Madam Speaker, that was a spectacle. I would suggest that, if the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources cannot understand the connection between plastic straws and fuels for vehicles that Canadians like and want to drive, then that says all we need to know about the Liberals' understanding of oil and gas development and how this all works in Canada and the world. Does it not?
Make no mistake, today is a dark day for Canada's democracy. Unfortunately, these darks days are increasingly frequent under the NDP-Liberal coalition government. After eight years, I, like a growing number of Canadians, cannot help but reflect on how far away, quiet, dim and so obviously empty the promises of sunny days were. There were promises of sunlight being the best disinfectant, of being open by default, and of collaboration with other parties, provinces and all Canadians, no matter where they live or who they are.
The truth is that, after eight years, the Information Commissioner says transparency is not a top priority for the NDP-Liberal government. She says that systems for transparency have declined steadily since the Prime Minister took office in 2015 and that the government is the most opaque government ever. She sounded ever-increasing alarms about the closed-by-default reality of the NDP-Liberal government over the last couple of years.
Back in 2017, an audit done independently by a Halifax journalist and his team for News Media Canada, which represents more than 800 print and digital titles, pointed out that the Liberals were failing in breaking their promises and that the previous Conservative government had been more responsive, open and transparent, including during the latter majority years. Everyone can remember when the now Prime Minister made a lot of verifiably baseless claims. Today, the NDP-Liberals want to ram through a bill that their own internal briefings warn would kill 170,000 Canadian oil and gas jobs and hurt the jobs of 2.7 million other Canadians employed in other sectors in every corner of this country. I will say more on that later.
Canadians deserve to know what transparency has to do with this. I will explain, but first, members must also know this: The motion the NDP-Liberals have forced us all to debate today, with as little time as possible, is extraordinary. It is a measure usually invoked only for emergencies, and to be clear, it was used twice in nine years of the former Conservative government, but it is happening almost every other day with the NDP-Liberals.
Now, I will give the background. Last week, Conservatives and so many horrified Canadians challenged the Liberals on their approach to crime,being hard on victims and soft on criminals, which, at the time, was made obvious by the decision to send Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison. As usual, the Liberals claimed to be bystanders that day, as they do with almost all things happening in the Government of Canada, which they have been ruling over eight long years. The minister responsible really had nothing to do with it. He was removed from that position in late July, so evidently, someone over there thought he was. However, I digress.
To change the channel during the last weeks of that session, the Liberals dumped a number of bills in the House of Commons with promises to those they impacted, which they must have never intended to keep, including Bill C-53 about recognizing Métis people, which they put forward on the last sitting day of the session. They told people it would be all done at once, a claim they had no business to make, and they knew it.
Before that, on May 30, the Liberals introduced Bill C-49, a bill to functionally end Atlantic offshore oil and to establish a framework for offshore renewable development that, get this, would triple the already endless NDP-Liberal timelines. There would also be uncertainty around offshore renewable project assessments and approvals. The bill would invite court challenges on the allowable anti-development zones and the potential delegation of indigenous consultation to the regulators, which has been drafted, never mind the 33 references to Bill C-69, which the Supreme Court said nearly two months ago was largely unconstitutional over the last half decade.
That claim may end up to be okay in the context of offshore development, but surely we can be forgiven for refusing to just trust them this time, since both the Supreme Court and the Federal Court have recently ruled against the NDP-Liberal government and affirmed every single jurisdictional point that Conservatives and I made about both Bill C-69 and their ridiculous top-down, plastics-as-toxins decree.
On May 30, there was no debate on Bill C-49. The NDP-Liberals brought it back to the House of Commons on September 19. They permitted a total of 8.5 hours of debate over two partial days. It is important for Canadians to know that the government, not the official opposition, controls every aspect of the scheduling of all bills and motions in the House of Commons. The government did not put Bill C-49 back on the agenda to allow MPs to speak to it on behalf of the constituents the bill would impact exclusively, such as, for example, every single MP from every party represented in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Instead, a month later, within two days, the NDP-Liberals brought forward a motion to shut down debate and send the bill to committee.
No fewer than seven Liberals and two NDP MPs argued to fast-track Bill C-49 to justify their shutdown of the debate, and they accused Conservatives of holding it up. This is about all the groups and people who must be heard. This is important because of what they then proposed at committee, which was not a concurrence study, as the parliamentary secretary claimed today.
