- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
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Madam Speaker, once again we are seeing the Liberals shutting down debate, something they said they would never do. Here, they are doing it again and on a bill that is worth debating.
They are talking about taking the oil and gas board in the Atlantic area and making it responsible as a regulatory board for all electric and other technologies, which it has no experience in. Really, this is something we cannot leave to committee.
We need to have voices heard up front so that we can get a fulsome debate on it, but once again, they are ramming things through the House with the help from the NDP. I am not sure why NDP members are still supporting the Liberals. They have gotten nothing they asked for, and they had an opportunity at their convention to say that they did not get pharmacare and dental care is a vague promise for 2025, after the next election. They should just give it up and quit propping up a government that continually shuts down debate.
Can the member opposite explain why they do not want to hear fulsome debate?
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Madam Speaker, I apologize.
Sustainable Marine Energy started developing an alternative energy project in the Bay of Fundy. After 10 years of hard work, it was providing clean, green energy, which is what we all want, to Nova Scotians. For all their trail-blazing efforts, Sustainable Marine Energy was awarded a tide of red tape from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The repeated delays and a bombshell permit rejection, which the Liberal government refused to justify, were the straw that broke the camel's back. After five years of insurmountable regulatory challenges, the pilot project in Digby county was cancelled.
Let us think about the common elements here. Even though the project was the kind of renewable energy that the Liberal government is saying it wants to have, the company had to jump through hoops for 10 years. Finally, the government was able to pull the permit. The federal government can pull the permit without any justification. This is just a precedent of what is to come with the other projects currently existing in the petroleum sector on the coast. I am very concerned about that.
The other thing I would say is that Bill C-49 contains language to put Bill C-69 in it. It directly references the Impact Assessment Act, which, as I said, is a process that makes project approvals longer and their consultations more complicated. At the same time, someone could start and stop the process as many times as they wanted. There is lots of uncertainty. I am very unhappy about that one.
If we look at the access to offshore infrastructure, this bill says that the cabinet, the governor in council, would regulate access to that infrastructure, including enforcing tolls and tariffs. Here we go again. It is another opportunity for the Liberal government to toll, tariff and tax something that is already in place.
Who is going to pay the extra cost of those tolls, tariffs and taxes? The consumer of the energy that has been created will ultimately pay those costs. Have we not learned anything? We have seen the carbon tax get put in place. It drives up the cost of gasoline. It drives up the cost of home heating.
People in the Atlantic provinces are already struggling. All the premiers have asked for the removal of the carbon tax, and even the Liberal MPs from that area are asking for the removal of the carbon tax because it is increasing the cost of everything. It is increasing the cost of food.
They are not just taxing the farmers and putting tariffs on the fertilizer, which is another tariff and another cost that is being passed along, but they are also taxing the transporting of the goods to the processor. There is a carbon tax on the processor. They are shipping it to the grocery store with a carbon tax on that.
At the end of the day, the consumer is paying. When I see clauses such as this saying that the government can enforce tolls and tariffs on the infrastructure, I am concerned for the ultimate consumer because these costs are significant.
If we think about the carbon tax, we know from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that the carbon tax is costing, depending on what province one lives in, from $1,500 to $2,500. Then there is the second carbon tax that was put in place, and the cost of that is another $1,800. That one is in every province, even in Quebec, although they are trying to deny that it is.
We talk about extra tariffs on top of that, and Canadians are out of money. The government is out of touch when it comes to understanding that there is no more money that people can pay. They were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills before the pandemic. Now, with the increase of all these taxes, people are borrowing money to live, and some of them have lost their houses and become homeless. People are skipping meals. They cannot afford to eat. Honestly, I am very concerned when I see this kind of language in the bill.
There is also a financial stipulation in the bill. It came with a royal recommendation, which says there is some level of federal funding that is required. An obvious question may be how much the funding is. There is no answer to that. It was not in the budget. It was not in any of the forecasts.
