QUESTION PERIOD — Natural Resources
Just Transition
April 28, 2022
Honourable senators, my question is for the government leader in the Senate.
Speaking of the Prime Minister, while the Prime Minister may never have to worry about the cost of the carbon tax or the cost of anything else, the hundreds of thousands of men and women who work in our energy sector do.
In its 2019 election platform, the Liberal Party promised energy workers a “Just Transition Act,” “giving workers access to the training, support, and new opportunities needed to succeed in the clean economy.”
Leader, Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco reported on Tuesday that the NDP-Liberal government has no implementation plan, no formal governance structure and no monitoring and reporting system in place to support a “just” transition.
Was this your government’s plan all along — to talk down the sector, destroy livelihoods and call that “just”?
Honourable senators, the answer is no. Thank you for your question, senator.
The purpose of the just transition and all the other programs is for the government to do what it can to assist industry, workers and families who depend on those industries to, in fact, weather the transition that the world, capital markets and our own commitment to fighting climate change necessarily impose upon us.
Leader, last June, when I asked why your government had failed to bring forward the “Just Transition” legislation as promised, you blamed “the environment we’re in, including a minority Parliament.”
In fact, according to the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the Trudeau government had not developed the legislation. I don’t see how your government’s inaction can be blamed upon a minority Parliament. The commissioner was blunt when he said the NDP-Liberal government was “unprepared and slow off the mark.”
Leader, the just transition consultations — which were also criticized by the Commissioner of the Environment — end this Saturday, April 30. Can we expect even more delay after their conclusion — before we finally learn just what a “just” transition really means to this NDP-Liberal government?
Thank you for your question. I am going to answer it directly, but I want to remind and advise colleagues in this chamber of the innovation that was in these commission reports and which the government welcomes, namely that, rather than waiting until the end of programs, these audits and reports were done in midstream so as to provide the welcome opportunity for the recommendations that it makes to be taken into account as the government adjusts.
To your question: Implicit in my answer — and I will say it more categorically — the government thanks the CESD for its report and accepts the audit’s recommendations within the context, as I will explain, of the narrow scope and limited time involved in that report.
The scope of the audit covered the period of January 2018 to September 2021 and therefore was not able to fully assess the work that was under way to deliver upcoming just transition legislation and the relevant Budget 2021 programming delivered by this government. Recent events, such as the ministerial round table on sustainable jobs, the relaunch of consultations on legislation and the clean jobs training centre demonstrate the government’s ongoing commitment to advancing just transition. Finally, the government is hard at work to ensure that just transition legislation is tabled in Parliament.
