SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 116 - Oct/24/22

Oct/24/22 1:27:01 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I am not sure if the member has read the notes, but the bill before us is not about the carbon tax. Bill S-5 is about dealing with toxic chemicals, which apparently the Conservatives are very supportive of, but it has nothing to do with the carbon tax.

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The Deputy Speaker

Oct/24/22 1:27:15 p.m.
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I appreciate the intervention. I will remind everyone to try to stay relevant to the bill we are debating. The hon. member for Dufferin—Caledon.

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:27:23 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, some members do not like hearing the truth and want to interrupt other members when they are speaking. Going back to my point, I was talking about the fact that the current government has such a terrible record on the environment. That is because there are a number of promises in this bill that the government says it is going to do, which I say it will not do because it has a track record to show that it does not do the things it says it is going to do. I hope that will satisfy the member who chose to interrupt. If that is the plan, for the Canadian economy to reach its carbon tax emissions it is going to have to contract by 45%, because a 5% carbon reduction is a 9% reduction in GDP. If that is the Liberals' plan, they should tell us about it. The other part is that the government is supposed to put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. Of course, it does not. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has been abundantly clear that it does not put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. If we do the hard work, like the hard math, and I know the current government does not like to do the hard work and the hard math, and we factor in the cost of the carbon tax throughout the entire Canadian economy, it ends up costing Canadians more money than they get back from the paltry cheques the government sends them every so often. The worst part is it detrimentally and adversely affects people in rural communities, like in my riding of Dufferin—Caledon, where people have no choice but to commute long distances to work and put gas in their cars. They heat their homes with propane because that is the only option they have. Those paltry rebate cheques absolutely do not even come close to covering the cost of the carbon tax they are paying. The Senate passed 24 amendments to this bill and I will say that 11 of them are of great concern. We have yet to hear what the government thinks of those 11 amendments, which I will come back to later in my speech. I still want to flesh out why I think there are so many problems with this legislation and the fact that the current government will not live up to the promises in it with respect to the right to a healthy environment. I am going to touch on that. We are also going to talk about the fact that the government put in this bill that anyone can have a substance assessed. Under the current government, we cannot get a passport. It has lost track of 500 criminals, who were subject to deportation, and does not know where they are. However, it is going to have the capacity to somehow deal with the hundreds of thousands of requests that are going to flood into the department to have a substance assessed, because the legislation is very clear that anyone can ask for such an assessment. It is inconceivable that the current government would think that is a good thing to include in this piece of legislation. I will talk about why I do not think the government is going to be able to implement half of the things it put in this bill. The commissioner of the environment did about 10 reports on the progress of the Liberal government with respect to the environment. Guess what. Virtually all of them got a failing grade. Let us talk about a just transition for coal workers. The environment commissioner was very clear that there was no just transition for coal workers. In fact, they were left out in the cold. Therefore, when we hear the government saying that everyone is going to enjoy a right to a healthy environment, I have enormous skepticism that it is actually going to do that. It did not help coal workers. It talks about a just transition all the time. The government says it is going to provide a just transition for any energy worker who is displaced by any of its punitive pieces of legislation, whether it is the no-development bill, the carbon tax or anything else. The government claims it will be there for anyone who is displaced. Do members know who the first people were who were displaced? It was coal workers. Where was the government? Absolutely nowhere. The commissioner was clear. The government left coal workers with virtually nothing, but it is going to enact a right to a healthy environment and therefore all Canadians are going to enjoy this right. I do not think it is going to deliver that, because it does not ever deliver anything that matters with respect to the environment. The other thing the Liberal government has put in this bill is that plastic-manufactured items are now in schedule 1. When the current government was first elected it said there would be no more Ottawa knows best and no more telling the provinces what to do, but that it would be this wonderful government that rules by consensus. Guess what. The provinces are now suing the federal government as a result of plastics being placed in the new schedule 1 of this legislation. It is hard to talk about how many times the Liberals say they are going to do something and then actually do nothing or do the opposite. We could talk about freedom of information and this being a government that is going to be open and transparent by default, but the system is absolutely a mess as a result of what? The Liberal government. Again, it says it is going to do something, but it does not do anything or it does the opposite. Let us talk about this vaunted right to a healthy environment. First of all, it is in the preamble, and when something is put in the preamble it actually has different legal weight from something that is actually in a section in a statute. Again, the Liberals snuck it into the preamble to virtue signal and say to people they care so much about a healthy environment that they are going to put it in the bill, except they did not put it in the bill. They put it in the preamble, which has different legal impact than putting it in the statute itself. There we go. Number one is that they are not delivering yet again. It is in the preamble and not in the actual statute. What is worse about it is that there were five years of consultation for the Liberals to come up with this piece of legislation. If all of this was so important, why did it take five years? I have no explanation. This is a government that finds it very difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time. Its members cannot do more than one thing at once. They sort of stumble from one crisis to another. There were five years to consult to draft this piece of legislation. Now the Liberals say the right to a healthy environment is really important and they will enshrine it in legislation, but they stuck it in the preamble and now say they need a further two years to figure out what it means. This is a government that is not moving slowly. This is a government that is moving basically in reverse, when Canadians do actually deserve these things. It speaks to the absolute incompetence of the government. It cares so much about the right to a healthy environment that it is going to consult on it for five years, then because it realizes it probably needs to get some legislation put forward, it is just going to say it will consult for another two years. Who knows what that is going to turn out to be? The