So V ote

Context: House Hansard - 190 - May/3/23

May/3/23 9:28:26 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-6

Madam Speaker, I feel like I am preparing for the LSATs and this is a logic games test. If we are bringing in a new regulation, we actually have to eliminate one. However, if we are just eliminating regulations, which is the plan, we take out a whole bunch. That is the difference. That is the trick that the member did not pick up on. We would actually take a whole bunch out, but if we do have to bring in a new one, we would also take one out. Regulation in this country would always shrink under a Conservative government.

101 words

All Topics

Context: House Hansard - 190 - May/3/23

May/3/23 9:27:13 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-6

Madam Speaker, it is a good question. It would actually make some difference, and I did say that. The challenge is that it is not ambitious enough. As I pointed out, the Government of Canada's forward regulatory plan from 2021 to 2023 is to actually bring in 270 new regulations. Therefore, if it is going to take out 30, as the member said, or 46, as I said, and then bring in 270 new regulations, it is defeating the purpose. The government should be more ambitious. The government should be working harder to reduce red tape, and that is the real problem with this piece of legislation.

108 words

All Topics

Context: House Hansard - 123 - Nov/2/22

May/3/23 9:16:14 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-6

Madam Speaker, when I first thought I wanted to get into politics I was about 14 years old, and it was always my dream to speak to regulatory modernization. I was one of those kids who said that if I could make it to Parliament to talk about regulatory modernization, I would know I really succeeded in life. I want to talk about this, because I think it is an important issue for Canadians from coast to coast to coast. When I meet with farmers in my riding of Dufferin—Caledon, which is the number one producer of economic growth for our GDP, and when I speak to small businesses, I ask them, “What things make your lives more difficult?” Members would think the farmers might say they have to get up at 5 a.m. and have to do this and that, and that there are always more things for them to do than they have time for. However, what the farmer will say is that the regulatory and tax burdens in this country keep them up at night and take up so much of their time. The same thing is said when we talk to small businesses. I think the real disconnect is that when regulations get passed by the Liberals, they assume that somehow, much like in a minister's office, 1,000 people will be there to make sure someone checks box A, circles things in the right direction and does all these kinds of things. However, most small businesses, which are the driver of economic activity in this country and truly the lifeblood of the Canadian economy, are very small organizations. It is often one or two people working hard to understand what the regulatory burden is for their business, on top of trying to make their business successful and profitable. That is the challenge we have all across this country. I want to divert momentarily, because the other big thing they talk about besides regulations is the carbon tax. The carbon tax is such a punishing thing for Canadian businesses, especially in the farming sector. I had the opportunity to visit farms on our last break week. I met with a number of farmers and I asked them, “How much carbon tax did you end up paying in the last year?” The first farm I went to said they paid $17,000 in carbon taxes. Can members imagine how much this impacts that family's bottom line? That is $17,000 that they do not have for investing in a new combine, for investing in more sustainable agricultural practices or for putting food on the table. These are the kinds of difficult things being experienced. However, when we add to that the difficulty of complying with regulations from across this country, it is a burden wearing down Canadians. That is why it was so great to hear my colleague talk about the plan to cut red tape. It is something a Conservative government would absolutely do. One interesting thing is that the bill would make 46 slight changes to regulations. I had the opportunity to look at the Government of Canada's forward regulatory plan for 2021-23. While the bill is going to nibble around the edges of 46 slight changes, the plan is to bring in 270 new regulations. This is exactly the problem: We are going to nibble around these 46 things and then bring in 270 new ones. Now, I am not very good math, but I would say that is approximately 234 more regulations going in than are potentially coming out, and that is how this government works. Somehow it thinks that adding to regulatory burden, making things more complex and more difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to understand and implement, is the way forward for economic success. However, we know it is not, and we see that in projections for Canada's economic growth going forward. We are continuously moving down. We are moving down on the productivity scale as well. We are becoming less and less productive. I suggest that people are less productive because they are spending more time in the office trying to navigate through the myriad of red tape regulations than they are in putting productive effort into their businesses. This is the challenge we have after eight years of the Liberal government: more regulations, more all the time. The other problem with the regulatory process from the government is that it is regulate first and ask questions after. It does not do the hard work of seeing whether there is a way to promulgate regulations that would not be so burdensome and that would not be so hard for businesses to comply with. I am going to speak very briefly to one example of that: film plastic regulations. The Government of Canada just said it thinks we should get to 60% recyclable content there. However, the technology does not exist. It is not even close to existing. The government is therefore bringing forward a regulation, which may be well-intentioned, to add recycled content into plastic film, but it has not taken the time to figure out whether or not it is actually possible. What does that do? Imagine being in a business and finding out that the business now has to comply with this regulation, but its own scientists and its own R and D are saying they have no idea how this is possible. This is just one tiny example going on across the country from coast to coast to coast. Why is it so hard for the government, if it is going to bring in a new regulation, to consult with businesses that are going to be affected before it brings in the regulation? That is how to find a path forward if it is going to bring in a new regulation. Instead, what the government does is it decides the path forward, and businesses need to comply whether they can or cannot. If they cannot, that is too bad; they will just leave the country. This is incredibly disturbing to me as a way to move forward with regulatory reform. Another thing I want to talk about is giving the Minister of Transport the ability to make interim orders. This is a very broad discretion being granted to the Minister of Transport. We know the Minister of Transport. He is the jolly fellow who has been governing the country with the chaos at our airports over the last two years. I do not know about other people in this chamber, but air travel in this country is not an enjoyable experience anymore. If our flight is on time, which is rare, there is some kind of chaos at the airport where we are landing, and we are sitting for an extended period of time. In my own recent experience when flying from Toronto to Ottawa, I showed up at the airport, got to the gate when it was time to board and then was told the pilots did not show up. Did they only know that 15 minutes before? Then there was a problem with the plane. Then the crew timed out. Then the flight was delayed even more. This is happening all over the place, and the number of complaints being filed with respect to this is astronomical. My submission is that the last minister who should be getting any authority to make new regulations on anything is the minister who has governed during the chaos at our airports. It is all across the transportation sector too. This affects our supply chains. We know that part of the cost of living crisis in this country is a result of challenges with our supply chain. Who could fix these things? Maybe the Minister of Transport could, but clearly he cannot. Why are we going to give the Minister of Transport any more authority to make things worse than they already are in this country? There is a bright future, though. The Conservative Party has promised that if any new regulation comes in, a regulation has to go out. This would not be 46 minor changes while bringing in 270 new regulations. It is going to be a bright new future. We are going to consult with businesses. We are going to reduce red tape and get the economy of Canada moving.