Where is this magic money going to come from? Are we going to run additional deficits? That is inflationary spending. We keep telling the government about this. In fact, the finance minister herself said that it would be pouring fuel on the inflationary fire to have this extra spending, but then we see things such as this, where there is extra spending. It is not even defined how much it would be. That is not going to be an acceptable alternative, as far as I can tell.
I will be clear that Conservatives support the development of renewable resources, but we support those developments without political interference. We do not want the government of the day picking winners and losers and deciding what to shut down based on its ideology. That is not where we want to be. We want to see the free market drive this. There is an opportunity to create jobs, create prosperous industry and do the right thing for the environment. That is what Conservatives want to see.
I do not think this bill is capturing that. I think there is a lot of political interference put into the mechanisms of this bill in ministerial powers, cabinet powers, and tolls and tariffs. There are lots of mechanisms for the government to interfere.
Canadians are struggling, and the government's new draft regulations on clean electricity will push up costs even higher. Reporting from CTV in August indicates, “Electricity infrastructure expenses are expected to increase significantly over the next several decades as maintenance and increased demand is estimated to cost $400 billion”. That is already before we know how much the offshore renewables are going to cost.
I ask members to remember the lesson from Ontario, which was that it drove the price of electricity up so high that we were uncompetitive and people could not pay their power bills. This is not just a lesson from Canada. Germany experienced the same thing. It went heavy on renewables, which drove the cost of everything up. It then went back onto Russian oil and coal. Of course, we refused to take $59 billion to put Germany on low-carbon LNG from Canada, so Australia took that deal. It was the same thing with Japan, which gave us the same offer. Saudi Arabia took that deal.
Gee, I wish we had $120 billion more to put in our health care system so that everyone in this country could have a doctor. That is what I think. All I can say is that those are some of the concerns I have. There are many things in the bill that I do not object to. There are some administrative things that are taken care of. Those are fine.
Do I think we can fix all of this at committee? Call me skeptical, but my experience under this NDP-Liberal coalition is that its members will ram through an agenda to shut down oil and gas, and it does not matter what reasoned amendments the Conservative Party will bring at committee, as they will be refused. They will ramrod it through. They will time allocate it to make sure this thing is rushed through. They will be skimpy on the details and say, “Trust us. We'll get it in the regulations.” I have been here long enough to know that that is not good for Canadians.
Our job here as the official opposition is to point out what is wrong with these bills. It would be so nice if we could be consulted before the thing was written, when it could still be altered, but here we are with something that honestly has way too much political power in it. I do not think it is going to be good for the Atlantic provinces. They do not think it is going to be good for them. They are already crying out against the policies of the government with respect to the carbon tax.
Those are my initial thoughts. I may have more thoughts as we go forward, but I would be happy to take questions.
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Mr. Speaker, there was a project from Sustainable Marine Energy. It was the first North American tidal power project, and it was cancelled by the Liberals through stalling and lots of regulatory red tape. Is the member concerned that the bill before us would exacerbate that problem by institutionalizing red tape and bureaucracy, which would prevent projects from being built?
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Centre.
It is a pleasure to rise today and speak to Bill C-42, an act to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other acts.
Bill C-42 amends the CBSA to require Corporations Canada to make public certain information regarding those with significant control or ownership of federally regulated private corporations in Canada, creating a national registry of these individuals. In this case, “significant control” is defined as someone owning or controlling at least 25% of the corporation's shares. The bill will also better protect whistle-blowers, add new offences and give Corporations Canada additional inquiry, data validation and information-sharing powers.
The government has stated that its goal with this bill is to protect Canadians against money laundering and terrorist financing, deter tax evasion and avoidance, and ensure that Canada is an attractive country in which to conduct business. The bill's title, while literal, does not speak to the good the bill would do to combat money laundering and criminal financial activity in our country. Because of this, the Conservatives support the bill in principle, with important amendments recognizing the sheer need for action on money laundering in Canada. I will talk about the amendments later. First of all, I need to outline just how serious financial crime is in Canada and, thus, speak to the need for this bill.
