There was no technical briefing on Bill C-38

Elizabeth May

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my hon. colleague from Abbotsford to withdraw the accusation of hypocrisy. I find it offensive. Everyone in this place knows that it is a requirement of our job to travel to our ridings to do our work and to be here in this place.

How can the hon. member for Abbotsford have such a short memory? Bill C-38, introduced in the spring of 2012, was the omnibus bill to end all omnibus bills. It was more than 400 pages long, and it changed 70 different bills. It repealed the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act. It repealed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy Act. It repealed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and replaced it with an entirely inadequate piece of garbage. This bill is a bit better than that, better than what was left in 2012. It is not adequate, but it is much better. In the words of former Conservative fisheries ministers, it “gutted” the Fisheries Act.

Bill C-38 was never attached to a single technical briefing. I sat at this desk and read all 430 pages, and by the time I was done, I saw that a decade’s worth of environmental laws were pledged to be destroyed by the previous government.

Does the hon. member recall a single technical briefing on that omnibus bill?

Ed Fast – Member for Abbotsford

Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to ask her to withdraw a comment.

The 2012 legislation, as I mentioned, was focused exclusively on streamlining the process without, in any way, undermining the environmental rigour of our system, those very legislators who supported it and all the people who fed into the process, and she calls the end of that process garbage. A member of Parliament is calling our work in the House garbage. That is offensive to Canadians, and she needs to apologize.