1409 words

All Topics

Nov/2/22 5:31:37 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, one of the things in Bill S-5 that I know is concerning is the ability for anyone in Canada to ask for an assessment of a product. Maybe the member could speak to the challenges the government is going to have, when the government is effectively broken on so many levels and cannot get things done. What would happen if every Canadian could ask for a substance to be assessed?

73 words

All Topics

Oct/24/22 1:54:03 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I have an interesting fact: The only government, outside of a pandemic, where carbon emissions have gone down was under Stephen Harper. That is the first time. It took a pandemic that savaged our economy by 9%, a 9% contraction in GDP, for the Liberals to get a 5.8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. I think that is their secret plan. They are just sort of whispering it to themselves. That is how they are going to lower emissions, by savaging the Canadian economy.

87 words

Oct/24/22 1:52:26 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I am going to disagree with my colleague. Where I am getting my facts from is an interview with Vaclav Smil, who is one of the preeminent thinkers on energy transitions. Vaclav Smil wrote an article a few weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times, citing exactly the study just used in my speech. I would suggest the member's statistics are wrong about Germany's energy transition. Whether the government decides to hire more people within the Department of the Environment, it is not going to matter, because it has proven that it cannot function with the staffing levels it has. The Liberals have massively increased staffing levels across the Canadian government. Huge amounts more in resources are being donated. With a 12% increase in the number of employees across the Government of Canada, people still cannot get a passport and the government cannot keep track of those 500 people subject to deportation orders. I could go on and on about the failings of the government. More money is not the answer for the government. We need a new government that can run departments efficiently.

