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Context: House Hansard - 251 - Nov/20/23

Nov/20/23 5:15:51 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleague's speech; it was great. There was a question raised by a Liberal member, who said that this bill, this legislation, this trade agreement is going to help Ukraine rebuild. The rebuilding of Ukraine is going to require concrete, steel and heavy equipment. All these things are very carbon-intensive. If the Liberals actually wanted to help Ukraine rebuild, why would they have put a carbon tax into a trade agreement for the first time ever? Does my colleague think this is actually going to help with the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after it wins the war?

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Nov/20/23 5:00:52 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Madam Speaker, the carbon tax has now become one of the most hated and reviled taxes in all of Canadian history. When we talk about exports, it is quite interesting that the government has decided to export a carbon tax into a trade agreement for the first time ever. In all of the trade agreements Canada has signed across the world, there is no carbon tax; there is no mention of carbon price or carbon leakage. For the first time ever, the government has decided to put a carbon tax into a trade agreement with a country in the middle of a war. I wonder what the member thinks about that.

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Oct/23/23 12:54:48 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, that was a great question, the best one so far. The issue the member raised with respect to the export of those turbines was a shameful affront to Ukraine. The Liberal government and Liberal members should be ashamed of that. If we look at LNG exports to the European market, the United States is at 26%, Qatar is at 24% and Russia is at 20%. Canada could absolutely fill that need if we had a government that recognized that LNG exports are good for lowering emissions, are good for the Canadian economy and would be very good at disrupting the Russian war machine.

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Oct/23/23 12:52:34 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, eight out of 10 people know one can make up statistics about anything. That is effectively what this member is doing in saying they have done the most. Anyone can make up statements about anything. It is great that they came to the trade party, but they came to the trade party late. I still recall their vehement opposition to free trade with the United States. I led in my speech with what they said about the one final line they would like to change, and they erased the border between Canada and the United States. The member is saying not to go back in time, yet every time we talk about things, they talk about former prime minister Harper, from 2006. It is typically Liberal: They want it their way one way but everybody else has to have it a different way. I am glad this free trade agreement has been modernized. I look forward to looking at it, examining it and doing the due diligence that it seems like parliamentarians want to do, whether they are in the NDP or the Bloc. The only members who do not seem to want to study this agreement are the Liberals, because as usual, in their arrogance, they believe they have birthed the perfect child and nothing could be wrong with it. We want to verify if that is true.

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Oct/23/23 12:49:51 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, I do not know what the motives are. I do know that this agreement was signed much earlier. If it had been tabled in Parliament earlier, we would certainly have had more debate and more time to scrutinize this particular piece of legislation. The members of the Liberal Party were chirping when I was speaking about taking the time to study something. There is an old adage saying that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. A government that thinks it can do no wrong and has birthed the perfect agreement is also a fool because mistakes are made. We know that. We know that with respect to beef and pork access to the EU. The Liberals thought they had a deal with a side letter that was going to resolve all kinds of things, but in fact it did not. There is no access, effectively, for beef and pork. Parliament should do its work. I wish this bill had been brought to Parliament sooner so that there would not be the rush the government is making to get it through Parliament.

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Oct/23/23 12:46:41 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more. In the particular circumstances of that remission order, I agree. I was certainly consulted on that. Chicken farmers were not against supporting Ukraine, but it looked like that was rushed and not all details were looked at. I did talk about that in my speech. I still remember my contracts professor in my first year of law school saying that the devil was always in the details. We do not look at things in broad strokes if we want to be a good lawyer. We have to get down into the nitty-gritty. When we look at this agreement, which is somewhere in the range of 600 pages, and we are asked to rush this through, that is how mistakes happen. That is how we end up with agreements with unintended consequences by not scrutinizing them. It is the job of parliamentarians to scrutinize this and reach out to stakeholder groups that will also be looking at this. They will ensure they look at those details. We should ensure that work gets done.