Liberals have not given any suggestions on what that is going to be. They have not talked about what that consultation would entail, who would be consulted or where those consultations would take place. These are things the Liberals say they are going to do, but I have very little faith in their actually doing them. They said there were going to be extensive consultations on plastic bans. When we talked to a lot of industry stakeholders, they were not consulted at all, so I am not necessarily sure that what the Liberals say about consultation is actually going to come to fruition. This is what we talk about when the Liberals say in the legislation anyone can have a substance assessed. Let us think about that for a minute. That is not narrowly defined. It is as inclusive as it can be; it is anyone. Any Canadian, if this bill passes, can go forward and ask for a substance to be assessed. That is going to create a deluge of requests for assessments from environmental groups, from concerned citizens and from others. That would mean the department, which is already busy enough with what it has to do, would become overwhelmed, and when departments become overwhelmed under this government, which is something that happens literally every other day, we cannot get a passport. We have all been through that. There were a number of constituents who got in touch with my office who said they could not get a passport and asked if we could please help. I said to them that I tried to get my son's and daughter's passports renewed for our vacation, and I could not, so our vacation was cancelled. This is how effective the government is on managing something as simple as issuing a passport. I know I heard the minister one day in question period saying they had no idea how to anticipate the influx of applications. It is very complicated. Passports expire on five-year or 10-year increments. The math is very hard, like 2022 to 2027 or 2032. I know complex, difficult math equations are something the government has incredible challenges with. When we look at the ability for anyone to assess a substance, how are the Liberals going to handle it? The minister has not talked about it. None of the members opposite have talked about it in their speeches. It is like they have not contemplated how difficult that could be. We know they have not, because they did not contemplate how difficult it would be to issue a passport. The Liberals clearly did not contemplate how difficult it would be to keep track of 500 criminals who faced deportation orders. They are all gone. What is the explanation from the government? We have no explanation. I think maybe it is, “Oops.” That is where the government is on that. We support referring this piece of legislation to committee to be studied, but we have grave concerns about it, concerns that I am going to continue to express today. It is so easy to say one is going to do things. The government says it is going to do all kinds of things. The difficulty comes when it actually tries to implement the things it says. That is the hard part. There is an old Seinfeld episode in which Jerry Seinfeld is trying to rent a car, and the car is not there. He said that anyone could just take, take, take reservations; it was holding the reservation that was the difficult part. The Liberal government can make all kinds of environmental announcements, saying it is going to do this or that, that it is going to solve climate change or reduce carbon emissions and that it is going to have a just transition for coal workers. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually doing it. That is the part the government is really not very good at. That is what I am deeply concerned about with respect to this piece of legislation, both with the right to a healthy environment with respect to anyone being able to assess a substance, and with the fact that plastic manufactured items have been placed on schedule 1. What is that going to lead to? This is being talked about. This is a government that likes to demonize plastics. It is in all the government's things. The Prime Minister famously did a press conference where he talked about the drink box, water bottle kind of thing that he wanted to eliminate. Plastics are critical in our lives. We could look at the medical field. If we are going to be looking at further regulations of plastics, what is that going to mean if we go in for an operation? Lots of surgical instruments use plastics. Are we going to end up getting IVs made with wood, because we are against plastics? It is the virtue signalling that we are going to do something, again without doing the hard work of thinking it through and deciding what is actually the best course of action. Virtue signalling is something the government does so often, it is difficult to keep up with. It continues to talk about its record on the environment, and again I am going to go back to the fact that it is so poor that it leads me to think that the government is not going to implement what is in this particular piece of legislation. It keeps talking about an energy transition. That is what it wants to do. That is the government's big thing, that we have to get off fossil fuels. Let us talk a little about that, this sort of woke energy environmentalism. Germany spent a couple of hundred million dollars on trying to get carbon out of its electricity grid. Over the past 20 years, it has been doing that, and it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the path the Liberal government wants us to go down. It does not want to learn from somebody else's mistakes. After hundreds of billions of dollars, Germany has taken its dependence on hydrocarbons for electricity from 84% to 78%. I am not an investment person, but I can tell members that is not a good return on investment. The average per kilowatt hour cost of electricity in Germany is 45¢, and here in Ontario it is 13¢. Imagine spending hundreds of billions of dollars, barely moving the needle and paying some of the highest electricity rates in the world. That is the result of those kinds of policies. That is the same policy road that the Liberal government wants us to take a trip down with respect to electricity generation in this country. Again, this brings me back to why we have such an incredible challenge with this bill. There are 24 amendments that were passed in the Senate, and, yes, there is supposedly an Independent Senators Group, but they are all appointed by the Prime Minister, so these are members of the Senate who are beholden to the Prime Minister, to a certain extent. Is that what the government's plan is for this piece of legislation? We on this side and, I am sure, all the other opposition parties would like to know that. Does it support all these amendments? They changed the definition of “right to a healthy environment” at the Senate. That is a significant change. Is the government supporting that amendment? We would like to know. They made changes to “living organisms”. They made a big change with respect to the precautionary principle. I am very happy that Bill S-5 preserves the precautionary principle, but they removed “cost” from “cost-effective”. That is a very important balancing point with respect to the precautionary principle. What is the government's position on having done that? Is it going to change that at committee? Is it going to work with the opposition to do that? We do not know. It has been wonderful to discuss this bill and discuss Liberal failures on the environment and how I think they are going to translate into Bill S-5. I hope the government will take some of these criticisms of the bill seriously, with respect to the right to a healthy environment, with respect to the precautionary principle and, of course, with respect to how anyone can have a substance assessed. I hope it will take these requests to amend seriously and that it will do the work in committee to make these changes so this bill can be supported at third reading.

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Hon. Bardish Chagger (Waterloo, Lib.)

Oct/24/22 1:44:27 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, the member for Dufferin—Caledon shared many different comments. He definitely spoke on a range of different things. What I find fascinating is that in the last campaign, the member and his colleagues in the Conservative Party ran on a platform that actually included two carbon taxes. In addition to the price on pollution, the carbon tax, as he refers to it, the Conservative platform also planned to bury a second price on carbon in fuel regulations. It is fascinating that they oppose these policies in the House, because when they were running and they were speaking to Canadians, their platform said otherwise. That is why we have said, time and time again, that the Conservatives like to flip-flop. The Conservatives also like to mislead, which is unfortunate. The member refers to the environment a lot. He says that he cares about the environment, yet rather than talk about what the government is doing, would the member like to let us know if he actually believes in climate change, and what a Conservative environment policy would look like, since it is important that we protect our environment?

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:45:32 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the member campaigned on not raising the carbon tax above $50 a tonne, and now it is going to go up to $170 a tonne. I find the question a little rich. First of all, what people campaigned on in a previous election has nothing to do with Bill S-5. I will say this, though: I am against the Liberals' carbon tax. We have always been against it. It does not do anything. I could go on and on about it. Carbon emissions have gone up every single year under the Liberal government, every single year, except the pandemic year, when they liked to say that things were working but then they did not want to talk about the contraction to the environment. The PBO has made it clear: It does not put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. By any measurable metric, their version of the carbon tax is an unmitigated failure. We are against it. We will always be against it. We will scrap that carbon tax once we form government under the leadership of our new Conservative leader, which we look forward to.

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Mr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC)

Oct/24/22 1:46:47 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I find the hon. member for Dufferin—Caledon refreshing when he speaks on these issues. Liberal hypocrisy seems to be front and centre on Bill S-5. This is from the same government that starts talking about the need to fast-track certain projects, like LNG. It is talking about lithium without actually talking about the fact that our regulatory system is broken and without talking about the fact that one would need so much water. By the same token, where would it get the water and where would it source this lithium from? The government talks about a so-called “right to a healthy environment”, when it is really a socio-economic factor that an official will take into account during a CEPA regulatory application. Again, when it comes to the government's hypocrisy on these issues in this bill, what does the member have to say about this?

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:47:40 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I cannot ask for a better question than one about Liberal hypocrisy. When we talk about the environment, the government will not approve projects in Canada, let us say a project with lithium, so that project goes on and gets done somewhere else in the world, because the world needs lithium. It goes to a country that has carbon emissions that are 10 to 15 times higher than what would happen if the project were done in Canada. It is generally a country that has lower environmental standards on all other measures of the environment. These countries have terrible human rights records and terrible employment standards for their employees. The government says it has cleaned up its balance sheet, but the global balance sheet on all those metrics gets so much worse. There is no carbon dome over Canada. When we export our carbon emissions to other countries, along with the jobs and the tax revenue, all we do is make the world a much worse place on all those things we talked about. This is the same kind of thinking that the Liberals bring forward with the right to a healthy environment, which they do not define and no one knows what it is, and with respect to the fact that anyone can assess a substance. All these things are absolutely nonsensical.

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Mr. Wayne Long (Saint John—Rothesay, Lib.)

Oct/24/22 1:48:57 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I have a few comments. First and foremost, I know there was mention made of a broken regulatory system. That system was broken because the previous government, prior to 2015, absolutely gutted that system and broke all trust in it. That is why that system was broken. That is number one. Number two, the member talked about the government's credibility with respect to a price on pollution. I am always confused when I look across the aisle. They were for it. They were against it. They ran on it. Now, all of a sudden, they want to scrap it. I am just wondering, if our system is so bad, whether the member opposite could name for me a couple of initiatives that his government would take to reduce carbon.

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:49:49 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, it is not my position to postulate on what our campaign election promises might look like coming up in the next election. I am not the leader of the party. However, I will say this. The unequivocal fact is that the Liberals' carbon tax is an abysmal failure. We are against it. We have been very clear and unequivocal about that. It does not reduce emissions, and it does not put more money in the pockets of Canadians. I am going to talk again about my riding in Dufferin—Caledon. I have people who commute an hour to an hour and a half every single day to get to work. These are people who are not rich. The carbon tax is punishing them every single day they fill up their tanks with gas. When they heat their homes with propane, they are punished again, and the government does not care, because people in rural communities do not vote for the current government. The carbon tax is punitive. It is designed for the person who lives in a downtown urban centre, who can take transit and buy their energy from Bullfrog Power or some other company that provides allegedly green electricity. Everybody else, including all the people in my riding, is absolutely punished by the carbon tax. I am against it. Everyone in this party is against it, and we are going to scrap it when we form government.

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Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Oct/24/22 1:51:08 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, obviously I would disagree with the hon. member for Dufferin—Caledon, and so would some members of his caucus, who favour carbon pricing. I want to correct the record, because, I am sure unintentionally, he has misstated the progress Germany has made in reducing greenhouse gases. He used the claim that 70% of Germany's electricity was still coming from fossil fuels. It is too high, but it is 30%. Renewables represent 50% of Germany's electricity grid. The result is that, yes, it is true, Germans pay very high prices for energy, but they have reduced greenhouse gases to 40% below 1990 levels, while Canada is 20% above 1990 levels. Therefore, we should have another look at Germany's path. I want to expand on something the hon. member talked about, which is the capacity of Environment Canada to meet the challenges under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in Bill S-5. There was an observations paper that was attached to the amendment from the Senate. I would ask whether the member for Dufferin—Caledon noted that in that observation paper the Senate asks whether the government will expand resources to Environment Canada to be able to fulfill the act's promise.

