth is that during the great global recession, the Conservatives had the smallest deficits and the smallest debt of any country in the G7, and the Liberals, at the same time, said, “Spend more, spend now, spend faster.” They said we should do like Kathleen Wynne, which was to lie in four elections about tax increases while doubling the debt and doubling power bills. That is exactly the strategy of the Prime Minister: to hide his tax increases until after the election, when he no longer needs Canadians' votes.Oral questionsPersonal income taxGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Well, Mr. Speaker, the Liberals actually did think Conservative debts were tiny, because they kept asking us to make them bigger, and that is precisely what they have done since they took office. Following Kathleen Wynne, they are trying to drive up debt, which means future tax increases down the road, and they will not even deny it. Unlike Kathleen Wynne, they are not even hiding their plans to raise taxes again on the middle class.If the government is not going to raise taxes, will the Liberals tell us how it is they are possibly going to erase their deficit without imposing higher taxes on Canadians?Budget deficitOral questionsPersonal income taxJenniferO'ConnellPickering—UxbridgeJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister changed the law to allow government-funded influencers to interfere in the election, once again using his power to try to rig the election. The Chief Electoral Officer agrees that a campaign involving social media influencers is very politically sensitive.Will the Prime Minister finally release the names of those influencers?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, that is ironic coming from a Liberal government that has no problem breaking the law. We have seen Liberal ministers exchanging cash for access, our current Prime Minister being the first in Canadian history to be found guilty of breaking ethics laws and the Prime Minister interfering in not one but two criminal prosecutions. Canadians are still waiting for the Liberals to return the money they stole in the sponsorship scandal. Now government-funded influencers urging people to vote risk the appearance of further political interference in the election.When the Liberals tell us who they are?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35397JacquesGourdeJacques-GourdeLévis—LotbinièreConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GourdeJacques_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMr. Jacques Gourde (Lévis—Lotbinière, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised a dirty election campaign and has stooped to a new low. He is letting his friends, third parties like Unifor and Engage Canada, do his dirty work for him.The Liberals asked Unifor to distribute $600 million to the media, and now it is returning the favour by launching an unprecedented, unfair multi-million dollar attack ad campaign against the future prime minister of our country, a campaign that circumvents the Canada Elections Act.Why does the Prime Minister have such close ties with partisan interest groups? Is there a secret agreement? Canadians want to know the truth.Electoral systemLobbying and lobbyistsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Toronto Raptors lost last night, but at the end of the game, the Prime Minister was smiling from ear to ear. That is because anti-Conservative attack ads ran in prime spots during the game, and the Liberal Party did not have to spend a cent, because a special interest group called Engage Canada did its dirty work for it. Unifor has bragged about bankrolling Engage Canada to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.When will the Prime Minister stop stacking the deck, and finally kick Unifor off the panel that will decide which media outlets get $600 million in government bailouts from these guys?Canada Media FundElectoral systemGovernment assistanceMedia and the pressOral questionsUniforKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonPabloRodriguezHon.Honoré-Mercier//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, from day one, my province of Saskatchewan has been fighting tooth and nail against the Liberal carbon tax, because we knew all along that it was a scam. It turns out we were right. Not only are the Liberals charging the GST on top of the carbon tax, but residents in Saskatchewan are receiving significantly less than the Prime Minister promised through his so-called rebate. When will the Prime Minister admit that, just like him, his carbon tax is not as advertised?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am sure that Premier Moe would love to hear that. No matter how loud the environment minister said it and how many times she repeated it, Canadians have been totally misled on the Liberal carbon tax rebate scheme.We now know that residents in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario received much less than they were led to believe under the Liberal rebate scheme. What is true, however, is that every Canadian is now paying more in these provinces for the necessities of life because of the Liberal carbon tax. Now that we know the truth, will the Prime Minister finally admit that his carbon tax is not as advertised? Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change has told yet another whopper.Let usplay who is telling the truth. On the one hand, the Liberals have announced that Canada will meet its Paris targets and, on the other, institutions such as the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the Climate Action network and even the United Nations are confirming that Canada will not reach these targets.Who are we going to believe? The answer is obvious. Let us not forget that the Liberals have invested more than $4 billion in a pipeline.How can this government utter this falsehood and make Canadians believe the Liberals' talk about the environment?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's environment plan is spiralling out of control. We know from his own officials that the Liberals will not meet their Paris targets. This comes as no surprise, because they do not have a climate plan; they have a tax plan. However, yesterday, we also found out that the Prime Minister's plan is a “drink box water bottles, sort of thing”. Those are his words. When will the Prime Minister admit that he will not meet his Paris targets? Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1455)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, the law firm of the Liberal MP for Steveston—Richmond East facilitated a bare trust deal for an alleged member of the Chinese cartel Big Circle Boys.The deal was completed while Kwok Chung Tam was still serving a conditional sentence for a drug trafficking conviction.We also learned that the British Columbia Law Society took control of the MP's law firm and that he is no longer a member of the society. Things are looking very bad for him.Has that hon. member ever pressured cabinet members over money laundering?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersFilomenaTassiHon.Hamilton West—Ancaster—DundasBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, we have learned that an alleged Chinese cartel drug boss used a Liberal MP's law firm to launder money through a B.C. condo purchase. The bare trust deal in 2011 allowed a key member of the “big circle boys” to conceal his investment of almost $9 million in a B.C. property. That property flipped four years later for almost $15 million.Has the MP for Steveston—Richmond East ever lobbied members of cabinet on bare trust deals, mortgage rules, money laundering laws or FINTRAC reporting?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersBillBlairHon.Scarborough SouthwestBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, bare trust deals are blamed for creating a veil of secrecy for international criminals trying to hide and launder proceeds of crime.A B.C. inquiry is expected to focus on a loophole that exempts Canadian lawyers from reporting suspicious transactions to Canada's anti-money laundering watchdog. Now we learn that the Liberal member's firm was seized by the B.C. Law Society in April, and he has been removed from the B.C. bar.Are we really expected to believe that the member for Steveston—Richmond East has not lobbied cabinet and that the Prime Minister is not aware of this developing scandal?British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoeReferences to membersBillBlairHon.Scarborough SouthwestBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians expect the Liberals to approve the Trans Mountain expansion because they already approved it once before, back in 2016. In fact, construction was supposed to be done in the next six months, but three and a half years later, not a single inch has been built. Then the Liberals said that spending billions of tax dollars would get the expansion built “immediately”. That was more than a year ago. What exactly is the plan to ensure that construction of the Trans Mountain expansion starts in Burnaby on June 19?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineMaryamMonsefHon.Peterborough—KawarthaAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNational DefenceInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, the charges may have been dropped in the Vice-Admiral Norman affair, but justice has yet to be served.Under the Queen's Regulations and Orders of the National Defence Act, now that his name has been cleared, Vice-Admiral Norman should have been honourably returned to his position as vice-chief of the defence staff. However, that has not happened.When will the Minister of National Defence do his job, uphold the law and order the chief of the defence staff to reinstate Mark Norman as our Canadian Armed Forces second in command?Canadian ForcesNorman, MarkOral questionsReintegration into working lifeMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountHarjit S.SajjanHon.Vancouver South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodOral QuestionsInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1515)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order on a matter arising out of question period. In the questions from member for New Westminster—Burnaby, he referred to the MP for Richmond. I am wondering if he could clarify that he was not referring to the Conservative MP for Richmond Centre, but to the scandal of the Liberal MP for Steveston—Richmond East. I would ask him to clarify that for us.British ColumbiaMoney launderingOral questionsOrganized crimePeschisolido, JoePoints of orderReferences to membersGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJagmeetSinghBurnaby South//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersPrivilege [Video Record of House Proceedings of June 6, 2019]InterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1525)[English]Mr. Speaker, when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really fall? That is the same principle by which I raise this question of privilege today.On Thursday, June 6, during Routine Proceedings, I rose to table a petition. When I did so, I stated the following: Mr. Speaker...Canadians depend upon the economic benefits and the jobs created by Canada's oil and gas industry. Unfortunately, without the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, there are thousands of unemployed Canadians who are worried about their next paycheque and where it will come from, instead of being able to plan for their families' future. With the carbon tax, even life's essentials have become a very costly burden. Therefore, I table this petition calling on the government to immediately build the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and repeal the carbon tax so we can get this country back on track and create opportunities for thousands of Canadians.The problem was that it was not actually on the video of the proceedings of the House that day, nor were a number of other interventions that came before it. In reports from committees, the member for Avalon, the member for Bay of Quinte, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and the member for Sydney—Victoria all presented reports from committees, and none of those were available on the video either.The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons rose with a response to two petitions on behalf of the government. That was not recorded either. Nor was the petition presented by the member for Salaberry—Suroît.We looked to see if the video was available. We intended to use it for social media, and it was not available on ParlVu. Everything prior to 10:09:52 that morning was not available. We reached out to multimedia services and information services at that time and were informed at 11:39 a.m. that day that the video would be made available after the House adjourned at 12:30 a.m. the following morning, June 7. That was the understanding we had at that time. The next morning, we checked again. The video was still not available, and when we reached out to multimedia services and information services that morning, Friday morning, no response was ever received. No indication has ever been given as to why it was not made available or what the problem was. Going back to the statement I made at the beginning about a tree falling in the forest, this is the same thing. In the days of social media, members often use the statements they make, whether it be presenting petitions, reports from committees or other interventions in the House, for those purposes. When they are not made available to a member to share with constituents or others, the question is whether privilege has been breached. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask for your ruling on this question of privilege. As members, does our right to be heard extend to our right to be heard on the video recording that is supposed to be made available for the public?Parliamentary broadcastingParliamentary privilegeRights of Members breachedVideo recordingsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1555)[English]Madam Speaker, I would like to waylay some of the comments made by the hon. minister.Early in this parliamentary session, I could see that the Fisheries Act was going to be up for possible review and debate, so I put in an Order Paper question, No. 626. I asked the government for any proof of harm or habitat destruction, any loss that might have been created through the 2012 changes in the the Fisheries Act. The answer we received back on that Order Paper question was basically zero: no proof of harm whatsoever. How can the minister mislead the Canadian public by saying there was a loss of protection when the government cannot prove it when asked to do so in an Order Paper question? It is an absolute farce, and he should correct his statement.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, if other jurisdictions, including the United States, are able to bring in effective third party habitat banking systems and programs, why is that Canada cannot do that?C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverJonathanWilkinsonHon.North Vancouver//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, it is an honour to stand in the House and speak to the Senate amendments to Bill C-68. I listened intently as the minister did whatever he could, every step of the way, to disparage the previous government while trying to prop himself and his department up along the way. This comes from a minister who took credit for a Coast Guard vessel just last week on social media. He said that the Liberal government did this, but it was our former Conservative government that did it. It is very disingenuous for a minister to use his time to continue to slander and disparage the previous government.I have said time and again, very publicly in this House and at committee, that consecutive governments, including Liberal governments, should take blame for where our fisheries stocks are. When questioned as to why our fisheries stocks are at critical levels, there are bureaucrats who have been in their positions for 20-plus years who have consistently told every government that they promise to do better. It is quite shameful that this minister would stand up here and trumpet that the Liberals are moving the ball. I will provide proof in my speech that they are not.Today we are here to talk about the Senate amendments to Bill C-68, which is essentially a flawed piece of legislation. We saw that it was flawed when it was first introduced. Unfortunately, again the government put time allocation on the bill. I believe at that time it was the 40th time the Liberal government had done that, the same government that is led by the member for Papineau, who, during the 2015 campaign, said that his government would let the debate reign and would not resort to parliamentary tricks, such as invoking time allocation.Here we are today, and I think it is now over 70 times that time allocation has been used. We have not seen time allocation on this bill up to this point, but the day is still early.I will return to the Senate amendments. Early last week, the Senate sent back 15 amendments to Bill C-68 on about four different topics. As mentioned earlier, they cover inshore fisheries and habitat banking. Bill S-203, which is the bill that would end keeping whales in captivity, was rolled into Bill C-68, as well as Bill S-238, which is the shark finning bill put forward by a Conservative senator. I will get back to this shortly.It was interesting when the department was before our committee recently regarding Bill S-238. The officials mentioned that while we would be banning shark fins unless the fin is attached to the shark carcass itself, the importation of shark fin soup was still going to be permitted. The department has committed to getting back to us and double-checking that, but the comment we received from the official when he was asked and pressed on it was that “soup is soup.”Here we are now, talking about the Senate amendments to Bill C-68. Bill C-68 was introduced early last year and, as mentioned, is a piece of flawed legislation. During the 2015 campaign, the Liberals promised to restore the definition of “harmful alteration, disruption or destruction” of fish habitat. From this point, I will refer to that as “HADD”. I mention that for the Canadians watching from coast to coast to coast, as well as for those in the gallery, which is full once again today.(1610)As the Liberals put it, they wanted to restore the lost protections implemented by our previous Conservative government. As a matter of fact, I will use the term that our minister just used, that the Conservatives “gutted the Fisheries Act”. That is what he was saying, and that is shameful. That is the same eco-warrior language, shamefully, that the government used in 2015 to tarnish any of the great work that our previous Conservative government did. As well, cabinet ministers and members of the current government have used this language to disparage some of our natural resource companies, such as mining and oil and gas, and, again, our former Conservative government.The fisheries committee did an extensive study on the so-called “lost protections” in the changes that were made in 2012 to the Fisheries Act under our previous Conservative government. Not one group and not one witness could provide any evidence that there were lost protections that resulted from the changes in 2012—not an academic, not an environmental group, not a scientist. I will get into that more throughout my speech.Not surprisingly, the government has capitalized politically with these environmental groups and the public at large with this proposed legislation. The Liberals have positioned themselves as the defenders of the environment, and restoring the imaginary lost protections has garnered positive support through various media outlets. This is the same government that continues to approve the dumping of millions of litres of raw sewage into our waterways, yet here they are defending their actions, standing up and disparaging those who are opposing what they are saying. They continue to this day to approve the dumping of millions of litres of raw sewage into our waterways. Canadians should be paying attention.We oppose Bill C-68 because of the HADD provisions, but there are some positive aspects of the bill. It potentially has some good points. We have always said that Bill C-68 is a bill that we will repeal and replace, and that we will bring stakeholders around the table and build a piece of legislation that truly represents the intent of Bill C-68. On the 15 reasoned, responsible amendments that the Senate sent back, the Senate did its job. It attempted to fix an omnibus piece of legislation that should have probably been split into two or three different bills, and there is another broken promise. I believe it was in the Liberal 2015 campaign, and probably it was the same day when the member for Papineau said that he was not going to resort to such parliamentary tricks as omnibus bills. Well, here we are, and Bill C-68 is one of those. He has not let the debate reign. Time allocation has been seen time and time again. The amendments focused on changes to the Fisheries Act, such as the owner-operator fleet separation, which, as my hon. colleague across the way mentioned, the fisheries committee has heard about time and again. The bill also talks about habitat protection and habitat banking, and it rolls in Bill S-203 on cetaceans in captivity and Bill S-238 on shark finning. Bill C-68 introduced habitat banking as a means by which companies could restore waterways affected by development. As an example, when I was in aviation, we built one of Canada's largest runways. To be good neighbours, we noticed during our environmental assessment that there was a potential area for waterfowl or the western spadefoot toad. (1615)Therefore, we had a toad rodeo. We looked to find how many toads were in that certain area that was designated or that could be environmentally sensitive. We also looked for the water fowl that could be present in those wetlands. To be good neighbours, we worked with Ducks Unlimited Canada, the conservation group. We are not the experts in this. We needed somebody to tell us what would be more appropriate, and we wanted to make sure that if there was going to be displacement, it would be within our region. We worked with Ducks Unlimited and other local groups. We found an area that was suitable, and we committed and purchased that area. That is an example of what habitat banking is.There are concerns with moving down the way in terms of habitat banking, as well as, let us say, carbon credits. It is very similar to carbon credits. As I was running for election in 2015, I was interested to find that we have offshore companies, European companies, that were buying up huge swaths of agricultural land in my riding. They were literally showing up to a farm and offering suitcases full of money. Many of our farmers are long-time generational farmers and do not have that next generation coming in. Who can blame them, if they have this opportunity present itself? The companies told a good story. Very quickly after purchasing the land, they mowed under all that agriculture potential. They were buying it for carbon credits to be applied in other countries. We cannot create more land; we are not able to do that. We put a stop to that. Therefore, the habitat banking provisions that the Senate tried to fix with its amendments dealt with third party offset payments and they would keep the restored habitat closed. Habitat banking is a market-oriented approach to environmental conservation. As a matter of fact, we are starting to see this more and more. When I was in aviation, “carbon credits” was the buzzword. It was carbon credits this and carbon credits that. Every passenger who was flying on an airline had an opportunity to buy carbon offsets as part of his or her ticket. A habitat bank is now the next generation of a very similar type of market-oriented approach to environmental conservation. A habitat bank is defined in the bill as “an area of a fish habitat that has been created, restored or enhanced by the carrying on of one or more conservation projects within a service area and in respect of which area the Minister has certified any habitat credit”. A habitat credit, before being amended at committee, was defined in the bill as “a unit of measure that is agreed to between any proponent and the Minister under section 42.02 that quantifies the benefits of a conservation project.” In plainer language, the old version of the bill stipulated that the proponents, and only the proponents, can offset the adverse effects on fish or fish habitat as a result of conservation work being done by the proponent. That leaves out important third party conservation groups and indigenous groups. (1620)I do not know of too many mining or forestry companies that are experts in conservation projects. If a mining operation leads to deleterious effects on fish habitat, for example, that mining company may offset the impacts of those effects through a conservation project, like moving affected fish to another pond. Other examples include the construction of a salmon ladder, preservation of a wetland, as I described with our airport, or any other measure that creates, restores or enhances a fish habitat. Ensuring that proponents offset their impacts on fish habitat is necessary for environmental conservation. We all agree with that. There is not a single compelling reason to restrict habitat banking solely to proponents. When we say that only a proponent can create a habitat bank, we are excluding first nations groups and conservation specialist groups like Ducks Unlimited or wetlands advocates. We are also excluding municipalities, among other prospective participants. These stakeholders all want to be on the front lines of habitat restoration and enhancement, and they should be. Not all proponents have the expertise, resources or knowledge to build a physical offset. We all know that the balance of power in the Senate rests on the independent side, which we know is the government side. Under the amendment passed by our senators, proponents would now be able to purchase the credit rather than designing and building their own physical offset. The offset must still be created, but now it could be created by a group with a specific conservation expertise. In these cases, the proponents would essentially be funding the construction of an approved physical offset. The proponents would say, “We understand that our project has displaced fish, wildlife or aquatic species, and we will work to make amends. However, we are not the experts on this, so let us partner with an approved group to get this done.” It is a win-win for industry and the environment. Companies do not have to divert their attention from the core aspects of their business and creating the jobs that come with it; all they have to do is buy the credit for the habitat bank established by a third party group. With a new market for the credits, there is an incentive for third parties to get into the habitat banking game, thus leading to additional biological protections.The second amendment the Senate sent back on this issue relates to the offset payments. This amendment would allow the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to collect and offset payment in lieu of establishing and offsetting a habitat bank. The purpose of introducing this tool, as argued by the Canadian Wildlife Federation and others, was to provide the flexibility in areas where an appropriate offset project is not available or cost-effective. That makes sense.As an alternative to purchasing credits, proponents could pay into a habitat protection fund, for example the environmental damages fund, to offset any impacts their project may have. Under this amendment, funds would need to be spent as close as practicable to where the work, undertaking or activity is located, or at least within the same province where such work occurred. If the displacement or impact is taking place in a region such as Cariboo—Prince George, I would like to see that habitat banking take place right in my riding. I would have to say that it has to be done there. We do not want to see these other companies coming in and doing something similar to what we mentioned earlier with the carbon credit program. If that displacement is taking place in an area such as Cariboo—Prince George, then an appropriate project should be found in the same region. I would suspect there are a lot of conservation projects that could benefit from this type of program.(1625)Adding these parameters to the system was imperative to ensure equal treatment among all provinces, territories and, hopefully, if administered accurately by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, among watersheds as well.This amendment does not mandate how the government should collect or spend the money. It simply establishes a structure by which private sector funds, determined and accepted at the discretion of the minister—again, it is all about this minister having all the power—can be used to support restoration projects in Canada. It makes sense to me.The third amendment on habitat banking shares the spirit of the second, but it is entirely distinct among the three, and here is how. Bill C-68, in both its current and former iterations, specifies that certified habitat credits must be used within a service area. A service area is defined in Bill C-68 as “the geographical area that encompasses a fish habitat bank and one or more conservation projects and within which area a proponent carries on a work, undertaking or activity.”The broadness of that definition was concerning. As currently written, a service area could technically be considered the whole country. For discussion purposes, let us say that SNC-Lavalin, working on a project in Quebec, is deemed to have done some damage to fish or fish habitat or is looking to buy some habitat banking credits, but it also does work in Vancouver, Toronto or other areas. It could apply those habitat banking credits to those areas, not necessarily the area in which it is making the displacement.That is incorrect, and the third amendment sought to fix that. The intent of this amendment is to ensure that the benefits of an offsetting habitat bank remain local in comparison to the work, undertaking or activity. “Local” would be either as close as practicable to the area, or within the same province. The general idea is that the closer to the affected area it is, the better. A mining project in St. John's should not be offset by a habitat bank in northern Ontario or Vancouver Island, or vice versa.This amendment maintains that it needs ministerial flexibility while protecting the local fish populations and providing certainty to industry about where credits can be used. Habitat banking benefits should remain as local as possible, as a guiding principle. If that is not practical, then the benefits should at least remain in the province where the work was carried out.Late last night, the government set forth and gave notice of its amendments to the Senate amendments. Unfortunately, late last night the government responded by removing the new habitat banking provisions. The government said that it “respectfully disagrees with amendment 11 because the amendment seeks to legislate in respect of third-party, or market-based, fish habitat banking, which is beyond the policy intent of the Bill that is to provide only for proponent-led fish habitat banking.”Is the government kidding? What a bunch of hogwash. The government put the habitat banking provisions into the bill. To say that the amendments to the habitat banking are beyond the policy intent is absolutely absurd, unless, of course, this bill is nothing more than just a cover and a piece and is not really intended to actually do anything but is just another thing for Liberals to stand up and say, “We did it”, getting all the support from the third party groups that supported them in 2015. I will say more on that later.(1630)Let us go back and look at the absurdities of the bill from the beginning. On restoring lost protections, the minister stood and said that the former Conservative government gutted the Fisheries Act. Bill C-68 started with the Liberal campaign promise in 2015 to restore lost protections. After forming the government, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans asked the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans to investigate the so-called lost protections.After an extensive study, an 86-page report to Parliament was issued. To my colleagues who are in the House, and the packed gallery, how many lost protections were found? There were none. Zero. Not one witness came before the committee and said that the 2012 amendments to the Fisheries Act by the former Conservative government resulted in lost protections. As a matter of fact, what we heard was that they gave some assurances or some consistency to the application process. We also had some proponents who said that it actually made things tougher, but at least they knew the steps in the process they had to go through.It is shocking that these guys, time and time again, stand in the House and use the same old talking points. Canadians are not going to be fooled. I think I just saw a poll that ranked the Prime Minister and the Liberal government at 15% in terms of environmental protection. Our hon. colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands scored the highest, and I think our leader was next. Way down the list was the member for Papineau, our Prime Minister. After that extensive study and an 86-page report, not one lost protection was found. The dissenting report we issued said the following:Contrary to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard's correspondence to the committee dated June 29, 2016 whereby the minister directed the committee to undertake a study investigating the 2012 changes to the Fisheries Act and any resulting lost protections, I thought committees were supposed to be at arm's-length and masters of their own destination. How many times has a minister or parliamentary secretary stood in the House and said, “Madam Speaker, committees are on their own to do whatever they want”? Probably they even had their hands on their hearts. It is crazy. It just adds to the hypocrisy of those across the way.The report continues:[W]itnesses who appeared before the committee were unable to provide any scientific or legal proof of harm resulting from asserted lost protections under the Act as a result of the 2012 changes. This fact was noted on page 33 of the committee report, which states, “The preceding paragraphs in this section indicate the differing testimony heard with no scientific or legal evidence provided to show whether the 2012 changes broadened or reduced the circumstances under which section 35 applies.” In some cases, witnesses like the Mining Association of Canada expressed that the 2012 changes to the Act actually increased habitat protections. They said, “...the 2012 changes have in practice broadened the circumstances in which the section 35 prohibitions apply and increased the circumstances in which an authorization and offsets are required.”The CFA also added that, “...it is the CFA's position that a complete revert to reinstate all provisions of the Fisheries Act as they were would be unproductive [and] reestablish the same problems for farmers, and...provide little improvement [in conservation].”(1635)I have just gone through the Senate amendments as they apply to habitat banking. I could go on at length about inshore fisheries, and I will do that later in my speech. I will talk about Bill S-203, which is ending whales in captivity, which was rolled into this bill, and some of the concerns Conservatives have. Previously, when a southern resident killer whale was in jeopardy and in need of rescuing, there had to be an order in council from the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. The Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia and the province do not have the mechanisms in place to respond quickly to that request. When every minute counts when trying to save the life of a resident killer whale or a cetacean, we need to have a tool in our tool box to act quickly. In that regard, Bill S-203 was flawed at that point. That was a serious concern the Conservatives had. The Senate amendments took that away, and that power now rests with the minister in this House, which I think is the right way of moving forward. While there are still concerns about Bill S-203, we believe that the amendments from the Senate give us some assurances that some of the main concerns we had were addressed. However, in Bill S-203, there were some differences in the translation from French to English. In legal terms, one could argue that the intent may not be the same. That was brought up at committee, and the legal team and officials could not answer questions as to whether those discrepancies in the translation from French to English could have serious consequences down the road.Bill S-238 is the shark finning bill. As I mentioned, a Conservative senator put forward Bill S-238. It is similar to the bill my hon. colleague from Port Moody—Coquitlam put forward earlier in this session, which was voted down, but I am glad to see that Bill S-238 has been rolled into Bill C-68. Again, there are concerns as to how Bill S-238 could be prescribed down the road, but I believe in my hon. colleague's intent and in the spirit of the bill.As was mentioned earlier, when the officials were before committee during the study of BillS-238 talking about the practice of shark finning and the importation of shark fins, shark fin soup is apparently still allowed to be imported. Shark fin soup can come in, because “soup is soup”, which is a quote from one of the officials. They committed to get back to the committee as to whether that was true. I have yet to hear if they got back to the committee.My hon. colleague talked about the intent of Bill C-68. It is important for Conservatives to state our concerns about the bill once again. They were mentioned previously, and I have expressed some of them. Bill C-68, from a policy perspective, is a piece of legislation that makes Canadians feel good. (1640)It is interesting that after the Senate amendments beefed the bill up, the minister and the Liberal government watered it back down, just as senators were trying to beef things up and do their job. The Senate does great work. It sent the bill back to us with some good amendments, yet the minister and the government are scrapping a good portion of them.As I said, Bill C-68 was payback for all the third party groups that supported our Liberal colleagues across the way. Well, they supported anyone but the Conservatives. This leads me to my next point, which is relevant, because it goes to the crux of Bill C-68.Bill C-68 can be grouped with Bill C-69, the Liberals no pipeline bill, and Bill C-48, the oil tanker moratorium act. Recently, six premiers from across the country wrote the Prime Minister to say that the bills represent one of the largest threats to national unity we have seen, that the threat to our national economy is real and that the damage these bills would do to our economy, jobs and investments is profound.Why do I bring this up? As I mentioned, Bill C-68 is payback for all the support the Liberals got in the 2015 election. What support am I referring to? In 2015, 114 third parties poured $6 million into influencing the election outcome. Many of those parties were funded by the U.S.-based Tides Foundation. The new director of policy was a top executive there. The Prime Minister's former chief adviser, Gerald Butts, was previously the president of the World Wildlife Fund, another Tides-sponsored organization.Another Tides-sponsored organization is Leadnow. As noted in an article, it is a “non-profit society that was created in 2010 with the goal of bringing to Canada a model of on-line, political campaigning and movement organizing that began in the U.S. behind President Barack Obama.”The article states:During Canada’s 2015 federal election, Leadnow ran a strategic voting initiative called Vote Together. Leadnow claims to have defeated 25 Conservative incumbents. Leadnow targeted me, but it did not win. However, it was successful in 25 Conservative-held ridings.The article continues:From Leadnow's 2010 Business Plan, it is clear that as far back as 2010, Leadnow has been focused on defeating the Conservative government. Leadnow's “Investor Package” states that Leadnow intended to "offer tangible support to parties that adopt their policies, and use tools like strategic voting to ‘swing elections’ to reflect Canada's progressive majority.”Why am I bringing this up? What is the relevance? This goes back to 2008, when a group of radical American anti-fossil-fuel NGOs created a tar sands campaign. It was geared, as quoted in a column in the Financial Post, to landlocking “the Canadian oil sands by delaying or blocking the expansion or development of key pipelines” by “educating and organizing First Nations to challenge construction of pipelines across their traditional territories” and bringing “multiple actions in Canadian federal and provincial courts.” These NGOs wanted to raise the negatives, including by recruiting celebrity spokespeople, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, to “lend their brand to opponents of tar sands and generat[e] a high negative media profile for tar sands oil.” The column states:[T]he Rockefeller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation... along with environmentalist charities, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S.-based Tides FoundationWhy did the they do that? It was to do whatever they could to target our natural resources.I say this because fish is a natural resource, and Bill C-68 is another bill, along with Bill C-69, the no pipelines bill, and Bill C-48, the tanker moratorium, that targets our resource sector.(1645)I will bring members back to the earliest days of this sitting where the Prime Minister stood and said that Canada would become known more for our resourcefulness than our resources.Make no bones about it; these groups have infiltrated our government at the highest levels. Gerald Butts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, was a chief adviser to the Prime Minister. He brought with him former campaigners. Marlo Raynolds, chief of staff to the environment minister, was a past executive director for the Tides-backed Pembina Institute. Zoë Caron, chief of staff to the Minister of Natural Resources, was a former WWF Canada official. Sarah Goodman, on the Prime Minister's staff, was a former vice-president of Tides and now holds potentially one of the most powerful positions as director of policy in the PMO. It is concerning at every step of the way.I will bring members back to question period when the Minister of Democratic Institutions said that one side of the House likes to cheat and the others are doing everything to protect our democracy. We have seen time and again, going back to 2015, where we have all of these groups that were funded to take on our former prime minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives to defeat them and they propped up this Prime Minister, then the member for Papineau, and he made all of these promises. What do we see? We see now that he is following through on those promises to the environmental groups, the NGOs. I have had fisheries groups and first nations say to me that when they want to get in to see the minister, they have to go through environmental groups. I do not think there is a government that has had more lawsuits against it from first nations than any other than the current government. On marine protected areas, the government is doing what it calls consultation. I will get into the consultation on Bill C-68. The Liberals like to say it is consultation. They will stand in the House and they are disingenuous to Canadians who are listening in. We have the proof. I talked a little about how the foreign funding has influenced our highest offices of the government, and that is what we are seeing in our pieces of legislation. Bill C-68 is no different. As part of the economic action plan in 2012, and in support of a responsible resource development plan, our former Conservative government put forward changes to the Fisheries Act. They were geared at strengthening the act and removing unnecessary bureaucratic red tape. They were geared at making that process manageable so that proponents knew the steps that had to be taken. It was not letting them off the hook. We heard testimony from the Mining Association of Canada that it actually increased areas to which its members could be found negligible and fined. Our changes supported a shift from managing impacts to all fish habitats to focusing the act's regulatory regime and managing threats to the sustainability and ongoing productivity of Canada's commercial, recreational and indigenous fisheries. Now, instead of listening to experts, the people who actually use our waterways and fish our rivers, lakes and oceans, the government turned a deaf ear to practicality and pushed forward, through the use of time allocation, legislation that will affect lives and do little to enhance the deterioration of fisheries in Canada. I said that in a previous speech. At that time, I believe it was 23 out of 25 of our core fisheries that were at very serious levels. Why was that? The fisheries management plans were not done. We do not manage fisheries to grow more fish. We manage fisheries to extinction. (1650)I would put our team up against that team any time. Our member of Parliament for North Okanagan—Shuswap, our member of Parliament for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa and our member of Parliament for Red Deer—Lacombe all had previous careers in this. We hunt. We fish. We live off the land. We are farmers. We are conservationists at heart. Bill C-68 actually made things harder with some of the changes that we did. One of the Liberal members who was on the committee at the time, who himself is a farmer, said that if he had a flood on his property, the changes that the former Conservative government had done would actually make it easier for him to respond. If a community or a municipality had a road that was washed out, it actually allowed workers to go in, without skirting any of the rules or regulations, work within the prescribed timelines and schedule to actually get the work done and respond quickly.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceCetaceansConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersFisheries stocksFundraising and fundraisersGovernment billsHabitat conservationSharkTerminologyWetlandsJonathanWilkinsonHon.North VancouverCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1655)[English]Madam Speaker, I have to get back to where I was. I was on a roll too. Instead of listening to experts, the Liberals thought they knew best. Bill C-68 proposed to restore the lost protections by returning to the previous definition of harmful alteration disruption and destruction of fish habitat, or HADD, as I mentioned in my earlier comments.The act would also require the minister to take into account indigenous knowledge and expertise when provided, and all decisions would have to take into account the possible impacts on indigenous rights. The bill would allow for the establishment of an advisory panel and for members to be remunerated, and provides no guidance on or limitation to its use.Bill C-68, under the part with respect to the prevention of the escape of fish, would prohibit the fishing of cetaceans with the intent to take them into captivity. This was captured under Bill S-203.The Liberals believe that the bill will restore lost protections and incorporate modern safeguards. They think it will provide certainty for industry. They say it will provide strong and meaningful protection of fish and fish habitat. However, we know they are wrong. When we introduced changes to the act in 2012, we did so because the former Fisheries Act was not working. The legislation was way past its best before date, a line, by the way, which the former fisheries minister used when he was describing the changes to it. The legislation was past its best before date and no one was happy with the way things were working. We acknowledged that so we made some changes.Our common sense approach improved fisheries conservation, prioritized fish productivity, protected significant fisheries and reduced the regulatory burden on industry and communities. Again, it did not lessen any of the regulations. They were still there. They were still in place. I will go back to the Mining Association of Canada's comment that it actually increased some of the areas where under section 35 they could be found in contravention. In 2012, the Conservative government undertook a rigorous review of and revisions to the Fisheries Act. This review was commenced for a number of reasons, and primarily that the broad scope of the definition of “fish habitat” included entire watersheds and extended the reach of the federal government into watersheds and land use planning, in which the Department of Fisheries and Oceans did not have expertise.As a matter of fact, I believe a witness said that by the definition under the former Fisheries Act, a puddle in one's backyard could be deemed a fish habitat. Even a septic pipe that burst and led to a large pool of water in one's backyard could be deemed a fish habitat.There was a lack of discretion for what was important fish habitat as it relates to fish productivity and what was less important. The House will not get any argument on this side that all fish are important. We must do whatever we can to ensure that we are growing fish for today and for the future. We do incredible work on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans by putting our partisan stripes aside. All members of that committee are able to work together to try to find common ground. (1700)I know that might be foreign to some people in this House. I know that some members who are not on that committee from the government side are laughing and heckling at me right now. However, I can say with all honesty that our colleagues from all sides of the House are committed to finding whatever solution we can, whether it is the northern cod study, the Atlantic salmon study, the aquatic invasive study that we just completed, or our steelhead study that we have done. We did a study on abandoned and derelict vessels that was proposed by one of our NDP colleagues. In the last sitting, it was proposed by a Conservative colleague for us to review and revise, to look at how Canada deals with its derelict vessels. In the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, that authority was not happening. Many times, communities, and in some instances individual Canadians, were left to try to deal with rusting and derelict vessels that were left in their waterways.We do great work, and we all are focused on one thing: the protection of our coastal communities. It is not just our coastal communities, but those families who depend on our fisheries for their livelihoods and for sustenance. We are committed to trying to find a way, working through our committee, to having a full understanding of how certain pieces of legislation come through and how the government continues with its mandate. All members, if they were polled, would say it is absolutely shameful when we have bureaucrats and officials come before us and they promise to be better. At one of my very first meetings, I walked into the committee like a bull in a china shop. It had a bit of a reputation as one of those committees that spun its wheels and never got anything done. That is what I heard, but little did I know. I met my colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa and learned of the great work he had done previously and the history that he has. I met some of my Liberal colleagues and heard from them first-hand about what goes on in their communities, and some of the concerns coming from the Rock or the east coast and from Vancouver.I take offence on this, and some of my colleagues from the Rock know where I am going with this one. When the surf clam issue took place, the seven MPs from the Rock for the most part were silent. I am looking at my friend across the way and I know he was not. However, for the most part, the members from the Rock were silent during the whole surf clam issue. The issue was that the former fisheries minister awarded a lucrative surf clam quota to a sitting Liberal MP's brother, a former Liberal colleague. As well, we found out down the way, it was a company that was being led by the former minister's wife's first cousin. We managed to get a stop to that. I bring that up to point out that we do great work in these committees. They are supposed to be at arm's length and masters of their own destiny in terms of the work that they do. However, on Bill C-68 on the Fisheries Act, we saw a letter that came from the minister, not asking but ordering the committee to immediately undertake a study on the changes to the Fisheries Act.Going back to my speech, as I mentioned, there was a lack of discretion in terms of important fish habitat as it relates to fish productivity and what is less important. I got off track, but I want to reiterate that all fish are important. The inconsistencies led to difficulties in assessing an appropriate level of regulatory effort that was proportional to actual importance. (1705)I met with front-line officers, who said that previously the act was harder to enforce. It was challenging. They needed to have some consistency. The Conservative changes made it, not easier for the proponent to get away with what they were doing, but it did make it easier because it was black and white as to what was wrong and what was right. It made it easier for the front-line officers to enforce the Fisheries Act.Further, the lack of knowledge regarding fish populations allowed for all water bodies to be considered as fish habitat until proven otherwise, and as I mentioned, even puddles. One of the witnesses said that technically, under the former definition, a puddle could have been considered a fish habitat.Before we introduced changes, all fish and consequently all fish habitat, regardless of economic or social value, received protection under the Fisheries Act. This created a system that was impossible to manage and impediments for most minor work. Farmers looking to improve their land or deal with flooding or other issues, or municipalities looking to install a drain, had to go through a bureaucratic process that made doing one's taxes look easy.To top it off, there were the inconsistencies between departments. Depending on which DFO office someone went to, it could make someone want to give up on the whole process entirely.With the restoration of “harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat”, HADD provisions, the government is putting it back in place. It means that Canadians will once again need to deal with a set of unenforceable guidelines that will hinder the development and truly do nothing to increase fish stocks or protect valuable habitat.We heard numerous members, over the course of our previous discussions on Bill C-68, as well as this one, talk about the restoration of lost protections. Again, they used terms such as “gutted”. To me, that is fairly offensive. I think all members of Parliament in this House sign up to do the best that we can, given the portfolios and the files we have. Some of the language that we get from across the way is quite offensive.It is interesting. Liberals are always the ones who stand up and say that Conservatives are the most divisive bunch. They are fearmongering and they are pitting Canadians against Canadians. Do not even get me started on Liberals using reconciliation on things such as the surf clam project. Liberals stood in the House and said that it was all under the guise of reconciliation, when we knew it pitted first nation against first nation and non-first nation against first nation. I will go back to this issue as well. The government was trying to deal with the southern mountain caribou issue that we have in British Columbia, and some of the consultations, or lack of consultation, that the Liberals have done. They basically mandated the provincial government to immediately do something, or the Liberal government was going to do a section 80, I believe it is, under the Species at Risk Act. That essentially sent fear throughout our whole province. I urge Canadians, if they get a chance, to Google the southern mountain caribou issue in the province of British Columbia. If Canadians want to see a bungled PR mess, that is it right there. The Liberals have now walked back on it.However, this all goes back to what we were saying, that the Liberals were not listening to local stakeholders who are on the ground. Liberals believe that they know best and so this is what they are going to do. Again, I will go back to this. If we looked at the letters and requests to the minister to take action, they all came from groups that receive money from foreign-funded groups. There is no one here who would want to see a species die off. I stood and very clearly stated my message during this whole process that the promise and trust have been broken. At one point, our federal representatives did not want to chime in, although they were the ones who were directing it. They wanted the provincial government to be front and centre, taking all the heat at all the town hall meetings.(1710)Trust has been broken by the Liberal government time and time again. It uses terms like “reconciliation”. Just last week, a member of a first nation called me and said that “reconciliation” is not a buzzword. Unfortunately, the government and the Prime Minister have used it time and time again, and it is shameful. They do things like the surf clam and the southern mountain caribou, and do it under guise of reconciliation. If they want to do something under the guise of reconciliation, how about ending all of the boil water advisories or the suicide epidemic in first nations communities from coast to coast to coast?Last week, the missing and murdered indigenous women's commission came out with some recommendations. The government knew that this report was coming, but did it budget anything to act on any of the findings? There was nothing. When we talk about Bill C-68, we are talking about trust. Time and again, the government has broken the trust of Canadians. It promised to have only small deficits and that it would balance the budget by 2019. We are in 2019. Liberals always like to blame those who came before them. It is quite shameful. They have been in government now for four years. It is about time that they take some leadership and ownership of the problems they have created themselves. We have heard a number of members opposite talk about the restoration of lost protections. We know from the recounting of testimony from witness after witness that there were no lost protections from the previous government's changes. The former minister of fisheries and oceans said, “Canada is uniquely blessed with an abundance of freshwater and marine coastal areas that are both ecologically significant and linked to the economic prosperity of Canadians.” I could not agree more on this. Canada has the longest coastline in the world. What I do not agree with is the assertion that protections were lost. The Liberal changes to the Fisheries Act would lengthen the regulatory process, provide unclear and weaker rules to establish and manage ecologically significant areas, and simply put, return us to a destabilization that will prove to be cumbersome and unmanageable. The former minister noted that he wanted to re-establish public confidence, and yet the amendments he proposed to the bill would do nothing. The bill we got back from the Senate had some good amendments that strengthened the bill to a certain extent, and yet the Liberals gutted them again.Bill C-68 would make it harder for proponents wishing to develop property and will weaken transparency through the creation of more bureaucratic red tape. Farmers looking to improve their land, and municipalities looking to install drains, are going to be faced with a lengthy bureaucratic process that is going to make it harder to respond to critical incidents. There have been flooding incidents in our communities. In 2017, there were massive wildfires, as everyone knows, and it would make it harder and harder for farmers to recover from natural disasters. The minister hoped his bill would help to protect middle-class jobs in coastal communities. He actually said that. However, just after introducing the bill, the surf clam process took place. I have spent a lot of time in Grand Bank and several coastal communities meeting with fishing organizations and indigenous communities from all across our country, and they are fed up. They are fed up with the government's virtue-signalling and while doing whatever it can to make it harder for them to prosper.(1715)A chief of a first nation called me last week. He told me, “I just want the government to get out of the way so that I can lead my community to prosperity. I want the government to get out of the way. When I need their help, I want them to be able to act and act quickly, but I need them to get out of the way, because if there are poverty or social issues in my community, that is on me.” He said, “I am a forward-leaning leader within my community and I want to lead my community to prosperity.”Unfortunately, the government's pandering to third party groups is making it harder. He said, “I for one, and our community for one, are tired of being the poster child for some of these third party groups.” Some of them I named earlier in this speech.That brings me back to Edgar, a good friend I met during the surf clam project. I remember his words. He said that the minister's decision to arbitrarily take that surf clam quota away shook his life, shook his foundation, shook his community, the Grand Bank community. It is a community that has had a fishing history for over 400 years. I remember the mayor telling me that the scars of the industry run right straight through the middle of this community.That is an example of how the government has lost the trust of Canadians. I bring this up because Bill C-68 is another example, and Canadians are weary. They are distrustful that in the eleventh hour of the final session for this government, it is bringing this measure forward, just as we saw with other pieces of legislation. We are sitting to midnight now. Why are we sitting to midnight? The government House leader says we are sitting to midnight now. Canadians expect us to work. I do not have a problem sitting to midnight, but why are we sitting to midnight? It is because of the Liberals' failure to make progress with legislation. There has been no real priority.Let us speak about priorities. Two weeks ago we heard from the government's independent leader in the Senate as to why softwood was not negotiated in the new NAFTA, but was there a priority? Today a Liberal member from the Lower Mainland in Vancouver stood up and touted his government's great record on job creation and low unemployment numbers in our province, all while layoff notices and job losses are mounting. That is shameful.Just last night Canfor, the largest employer in my province and Canada's largest forestry producer, announced sweeping job curtailments throughout the province of British Columbia. Hundreds if not thousands of Canadians are out of work, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard is clapping. That is shameful. I urge the parliamentary secretary to come to my riding. A tone-deaf, muted response was all I got last week to my comments about softwood not being a priority. (1720)There was another response from the Liberals last week in response to my comments about softwood not being a priority. It was that Canadians should be reassured because the job numbers are up and the Liberals stand with the forestry workers. When are they standing with them? Are they standing with them when they are looking for work? Are they standing with them when they are worried about how they are going to make ends meet because they lost their livelihoods? Are they standing with them when they have to go to the bank because the bank is foreclosing on their house? That is shameful. That goes to—Aboriginal policyC-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceCetaceansConsideration of Senate amendmentsFarming and farmersFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationWildlife conservationCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingSeanCaseyCharlottetown//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (1720)[English]Madam Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague's intervention. That brings me back to a word that you used in your intervention, Madam Speaker, and that is “trust” . That is what has brought us all down this path. When Bill C-68 went to the Senate, we had trust that the Senate was going to do its job. Bill C-68 came back, and we had trust that the government was going to take a reasoned look at it, but n it has gutted the amendments from the Senate.I was going down a path with this in terms of trust. Canadians have lost trust and are weary of hearing the Liberals stand there and say they have our best interests at heart. It truly is relevant to Bill C-68 and to the Senate amendments, because members of the Senate heard from Canadians that they represent in their respective areas. They came at it, as I mentioned, in a collaborative spirit, as we do at the fisheries committee, and tried to enhance the bill.I will offer this explanation as to why we are going down this path. When the minister stood and gave his presentation and intervention here, colleagues will remember that he talked at length about Bill C-68 and the Senate amendments and why the government felt it was necessary to go down the path that led to Bill C-68. Therefore, I believe I have the ability to talk about Bill C-68 and the background to it, and part of that background is Canadians' trust in the government, or their lack of it. The hon. colleague can stand on a point of order as much as he likes. It is his privilege to do that, but it is also my privilege to be able to stand in this House and represent the electors of Cariboo—Prince George. In time allocation, time and again the government chooses to ignore that there are 338 members of Parliament in this House, and that all members are here to represent the electors who elected them to this House. This House does not belong to the Prime Minister. It does not belong to you, Madam Speaker, and it does not belong to me. It belongs to the electors and those who elected us. It is our job to be here and bring our voices here.When I am talking about priority and trust, I am trying to bring forth the voices of indigenous groups who have not been consulted on Bill C-68. I am bringing forth the voices of coastal communities who have not been consulted or who feel that they have not been heard in terms of Bill C-68. I am bringing forth the voices of my electors in Cariboo—Prince George, who feel that the government is not listening to them. I will go back to Bill C-68 again and talk about protecting the livelihood of fishers in coastal communities, which is what the minister said was his intent in tabling this bill. If the minister was truly interested in protecting the livelihood of fishers in coastal communities, then probably both the former minister who made the statement and the current minister should have travelled to Grand Bank. They should have come to the Lax Kw'alaams first nation, which has major issues in terms of Bill C-48 and Bill C-69. They should talk to fisheries organizations, which have some serious concerns. They should talk to the farmers and municipalities that all have concerns with Bill C-68. The minister received a letter from the Fisheries Council of Canada with respect to Bill C-68, and I should make it clear that it was the former fisheries minister who first tabled Bill C-68. He received a letter from the Fisheries Council of Canada that outlined some of their grave concerns over the way he had managed that file to that point.(1725)I will provide a bit of background. The Fisheries Council was established in 1915. It has been the national voice for Canada's commercial fisheries for decades. Its members include small, medium and large companies along with indigenous groups that harvest fish in Canada's three oceans and inland waters. Member companies are also processors. They process the majority of Canada's fish and seafood products. The members take pride in being key employers in their communities. They are also stewards of the resource and work diligently to protect the waters, because sustainability of the fisheries is in the best interest of all involved, and they know that without the proper care and conservation, the resource will disappear. Members of the Fisheries Council of Canada provide jobs for people like my friend, Edgar, whom I met in Grand Bank, where the minister's corrupt surf clam decision shook their foundation and people's livelihoods. Members of the Fisheries Council create an economic base that helps sustain the whole economy of these small towns and villages, these coastal communities, many of which have no other source of economic income. What the minister's actions did in taking away the lucrative surf clam quota, Bill C-68 at that point, was shake those communities to the core. In its letter to the minister, the Fisheries Council wrote that recent actions and announcements from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had undermined the fishing sector and therefore undermined the economic growth of Canada's coasts. It said, “Taking away the long-standing licences and quotas does not respect past investments and has put a chill on the future investments by Canadian fish processors. Many coastal communities and fish harvesters rely on their local fish processor to purchase their goods in order to bring their products to market. Without continued investment, the industry will stall.” This is astounding. The Fisheries Council has worked with governments of all colours and stripes and it had to write this letter to the former minister. The fact that it had to do this speaks volumes. In fact, what we heard from people all across Canada and in Grand Bank is that the current government has done nothing to ensure a stable, reliable, sustainable fishery.It would seem to me, after witnessing what the government has done in regard to the Arctic surf clam, Bill C-68, Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, that unless one holds a Liberal Party membership or was once a Liberal member of Parliament or has made successful financial contributions to the Liberal cause, one is plain out of luck. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to continuing. I know that all my colleagues look forward to hearing the rest of my remarks.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceConsideration of Senate amendmentsFisheries and fishersGovernment billsHabitat conservationPublic consultationCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersFisheries ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1730)[English]The hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George will have the floor when the House next gets back to debate on the question that is before the House. It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's Order Paper.ToddDohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeNeilEllisBay of Quinte//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1740)[English]I wish to inform the hon. member for Bay of Quinte that he is unable to move an amendment to his own motion. He had the floor to speak to the motion that he proposed to the House. Accordingly, perhaps if another member is willing to do so, that could be taken up at a later time in the debate.Questions and comments, the hon. member for Saskatoon West.Amendments and subamendmentsDecisions of the SpeakerHomelessness and homelessM-225Private Members' MotionsVeteransNeilEllisBay of QuinteSheriBensonSaskatoon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1745)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am fully in support of the motion. There are a few things I am not positive about, because it is incorporating it in the national housing strategy, which is okay, but not fantastic.For four years, the Liberals have been in power. They have talk about the things they have done for veterans. They have talked about the national housing strategy. Why has nothing been done in the last four years?Homelessness and homelessM-225National Housing StrategyPrivate Members' MotionsSocial housingVeteransNeilEllisBay of QuinteNeilEllisBay of Quinte//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1750)[English]Mr. Speaker, as this session comes to a close, I cannot think of a better way to end my first term as the member of Parliament for Yorkton—Melville than to rise and speak to our veterans community on issues that so deeply impact veterans' quality of life following service and their sense of being valued and appreciated by Canadians. I am humbled and grateful that I have had the privilege of serving as deputy shadow minister of Veterans Affairs and also on the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs for these four years.In that time, individual veterans and veterans organizations have reached out to me through committee, social media groups, emails and face-to-face meetings at round tables and town halls as I travelled across Canada and then over to France to celebrate Canada's Hundred Days. The time I spent with the veterans who travelled with us was very precious. They have also reached out to me by getting together informally at restaurants and in homes. What I have appreciated more than anything is how patient veterans have been with me while reminiscing, documenting experiences and providing their perspectives on how things could be done so much better than they are. I am sure members can appreciate that veterans do not tend to sugar-coat the issues. They are pretty direct. They speak very frankly and passionately. I am not surprised or, quite honestly, offended by the intensity they sometimes express. After all, they have been trained to be intense, to fight against injustice and to fight for us.Long overdue is the government's recognition of duty of care implied in the promise that whatever happens when enlisting, the government will take care of veterans and their families. The recommendations on transition, mental health, homelessness, medicinal cannabis, abuse of mefloquine as an anti-malarial drug and financial support for the treatment of physical and mental repercussions of war, just to name a few, are reasonable and achievable. Motion No. 255 provides the opportunity for the Government of Canada to respond to veterans' recommendations on the need and the possibility to end veterans homelessness in Canada: first, by setting a clear target for eliminating homelessness among Canadian veterans; second, by maximizing Veterans Affairs Canada's capacity to deliver key benefits; and, third, by co-partnering with national veterans organizations to employ their existing capacity, peer-to-peer networks and bonds of trust established with veterans in order to accelerate the delivery of this program nationally.Truly, these organizations have such a capacity already. They have good peer-to-peer relationships and they have bonds of trust that come through the relationships they have among themselves with veterans. Therefore, their role in this is very significant. It is undeniable that the level of bureaucracy and the long-standing culture of mistrust and denial within VAC needs to be purged.There is no question that this uneven playing field has added much frustration to an already challenging life change for our veterans. Quite often, mental illness, family dysfunction, physical pain and suffering, suicides and homelessness have been increased as a result of their frustrations in trying to work with VAC. To ensure opportunities for the government to respond, I have heard the following from veterans' advocates. They feel that the role of VAC should be mandated in three ways. First is to provide sufficient funding for clearly delineated, simple, efficiently administered programs of care for injury and lifetime benefits, with the benefit of the doubt going to the veteran and his or her family. Second is that beginning with enlistment and throughout their service, VAC must facilitate future veterans and their families in choosing and implementing their own path for life beyond service, in other words, for VAC to be involved early in the beginning stages of the veterans' service and be there to facilitate and encourage them to realize that they can make decisions to determine in advance their own paths once their service ends and that they can have a lot of understanding before they face that very difficult time when they no longer serve.(1755)Finally, VAC should identify and support veteran and community organizations that veterans and their families can access for delivery of services. In polite terms, affirm, enable and empower those organizations to do what they do best, and the things they do best that VAC would be better giving them the responsibility for.I was honoured to represent my Conservative caucus at the press conference announcing Motion No. 225 on veterans homelessness in Canada. There are very good elements in this motion put forward by this government. However, as the member mentioned, because of the lateness of its introduction, we are now days away from this session ending. Therefore, it is only a first step. It is a motion that will depend on the next government to implement. I was very pleased to also recognize at that press conference the role of Tim Richter with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, Dave Gordon and Ray McIinnis with the Royal Canadian Legion, Matthew Pearce with the Old Brewery Mission, and Jim and Debbie Lowther with VETS Canada, for their involvement in the making of that announcement. Truly, they were very pleased to see a focus on homelessness going forward from our government.Along with other veteran and community organizations, they are the heart, hands and feet that advocate for and work directly with veterans and their families. They successfully implement the quality of care that our veterans deserve and need. They are all unique in their approach and provide a variety of options for services that tackle many issues, including veterans homelessness. For example, VETS Canada has opened up a care centre five blocks from where I live. In the course of its first year, it has serviced 365 different veterans with emergency needs, and it has done it without any direct funding from VAC.ln testimony at our committee on the study of veterans homelessness, they all had excellent contributions. I would encourage all veterans and people who are viewing today to take a look at the study from the veterans affairs committee on homelessness and listen to what they had to say.I can focus on only one veteran today, and so I am going to talk about Tim Richter. He is the president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. I would like to share some of his recommendations. He has solid experience in preventing and ending homelessness, including experience in developing housing programs for homeless vets. He also served for just over six years in the Canadian Forces and is a Veterans Affairs client. Clearly, he is capable and well positioned for this. Veterans homelessness is a concern that is very close to his heart, and he is rightly pleased to see us working together on an initiative. He said, “The first [thing] is that veterans homelessness in Canada is readily solvable. The number of homeless veterans in Canada is relatively small. It's unknown, but it's relatively small. We know what to do and we know how to do it.” He went on to say, “We have a strong veterans network. We have solid expertise in communities like Homes for Heroes. We have proven models to follow, and I think we have strong public support.”I can affirm that they certainly do. He continued with, “What's missing is federal leadership and decisive action. We need a federal government prepared to make a clear and unequivocal commitment to ending veterans homelessness and to invest the fairly modest additional resources needed to get the job done.”Ending veterans homelessness is possible if government does its part, and, in doing its part, realizes that there are others, not politicians, not public service employees, but others who have served or are dialed in to assist veterans on the ground where and how they need it most. There are people available to be the feet, the hands and the hearts of this particular focus to end homelessness. To quote Tim one more time, “We know what to do and we know how to do it.”Following October 21, 2019, the incoming government will do its part to enable and work with stakeholder communities and organizations to ensure that every veteran has a home.Associations, institutions and organizationsCanadian Alliance to End HomelessnessGovernment servicesHomelessness and homelessM-225Private Members' MotionsService deliverySocial housingVeteransVeterans benefitsVeterans Emergency Transition ServicesNeilEllisBay of QuinteSheriBensonSaskatoon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1815)[Translation]It is my duty to inform hon. members that, pursuant to Standing Order 93(3), no amendment may be proposed to a private member's motion or to a motion for second reading of a private member's bill unless the sponsor of the item indicates his or her consent.[English]Therefore, I ask the hon. member for Bay of Quinte if he consents to the amendment being moved.Amendments and subamendmentsConsent of moverHomelessness and homelessM-225Private Members' MotionsVeteransStéphaneLauzonArgenteuil—La Petite-NationNeilEllisBay of Quinte//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89095RobertKitchenRobert-KitchenSouris—Moose MountainConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KitchenRobert_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionMr. Robert Kitchen (Souris—Moose Mountain, CPC): (1815)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise in the House today to debate Motion No. 225, veterans homelessness in Canada, which has been put forward by my colleague, the member for Bay of Quinte. This member and I have worked together here in Ottawa for a number of years, and since the 2015 election, we have been on the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs together. It has been a great privilege to work with him. We spent many hours discussing many important issues and what we can do to assist our veterans. I commend my colleague for his work in putting together this motion and for his time on the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs. It has been a pleasure to work with him. Also, I would like to acknowledge and thank the many Saskatchewan members of Parliament who are speaking to this motion today and recognizing how we, in Saskatchewan, have had to deal with veterans homelessness, not only in urban centres but also in the rural communities we represent.I would like to take a moment to read the text of the motion that we are debating today. It reads:That, in the opinion of the House: (a) the government should set a goal to prevent and end veteran homelessness in Canada by 2025; (b) a plan to achieve this aim should be developed by the government and be presented to the House by June 2020, led by the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development and supported by the Minister of Veterans Affairs; and (c) this plan should include consideration of whether a National Veterans Housing Benefit similar to the highly successful U.S. Housing and Urban Development – Veterans Administration Supportive Housing (HUD VASH) Program would fit the Canadian context, complementing the National Housing Strategy.I add to that the amendment we just heard, which proposed using the word “co-led” instead of “led”. I do not think we will see that as an issue in our discussions, at least from my point of view.I truly believe that all members on all sides of this House are in favour of ending homelessness among veterans. If my time on the veterans affairs committee has taught me anything, it is that when it comes to veterans, almost every politician is willing to put aside partisanship for the greater good of serving those who have served us. While we may have differences when it comes to what that service looks like, ultimately we all want the very best programs and services for those who have fought for and represented Canada. With respect to this motion specifically, I truly and wholeheartedly support the intent behind it, and it is only the effectiveness of the measures contained therein that I take any issue with. We want to provide the best possible service to our veterans who are struggling with homelessness, and we want to ensure that we are using the most appropriate avenues to accomplish that goal. Veterans each have their own unique story, with their experiences shaping who they are and where they are today. We need to understand that while a group of soldiers may share a common experience, how they deal with that experience is different from one individual to the next. What rolled off the back of one soldier may have affected another soldier deeply. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the issues our veterans face, and that is certainly the case when it comes to veterans homelessness. One thing that we have repeatedly heard at the veterans affairs committee is the importance of a community. The best people to help veterans are their fellow veterans, because only they can begin to understand what their brothers or sisters in arms have been through. We had many community outreach groups appear before the committee and outline the outstanding efforts they have made from coast to coast with the goal of ending veterans homelessness. Veterans Affairs Canada, or VAC, has provided information about its programs and services to approximately 200 of these community outreach organizations that work with the homeless in more than 50 major cities across the country. This includes key information on how to contact VAC. VAC is also currently involved in outreach initiatives with veterans groups and community organizations to find and assist homeless veterans. I am glad to see that this is happening, and I encourage VAC and the minister to ensure that supporting these organizations remains a top priority going forward. I would like to touch on some of the great work already being done in this country with respect to community outreach for veterans. As I said, we heard from many grassroots organizations that are taking a community-based approach to finding and assisting veterans in need with housing, social benefits, mental health assistance and much more. One of these organizations, which has testified at the veterans affairs committee more than once, is VETS Canada. VETS Canada does an annual tour of Canada's major cities, where volunteers walk the streets in order to identify homeless veterans in need and point them towards the appropriate services. (1820)It also provides emergency transition housing in Halifax, Vancouver and Ottawa. That is just a fraction of what it does. In fact, the chair and co-founder of VETS Canada advised the committee that about half its referrals each month come from VAC case managers. That is how effective this organization has been in getting veterans the help they need. It is truly incredible to see what people can do if they are willing to put the time and effort toward a common goal, which VETS Canada so clearly has. I would also like to highlight an organization that we all know very well: the Royal Canadian Legion. Its Leave the Streets Behind program provides emergency housing as well as financial assistance to homeless and at-risk veterans. It also works in partnership with the organization I just spoke of, VETS Canada, as well as other community-based groups, to serve veterans that require assistance. I am not sure if many Canadians are aware of the full scope of the Legion's work, outside of its annual poppy campaign in the fall, but it maintains a national network of support, allowing it to address matters that come to it at a local level. It is modernizing and adapting to the needs of today's veterans and has assured us that it will continue to do so into the future.Other areas that homeless and low-income veterans can access are VAC's veterans emergency fund, the Royal Canadian Naval Benevolent Fund, the Canadian Forces personnel assistance fund and the Montreal Old Brewery Mission sentinels of the street program, just to name a few.One of the issues we have unfortunately heard about repeatedly in the discussion on ending veterans homelessness is that some veterans simply do not want to be found. There are a number of reasons for that, many of which a person who has never served would not understand. Veterans tend to struggle with issues that the majority of the population never will, such as PTSD from traumas that were personally experienced or things like a brain stem injury from being forced to take a medication with harmful side effects, such as mefloquine. When people are stuck in the cycle of failing mental health, it can be extremely difficult for them to seek help. Many times, they will choose to self-medicate by using drugs or alcohol to cope with the mental turmoil they are experiencing. Homelessness is directly tied into this, as in some cases, veterans will lose everything, including their families and homes, because their mental health has deteriorated to the point where they cannot manage the demands of their day-to-day lives. Even if veterans do seek help, they are sometimes turned away, as they do not meet the qualifications. For example, some veterans who are using medical marijuana are turned away from support programs that would otherwise help them, despite the fact that they are using marijuana under the advisement of a physician, as medication. The medical marijuana may be helping them cope and helping them get off the many neuropsychiatric medications and opioids they are on. However, they end up being removed or disallowed from participating in programs that are meant to help them, resulting in a continued cycle of homelessness.Another thing we heard about, which was very interesting, was pets. I think that most of us here know how therapeutic it is to spend time with pets. They are constant companions who provide reassurance and comfort. People can pour their hearts out to animals and not worry that they will love them any less. However, it becomes a bit of an issue when we look at veterans homelessness, as the majority of facilities that provide emergency housing will not allow pets. Most people would not think this would be a barrier to housing, but it truly is. Time and again, I have heard that veterans are willing to give up their beds in a shelter or emergency transition home so that they can have their dogs at their side. This is a small facet of all the details that need to be considered when formulating strategies to end veterans homelessness.I would encourage the government to listen to its own Advisory Committee on Homelessness when it comes to a proven method of reducing homelessness in Canada. The advisory committee's final report on the Conservative's Housing First policy stated: A key learning in the national implementation of Housing First is that the Housing First model must be adapted to local conditions (like funding, community size, local housing type and availability), and must be tailored to meet the unique needs of different populations (such as youth, women, veterans, Indigenous Peoples).(1825)I could speak to this for hours, but unfortunately, I am limited in time. I am proud of the work that is going on in Canada, separate and apart from any federal government initiative, with respect to combatting homelessness among veterans. While I do not think that the national housing strategy referenced in the text of the motion will actually be the catalyst for ending veterans homelessness, I am happy that the issue is getting the attention it needs. Our veterans gave us so much and served our country with respect, honour and dignity. They deserve the same in return, and it is our job to ensure that they get it.Committee studies and activitiesCommunity organizationsDepartment of Veterans AffairsGovernment servicesHomelessness and homelessM-225MarijuanaMental healthPetsPrivate Members' MotionsRoyal Canadian LegionSheltersVeteransVeterans Emergency Transition ServicesNeilEllisBay of QuinteBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1825)[English]Resuming debate, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader. I will just let the parliamentary secretary know that there are only about three minutes remaining in the time provided for private members' business.The hon. parliamentary secretary.RobertKitchenSouris—Moose MountainKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1825)[English]We are down to about two minutes remaining.Resuming debate, the hon. member for Elgin—Middlesex—London.KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKarenVecchioElgin—Middlesex—London//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1825)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for the Bay of Quinte for this very strong motion. Every single person in this place will be supporting this motion. Members from the Conservative Party, from the NDP, and I am sure from the government will all be supporting this.We recognize that there is a time frame. Rather than worrying about this going to a vote, let us worry about what we are going to do on the ground as Canadians and how we are going to help our veterans. Therefore, I urge everyone to not be caught up in the politics of this debate, as I see some members of the government are. Let us recognize that we can work very well with the member for Bay of Quinte, with the member for Saskatoon West and with all the different speakers. We just recognized D-Day because of the great men and women who have served this country. Just because it is a motion that will be losing time and be lost on the Order Paper does not mean that in our hearts we cannot do what is right and help out our veterans each and every day. This is a motion the members of the Conservative Party are very happy to support. We recognize that there is a lot of political stuff going on over this as they talk about how much time we have to debate. I have had one minute to debate this as the critic for this role. Let us not worry about the 25 minutes the Liberals have used, reducing us to 20 minutes.I am being asked to call the question by a member who has sat there and ridiculed us, saying that Conservatives do not support this. We support this wholeheartedly, but it is very important that there is an opportunity to debate these types of issues.We talk about things like the portable housing benefit. I would love to see that as we go forward with this. The portable housing benefit is supposed to be coming in April 2020. It was introduced in the national housing strategy back in November 2017. If this is an idea we can put forward that would work for our veterans, it is something we should be doing. We should be working hard for our veterans each and every day. That is something that our party will continue to do.Homelessness and homelessM-225Private Members' MotionsSocial housingVeteransBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessVeterans HomelessnessInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1830)[English]The time for the consideration of private members' business has now expired and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order Paper.Dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order PaperHomelessness and homelessM-225Private Members' MotionsVeteransKarenVecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1830)[English]Pursuant to Standing Order 67(1), there will now be a 30-minute question period. Members are familiar with what we ask now. Those who are interested and wishing to participate in the 30-minute question period will rise. We will then ask members to keep their interventions to approximately one minute. That will allow all the members who have expressed an interest to have an opportunity to do so. I remind members also that in the course of these 30-minute question times, preference is given to members of the opposition. However, that is not to the exclusion of members from the government as well. We will now proceed with questions. The hon. member for Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooGlenMotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—Warner//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Glen Motz (Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, CPC): (1830)[English]Mr. Speaker, Bill C-59 is the government's version of a supposedly improved national security framework. However, I am confused by what we heard from witnesses at committee and what the government continues to push forward. Therefore, I would be interested to hear from the minister why the government rejected an amendment to allow public servants across all federal governments to report information that they believe is connected or related to a national security threat. Why is the government blocking public servants from sharing information regarding threats with security forces or oversight committees? How does that improve national security?C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsBruceStantonSimcoe NorthRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (1835)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is great that I get to speak to the closure motion, but I wish I could have spoken to the bill when we were debating it. I would have talked about a lot of the national security issues that are facing this country, particularly the grave threat of China, which has been building a cyber-army that has been taking on a lot of the things coming into Canada.The other interesting thing about the bill is that it seems to be undoing a lot of the good work the previous Conservative government put in place, which is why my Conservative colleagues and I are not excited about the bill.I was wondering what the minister's perspective is on whether we are going to allow Huawei onto the 5G network.