Honourable senators, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling the vibe of a classroom on the last day of term. There’s a lot of restlessness in the room, and I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m standing in the way of that.

I would like to thank all senators who have spoken on this bill and those who moved amendments. I would especially like to thank the sponsor of the bill for his diligence in advancing this important piece of legislation.

I have already indicated to all of you via email that I intend to move two amendments. I telegraphed my intention early on in the debate at the Committee of the Whole when I asked the minister questions on one of the topics of the amendments I will be moving.

Let me say at the outset that I’m a supporter of Bill C-5 for all the reasons articulated by other supporters of the bill. For that reason, my amendments are, I believe, consistent with the bill. Not only are they consistent, but they also address what appears to be either oversights or discrepancies — intended or unintended — which, I believe, even the government accepts as being the case.

Since signalling my intention, I have been fortunate to have had conversations with government representatives who have assured me that they recognize the flaws I pointed out in the bill and that they would seek to remedy those errors. I won’t report more fully on those, essentially, private conversations, but there is an opportunity, of course, for the government to say more about it at the end of my speech.

Colleagues, the two items that I will be raising shortly have to do — first of all — with a discrepancy in the bill that came out of an amendment from the House of Commons. As you know, the bill sets out a number of factors for the determination of projects of national interest, and there are five criteria for this determination.

At the same time, there is a new provision in the bill — again, moved in, and adopted by, the House of Commons — which sets up a register, through which, there will be reporting on the ways in which projects deemed to be of national importance have met the criteria in the selection of projects in the first place. Curiously, the list of criteria in the register does not correspond to the list in the “factors” section of the bill. The item that is missing is item (e), which is, “. . . contribute to clean growth and to meeting Canada’s objectives with respect to climate change.”

Now, it is a very curious thing indeed that we would — on one hand — set up a criterion for designating a project and — on the other hand — not have the requirement to report on it after having selected the project. The government has assured us — and this is on the record from Senator Yussuff — that this is not the government’s intention. I believe that to be true. I also believe that if this amendment does not pass in this chamber, they will do what they can to remedy the situation.

However, it does beg the question as to how this discrepancy came about. The story — it seems — is that it was an amendment moved in committee by a Conservative member of Parliament. I don’t know. Maybe it slipped through and people were not paying attention, but it slipped through. We could offer less charitable interpretations, but one interpretation would be that there is an intention that this criterion be given less weight, and I don’t think that would be right insofar as what we would want to see in the classification and designation of national projects.

Again, I do not doubt the government’s good intentions to fix this problem as soon as they can, and they may well have to do it in the absence of an amendment here, but we are in a minority government situation, and there may be partisans in the other House who are determined and may well be explicit in wanting to exclude item (e) from consideration in the register. That’s the first amendment that I will be moving shortly.

The second amendment is a little more esoteric, but maybe I have brought it up a sufficient number of times in this chamber that you get the gist of it. It has to do with the Statutory Instruments Act, or SIA, which has been essentially nullified by this bill.

The SIA is an arcane piece of legislation that sets up procedures, reporting requirements and various consultation processes, which can seem to be cumbersome and might rightly be described as “unnecessary red tape.”

I understand it is the government’s intent to do away with some of this cumbersomeness and red tape not only to speed up the process of project approvals but also — and more importantly — to provide greater certainty to project proponents that projects of national interest will not become bogged down.

I think that’s a good objective. What I’m about to propose does nothing to get in the way of that.

But the SIA, sprawling as it is, also includes a provision that gives the authority to the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations, which I have had the privilege of sitting on and chairing in previous Parliaments. This committee looks at regulations and statutory instruments pursuant to the bills we pass to make sure those regulations are consistent with the bills passed.

It is obvious we cannot go into the minutia of the regulations that are needed for any bill that needs to take effect, and that’s why we have, in this Parliament and all Westminster parliaments, this kind of committee to look at the consistency of regulations with the law.

Unfortunately, by eliminating the application of the SIA holus-bolus, section 19 of that act also takes effect, which nullifies the work of the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations.

Now, the government will correctly say that there is an alternate mechanism that has been set up through amendments made in the House of Commons; it is the parliamentary review committee. It is based on the powers from the Emergencies Act. I understand it is also to be a joint committee and it will have the ability to look at the way in which this bill is implemented. That is a good step, but it does not amount to a scrutiny of regulations committee for, essentially, two reasons.

The first is that the parliamentary review committee will take more of a broad-brush approach to whether the minister has been exercising her or his powers correctly and whether the broad sweep of the way in which Bill C-5 is being implemented is kosher, if I can put it that way.

I don’t think it will go into the technical details and have the technical expertise to help that committee point out what may be fine legal errors in the regulations in relation to the bill itself. That kind of specialized work, with specialized support from a dedicated technical secretariat, a legal team, in other words, is available to the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations.

Furthermore, the parliamentary review mechanism that has been set up does not have the power of disallowance. Disallowance is where the Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations can, after a rigorous process of investigation and questioning of officials and maybe even the minister, disallow a regulation because it does not conform to the law.

Now, this power is used very, very rarely. It’s only taken with the full agreement of the committee, a committee that is characteristically non-partisan. In the last Parliament, we had the unfortunate experience of having to give an intention to disallow regulations in five areas, which I will not go into. But I will say that the act of giving a notice of intention to disallow regulations in five different bills led to corrective action on the part of the departments in some cases; in other cases the process is ongoing.

My point is that this power is real and can have positive effects in bringing regulations into conformity with the law, and that it is used with great reservation. So you don’t expect that this committee would take any other approach in the review of Bill C-5.

Now, there may be a way in which the parliamentary review committee can incorporate scrutiny of regulations into its work. If this amendment doesn’t pass, perhaps that is something we can collectively look at or the government can propose.

Colleagues, I will shortly read the text of the amendment. Let me say that I hope it passes, but I’m not going to press for a standing vote. If it fails, I will go on the assumption that it failed because we are going to trust the government to fix the problem themselves and that it will happen one way or the other.