- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Cypress Hills—Grasslands
- Saskatchewan
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,746.42
- Government Page
- May/3/23 6:40:01 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, I found it interesting that throughout the member's speech, he quite often made reference to the environment.
Through you to the member, I am curious what specific regulation the government is changing that would prevent it from once again handing out a $13-billion subsidy to the one automaker in this country that has actually been charged for violating CEPA. Which regulation would it like to change to make sure that does not happen again?
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- Oct/24/22 12:05:26 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise once again to finish my speech on Bill S-5. For the benefit of my colleagues in the chamber today, I will do a quick review of where we were last week.
Before looking at how the bill is written, I explained why we should always be ready to question the Liberal government's real agenda whenever it makes announcements or introduces legislation about the environment. We need to look no further than its history of hypocrisy, double standards, failures and empty promises. If its members say that they are doing something in the name of the environment, it is not necessarily the case to begin with, and later we do not see the expected results.
Sometimes it gets worse than that, when a policy that claims to be helping the environment will end up having a negative impact on the environment. With all the economic and social costs, and with our industries attacked or neglected despite their own best efforts to be environmentally responsible, Canadians are left to wonder what the point of it really was, but it does not need to be that way.
There needs to be a balanced approach to caring for the environment and promoting industry. Bill S-5 seems to be a little different from the more outrageous examples that Canadians are used to seeing from the Liberals, but some of the amendments have raised concerns that we will not maintain the right balance, which is the point I was making before the House adjourned.
I was talking about one of those amendments in the section dealing with assessments of whether a substance is toxic or not. The original version of the bill mentions “vulnerable population”, but it has been amended to include a new term, which is “vulnerable environment”. As a new term, it is vague and unclear, and this could be another source of regulatory uncertainty for the stakeholders who are involved in the assessment or enforcement process.
Such a concern does not come out of nowhere. It is a real possibility, and we have already seen it happen more broadly with the same government's impact assessment process. It has not only ruled out new pipelines for oil and gas, exactly as it was expected to do, but the Liberals have made their hostility to that sector abundantly clear, and they will find any excuse to express it to the point of absurdity.
The Chancellor of Germany travelled all the way here to ask for our support in supplying them with more LNG, but we let him down. Since then, we recently heard the Prime Minister say that Russia invading Ukraine will accelerate Canada in its transition away from petroleum products, even though there is a surge in global demand for Canadian LNG and oil to stop relying on Russian energy. Despite the needs of our allies, the Liberals will not miss a chance to publicly attack our energy sector. This will be a sad part of the legacy of the Impact Assessment Act.
That same process has created challenges in other areas of resource development, whether it is with forestry or even with expansion in new mining projects, and I will provide a quick example.
In the CUSMA deal, when it was renegotiated, there was a three-year window to source lithium tariff-free regionally, but because of the Impact Assessment Act, there is not a chance that there will be a mining project in Canada put on—
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- Oct/19/22 6:44:58 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, it is always an honour and a privilege to rise in the House of Commons and to get a chance today to speak to Bill S-5, which is a piece of government legislation that comes to us from the other place. After it was introduced there, several amendments were made to the bill and it was sent to this House for more consideration. This piece of legislation mainly focuses on how the government will administer the Environmental Protection Act, 1999, as well as the Food and Drugs Act. I will talk about some of that in a moment.
First, it is worth noting that this is another environment bill coming from the Liberal government, which is a frequent topic. That is always something interesting to see when we consider the long list of hypocrisy, double standards, failure and empty promises that we keep getting from the government. That is why we often have to wonder what exactly the Liberals are trying to do whenever they are trying to bring something like this forward. Sometimes they are pushing political agendas or special interests in the name of supposedly helping the environment. Other times they are quickly trying to change the subject to distract from their failed policies or one of the many scandals that they seem to find themselves involved in on a regular basis.
For all we know, that might be why the government added a general statement that we should protect the environment, without really defining or explaining it any further. Regardless, it is important to remember how the Liberals tend to operate when any bill on this topic comes from their government.
Until recently, I was on the public accounts committee. Along with reviewing the Auditor General's reports, we had the privilege of being able to look at the environment commissioner's reports on a regular basis as well. This gave me and my Conservative colleagues a closer look at the government's record of not keeping its promises or of missing its targets. It is remarkable how, over the course of time on the committee, and I am sure many other members here who have sat on the committee would agree with me, there is a recurring theme of overall failure to get things done and accomplished. More than half of the reports that we saw in this particular Parliament indicated significant failure. In some cases, the government is not delivering because there was no plan or no effort at all to get it done.
The last environment commissioner's report that I worked on had to do with the just transition, as the government supposedly calls it. This is what the commissioner told us:
[T]he government has been unprepared and slow off the mark.... We found that as Canada shifts its focus to low‑carbon alternatives, the government is not prepared to provide appropriate support to more than 50 communities and 170,000 workers in the fossil fuels sector.
The government identified Natural Resources Canada as the lead department to deliver just transition legislation in 2019.
[We found [t]he department took little action until 2021, and it did not have an implementation plan to address this significant economic shift.... Without a proper just transition plan in place, there are risks that are comparable to what occurred with the collapse of the northern cod fishery in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s.
