Jamie Sarkonak: Mark Carney is demanding power to suspend all federal laws. What will he use it for?

National Post

5 hours ago

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Making matters more concerning are Carney's own potential private-sector interests: he is the former chair and environmental, social, governance (ESG) lead of Brookfield Asset Management. Carney's publicly traded assets have been put into a blind trust, but we're still waiting on financial disclosures through the ethics commissioner. All considered, he could stand to benefit from the suspension of law in the area of modular housing and green energy, for example, given Brookfield's holdings.
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Aside from the corruption risk, the Building Canada Act could ultimately create the expectation that the feds should selectively suspend clunky laws to get anything of worth built, incentivizing lobbying campaigns and distracting from the actual job of government. If some Canadian laws are so hostile to development that they warrant total suspension, as the Liberals seem to admit by tabling Bill C-5, they should spend their time fixing them. Fast-tracking exceptions aren't out of the question, either: if Parliament wants to give cabinet the ability to suspend certain pre-determined clauses in certain cases, it can go right ahead.
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Indeed, the left decried Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's plan to repeal the burdensome Impact Assessment Act, which hasn't approved a single project in its six years of existence, and requires proponents to file everything from sociology dissertations to greenhouse gas projections in their applications. But Poilievre's intent was to replace it with something else — and he certainly didn't set out to suspend the whole roster of environmental laws, as seems to be Carney's approach.
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Proponents of the scheme will likely defend it by pointing to the fact that Bill C-5, as it's currently written, proposes a list of only 13 suspendable laws. These include the Impact Assessment Act (and its predecessor, which still applies to a number of projects underway in Canada), the Fisheries Act, the Indian Act, the National Capital Act, the Migratory Birds Convention Act, a part of the Canada Transportation Act, the Species at Risk Act, and a handful of federal laws that govern Canadian bodies of water.
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It's a fraction of the hundreds of federal laws that are on the books — but that's just for now. The moment the Building Canada Act becomes law, that list can be expanded at cabinet's pleasure. In that way, Bill C-5 is a Trojan horse.
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The Liberals are now moving the bill along at a pace so fast that it escapes the rule of law. The House of Commons transport committee is scheduled to handle the bill this week, with only one day of witness hearings planned before MPs hit their deadline to propose amendments. It will simply be impossible to give this wide-ranging bill the full consideration it deserves, as a proposal to allow cabinet to pause any law at any time should take months, not hours.
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Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet got it right last week when he denounced the bill and promised to fight the Liberals' attempt to speed it through the House of Commons without any meaningful debate.
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The Conservatives are still on the fence, but they shouldn't be. Supporting Bill C-5 in its current form means unleashing the Liberals from the oversight of Parliament, which would be a catastrophic dereliction of duty for the Opposition.
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