When it comes to the last-minute name change to Bill C-50, which is still the globally planned just transition no matter what the NDP-Liberals spin to Canadians now. The Liberals first announced plans to legislate this in July 2021.
They introduced Bill C-50 with no debate on June 15, just a week before MPs headed to work in our ridings until September. They brought in Bill C-50 on September 29. They permitted only 7.5 hours of total debate over two months, and about a month later, over two days, shut it down and sent it to committee.
Bill C-50, which represents the last step and the final solution in the anti-energy, anti-development agenda that has been promoted internationally and incrementally imposed by the NDP-Liberals in Canada, and which they know would damage millions of Canadian workers in energy, agriculture, construction, transportation and manufacturing, just as their internal memos show it, was rammed through the first stages in a total of three business days.
Government bills go to committee and are prioritized over everything else. At committee, MPs analyze the details of the bills, line by line, and also, most importantly, hear from Canadians about the intended, and sometimes even more imperative unintended, consequences. They then propose and debate changes to improve it before it goes back to the House of Commons for more debate and comments from MPs on behalf of the diverse people in the communities we represent across this big country. That is literally Canadian democracy.
However, on October 30, the Liberals brought in a detailed top-down scheduling motion for the natural resources committee and changed the order of the bills to be considered, which was not concurrent. Their motion was to deal with Bill C-50, the just transition, first. This was a reversal of the way they brought them in. They also shut down debate on each, delaying Bill C-49, the Atlantic offshore bill they said they wanted to fast-track, even though they actually control every part of the agenda themselves.
Their motion limited the time to hear from witnesses to only four meetings, and there were four meetings to go through each line and propose changes, but they limited each of those meetings to three hours each for both bills.
On behalf of Conservatives, I proposed an amendment that would help MPs on the natural resources committee do our due diligence on Bill C-49 to send it to the next stages first, exactly as the NDP-Liberals said they wanted to do. I proposed that the committee would have to deal with the problem of the half decade old law Bill C-69, which was found to be unconstitutional two weeks earlier, because so many of its sections are in Bill C-49, and then move to Bill C-50, the just transition.
Conservatives have always said that both of these bills are important with disproportionate impacts in certain communities and regions, but ultimately very consequential for all Canadians. The NDP-Liberals had the temerity to say, that day and since, that they wanted to collaborate on the schedule, as we heard here today, and work together to pass these bills.
Let us talk about what that actually looked like. It looked like a dictatorial scheduling motion to the committee with no real consideration of the proposed schedule by Conservatives, and then there was a preoccupation to silence Conservative MPs' participation. They even suggested kicking a couple of them out, such as the MP for Peace River—Westlock and the MP for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, who, like me and every Conservative Alberta MP, represent the hundreds of thousands of constituents that Bill C-50 would harm directly. They do have a right to speak and participate at any committee, like it is in all committees for all MPs and all parties here. Believe me, we have spent every single day fighting for workers, and we will not stop.
For an entire month, as of yesterday, the NDP-Liberals have claimed that they want to collaborate on the schedule for this important work, but other than a text message from the natural resources parliamentary secretary, which received no response when I replied with the very same suggestions Conservatives proposed in public and otherwise, and ironically, in the very order that they rammed it all through, they really have not dealt with us in any measure of collaboration or good faith at all.
I guess now would be an awkward time to put a fine point on it to remind the ever-increasing top-down NDP-Liberal government that Canadians actually gave Conservatives more votes individually in both of the last two elections, and they are a minority government, which most people hope or claim means more compromises and more collaboration. However, these NDP-Liberals do the exact opposite. Whatever happened to all those words long ago about respecting everyone, inclusion and working together? I guess we can never mind that.
That brings us to today, Friday, December 1. Close to midnight on Wednesday, Conservatives received notice of this motion. As usual, there is a lot of parliamentary procedure and legalese here, but I will explain exactly what it proposes to do about Bill C-50.
The motion would limit Bill C-50 to less than two hours of debate. The committee would hear no witnesses, so none of the affected workers, experts or economists would be heard. The committee would not hear from anybody. MPs would only have one day to review the bill at report stage and one day of debate at third reading. Given that debate at second reading was limited to less than eight hours, this is absolutely unacceptable for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose livelihoods this bill would destroy.
