I said his words were, his approach, and I—
Dominic LeBlanc Liberal
This bill has received Royal Assent and is, or will soon become, law.
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
Part 1 enacts the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act , which establishes a statutory framework to remove federal barriers to the interprovincial trade of goods and services and to improve labour mobility within Canada. In the case of goods and services, that Act provides that a good or service that meets provincial or territorial requirements is considered to meet comparable federal requirements that pertain to the interprovincial movement of the good or provision of the service. In the case of workers, it provides for the recognition of provincial and territorial authorizations to practise occupations and for the issuance of comparable federal authorizations to holders of such provincial and territorial authorizations. It also provides the Governor in Council with the power to make regulations respecting federal barriers to the interprovincial movement of goods and provision of services and to the movement of labour within Canada.
Part 2 enacts the Building Canada Act , which, among other things,
(a) authorizes the Governor in Council to add the name of a project and a brief description of it to a schedule to that Act if the Governor in Council is of the opinion, having regard to certain factors, that the project is in the national interest;
(b) provides that determinations and findings that have to be made and opinions that have to be formed under certain Acts of Parliament and regulations for an authorization to be granted in respect of a project that is named in Schedule 1 to that Act are deemed to have been made or formed, as the case may be, in favour of permitting the project to be carried out in whole or in part;
(c) requires the minister who is designated under that Act to issue to the proponent of a project, if certain conditions are met, a document that sets out conditions that apply in respect of the project and that is deemed to be the authorizations, required under certain Acts of Parliament and regulations, that are specified in the document; and
(d) requires that minister, each year, to cause an independent review to be conducted of the status of each national interest project.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Bill numbers are reused for different bills each new session. Perhaps you were looking for one of these other C-5s:
This is a computer-generated summary of the speeches below. Usually it’s accurate, but every now and then it’ll contain inaccuracies or total fabrications.
Bill C-5 aims to reduce interprovincial trade barriers and expedite major projects deemed to be in the national interest, but concerns remain regarding environmental protection, Indigenous consultation, and workers' rights.
Liberal
Conservative
NDP
Bloc
Green
One Canadian Economy ActGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker John Nater
Order.
The time has now expired for that. I will take it under advisement. I thank the member for London West. We will take it under advisement. We will review the blues and get back to the House.
We are now resuming debate.
The hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, I will recognize the territory from which I speak today: I am at the annual general meeting of Friends of Nature, a wonderful small group in Nova Scotia on the territory of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy. When I accepted the invitation, I foolishly thought we would be having an election on the fixed election date, but here we are on June 20, the last day of the very short session of the current Parliament following the election, under a new government.
I know it is a new government, because I do not think this could have happened under any other government. This is called the new government's honeymoon period. I used to think, I like to think, that in honeymoon periods, acts were consensual. This is anything but consensual, but Bill C-5 is before us now for its final vote.
I want to take a moment, if it is all right, to say that I do appreciate the Speaker's ruling earlier today that we will vote on part 1 and part 2 separately. I want to make it clear that the Greens definitely support bringing down interprovincial trade barriers. We desperately want to see a national approach that makes Canada at least as co-operative and effective between and among different jurisdictions as is the European Union, which deals with separate nation-states, many of which were certainly in the oral history of my childhood from parents who lived through the Depression and the Second World War. We certainly knew countries that now co-operate fully in the European Union were, a short time ago, relatively speaking, at war with each other.
Here we are in Canada, and we have less co-operation. The European Union, for instance, has a viable electricity grid that works across all its jurisdictions. It was able, after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, within months, to plug Ukraine into the EU electricity grid. We do not have one in Canada that we can plug into. The province of Nova Scotia has very, very high utility rates, and it stills burn coal for electricity, which other provinces have ceased to do. It could buy everything it needs from Hydro-Québec if only we had the interties to have a Canadian electricity grid. It has been something that hurts our economy and certainly hurts our businesses and many sectors.
We do not act like a country, but worse than that, we often do not think like a country, so I was very excited to hear the new Prime Minister's commitment to bring down interprovincial trade barriers. We certainly also need labour mobility; we need to recognize it across provinces, and that means working with many regulatory bodies. For instance, for doctors, we need to deal with the appropriate medical societies within each province to make sure the health care professionals we so desperately need can be recognized more quickly.
