Environment Committee on May 5th, 2009

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

I'll just wait for the witnesses to be ready.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I notice, Ms. Cosgrove, that you're consulting quite frequently with the lady at the desk. Would it be easier for you if the person at the desk whom you're consulting with joined you at the table? It's up to you, but she's free to be here.

She needs the table for all her papers. I understand.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Yes, I just need a minute to look at this list. I hope all of us do.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll take a couple of seconds for each member to look at the list.

Mr. Warawa.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Mr. Chair, it appears that there's concern with this clause, and we may need to have some sober second thought on this. If we were to defer this and then come back and deal with it again maybe at the end---

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

At the end of the process, do you mean?

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Yes, at the end of the process. That would give us a chance to move on.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay. However, I do have some speakers who want to speak on this.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

I think it would be helpful to elucidate more comments so that the government could make--

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Why don't we get to Mr. Ouellet after you and Mr. Trudeau?

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

I think it would be useful. That way the government can take back some of the elucidated notions and perhaps look to amend or move forward.

Madame Caron, I want to go back to one specific idea. We're desperately trying in this country, at the federal and provincial levels, to enhance apprenticeships and training programs to deal with skills shortages, many of which are not actually executed by colleges or universities; they're done through accredited programs usually overseen by provinces, through labour unions, through trades, organizations for carpenters and plumbers, by accredited associations, and so on and so forth. They would be excluded from this. It's there on the front lines, in my experience, that we need so much more training. We have institutes of the environment and ecological economics springing up in universities in Montreal, Victoria, Ottawa, and right across the county, which are often well resourced. Certainly they were under the previous government.

I'm just trying to get a sense of whether or not you have thought about giving the judge a bit more latitude here to say we'd like to expand this beyond scholarships for colleges and universities.

[Renée Caron]

Mr. Chairman, I think that would be a fair comment.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Trudeau.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

My issue is the same

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Ouellet.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Chairman, if a fine that has to be paid for scholarships at a university still isn't paid after three years, what happens? