44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 21, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand in the House of Commons today to discuss Bill C-23. Today and every day, I am pleased to represent the interests of the citizens of Calgary Centre.
One of the purposes of this bill is to create a Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Among other things, this bill gives the minister the authority to recognize the national historic significance or national interest of sites. It also gives the minister regulatory powers, and that is where we have a problem. The Governor in Council can make regulations respecting historic sites administered by the Agency.
This is where we might differ a little.
There are many other regulatory powers to be concerned about.
One of the main parts of this bill, which we strongly support, of course, is the call to action 79 from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I will read that into the record here very quickly, if I may:
We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal organizations, and the arts community, to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration. This would include, but not be limited to:
i. Amending the Historic Sites and Monuments Act to include First Nations, Inuit, and Métis representation on the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and its Secretariat.
That is the most important part of this one, and that is also what is in the bill that we need to support strongly. This is something that has gone on for too long in Canada, where we are not including the most important part of our history, pre-colonialization, in the decisions in the historic sites across Canada.
I do not know how that happened. I have been exploring, in my riding and across Canada, where the division happened in what was a real consensus between the colonialists who came to Canada and the first nations who were here before they came to Canada. They used to work very much hand in hand together. Somewhere in our history, that compact seemed to get broken, and we seemed to be separate entities. We are only coming past that dark part of our history in these years, as we deal with things in the House of Commons.
This call to action, of course, is part of that reconciliation. It is an important part of this bill that we need to make sure we instill in law here in Canada and in the laws going forward.
There are other things in this bill that are huge regulatory oversteps. The minister, the Minister of the Environment in this case, would have the sole authority to designate a historic site. That might sound innocuous to my colleagues. It is not so innocuous when we look at everything that has been given to this minister, and everything that has been given to this minister that he has made gross oversteps on.
I could give a few examples here. The first thing I am going to talk about is the Impact Assessment Act. The thing about the Impact Assessment Act, passed in August 2019, is that it allowed the minister, not Governor in Council, the cabinet, but this minister alone, the Minister of the Environment, to actually say, “yes, I get to approve a resource development by myself in any part of Canada, or I get to disapprove of such a resource development”, which is contrary to the Canadian Constitution.
The Canadian Constitution allows resource development in the provinces to be the purview of the provinces. It is only when it crosses provincial boundaries that the federal government or, in this case, the federal Minister of Environment might get involved.
This was an overstep, and it was recognized by the Alberta Court of Appeal in May 2022, when they overturned, by a good margin of four to one, the actual constitutionality of the Impact Assessment Act.
What was lost to Canada in those almost three years, between the passage of the bill and the overturning of the bill, ruling it unconstitutional, in the Alberta Court of Appeal, were three years of project developments in Canada's natural resource industry.
That is a whole bunch of uncertainty and hundreds of billions of dollars of projects, literally hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of taxation revenue to this government to pay for things like health care and education. We will note the deficits that the government has plunged itself into as a result of not having enough revenue to pay for the programming that it is so fond of signing cheques for. This is a problem.
The Impact Assessment Act is in limbo right now, until it goes to the Supreme Court of Canada, after being overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal. People need to recognize that the Alberta Court of Appeal is five justices, all appointed by the Prime Minister of Canada. This is not an Alberta versus federal decision. These are actually people who are appointed by the federal government who have overturned a piece of federal legislation soundly.
I think anybody who is a constitutionalist around here could look at that and say, “If the constitutional authority rests with the provinces, why does the federal Minister of the Environment, by himself, get the authority to turn this over and say no, the provinces cannot do this?” It defies constitutional law, and I am going to be wondering what happens when the Supreme Court of Canada hears this. Is it going to acquiesce, or is it going to agree with everybody else in Canada who says yes? This has been a gross overstep and it needs to end.
The second thing I am going to talk about is something that happened this past summer. In June 2022, the Minister of the Environment thrust some new regulations on the migratory birds regulations. The regulations actually say that if people discover a pileated woodpecker nest anywhere near a construction site, they cannot construct anything for three years. Regulations do not come to the House. We know that. They actually go through the Hansard process.
All of a sudden that became a regulation that impeded the progress of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which had been under construction for a number of years at that time, and it is still under construction. There is a reason it is grossly over budget. The Minister of the Environment keeps putting roadblocks in the way to getting it completed. As a matter of fact, he stated he does not want to ever see this pipeline created.
This is in stark contrast to the Minister of Finance, who is responsible for the entity that actually builds the pipeline, who says we need to build this pipeline. We have a conflict here at cabinet. There is the Governor in Council, and now there is one minister able to make this decision about many of these regulations that are going forward. This is a problem in our governance.
It is a serious problem. We have already been exposed to what it means: $30 billion. It is $22 billion over budget for a major Crown project. That is obscene. That is something Canadian taxpayers are paying for. It is dissonance on the front bench of the Liberal government. The Liberals need to get their act together. This is something that we need to make sure we do not replicate in this legislation going forward. It is a gross overstep.
I should add one more thing about the TMX pipeline. It is over budget. The benefit of the TMX pipeline, at the end of the day, is that we are actually going to receive about $22 billion a year in national benefit as a result of the building of this pipeline. In as much as the project itself is not going to pay the proponent the amount of money that has gone into it, and we need to acknowledge that, it is a huge benefit for this country on a yearly basis going forward. It is $22 billion in revenue per year going forward, and we are way behind on getting it built.
I will also talk about budget 2019, where the Minister of the Environment could not get things one way, so he got things another way when he actually—
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the intervention from my learned colleague, as always.
Budget 2019 was another example of the Minister of the Environment overstepping, as we are seeing the authority being given in this bill, when they actually unilaterally withdrew lands that were designed for ski resorts in the Rocky Mountains without even discussing with the proponents of that. What is the problem here? There are all kinds of things. This is about waterways regulation that is going to be unilateral. This is about development of lands. It is going to be unilateral approval or disapproval by one minister.
We have already heard from my speech, which was very relevant, how this negatively affects our country. We need to make sure that we address and that parts of this do not go forward as written. We need to make sure that we have the full authority of the government and that it has proper authority in order to make this happen. The minister may want all this authority, but it is not up to the House of Commons to give him alone that authority.
I look forward to my colleagues' questions.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question. It is a good question.
It is not the minister himself who is responsible for the approval of regulations, it is the Governor in Council. It is cabinet, the council of ministers, that is responsible for Canadian laws. It is not just one minister, it is all the ministers. As I said, there seems to be a conflict between the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Environment and Climate Change about the Trans Mountain pipeline. This cannot go on.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague's question is on call to action 79, which calls for indigenous, Métis and Inuit representation on the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and its secretariat. That is one of the calls to action. The other calls to action are just as important, but in this case, we are only talking about call to action 79.
Also, we do not agree with the part of the bill that gives the Minister of the Environment the power to approve Canadian regulations.
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Madam Speaker, Conservatives are in accord with our friends in the NDP in this regard. This has been a gross overspend. We would like to see exactly where the money has been spent, but in the annals of Canadian history, to be $22 billion over-budget on a $7.5-billion project, before the government got involved, shows exactly what is wrong with the government. It thinks it can spend its way without any accountability whatsoever.
This bill we are talking about today—
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