As Parliament resumes, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are striking a more conciliatory tone on issues like crime but remain unrelenting in their demands to axe carbon pricing and fast-track pipelines.
Parliament returned on Jan. 26 after an eventful week marked by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a follow-up speech in Quebec that was badly received, and new 100 per cent tariff threats levelled by US President Donald Trump. The drama is set to continue. In just a few days, the federal Conservative Party of Canada’s convention kicks off in Calgary and, with it, a high stakes vote on whether Pierre Poilievre is still the right person to lead the party.
In Ottawa, the Conservatives are signalling a willingness to work with the Liberals, under some conditions and on select issues, Poilievre said in a letter posted to social media on Saturday. On the first day back, signs continue to point to some amount of cooperation.
It appears as though the Conservatives may support the new affordability measures Carney proposed Monday morning. These include a GST rebate boost for low- and modest-income families, $20 million in funding to help food banks, creation of a $150-million Food Security Fund to help small and medium businesses and $500 million from the Strategic Response Fund to help businesses address supply chain disruption costs.
“One of the things we’re doing is reinforcing the Competition Bureau’s oversight of the of the industry as a whole, plus working … to move towards unit labelled pricing so that you have a true and very visible comparator between two types of good what is it per litre, per kilogramme, per amount,” Carney said at a Monday morning press conference in Ottawa. He will raise this at a meeting of provincial and territorial leaders later this week.
Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer panned the announcement as a “recycled Trudeau era policy” that will not provide permanent relief, and once again advocated to eliminate the industrial carbon price and clean fuel standard and reduce government spending.
However, “if they bring forward a simple bill that just does exactly what they said today, Conservatives will never stand in the way of relief for Canadians,” Scheer said to media in the House of Commons foyer on Monday afternoon. “We are the party of tax cuts.”
NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice said the GST rebate boost is “a step in the right direction” and something the NDP has proposed for several years.
In his letter, Poilievre said his MPs are prepared to pass two bills drafted under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that would invite the UK into the Trans-Pacific partnership and approve the Canada-Indonesia trade deal.
The government’s bail and sentencing reform act is another area of likely cooperation. Poilievre said Bill C-14 is “a weak, and watered-down bail bill” but “it is better than nothing” so the Conservatives would be willing to fast-track it.
“There are elements of C-14 that Conservatives can agree with,” Scheer said. The committee that will study it has been tied up on the controversial hate crimes bill, but on Jan. 26, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights acquiesced to Conservative requests to pause debate on C-9 in order to study the bail bill and get that moving through the legislative process, he added.
“Conservatives are here willing to work on behalf of Canadians to at least do no further harm with Liberal legislation, and where there are improvements and things that we have been calling for, and they have adopted our ideas, of course, we have allowed those bills to pass,” Scheer said. Both Poilievre and Scheer noted that Conservatives helped pass the Building Canada Act before the summer recess, though in their estimation Carney has not done much with the extraordinary powers afforded to him by C-5.
The government’s Budget Implementation Act, an omnibus bill that would enact certain parts of the budget, is also up for study in the Standing Committee on Finance. Now that former Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland has resigned, the party has 170 seats including speaker of the House Francis Scarpaleggia who only votes to break a tie in the House. This means the Liberals need at least three opposition MPs to vote with them — or a handful of absences and abstentions — to get legislation through. When the act returns to the House, it will trigger a confidence vote which, if lost, could trigger an election.
Liberal House Leader and Minister of Transportation Steven MacKinnon called on Poilievre to “commit to a reasonable timeline” to advance the Budget Implementation Act to the report stage and third reading in the House of Commons.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May came out swinging against the act, saying there’s “not a chance” she would support the 634-page omnibus bill as written.
For example, it includes a clause that allows all cabinet ministers to exempt any individual or corporation from any federal Canadian law, except the Criminal Code, if the minister deems the exemption to be “in the public interest” encourages innovation, competitiveness, or economic growth, May said, nodding to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ analysis of the omnibus bill.
“There are no criteria in the bill to tell us what would direct the minister’s attention to think it’s in the public interest,” May said. The Green Party is very concerned about this section dubbed the “Red Tape Reduction Act” and wants to see it “substantially amended, if not deleted.”
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said the environment and climate change is one of his top three priorities this parliamentary session, promising to oppose Liberal and Conservative oil policies, in a press release on Jan. 25. Blanchet also said Carney should apologize to Francophones for a recent speech on the Plains of Abraham — site of a historic battle in which the English defeated the French — in which the prime minister said the battle symbolized partnership. Carney, however, is standing by his comments despite significant backlash and simmering separatist rhetoric in Quebec.