188 words

All Topics

Oct/24/22 1:49:49 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, it is not my position to postulate on what our campaign election promises might look like coming up in the next election. I am not the leader of the party. However, I will say this. The unequivocal fact is that the Liberals' carbon tax is an abysmal failure. We are against it. We have been very clear and unequivocal about that. It does not reduce emissions, and it does not put more money in the pockets of Canadians. I am going to talk again about my riding in Dufferin—Caledon. I have people who commute an hour to an hour and a half every single day to get to work. These are people who are not rich. The carbon tax is punishing them every single day they fill up their tanks with gas. When they heat their homes with propane, they are punished again, and the government does not care, because people in rural communities do not vote for the current government. The carbon tax is punitive. It is designed for the person who lives in a downtown urban centre, who can take transit and buy their energy from Bullfrog Power or some other company that provides allegedly green electricity. Everybody else, including all the people in my riding, is absolutely punished by the carbon tax. I am against it. Everyone in this party is against it, and we are going to scrap it when we form government.

241 words

All Topics

Oct/24/22 1:47:40 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I cannot ask for a better question than one about Liberal hypocrisy. When we talk about the environment, the government will not approve projects in Canada, let us say a project with lithium, so that project goes on and gets done somewhere else in the world, because the world needs lithium. It goes to a country that has carbon emissions that are 10 to 15 times higher than what would happen if the project were done in Canada. It is generally a country that has lower environmental standards on all other measures of the environment. These countries have terrible human rights records and terrible employment standards for their employees. The government says it has cleaned up its balance sheet, but the global balance sheet on all those metrics gets so much worse. There is no carbon dome over Canada. When we export our carbon emissions to other countries, along with the jobs and the tax revenue, all we do is make the world a much worse place on all those things we talked about. This is the same kind of thinking that the Liberals bring forward with the right to a healthy environment, which they do not define and no one knows what it is, and with respect to the fact that anyone can assess a substance. All these things are absolutely nonsensical.

225 words

Oct/24/22 1:45:32 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the member campaigned on not raising the carbon tax above $50 a tonne, and now it is going to go up to $170 a tonne. I find the question a little rich. First of all, what people campaigned on in a previous election has nothing to do with Bill S-5. I will say this, though: I am against the Liberals' carbon tax. We have always been against it. It does not do anything. I could go on and on about it. Carbon emissions have gone up every single year under the Liberal government, every single year, except the pandemic year, when they liked to say that things were working but then they did not want to talk about the contraction to the environment. The PBO has made it clear: It does not put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. By any measurable metric, their version of the carbon tax is an unmitigated failure. We are against it. We will always be against it. We will scrap that carbon tax once we form government under the leadership of our new Conservative leader, which we look forward to.