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Glen Motz: (1845)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that Bill C-59 leaves Canada with a larger, weaker national security and intelligence apparatus and is more focused on internal processes than external results. It is unfortunate, but the reality is that Bill C-59 focuses on policing the actions of national security intelligence agencies instead of criminals and extremists and what they do and plan to do to Canadians.There are four oversight bodies that intelligence individuals need to be subject to, but it makes no sense to me to shift the security operations that protect Canadians to administration and paperwork. This bill would do just that. It would take $100 million from operations and put it into administration. That is $100 million focused on things other than defending national security. I am wondering if the minister could comment on the reason for moving $100 million to administration.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1855)[English]Mr. Speaker, in the minister's speech, he mentioned the use of datasets. He talked about sharing of information between interdepartmental agencies, and not necessarily law enforcement. Canadians saw earlier in this Parliament that Statistics Canada had been eager and very fervent in wanting to know our personal banking information. What measures have been put in place to ensure that the data collection, the information the government is gathering on Canadians, is used for fighting terrorism as opposed to any other reason?C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/84672TedFalkTed-FalkProvencherConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkTed_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Ted Falk (Provencher, CPC): (1855)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a good deal of respect for Craig Forcese and his opinion. However, there have been a couple of developments over the past two years since the bill was originally drafted, with the number of illegal migrants who have come across the border. This has created some security concerns. I know a great many of them have criminal records. The other one would be with the government not requiring visas for Mexican nationals. There are rumours and allegations that the Mexican cartels are operating more freely in Canada than they used to.In light of those two developments in the last two years, does the bill adequately address those two situations and does it give our law enforcement the proper tools they need to do their job?C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionMr. Glen Motz: (1900)[English]Mr. Speaker, the minister spoke early on about two academics who supported the bill. I want to remind him of what retired Canadian Forces Lieutenant-General Michael Day said. He said he had zero confidence in Canada's ability to combat emerging threats with Bill C-59. We know that the charter is mentioned 26 times in the legislation, but the minister should know that every bill has to meet the scrutiny of the charter. Privacy appears 88 times in the bill. We do not know why the government is so concerned about trying to police the agencies that protect Canadians rather than going after those who would appear to do us harm. The last point I want to make is this. The bill is called undemocratic and one of the reasons for that is the rarity that the Henry VIII clause was kept in it, which means there is the ability of the Prime Minister and cabinet to unilaterally change legislation without coming through Parliament. I am curious whether the minister would care to comment on that manoeuvre in the bill.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersClosureConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017 [Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned]InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1900)[Translation]Order. It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings at this time and put forthwith the question on the motion now before the House.The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion? Some hon. members: Agreed. Some hon. members: No. The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea. Some hon. members: Yea. The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: Nay. The Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the yeas have it. And five or more members having risen: The Deputy Speaker: Call in the members.RalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2055)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is an expression that I think should apply here: that the government's lack of planning and good House management does not constitute an emergency on our part. This particular government was aware. It introduced Bill C-88 months ago. The Liberals have rarely brought it up for debate, and now they want to shut it down in the last couple of days of Parliament. It is a piece of legislation that deserves an opportunity for appropriate debate. Again, they have had it on the Order Paper for over 18 months, and finally they bring it up in the last week. I would like the minister to explain what happened to the last year and a half when we could have been debating this legislation.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul's//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (2100)[English]Madam Speaker, the consultation on this bill was a joke. The Liberals phoned the Premier of the Northwest Territories 20 minutes before they made the announcement on the moratorium in northern Canada.The Liberals are holding the Government of the Northwest Territories hostage with this bill, in the fact that they have put in one piece that the Northwest Territories wants and one piece that the Northwest Territories does not want.Will the minister admit that she is just holding the territories hostage?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul'sCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul's//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (2105)[English]Madam Speaker, for this minister to say that members of Parliament who wish to debate legislation are obstructing the process demonstrates quite unbelievable arrogance on her part.Since the minister did not answer the question from the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo or the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay, I am going to ask the question again.This has been on the books for 18 months. Why, in the twilight of this Parliament, is the government invoking closure on a bill and claiming it is because the bill needs to be expeditiously passed? What have you been doing for the rest of this Parliament?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul'sCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (2110)[English]Madam Speaker, I have to stand today and say that never has a government spent so much and achieved so little. That is why we end up with this logjam of legislation that the Liberals have not been able to get through in the three and a half years that they have been stumbling along on this.Talking about consultation, the minister says that the Liberals have done adequate consultation on this. I have to reflect back to the consultation that the government supposedly did on Bill C-68, which we are also debating today, with the Fisheries Act. The Liberals spent over a million dollars providing first nations with the ability to provide briefs to the committee on the review of the Fisheries Act. Those briefs were never provided to the committee for its study on the act.How can the minister stand there and say that the Liberals have done adequate consultation, when that is an example of how they have not done so?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul's//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (2110)[English]Madam Speaker, I have the utmost respect for our hon. colleague across the way. However, I have said from the very beginning that there is no plan. If one fails to plan, one plans to fail. The Liberals have failed first nations with respect to the suicide epidemic that has ravished our first nations in rural communities from coast to coast to coast. They have failed our first nations regarding boil water advisories. They stand here all the time, with their hand on their hearts and the minister wraps herself in an indigenous-flavoured scarf and they say this is their most important priority. I take offence to that. I have been open and transparent with the House. My wife and children are first nations. The minister has failed our first nations. Time and again, first nations chiefs have come to us, saying the government has not consulted them on many different issues. I have reached out to the minister and she has failed to act. Does she not feel this is another piece of legislation where the government will go down a path to fail not only Canadians, but first nations communities from coast to coast to coast?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul'sCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (2115)[English]Madam Speaker, as I said, my family is first nations people. My family is first nations.Aboriginal peoplesMembers' remarksPoints of orderReport stageThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (2115)[English]Madam Speaker, I deeply appreciate and respect my hon. colleague, but as someone who has first nations in his family and has hung on the hope that the minister would follow through on some of the promises—Aboriginal peoplesMembers' remarksPoints of orderReport stageThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMr. Todd Doherty: (2115)[English]Madam Speaker, if you will permit me, I believe I have the opportunity to respond to this. I will apologize and retract what I said, but it is shameful that the minister stands—Aboriginal peoplesMembers' remarksPoints of orderReport stageThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management Act [Bill C-88—Time Allocation Motion]InterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2120)[English]Madam Speaker, I have suggested that the bill, in spite of the fact that it has taken the Liberals so many years to get it here, is a paradox. It is about the consultation. What the minister has failed to mention is the fact that part 2 is an arbitrary move by the federal government to give extraordinary powers with respect to moratoriums around resource development. Is it the position of the government that it consult to perhaps stop progress or stop projects, but does not consult when it wants to stop them itself?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsMackenzie ValleyMotionsReport stageThird reading and adoptionTime allocationCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul'sCarolynBennettHon.Toronto—St. Paul's//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2210)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have found it very interesting that as the Liberals have been debating this particular bill, they only pay attention to half of the bill, and that is the half related to the water board issue. They are completely silent on the very important second half, which is a direct paradox to consultation and collaboration. It is where the government is taking the power onto itself, in terms of placing moratoriums through Governor in Council, through the executive branch, for very vague national interest reasons.I would ask my colleague to ignore part A in his answer, but look at Bill C-69, Bill C-48, the letter that was sent yesterday from the premier of his territory and part B of this bill, and tell us if he believes that the government is acting in the best interests of his territory.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (2220)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have travelled with the member to his territory a couple of times, and I know how important it is to him that the residents of his riding have access to employment opportunities. I know that is important to him and to the people of the Northwest Territories.In his remarks and in general in the debate on this, there has been heavy criticism of Bill C-15 from the previous Parliament. Neither of us was in the previous Parliament. Is the member aware that his party voted for Bill C-15, the bill that the Liberals are now describing as this terrible, poor bill that needed to be undone by the government?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2220)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have noticed a pattern with the government. It consults when it feels like it. In the case of the tanker moratorium, in the case of the northern gateway project, and in the case of the Beaufort Sea moratorium, there was no consultation. How does the member align that with his words about consultation around this bill, when clearly there are many times when the government has utterly failed in that area?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh (Saskatoon—Grasswood, CPC): (2220)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight to speak to Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act.Once again, this bill, like many other bills we have seen in the House, is being debated and rushed through Parliament in the last few days before the House rises for the summer. It is worth noting that this is a bill that was only studied in our committee on indigenous and northern affairs for one meeting before we went into clause-by-clause consideration. As a result, we were unable to hear live testimony from stakeholders such as the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Northwest Territories Chamber of Commerce.We have recently seen these legislative delays with other important bills, such as Bill C-92, which was passed at third reading in this House just last week, on June 3. It is totally unacceptable that the Liberals have so utterly mismanaged their legislative schedule when it comes to the bills that are now before us, days before we rise.Bill C-88 is a bill that forms part of a long Liberal saga to kill natural resources development in this country. The bill would amend subsection 12(1) of the Canada Petroleum Resources Act to allow the Governor in Council to arbitrarily ban any oil and gas activity across the Arctic offshore. Under this bill, the government would only need to invoke the national interest to ban oil and gas development in the Beaufort Sea. However, the term “national interest” remains undefined in this bill, so the government would have complete discretion to decide when it should ban oil and gas activities in the Arctic offshore. These opportunities for greater economic prosperity in the north would therefore be limited and controlled by the ministers here in Ottawa. Again, under the current government, Ottawa knows best.We have already seen the Liberals reveal their paternalism when it comes to economic opportunities for northern communities. We just have to go back to December 2016. While the Prime Minister was in Washington, D.C., he announced that there would be a moratorium on offshore oil and gas development in the Beaufort Sea. No, he was not up in northern Canada. He was, in fact, meeting with President Obama in Washington. There was absolutely no consultation with the Government of Northwest Territories before this moratorium was announced in Washington. In fact, the territorial leaders of the day were given less than half an hour's notice before the Prime Minister declared the moratorium, in the United States, the farthest destination away from northern Canada.By single-handedly introducing a moratorium on oil and gas development in the Beaufort Sea, the Liberals are telling northern communities that Ottawa knows best. The Liberals are saying, through their actions, that northerners do not have the right to pursue their own economic opportunities without the approval of the current federal government. We heard from multiple witnesses in committee about the devastating impact the Liberals' moratorium has had on northerners. Wally Schumann, the minister of industry, tourism and investment and the minister of infrastructure for the Northwest Territories, said the following about the moratorium: I guess we can be very frank because we're in front of the committee. When it first came out, we never got very much notice on the whole issue of the moratorium and the potential that was in the Beaufort Sea. There were millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars in bid deposits and land leases up there. That took away any hope we had of developing the Beaufort Sea.We also heard from Merven Gruben, the mayor of Tuktoyaktuk. He was very disappointed with the Liberal decision to unilaterally impose this moratorium on northerners. He was very concerned about the effects this ban would have on the people of his community. He said:(2225)It's so easy to sit down here and make judgments on people and lives that are some 3,500 klicks away, and make decisions on our behalf, especially with that moratorium on the Beaufort. That should be taken away, lifted, please and thank you. That is going to open up and give jobs to our people—training and all the stuff we're wishing for. Unfortunately, the Liberals are not listening to the voices, again, of the northerners, and as a result, communities are paying the price now for the Liberal government's arrogance. There is absolutely no doubt that Bill C-88 is just another attempt by the Liberal government to polarize oil and gas extraction in this country. It explains the power of cabinet to block economic development and adds to the ever-increasing levels of bureaucratic red tape that need to be navigated by proponents of energy development.The bill makes northern energy development more difficult by increasing the obstacles that must be overcome by energy proponents before they can even put shovels in the ground.In response to these polarized anti-energy provisions, many stakeholders have voiced their concerns. One of the numerous stakeholders that want to see the Governor in Council power to ban oil and gas development removed finally from the bill is the Northwest Territories Chamber of Commerce. It has written submissions to our committee. The chamber indicated its opposition to the final authority of the Governor in Council to ban northern oil and gas development.The chamber wrote to us as follows: The final decision needs to be approved by the Indigenous Nation of the prescribed area who are the steward's of the area but also rely on the land to provide economic independence to their membership and throughout the NT.Of course, in pushing through Bill C-88 without any amendments, the Liberals have demonstrated that they do not care about the opinions and concerns of our northern communities, which will be deeply affected by this piece of legislation. These northern voices are once again being ignored by the Liberal government.Another important stakeholder that expressed really serious concerns about Bill C-88 was the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. Unfortunately, like the Northwest Territories Chamber of Commerce, the IRC was not afforded the opportunity at all to present live testimony to our committee, because, as I mentioned before, we were only given one day to hear from witnesses on this very important matter.Again, the Liberals rushed the process. It was the result of the Liberals' mismanagement of the parliamentary agenda and a consequence of the fact that the Liberals left this bill to the very last minute for deliberations. Like so many other crucial stakeholders, the IRC is opposed to the unilateral power to ban oil and gas development in the Arctic offshore, which the bill gives to the Governor in Council.It is hardly surprising that the IRC is against the arbitrary power given to politicians here in Ottawa to determine the fate of energy development in the north. Bill C-88 says that the Governor in Council can ban oil and gas development projects when “it is in the national interests to do so”. However, does Bill C-88 tell us what the national interest is? Does Bill C-88 tell northern communities what the national interest is? No, of course not. Like so many other Liberal anti-energy policies, questions of the national interests are only for the Liberals to decide and nobody else. The bill is simply a reinforcement of the arrogant mantra that the Liberals know best. Given that the IRC was not given the opportunity to offer live testimony on this discussion on Bill C-88, I would like to read into the record some of the serious concerns the IRC highlighted in its written submission to our committee.(2230)First of all, it bears noting that the IRC is an organization that was created way back in 1984 to manage the settlement that formed part of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, better known as the IFA. The Inuvialuit occupy the Inuvialuit Settlement Area, or the ISR, and beyond. The IFA was the first comprehensive land claim agreement settled north of the 60th parallel and only the second settled in Canada's history.Why was this land claim agreement so important for Inuvialuit people, and why did they initiate the negotiations with the Government of Canada? In the IRC's own words, the land claim negotiations “came in response to our limited influence in increasing development activity on our lands and the vast marine areas of the ISR.” In the short term, then, the Inuvialuit secured a land claim agreement, in part, so that they could have greater influence over development activities on their own lands. With this background in mind, the IRC has written about its serious reservations with regard to the power the bill would give to Ottawa to declare oil and gas moratoriums on IRC lands. In fact, the IRC already saw the Prime Minister declare a moratorium in a significant portion of their settlement region when the Liberals were first elected to power in 2016. In regard to this ban, the IRC wrote, it is important to note that the imposition of the Moratorium by the Prime Minister was done without consultation with any Inuvialuit in contravention of the IFA and with the framework established and the promises made under the Northwest Territories Lands and Resources Devolution Agreement.The Liberals simply seized the opportunity in 2016 to unilaterally implement a moratorium on oil and gas in the north while the Prime Minister, as I mentioned before, was not even in this country. He was in the United States of America looking for photo ops and free publicity. The Liberals did not consult at all with stakeholders before they took on this decision. What is worse, instead of apologizing to many of the northern communities that are suffering because of this moratorium, the Liberals are going full steam ahead with Bill C-88, as we see tonight, to ensure that they can unilaterally put bans on northern oil and gas development again and again.Bill C-88 says that the Governor in Council can make these bans when it is in the national interest to do so. The IRC and Conservatives would like to know what the Liberals mean when they say “in the national interest”. The IRC had the following to say on the issue of the national interest:The national interest criterion is problematic as it elevates the national priorities of the day vis-à-vis Inuvialuit priorities within our traditional territory. It would be akin to an appropriation a constituent might experience in the south without any restitution from the government. Bill C-88 does not define national interest or incorporate an express requirement to consider how the national interest ought to be balanced against the ability of rights holders to provide for their economic future.Despite these concerns from indigenous stakeholders in the north, the Liberals have demonstrated repeatedly, through their anti-energy policies, that they have no intention at all of ever balancing their vision of the national interest against the views of indigenous groups that do not share the Liberals' hostile attitude toward natural resource development.Unfortunately, Bill C-88 is not the only bill the Liberals have pushed forward, to the detriment of the indigenous communities across this country. We have just heard from indigenous communities about the real concerns they have about Bill C-69, the Liberal environmental assessment act. (2235)Stephen Buffalo, the president and CEO of the Indian Resource Council and a member of the Samson Cree Nation, said:Indigenous communities are on the verge of a major economic breakthrough, one that finally allows Indigenous people to share in Canada's economic prosperity. Bill C-69 will stop this progress in its tracks.Roy Fox, chief of the Kainai or Blood tribe first nation, said the following about Bill C-69:...I and the majority of Treaty 7 chiefs strongly oppose the bill for its likely devastating impact on our ability to support our community members, as it would make it virtually impossible for my nation to fully benefit from the development of our energy resources.Bill C-48, the northern B.C. oil tanker ban, is yet another Liberal anti-energy bill that the Liberals have rammed through this Parliament against the wishes of major indigenous stakeholders. Bill C-48 shuts the door to the Eagle Spirit pipeline proposal, an energy corridor that is supported by over 35 first nations and is an indigenous-led and indigenous-owned initiative. It is a $17-billion project that has the potential to provide economic opportunity to numerous indigenous communities. However, as with Bill C-88, this one tonight, Bill C-48 is another Liberal anti-energy bill that is both hurtful and patronizing to indigenous communities. Bill C-48 is another example of the Liberal government here in Ottawa telling indigenous communities that they cannot pursue their own natural resource development when it does not suit the interests of the Liberal agenda of the day.Indigenous communities are tired of the paternalism that has been constantly demonstrated toward them by this anti-energy Liberal government. The chair and president of Eagle Spirit Energy, Calvin Helin, who is a member of the Lax Kw'alaams First Nation, had the following to say about the viewpoint of the 35 first nations that are in favour of the Eagle Spirit pipeline. He said that these first nations “do not like outsiders, particularly those they view as trust-fund babies, coming into the traditional territories they've governed and looked after for over 10,000 years and dictating government policy in their territory.”However, the Liberals clearly do not think that these indigenous viewpoints are part of the current government's idea of a national interest, so they choose to ignore these voices. As a result of Liberal indifference to the concerns of these indigenous groups, in 2018 the chiefs council for the Eagle Spirit pipeline had to launch a GoFundMe campaign just to help pay legal costs in a court challenge to Bill C-48. The Eagle Spirit project noted the sad state of affairs by stating that this action is required to be taken by Canada's poorest people against a federal justice department with unlimited resources. Other indigenous groups have either filed lawsuits or are planning to do so pending the legislative fate of Bill C-48. Sadly, the Liberals again did not listen to these indigenous voices then, and they are not listening to the indigenous voices in our northern communities today. It is glaringly clear that all the Liberals care about is the pursuit of their anti-energy policies at all costs. However, the cost is a very real human cost to the ability of northern communities to be in control of their own economic development opportunities. The Liberals have promised time and time again to work with northerners. With only days left now in this Parliament, when will the Liberals finally live up to this promise?Aboriginal rightsAboriginal self-governmentAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsComprehensive land claimsEconomic developmentGovernment billsInuitMackenzie ValleyMoratoriumOil and gasPermits and licencesThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesYvonneJonesLabrador//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh: (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, I should note that I was not here when Bill C-15 first came forward under the previous government. However, of course, the Liberals voted for Bill C-15 in the last Parliament. Here they are now, saying it is no good, yet at the time, they voted for it. It is really interesting.So what is the national best interest regarding the oil and gas in this country? Today, we saw the Prime Minister ridicule six premiers of this country, including the Premier of the Northwest Territories. They have major concerns over Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, and the Prime Minister took shots at all six of them today in the House.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionYvonneJonesLabradorGuyCaronRimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh: (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, we did have Neil McCrank, from Calgary. He did all the consultations regarding the superboard. He was one of the few live guests we could bring in on the one day we had to talk about Bill C-88 at committee. As members may know, other submissions were submitted through email.At committee, Neil McCrank disputed that claim. He spent months talking about the superboard. As members know, the proposal back then was to go from four boards down to one. Members know the result: It ended up in court and we did not do that.I want to put on the record that Neil McCrank spent months in the territories dealing with the superboard issue.Aboriginal self-governmentAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionGuyCaronRimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les BasquesLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh: (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, well, there is not much, as members can tell by my 20-minute speech.The minister said that the Northwest Territories government wanted Bill C-88 passed expeditiously. Why then did the Liberals sit on this bill for months, if not years? They had the opportunity to move this long before 10 days before the House rises. That is the question I had when the minister stood before us and talked about how great Bill C-88 was when, in fact, the Liberals buried the legislation for months.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on some of the comments my colleague made regarding the arbitrary decision-making that the government has done. The Liberals have not done any consultations. It seems that the Liberals' desire to consult is only when they feel like it, and that would be related to a number of projects, like the tanker moratorium, Eagle Spirit and the northern gateway. There is also the moratorium that was announced down in the United States. We are hearing increasing concerns not only from indigenous communities, who have not been consulted properly, but also from the premiers of these provinces. I speak in particular about a very concerning letter regarding Bill C-48 and Bill C-69 and how dismissive the Prime Minister and his party are in terms of engaging the premiers and indigenous communities to allow projects to move forward. The Liberals are happy to cancel projects, but they are reluctant to create an environment for projects to move forward.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionKevinWaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodKevinWaughSaskatoon—Grasswood//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh: (2250)[English]Mr. Speaker, the letters from six premiers to the Prime Minister came out yesterday. There are letters from the territories, New Brunswick, the premiers of Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. As well, one of the biggest oil and gas demonstrations this country has ever seen was taking place today in Calgary, Alberta. It is shameful what the government has done with Bill C-69, Bill C-48 and certainly with this legislation, Bill C-88.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89084KevinWaughKevin-WaughSaskatoon—GrasswoodConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WaughKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kevin Waugh: (2250)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians are looking forward to seeing the Green Party policy because it has been under the rug for so many years. Now it has a little jump in its step from the by-election and Canadians are really going to know what the Green Party stands for. It wants to shut down oil and gas. It would rather get it from Venezuela and other countries, not Canadian clean energy.I am wondering where the Green Party will go in October, because it is not going to be welcomed in my province of Saskatchewan. The Green Party will not be welcomed in Alberta. It will be interesting to see where the party goes once its policies are looked at by Canadians from coast to coast to coast.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsEnvironmental protectionGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and Addington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, one of the things that my hon. colleague did not bring up was the fact that the government has imposed a drilling moratorium on the North Sea and that this moratorium was put in place without any consultation with the Northwest Territories. The government gave the premier a phone call 20 minutes before making the announcement in the United States to a foreign audience. So much for consultation.Will this member agree that there was no consultation on the northern drilling ban?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesBeaufort SeaC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyMoratoriumThird reading and adoptionMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and AddingtonMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and Addington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2315)[English]We will go to the five-minute round, which is usually for questions and comments. According to recent tradition, we will have three members comment and then we will go back to the hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam for a brief response.The hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George.FinDonnellyPort Moody—CoquitlamToddDohertyCariboo—Prince George//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (2315)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am a new member in the House. While I have had the privilege over the last four years to get to know the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam, being from B.C., I have known him for a long period of time. This is a member who swam the Fraser going through my riding, not once but twice. The first time he was young enough that he had water wings on. This gentleman walks the walk and talks the talk. I have come to know and respect him over the last four years, being on the fisheries committee. He truly believes what he speaks. His heart is in the right place. Although we come from different political stripes, I truly respect him and cherish the time with him. I am a better person, I know that. I will never forget travelling with my hon. colleague. We get to know people in the House in a very partisan way, but we truly get to know our colleagues when we travel with them. That is when we truly become friends, because partisan politics are put aside. During the week I spent with my hon. colleague, I got to see first-hand his passion for protecting our oceans. I also got to spend a day, traipsing around London. He gave me these words of wisdom by which I live: Happy wife, happy life. I will not go into the details, but he bought a gift for his wife that was far more generous than I would get away with, but that speaks volumes. I think the world of this man. It is shameful he is speaking at 11:15 in the evening. Somebody of his calibre should be speaking earlier in the evening, when the House is packed. He deserves that. I want to thank him for making this a better place.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsDonnelly, FinGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyMembers of ParliamentPort Moody—CoquitlamReferences to membersResignationThird reading and adoptionTributesBruceStantonSimcoe NorthNathanielErskine-SmithBeaches—East York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2320)[English]We will have a final word from the hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam.GordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniFinDonnellyPort Moody—Coquitlam//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2345)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to point out that Bill C-15, the bill the Liberals keep talking about that they claim was so wrong, is something that the Liberals actually voted for in the last Parliament.However, my bigger issue is that clearly there was a challenge that needed to be addressed over the last few years. The member talked about how important it was for people to know what the situation was for resource development moving forward. However, it has taken them four years. We are in the last week of this Parliament, and all of a sudden they are rushing it through and suggesting that we are standing in the way. Why was the bill not in this Parliament two years ago, in a timely way? Could the member explain that to his constituents, in terms of the members who say that it needs to move forward now? What will happen if it does not move forward? Why have the Liberals not brought the bill to the House until the very last minute?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (2345)[English]Mr. Speaker, my colleague talked about how important the bill is in relation to the 85 other important bills that the Liberals passed. I have to question him on that. A couple of years ago, we got stuck debating, day after day, Bill C-24. The only purpose of Bill C-24 was to change the way that eight former ministers of state were paid, moving it out of the department operation fund into the consolidated fund. Therefore, I have to ask the member, why was that bill more important than the bill before us?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2355)[English]Mr. Speaker, my first question is about the timeline for introducing this bill. I should also point to many bills that, according to my colleague, would not have priority. Here we are at the last minute on a bill that has been sitting for months and months because of the Liberals' lack of planning and determining that it is an emergency.Having said that, the member talked about the importance of natural resource development and partnerships. How many bills has the government moved forward where indigenous consultation was completely lacking, such as when the Liberals put an arbitrary moratorium on tankers? We are seeing great concern from both premiers and indigenous communities across the country.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNotice of Closure MotionInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2355)[English]I am sure the House thanks the hon. government House leader for the notice pertaining to these two motions.BardishChaggerHon.WaterlooArnoldViersenPeace River—Westlock//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89211ArnoldViersenArnold-ViersenPeace River—WestlockConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ViersenArnold_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock, CPC): (2355)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to speak to this bill. I do not know if members have ever seen a hostage situation where the hostage makes a statement by video conference. We hear that statement and it is interesting because we know the person and that person would never make that statement otherwise. We kind of have that going on here. We have heard the same statement read over and over again tonight. People say they support the bill. They say that there is a part of the bill that everybody in the Northwest Territories supports and there is a part of the bill that people do not. However, when they say they support it, the good outweighs the bad and therefore they support it. One of part of the bill that does not fit with the rest is the fact that it would allow for a moratorium to be imposed from on high, from Ottawa, on the north. The moratorium was imposed without any consultation in the north whatsoever. What we have here is the Government of the Northwest Territories in this hostage situation where it either takes the bill or not. The Liberals ran around and got statements of support for the bill, despite there being a poison pill in it that people actually did not like.When it comes to consultation, the Liberals, if it is to hold something back, if it is to ensure development does not happen, are entirely in favour of consultation. However, if it comes in a place where they are trying to hold something back unilaterally, then they do not have to do the consultation. In the case of putting in more regulations or preventing a pipeline from happening, then they need to have more consultation. However, if they are just going to unilaterally do something that is in that same vein, like a drilling moratorium, then they do not have to consult whatsoever. It seems to me that the bill is entirely in keeping with the anti-energy agenda of the Liberal government. If it comes to getting a pipeline built, consult and consult. If it comes to imposing a drilling moratorium, or a tanker ban or a shipping ban, do not consult at all, just impose it from on high.The government's anti-energy agenda is being portrayed loud and clear in Bill C-88. I find it completely disingenuous for the member for Yukon to say that the bill will help attract resource development in the territory. It will not do that whatsoever. He is correct when he says that it brings in regulatory certainty. It does bring in regulatory certainty. It will ensure that companies know that developing in the north sea is not allowed.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasThird reading and adoptionBruceStantonSimcoe NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (2400)[English]The hon. member for Peace River—Westlock will have about 17 minutes remaining in his time when the House next gets back to debate on the question.It being 12 a.m., pursuant to order made on Tuesday, May 28 and pursuant to Standing Order 24(1) the House stands adjourned until later this day at 2 p.m.. (The House adjourned at 12:01 a.m.)ArnoldViersenPeace River—Westlock//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/820RobNicholsonHon.Rob-NicholsonNiagara FallsConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/NicholsonRob_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessEnding the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins ActInterventionHon. Rob Nicholson (Niagara Falls, CPC): (1115)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am rising in the House to speak to Bill S-203. Despite good intentions, this legislation is flawed in its current form. It should come as no surprise that there are many issues with this bill. In the short time it has been before the House for consideration, one of the major problems identified is an English-French language conflict in the text of the bill.As we all know, Canada is a bilingual country. Our two official languages are French and English, and all legislation drafted and passed in Parliament reflects this. Anyone who has ever read these documents knows that the English text is on the left side, while the French text is on the right. We also know that Canadian laws and legislation must be applied in the same manner for all Canadians, regardless of language. This is fundamental for ensuring a fair justice system, which is key to our democracy. Otherwise, it would be grossly unfair and inhumane for a state to subject its citizens to different laws and penalties based on the language they speak. I hope in this place, and across Canada, we can all agree on that.That is why I believe the mistake in Bill S-203 was an unfortunate oversight made by the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. Issues like this are more likely to happen when legislation is rushed through the process without being subject to a thorough study. As members may know, Bill S-203 was given only two meetings before it was pushed ahead without amendment. It began on March 18, 2019. In a meeting of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, the government member from Miramichi—Grand Lake identified an important and significant language conflict in the text of Bill S-203. The following is a quote from the Evidence, as the member questioned a department official on this issue:Another thing that would need to be clarified for me is clause 4 of Bill S-203 to prohibit the importation to Canada of living cetaceans as well as cetacean tissue or embryos, subject to a special permit. Apparently the English text of the clause refers to permits issued pursuant to proposed subsection 10(1.1) of WAPPRIITA [the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act] while the French version of the text is silent on the type of importation permit required. That sounds very odd. I wouldn't know of any other piece of legislation in which the French version would be different from the English version.The departmental official replied, “I am not completely sure about the two clauses you are referencing. I haven't done a comparison of the English to the French so I don't have a response for you on that.” In response, the member asked, “Do you think we should clarify that?” The departmental official replied, “It would be important to make sure that the intent in both the English and the French is the same.”Interestingly, it was a member of the current government, from a bilingual province, who flagged this critical language concern. It is also interesting how the department official stressed the importance of getting the language right.The story does not end there. It continues.On March 26, 2019, the Honourable J.C. Major, a former Supreme Court justice, penned a letter to all members of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. He, too, identified the same language conflict as the member did. However, rather than merely stating his concern, he elevated the issue to be a constitutional matter. In addition to that, he informed the committee that this part requires amendment.This is what the Honourable J.C. Major wrote to the members of the committee in his letter: I have reviewed the proposed Section 7.1 which is scheduled as an amendment to Bill S-203 of the Wild Animal and Plant Protection Regulation of International and lnterprovincial Trade Act (WAPPRIITA). In addition I have reviewed the French to English and English to French review certified by...ABCO International which on review concludes that the wording of Section 7.1 between the French and English version is starkly different. The question raised is whether the difference is so material that compliance is affected. In my opinion the differences are material and confusion is inevitable and an amendment is the only remedy that will clarify the intent and purpose of Section 7.1. Canada, by virtue of the Federal Government's legislation, confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada and evidenced by the Charter of Rights, is officially bilingual. In addition, under S.18 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Part 1 of the Constitution Act 1982), both English and French are made equally authoritative. (1120) Given that both languages are authoritative and that differences between the French and English drafting of Section 7.1 are materially different, it is apparent that revisions by way of amendment of that section would by its uniformity confirm Parliament's intention as the section would then be clear to parties affected by it and invaluable to the judiciary. The latter consideration is important as explained below as case law is replete with decisions evidencing the difficulty the courts in all provinces have from time to time reconciling statutory conflicts and either succeeded in doing so or entering an acquittal. Section 7.1 of Bill S-203 is an enforcement provision under the Act. Given the conflict in the English and French versions of the proposed legislation its passage without a clarification amendment would, in the event of an illegal violation and subsequent prosecution, present a dilemma to the court. An obvious example being that an application under the English version would be required to meet the conditions set out in s. 10(1.1) whereas an application adhering to the French version would not. In the result the same law would be different depending on the site of the application. Should a charge be laid under the proposed Section 7.1 the difficulty described would be left to the court then to attempt a reconciliation of the conflict in the language and if not possible to strike down the section and order an acquittal.The foregoing is a brief response to the difficulties that are inevitable if there is no amendment clarifying the intent of the legislation.It is of value to consider the unequivocal recommendation number 35 of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada which concluded “the English and French versions of a bilingual Act must be identical in substance”.My observation is that the member and the former Supreme Court justice both share the same concern: There is a language conflict in the bill's text. That common ground should be encouraging. However, what happened next in the committee at clause-by-clause was anything but. My party brought forward two amendments. One would make the English text read the same as the French, and the other would make the French text read the same as the English. Both amendments were rejected by the government, and Justice Major's legal opinion was ignored.My second observation at committee was about the four government amendments that the member for Miramichi—Grand Lake suddenly withdrew at clause-by-clause. The withdrawals came as a surprise to the opposition members, because they were sensible amendments. Their intent was largely to coordinate Bill S-203 with the Liberals' own Bill C-68, which I can understand. Both bills share overlapping objectives, and if both were to pass, their implementation could clash or create confusion. In short, it made little sense for the member to make those withdrawals, especially when the changes were responsible ones that the Conservatives were prepared to support.[Translation]Here we are then. This is the second hour of third reading of Bill S-203. This bill is flawed. A former Supreme Court justice was called in. Bill S-203 is a constitutional challenge in waiting, and the scariest thing is that this bill is about to come into force.This is as good a time as any to remind all members of the House that it is our responsibility as parliamentarians to ensure that the bills we pass are constitutional and legally sound. (1125)[English]Given the government's majority position, this decision ultimately weighs on the Liberal government to do what is right. It must act in the best interests of Canadians. That action is passing legally sound and constitutional legislation. So here we are, at the second hour of third reading debate. The bill, in its current form, is flawed. A former Supreme Court justice has weighed in on the constitutionality, and those changes needed to be made. Now is a good time to remind all members of the House that it is our responsibility as parliamentarians to ensure that all laws we pass are constitutional and legally sound.Given these reasons, I hope the government reconsiders its position on Bill S-203.CetaceansFisheries and fishersOfficial languages policyParliamentary democracyPrivate Members' BillsS-203, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts (ending the captivity of whales and dolphins)Senate billsThird reading and adoptionKenMcDonaldAvalonGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessEnding the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins ActInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins (Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC): (1135)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that I rise today to speak to Bill S-203, which on its surface seems to be popular and appeals to the emotional drives behind it. Like many Canadians, I have seen cetaceans in captivity at places like SeaWorld and the Vancouver Aquarium; and at places like Marineland, where personally I have never been. I just want to put this in context.This bill is designed to shut down one business in Canada. There is only one business in Canada actively pursuing or using cetaceans right now for the purpose of entertainment. That is what I want to talk about in this bill.I am not against the notion that, if Canadians are by and large against having cetaceans in captivity, we can have that conversation. Of course we can have that conversation. It is the approach that this piece of legislation is taking that concerns me. It concerns me because I am a hunter and an angler. I am a guy who grew up on a farm and used animals every day at every stage and walk in my life. I am a guy who represents two areas of my constituency. One area hosts the Ponoka Stampede and one area hosts the Canadian Finals Rodeo in Red Deer. I am also a conservationist. I have a zoology degree. I am pretty sure the guys who are laughing at me right now probably do not. I am going to ask that they just sit and think about this for one second. Many scientists appeared before the committee in the Senate and the committee in the House of Commons. They were people with not just bachelor of science degrees in zoology but with Ph.D.s. They were very concerned by the precedent that this piece of legislation would set. I asked the question in the committee whether we could end cetacean captivity in Canada in a simpler way, such as by just ending the permits of this particular business. We could do that by making a small change to the Fisheries Act and to the plant and animal transfer act.However, this bill would change three things. It would change the Criminal Code of Canada and would do some interesting things. The bill is not about how humans handle animals or about the welfare or treatment of animals in people's care. The bill would, for the first time ever, make it a criminal act in Canada to keep an animal in captivity. That is the first time in our legislation anywhere that having an animal in captivity would be considered an illegal act. It would be illegal in the Criminal Code of Canada to breed animals, and these particular cetaceans—An hon. member: Oh, oh!CetaceansPrivate Members' BillsS-203, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts (ending the captivity of whales and dolphins)Senate billsThird reading and adoptionGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35897BlaineCalkinsBlaine-CalkinsRed Deer—LacombeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CalkinsBlaine_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessEnding the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins ActInterventionMr. Blaine Calkins: (1135)[English]Mr. Speaker, all I am asking for is the same respect I granted the speakers from other political parties while I sat and listened to them.The problem, as I and the people I represent see it, is with the Criminal Code amendments as well as the follow-through and execution of this piece of legislation, which creates a framework and structure whereby anybody can add onto that by simply adding a comma into the legislation and saying that horses can no longer be kept or used for breeding or for purposes of entertainment. I am not saying that is going to happen, but the structure is actually there in the legislation to do it. One has to ask the question why this would need to be done. Why do we need this sledgehammer in legislation to effect the change we are looking for?We are known by the company we keep. If we look at the organizations that are publicly and vocally expressing support for this bill, we see they call for the end of things like rodeos, fishing, eating animals and raising animals on a farm. These organizations, like Animal Justice and some SPCAs, call for these kinds of things. This is the company that this piece of legislation is keeping.As I said, I am actually okay with it. I understand the science behind cetaceans and that not all cetaceans do well in captivity, but we also have to be logical. We have to think with our heads too about whether this is the right way to go. I will give an example. Dr. Laura Graham, who has a Ph.D., testified at committee and said there is no actual definition of cruel anywhere in this bill. As I said, it would create new definitions. For the very first time, it would make it illegal and criminalize the breeding of animals. This is something that is a very dangerous precedent for anybody involved in animal husbandry or any of these industries.Dr. Laura Graham says that the definition of cruel is not anywhere in this bill, and as a scientist, she finds the lack of objective assessment troubling. She has also observed that the people pushing this bill are dismissing the importance of zoos and aquariums in educating the public and eliciting a concern for conservation and saving the planet. As a matter of fact, she highlighted a very specific case about Vaquita dolphins down in the Gulf of Mexico, of which there are about 10 left; that is all that is left. If we were to use the facilities in Vancouver, Marineland and various SeaWorld installations as something other than entertainment, but rather as a conservation tool, through captive breeding programs we could potentially some day get to the point where we could release a viable population of Vaquita dolphins back into the wild.I will get back to Dr. Graham in a second. When I was talking to Senator Sinclair at committee, I asked him about this notion of going to a national park, for example. Where I live in Alberta, there is a park called Elk Island National Park, which is not the typical national park that people think of when they go to national parks in their neighbourhoods. Elk Island National Park is a completely fenced-in enclosure. It is a captive facility for the purpose of breeding and population enhancement. People buy a park pass and go in there for the purpose of seeing that wildlife. They may have other purposes, but make no doubt about it, they go there to see the elk and the bison. There has just been a relatively successful, depending on the standards one wants to measure it by, reintroduction of bison into Yukon. There has been reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park, which would not have happened without the captive facility and the breeding program that went with it to re-establish this population. The whole argument behind getting rid of cetacean captivity is an emotional one. I get it. Look, I have those same convictions when I look at animals in captivity as well. As a guy who goes hunting and fishing and sees all kinds of things in the wild, I get those same heartstring tugs that everybody else gets. I am not some cold and cruel individual. I get the arguments. However, as a conservationist, I also know that we need to make use of every tool available to us in order to help reintroduce wildlife lost through bad practices or mismanagement. Not everybody in the world does things as well as Canada, and we do not do some things all that well either. However, we have an opportunity to ask ourselves if this bill is actually going to do more harm than good in the long run. It is the same emotional tug that wants us to end the captivity of whales and dolphins that never would have created these facilities in the first place. The City of Vancouver made the choice to end cetacean captivity for the purposes of entertainment without needing this big piece of legislation to do it, yet that facility is still used for rescue and rehabilitation of cetaceans.(1140)It could just as easily use that facility to save a population of belugas, such as the population of belugas in the St. Lawrence Seaway. We know from the experience at Marineland that belugas are actually breeding quite well there. This legislation would be for the express purpose of making that breeding impossible or illegal, actually to the point that someone could go to jail for it. What is that going to do? It is going to split up that family pod at Marineland. It is going to separate the males from the females, and it is going to create the exact same issue that others are arguing captivity is causing in the first place. It is going to create divisiveness and stress in those families.We know that belugas in captivity are quite successful at breeding. They have a very high success rate. They have a very high birth rate and a very high survival rate. We have populations of belugas right now in the world that are in trouble. If we do not get the environmental conditions right in nature, in the wild, before those populations are actually gone for good, we would have an opportunity to save those genetics. We could actually use the revenue from letting people come and watch them to help the science and research and help that captive breeding program do more good than harm in this particular case.That is what I am asking my friends in the House to consider. Yes, it is going to be very popular to vote in favour of this bill. We have Free Willy and Blackfish and others movies that create the desire to do what we think is right.Dr. Laura Graham talked about Dr. Jane Goodall. She had the same feeling about keeping chimpanzees in captivity, and then she changed her mind. As the habitat was encroaching on the natural range of these chimpanzees, as she saw how zoos and other captive facilities were treating these animals and as research and knowledge expanded, she changed her mind. I am simply asking my colleagues to at least consider that before passing this flawed legislation.Animal rights and welfareCetaceansPrivate Members' BillsS-203, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts (ending the captivity of whales and dolphins)Senate billsThird reading and adoptionAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my fellow British Columbian raising an important topic. Canadians obviously are finding life less affordable under the Liberal government and we should be looking for ways to find some relief for them. In true NDP form, the intention is fine, but the execution is terrible. Some of the policies being presented in the motion are right out of the 1970s. The “zap, you're frozen” approach of a price cap would alter the way we can access new technologies. For example, 5G technology is coming. It will require tens of billions of dollars of new Internet infrastructure. It will allow Canadian businesses and Canadian individuals to innovate. However, with a price cap, how does the member propose that those investments of tens of billions of dollars be made?Can the member explain how, under a price cap where the price is pushed down to a certain amount, companies will be able to unroll this 5G technology that people want?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryPeterJulianNew Westminster—BurnabyPeterJulianNew Westminster—Burnaby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have done a terrible job when it comes to this issue. The Auditor General found their connect to innovate program poorly designed. The Liberals have done announcements, but less than 10% has actually been funded.In addition, the member has suggested some alternative paths. Number one of their points was a price cap. In the Auditor General report of last fall, the Auditor General said it would take tens of billions of dollars to invest and bring up substandard Internet access, particularly in rural and remote communities. A price cap would be the fastest way to stop reinvestment, which would see rural areas receive the connectivity we all want to see.I would simply ask the NDP member this question. Does she have a solution? If the amount of money is lowered that goes into the industry to be able to supply these things in order to have rural connectivity, where is the money going to come from? Where is the money, in the self-created shortfall the NDP is creating in investment, going to come from?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryKarineTrudelJonquièreKarineTrudelJonquière//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, for the first time ever, the government has clawed back a spectrum, not because companies did not own up to the conditions of the spectrum but because the spectrum itself was worth more. In question period last week, I asked the minister about the clawback and repurpose of the 3,500 megahertz spectrum, and he called it a clawback. The Liberals are kneecapping rural and remote communities where small and regional players have designed networks, have innovated and are supplying services. They are either going to cut services to rural customers or they are going to have a permanent cap on the services' ability to grow. Why is the Liberal government talking a good game on affordability and access in rural areas, and handicapping the very people who are offering the services that are bringing up the quality of life of rural residents in Canada?Broadband Internet servicesConsumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryRémiMasséAvignon—La Mitis—Matane—MatapédiaRémiMasséAvignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1255)[English]Mr. Speaker, my riding of Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes is served by the Eastern Ontario Wardens' Caucus, which has developed a working group, the Eastern Ontario Regional Network. It has a shovel-ready project that requires a $71 million investment from the federal government. The provincial government in Ontario has committed $71 million and the municipalities have committed the same. All of the Liberal members in eastern Ontario, including a minister of the government, have signed on and endorsed the Eastern Ontario Regional Network project. If my colleague is unfamiliar with it, this project would close the cell gap, which is vital in our region, but it would also allow for reliable broadband Internet in homes and businesses. This region is home to 1.1 million people. The current government has made all the noises and waved its hands about being committed to connecting Canadians, but there are 1.1 million Canadians in eastern Ontario, including in my riding of Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, who are counting on the current government to commit $71 million. Will it commit that money?Broadband Internet servicesConsumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1300)[English]Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the opportunity to stand and represent the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.When I found out we were going to be debating telecommunications policy here today, I was very excited. Accessing services and the cost of those services are barriers that Canadians from coast to coast to coast experience every single day. When I speak to Canadians, cost of living is their number one concern. With the Liberal government's huge tax increases weighing them down, the added cost of a $100-a-month cellphone bill can be devastating. Canadians are struggling with affordability more now than ever and the Liberal government has just made it worse. Yes, I was excited to talk about and debate real solutions and ideas about how we can support Canadians and make their lives more affordable. Then I read the NDP motion. This motion is typical New Democratic policy. It identifies a very real problem and then proposes terrible ideas to deal with it. This motion is full of ideas that are impractical at best and ruinous at worst.Let us examine the motion and see how many of these proposals would only serve to hurt Canadians. My NDP colleague proposes a price cap for mobile phone bills. That would be a disastrous idea. Canadian mobile phone companies have to spend billions on new infrastructure every year to keep up with new technology and new data demands. They must spend hundreds of millions of dollars on spectrum so they can offer services at all, not to mention the immense cost of bringing Canada into the 5G future we all desire. One report estimated well over $20 billion. If the government were to implement a price cap on mobile services, it would make these investments impossible. We all want lower prices. In committee last week, I questioned a representative from the telecommunication industry about how we can lower prices and ensure we see the investments we need. The only solution is more free market, not less. I know that New Democrats prefer big government, bureaucratic ideas that only work in university classrooms and, I suppose, probably in their caucus room, but they do not work in the real world. We need to see more competition in the marketplace, more new entrants and smaller regional companies; and the existing big mobile companies are going to have to accept that fact. I want to make myself extremely clear. I am not defending the status quo. Clearly, data prices are too high in Canada. However, a top-down big-government price cap would only make things worse in the long run. Regarding the second point on data caps, I agree with the sentiment. Like many Canadians, I also see the mobile phone plans available around the world that offer unlimited data plans. Unlimited data plans should be an attainable option for Canadians. However, mandating that is not the right policy. Again, only free market solutions will ensure we have the services we all demand. Canada has among the fastest mobile networks in the world, a testament to the amount of investment we have seen in our country. However, data usage is a challenge. Modern services like video streaming put a huge drain on network resources, and if everyone is using these services, it can bog down the connection speed. This is why I find it annoying when mobile phone companies advertise steaming sports in high definition on their networks. That activity is not really practical across the board under current circumstances.In a future world, with 5G and Internet of things and all of the innovations those will bring, it is unavoidable that data caps will have to go. However, we are not there yet and we have to make sure the accessibility of the network is open to all Canadians. Therefore, the logical question is, do I like data caps? Of course not; no one likes data caps, but forcing a big-government solution on the issue is not the right way to proceed.Regarding the point on outrageous sales practices, let me start by saying that no one supports companies preying on people and using abusive practices. I question if an entire bill of rights is necessary when consumer protection rules already exist, but in principle, this is a point I believe there is widespread agreement on, and I would like to hear more from New Democrats as to exactly what that would entail.(1305)Clearly, when the government put out its air passenger bill of rights, it was all marketing and, even now, on the implementation, when I talk to most Canadians about air travel, they want to know who is going to enforce it. They do not see the actual promise attached to the marketing. I would say, in this case, unless the NDP starts putting forward concrete proposals on how current legislation could be improved so that we deal with this, it is just marketing for a party that is quite low in the polls.Sales practices that lie or misrepresent what a customer is agreeing to need to stop, and they need to stop now. The point in the motion that talks about spectrum is a great opportunity to speak about how the government is hurting rural Canadians with its 3,500 megahertz clawback. I asked the minister about this last week, and he did not deny that rural customers will lose service, and he even called it a “clawback” in this place. At least he gets points for being honest.The 3,500 megahertz band is essential for ensuring Canadians can join the 5G future. We are not denying that at all. However, government policy that cuts off service to rural Canadians with no recourse is absolutely unacceptable.The chair of the industry committee just spoke, and he talked about all the new technology that will help people in rural areas to access medical services. This policy eats away at that promise, because if those areas that have the least access are being clawed back spectrum that is necessary to run the service, these innovations, these abilities to offer medical services in rural areas, just will not happen.Exactly how many people will be affected at this point remains unclear, but I asked a mobile fixed wireless company about the impacts during an industry committee meeting last week. The response it gave was that it would be significant.The 3,500 megahertz band has been previously allocated to fix wireless for rural communities. Now that band is in major demand for 5G. The fact is that it is not the government's fault. International forces determine which bands should be used. However, what is the government's fault in this case is not addressing the fact that crucial rural infrastructure is now in conflict with extremely important new technologies.Even if no one lost service from the clawback, and I think many will, repurposing the band to mobile without first finding an alternative for fixed rural wireless will stop rural providers from being able to acquire more spectrum to grow their business or to provide faster speeds. We also need to be mindful that fixed wireless technology and the spectrum required to run it has allowed regional players to provide service to rural areas, which raises competition, which facilitates better prices.This whole decision needs a rethink to ensure rural customers would not be left in the cold. However, over and over again, the Liberal government has proven it is not especially concerned with rural Canadians.Looping back to the NDP suggestion within the motion, it is fundamentally flawed. Frankly, I am surprised that the NDP, a party that never saw a tax it did not like—well, except for when the B.C. NDP opposed the carbon tax—would oppose money flowing into general revenue. The NDP says that over $20 billion brought into government over the last number of years has been squandered. Do not get me wrong. The Liberal government has squandered much more than $20 billion. However, under a Conservative government, that revenue was used for health care, old age security, social transfers. I suppose the NDP does not think those things are important.In principle, can spectrum auctions be done better? Absolutely; we can never stop working to make sure that government programs function better. Unfortunately with this motion, the NDP would clearly rather attack the previous Conservative government for funding health care and social services than find a workable solution.Regarding rural broadband in general, this is a topic that every single Canadian needs to pay attention to, to work to find solutions. While the major mobile companies like to say that the vast majority of Canadians have good services, many do not and they are Canadians too.I was very disappointed during a committee meeting last week when the member for Pontiac lamented the fact that the first phase of the CRTC rural broadband funding was only open to the territories. The needs of our northern brothers and sisters are immense, and if service even exists in the remote north, the cost would make most Canadians' heads spin.(1310)Making sure that remote northern communities get a first crack at broadband funding is a positive move, but clearly at least one government member disagrees. To give him the benefit of the doubt, he is probably just frustrated because the government's connect to innovate program is such a disaster. This program was supposed to bring broadband to rural communities. Unfortunately, it has largely been a communications exercise in trying to get Liberal members good press.Based on an Order Paper question from my colleague from Edmonton Riverbend, we learned that less than 10% of the funding promised and announced has actually gone out the door. This is a government of stalled and delayed infrastructure funding, so it should not come as a surprise, but the government at least seems to pretend to care about rural broadband. It is not just me saying that the Liberal government has problems. The Auditor General declared last year that the connect to innovate program was poorly designed and did not get good value for money. Maybe that finding is why the government refuses to fund the Auditor General now. There has been announcement after announcement with press releases, but no funding. I have a list of projects with start dates in 2017 and 2018 on which literally zero dollars have been spent. For Câble-Axion and Projet Redondance Estrie in Brome–Missisquoi, Quebec, the amount of money pledged was $119,000, but the money given to date is zero. For CoopTel, Quebec, again, with just over half a million dollars, to this date zero dollars have been paid. We also have Duclos & Michaud Télécom, projet Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec: Again, from over $1 million, the amount actually provided to date is zero. I could go on and on with these things right across this great country. It is absolutely shocking to see that a program designed and launched with so much fanfare still has not found its feet. Canadians expect that their MPs show up with a cheque that maybe two years later might be cashed. It seems to me that the Liberal plan is to break ground on these projects this summer as a pre-election, taxpayer-funded media blitz. I asked the minister responsible if any projects announced already would be re-announced this summer, and she refused to say no. Now, as we know with the Liberal government and the SNC-Lavalin scandal, a denial often means yes. Therefore, a refusal to answer probably definitely means yes.Now we need to have a real plan to deliver broadband services to all Canadians, no matter where they live, a plan that works with every single level of government to identify where and when we can get cable in the ground and people connected. We also have to work with the existing telecommunications companies, not to do what this motion does and simply attack them.Earlier, an NDP member said she was concerned that small companies are being played down by the larger companies and that more competition is needed. The price cap, again, affects all companies, including small or regional players, and they have the least access to capital and the smallest footprint in terms of already existing infrastructure. Therefore, the New Democrats really need to figure out what they want to do and the mechanism they want to do it by.Do not get me wrong, the big three are not innocent. Canadian mobile companies receive among the highest revenue per customer in the world, while claiming poverty. Over the last number of days, I have seen several things from various telecommunications companies that make it seem to Canadians like they do not take affordability seriously. The other day in a panel at an industry conference, one representative said that there is no price challenge because most Canadians have phones. This is a totally absurd statement and extremely unhelpful when we need everyone to work together. Just because most Canadians have a place to live, that does not mean there is no housing affordability crisis in much of the country. Another statement that struck me as incredible was that Canadians cannot expect price drops because their demands on data are increasing. Now, taking it to the extreme, are we then to expect a $1,000 basic data bill when 5G rolls around? Prices have to come down, not data prices relative to what data cost 10 years ago, but real prices in real terms. The sector must take that seriously. Canadians are not an endless piggy bank. Despite all that, and despite how good it can feel to criticize the telecommunications sector, that would be absolutely zero towards connecting Canadians and lowering their bills. It is perhaps good politics, but bad policy. (1315)This is a major challenge for everyone, and everyone must work together to get this done.The motion contains ideas that would do nothing to address the structural problems in Canada, help rural and remote residents get connected, or ensure adequate competition.In the NDP world, where the motion would be law, companies would never be able to build the capital needed to invest in facilities to connect more Canadians. There would never be 5G, or there would be 5G but it would happen in other places. We would see a continued flight of talent and capital to other regions. Young, aspiring creators and programmers, the people who want to create new systems and innovations, would just go to the places that allow them. Again, the NDP is putting a cap on all these plans.The answer is not big government and less freedom. More economic freedom is what brings prosperity. More freedom in this space to adopt new technologies and push the envelope would allow Canadian innovators to stay in Canada, participate in our economy and help Canadians lead the field when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, particularly regarding the Internet of things.We need more competition in that sector, not regulations that ensure no company will ever want to compete. We also need new investment, innovation and price caps.We need only look to the 1970s line “Zap, you're frozen.” It is very easy for government to dictate a price. However, it is very difficult for those operating in the market to then be able to invest properly and make capital plans. It would run from small operators all the way up to the large ones.I have never faulted NDP members for having their heart in the right place. They clearly have identified a problem. However, their solutions, I have to say, border on the absurd.We have a New Democratic Party that thinks with its heart and a Prime Minister who wants to grow the economy from the heart out. Conservatives will use their heads to find good policy that ensures all Canadians can live a prosperous and successful life.Canadians are drowning under the weight of the Liberal government's affordability crisis. A future Conservative government would ensure that people have more money in their pockets and more market choice, because that is what brings prices and costs down for everyone.Again, it is an honour to rise on behalf of the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. I hope I have added some thought to the debate. I certainly appreciate that all of us come here with our strong ideas on how things should be. I know I have mine, and I am prepared to defend them. However, as we move forward, let us really focus on trying to find practical solutions.Canadians do not care what is in our minds. They just want to be able to pay their bills and see their kids go to school, get good access to the latest health care, utilize technologies and be able to stay in Canada. Those are the things we should be focused on in our telecom policy, and a future Conservative government would ensure that Canadians can get ahead and will not simply tread water.Broadband Internet servicesCompetitionConsumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionFrequency allocationInvestmentNew technologiesOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple RidgeBrianMasseWindsor West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1320)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's work and I enjoy sitting with him on the committee so we can have these discussions.There is a certain danger in thinking that because one country has a particular set of circumstances we need to apply that to our own situation. Let us just focus on the Canadian context for a moment. The Auditor General has said that it could take up to $160 billion to bring the whole country up to the standard that has been dictated through different committee reports and CRTC's own goals. That is an incredible amount of money.Regarding 5G, I mentioned earlier that industry estimates that it is going to be a $24-billion investment so that Canada can be, while not the first, among the first to adopt that. The ability to have higher download speeds would increase Canadian productivity, which is important to our economy. Both of those things require massive investments. The New Democrats have not been able to answer the question of where that money would come from. They can point to the spectrum, but they have talked about $20 billion in about 14 years. That is not going to pay. If they were to divert money from the spectrum, that would not even help toward investing in 5G, let alone what the Auditor General has pointed out.I question the policy because it is impractical for moving forward to ensure universal accessibility and the next wave of innovation with 5G.Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentNew technologiesOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryBrianMasseWindsor WestLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1325)[English]Mr. Speaker, I think any Canadian government is going to look at innovative ways. Specifically, on Statistics Canada, the member knows I have some concerns about how Statistics Canada operates. The government had a mandate to bring back the mandatory aspect of the long-form census. It was clear it had a democratic mandate to do that. However, I do not believe Statistics Canada should be getting access to people's personal financial information without their consent, which is something at which the Privacy Commissioner is currently looking. Getting to the brass tacks of it, affordability means that Canadians feel they can access services and do not have to choose between paying their rent or paying their Internet bill. We want to see, through market mechanisms, a stronger emphasis on affordability. Unfortunately, even with the 35 megahertz clawback and repurpose, and the minister has clearly called it a clawback, members must know it will reduce the amount of service or even cut off service to certain areas.We need to be focused on the real issues. There are all sorts of things government can support that are new and novel. However, when someone cannot access e-health or cannot process an Interac transaction because the broadband is insufficient, that is what we need to be focused on in this place.Broadband Internet servicesConsumers and consumer protectionInformation collectionOpposition motionsStatistics CanadaTelecommunications and telecommunications industryLloydLongfieldGuelphMelArnoldNorth Okanagan—Shuswap//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89294MelArnoldMel-ArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ArnoldMel_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Mel Arnold (North Okanagan—Shuswap, CPC): (1325)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola on his background knowledge on this. I want to provide a little background. I had a small business in my community of Salmon Arm in the North Okanagan—Shuswap, which is semi-rural community. I worked with a rural internet provider who would actually tap into my fibre optic plan, because we had good access. He would beam it out through a radio signal on the roof, bounce it off another antenna and hit a remote community. He was trying to address the needs of about 20 rural homes that were simply out of range. However, because of data hogs, he had to put caps on the amount of usage. The motion asks for abolishing data caps on broadband internet, but that was one example where it had to be put in place, because of one data hog who simply put all of the others off-line.I would like the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola to respond to that.Consumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1325)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member and his work in his riding and also in this chamber. He gives me far too much credit, I think most of us would agree.However, again, under the current technology we have now, it only takes a few data hogs, as the member called them. They are using different streaming services and can block out other things. Therefore, it does not make any sense under the current technology.I know Great Britain has seen an increase, with just the basic introduction of some new technology, that is ten times the previous speed. In that kind of environment, we may be able to see some progress on dealing with data caps. Until that point, a data cap is a market mechanism for those people who consume a certain amount to ensure they do not over consume and crowd out the bandwidth. We all have had cases where we have important things we need to do. That just points again to the NDP. It has really good intentions, but terrible execution on policy items.Consumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryMelArnoldNorth Okanagan—ShuswapRachelBlaneyNorth Island—Powell River//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, being from British Columbia, the member understands the challenges in British Columbia, particularly in rural and remote communities that have little to no Internet. The NDP proposed a price cap. A price cap would basically make it more difficult for small regional players, with less access to capital, to reinvest in their networks to expand affordable Internet. The price cap would kneecap these smaller operators. Does the NDP have a solution to the problem it would create by proposing this?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryRachelBlaneyNorth Island—Powell RiverRachelBlaneyNorth Island—Powell River//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1355)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's contribution today, as well as his work on the industry committee with me and others.I have asked several NDP members, and since the motion today is in his name, I am hoping he could elucidate some details here. A price cap would immediately have an effect in the market, meaning that small regional carriers that do not have legacy systems would suddenly find that their ability to raise private capital would be halted, because there is a max that can be borrowed under a price cap.Does the member not see how this would actually be the opposite of what we all want, which is to have a stronger presence of regional challengers to the big ones in these underserved communities?