- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Churchill—Keewatinook Aski
- Manitoba
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moved that Bill C-245, An Act to amend the Canada Infrastructure Bank Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
She said: Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise in the House to speak to my private member’s bill, Bill C-245. It is a bill that would amend the act of the Infrastructure Bank of Canada, a bill that would use public ownership in the fight against climate change, and a bill that would give hope to communities like the one I come from, the ones I represent and the ones across our country that are already paying the price for climate change.
This bill would provide a new avenue for indigenous communities, northern communities and all Canadians to develop the infrastructure they need right now.
The climate crisis is on our doorstep, and what we are hearing back home in the north is alarming. The permafrost is melting and jeopardizing our municipal infrastructure. Thousands of people rely on temporary winter roads to receive deliveries of heavy equipment, but the season for using them is getting shorter and shorter. These communities need help dealing with climate change before it is too late.
Meanwhile, the Canada Infrastructure Bank has failed. Not a single project has been completed, and billions of dollars are sitting unspent.
As the UN Secretary-General said this week, time is running out. We must use all of the tools at our disposal to tackle the climate crisis. The bill I am proposing today is part of the solution.
This past September, I sat with the chief and council of Pauingassi First Nation at the hotel in Winnipeg where they had been evacuated. They were into the third month of their forced evacuation from wildfires raging in eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. This was their third evacuation in four years. This time it lasted four months.
We sat in one of the hotel meeting spaces that had been converted into a makeshift school. The leaders and principal of the school shared their concerns. “These fires are only getting worse,” they shared. “We need support to keep our communities safe,” they said. Pauingassi is one of two first nations in Manitoba that, despite years of advocacy, does not even have an airport. They have no all-weather road and no airport. “We felt trapped,” they said.
Pauingassi lost community members during the time of the evacuation. Many community members were desperate to go home, and when they got home, they found hectares of their traditional lands devastated. Traplines were gone and cabins had burned to the ground. A way of life was under threat.
Last summer saw a series of devastating climate events. Perhaps the one that received the most attention was the burning to the ground of Lytton, in British Columbia. The excruciatingly high temperatures of the heat dome created the conditions of a fire that engulfed a village, a community, lives and livelihoods. As Edith Loring-Kuhanga, school administrator for Stein Valley Nlakapamux School in Lytton, said, “The extreme temperatures of 49°C-plus leading up to June 30 contributed to the Lytton Creek fire that destroyed the Village of Lytton in 25 minutes and burned many homes and businesses on IR 17, 18 and 22 of Lytton First Nation and the Thompson-Nicola Regional District. Our lives were forever changed on June 30. Nine months later, those who lost their homes continue to be homeless and struggle with high anxiety and PTSD as they continue to reconnect with their families, culture, way of life and the land.” To this day, Lytton is still waiting to be cleaned up and rebuilt.
Pauingassi, Lytton, Little Grand Rapids, St. Theresa Point, Shamattawa, Thompson, Iqaluit, Old Crow, The Pas, Fort Chipewyan, Prince George, Pinaymootang First Nation, Peguis, Inuvik, Uashat-Maliotenam and Happy Valley-Goose Bay: this bill is for all of our communities. These communities have been sounding the alarm on climate change for some time. They have been clear on what they need and what we need to mitigate and adapt, and they are communities that have been ignored. This must change. Time is running out.
Just this week, the IPCC came out with a damning report highlighting the absolute urgency needed to fight climate change. The report outlined the need to ditch fossil fuels. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the report, but just as easily could have been talking about the Liberal government record on climate change, as a “litany of broken promises” and “a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world”. He said, “The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning. We are on a fast track to climate disaster.”
There have been many reports and many words, but not enough action. The Liberals continue to maintain the anti-science fallacy that fossil fuel investments will pay for a clean-energy transition. The government has given more to oil companies than even the previous Conservative government could have dreamed of. We are, shamefully, the worst G7 country when it comes to GHG emissions, and at a time when we should be supporting the transition to green energy, dozens of northern communities in our country are running on dirty diesel.
Time is running out. We must act now. It is time that we commit to investing in indigenous and northern communities and all our communities in supporting their efforts for a just transition by supporting this legislation, because it is that important. The infrastructure needs are that important.
A recent report claimed that the infrastructure gap for first nations is conservatively estimated at $25 billion to $30 billion, yet many of the infrastructure needs we see are for projects between $1 million and $25 million. Bluntly speaking, slapping a profit requirement on Infrastructure Bank projects locks communities like the ones I represent out of these dollars. Do their infrastructure needs not matter?
Chief Owens of Pauingassi First Nation said, “We have already seen the effects of climate change over the last few decades. It’s real. I was surprised in conversations with Niki to even hear of Canada’s Infrastructure Bank. We’ve never heard of it. We’ve never been able to use it. Investments to connect us with the rest of the country or help us deal with fires we would like to see, and this bill would help with that.”
Chief Redhead is from Shamattawa First Nation, a community that as been failed by Canada time and time again. It deals with massive infrastructure gaps, a housing crisis, tuberculosis outbreaks as a result of the housing crisis and a recent COVID outbreak that was so bad that the military had to be sent in. In regard to this bill, he said, “One of the benefits of seeing this bill pass would be the ability to connect Shamattawa to the main hydro line. Right now we’re dependent on burning dirty diesel for the entire community. It’s 2022 and it’s time to bring communities like Shamattawa into 2022. I’d really like to see this bill pass and for all parties to support it so we can make real change in the fight against climate change.”