201 words

All Topics

Oct/24/22 1:27:23 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, some members do not like hearing the truth and want to interrupt other members when they are speaking. Going back to my point, I was talking about the fact that the current government has such a terrible record on the environment. That is because there are a number of promises in this bill that the government says it is going to do, which I say it will not do because it has a track record to show that it does not do the things it says it is going to do. I hope that will satisfy the member who chose to interrupt. If that is the plan, for the Canadian economy to reach its carbon tax emissions it is going to have to contract by 45%, because a 5% carbon reduction is a 9% reduction in GDP. If that is the Liberals' plan, they should tell us about it. The other part is that the government is supposed to put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. Of course, it does not. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has been abundantly clear that it does not put more money back into the pockets of Canadians. If we do the hard work, like the hard math, and I know the current government does not like to do the hard work and the hard math, and we factor in the cost of the carbon tax throughout the entire Canadian economy, it ends up costing Canadians more money than they get back from the paltry cheques the government sends them every so often. The worst part is it detrimentally and adversely affects people in rural communities, like in my riding of Dufferin—Caledon, where people have no choice but to commute long distances to work and put gas in their cars. They heat their homes with propane because that is the only option they have. Those paltry rebate cheques absolutely do not even come close to covering the cost of the carbon tax they are paying. The Senate passed 24 amendments to this bill and I will say that 11 of them are of great concern. We have yet to hear what the government thinks of those 11 amendments, which I will come back to later in my speech. I still want to flesh out why I think there are so many problems with this legislation and the fact that the current government will not live up to the promises in it with respect to the right to a healthy environment. I am going to touch on that. We are also going to talk about the fact that the government put in this bill that anyone can have a substance assessed. Under the current government, we cannot get a passport. It has lost track of 500 criminals, who were subject to deportation, and does not know where they are. However, it is going to have the capacity to somehow deal with the hundreds of thousands of requests that are going to flood into the department to have a substance assessed, because the legislation is very clear that anyone can ask for such an assessment. It is inconceivable that the current government would think that is a good thing to include in this piece of legislation. I will talk about why I do not think the government is going to be able to implement half of the things it put in this bill. The commissioner of the environment did about 10 reports on the progress of the Liberal government with respect to the environment. Guess what. Virtually all of them got a failing grade. Let us talk about a just transition for coal workers. The environment commissioner was very clear that there was no just transition for coal workers. In fact, they were left out in the cold. Therefore, when we hear the government saying that everyone is going to enjoy a right to a healthy environment, I have enormous skepticism that it is actually going to do that. It did not help coal workers. It talks about a just transition all the time. The government says it is going to provide a just transition for any energy worker who is displaced by any of its punitive pieces of legislation, whether it is the no-development bill, the carbon tax or anything else. The government claims it will be there for anyone who is displaced. Do members know who the first people were who were displaced? It was coal workers. Where was the government? Absolutely nowhere. The commissioner was clear. The government left coal workers with virtually nothing, but it is going to enact a right to a healthy environment and therefore all Canadians are going to enjoy this right. I do not think it is going to deliver that, because it does not ever deliver anything that matters with respect to the environment. The other thing the Liberal government has put in this bill is that plastic-manufactured items are now in schedule 1. When the current government was first elected it said there would be no more Ottawa knows best and no more telling the provinces what to do, but that it would be this wonderful government that rules by consensus. Guess what. The provinces are now suing the federal government as a result of plastics being placed in the new schedule 1 of this legislation. It is hard to talk about how many times the Liberals say they are going to do something and then actually do nothing or do the opposite. We could talk about freedom of information and this being a government that is going to be open and transparent by default, but the system is absolutely a mess as a result of what? The Liberal government. Again, it says it is going to do something, but it does not do anything or it does the opposite. Let us talk about this vaunted right to a healthy environment. First of all, it is in the preamble, and when something is put in the preamble it actually has different legal weight from something that is actually in a section in a statute. Again, the Liberals snuck it into the preamble to virtue signal and say to people they care so much about a healthy environment that they are going to put it in the bill, except they did not put it in the bill. They put it in the preamble, which has different legal impact than putting it in the statute itself. There we go. Number one is that they are not delivering yet again. It is in the preamble and not in the actual statute. What is worse about it is that there were five years of consultation for the Liberals to come up with this piece of legislation. If all of this was so important, why did it take five years? I have no explanation. This is a government that finds it very difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time. Its members cannot do more than one thing at once. They sort of stumble from one crisis to another. There were five years to consult to draft this piece of legislation. Now the Liberals say the right to a healthy environment is really important and they will enshrine it in legislation, but they stuck it in the preamble and now say they need a further two years to figure out what it means. This is a government that is not moving slowly. This is a government that is moving basically in reverse, when Canadians do actually deserve these things. It speaks to the absolute incompetence of the government. It cares so much about the right to a healthy environment that it is going to consult on it for five years, then because it realizes it probably needs to get some legislation put forward, it is just going to say it will consult for another two years. Who knows what that is going to turn out to be? The Liberals have not given any suggestions on what that is going to be. They have not talked about what that consultation would entail, who would be consulted or where those consultations would take place. These are things the Liberals say they are going to do, but I have very little faith in their actually doing them. They said there were going to be extensive