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryBrianMasseWindsor WestBrianMasseWindsor West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersWater QualityInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1400)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, my riding is privileged to be home to Lac-Saint-Charles, one of the Quebec City region's largest sources of drinking water. This 3.6-square-kilometre lake provides drinking water for nearly half the residents of Quebec's capital.Although Lac-Saint-Charles is always beautiful to behold, preserving its health and the quality of its water is a considerable challenge that requires the co-operation of all stakeholders. We have taken this valuable natural resource for granted for too long. Over 280,000 Quebeckers depend on this life-giving resource and we are all responsible for protecting it. We need to act quickly.The Association pour la protection de l’environnement du lac Saint-Charles et des Marais du Nord has called upon many important stakeholders to take practical measures to protect Lac-Saint-Charles. I have heard their concerns. For the past few months, I have been working with this organization in my riding to find solutions to slow the aging of the lake and maintain the water quality. Water is sacred, and Lac-Saint-Charles is a priority for me.Lac-Saint-CharlesStatements by MembersWater qualityWater resourcesLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesShaunChenScarborough North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersHunsdeep RangarInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, about a decade ago, a bright young man resplendent with energy and optimism came into my life. Hunsdeep Rangar invited me to participate in South Asian Fest, an event of which he was very proud. Later, he would invite me on his famous local Ottawa radio show. His purpose in all of these things was to bring the South Asian community together, introduce other Canadians to that community and to raise money for local charities. In my friendship with him, I came to know his incredible love for his wife Oshima and his daughter Neela.Tragically, he passed away suddenly at the young age of 43 to heart failure last week. This is a devastating loss to our community. This Sunday, the community will come together at the local gurdwara to pray for him, right after the funeral services. On behalf of all my constituents and Parliament, I say goodbye to Huns. We will miss him. We love him. May Waheguru welcome him into his home.Deaths and funeralsRangar, HunsdeepStatements by MembersTD South Asian FestAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingRamezAyoubThérèse-De Blainville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' carbon tax has made life more expensive for Canadians. It has raised the price of everything, including buying groceries, driving the kids to hockey or dance and even the luxury of home heating. Canadians are being punished for living life in Canada.The carbon tax was advertised as a measure that would save the environment and that Canadians would be better off because of rebates offered to cover the cost of the tax. However, we know that the Prime Minister's carbon tax is a tax plan to pay for consecutive deficits and his reckless spending. The carbon tax rebates are a third lower than the Prime Minister promised and have no correlation to the amount of hard-earned money that Canadians will pay through the carbon tax. We can bet that as the Liberal carbon tax rises to $300 a tonne, the carbon tax rebate will not rise with it. Like his entire mandate, the Prime Minister's carbon tax rebate is not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersPaulLefebvreSudburyYasminRatansiDon Valley East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCarbon PricingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will remind Canadians what the Minister of Environment said recently, “if you actually say it louder, we've learned in the House of Commons, if you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your talking point, people will totally believe it”.Well, in addition to this fascinating insight into how naive Liberals think Canadians are, the minister stood in the House repeating the talking point that the carbon tax rebate program would totally give people $248 in New Brunswick, $300 in Ontario, $336 in Manitoba and $598 in Saskatchewan.Well, it turns out that the carbon tax rebate, like everything else the Liberals and the Prime Minister do, is not as advertised.In a report over the weekend, as of June 3, the CRA says Canadians are receiving much less of a rebate than they were led to believe by the environment minister, yet we all are paying more for the necessities of life in Canada and paying more despite the fact this Liberal scheme will fall 79 million tonnes short by 2030.Let us call the Liberal carbon tax plan what it is. It is not an environmental plan; it is a tax plan, and it is not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersRichardHébertLac-Saint-JeanAndrewLeslieHon.Orléans//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, we know that the supposed carbon tax rebate is significantly less than the Liberals advertise and it will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It will cost Canadians a lot. When asked today by a reporter what his family was doing to protect the environment, the Liberal leader floundered and said, "We, uh, uh, we have recently switched to drinking water bottles out of, uh, water out of, uh, when we have water bottles out of, uh, plastic, uh—sorry, away from plastic towards, uh, paper, um, like drink...water bottles sort of things."I checked, and one of those drink water bottle sort of things is actually lined with plastic and is 20% less likely to be recycled. When they are recycled, a significant portion of the box is not actually recycled. They still produce plastic waste and cost nine times more than a bottle of water does. Come on. When it comes to the environment, the Liberal leader is not as advertised. Environmental protectionGovernment performanceStatements by MembersAlistairMacGregorCowichan—Malahat—LangfordSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, we all know that the Liberal carbon tax is a not an environment plan. It is a tax plan that takes money from Canadians and accomplishes nothing for the environment. It is no surprise, then, that Canadians have found out that the Liberals have been misleading them about the amount of the so-called rebate. It has been confirmed. Canadians are getting about one-third less than promised. Just like the Prime Minister, the rebate is not as advertised. What else is the Prime Minister misleading Canadians about when it comes to his useless, ineffective carbon tax?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, that is just not true. In fact, according to their own numbers, families are getting about one-third less than what the Prime Minister promised. The Liberals spent millions of taxpayers' dollars on a misleading campaign about the so-called rebate while at the same time refusing to come clean on how high the carbon tax will actually go. Why will the Prime Minister not just admit his carbon tax scheme will do only one thing, and that is take more money from Canadians to fill his coffers?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is quite humorous to watch, because the Liberals actually believe that if one repeats a talking point and says it louder, even if it is not true, Canadians will totally believe it. It has now been confirmed, however, that despite repeating it and saying it louder, Liberal claims about the carbon tax plan are simply not true. It is not an environment plan. It is a greedy Liberal tax grab. Why do the Liberals not just admit it? Given the chance, they are going to increase the tax on Canadians and keep hosing them all the way to the bank. Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, here is the Liberals' record: four budgets, four years of irresponsible handling of taxpayer money, and four years of deficits. Who will pay the price? Our children, our grandchildren, and Canadian workers who work hard for their money and are paying more today than they were four years ago.Will the Liberals ever realize that raising taxes and racking up deficits is not the way to create wealth?Economic conditionsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1420)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the reality is that, over the past four years under the Liberal government, the cost of living has steadily increased.Canadian families have been paying an average of $800 more a year since the Liberals took office. The Liberals even abolished the public transit tax credit and the children's sports and culture tax credits.Will the government stop taking more and more money out of taxpayers' pockets?Cost of livingOral questionsPersonal income taxDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—VerdunDavidLamettiHon.LaSalle—Émard—Verdun//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/100521RichardMartelRichard-MartelChicoutimi—Le FjordConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MartelRichard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Richard Martel (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives left behind a $7.5-billion surplus in fiscal year 2015-16. The Liberals are being irresponsible by burying generations under a massive deficit. They promised to balance the budget in 2019. That promise was broken, along with many others.When will the Minister of Finance table his plan to balance the budget?Economic conditionsOral questionsPattyHajduHon.Thunder Bay—Superior NorthJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/100521RichardMartelRichard-MartelChicoutimi—Le FjordConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MartelRichard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Richard Martel (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC): (1430)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, middle-class taxes have gone up by $800 per family. According to accounting firm MNP, nearly half of all Canadians are within $200 of not being able to pay their bills. Canadians cannot afford higher taxes to cover the Liberals' deficits.Everyone knows the government will have to raise taxes. When will the Minister of Finance admit it?Cost of livingOral questionsPersonal income taxJenniferO'ConnellPickering—UxbridgeJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, the government sent out little leaflets, promising tiny rebate cheques just before the election to offset the cost of the carbon tax that would come largely after the election. However, now we find out that those leaflets were not as advertised. In Ontario, for example, a family will receive a third less than the government promised in its taxpayer-funded advertising. The reality is that Canadians will pay more and get ultimately nothing in return. Why will the Liberals not admit that the carbon tax is not as advertised?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, but in reality, nothing the Liberals write for others to read can be believed. If people looked at the little leaflet, they would think they would be getting over $300. In fact, they are getting significantly less and not enough to compensate for the higher gas, grocery and heating bills they will have to pay in the province of Ontario and the other provinces in which this high tax applies. Worse, the tax is expected to rise 250% if the government is re-elected. God forbid. Why will the Liberals not admit that this carbon tax scheme is not as advertised?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, I invite him to campaign for the next election on making gas prices, home heating prices and grocery prices thousands of dollars more expensive for families in his riding.The reality is that the out-of-control promise-breaking deficits of the government will lead to higher taxes down the road. There is no question. Canadians are already paying $800 per family more in income tax than when the government took office. However, the worst is yet to come.Why will the Liberals not admit that if they are re-elected, they will take more from Canadians when they no longer need voters' votes, but still need their money?Cost of livingEconomic conditionsFamilies and childrenOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, we are proud to run on a record of a million net new jobs right in the middle of the great global recession. We had the biggest drop in poverty, one that was remarked on by UNICEF, the largest increase in middle-class incomes of any government in 40 years, and we left a balanced budget while lowering taxes.By contrast, the Liberals have broken their promise to balance the budget this year and their out-of-control spending will lead to higher taxes.Why do the Liberals not do the honourable thing and admit that before the election, rather than keeping it hidden from Canadians?Cost of livingEconomic conditionsFamilies and childrenOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJenniferO'ConnellPickering—Uxbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have failed on Trans Mountain from the very beginning. If the Prime Minister really supported this project, it would have proceeded as first proposed and construction would be done by the end of this year. Instead, the Prime Minister's failures have forced taxpayers to purchase Trans Mountain, and now they are on the hook for all of the additional delays. Next week, the Liberals will make another announcement about approvals, but the real question is this: When will this pipeline get built in Burnaby?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineBernadetteJordanHon.South Shore—St. MargaretsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, experts agree the Liberals are not getting it right. Their tanker ban and their no-more-pipelines bill, Bill C-69, are sinking Canada's energy industry, and the Liberals' energy ineptitude is continuing with these delays to the Trans Mountain expansion. The Liberals are going to announce next week, once again, approval for this project, but it means absolutely nothing unless there is an actual plan to get it built. The construction season is half over. What is the Prime Minister willing to do to ensure that construction begins in Burnaby this summer?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 ActsOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, three and a half years ago, the Liberals approved the Trans Mountain expansion the first time. It was supposed to be operating by the end of 2019, in the next six months, but their failure to exert federal jurisdiction and their mistakes on consultation have held it up. A year ago, they said spending billions of tax dollars would build it immediately, but not a single inch has been built. Now they are eight days away from approving it again.What exactly is the plan to get construction started in Burnaby on June 19?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, under the Conservatives, four new major pipelines were approved and built, and not a single one has gone ahead under these Liberals. The Trans Mountain expansion was supposed to be built by the end of this year, but after taking the longest, costliest, most uncertain approach, the Liberals delayed their second approval by a month. Further delays will cost taxpayers billions more, and the Liberals must tell Canadians the plan to deal with new court challenges, who will build, own and operate the pipeline, the cost to taxpayers and when the expansion will be in service.What is the Prime Minister prepared to do for construction to start in Burnaby on June 19?Oil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, Elections Canada announced that it is going to use social media influencers in the upcoming election. The Chief Electoral Officer agrees that this type of campaign is very politically sensitive, but it refused to release the names of these 13 influencers.The Prime Minister promised to be open and accountable to Canadians, but will not provide even this basic level of transparency.Will the Prime Minister finally be transparent and reveal the identity of the 13 people who have been hired to influence the next election?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35397JacquesGourdeJacques-GourdeLévis—LotbinièreConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GourdeJacques_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMr. Jacques Gourde (Lévis—Lotbinière, CPC): (1450)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government amended the Elections Act to impose its vision of the electoral process. It is forcing Elections Canada to jump on to the new social media trend of recruiting influencers that the government itself chose. Now that these influencers know that they have been chosen and that they will be paid by Elections Canada, we have doubts about whether they will be able to remain impartial.The Liberal government has a duty to guarantee more transparency in the electoral process.Will it share the names of these mystery influencers?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, we know the Liberal leader admires China's basic dictatorship. We know the Liberals are forcing Elections Canada to hire social media influencers to influence the election. We know the Liberals chose a partisan union to decide which newspapers will receive election-year subsidies and which will not. We know the Liberals have threatened to shut down Twitter if it does not promise to remove what they consider to be inauthentic content. Do the Liberals really want to follow China, Iran and North Korea regarding Twitter?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have dithered on developing meaningful measures to prevent foreign and domestic interference in Canada's democratic electoral process. They confected deeply deficient legislation to stack the deck in their favour. Now the minister fears that it will not be enough. She is afraid of voices she cannot control, so she is threatening to shut down Twitter during the election. Do the Liberals realize they are walking in the basic footsteps of the Chinese, Iranian and North Korean dictatorships?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, things are bleak when a government commits to meeting very specific targets and cannot even see that it is running into a wall.How can the Minister of Environment and Climate Change keep a straight face when she tells Canadians that the Liberal government will meet the Paris Agreement targets? It is irresponsible. The government does not take the environment—or sound fiscal management—seriously.I will ask a simple question and hope for an honest answer. Will Canada meet the Paris Agreement targets?Climate change and global warmingOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeJean-YvesDuclosHon.QuébecSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, for the first time in Canadian history, the Auditor General has stated publicly that he does not have the funds necessary to do his job. The Liberals have consistently rewarded their friends and silenced their critics and now they are targeting the Auditor General. This Liberal attack on the Auditor General has forced the office to cancel audits that would have been released right before the election. Why do the Liberals think they can get away with silencing the Auditor General?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver Quadra//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is ridiculous. The Auditor General has never, until now, come out and said publicly that he cannot do his job for a lack of funds. At no time during the previous government did the Auditor General ever say he could not do his job. This is an unprecedented attack on our democracy. When will the Liberals give the Auditor General the funds that he needs to do his job and hold the government to account?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver QuadraJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver Quadra//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25488MichaelChongHon.Michael-ChongWellington—Halton HillsConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ChongMichaelD_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionHon. Michael Chong (Wellington—Halton Hills, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, in December 1941, Canadians died in defence of Hong Kong and her liberty. Yesterday, a million people took to the streets of Hong Kong and thousands more here in Canada to voice their concerns about their liberty because of proposed changes to Hong Kong's extradition law. These changes would allow anyone in Hong Kong, including 300,000 Canadians living there, to be extradited to mainland China where two Canadians are being improperly detained and two others are on death row. Will the Prime Minister make a clear statement about these proposed changes and has the government taken a démarche with the government in Beijing or the Government of Hong Kong? Deportation, extradition and removal of foreignersForeign policyHong KongOral questionsMaryamMonsefHon.Peterborough—KawarthaRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25475JamesBezanJames-BezanSelkirk—Interlake—EastmanConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BezanJames_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Manitoba-Minnesota hydro transmission project is good for Manitoba and is good for the environment by replacing Minnesota's coal-fired power plants. However, the Prime Minister has made it perfectly clear: It is either his way or the highway.Former B.C. premier Christy Clark had it right when she said the Prime Minister does not consider himself first among equals, because he believes that he is the only one who has no equal.Will the Prime Minister just once humble himself, change course and allow Manitoba to build this clean energy project?ExportsHydroelectric powerManitobaMinnesotaOral questionsMarcoMendicinoEglinton—LawrenceAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCommittees of the House [Health]InterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1520)[English]Mr. Speaker, while the Conservatives agree with many of the recommendations in the report on methamphetamines, there are three with which we do not agree. The first has to do with using taxpayer money to buy free methamphetamine to keep drug addicts safely addicted. We believe the answer is recovery and to get drug addicts off drugs, so we do not support that.In addition, there is a recommendation to decriminalize all hard drugs, and we also do not agree with this position.Finally, the government wants to continue to increase funding for supervised injection sites. We have seen that, with this crisis of addictions across the country, the number of deaths continues to escalate. Clearly, this is not working. We need to move to a more holistic approach of prevention and recovery.8510-421-597 "Impacts of Methamphetamine Abuse in Canada"Dissenting or supplementary opinionsMethamphetamineStanding Committee on HealthBillCaseyCumberland—ColchesterLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCompetition ActInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC)(1525)[English]Bill C-455. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-455, An Act to amend the Competition Act and the Bank Act (reduction of administrative burden—credit unions). He said: Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honour to rise on behalf of the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola who, coincidentally, every time I stand to talk about the credit union movement in this country, are very happy with that. As they know, Canadians benefit from a strong, competitive and vibrant financial sector. Currently, we have a challenge where federally regulated credit unions are subject to both federal and provincial regulations. This situation creates regulatory duplicity in having a second layer of often redundant administrative burden to comply with. In fact, as credit unions seek to merge and grow to better serve their members, it actually acts as an extremely costly disincentive to do so. There are also provisions in the Bank Act that create unique challenges for financial institutions that use a co-operative structure versus those of a bank. That is why the credit unions themselves, along with the Canadian Credit Union Association, have asked for many of these changes.It is a great honour, on behalf of Canadian credit unions, to present this bill to support these requested changes, and I thank the member for Provencher, who is a small business owner and also served on a credit union in his area. We both know the value that credit unions bring to this great country, and we would ask for all members in this place to support this legislation and bills like it.(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)C-455, An Act to amend the Competition Act and the Bank Act (reduction of administrative burden — credit unions)Credit unionsIntroduction and First readingPrivate Members' BillsBryanMayCambridgeRuth EllenBrosseauBerthier—Maskinongé//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Impaired Driving]InterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1525)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of our colleague and good friend, the member for Langley—Aldergrove, with three petitions to present on his behalf. Knowing that he is at home and not well, I appreciate the opportunity to do this. The first petition is from citizens of Canada who acknowledge that the current impaired driving laws are too lenient. In the interests of public safety, the petitioners want to see tougher laws and the implementation of new mandatory minimum sentencing for those persons convicted of impaired driving causing death. They also want the Criminal Code of Canada to be changed to redefine the offence of impaired driving causing death as vehicular manslaughter. Impaired drivingMandatory sentencingPetition 421-04223Petition 421-04224Petition 421-04225Petition 421-04226Petition 421-04227Petition 421-04228Petition 421-04229Petition 421-04230Petition 421-04231Petition 421-04232Petition 421-04233Petition 421-04234Petition 421-04235Petition 421-04236Petition 421-04237Petition 421-04238Petition 421-04239Petition 421-04240Petition 421-04241Petition 421-04242Petition 421-04243Petition 421-04244Petition 421-04245Petition 421-04246Petition 421-04247Petition 421-04248Petition 421-04249Petition 421-04250Petition 421-04251Petition 421-04252Petition 421-04253Petition 421-04254Petition 421-04255Petition 421-04256Petition 421-04257Petition 421-04258Petition 421-04259Petition 421-04260Petition 421-04261Petition 421-04262Petition 421-04263Petition 421-04264Petition 421-04265Petition 421-04266Petition 421-04267Petition 421-04268Petition 421-04269Petition 421-04270Petition 421-04271Petition 421-04272Petition 421-04273Petition 421-04274Petition 421-04275Petition 421-04276Petition 421-04277Petition 421-04278Vehicular homicideGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestCathayWagantallYorkton—Melville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is from residents of Canada who draw the attention of the House to the following: that coercion, intimidation or other forms of pressure intended to force physicians and health institutions to become parties in assisted suicide or euthanasia are a violation of fundamental freedoms of conscience; that during testimony at the special joint committee for physician-assisted dying, witnesses stated that the protection of conscience should be included in the government's legislative response to Carter v. Canada; that the Canadian Medical Association confirmed that conscience protection for physicians would not affect access to physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia because 30% of physicians, 24,000, would be willing to do it; that section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.Therefore, the petitioners call upon the Parliament of Canada to enshrine in the Criminal Code the protection of conscience for physicians and health care institutions from coercion or intimidation to provide or refer for assisted suicide or euthanasia. Assisted suicideDoctorsEuthanasiaFreedom of conscience and religionHospitalsMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04279Petition 421-04280Petition 421-04281Petition 421-04282Petition 421-04283Petition 421-04284Petition 421-04285Petition 421-04286Petition 421-04287Petition 421-04288CathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleCathayWagantallYorkton—Melville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsSex SelectionInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, the third petition indicates that a CBC documentary revealed that ultrasounds are being used in Canada to tell the sex of an unborn child so that expectant parents can choose to terminate the pregnancy if the unborn child is a girl. An Environics poll found that 92% of Canadians believe sex-selected pregnancy termination should be illegal. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and the Canadian Association of Radiologists strongly oppose the non-medical use of fetal ultrasounds. There are more than 200 million girls missing worldwide. This gendercide has created a global gender imbalance resulting in violence and human trafficking of girls. The three deadliest words in the world are “It's a girl”. Therefore, the petitioners call upon Canada's Parliament to support legislation that would make sex selection illegal. AbortionFetus and embryoPetition 421-04289Petition 421-04290Petition 421-04291Petition 421-04292Petition 421-04293Petition 421-04294Petition 421-04295Petition 421-04296Petition 421-04297Petition 421-04298Petition 421-04299Petition 421-04300Petition 421-04301Petition 421-04302Petition 421-04303Petition 421-04304Petition 421-04305Petition 421-04306Petition 421-04307Petition 421-04308Petition 421-04309Petition 421-04310Petition 421-04311Petition 421-04312Petition 421-04313Petition 421-04314Petition 421-04315Petition 421-04316Petition 421-04317Petition 421-04318Petition 421-04319Petition 421-04320Petition 421-04321Petition 421-04322Petition 421-04323Petition 421-04324Petition 421-04325Petition 421-04326Petition 421-04327Petition 421-04328Petition 421-04329Petition 421-04330Petition 421-04331Petition 421-04332Petition 421-04333Petition 421-04334Petition 421-04335Petition 421-04336Petition 421-04337Petition 421-04338Petition 421-04339Petition 421-04340Petition 421-04341Petition 421-04342Sexual discriminationVictims of crimeViolence against womenCathayWagantallYorkton—MelvilleGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71902MichelleRempelHon.Michelle-RempelCalgary Nose HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RempelMichelle_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsEqualizationInterventionHon. Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC): (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, my constituents are furious with the government's attempt to pass Bill C-69, the no more pipelines act. They are similarly furious with having to pay equalization payments under the current formula, given all the efforts of the government to stop the development of Canada's natural resources sector, specifically the energy sector. The petitioners believe that enough is enough. The context has changed. They believe that it is not fair for people in my province to pay equalization under the same formula, given the punitive policies the government has put forward.I am pleased to present this petition on behalf of my community, which calls on the government to immediately cancel Bill C-69 and launch a study on the economic impact of equalization, including an examination of the formula.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 ActsEnergy and fuelEnvironmental assessmentEqualization formulaPetition 421-04347CarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingMarkGerretsenKingston and the Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have nine petitions to table in the House today.The first petition is on Bill S-240, which seeks to address the scourge of forced organ harvesting. The petitioners call on the government and the House to get the bill passed as soon as possible.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04354S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition highlights challenges facing religious minorities in Afghanistan, in particular the Hindu and Sikh communities.The petitioners call on the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to use the powers granted to him to provide assistance to these persecuted minorities. They also call on the Minister of Foreign Affairs to raise these issues repeatedly, regularly and effectively with her Afghan counterparts.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04359Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the third petition is in support of Bill S-240.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04355S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsReligious FreedomInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the fourth petition highlights the issue of religious freedom. It is signed by members of the Christian community, who are calling on the House to protect the religious freedom of Christians and of all people practising their faith in Canada.In particular, the petitioners ask the House to amend section 241 of the Criminal Code, which deals with euthanasia, to protect conscience rights and to ensure the protection of conscience in the context of the Civil Marriage Act to ensure that individuals and faith-based institutions have those protections afforded to them.Christianity and ChristiansFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04361Same sex marriageGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the fifth petition is also in support of Bill S-240.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04356S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHealthInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the sixth petition highlights the issue of health products. The petitioners call on Parliament to instruct the Standing Committee on Health to undertake a comprehensive study of the impact of uninsured self-care products and wellness services and of the barriers that exist for those wishing to access them.Health care systemNatural health productsOver the counter drugsPetition 421-04362GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the seventh petition is in support of Bill S-240.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04357S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the eighth petition also highlights the issue of religious minorities in Afghanistan. The Sikh and Hindu communities call for action from the government on that.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04360Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, the ninth petition is also in support of Bill S-240.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04358S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, on behalf of our colleague from Langley—Aldergrove, I hereby present 50 petitions on the following. The undersigned residents of Canada draw the attention of the House to the following: that in the 41st Parliament, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion calling on the government to create a national strategy on palliative care to ensure that every Canadian has access to high-quality palliative care at the end of life; that in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that competent and consenting adults who have a grievous and irremediable medical condition that causes enduring and intolerable suffering should be allowed to access physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia; and that it is impossible for people to give informed consent to assisted suicide/euthanasia if appropriate palliative care is unavailable to them. Therefore, the petitioners call upon Parliament to establish a national strategy on palliative care.End-of-life careHealth care systemPalliative carePetition 421-04365Petition 421-04366Petition 421-04367Petition 421-04368Petition 421-04369Petition 421-04370Petition 421-04371Petition 421-04372Petition 421-04373Petition 421-04374Petition 421-04375Petition 421-04376Petition 421-04377Petition 421-04378Petition 421-04379Petition 421-04380Petition 421-04381Petition 421-04382Petition 421-04383Petition 421-04384Petition 421-04385Petition 421-04386Petition 421-04387Petition 421-04388Petition 421-04389Petition 421-04390Petition 421-04391Petition 421-04392Petition 421-04393Petition 421-04394Petition 421-04395Petition 421-04396Petition 421-04397Petition 421-04398Petition 421-04399Petition 421-04400Petition 421-04401Petition 421-04402Petition 421-04403Petition 421-04404Petition 421-04405Petition 421-04406Petition 421-04407Petition 421-04408Petition 421-04409Petition 421-04410Petition 421-04411Petition 421-04412Petition 421-04413Petition 421-04414Petition 421-04415DenisParadisHon.Brome—MissisquoiPierreBretonShefford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25461DavidTilsonDavid-TilsonDufferin—CaledonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/TilsonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAgricultureInterventionMr. David Tilson (Dufferin—Caledon, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a petition from a number of my constituents from Dufferin—Caledon highlighting that farmers should have the right to keep the seeds that come from their farming activities and use them as and how they see fit and to not have them subjected to intellectual property restrictions on how and where they can be used.Grain industryPatentsPetition 421-04417Seed growingPierreBretonSheffordScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Scott Reid (Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, one of the petitions I have today has come up before. The petitioners are urging us to support either Bill C-350 or Bill S-240 on the issue of international organ harvesting, essentially making organ tourism unlawful in Canada.C-350, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking and transplanting human organs and other body parts)Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04418S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)DavidTilsonDufferin—CaledonScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCannabisInterventionMr. Scott Reid (Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, CPC): (1540)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is one that has not been repeated dozens times by other members. It is in relation to a cannabis production facility in my constituency in Beckwith Township. The petitioners are concerned that the facility does not meet Health Canada requirements. They urge the minister to look carefully, prior to issuing a licence for it.CannabisCannabis ActCrop productionPermits and licencesPetition 421-04419Township of BeckwithScottReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1550)[English]Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the member opposite's work, along with other members such as me, on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.Last week, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development dropped a bomb, not literally but metaphorically, on the fixed wireless providers due to the new announced changes to the 3,500 megahertz spectrum auction. The government is going to be clawing back from rural areas and repurposing that, which is the first time this has ever happened. In previous years, if providers did not follow through with the conditions, that could have been possible. This is the first time the government has ever done this.This policy will either cause service to be lost, because spectrum runs the system, or it will put a permanent cap on the growth of those wireless providers that are offering competition to the other large telecom providers. I would like to hear the member comment on this. I know he is a great advocate for e-health and other innovations, but this will be very harmful to local economies.AuctionsConsumers and consumer protectionFrequency allocationOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryLloydLongfieldGuelphLloydLongfieldGuelph//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1555)[English]Madam Speaker, I really would like the member opposite to reconsider his previous answer to me. The fixed wireless communities are usually small, local regional players that have offered services that, through no fault of their own, have had their spectrum clawed back. That is why it is called a clawback. It is going to be repurposed, as in, sold at a higher auction price. This is kneecapping those regional players that have traditionally gone to places where the big telecoms have not. Does the member not understand there was a consultation and the minister announced last week this change in policy? It is ridiculous.AuctionsConsumers and consumer protectionFrequency allocationOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryLloydLongfieldGuelphCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/820RobNicholsonHon.Rob-NicholsonNiagara FallsConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/NicholsonRob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionHon. Rob Nicholson (Niagara Falls, CPC): (1555)[English]Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Guelph, who was good enough to share his time with me, as well as all those individuals from different political parties who have been so supportive and helpful over the years.It is with mixed emotions that I rise today to give what will be my farewell address in this chamber, the people's House. Thirty-five years ago, the people of Niagara Falls first elected me as their member of Parliament, and I will be forever grateful to them.I am proud today to be wearing the Nicholson tartan tie for this occasion. I am pleased as well to be wearing a medal that was given to family members of World War I veterans. I received this when I was over at Vimy Ridge a couple of years ago. I was told that the Borden government encouraged people who were related to people who served in World War I to wear the medal. I had two grand-uncles, Gordon Gunn and Stewart Gunn, who fought in World War I. I have been very proud to wear this in public since that time.As a boy, I took an interest in Prime Minister John Diefenbaker during the Cuban missile crisis. We talked about it all the time and I got quite caught up with this. I wrote to Mr. Diefenbaker and told him of my support for him, and it started a fan club in my class on his behalf.Among other things, I would like to point out to the chamber that on this day, June 10, 1957, John Diefenbaker won his first election as Prime Minister of Canada. That was a great day for our country.At the age of 13, I had the privilege of meeting the Right Hon. John Diefenbaker, who asked me if I wanted to become a Conservative MP some day. I said for sure I would. What I did not know at the time was that since the creation of the Niagara Falls riding, the Liberals had won five straight elections. It came as no surprise to me that years later my teacher, Mrs. Gordon, told me that when she told other teachers I wanted to be a Conservative MP some day, one of them said she should have encouraged me to become the captain of the Zeppelin instead. In my 24 years in the House of Commons, I have witnessed much, such as the rise and fall of governments, including my own. Regardless of political stripe, the important thing is that our democracy works. There is not another country in the world that does it better than Canada. At citizenship courts and others, I always say that to be a Canadian means that one has won the lotto of life. That was consistently true in the roles I have had as defence minister, foreign affairs minister and justice minister. Wherever I went in the world, representatives of other countries were always and completely consistent. They were appreciative of and grateful to Canada. I remember being in Afghanistan a few years ago, talking with government officials. They wanted to talk about the difference Canada and our allies had made in that country. They told me that in 2006, 75,000 girls went to school in Afghanistan. They pointed to me and said that two million girls now went to school in Afghanistan, that this was the difference Canada and its allies had made. What we heard was so consistent with what we hear wherever we go.One of the other things that always struck me was Canada's influence. I remember getting off a plane in Ukraine and being asked if I would wear a poppy on my left lapel. This was in March. I said I would. Everywhere I went I could see posters of people wearing poppies. I checked my briefing notes, but I did not see anything on this in particular. When I asked about it, I was told that up to a couple of years ago Ukraine had commemorated its war dead the way the old Soviet Union did, but had decided to do what Canada did, which was to wear a poppy. It is a perfect example of Canada's influence.I remember getting off the plane in the United Arab Emirates and meeting Prince Abdullah, who was the foreign minister. We made a bit of chit-chat. He told me his son had just completed the Terry Fox run. I asked if he had visited Canada recently, to which he replied no, that the run was in Abu Dhabi, where 20,000 people participated in the Terry Fox run. He said that they got the idea from Canada, to which I replied “I know”. This is so consistent with what we have heard about Canada. Canada has always been there for the right reasons. Over the years, I have always emphasized the great opportunities for our country. Sometimes we do not underscore that enough.(1600)I remember, back in 1988, I had a meeting with an American congressman. We were going to have an election later in 1988, and he said to me, “Do you have your money lined up?” I told him that my party had a few dollars in the bank and that we could spend only $50,000, because that was the limit. He said, “Fifty thousand? I don't think I could open an office for $50,000.” I asked him how much he had, and he said, “I am running for re-election as a congressman, and I have $2 million in the bank right now.” I thought to myself, what a wonderful country this is. One does not have to have a couple of million dollars to become a member of Parliament. We do not need that kind of money, and we are not dependent on people for that.We are truly blessed to live in this country. In the words of Prime Minister Diefenbaker:I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.May all of us in this House continue to value those ideas, because that is what makes Canada great.It was a great opportunity to be elected in 1984, and it was a great day for Canada when Brian Mulroney was elected prime minister. I have had so many amazing experiences that I would need much more time than I have today to recall them all.I do remember, for instance, that very soon after being elected, Brian Mulroney sent several of us MPs over to Ethiopia and Sudan to observe that aid was getting through to the people of those countries. It was no surprise to me that it was getting through. Canadian aid was being delivered to the people of Sudan and Ethiopia. Again, this is one of the things that are so characteristic of this country.I was proud to be a member of the government that enacted the acid rain treaty between Canada and the United States and the free trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and I was proud of the fact that Brian Mulroney took such a determined stance against apartheid and was the first western leader to recognize the freedom of Ukraine.One of the last pieces of legislation to be passed under that government was legislation that made the possession of child pornography illegal in Canada. I am most proud that as a government we stood to protect children from falling prey to this heinous crime.I also had the honour of serving under Canada's first female prime minister, the Right Hon. Kim Campbell, first as her parliamentary secretary and then later as minister of science and small business.Serving in the cabinet under the Right Hon. Stephen Harper was one of the great chapters of my life, first of all as his House leader, minister of justice, minister of national defence, and minister of foreign affairs. I thank him, because on the world stage, he stood up consistently for what is right. He stood up for the integrity of our justice system and the rule of law, and for victims of crime. I believe he will go down in history as one of Canada's greatest prime ministers.During my time as an opposition member these last few years, I was very pleased to have passed my private member's Bill C-233, on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. One of the most poignant memories I have, after the passing of my friend and colleague Gord Brown, was my initiative to distribute aspirin pill holders in his memory. I also want to thank the hon. Leader of the Opposition for having placed his confidence in me. I am grateful to have served under him as shadow minister for justice and shadow minister for procurement. I thank him for putting my name forward for the national security committee. Canada is fortunate to have the Leader of the Opposition.There are many I would be remiss if I did not thank. The countless volunteers who gave up their personal time to elect me are all remarkable Canadians, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. I want to thank all those who worked on my federal campaigns, people like the Lyon, Gibson and Stockton families, and members of my own family who have helped me for over 35 years. This is also for Maureen Murphy and the outstanding staff I have had the privilege of working with in my ministerial portfolios, on the Hill and in the riding. I cannot name all the people who worked in my Hill and constituency offices, but I will name those who are with me today: Stewart Graham, Tracy Alway, Anna Annunziata, Jenn Stockton, Billy Morrison and Cheri Elliott. I want them to know that it has been an honour to work with them, and a great privilege for me.(1605)To my beautiful wife and partner, Arlene, so often she displayed extraordinary graciousness in not having her husband by her side when duty called. There were many special occasions I was not able to be present at. I often tell people, though, that if a spouse does not completely support them in their candidacy, they should not get into this job, because it is a 24-hour-a-day job. One of the blessings I have had is the unequivocal backing of my wife, and I thank her for her love and support. I am looking forward to being there for my wife and my family. I love Arlene dearly.To my colleagues in the House and those who work with us, I am grateful. It has been a privilege serving with them, and Canada is a better place because of them.There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens. Now is my time and season to say farewell to this venerated chamber. This marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life for Arlene, myself and our three children, Rob, Peter and Christine. I have enjoyed the journey thus far and look forward to what the future holds. I have always been proud to be a loyal subject of Her Majesty the Queen, and I am proud that the people of Niagara Falls have given me the privilege of serving in this place. I thank everyone for the memories, for they will last long after the goodbyes.Members of ParliamentNiagara FallsReferences to membersResignationLloydLongfieldGuelphCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1615)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to pass on my thanks to the member for his dedication to our great country, to our Queen and to his family. He has been a fantastic person to learn from, and I will always remember him as being the best minister of justice I have had the opportunity to serve beside. He did many great things for this country. However, I have to say that I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the member that the wines of British Columbia, particularly the Okanagan Valley, are far superior to those of Niagara and Ontario in general. I would like to ask the member whether he now agrees that B.C. wines are far superior to Ontario wines. Have I finally had some influence on his taste and his perspective?Members of ParliamentNiagara FallsNicholson, RobReferences to membersResignationFrancisScarpaleggiaLac-Saint-LouisRobNicholsonHon.Niagara Falls//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/820RobNicholsonHon.Rob-NicholsonNiagara FallsConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/NicholsonRob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionHon. Rob Nicholson: (1615)[English]Madam Speaker, I do not agree. The member was doing so well with his comments, and then he got a little off track. I want to thank members from all three political parties. In the different roles that I have had, on many occasions, I have had the opportunity to work with members and their staff. It was a great experience for me, and I grew greater respect for all those who do work, because they truly believe. As the hon. member from the Liberal Party said, we do not always agree on the same issues, but we passionately agree with what we do understand to be the truth and what is the best for this country. While we may disagree, that respect continues. Again, I thank all my colleagues very much. I appreciate it.Members of ParliamentNiagara FallsResignationDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1625)[English]Madam Speaker, certainly Canadians are experiencing an affordability crisis. The member and other NDP members are certainly right to raise this as one of the issues. The problem is the impracticality of their suggestions. They say that they want to see further investments so that rural and remote areas, particularly indigenous communities up north, can have full, affordable access to Internet. That is certainly possible. The Auditor General chronicled it. He said there was about 160 billion dollars' worth of work that needs to be done. However, by putting a price cap on this, right away it handicaps small regional providers from being able to get the capital necessary to build out those networks.Does the hon. member not recognize that by her party's own motion today, just that one simple suggestion is going to drive away investment and make it more difficult for indigenous communities and small regional players to get spectrum and give Canadians the services they need and desire?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryTraceyRamseyEssexTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1630)[English]Madam Speaker, the member has raised the subject of affordability a number of times. The previous Conservative government reduced the GST from 7% to 6% to 5%. That lowered the cost of everyone's cellphone and Internet service. It is something the NDP opposed at the time. The NDP has always opposed tax relief that would help Canadians. NDP members are now bringing up the spectrum auction, suggesting that somehow they can be the white knights of affordability without actually saying what they would do with the spectrum auction. I would like to hear what the member proposes concretely to change in the spectrum auction that would provide some relief for Canadians.AuctionsConsumers and consumer protectionFrequency allocationOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryTraceyRamseyEssexTraceyRamseyEssex//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1640)[English]Madam Speaker, as I said many times today, Conservatives want to see more money in the wallets and back pockets of Canadians so that they can spend on important things for their families, save for their children's education, etc. The NDP members who have risen today continue to fail to actually say what their spectrum policy will be. The auction process for spectrum is actually charged to the companies, which then have to charge Canadians to be able to facilitate and pay for that spectrum. With a price cap, the motion before us would kneecap many of the small, regional operators that have been able to carve out a niche right across this country. Again, on the spectrum, do the NDP members actually have any ideas, or are they just saying they are going to reform it; and who will pay for it? Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryCharlieAngusTimmins—James BayCharlieAngusTimmins—James Bay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (1645)[English]Madam Speaker, I go back to the spectrum policy. The reason there are spectrum auctions is that there is only so much spectrum available, and an auction is a very efficient way for government to allocate it based on what people are willing to pay for it.The member has not given a single thing the NDP would propose to do differently. I would like to hear one or two original ideas of what it would do differently in a spectrum auction. I would like him to admit that the NDP is just putting forward things it has no intention of getting serious about. It is just marketing for electoral gain.AuctionsConsumers and consumer protectionFrequency allocationOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryCharlieAngusTimmins—James BayCharlieAngusTimmins—James Bay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1705)[English]Madam Speaker, in this debate, the member has made a number of points about the government introducing programming. The connect to innovate program, should be called the “connect to announce”. It announces so much but does not fund anything.The minister's own office said this in response to an Order Paper question about improving community Internet connectivity through backbone infrastructure. It said that with regard to a first nations community in the Fraser, the Sts'ailes in B.C., $132,000 were announced and zero dollars were funded. On connect to innovate projects in Newfoundland and Labrador, over $24 million and zero dollars were funded. On connect to innovate projects in Nova Scotia, over $17 million were announced and zero have come through. On the Fort Severn and Peawanuk satellite backbone project in Ontario, again, $5 million-plus were announced and zero dollars have gone through. Last, on the Little Red River backbone project in Alberta, over $4 million were announced and zero dollars have gone through.Why is the government so bad on delivering infrastructure such as roads, bridges and everything that it has to get even worse when it comes to funding these things through connect to innovate?Broadband Internet servicesConsumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1745)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's contribution to this debate today. There are a couple of inherent contradictions within the NDP motion today, and I would like to ask the member's opinion on this.First of all, there are some criticisms about the CRTC $750-million fund to ensure that remote communities can have access to connectivity. That money, that $750 million, comes from Canadians. It is charged, obviously, by the industry and passed on to the CRTC. However, the member's party is talking about a price cap. The Auditor General was quite clear that tens of billions of dollars of investment would be required to have access to places like the territories or northern communities such as those in Saskatchewan or Manitoba.How does the member propose to actually be able to pay for those things when she is advocating for a price cap, which would kneecap those activities?Consumer priceConsumers and consumer protectionInvestmentOpposition motionsTelecommunications and telecommunications industryGeorginaJoliboisDesnethé—Missinippi—Churchill RiverGeorginaJoliboisDesnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. John Nater (Perth—Wellington, CPC): (1800)[English]Mr. Speaker, the hon. parliamentary secretary mentioned the connect to innovate program. I have to say how disappointing that program is for the people in rural Ontario, particularly those in Perth—Wellington. I know of at least three small, independent Internet service providers that applied for that program in November 2016. Here we are in June 2019, and they still have not been told, one way or the other, whether they have been approved or denied. These small, independent telecoms are the ones leading the way in putting fibre to homes in rural communities, yet the current government has left them dangling for over two and a half years. Why is it that the Liberals like to talk a big game, but when it comes to supporting rural communities and broadband Internet, they deliver nothing to the rural communities in places like Perth—Wellington?Broadband Internet servicesConnect to InnovateConsumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryMarcSerréNickel BeltMarcSerréNickel Belt//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of Supply [Opposition Motion—Telecommunications]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1815)[English]Mr. Speaker, last week, the minister announced at the telecom summit that he was going to be clawing back and repurposing a large amount of the 3,500 megahertz band under options one and two. I appreciate that he provided a modified version of option two.The minister was not clear in question period, so I still have a question for him. How many rural Canadians will have their service cut off or their regional operator stop growing? I would like to hear the government's numbers as to how many Canadians the minister estimates will be affected by this clawback and repurposing scheme, which has never been done before.Broadband Internet servicesConsumers and consumer protectionOpposition motionsRemote communitiesRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—MaltonNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms Tariff [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1830)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is not an insignificant bill. This is a bill that has leapfrogged over a whole bunch of legislation that has been on the books for quite some time and was introduced as a topic not more than two weeks ago. This legislation would significantly affect workers and companies in the steel industry after a time when we have already experienced punishing steel and aluminum tariffs. For the Liberals to rush to put something forward, something that involves a very complex issue and will have a significant impact, is just another excuse for them not to do their homework and not allow the House to explore and debate the details and nature of the bill.By removing the two-year moratorium on implementing the safeguards, we would not be giving companies time to prepare, yet we cannot even have a debate about that. By not arguing what the safeguards are going to be and surprising everyone with them, we do not have the opportunity in the House of Commons to have a debate about them.The bill does not take into account regional disparities and how Newfoundland, Quebec and B.C. will be be affected by this legislation, yet we in the House cannot have a debate about that.The bill also does not look at what the definition of “surge” above average and historical content is going to be.If the House is here to ensure that significant legislation is fully and openly debated, we need to have the time and ability to have that conversation. Closure, particularly on legislation that has not even been discussed over a three-year period, is abhorrent. It is not what this Parliament is here to do. It significantly jeopardizes the ability to execute on this bill and ensures that we will not get the right solution for this country.I would like to understand exactly what the government is doing in this respect by shutting us down, preventing us from having a debate and jeopardizing our steel industry in Canada. C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActClosureCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms Tariff [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1840)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is very disturbing. In my community, there is a big steel recycler, Gerdau Ameristeel. The minister knows how important the auto sector is, as well as certainty with regard to prices and inputs. He talked about these illegal tariffs. The minister was at committee and we found out that the Liberals actually knew that Mr. Trump was going to be using a tariff strategy for steel and aluminum a year before he put these tariffs in place, and the current government did absolutely nothing about it, though there were things put forward. We have talked about the importance of debate as opposed to closure. I would like to ask the minister about a certain number: $2 billion. The Liberals have collected a huge amount in tariffs from the steel and aluminum community, but they really have not disbursed very much of it. The minister is quite aware that the regional challenges in Ontario are quite different from those in British Columbia. I wonder if the minister could address the $2 billion and how the government is going to utilize that to support the areas of the country that are going to be disproportionately affected by moving forward on this bill.Aluminum industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementClosureCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—MaltonNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms Tariff [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1845)[English]Mr. Speaker, my question has to do with the interesting timing of this bill. It came forward suddenly in a big rush two weeks ago, just after the steel tariffs were lifted and the government sacrificed our ability to put strategic tariffs on the U.S. in any future deal. I have a concern because, in my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, there are very large projects that are up to seven years long and involve a lot of steel purchases. This bill would give the government the ability to interfere in the steel free market. Would the minister admit that this is just a virtual signal to steel workers, who know that the Liberals dropped the ball on the USMCA when the tariffs were put in place and that they might be reinstalled in the future?Aluminum industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementClosureCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—MaltonNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms Tariff [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1850)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am going to be specific, and I hope the minister will provide some clarity for my constituents. I hear from businesses in my own riding that are concerned and impacted because they are importers of steel. It is a common story in western Canada, where companies are importing steel. They are not able to buy steel within Canada because they see it as cost prohibitive, or there are limits of supply or whatever their concerns are. Also, they have concerns about some of the administration of safeguards. For example, I have heard that permit applications can essentially only happen a few days before the shipment arrives, which makes it very difficult for companies to plan in advance whether they are going to get permits. Also, I have heard of cases where the application for a permit requires them to send a fax to a number in Ontario. These are real practical difficulties that western Canadian businesses have. There is a possibility of higher costs as a result of these safeguards but also a lack of predictability.What would the minister say to producers who have contacted me in my riding who are concerned about the impacts on their business because they rely on, and need to rely on, imported steel?C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActClosureCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—MaltonNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms Tariff [Motion that debate be not further adjourned]InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1850)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the importance of the debate. The bill seeks to amend and basically change the current process. Right now, we have the CITT, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, that looks at the integrated supply chains, international markets and surges and falls. It has a full process that, the minister must fully admit, is far more fair to all those concerned than the simple discretion of the Minister of Finance.Right now there is a rights-based process that also has evidence-based hearings. It hears and collects evidence and then makes a judgment. The minister is suggesting that we put the power in the hands of the minister to simply say that he or she will hear new concerns after there was that process. Does the minister not believe, first, that this undermines the CITT and our commitment as a country toward a trade rule-based order? Second, is the minister not concerned about rushing the bill through without having a discussion about what are reasonable limits for a minister of the Crown to have? This would not just be applied to steel, but would be applied to other industries as well.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActClosureCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—MaltonNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1940)[English]Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak again to Bill C-101, which is effectively a story of failed foreign policy, a story of failed Liberal trade policy and a story of abandonment of our western industries and our manufacturers.This bill, in short, is really reflective of the Prime Minister's failure to recognize how important the relationship between Canada and the United States is. That relationship is with our largest trading partner. Our bilateral trade is somewhere in the order of $850 billion a year. What happened was that, for a number of years, the United States has been asking Canada to address a serious trade challenge. That trade challenge is the issue of steel and aluminum imports coming into North America, coming into Canada, effectively being dumped in Canada by countries that sell it at prices that are below the actual cost. It is about illegal imports of steel coming through Canada and then being transshipped into the United States.The challenge here is that, even though the United States was asking Canada to implement some legislation that would address this very serious trade challenge, our Prime Minister did not listen. He thought that Donald Trump was bluffing, and he did not do anything about it.A year ago, our American cousins became frustrated and said that if Canadians were not going to listen to their concerns, they were simply going to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. That is exactly what happened. It took over a year for this Prime Minister to actually take that message seriously.Today, we are debating the legislation that should have come forward over a year ago. We did not have to go through this period when the United States was imposing tariffs under the guise of national security concerns. We can just imagine Canada, one of the most trusted partners of the United States, security partner, trade partner, foreign policy partner, and the United States becoming so frustrated that it said it would have to use section 232, the national security exemption, to impose these tariffs on Canadians. It might be illegal at the World Trade Organization, but the U.S. was going to do it anyway because it was so frustrated with Canada's intransigence.That has to be laid at the feet of the Prime Minister. It is symptomatic of a broader malaise in Canada's trade agenda and policy that started back in 2015. Canadians have a right to ask what the playing field was like back in 2015 when the Conservatives left government and the Liberals came in.Over the preceding 10 years—Aluminum industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryTrade agreementsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingZiadAboultaifEdmonton Manning//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89156ZiadAboultaifZiad-AboultaifEdmonton ManningConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AboultaifZiad_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionMr. Ziad Aboultaif: (1945)[English]Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Since my colleague started his speech, we have been hearing a lot of noise. If some conversations could be taken outside the chamber, that would be best. Could the conversations be calmed down?C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeNoise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingPoints of orderSecond readingEdFastHon.AbbotsfordCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1945)[English]Madam Speaker, thank you for your consideration. There was a lot of heckling coming from over there. They have very thin skins over there because they do not want to hear the truth about their reckless trade policy. What did 2015 look like? The Conservative government under Stephen Harper had just completed free trade agreements with 46 different countries around the world: trade agreements with the European Union, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership partners, with South Korea, with Jordan, with Peru, with Colombia and with Ukraine. We also modernized trade agreements with countries like Chile and Israel. We had the most aggressive, successful trade agenda this country had ever seen. For 2015, the tableau had been set. Our diplomatic relationships and trade relationships around the world were as good as they had ever been. We then had a Liberal government come in. Here we are four years later, and what does that agenda look like? Can our Prime Minister travel to China and talk about trade policy? He absolutely cannot. The Prime Minister went to the Philippines and he embarrassed the president of the Philippines in his own country when our Prime Minister was the president's guest at the East Asia Summit.It has been a disaster of a trade policy. We can think about India. We can think about the tweet about Saudi Arabia—C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingTrade agreementsTrade policyCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1950)[English]Madam Speaker, that is funny. The member started off by saying the Liberals completed the agreements. He then said the agreements are not effective. We are talking about the largest consumer market in the world, the European Union, negotiated under the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper. It is the second-largest trade agreement we would have with any other trading partner in the world, the U.S. being number one. The one thing he said that is truthful is that the United States is our largest trading partner and our bilateral trade is some $850 billion. However, the second-largest consumer market in the world is the European Union, a well-heeled market under which trade is growing. There are huge opportunities for Canadians to now penetrate that market and drive economic growth and prosperity here at home.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingTrade agreementsTrade policyWayneEasterHon.MalpequeKarineTrudelJonquière//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1950)[English]Madam Speaker, that is a great question. I am a former steelworker. As a UBC student, I worked summers at Wrights Canadian Ropes, a steel mill. I earned my way through university. It is absolutely critical that we understand the needs of Canadian workers, that we implement policy in a timely way.What happened here is that the concerns of the United States were not listened to. We had a Prime Minister who thought he could bluff the United States and pretend that we are going to go on our merry way and not worry about surges and about dumping. Then the United States said to Canada, “Okay, you are not listening to us. Even though you are a security partner of ours, we are going to trigger section 232, impose very harmful steel and aluminum tariffs that are going to impact steelworkers across the country and many other workers.” This includes industries in my hometown of Abbotsford, like Mayne Coatings that uses extruded aluminum to manufacture what is called longboard. It made a $100-million investment in Abbotsford and suddenly, overnight, it was told the Prime Minister was not paying attention or being respectful to the Americans and tariffs were being imposed on exports into the United States.That is what happened. It has been devastating for many companies across Canada.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeLabour forceSecond readingTrade policyKarineTrudelJonquièreCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1955)[English]Madam Speaker, that is quite something. Liberals are standing in the House claiming the high ground on trade, but everyone who knows anything about trade knows that the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper was the most successful government when it came to opening up new doors for trade all over the world.There has been a lot of gamesmanship going on across the way with the Liberals. They know that their time as a government is coming to an end. On October 21 there will be a reckoning coming when they will have to account for their failed trade policies, for breaking promises on balanced budgets and on electoral reform. They are going to have to account for mismanaging the relationship with first nations, the provinces and territories. Their time is coming on October 21. Watch for it.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryFrancisDrouinGlengarry—Prescott—RussellColinCarrieOshawa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1955)[English]Madam Speaker, I hear the Liberals and it has been a litany of disasters on the trade file. Two weeks after the Prime Minister was elected, he was in Manila and U.S. President Barack Obama said that Canada—An hon. member: Oh, oh!C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingEdFastHon.AbbotsfordCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionMr. Colin Carrie: (1955)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to quote the most progressive president in United States history, Barack Obama, who said at the APEC summit just two weeks after the Prime Minister was elected, that Canada and the United States would both soon be signatories to the TPP. The 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership was signed October 5, and it was one of the topics they were discussing.I would like my colleague to talk about this. If the Prime Minister had signed the original agreement, which was also the renegotiation of NAFTA, that would have been 13 or 14 months before Mr. Trump was even in office. The deal could have been done, but he could not get that deal done because Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all of the Asian members were upset at Canada. Could the member please comment on the incompetence that started almost from day one with the government?C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingTrade agreementsTrans-Pacific PartnershipCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingEdFastHon.Abbotsford//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1955)[English]Madam Speaker, as a former trade minister involved in the negotiation of the TPP, I can tell members that I was aghast, and all of my Conservative colleagues were aghast, at what happened in Vietnam. The 11 remaining partners of the TPP had completed negotiations and they all agreed that they were going to meet the next morning to sign the TPP, finalize everything and have a formal announcement. They all got together the next morning, except that there were two chairs empty. Canada's trade minister was missing and Canada's Prime Minister was missing. They were missing in action. They did not show up. It is among the most embarrassing trade moments that Canada has ever been responsible for. I can tell members that under the next Conservative government, that kind of embarrassment will never happen again.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingTrade agreementsTrans-Pacific PartnershipColinCarrieOshawaFrancescoSorbaraVaughan—Woodbridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersSecond ReadingInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (2000)[English]Madam Speaker, let me get this right. What I hear the member say is that the government screwed up because it did not listen to the United States. For a year we had tariffs slapped against us because of the government's incompetence, but now we should be thankful that tariffs are gone.Mayne Coatings, an industry in my riding, made that $100-million investment. There are many other companies in my community alone that were furious at the Prime Minister for his neglect of his responsibilities on trade and for disregarding the concerns the Americans had on dumping and surges. It is only now, at the very last minute as this Parliament is expiring, that we see this legislation coming forward. It is too little, too late. C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingTrade policyFrancescoSorbaraVaughan—WoodbridgeCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2035)[English]Madam Speaker, the government members like to talk about consultation and how they have worked very closely. We know that the Prime Minister was in New York when he announced the original moratorium on drilling in the Beaufort Sea. He gave 20 minutes' notice to the premiers and very limited notice to the indigenous communities that would be impacted by that decision. Is my colleague's idea of consultation a 20-minute phone call from the Prime Minister when he is in New York, to say he is going to impose a moratorium?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionMarcMillerVille-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-SoeursMarcMillerVille-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2040)[English]Madam Speaker, I find it absolutely ironic that the Liberal House leader suggested that we are sort of blocking this bill. This is actually the first speech at third reading. This is a government that has had four years to bring this important piece of legislation to the table. As my colleague from South Okanagan—West Kootenay said, when does their lack of planning become our emergency? It is appropriate for us to debate it at third reading. That is what we are doing. I would like to ask the member this. Why in the final week of Parliament is it only at this stage when they could have introduced it years ago?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMarcMillerVille-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-SoeursMarcMillerVille-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (2045)[English]Madam Speaker, it is an honour to stand in the House to speak to this particular bill. Unfortunately, Bill C-88 is another anti-energy policy from the Liberal government, which is driving energy investment out of Canada, costing Canadian workers their jobs and increasing poverty rates in the north. Like Bill C-69 before it, Bill C-88 politicizes oil and gas extraction by expanding the powers of the cabinet to block economic development and adds to the increasing levels of red tape that proponents must face before they can get shovels in the ground.Further, Bill C-88 reveals a full rejection of calls from elected territorial leaders for increased control of their natural resources. I am deeply concerned that with Bill C-88, the Liberals would entrench into law their ability to continue to arbitrarily and without consultation block oil and gas projects. As witnesses noted in the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, again we see the Liberal government putting together very different pieces of legislation. Before taking office, they promised to table only legislation that stands alone, and they have run away from that promise altogether.The former Conservative government viewed the north as a key driver of economic activity for decades to come. Other Arctic nations, including China and Russia, are exploring possibilities. The Liberals, meanwhile, are arbitrarily creating more barriers to economic development in Canada's north, with the Liberal government's top-down and ever-paternalistic action to do nothing to reduce poverty in remote and northern regions of Canada. Northerners face the unique challenges of living in the north with fortitude and resilience. They want jobs and economic opportunities for their families, and they deserve a government that has their back.Bill C-88 is another one in the long list of failed Liberal environmental policies. There are Bill C-69, which will further throttle natural resource development; Bill C-68, the new fisheries act, which will add another layer of complications to all Canadian economic development; Bill C-48, the tanker ban; as well as Bill C-55, the marine protected areas law. Added together, it is a complete dog's breakfast of anti-development legislation. The natural resource industries are extremely important in this country. Indeed, I am very honoured and proud to represent a natural resource constituency. What do the natural resources consist of in this country? They are energy, forestry, agriculture, mining, commercial fishing, hunting, fishing, trapping and so on. In my riding of Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, all of these activities take place in various regions, in all 66,000 square kilometres of my riding, and it sickens and angers me how the workers in the natural resource industries and the people in the communities are continually being attacked by the government, whether it is anti-firearms legislation, Bill C-69 or Bill C-68. All of these pieces of legislation collectively add up to a complete throttling of rural communities.I listened with great humour to the parliamentary secretary's comments about the Mackenzie Valley. I cut my teeth as a young fisheries biologist doing environmental impact work in the Mackenzie Valley. I was there in 1971, 1972, 1975 and again in the 1980s. While I would certainly never claim to know as much about the Mackenzie Valley as does the hon. member for Northwest Territories, my experience as a biologist has been unique. Back in the 1970s, when the first environmental impact assessment work was done in the Mackenzie Valley, I was part of teams of biologists who sampled every single waterway in the Mackenzie Valley where the pipeline would cross. We assessed fish and wildlife habitats up and down the valley, and I am one of the few people in this country, apart from the residents of the Mackenzie Valley itself, who have seen, experienced, photographed and measured essentially all of the environmental amenities and characteristics that the Mackenzie Valley has. In addition, I have also visited most communities. It was quite a while ago; nevertheless, I do not think a lot has changed.The implication from the parliamentary secretary is that absolutely nothing has been done in the Mackenzie Valley, nothing at all. The work started in the 1970s, with the aforementioned environmental impact assessment that was done and that I was a part of. Those were the years of the Berger commission. The shameful Berger commission held hearing after hearing. That was a time when natural gas and energy prices were fairly high, so much so that Thomas Berger recommended that the project be shelved, which it was, after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on exploration activities and with much community involvement. I was there. I saw it. I was part of it.(2050)In the 1990s, it was done all over again. The same streams that we sampled in the 1970s were looked at, the same wildlife habitat, the same environmental characteristics were all measured and, again, the same conclusion was reached: no development. The late 1990s were a time when natural gas prices were something like $15 per 1,000 cubic feet. It made the pipeline economical. Well, along came fracking, and the price of natural gas went down to $3 per 1,000 cubic feet, and in the mid-2000s, the pipeline project was shelved in perpetuity, leaving these communities consigned to poverty. The Mackenzie Valley is a unique and wonderful place. The soils are rich and the trees are big. It is indeed an anomaly in the north. One does not have to go too far east of the Mackenzie Valley to hit the tundra. There have been experimental farms in the Mackenzie Valley. There was one at Fort Simpson when I was living there. Again, the agricultural and forestry potential is absolutely enormous. The parliamentary secretary talks about the fragility of the Mackenzie Valley. I doubt he has seen it. All of the world's environments need to be treated with care. However, does he realize that there have been oil wells in Norman Wells since the Second World War? Does he realize that, in 1980, a pipeline was built from Norway House to Zama Lake, Alberta? All of these developments were done without any fanfare, and Norman Wells, producing some of the finest crude oil in the world, has been operating for decades now with little or no environmental impact. People who do not know what they are talking about and do not know about the environment are making laws that consign people in these communities to poverty in perpetuity, and that is absolutely shameful.In terms of indigenous communities and resource development, one need only look at the Agnico Eagle gold mine at Baker Lake. I hate to break it to my friends opposite, who so object to resource development, but the employment rate in Baker Lake is 100%, thanks to that mining operation. During the testimony for Bill C-69, I asked Pierre Gratton, the head of The Mining Association of Canada, about the social conditions in communities that operate in the diamond mining area. These are his words, not mine, but I am paraphrasing. He talked about the increase in education levels. Literacy went up; job training went up; and the social conditions improved. The current government is consigning Canada's north and Canada's northern communities to poverty in perpetuity, and I hope it is happy about it, because I certainly am not. It is shameful what it is doing.In my time as a biologist, I have seen the evolution of environmental policy, starting in the 1970s. I was not there, but I remember the first Earth Day in 1970, which Maurice Strong organized. Back in the mid-1980s, the Brundtland commission came out with “Our Common Future”, which talked about the concept of sustainable development. Gro Harlem Brundtland was very clear on the concept of sustainable development. She said clearly that sustainable development is not an environment concept; it is a development concept, and it is development in harmony with the environment. However, the current government has seen fit to break that particular compact with the people. In the 2000s, of course, I also saw the rise of climate science and environmental policy. It is an evolution I have been very fortunate to witness, but what I see now, from the Liberals especially, is that they are phony environmentalists, most of them, apart from the member for Northwest Territories, whom I have an enormous amount of respect for. They talk a good game about the environment, but they do not know anything about it. They have never been there. They have never studied it. They do not measure it, and they have no concept of what goes on. There are two paths in terms of environmental policy. One is with the Liberals and the NDP. For them, environmental policy is all about process, consultation and nothing else. Strategies without results are meaningless. On this side of the House, Conservative environmental policy is focused on real and measurable environmental results. It is no accident that former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was named the greenest prime minister in Canadian history: the acid rain treaty, the Montreal Protocol, the green plan, the pulp and paper effluent regulations. My own previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, connected with that particular legacy. (2055)The track record of Conservative governments is by far the best in terms of measurable results. Environmental assessments should be all about what effect a project would have on the environment, how we mitigate it and how we ensure the project moves ahead with all the attendant benefits that it will develop?What is really interesting is that those on the Liberal left think modern society is the problem. Those of us on the Conservative side of the House say modern society is the answer. A group of academics coined an index called the “environmental benefits index”. Basically, it is a graph comparing country income, per capita income in any given country, and environmental quality. It is very clear, if we look at measurable environmental indicators, such as water quality, air quality, amount of protected land, conservation agriculture, the fewest species at risk and on and on, that the wealthy countries have the best environments.Which party delivers economic growth, economic development through trade, creating a business climate for economic growth? That is only the Conservatives. That is why, under Conservative governments, if one looks at the actual measurable environmental characteristics of Canada, for example, indeed all of the developed nations of the world, they are vastly superior to countries that are run under the stultifying control of excess governments.We can look, for example, at the Sudbury miracle. What happened there? A few decades ago, a moonscape was around Sudbury. Investments were made in sulfur dioxide removal. Now the forests have all come back. There are still jobs there. The forest and the environment have come back. That is what happens when we have Conservative-style environmentalism. We actually get results.Let us get back to the Mackenzie Valley. When we were doing our assessments in the Mackenzie Valley, we had aerial photographs. This was back in the days before GPS or any of that kind of stuff. We sat down with aerial photographs in our laps, big huge rolls. We were in the helicopter, following this black line through the Mackenzie Valley. The GEO chemist beside me would take notes, the hydrologist would take notes, and then the helicopters would land in various stream crossing areas, where we knew the pipeline would cross.All of us scientific types, hopped out and did our various work, such such wildlife habitat and fisheries habitat assessments. I would set my little nets in the pools and see what was there. I have to confess something, I was actually paid to fish back in those days. It is something that a young biologist very much appreciated.This was back in 1975, the care with which the pipeline was planned, the soil types were measured, the depth of the permafrost was looked at, all that kind of stuff. Even back then, in the dark ages of 1975, we knew darn well that that pipeline could be built and delivered in an environmentally sound way. Indeed, my friend, the natural resources critic would know how many kilometres of pipeline there are in the country, about 30,000 kilometres of pipeline, give or take. However, nobody knows where they are, because they are all cited according to our best environmental practices.It always bugs me when I hear members opposite, or the NDP members, talk about cleaning up our economy, going green, clean tech and so on. I have a dirty little secret to share with them. All industries in Canada are already clean. Let me give an example of that. Brian Mulroney, the Conservative PM in 1989, implemented the pulp and paper effluent regulations. They mandated the construction of a waste water treatment plant at every pulp and paper facility. What was once a toxic effluent now became an effluent that people could actually drink. Industry after industry across the country follows those exact same guidelines. (2100)Before I became an MP, I had this pleasure through environmental assessment in the oil sands. I lived at the Denman camp, part of the Kearl project. It is a human tragedy what the Liberals are doing. I had a chance to mix, mingle and make friends with people all across the country of all ages, of all education levels, from tractor drivers to hydrogeochemists and everything in between. They were all fulfilling their dream, making a very good living, helping their families, paying their way through school, buying that first house. The Liberals are destroying that for the families of those good people who work in the oil sands. That is something I will never forgive. It is simply not true that our industries are not clean. They are the cleanest in the world.Here we are importing oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, leaving aside the social conditions in those countries. We know there are simply no environmental standards in those countries. The government and the NDP willingly import that kind of oil, yet block the exports of Canadian oil and gas whether it is from the Arctic or the west coast.What is also interesting is that there are national security implications to this as well. I remember meeting with the ambassador from Slovakia. That country is dependent on Russian gas. It would only be too happy to buy energy from us. The implications of what the Liberals and NDP are doing to stop Canada's resource development goes far beyond our country. Indeed they go far beyond Alberta. Again, Canadians from all walks of life have worked in the oil sands. Getting back to the bill for the Mackenzie Valley, it truly saddens me when I think about the communities of the Mackenzie Valley, which are ably represented by the member for Northwest Territories. It really saddens me to see what is perhaps going on there, apart from where there is no resource development. I mentioned Baker Lake and the diamond mines. Where there is resource development, communities are thriving. Wages are high. Environmental quality is very high because all these industrial activities, all these installations are built with the highest environmental standards in mind. People say that this industry did this badly or this industry is not doing it right. Every industry in the country operates under the terms and conditions of an environmental licence. I should know. I managed an environmental licence for a paper company. We had to do the appropriate monitoring of our industrial activity. I had to submit reports. We were checked on a regular basis. If any industry in the country does not operate in an environmentally sound way, it is not the industry's fault; it is the government's fault. Either the terms and conditions of the environmental licence are not right, but the company is following these terms, or the government is not enforcing the rules. I, for one, will stand and proudly defend all the Canadian industry. What we do in our country is right and proper and is a model for the world.Therefore, I move:AmendmentThat the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following therefore:Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources 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 Indigenous and Northern Affairs for the purpose of reconsidering clauses 85 and 86, with a view to removing the ability for the federal cabinet to prohibit oil and gas activities on frontier lands based on “national interest”.