Chief Flett of St. Theresa Point has talked about the need for an all-weather road system to the Island Lake Region, given the melting ice roads and the chance to cut down on the carbon footprint that comes from an absolute reliance on air travel.
We have heard from leaders about water pipes breaking down in their communities because of melting permafrost, radio towers snapping because of the weight of record snowfalls, historic droughts and unpredictable flooding.
In discussions with indigenous, territorial and northern leaders, we repeatedly heard about how they want to move forward with mitigation and adaptation. We also heard how hard it was for them to access any federal dollars. Overwhelmingly, there was a sense that the federal government existed to serve the needs of the southern part of the country, if that.
In conversations with some of my Liberal colleagues in advance of today, I heard concerns that there are other federal institutions that can do this work, that can fund these type of projects, but the reality is that they are not. That is why so many of these communities are in such dire straits.
If we acknowledge that the need is great, if we acknowledge that current institutions are not getting the job done, why do we not use Canada’s Infrastructure Bank to do the job we originally wanted it to do? We cannot afford to wait in terms of climate, and we certainly cannot afford to wait when it comes to people. If not now, when?
It is clear that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is not living up to its promise. We are talking about a Crown corporation with a budget of $35 billion dollars that has yet to complete a single project in almost five years of existence. A recent PBO report said it would not even spend half its money. In the infrastructure committee study called for by my colleague, the MP for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, witness after witness made it clear that the bank in its current form does not and cannot work, yet when the bank was first established, many folks were excited. Robert Ramsay, senior research officer at CUPE, described the excitement when they thought that they were hearing about the creation of a public infrastructure bank that could invest in desperately needed infrastructure across the country. This has not been the case. The reality is that the bank is refusing to do the work that it promised to do.
At committee, the PBO reported that the Canada Infrastructure Bank had only approved 18% of the projects it considered, with one of the most common reasons given for rejection being that the projects themselves were not considered big enough. This bill would fix that. It would prioritize the infrastructure needs of the communities the bank claims to be working for.
The bank's privatization agenda has been a key part of the problem. There was a consistent feature of testimony at committee from witnesses, including Canadians for Tax Fairness, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Council of Canadians, that public-private partnerships, particularly ones that include private operators collecting revenues through user fees, inherently raised questions about which projects are selected. They questioned whether Canadians can be satisfied that an infrastructure project is being funded because it serves the greatest public interest and not because it offers the highest rate of return for private equity providers.
Mr. Sanger testified:
The only purpose that P3s fill is to engage in some off-book financing and provide private finance with lucrative low-risk investment opportunities that taxpayers will cover for decades to come. If these projects are really privatized, we will undoubtedly end up with some really inadequate infrastructure....
In Mapleton, Ontario, it took public outrage to stop the Infrastructure Bank from privatizing water services.
As Angella MacEwen, a senior economist at CUPE, said, “The most critical infrastructure needs in Canada aren’t ones that work with a profit attached to them. It’s basic infrastructure that is needed for communities to go about their daily lives. It should be publicly financed and publicly owned so it benefits the most people. I’m really excited to see this bill. This is what we’ve been asking for at CUPE and the broader labour movement: for the bank to move in this direction.
Along with its privatization agenda, there is a lack of transparency from the bank. At committee, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux discussed the bank's refusal to share information, saying that the bank was probably less transparent than the Department of Infrastructure. He also pointed out that parliamentarians had yet to receive a full status update on the bank because the government has not kept track of information on all funded projects. This is obviously unacceptable.
Through this bill we are also calling on the bank to include first nations, Inuit and Métis voices in its governance. If we acknowledge that the greatest infrastructure gap in the country is within these communities, it is frankly inconceivable in 2022 and in an age of reconciliation that these communities do not have a say in what is happening on their land.
It is clear that the foundations of the Canada Infrastructure Bank must be rebuilt. We can do this work. We know that the fight against climate change requires bold collective action. It requires the leveraging of public investment in historic ways. Crown corporations are key tools in this fight. Our Crown corporations belong to us, the Canadian people, and they ought to be leading players in the fight against climate change. Today we can start with the Infrastructure Bank. The Infrastructure Bank can be the solution and not a tepid part of the problem. I urge my Liberal colleagues and indeed all members of the house to be part of that solution. The bank should be issuing green bonds, as many have called for. Let us let the CIB be a driving force in the fight against climate change, in the fight against the infrastructure gaps our communities face.
Rather than allocating public funds to be used by the private sector, which will prioritize profits, let us direct that money to the communities that are struggling to survive in the midst of a climate emergency. Let us use all levers of government and put them to work for the people. Let us create green jobs. Let us join forces with indigenous peoples who are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. Let us identify all of the government's underperformers, like the Canada Infrastructure Bank. We need to do this for the survival of our planet.
My message to the Liberals is clear: If they want the Infrastructure Bank to live up to its promise, make these changes.
My message to all MPs in the House is clear: If they believe communities across our country deserve federal investment as they take on the climate crisis, vote for this bill. If they believe we need bold action to take on the climate emergency, vote for this bill.
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