The federal government’s Canada Sustainable Jobs Act finally passed third reading after spending just under a year in the House of Commons, including 20 hours in committee and a 12-hour voting period due to Conservative efforts to delay the bill.
The bill will give workers and affected groups a voice in how the government intends to create sustainable jobs and facilitate the shift to a net zero economy. It now goes to the Senate to be studied and possibly modified before it can become law.
The law requires the federal government to report every five years on what it is doing to build an economy with sustainable jobs and those employment plans must be based on the advice of a council made up of representatives of different affected groups, such as unions, industry, people natives. , environmental NGOs and other interested parties.
Like the federal government’s fuel excise tax, the 11-page document bill has attracted the ire of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s camp, with shadow natural resources critic Shannon Stubbs leading the charge.
Stubbs and Conservative MPs regularly refer to Bill C-50 as “central, top-down, Soviet-style planning” and part of a “globalist” agenda to kill jobs in Canada’s oil and gas sector.
At a popular right-wing networking conference last week, Stubbs spoke at length about Bill C-50 in a fireside chat with Tim McMillan, who spent nearly eight years as president of the oil lobby group Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers after leaving provincial politics in 2014.
“Due to procedural tactics, not a single Canadian worker, business owner, Indigenous leader or energy worker or business owner, not a single Canadian in any sector in any province will be able to speak… on the record in the House of Representatives. the Commons,” he said. Stubbs on April 11. It is true that the committee did not hear from any witnesses during its study of the sustainable employment law.
“That opportunity didn’t exist because the Conservatives were obstructionist for weeks,” Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in a telephone interview with Canadian National Observer. For a month, committee meetings were filled with countless points of order and no meaningful discussion of the legislation.
“It’s a shame that Labour, industry and others have not been able to intervene effectively on the bill… but it is a function of the tactics the Conservative Party employed,” Wilkinson said.
Bill C-50, the Canada Sustainable Jobs Act, passed its final vote in the House of Commons on Monday and will now move to the Senate. #cdnpoli
Conservative MPs tabled almost 20,000 amendments during committee stage in December.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in the history of Parliament,” Wilkinson said..
MPs voted on another 200 Conservative amendments last Thursday and Friday, which took about 15 hours.
NDP MP and natural resources critic Charlie Angus, who worked closely with labor groups and the Liberals to craft the bill, celebrated its passage on April 15 and criticized Conservative efforts to delay the legislation, which during a meeting of the committee late at night, involved a lot of shouting.
“The International Energy Agency, hardly known as a left-wing think tank, in [its] The most recent report said that we are seeing the end of the fossil fuel era. We have to prepare for the next era,” Angus said on Monday.
Wilkinson believes the Conservatives have become so entrenched “because this is a fight to the death in terms of the future of oil and gas.”
“I think they are choosing, by far, the wrong fight,” said Wilkinson, who has made clear that he sees a continued role for oil and gas, particularly for non-fuel uses such as fertilizers.
“But you really have to recognize that the oil and gas industry needs to reduce emissions and… accept the fact that we are going to peak in terms of oil and gas demand in the next few years,” Wilkinson said.
A scenario in which global demand for oil and gas grows exponentially “is completely inconsistent with any commitment to climate change,” he added.
Before being referred to the Senate, MPs had one more opportunity to debate the bill and Bloc Québécois MP Mario Simard took the opportunity to ask Stubbs if he believes the oil and gas sector has any responsibility in climate change.
He didn’t get a clear answer. Instead, Stubbs said: “What I believe is that governments and politicians have to be honest about their policies and what they stand for” and then reiterated the common conservative refrain that “emissions reductions must be achieved by through technology, not taxes.