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Oct/23/23 12:27:42 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives have a very long, storied and proud tradition of supporting free trade. We only have to look back to the negotiations of the original Canada-United States free trade agreement, which was, of course, something Conservatives were in favour of and that Liberals campaigned very hard against. I was a young lad back then, but I remember a commercial from the Liberal Party on this, talking about free trade. It said that there was only one more line that we had to remove, and then it erased the border between Canada and the United States. That was a long time ago, but I just want to talk briefly about how strongly Conservatives support free trade. We believe in free trade between free nations as an integral part of improving the prosperity of all people. We were also the people who started the negotiations on CETA. The CETA deal is a Conservative deal that was started by Prime Minister Harper as part of our aggressive trade expansion. The same thing with the CPTPP, which was a Conservative initiative. Conservatives are very supportive of free trade. This original free trade agreement between Canada and Ukraine was originated by a Conservative government under Prime Minister Harper. The member for Abbotsford, from the Conservative Party, was the lead negotiator on that. He will speak to this, and we will have some wonderful insights on this agreement. When we talk about the importance of the Canada-Ukraine relationship, we have to talk about the 1.3 million Canadians of Ukrainian origin who live here in Canada. Many of them were integral in the development of western Canada. They are an incredible and important part of the social fabric of Canada, and their contributions to Canada cannot go unnoticed. As a result of that, in part, we have very strong people-to-people ties between Canada and Ukraine. Of course, we are strong supporters of Ukraine during the illegal invasion being prosecuted by Russia. With respect to this agreement in particular, this modernization would build on the 2017 agreement, which updated or added 11 new chapters to the free trade agreement. The updated chapters included rules of origin and procedures, government procurement, competition policy, monopolies and state enterprises, electronic commerce, digital trade, labour, the environment, transparency, anti-corruption and responsible business conduct. There is also a significant number of new chapters, 11 new chapters, in this trade agreement, and I will talk a little more about that later in my remarks. However, these are on investment; cross-border trade and services; temporary entry for business people; development and administration of measures; financial services; services and investment, non-conforming measures; telecommunications; trade and gender; trade and small and medium-sized enterprises; trade and indigenous peoples; and good regulatory practices. This is a substantial change from the original agreement that was signed in 2017. On that, I would echo some of the comments made by the NDP, which is that this agreement is actually substantial. It is a very large trade agreement. Of course, we have to take our time to make sure we study free trade agreements in detail and thoroughly. However, it does seem as though the government is trying to rush this forward, and I am not sure that is necessarily the way Parliament should look at things. We should do our jobs as parliamentarians. I would like to talk about the original trade agreement. In 2022, Canada's total merchandise trade with Ukraine was $420 million, $150 million in exports and $270 million in imports. The way the original agreement was designed, as it was negotiated by the Conservative government, was that this would be, in a sense, a bit of an asymmetrical agreement. It was set up such that Ukraine would have a little more advantage in the early stages of the agreement, with the anticipation that there would be a final agreement in which more things would be added. Originally, this was primarily a merchandise agreement. We can see now that a lot of chapters have been added on the services side. I suspect that as a result of that, we will see the trade balance perhaps narrow between Canada and Ukraine, but in general increase the trade between the two countries. After the ratification of the original agreement, exports to Ukraine, other than coal, grew about 28% between 2016 and 2019, which reinforces the view that trade, especially free trade, is good for both countries. We saw a significant increase in the two-way trade between two countries as a result of the free trade agreements, which goes back to why Conservatives absolutely and unequivocally support free trade agreements. Interestingly enough, the top three exports to Ukraine were motor vehicles and parts, fish and seafood, and pharmaceutical products. The top imports from Ukraine were animal and vegetable fats, oils, iron and steel, and electrical machinery and equipment. Canadian businesses certainly have an opportunity to expand their trade with Ukraine. I have undertaken to consult with industry with respect to this. I have spoken with agricultural companies, agricultural industries, etc. The challenge of course is the very condensed time frame, and I should explain this. What we have before Parliament is the enabling legislation to implement the free trade agreement, but that is probably not what we are debating today. We are not actually going to look at and debate whether “subsection 42.1(1.1) of the act is amended by adding the following paragraph after (a).” I suspect that is not what we will debate here today. The implementation legislation is how we implement the changes to relevant statutes and other things to implement the actual free trade agreement. This implementation bill's enabling legislation does not seem to have much in it that any of us will spend a lot of time debating in this chamber, although I could be wrong, as some members do enjoy debating those kinds of things. The member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan might enjoy going through and deciding whether “paragraphs (b) and (c) of the definition Ukraine in subsection 2(1) of the act are replaced by the following” is a good or significant change, but that is not what I will talk about today. What we can talk about are the general principles of supporting free trade and the free trade agreement itself. In that is some of the difficulty that was expressed by the NDP member. He said he had not had the time to discuss this legislation with his caucus and colleagues, which takes me back to discussions with stakeholders. As part of looking at whether this will be a trade agreement that benefits Canada, we want to talk to stakeholders to see whether they view some of the changes to this free trade agreement as being good or bad. In particular, in the agricultural sector, we are going to be talk about things like sanitary and phytosanitary measures. We are going to look at whether the quotas that will be allowed, the products that are coming in without tariff, are appropriate. This could be in the beef sector, the pork sector or in a whole bunch of agricultural sectors. Those consultations are ongoing right now. I have reached out to the industries that would be affected by that to find out where they stand on it. When I attended law school, we had professors very clearly say that the devil was often in the details. I am not 100% sure that Parliament should just pass things without any scrutiny whatsoever. We have learned that when other trade agreements were put forward by the Liberal government and passed rapidly, we ended up with some challenges. If we look at, for example, free trade with the European Union, we have all kinds of challenges now with the sanitary and phytosanitary measures surrounding beef and pork. It is a particular issue right now in our negotiations with the U.K. It is almost impossible for Canadian beef or pork producers to export into the United Kingdom. They also have great difficulty exporting into the European Union. Why? It is because there are sanitary and phytosanitary measures preventing those exports from taking place. We would think that after this amount of time that these things would be resolved. However, for both things, there are very complicated dispute resolution procedures in place to try to resolve issues of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. Sanitary and phytosanitary measures are important. They are put in place to ensure the health of people consuming the products. They are also protections put in place to protect biodiversity, to ensure things are not contained within certain products that could harm biodiversity. These measures are important, but sometimes these sanitary and phytosanitary measures are used as non-tariff barriers, or NTBs. NTBs have become sort of the new way to frustrate free trade. As we look around the world, we see that NTBs are growing in number and there are challenges in resolving those free trade agreements. I took the time to look at the section in this free trade agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary measures. I am pleased to see that this section sets out that they will be resolved within the rules set out by the World Trade Organization. That is quite a difference from the measures that have been put in place for the resolution of sanitary and phytosanitary measures within CETA, which the U.K. benefits from in the transitional agreement. Trying to resolve those issues through that process has proven to be, if not incredibly complicated, almost impossible. It is good to see that is in this agreement. If we look at the opportunities for Canada, one of the things I raised in my question to the minister was that the agreement talked about the phase-out of coal. However, in Europe, we have seen the rise in the use of coal by a number of countries as a result of them trying to stop buying Russian gas. As we all know, the purchase of Russian gas is providing revenues and profits to Russia so it can use those monies to fund its illegal war in Ukraine. Many European countries have asked Canada to export more LNG, and the United States has actually taken that up. It has built a number of LNG export facilities over the last number of years to take advantage of the demand for LNG, including that demand in Europe. Unfortunately, Canada has not taken advantage of that and, in fact, has lost all kinds of opportunities. However, when talk about transition, we do not transition from coal to a solar panel. Those kinds of transitions generally do not work. We do not transition from coal to a wind turbine and solar. Those things do not work. Both of these things provide intermittent power. Intermittent power makes maintenance of the electric grid more expensive and it is unreliable when there are surges in demand. We need a strong baseload of electricity generation. I hope that when I have the time to go through this agreement in full, I will see this addresses a great area of potential opportunity for Canada and Ukraine with respect to electricity generation. We have amazing expertise in the production of nuclear reactors, as does Ukraine. Canada has all kinds of uranium that it can export. I really hope there will be some things in the agreement that talk about furthering this kind of development and partnership. It would be both good for Ukraine and good for Canada. However, transitioning from coal would be beneficial to the world. When we look at energy transitions, we know they do not happen rapidly. In fact, they take a long time. All we have to do is think about how coal was discovered 200 to 250 years ago. We have had gas, natural gas and nuclear for a much shorter period of time, but they have not completely displaced coal even though the power density for both gas and nuclear is far more dense than for coal. Therefore, it makes sense to transition to these things. This is the challenge in suggesting we transition from coal to solar or wind, because the actual energy density is so much smaller. An electricity plant that would use LNG or nuclear would take up 20 acres, but to get a similar amount of energy from wind or solar, we would be looking at 10 to 100 times that amount of land. The suggestion that we can make those transitions quickly from coal to wind and solar is not feasible and it does not make sense. We should be exploring the opportunities that Canada has with LNG and nuclear. The Conservative Party is 100% behind supporting Ukraine, supporting trade and free trade. Free trade between free nations is something we support 100%. I look forward to going through this agreement and to the debate on this agreement in the House.