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesAmendments and subamendmentsBituminous sandsC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsEconomic developmentEconomic prosperityEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsImportsMackenzie ValleyMining industryOil and gasPipeline transportationRecommittal to CommitteeSustainable developmentThird reading and adoptionCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck: (2110)[English]Mr. Speaker, as much as I respect my friend, what a stupid question. Of course indigenous people need to be involved in these consultations. To suggest otherwise to a member who has 15 first nations in his own riding is far beneath what I would expect from my friend. It is an ill-considered comment. As I said earlier, while I certainly would never claim to have as much knowledge as he does about the Mackenzie Valley and the people who live there, my experiences living and working with the indigenous people in the Mackenzie Valley has been nothing but positive. I absolutely respect and revere their knowledge of the land and their desire to ensure it is conserved. I also respect and revere their desire for economic development to make their lives better, as well as for their families, their children and their communities.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck: (2115)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for playing right into my hands. Should he wish to debate environmental policy, I will do it anytime, anyplace, anywhere.I noticed that in his question, there was nothing about environmental results. It is all process oriented. Under the recreational fisheries conservation partnerships program, 1,700 kilometres of streams were fixed and two million square metres of spawning habitat was restored. A record number of hectares became protected areas in this country. Under the national conservation plan, 800,000 hectares of valuable endangered species habitat was protected. The national conservation plan had measurable results. Sulfur dioxide emissions and nitrous oxide emissions were down and greenhouse gas emissions in general were down.The NDP and the Liberals, I notice, never talk about results. It is all about environmental process.I was on the fisheries committee when Bill C-68 was being debated. It was going to change the Fisheries Act, 2012. We asked witness after witness from the same class my hon. friend is from, the Ecojustice types, very pointed questions. We asked whether the changes made to the Fisheries Act, 2012 had any measurable effects on any fish population or community in this country. They kind of looked at their shoes and said that they really could not say, that they did not know and that there were really no effects.This is about the environment, what is measurable and what progress is made. That is what environmental policy should be about.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsHabitat conservationMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West KootenayJohnBrassardBarrie—Innisfil//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (2115)[English]Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy when my colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa stands, especially when he fields questions from the government and the NDP. It is like they are taking a knife to a gunfight, given the level of knowledge the hon. member has.I want to speak specifically about Governor in Council orders, which the member talked about in his speech. We are seeing a pattern of a consistent and concerted effort on the part of the government to put control of a lot of these natural resource projects into the hands of the executive branch of government and cabinet. I note specifically Bill C-69, Bill C-48, Bill C-86 and Bill C-55.Could the member expand on that and the concern with respect to the impact this will have on our natural resources sector?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionRobertSopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaRobertSopuckDauphin—Swan River—Neepawa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck: (2115)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a perfect example to answer his question. Today the Minister of Natural Resources had the gall to stand and say, with a straight face, that he is denying a permit to allow Manitoba to deliver clean, green hydroelectricity to Minnesota, as though it were some spurious thing. It has been a five-year process with the National Energy Board. Having worked on transmission lines, I know that there are thousands of kilometres of transmission lines in this country. Once the transmission line hits the U.S. border, it is going about 100 kilometres or so.To have that project stalled at the whim of a natural resources minister who really knows nothing about the file is nothing but shameful. It is also shameful that members of Parliament on the Liberal side are not protecting and defending the interests of Manitoba. Shame on them.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsHydroelectric powerMackenzie ValleyManitobaThird reading and adoptionJohnBrassardBarrie—InnisfilRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2140)[English]Mr. Speaker, my colleague from South Okanagan—West Kootenay brought up what is truly the paradox of this bill. On the one hand, there is part 1 which the government says it has put forward due to some lack of consultation and some movements made by the former Conservative government. It has said many words about that. Then in part 2 of the bill, I would suggest the government has done more with less rationale in terms of lack of consultation, arbitrary moves, creating moratoriums, and a new concept of “in the national interest” by the Governor in Council, all with no consultation.I would like my colleague to talk about the paradox of what the government has done. I also would appreciate his comments on the timelines and why, with only a week and a half left in this session, we are being told that we are stalling this bill which was not actually presented for debate until very recently. Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West KootenayRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West Kootenay//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2145)[English]Mr. Speaker, I also want to join the parliamentary secretary in wishing the Minister of Intergovernmental and Northern Affairs and Internal Trade a full recovery. I know that everyone in the House is thinking of him and wishing him a full recovery. We hope to see him back here in the fall after the election.I am going to start my comments on Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts, with some technical details. Anyone watching CPAC rather than the Raptors tonight will appreciate understanding what the debate is actually about. I will then go broader with my comments and more generally into terms of the current government's approach to the energy industry and, I am going to suggest, the natural resource industry, which is putting us into an incredibly difficult position.The member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa in Manitoba talked about having the great privilege of spending a lot of time in the Mackenzie Valley. I suspect that there are not many people who have had that opportunity in their lifetime. Therefore, I think it may be a good thing for us all to put on our bucket list, travelling this beautiful country to see some of these beautiful places. However, I want to talk about the Mackenzie Valley regulation management regime, which was enacted in 1998. It is called the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act. It came into being 20 years after the Berger inquiry. It recommended a 10-year moratorium on development in the Mackenzie Valley in order to settle land claims and involve indigenous peoples in modern treaties that provide an integrated, co-managed land and water management regime delivered through a quasi-judicial process for the entire Mackenzie Valley.The Northwest Territories, in its release, talks about it providing a progressive regulatory environment that integrates and sequences authorizations in one single process. It entrenches indigenous peoples rights and their governments' role and processes. It provides a way to mitigate environmental, economic, social and cultural impacts through conditions set by boards that represent the interests of all NWT residents. The scope of the MVRMA lays out decisions and functions in a single piece of legislation for federal, territorial and indigenous governments. It eliminates the need for harmonization of substitution agreements and allows for life-of-project regulations from project inception, including conformity of proposals against the land-use plan, environmental screening and assessment to permitting site closure and remediation of major industrial sites. Decision-making is based on lines of evidence that consider science, traditional knowledge, economic impact and mitigation of environmental assessment, and socio-cultural impacts of the project and integration with other resource management legislation, notably the federal and territorial species at risk and broader social economic perspectives. When we hear that sort of description of the process, I think there are many provinces in the country that perhaps could learn from it. Certainly the territories, in many ways, have moved forward with sort of a tripartite process for environmental assessments that we could all learn from.As other speakers have noticed, the bill before us really has two parts, and I would say it is the paradox of two very different pieces of legislation that the Liberals have put together. One part is where they are moving back from some measures that we had put in place, which they actually voted for in the last Parliament. I would note that the Liberals voted for Bill C-15 in the last Parliament. They are very critical now, but they certainly did stand up in support of Bill C-15 and now would make some corrections to it.(2150)This is part A of the bill and it is an amendment to the act, Bill C-15, Northwest Territories Devolution Act in 2014. A major component of Bill C-15 was restructuring the three land and water boards in the Mackenzie Valley into one. After this was passed, there were concerns expressed by the Tlicho and Sahtu first nations who filed lawsuits against Canada. In 2015, there was an injunction. The first part is reversing some of the work that was done around the land and water boards.It is interesting, as we are trying to understand why that change was put in place, that we did have Neil McCrank as a witness. He talked about the process, about the engagement. Contrary to what the member for Northwest Territories indicated, he clearly said he was not given any direction by the then aboriginal affairs minister, Chuck Strahl, but he was asked to engage and come up with what seemed to be a better process.It was not that this idea of the amalgamation of the water boards came out of the blue; it came through a process of engagement. One thing he said, which was an important piece of information, was that he always contemplated that the land use plans needed to be done first, so that all the land use plans needed to be in place and then the water board would just be a very technical group to deal with the actual assessment, so very technical. What I had not realized is that the land use plans were not in place. However, there was rationale and consultation, but obviously there was also in the end some resistance to that particular section of the bill.Perhaps a more concerning part of this piece of legislation is part 2 of Bill C-88, clauses 85 and 86. This expands the Liberals' five-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea. It amends the Canadian Petroleum Resources Act to allow the Governor in Council to issue orders, when in the national interest, to prohibit oil and gas activities and freeze the terms of existing licences to prevent them while the prohibition is in place.What we have again is the Liberals politicizing the regulatory and environmental process for resource extraction in Canada's north by giving cabinet sweeping powers to stop projects on the basis of national interest. Who defines the national interest? I would suggest it might be Liberal interests in this case defining what is the national interest. It is certainly not national interests.We have not been alone. We heard from my colleague from the NDP about the terrific concern when President Obama and our Prime Minister were in the United States, when 20 minutes before he was going to make an announcement, he phoned the premiers with 20 minutes' notice. This is not called engagement. It is not called consultation. It is not called discussion. It is called “We are doing this and, by the way, I am giving them 20 minutes' warning, so maybe they can react when the media calls them”.The premier from the Northwest Territories and many others were scathing in terms of this action by the Prime Minister. They indicated a red alert: the Liberal government of this country wants to turn the north into a park. It does not care about their economic opportunities. It does not care about their future. It sure does not care about engagement and consultations.We have created in legislation the opportunity for 20-minute phone calls to come any time the government thinks it wants to make a change. With 20 minutes' notice, by the way, Liberals are going to do another moratorium in the national interest. Rightfully, it is absolutely incredible that they are responding to concerns from indigenous communities in part 1 and they are ignoring concerns in part 2, which again is the paradox of this.(2155)I will go to the broader picture, which is what has become incredibly clear over the four years. The government wants to not only shut down our energy industry, it really gives very limited care to our natural resource industry. I will go through a number of measures.The government is all about superclusters and giving Loblaws fridges, but it does not understand and it does not care about our rural communities, our resource development and the enormous wealth and jobs it provides for the citizens.Let us start with Bill C-48, the oil tanker moratorium. The Liberals talked about caring about consultations. How much consultation did they have with the 33 first nations that were represented by Eagle Spirit Energy? They want to build a pipeline in northern British Columbia. Now they cannot do that. There was no consultation. The Liberals arbitrarily said they would put in a moratorium on tankers carrying a specific product.The Liberals pay no attention to the tankers going from Alaska, down the coast. They pay no attention to the tankers that are coming down the St. Lawrence Seaway, from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. However, they have cut off an opportunity for communities in northern B.C., through the tanker moratorium, to prosper and have a future for their communities.It is so bad that the Senate took an unprecedented step. Senators were given the opportunity to review the tanker moratorium. They were able to go out and talk to communities. The Senate committee members had an opportunity. Their advice to the government was, to forget it, to get rid of the bill as it was terrible, wrong and unfair. They said it should not move the bill forward.Unfortunately, Liberal appointed senators are carrying the day. I understand there was great arm-twisting that went on between the government and its senators. I understand the Senate did not take the advice of the committee members who had the knowledge, who talked to the people, who quite frankly did an amazing analysis of what the issues were. The Senate just ignored the committee, and there was arm twisting. It fits with the Liberals' narrative that they do not care about resource development and want to shut down the oil sands.The next project, energy east. All of a sudden, energy east was going to be—Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesBritish ColumbiaC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsComprehensive land claimsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasOil tankersProvincial and territorial boards and agenciesPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionRichardCanningsSouth Okanagan—West KootenayLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2200)[English]Mr. Speaker, I absolutely talked about the bill. I went from the small picture of the bill and to the broader picture of the philosophy of the government. Obviously it all feeds back into what was a very arbitrary move in part 2 of Bill C-88.With energy east, new things were imposed on the company that made it uncompetitive. All of a sudden, company representatives had to meet criteria around upstream and downstream emissions. They knew those same criteria were not being imposed on foreign imports. They knew they were putting good money after bad if they continued, so they walked away from the process. As soon as the Liberals took office, they immediately cancelled northern gateway. The National Energy Board had approved it with conditions and the Liberals just cancelled it. Eventually, we got some very clear guidance from the courts around what needed to be done with indigenous consultation. The next pipeline on the list was the Trans Mountain. Unfortunately, the Liberals did not bother to do what the courts had told them to do with the northern gateway decision. They were given a recipe and clear directions and they said they would follow that for the Trans Mountain pipeline. The Liberals have put all their eggs into one basket. I know the Liberals have said they want to shut down the oil sands. They have done everything they can to do so. For some reason, they have decided they will support one pipeline, because they want to play both sides in this debate. They blew the consultation process. We thought they were doing it properly. They talked about how they were putting extra effort into it. However, we found out that the Liberals had not done proper consultations. They did not follow the guidance that was given in the northern gateway decision and they were put back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, the Liberals bought the pipeline. From all accounts, they spent $1 billion too much and then they could not build it.I want to talk a bit about this pipeline. The Trans Mountain pipeline is going to be very important for my riding for a number of reasons, and I will also link this to the Liberals' lack of concern for natural resources.We have the softwood lumber dispute, which has now been unsolved since the Liberals took office. I have a community on this pipeline route which has just lost one of its mills. The people in the community are saying to please ensure the Trans Mountain pipeline gets built. They know it will not be a long-term solution but it will see them through. They say that the 18 months of construction for the Trans Mountain pipeline will see them through an incredibly difficult time, from the shutdown of their mill, their forestry industry and loss of over 180 well-paying jobs. Certainly, the Liberals' lack of ability for the softwood industry to get that deal done has impacted that community. Now the people in the community are pleading to get the Trans Mountain pipeline built.Here we have a bill, one for which the Liberals voted. In part A, they are making some changes to deal with the court issue. However, part B is really about the Liberals' anti-energy position, their anti-natural resources position, their desire to shut down the oil stands and their desire to shut down drilling in the Beaufort. We all recognize we need to move toward a lighter carbon footprint. However, why should we be importing oil when the demand is there? Technology is going to take us there. Meanwhile, Canada needs to benefit from the opportunities we have. The government is totally uninterested and unwilling to do so.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasPipeline transportationThird reading and adoptionTrans Mountain pipelineAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2205)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have to talk about the paradox of the bill. Part 1 has two parts to it. Part 2 has received no consultation. The Governor in Council can impose moratoriums in the national interest. Doing things this way has never happened in our energy industry.The Liberal government is, without consultation, embedding moratorium measures in legislation, providing governments the ability to be arbitrary in future decisions. Part 2 is fundamentally wrong, in my opinion.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesScotDavidsonYork—Simcoe//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102653ScotDavidsonScot-DavidsonYork—SimcoeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DavidsonScot_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Scot Davidson (York—Simcoe, CPC): (2205)[English]Mr. Speaker, I understood, through committee work, that certain first nations opposed certain parts of the bill. Could the hon. member get into more details on that so we can have a greater understanding of it?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2205)[English]Mr. Speaker, part 2 of the bill would allow the government, in a very arbitrary way, to take action based on a “national interest” that would only be defined by it, affecting not only indigenous communities in the area but certainly the premier. Given his response when the moratorium happened, we can understand how appalled he was with the utter lack of engagement and consultation on the bill.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionScotDavidsonYork—SimcoeLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2210)[English]Mr. Speaker, this is absolutely bizarre coming from that side of the House. The Liberals voted for Bill C-15 in the last Parliament; the NDP voted for it. Now they are suggesting that they voted for a bill that is not constitutional. That is quite bizarre. We presented a bill that we thought would be helpful and would modernize and move things forward in the Northwest Territories. Obviously, there are some challenges that need to be dealt with, but, first of all, Liberals voted for this bill, and second, they threw in something that makes one wonder about the constitutionality of part 2 of this bill.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsConstitutionalityGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonAliceWongHon.Richmond Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (2210)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government is known for making promises and breaking them. I noticed that quite a number of members are also on the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. Again, we see the Liberal government putting together a very different piece of legislation. The hon. member from the other side mentioned there are three parts to the whole thing.Before taking office, the Liberals promised to table only legislation that stands alone and have now run away from that promise altogether. I would like my hon. colleague to comment on that part of the bill.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2210)[English]Mr. Speaker, certainly we have talked about the challenge of part 1 and part 2 being totally unconnected pieces of legislation, but I want to take it further. The government, in its budget implementation act, embedded massive changes and the separation of the department into Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, something it definitely promised it would never do. The government referred it to our committee, but the Liberal majority on the committee would not allow for witnesses and allowed for departmental officials only. It went back to the finance committee and we found out there were flaws in the bill that the government had to table amendments to. Who knows what is wrong with the budget implementation act. We look at Bill S-3 and its sloppy drafting. When it came to us, the government said everything was great and that it would fix a legal problem. It turned out it was a total mess and it had to be taken back to the drawing board.What is happening is that the Liberals are trying to force legislation through very rapidly at the end of a session, and who knows what flaws are embedded in this particular piece.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionAliceWongHon.Richmond CentreJohnBrassardBarrie—Innisfil//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (2215)[English]Mr. Speaker, effectively, what we are seeing is a systematic destruction of our natural resource industry by the Liberals. All these pieces of legislation that have come forward speak to that. In particular on this one, more broadly, when the east-west pipeline was cancelled, Premier Frank McKenna at the time said that we needed to have a national debate on whether Canada wants to be a carbon-producing country so we could all understand the implications of basically turning off the taps and what that would mean to this country in terms of equalization and the social fabric of this country. More broadly, do we need a national debate on this issue because of this incremental, systematic destruction of our natural resource sector?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod: (2215)[English]Mr. Speaker, that was an incredibly important question. Every move the government has made, with one exception, is consistent with the Prime Minister's stated objective to phase out the oil sands and basically destroy Canada's energy sector.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionJohnBrassardBarrie—InnisfilMarilynGladuSarnia—Lambton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (2215)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts.Normally, I am even more pleased to rise in the House, but I want to point out that we are here sitting late in the session. At 10:15 in the evening, I am sure most other people are watching the Raptors game. I want to point out that the Liberal government is rushing through a lot of legislation at the last minute. We have seen a bill today that was just introduced two weeks ago and that the government is moving closure on. The Liberals have moved closure on this bill in a big rush. They have woken up like a teenager at school and realized that the end of the session is upon them and they have not finished any of their assignments.I am happy to be here and debate this legislation. I do not have any family or a spouse who would be an issue. However, a lot of members do have young families or spouses. We talk about this being a family-friendly Parliament. A lot of rhetoric often goes on by members on the other side, but we can see that the Liberals are using their powers as government to drive an agenda that is not family-friendly.I would be remiss, as the shadow health minister, if I did not point out that these late sessions that go until midnight are not good from a sleep perspective. There are a number of more aged members of Parliament. It is not good for them either. While it is worthwhile debating Bill C-88, the government should have done more careful planning so as to avoid coming to the end of the session and realizing that none of its legislation was passed.I do not want to be accused of not being relevant tonight, so I will tell the House in advance what I am going to speak about so members will understand where I am going with this whole thing.First, I am going to talk about what the bill would do and what it proposes to do, and then I will discuss my concerns about the bill. Then, I want to talk a bit about how the bill aligns overall to indigenous reconciliation in Canada, which is on the minds of all Canadians and I am sure is important. Then, I will speak a bit about how the bill aligns to natural resource sector development. The natural resource sector is a huge part of Canada's GDP and our economic growth. It is an important industry, so every time we make a change to something that will impact that industry, it is important to look at how it will align to the overall plan. We have a strategy for the north. It is important to look at this bill and how it will align to our northern strategy. Does it fit in? Are there any concerns there?The bill actually has three parts. The first part would amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, from 1998, to reverse provisions that would have consolidated the Mackenzie Valley land and water boards into one.These provisions were introduced by the former Conservative government within Bill C-15, the Northwest Territories Devolution Act. By way of history, we know that a major component of Bill C-15, where this originated, was the restructuring of the four land and water boards from the Mackenzie Valley into one. Following its passage in 2014, the Tlicho government and the Sahtu Secretariat filed lawsuits against Canada, arguing that the restructuring violated their land claim agreements.In February 2015, the Northwest Territories Supreme Court issued an injunction preventing the board restructuring provisions from coming into force until a decision on the case was issued. The Liberals paused that legal battle shortly after forming government, and it remains an unresolved issue. To try to consolidate the land and water boards into one seems to be, in my view, an efficiency, but again, it is important to consult and understand what the people who have the land claims are thinking. For the government to leave it so late in the session, when there is a lawsuit that pertains to this, is troubling. When we rise from this Parliament, there will be an election, and whatever government is elected will not be able to get back to this matter in a timely way. That is unfortunate.(2220)The second part of the bill would amend the Canada Petroleum Resources Act to allow the Governor in Council to issue orders, when in the national interest, to prohibit oil and gas activities, and it would freeze the terms of existing licences to prevent them from expiring during a moratorium. There are a lot of vague terms there. What is the national interest? How is that determined, and who determines that? I assume it is the Liberal cabinet, and I am not sure it would be necessarily unbiased in its definition. What are oil and gas activities? There is a bit of vagueness in the second part of the bill.The third part of the bill, as we heard earlier, talks about the regulatory items that were brought forward from the previous Conservative bill, which I have heard members on the opposite side say were actually good. It is not surprising, because the Conservative government has, in the past, done a very good job with respect to regulations that have brought us forward in terms of emission reductions and a number of other items. I do not have much objection to the regulatory items. I agree the Conservative government brought them forward, and they are fine as they are.Let me go to concerns about the bill. In addition to the litigation cycle that is hanging over this bill, I am concerned with the number of powers the government would have to politically interfere in the development of our natural resources as a result of this bill. We have seen lots of political interference by the government. Today, I participated in a debate on Bill C-101, a bill about the government politically interfering in the steel market. We have the USMCA agreement with the U.S. and, as members know, there were tariffs on steel for nearly a year that were very punishing to our businesses. In order to get rid of those tariffs, the Liberal government traded away our ability to strategically put tariffs in place on the U.S., which, ironically, is how we got rid of the tariffs on steel in the first place.It is troubling to me, having the knowledge that the U.S. may again put tariffs on steel, which it is not prohibited from doing under the agreement that has been signed, that the government would immediately virtue-signal to the steel industry that it is doing something. It came forward with a bill two weeks ago, with the dying days of Parliament before us, trying to rush it through in order to make it seem as though it is doing something, when, in fact, it is trying to politically interfere in the free market for steel.That is not the first time, as I mentioned. There is a pattern of behaviour that I want to talk a bit about. We saw with Bill C-69, the no-more-pipelines bill, that this bill would hugely interfere in projects that are proposed to be built in Canada. It would give the environment minister powers to, for any reason, at any time, reset the process and start the clock again, to veto the process. That is a huge amount of power, and it causes great uncertainty. Those looking to invest and do large projects in Canada are not going to want to invest billions of dollars, knowing that at the whim of the environment minister, projects may die on the vine. I will talk a bit about the reason the government brings these bills forward and the reaction in the indigenous community. Part of the bill would allow the government to put a moratorium on oil and gas development. I heard in some of the speeches earlier the comment that just before Christmas 2016, the Prime Minister travelled to Washington, D.C. to make an announcement with then U.S. president Barrack Obama, even though there had been no consultation with northerners, despite consistent rhetoric about consulting with Canada's indigenous peoples prior to decision-making. The Prime Minister's Office made this decision and, with 20 minutes' notice, elected leaders in Canada's north were made aware of the announcement. Some of the comments that followed from the community are probably worthy of note.(2225)Wally Schumann, who is the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment and the Minister of Infrastructure for the Northwest Territories, said:I guess we can be very frank because we're in front of the committee.When it first came out, we never got very much notice on the whole issue of the moratorium and the potential that was in the Beaufort Sea. There were millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars in bid deposits and land leases up there. That took away any hope we had of developing the Beaufort Sea.The mayor of Tuktoyaktuk, Merven Gruben, said:I agree the Liberals should be helping us. They shut down our offshore gasification and put a moratorium right across the whole freaking Arctic without even consulting us. They never said a word to us.The Hon. Jackie Jacobson stated:It's so easy to sit down here and make judgments on people and lives that are 3,500 klicks away, and make decisions on our behalf, especially with that moratorium on the Beaufort. That should be taken away, lifted, please and thank you. That is going to open up and give jobs to our people—training and all the stuff we're wishing for. Merven Gruben further said, “We're proud people who like to work for a living.” He spoke of the increasing reliance on social assistance.Here again we see that the people who are living there are looking for that economic development they so badly need, but the current government, without any consultation whatsoever, shut it down and put a moratorium in place. Clearly, that is not acceptable.The pattern of reversing what Conservatives have proposed or put in place is not new to this House. I would say that it has been done on a number of bills. I will pick a small sampling to back up the point.We had a housing first program that was lifting people out of homelessness. Of the people on that program, 73% ended up going into stable housing. When the Liberal government came in, it decided it was going to have its national housing strategy, but instead of keeping something that was working, it tossed the baby out with the bathwater on that one.I would say the same was true regarding a bill in the previous government, Bill C-24, which suggested that if people had become a Canadian citizen and gone off to fight against Canada, their citizenship would be revoked. We see that we are in a situation now with people who have been involved in terrorism trying to come back and the government is struggling to get the evidentiary proof to file charges. That would be another example.One of the first bills the Liberals passed in this Parliament was to remove the financial transparency and accountability for the first nations people on the funding they receive.Therefore, there is a previous pattern of behaviour of the Liberal government reversing things the Conservatives did when those things were not necessarily bad things.With respect to the themes we are talking about today, I have expressed some concerns about the bill, but I want to talk about how this bill aligns to indigenous reconciliation, because there has been a lot of rhetoric in the current government about lining up to indigenous reconciliation and consulting with indigenous people. I would say that it is forever consulting but never listening.If we think about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations, early in the mandate of the government it unanimously adopted all 94, and where has the action on those gone? Crickets.We have seen the mess of the inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women has been, with the number of people who have resigned en route and the fact that many indigenous people feel they were not allowed to participate. Here we are four years down the road, with $98 million or something like that having been spent, and no action.Many indigenous people felt the tanker ban, Bill C-48, would be bad for them, especially those who were trying to get the Eagle Spirit pipeline built. They were saying this was going to deprive them of an opportunity to have the kind of economic development they need, the same kind of economic opportunity that we see in Bill C-88, which the people there are looking for. Now we have this moratorium on the Beaufort Sea.Another issue we need to consider when looking at Bill C-88 is how it fits into our northern strategy. If we think about the needs of people who are living in the north, we know there are a number of issues. We know that there is a food insecurity issue in the north. Will this help with that issue? When the government is depriving people of economic development, I am not sure that it is helping that situation.(2230)In terms of the broadband problem, the government has had four years to address the issue. I know I have an inventor in my riding, and I put ideas forward to the innovation minister that for less than $20 million, I have somebody who knows how to put that kind of broadband Internet access across the north, with satellite balloons that are solar powered, incidentally, but to no avail.The health care in the north has huge issues, from dental hygiene to tuberculosis and just even access to care. There are those things and the sovereignty issues. We have sovereignty in the north, but we have Russia and China really starting to pay a lot of attention to that area. We need to have a plan for how we are going to defend that area, along with the natural resources that are there and what we need to do to protect those. I do not see any plan or any discussion about how this fits into that northern strategy. I think that is something that needs to be looked at.Another thing that is really affecting the northern area is climate change. We are seeing a thawing of the permafrost. As an engineer who used to work in construction, I am paying close attention to some of the horrendous things that are happening, in terms of roads that are developing huge crevices as the permafrost shifts and buildings that are collapsing after months of construction because the foundations are no longer solid. There really does not seem to be a strategy for how we are going to make sure that, in the north, we are setting them up for success, that we are protecting the assets that are in place. These are places where, if people cannot get to them, any hope of economic development would be lost. There is something to be done there.Many times this week we have heard that the government has a tax plan, not a climate plan. This is just one more thing that I would add to what needs to be part of a comprehensive climate plan, how we are going to address the results that we see as the climate shifts.As we look to this bill, in the dying days of the 42nd Parliament, it looks to me, again, like something that may not even make it through in the remaining days that we have, and it may not have a good chance of being implemented. Certainly, with all of the things the government promised to do but never did, I reflect on the 42nd Parliament and I think, “What did the government really do?” The Canada child benefit and the legalization of marijuana, I will give it those two. Other than that, I am not really sure what has been accomplished. As we look to the summary of Bill C-88, we have talked about what the bill does, some of the concerns of the political interference that exists and how people are not being listened to in the north. People want this economic development, and the government now has the power to shut them down and is using that power.I do not think the actions being taken by the government align well with the overall theme of indigenous reconciliation. I feel this will be more fanning of the flame, when people in the north want this economic development and the government is standing in the way or is interfering in the ability of the people to support themselves. That will not go over well.I also think it is part of a bigger rhetoric on the natural resources sector. We know that the carbon tax has been a huge problem for small businesses. In my riding I have a lot of refineries. Now the government has exempted all the large emitters, 90%, from the carbon tax, but it has also put on a clean fuel tax, which is costing billions of dollars. One refinery in my riding has just gone up for sale, and another one has said that if it does not get an exemption from those clean fuel taxes, it may be unsustainable as well.The government has a clean pattern of undermining the natural resources sector. We know that it has killed all kinds of natural resource projects: energy east, the northern gateway, the Petronas LNG and, of course, the Trans Mountain pipeline has gone absolutely nowhere.Until the government can come with a clear message about the natural resources plan and support for that plan, and support for people in the north who want that economic development and are looking for the government to support them and not interfere, then I think that Bill C-88 is not going to go a long way in achieving what is hoped.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesBroadband Internet servicesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsCanadian Arctic sovereigntyCarbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingComprehensive land claimsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesEnvironmental assessmentGovernment billsHomelessness and homelessMackenzie ValleyPermafrostProvincial and territorial boards and agenciesPublic consultationSteel industryThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member opposite sounds as if he was here in the previous Parliament and so would have more access to those details. I do not know exactly how many boards, but I do know, from an efficiency point of view, that if we could collect input on things that are related, like land and water, by a group of folks who are dedicated to that, it is always a cost savings and it usually results in some synergy. That said, it is important to listen to the voices of the people who are involved and get their opinion on it. If they are not in favour of coming together, then it is not going to be a harmonious institution. That is the way I see both sides of that.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyProvincial and territorial boards and agenciesThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like the member know, with no spoiler alerts, that he is going to see a great plan come from the Conservatives on climate change in due time.That said, on the permafrost issue, this is not something new. It is not something that has happened just this year. It was clear at the beginning of the mandate. I am not sure why the Liberal government has done nothing. There was no plan. I did not see a budget item in budget 2019 that addressed any of the infrastructure issues that are related to permafrost, which points again to the fact that the Liberals do not have a climate plan; they have a tax plan, and that is unfortunate.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsClimate change and global warmingGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPermafrostThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2235)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the comments from the member for Sarnia—Lambton and how she drew the subject of health into it. However, the point of her speech that I really picked up on was where she talked about how the current government is reversing legislation and, in many cases, very important legislation that gave people who wanted to invest in this country a comfort in terms of what their process and regulations were going to be. One that comes to mind that she did not mention was Bill C-69 and navigable waters.I used to be a municipal mayor and I remember the navigable waters act, which drove municipalities across the country crazy, because if there was just a tiny body of water that could float a canoe, we had to get permits through Transport Canada to do anything, such as minor road repairs. It was a very onerous piece of legislation. Unfortunately, the Liberals and the NDP painted it as an environmental nightmare that we had got rid of protection for waters. To be frank, in all the time after that piece of legislation was enacted, I am not aware of one issue of environmental concern that came about because of that particular change to the navigable waters act. I wonder if the member could make some comments in terms of perhaps the difficulty of reversing legislation that protects the environment but ensures that people who want to move forward in this country can do so with comfort, knowing that they have reasonable regulations in place.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsInland watersMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMarilynGladuSarnia—LambtonMarilynGladuSarnia—Lambton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for her excellent work on this file and for her question. It is actually a very timely question, because I received a call today from the Township of Enniskillen in my riding, which is very concerned about Bill C-68 and the new definitions under Bill C-68 and Bill C-69 of what, in fact, will fall under this bureaucracy. We have a lot of farmer fields that get what I would call deep puddles. We have agricultural drainage ditches that used to be excluded from the definition but are no longer excluded, which will expose them to a huge amount of bureaucracy with respect to controlling fish habitat. This is what happens when we do not go to the necessary detail level and take our time to really consult broadly and understand what the impacts would be when the legislation is implemented.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooAliceWongHon.Richmond Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionHon. Alice Wong (Richmond Centre, CPC): (2240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have been to the north several times and have listened to seniors and to members of the organizations helping them. They are crying out for more resources. At the same time, they say that if the economic situation in the north can be improved, that is definitely a big driver. In our previous Conservative government, we viewed the north as a driving force for economic development as well.Let us look at other nations, like China and Russia. They are both Arctic nations and they are now exploring a lot of opportunities for economic development. Let us look at Canada and our Liberal government. Right now, the Liberals are arbitrarily hindering things and creating barriers to economic development in the north. I would like the hon. member to comment on that.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMarilynGladuSarnia—LambtonMarilynGladuSarnia—Lambton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am not sure why the government has such a war on natural resources. Across the country, we see 100,000 jobs lost in the west in the oil and gas industry. We see that the softwood lumber sector has been without a deal since 2015. I remember the foreign affairs minister telling us it was a huge priority, yet here we are four years later, still with no deal and mills are closing across the country. The fact remains that the Prime Minister is against fossil fuels. He has said multiple times that he wished he could shut down the oil sands and he was sorry he could not shut them down faster. This is just another example with this northern petroleum opportunity that the government is shutting down.In Canada, our oil and gas sector is a huge benefit not just to us but from a climate change point of view, if we could get our oil and gas to either coast, we could sell it to many people in the developing world who are building coal plants. We could reduce their footprint by a factor of five. Would that not be a great thing?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasThird reading and adoptionAliceWongHon.Richmond CentreLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu: (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, reconciliation is a very important thing. One of the things I have observed is that the government may think there is reconciliation and agreement at a certain level with the different tribes that are participating, but in many cases it does not have the support of all the people. It is almost like ratifying a union agreement where everyone needs to get on board. It is clear from the comments that I have heard that not everybody is on board and either more consultation is needed, or listening to the existing commentary and opening up that moratorium would be good.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle Creek//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (2245)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Markham—Unionville. I appreciate having the opportunity to speak to Bill C-88 at third reading stage. This bill is divided into two parts, as we have heard. Part 1 amends the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act while part 2 amends the Canada Petroleum Resources Act. It is the second part of the bill that I will primarily be addressing in the time that I have today. Simply put, this part of Bill C-88 makes a mockery of the government's claim to seriously consult with aboriginal and Inuit peoples. Furthermore, it proves yet again that the Liberal Party is no friend of the Canadian oil and gas sector.Part 2 of Bill C-88 imposes a five-year moratorium on the development of offshore oil and gas projects in the Beaufort Sea. This is not surprising for anyone who has followed the government with even a modicum of attention. The Liberals have proven time and time again that they are opposed to Canada's energy sector. Whether it be the carbon tax or Bill C-48 banning tanker traffic off of British Columbia's northern coast or the 180-amendment, Frankenstein monster of a bill that is the “no more pipelines” Bill C-69, or the cancellation of the northern gateway and energy east pipelines, or the continued bungling of the Trans Mountain extension, we can always count on the Liberals to find a way to make life miserable for workers in our oil and gas sector.At every opportunity, the Prime Minister has politicized the regulatory and environmental assessment processes. Bill C-88 follows this already established pattern. As a result, it is no wonder Canada has been bleeding foreign investment funds and suffered economic stagnation under the Prime Minister.Bill C-88 is about more than just the Liberals' clear disdain for our natural resource sector. This bill exposes the Prime Minister's false claims of consultation. Under the previous Conservative government, we made a concerted effort to devolve power to the territories to ensure that they had the decision-making powers they needed to develop their abundance of natural resources in a safe, secure and sustainable manner. I will not pretend that we got it right every step of the way but there was no doubt about our goal and our honest attempt to transfer power to the territorial level.In one afternoon, the Prime Minister derailed years of progress by the territories toward full self-governance. At a glitzy press conference in Washington designed to garner praise from the international press, he announced that Canada would be placing a moratorium on offshore drilling in the north. This announcement came as quite the surprise to the governments of the territories. Some of them received less than an hour's notice that the Prime Minister was about to throw their economic futures out the window so he could get a nice write-up in Vanity Fair.Minister Wally Schumann of the Northwest Territories described how they found out about the ban and the impact it will have on our north. He said: When it first came out, we never got very much notice on the whole issue of the moratorium and the potential that was in the Beaufort Sea. There were millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars in bid deposits and land leases up there. That took away any hope we had of developing the Beaufort Sea. Really, we should not be surprised. The Prime Minister has always believed in a paternalistic, “Ottawa knows best” relationship with the territories, provinces and indigenous peoples. Mayor Merven Gruben put it well when speaking at committee in Ottawa. He said:It’s so easy to sit down here and make judgments on people and lives that are 3,500 klicks away, and make decisions on our behalf, especially with that moratorium on the Beaufort. That should be taken away, lifted, please and thank you. That is going to open up and give jobs to our people—training and all the stuff we’re wishing for. The Prime Minister has decided the future for the north and he is using this bill to make that happen but he never stopped and asked what the people in the north want, and they do not want this.(2250)Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod stated clearly how his government felt about the announcement. He said: It feels like a step backward. We spent a lot of time negotiating a devolution agreement and we thought the days were gone when we'd have unilateral decisions made about the North in some faraway place like Ottawa, and that northerners would be making the decisions about issues that affected northerners. Then premier of Nunavut, Peter Taptuna, shared McLeod's frustrations. He said: We do want to be getting to a state where we can make our own determination of our priorities, and the way to do that is gain meaningful revenue from resource development.And at the same time, when one potential sources of revenue is taken off the table, it puts us back at practically Square 1 where Ottawa will make the decision for us. In my role as shadow minister for transportation, I have had the chance to meet with companies and groups seeking to develop in the north to provide jobs and future prospects to Inuit and other northern Canadians. I heard one phrase repeated over and over again: one big park. Stakeholders told me over and over again that they feel the Liberals do not care about their economic development, but are only interested in making northern Canada one big park even if that means ignoring the will of indigenous peoples.As I prepared these remarks and delved into Bill C-88, I could not help but see the parallels between the top-down “Ottawa knows best” bill and Bill C-48, the Liberals' ideological oil tanker moratorium act. Bill C-48 is called the oil tanker moratorium act, but everyone knows it is an anti-pipeline bill designed to eliminate any possibility of a pipeline to tidewater through northern British Columbia.The Prime Minister has a pattern of imposing his will on indigenous groups while still claiming to consult. Just like they did when banning northern development through Bill C-88, the Liberal government pushed ahead on Bill C-48 without consulting indigenous stakeholders.When testifying at transport committee on Bill C-48, Gary Alexcee, hereditary chief of the Nisga'a Nation for the community of Gingolx, made the following comments about the Liberal government's consultation process: With no consultation, the B.C. first nations groups being cut off economically with no opportunity to even sit down with the government to further negotiate Bill C-48. In fact, Eagle Spirit Energy, a first nations owned energy company, is taking the government to court over Bill C-48 because of, among other reasons, the very lack of consultation. In cancelling the northern gateway pipeline, the Prime Minister ignored the input of over 30 first nations along the route who have revenue agreements in place. Again, this is the Liberals' “Ottawa knows best” mentality in practice, yet the Prime Minister continues to claim time and again to consult with indigenous stakeholders.I oppose this Ottawa-centric anti-Canadian energy industry mentality and it is for that reason that I will be voting against Bill C-88.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsDownload responsibilityDrilling platformsEnvironmental assessmentFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasPublic consultationSplitting speaking timeThird reading and adoptionMarilynGladuSarnia—LambtonMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question, although I will dispute his characterization of what I said in my speech. He is trying to confuse the issue, when, in fact, the issue that most indigenous communities have and that we have with this bill is part 2. We have heard that indigenous peoples and communities were not consulted on this part of the bill. We know that part 2 would amend the Canada Petroleum Resources Act to allow the Governor in Council to issue orders, when in the national interest, to prohibit oil and gas activities and freeze the terms of existing licences to prevent them from expiring during a moratorium. Again, we have heard that indigenous communities were not consulted on this part of the legislation.Further, this bill reveals a full rejection of calls from elected territorial leaders for increased control of their natural resources. We heard that. I am deeply concerned that with Bill C-88, the Liberals will continue to entrench into law their ability to continue to arbitrarily and without consultation block oil and gas projects. Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are consistently trying to confuse as they ask questions tonight. I have described part 1and part 2 as the paradox in this bill. Part 1 is about the consultation process and reflecting on what happened, and part 2 is about ignoring the appropriate consultation process. With regard to part 2, I would like my colleague to talk about how it is consistent with almost every single piece of legislation the government introduces in Parliament in being anti-resource development and against support for our industry.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle Creek//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Kelly Block: (2255)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to recognize the very good work my colleague does as the shadow minister for indigenous and northern affairs and how well she keeps us informed about what is happening on the files she oversees on behalf of our Conservative caucus and on the work the committee is doing.It is my understanding that with part 2, the Liberals are further politicizing the regulatory and environmental processes for resource extraction in Canada's north. They have consistently politicized these processes, as I shared in my earlier remarks. As the shadow minister for transportation, we heard testimony from witnesses on Bill C-48 and Bill C-69 who told us very clearly that first nations communities were not consulted when it came to the introduction of these bills. In fact, many of the changes being proposed in these bills were simply the result of direction that had been included in the mandate letters for these ministers. There was actually no evidence to support what the minister was proposing when it came to making those changes.Aboriginal peoplesAgriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooBobSaroyaMarkham—Unionville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Bob Saroya (Markham—Unionville, CPC): (2300)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts. Before I get into the details of the bill, it is important to look at the context of what has been happening over the past three years and what is starting to be a pattern of the Liberal government. The decisions it makes consistently increase red tape and bureaucracy and are mostly anti-resource development. This bill is no different.I would like to talk about a few areas that show the context, which will then show that this follows a pattern that adds to what is becoming an increasing concern in the country, which is the ability to move our natural resources forward.When the Prime Minister took office, there were three private companies willing to invest more than $30 billion to build three nation-building pipelines that would have generated tens of thousands of jobs and billions in economic opportunities. The Prime Minister and his cabinet killed two of them and put the Trans Mountain expansion on life support. Bill C-69 would block all future pipelines.In addition, the government has made a number of arbitrary decisions regarding natural resource development, with absolutely no consultation with those impacted. Today, we only need to look at what is happening in Alberta with the hundreds of thousands of job losses. Who has ever heard of a premier having to decrease the production of a needed resource throughout the country and the world because we simply cannot get resources to the market? This is because of the government's failure. The northern gateway project was approved by the former government in June 2014. It had a number of conditions on it, just like the current Trans Mountain project does. In November 2015, just one month after being elected, the Prime Minister killed the project without any hesitation. It was subject to a court challenge. When we finally heard what came out of that court challenge, to be frank, it was nothing that could not be overcome. We could have dealt with that. The court decision told the Prime Minister to engage in consultation in a more appropriate and balanced way. The court really gave what I would call a recipe for perhaps fixing some problems with the process. Did he wait for the court decision? No. He went out and killed it flat. With this approved pipeline, he did not wait for a court decision or wait to see how it could move forward. He decided that he did not want that one. I think we are all pretty aware of the Trans Mountain pipeline as it has been moving along for many years. We know that many first nations support it and hope to see it go through, as they see enormous opportunities for their communities. Of course, others are against it. What happened in this case? When the Liberals formed government, they decided they had to have an additional consultation process. However, did they follow the directions of the court in the northern gateway decision, in which the court was very clear about what the government had to do in order to do consultations properly? Apparently not. When the court decision came down, we learned otherwise. To be frank, it was much to my surprise, because the Liberals talked about how well they were consulting and that they were putting this additional process in place. The court said that the Liberals did not do the job. What they did was send a note-taker and not a decision-maker.(2305)The fact that the Liberals did not consult properly on the Trans Mountain pipeline is strictly on their laps, as they had very clear guidance from the northern gateway decision, and they did not do what they needed to do. They should be ashamed of themselves. Had they done a proper process, they likely would not have had to buy the pipeline, the pipeline would be under construction right now and we would be in a lot better place as a country. With respect to the Trans Mountain pipeline, the blame for where we are on that pipeline lies strictly on the laps of the Liberals.I also want to note, in spite of what people say, that the courts have said that the process was okay, so it had nothing to do with environmental legislation by the previous government or with anything the Conservatives put in place. It was—Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasPipeline transportationPublic consultationThird reading and adoptionTrans Mountain pipelineKellyBlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Bob Saroya: (2305)[English] Mr. Speaker, it was the Liberals' execution of a flawed process.Energy east was another one. The former Liberal MP who is now the mayor of Montreal was very opposed to it. I am not sure of all the pieces that went into the Liberals' decision-making, but all of a sudden, the downstream and upstream emissions of energy east had to be measured. As people have rightfully asked, has that happened for the tankers coming down the St. Lawrence from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela? Did that happen with the bailout of Bombardier?The Liberals created regulatory barriers. Trans Mountain hung on for a long time before it finally said it was a no go. I think energy east saw the writing on the wall, knowing that the government was not going to be its friend and create an environment in which to get work done. It could see the new rules coming into place, so it walked. What a double standard. Canadians who extract energy in an environmentally sound and environmentally friendly way have had standards applied to their ability to move oil through a pipeline that no other country in the world imposes on companies in terms of upstream and downstream emissions.The final part of Bill C-88 is the drilling moratorium. It is perhaps the most troubling. It would allow the federal cabinet to prohibit oil and gas activities in the Northwest Territories or offshore of Nunavut if it were in the national interest. This is a much broader power than currently exists, which allows Canada to prohibit that activity only for safety or environmental reasons or for social problems of a serious nature.As I have noted, Bill C-88 is another anti-energy policy from the Liberal government. It is driving investment out of Canada, costing Canadian workers their jobs and increasing poverty in the north. Like Bill C-69 before it, Bill C-88 would politicize oil and gas extraction by expanding the power of cabinet to block economic development, and it would increase red tape that proponents would face before getting shovels in the ground. Further, Bill C-88 reveals a full rejection of calls from elected leaders in the territories for the independence they desire.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasThird reading and adoptionGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Bob Saroya: (2310)[English]Mr. Speaker, in 2014, the Liberals voted for it. However, all of a sudden, in 2015, there was a whole mind change on the political process and the reason was to gain more votes. This was the main reason they voted against it, and for the same reason energy east was cancelled, northern gateway was cancelled and TMX is still waiting for final approval. We talk about the environment. If the Liberals were really concerned about the environment, where were they when eight million litres of sewage water was dumped into the St. Lawrence? What did they do? Did they ask questions of anybody about what was going on? It is just nitpicking here and there.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Bob Saroya: (2310)[English]Mr. Speaker, let me refer to some comments by one of my favourite former Liberal MPs, Martha Hall Findlay. On Bill C-69, a number of former Liberals have been very open about their concern. Martha Hall Findlay is a very respected former MP who said that it is the “antithesis of what the regulatory reform effort hopes to achieve.” She also said, “But in its 392 pages, the word 'competitiveness' appears only twice. Neither the word 'economy' nor the phrase 'economic growth' appear at all.”We have new environmental legislation that most people call the no-more-pipelines bill.She went on to note that the bill would “create enormous uncertainty, more red tape and increased court challenges. And not only for the energy sector...every major infrastructure project in Canada for years to come.” This is from Martha Findlay, a former Liberal member of Parliament. I do not know if members are starting to see a pattern. The Liberals have killed pipelines and put forward legislation preventing new pipelines from being built. Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyOil and gasPipeline transportationThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2310)[English]Mr. Speaker, I know that the Liberals on the opposite side question relevance, but I would suggest that every single point you made was relevant, and that is talking about how part 2 of Bill C-88 is consistent with their anti-energy policies. Could you quickly mention some of the other legislation that they have introduced that is so detrimental?Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionBobSaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/58878BobSaroyaBob-SaroyaMarkham—UnionvilleConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SaroyaBob_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMackenzie Valley Resource Management ActInterventionMr. Bob Saroya: (2310)[English]Mr. Speaker, one of my favourite shows is Ice Road Truckers, which takes place up north. When I get home late at night, I can watch it. According to the show, people up north can pay $38 for a jug of milk or a loaf of bread and $50 to $60 for a piece of meat. The cost of some things can be 50 or 60 times more than anywhere else. However, things such as extracting gas up north would create the opportunity for the northern people and would take them out of poverty. Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (2315)[English]Mr. Speaker, a couple of things are not lost on me this evening. First is the fact that the Raptors were down by three points with about six minutes left. That may have changed; I do not know. Maybe the page can provide an update on the latest score.The other thing that is not lost on me is the fact that the government House leader just came down with the hammer again, effectively stopping debate on an issue that the members on this side of the House feel is important to speak about.We heard the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo speak about this issue earlier tonight. The member for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa spoke about this. I have been in this House most of the time during this debate, and that was one of the best assessments of this piece of legislation and the consequential impact it would have on our natural resource sector. I mentioned earlier, when the hon. member was speaking, that it was almost like taking a knife to a gun fight with respect to some of the questions that were coming, not just because of the member's experience working in the Mackenzie Valley as a biologist and understanding these issues, but because the knowledge the member has of our natural resource sector is just incredible. The hammer comes down once again, and it comes down because there are nine days left in this session of Parliament, assuming we are not recalled in the summer for some other circumstance, and the government has completely mismanaged the legislative agenda of the House. The Liberals had an opportunity to bring this legislation forward far in advance of where we are this evening at 11:17 p.m. on June 10. Now that their backs are up against the wall, not just on this piece of legislation but on other pieces of legislation, the hammer drops tonight. They will no longer be debating this issue, in spite of its importance. It is not just this piece of legislation that is a problem. It is an incremental, systematic destruction of our natural resource sector through other pieces of legislation. I will remind members of them: Bill C-69, Bill C-48, Bill C-86 and Bill C-55. All of these pieces of legislation are intended to effectively handcuff our natural resource sector and bring Alberta and Saskatchewan and the western producers and manufacturers of oil and gas in this country not just to their knees, but begging on their knees for the government to do what it needs to do and not destroy this important sector of our economy. This sector is important for many reasons: not just for the transfer payments that it has provided so that various regions of Canada can prosper from the success of our natural resource sector, but also because the social fabric of this country is largely based on the revenues that are created from our natural resource industry. Every single Canadian depends on what our natural resource sector can provide: proper health care, proper social safety systems and the ability to look after the most vulnerable in our society, including indigenous communities, which have prospered in the past as a result of Canada's success. That success is not just economic. It is our success from an environmental standpoint, to make sure we get our product out of our country in an environmentally sustainable manner. It is sad that we are at this point.Bill C-88, an act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts, consists of two parts. Part 1 amends the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, which was initially passed under the Chrétien Liberals in 1998 and amended by the former Conservative government within Bill C-15, the Northwest Territories Devolution Act.(2320)I will remind the House that a major component of Bill C-15 was the restructuring of the four land and water boards in the Mackenzie Valley into one. Following passage in 2014, the Tlicho government and the Sahtu Secretariat filed lawsuits against Canada, arguing that restructuring violated their land claim agreements. In February 2015, the Northwest Territories Supreme Court issued an injunction preventing the board restructuring provisions from coming into force until a decision on the case was issued. The Liberals paused that legal battle shortly after forming government, and there is more to that.More concerning about Bill C-88 is part 2, with respect to the Liberals five-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration.Bill C-88, and particular part 2, is also quite concerning as is the five year moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea. The bill would amend the Canada Petroleum Resource Act to allow the Governor in Council to issue orders, when in the national interest, to prohibit oil and gas activities and freeze the terms of existing licenses to prevent them from expiring during that moratorium. Again, as I said earlier, this is a consistent and systemic pattern of the Liberal government to want to control almost every aspect of our natural resource sector through Governor in Council orders. That would place the decision-making powers effectively in the hands of the minister and in the hands of the executive branch of government through cabinet order.Think about this as an investor looking to invest in Canada. One of the things investors look for the most is certainty. They want to know that if they are going to park their money in the type of investments within our natural resource sector, that it is going to provide a profit, not a bad word, especially for those who are investing. They need to know whether there is actual certainty in the process itself. After having invested all this money to investigate the potential of investing in Canada, all of a sudden it goes to cabinet or the minister and the minister decides again, like the government House leader did tonight, to bring down that hammer on the investment, saying the government is not going to approve this for whatever reason, mostly based on ideology. If I am planning on investing multi-billions of dollars into the Canadian resource sector, why would I do that?It is not just that uncertainty it has created, but we also have a government that has clearly indicated to the investment community in the natural resource sector its intent, through its ideology, of flipping the switch. The Prime Minister effectively stated as much in his travels around the world. When he spoke in Paris and said that he would shut down the natural resource sector tomorrow if he could, did he think what he said would not travel back to Canada? That message was heard loud and clear not just in Canada, but in North America by those investors who were willing to look to Canada as a safe haven to invest and grow their businesses. It is particularly troubling when the government says, as the Government House Leader did just 10 minutes ago, that it is going to shut down debate. It is important that voices in the House speak to that issue in particular. It is important that Canadians know what the incremental systemic plan is of the government to shut down our natural resource sector and effectively chase investment away.(2325)Where is that investment going? Clearly, all of that money is going down to the United States. We saw that with Trans Mountain. The government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline. Where did that money go? It went back down to Houston to be reinvested into a more friendly environment for investment into natural resources. Arguably, the American economy is firing on all cylinders, being led by the natural resource sector. It is building pipelines like it has never built them before. It is building deep water ports like it has never built them before. All of this is to make sure it gets its products to global markets where the demand is great. That demand is going to continue, whether Canada and a Liberal government decide it is not going to participate in that or whether other competitors of Canada, like the United States, decide they are going to make sure they get their products to market. All of these incremental pieces of legislation that have come up, this one within the last nine days of Parliament, are intended and designed to shut down our natural resource sector.Today, in an unprecedented move, premiers from six provinces signed a letter. I am not sure in the history of this country whether that has been done. There have been other issues of national importance where premiers have gathered together and discussed with the prime minister certain issues that were impacting them, but collectively, as a group, I am not certain whether that has been done. They sent a letter to the Prime Minister today, which is public. I want to read it into the record so that Canadians are clear on just how serious this issue is, not just on a regional level in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but now we are finding out with Manitoba regarding the hydro electric line that the government is getting in the way of, which is effectively a clean energy project. There is significant concern within the confederation, so much so that these six premiers wrote this letter today. It states:Dear Prime Minister,We are writing on behalf of the Governments of Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Collectively, our five provinces and territory represent 59 per cent of the Canadian population and 63 per cent of Canada’s GDP. We are central to Canada’s economy and prosperity, and it is of the utmost importance that you consider our concerns with bills C-69 and C-48.Canadians across the country are unified in their concern about the economic impacts of the legislation such as it was proposed by the House of Commons. In this form, the damage it would do to the economy, jobs and investment will echo from one coast to the other. Provincial and territorial jurisdiction must be respected. Provinces and territories have clear and sole jurisdiction over the development of their non-renewable natural resources, forestry resources, and the generation and production of electricity. Bill C-69 upsets the balance struck by the constitutional division of powers by ignoring the exclusive provincial powers over projects relating to these resources. The federal government must recognize the exclusive role provinces and territories have over the management of our non-renewable natural resource development or risk creating a Constitutional crisis.Bill C-69, as originally drafted, would make it virtually impossible to develop critical infrastructure, depriving Canada of much needed investment. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, between 2017 and 2018, the planned investment value of major resource sector projects in Canada plunged by $100 billion....That money is gone.It continues:[This is] an amount equivalent to 4.5 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. To protect Canada’s economic future, we, collectively, cannot afford to overlook the uncertainty and risk to future investment created by Bill C-69.I would argue, incrementally, Bill C-88 as well.It further states:Our five provinces and territory stand united and strongly urge the government to accept Bill C-69 as amended by the Senate, in order to minimize the damage to the Canadian economy. We would encourage the Government of Canada and all members of the House of Commons to accept the full slate of amendments to the bill.(2330) The Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment, and Natural Resources heard 38 days of testimony from 277 witnesses including indigenous communities, industry, Premiers, and independent experts. Based on that comprehensive testimony, the committee recommended significant amendments to the bill, which were accepted by the Senate as a whole. We urge you to respect that process, the committee’s expertise, and the Senate’s vote.If the Senate’s amendments are not respected, the bill should be rejected, as it will present insurmountable roadblocks for major infrastructure projects across the country and will further jeopardize jobs, growth and investor confidence.Similarly, Bill C-48 [and again I would argue Bill C-88] threatens investor confidence, and the tanker moratorium discriminates against western Canadian crude products. We were very disappointed that the Senate did not accept the recommendation to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications that the bill not be reported. We would urge the government to stop pressing for the passage of this bill which will have detrimental effects on national unity and for the Canadian economy as a whole.Our governments are deeply concerned with the federal government’s disregard, so far, of the concerns raised by our provinces and territory related to these bills. As it stands, the federal government appears indifferent to the economic hardships faced by provinces and territories. Immediate action to refine or eliminate these bills is needed to avoid further alienating provinces and territories and their citizens and focus on uniting the country in support of Canada’s economic prosperity.That was signed by six premiers and territorial leaders: the Hon. Doug Ford, the Hon. Blaine Higgs, the Hon. Brian Pallister, the Hon. Scott Moe, the Hon. Jason Kenney and the Hon. Bob McLeod, Premier of the Northwest Territories. We need to focus on uniting the country in support of Canada's economic prosperity. That is what this is all about: making sure that Canada has economic prosperity in all sectors. I know that the government is focused on new technologies, new innovation and green energy. We should all be focused on these things, but we have to take a parallel path. We cannot simply shut or blockade this path for the sake of moving down that path, a path that will require time, energy and significant investment if we are to move to a green economy, if we are to move to the sustainable development of the government's ideology. Unlike what the Prime Minister says, we cannot flip the switch on our natural resource sector. We have to continue to support it, and we have to continue to support it not just in an environmentally sustainable way. I would argue that Canada has always done that. Canada is a world leader in innovation and technology as it relates to energy extraction in this country and around the world. We have that capability. Why are we implementing legislation and putting the power into the hands of a government and cabinet whose ideology does not conform with what most of Canada would like to see? That is that we continue to extract and use our natural resource sector and stop buying and relying on energy from other countries. There are millions of barrels being purchased from our greatest competitor, the United States, and from countries with despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. We have the ability in this country to do what we need to do to ensure economic prosperity for all, prosperity for Canadians across this country, from Newfoundland to British Columbia to northern Canada and to indigenous communities in between. We have that capability.I said it earlier and will again echo the words of Premier Frank McKenna. It is time we had a truly national debate about whether we want to be a carbon-producing country. In doing that, only then will we determine the risk and the reward of that decision.(2335)Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your time tonight, and if you would indulge me, could you tell me how the Raptors are doing? I got an update, but I would like another update.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsInvestmentMackenzie ValleyOil and gasThird reading and adoptionBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. John Brassard: (2335)[English]Mr. Speaker, I respect the hon. member. He has been around here a long time. As to any suggestion that we do not support northern governments, duly elected governments, I do not show that type of contempt for our democratic institutions. We can differ on how we get to different places with respect to legislation and whether in fact we support that.Again, I hope I relayed this well in my speech that this is not just about Bill C-88. It is this incremental, systematic destruction of our natural resource sector through many pieces of legislation. Over the course of years of the government, we have seen an unwillingness to listen to Canadians, an unwillingness to hear from those stakeholders and those Canadians who are directly impacted by these types of legislation.Nobody has a problem listening to and respecting the will and the right of provincial and territorial leaders, but again, as I said earlier, there was a letter that was written today by six premiers in this country who have grave concerns over the direction that the government is taking with respect to policy and legislation in our natural resources sector.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. John Brassard: (2340)[English]Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt that there was an effect on the oil prices, but the other aspect that I would focus on is the fact that, in 2008, we went through a global recession.Canada, through the former finance minister, Jim Flaherty, with broad support from the opposition parties, invested in economic stimulus that actually created deficit situations, but again, Mr. Flaherty developed a plan, through the government of the day, to work our way out of deficits in spite of that significant deficit spending that went on. In 2015, we saw the current government invest a surplus of $1 billion, according to Finance Canada reports.With the plan that was put in place, yes, there were some difficult decisions that were made but they were made in order to ensure that our economic sustainability was in place, whether it was in northern Canada or Atlantic Canada. Certainly, the decisions that the previous government made, in particular Mr. Flaherty, to get us to that point worked to the desired plan.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionMichaelMcLeodNorthwest TerritoriesCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—Cariboo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (2340)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to make two points and perhaps the member for Barrie—Innisfil could reflect on them. I found it very interesting that the Prime Minister announced he wanted to shut down the oil sands when he was in Paris and then he announced a moratorium in the U.S. What does that say to Canadians about his interest and willingness to allow our energy resources to develop?Today, we had the hammer put down on debate. Maybe five speakers have been able to debate this important issue. The government has had this legislation on the docket. Probably the Liberals should have introduced it two years ago. Now all of a sudden, they try to make their lack of planning our emergency. Quite frankly, I do not believe it is.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionJohnBrassardBarrie—InnisfilJohnBrassardBarrie—Innisfil//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionMr. John Brassard: (2340)[English]Mr. Speaker, on the issue of the Prime Minister's comments, as I said during my speech, when he travels to Paris and speaks on our national resource sector and makes statements like if he could flip the switch tomorrow, he would do it, it effectively means he could shut it down tomorrow. I do not know what the alternative is of shutting it down, but it would be a great economic hardship on our country. Those are very irresponsible comments to make, because they come back, work their way into the investor community and speak directly to investor confidence. As I said, if I am looking to invest in a natural resource project or looking to partner in this country and I have that uncertainty, which is the one and only thing business does not want, then why would I make that investment.On the issue of the government House leader dropping the hammer tonight on debate, with only five speakers on the list to speak about this, again it is a pattern of the government, which is really hypocritical. When we go back to the Liberal platform of 2015, in fact back to the throne speech, the Prime Minister stated, for what it is worth, that every member in the House would be respected and would have the opportunity to speak on pieces of legislation. He said that not just once in the platform, but also said it in the throne speech. I am not sure what number this is with respect to time allocation and stopping the debate. It probably is close to 100 times or more that the government has done this. It is completely counter to what the Prime Minister said. It should not be surprising to anyone on this side or to Canadians in fact. The Prime Minister has said he would do many things, but he has failed to do them. The year 2015 was going to be the last election under first past the post. We know that in 2019 that will not happen because it did not suit the Liberal narrative. The Liberals knew they would not benefit from it. He said veterans should not have to fight their government in court. Veterans are fighting their government in court in every region of the country. I was another false promise by the Prime Minister. It is not surprising to me, and it should not be surprising to Canadians, that he has done this because he is not as advertised.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyThird reading and adoptionCathyMcLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooMichaelMcLeodNorthwest Territories//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/30812AliceWongHon.Alice-WongRichmond CentreConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/WongAlice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersThird ReadingInterventionHon. Alice Wong: (2355)[English]Mr. Speaker, the hon. member across the way has not even touched on the other parts of the bill. I would urge him to comment on the whole bill, not just parts of it.Agriculture, environment and natural resourcesC-88, An Act to amend the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act and to make consequential amendments to other ActsGovernment billsMackenzie ValleyPoints of orderRelevancyThird reading and adoptionGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1025)[Translation]Minister, I thank you for your explanations.