It is an awful shame, then, that I find I have to vote against part 1, and that is because of concerns raised to me directly by the Canadian Cancer Society with the way the bill is drafted with respect to the way a recognized standard at a provincial level could be recognized and could replace a stronger standard at the federal level. Had the bill not had the programming motion that pushed it through before anyone could think twice, I think that could have been fixed quite easily.
Most legislation like this would include a carve-out, an exemption, for health and environmental protections, but we were too busy. The Prime Minister and his government were in too big a rush. I question why that would be. It certainly could have been fixed easily. I cannot vote for it as it now stands.
I do not want to see another Walkerton in Canada, and I do not want to see what happened in England when Maggie Thatcher got rid of unnecessary regulations: the spread of mad cow disease. We really do not know the cost of getting rid of valuable regulations until we are dealing with a crisis. Many regulations can be removed. Much red tape is in our way, but we need to look before we leap. The bill is all about leaping before we look, and definitely that is the case in the “build Canada fast” section, the identification of projects in the national interest.
That is the key question. What is a project of national interest? How do we determine which projects are truly in the best interests of all nations in Canada? How do we find the common destiny of all provinces, territories and indigenous peoples? How do we determine which projects are truly in the national interest?
The bill leaves it a mystery. What is a project in the national interest? There is a definition section in the bill that tells us that a project in the national interest can be found in schedule 1. Of course, schedule 1 is blank, and we can find out what is going to be put there because cabinet is going to decide, and there are no fixed criteria or anything reviewable later on as to why a project was in the national interest.
It could be that the main factor taken into consideration is polling. That would not be against this law, and there would be no way to challenge it in court later. It could be that everything put forward by cabinet is absolutely brilliant, and I will be cheering for it, like an east-west-north-south electricity grid or a public transit system that works for people in the way the inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls wanted. It was made a call for justice that there be public transit so that vulnerable people like indigenous women and girls would not be forced to hitchhike, because there is no way to get from A to B in a wealthy, modernized, industrialized country like Canada unless someone has the money to own a car or buy a plane ticket.
There are many projects in the national interest that we need. The Prime Minister said that free, prior and informed consent and the rights of indigenous people are “at the heart” of Bill C-5. I do not want to rewrite his speeches for him, but I suspect what he really wanted to say was that it is in his heart. It is what his government cares about, but it is nowhere to be found in Bill C-5.
I suspect our first big national interest project is going to be something of a moon shot. It is going to be building a time machine, because we cannot get free, prior and informed consent unless indigenous peoples, first nations, Métis and Inuit are in at the very beginning of the conversation, before it gets put on the national interest project list. For that, my friends, we need a time machine to go back in time to do the consultations that will not have happened, because with the way the legislation is drafted, it cannot happen in advance.
I am all for a time machine, but I do not think it is very practical. I do not think it is likely to happen. I think like many leaders in indigenous communities do. As Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak said in her testimony to the House and the Senate as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and as Jody Wilson-Raybould has said, our former minister of justice and someone who really understands the rights and title of first nations in section 35, this bill would do violence to the efforts we have made, inadequate as they are, toward reconciliation.
This bill has clauses that are completely unbelievable, such as clause 6, which would deem that decisions made in the future are already going to be in favour of the project proceeding, even before we have either listed the project or studied it. That is a fascinating provision, a provision that only Henry VIII could have come up with. The kinds of powers the government would be taking onto itself are unknown in modern times, and they should have remained so.
I will be voting against both part 1 and part 2, with reluctance. I would love to be on board. I want the government to succeed because Canada has to succeed. We must have a successful country that stands up against the arrogance and threats of the Trump administration, but we do that through economic sovereignty. We do not do it by imitating Trumpian moves, like deciding the central power needs more power. We do not do it with the bravado of signing statements that are meaningless. Laws in this country should be drafted with precision. Words have meaning when they are in legislation. Words in press releases and promises are good, as long as governments respect the things they have said in elections, but to say they mean something and care about something is rather a hollow claim when they produce a bill like Bill C-5.
This makes me so very sad. I think it is a real tragedy that the first bill introduced by this new government is so dangerous, as we have seen in recent days and weeks.