consultations on plastic bans. When we talked to a lot of industry stakeholders, they were not consulted at all, so I am not necessarily sure that what the Liberals say about consultation is actually going to come to fruition. This is what we talk about when the Liberals say in the legislation anyone can have a substance assessed. Let us think about that for a minute. That is not narrowly defined. It is as inclusive as it can be; it is anyone. Any Canadian, if this bill passes, can go forward and ask for a substance to be assessed. That is going to create a deluge of requests for assessments from environmental groups, from concerned citizens and from others. That would mean the department, which is already busy enough with what it has to do, would become overwhelmed, and when departments become overwhelmed under this government, which is something that happens literally every other day, we cannot get a passport. We have all been through that. There were a number of constituents who got in touch with my office who said they could not get a passport and asked if we could please help. I said to them that I tried to get my son's and daughter's passports renewed for our vacation, and I could not, so our vacation was cancelled. This is how effective the government is on managing something as simple as issuing a passport. I know I heard the minister one day in question period saying they had no idea how to anticipate the influx of applications. It is very complicated. Passports expire on five-year or 10-year increments. The math is very hard, like 2022 to 2027 or 2032. I know complex, difficult math equations are something the government has incredible challenges with. When we look at the ability for anyone to assess a substance, how are the Liberals going to handle it? The minister has not talked about it. None of the members opposite have talked about it in their speeches. It is like they have not contemplated how difficult that could be. We know they have not, because they did not contemplate how difficult it would be to issue a passport. The Liberals clearly did not contemplate how difficult it would be to keep track of 500 criminals who faced deportation orders. They are all gone. What is the explanation from the government? We have no explanation. I think maybe it is, “Oops.” That is where the government is on that. We support referring this piece of legislation to committee to be studied, but we have grave concerns about it, concerns that I am going to continue to express today. It is so easy to say one is going to do things. The government says it is going to do all kinds of things. The difficulty comes when it actually tries to implement the things it says. That is the hard part. There is an old Seinfeld episode in which Jerry Seinfeld is trying to rent a car, and the car is not there. He said that anyone could just take, take, take reservations; it was holding the reservation that was the difficult part. The Liberal government can make all kinds of environmental announcements, saying it is going to do this or that, that it is going to solve climate change or reduce carbon emissions and that it is going to have a just transition for coal workers. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually doing it. That is the part the government is really not very good at. That is what I am deeply concerned about with respect to this piece of legislation, both with the right to a healthy environment with respect to anyone being able to assess a substance, and with the fact that plastic manufactured items have been placed on schedule 1. What is that going to lead to? This is being talked about. This is a government that likes to demonize plastics. It is in all the government's things. The Prime Minister famously did a press conference where he talked about the drink box, water bottle kind of thing that he wanted to eliminate. Plastics are critical in our lives. We could look at the medical field. If we are going to be looking at further regulations of plastics, what is that going to mean if we go in for an operation? Lots of surgical instruments use plastics. Are we going to end up getting IVs made with wood, because we are against plastics? It is the virtue signalling that we are going to do something, again without doing the hard work of thinking it through and deciding what is actually the best course of action. Virtue signalling is something the government does so often, it is difficult to keep up with. It continues to talk about its record on the environment, and again I am going to go back to the fact that it is so poor that it leads me to think that the government is not going to implement what is in this particular piece of legislation. It keeps talking about an energy transition. That is what it wants to do. That is the government's big thing, that we have to get off fossil fuels. Let us talk a little about that, this sort of woke energy environmentalism. Germany spent a couple of hundred million dollars on trying to get carbon out of its electricity grid. Over the past 20 years, it has been doing that, and it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the path the Liberal government wants us to go down. It does not want to learn from somebody else's mistakes. After hundreds of billions of dollars, Germany has taken its dependence on hydrocarbons for electricity from 84% to 78%. I am not an investment person, but I can tell members that is not a good return on investment. The average per kilowatt hour cost of electricity in Germany is 45¢, and here in Ontario it is 13¢. Imagine spending hundreds of billions of dollars, barely moving the needle and paying some of the highest electricity rates in the world. That is the result of those kinds of policies. That is the same policy road that the Liberal government wants us to take a trip down with respect to electricity generation in this country. Again, this brings me back to why we have such an incredible challenge with this bill. There are 24 amendments that were passed in the Senate, and, yes, there is supposedly an Independent Senators Group, but they are all appointed by the Prime Minister, so these are members of the Senate who are beholden to the Prime Minister, to a certain extent. Is that what the government's plan is for this piece of legislation? We on this side and, I am sure, all the other opposition parties would like to know that. Does it support all these amendments? They changed the definition of “right to a healthy environment” at the Senate. That is a significant change. Is the government supporting that amendment? We would like to know. They made changes to “living organisms”. They made a big change with respect to the precautionary principle. I am very happy that Bill S-5 preserves the precautionary principle, but they removed “cost” from “cost-effective”. That is a very important balancing point with respect to the precautionary principle. What is the government's position on having done that? Is it going to change that at committee? Is it going to work with the opposition to do that? We do not know. It has been wonderful to discuss this bill and discuss Liberal failures on the environment and how I think they are going to translate into Bill S-5. I hope the government will take some of these criticisms of the bill seriously, with respect to the right to a healthy environment, with respect to the precautionary principle and, of course, with respect to how anyone can have a substance assessed. I hope it will take these requests to amend seriously and that it will do the work in committee to make these changes so this bill can be supported at third reading.