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus: (1025)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the minister for his explanation.However, I am still skeptical about part 7. I listened carefully when the minister explained the part about the commission of a terrorism offence. In the broader conversation, people are comparing Bill C-59 to Bill C-51.Bill C-59 is 260 pages long. Many parts of it are very administrative and relate to structural changes. I will talk about that later.Everyone agrees that the government's approach here is wrong. National security experts say so. Conservatives sent the same message with our amendments. Even the Senate's amendment confirmed that the government's approach is wrong. Despite all that, the minister insists that he has the right solution.Is the government butting heads with everyone just because it wants to keep its election promise to change Bill C-51 at any cost?C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1030)[English]Madam Speaker, I want to thank the minister for his clarification, but there was one thing he did not really clarify. My colleague asked about part 7. I want to ask him about threat disruption. Part 7 raises the threshold for recognizance orders and peace bonds, making it more difficult for law enforcement to disrupt threats before they occur. This section proposes to change the Criminal Code from “the peace officer suspects on reasonable grounds that the detention of the person in custody is likely to prevent a terrorist activity” to “the peace officer suspects on reasonable grounds that the detention of the person in custody is necessary to prevent a terrorist activity.”This is an extremely high bar when times are very short. Our Conservative Bill C-51 aligned with our allies, including countries like Norway and Finland. Why has the minister made it more difficult for information sharing and also taken away the reasonableness that is in agreement with our allies, as far as that point is concerned?C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityTerrorism and terroristsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1035)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I rise this morning to speak to Bill C-59, an omnibus bill that is over 260 pages long and has nine major parts. I listened to the minister's speech, which addressed the Senate amendments, but I would first like to focus on Bill C-59 itself.As I have been saying from the outset, the problem is that most parts of Bill C-59 are administrative in nature. They make changes to the various intelligence and communications agencies. That is fine, but the main goal of Bill C-59 was to respond to Bill C-51, which was implemented by the Conservatives following the attacks that took place here in Ottawa. Bill C-51 was specifically designed to counter terrorism and ensure that anyone seeking to commit terrorist acts in Canada was stopped to avert disaster.Overall, the omnibus bill has some parts that are fine. They contain the sort of changes that need to be made from time to time. However, other parts are very administratively heavy and will be very costly for the public purse. Essentially, this is a bill on national security. The public expects the government to protect people properly and ensure that the offenders and would-be terrorists of this world are stopped. Despite what the minister says, we believe that Bill C-59 limits CSIS's ability to reduce terrorist threats. It also limits the departments' ability to share information in order to protect national security. It removes the offence of advocating or promoting the commission of terrorism offences in general and raises the threshold for obtaining terrorism peace bonds and recognizance with conditions.At the end of the day, Bill C-59 is going to make life difficult for CSIS agents and telecommunications services people. The bill makes it harder to exchange information. It will once again clog up a system that is already burdensome. People working on the ground every day to ensure Canada's security and safety will be under even more restrictions, which will prevent them from doing their jobs.Here is a snapshot of the nine parts. Part 1 establishes the national security and intelligence review agency.Part 2 enacts the intelligence commissioner act. It deals with everything pertaining to the commissioner and the various tasks he or she will have, but abolishes the position of the Commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment and provides for that commissioner to become the intelligence commissioner. It transfers the employees of the former commissioner to the office of the new commissioner and makes related and consequential amendments to other acts. In other words, it shuffles things around. Part 3 enacts the Communications Security Establishment act. CSE's new mandate includes the ability to conduct preventive attacks against threats in addition to its role in signals intelligence and cyber defence. We really do not have a problem with that, provided it remains effective. That is an important point. Part 4 amends the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act. It changes the threat reduction powers by limiting them to seven types of measures, one of which gives rise to the issue of whether non-invasive actions require a warrant. The measure in question is described as interfering with the movement of any person. This could mean that a CSIS officer requires a warrant to give misleading information to someone on the way to meeting with co-conspirators.During operations, officers will sometimes provide individuals with false information to be passed on to those organizing terrorist or other plots. That is one of the work methods used in the field. Henceforth, warrants will have to be obtained, making the work more complicated. The officers will have to spend more time in the office doing paperwork and submitting applications instead of participating in operations.(1040)Part 5 amends the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, which was enacted by the Conservative government's Bill  C-51. Individuals and privacy groups were unhappy that government institutions could, on their own initiative or at the request of another institution, share information on activities that undermine the security of Canada. Bill C-51 was criticized for permitting the sharing of citizens' personal information.Although Bill C-59 maintains part of the departments' ability to share information, it is much more restrictive. This means that the departments operate in silos, which was harshly criticized by the national security experts who testified.Part 6 is the most positive part, and we fully support it. This part deals with the Secure Air Travel Act and the problems with the no-fly list. When travellers have the same name as a terrorist, they encounter major problems, especially when it happens to children and they are not allowed to travel. This part will help fix this problem, and we fully support it. Part 7 amends the Criminal Code by changing the offence of advocating or promoting terrorism offences in general to one of counselling the commission of a terrorism offence, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.I will read the next part, which does not pose any problems: Part 8 amends the Youth Criminal Justice Act to, among other things, ensure that the protections that are afforded to young persons apply in respect of proceedings in relation to recognizance orders, including those related to terrorism, and give employees of a department or agency of the Government of Canada access to youth records, for the purpose of administering the Canadian Passport Order.Finally, here is the last part: Part 9 requires that a comprehensive review of the provisions and operation of this enactment take place during the sixth year after section 168 of this enactment comes into force. These are additional administrative measures. In short, of the nine parts of Bill C-59, we fully support part 6 on the no-fly list. The other parts contain a lot administrative provisions that will make the system more cumbersome. Part 7 is the most problematic.We believe that the Prime Minister and the minister are weakening Canada's national security agencies and their ability to keep Canadians safe. This legislative measure will make it more difficult for law enforcement and security agencies to prevent attacks on Canadian soil because it takes away their authority to counter threats. The information silos this bill will create within our federal agencies are dangerous and foolish. Rather than countering radicalization, the Liberals are creating loopholes that could be exploited by those who want to radicalize our young people. The Conservatives take the safety of Canadians very seriously. That is why the previous government brought Canada's national security laws into the 21st century and aligned them with those of our allies. While all of the Five Eyes allies are taking measures to strengthen national security, this government is bringing in legislation that will eliminate our intelligence service's ability to reduce terrorist threats. The Liberals' irresponsible approach will put Canadians' safety at risk.I was pleased with the four amendments proposed by the senators, who also took the time to work on Bill C-59 and hear witnesses. We know that the independent Liberals have a majority in the the Senate, so we would not normally expect to see amendments that reflect the Conservatives' views. This time, however, we think all four amendments are excellent and deserve our support. We waited for the government's response. Two of the amendments had been proposed by me and my Conservative colleagues on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, but the Liberals had rejected them. One of them sought to clarify the definition of the phrase “counselling commission of terrorism offence”. This short phrase really embodies the problem we have with Bill C-59. For the benefit of our viewers, I would like to quote the specific wording.(1045)The bill would amend the Criminal Code by changing the following existing definition:Every person who knowingly instructs, directly or indirectly, any person to carry out a terrorist activity is guilty....The bill would change it to the following:Every person who counsels another person to commit a terrorism offence...is guilty....What is the Liberals' real goal here, if not to just strike out the Conservative government's Bill C-51 so they can say they made a change? Did they make this change with the intention of improving the legislation? No. Even the senators advised the government to preserve the essence of the definition set out in the Conservatives' Bill C-51.The minister says that in 2015, when Bill C-51 was introduced by the Conservative government, no charges were ever laid. Is it not possible that no charges were laid because people got scared and decided not to run any risks, in light of the legislation and resources that were in place, as well as the enforcement capability? Maybe that was why nothing happened. Does watering down and changing this—An hon. member: Oh! Oh!Arrest warrantsC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersCanadian Security Intelligence ServiceCommunications Security EstablishmentConsideration of Senate amendmentsData sharingExtremismGovernment billsNational securityPropagandaSecurity of Canada Information Sharing ActTerrorism and terroristsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus: (1050)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I will continue my speech on this very serious matter.This week the Liberals moved a motion declaring that they would accept just two of the four amendments proposed by the Senate and that they were rejecting the important amendment on terrorism. The two amendments they retained were administrative ones.Also, we did not support this bill because it makes it harder for law enforcement and security agencies to prevent attacks on Canadian soil, since they no longer have any threat disruption powers. Furthermore, the bill creates information silos among our agencies, which creates problems. I have said this before and I will say it again: information sharing is fundamental.The Senate's first amendment is to part 2 of the bill, which deals with the intelligence commissioner. The amendment adds a new clause under the “Foreign Intelligence Authorization” heading. This new clause would allow the intelligence commissioner to refer a matter back to the minister with a description of the condition that would have to be added to the authorization in order to make the conclusions reasonable. This amendment would affect the Communications Security Establishment in particular and was recommended by the commissioner.We support this amendment because it improves the bill by increasing communication and feedback between the information commissioner and the minister, thus reducing administrative formalities. We also proposed this amendment at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. Unfortunately, the government rejected it.The second amendment pertains to counselling the commission of a terrorism offence—I keep bringing it up and we will talk about it again and again—under the “Criminal Code” heading. Those few words make a world of difference in these 260 pages. This amendment broadens the scope of the wording slightly, given that some of our witnesses felt that the term “counselling” was too narrow. We support that amendment because it significantly improves the wording, ensuring greater certainty regarding how counselling another person to commit a terrorism offence should be interpreted. For an offence to have been committed, there is no requirement that: (c) the accused knows the identity of the person whom the accused counsels to carry out the terrorist activity; or(d) the person whom the accused counsels to carry out the terrorist activity knows that it is a terrorist activity.This amendment addresses concerns specific to online terrorist propaganda. We do not understand why the government rejected this amendment proposed by the Senate, which is dominated by independent Liberals.Despite two positive amendments, this legislation is still flawed. Aside from our unconditional support of part 6, we cannot support Bill C-59.I will close by mentioning a few examples of serious flaws.Part 4 amends threat reduction powers by limiting guaranteed powers to seven types of actions, one of which raises the question of whether non-invasive actions require a warrant. That action is described as interfering with the movement of any person. That means a CSIS agent on the ground would need a warrant to give false information to someone who could help the agent meet conspirators. It would also prevent a CSIS agent from warning the parents of a child who is being radicalized unless the agent has a warrant. These changes place an additional administrative burden on our agencies, which, without additional funding, will have to take agents out of the field so they can take care of paperwork.Information silos are another problem. Part 5 was created in response to privacy protection groups that were unhappy with the fact that government institutions may share information, of their own accord or at the request of another institution, about activities that pose a threat to Canada's security. This creates a silo effect, which national security experts decried.When ordinary Canadians look at the government, it seems complicated to them. There are many different public servants and many different departments. They often say that people do not talk to each other. Part 5 further complicates the exchange of information that is crucial to protecting national security. People have to be able to communicate. Information silos hinder communication. Leading national security advisors expressed concerns, but the government did not want to change its approach. The third important element is threat disruption. Part 7 raises the threshold for recognizance orders and peace bonds, making it more difficult for law enforcement to monitor problematic individuals and disrupt threats before they occur. (1055)This clause replaces the following words from the Criminal Code, “suspects on reasonable grounds that the imposition of a recognizance with conditions on a person, or the arrest of a person, is likely to prevent the carrying out of the terrorist activity” with “suspects on reasonable grounds that the imposition of a recognizance with conditions on a person, or the arrest of a person, is necessary to prevent the carrying out of the terrorist activity”.It all comes down to two words: “likely” is replaced by “necessary”.Instead of having serious concerns or information about a likely terrorist activity, we now have to be sure that the arrest is necessary. This complicates things. If there is any doubt, we have to back off. Terrorist activities tend to develop quite quickly. People who plot attacks might take months to think about and plan them, but others might quickly decide that they feel like doing something on Sunday, for example. When we get information quickly we have to be able to react quickly. Bill C-59 encumbers the process.The powers provided for in Conservative Bill C-51 were aligned with those of our allies, including Norway and Finland. We modelled our bill on other democracies that believe freedom and security go hand in hand.In summary, Bill C-59 is a heavy bureaucratic tool that will not ensure public safety, but will undo what the Conservative government put in place to safeguard the security of Canadians.AmendmentI move:That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:“the order for the consideration of the amendments made by the Senate to Bill C-59, An Act respecting national security matters, be discharged and the Bill withdrawn”Arrest warrantsC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsData sharinge-SecurityExtremismGovernment billsNational securityPropagandaReasoned amendmentsTerrorism and terroristsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus: (1100)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague opposite for his question.He asked me if it was appropriate to quote a terrorist organization. I believe it is. That is why it is also important to record the names of terrorist organizations in the Criminal Code. We have to state the facts and use the right words.With respect to the definition of committing a terrorist act, the main objective should always be to be effective and ensure that we arrest those seeking to commit terrorist acts.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsExtremismGovernment billsNational securityPropagandaTerrorism and terroristsOmarAlghabraMississauga CentreCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89109MartinShieldsMartin-ShieldsBow RiverConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ShieldsMartin_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersBrooks Bandits Hockey TeamInterventionMr. Martin Shields (Bow River, CPC): (1100)[English]Madam Speaker, Brooks Bandits fans know their team is top in the Alberta Junior Hockey League. The Bandits won the national championship in 2013 and made it to the championships in 2015 and 2017. They have won four AJHL titles in recent years. This year, we were hosting the national championships, and fans' expectations were high. Unlike the Prime Minister, the Bandits delivered. The Bandits shattered multiple records this season, with a record of 57 and 3, an unprecedented 30 to zero at home, a 33-game winning streak, a new record for points earned in a season, a new record for wins overall, and they scored the most goals in this league in decades. They lived up to their promise by winning their fifth AJHL title in eight years, and to cap it off, they won the National Junior A Championship, hosted in their hometown of Brooks, the hardest championship in sports to win, with 133 teams competing. The Brooks Bandits fans expected nothing less. Unlike the Prime Minister, the Brooks Bandits are as good as advertised.HockeyStatements by MembersJean-ClaudePoissantLa PrairiePatFinniganMiramichi—Grand Lake//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersCalgary Ukrainian FestivalInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1105)[English]Madam Speaker, this past weekend my family and I had the pleasure of attending the 10th annual Calgary Ukrainian Festival in my riding of Calgary Midnapore. As both my husband and my mother come from Ukrainian backgrounds, it is something we all look forward to every year. The two-day annual festival provides an opportunity to showcase not only Ukrainian arts, cuisine, entertainment and culture but genuine, warm and energetic Ukrainian hospitality. As Albertans, we are aware of how much Ukrainians have added to our province and our country. They are hard-working, loyal and kind people.As Conservatives, we have always supported Ukraine. Our previous Conservative government was one of the first voices on the international stage to offer explicit support for the Ukrainian people in their struggle to restore democracy, freedom and the rule of law, and our leader has reaffirmed that this commitment will only grow stronger under our next Conservative governmentI want to thank all the organizers, including Chris, Lysia and Mike, for making my family and me feel so welcome last weekend, and congratulate them on a decade of honouring Ukrainian culture.Calgary Ukrainian FestivalStatements by MembersUkrainian CanadiansChandraAryaNepeanAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersKim SimardInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1110)[English]Madam Speaker, I rise today to honour the life and passion of Kim Simard, who passed after a courageous and faith-filled battle with cancer. Kim and I met some 20 years ago, when we were attending the same church with kids the same age. What really drew us together was our sole political goal of defeating the Liberals. Kim loved politics, and we knocked on many doors, made phone calls and raised money in the riding of St. Boniface with the purpose of electing Conservatives. Kim was passionate about much more than just politics. She loved God and she adored her family, including her church family at Springs Church, but she especially loved her husband Pat and their kids Josh, Jordanna and Jamie.Kim always had the most beautiful smile on her face, laughter in her voice and light in her eyes, even through some her most difficult physical battles. That light and that smile will be very much missed. I love you, Kim, and I am going to be thinking of you during the election campaign in October, because if there is any politicking going on in heaven, I know you will be leading the Conservative charge and cheering us on all the way.CancerDeaths and funeralsSimard, KimStatements by MembersMarcoMendicinoEglinton—LawrenceMikeBossioHastings—Lennox and Addington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89139RonLiepertRon-LiepertCalgary Signal HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LiepertRon_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionMr. Ron Liepert (Calgary Signal Hill, CPC): (1110)[English]Madam Speaker, I recently prepared and distributed a report card to constituents on my four years as a member of Parliament. While I was preparing that report card, I wondered what the Prime Minister's report card would look like. Let me tell members that it was four years of failure, because we have four deficit budgets—Some hon. members: Oh, oh!GregFergusHull—AylmerCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89139RonLiepertRon-LiepertCalgary Signal HillConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LiepertRon_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionMr. Ron Liepert: (1110)[English]Madam Speaker, I will start again. As I said, I spent some time preparing a report card for constituents on my four years as a member of Parliament. While I was doing that, I was thinking about what the Prime Minister's report card would look like. Let us look at the Prime Minister's past four years. We had four years of massive budget deficits when we were promised a balanced budget in 2019. There were four slaps on the wrist by the Ethics Commissioner, one of which was with respect to the finance minister, because he forgot about his French villa. We had three women kicked out of the Liberal caucus because they stood up to the current Prime Minister. Then we had the meeting with either the prime minister of Japan or the prime minister of China. The Prime Minister gets an F on this report card for failure. The Prime Minister is not as advertised.Prime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersTrudeau, JustinCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingKamalKheraBrampton West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersGovernment PoliciesInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1115)[English]Madam Speaker, I would like to reintroduce the members to the Liberal leader of 2015. He promised modest deficits, GST removal from social housing, to respect Parliament, to empower committees free from government interference, an open and transparent government, to take climate change seriously, a non-partisan Senate and to end first past the post elections. To top it off, he promised sunny ways.On these promises and so much more, he failed to deliver.The Liberal leader stepped into the office of the prime minister in 2015, with voters being sold a bill of goods. However, Canadians will not be fooled twice. He does not understand his failed policies and the negative impact they have on Canadian families.Canadians know that the Prime Minister is not as advertised.Prime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersTrudeau, JustinFinDonnellyPort Moody—CoquitlamRodgerCuznerCape Breton—Canso//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1115)[English]Madam Speaker, it has only been a short time since Premier Kenney, a newly elected Conservative premier, has taken office and already he is keeping his promises. The elimination of the carbon tax has led to among the lowest gas prices in all of Canada. Meanwhile, in neighbouring British Columbia, which has the carbon tax model the Prime Minister seeks to replicate, had prices that reached almost $1.80 a litre, something the Prime Minister says is “exactly what we want”.I have a clear question in search of a clear answer. What will be the full and final increase in gas prices when the Liberal government's carbon tax is increased?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsRodgerCuznerCape Breton—CansoSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1120)[English]The Liberals do not want to answer the question, Madam Speaker, because they do not want Canadians to know how expensive life will become when this carbon tax is fully and finally implemented. In fact, the total price is not even known for 2023, only four years away. We know already that Alberta has seen its gas prices drop to among the lowest in the entire country and the places with higher carbon taxes pay more at the pump. The average Canadian family is $200 away from insolvency. They cannot afford to pay $2 a litre for gas.Is that how high gas prices will go when the Liberal plan is finally implemented?Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodCarbon PricingInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1120)[English]Madam Speaker, only a Liberal would think life becomes more affordable when gas prices go up. In fact, that is what the Prime Minister said. When asked about $1.70 a litre gas prices in the province of British Columbia he said this was “exactly what we want”.Canadians without trust funds know that high gas prices hurt their bottom line. That is why families are on average $200 away from insolvency today.Why will the Liberals not answer the question? It is a simple and factual one. What will be the full and final increase in the price of gas when the Liberal carbon tax is completely implemented? Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceGasolineOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1120)[Translation]Madam Speaker, how can the government be happy about making Canadian taxpayers poorer?On average, hard-working Canadians have $800 less in their pockets, and the Liberals are happy about it. Millions of Canadians are still not earning enough to pay their bills and debts. Worse still, the government has mortgaged our children's and grandchildren's future by leaving them a deficit in excess of $80 billion.Will the Liberals stop wasting Canadians' money?Budget deficitFinancial managementGovernment accountabilityOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodFinanceInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1125)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I have plenty of respect for my colleague from Louis-Hébert, but I have to say, the Liberals are total hypocrites.The Liberals are strangling Canadian families. They eliminated the children's fitness and arts tax credits. They think Canadians are stupid. They send them money with one hand and take even more away with the other. Canadian families have $800 less in their pockets. This behaviour is irresponsible and dishonest to Canadian families.When are they going to stop wasting Canadian workers' money?Budget deficitFinancial managementGovernment accountabilityOral questionsJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1130)[English]Madam Speaker, Canada-China relations are now at their worst level since Ottawa established diplomatic relations with communist China in 1970. The Chinese president refuses to take the Prime Minister's calls, while the foreign minister's attempts to contact her Chinese counterpart have been met with silence. All this is happening while Canadians are unlawfully detained and China continues to punish Canadian farmers and producers. Now the Prime Minister is saying he hopes to meet with the Chinese president in three weeks. He should have done that six months ago. Will the Prime Minister tell us how he expects to get a meeting with the Chinese president when he has put himself in such a weak position to do so?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35607HaroldAlbrechtHarold-AlbrechtKitchener—ConestogaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AlbrechtHarold_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Harold Albrecht (Kitchener—Conestoga, CPC): (1130)[English]Madam Speaker, since the Liberals visited China, the situation has gotten even worse. Farmers and processors in my riding are paying for the Liberal government's failures. China is continuing to unfairly target Canada and is now taking aim at our pork producers. Now the Prime Minister is saying that he might talk to the Chinese president in three weeks. This crisis has been going on for six months. When will the Prime Minister finally stand up for our ranchers and farmers and support our Canadian agricultural industry?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89109MartinShieldsMartin-ShieldsBow RiverConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ShieldsMartin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Martin Shields (Bow River, CPC): (1130)[English]Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister has grossly mismanaged our relationship with China. Now we have learned that meat producers are next in China's target list. Farm incomes were down 45% across the country in 2018, 68% in Alberta alone. Constituents in my riding of Bow River are suffering the consequences. This crisis began six months ago, and now the Prime Minister is considering, maybe, meeting the President of China in three weeks. Gee, thanks. What is the Prime Minister waiting for to take some real action for my ag producers? ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1135)[English]Madam Speaker, those actions have had zero results. It has been six months since our relations with China have soured, six months since Canada has not had an ambassador to China, six months that two Canadians have been detained, and now the Chinese government is doubling down on canola, peas, soybeans and meat from Canada. We have repeatedly called for the Prime Minister to take action. Yesterday, he said he might arrange a meeting in three weeks. Really, three weeks?Why will the Prime Minister not take action now to protect Canadians?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1135)[Translation]Madam Speaker, for six months, our relationship with China has been deteriorating. For six months, Canada has not had an ambassador in China and for six months, two Canadians have been detained there. Now, China is imposing sanctions on our agricultural products.We have asked the Prime Minister many times to take action. He announced that he might organize a meeting in three weeks. However, before doing so, he is going to look into whether it is “appropriate or desirable”, as he said yesterday.If the Prime Minister is scared to do his job, could he ask someone else to do it for him?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1135)[English]Madam Speaker, there is no progress. The Prime Minister continues to destroy Canada's relationship with China, as tensions continue to escalate. Canadian farmers are struggling as China has stopped imports of canola and is restricting soy and pork shipments, while two Canadians are suffering in a Chinese prison and another one faces the death penalty. Now the Prime Minister is only considering engaging directly with China in three weeks, and that is if the Chinese agree to it. Why is the Prime Minister showing such weakness in the face of China?ChinaInternational relationsOral questionsRobertOliphantDon Valley WestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodVeterans AffairsInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1140)[Translation]Madam Speaker, the veterans' hospital in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, was transferred from the federal government to the Government of Quebec in 2016.Unfortunately, under this Liberal government, the quality of care has gone downhill, forcing very elderly veterans to take legal action to get the services they were promised at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.Why are the Liberals once again abandoning our veterans?Government servicesOral questionsSainte-Anne-de-Bellevue Veterans HospitalService deliveryVeteransAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkSergeCormierAcadie—Bathurst//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodVeterans AffairsInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1140)[English]Madam Speaker, what is inappropriate is for the Liberal government to ignore our veterans a day after we celebrated their win over tyranny in World War II, veterans like Wolf Solkin, who is the lead veteran at the Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue hospital. He and his friends were the veterans who secured the democracy we have today. He is standing up for his fellow veterans at Ste. Anne's to ensure that they have the same level and quality of service and treatment that they had before the transfer in 2016. We can celebrate our veterans, and both sides respect that, but only this side can make it right. When will the government commit to fixing the situation at Ste. Anne's?Government servicesOral questionsSainte-Anne-de-Bellevue Veterans HospitalService deliveryVeteransSergeCormierAcadie—BathurstSergeCormierAcadie—Bathurst//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1140)[English]Madam Speaker, it is obvious that the government does not care about the over 200,000 Canadians who are employed by forestry, or the 9,500 forestry jobs in indigenous communities across our country, or the hundreds of communities across rural Canada that depend on the forestry industry for at least half their base income. Despite having a once-in-a-generation chance to end the long-standing softwood dispute by negotiating a new NAFTA, Liberals squandered the opportunity. Why? Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsSergeCormierAcadie—BathurstKateYoungLondon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1145)[English]Madam Speaker, thousands and thousands of jobs are at risk right now. Hundreds of jobs have been lost in recent weeks in my province alone. Where are they standing with them? In the unemployment line? That answer is shameful. The Liberals have admitted that forestry has not been a priority. They would rather litigate than negotiate. For the past four years, they have failed to be a champion for our forestry families. What are they going to do for the thousands of Canadians employed in our forestry industry who have already received mill closure layoff notices or job losses?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsKateYoungLondon WestKateYoungLondon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1150)[English]Madam Speaker, the Auditor General has many new responsibilities now, including auditing the government's ill-considered Infrastructure Bank and the new Trans Mountain Crown corporation that resulted from it chasing Kinder Morgan out of Canada. Last summer, the Auditor General said that they needed more money to be able to keep doing performance audits, and last month, he told the public accounts committee that he cancelled audits, including on cybersecurity, because they did not have enough money. What is the government trying to hide from the Auditor General?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsKamalKheraBrampton WestGregFergusHull—Aylmer//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1150)[English]Madam Speaker, one thing that never ever happened under the previous government was the Auditor General coming to the public accounts committee saying we do not have enough money to do our job. That never happened. On May 14, the Office of the Auditor General told public accounts, “[H]ad we received the $10.8 million.... [w]e would have been able to do the work that was expected.” I said, “You are not adequately funded now.” They replied, “That's right.” What part of that testimony does the parliamentary secretary not understand, and why will they not—Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsGregFergusHull—AylmerCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTransportationInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1150)[English]Madam Speaker, the Port of Oshawa is one of my riding's crown jewels. The transport minister announced the amalgamation of the port authorities of Oshawa and Hamilton this week, and it will take effect on June 18, just 11 days from now. This decision was made without any meaningful consultation with the Oshawa Port Authority, the regional and city governments, port users, customers, tenant operators, labour groups or the public. While the government once promised transparency, it has not been as advertised.When will the minister table the business case for the port amalgamation in this House?Hamilton-Oshawa Port AuthorityMergers and acquisitionsOral questionsOshawa Port AuthorityPort authoritiesGregFergusHull—AylmerMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89098CathayWagantallCathay-WagantallYorkton—MelvilleConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/WagantallCathay_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): (1150)[English]Madam Speaker, with the Prime Minister's counter tariffs, steel and aluminum manufacturers in my riding of Yorkton—Melville were crippled. Small and medium entrepreneurs invested everything they could to keep their employees working. The Liberal government promised to have their backs but never came through. It is clear that assistance from the $2-billion tariff windfall was never intended for them. When will the Prime Minister admit that his help for the steel industry is not as advertised?Aluminum industryCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementCustoms tariff and customs dutiesOral questionsSteel industryTrade agreementsMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98079DaneLloydDane-LloydSturgeon River—ParklandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LloydDane_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC): (1155)[English]Madam Speaker, we have seen how the Liberals are using $600 million and Unifor to stack the deck in their favour in an election year. Now the Liberals are forcing Elections Canada to hire social media influencers to get out the vote. I thought we were fighting to get influence out of elections.Can the Liberals guarantee that these influencers will be non-partisan, or is this just another example of Liberals trying to stack the deck and rig the next election?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsSeanCaseyCharlottetownKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1155)[Translation]Madam Speaker, we have learned that Elections Canada plans to spend $650,000 to hire social media influencers. Elections Canada should be focusing on free and fair elections, instead of being forced by the Liberal government to come up with another way to rig the election. When will the Prime Minister stop manipulating every aspect of our democratic institutions to change the rules in his favour?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/96367StephanieKusieStephanie-KusieCalgary MidnaporeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KusieStephanie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionMrs. Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore, CPC): (1200)[Translation]Madam Speaker, the only dangerous game would be to rig the election.[English]Elections Canada is keeping secret the names of its social media influencers: musicians, celebrities, athletes and YouTube producers. However, it is unfair and impossible for the Prime Minister to demand these people set aside their own opinions and experiences to remain unbiased.Why does the Prime Minister not just admit that he is using his power and influence in this latest stunt to stack the deck and rig the next election?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTelecommunicationsInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1200)[English]Madam Speaker, the Eastern Ontario Regional Network has a plan to help people get the broadband and cellular service connections they need.Nearly 20% of eastern Ontario has no cell service, putting Ontarians lives at risk. The project is expected to generate up to 3,000 jobs over 10 years, with potential revenues of $420 million. Municipalities, private sector partners and the province have all committed.When will the Prime Minister start taking connectivity seriously and commit to funding this essential project?Broadband Internet servicesEastern Ontario Regional NetworkOral questionsRural communitiesCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingMarcSerréNickel Belt//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTelecommunicationsInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1205)[English]Madam Speaker, we have heard the same answer from those Liberals about the Eastern Ontario Regional Network project and its inaction after four weeks of non-answers. The province has already committed $71 million to fund it. This project will save lives by connecting first responders on a dedicated network. Municipalities in the province have put people's safety first and committed their share. The Ontario government has stepped up. The municipalities have stepped up. When will the Liberal government and the Prime Minister finally put eastern Ontarians' safety first and fund this project?Broadband Internet servicesEastern Ontario Regional NetworkOral questionsRural communitiesKirstyDuncanHon.Etobicoke NorthMarcoMendicinoEglinton—Lawrence//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1809CherylGallantCheryl-GallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GallantCheryl_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Firearms]InterventionMrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC): (1215)[English]Madam Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition signed by Canadians from the ridings of Brampton West, King—Vaughan, and Richmond Hill.The petitioners call on the House of Commons to respect the rights of law-abiding firearms owners and reject the Prime Minister's plan to waste taxpayers' money on a ban on guns that are already banned.FirearmsPetition 421-04213SentencingCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingPatKellyCalgary Rocky Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPTSD TreatmentInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1215)[English]Madam Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition signed by 100 people in Calgary who are calling on the government to revert its decision to change the medical questionnaire that has made it more difficult for veterans to access treatment for PTSD. The petitioners call on the government to either revert to the old form or amend the existing form, because the change it has made is making it more difficult for veterans to access the care they need.Mental healthPetition 421-04214Post-traumatic stress syndromeVeteransVeterans benefitsCherylGallantRenfrew—Nipissing—PembrokeFrancisScarpaleggiaLac-Saint-Louis//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1220)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my NDP colleague.Our visions are often very different. However, our common goal is to succeed in making things better. Bill C-59 is a 260-page omnibus bill with more than nine parts. The NDP originally suggested splitting the bill so that we could work on it in a different way. All of its requests were denied. That was the government's ideology. The Liberals had their hearts set on attacking Bill C-51, and never mind everything else. Yes, I agree with my NDP colleague that our visions were different, but our objective was the same. Sadly, the Liberals were not willing to listen.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus: (1225)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.Bill C-59 is an omnibus bill. That will make it easy for the government to claim that the Conservatives voted against the bill as a whole, but that is completely untrue. I made that clear in my speech. For example, we agree with part 6, which makes changes to air travel legislation to fix problems with the no-fly list. There are also other parts where certain elements were changed. The fact remains that, overall, Bill C-59 is a political document designed to attack Bill C-51. In our opinion, the primary objective of fixing things that were problematic in the eyes of the Liberals or others has not been met, or has been met in a way that caters to certain interests.As for security, this bill makes it harder for our agencies to do their job, especially the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS. It is wrong to say that we oppose Bill C-59 as a whole, but we cannot support it, because it is an omnibus bill and the problematic provisions are simply unacceptable.Anti-terrorism ActC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthMatthewDubéBeloeil—Chambly//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89156ZiadAboultaifZiad-AboultaifEdmonton ManningConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AboultaifZiad_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC): (1245)[English]Madam Speaker, I have a question on the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act within Bill C-59. Could the member comment on how effective that element is and how it will make the Canadian public more secure and more effective? I would appreciate it if the member could elaborate on this point.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsData sharingGovernment billsNational securityMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyMatthewDubéBeloeil—Chambly//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1250)[English]Madam Speaker, Bill C-59 is a very important bill because it is an omnibus bill related to security and intelligence measures. I have spoken to it several times in the House, and it is critical. It is critical for parliamentarians to understand and hear the discussion on this bill before we pass it. Therefore, Madam Speaker, I would like to ask you whether the House has quorum for my speech on Bill C-59.And the count having been taken:C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityQuorumMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1250)[English]Thank you, Madam Speaker. I appreciate your rousting the government members from their slumber. As most Canadians realize, they have been—C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1255)[English]Madam Speaker, for Canadians watching, it is not appropriate for a member of Parliament to refer to the presence or absence of a member in the House, and I certainly did not mention an individual member at all. Most of the Liberals were not here, so I certainly did not highlight anyone specifically.Because Bill C-59 is one of the many omnibus bills we have seen in this Parliament, I am going to speak to three aspects of this bill. I need to remind Canadians and my friend, the deputy House leader of the Liberal Party, that the Liberals promised Canadians that they would never use omnibus legislation in this Parliament. I have lost count of the number of omnibus pieces of legislation, which my friend, the Liberal MP from Winnipeg, once called an assault on democracy. They have been regularly assaulting this democracy in this Parliament, and Bill C-59 is an example, because it is comprehensive. It would affect the Criminal Code, the Communications Security Establishment and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. There are multiple pieces of legislation referenced and amended. It is very comprehensive. The Conservatives have tried to work with the government on it. There are two central concerns I have with Bill C-59, which is why I and the Conservatives cannot support it, despite the good work by opposition members and despite the good work by the Senate, which agrees with much of what I am going to say. I am going to talk about two critical pieces where the government is falling short, from a public safety standpoint, with Bill C-59. Then I am going to talk about the great advocacy work of No Fly List Kids and people like Sulemaan Ahmed and the families that have been some of the most sincere, thoughtful and creative advocates I have seen in my six years in Parliament trying to make public policy better. I am going to make a commitment to them right at the start of this speech. Conservatives will fix the problems with the no-fly list. We will make sure that there is a redress system to have false positives addressed, and we will do that within the first two years of government. We will have a process to get it fixed. The government throws it into an omnibus bill and claims that it is going to cost far more than it is. We need a redress system, much like the one in the United States. When the no-fly list was created under the Conservative government, and I am not suggesting that it was not under the Conservative government, there was no idea that there would be so many false positives. Families impacted by that, many families who have children sharing a name with someone who might be on a no-fly list, have no way to distinguish that or redress that, and that is unfair. It has affected many families from across the country. I want to thank the no-fly list kids and their families and make that personal pledge to them. I have mentioned it many times in the House and in committee. If we win the election in the fall, which we are planning to, to get Canada back on track, we will make a commitment to fix that very quickly, faster than the government that still has not fixed the Phoenix pay system in the final months of its time in government.Here are the substantive measures we cannot support in Bill C-59. The no-fly list is part of this large omnibus bill. The reason Conservatives cannot support it are central to public safety and security. I say this as a Canadian Armed Forces veteran, as a former minister of the Crown and as a former shadow minister for public safety. I have looked at this bill and the issues involved in great detail. The first issue is the threat disruption threshold. The government's change is a risk to public safety. I never overstate risks. There is not a bogeyman around every corner. However, when we change the threshold for peace officers, law enforcement and our justice system from “likely to prevent” a terrorist act to “necessary to prevent” the commission of such an act, that is a threshold that will perplex police forces across this country and make it hard for them to detain risks to public safety and security.(1300)Why is that critical? It is because, when we introduced a change to this power, following the attack on Parliament and following the attack and death of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, the Prime Minister, who was the member for Papineau and third party leader in the last Parliament, praised this preventative measure in that Parliament. In fact, he said that he “welcome[s] the measures [on] preventative arrest” that were contained in the bill. However, the Liberals are changing it, and law enforcement and security officials are telling them not to change it. I would invite Liberal members who were not here in the last Parliament to read the committee transcripts from the last Parliament and the testimony from Patrice Vincent's sister. He was a warrant officer serving with distinction in Quebec who was run down and killed by a radicalized Canadian because of the uniform he wore. That is it. He was targeted. Police knew that the young man from Quebec was a risk, but they did not feel they had an evidentiary burden to make a preventative arrest to prevent what they thought might be the commission of a terrorist offence.By making it “necessary to prevent”, the bill sets a high standard. As a lawyer, I worry about that standard. “Likely” does not mean that this power would allow law enforcement to willy-nilly preventatively arrest people. “Likely to prevent” the commission of an offence is an appropriate threshold. Changing this is a very poor and, quite frankly, dangerous public policy. Therefore, we have asked for that amendment, as have many Canadians and many law enforcement experts. We, in the Conservative caucus, trust law enforcement officers. They have a difficult job to do whenever someone is caught on the way to committing an offence, as we saw in southwestern Ontario with Mr. Driver. Questions are asked by law enforcement. Look at how close we were. We have relied now two or three times in the last few years on FBI information to stop threats in our country. Therefore, this is a serious gap in Bill C-59.The second issue is the “counselling commission of terrorism” element of the bill and the criminal standard of the offence under our Criminal Code. Many groups appeared before committee in this Parliament saying that we cannot have ambiguity on the counselling the commission of terrorism issue in the bill. The old standard was “knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism”. Therefore, there is still an evidentiary threshold that is required. This is not some draconian power that people are suggesting. There is a threshold required. Making the threshold too high or too ambiguous is a risk, and that is unnecessary. In fact, the entire Senate agrees with our position on this. “Counselling” is way too broad and unclear. In an age when a lot of threats are now online, advocating, pushing, promoting should be something for the commission of violence on another, so that we can avoid the next attack on the Hill, so that we can avoid the next horrible attack like the one we saw at the mosque in Quebec City. That horrendous killer went into the mosque, and if law enforcement had seen that he was knowingly advocating or promoting violence against an identifiable group, that would have been enough. In fact, combined with my last point, it would have been “likely to prevent”. That could have stopped someone in that circumstance. All communities, particularly religious communities like the Muslim and Jewish communities that face threats and see horrific things online, should not want these aspects of Bill C-59 to pass, and that is what the Conservatives have consistently been advocating in the interest of public safety, in the interest of all Canadians. The Senate agrees on the issue of counselling the commission of an offence. Most advocacy groups agree that it is too ambiguous. In a time when we are seeing these threats emerge online, we are seeing people radicalized online.(1305)In the last Parliament, I remember one of my early votes was to make travelling abroad for training with a terrorist organization a crime under the Criminal Code. Now, with social media, technology and YouTube, people do not need to travel. They can be radicalized, promote hate and violence and actually advocate for violence against an identifiable group online.We have to give law enforcement the tools of preventative arrest and we have to criminalize some of that terror activity at its source, trusting our law enforcement and our courts. Preventative arrest is not trial and conviction. It is law enforcement, in conjunction often with the Crown, saying that it has ascertained there is a serious risk to public safety, to Canadian citizens, to people living in Canada, to people visiting Canada, and that preventative arrest will likely prevent it. That is a reasonable standard. That was the old standard. Changing that to arresting the person preventatively to prevent this or to stop it is too high a threshold. That could mean law enforcement would spend three more weeks looking into the suspect. In the case of Patrice Vincent, we heard that in committee in particular. I would invite Canadians to look at the committee transcripts. I will tweet his sister's testimony out later. Law enforcement knew that gentleman in Quebec. I cannot remember his name right now. He was a young Québécois who had been racialized and law enforcement knew he was a risk.Those are the two elements why the Conservatives cannot support Bill C-59. It is bad for public safety and security. There are other elements in the bill we like. However, an omnibus bill, as my friend from Winnipeg used to say, is an assault on democracy. I have tried in my speech to commit to two key things on why the legislation is flawed.I cannot understate enough how impressed I am by the thoughtful and informed advocacy of the no-fly list kids. I know members on all sides of the House have heard from these people and have seen their commentary.My friend Sulemaan will laugh when he hears I am promoting going to a Montreal Canadiens game, as a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, but I am. When young people are prevented from going to a hockey game of the Montreal Canadiens because they share a name with someone who is a threat, not only is it unfair to them, it shows that our no-fly list is full of garbage. In public safety and security that is not enough. If someone has to sort through dozens, hundreds and thousands of false positives, is there really security at all?This is a commitment from my leader and our caucus. We want to thank the no-fly list group and their families for the advocacy they have done with all the members of the House and commit to them. We are the party that delivers. We are not the hashtag party. We are not the photo ops party. We are the party that will deliver. We give our commitment that this will be a priority early in our government.I can see a resolution. I have often said that this is not as complex as the minister of public safety has suggested. I do not even believe it is an accurate statement that it will cost $80 million to fix it. The U.S. has a redress list. This is about data. This is about ensuring we constantly review the no-fly list . If people who are not threats are crowding out the one or two who may be, the system is not working. I think all Canadians will agree with our pledge to commit that. I praised the government when it finally addressed the issue, after listening to the families of the no-fly list kids. However, by putting it into an omnibus bill, it prevents us from addressing it immediately. I am not suggesting bad faith on the part of the government. I think it listened to the advocacy and found this was the most appropriate bill to put it into. However, I do not think it even requires legislation. It could have been done through a ministerial directive. Most of the entries on the no-fly list are known to be false positives. (1310) I remember when retired Senator David Smith was on the list. He was a prominent Liberal senator, or whatever those types of senators are called these days, Liberal or independent. I am not sure. How many David Smiths would there be in Canada? There would be roughly a thousand, so the list is garbage. Then we saw that a number of young Canadians were on the list because they shared common names in certain communities. How do the hundreds of people with the same name but no biometric information redress that? How can we get the newborn babies off that list? The minister could fix that under his or her own authority. If that had been done, as I said at the time, there would have been full support for the government. I acknowledge that when we brought this measure in, even prior to my time in Parliament we did not anticipate this false positive issue. I think we have much to learn from the redress system in the U.S., because if there are problems with their no-fly list there, we could avoid some of those pitfalls and make ours world class. That is a commitment we want to make as part of the debate on Bill C-59.I will go on to say that we generally support other aspects of the bill, those related to security and intelligence oversight, and we have been trying to participate in that work. At various times during our time in government, we talked about a super SIRC and more coordination and oversight with respect to the agencies that collect data. However, one challenge that was faced in minority parliaments was that it was very hard to set up a committee of parliamentarians that would have been devoid of politics. So far, from what I have seen from that committee, although we have not had much in the way of reports from it, it does not seem that politics have been impacting the process. That is a good thing that has come out of this. There are elements of Bill C-59 that we support. However, when they are included in an omnibus bill, we have to weigh the elements we support on the intelligence side, such as the redress system for the no-fly list, against the elements we do not support. During my speech, I tried to outline the two very serious ones. I cannot underscore enough the fact that preventive arrest is a rare power provided to law enforcement, but it is there because we live in a dangerous and uncertain world. Many of us will remember the day when Nathan Cirillo was killed and the gunman came into the old building, and Patrice Vincent, and the shooting in the mosque in Quebec City, and the Aaron Driver case, when law enforcement stopped this person in southwestern Ontario when he was on his way to commit an offence. We cannot set the burden so high for law enforcement officers that they know there is a risk but are debating for weeks on whether preventive arrest will stop that risk from harming Canadians. One of our most fundamental duties as parliamentarians is to provide a safe, secure, rules-based system that respects diversity and human rights. Law enforcement officers have a tough job to do, so the last thing we can do, as this Parliament wraps up, is support a bill that will make their job harder. Arrest warrantsC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsExtremismGovernment billsLaw enforcementNational securityNo Fly List KidsNo fly listsPropagandaTerrorism and terroristsCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1315)[English]Madam Speaker, I always enjoy my friend from Winnipeg North. I know he loves my using his assault-on-democracy quote with respect to omnibus bills. The frequency of the Liberals' time allocation and closure in the last few weeks of Parliament would really make Peter Van Loan blush. He should review some of his speeches of outrage in the previous Parliament.Let me address the member's issues. As I reminded him when he railed on about Bill C-51, he voted for it. The Prime Minister, at that time the leader of the third party, praised the preventive-arrest measures. Now the Liberals are throwing those out the window. Much like everything with this Prime Minister, it is just not as advertised. I have heard that a few times. We generally support intelligence oversight, as the member will note from my remarks. That was difficult to do in a minority government at times. During the majority government it was not something that was looked at, but we have spoken in favour of it at times. I have spoken of it, and in fact Peter MacKay spoke in favour of it back around 2006.The final piece the member said about rights is critical. Public safety is a balancing between our important freedoms, liberties and rights and our public safety and security, and we certainly should be very careful. However, as I said, there are legal thresholds required for preventive arrest, and baked into them are evidence, a threshold and a trust in law enforcement to follow in conjunction with the Crown. We have the best legal system in the world. We have the best law enforcement in the world. It can always be better and we can make it better, but we cannot tie law enforcement agencies' hands. If someone is killed in a mosque or while guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, his or her rights are erased, so let us not bind the hands of law enforcement agents, who have a tough job in keeping Canadians safe. That is why we do not support the provision in Bill C-59.Anti-terrorism ActC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthWayneStetskiKootenay—Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1315)[English]Madam Speaker, with respect to privacy, I refer the member to the comments of the Privacy Commissioner, who has provided testimony that directly contradicts what the member is saying. At least the NDP has been intellectually consistent with respect to the elements of Bill C-51. The Liberals voted for it, and now they are undoing it. The Liberals praised some of the elements on preventative arrest and now are caving on them. I think that is due more to electoral fortunes that anything else.I refer the member for Kootenay—Columbia, and anyone protesting in his riding, to look at the testimony of Patrice Vincent's sister, Louise Vincent, from March 2015, who said:It would have probably been able to prepare even more material for the attorney general who, with a lower burden of proof, would have agreed to issue a warrant. On October 20 of last year, Martin Couture-Rouleau very likely would have been in prison, and my brother would not be dead.Law enforcement knew that this young man, Mr. Rouleau, was a threat, and in fact, they had discussed with the Crown whether the burden for preventative arrest could be met.We are not requiring no burden, but we are also not saying to law enforcement that they have to be ready to go to trial if they fear that there is an imminent risk to public safety and security. Patrice Vincent had not done anything to Mr. Rouleau. He had a uniform on, and law enforcement could not protect him. That is why our laws have to reflect the world we live in, not a perfect world, not a dream world. We have to balance rights and liberties alongside public safety and security.Putting the threshold too high puts Canadians at risk, and that is why we have been consistent on this point. The Liberals have not been. At least that member has been consistent, and I respect that, but we, forming the next government, will have to make sure that we can tell Canadians that we will always make their safety a priority.Anti-terrorism ActC-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityPrivacy and data protectionWayneStetskiKootenay—ColumbiaFrankBaylisPierrefonds—Dollard//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1320)[English]Madam Speaker, he is not surprised, because I spoke to him about 30 minutes ago as a courtesy. He is a wonderful Canadian, as are the parents of the no-fly list kids. I explained to him that our commitment, should we form government in the fall, is to deliver the redress system faster and more effectively than the government, which has lumped it into an omnibus bill. I explained to him that when there is an omnibus bill, we have to look at what elements we support and what elements we do not. This is why the member for Winnipeg North used to rail about omnibus bills when he was on this side of the chamber, which he soon will be again.However, I want to thank the member for that question, because at the end of the day, leaving the partisanship aside, we should thank families like the Ahmed family and others for their thoughtful advocacy. They worked with both sides of the House, appeared at committee and did a really innovative social media campaign, so much so that I think there is a business case study on their effective advocacy. Both the hon. member and I can say to Sulemaan that this is something we have identified as a gap. The Liberals have put it into this bill. We are making a commitment to make it a priority, should we form government. Both sides are committed to fixing that element of the no-fly list quandary.At the end of the day, we should thank Canadians for engaging with parliamentarians. We represent them. We are not perfect, nor are any bills perfect, but their advocacy helps make positive change. I want to thank them for doing that.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentsGovernment billsNational securityFrankBaylisPierrefonds—DollardBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88671LeonaAlleslevLeona-AlleslevAurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond HillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/AlleslevLeona_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersNational Security Act, 2017InterventionMs. Leona Alleslev (Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, CPC): (1325)[English]Madam Speaker, it is an honour and a privilege to have the opportunity to speak to such an important bill today.Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a very important turning point in the Second World War and one where Canada was overwhelmingly able to contribute and further the cause of peace and security in the world.Why do I bring that up? This is a piece of legislation respecting national security matters and one that we must take very seriously, given the nature of the threats that are facing not only Canada here at home, but the world, at this point.For the first time in many years, we are seeing the rise of great powers. We are seeing an increase in the number of threats that are facing our country, and those threats are not coming only in terms of troops on the ground or weapons or guns being fired. Those threats are coming from what we call non-traditional or asymmetric threats. We can be sitting at home and we find that information manipulation, cyber-threats and online instigating of violence are having a significant contribution on people who would want to commit these acts.We must be vigilant. Democracy is fragile. Those men who sacrificed their lives 70 years ago for what we have today must be honoured. How do we honour them? Yes, we remember the incredible sacrifice they made, but we have also been entrusted with preserving the security and the values for which our nation stands going forward.What are those values? Those values are safeguarding the freedom of individual liberty, the principles of democracy and the rule of law. Every time any one of those things is eroded, we must stand and be counted to ensure that we do honour their memory and we remember what exactly they fought for and what we must also fight for into the future.What would Bill C-59 actually do? Bill C-59 is trying to make it appear that the Liberal government takes national security threats seriously. In a world of increasing threats, the government wants to show that it is doing something. Unfortunately, it is more about show than actual reality. Significant parts of the bill take existing legislation and muddy the waters. They make it weaker. They make the wording so that it is more difficult to execute on. Instead of giving money to the areas that will further pointy-end national security efforts, the government is putting money into more bureaucracy and more red tape and ensuring that nothing actually gets done.This is highly disconcerting. If Canadians do not understand what the threats are, and if our national security agencies and our law enforcement people have less ability, less legislation, weaker and more confusing legislation and more bureaucracy to execute on making sure we are safe and secure, then what exactly are we trying to accomplish? That is one of the more fundamental reasons why Conservative members cannot support the bill. It is a lot of bureaucracy. It is a lot of smoke and mirrors. It is an attempt to make it look like the Liberals are taking national security seriously, when in fact it compounds the problem and confuses the issue.The Liberals have combined it all into one organization, the national security and intelligence review agency, and we are not able to see what that organization is going to do and what its mandate will be.C-59, An Act respecting national security mattersConsideration of Senate amendmentse-SecurityGovernment billsNational securityOversight mechanismBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessBankruptcy and Insolvency ActInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1350)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I am honoured to give a speech on this bill. I would also like to thank the member for Manicouagan for her bill on this very important topic.Retirement security is a very important issue. Seniors' overall financial security is an even more important issue for Conservatives.I agree that there is a problem with our pensions at the moment, but I do not agree with the solution put forward in this bill.I do not support this bill because it will create more problems for businesses in financial crisis.Last year, I introduced Bill C-405, which deals with this issue. Neither the Bloc Québécois nor the other parties supported my bill, which is a shame because my bill did not create problems for small businesses.(1355)[English]There were fewer problems with Bill C-405, which I introduced, because while we can agree that there is a problem with underfunded pension liabilities for pension plans, not the contribution-based plans but the defined benefit plans, when the pension is underfunded, we know it is a problem if there is insolvency of a company. If we changed the bankruptcy laws to a point where we caused more companies at risk to become insolvent, to liquidate, the solution being proposed by the Bloc would actually be worse than what they are trying to cure, even though we are in agreement.My bill tried to address the issue of underfunded pension liabilities without the impact that changing the bankruptcy laws for Canada and the insolvency laws in the CCAA would do.[Translation]My bill would have ended the unfairness of excessive payments that exacerbate pension shortfalls. It would have helped protect workers wanting to retire by giving administrators options to protect and improve the pension funds.Furthermore, my bill would have increased transparency and accountability by improving the national reports on the solvency of pension plans. It proposed a lot of solutions, without any of the problems caused by Bill C-372.[English]There is a way to tackle the public policy challenges of underfunded defined contribution pension plans without causing harm to businesses that are in financial distress, which will not be able to receive financing if they have an underfunded pension, because they will not be loaned money by creditors. I agree with the MP's public policy issue here, but we have to have a solution that does not cause disruptions in her province, in my province and across the country.One interesting point the member may not know is that Ontario has a pension benefits guarantee fund. We have talked a lot about Sears employees. Some of the Sears employees, in Ontario at least, will get assistance from the pension benefits guarantee fund. Other provinces do not have that, so it would be unfair to Ontario, which funds and backstops a pension benefits guarantee fund, to change national insolvency legislation.I worked as a lawyer on the insolvency and the protection process for Air Canada, which I know that member thinks highly of as our national carrier, based in Montreal. I was at the law firm Stikeman Elliott, which represented Air Canada in its restructuring, and it successfully restructured, as many MPs will know when they take Air Canada back to their provinces later today. CCAA puts a focus on restructuring, not on liquidating. Restructuring a company saves all the jobs; saves the pension by keeping it a going concern; makes all the suppliers whole, for the most part, or tries to; and keeps that business operating. In the case of Air Canada, restructuring kept it in place to provide an important service that a lot of Canadians use. Therefore, our focus when companies are in trouble must be to help the company survive. If the company survives, the pension fund is fine. If the company does not survive, then the liquidation will take place, and even if we applied superpriority to pensions, with most companies it would still only amount to pennies on the dollar or a much-reduced pension outcome. My bill, Bill C-405, tried to give pension administrators the ability to keep that fund going within another fund so that the pensioners who were stranded could get the upside of an existing fund through the pooling of resources and the ability for their returns to go up. In an insolvency, all the pension administrator can do is buy an annuity. As a result, those pensioners will be locked into a far lower annuity payment amount, because that annuity has to be purchased at a time when the markets are likely bad, and it will basically guarantee a bad outcome for pensioners. What is the solution? It is to keep companies operating. CCAA's focus is on maintaining those companies as going concerns, as well as their pensions and their employees. Let us take out some of the abuse. Bill C-405 proposed to take out some of the abuse occurring through key employee retention plan payments, whereby companies give large executive payments that seem to drain the company of resources while the pension was underfunded. Bill C-405 also tried to work with provincial securities regulators to make sure that there was a national health report on pensions each year. Canada already produces one, but it does not collaborate with the provinces, where most of these pensions are administered. The federal government can change insolvency legislation, but these are actually, in many cases, provincial pension funds. Sears Canada had its assets hollowed out by its main shareholder in the United States, thereby stripping out resources that could have been used for the pension. In cases like Sears, some of those actions could be prevented by securities laws and securities regulation, so my approach was also to have a report in which all levels of government and security commissions would look at ways to prevent the stripping out of resources. A lot of people out there, including great people at the Canadian Federation of Pensioners, CARP and others, see changing our bankruptcy and insolvency laws as a magic bullet. It is not. I do not think anyone wants to see more companies driven into liquidation. We want to see them survive, but how can we backstop and preserve payments to these pensioners? I think there is a way to do it without the negative consequences of superpriority, as it is called. Why do I know that this approach is better? It is because multiple governments at multiple levels have never fulfilled on pension superpriority, and even bills here in this Parliament are coming late in the session, because the studies have shown that more companies will go under as a result. We want the companies to survive so that the jobs and the pensions are preserved, which is what CCAA and restructuring legislation are about.(1400)I want to thank the member for her bill and thank her for the opportunity to speak to the elements of the issue that I agree with her is an issue we have to tackle.AdministratorsBankruptcyC-372, An Act to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (pension plans and group insurance plans)Employment benefitsModernizationPensions and pensionersPreferred creditorsPrivate Members' BillsSecond readingLindaLapointeRivière-des-Mille-ÎlesScottDuvallHamilton Mountain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Natural Resources]InterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1005)[English]Mr. Speaker, I present a petition that indicates Canadians depend upon the economic benefits and the jobs created by Canada's oil and gas industry. Unfortunately, without the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, there are thousands of unemployed Canadians who are worried about their next paycheque and where it will come from, instead of being able to plan for their families' future. With the carbon tax, even life's essentials have become a very costly burden.Therefore, I table this petition calling on the government to immediately build the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and repeal the carbon tax so we can get this country back on track and create opportunities for thousands of Canadians.Carbon taxOil and gasPetition 421-04148Trans Mountain pipelineMarkEykingHon.Sydney—VictoriaAnne Minh-ThuQuachSalaberry—Suroît//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (1005)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today. The petitioners draw the attention of the House of Commons to the following: Whereas increasing concerns about international trafficking in human organs removed from victims without their consent have not yet led to legal prohibition on Canadians travelling abroad to acquire or receive such organs, and whereas there are currently two bills before Parliament proposing to impede the trafficking of human organs obtained without consent or as a result of financial transactions, and whereas Bill C-350 is in the House of Commons and Bill S-240 is in the Senate, therefore the petitioners urge the Parliament of Canada to move quickly on the proposed legislation so as to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to protect Canadians from travelling abroad to acquire human organs removed without consent or as a result of a financial transaction and to render inadmissible to Canada any and all permanent residents or foreign nationals who have participated in the abhorrent trade in human organs.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04150Anne Minh-ThuQuachSalaberry—SuroîtJimEglinskiYellowhead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (1010)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is from petitioners who draw the attention of the House of Commons to the following: Whereas at one time Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but today less than 5,000 remain, and whereas a recent bombing in Afghanistan that killed leaders from both communities demonstrates their ongoing vulnerability, especially since these leaders were on their way to meet the president, and whereas the Minister of Immigration is already empowered by legislation to allow vulnerable minorities to come to Canada as privately sponsored refugees directly from the country where they face persecution, and whereas the Sikh and Hindu communities are ready to sponsor Afghan minority refugees, therefore the undersigned urge the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenshipto use the powers granted to him to create a special program to help persecuted minorities in Afghanistan. Further, they urge the Minister of Foreign Affairs to raise the issue of the persecution faced by these communities with her Afghan counterpart and strongly advocate for more to be done to protect them.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04151Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsJimEglinskiYellowheadGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72035BobZimmerBob-ZimmerPrince George—Peace River—Northern RockiesConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ZimmerBob_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPensionsInterventionMr. Bob Zimmer (Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, CPC): (1010)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am here today on behalf of my colleague from Langley—Aldergrove, who is home fighting his battle with cancer. We wish him well today. I am sure he is watching. I am presenting this petition with 13,740 signatures. The person who initiated it is with us today, Mr. Gerry Tiede. It calls on the Government of Canada to promote and protect earned pensions for all Canadians in the future, to withdraw Bill C-27, and to establish a national pension insurance program to ensure that seniors can live with financial security.Pensions and pensionersPetition 421-04168Senior citizensGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniTomKmiecCalgary Shepard//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1010)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition on behalf of 40 petitioners today on Bill C-350 and Bill S-240. They are concerned about the trafficking of human organs obtained without consent and for financial gain.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04169BobZimmerPrince George—Peace River—Northern RockiesPeterJulianNew Westminster—Burnaby//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98749RosemarieFalkRosemarie-FalkBattlefords—LloydminsterConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkRosemarie_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionMrs. Rosemarie Falk (Battlefords—Lloydminster, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present three sets of petitions. The first set of petitions are signed by Canadians across the country who are gravely concerned with the shortage of quality palliative and end-of-life care available in Canada. These petitioners assert that it is impossible for a person to give informed consent to a physician-assisted suicide if appropriate palliative care has not been made available to them.They are calling on the Government of Canada to create a national strategy to ensure that all Canadians have access to quality palliative care when they need it.End-of-life careHealth care systemPalliative carePetition 421-04173Petition 421-04174Petition 421-04175Petition 421-04176Petition 421-04177Petition 421-04178Petition 421-04179Petition 421-04180Petition 421-04181Petition 421-04182Petition 421-04183Petition 421-04184Petition 421-04185Petition 421-04186Petition 421-04187Petition 421-04188Petition 421-04189Petition 421-04190Petition 421-04191Petition 421-04192Petition 421-04193Petition 421-04194Petition 421-04195PaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithRosemarieFalkBattlefords—Lloydminster//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98749RosemarieFalkRosemarie-FalkBattlefords—LloydminsterConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkRosemarie_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAgriculture and Agri-FoodInterventionMrs. Rosemarie Falk (Battlefords—Lloydminster, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, the next set of petitions are signed by constituents of mine who are concerned with the efforts to restrict the rights of farmers to save and plant seeds from their crops. They are calling on the Government of Canada to affirm, through legislation, their right to freely save, reuse, select, exchange, condition, store and sell their seeds.Grain industryPatentsPetition 421-04196Petition 421-04197Seed growingRosemarieFalkBattlefords—LloydminsterRosemarieFalkBattlefords—Lloydminster//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/98749RosemarieFalkRosemarie-FalkBattlefords—LloydminsterConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkRosemarie_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPornographyInterventionMrs. Rosemarie Falk (Battlefords—Lloydminster, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, the last petition I am presenting today is signed by constituents in my riding who are concerned about the accessibility of sexually explicit material to children. These petitioners are calling on the House of Commons to ensure that meaningful age verification is used on pornographic websites to better protect underage children from violent and explicit content.InternetLegal agePetition 421-04198PornographyRosemarieFalkBattlefords—LloydminsterAlexandreBoulericeRosemont—La Petite-Patrie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1015)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be tabling nine petitions today.The first is in support of Bill S-240, which is a bill that some members may have heard of before. It is a bill currently before the Senate. It deals with the issue of forced organ harvesting. Hopefully, we will be able to get this done in this Parliament.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04203ElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the second petition is in support of persecuted minorities in Afghanistan, in particular the Hindu and Sikh minorities. The petitioners call on the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to use the powers granted to him to create a special program to help those minorities to be sponsored directly from Afghanistan. They also call on the Minister of Foreign Affairs to be actively engaged in this issue with her Afghan counterpart.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04208Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]The third petition, Mr. Speaker, is also in support of Bill S-240, currently before the Senate, dealing with the scourge of organ trafficking.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04204S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsCanada Summer Jobs InitiativeInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the fourth petition deals with the application of section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the context of the Canada summer jobs program. The petitioners are concerned about the way in which government policy has negatively affected the rights and freedoms of Canadian organizations who wish to access the Canada summer jobs program on an equal basis. They call the attention of members to the protection of freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of belief as fundamental freedoms in the charter.Canada Summer JobsDiscriminationEmployersFreedom of conscience and religionPetition 421-04210Student summer employmentGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]The fifth petition, Mr. Speaker, is also in support of Bill S-240 on organ harvesting.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04205S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHealthInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the sixth petition calls the attention of the House to the fact that the World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The petition calls for greater awareness and study of the impact of self-care options, including natural health care products, and in particular urges Parliament to instruct the Standing Committee on Health to undertake a comprehensive study of the impact of uninsured self-care products and wellness services and of the barriers that exist for those wishing to access them.Health care systemNatural health productsOver the counter drugsPetition 421-04211GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, petition number seven is in support of Bill S-240 on organ harvesting.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04206S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAfghan Minority CommunitiesInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Petition number eight, Mr. Speaker, is also about the issue of Afghan minorities, especially the Hindu and Sikh communities in Afghanistan. The petitioners are calling on the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship and the Minister of Foreign Affairs to take action in their respective domains in support of these communities.AfghanistanHinduism and HindusPetition 421-04209Religious minoritiesSikhism and SikhsGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsHuman Organ TraffickingInterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the ninth and final petition is in support of Bill S-240, which is on organ trafficking. The bill is currently before the Senate. We hope to see that bill passed as soon as possible.Human organs and other body parts traffickingMedical tourismMedical transplantationOrgansPetition 421-04207S-240, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)GarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsQuestions on the Order PaperInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1020)[English]Is that agreed?Some hon. members: Agreed.KevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1020)[English]When the House last took up debate on the question, the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan had two and a half minutes remaining in his time. Therefore, we will go to him now.The hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.BruceStantonSimcoe NorthGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (1020)[English]Mr. Speaker, the points that are being made by our Conservative colleagues in the context of this debate are very important. They are that Canadians want to get ahead. Maybe they are getting by, but they are struggling to get ahead. Under the current government, that struggle is made more difficult by the piling on of new taxes and the clear promise that the direction that the Liberals are taking this country with uncontrolled spending, if it is not controlled in the near future, is going to lead to tax increases. We have to act now to replace this government with a government that will be committed to living within its means and to managed, prudent spending.We have to act so that we do not go down the path that the Kathleen Wynne Liberals and the Rachel Notley New Democrats took their provinces, which then required a strong correction after the fact. Rather, the alternative is for us to replace the government now with a government that will make sure the wasteful spending stops and will cut taxes and provide tax relief in so many different areas.I spoke as well about the issues around the media bailout. We have a government here that is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to media organizations. The Liberals say this is in defence of independent media, but in fact they are delivering those funds and setting definitions around who is and who is not media through a board that includes someone who is explicitly partisan and is planning on campaigning for the Liberals in the next election.We hear from journalist after journalist, from leading commentators in Canadian politics, about how this policy and approach create a threat to the independence of the media. Those who believe in independent media, including those within the media, are strongly opposing this policy. Some of the corporate barons who own media companies are happy about this policy, but individual journalists who are responsible for covering our politics on a daily basis, the voices that Canadians read and trust, are overwhelmingly critical of this policy.Let us oppose this budget and replace this government with a government that has a new fiscal approach that allows Canadians to get ahead, that cuts our taxes, that genuinely protects the independence of the media and that moves us forward in so many other domains.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment assistanceGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionBruceStantonSimcoe NorthLarryBagnellHon.Yukon//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis: (1025)[English]Mr. Speaker, I sure hope I did not misspeak in the midst of the post-Raptors game euphoria late last night. What I intended to say, and what I think I actually did say, if we check the record, is that in response to every challenge that exists, the government proposes a program as a solution. I would never say it has been effective in its proposition of solutions to problems. Rather, the government's response to every challenge the country faces is for it to say bigger government, more spending, more interference of people's lives is the solution. We do not believe that on this side of the House. We believe that empowering individuals by cutting their taxes and allowing them to keep more of their own resources is often the best way to move our country forward.The member spoke about our opposition day motion, and I was very proud to speak in favour of it. The Conservatives were prudent and realistic about our chances of succeeding in that vote, given the current configuration of this Parliament. However, I take the member's point that we need to do all we can to change the configuration of Parliament to ensure that in the future, we can pass common sense motions like that.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionLarryBagnellHon.YukonAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis: (1025)[English]Mr. Speaker, surely the member cannot be as unaware of the arguments that people have been making, including in the media, about the reality of the effects of this, at least as unaware as he may have been about the process that Bill C-81 followed in the House.Eligible media organizations are precisely the hinge point in this issue. It is the government, through this panel, that will determine who should be considered eligible to access this funding and who should not. Yes, we are talking about something that involves a cost to government of $600 million. Therefore, there is a cost, and it only applies to eligible media organizations. The member knows that who fits into that box and who does not will be decided by a panel that includes Unifor. I did not just make that up. It was not an invention of the opposition. Anybody who reads the papers or consults the independent media about which he speaks will know that the government has created this panel, it does in fact include Unifor and that many of the leading journalistic voices in the country have criticized it.