All I can say at this point is that it breaks my heart. I want to be with the new government. I want to be with my colleagues and stand for one Canadian economy, but we need to think it through. We cannot make it so with the bravado of a great signing ceremony and a bill whose laudable ends are undermined by appalling drafting and a claim for powers that no government should hope to achieve.
Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Mr. Speaker, it is a very significant day today. The Prime Minister and Liberal candidates from across the country made a solid commitment as part of our election platform to build one Canadian economy. It was on page 1 of the platform. Sometime in the next half-hour, we are going to be passing Bill C-5. That is a checkoff. That is something the Prime Minister and the Liberal caucus pushed through to fulfill a solemn commitment we made to Canadians.
I will conclude by saying that in the last number of weeks, we have seen all sorts of initiatives from a new Prime Minister and a new administration. We are making a difference. We will continue to work hard for Canadians.
Could the leader of the Green Party explain why, in a nutshell, she feels that this bill should not pass?
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, the bill cries out for amendments and improvements to ensure that the projects chosen to be in the national interest meet some kind of binding set of criteria. It needs to create a system. Why have a law in place, as opposed to a wonderful declaration that everyone signs? If it is a law, it should have accountability mechanisms. It should be reviewable by a federal court if the promises and commitments made by the government are not observed.
The bill has nothing mandatory. Even the much-vaunted major projects office is a discretionary move. It is claimed the bill would do all sorts of things: We will not proceed unless there is consensus and we will not proceed unless there is a private sector proponent. The Minister of Natural Resources said this in the main estimates, but nothing in the bill says that.
Lori Idlout NDP Nunavut, NU
Uqaqtittiji, the Liberal government, a minority, which to me does not indicate that this is such a massive decision by all of Canada, has successfully pushed through legislation that would violate the rights of indigenous peoples. It does so first of all by the process of getting Bill C-5 through in such a fast-tracked way, but it will continue to do so because of the way the legislation is crafted.
I wonder if the member can share with us the impact this bill would have on indigenous children. Will they be part of this great economy that the Liberal and Conservative coalition has led in Bill C-5?
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the member of Parliament for Nunavut, for her extraordinary courage, her championing of indigenous rights and her consistently calling out the importance of intergenerational love. There has been a lot of trauma visited on indigenous peoples, and I do not know anyone who has been clearer than the hon. member for Nunavut.
The offences done to indigenous rights in the bill are significant, and the offences to children, whether settler culture children or indigenous children, in undermining our democracy, will cause, I am afraid to say, serious damage. I have never seen a government expand powers to the centre and then, when the so-called emergency is over, relinquish them to go back to normal levels of respect for Westminster parliamentary democracy. The role of a prime minister is first among equals.
Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC
Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the member could elaborate. In rushing through Bill C-5, not only does it, of course, violate indigenous rights, as we have heard, but what are the implications for the environment of overriding environmental standards?
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Mr. Speaker, it is a strange thing to find myself more shocked now than I was by things that the Harper government tried. We saw bills pushed through before, but I have never seen an omnibus bill with such breadth and such impact on multiple laws that dictates future decision-making. Again, the use of a time machine would be handy. It violates the basic precepts of study, exploration, hearing from witnesses and making amendments based on hearing advice from those who are experts in the field.
As for the effect on the environment, it could be quite substantial because it is a matter of luck at this point. What projects get approved? Who knows? It is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all over again.
One Canadian Economy ActGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker John Nater
It being 5:07 p.m., pursuant to order made on Monday, June 16, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the third reading stage of the bill now before the House.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69.1, the first question is on part 1 and on the short title.
If a member participating in person wishes that part 1 and the short title be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
One Canadian Economy ActGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker John Nater
The recorded division on part 1 and the short title stands deferred.
The next question is on part 2, including the schedule, which belongs to part 2.
If a member participating in person wishes that part 2, including the schedule, be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
One Canadian Economy ActGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker John Nater
The recorded division on part 2, including the schedule, stands deferred.
Pursuant to an order made on Monday, June 16, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded division at the third reading stage of the bill.
Call in the members.
(The House divided on part 1 and the short title, which were agreed to on the following division:)
