44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 27, 2023 11:00AM
- Nov/27/23 1:11:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Chilliwack—Hope has made an important point about the job-destroying track record of the government when it comes to energy policy. These are unionized workers, non-unionized workers and indigenous workers. These are every kind of worker in some of the highest-paying, best jobs in the Canadian economy.
Could he comment on the government's track record on jobs in this industry?
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- Nov/27/23 1:14:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, since I was elected in 2015, I have spent most of my energy speaking up for the workers I represent in Calgary. They have been systematically crushed by the government, its NDP coalition partner and, sadly, from 2015 to 2019, by a short-lived NDP government in Alberta. Therefore, this bill is not one that is going to be a great prescriptive answer for workers in my riding. They have been punished by the government and it appears they will continue to be so.
I am passionate about the freedom of workers in my riding to work, about their freedom to organize and to bargain collectively through union membership. I am passionate about freedom of association. It is an essential and foundational freedom on which our country was built. Let there be no doubt about that.
Also, let there be no doubt that there is only one party in the House of Commons that supports worker, which is this party. The other three parties in the House have never supported the workers in my community. Everything the NDP-Liberal government and its fellow travellers in the Bloc do, every instinct they possess runs counter to the interests of the workers in my riding.
Let us examine the track record of the NDP-Liberal government as it relates to the workers in my community. The very first thing the government did, even before Parliament met for the first time, was to cancel the northern gateway pipeline by an order in council. This decision instantly killed thousands of jobs, union jobs, non-union jobs, indigenous community jobs, every kind of job one can imagine.
The people who would have been employed by that project were among the highest-paid workers in the Canadian economy. Had that critical infrastructure actually been built, it would have led to thousands of new jobs in extraction projects that never materialized for the lack of infrastructure that the government deliberately killed. It was literally the first thing it did when it took office.
It also denied the world access to Canada's energy products, leaving it vulnerable to dictator oil, much to our folly and what we see tragically happening in the world today as Putin funds his war machine with energy exports that could have been displaced by Canadian exports.
The Liberals passed Bill C-69, which ensured that no major project would ever be approved again. They used to have talking points that tried to deny that was case, but when the Minister of Environment was a candidate, he let the mask slip and admitted that killing the energy industry was exactly the purpose of Bill C-69. Who is paying for this? It is the workers who are paying for the destruction to the Canadian economy that has happened in this sector under the government. That bill ruined the lives of thousands of workers and their families. Under the NDP-Liberal government, 200,000 energy workers lost their job. I say that deliberately.
Let us not forget that before the federal NDP-Liberal coalition took place, there was a different alliance between the NDP and the Liberals, and that was the Alberta NDP and the federal government. Together they destroyed thousands of jobs and the lives that depended on them.
Again, these were union jobs, non-union jobs and indigenous community jobs. The callous way in which the NDP and the Liberals threw away all these jobs and made sure they would not come back is shameful. Therefore, we will take no lessons from them on protecting jobs for workers, whether they belong to a union or not.
I have said before in the House, especially between 2015 and 2018, that I had grown men in their fifties reduced to tears in my office over the loss of their livelihoods. These are highly paid, professional, proud people. Some of them were old enough that they had entered the workforce when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. They told me that they had even managed to survive the NEP, but now they did not have a job. Women, who had reached the senior levels of corporate Calgary, were suddenly without a job.
I have knocked on doors. I knocked on one door where a mom said their family came to Canada 20 years ago. Her husband was working in the Middle East and her son was working in Texas. They had to leave the country for work in the energy industry. I will take nothing from the government on jobs.
What are the Liberals doing now? They are subsidizing replacement workers from foreign countries to come and take work away that should be given to Canadians. There was $7 billion for the Northvolt project with foreign replacement workers. There was $15 billion to Stellantis for foreign replacement workers. It is disgraceful and it is shameful the way the Liberals come here and try to lecture Conservatives on supporting workers.
We are now at the end of the year. The NDP-Liberal government tabled this bill banning replacement workers in federally regulated industries as per the demand put upon the government by the NDP. This is not what the Liberals campaigned on. This is something the Liberals voted against. The NDP has tabled this very policy in the House through private members' business.