Money laundering in Canada is so well known in the world that criminals call it “snow-washing”. While it is a problem throughout the country, the worst of the issue is concentrated in British Columbia, especially in the Vancouver area. As stated in the Cullen commission's final report on the issue of money laundering in British Columbia, money laundering has, as its origin, crime that destroys communities. This includes drug trafficking, human trafficking and fraud. Such crimes victimize the most vulnerable members of society. Money laundering is also an affront to law-abiding citizens, who earn their money honestly and pay their fair share of the costs of living in a community. There can be few things more destructive to a community's sense of well-being than a governing regime that fails to resist those whose opportunities are unfairly gained at the expense of others.
Under the Liberal government, and going back into certain governments in the 1990s, Canada became a haven for money laundering. Specifically, in the nineties, the British Columbia provincial NDP government changed regulations that governed casinos. Five-dollar bets became $500 bets at baccarat tables and private gambling salons, and the bets only grew from there.
The Cullen commission report indicates a stunning growth in cash transactions in B.C. casinos; first flagged by investigators in 2008, transactions continued unabated until at least 2014, when casinos accepted more than $1.2 billion in cash transactions. Many of the transactions matched the indicators for criminal funds, where bricks or even duffle bags of cash were delivered to casinos. The commission indicated that these criminal transactions involved loan sharks delivering bundles of $20 bills, which had been packaged in a way that was consistent with the proceeds of drug trafficking, to high-profile foreign gamblers. These gamblers had travelled primarily to Canada to play baccarat in secluded areas of the casino. These high rollers often paid back the loan sharks the funds they gambled via transactions in their country of origin. In this evolution, B.C. gambling, real estate and luxury items became favourite tools of criminals to launder illicit foreign funds.
It is ironic that it is the Liberal government strengthening money-laundering bills. I am glad to see it, but if we look at the history even since I was elected, there was Joe Peschisolido, who was accused of money laundering. Then we had Raj Grewal, who asked questions about money laundering to FINTRAC at committee just before being arrested and charged with fraud. We also have another backbencher who is flipping real estate, even though we know that real estate is one of the key ways in which money laundering is happening. As I said, it is ironic that they are bringing this forward, but I certainly agree that we need to do something to rein in out-of-control money laundering.
The commission also found that, in B.C.'s economy, casinos, real estate dealings, banks and law offices face big money-laundering risks and that the failures of the federal RCMP and FINTRAC allowed money laundering to grow. The report indicated that FINTRAC's reporting regime is essentially wasteful and that the RCMP's lack of attention has allowed for the unchecked growth of money laundering since at least 2012.
The report states:
One of the primary criticisms of the federal regime is the ineffectiveness of FINTRAC.... While...there is a statutory threshold that must be met before FINTRAC can disclose information to law enforcement, the number of disclosures to law enforcement is [allegedly] not commensurate with the volume of reports that FINTRAC receives, nor with the scale of money laundering activity in British Columbia.
That is according to Cullen and his team. He suggests:
Law enforcement bodies in British Columbia cannot rely on FINTRAC to produce timely, useful intelligence about money laundering activity that they can put into action.
It is true that FINTRAC receives an enormous volume of reports from public and private sector reporting entities, but it produces only a modest number of intelligence packages that actually go to law enforcement. For example, in 2019 to 2020, the Cullen commission found that FINTRAC received over 31 million individual reports. In that same year, it disclosed only 2,057 intelligence reports to law enforcement agencies across Canada and only 355 to law enforcement agencies in B.C.
Global News reporter Sam Cooper has been investigating dirty money in B.C. for years. He found that, as of 2016, fully half of the luxury properties in Vancouver were owned through suspicious circumstances. The Prime Minister has known about this for years. The global money-laundering watchdog warned the Prime Minister in 2016 that Canada was a safe haven for money laundering, particularly in our real estate market, and that a registry was needed to help identify and deter this activity. In fact, the watchdog gave the Liberal government a failing grade in five key areas because dirty money was able to slip into our businesses and real estate market undetected, with no questions asked. That was 2016, and it is now 2023; the legislation is pretty late in coming.