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment assistanceGovernment billsMedia and the pressThird reading and adoptionAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf Islands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis: (1030)[English]Mr. Speaker, I guess we agree that it should be tweaked, but we might disagree about the degree of the tweaking.The member makes an interesting point about looking at other members of the panel. In the context of our motion, our observation would be that the Unifor case is particularly egregious. Nobody else, in the context of that panel, has publicly tried to define itself as “the resistance” to not only a particular party, but to a particular individual who leads one of those parties. Obviously it is the tone and the rhetoric in explicit support of one party and in explicit opposition to another party. It would be obviously inappropriate that anybody else in a government-appointed administrative role that was supposed to make these kinds of determinations would show such favouritism, such partisanship.The member may have other points about other individuals on the panel, but it is quite clear that the case of Jerry Dias is particularly egregious in this context.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment assistanceGovernment billsMedia and the pressThird reading and adoptionElizabethMaySaanich—Gulf IslandsKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis: (1030)[English]Mr. Speaker, as a matter of order, I would question the discussion about the presence or absence of members. I would be happy to engage in that conversation. Of course I would not comment the relatively small number of government members who are in the House now or, for example, the fact that we had successful quorum calls during this budget debate. A quorum for the House of Commons is only 20 members, and in debating the government's own budget, somehow we fell below quorum. Again, does the member want to go down this road?Some of our members were busy campaigning in Winnipeg North at the time of that vote. I know the government always has to have enough members here to ensure they win the votes, and we do not win very many votes in the opposition. However, the Conservatives are also very successfully engaged in beautiful ridings, like Winnipeg North, talking to voters there. I look forward to seeing the fruits of both the arguments we make in the House on the issues and of our many visits to ridings like that of the member.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthSukhDhaliwalSurrey—Newton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1045)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned housing, which is one of my favourite subjects right now, especially in the budget, with the 100,000 so-called first-time homebuyers who will be helped. However, neither CMHC nor the Department of Finance could point me to the document where the numbers actually came from. They each said that the other one knew how they got to the number. It is interesting that the member thinks that it would help that many people, because there are no details about the program available. Perhaps the member could tell me if there would be a special fee assigned with the government purchasing equity in a person's home, because the government would then own a share of the home. Will the homeowner be able to buy out the government's share early, before selling the house? Will there be any other terms and conditions associated with the shared equity mortgage? Does the member know that the Mortgage Brokers Association said that it would take eight to 10 months to set up the IT system to enable the rollout of this program? Is the member aware that the chartered banks have similarly said that it would take much more than two months to do so? Will there be a special premium on the shared equity mortgages?I would like to hear from the member on this matter. Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsMortgagesThird reading and adoptionSukhDhaliwalSurrey—NewtonSukhDhaliwalSurrey—Newton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89156ZiadAboultaifZiad-AboultaifEdmonton ManningConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AboultaifZiad_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC): (1100)[English]Mr. Speaker, I had the pleasure of travelling with the hon. member on one or two occasions while serving on the finance committee. He talked about improving the manufacturing sector in general based on this budget. The debate has always been about the productivity level in Canada. I am sure the hon. member is aware that we are way behind compared to other nations, such as Germany and the United States. How can we claim we are working on enhancing the manufacturing sector, when productivity should be an important element in making sure we are competitive enough in international markets? How can we make that claim when the government has been raising payroll and other taxes to the disadvantage of our businesses? How can the manufacturing sector compete in the conditions that the government has been creating since day one?Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsManufacturing industryThird reading and adoptionWayneEasterHon.MalpequeWayneEasterHon.Malpeque//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1130)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member talked vehicle electrification. An amendment moved by one of the new Liberal MP members on the committee was to go from a 15 kilowatt battery to a 7 kilowatt battery to be eligible for two of the financial measures in the budget. However, by doing so, the Liberals would effectively allow for luxury electric vehicles, $100,000-plus vehicles, to be discounted on purchase, about $55,000 off their taxes. I was at committee when officials confirmed this would be the BMW 530e, BMW 330e and the Audi e-tron series of vehicles.If we are talking about vehicle electrification, would we not first start with transit and vehicles that the regular, everyday person could afford? Could the member speak about that and about the priorities of the government?Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresElectric vehiclesGovernment billsTax refundsThird reading and adoptionGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1150)[English]It being 11:48 a.m., pursuant to an order made on Tuesday, June 4, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the third reading stage of the bill now before the House.[Translation]The question is on the amendment. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment?Some hon. members: Agreed.Some hon. members: No.The Deputy Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.Some hon. members: Yea.The Deputy Speaker: All those opposed will please say nay.Some hon. members: NayThe Deputy Speaker: In my opinion the nays have it. And five or more members having risen:The Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to order made on Tuesday, May 28, the recorded division stands deferred until later this day, at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions.Division on amendment deferredAmendments and subamendmentsBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresDeferred divisionsGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkPabloRodriguezHon.Honoré-Mercier//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1205)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am happy that the government is moving on this.We in the Conservative Party wanted the government to take action over two years ago. As a matter of fact, when we had the minister in committee, we found out that a year before the Americans put tariffs on our steel and aluminum sector, the Americans asked Canada to come on board and help out. Basically, because of dithering and incompetence, Canadian companies have been suffering with these steel and aluminum tariffs since that time.The bill is extremely important, especially in my community, where we build automobiles and have Gerdau Ameristeel. The government has collected over $2 billion in tariffs, and because of the way it is enacting the bill, some companies may be affected negatively. What is the government going to do to dispense, perhaps regionally, this $2 billion, this massive amount of money? The government has collected it and has promised to get it out to the affected companies, but it has really done absolutely nothing. What is the government going to do to address any inadvertent harm from the bill and get money out to the producers and manufacturers that require that support?Aluminum industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States relationsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesDuty remissionGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (1210)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the regional disparities in this country when it comes to steel and aluminum producers. In the central part of Canada, safeguards are welcomed as a way to protect the big, central Canadian steel mills and those jobs. As a member of Parliament from British Columbia, I have heard from steel and aluminum producers there who have never sourced their steel from central Canada, because that is not the way the supply chain is set up to work. They have always sourced their steel from the offshore markets. They do not transship. This is what they use to produce the goods that employ people all across western Canada.Are the jobs in manufacturing facilities in British Columbia being sacrificed? Are there any regional considerations at play? What is being done to protect the jobs of companies that have always used offshore steel and are now going to be put at a competitive disadvantage in not being able to get the supply? I am really worried about the jobs in British Columbia, and I want to hear what the government is doing specifically for western Canadian jobs.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeLabour forceSecond readingSteel industryJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1215)[English]Mr. Speaker, I need to start my remarks by recognizing that today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day. I have the ability to stand in this House, in our parliamentary democracy, because of the sacrifice of the 359 Canadians who died on D-Day, the 14,000 who landed on Juno Beach, and the 25,000 involved in the operation with our allies. I would be remiss if I did not start my remarks with this, because we are fortunate to have democracy based on that.The parliamentary secretary said that this bill is a reflection of the Liberal government's values when it comes to trade. He is either reading a speech that was provided for him, or he does not realize it is actually a very high-profile abandonment of the values that Liberals projected on trade for several years. The parliamentary secretary has heard the foreign minister talk countless times about the international rules-based order. With the trading order and security order, the international rules-based order has probably been one of the foreign minister's most common refrains. In fact, in her famous speech in Washington, in June 2018, she said:One answer is to give up on the rules-based international order, to give up on the Western alliance and to seek to survive in a Metternichian world defined not by common values, mutually agreed-upon rules and shared prosperity, but rather by a ruthless struggle between great powers governed solely by the narrow, short-term and mercantilist pursuit of self-interest.“The ruthless, short-term, mercantilist pursuit of self-interest” should be the preamble to Bill C-101. It is an abandonment of WTO rules with respect to international trade, the rules on which the minister would like to lecture not only us but also the Americans in Washington. It is not just my opinion that it is a WTO violation. As noted trade lawyer Mark Warner tweeted about Bill C-101, the Canadian government has been proclaiming its adherence to the rule of law at every turn, and now is suspending parts of the WTO safeguards agreement for two years.This is an example of an abandonment of a rules-based approach to trade, and our trading partners and friends around the world notice that.Now, there is a real politic to trade that the government avoided and ignored for its first several years. That is why Canadians should be shocked that in the final weeks of this Parliament and with no collaboration from the opposition, Liberals have tabled a ways and means motion on the new NAFTA, on safeguard provisions. In fact, they are changing the law, not to allow safeguards not to have their two-year suspension after being applied, but to have the ability to have permanent safeguards. The Liberals are doing this in the final days of the House and will likely use time allocation to rush it through.The Conservatives are going to use this time to try to suggest some ways to mitigate the impacts of Bill C-101 with regard to issues that the government should have thought of and should have brought for debate. We are going to stand up for the interests of the wider group of employers and employees in the fabrication of steel products, particularly the western steel and construction industries, and recommend ways to help them through the disruption this bill will cause.Hopefully, the government will address some of our concerns and make this better. Hopefully, it will deal with the companies and employees in western Canada, in Quebec and in Newfoundland and Labrador who will be impacted. In my remarks, I am going to use some time to recommend that. We want to, and may, support this bill, but it is up to the government, rushing it through in the last few days, to address the real issues that will affect small and medium-sized businesses, and to allocate some of the $2 billion it has already collected in retaliatory tariffs. The government promised this would help small and medium-sized enterprises, but it has not.We want to hear a plan. The government has lurched from crisis to crisis on trade, tariffs, NAFTA, canola with China and pork with China. Enough with the crises. We want a plan. As an effective opposition, that is what we will do.(1220)I have already said that this violates WTO safeguard regulation, but it also violates the ruling of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal from April, our own rules-based order. I would refer to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The trade tribunal did say that there was “serious injury” with respect to the dumping or import of heavy plate and stainless steel wire. However, it clearly said that on rebar, energy tubular products, hot-rolled sheet, pre-painted steel and wire rod, there was no serious injury and therefore no need for safeguards. These may seem like obscure terms to Canadians, but our recommendations today will actually show how we can go with the spirit of the safeguards and also safeguard the jobs and economic activity that depend on these steel products. I will bring it home for Canadians. Energy tubular products are used in our oil sands, the energy industry in western Canada. There is steel plate that, if we do not have specific imports, will raise the cost of the Champlain Bridge in Quebec by $1 billion, putting at risk critical public infrastructure. There is also the Muskrat Falls project in Newfoundland and Labrador. I would like to shake out of their slumber the Maritimes and Atlantic members of the Liberal caucus. Do they realize that this project, which is already in huge cost overruns, will potentially be made worse unless there are geographic or steel-specific exemptions? The LNG Canada project, which I believe the Prime Minister took some photos at the launch of, is at risk unless some exemptions or specific regional quota is provided. There is also the Site C dam in British Columbia. Therefore, critical jobs, economic development and public infrastructure, like the Champlain Bridge, are all potentially at risk economically because of steel that needs to be imported. We do not make enough of these types of products, such as rebar. We already know of the affordability crisis in Vancouver, the Lower Mainland and Toronto. The construction industry needs rebar for commercial and residential building, and 40% of it in western Canada has been imported from Asia, Taiwan mainly. It will be cut off, and the producers, construction companies and fabricators that use a lot of these types of steel will see their prices go up by more than one quarter. There are real impacts here. The government cannot rush in all of these bills at the end of Parliament because it messed up its trade strategy for four years. Therefore, we are going to have some recommendations that we want the government to take seriously, because there are thousands of jobs. Let us have a win for the steel producers, fabricators and construction companies by being smart with safeguards and having regional provisions, regional protections and quota allocations. Let us review the history. The Liberal government came in knowing that the U.S. had issues with the Chinese oversupply and transshipment of steel. In fact, the Obama administration, in 2016, applied tariffs when it introduced the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act and brought up steel duties by 500% on some steel products. We know that the Prime Minister got together with President Obama for another photo-op the other day. We know that bromance. Why did they not start coordinating concerns about transshipment then? In fact, they did not. Some of the members are waking up now, and I am happy to see that.In 2017, the U.S. president expressed a direct concern about oversupply and transshipment, and said he would use section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum. What was our response? Absolutely nothing. We know that because of the admission of failure from the finance minister that came on May 30, 2018, when he quietly introduced country-of-origin labelling rules for Chinese steel tracing, which is part of transshipment investigation, hours before section 232 tariffs were applied on Canada. I would remind the member for Malpeque of that. The U.S. had been asking for this. In fact, the Commerce Secretary has acknowledged that Canada did not work with the U.S. on transshipment concerns; therefore, section 232 tariffs were applied.(1225)Despite the fact that, in 2018, the Prime Minister went to Sault Ste. Marie and a number of other communities and said he had their back because he had a one-month exemption, the Conservatives who were going down to Washington knew that Canada had not made the moves. It had not put in tracing measures, country-of-origin labelling, to take American concerns on transshipments seriously. Therefore, the tariffs were applied. We could have avoided that. I laugh at the friends who used to call the current Prime Minister the “Trump whisperer”. We have been in a one-sided, bad-outcome relationship with the United States under the Prime Minister, going back to Obama, because transshipment concerns could have taken place back in the Obama administration. I will remind the members that, in June of last year, over a year ago, I asked the minister about this at the trade committee. I referred to the section 232 tariffs and the need for country-of-origin marking and transshipment concerns. The minister dodged my questions for six minutes.Agreements and contractsBuilding and construction industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States relationsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeProtectionismSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryWorld Trade OrganizationJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1230)[English]Mr. Speaker, there is a transcript from a year ago, when I questioned the minister on Liberal delays on safeguards. I will send this package to the member from Toronto and to the rest of the Liberal caucus, because they have been asleep. How do I know that? None of them showed up to their own government's briefing on this bill last night. In fact, I found out about it when the Minister of Finance asked me and said there was a briefing. The Liberals did not invite the opposition to the briefing. That is how they have played this from day one. The minister avoided all my questions on why Canada waited over a year to take U.S. concerns over transshipments seriously. We could have avoided section 232 tariffs. We could have been having this debate on safeguards a year and a half ago, when the Conservatives asked for it, at a time when we could have mitigated some of the impacts of safeguards. I am going to go through those impacts now, because they are real. They affect jobs in Winnipeg, Sault Ste. Marie, Hamilton, Toronto, Prince Edward Island and wherever that guy is from. They are real because there are fabricators in all communities.I toured a great fabrication plant, one of the largest employers on Prince Edward Island. It works with Quebec steel companies to bid on and build stairways and parts of construction in Manhattan high-rises. I know the member for Malpeque is proud of those jobs, as am I. These are all affected by poor Liberal decisions on trade policy and will be impacted by Bill C-101. What the Conservatives want to see is mitigating the impact. We want to see western Canadian fabricators and critical public infrastructure projects like Muskrat Falls, Site C, LNG Canada and the Champlain Bridge protected by regional allocation of quota. We want to make sure that the Champlain Bridge does not cost $1 billion or $2 billion more as a result of this bill. That can be done, and it can be WTO-compliant through TRQs, regional allocation of quota for critical industry, because western Canada cannot get steel from Hamilton to Sault Ste-Marie. It is uneconomical to ship it there. We do not make enough rebar and other critical elements of plate that we need. They need to import, so let us give tariff allocation where it is needed, for example in Newfoundland and Quebec. We are going to recommend that.We also have recommendations about the $2 billion the Liberals have collected through tariff-like taxes, through retaliatory tariffs. They said it would go as relief to small and medium-sized businesses impacted by trade disruptions, by section 232. They have not given the money. They have given some loan guarantees to the large steel players. We want to see a commitment to allocate some of those funds to the small and medium players and to address geographic concerns. If so, they will see the Conservatives work with them on Bill C-101, work with them on NAFTA, even though we are not happy with the fact that we are seeing these in the final weeks of Parliament, when the Conservatives have been asking for this for over a year.Let us review. President Trump was not even inaugurated when the Prime Minister volunteered to renegotiate NAFTA. That was a risk we did not need to take, but when it was taken, the Conservatives put forward suggestions to the government. Let us remember that 98% of Canada's trade access was negotiated by Conservative governments, including NAFTA, including U.S. free trade. We said, let us put auto forward. Let us put softwood and key agricultural sectors forward as our priorities, because the U.S. trade representative Ambassador Lighthizer and his team had already prepared a list of priorities where the U.S. wanted to go.The minister's speech at the University of Ottawa addressed none of the issues the U.S. wanted to talk about. The Liberals launched their much-vaunted progressive agenda and they talked about issues related to the Prime Minister's brand, but that had no relation to trade whatsoever. In fact, they did not mention auto and auto part calculation for six months. When they did, we praised them for that and there was progress finally made in the NAFTA discussions. Mexico took the talks seriously and had 80-plus meetings with White House officials. It had a deal done before Canada did. That should trouble Canadians. The government virtue-signalled, as I call it, and put its own electoral ambitions ahead of the national interest. That should trouble Canadians.(1235)That is why, in the final days of Parliament, we have the two most substantive economic pieces of this Parliament being rushed through in ways and means motions. It is because of incompetence. The section 232 tariffs were completely avoidable if, going back to President Obama, we had taken concerns about Chinese transshipments seriously. They were avoidable if we had taken NAFTA seriously and had put forward the auto sector, which was always going to be critical, and if we had put in softwood lumber and tried to deal with that constant generational issue that is now hurting our western producers, and if we had put in agriculture and started punching back at the administration's claims about subsidies through our supply management system. The U.S. spends more on agricultural subsidies than we do on our military. I did not hear the government pushing back on that.The Liberals were talking about the progressive agenda with a president who they know was not quite progressive. They totally misaligned our interests. That is why Mexico, which had a weaker position going in, got a deal before Canada did. We had to scramble to try to be an add-on to that deal.The same thing happened with tariffs. Mexico was ahead. That is why I am happy that the Conservatives collaborated. We told the ambassador that we were going down. The member for Prince Albert and I, in one day, were invited to a caucus meeting and met more members of Congress than the government did in the previous year to talk about section 232 relief.I have talked about some of the ways we can work with the government on Bill C-101. To fix the issues that are missed, to mitigate, we are proposing an amendment to make this bill better.I move, seconded by the member for Oshawa:AmendmentThat the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act, because it fails to:a. take into consideration regional disparities in industry needs, specifically, that domestic producers only minimally supply certain steel products to British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador;b. add a geographic exclusion, either exempting British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador from the proposed safeguards or allocating a dedicated share of the regional quota to British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador;c. stipulate specific tariff and trade disruption relief to steel fabricators;d. mandate that the funds collected through retaliatory tariffs on the United States go to support small and medium-sized Canadian steel and aluminum fabricators and retailers impacted by the application of the retaliatory tariffs; ande. grant specific product exclusions for certain steel products that are not produced in commercial quantities in Canada to avoid the negative economic impact of safeguards on critical public infrastructure projects like the Champlain Bridge, the Muskrat Falls Hydroelectric Dam, the Site C Dam, and projects of national economic importance like LNG Canada.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States relationsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesDuty remissionGovernment billsInternational tradeMexicoNorth American Free Trade AgreementProtectionismReasoned amendmentsSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryTrade agreementsAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingTomKmiecCalgary Shepard//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (1235)[English]Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I wonder if you could direct the Sergeant-at-Arms to have whoever is having conversations outside the chamber to quiet down, because they are extremely loud at this point. We cannot hear anything on the floor.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeNoise/conversations/heckling, interrupting Member speakingPoints of orderErinO'TooleHon.DurhamAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am glad we can recognize this special day today.We have said from the outset of the NAFTA negotiations and the risks to tariffs that we want to work with the government. In fact, our amendments would mitigate against some of the negative impacts of this legislation. The reason we are putting it in an amendment is that when we asked for this safeguard debate over a year ago, the government did not comply. In fact, as I said, a day before tariffs were applied, the finance minister finally put tracing mechanisms in place in response to U.S. concerns about transshipment. The government has been lurching from crisis to crisis. We are now at the final weeks of Parliament, and now it has a proposed solution to the latest crisis. What we are suggesting is some improvements to recognize critical regional infrastructure projects and jobs in western Canada. We can mitigate against the impacts with some modest amendments.That member knows that the Liberals have collected in the range of $2 billion in tariffs from Canadian companies, such as retailers and steel producers that needed to fabricate U.S. steel to re-export it. They have had to absorb the costs of the trade disruption the government has handed them. We want a commitment that this $2 billion will go to small and medium-sized enterprises. That is what the Liberals said at the beginning. The Prime Minister is very good at going to Algoma and putting on a jacket or a hat and making promises. Most of the time he has not come through. We want to support the Liberals, but we want to see some mitigation aspects. We want to see them recognize the impact this would cause to western Canada, in particular on construction costs for key projects such as Site C, Muskrat Falls, the new Champlain Bridge and LNG Canada. In fact, the fabricators in those projects provide five times or more the number of jobs of the steel producers, so let us try for a win-win. They are not used to a single win in this Parliament. Let us try for a win-win.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeLabour forceProtectionismSecond readingKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthScottDuvallHamilton Mountain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, the member for Hamilton Mountain and I are in full agreement on his definition of the Liberals' handling of this. He used the term “mess”. I agree wholeheartedly. We in the Conservative caucus want to stand up for the members of that union, and not just workers in and around Hamilton, but also others. I am not sure if the member is on the trade committee, but he might know that a year ago Conservatives asked the minister about safeguards. We knew that it was critical to have this debate to find out how we could apply safeguards but mitigate against some of the real impacts on fabricators, on critical infrastructure projects and on western Canada in particular. The member would know, because the union members in his riding are akin to some of the pipeline workers and union members in western Canada, that those industries are suffering. We do not need to pile yet another economic challenge on top of that.Our modest proposals to the government should be a way of constructively addressing some of the impacts of this big, quick trade action. As I have said, the government knows that it violates the WTO rules. It formed a little Ottawa group to modernize the WTO, and it has lost a lot of credibility on this issue. Let us try to blunt some of the negative impacts of this legislation. Conservatives have been wanting to have the debate on safeguards for over a year. Let us get it right. I hope the NDP and the Conservatives can both push the Liberals to finally do the right thing.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeProtectionismSecond readingSteel industryScottDuvallHamilton MountainLarryMaguireBrandon—Souris//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionMr. Larry Maguire (Brandon—Souris, CPC): (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would ask my colleague to go back to the mitigation that he was speaking about. I have a situation in which small businesses in the recreation area have had to purchase inventory for the coming season because winter is over, but the steel tariffs have increased the cost of carrying an inventory of recreation vehicles, boats, campers and that sort of thing. In this one case that I am looking at, it may not be as much as the greater steel industry, but $35,000 to one small business is a lot of money. I would like the member to expand on what he thinks we could do. In his speech and in answers to questions, he mentioned the $2 billion that the government has obtained from the tariffs that it imposed, but I want to follow up on it again with regard to mitigation and how we could best convince the government to make it part of an amendment and move it forward before we pass this legislation.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeProtectionismSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryErinO'TooleHon.DurhamErinO'TooleHon.Durham//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole: (1245)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have had the fortune of being in the riding of the member for Brandon—Souris and know he has a great relationship with the chamber and a lot of businesses, and those are real concerns. The aluminum recreational boat industry has been hammered, and Conservatives have raised this issue in the House. I have talked about the Junkin family in my riding at LakeView Marine in Port Perry. It now has stranded inventory. It has some inventory for which it had to absorb the cost of the tariffs, but consumers now know the tariffs are off, so how is it going to deal with this stranded inventory that it paid tariffs on? Some of that $2-billion fund that the government has collected could be put toward that. That is all Conservatives are asking on that front. That would help in Brandon, that would help in Port Perry and that would also help fabricators like Mielke Industries in the Fraser Valley and in areas like Abbotsford and Chilliwack. There are a lot of fabricators in western Canada that have imported steel to fabricate into world-leading products. They are some of our best exporters, but they are now becoming uncompetitive because of the trade disruption that happened because we could not avoid the section 232 tariffs the way Australia and South Korea did. The government has put them in a place where they are uncompetitive. Let us use the $2 billion the government has collected to provide some relief, to make sure they do not lose international contracts and to make sure small businesses—family-owned, in many cases—in Brandon and Durham do not have a loss this year and next.The government promised that small and medium-sized enterprises would be helped by this relief, but we have seen none of it. Time is running out. The government will see Conservatives co-operate if it addresses these geographic and small and medium-sized business issues. We have given it some ways to do that. It could also help provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador or Quebec with the Champlain Bridge. Our recommendations are not only effective but modest. We can make this bill better. Let us all get on the same page by addressing the shortcomings of this bill quickly so we can pass it and remain competitive.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeProtectionismSecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryLarryMaguireBrandon—SourisScottDuvallHamilton Mountain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1305)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Hamilton Mountain, the place where I was born. I have to say that I still have that steel guy inside me. In my community of Oshawa, steel is so important for the auto sector. He mentioned a friend of mine, Roger Paiva, from Gerdau Ameristeel Corporation, and how important the steel and aluminum sector is to my community.Earlier on, the member mentioned the uncertainty and the mess the current government has created, and I am extremely concerned. I know both our communities are very happy this bill is being debated in the final days of the current government. It is a very important issue. My colleague from Durham spoke about how this is something the bigger companies want to see moved forward as quickly as possible, but for regional suppliers, fabricators and different communities there needs to be something else done. We talked about this $2 billion the Liberals are sitting on and holding. That could be spread to the companies that are going to be so negatively affected, especially if we go forward and implement this bill as is.In order to decrease the uncertainty out there, I was wondering if the NDP would be supporting our amendment, which my colleague from Durham read into the record. He said he agreed with my colleague from Durham. Because there is such a short period of time, we do not have the time to debate this as well as we could. Therefore, could he give us some certainty and let Canadians know if the NDP will be supporting our amendment, which would make this better by working together?C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryScottDuvallHamilton MountainScottDuvallHamilton Mountain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, unfortunately the cause of this legislation has to be placed right at the feet of the Liberal government. It appears that the American government, for over a year, has been pleading with the Canadian government to implement protections to ensure that foreign steel and aluminum is not dumped into Canada, that surges are addressed and that if foreign steel and aluminum enter Canada, they are not transshipped to the United States, undermining the competitiveness of their industry and ours in Canada. It has taken over a year for this legislation to come forward to address the concerns of our American cousins. Is the member not concerned about that delay? As well, why did that delay happen? This legislation should have happened well over a year ago. Why did it not?C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States relationsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesDumping of importsGovernment billsGovernment performanceInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryBobBratinaHamilton East—Stoney CreekBobBratinaHamilton East—Stoney Creek//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1340)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to engage in this debate.This debate is really a story of failed Liberal foreign policy. It is a story of failed Liberal trade policy. It is also a story about the abandonment of Canada's western manufacturers who depend on competitively priced steel and aluminum products.As with most Liberal ventures, there is always a backstory, a very ugly backstory. In an earlier question, I signalled what that story might be. It is a story of a government that thought it could bluff the Americans. It thought it could get away with not addressing the issue of steel and aluminum dumping, and the U.S. called its bluff. A year ago, the U.S. imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, its most trusted trading ally.When has that ever happened? Never. This is a Liberal government that cannot even get its relationship with the United States right. I can speak from experience. I am the former trade minister of Canada. Under our Conservative government, we were able to negotiate free trade agreements with 46 different countries around the world, the most successful trade policy ever implemented in this country. We left the Liberal government with a trade environment that was as good as it gets. There was not a relationship around the world that we had where we could not go to our counterpart, whether it was the U.S. trade representative or the trade minister for China or Chile or Peru, and resolve important issues, trade irritants between our countries.Now we have found ourselves in this situation for a whole year. Canada has faced punitive tariffs from the United States, because of the incompetence of the Liberal government. Let me explain.The present Liberal government thought it could bluff Donald Trump by saying, “I know you are concerned about the dumping of aluminum and steel products into Canada, for example from China, one of the worst offenders when it comes to dumping. I know you are worried about it, Mr. President, but we are going to do nothing about it.” Donald Trump said, “I am not someone who does nothing. I am going to do something about it. I am going to impose tariffs on you, Canada, one of our most trusted allies. I am going to do it under section 232, the national security provisions.” What an embarrassment that should be for the Liberal government, that this would happen under the Liberal watch. However, that is what happened. For a year, we had American tariffs on any exports that involved aluminum or steel. We can imagine how difficult that has been for our industries.I am going to speak a little about Abbotsford, my home community, where we have a number of very significant manufacturers that use steel and aluminum to create products for Canadians and for export to the United States and elsewhere around the world. These companies, small to medium-sized businesses, had been expanding.In fact, one company, Mayne Coatings, a favourite of mine, had chosen Abbotsford as the best place to invest, assuming that under a Liberal government the trade policy of this country would continue on, that it would be a healthy one, and that our relationship with the United States would continue to be healthy. They made those assumptions, quite falsely, of course. They assumed that would carry on, and they invested heavily in Abbotsford. In fact, they built a manufacturing facility worth $100 million in a small community of 150,000 people. They trusted the Liberal government, and what a mistake that was. No sooner had construction started on this building that Canada was slapped with aluminum and steel tariffs that have seriously undermined the business model for this company.(1345)I feel very sorry for Mayne Coatings and other industries and companies in Abbotsford that trusted the Liberal government. What a misplaced trust that was. Today we are seeing the tail end of that process. For a year, we suffered under those punitive tariffs, and now finally the Liberal government has woken up to the fact that the Americans expect Canada to address the illegal dumping of steel and aluminum in Canada and to address surges. The government is finally introducing Bill C-101, which addresses this issue, except it has a number of failings. We have introduced an amendment that highlights the fact that this legislation fails to take into consideration regional disparity. In other words, what happens in British Columbia, where I am from, is quite different from what happens in Ontario and Quebec, where steel and aluminum are produced. Shipping that aluminum and steel to the west coast does not make any financial sense, so those who manufacture products in my region of the country need to have different rules, which take into account the fact that they have to bring in their steel and aluminum from elsewhere because it is not competitive to do so from central and eastern Canada.Second, this legislation fails to add a geographic exemption for industries like Mayne Coatings from Abbotsford that are far beyond the reach of our own homegrown Canadian steel and aluminum producers.Third, this legislation fails to stipulate specific tariff and trade disruption relief for steel fabricators.The fourth one is the most important one, in my mind, because it is a breach of trust, a breaking of failed promises by the Prime Minister. A promise was made by the Liberal government that it was going to impose retaliatory tariffs on the Americans, which is great. They do it to us; we do it to them. We collect tariffs coming in. What did the Prime Minister promise? He promised that those tariffs would be used to offset the impact of American tariffs on our Canadian manufacturers.How much did the Liberal government collect? It collected $2 billion in tariffs. How much of that money has actually gone to the manufacturers across Canada that were impacted by the tariffs the Americans imposed upon us because we would not act on their concerns? How much of that money went to our manufacturers across Canada? Virtually zero. This is another broken promise on the part of the current Prime Minister. Members may remember that he made a ton of promises. He knew very well from the start, even before the last election, that many of those promises he could not keep. He made them anyway, because he just wanted to get elected. That is disgraceful. We see it playing out now here in Canada with our manufacturers who are suffering the consequences of it.Two billion dollars were supposed to be dispersed to support our small and medium-sized businesses across Canada, and larger ones, that were all being impacted by this failure of the Liberal government to take care of our bilateral relationship with the United States. The Liberals could not even deliver on that.I do not hold any ill will toward my Liberal colleagues across the way. They are not disputing the fact that $2 billion was collected by the Prime Minister, with the understanding that the money would be dispersed among Canadian companies to make sure they did not suffer as a result of the Donald Trump steel and aluminum tariffs. Guess what. It was a broken promise. Every single one of those MPs on the Liberal side is going to be held accountable for that in October. A reckoning is coming on October 21, and that reckoning is going to hold the Liberals to account for their false promises, such as their promises on balanced budgets, their promises on small deficits—Aluminum industryC-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCanada-United States relationsCustoms tariff and customs dutiesDumping of importsDuty remissionFreight transportationGovernment billsInternational tradeRegional diversitySecond readingSmall and medium-sized enterprisesSteel industryBobBratinaHamilton East—Stoney CreekAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1355)[English]Mr. Speaker, this whole catastrophe, starting with the section 232 tariffs that Donald Trump imposed on Canada under the auspices of national security concerns and all that entailed, the casualties along the way and the companies that went under because of these tariffs, all of that has to be laid at the feet of the current Liberal government and our virtue-signalling Prime Minister, who cannot keep simple promises.As members know, we are heading into election season, the silly season, and each one of these Liberals will be held to account. However, we can bet our boots the current Prime Minister is already—Some hon. members: Oh, oh!C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational tradeSecond readingAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1355)[English]Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have?AnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCustoms TariffInterventionHon. Ed Fast: (1355)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am thankful that you reminded my Liberal colleagues across the way that they should not be heckling something that is a serious matter. I think you, Mr. Speaker, will acknowledge that most of the noise is coming from over there, because they do not want to hear the truth. The Liberals moved forward with disastrous economic policies that are laying waste to many of our industries. Companies are going under, across Canada, because of tariffs that have been imposed by our largest trading partner.I started off by talking about Canada's foreign policy, and I said that the story of these tariffs is about a failed Liberal foreign policy and a failed Liberal trade policy. I mentioned the fact that The Conservatives left our trade relationships around the world in excellent shape. I could call any of my counterparts around the world and say that we have a trade irritant, a trade problem we need to resolve, and, invariably, we could get those issues resolved. Today, no matter where we look, it is a disaster. It is a wasteland of broken trade relationships and burned bridges.We talked about China earlier. Can the Prime Minister even pick up the phone and call the President of China to try to address the issue of the two Canadians who are held there? He cannot even get him on the phone. Our foreign affairs minister cannot get the Chinese on the phone.If we look at the Philippines, can the Prime Minister travel to the Philippines today, after sending it garbage and not taking it back on time? If we look at India, do members remember the disaster with the India relationship because our Prime Minister travelled there? We have no diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia at all. It is a wasteland of trade relationships.C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal ActCustoms tariff and customs dutiesGovernment billsInternational relationsInternational tradeSecond readingSteel industryAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersMember for Battle River—CrowfootInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1400)[English]Mr. Speaker, after six elections and close to 19 years in the House, it is time for me to leave. While this has been an extremely difficult decision, it is the right decision, as it will allow me to spend more time with my family, especially my new grandson, Kaden.My wife Darlene, my son Ryan and my daughter Kristen and her husband Matt have patiently and stoically stood by my side since November 2000, when I was first elected. For that and their unwavering support and love, saying “thank you” just would not be enough. I will, over the coming years, try my best to repay such a huge debt of gratitude and make up for lost time.I thank the people of Battle River—Crowfoot for the faith they placed in me to represent them. I tried my utmost to always respect and truthfully represent their views and concerns in Ottawa. I will miss all their letters, emails and phone calls and our in-person discussions and debates.I have made many friends during this time, especially in the campaigns. I thank Neil and Leona Thorogood and Bruce and Sylvia Dahl, who are just a few of the many lifelong friends we have made.Battle River—CrowfootMembers of ParliamentResignationStatements by MembersJoePeschisolidoSteveston—Richmond EastBryanMayCambridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersDon BarnardInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, 75 years ago, 14,000 Canadians were fighting on Juno Beach, supported by our navy and air force. By the end of D-Day, 359 had paid the ultimate sacrifice. By the end of the Normandy campaign, 5,000 Canadians had died fighting tyranny.Behind every name on the cenotaph there is a family, like the Barnard family of Toronto. Brothers Fred and Don joined the Queen's Own Rifles and they were part of the first wave to land at Juno Beach at Bernières-sur-Mer. As the landing craft approached, Fred hit Don on the shoulder and said “give 'em hell Don”. However, by the time Fred hit the beach, Don's war was over. Fred had to start D-Day witnessing the death of his brother. Two brothers and 75 years later, Fred, at 98, is the oldest living Queen's Own Rifle, veteran, and we still remember Don's sacrifice today.In Uxbridge, his regiment and community will be parading in front of Fred's house remembering. Canadians will never forget the service and sacrifice of our veterans like Fred and Don Barnard.Lest we forget.AnniversaryBattle of NormandyCanadian ForcesSecond World WarStatements by MembersRameshSanghaBrampton CentreJulieDzerowiczDavenport//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersStatus of WomenInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, “It increases my feminism” said the Prime Minister when he was recently asked about the decision he made to fire the former attorney general and the former president of the Treasury Board. Let me get this straight. When two strong, intelligent and principled women stand up and speak truth to power, firing them equals an increased commitment to feminism, correct? The Prime Minister has communicated loud and clear to the Canadian public that arrogance and self-righteousness are at the centre of his definition of feminism. In his so-called "feminist" world, women are to be exploited, women are to be silenced and women are to be treated as less than. A year ago, when a strong female reporter went public with accusations that the Prime Minister had groped her, did that also increase his feminism or was it simply that she just experienced things differently than he did? What is clear is this. The Prime Minister has no absolutely no real intent to increase his feminism. His sole interest is in serving himself. Women across Canada deserve better, and better will be delivered in October.Prime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersStatus of womenTrudeau, JustinSherryRomanadoLongueuil—Charles-LeMoyneGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgStatements by Members75th Anniversary of D-DayInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1410)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, 75 years ago on June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Régiment de la Chaudière, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Mathieu, landed on Juno Beach to fight the Nazi forces that had invaded France and Europe.The Régiment de la Chaudière helped liberate the beaches of Normandy, the city of Caen, the Carpiquet airport and many other areas where heavy fighting claimed many victims from our regiment.Dozens of men from the Régiment de la Chaudière died in the Normandy campaign and many others were wounded. However, one fact remains: these men are heroes. They are the heroes of the Régiment de la Chaudière.Today marks the 75th anniversary of a major military operation, the largest in history. In memory of all those Quebeckers who gave their lives in battle to protect our freedom, let us all be eternally grateful to those men and say, “Never again”. Aere Perennius.AnniversaryBattle of NormandyCanadian ForcesLanguage other than official languageLatinSecond World WarStatements by MembersAnitaVandenbeldOttawa West—NepeanSalmaZahidScarborough Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgStatements by Members75th Anniversary of D-DayInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, D-Day veteran Martin Maxwell, now 95 years old, made this profound and relevant statement in the days leading up to today:If these young men [killed at Normandy] could look at the world and what is happening, not only against the Jews—mosques are being attacked, churches are attacked—they would say: “What the hell have you done with the tomorrows we gave you?”Fourteen thousand Canadian soldiers landed on Juno Beach 75 years ago today. D-Day was the turning point in the fight from oppression, the fight for freedom, the fight for valuing human life, the fight for human dignity and the fight for democracy.Three hundred and fifty-nine of our fellow citizens gave their lives that day, believing their selfless sacrifice would lead to a better tomorrow and a better world. Today is the tomorrow that those who died have given us. Each and every one of us has a responsibility to honour their sacrifices by treating each other with kindness, to respect our differences and be united as a nation, just as they were on this day in June of 1944.AnniversaryBattle of NormandyCanadian ForcesSecond World WarStatements by MembersCherylHardcastleWindsor—TecumsehNathanielErskine-SmithBeaches—East York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question Period75th Anniversary of D-DayInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, on June 6, 1944, the operation to liberate France began, and today, we commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day. We acknowledge and will never forget the sacrifice that was made by these brave men and women who answered the call to duty without hesitancy to make sure that we had freedom and democracy today. In that spirit, Her Majesty's loyal opposition would like to offer the government an opportunity to inform this House and Canadians how we are commemorating this incredibly important day in Canada's history.AnniversaryBattle of NormandyCanadian ForcesOral questionsSecond World WarGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestBillBlairHon.Scarborough Southwest//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. minister for his gracious words.As we are approaching the election in the fall, many of us are in our communities talking to our constituents. One of the topics that continually comes up for me in Milton is the fact that Canadian families are worried about affordability. They worry about more taxes that they are seeing on their bottom line each and every day, and as a result, they are asking us questions. It makes sense to me that the accounting firm MNP indicates that Canadians are only $200 away from insolvency. Will the minister please acknowledge the pain that these families go through and stop the taxes?Oral questionsTaxationBillBlairHon.Scarborough SouthwestRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/54325LisaRaittHon.Lisa-RaittMiltonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/RaittLisa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionHon. Lisa Raitt (Milton, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, I do not believe Canadians actually agree with the government that it reduced tax liability. What Canadians are seeing is the loss of their ability to deal with their education and tuition costs through a tax credit. They have lost their transit tax credit. They have also lost their children's arts and fitness tax credit. These things are meaningful to Canadian families. As a result, Canadians are asking how many more taxes are coming. Would the government please give comfort to Canadian families, and assure them that it will not continually look to them for more taxes?Oral questionsTaxationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, since the Liberal government was elected, Canadian families have been paying $800 more a year. What with the carbon tax, which is driving up food and gas prices, and the elimination of the public transit tax credit and the children's sports and cultural activities tax credits, Canadians are sick and tired of paying for the Liberal government's mistakes.When will the government and the Prime Minister stop taking away Canadians' hard-earned money?Oral questionsTaxationRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaJean-YvesDuclosHon.Québec//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the facts are clear. Canadian families are paying $800 more every year; one in two Canadians is $200 or less away from insolvency; and 80% of Canadian families are paying more tax today because of the Liberals. Only a Liberal would think that wealth can be created by taxing people.Will this Prime Minister and his Liberal members stop taking Canadians' hard-earned money?Oral questionsTaxationJean-YvesDuclosHon.QuébecJean-YvesDuclosHon.Québec//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodGovernment PrioritiesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has no understanding and no respect for hard-working, middle-class Canadians. He thinks that small business owners are tax cheats. He thinks construction workers are a threat to our rural communities and he calls commuters who are driving to work polluters. He has made it more expensive to access public transit, to buy textbooks or to put kids in sports. To add insult to injury, these are the very same people who are going to be paying more for gas at the pump.Why is the Prime Minister making life so expensive for everyday, middle-class Canadians?Budget deficitOral questionsTaxationJean-YvesDuclosHon.QuébecFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—Champlain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodGovernment PrioritiesInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1430)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will tell members what the Prime Minister has no idea of and does not know anything about. That is the struggles that everyday middle-class Canadians are going through. He is more focused on self-promotion and increasing his so-called feminism than on the needs of hard-working families. He does absolutely nothing, while small business owners are dealing with the price of his carbon tax. Canadian families are falling further and further behind under the weight of the Prime Minister's failed economic policies, and they are asking for tax breaks. Does he know what? Conservatives are going to give Canadians those tax breaks. Why are the Liberals ignoring Canadians? Budget deficitOral questionsTaxationFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—ChamplainMaryNgHon.Markham—Thornhill//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1435)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, small business owners in Canada clearly remember two years ago when the Minister of Finance mounted an all-out assault against them. The Prime Minister sees small business owners as people who try to get out of paying their share of taxes. That may be the Prime Minister's approach, but that is not the approach of Canadian workers and it is certainly not the approach of small business owners.Will the government finally realize that small businesses are the backbone of our economy? We have to help them, not hinder them like the government has been for four years.Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88535GérardDeltellGérard-DeltellLouis-Saint-LaurentConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DeltellGérard_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodSmall BusinessInterventionMr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC): (1435)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind my colleague from Louis-Hébert that his leader, the Prime Minister, has said that he thinks small businesses are a way to avoid taxes. Perhaps that is what the Prime Minister and other people, like the Minister of Finance, believe, but it is not what real Canadian workers and entrepreneurs believe. Entrepreneurs mortgage their homes in order to create jobs and wealth. We, the Conservatives, stand up for Canadian workers and entrepreneurs.Does the government understand that by directly attacking wealth creators, it is attacking the Canadian economy?Corporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, middle-class families that are paying $800 more in income tax since the current government took office are asking what is next. The government is running out of other people's money and tries to take more. It tried to take away the disability tax credit from diabetics. It considered taxing health and dental benefits for middle-class families. It tried to raise tax on investment income for small businesses to 71%. Will the government tell us today that although it tried to bring in those tax increases, it will never reintroduce them again?Oral questionsTaxationJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25524PierrePoilievreHon.Pierre-PoilievreCarletonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PoilievrePierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTaxationInterventionHon. Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, the government that missed its deficit promises by $20 billion wants to extol its virtues and prowess in arithmetic. The member wins the award for irony today. I wish he would win the award for clarity. I asked him a very specific question, that he would rule out future tax increases on Canadian families, the ones the government tried to implement already. Will he not admit that the reason the Liberals will not rule those out is because the only way they can pay for their out-of-control spending is through massive tax increases—Oral questionsTaxationJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1440)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, it is clear today that, as with canola, the government has no plan to ensure that Canada will be able to continue to export pork to China. If nothing is done, there will be a national crisis.Canadian exports about $600 million worth of pork to China every year, including $300 million from Quebec, $170 million from Alberta, and $116 million from Manitoba.The Prime Minister is now saying that he plans to talk to the Chinese president at the G20. Does he realize that Canadian farmers and livestock producers are being held hostage in this political dispute? What is he waiting for? When will he intervene to help Canadian farmers and livestock producers?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsDanVandalSaint Boniface—Saint VitalMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1445)[Translation] Mr. Speaker, for the past five months, we have been asking the Prime Minister to talk to the Chinese president, but he has chosen not to. That is how the Liberal government operates.The Premier of Quebec said that China's plan to inspect every single shipment of pork is unacceptable. He thinks the Canadian government should be firm in its negotiations with China. The Liberal Prime Minister has not said a word yet. The problem is that the minister wants nothing to do with this. She is offloading the responsibility onto pork producers and telling them to be careful or suffer the consequences. It does not take a committee to make a call.Why are the Liberals leaving pork producers to fend for themselves?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, six months ago, China detained our citizens on trumped-up charges. Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor receive daily interrogations and are in prison with the lights on 24-7. In those six months, our exporters have faced trumped-up claims over the quality of our products, blocking our exports.It has been half a year of crisis, but only today did the Prime Minister say he is considering engaging directly with the Chinese leadership. He is only considering getting involved after six months.It has been five months since his hand-picked Liberal ambassador resigned in disgrace. Will the Prime Minister consider appointing a new one?AmbassadorsChinaInternational relationsOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72773ErinO'TooleHon.Erin-O-TooleDurhamConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/OTooleErin_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionHon. Erin O'Toole (Durham, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, let us summarize six months of Liberal failures on China. Our citizens are suffering; our exporters are suffering and the situation is deteriorating each week.After six months of no plan, today the Prime Minister said he is considering getting involved. He should consider getting serious about China. This diplomatic dispute will not be solved by tweets or by photo ops.Rather than posting tweets like “Canada is back”, how about Liberals get our Canadians back?Canadians in foreign countriesChinaImprisonment and prisonersInternational relationsOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, we learned today that Elections Canada will spend $650,000 to hire social media influencers. Canadians are growing weary of hearing the linked words of “influence” and “elections”. No one can claim to be free of opinions on the issues contained within each party's electoral platform, so how can Elections Canada ensure that these social media influencers have never had political opinions and do not have political opinions today?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKamalKheraBrampton WestKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35699PeterKentHon.Peter-KentThornhillConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/KentPeter_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodDemocratic InstitutionsInterventionHon. Peter Kent (Thornhill, CPC): (1450)[English]Mr. Speaker, Elections Canada is keeping secret the names of its social media influencers: musicians, celebrities, athletes and YouTube producers. These folk become influencers because they have strong opinions. How can Elections Canada ensure that these influencers have never expressed political opinions?The Chief Electoral Officer concedes that this unprecedented campaign is politically sensitive. Should Elections Canada not simply focus on administering a fair election?Electoral systemInternetOral questionsKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonKarinaGouldHon.Burlington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, yesterday was World Environment Day, and I thought the minister was going to tell us the truth by confirming that the Liberals' environment plan is not working.It is urgent that we take action, and we, the Conservatives, know and acknowledge this. The Liberals must take action and propose a real plan to meet the Paris targets. Why are they so intent on hiding the truth from Canadians?I would like the minister to listen to the question, which is very simple: when will her government tell the truth and clearly state that Canada will not meet the Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeKarinaGouldHon.BurlingtonSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal environment plan is in shambles. We see raw sewage in the St. Lawrence, million-dollar handouts to Loblaws and punishing carbon taxes.Now it is clear that the Liberals will not even meet their own Paris targets, because they do not have a climate plan. They have a tax plan. However, the minister refuses to admit that her plan has failed. She even told us her strategy: “If you repeat it, if you say it louder...people will totally believe it.”When will the minister admit her plan is totally not believable and will not meet the Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeSeanFraserCentral NovaSeanFraserCentral Nova//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1500)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General asked for additional funding to fulfill his mandate, but the Prime Minister refused his request. The Auditor General was therefore forced to abandon his audit of the government's performance on cybercrime and Arctic sovereignty. Once again, this Prime Minister does not care about anything that relates to security.Can the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness call his boss to order and bring him to his senses?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsSeanFraserCentral NovaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89130PatKellyPat-KellyCalgary Rocky RidgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KellyPat_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Pat Kelly (Calgary Rocky Ridge, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, we will not have an Auditor General's report to look into it and see if the government has done its job or not. For weeks, the President of the Treasury Board has said that they always consider funding requests from officers of Parliament—this while denying the Office of the Auditor General the money that it has repeatedly requested. The Auditor General needs another $10.8 million to do his job, including audits on cybersecurity and Arctic sovereignty. This is less than the money the government gave to Loblaws for refrigerators. Why is giving money to their friends more important than transparency and accountability?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has over $48 million of Canadian pension dollars invested in Hangzhou Hikvision and Zhejiang Dahua tech companies, which are two firms working closely with China's military. These companies are playing a significant role in China's internment of over one million minority Uighurs. These growing labour camps are euphemistically referred to as “vocational schools”, but the Uighurs in these camps can expect a starvation diet, torture, forced labour, beatings and worse. Will the government direct the board of the CPP to divest from these companies, yes or no?ChinaFreedom of conscience and religionIslam and MuslimsOral questionsUyghurRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodTelecommunicationsInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, time after time the Liberals have failed to address the lack of Internet connectivity for rural Canadians. Yesterday the Liberal government announced a spectrum clawback that may significantly affect Internet service for a huge number of rural customers. How many rural Canadians will be negatively impacted by the Liberal government's decision to claw back and repurpose the 3,500-megahertz spectrum band?Broadband Internet servicesOral questionsRural communitiesTelecommunications and telecommunications industryMaryNgHon.Markham—ThornhillNavdeepBainsHon.Mississauga—Malton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/31715DavidSweetDavid-SweetFlamborough—GlanbrookConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/SweetDavid_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodHuman RightsInterventionMr. David Sweet (Flamborough—Glanbrook, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, Irwin Cotler is a vocal defender of minorities around the world against tyrannical dictatorships. He has represented the likes of Nelson Mandela, Jacobo Timerman and Natan Sharansky. He serves several human rights organizations.On Monday, Mr. Cotler was interrupted and berated during a speech at Concordia University in an attempt by a protestor to shut him down. Will the government condemn this attack on the free speech of one of Canada's top human rights defenders?Civil and human rightsCotler, IrwinInternational relationsOral questionsParliamentariansBernadetteJordanHon.South Shore—St. MargaretsRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25522LarryMillerLarry-MillerBruce—Grey—Owen SoundConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/MillerLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersInterventionMr. Larry Miller: (1530)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I am kind of new to this place. It seems odd to me that so many ministers cannot be here for question period but can show up for the vote.Absence or presence of membersOral questionsPoints of orderGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBusiness of the HouseInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1535)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, given the uncertainty surrounding the agenda and future work of the House, can the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons tell us about the business of the House for the rest of this week and next week?Weekly Business StatementGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestBardishChaggerHon.Waterloo//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (1535)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to speak once more to Bill C-93, an act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabis.I will be splitting my time with the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London.As I said last week, this is a terrible bill. It reminds me of the NAFTA bill. However, sometimes a bill is better than no bill.As I have said many times in the House, I was never in favour of the legalization of marijuana, Bill C-45, which was another typically ill-conceived bill brought in by the Liberal government.I will support the Bill C-93 because there is a common-sense element to it.Although I did not support legalization, I am not naive enough to say that it was not right to look at the whole cannabis strategy in Canada. Let us face it, we are not the only ones. Many other countries have legalized or decriminalized marijuana. We only have to look at our closest and best trading partners, the good old U.S.A. The use of marijuana has been legalized and decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, the District of Columbia, Mariana Islands and Guam. Many of these jurisdictions are looking at or have commenced programs to get rid of the old cannabis-related charges for simple possession. There are several different programs being looked at. Some are similar to this bill, Bill C-93. Some are similar to what the NDP has been pushing, which is expungement. We have heard from many of my colleagues in the House about the injustices that have taken place with respect to Canadians who have records for simple possession of marijuana. Stories have been told about people being turned back at the U.S. border. However, in my research, I have found the same things are happening in the United States. I will provide two cases. We have heard this before with respect to our people, just not south of the border. I will not to give their names to protect their identity.A 70-year-old retired carpenter in the United States, who once ran for the Senate, was convicted back in 1968 for simple possession. His conviction caused him to be refused entry into Canada and he is unable to purchase a firearm in the United States.Another gentleman, a professional lighting technician, worked for Willy Nelson for a time. Because of a misdemeanour drug charge as a youth, he was unable to accompany the band on tour to Canada.Therefore, I strongly believe we need to remove the records for Canadians who were charged with simple possession of marijuana. Clearing people's records can remove barriers to employment and housing.Many groups in Canada have become victims because of the area they live in and the environment around them. Many are good people who made the wrong choice at the wrong time. That is why I support Bill C-93, although I feel the bill did not go far enough. It should have, and could have, looked at many minor Criminal Code offences, such as public mischief and wilful damage, offences we call misdemeanours in the Criminal Code. There is always room to fix things. Maybe sometime in the future Bill C-93 coanbe fixed.I spoke about this last week. In California, Code for America has brought out a program called “Clear My Record”. It is a computerized program that allows for the expedient removal of simple criminal code records, such as the simple possession of marijuana.(1540)From the list of states I mentioned previously, nearly every one has passed laws that allow people to clear or change their criminal records. Those states recognize the impact on the economy and on the lives of families when millions are shut out of the workforce or unable to fully reintegrate into their communities because of criminal records from their past. I was shocked to learn, in my research on Bill C-93, that one in three people had a criminal record in the United States.I also discovered that those states that had a cumbersome, overly complicated system of removing one's record failed in their goals. Only a small fraction of the tens of millions of eligible Americans benefited from these laws, which was directly related to being over-complicated, costly and took too much time to do.“Code for America”, a computerized system that was adopted by California, is a modern 21st century technology that is quick, efficient and benefits the recipients. “Clear my Record” is a free online tool that assists people in California to navigate the complicate process of clearing their records. People can fill out a short, easy to understand application online that typically takes 10 minutes to get connected to a legal authority.Jazmyn Latimer and Ben Golder, who co-developed the program, realized there was a problem when they looked into how many people were taking advantage of getting their records expunged. They found that less than 8% of the people who qualified accomplished it, simply because the system was opaque, hard to understand and navigate and costly, both for the people with the records and for the government. Does this sound like Bill C-93? It very much does. I made recommendations to Bill C-93 during committee that the Canadian Parole Board look at electronic means of modernizing the way we do business. We are still following 20th century technology, trying to do too much by hand. Why? I could not get an answer for that.The state of California, which has implemented the electronic process, has plans to try to clear over 250,000 cannabis-related convictions by 2020. That is probably as many as we have in Canada, and if not, a lot more. I hope it succeeds. As well, I hope our Parole Board looks at an electronic process for Canadians with all possession charges and to expand in the future to look at other minor Criminal Code offences. We owe it to Canadians to make this system simple and free so they can get rid of their records, live better lives and be less of a burden on society.Application processBordersC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsInformation technologyPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionUnited States of AmericaGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestSeanCaseyCharlottetown//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski: (1550)[English]Madam Speaker, the Conservatives' stand was that we were trying to run an efficient government, with a balanced budget. Sometimes, governments must take hard measures, realizing that certain expenses may have to be passed down to the public. It is obvious that not many people are receiving the benefits of our parole program and pardon system. We would be naive if we did not look at ways of modernizing it. Bill C-93 tries to do that. It should have gone further. It should have been more forceful in looking at electronic means to make it simpler, less costly and more efficient for the government.Application processBacklogsC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionFeesGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionSeanCaseyCharlottetownGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski: (1550)[English]Madam Speaker, I have mixed emotions. Expungement would be a quick and simple way of doing it. However, I was a police officer for 35 years. Many times when I charged an individual with possession for the purpose of trafficking, that charge got reduced. There may have been other charges. When that person went to court, the Crown and the defence lawyer would decide to plea bargain and, a lot of times, it went down to the simple possession charge. Therefore, I have a hard time with that.We need to have a way to clarify if the is the only thing relating to the charge of simple possession. I personally have dealt with hundreds of cases over the years, where I may have made the charge simple possession but it may have been a lot more serious. If the guy was polite and co-operative, I would give him the benefit of the doubt. The chiefs of police have brought that concern forward. I know that technically we could do it with the press of a button, but I do not know if that would be right. We need to really look in-depth at that aspect. We need some way of clarifying it. It is not as easy as a simple possession. In many cases, there are a lot of other things relating to that charge.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionExpungement of convictionsGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniKarenVecchioElgin—Middlesex—London//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): (1550)[English]Madam Speaker, I could just stand here and listen to the member for a few more minutes. There is so much to learn, because this debate does have so many different sides to it. We have people who have spent 35 years in the policing community, who have a voice in here. People who have had a criminal charge against them have a voice in here. There are so many different things that we need to look at, so I do respect the words that the member said. That is what makes a healthy debate in the House of Commons.I am proud to stand here and speak to Bill C-93, an act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabis. Although I am not 100% behind the bill, I do feel that it does what is best for Canadians.To begin, I am concerned about the cost to taxpayers. There are different ways of looking at this. In the previous Conservative government, the process was a user-pay system. This system was put in, and for many years in my experience as a constituency assistant, I would sit with people who had a criminal record and needed to get a record suspension.We would go through the list of what they needed to do, everything from going to the police station and to the courthouse and all of those different things that were necessary. In many cases, people were trying to get their criminal record suspended because they were looking for better opportunities, for better jobs, for things that would increase their livelihood. I fully respected that.For many people, although there are different ways of looking at this, what I found was that sometimes the user-pay system was very difficult. For those people who wanted to have a better life, I found it extremely difficult when I knew that they did not have the means, and all they wanted was to have a job. Sometimes this is a real difficulty.What is at the end of the day for taxpayers? The border security minister indicated that there could be up to 400,000 Canadians who have a criminal record for simple possession, but the government expects between 70,000 and 80,000 are eligible to apply. According to public safety, the cost would be approximately $2.5 million, equalling approximately 10,000 applicants.There are ways of doing this. I believe that when someone breaks the law, there needs to be some sort of penalty, but sometimes the penalties can live on forever if people do not have the opportunity to have their record suspended, because it is not going away. If people do not have the means to pay for that record suspension, they are going to continue to have that record.That is why I wish I could see that the government looked at a possible means test. The Liberals talk about means tests all the time, and about not helping the millionaires or the people who do not need it, so I do not know why they did not consider having means tests. Those people who cannot afford it could pay what they can—pay a small portion or pay for the court documents or the records or whatever it is they need. It could be very difficult, but instead we will have people who are making zero dollars and people who are making $500,000 all paying the same to make it universal. We know that this is an expensive program, so if we are looking it as a poverty reduction measure, let us make sure we are actually helping those in poverty by reducing the cost to them so that those people can have a better life.One of the discussions we had was whether it was necessary, the idea being that people would say getting a job was not a big deal and having a criminal record was okay. I lived during an economic downturn, and people who had lost their job at Ford in St. Thomas or lost their job at Sterling or a variety of other places were now looking to get a foot in another door. One of the things stopping them was their criminal record.Many people would say it is against human rights. If there is no reason to worry about that criminal record and it has nothing to do with their job, it should not matter to the employer whether they have a criminal record or not, but let us be honest: When a company is receiving 200 applications and notices there is a criminal record, it is very easy to put it into the “later” pile, because those are issues it does not want to deal with. Companies do not know that it may be a simple possession of marijuana, but it is a simple way of separating the good from the bad, even though the best employee may be lost in that later pile. Those are some of the things we have to understand. One of the key elements to this issue is poverty reduction. I believe giving every Canadian a chance to better themselves is extremely important, and now that we have legislation that allows for the possession of cannabis and the use of cannabis for people over the age of 18 in Canada, we need to be able to make sure that nothing is holding them back. Having this record suspension so that they can have better lives is key when it comes to a poverty reduction strategy, and it is one of the things that should be implemented for that strategy.(1555)Law enforcement seems to be somewhat supportive. It is off and on. However, as we just heard from the previous speaker, sometimes people had reduced charges. For instance, people trafficking on the streets or who had something else in their possession may have had a reduced charge. There may have been other petty crimes like that, but the possession of cannabis was seen and may have been the only charge laid. As the previous speaker said, it would be really nice if we could find out more, but what more do we need to do? At the end of the day, it would definitely slow down the process and would not make the process as expedient as people would wish. However, it is important, because sometimes people who have committed much greater crimes have only this possession conviction on their record. In some cases, it was the only offence for which a person could be found guilty, or it may have been a plea deal or a variety of things like that. Some Canadians, like the NDP, are asking for full expungement. However, I question full expungement because of those cases in which a person has been able to get the charges reduced to simple possession.There were several common sense amendments put forward by the Conservative Party that were defeated. Those who had fines and had never paid them would still be eligible for this program, which defeats the whole purpose of having a fine. This is one thing that I am really concerned with. If, let us say, a person has a fine from 20 years ago sitting on their record, it would also be expunged. However, if my mom had a fine, for example, she would be at the station paying it the very next day, because that is who she is. She is a very honourable person. There are some people who may forget, which is one thing, but there are people who just choose not to pay the fine, and they would have this service as well, so at the end of the day, was there any penalty? The answer would be no. I also think that the surcharge should be up to those individuals with unpaid fines and should not be laid upon the taxpayer. One thing I like is the amendment that would allow the swearing of an affidavit. Many times I have helped people who have tried to get their records. They have gone to the courthouses and police stations, but sometimes getting those records has been extremely difficult, so the opportunity to swear an affidavit is a very positive amendment. I congratulate all parties who supported it.Turning back to the legislation, a criminal record showing that charges were withdrawn or that there was an acquittal can have negative effects and can be an obstacle for people wanting to volunteer at their child's school. For years I volunteered at my children's schools in reading programs or on school trips, although not so much now that I am a member of Parliament. However, if a person has been charged with simple possession in the past—which, let us be honest, has happened to a lot of Canadians—that person is not allowed to volunteer at their child's school or for a school trip. If this was something that happened when they were 18 years old and now they are taking their 10-year-old on a school trip, it is just really out there. We have these screenings because children are vulnerable and we want to make sure that the children have the best opportunity to be with the best role models, but a simple possession charge does not make a person a horrific human being. It is so important that we allow those people to also be involved, whether it is volunteering at food banks, schools, or churches, or at many organizations where a person's criminal record must be clean. These are big concerns. This goes to the idea of where the NDP would go. What would happen if there was expungement? There are a lot of issues with that. People with a criminal record would be unable to work at a bank, at most government jobs, as insurance or real estate brokers, taxi drivers, police officers, or private investigators. They would be unable to work at restaurants where alcohol is served and, as I said, as volunteers. We have to give people opportunities, and sometimes it is as simple as giving them a second chance. Therefore, I am pleased to support the bill before us. As with any other piece of legislation, we will have to look at it and make sure that it is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. We have to make sure that it does what it is supposed to do for the people who are supposed to gain the ability to have their sentences removed. Let us do this while looking ahead and also looking behind to make sure that we have done it properly.AffidavitC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCostsCriminal record suspensionExpungement of convictionsFeesGovernment billsLabour forceOpportunity for All - Canada’s First Poverty Reduction StrategyPenaltiesPossession of a controlled substancePovertyThird reading and adoptionVolunteering and volunteersJimEglinskiYellowheadKarenMcCrimmonKanata—Carleton//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio: (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, I think part of it is making sure that those records are all compiled, because people have to go here, here and here. We need to make it user-friendly. That is one of the biggest things we have to lean towards, making it user-friendly.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionKarenMcCrimmonKanata—CarletonGordJohnsCourtenay—Alberni//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio: (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, I was fully supportive of Bill C-66 and the expungement. Being an ally of the LGBTQ+ community, I look at people and who they are. This is something I look at differently. When comparing cannabis to a person's sexual diversity, I find the issues to be very different.That being said, we need to make sure that we are actually focusing on people charged with simple possession. The thing is, I am concerned that we can come to an administrative barrier. Part of it is that I know the drug dealers on the street. I know there is a big issue happening here.Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Mrs. Karen Vecchio: I do not know them all by name.Part of the issue is that there are some bad people out there, and I do not want to just say, “Forget about it. It was a simple charge.” Some of those people have caused great angst for many families.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionExpungement of convictionsGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionGordJohnsCourtenay—AlberniPaulManlyNanaimo—Ladysmith//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88742KarenVecchioKaren-VecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/VecchioKaren_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMrs. Karen Vecchio: (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, I look at this and I am just not there yet with expungement. I need more facts to show that we are getting only the people who have had simple possession. I think that is where my breaking point is, simple possession versus trafficking. That is where the line is.