Elizabeth May: I will be voting against both part 1 and part 2 of Bill C-5

2025-06-20 16:52 [p.1488]
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Hou...

Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich—Gulf Islands: 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?...

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