The Panama papers data leak in 2016 exposed that international criminals have long exploited the gaps in Canada's corporation beneficial ownership regulatory scheme to engage in corrupt conduct through federally, provincially and territorially administered corporations. Canada is generally perceived as having weak laws to combat money laundering and the proceeds of crime. As a result, in 2018, B.C. launched the expert panel on money laundering in real estate. The panel estimated that in B.C. alone, more than $7 billion of dirty money was laundered in 2018 and between $800 million and $5.3 billion was laundered through the real estate market, raising housing prices by an estimated 5% on already wildly expensive properties.
The Cullen commission report demonstrates that money laundering within real estate often involves the use of loans, mortgages and, in some cases, lawyers' trust accounts in the legal system. It can also involve cash. The report provides this example: A criminal might take out a mortgage with the purchase of a property and repay the mortgage with the proceeds of crime. If the cash deposited for each payment is under $10,000, it will not trigger the requirements for a large-transaction report to FINTRAC. Over time, criminals may accumulate multiple properties or higher-value real estate using this strategy. The properties can then be sold, often at a significant profit in the Vancouver real estate market, with the criminal property owner receiving clean funds from the purchaser to complete the money-laundering process.
Law-abiding Canadians across the country have been suffering as a result of this issue. Since the Trudeau government was elected, the price of a home in Canada has—
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Louis‑Saint‑Laurent.
I rise today to address Bill C-34, an act to amend the Investment Canada Act. Bill C-34 is an attempt to update and strengthen the Investment Canada Act through seven significant amendments. Mainly, these changes to the act aim to protect Canada's national security with stricter regulations and higher penalties.
The main tenets of the bill attempt to introduce a pre-implementation filing requirement for specified investments. It would streamline the minister's ability to investigate national security reviews of investments and strengthen penalties for offenders. It would create regulatory power to generate a list of national security industries where automatic proposed acquisitions would be reviewed for national security harm, and it would provide ministerial authority to impose interim conditions and accept mitigation undertakings.
The bill would remove the Governor in Council, replacing it with the minister in making an order for further national security review, and involve the Governor in Council in the results of the national security review only if the investment is found, after investigation, to be injurious to national security. It supposedly would improve coordination with international partners and strengthen rules for the protection of information in judicial review proceedings.
In essence, this bill would give the Minister of Industry more time and authority to assess foreign transactions that might compromise national security, by removing the Governor in Council from the initial process while also making more severe the penalties for violating the Investment Canada Act. This, on its face, is beneficial and necessary, but there are several gaps that need to be addressed, which I will outline later.
Threats to our national security and sovereignty come in a dizzying array with regard to scope and creativity. Today, I want to focus on threats to our national security via our economy by investment from actors with malicious intent. There is just cause to update and strengthen the Investment Canada Act to prevent such threats or, at the very least, reduce the number of threatening actions made to Canada's economy and national security via investment. There exists a scary number of examples wherein Canada's national security was jeopardized due to a lack of due diligence on behalf of the industry minister with regard to foreign direct investment.
The industry minister's 2021 mandate letter directed the minister to do the following:
Contribute to broader efforts to promote economic security and combat foreign interference by reviewing and modernizing the Investment Canada Act to strengthen the national security review process and better identify and mitigate...security threats from foreign investment.
The keywords here are “better identify and mitigate...security threats”. There is ample evidence to show why the Prime Minister so directed the industry minister, as the Liberal record on allowing bad actors to invest in Canadian companies, and therefore our intellectual property and data, is rather horrifying.
In 2017, the Minister of Industry failed to request a full national security review of the acquisition of a B.C.-based telecommunications company, Norsat International, and its subsidiary, Sinclair Technologies, by China-based Hytera Communications, which is partially owned by the People's Republic of China. The Chinese government owns about 10% of Hytera Communications through an investment fund.
The United States, our largest and most important trading partner, blacklisted Hytera in 2021. Its Federal Communications Commission stated that the company “pose[s] an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons”. Sales and import of Hytera equipment are banned in the U.S. as a result, and our industry minister let this company, with its ties to the Chinese ruling Communist Party, buy a Canadian company.