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionPaulManlyNanaimo—LadysmithMichaelBarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1605)[English]Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my neighbour to the north, the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston.I rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-93. When I spoke to the bill previously, I expressed my concern that it has been rushed to meet the Prime Minister's self-imposed political timeline. We are going to miss real opportunities to get this right, and there was a lot of runway for the government to get this done.Municipalities are going to struggle with this. There will be real costs for them. We have heard from law enforcement professionals about the challenges that the hurried legislation will present for them. Health care professionals have also expressed concerns about the timetable that came with legalization. It is fair to describe it as half-baked indeed.The issues that come from a lack of due diligence are so much more than the downloading of responsibilities to municipalities. It furthers the inequalities people will face.There is also a risk, as my colleague said, that we will not be able to have full visibility on the criminal records of the folks who will receive these expedited pardons. Perhaps the amendments that were proposed ought to have been given better and proper consideration by the government in an effort to further the interests of justice in Canada.The last time I spoke to the bill, I described issues in a very clear way for the government to give it the opportunity to understand and consider the error of its ways. I did this using the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare”. I will not retell it, as I am sure government members were captivated by my first telling of it. However, the fact remains that through the government's failure to deliver, we find ourselves here.When the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety spoke on this issue, she conceded that due diligence had not been done. She said:However, not all of the fines are owed to the federal government. All the federal government can do is wipe its fines, but it has to discuss this with provinces and municipalities and encourage them to do the same. That kind of discussion is ongoing, but it will take a while to come to an understanding of how provinces and municipalities can actually contribute to this process.Further on she said:Mr. Speaker, I believe how it would work, at a provincial or municipal level, is that payment of those fines, if they are not granted amnesty on those fines, would be through civil recourse.It is pretty late in the game, as we are at quite an advanced stage, for those discussions to be ongoing or, more correctly, not happening.Concerns that have been expressed by stakeholders persist. We have heard what the risks are for municipalities. However, our law enforcement and public safety professionals continue to have inadequate tools for roadside testing and screening for impairment. That presents a grave challenge. Despite all of the time and education that has been invested in preventing and stopping alcohol-impaired driving, we continue to have issues. Authorities could run a ride check any time of day and they would find people who are impaired.It concerns me that while our law enforcement agents are out trying to do their jobs with this newly legalized substance, they do not have the tools and the tool kit to get the job done. The tool they have is error-plagued. Members may recall that the device police have been given is the same device on which folks test positive for opiate use after eating a poppyseed bagel.An hon. member: What?Mr. Michael Barrett: Madam Speaker, I share the shock and surprise of my colleague. It is unbelievable.(1610)The rush to get things done comes out of the government now realizing that it has run out of runway and it wants to have a few things on the achievement list after a pretty rough spring for Canada. The institution that we believe in, the independence of our judiciary, has been questioned. It has been weakened by the Liberal government's actions. We need to look no further than the SNC-Lavalin scandal. We need to look no further than the politically motivated prosecution and persecution of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman.Now that the Liberals are looking to get a few accomplishments in their brochures for the election, this bill is one that they want to get done. The Liberals have broken promises that they made in the last election. The democratic reform that they promised has not materialized. Certainly, it is quite the opposite. It is very concerning that the Liberals have Elections Canada now paying the better part of three-quarters of a million dollars to Instagram models and the like to influence the outcome of the election. It is preposterous. I cannot even believe that is part of the government's strategy. It clearly is not the work of a serious mind.So much of what the Liberals have failed to do risks the future for Canadians. Failing to balance the budget, as the Liberals promised, is a huge problem. Having been given a balanced budget in 2015, they plunged us into deficit after deficit after deficit. Here we are in year four with another deficit. These deficits today will be the taxes of tomorrow. It is very concerning for Canadians.We had a promise from the government that it was going to take real action on the environment. Hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage are being dumped into the St. Lawrence without consequence. It is not a concern for the Liberals.In the absence of a plan to help the environment, the Liberals put a tax on everything. They put a tax on driving one's kids to hockey and a tax to run a small business, those same small businesses that the Liberal government alleged to be tax cheats.Conservatives know that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They are the real economic driver. We have often heard the government say that it created one million jobs. It is not the government's responsibility to create jobs. It needs to create an environment where jobs can be created. Canadians create jobs.The Liberals will not accept responsibility for failures but they are quick to take credit for other people's successes. Certainly they are quick to take credit on the backs of ordinary Canadians and small business owners, just as they are quick to bring in taxes to pay for their reckless spending.It is a hurried process that we have arrived at with Bill C-93, but it matches very much the chaotic nature of the government. We will monitor the implementation of this bill. We commit to reviewing its effectiveness and fairness. When we form government, we will see if any changes need to be made to ensure the reasonableness and fairness of it are applied.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCities and townsCriminal record suspensionFederal-provincial-territorial relationsGovernment billsPenaltiesPossession of a controlled substanceSobriety testSplitting speaking timeThird reading and adoptionKarenVecchioElgin—Middlesex—LondonAlainaLockhartFundy Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, I find it interesting that the parliamentary secretary would say there has not been an increase in impaired driving cases. The Liberals have not even given the police the tools necessary to detect if impaired driving has occurred. The equipment that they approved is not even ready to use. It is pretty rich for the Liberals to say that the implementation has been without error. In fact, I think the chaos that the Conservatives predicted has arrived.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsImpaired drivingPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionAlainaLockhartFundy RoyalWayneStetskiKootenay—Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, I have had the pleasure of visiting the riding of Kootenay—Columbia and it is, indeed, quite wonderful, although I did not visit any cannabis-growing farms. Bill C-93, in its current form, is flawed. The amendments proposed at committee by industry in response to recommendations by industry experts would have served this piece of legislation well. With a view to fairly implementing the new legislation in what should have been lockstep with the legalization of marijuana, the Conservatives are going to support this piece of legislation, but, as I said before, like so many other pieces of legislation that the Liberals implemented, we will fix it and clean up the mess.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionWayneStetskiKootenay—ColumbiaScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Scott Reid (Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, CPC): (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, there was a discussion by a Liberal member about my party being afraid of the consequences of cannabis legalization. There was an implication that a Conservative government would want to recriminalize or put penalties in place for the use of cannabis in the future, and I thought that was an unfortunate implication. I want to give my colleague the opportunity to make it clear what the Conservative Party position is with regard to the legal status of cannabis under a Conservative government after the next election.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionMichaelBarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesMichaelBarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Michael Barrett: (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, I thank my neighbour to the north in Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston for the opportunity to say that of course, a Conservative government would make no effort to recriminalize cannabis. C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionScottReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Scott Reid (Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, CPC): (1620)[English]Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague to the south, who has been representing very ably the riding that was, until very recently and for a long time, represented by my dear friend and colleague Gord Brown. Those were big shoes to fill. I know I am expressing a view that is shared by many in his constituency when I say that my colleague is doing a very admirable job, and my hat is off to him for that.This is my second opportunity to address Bill C-93 and my third to address the issue of pardons for the formerly criminal act of simple possession of cannabis. I was also able to address the private member's bill, Bill C-415, which was moved in the name of our colleague from Victoria. I want to focus my remarks primarily on the contrast between the expungement model in Bill C-415 and the record suspension or pardon model in Bill C-93. Looking at this bill and the comments raised in committee persuades me of the truth of a remark that was made in committee by a criminal defence lawyer, Solomon Friedman, who said:I should first note that Bill C-93 is better than nothing. But better than nothing is a mighty low bar for our Parliament. You can do better. You must do better. Instead, I would urge a scheme of expungement along the lines already provided for in the Expungement of Historically Unjust Convictions Act.That act was, of course, passed by this Parliament at the instigation of the current government, which revealed that expungement is, at least in principle, possible for the former offence of simple possession of cannabis.Better than nothing turns out to be the equivalent, in practice, of very little at all. Parole Board officials testifying before the committee studying this bill estimated that out of the 250,000 to 500,000 Canadians with convictions for cannabis possession, only 10,000 would apply for a record suspension or expedited pardon. I will make two comments. First, I am not sure how much precision or accuracy we can expect in the prediction of 10,000 from people who said that the number of records out there is somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. That is a substantial margin of error. Additionally, if it is 10,000, why so few? The answer, in part, is the incredibly bureaucratic nature of the process under Bill C-93. When looking at Bill C-93, one gets the impression that the government looked at all available options for dealing with this issue and selected the most bureaucratic one it could find. Let me quote from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, a supporter of this bill, and my point will be made. In promotion of the bill, she said:[W]hy not just do it like some California municipalities and erase all the records with the press of a button? We do have an electronic police database of criminal records here in Canada, however, that database does not contain enough information to allow for a proactive amnesty....[The] Parole Board should explore options for moving towards a more digitized system capable of receiving applications electronically, something particularly important for Canadians in rural areas.That system would be in the future, not under this bill. That is a reference to the problems of getting access to broadband Internet in rural areas. The parliamentary secretary then said:In the meantime, the Parole Board is taking a number of steps to simplify the application process in other ways. It is simplifying its website and application form. It is creating a dedicated, toll-free phone number and an email address to help people with their applications.In other words, none of this stuff is available, and it will take some time before that happens. She continued: It is developing a community outreach strategy with a particular focus on the communities most [likely to be] affected by the criminalization of cannabis to make sure that people know about this new expedited process and how to access it...We will need an advertising campaign. This is going to be slow and complicated. By contrast, what would have happened under an expungement system? Expungement is nothing the government ever considered. Indeed, it seems not to have even thought of this possibility. Under expungement, we would simply say that the government would act as if any record that stated that a person had been convicted for possession of cannabis did not actually exist. If we found it, we simply would say there was nothing there.(1625)This is done by the courts all the time. Any correspondence between lawyers done on a without prejudice basis, whether or not the words “without prejudice” are put at the front of the various pieces of correspondence, is automatically disregarded by a court. They have no ability to present it as evidence in a proceeding.Similarly, we could do the same thing with records. This would overcome the problem of having different records kept in different ways, some on paper and some electronically, in different jurisdictions. They would simply have no existence in law. Because it is such a common conviction, when one was accessed, we would understand that it simply did not exist for the purpose of being used by any law enforcement official. That is how we could introduce expungement. This would eliminate all the bureaucracy, all the application fees that are necessary, which would still exist under this proposal, all the time, all the work and all the money that would have to be expended. There is a cost estimate, which I find hard to believe, attached to this bill. There would be zero cost with an expungement system.In all fairness, the bill is better now than it was before it went to committee and came back with amendments. This is thanks, in part, to an amendment proposed by the member for Toronto—Danforth. I will again read from the parliamentary secretary's words to give members an idea of what was done. She stated:thanks to an amendment at committee from the member for Toronto—Danforth, people will be able to apply [for a pardon] even if they have outstanding fines associated with their cannabis possession conviction. Due to an amendment we voted on at report stage...people whose only sentence was a fine will not be required to submit court documents as part of their application.Finding these court documents was part of the supposedly costless, expedited process until this amendment was made.On the other hand, a further suggested amendment, put forward by the Conservatives, was accepted at committee and then subsequently rejected by the government. I will quote from our Conservative critic on this issue, who stated, “We proposed a measure to allow applicants whose records were destroyed to swear an affidavit explaining their situation and certifying that they are eligible”, which of course creates some paperwork but is less complicated than what we are left with. He went on to say, “This would have made the process even more fair. The Liberals agreed to this amendment in committee but changed their minds at report stage and decided to reject it.”That would have helped relieve some of the bureaucracy. There are certain costs that continue to exist, and this prompted one person to quip, I think very appropriately, that the bill should not have been entitled an act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabis, but rather, an act to provide for lower-cost, somewhat expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabis.In the remaining minute and a half of my time, I want to deal with another important issue. Getting a pardon essentially equals getting forgiveness. People have done something wrong, we forgive them, and we move on. Expungement is a way of saying that what they did was not wrong in the first place. There are some offences for which this might not be true, even if we eliminated them retrospectively. I think, in the case of cannabis possession, it is clear that our ancestors, those who came before us, did not make it legal because they felt it was morally wrong to ingest or use marijuana. They thought it was the best way to protect people from their own unwise instincts. It was a wrong move. It did not work. It ruined a lot of lives, but those people were not put in prison because they had done something that was evil or wrong or would harm the rest of society. Therefore, removing this is entirely appropriate. We need not save expungement, as the government has proposed, only for the righting of historical wrongs based on laws that are now prohibited under the charter. I suggest that, in this case, it is also appropriate, and I urge all of us to consider, as we look forward to the future, the expungement model, perhaps in a second piece of legislation in the 43rd Parliament.AffidavitApplication processC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionExpungement of convictionsFeesGovernment billsInformation disseminationInformation technologyPenaltiesPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionMichaelBarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesMatthewDubéBeloeil—Chambly//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Scott Reid: (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, first of all, I thought the amendment was a good one. The decision to remove it I will not say was unwise, but I think it was inexplicable. I really do not know the reason for removing it.My colleague is entirely right that it is harder for people in some parts of the country to get access to these kinds of records. It is harder for people who do not have ready access to a lawyer or the ability to pay for a lawyer or the services of a lawyer's office to hunt through court records. Citizens are not easily able to do this on their own.The same people who were victimized too much initially, those who are poorer, those who are suffering from mental illness, those who are less able to manoeuver their way through the byzantine legal system, will have the same problem at this level. I think we will discover that the same groups that faced too many arrests and convictions will face too small an ability to right these wrongs, relative to the population as a whole.AffidavitC-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionFeesGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionMatthewDubéBeloeil—ChamblyKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Scott Reid: (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, I can only speak for my own position. I am in favour of the bill. It is better than nothing, but it is not much better than nothing, in my opinion.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionKevinLamoureuxWinnipeg NorthColinCarrieOshawa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25486ColinCarrieColin-CarrieOshawaConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/CarrieColin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC): (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, I hold my colleague in great esteem, and I appreciated his speech.One of the questions I am hearing is, “What is the cost going to be for this?” More importantly, many of these convictions were plea bargained. In other words, a more serious offence was pleaded down, and now these people may have these options available to them, as well as the people who have convictions for simple possession.Could the member comment on that issue? The government really has to look at this carefully, because no prosecutor would have accepted a plea bargain knowing that it was going to be washed away in the future.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionScottReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonScottReidLanark—Frontenac—Kingston//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1827ScottReidScott-ReidLanark—Frontenac—KingstonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ReidScott_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersCriminal Records ActInterventionMr. Scott Reid: (1635)[English]Madam Speaker, this is an issue on which I disagree with many colleagues in my own party. Some people, no doubt, were convicted because it was part of a plea bargain; others were not. I do not know the percentage. I suspect the majority who faced simple possession charges and were convicted did not plea bargain.Blackstone, the great author and authority on the common law, said in the 18th century that it was better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be hanged. Everybody knows this saying. The same principle ought to apply here. It is better that some people be able to get a pardon even though their conviction was the result of a plea bargain, than the alternative, namely that others who had simple possession charges be unable to get a pardon.C-93, An Act to provide no-cost, expedited record suspensions for simple possession of cannabisCannabisCriminal record suspensionGovernment billsPossession of a controlled substanceThird reading and adoptionColinCarrieOshawaCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessCanadian Environmental Bill of RightsInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1740)[Translation]Madam Speaker, there are two people I want to thank. First, I want to thank the Leader of the Government for her apology. I understand very well that things can move quickly in such an intense period. I accept her apology, although it was not necessary. I want to thank her.Next I want to thank my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment, who spoke before me. I asked him some questions earlier, but unfortunately I found his replies unsatisfactory. It is important to acknowledge the situation in order to take action. The Liberals have not wanted to tell Canadians the truth regarding the Paris targets, which Canada will not meet under the Liberals' current plan.I rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-438, an act to enact the Canadian environmental bill of rights and to make related amendments to other acts. First reading of this bill was on April 5, 2019, and I am pleased to contribute to this debate.I thank my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona for being so passionate about the environment. I was sad to learn that I will not have the opportunity to work with this wonderful, passionate, sensitive and kind woman during the next Parliament, if the people of Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier put their trust in me, of course. Dear colleague, I truly appreciated working on this with you. I am a bit emotional because there are some colleagues, regardless of political stripe or beliefs, who are extraordinary people. I wanted to say that publicly.C-438, An Act to enact the Canadian Environmental Bill of Rights and to make related amendments to other ActsEnvironmental lawEnvironmental protectionPrivate Members' BillsSecond readingBardishChaggerHon.WaterlooCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessCanadian Environmental Bill of RightsInterventionMr. Joël Godin: (1740)[Translation]Madam Speaker, I would like to tell my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona that I truly appreciate her and that I will miss her. She has been here for many years. She was elected in 2008, re-elected in 2011 and again in 2015. She is unfortunately leaving us at the end of this term. She is the NDP's critic for international development and the deputy critic for the environment.I had the opportunity to work with her on the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, and in writing my speech I learned that she had a lot of experience and knowledge about the exciting world of the environment. I am unfortunately discovering this now, but I did notice it when we worked together on the committee.I want to give an overview of her career. She worked for the Environmental Law Centre in Edmonton, she was an international law consultant, she was chief of enforcement at Environment Canada and she was the assistant deputy minister for renewable resources for the Yukon government. She clearly knows her stuff. Hats off to her, once again. I want to express my heartfelt congratulations and love for her.With respect to the bill, my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona recently wrote to us about it. She explained that the bill would enshrine the right of all Canadians to a healthy, ecologically balanced environment. She added that, some years ago, Canada accepted the principle endorsed by the World Commission on Environment and Development that all human beings have the fundamental right to an environment adequate for their health and well-being. This principle is reiterated in many environmental conventions and agreements signed and ratified by Canada.It is important to mention this because I support this principle. In fact, I support this principle as a Conservative member. That is not all. I am also wearing a Blue Dot lapel pin, which I was given on Monday night when I participated in an activity with my colleague and the chair of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. Three members from three different political parties attended this event hosted by the David Suzuki Foundation. Last fall, Blue Dot asked me to sign a pledge. When they invited me to speak on Monday evening, I was obviously pleased to do so and to say that the Conservatives believe in the environment and will take the necessary steps to meet the Paris targets. Here is the pledge that I signed and proudly hung up in my office: The Pledge for Environmental Rights responds to the growing movement in Canada and around the world for legal recognition of the human right to a healthy environment.Environmental rights are based on the simple yet powerful belief that everyone has the right to clean air and water. It is one of the fastest-growing fields of human rights internationally. More than 150 countries now recognize the legal right to a healthy environment, but not Canada.More than 170 Canadian municipalities have passed resolutions recognizing their citizens' right to a healthy environment, and 9 out of 10 Canadians agree that Canada should recognize environmental rights in law.I hereby pledge that, as a Member of Parliament, I will support the recognition in law of the right to a healthy environment for all people in Canada.Members from other parties have also signed this pledge.Bill C-438 features a number of poorly designed provisions that could very well put a lot of stakeholders in a tough spot. Not to mention that financial adjustments would have to be made. The legislative process will give us the opportunity to fine-tune the bill so that it can pass. However, with the current Parliament coming to an end, I have some doubt as to whether we will be able to get it across the finish line before then; my colleague has certainly been through this before.That said, I would like her to know that I am committed to doing what needs to be done to effectively represent Canadians and to ensure that appropriate measures are taken to protect the environment.(1745)I understand why the NDP has concerns about the government and cares so much about the environment.In 2015, when the Liberals were campaigning, they promised to be thorough and respectful, to bring in measures to protect the environment, and to do everything in their power to reduce their carbon footprint.In 2019, nearly four years later, they have little to show for it. They did take one tangible action when they invested $4.5 billion in an existing pipeline that belonged to Americans. That money went to the country of Uncle Sam. It was supposed to help move another pipeline project forward, but nothing is working. We are not making any progress. What was the point of investing $4.5 billion in an existing pipeline?If I were the government, I would have invested $4.5 billion in innovative projects on green technologies. What I am saying is that the government should have invested that $4.5 billion in reducing our footprint and doing research and development. Many businesses that appeared before the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development showed that they had the technology to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Furthermore, the Liberal government added a tax. It is using the environment as an excuse to take more money out of the pockets of Canadians. History has already proven in Quebec and British Columbia that this does not work.This is not a carbon tax or an environmental tax. It is a tax to try to recover some of the money they spent so recklessly. The Liberals are not telling the truth about the environment. As I said earlier, they refuse to admit that they will not be able to meet the Paris targets. If they cannot even admit that, they cannot bring in a plan to fix the situation.As far as we are concerned, unfortunately, this is a governance problem on the part of the Liberal government. That said, fortunately for Canadians, it will last only a few more months, until the election on October 21.There is so much more I would like to say, but I must wind up. I want to assure all Canadians and the people of Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, as well as my colleague who is leaving us, that I will be here to take all the necessary steps to protect our environment for us, for our children and for our grandchildren.C-438, An Act to enact the Canadian Environmental Bill of Rights and to make related amendments to other ActsCarbon pricingCarbon taxClimate change and global warmingEnvironmental lawEnvironmental protectionNationalizationOil and gasPipeline transportationPrivate Members' BillsSecond readingTrans Mountain pipelineCarolHughesAlgoma—Manitoulin—KapuskasingMurrayRankinVictoria//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/94305GlenMotzGlen-MotzMedicine Hat—Cardston—WarnerConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MotzGlen_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersPublic SafetyInterventionMr. Glen Motz (Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, CPC): (1405)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals continue to mismanage the public safety of our country. Now they are considering a firearm ban in an attempt to deal with gangs and gun violence. This plan will also fail as it threatens licensed, law-abiding Canadian firearm owners and ignores the obvious problem: criminals.News flash: criminals already ignore the law. As gang violence increased, Liberals failed to deliver funding to the police to combat it. As rural crime increased, Liberals turned their backs on rural Canada. Their border security mismanagement has led to dangerous foreign criminals entering our country. What is worse, the Liberals are watering down sentences for some violent crimes. The first step to address any problem is admitting that there is one. Right now, many Canadians understand that Liberals are actually the problem.The Conservatives have a plan to tackle crime by focusing on criminals and gang violence. It is time to replace Liberal failures with Conservative action.Criminal gangs and gangstersFirearmsStatements by MembersVanceBadaweyNiagara CentreGudieHutchingsLong Range Mountains//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgStatements by Members75th Anniversary of D-DayInterventionMr. John Nater (Perth—Wellington, CPC): (1410)[English]Mr. Speaker, June 6 marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the Normandy invasions. Fourteen thousand Canadians landed at the beaches of Normandy that morning, and by day's end 359 had fallen. In the coming weeks, 5,000 more would die. We, as Canadians, owe a debt of gratitude to the heroes of D-Day that we will never be able to fully repay. Among those heroes was a young man named Art Boon. At age 19, Art had already been in the war effort for four years, having enlisted at just 15 years of age. He would go on to participate in the liberation of Holland and would serve his country in uniform for decades to follow. Today, Art Boon is back in Europe. Where he arrived 75 years ago to liberate a continent, he returns once more as a hero. History must never forget the heroes of D-Day. Today and always, we honour those who have served and those who made the ultimate sacrifice. We will remember them. AnniversaryBattle of NormandyStatements by MembersTerryDuguidWinnipeg SouthGordieHoggSouth Surrey—White Rock//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59156KellyBlockKelly-BlockCarlton Trail—Eagle CreekConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BlockKelly_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersStatus of WomenInterventionMrs. Kelly Block (Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, CPC): (1415)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is masquerading as a feminist, willing to tear down any woman who opposes him. As the member for Whitby said when she ran afoul of him, “He was yelling that I didn't appreciate him, that he'd given me so much”.Earlier this week, the Prime Minister stated that the history of women's rights shows that every step forward is met by another push back, but it is his divisive actions and words that have pushed back progress for all women. It is one thing to describe oneself as a feminist and claim to value gender equality, but quite another to walk the talk, just ask the former attorney general and the former president of the Treasury Board. If a woman disagrees with the Prime Minister, she can forget about civil discourse. He will undermine and then dismiss her. Canadian women are not being fooled by his virtue signalling. This Prime Minister is not as advertised. Prime MinisterReferences to membersStatements by MembersStatus of womenTrudeau, JustinMarcMillerVille-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-SoeursAnitaVandenbeldOttawa West—Nepean//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88404AlupaClarkeAlupa-ClarkeBeauport—LimoilouConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ClarkeAlupa_CPC.jpgStatements by Members2019 General ElectionInterventionMr. Alupa Clarke (Beauport—Limoilou, CPC): (1415)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, this Liberal government is more centralist, paternalistic and, quite simply, arrogant than any other Liberal government in the history of our federation.For the past four years, the government has repeatedly shown that it is out of touch with the spirit of federalism. It refuses to honour the tradition of appointing a political lieutenant for Quebec and instead made a minister from Toronto responsible for the economic development of our province. It is imposing political conditions on federal transfers. It refuses to give Quebec greater powers in the area of immigration. It refuses to respond favourably to the National Assembly's request for a single tax return, something all Quebeckers want. I could go on and on. Following in the footsteps of founding fathers Cartier and MacDonald, we the Conservatives will continue to properly honour federalism. In 2008, we recognized that Quebeckers form a nation within a united Canada.In 2019, when we form the government, we will respond favourably to the demands of Quebeckers and Quebec.Federal-provincial-territorial relationsProvince of QuebecQuébécois nationStatements by MembersEmmanuelDubourgBourassaDanRuimyPitt Meadows—Maple Ridge//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/102275MichaelBarrettMichael-BarrettLeeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau LakesConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarrettMichael_CPC.jpgStatements by MembersThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Michael Barrett (Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, CPC): (1420)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's sunny climate plan was supposed to save the environment and boost the economy. Well, it did neither. In reality, all it did was punish Canadians for getting groceries, driving the kids to hockey or even running small businesses. In reality, the carbon tax is a money grab. The Prime Minister has to pay for his consecutive deficits and reckless spending, so he is making hard-working Canadians pay for it under the guise of a climate plan. If the Prime Minister really cared about the environment, he would not be exempting Canada's largest emitters from the carbon tax and he certainly would not be spending more time flying to his vacations than most Canadians have actually spent on a vacation in the last five years.The Liberal government is nowhere near meeting its climate goals and now we are at the point where the United States is closer to reaching its targets than Canada. The sunny ways are over and we are left with a money-grabbing carbon tax. The Liberals' climate plan is not as advertised.Carbon pricingCarbon taxConsumer priceStatements by MembersJennyKwanVancouver EastRandyBoissonnaultEdmonton Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's failures when it comes to dealing with the Government of China are escalating, and his gross mismanagement of our relationship with China will now hurt even more Canadians. This time, Canadian meat producers are being punished, after China's customs agency announced that it is going to dramatically increase inspections and open all containers of Canadian meat and meat products.Does the Prime Minister not realize that Canadian producers are suffering as a result of his failures? What is he prepared to do about this?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1425)[English]As if it is the producers' fault, Mr. Speaker. That is absolutely incorrect.Five months ago, former Liberal cabinet minister John McCallum had to resign in shame as our ambassador to China. We are now in June and the Prime Minister has not appointed a replacement. Canadians are being detained on bogus charges, soybean producers are facing new barriers, canola producers are having shipments blocked, and now the Chinese government is going after our meat producers. This is going from bad to worse.Why has the Prime Minister not appointed an ambassador to China? AmbassadorsChinaInternational relationsOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-Cartierville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59110CandiceBergenHon.Candice-BergenPortage—LisgarConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BergenCandice_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForeign AffairsInterventionHon. Candice Bergen (Portage—Lisgar, CPC): (1425)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is not working. This relationship and the impact are getting worse. The Prime Minister's failure when it comes to the Chinese government is causing real pain and real suffering for Canadians. He has failed to appoint a new ambassador. He is refusing to pick up the phone and call the Chinese premier. Canadian lives are at risk and agriculture producers are suffering. When will the Prime Minister finally start treating this crisis with the seriousness, urgency and attention it requires? AmbassadorsChinaInternational relationsOral questionsMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-CartiervilleMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-Cartierville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are all talk and no action when it comes to the China crisis, which keeps getting worse. The Chinese government is now targeting the pork industry. Two factories had their permits suspended, and each container of Canadian pork is now being heavily scrutinized by the Chinese government.What are the Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture doing to protect our market access? They are doing absolutely nothing.When will the Prime Minister finally stand up for our ranchers and farmers?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-CartiervilleMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88541LucBertholdLuc-BertholdMégantic—L'ÉrableConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BertholdLuc_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInternational TradeInterventionMr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC): (1425)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, the canola crisis is not about quality. There is no issue with the quality of Canadian pork and yet the Liberal government stubbornly refuses to deal with this crisis politically. As the director of the China Institute of the University of Alberta clearly said, “I think it is veiled political retaliation”.Why is the Minister of Agriculture hiding behind a delegation of experts that is incapable of going to China, and so-called administrative errors?Why is the Prime Minister refusing to appoint an ambassador and file a complaint with the WTO?ChinaFarming and farmersInternational tradeOral questionsGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—Stanstead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1435)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, yesterday, all parties at the National Assembly of Quebec spoke out against the paternalistic and centralist approach of this Liberal government. All parties of the Government of Quebec condemned the fact that this government wants to try to bypass the government to allocate funding to the municipalities. That is unacceptable. This law has been on the books since 1867.Why are the Prime Minister and the Liberal government so disrespectful—Cities and townsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsProvince of QuebecTransportation infrastructurePabloRodriguezHon.Honoré-MercierGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88600AlainRayesAlain-RayesRichmond—ArthabaskaConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RayesAlain_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodIntergovernmental RelationsInterventionMr. Alain Rayes (Richmond—Arthabaska, CPC): (1435)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I am not making this up. His Prime Minister told the Federation of Canadian Municipalities last Friday that he was prepared to bypass the provinces to get his way. Act M-30 makes it clear that any agreement regarding municipal infrastructure must go through the Government of Quebec. This Prime Minister has no respect for provincial jurisdiction. He is a centralizing and paternalistic Prime Minister.Does the minister agree with his Prime Minister about bypassing the Government of Quebec, yes or no?Cities and townsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsOral questionsProvince of QuebecTransportation infrastructureFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—ChamplainFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—Champlain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInterprovincial TradeInterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, Canadians are sick and tired of the protectionism within their own country and the Liberal government's failure to do anything about it. We are one country from sea to sea to sea, and Canadians should be able to buy and sell goods between provinces.In the Prime Minister's free trade plan, half the agreement is 130 pages of exceptions. It is time for action, not more Liberal failures.Premiers are stepping up for genuine interprovincial trade. When will the Prime Minister do the same?Canadian Free Trade AgreementInterprovincial tradeOral questionsTrade agreementsFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—ChamplainFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—Champlain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/86261JohnBarlowJohn-BarlowFoothillsConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BarlowJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodInterprovincial TradeInterventionMr. John Barlow (Foothills, CPC): (1435)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has failed miserably when it comes to free trade between provinces. In fact, he has fought against it in court. Half the Liberals' Canada free trade agreement is a list of exemptions for things that cannot be traded. This is not free trade. In fact, much like the Prime Minister, his no-trade agreement is not as advertised.Interprovincial trade barriers are costing the Canadian economy $130 billion. When will the Prime Minister get out of the way and allow free trade between provinces?Canadian Free Trade AgreementInterprovincial tradeOral questionsTrade agreementsFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—ChamplainFrançois-PhilippeChampagneHon.Saint-Maurice—Champlain//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88770JamieSchmaleJamie-SchmaleHaliburton—Kawartha Lakes—BrockConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/SchmaleJamie_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Jamie Schmale (Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Kawarthas lost 300 jobs when the Liberals killed the west to east pipeline. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in Alberta and across the country because of Liberal indecision and a lack of planning on TMX.Conservatives have a plan. We will work up front with the provinces and indigenous communities on an energy corridor, a plan that will lower assessment costs, improve certainty for investors and create jobs.When will the Prime Minister quit attacking the energy sector and allow job-creating projects to move forward?Job creationOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89198ShannonStubbsShannon-StubbsLakelandConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StubbsShannon_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMrs. Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, CPC): (1440)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberals already killed two pipelines outright, and zero new ones are in service. Getting the Trans Mountain expansion built will lower sky-high gas prices in B.C. and get western and Atlantic Canadians back to work. It will create thousands of jobs outside of Alberta and benefit all of Canada. It will support the 100,000 jobs in Ontario and Quebec that depend on oil and gas.The Liberals already approved it once in 2016, and their mistakes have held it up. The majority of Canadians and indigenous communities want the Trans Mountain expansion. This time, what exactly is the plan for construction to start on June 19, and when will it be in service?Job creationOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationTrans Mountain pipelineAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPublic SafetyInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1445)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness did not listen carefully to my question. I hope he does today.We know that the Canada Border Services Agency intercepted 238 individuals, that 27 of them were inadmissible and that three were members of Mexican cartels. That is what we know.The problem is that there are 400 other individuals, Mexicans or foreigners travelling on Mexican passports, with ties to organized crime, who have come to Canada and are now operating in our communities.My question is simple. Is the minister taking steps to arrest and deport them?BordersCrime and criminalityMexicoOral questionsPassports and visasGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71454PierrePaul-HusPierre-Paul-HusCharlesbourg—Haute-Saint-CharlesConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/PaulHusPierre_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPublic SafetyInterventionMr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC): (1445)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for his answer. We know that people were intercepted. The issue now is whether 400 Mexican cartel members are actually operating here in Canada.I have another question for the minister. Can he confirm that Mexican cartels are currently selling drugs in Canada and that they are very active, yes or no?BordersCrime and criminalityMexicoOral questionsPassports and visasRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—Wascana//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1445)[English]Mr. Speaker, like everything else with the current Prime Minister, he says one thing and does another. The so-called transparent and accountable-by-default Liberals are at it again. This time it is not redacted documents or withholding documents for Liberal cover-ups and scandals they are engaged in. This time they are trying to prevent the Auditor General from doing his work to hold these Liberals to account, because for the first time in Canadian history, he will be unable to complete audits as a result of the Prime Minister's refusal to fund his important work. Why?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsRalphGoodaleHon.Regina—WascanaJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver Quadra//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88674JohnBrassardJohn-BrassardBarrie—InnisfilConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/BrassardJohn_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodAuditor General of CanadaInterventionMr. John Brassard (Barrie—Innisfil, CPC): (1450)[English]I asked why, but there was no answer, so I will tell you why, Mr. Speaker. It is because the Liberals know that they are failing at just about everything they are doing, except looking after their well-connected, well-heeled friends while attacking anyone, including the Auditor General, who would expose the rot within the Liberal Party. At no time in Canadian history have any auditors general ever said that they could not do the job and would have to cancel audits for a lack of funding, until now. Is it not true that the Prime Minister is afraid of the truth of his failures being exposed, and that is the reason he has moved in to silence the Auditor Genera?Audits and auditorsGovernment expendituresOffice of the Auditor GeneralOral questionsJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver QuadraJoyceMurrayHon.Vancouver Quadra//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35397JacquesGourdeJacques-GourdeLévis—LotbinièreConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GourdeJacques_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodGovernment Priorities InterventionMr. Jacques Gourde (Lévis—Lotbinière, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, after giving Loblaws $12 million, this Liberal government is in hot water again for showering $50 million on a handful of Canadian venture capital funds.However, two of the three winning funds that applied to the program said they were not in particularly dire need of Ottawa's money. That is totally backwards. This is a gross injustice to those who really need this money.Why does the Liberal government not just mind its own business? Why is it giving money to investment funds that do not even need it?EcotechnologyGovernment assistanceOral questionsVenture capitalGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59235BlakeRichardsBlake-RichardsBanff—AirdrieConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/RichardsBlake_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodGovernment Priorities InterventionMr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, under the Liberals, the national debt is growing by over $2 million an hour, yet it is not stopping them from finding new ways to squander Canadians' hard-earned tax dollars. First, the Liberals gave Loblaws $12 million for fridges. Now it is giving $50 million to an investment fund that when asked if it needed the money, said “No, but it's great to have it”. Those are words that most Canadian small businesses would only dream of being able to say.Why are the Liberals handing out money to giant companies that literally do not need it, instead of helping small businesses by reducing taxes and cutting red tape?BureaucracyCorporate income taxOral questionsSmall and medium-sized enterprisesJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertJoëlLightboundLouis-Hébert//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89407JoëlGodinJoël-GodinPortneuf—Jacques-CartierConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GodinJoël_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionMr. Joël Godin (Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, CPC): (1455)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I have asked the Minister of Environment several times to tell Canadians the truth about the Paris targets. Why is she refusing to answer and be transparent?We know that this government's so-called environmental plan is not working. The government has to take its head out of the sand. It must be honest and confirm that the Paris targets will not be met.I have a very simple question. When will this Liberal government clearly say to Canadians that Canada will not meet its Paris targets?Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeJoëlLightboundLouis-HébertCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa Centre//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35904EdFastHon.Ed-FastAbbotsfordConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FastEd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodThe EnvironmentInterventionHon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC): (1455)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal climate plan is a massive failure. In fact, every expert, including the minister's own department, says the that the Liberals are not going to meet their Paris targets. The minister continues to deny the truth and mislead Canadians.Two weeks ago, during a very candid moment, the minister admitted what she was trying to do. She said, “if you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your talking point, people will totally believe it.”Canadians are smarter than that. Will the minister now admit that her plan—Agreements and contractsGreenhouse gasesOral questionsParis Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate ChangeCatherineMcKennaHon.Ottawa CentreGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/84672TedFalkTed-FalkProvencherConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/FalkTed_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodNatural ResourcesInterventionMr. Ted Falk (Provencher, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, Manitoba produces a lot of clean energy, so we can help other jurisdictions reduce their environmental impact with our clean energy resources. Minnesota is prepared to buy renewable clean hydroelectricity from Manitoba to displace coal generation in its state. The National Energy Board and the province have both approved the transmission line, but the Prime Minister refuses to allow the project to go forward. We know the Prime Minister regularly shows his disrespect for the provinces, but why is he punishing all Manitobans and preventing them from realizing the benefits of this fantastic clean energy opportunity?ExportsHydroelectric powerManitobaMinnesotaOral questionsMarie-ClaudeBibeauHon.Compton—StansteadAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/59265CathyMcLeodCathy-McLeodKamloops—Thompson—CaribooConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/McLeodCathy_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMrs. Cathy McLeod (Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, CPC): (1500)[English]Mr. Speaker, the community of Vavenby received devastating news on Monday when the Canfor sawmill closed and 178 people were out of work. This follows the Tolko Industries closure, where 240 people in Quesnel are out of work. This is the second major shutdown in the last 30 days. We have an industry in crisis. Why did the government fail to make resolving the softwood lumber issue a priority when it renegotiated NAFTA?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementLayoffs and job lossesOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill Woods//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89249ToddDohertyTodd-DohertyCariboo—Prince GeorgeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/DohertyTodd_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodForestry IndustryInterventionMr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC): (1505)[English]Mr. Speaker, in signing the last softwood lumber agreement, the former Conservative government put an end to the longest and most costly trade dispute with the U.S. We expanded overseas markets, we championed a wood-first initiative. However, when the deal expired, the Liberals refused to make securing a new softwood lumber agreement a priority. In my province, over 140,000 jobs are forestry-dependent, 140 communities are forestry-dependent. In the past three weeks, seven mill closures have been announced or are imminent. How many more families have to lose their livelihoods before it becomes a priority for the Prime Minister?Canada-United States relationsCanada-United States-Mexico AgreementLayoffs and job lossesOral questionsSoftwood lumber industryTrade agreementsAmarjeetSohiHon.Edmonton Mill WoodsRobertOliphantDon Valley West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88404AlupaClarkeAlupa-ClarkeBeauport—LimoilouConservative CaucusQuebec//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/ClarkeAlupa_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodOfficial LanguagesInterventionMr. Alupa Clarke (Beauport—Limoilou, CPC): (1505)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, everyone remembers the huge mistake the Minister of Official Languages made two years ago when she concluded an agreement with Netflix that did not guarantee any French-language cultural production. Quebeckers and francophones across the country were so frustrated that the Prime Minister removed her from that position and she lost the heritage portfolio.Here is what she is telling us today. She made a plan for tourism two weeks ago. It contains no guarantees, no investments for the francophone minority communities across Canada. She just made an announcement today and, once again, there is nothing for francophones.Was this an oversight on the part of the minister or does this government just not take official languages seriously?Francophones outside QuebecGovernment policyOral questionsTourismGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestMélanieJolyHon.Ahuntsic-Cartierville//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89179KellyMcCauleyKelly-McCauleyEdmonton WestConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/McCauleyKelly_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPrivacyInterventionMr. Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government has repeatedly broken laws by sharing reporters' private information and their questions on the multi-billion dollar Irving shipbuilding project. Now the government has refused to release a 200-page access to information request on the Liberals' sharing of this private information with Irving. Why is the government continuing to break the law and what is it trying to hide?Access to informationGovernment contractsIrving Shipbuilding Inc.Media and the pressOral questionsMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountCarlaQualtroughHon.Delta//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPoints of Order [Oral Questions]InterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1510)[English]Mr. Speaker, as you have said often in this place, official opposition members ask questions and government members answer those questions, or at least give it their best shot. In that exchange, sometimes opinions are shared or questions are asked that maybe other members disagree with. You have asked us to be respectful toward one another, nevertheless.I would like to bring to your attention an incident that took place earlier. Mr. Speaker, actually, I would like to bring to your attention the incident taking place right now. I am being heckled by members opposite who want to shut my voice down at this moment. I will wait for you to bring them to order.Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Breton, PierreJob creationOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationPoints of orderReferences to membersTrans Mountain pipelineUnparliamentary languageMarcGarneauHon.Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—WestmountGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgOral Question PeriodPoints of Order [Oral Questions]InterventionMs. Rachael Harder: (1515)[English]Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that you are upholding the rules equally in this place.During question period, my colleague, the member for Lakeland, asked a question. My colleague is a grown woman. She was elected by the constituents of Lakeland, who brought her here to represent them. She has been given the opportunity to carry a portfolio that has to do with energy and natural resources in Canada. She is very knowledgeable about that file.During question period, she asked a question with regard to that file, which is her privilege in this place. After asking her question, she was heckled by a member opposite. It was the member for Shefford, who told my hon. colleague this.I will wait for the members opposite to stop heckling me once again.Some hon. members: Oh, oh!Ms. Rachael Harder: Mr. Speaker, the member for Shefford told my colleague, the member for Lakeland, to be quiet. He then said, “Sit down, kid.”That is incredibly demeaning, it is incredibly degrading and it is incredibly sexist to tell my female colleague this. She is a grown woman who understands her file very well and was elected by the people of Lakeland to represent them in this place. To call her a kid and infantilize her in that way is absolutely inappropriate in this place. I would ask that the member opposite apologize to my colleague.Breton, PierreJob creationOil and gasOral questionsPipeline transportationPoints of orderReferences to membersTrans Mountain pipelineUnparliamentary languageGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestGeoffReganHon.Halifax West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPetitions [Physician-Assisted Dying]InterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1655)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have four petitions on three subjects. The first two petitions deal with Bill C-418. The petitioners ask Parliament to support the bill. It would amend the Criminal Code to make it an offence to intimidate a medical practitioner, nurse practitioner, pharmacist or any other health care professional for the purpose of compelling them to take part in the provision of medical assistance in dying. It would also makes it an offence to dismiss from employment or to refuse to employ such practitioners for the reason only that they refuse to take part in that activity.C-418, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying)Caregivers and health care professionalsFreedom of conscience and religionMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04107Petition 421-04108NathanielErskine-SmithBeaches—East YorkDavidAndersonCypress Hills—Grasslands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsRural CrimeInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1655)[English]Mr. Speaker, the third petition calls on the Government of Canada to fully fund the RCMP in order to deal with rural crime issues.Agreements and contractsFederal-provincial-territorial relationsPetition 421-04110Police servicesRoyal Canadian Mounted PoliceDavidAndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsDavidAndersonCypress Hills—Grasslands//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1795DavidAndersonDavid-AndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/AndersonDavid_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAgricultureInterventionMr. David Anderson (Cypress Hills—Grasslands, CPC): (1655)[English]Mr. Speaker, my last petition calls on Parliament to enshrine in legislation the inalienable right of farmers and other Canadians to freely save, reuse, select, exchange, condition, store and sell the seeds from their farms. It recognizes the inherent rights of farmers to freely do that.Grain industryPatentsPetition 421-04109Seed growingDavidAndersonCypress Hills—GrasslandsHélèneLaverdièreLaurier—Sainte-Marie//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/31765DaveVan KesterenDave-VanKesterenChatham-Kent—LeamingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/VanKesterenDave_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPalliative CareInterventionMr. Dave Van Kesteren (Chatham-Kent—Leamington, CPC): (1700)[English]Mr. Speaker, I have a number of petitions.The first one is on palliative care. It is a petition to establish a national strategy on palliative care.Assisted suicideEuthanasiaNotwithstanding clausePetition 421-04113Petition 421-04114Petition 421-04115Petition 421-04116Petition 421-04117Petition 421-04118DenisParadisHon.Brome—MissisquoiDaveVan KesterenChatham-Kent—Leamington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/31765DaveVan KesterenDave-VanKesterenChatham-Kent—LeamingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/VanKesterenDave_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsPhysician-Assisted DyingInterventionMr. Dave Van Kesteren (Chatham-Kent—Leamington, CPC): (1700)[English]Mr. Speaker, I also have a host of other petitions, which are on the same subject. These are petitions to establish conscience protections for physicians in health care institutions.Assisted suicideDoctorsEuthanasiaFreedom of conscience and religionHospitalsMedical assistance in dyingPetition 421-04119Petition 421-04120Petition 421-04121Petition 421-04122Petition 421-04123Petition 421-04124Petition 421-04125Petition 421-04126Petition 421-04127Petition 421-04128Petition 421-04129Petition 421-04130Petition 421-04131Petition 421-04132Petition 421-04133Petition 421-04134Petition 421-04135Petition 421-04136DaveVan KesterenChatham-Kent—LeamingtonFrançoisChoquetteDrummond//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88917JohnNaterJohn-NaterPerth—WellingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/NaterJohn_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsAgricultureInterventionMr. John Nater (Perth—Wellington, CPC): (1700)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present this petition signed by a number of petitioners in my riding of Perth—Wellington. The petitioners call on the government to allow farmers to save or use select, exchange and sell seeds.Grain industryPatentsPetition 421-04138Seed growingFrançoisChoquetteDrummondSheriBensonSaskatoon West//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89200RachaelHarderRachael-HarderLethbridgeConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/ThomasRachael_CPC.jpgRoutine ProceedingsConsumer ProtectionInterventionMs. Rachael Harder (Lethbridge, CPC): (1700)[English]Mr. Speaker, today I have the privilege of presenting two petitions, one that is an electronic petition and one that is paper-based. Both of these petitions are of the same nature.The petitioners call on the government to support Bill C-419, which is a private member's bill that I have on the floor on the House of Commons, calling for greater consumer protection with regards to credit card use. Ultimately, this comes down to fairness and transparency on behalf of Canadians.C-419, An Act to amend the Bank Act, the Trust and Loan Companies Act, the Insurance Companies Act and the Cooperative Credit Associations Act (credit cards)Credit cardsPetition 421-04140Petition 421-04141SheriBensonSaskatoon WestLindaDuncanEdmonton Strathcona//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71786K. KellieLeitchHon.K-Kellie-LeitchSimcoe—GreyConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/LeitchKKellie_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessHealth Care Delivery in Rural CanadaInterventionHon. K. Kellie Leitch (Simcoe—Grey, CPC): (1745)[English]Mr. Speaker, I will be supporting this motion by the member for Kenora. It is a study that is long overdue.I, like the member opposite, represent a rural riding, but I will also say as a physician that patients who live in rural communities have substantive and challenging issues. In Nunavut, if someone sprains their ankle, we can take care of that. However, if a child breaks their femur there, it is an expensive endeavour, both for the parents and the government, to bring them all the way to Ottawa to be treated.I support the member's motion, but I would like to ask him if there are some specifics that we should be focusing on in the study to make sure that rural Canadians receive the health care they deserve.Health care systemM-226Motion of instructionPrivate Members' MotionsRural communitiesStanding Committee on HealthRobertNaultHon.KenoraRobertNaultHon.Kenora//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/88938MarilynGladuMarilyn-GladuSarnia—LambtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GladuMarilyn_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessHealth Care Delivery in Rural CanadaInterventionMs. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC): (1750)[Translation]Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Motion No. 226. which seeks to give instructions to the Standing Committee on Health regarding health care delivery in rural Canada. There is an extremely concerning shortage of family doctors and nurses in Canada, particularly in rural areas. The lack of broadband Internet also prevents rural communities from accessing online health services. The committee should also consider the worrisome deterioration of rural hospitals in its study.[English]I want to thank the member for Kenora for bringing the motion before the House. My daughter was a nurse in his lovely riding, so she is well acquainted with its hospital and the health care services that are available there.As the member for Sarnia—Lambton, I note that Sarnia is a mixture of urban and rural, so there are also quite a number of parts of my riding where services and transportation are not available. I would like to start by talking about the current situation in health care in general in Canada.We know there is already a shortage of doctors and nurses across the country. I have travelled from coast to coast to coast and spoken with people in various ridings. I would like to give members a few examples of the shortage, starting with what I think is one of the worst cases I have heard, which is Cape Breton.Cape Breton was missing 52 emergency room physicians and a vascular surgeon. People who cut an artery in Cape Breton would lose a limb or die because they would not be able to get to Halifax in time to get the services.Let us look across the country. Given the wait times in Ottawa, it takes six years to get a family doctor. The former member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith ran provincially, and one of the priority issues she brought up was the shortage of doctors in B.C. Truly, there is a shortage of health care workers.This is particularly disturbing, as we have an aging population. Right now, one in six people is a senior, and that will be one in four in the next six to 10 years. With that comes a need for a number of different services.First of all, we are seeing a movement toward more chronic disease, in part due to rising obesity rates, smoking issues and so on. Also, as people are living longer, we are seeing an increase in dementia, and there is a need for palliative care. Of course, I have been a strong advocate for palliative care during my time in the House. About 70% of Canadians do not have any access to palliative care, and this is especially true in rural and remote places. It is a pressing problem.As I look to the government that has been in power for four years, I see absolutely no plan to address the gaps that exist regarding the resources for health care workers and all the infrastructure needed in places like Petrolia, which is one of the hamlets within my riding. Right now, the electrical and mechanical systems in place at the Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital are so obsolete and so likely to fail that Petrolia is planning how it will shut down the hospital when the systems fail. All of the patients will have to be moved to the nearby high school. Petrolia needs $5 million to repair that infrastructure.I could tell members similar stories, from across the nation, of hospitals that have not received any funding for infrastructure. Clearly the provinces do not have money for that. One solution the government could bring forward in that light is a program that would specify rural hospitals and their infrastructure needs, which would address some of the outstanding issues there.Another need in many rural and remote places is broadband Internet. As we move increasingly to using virtual services, such as virtual palliative care and virtual consultations, communities need broadband Internet to receive them. There is a huge need for this in the north. My riding has several places without good access to the Internet. I think it will be incredibly important to address this need.(1755)One of the other problems with the rural and remote health care system is just accessing the services. Transportation can be very costly and, as the member for Kenora has mentioned, it can take a really long time. In Kenora, people transit by airplane. In my riding, even though there are many services, a lot of people have to go to nearby London, which is an hour away. For low-income people and those who do not have transportation, there is no service to take them for weekly cancer treatments or other procedures. Transportation is a big barrier, and we need to find solutions to address that.There have been some really innovative solutions that I discovered when I was working on the palliative care private member's bill. One of them was the use of paramedics to deliver palliative care. Trained paramedics, during the hours they are not taking care of emergencies, would distribute pain medications and perform procedures that patients need. This is really cost-efficient, because they are already on the payroll, and it is a great service for people who have trouble accessing services and cannot get the transportation they need. It is those kinds of innovations that will be really important as we move forward.Another issue in my riding—and I heard it is also an issue in Kenora—has to do with how to attract doctors, nurses and health care workers to go to rural places. There has to be some kind of incentive. One of the great innovations, also in Petrolia, was a clinic that was put together with multiple family physicians and nurse practitioners providing various services. Because the doctors did not have to be sole family physicians working umpteen hours in practice and then being on call for emergencies, the balance of life and work was much better. There was a real effort made to attract doctors to that practice. They are doing a fine job and making services very accessible to people who live nearby. In fact, because of the quality, in some cases people are even coming from Sarnia to Petrolia to access services.We need to come up with solutions on how to provide health care and work with the provinces and territories. Every region is different. We talked about some of the barriers, such as travel during bad weather, for accessing services, but in some places, the problems are different. Some places have an aging population. In my riding, 50% of people are over the age of 57, so care for seniors is a key issue, and I know that is true as well in Nova Scotia and a number of places across the country.At the end of the day, I would be happy to have the health committee study this issue. I wish we had time in this parliamentary session, but, as has already been pointed out, it is unlikely that a study could be taken up at this point in time. Perhaps it will happen in a future Parliament. This is an urgent need and something we need to consider. We need to put together a plan that will identify the health care workers required and how to get them. In some cases, there are enough workers in Canada; in some cases, we will have to change how we train doctors, for example. There was a very innovative example in New Brunswick, where, although there is no teaching hospital or university for residencies, the province partnered with Dalhousie University and Sherbrooke for a residency program that would provide medical services in New Brunswick and allow doctors to be certified. That kind of innovation is needed to address the health care worker issue.In addition, there is a need for an infrastructure plan, as I have mentioned, for broadband Internet and hospital care and other services. For example, we see an increasing need for home care. Home care in rural and remote situations is increasingly difficult because of the amount of travel time and, in some cases, the weather, etc. When we get this plan together with the resources and infrastructure and decide which services we will need as we move toward more chronic disease and an aging population with more dementia, thus requiring more palliative care, then we can start to execute that plan. It could not happen soon enough because, as I have said, one person in six being a senior now will be one in four within six to 10 years. It is an urgent issue, and I am happy to support this motion.Aging populationBroadband Internet servicesCaregivers and health care professionalsCollaborative health careHealth care systemHealth services accessibilityHospitalsHuman diseases and disordersInfrastructureInterprovincial relationsLabour shortageLife expectancyM-226Medical schoolsMotion of instructionPalliative careParamedicsPrivate Members' MotionsRural communitiesStanding Committee on HealthTransportationRobertNaultHon.KenoraChristineMooreAbitibi—Témiscamingue//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35600BenLobbBen-LobbHuron—BruceConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/LobbBen_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessHealth Care Delivery in Rural CanadaInterventionMr. Ben Lobb (Huron—Bruce, CPC): (1820)[English]Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House of Commons today. As a lifetime resident of a rural community, it is a pleasure to talk about rural health care and rural issues. Just talking with different health care providers in the riding, talking to farmers in our communities and what we see in the news, mental health issues in our rural communities are probably the most significant we have ever seen. I do not mean to point farmers out, but people in the agriculture sector feel this due to the stresses of finances, crop prices, trade, last year's harvest and this year's spring planting. Therefore, when we look at the entire package of health care, mental health needs to be a priority. Of course, the proposed study will not happen in this Parliament, but hopefully it will in the 43rd parliament.Youth suicide is another issue. The youth suicide rate in rural communities is higher than anywhere else. Any information or strategies we can put together to dovetail mental health and youth suicide rates would be very important. Another topic is addiction. There is an opioid addiction crisis from coast to coast in our small communities. Opioids are a big issue as is crystal meth. It does not really matter what part of the country we are in at this point in time, it is in every one of our communities. Therefore, addiction and mental health treatment and having facilities that are world class and state of the art would help people of all ages deal with these issues, but primarily in a rural area where one has to go so far. People cannot just go down the street for their treatment; it could be several hours away.Another issue is the number of health care providers who provide a certain service. If we look at mental health, people may require treatment, but they might be told it could take three months to get an appointment. When people are at the point where they have come forward and have asked for help, to tell them that can get that help in three months is not a solution to the problem. Getting hard data to put into this report would be fantastic and would build out these action plans. I know there is lot of it out there, but we need to hammer this home.In rural Ontario, where I am from, there have been higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity for years and decades. Numerous strategies have been put together with respect to this, but we need proactive health care in our rural communities. We need facilities that will promote a healthy lifestyle and get people out exercising.COPD are is unique to communities as are some forms of cancer. We need further information on that moving forward.Baby boomers are getting to the age where they have a different set of health care requirements than they once had. In my community, there is now a geriatrician, which is a vital specialist, to provide help to our aging population. I am from a rural community, Huron County and Bruce County, which is on Ontario's west coast. It is a favourite destination for retirees to head to when they are of that age. We have a higher proportion of seniors than other communities. Therefore, a geriatrician is a vital physician.A couple of weeks ago, one of our beloved members from British Columbia talked about the issue of palliative care doctors. We could use a lot of palliative care doctors in our rural communities, which would help provide a fitting tribute to some of our hard-working Canadians.Doctor attraction and retention has been an issue in our rural communities. Going back 20 years ago, for example, Goderich, with a population of over 10,000 people, needed doctors. It put together a great doctor attraction and retention program. (1825)Many may know of Gwen Devereaux from Seaforth, Ontario. From coast to coast, she has been educating and informing Canadians on how to attract doctors to rural communities. She has been on CBC and different radio stations, talking about what she has done. Someone else mentioned that having a beautiful state-of-the-art clinic would attract physicians to the area. Spouses having meaningful employment would go a long way in attracting a physician to a certain community. The provision of services, which can be as basic as broadband Internet or a community centre with a fitness centre, would also help. All of these things contribute to attracting well-educated physicians, nurses, radiologists or whatever position to go into communities, plant roots and live there. When most doctors and other health practitioners make a commitment to rural communities, they love it and want to stay, and people are happy to have them.There has been a lot of improvement with e-health records from coast to coast. It defies logic to look at our phones and see what the technology sector can do, yet health continues to lag behind. It is making innovations, but it is lagging behind. Another good innovation is the Ontario Telehealth Network, which we are happy to have. It is changing outcomes in people's lives. I think we can all agree that we need hard infrastructure. For example, communities need CT scanners. For people who have strokes or heart attacks, scanners can make a difference in their lives. However, does it make sense that a community has to fundraise to have a CT scanner in its hospital? It defies logic. When we talk about ways the federal government can work with all jurisdictions, why make a community pay for that? There may be strategic ways to provide funding for CT scanners.Something else communities desire are hospices. They are few and far between. Communities have to fundraise to build them. In Ontario, where I am from, if communities are fortunate enough to have funding for the land, which is only 60%, they have to continue to fundraise in perpetuity for the other 40%. The federal government could play a role in working on a national plan to change this and be a little more fair to communities.It is the same thing for long-term care. Many long-term care facilities are way out of date and need serious upgrades. There are no addiction treatment centres in my area. They are regional, yes, but there is a whole pile of changes we could make to that. Last, and probably most important, if we do this study in the 43rd Parliament, the Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health should be invited. It is in my riding and it is the only research facility like this in Canada. It was modelled on a U.S. idea. It does rural health research in partnership with universities. The best and brightest minds come to my community every year to do rural health research, and people are so happy for it. Again, they do it on their own dime. It would great if the federal government and the provinces could come together and provide operational funding to different research facilities like this, which provide great research to rural Canada and, in some cases, encourage these bright, young minds to stay in the area.I look forward to coming back in the 43rd Parliament. I am sure my colleagues across the way would like otherwise. Regardless of the outcome, it would be great if the health committee would do this study and look at moving beyond jurisdictions. National defence provides health care and we provide all sorts of health care to indigenous Canadians. There is a role for us. If we all work together, we could rise above the partisan lines.I wish all my colleagues the very best this summer and in the election in October.Caregivers and health care professionalsDrug treatment centresDrug use and abuseElectronic health recordsFarming and farmersGeriatricsGovernment assistanceHealth care systemHospitalsHuman diseases and disordersLabour shortageLong-term careM-226Medical and assistive devicesMedical researchMental healthMotion of instructionPalliative carePrivate Members' MotionsRural communitiesStanding Committee on HealthSuicidesYoung peopleDarrellSamsonSackville—Preston—ChezzetcookBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgPrivate Members' BusinessHealth Care Delivery in Rural CanadaInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1830)[English]The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order Paper.Dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order PaperHealth care systemM-226Motion of instructionPrivate Members' MotionsRural communitiesStanding Committee on HealthBenLobbHuron—BruceBruceStantonSimcoe North//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/35724BruceStantonBruce-StantonSimcoe NorthConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/43/StantonBruce_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionThe Deputy Speaker: (1830)[English]It being 6:31 p.m., pursuant to order made on Tuesday, May 28, the House will now proceed to statements by members not seeking re-election in the 43rd Parliament.Before we begin this evening's debate, I would like to remind hon. members of how the proceedings will unfold.[Translation]Each member speaking will be allotted 10 minutes. No time will be allotted for questions and comments.[English]The order also prescribes that tonight's debate will be interrupted after three hours or when no member rises to speak.We will begin with the hon. member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country.Members of ParliamentResignationRules of debateBruceStantonSimcoe NorthPamelaGoldsmith-JonesWest Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71786K. KellieLeitchHon.K-Kellie-LeitchSimcoe—GreyConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/LeitchKKellie_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionHon. K. Kellie Leitch (Simcoe—Grey, CPC): (1850)[English]Mr. Speaker, being a Canadian is a privilege almost without equal in the world. To be selected by our fellow Canadians as a representative in the House of Commons is as high an honour as there is. Thanks to the incredible people of Simcoe—Grey, who put their faith in me, I have been a member of Parliament for eight years. First and foremost, I want to thank them.I grew up in a family where my parents, Lynne and Kit Leitch, lived certain values. My mom emphasized hard work every day. She was the most generous person I have ever known. None of my friends could leave our house without a toque on their head or a hug if they needed it. Sadly, after a strong fight, she lost her battle with breast cancer in 1989.My dad continually challenges us to have free thoughts and develop new ideas every day. Even now, he challenges me to work harder and be better. Like so many who live and were born on the prairies, he believes that everyone is equal and should be treated respectfully. He is the epitome of tolerance.In many ways, my parents are the embodiment of Canadian values, and these values matter. They are the reason Canada is a beacon of hope around the world for those fleeing persecution or seeking a better life. The values that Canadians share, that my parents taught us, are what make this country, Canada, the greatest country in the world, one that it has been an honour to represent.The one question I get asked all the time as a member of Parliament is why a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon would run for office. There are three reasons.First, my mom was insistent that public service is good for us. Second, as a doctor, I would be helping dozens of kids every day. I loved my job, but in 2006, I was asked to chair the expert panel on the children's fitness tax credit. This opportunity allowed me to see first-hand how good public policy can have a positive impact on the health of thousands of Canadian kids, not just one child at a time, as I did as a doctor.Third, I was asked. It was that simple. Jim Flaherty called me at the clinic one day on a Friday morning and said, “I hear you're running for office.” I said, “No.” We can see how well that worked out. On May 2, 2011, my name was on the ballot in Simcoe—Grey as the Conservative candidate the day the Conservative majority government was won. I was appointed as a parliamentary secretary immediately after the election. As a PS, I was assigned the task to develop a new EI rate mechanism reform in the May budget. I also contributed to the creation of the Canada job grant. As an Albertan, I heard every day from family and friends—especially my sister, who is a no-nonsense, super-smart engineer in Calgary—about the need for skilled labour. I led the consultations across the country related to this program, which revolutionized on-the-job training by providing incentives for employers to train people.On my dad's birthday in July 2013, I was invited to meet with the Prime Minister. The PM appointed me Canada's first minister of status of women as well as minister of labour. I remember accepting and then immediately formulating in my head how to eliminate the department. I thought, as a professional woman, how ridiculous it was that the department even existed. My sister completely agreed. When I returned home that night and told my father, to my surprise he was ecstatic. He thought this was the best role ever. I thought he was crazy.In retrospect, I will say that being the minister of status of women was one of the more meaningful and most fulfilling roles I have ever had. I learned so much, and realized that the department is in fact necessary and important. I have a strong belief that women are most successful in all aspects of their lives if they can be independent, when they can stand on their own two feet and make choices for themselves and families unencumbered by others and government. Our great team at Status of Women focused all its efforts on helping women of all backgrounds achieve this independence. I am particularly proud of our focus on championing women entrepreneurs. Early in my term, I realized that for women to be successful, they needed three things: mentors, money and markets. As a young medical student, I benefited from mentors. Therefore, it was no surprise to me when I met with women across the country and heard they needed mentors and found it challenging to succeed without one. The expert panel on championing and mentorship for women entrepreneurs was launched in 2013. Its work created “It Starts with One – Be Her Champion”, an initiative to provide mentors for women in all fields. As I leave public life, I look forward to continuing to support and build this program so that young women across our country can reach their greatest potential.(1855)I have always championed children. I am told that my face lights up when a child walks into the room, so it was not challenging for me to embrace the idea of the International Day of the Girl Child at the UN and become one of the driving forces of its creation in 2013. This experience is the reason that today I am passionate about organizations that help eliminate the practice of early, child, and forced marriages around the world, such as Girls Not Brides.When I was growing up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, my father ran a construction company. My talented brother Michael now runs that firm, and it has never had unionized workers, nor was there ever a desire for our labourers to unionize, so being Minister of Labour in Canada was a new place for me. I was determined to have Canada ratify the UN ILO Convention No. 138 on minimum age for admission to employment. As a pediatric surgeon, I was somewhat dumbfounded that Canada had not ratified this basic convention, which we finally did in 2014. Our team at labour also spearheaded changes to the Canada Labour Code to ensure that interns were covered by health and safety protections and that these young Canadians received the pay they were due when they worked hard. I believe that we as Canadians need to lead internationally by example as well as practise what we preach. The changes to these policies did both.Politics is a rough sport. I realized that during the challenging 2015 campaign, and during my leadership campaign I learned that in spades. During the leadership campaign, I learned many things. I now have a better wardrobe and I wear makeup, and sadly, I also learned how much these material items matter. How we look is often as important as, if not more important than, our ideas or intellect, especially as women. I also learned that not all Canadians are tolerant. In Canada, as children we are encouraged to have new ideas, talk about those ideas and encourage debate. That is not at all what I experienced. What most Canadians saw during the campaign was people slandering me and my reputation. They saw me bullied continuously. I was subjected to the worst type of threats online. My home was broken into. My constituency office was compromised with hate banners illegally hung. My staff was intimidated. My Parliament Hill office even received long letters in which people outlined in graphic detail their plans to sadistically rape me. This was all fuelled by people who claimed they were champions of freedom of speech, champions of women and champions of a tolerant society. I can tell members that these people are anything but that. I acutely learned that when individuals are unwilling—or, more often, unable—to debate an issue in a tolerant and respectful way, they turn to bullying, intimidation or worse. I would not wish this treatment on anyone, even on those who subjected me to it. My campaign sparked debate on issues that Canadians wanted to talk about. I am proud to say that unlike some, I am not afraid to tackle the elephant in the room. For me, health care will be one of those topics as we go forward. We need an open and healthy debate in this country about our health care system. Today, politicians get to say when and where we get our care, but they are not accountable to deliver that care in a timely manner. Canadians are ready for a thoughtful discussion about the future of health care. As elected leaders, we need to be ready too.Canadians have always been the most successful in all fields when we embrace our responsibilities as well-educated and tolerant people who put forward bold ideas on important subjects. Canadians elected us in the House of Commons to be leaders. We are expected to speak about issues that matter. We are not supposed to be afraid of tackling the tougher issues, and we should be able to discuss issues like health care, climate change, abortion and immigration without name-calling, without bullying, without resorting to insults or character assassinations. If we are not prepared to tackle the tough issues in a respectful manner in this place, then who is? Leadership is about courage and about having the courage to act. As one politician once accurately outlined, most politicians, with the exception of a few with great courage, wait to see how political events are breaking before they risk their own political capital. I can say that I now understand that. Even with my challenging experience during and following the leadership campaign, I will continue to talk about issues that matter to Canadians, like the ones they talk about every day at the dinner table and at Tim Hortons. This country and the responsibility we have as Canadians to help others both here and abroad is too important to me not to.