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Oct/23/23 12:16:57 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, article 13.10 of the trade agreement, subsection 8(d) says, “promote the rapid transition from unabated coal power to clean energy sources.” We know that the Russian war machine has been powered by energy exports. This certainly seems to contemplate the transition from coal to other less-polluting fuels. To me, this is a massive opportunity for Canada to work on exporting LNG from Canada, which many European countries have asked us to do. This would not only to starve the Russian war machine of funds but also be good for the environment. Does the minister now admit that this is something Canada should do?

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Mar/3/22 3:48:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is a legitimate question. What the member from the Green Party ignores is that, often, natural gas is replacing far more carbon-intensive and dirtier fuels such as coal-fired electricity plants. When we talk about using natural gas, what we are actually doing is taking a much higher-polluting source of energy and replacing it with a much lower-polluting source of energy. That, in itself, is a win. Of course, we dream of the day when we are all powered by solar and, who knows, even cold fusion, but those days are not here. We are living in this reality, and right now natural gas can actually provide the global security that we need. I hope all members will vote for this motion.

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Mar/3/22 3:46:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, you are making me feel old. The nature of that question, quite frankly, is shameful. Energy security is one of the reasons why there has been such an issue with appeasing Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. The threat of natural gas being shut off to Europe was a tool he used to try to exert his influence. We can actually do multiple things at once. Maybe the New Democrats can only do one thing, and say, “We can only do this, and therefore we do not think about that”. We can actually think about planning for a future where Canadian natural gas can provide energy security around the world, while we do other things. We in the Conservative Party, in the opposition, can walk and chew gum at the same time.

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Mar/3/22 3:44:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not sure what the question actually was, but I will say this. As I said in my speech, the need for natural gas is going to go up by an estimated 22% by 2040. We can pretend that we are going to live in a world where we do not need natural gas and that renewables are going to magically take over all of our energy needs. That world does not exist. Until it does, we actually need things such as natural gas. Why do we not use the cleanest, safest natural gas in the world to help countries around the world and, of course, help Canadians and the Canadian economy?

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