2796 words

All Topics

Context: House Hansard - 113 - Oct/19/22

Oct/24/22 1:24:34 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to talk about Bill S-5. We on this side of the House certainly have some concerns about the bill, and I will talk about that a little later in my speech. First, this is an environmental bill. It is the first update to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in a very long time. Of course, protecting the environment is something that is very important and something that we should all care very deeply about. However, the challenge we have is that this is a government that talks a lot about caring about the environment, its members say lots of things about how they care about the environment, but the actual translation of that into measurable, quantifiable improvements to the environment is really almost zero. I am going to talk a little about that. Let us talk about the carbon tax. It was brought in with enormous fanfare by the Prime Minister and his Minister of Environment, saying it was going to be the cure for reducing carbon emissions across the country. I will skip to the end of the story where, in fact, we find that carbon emissions have not gone down. They have gone up every single year under this Liberal government. I will say it again, because it is worth repeating. Carbon emissions have gone up every single year under this Liberal government, which claims to be the big defender of the environment: “We're going to solve climate change, because we brought in a carbon tax.” In fact, it is an absolute failure. Someone who is paying attention on the other side, or who has done some of their research, will say, no, carbon emissions went down in 2020 and things are going great. It is true that carbon emissions did go down in 2020 by 5.8%. However, it is now 2022, and some people will forget but that was at the peak of the pandemic. The economy contracted by 9% during that time. My statement is that, if this is actually the Liberals' plan to reduce carbon emissions, then just be honest with Canadians and tell us that it is their plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% and reduce—

375 words

All Topics

Context: House Hansard - 113 - Oct/19/22

Oct/19/22 5:32:27 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, it was interesting listening to the member's speech. Right now, we are in a situation where the government cannot really seem to get much done. People cannot get a passport or a NEXUS card. People cannot immigrate to Canada. People trying to renew their work permit cannot get that done either. The bill says that any person can ask for a substance to be assessed. Given the state of the government as it stands now, and it cannot even get passports done, could the member please explain to me how the Liberals think the government is going to be able to assess every chemical that any person in the country decides needs to be assessed?

118 words