Mark Carney’s election platform did not include giving himself the power to suspend the entirety of federal law and, by extension, democracy. But that’s what he aims to do with
Bill C-5, which he hopes to ram through by
Canada Day.
Conservatives, astonishingly,
haven’t ruled out helping the prime minister on this front, which is a royal shame since they’re our last line of defence.
Introduced to the House of Commons on June 6, the bill would create a Building Canada Act to fast-track any project the feds consider to be in the national interest. The act would do this by allowing the Liberal government to completely bypass parliamentary scrutiny. The act would give cabinet the power to
add any project it likes to a list of “national interest projects” by issuing an order-in-council. Cabinet would also have the power to
make a list of federal laws that can be suspended at any time, with the stroke of a pen, with respect to any designated national interest project. To exempt any designated projects from any number of suspendable laws, the feds would simply need to
write a regulation specifying which laws no longer apply to which projects, and it would be so.
For example, the Building Canada Act would allow Carney and his team to designate all work by his forthcoming home-construction agency as a national interest project, and shield all of its business from conflict-of-interest laws, from transparency rules set out in the Access to Information Act, from the scope of the auditor general, from federal taxes via the Income Tax Act, and from police via the Criminal Code.
The same legal exemptions could be given to a favoured engineering firm, telecom company, construction giant, consulting behemoth, etc., as long as cabinet finds a national interest angle in the work. Foreign entities could even be excused from following the Investment Canada Act, which exists to protect economic and national security.