I want to make the following point clearly. Because of the NDP-Liberals' actions to date, no Canadian would be able to speak about the actual bill, Bill C-50. No MP would be able to hear from any Canadian in any part of the country about it. Of course, this is just like the Liberals' censorship of Canadian media, and now they are all howling that we have to communicate directly on the only option they have left us.
This bill would impact Canada and the livelihoods of millions of Canadians. As if the NDP-Liberals have not done enough damage already by driving hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs out of this country. They definitely do not want to hear from anyone about it. It is bad enough that they did a last-minute copy-and-paste job to switch all the references from “just transition” to “sustainable jobs”, even though no one had actually ever called it that before.
There was a National Post column in February entitled, “Most Canadians don't trust Liberals' plan for 'just transition' away from oil: poll”. The column says, “84 per cent of Canadians do not know what the 'just transition' plan actually is.” It also states, “40 per cent believe it will hurt the oil and gas sector; 36 per cent believe it will lead to lost jobs,” and, “Fifty-six per cent of Canadians are 'not confident' the government will be able to deliver, and 26 per cent of those people are 'not at all confident'.”
The article says, “About one quarter...of Canadians think the government is moving too fast to transition Canada’s economy,” which is what this is really all about. About 60 per cent of Canadians “don’t want to pay any additional taxes to support the transition and just 14 per cent were willing to pay one or two per cent more.” That is bad news for those who are pro quadrupling the carbon tax in the NDP-Liberal-Bloc coalition.
The article continues, “57 per cent of Canadians worry about the impact of lost tax revenue to governments should the economy transition away from natural resources. And 40 per cent believe that the plan to transition away from fossil fuels will make Canada less competitive in the global economy.” A whopping “60 per cent of all Canadians think we shouldn’t make major changes before larger global polluters make serious efforts to reduce carbon emissions”. Of course, and luckily, common-sense Conservatives agree with all of those Canadians.
For the record, I believe all of those Canadians will be proven to be correct if Canadians let the NDP-Liberals advance the rest of this destructive agenda, but I am hopeful more Canadians than ever will see right through the Liberals now and will have a chance to stop it. It does look like it will come down to that since, despite all the NDP-Liberals' big talk, they really are not interested in adjusting their anti-energy agenda at all. They are only interested in escalating it to what would be more major costs and more brutal losses for the vast majority of everyday Canadians, whom they prove everyday they do not really care about.
Canadians can stop this attack on our country from our own government, this attack on our standard of living, our quality of life and our ability to buy and thrive here in our Canadian home. However, because of the NDP propping up the Liberals, Canadians have no choice, but they will have to deal with it in the next election. Luckily, they have a common-sense Conservative Party that is ready and able to bring our great home, our country of Canada, back up and away from this cliff.
The NDP has abandoned its traditional, and often admirable, position of being a principled and plucky opposition party because it cries outrage everyday while it props up the Liberals, apparently with the co-operation of the Bloc now too, to keep them in power and to prevent Canadians from having a say in an election sooner than later. The NDP-Liberals are clearly parties of power at any price now, so it is logical to conclude that the truth-telling Canadians featured the February column about the polls on the just transition are exactly what caused the crass and obviously last-minute name change to cover up the facts and try to fool Canadians that Bill C-50 is not exactly what they fear and exactly what they do not trust the government to do. That is with good cause, after eight years, but it is the just transition.
I would also mention here that Alberta NDP leader, Rachel Notley, has also called on the NDP-Liberals to scrap this just transition plan, but they are not listening to her either, even though the NDP's federal and provincial parties are formally related, unlike, for example, the federal common-sense Conservatives, which is a federal party in its own right with no official ties with any similar free enterprise Conservative provincial parties.
The NDP-Liberals will say that this is all much ado about nothing. They will say, as the member did, that it went through committee last year. Of course, the bill itself absolutely did not. It was a study on the general concept.
I must note that, between April and September, we had 64 witnesses and 23 written submissions, and not a single witness, except for one lonely government witness at the very end, ever called them “sustainable jobs”. They all said “just transition”. However, the NDP-Liberals announced the Bill C-50 just transition before the committee even issued its report and recommendations, so that was all a bad charade too.
It is ridiculous that they are claiming this is not about what it plainly is, because of course, if there was no plan to kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and disrupt millions more, there would be no need for anything called a “transition” at all.