The same Liberals who are speaking this morning in debate, who voted against this, would now have people believe that this is somehow part of their policy and what they ran on. This is clearly a long-standing NDP policy, but this is nothing more than the NDP tail wagging the Liberal dog. That is exactly why we call it the NDP-Liberal government.
The bill would ban workers from working in federally regulated industries if the workers who belong to a union go on strike. It is a bill that risks pitting workers against each other. Workers who choose not to join a union are workers too. Workers across picket lines are workers too, but not to the NDP-Liberals.
I even heard this morning the use of dehumanizing language. The Liberals referred to these workers as “scabs”. Let us think about that. It is a degrading, humiliating and dehumanizing word they used, not because this is about power for workers. It is not. It is about control and that is why they use this type of language.
The market is an amazing and undeniable force of nature, and it does tend to sort things out quickly. It allows the best decisions to be made at the bargaining table and incentivizes agreements. The government is presiding over a cost-of-living crisis where rent has doubled, mortgage payments are up 150% and a generation of young Canadian workers have given up on the dream of home ownership because they cannot afford to live in this country. We have seen food inflation. We have seen every kind of inflation fuelled by taxes paid by workers.
The NDP-Liberal government has nothing to teach Conservatives or tell Canadians about supporting workers. There is only one party that is supporting workers, the one party that stands for powerful paycheques that can be used to buy homes that people can afford in safe communities. That is what the Conservative vision is for this country. It is not spending billions of tax dollars, paid for by workers, to pay foreign workers to come and take their jobs away from them and bid up the price of homes in their communities. It is shameful.
I will take no lessons from the Liberal-NDP government on support for workers. The workers in my riding have seen the sharp end of the Liberal government. I saw desperation at people's doors, especially in the 2019 election. The community I represent is full of talented, hard-working, ambitious workers who have been crushed by the government.
The good news is they see hope. They know workers are increasingly turning to the Conservative Party, and it is the workers in Canada who are going to elect a Conservative government that will deliver powerful paycheques that Canadians need to be able to afford to live, and rein in the wasteful spending and corporate welfare that has become endemic under the government.
It is only the Conservatives in this place who are standing up for workers in Canada.
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- Nov/27/23 1:25:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am sure that question was out of order for relevance, but I can understand why this member would not wish to ask a question relevant to the speech that I just made; he knows he is one of the members who has already voted against anti-replacement worker legislation in this House more than once. Therefore, I fully understand why the member will not talk about the bill or ask me a question about this bill. It is because his flip-flop that he is undertaking right now is not something that he wants well understood by his constituents, perhaps.
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- Nov/27/23 1:26:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is demand for the product that the energy industry produces. Despite everything that the current government has done to kill that industry, the billions and billions of dollars that the businesses lost and the hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, we are a long way from catching up to where we could have been and the promise that existed.
With respect to the TMX, the member is right to bring up the waste on that. This is a project that should have been built with private capital. We had a private proponent who was going to build the TMX with its own money. If it ballooned from $4 billion to $30 billion, that would be on the proponent and its shareholders to worry about. However, it is the people and the workers of Canada who are paying for the overage now that the government has been put in a position to nationalize it after it chased private capital out.
With respect to the member's third question, I oppose the subsidizing of any industry where the crown is subsidizing a private business on the promise of creating jobs when it is really just importing temporary labour, bidding up the cost of housing and making the taxpayer, the workers in Canada, pay for the jobs for the foreign replacement workers.
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- Nov/27/23 1:28:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not want to put this all on that particular policy change in 1977. Maybe even going back earlier than 1977, the Province of Quebec has been the laggard in the Canadian economy for most of these past 45 years. Its per capita GDP has been much lower than other provinces. If the member would ask me if there is a grand economic success behind the policies of Quebec, we could have that discussion. I do not think it is really appropriate for the purpose of this chamber, but I do not see a connection to a grand period of economic expansion behind that policy in 1977.
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- Nov/27/23 5:17:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know that in the member's riding, the government's track record is particularly horrific given the jobs it has killed through its attack on resource industries.
I wonder if the member would like to comment on the NDP tail suddenly wagging the Liberal dog, forcing a bill onto the House that the Liberals twice voted against when raised as opposition private members' bills. Does she have any comment on the credibility the government has when it comes to standing up for workers?
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