Why is this important? I represent an area in southwestern Saskatchewan and my colleague from Souris—Moose Mountain is in the southeast corner of Saskatchewan. Right where our borders meet is an area that is going to be affected by this supposed just transition by the government. The towns of Rockglen, Willow Bunch, Coronach and many other communities in that area are going to be directly impacted by this. What we have seen repeatedly through the delays is that the government has not actually taken any steps yet to help these communities with this transition as the government is removing the number one economic driver in those communities and throughout that entire region. This has only been exacerbated these last two years, but that does not give the government the excuse of not being able to deal with something that it has implemented and forced upon these communities.
Whenever the government takes something away from someone, it has to be able to backfill it or replace it with something else. That is what the government is supposedly trying to do with a just transition, but we are just not seeing it. It is really important. Having gone through so many of the public accounts reports and seeing the failure, not even to have a plan in place is doing an extreme disservice to these communities.
I will talk about the town of Coronach as well. Coronach is in the riding of the member for Souris—Moose Mountain. I met with the mayor because he is part of a regional group that is represented by both Rockglen and Willow Bunch in my riding. He was talking about how their town specifically was designed to accommodate a population base of closer to 2,000 people. The town has only around 800 people right now, though. With the removal of the coal mine and power plant from the riding, who knows what is going to happen to that population?
Coronach is a town that is uniquely set up to grow and blossom, if only there were some proper investments into the community, from both the private sector and the government, particularly from the government, when it is removing the number one driver of the local economy. This is a town that has all the potential in the world to be able to do more, but the government is making sure it will achieve less, and unfortunately it is going to be at risk of suffering a fate similar to other communities that have had their entire economies wiped off the map.
Again, I look at Rockglen and Willow Bunch. The government spent some money in those communities. That had nothing to do with this just transition plan, yet the government is saying that it was actually from that funding stream, which is completely backward and is not actually helping to address the problems these communities are going to have going forward. These are problems such as broadband, which would be a far more appropriate investment by the government into their communities. Instead, it is investing in other areas that are not on a priority list for these communities. They are seeking an opportunity going forward as the government removes this critical industry from them.
Something else the committee looked at in public accounts was the carbon tax. The Liberals call it a price on pollution as though it is supposed to help protect the environment and we have just not seen the results yet. It is supposed to be their signature policy for the environment, but we see it is not actually a serious approach to the issue of the environment. Instead, it has turned out to be a great excuse for the government to take more money from Canadians' pockets, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer has released reports to confirm that Canadians, in fact, are receiving less than what the government is taking from them.
On the government's claims about the carbon tax being revenue neutral, when I asked the finance department about the amount of GST charged on top of the carbon tax, it confirmed that is over and above the $4.3 billion collected last year, but it could not actually give me a number because it was not keeping track of it. This is absolutely insane, because when we look at an energy bill, and I have many farmers who are sending me their bills to show how much carbon tax they are paying on their energy costs to dry grain, heat their barns and things like that, there is the carbon tax price and right below it there is a line for the federal GST that is collected.
Over time that becomes a lot of money, because there is a lot of carbon tax being collected now, but as we see the government planning to triple the carbon tax going forward, all the way up to $170 a tonne, that is going to be problematic, and we are going to see that GST number rise, yet the government does not even know how much money it is collecting from it. It is just insane. I do not even really know what more to say than that.
Bill S-5 is a bit different from the more outrageous examples out there. In particular, it would bring the focus back to Canada's legal and regulatory frameworks, which have already been in place for a long time. While many industry associations have supported the bill from when it was originally introduced, they have also expressed their concerns with some of the amendments it has received since then.
It is our job in the House to consider all of this and carefully review everything so that we can get the right balance, and hopefully the government will listen and reconsider some of the changes made to how it originally wrote its own piece of legislation. One of the first questionable issues for Canadian industry is a change to the wording related to the precautionary principle.
At first reading, the bill originally used standard wording, which is internationally recognized. It read, “the lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”. The key word in that sentence is “cost-effective”. It demonstrates that we fully expect the co-operative and responsible approach on the part of our industries to protect the environment. This expectation also includes awareness and respect for the needs and circumstances for those same industries. That is quite clear.
However, this statement has been amended to say, “the lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”. Such a change is not as small as it might sound. Those two words are clearly different with their emphasis, and this causes a shift in the meaning and interpretation of that section.
The other problem is that the bill refers to the precautionary principle, which is an international concept of long-standing international recognition. It represents a balanced approach between the environment and industry, and there is no need to move away from it. The wording for it is “cost-effective” and our law should faithfully reflect what it is citing, instead of creating uncertainty by changing what it says and what it means.
I will turn to another amendment made to this bill about assessing whether a substance is toxic. The original version mentioned vulnerable populations, but it did not include “vulnerable environment” as a new term, which has been added along with it. In Bill S-5, it is vague and unclear, which is not helpful and can create regulatory uncertainty for stakeholders dealing with the process of assessment or enforcement.
Again, we must not lose sight of the right balance between strong protection for the environment and practical concerns expressed by our industry. In that regard, it is a real possibility for a regulatory regime to become excessive and hostile to development.
We have seen a similar situation that is unnecessarily blocking resource projects across the different regions of the country. The Impact Assessment Act process has not only ruled out new pipelines for oil and gas, but also created challenges for forestry, and even more so for new mining projects, which are needed for the government's green ambitions.
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