Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the drive by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to rush its major projects bill through Parliament this week represents a “new low” in government contempt for Parliament.
Speaking at a news conference Monday morning, May said she hasn’t seen anything like it since the Conservative government under Stephen Harper pushed an omnibus bill through more than a decade ago.
May said she was “shocked when Stephen Harper in spring of 2012 brought in an omnibus bill, Bill C-38, that was 400 pages long and destroyed 70 environmental laws, and it was fast-tracked.”
“This is worse,” she said. “It appears to me — and it remains to be seen — that Mr. Carney’s new majority coalition is Liberal-Conservative, delivering [Conservative Leader] Pierre Poilievre’s policies with a more friendly face.”
May made her comments at a news conference outside the House of Commons foyer Monday morning alongside First Nations leaders, NDP MP Gord Johns and lawyers from environmental groups — all of whom raised concerns about the legislation and the pace at which it’s sprinting through the Commons.
Senator says he’ll introduce amendment to delay Bill C-5
The Liberals passed a closure motion Monday morning to speed through study and debate of Bill C-5 by week’s end — but not before multiple opposition MPs excoriated the government during debate for moving so fast.
Government House leader Steven MacKinnon defended the bill’s timeline, arguing that the government has public buy-in since the bill delivers on major campaign promises from the recent election.
“We just had the ultimate democratic test, and you know what we heard?” he said. “Get this country moving. We need a response to the threats coming from down south.”
The bill is now set for an unusually fast one-day study by the House transport committee Wednesday afternoon and evening. The government expects to pass the bill by the end of Friday.
At the news conference, Sen. Paul Prosper said he plans to try to slow down the bill in the Senate with an amendment.
He warned that if the bill is not carefully reviewed, it will quickly lead to litigation.
The legislation would give the federal cabinet the ability to set aside various statutes to push forward approvals for a small number of major industrial products, such as mines, pipelines and ports, if the government deems them to be in the national interest.
It aims to speed up the approval process for major projects so that cabinet can render a decision in two years at the most.
Some critics warn the proposed law would allow Ottawa to flout its constitutional duty to consult with First Nations under Section 35 of the Constitution.
But some constitutional experts told The Canadian Press that the legislation’s most far-reaching provisions — the ones that would allow the executive branch to skirt laws to push forward big projects — are likely to survive a court challenge.
Paul Daly, chair in administrative law and governance at University of Ottawa, said that while the provisions giving the executive more power are controversial, they’re likely constitutional.
“It is unlikely that a court would invalidate this as violating the Constitution,” he said.
Sections 21 to 23 of the bill allow the executive branch to bypass existing rules and processes in 13 laws — including the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Indian Act and the Impact Assessment Law — through a regulatory process that does not need to be approved by Parliament.
These sections are what’s known in the legal community as “Henry VIII clauses” — a reference to a king who preferred to govern by decree rather than through Parliament.
Courts haven’t found these to be constitutionally invalid, Daly said, adding there are guardrails in the legislation and Charter rights will continue to apply.
“It’s similar in character to the carbon tax legislation from a few years ago, where the Supreme Court said the Henry VIII clause was constitutionally valid. And I suspect that a court, if this statute were challenged, would come to the same conclusion,” Daly said.
But Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, said sections 22 and 23 are “very worrisome” because they could allow the federal cabinet to exempt a pipeline or some other project from the Species at Risk Act.
She said the bill overall gives the federal government too much leeway on the Crown’s duty to consult with Indigenous people on decisions that affect them.
“If I were Canada’s lawyers, I would have advised them strenuously against this bill,” she told The Canadian Press.
“That consultation has to be meaningful and I worry that, especially under the timelines that this government wants to make these decisions, that this bill is basically circumventing the government’s constitutionally required duty to consult.”
Carney said in June that it takes too long to push major new projects through “arduous” approval processes and that in “recent decades, it has become too difficult to build new projects in this country.”
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet has warned that the legislation must be studied thoroughly since it can suspend various laws and regulations relating to language, First Nations rights, the environment and threatened species.
“The government seems to want to avoid scrutiny on the bill, which by itself is worrisome,” he told reporters in English on Friday.
NDP MPs Leah Gazan, Alexandre Boulerice and Lori Idlout wrote to MacKinnon last week to formally request that the bill’s study be slowed down to provide for more debate in the House.
The federal Conservatives have claimed the bill does not go far enough and want to see the Impact Assessment Act repealed.