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:52:26 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I am going to disagree with my colleague. Where I am getting my facts from is an interview with Vaclav Smil, who is one of the preeminent thinkers on energy transitions. Vaclav Smil wrote an article a few weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times, citing exactly the study just used in my speech. I would suggest the member's statistics are wrong about Germany's energy transition. Whether the government decides to hire more people within the Department of the Environment, it is not going to matter, because it has proven that it cannot function with the staffing levels it has. The Liberals have massively increased staffing levels across the Canadian government. Huge amounts more in resources are being donated. With a 12% increase in the number of employees across the Government of Canada, people still cannot get a passport and the government cannot keep track of those 500 people subject to deportation orders. I could go on and on about the failings of the government. More money is not the answer for the government. We need a new government that can run departments efficiently.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC)

Oct/24/22 1:53:35 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, in the member's speech, he went over the defects in the retail carbon tax. He also reminded the House and the public of every single target the government has missed on the environment. He made us see back to better days during the Harper years, so I would like the member to elaborate further on that.

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Mr. Kyle Seeback

Oct/24/22 1:54:03 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I have an interesting fact: The only government, outside of a pandemic, where carbon emissions have gone down was under Stephen Harper. That is the first time. It took a pandemic that savaged our economy by 9%, a 9% contraction in GDP, for the Liberals to get a 5.8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. I think that is their secret plan. They are just sort of whispering it to themselves. That is how they are going to lower emissions, by savaging the Canadian economy.

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Mr. Todd Doherty (Cariboo—Prince George, CPC)

Oct/24/22 1:54:39 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I first want to say happy Bandi Chhor Divas and happy Diwali as well. I have sat through the Bill S-5 debate, which has been riveting. I think the pages are wide awake, maybe not so much after my time. Bill S-5 deals with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which has not been significantly updated since it was passed in 1999. Bill S-5 is the first major update since 1999. We agree that this outdated act needs to be updated, but we have some concerns. Throughout the course of my 20 minutes, I will speak to that. First off, it is hard for us to take lessons from a government that has failed at every step of the way in the last seven years. It has promised a lot and talk a big game, yet it has failed every step of the way. Earlier on, I mentioned that the government likes to fly the flag and say that it is here for reconciliation and that it is the environmental steward of our economy and our country, yet it is still approving billions upon billions of litres of raw sewage being dumped into our waterways right across the country. I do not need to remind the House, although I will, that this is also a government that has waged war on our natural resource sector from day one. The Prime Minister apologized. He said that under his tenure Canada would be known more for its resourcefulness than its natural resources. That is not true. He has absolutely waged war. I will remind the House that it was the government that brought in the no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, which absolutely punishes Canadian producers. The government has waged war. It has sided with these third-party groups that helped the Liberals get elected in 2015. I will remind the House of that. Over 105 different organizations waged war against the Conservatives and sided with the Liberal Party to get it into power, and now it is paying them back. These organizations have infiltrated even the highest offices of the PMO. Bill C-68 was an act to amend the Fisheries Act. I debated and studied that. I stood in the House and talked about it for hours on end. That is the act to amend the Fisheries Act where we looked at the harmful alteration or destruction of fish habitats, which we showed and proved. Not one government scientist or biologist could prove that any of the changes that were done by the previous government resulted in or had harmful alteration or destruction of fish habitats. Bill C-48, the oil tanker moratorium act, is another one where the government waged war on our natural resources and energy sector. It essentially said that any tankers coming to the west coast to get Canadian products would be banned, yet American or other foreign vessels could come. Nothing similar was done on the east coast, where hundreds and hundreds of tankers each week are bringing in foreign dirty oil into our country. I know that we have just a short time before we get into a riveting session of question period. I am excited about that, too. I know the gallery is, and so are my colleagues. We have a lot of concerns about this, notwithstanding the 24 amendments that were passed, 11 of which I will get into when I have more time after question period. The government talks a good game on climate change, yet it has failed to reach any of its targets in the seven years since it was elected. It really has no plan. It was the member for Timmins—James Bay who mentioned this. My colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands said she has many concerns about what is in this bill and that amendments need to be addressed. However, we have heard the government say over the last seven years to just trust it and that it will deal with it in committee, yet it failed to do that. Trust is earned; it is not just given. Time and again, the government continues to burn that trust and any goodwill with not only the opposition, but also Canadians.