(1900)I challenge members in the House to not shy away from bold and controversial issues. Do not be afraid of the critics and the media, the trolls and the angry people. Have courage and move forward.It is an honour to serve in this House. I have many friends in this place and I have had many conversations, some more animated than others. No matter what our beliefs or political backgrounds, we share a common dedication to this country and to making it better. For that I thank my colleagues.I encourage the leaders in this place to remember to take courage and bring forward bold ideas. Canadians are expecting us to do so.Members of ParliamentResignationSimcoe—GreyJohnOliverOakvilleJimEglinskiYellowhead//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/48292JimEglinskiJim-EglinskiYellowheadConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/EglinskiJim_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionMr. Jim Eglinski (Yellowhead, CPC): (1900)[English]Mr. Speaker, as most of you know, I will not be running in the upcoming fall election. Tonight I will be saying goodbye to all my colleagues in this House on all sides. It is hard to say goodbye to fellow workers, to a job or a career that you really enjoy. Retirement: this is not my first kick at the can. Over 50 years of public service have been very rewarding to me. Am I ending it now? I do not really know. I am not sure yet. I was blessed to be born in a great country and a prosperous province, Alberta. Life has been good to me. For me to give back was just natural.I am a second-generation Ukrainian who grew up on a farm near Chipman, Alberta. After graduation, I joined the RCMP in April of 1968. I took a train and headed to Regina to be a Mountie. I think most of the farm boys did that back in the 1960s. It was a good choice for me. I served 35 years and had nine postings and five detachment commands. I went from a constable to staff sergeant and finished my career in the city of Fort St. John in B.C. Fort St. John is a great community in northern British Columbia.I met my first wife, Stephanie, in 1968. We had two daughters, Kim and Susan. Stephanie was with me throughout my service. I lost her to cancer a month after I retired.In 2002, municipal politics called me. I was elected to council and three years later re-elected as the mayor. This was a great place to learn about politics. I think it is the best politics. In 2004, I married Nancy, my current wife, who has been my strongest constituent, my right arm, my adviser and my critic. She loves politics. She gave me so much: time, love and support.Nancy and I decided to move from B.C. to Edson, Alberta, in 2011. I was home again. My stepdaughter, Sommer, her spouse, Brad, and grandchildren Kaylynn, Jenessa, Brayden and Tyler lived there. They live there today. We built a new home on the McLeod River, just outside of Edson, to retire. Then we met Rob Merrifield, who was the member of Parliament for Yellowhead. The next thing I knew, he asked me to join his EDA. Then I ended up being president. I never could say “no”. I have to learn that one day.In the fall of 2014, Rob called me on a Sunday and said, “Jim, put together a special EDA meeting for tomorrow at 6 p.m.” I asked why and he said he could not tell me. He wanted to meet with Nancy and me at 4 p.m. before the meeting. I asked why. He said he could not tell me. Was I confused? I was. As the EDA president, he was telling me nothing and I had to phone everybody.At 4 p.m. the next day, Rob and his wife, Brenda, met with Nancy and me and Rob told us he was retiring. When? Immediately. Nancy said, “What are we going to do?” Rob replied, “Jim, I think you should run. I spoke to Prime Minister Harper and it will be a great honour for you to serve as the federal MP for Yellowhead”. I said I could not, and to look at me, I was older. “No,” he said, “You're great. You have lots of experience.” I asked how long I had to make up my mind. He answered, “Two hours” because he wanted to tell the EDA. Forty-five days later, I was the MP for Yellowhead riding.(1905)I was so proud to serve the Yellowhead riding, and I want to thank all my supporters in Yellowhead for electing me in 2014 and again in 2015. What a year it was, with two elections and opening an office in Ottawa and an office in Edson.I remember my first week in Ottawa, when I was walked down the corridor here by Prime Minister Harper, being sworn in. The administration gave me a set of keys and said my office was 301 Justice. I asked where that was and was told, “Down the hill”. I met with finance and was told I could only spend this, could not spend that and to be careful. I was told to hire someone to work in my office. When I asked where I would find someone, they said to look around and that I would find somebody. Then I was told, by the way, I was on the immigration committee and it sits on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so to make sure I was there tomorrow. Then it was, “Goodbye and good luck.” How many of us did that happen to? That was day one. From there we learned as we went. I love challenges, but I have to say, thank God the men's washroom was across the hall from 301 Justice.In politics, time quickly flies. I have flown back and forth about 100 times. I have spent around 800 days on the Hill, approximately 1,000 days in the Yellowhead riding, and 15 hours every weekend, transitioning back and forth between here and there. Will I miss it? You bet. It has been an honour to serve my riding of Yellowhead, my province of Alberta, and my country. The friendships we develop here, from all parties, I will always cherish. The people Nancy and I met in our riding, the friendships we made, they are such great people. Yellowhead riding is large, 77,000 square kilometres. As an MP, I could not have represented this great riding if it were not for my staff in Edson. I was lucky that Rob's staff stayed on when I was first elected: Jude, Annette and Theresa. If Jude is listening, she was the nerve centre of the riding, the type of person who knows everyone and everything. She was a great help. I thank the staffers who are there today, Annette, Marsha and Sandra, and those who have moved on, Amy, Sylvie and Jude.In Ottawa, I was lucky. I hired Jeannette. What a find and what a knowledgeable staffer. She trained me, guided me and kept me in line, and that was difficult. Her knowledge and wisdom on the Hill is awesome and I thank her. Through her, I became so much better. I hired her as an employee, but I consider her a friend. I thank Jamyn, a former staffer in my Ottawa office, and Volodymyr, who is there now, for their service to me and the Yellowhead riding. I thank the four Ukrainian interns I had during the summers. I thank my Conservative colleagues. I have learned so much from them. It has been an honour to serve with them in the government and in opposition. I will always cherish the friendships we developed. I will miss them, all of them.I will miss the Hill, the security people, the drivers, the people in the cafeteria, the personnel around here. I stop and talk to as many of them as I can in a day. I will miss my staff. I will miss my constituents. However, I will not miss that weekly flight riding from Ottawa to home and back. I have been so lucky that Rob Merrifield asked me to run. I have been so lucky that my constituents supported me. I have been so lucky to have had a great campaign team. I am so lucky that my replacement candidate, Gerald Soroka is a great guy, a friend and, hopefully, he can have a good office, at 301 Justice, after the federal election when he joins our prime minister, Andrew Scheer.I could not have done any of this if it were not for my wife Nancy. I know she is listening. I thank “Beebs” for travelling back and forth across the Yellowhead riding with me, for helping in speeches, counselling me, campaigning, etc. She is special. She represented me so many times in the riding when I was here in Ottawa, giving speeches and doing all those other things. I was getting worried because people were telling me that they were starting to like her more than me. Nancy is my soulmate, a friend, and I thank her so much.(1910)People ask me what I am going to do when I retire. There is that word again: retire. I have my health, thank God. My motor home wants to travel. My motorcycle wants to be ridden. My restoration projects are begging to be finished. My grass continues to grow. There are fish in the McLeod River that need to be caught. My deer need to be fed; I have a herd of about 15 of them. However, mostly, I look forward to visiting my three sisters, my sister-in-law, their husbands and our four children, and spoiling our 11 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter who needs to see me more.Canada is a great big country and I am about to hit the road, folks. Yes, I will go back to boring holes in the sky, enjoying the freedom of flight.Members of ParliamentResignationYellowheadK. KellieLeitchHon.Simcoe—GreyBradTrostSaskatoon—University//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/25462BradTrostBrad-TrostSaskatoon—UniversityConservative CaucusSaskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/TrostBrad_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionMr. Brad Trost (Saskatoon—University, CPC): (1915)[English]Mr. Speaker, first, I want to start with the thanks. To my staff of over 15 years as a member of Parliament, I have been blessed to have wonderful, loyal staffers. Murray Heinzlmeir, Vikki Ruby and Brianne Toupin started with me 15 years ago and are still with the team today. Al Chant put in 13 years. When he retired, I was, in his words, “improving my staff” by hiring his wife Elizabeth. Mattea Merta joined the team these last few years. Denae Ferguson started out doing maternity leaves until her own maternity leave caused her to move on. I must also remember my Humboldt staff of previous years, Arlene Jule and Melanie Bain. They have all been very loyal. I appreciate their putting up with the quirks and mannerisms of their boss. To have so many of them stay for so long has meant a lot to me.I thank Lori Isinger, my first campaign manager, who was and is gracious and kind. She helped me put together a team in 2004 that won a riding that was considered unwinnable. I thank Ron Ardell, a very special friend, and we all miss him.Volunteers like Denise Hounjet-Roth, campaign managers like Rod Meier, riding presidents, volunteers, supporters and donors who are too mention, in all my campaigns supported me. Thanks, my friends.I thank my leadership campaign team, Russ, Joseph, Mike, Wally and Wayne, for all that we went through together.I thank my family. My mom and dad were always there in each election. I thank my brothers and their families for their support. My service here was definitely a family accomplishment and the wins were theirs as much as they were mine. Gerelt, my wife, joined me half-way through this adventure. I am not sure if it is what she expected, but she has embraced it with enthusiasm. I thank her for her support, love and encouragement. I love her very much.I thank the voters of Saskatoon—Humboldt and Saskatoon—University for the privilege of being their voice. I have tried to serve them faithfully whether I received their vote or not. I was once told the Trost family motto should be, “A Trost is a majority of one”. In my time in the House of Commons, I have striven to stick to the principles that I came here with. While it has been said that politics is about compromise, I have always believed politics should be about principle. What are the some of the principles I have stood for during my years here? Human life matters from conception to natural death. This is a fundamental right which should never be denied. To take away sweet human life as we do in our country is the greatest tragedy of Canada's history. Freedom matters, in our economic system and in our political system. A government that is large and all-encompassing is not a government that is the servant of the people, but is the master of the people. Government aid is often to be feared more than government neglect. Democracy matters: The price previous Canadians paid for our system of government is one that should not be forgotten. Even if we do not agree with everything this system has given us, it is still the best the world has ever seen.Let me close my brief speech by saying something for Isabel Anu Trost and Helena Esu Trost, my two little girls. Their dad ran for office, not because he thought he could win, but because it was the right thing to do. I believe in my Canada. I believe in the values of freedom, faith, family and free enterprise. This is what has made Canada great. I have tried to uphold these values so that some day they will inherit a Canada that is moral, just and strong, a country that believes in the rule of law and the supremacy of God.I thank everyone who has shared this journey with me. I did my best to serve. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens. To God be the glory.Members of ParliamentResignationSaskatoon—UniversityJimEglinskiYellowheadAnne Minh-ThuQuachSalaberry—Suroît//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/1832KevinSorensonHon.Kevin-SorensonBattle River—CrowfootConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SorensonKevin_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionHon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River—Crowfoot, CPC): (1950)[English]Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to deliver my farewell speech in the House of Commons, a place that I have been honoured to be in for 19 years, close to two decades.Although there are a number of friends and family here tonight, one person is not here who I wish was. It is my seatmate, the member for Langley—Aldergrove, who is in a hospital tonight in Langley. If he is watching or listening, our prayers are with him tonight, not just those from me and my family but those from our entire caucus.I also have another very close friend, Dale Markwart, who is lying on a bed in a hospital in Castor, Alberta tonight. He is in a tough battle. Dale is a close friend and he means a lot to us all.After six elections, 19 great years and various positions in the official opposition and the government, it is now time for me to spend more time with my family, which had so selflessly and stoically stood by my side through this long and demanding journey. It is time for me to return to the farm and dedicate more time to those who mean the most to me: my family, those in my community of Killam, Alberta and those in the county of Flagstaff.However, I do so with a very heavy heart, as I have so much enjoyed the privilege of being not only a member of Parliament, but a member of Parliament for the riding of Crowfoot, which later had its name changed to Battle River-Crowfoot.I cannot thank the good people of my riding enough for their support. For 19 years, they were my boss. Every day I have received letters, emails, telephone calls and face-to-face words of encouragement and prayers that mean more to me than they will ever know.I was first elected in November 2000. I stood in the House, on February 1, 2001, to deliver my maiden speech, in which I said: I thank all the people of Crowfoot for bestowing their faith in me. I promise to respectfully and truthfully represent their views and concerns here. I pledge to work hard, with the same diligence that the majority of the people of Crowfoot demonstrate daily as they go about their occupations and their careers in our predominately rural riding. I have worked hard to keep my word. I firmly believe that is why I was returned to Parliament in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2015.The people of my riding are important. However, it has been my faith in Jesus Christ and the hope he offers the world. That has been at the heart of my keeping my word, staying principled, serving with humility and respect and working hard every day to earn the trust of my constituents.When I thought about writing this speech, I thought I better go to Wikipedia to see what it said about me. It sounds a little selfish and vain, but I just want to mention some of the things Wikipedia views as accomplishments. It says I represent “a riding that is very conservative even by the standards of rural Alberta.” Well, as my staff has reminded me, a three-legged dog could win in Crowfoot as long as it is a Conservative. It also says, “most of his territory has been held by a centre-right MP without interruption since 1935.” I love Crowfoot. It goes on:He has won the riding by some of the largest margins ever recorded in Canadian politics. He was first elected in 2000, taking 70.5 percent of the vote, and since then has never dropped below 80 percent of the vote. In January 2006, he was re-elected with 82.5 per cent of the popular vote, the highest total recorded by a Conservative candidate in that election.Wikipedia also notes that I chaired the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security and the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan while the Conservatives were in government. In opposition, I have received a remarkable amount of enjoyment out of chairing the Standing Committee on Public Accounts.These opportunities, as well as being the public safety critic while in opposition, have given me such an appreciation for the institutions and traditions that have shaped this place and such respect for the many and varied stakeholders who come to us to plead their cases for change, accountability and principled policy that makes a difference in the everyday lives of average Canadians.(1955)Being appointed to these positions as a member of Parliament has been the greatest distinction in my working career. All of it is thanks to the tremendous support of the amazing constituents of Battle River—Crowfoot, the many volunteers on my election campaigns and the dedication and the sage advice of my board of directors and executives.I want to mention some of my campaign managers: Norman and Marian Steinwand, Bill and Judy Wilson, and for the last five elections, Steven Snider, as well as my president, Martin West. There are so many people I could thank.I thank my current and former staff for their outstanding work and support in running my Ottawa and constituency offices: Leslie Olson; Gail Nordstrom; John Howard, who passed away while he was employed in the office; Emily Gilroy; Kirsty Skinstead-Lutz; Amy Jackson; Damien Kurek; Jeannie Smith; Linda McKay; Nancy Stewart, Dan Wallace; Melissa Johnston; and Paula Wilkie. Without them and their tireless efforts and loyalty, we could not have provided the first-class assistance that my constituents so richly deserve and have received.I am equally indebted to my former ministerial staff led by chief of staff, Bram Sapers, who also professionally helped me navigate cabinet committees, memoranda to cabinet, departmental briefings and the onerous and exhausting budget preparations.I have had the privilege of serving under amazing leaders. Preston Manning was the one who got me excited about politics and interested in making a change in this country. Stockwell Day showed confidence in me after one year by appointing me as the public safety, or solicitor general in those days, shadow minister.I also need to thank our former prime minister, the right hon. Stephen Harper for the faith that he placed in me as the minister of state for finance, a position I served to the very best of my ability. I am so proud to have called the hon. Stephen Harper my Prime Minister, my leader and more importantly, my friend. He led his caucus and this country with unparalleled wisdom, humility and, yes, the tough veneer that is so necessary as a respected world leader of his calibre. I was proud to stand by his side and give him unconditional support as we negotiated trade agreements, steered through the recession and balanced successive budgets to ensure the future of this country and that of our children and grandchildren.Serving in his government was the highlight of my political career. Likewise, it is an honour to serve with our current leader, Andrew Scheer. I campaigned for him in 2004. We saw him as the Speaker of the House and hopefully as our next Prime Minister.For many of my colleagues and I there were some negatives. We will always remember the terrible day on October 22, 2014, when we feared for our lives and the life of our Prime Minister, as shots were fired just outside our caucus room doors. Corporal Nathan Cirillo had already been fatally shot a the Canadian National War Memorial before his killer made his way up here to Parliament and into Centre Block. Shots were fired. People were hit. All parties were in the midst of their caucus meetings. It was a long and scary day that is forever embedded in one of the darkest memories that I have of Parliament.The other was 9/11. I remember my nine-year-old daughter running onto the deck and telling me that a plane had hit a building. Less than a year after being elected and six months after being made public safety critic for the official opposition, I was tasked with responding to the ministerial statement calling on the Liberal government for anti-terrorism legislation.Those dark days are all but washed away by the many fond memories I have of Parliament Hill and the friendships I have forged. There are so many that I need to thank.First of all, more than anyone, I will miss my good friend and roommate for 19 years, the member of Parliament for Cypress Hills—Grasslands. David and his wife, Sheila, have become lifetime friends. Thank you for all the late-night chats as we ate pizza and popcorn, solving all the problems of Canada and the world, sometimes frustrated with political correctness. Today is his anniversary and he has been together with Sheila a little longer than he has been with me.(2000)To my parents, Ralph and Jean Sorenson, and my in-laws Ben and Alice Redekop, I thank them for their prayers and support. They have meant so very much to me and to my wife Darlene. My father, who watches most question periods with my mom, is now 93 years old and I am not hearing anymore, “Dad, it's time to get a life.”To my wife Darlene, and our children Ryan, Kristen and her husband Matthew, and now my grandson Kayden, words are not enough to express the deep appreciation and love I have for them all. I am so proud of each one of them. Darlene has been my partner, my sounding board, the anchor that has kept our family grounded and so much more. She has given speeches on my behalf, has campaigned and has always been there beside me. I love her more now than I have ever loved her.Once again, and in conclusion, I thank the people of Battle River—Crowfoot for bestowing their faith in me. They are truly the best constituents in all of Canada. I will miss this place. I will miss this job. It has been an honour to serve the people of Battle River—Crowfoot.Finally, to my colleagues here this evening, I thank them for indulging me. I thank them for helping me along the journey of being a member of Parliament. I thank them for allowing me a few moments tonight to reflect and to give thanks. I want to give God praise. God bless everyone here tonight, and may God continue to bless this great land that is the greatest country in the world: Canada.Battle River—CrowfootMembers of ParliamentResignationMarjolaineBoutin-SweetHochelagaDaveVan KesterenChatham-Kent—Leamington//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/31765DaveVan KesterenDave-VanKesterenChatham-Kent—LeamingtonConservative CaucusOntario//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/VanKesterenDave_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionMr. Dave Van Kesteren (Chatham-Kent—Leamington, CPC): (2000)[English]Mr. Speaker, I was born in Chatham, Ontario, in 1955 and have lived there all my life. I attended school in Chatham, was married in Chatham, raised a family in Chatham and started my business in Chatham. Chatham has always been my home. I have always been proud to live in the city that was once the site of the battle that claimed the life of the great Chief Tecumseh in 1813 in the War of 1812, that was the end of the Underground Railroad, and the city where John Brown came to recruit combatants before his fateful attack at Harper's Ferry. It is also the hometown of the great Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, Fergie Jenkins.I had no formal training for the job, but I always had a unique fascination for politics. Therefore, finally at the age of 49 after narrowly losing my first election in 2004, I found myself elected to represent the people of Chatham-Kent—Essex on the eve of January 23, 2006. I am so privileged tonight to rise to give my final remarks in the House of Commons after serving here for over 13 years.Let me first thank the constituents of Chatham-Kent—Leamington, as it is now known, for giving me this opportunity to serve them. It is an honour to have been chosen to represent them. Of course, this would not have been possible without the help of hundreds of volunteers manning phones, pounding signs, door-knocking and donating both their time and money during the past five writ periods.After I was elected, I would never have been able to serve without the excellent staff who worked alongside of me. Let me speak about them. Jill Watts-Declare joined me shortly after I arrived here in Ottawa in 2006. As a new member of Parliament, I had a lot to learn. She provided the office with stable and knowledgeable expertise on how to navigate my way around Parliament Hill. She has faithfully served in her role as an experienced office manager and has mentored several other staff members throughout her years here. She is greatly appreciated for all her service. I thank Jill for all her hard work. Peter Roos was my first campaign manager, but also a loyal friend and confidante from the beginning. Peter joined the office team in 2010, and finally decided to hang them up just before his 80th birthday last year. That has not stopped him from continuing to run passport clinics and he still comes in to help when we are short-staffed. I thank Peter.Another one of my friends and confidantes is George Paiciovich. I know George is listening. He is one of those political hacks we find around our circles, having been around Parliament since the 1970s. He served under several MPs and was the chief of staff to Garth Turner in the days of the debt clock; that was his brainchild. Early after my election, he offered me advice and guidance and then joined the team responsible for training our younger members and serving the riding with business, municipal needs and special projects. I thank George for his friendship and his tutoring throughout these years.I could not forget Nate Veltkamp and Adam Roffle, who served as my special assistants. I thank them for their dedication and great work. They have each moved on to greater challenges and continue to serve in the community. Presently, this position is being carried out by Will Pennell, who is now in George's boot camp.My Chatham office was served from day one by Julian Belanger, who also ran against me for the Conservative nomination. We all remember his professionalism and his political savvy, which were so important to me in those early days. Sadly, Julian was taken from us in 2014. We all miss him terribly. Wayne Hasson has filled this vacancy, and also served as my campaign manager in the 2015 election. He is doing a tremendous job in the Chatham office, managing the constituency casework, and I thank Wayne. Peter Bondy and Lisa Mitchell were also important leaders who served in the constituency and who helped me shape the office in those early years. I say thanks to Peter and Lisa.Of course there is my EDA: Dale, Eldon, Bernice, Mike, Gary and so many more. They were all there right from the very beginning and are still there today. I thank them for their loyalty and their hard work.(2005)Now let me talk about my family. My wife Faye and I are blessed with eight children and their spouses—Jeremy and Jolene, Rachael and Justin, Mike and Angela, David and Katie, Joel and Shawna, Andrea and John, Adam and Mel, and Eric and Katie—and 39 grandchildren. I only have 10 minutes, so I will not name them.They were all there, helping and supporting me at every election, pounding signs, going door to door, making calls. With this devoted army, it is no wonder I have had success these past four elections. Thank you, and we do love you.To Jeremy and Jolene, who under their leadership, and with David and Joel, grew a mom-and-pop dealership and faithfully built it into one of the finest Hyundai dealerships in the country, thank you for your sacrifice.My wife Faye has travelled beside me these 44 years on some crazy paths, and yet has continued to support me, encourage me, advise me and keep me grounded throughout the trip. She is the one who has kept the home fires burning, tending to our children and grandchildren over all the years I was away. She is the unsung hero who helped make all of this possible. Many times I have advised those seeking political office that unless they have the full support of their spouse, they had better not consider this job. Faye, I love you and I thank you for your support.I thank the office staff here in Ottawa who delivered the services that help make this great country work. I thank the many volunteers who make the passport clinics and other such events such a success. I thank my friends and family and supporters who have helped me through these years.Lastly, I thank my God for giving me this opportunity to serve Him as a member of Parliament for my country. I thank God for holding me and keeping me these years. I thank God for sustaining my health when working the long hours and for protecting me on the road each week as I drove back and forth.I know I must have forgotten to thank someone, but they should be sure to know that they are greatly appreciated. I am truly a blessed and fortunate man, and I owe it all to the goodness of others.Now let me spend a little time on some of my experiences here in Ottawa. This job has allowed me to travel to all parts of the world to meet with leaders and experts in many countries. I have witnessed the vibrant economy of Asia, honoured our soldiers in Europe, witnessed democracy at work in South America, encouraged peace in the Middle East, and saw extreme poverty but also hope in Africa.I have served on many parliamentary committees—ethics, fisheries, industry, finance, foreign affairs, international trade, status of women, and health, and currently I serve as vice-chair on the Library of Parliament committee. Last but not least, I remember all the years as chair of the Ontario regional caucus.I have shared these experiences with some extraordinary men and women. I want to talk about Steven Fletcher. Steven is a quadriplegic who overcame tremendous obstacles after an accident. He told me that he even had to relearn how to breathe. Although he does not experience sleep, he still arrived each day to serve as a member of Parliament and even achieved cabinet in the Conservative government.I have met so many special people here, and many have become my closest friends. I will not begin to name them, as that would be unfair. Their friendship will always remain as we return to our private lives.In closing, let me say that this has been a tremendous honour, but it is time to go back home, back to my family, back to Faye, back to the folks of Chatham-Kent—Leamington, and maybe some here will join me there soon so that Faye and I can give them some southwestern Ontario hospitality.I thank you. May God bless you, and may God bless Canada.Chatham-Kent—LeamingtonMembers of ParliamentResignationKevinSorensonHon.Battle River—CrowfootRobertSopuckDauphin—Swan River—Neepawa//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/69488RobertSopuckRobert-SopuckDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/42/SopuckRobert_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersMembers Not Seeking Re-Election to the 43rd ParliamentInterventionMr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC): (2015)[English]Mr. Speaker, I should point out right off the bat that you were one of my team members yesterday, and thanks to your efforts, our team won. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It was a pleasure to serve with you on that team.I had the honour of being elected in this House nine years ago this October. I was elected in 2010 with a minority government; again in 2011, five months after my first win, with a majority government; and then again in 2015. I have experienced being a member of a minority government, a majority government, and the opposition. I have had the honour of spending a lot of time in Centre Block. Over a nine-year career, I have been very fortunate. Why does a person enter politics? Quite simply, it is to make a difference.My political transformation from a wet-behind-the-ears, know-nothing teenager to a budding Conservative actually started in 1968. We lived in Winnipeg. I am of Czechoslovakian descent, and we were part of a small Czech community in Winnipeg. What happened in 1968 is the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. Our family took in refugees from Czechoslovakia. That gets a person thinking about the power of government and how government can be a force for evil, but if a person works hard enough, it can be a force for good.Of course, being a Czech, we are made fun of a lot. I have been called a bouncing Czech, a cancelled Czech, a blank Czech. As long as I am not a phony Czech, I will be okay.As the evolution of my political thought moved along, I bought a farm south of Riding Mountain National Park. I had a dream of becoming a farmer, living off the land, building a log house back in the woods, all that kind of stuff. What went through my mind were the opportunities that this country offers. If people take risks, they can fail, but they can also succeed. I am a Slavic person, as my mom was born in Poland. Slavic people like me have an inordinate fondness for property rights. We are visceral when it comes to owning our property. As I looked at the world around me, I could see that there were forces out there that were basically threatening my way of life and the way of life of all other property owners, and I do not just mean farmers; I mean people who have built something with their lives and how important that is to them. When government gets in the way of that, that is simply evil. People need a free society and the ability to take risks. What comes with a free society? It is is personal responsibility. I get a little tired when people talk about crime statistics all the time. I will be quite blunt: It is as if it is my fault when somebody commits a crime. Personal responsibility lies within the individual, so as I recite these characteristics, what political party would someone possibly join? It's the Conservatives, of course. These are the things that we stand for.I represent a large rural area of 66,000 square kilometres. Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa is one of the most beautiful places in Canada. My community is very diverse, with ranchers, farming, forestry, hunting, trapping, oil exploration and so on, yet with all that resource development, it remains an extraordinarily beautiful place.Actually, conservation is one of the major activities of the communities in my constituency. People are harvesting trees in their day job, and then in the evening working with their fisheries habitat group to repair streams. Those are the kinds of people who are in my constituency, and I get very angry when people like that are attacked. Whether it is the animal rights movement, environmental extremists or people who want to take their firearms away, I get angry. We are not supposed to get angry in this job, but I simply could not help it. The injustice of what happened when those good people got attacked made me even more determined to defend that particular way of life. I think we have a number of colleagues here who do exactly the same thing. I am very proud to be a colleague of members such as the member for Red Deer—Lacombe, the member for North Okanagan—Shuswap and the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound. I have been on the farm of the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound. I would defy any environmentalist to go to his farm and see anything that he is doing wrong. He gently manages the land. He looks after it. He looks after the wildlife and cares about the world. The member for North Okanagan—Shuswap was the president of the B.C. Wildlife Federation and the member for Red Deer—Lacombe has a fisheries background just like mine, so Conservatives have absolutely nothing to apologize for in terms of our conservation ethics.(2020)We are the people who actually get things done. Who negotiated the acid rain treaty? Brian Mulroney did. Who negotiated the ozone treaty? Brian Mulroney did. When I hear all this environmental stuff, all I know is that Conservatives can be very proud of our contributions to conservation.I did not travel as far as my friend from Chatham-Kent—Leamington. I stayed at home and spent all my time on the fisheries and environment committees, and I very much enjoyed that. We had some very contentious bills to deal with such as Bill C-69, Bill C-68, CEAA 2012 and so on. I have to say, though, that I really enjoyed my time on the fisheries committee, because believe it or not, it worked across party lines. It is a very collegial group, and most of the reports were unanimous. I see the chair of the fisheries committee here, and I want to thank him for his efforts on behalf of Canada's fisheries.Getting back to the constituency itself, what can I say about constituents? They place their faith in us. Nothing touches me more than when people I do not know comes up to me and says that they voted for me. Is that not something? We have all experienced that, because we cannot know everybody in our constituencies.I want to thank my EDAs and the volunteers, of course. The late Jeff MacDonald was a mentor to me, as was Bob Lepischak. I thank all those people who worked so hard: the fundraisers, the EDA and so on. What can I say about my family and my darling Caroline? I know she is watching—hello, darling. She was my best political adviser. As I said before, she is a spouse who praised me when it was required and made sure I knew what I was doing wrong when that was required as well. Caroline texted me earlier. She was out today planting tomatoes in the garden. She is what we call a “bush chick”, which is a term that I use with the greatest respect. She lives in the woods and knows how to do things.Tony and Marsha are our kids, and their spouses are Lainee and Graham. We have three absolutely beautiful grandchildren, Eden, Senon and Esmee. One of the reasons I will be heading out is to spend time with the three grandchildren on the farm. They love the farm. They love taking the guts out of a duck, cleaning a fish, driving a quad and doing all those things with papa.I want to thank my brother and sister, Tim and Joyce, for their support over the years. I also thank the neighbours. Those who live in rural areas know how important neighbours are. When my wife Caroline is by herself on the farm, I know the neighbours are there for her. That is a very important fact.I want to thank my mom and dad, Joe and Ida Sopuck. They have sadly passed on. They were both born in eastern Europe, dad in Czechoslovakia and mom in Poland. I want to thank my mentors. They include Alan Scarth, an environmental lawyer from Winnipeg, who is a deeply philosophical man who helped me; Ted Poyser, who was chief of staff to Duff Roblin—and I am going to talk about Duff in a minute; Charlie Mayer, whom many members know, as he represented part of my area; and the sainted Harry Enns, who was the longest-serving MLA in Manitoba's history. Harry gave me some really political advice. He said, “Robert, my boy, there are two things a politician never passes up: a chance to give a speech and a chance to go to the bathroom.” When one has a constituency as big as I do, one knows where all those spots are. I will leave it at that.I thank my Ottawa staff Branden and Alex, who are in the office now, as well as Duncan, Brett, Jay, Dan, Olivier, Kyle, and the constituency staff Judy, Janell, Megan, Grace, Nellie and Valerie. I am sorry to go so fast, folks, but I do not have time to stop. I really want to thank the House of Commons staff, the security staff and the bus drivers. They are salt-of-the-earth folks. As the member for Battle River—Crowfoot said, I was there in October when Parliament Hill was attacked, and we can never forget that these people will take a bullet for us. They deserve all of our respect. I want to end by thanking my colleagues all around the House. I made friendships that will last for years. The value of the team is so important. I especially want to thank the Manitoba caucus, the member for Brandon—Souris, the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, the member for Portage—Lisgar and the member for Provencher for their help and support and indeed love over the years.I too want to talk about what it was like to serve under Prime Minister Harper, who, as history will show, was one of the greatest prime ministers this country has ever seen. It has been an honour and a privilege to serve with all members on all sides of the House as I end my political journey.C-68, An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequenceDauphin—Swan River—NeepawaMembers of ParliamentResignationDaveVan KesterenChatham-Kent—LeamingtonLindaDuncanEdmonton Strathcona//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC): (2045)[English]Mr. Speaker, maybe to the chagrin of my Liberal colleagues across the way, this is not my farewell statement. They will have to put up with me a little longer. I listened to a lot of the statements made by retiring members and, again, I offer a heartfelt thanks for their service to Canada. There are some members like the member for Victoria, whom I appreciated working with on several committees. I know that many of us will miss him. Even though he was a New Democrat, he was one we could have a decent argument with and come away still friends at the end of the day.There is a Yiddish proverb that says, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.” That is what I want to start with. I know I have a 20-minute statement on the budget with questions and answers. I am not splitting my time. I do not want to do that, but I want to talk about this Yiddish proverb because the government has spent a prodigious amount of money over the last four years. We know that today's debt is tomorrow's taxes.The government now has a total debt of $705 billion. If one includes Crown corporation debt, it is over $1 trillion. I know there will be Liberal MPs who will say to look at the previous government, which increased the national debt as well. The counter-argument is that they had the Great Recession in 2008-09. As I remember it, the Liberal Party members clamoured for more spending. They actually wrote a coalition document with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Québécois, demanding even more spending. The government of the day decided that it would find a middle ground and not spend us off a cliff, but that it would do what the House of Commons was indicating, which was to spend cyclically into the economy. Budget 2019, which this bill tends to introduce and make real in the lives of people, I call it a distraction budget. Last year, I called it the refrigerator budget. There is an extra $41.3 billion of new spending over five years. The campaign promise of the Liberal Party was that there was supposed to be a surplus of $1 billion this year. It is a $19.8-billion deficit instead, $19.7 billion the year that follows, $14.8 billion in the year after, and $14.1 billion the year after that. It is successive years of deficits.If we look at the financial statements on the—Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)Budget deficitC-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAnthonyRotaNipissing—Timiskaming//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2045)[English]Mr. Speaker, I am usually the one rising on points of order about too much noise in this new interim chamber, which is beautiful but not very functional, as I like to remind members. I have been quoted in the Hill Times as having said that.To return to budget 2019, as I mentioned, successive budgets have increased spending. I went back to previous years' budget documents. I went all the way back to budget 2016. I looked at budget 2015. There is actually a gap in this year's spending. What budget 2015 expected to spend this year was $302.6 billion. Instead, what the government is intent on spending is $329.4 billion, which is a gap of $27 billion between what the government expected to do in 2015 and what it is now expecting to do in 2019. One of the great problems of the current government is its inability and maybe disinterest in controlling spending. Every solution requires gobs of new spending. Every problem requires gobs of new spending. Every single year, Canada's GDP growth keeps being revised downward. In the economy, there is a cycle of 10 to 12 years and we reach a recession. Sometimes they are short recessions; sometimes they are prolonged recessions. Again to my Yiddish proverb, if we want to know what God thinks of money, we look at the people he has given it to and look at what they have done with it. The Liberals have achieved far too little for the money that they have spent.I want to talk about the housing proposals inside the budget and some of the housing policies and ideas the government has put forward. The Liberals are far lacking in both what they should be trying to achieve for first-time homebuyers and the damage they have done by introducing the B-20 stress test and the Minister of Finance's stress test on insured mortgages. It is an issue I have raised in the House repeatedly. I have raised it at the finance committee repeatedly. I had Liberal MPs vote me down twice on a request to do a study of the B-20 stress test. The first time it was without saying a single word. They did not rebuff my argument on why it should be done. The second time, they did have an argument but it was not very strong.In budget 2019, the first chapter of the budget that the BIA would implement is on housing. I am glad the Liberals have a chapter on housing because young first-time homebuyers across my riding deeply care about being able to achieve the dream of home ownership. When I lived in Edmonton and purchased my first condo, for my wife and me it was one of the great achievements in our lives that we had put aside enough money and were able to qualify for a mortgage. We got a longer amortization of 35 years. Some people say that there are now 25-year amortization periods for insured mortgages, but there are still 30 years for the uninsured market, and there is a difference between the two. Taxes have gone up. It is harder for people to accumulate savings over time in order to have a down payment. Now we have a successive series of government decisions, with policy direction being given to the CMHC, policy direction being given to chartered banks and lenders on insured mortgages, and the B-20 stress test, an OSFI rule that is given the blessing of the government, that are hurting opportunities to get into housing, especially for young people.What I want to avoid is a situation where we eliminate an entire generation, a cohort of people, from being able to get into the type of home that suits their needs. That is different for different people at different times in their lives. When people are younger and starting a family they need a bit more space. When they are getting toward retirement, they want to downsize so they need to sell their house and move into something smaller that suits their needs.When the government begins to introduce different policies and legislation, that starts to gum up the workings of the real estate markets. I say “markets”, plural, because there is no such thing as a single real estate market in Canada. We do not compare a home in Vancouver to a home in Calgary, to a home in Halifax, to a home in Ottawa. Those real estate choices are very local. They are things such as schools, access to public transit or perhaps there is a baseball diamond near a home as there is near mine so my kids can go and play there. Those are the choices that really matter to people.(2050)The decision the government made with the B-20 stress test has heavily impacted the market. I am going to be referencing a TD Canada report and a CIBC economics report to make my point. There are defects inside the BIA. There are defects inside the budget and how the Liberals are trying to address the housing problem for young people, especially for first-time homebuyers.Approximately 20% to 30% of first-time home buyers have been pushed out of the market by the B-20 stress test. The statistics have shown this, whether we use Statistics Canada, CREA, the Canadian Real Estate Association, or Build Canada. Build Toronto has shown there is a 100,000 unit gap in the last 10 years of built dwellings in the Toronto area.When the B-20 was introduced, two reasons were given for it. OSFI said that the reason for introducing these much harsher stress tests, 2% to qualify for a mortgage, was to ensure the stability of the banks. What happened, according to TD, was that by introducing this rule, over the past year, 2018 and now into 2019, it had pushed lending to the B market, the B lending. That is not to say monoline lenders are bad, they just typically have higher interest rates, they offer different terms, and it is actually a 2% increase. In Toronto, in the GTA area, it is far higher.What the government has done is it has moved into the unregulated market by introducing the B-20 stress test.The second reason was given by the Minister of Finance in January. He said publicly that the reason was to reduce prices. That is not the reason this Parliament allows OSFI to regulate insurance, securitization and lending. The reason for that is the stability of chartered banks and large lenders.OSFI regulations are not supposed to be used to manipulate prices in different real estate markets. That is mission creep. That is policy creep. It is far beyond the scope of what Parliament intended when it gave the government the ability to set regulations through this independent, autonomous regulator.I always remind people that regulators are arm's length but within arm's reach. That is something I learned when I worked for the finance department in Alberta. They still have to abide by the wishes of the government and the general direction. The decision-making, the individual regulatory tools they have are truly up to the regulator to decide. However, this one in particular, the B-20, we know from TD Economics that the side effect was that a lot of people were pushed into mono lenders, B lenders, the unregulated market, which defeats the purpose of OSFI having introduced it.Ahead of B-20, we know that mortgage origination started to soften well before. If we look back, and this is a CIBC economic report, going all the way back to the third quarter of 2013, we saw an increase in mortgage origination to about the first quarter of 2015, and then it started to slide downwards. It is proof apparent that this rule did not have to be introduced, because mortgage origination, people taking out new mortgages, was on its way down for well over a year before the Minister of Finance introduced his stress test on insured mortgages.I have no idea why he would introduce a 2% stress test on insured mortgages, when it is on a fixed term. There was always a stress test on variable mortgages, because, reasonably put, if the government is offering insurance through the CMHC, or through Canada Guaranty or Genworth, two private providers, taxpayers are on the hook, because they are backing up that policy.On variable rates, it makes sense to ensure that the lendee can actually pay it back in case something happens in the market, such as the interest rates go up. On a fixed rate, five-year mortgage, there is absolutely no reason to do that. Over a five-year period, on average, and Statistics Canada will bear this out, people's incomes go up, their ability to pay goes up, their circumstances change, but typically it is for the better.We can look at CIBC Economics, and it is called “Mortgage stress test: the operation was a success, but” and then it goes into all the side effects of having introduced this rule. It is by Benjamin Tal.I have another graphic about which I want to talk. One of the things I heard, and it is in the chapter in the budget, where it talks about housing, is the a worry about affordability. It is also a worry about Canadians taking on too much debt.(2055)I sit on the Standing Committee on Finance, and I heard this repeatedly at committee from officials, Liberal members of Parliament and the CEO of CMHC, whom I will speak more of later. They worried that Canadians were taking out mortgages that were too big and were taking on too much debt. Chart 5 of the CIBC report notes that in 2012, in the third quarter, just under 50% of people had an average credit score of 751, which is an excellent credit rating. If a person's credit report says 751 or above, that is excellent.The number has been creeping up as well. Well before B-20, it started to creep up to 50%, 51% and then to 52%. It is not that people were being irresponsible. In fact, the average credit score of those seeking a mortgage loan is going up. Nevertheless, the government has done nothing for unsecured loans. It is still just as easy to get a credit card.Bank of Canada officials came to my office to explain the Bank of Canada's financial statements. I told them that if I got unsecured loan and spent $30,000 on a boat, the government would pat me on the back for consumer spending. If I then crashed the boat and claimed it on my insurance, the government would be extremely happy again because I might replace it with a new boat. That is $60,000 spent. However, the government is worried about mortgage debt.In Canada, because of our culture, people are pretty conservative when it comes to borrowing, especially on their homes, delinquency rates are at historic lows. I think it is 0.15% in British Columbia and 0.23% in Ontario. Every statistic I can find from the major chartered banks and every trend line I see from economic shops show that although there was a lending problem, the lending problem was not directly related to the mortgages people were taking out; it was related to unsecured debt, such as credit cards, personal lines of credit and home equity lines of credit.In fact, when the government introduced B-20, which is also in a report, there was a sudden spike in reverse mortgages, as people were taking more equity out of their homes. Interestingly, this number has been going up for about 10 to 15 years. It is a tool people use. Their homes are their savings so they take money out of them. There was a spike in January 2018. As soon as everybody knew the new stress test was coming, the number went up.An interesting report came out of Toronto asking about housing. It asked what young people and their parents were doing. A third of parents admitted that they had given their kids an early inheritance gift of, on average, $50,000. This speaks to the problem of pricing in the greater Toronto area and the greater Vancouver area.What the government and the Minister of Finance did was impose a one-size-fits-all policy, the B-20 stress test, across the board and across the country, as though every real estate market in the country has the exact same problems. Instead of introducing variants and designing a policy tool for specific problems, they went around whack-a-mole and hit everybody. I know I have to be careful. I hear the parliamentary secretary got in trouble with Premier Doug Ford when he called for him to be whacked, although I did say “whack-a-mole”.This is a policy tool. I am not saying people in housing should not be worried about what the government is doing in budget 2019, because the government has now given an answer to the problem. Its answer to the problem was to introduce shared equity mortgages. In the BIA, it is introducing a mechanism by which the CMHC will be a Crown agent acting on behalf of the government.For those listening at home this late in the evening, who perhaps have insomnia, the Crown borrowing program will allow the government to borrow $1.25 billion to buy shared equity stakes between 5% and 10%, depending on whether a house is new. A new home gets 10% and one that already exists gets 5%. The government says this will help 100,000 first-time homebuyers.When I asked Department of Finance officials where they got this number, they said from CMHC. When I asked CMHC officials where they got this number, they said from the Department of Finance. Nobody could explain to me where this 100,000 number came from. The CEO of CMHC gave it his best shot. The only way this number makes sense is if we look at insurance mortgages and assume that over the next three years, we will only be able to help about 30,000 to 40,000 people. Actually, the Minister of Finance said the same thing in Toronto.(2100)Then I went to MLS listings online to find what kinds of properties were out there. In the greater Toronto area, I found about 500 properties out of 20,000 listings that these shared equity mortgages could potentially apply to, and I specifically excluded those with parking spots, which are very expensive in the greater Toronto area, especially downtown. They are quite expensive to get, but that is not the goal of this. We do not want anybody living in a parking spot in a tower in downtown Toronto. That is not our goal.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)Budget deficitC-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingMortgagesThird reading and adoptionAnthonyRotaNipissing—TimiskamingAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2105)[English]I hear the parliamentary secretary saying they are.This tool is not the answer to it. When I questioned people at Mortgage Professionals Canada how long it would take the brokerages to get their IT systems ready to go, because they need IT systems to do their underwriting, securitization, double-check loans and all the details that need to be figured out, the said eight to 10 months. That is eight to 10 months on a program the government wants to be effective in September. When I asked the Department of Finance officials about the details of the program, the terms and conditions, the fees, if there would be a premium on these shared equity mortgages, they told me they did not know those details because they had not been decided yet. When I asked the CEO of CMHC, I was told it had not decided yet what those details would be. When I asked when the board of CMHC was informed that it would be handling the shared equity mortgages on behalf of the Government of Canada, he told me the night of the budget. That means the board of CMHC had no idea it would be administering this large-scale program.If we want to know what God thinks of money, we should look at the people he has given it to, what they have done with it and how badly they have mismanaged it. With a problem like housing, the policy tools chosen to address it are completely inadequate. I will not be supporting this bill and I encourage all members not to support it.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingMortgagesThird reading and adoptionAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkAnthonyHousefatherMount Royal//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2105)[English]Madam Speaker, I do not want to start a Yiddish proverb battle on the floor of the House of Commons. I do appreciate the member because he is thoughtful and an adept chair of committees. He stickhandled the last committee he was assigned quite nicely. However, this is an issue of debt and deficits. While the member is telling us to look at the wonderful investments the Liberals have made, it is all with borrowed money. Part of a responsible government is ensuring that it has the means to provide these investments. It cannot just be looking at borrowing on the markets, passing the bill to future generations and hoping the investments actually work out.I met with the Coalition for Canadian Astronomy. It is deeply disappointed by these so-called investments the government is putting through. The people there want to see more put toward basic research. A lot of what the government is putting the investments toward is engineering work instead of basic scientific research. It is a disappointment. If we want to know what God thinks of money, we should look at the people he has given it to.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsResearch and researchersThird reading and adoptionAnthonyHousefatherMount RoyalPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2110)[Translation]Madam Speaker, the member for Sherbrooke is correct.Witnesses at the Standing Committee on Finance said that the government will be playing the stock market with part of people's homes. We have no details on how this will work or how much it will cost. The president and CEO of the CMHC said that this measure would have a marginal impact, while some Liberal members in committee described it as transformative. They said that this would change everything.Even reports from the CIBC and TD Bank say that the impact on the market would be 0.2% to 0.4%, at most. This is a marginal impact. Furthermore, the government wants to spend $1.25 billion on this project, when it could be doing something else with the money. This is a big failure for the government in this budget.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingMortgagesThird reading and adoptionPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrookeGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (2110)[English]Madam Speaker, my colleague does excellent work in this place and in the finance committee. I appreciate his drawing attention to the issues with home ownership. This is something that I hear about often in my constituency. It is an interesting perception that, in some cases, government policy is aimed at making home ownership harder to access, with things like the stress test that was piled on. The perception, certainly in my constituency, was that these policies were not taking into consideration the reality of the real estate market in most of the country, but they were responding only to specific situations in specific regions. At the same time, there was another policy brought in that, as the member has pointed out, does not deal with the reality in those same places.It is striking that we have, on the one hand, policies that are aimed at making home ownership harder, and in other cases, policies that purportedly make accessing home ownership easier. There is a contradiction in the objectives, never mind the policy.I wonder if the member can comment on what we should make of this incongruity between policies like the stress test, which are making home ownership more inaccessible, and claims that other policies are going to make home ownership more accessible.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingThird reading and adoptionTomKmiecCalgary ShepardTomKmiecCalgary Shepard//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2110)[English]Madam Speaker, one of the things we heard from stakeholders who presented at committee was that 200,000 Canadians will not see a job created because of these changes by 2021. We know that the residential construction market is one of the areas where a lot of people work. We can imagine all the trades that go into building a home, whether it is a condo, a row house, a duplex or whatever it is. We heard that 147,000 first-time homebuyers were unable to get into the type of home they wanted. The Canadian Home Builders' Association said that. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the number of new mortgages coming out dropped by 11.9%. Then there is the government overreaching with the B-20 stress test, the Minister of Finance's stress test, and then panicking, I think, and being unwilling to admit it made a mistake. Even at committee, the Liberals would not admit they had made a mistake, so now they are trying shared equity mortgages, throwing it up there to see if it will work. That is not the right way to be doing policy-making in this country. It is okay to admit a mistake and then dial it back. That is what all the big banks have been asking for.I will mention one last thing. I asked every single stakeholder whether shared equity mortgages would offset the impact of B-20, and not a single one said they would.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingMortgagesThird reading and adoptionGarnettGenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort York//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89136TomKmiecTom-KmiecCalgary ShepardConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/KmiecTom_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Tom Kmiec: (2115)[English]Madam Speaker, that is one of the matters I would have liked the finance committee to consider. If it were not for the member's Liberal colleagues on the committee voting it down twice and then being unwilling to negotiate a reasonable study of the issue, we could have looked into what type of regionalization is reasonable and whether it is even reasonable or not. We already do it for employment insurance and for several other government programs. CMHC actually tracks the cost of mortgage premiums by province. Would that be a better way of doing it?We could not get to any of that expert testimony, expert information, because the Liberal MPs on the committee were so unwilling to even entertain the idea of looking at a B-20 stress test study. That would have given us the ability to call in people from CMHC and outside stakeholders to give us the answers on what is reasonable, what is not reasonable, what is doable, what is not doable.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsMortgagesThird reading and adoptionAdamVaughanSpadina—Fort YorkPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (2135)[English]Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Sherbrooke for the work he does on the finance committee, a task I know very well. We spend quite a bit of time on it.I would like to ask a more practical question about Bill C-97. In the bill, the government has offered a shared equity program through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. We had a similar program in British Columbia, and there was not very much pickup on it. I raise that for two reasons. The government has not given very much information, but what we do know is that it intends to make it operational by September 20. With our fixed election dates, it seems scandalous to offer a new program just before an election. However, more important to the people who will be relying on it, one of the reasons why the shared equity program in British Columbia was not picked up was that mortgage brokers said they were not able to get answers as to who could apply and under what criteria one could get the proper approvals to be able to purchase a house. As we know, it can be very difficult for someone who is not able to make a proper offer to buy a home in a timely manner. If they do not know within days, chances are the deal will go to someone else.Does the member feel that this is a proper program? Does he feel that the practical realities of implementing such a program on such a short time basis may end up not achieving its intended purposes?Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsHousingMortgagesThird reading and adoptionPierre-LucDusseaultSherbrookePierre-LucDusseaultSherbrooke//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC): (2155)[English]Madam Speaker, I have a simple question for my colleague.Her party ran in 2015 on a commitment to balance the budget by 2019. The budget is obviously not balanced. That was a choice. People voted for a balanced budget by 2019. Does the member think the budget should be balanced at any point? If so, by when?Balanced budgetBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionRachelBendayanOutremontRachelBendayanOutremont//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89226GarnettGenuisGarnett-GenuisSherwood Park—Fort SaskatchewanConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/GenuisGarnett_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Garnett Genuis: (2155)[English]Madam Speaker, I just have a brief follow-up to my previous question, which I do not think was answered. The member may have many other things she wishes to say about the economy, the government's record and so forth, but those watching can understand a simple question and whether the question is answered.Does the member believe that the budget should be balanced at any point, and if so, at what point does she think the budget should be balanced?Balanced budgetBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionRachelBendayanOutremontRachelBendayanOutremont//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/89156ZiadAboultaifZiad-AboultaifEdmonton ManningConservative CaucusAlberta//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AboultaifZiad_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC): (2210)[English]Madam Speaker, we have heard the list of achievements from the member opposite. Since the member is aware of all these achievements and government activities, is she aware of the high unemployment rate in Alberta? If yes, what does she think the percentage of unemployment is in Alberta?AlbertaBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresEmployment statisticsGovernment billsThird reading and adoptionIqraKhalidMississauga—Erin MillsIqraKhalidMississauga—Erin Mills//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC): (2215)[English]Madam Speaker, it certainly is a pleasure to rise in this august chamber to talk about the things that are important to the good constituents of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. It is always a pleasure to speak on their behalf.Before I begin my speech tonight, I would like to share my time with the hon. member for Brandon—Souris, who will give a much more comprehensive speech on the finer details of the budget. I will share a few thoughts and observations on the budget implementation act, Bill C-97.Who said that omnibus bills were used to prevent debate in the House and limit the ability of MPs to examine what was in the budget by putting all kinds of different things in a single budget? I will spare colleagues the suspense. It was the Prime Minister.It was also the Prime Minister who said, “I hope that future prime ministers will not make excessive use of omnibus bills and will not resort to prorogation to avoid problematic situations.” The same Prime Minister said, “the abuse of omnibus legislation under the previous government was egregious and something on which we committed to take action.” In fact, we know he promised not to use omnibus legislation in the last election, yet here we are.I only mention this because it points to the usual pattern from the Prime Minister. He is happy to demonize others, to make promises that he will never do that which he says is wrong. Even if he promises not to, he breaks his promise. Of course, in his mind it is always okay when he does it, just not okay when someone else does it: do as I say, not as I do.From my perspective, I am actually prepared to give some leeway to the use of omnibus legislation. Why? Because I have sat on the government's side of the House. When we are in government, our goal is to bring forward as many initiatives as we can and hope it will keep the economy strong. As I used to say when I sat on that side of the House, I would much rather be criticized for attempting to do too much for the economy in a budget bill than not enough. As an example, in one of the omnibus budget implementation acts of the last Conservative government, I was honoured that an amendment I used in my private member's bill to end the prohibition or ban on the shipping of wine was adopted by the previous Harper government and expanded to also include beer and spirits in the 2014 budget. I would even make light of the fact that it was one page in the former Conservative implementation act that received absolutely no complaints.Indeed, in this current Liberal BIA, there is language that seeks to further amend the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act with the intent to remove federal barriers to directly ship to, in this case, the end-user, shipping of wine, beer and spirits. Of course, that is all subject to provincial regulations. While the intention, I am sure, is fine, the deletion of any reference to domestic or interprovincial rules in the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act seems to me to be more of an abdication of any federal role. This is important. It is contrary not just to our Constitution and the framework that was set up in Confederation, but also it really says that the Liberal Party has lost any sense of imagination or creativity to apply leadership. In fact, it feels that abdicating the field is better than no leadership at all. I would take issue with that.There is also language in the budget implementation act that also proposes to protect RDSPs. As some may know, I submitted a private member's bill proposing to protect registered disabled savings plans and registered education savings plans. I was pleased to see the government take my suggestion of protecting RDSPs, which are a crucial savings option for many Canadians, particularly for those with children who have challenges.In last year's budget implementation act, the government also adopted another idea I submitted from one of my private member's bills to amend the Bank Act so that credit unions could continue to use consumer-friendly terms, such as “bank”, “banker” and “banking”. I mention these things to demonstrate that I do believe there is some merit in tabling comprehensive budget implementation acts and, at the same time, to also point out there are measures in a BIA that I would support.One other thing in this bill is about reducing the regulatory burden on credit unions. There is one measure in the bill that does exactly that. It was one of the four items proposed last December by the Canadian Credit Union Association. Therefore, I give big points for listening.(2220)However, of the two items listed in this year's budget, introduced by this Minister of Finance, we see in this bill only one. Again, the Liberals get points for listening but zero points for delivery, other than that one.This also leads to the challenge of budget implementation bills and why many critics oppose them. The downside of a budget implementation bill is that there are things one may strongly support, but there are also things that one may strongly oppose. As an example, this budget implementation act would not lead Canada back to any semblance of a balanced budget in 2019. This Prime Minister looked Canadians square in the eye and promised them that he would do precisely that. Again, what we have here is a broken promise. If we are being candid, let us simply admit the obvious. He is not even trying to balance the budget. The finance minister will not even say the words “balanced budget”. There is another challenge with omnibus legislation, and that is when a government tries to hide something in a budget implementation bill that has no business being there. In last year's budget implementation act, one example was the deferred prosecution agreement language. Not even Liberal MPs on the finance committee had any clue that the proposal was hidden in there or why. Several said it did not belong there. Now we know, sadly, why the Liberals hid it in there, or at least some of the reasons. I suspect that the full story will never be known. In this year's budget implementation bill, there are proposed changes to Canada's refugee system that, frankly, do not belong in the bill. Those changes need to be debated independently.Let me get back to the budget itself, and I will point out some other concerns that I will continue to raise. This budget is silent on household debt. Let us recap why this is a problem. After the Liberals' first year in government, household debt, as a percentage of gross income in 2016, was 166%. In January of this year, that had increased to 176%. Let us pause to think about that for a moment. Canadian household debt is now 176% of gross household income. That has occurred in spite of the Liberal government spending over $60 billion since being elected, and still Canadians are falling further and further behind. This does not include government debt that is being added onto the backs of Canadians every single day. Why do I raise household debt? Let us look at the Canada training benefit. On the surface, it sounds like a good thing. What can be wrong with encouraging skills, jobs and retraining? However, when we read the fine print, only $250 per year is available, up to a career maximum of $5,000. The challenge I am already hearing is that the majority of training programs cost well in excess of $5,000. Many skills training programs are literally thousands of dollars or more. For many workers, to benefit from this $250 training credit will mean borrowing thousands of dollars and increasing household debt. Similarly, to access a credit of $5,000 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle, for most people, would mean borrowing up to the maximum program amount of $45,000. This again would result in more household debt for anyone borrowing money for a new vehicle purchase.A similar situation would be created with the new homebuyers' program. This budget offers many programs that sound great until we read the fine print and realize that people will end up borrowing, and becoming deeper in debt, to access them. How about the proposal to borrow up to $10,000 more from an RRSP, up to a maximum of $35,000? How many new homebuyers have they run across with a spare $35,000 kicking around in an RRSP? Still, homebuyers are only being allowed to borrow that money. They have to pay it back. Once again, more debt would be added.Ultimately, a budget implementation act should try to do as much as it can for the economy. There are so many different things in here that it makes it difficult for us to say what is good and what is bad. There are so many aspects I have not been able to touch on. What should be number one on any government's mind is whether it is in the national interest to pursue this legislation. My vote will be no.Alcoholic beverages industryBanks and bankingBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresCanada training benefitElectric vehiclesGovernment billsInterprovincial tradeMortgagesPersonal debtRegistered Disability Savings PlanSplitting speaking timeTax creditsThird reading and adoptionIqraKhalidMississauga—Erin MillsNickWhalenSt. John's East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (2225)[English]Madam Speaker, when we had the Governor of the Bank of Canada at the finance committee, my province at the time had put forward a program similar to the shared equity program the government is offering. I asked the Governor of the Bank of Canada what he thought of it. At the time, the Bank of Canada was not in favour of it, simply because it can cause home prices to rise. We would have home prices rising at the same time we have people going into the market and taking on more debt, in addition to having a government that is borrowing money to pay for the program CMHC would be offering.Debt is an important part of an overall plan, but the government does not have a plan for its own debt. It does not have a plan to help Canadians get into homes without encouraging them to take on more and more debt. At some point, we have to find reasonable limitations and work with people. We should start in our own backyard with the Government of Canada starting to tame its own debt.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsMortgagesThird reading and adoptionNickWhalenSt. John's EastMarkStrahlChilliwack—Hope//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/71986MarkStrahlMark-StrahlChilliwack—HopeConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/StrahlMark_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Mark Strahl (Chilliwack—Hope, CPC): (2225)[English]Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his hard work in his constituency.I want to talk about this supposed benefit for homebuyers, the equity portion. The member comes from British Columbia, as I do. I would like him to talk about the average home price in his riding. In my riding of Chilliwack, the idea that people can get into a new home for anywhere near the $480,000 cap is just not possible. The prices in the Lower Mainland are much higher than that. Who would this be benefiting? Would it benefit people in his riding, or is this just a marketing gimmick to make it look like something is being done for first-time homebuyers?Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsMortgagesThird reading and adoptionDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/72029DanAlbasDan-AlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaConservative CaucusBritish Columbia//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/AlbasDan_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Dan Albas: (2225)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Chilliwack—Hope for the work he does. Obviously, his community has been impacted, because people are now having to go out further from metro Vancouver to be able to raise a family on a single detached lot. His community is fortunate to have many of those families, but again, it means longer drives, and it can be very tough. When it comes to that program, the government has not been very transparent with people. Liberals say that they will lend on property up to $480,000, but what they do not say is that people can only borrow a maximum of four times their income. For example, people would need to have $120,000 worth of income to get $480,000. Again, in many communities in the Okanagan, the average income is between $60,000 and $80,000. Four times that is not going to even be able to buy someone a condo. This is where the government is trying to play games. Rather than dealing with some of up-front challenges, the government is trying to say that three lefts make a right and offers a program so that people somehow feel that it is doing something. It is more of a gimmick than an actual program that will help people.Budget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsMortgagesThird reading and adoptionMarkStrahlChilliwack—HopeLarryMaguireBrandon—Souris//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Larry Maguire (Brandon—Souris, CPC): (2230)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, for sharing the block of time we have here this evening. It will allow me to zero in on one issue. He said that there are many that I might speak about, but I am going to zero in on one this evening.In the Liberal's budget implementation bill, the government snuck in a major change to Canada's refugee laws. In fact, the Liberals did not even want to send division 16 to our immigration committee for review. Luckily, our former Liberal chair, who I believe is very much opposed to his own government's changes, was able to get it referred to our committee.I want to set the stage for why the proposed changes are too little and too late. There is a good chance that they will be deemed not compliant with the Singh Supreme Court decision from the 1980s.Since the between-ports border crossers started to enter in the numbers we have seen in these past couple of years, the Liberals have literally done nothing to close the loophole in the safe third country agreement with the United States. While there are MPs in this House who want to scrap the agreement in its entirety, our public servants, who are in constant contact with their American counterparts, still firmly believe that the United States is upholding the spirit of the agreement.What we do not know is if the Liberal government has tried to renegotiate the agreement. Trying to get a straight answer out of the immigration minister is harder than getting the finance minister to tell us when the budget will be balanced.I also understand that division 16 caused great consternation in the Liberal caucus. This was a major pivot from their previous stance that we could not do anything because of obligations and international law. Somehow this change, which came out of nowhere, seems to have been given the green light by the justice department.The proposed Liberal changes have been panned by virtually every immigration professional in Canada and are not likely to withstand any sort of court challenge. We have asked for the government's charter review of the legislation, and it has yet to provide it. What the government did provide was a very high-level response that said it was compliant.Multiple witnesses testified at our immigration committee and said that these changes might even add to the administrative backlog and the burden on the refugee system by directing people through the pre-risk removal assessment process. This change also raised concerns that the pre-risk removal assessment process would be conducted by departmental officials rather than by the independent and quasi-judicial Immigration and Refugee Board.After ignoring concerns about how the Liberals reacted to the influx of people walking across the border to claim asylum, they took almost two and a half years to introduce legislation. In fact, they stuck it into the budget implementation bill, and our immigration, refugee and citizenship committee was not even permitted to amend it. The Liberals pushed it through and tried to limit any political fallout. It sounds just like how the Liberals presented the deferred prosecution agreements issue in the SNC-Lavalin affair.To add to the confusion, there are conflicting media reports as to whether the Liberals have reached out to the Americans to amend the safe third country agreement. According to the CBSA, they have had fruitful discussions with their American counterparts, but neither the Minister of Border Security nor the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship have told us if they want to amend the safe third country agreement.Moreover, the Auditor General just gave the Liberals a failing grade on how they have handled Canada's refugee system. The Auditor General was clear that the government “did not process asylum claims in an efficient and timely manner.”The audit revealed that the Liberals did not adequately respond to the influx of border crossers from the United States, and the Auditor General uncovered serious inefficiencies, which are contributing to significant delays. Due to these delays in processing claims, there has been an increase in total costs for all levels of government for such things as housing, social assistance and health care. This report confirmed that the Liberals were incredibly slow to react. They should have responded immediately, rather than delay for two years.(2235)The Auditor General conducted this review because of “the rising number of asylum claims that is testing the ability of Canada's refugee determination system to process claims in a timely manner.”According to the report, if the Liberals do not improve the system, the backlog and wait times will continue to grow. They are projecting that if the number of new asylum claimants remains steady at around 50,000 per year, the wait time for a decision will increase to five years by 2024, which is more than double the current wait time. It goes without saying that these delays are costing taxpayers millions of dollars and putting tremendous strain on the resources of our provinces and municipalities.In the report, it was determined that roughly 65% of all asylum hearings are being postponed at least once before a decision is made. This means that individuals seeking a decision from the Immigration and Refugee Board are facing increasing wait times to determine if their claim is valid or they will be issued a deportation order.The Liberals have only themselves to blame. The Auditor General was clear when he stated the postponements “were due to administrative issues within the government's control.”The Auditor General also brought to light that while the government records the identity documents of those seeking asylum claims, some were indecipherable and could not be read.Furthermore, the Auditor General took a sample of the asylum claims and reported the government failed to check for criminality or to determine the identity of 400 individuals. He concluded that neither CBSA nor the immigration department tracked whether criminal record checks were always completed.There is a vacuum of leadership at the very top that is now permeating throughout the entire government. If the Liberals cannot properly manage our immigration and refugee system, it is time for a new government. They should stop blaming others and take responsibility. They have had years to make the necessary changes to improve efficiencies, and now the entire system is backlogged for years to come.If the Liberals think their proposed changes in the budget implementation act are a step in the right direction, they should listen to the litany of people who are speaking out and saying it will only create more confusion. What we would have liked to have seen is a clear commitment to fix this situation once and for all.It was just last year that I wrote to the Parliamentary Budget Officer to request a full financial analysis of border crossers into Canada. The request stemmed from the lack of financial information provided by the Liberal government.Since January 2017, over 40,000 border crossers have been intercepted by the RCMP in Manitoba, Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. The PBO revealed that the border crossers cost taxpayers $340 million in 2017-18, $368 million this year, and if similar numbers come across next year, it will cost another $396 million. It is projected to cost at least $1.1 billion in just these three fiscal years, while costs will only continue to go up as the wait times for processing through the Immigration and Refugee Board have ballooned.These numbers are just the federal government's expenses, and they exclude the hundreds of millions of dollars in costs being borne by provincial and municipal governments for housing and for welfare payments. The numbers in the report are quite staggering. If the Liberals do nothing to either close the loophole in the safe third country agreement or deter border crossers, we can expect that the overall price tag will only continue to grow.The PBO outlined in his report that the average cost per asylum claim will grow from $14,321 to $16,666 by 2019-20 as the backlog continues to grow.The reason for this increased cost is that while asylum claimants are in the country waiting for their refugee hearing, they are eligible for various government services. Moreover, as asylum claimants are denied by the Immigration and Refugee Board, the individual can appeal that decision, which could end up costing $33,738 by the time the appeal is done.The PBO also revealed that only 18% of border crossers have had their refugee board hearing, and out of the failed claimants, only a fraction have been removed from the country.Because of this influx, there has been significant pressure on resources for all organizations involved in this process, which has led to delays in the processing of these claims.(2240)To wrap up, not only do I oppose division 16, but I also want the Liberals to immediately get to work to renegotiate the safe third country agreement. Then and only then will we be able to restore confidence in our refugee system and stop ill-thought-out changes of the kind we find in this budget implementation act.BacklogsBordersBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsIllegal migrantsImmigration and immigrantsThird reading and adoptionDanAlbasCentral Okanagan—Similkameen—NicolaNickWhalenSt. John's East//www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/7251LarryMaguireLarry-MaguireBrandon—SourisConservative CaucusManitoba//www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Parliamentarians/Images/OfficialMPPhotos/44/MaguireLarry_CPC.jpgGovernment OrdersBudget Implementation Act, 2019, No. 1InterventionMr. Larry Maguire: (2240)[English]Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for the question he has put forward and congratulate him on his new position as the chair of the immigration committee.However, to answer his question, no, I am not in favour of division 16. If he was listening to my speech, he would have learned that we think still stronger measures are needed to be more clear in how these border issues are being handled. On the issue of people who have come across between the border crossings, the government has come up with an idea right out of the blue, which I think half of its own caucus was surprised to see come forward. I think there needs to be consistency in dealing with this issue. As my colleague for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola said a while ago, that consistency is lacking in this budget, and the situation facing the border crossers right now is another point of inconsistency with the way the government has handled it. One of the things the Liberals took two years to do was to even talk to the Americans about whether or not they could begin the process. BacklogsBudget 2019 (March 19, 2019)C-97, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 19, 2019 and other measuresGovernment billsIllegal migrantsThird reading and adoptionNickWhalenSt. John's EastGeoffReganHon.Halifax WestINTERVENTIONParliament and SessionOrder of BusinessDiscussed TopicProcedural TermPerson SpeakingProvince / TerritoryCaucusSearchResults per pageOrder byTarget search languageSide by SideMaximum returned rowsPagePUBLICATION TYPE