It gets better, or should I say, it gets worse. Hytera Communications is also facing 21 charges in an American espionage case. The United States Department of Justice is accusing the firm of conspiring to steal trade secrets from Motorola. We know this tactic has been used before by the Chinese government, and yet our industry minister okayed a sale of a Canadian company right to it.
In 2019, Manitoba-based Tantalum Mining Corp. of Canada Limited, also known as Tanco, was purchased by the Chinese company Sinomine Resources. The purchase was approved by the Liberals with no national security review. The mine produces lithium and more than 65% of the world's cesium, which is used in drilling applications, as well as Canada's largest deposit of tantalum, which is used in electronics.
Sinomine was recently ordered by the government, in November, to divest itself of its investment in Power Metals Corp, a different mining exploration firm in Vancouver, but the government was apparently totally fine with its continued ownership of the Tanco mine and its critical minerals operations, as its divestment order said nothing about it.
In 2020, our Department of Global Affairs awarded a $6.8-million contract to state-owned, China-based Nuctech, which was founded by the son of the former Chinese Communist Party secretary general. That is $6.8 million of Canadian taxpayer money basically going directly into the Chinese Communist Party's pockets, along with precious data.
As John Ivison wrote for the National Post in 2020, “Nuctech is known as the 'Huawei of airport security'”. The contract was to supply security equipment for 170 Canadian embassies, consulates and high commissions around the globe. A security industry source told Ivison for the story that he was concerned there were now “significant pieces of Chinese technology sitting in every embassy” and that the contract included delivery, installation, operator training and software.
For the same article, Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador in Beijing, explained that the Chinese business strategy overseas is to win market share and, once dominant, dictate prices, illustrating that not only are there security concerns with these problematic investments, but there are also long-term economic implications. We cannot continue to let China and other actors with malicious intent interfere with Canada's economy and national security, even if they do offer the lowest prices for the service.
That said, the pattern of allowing risky investments without full security reviews continues. It was apparently briefly acknowledged in 2021, with the industry minister updating and enhancing guidelines for national security reviews of transactions involving critical minerals and state-owned enterprises in March of that year. However, 2022 saw a number of lapses, even with this enhanced protocol.
In January 2022, the minister failed to follow his own updated guidelines when he fast-tracked the takeover of the Canadian lithium company Neo Lithium Corp. by Chinese state-owned Zijin Mining, again, without a national security review.
Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in international affairs and intelligence gathering, told the industry and technology committee, while studying the takeover after the fact, that it was a mistake. The value of the transaction was close to a billion dollars.
Then, in November 2022, the minister ordered three Chinese companies to divest their ownership of three critical minerals firms, but Neo Lithium was not included.
In December 2022, possibly the worst offence, the RCMP awarded a contract to supply sensitive hardware for its communications systems to Sinclair Technologies, which, members will recall, was sold to Hytera Communications, the Chinese company partially owned by the Communist Party and blacklisted in the U.S.
It was also revealed in December of that year that the Canada Border Services Agency has been using communications equipment and technology from Hytera. A CBC story says that Public Services and Procurement Canada did not take into consideration the security concerns about Sinclair and its ownership during the bidding process. The difference between that and Quebec-based Comprod's offer was $60,000. The Liberals love to hand out money left and right, but they could not spend $60,000 to keep our security hardware domestically sourced and provide Canadians with jobs while we are at it.
As we can see, the bill is sorely needed, but there are a few areas for improvement within the bill itself.
I do not like the part that gets rid of the Governor in Council approval and gives power just to the minister. I think that should be fixed. The legislation should also consider updating the act's definition of a state-owned enterprise, which is now too vague. There is no provision to block any subsequent takeover by a state-owned enterprise of a previous Investment Canada Act-approved acquisition.
It is my hope that the government learns from its mistakes, listens to the opposition parties and experts, and gets this legislation right. We cannot keep selling off parts of our economy, national security and precious resources to bad actors.
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