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Mr. Shafqat Ali (Brampton Centre, Lib.)

Oct/24/22 2:00:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join everyone in Canada and around the globe in celebrating Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas. Diwali symbolizes the spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil and knowledge over ignorance. Bandi Chhor Divas is known as the day of liberation. It is a celebration of human rights and freedom, marking the freeing of Guru Hargobind Sahib and 52 rajas from a long imprisonment. Today, family and friends will get together to pray, exchange gifts, share meals and light diyas in the spirit of hope. On behalf of the residents of Brampton Centre and my family, I wish all who are celebrating a very happy Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas.

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Mr. Tony Baldinelli (Niagara Falls, CPC)

Oct/24/22 2:01:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am proud to support my new Conservative leader and the results he is getting for Canadians. Less than one month after the election, the federal Liberals threw in the towel and gave up on defending the disastrous ArriveCAN app. For many months, medical experts have told MPs that ArriveCAN could have been scraped as early as this past spring. Instead, the Liberals held on and continued its mandatory use through summer of 2022, crushing any chance for an economic recovery for our hardest-hit tourism sector. Not only did this useless app cost Canadians tens of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars, it also cost our economy untold billions of dollars in lost tourism revenue. Before the pandemic, the Canadian tourism industry was valued at $105 billion. Today, it is down to $80 billion largely because of failed Liberal pandemic policies, like the mandatory use of ArriveCAN. At a time when many economists are predicting rough waters ahead for the Canadian economy, the Liberals continue to waste precious taxpayer money on this useless app—

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The Speaker

Oct/24/22 2:02:43 p.m.
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The hon. member for Saint John—Rothesay.

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Mr. Wayne Long (Saint John—Rothesay, Lib.)

Oct/24/22 2:02:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, seven years ago, in 2015, I came to this great place on behalf of the constituents of Saint John—Rothesay with one major goal. That goal was to deliver much-needed federal investment in my riding, a riding that had become stalled under the previous government. I wanted to deliver strategic investment that would help my riding grow and thrive, and there is no better example than that of our government's $100-million investment in Port Saint John. A few years ago, Port Saint John did 60,000 containers per year. In the next several years, it will go up to 800,000 containers. That will create hundreds of well-paying, waterfront jobs. There is no better example of a government investing to create private sector investment. CP Rail and DP World will invest half a billion dollars in Port Saint John over the next several years. Port Saint John is growing and thriving. It is an economic catalyst for my riding and for all of New Brunswick. I am very proud of my government's investment.

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Mr. Luc Desilets (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ)

Oct/24/22 2:04:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, October 15 to 22 was public library week in Quebec, which is why I am so delighted to recognize the 10th anniversary of our new library, La bibliothèque Guy-Bélisle, which is located in Saint-Eustache, in my riding, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles. After being inaugurated in October 2012, the library quickly became a cultural hub for our residents. Our library can boast about 2.8 million book loans and 1.3 million visitors but, more importantly, it serves to nourish the dreams, culture and curiosity of an entire community. This library is a remarkable asset that enriches the lives of the people of Saint-Eustache. I want to thank Monique Khouzam and Nicole Grimard, the chief librarians who have led this successful institution for 10 years. I also want to thank my friend Raymond Tessier, a municipal councillor in Saint-Eustache, who made this project possible. Happy 10th anniversary.

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Mrs. Sophie Chatel (Pontiac, Lib.)

Oct/24/22 2:05:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada has all the ingredients to become a global leader in the economy of tomorrow. We have critical minerals, productive farms, high-tech companies and world-class universities. The main threat to our prosperity are irresponsible policies, such as those of the Conservatives in the United Kingdom. This week, the opposition will once again give Canadians slogans rather than solutions. If we withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the Canadian economy will suffer and lose its momentum. Not only will our European G7 partners condemn us, they will add a carbon tax on our products at their borders. We will no longer be able to export our products. Canadians deserve responsible economic leadership.

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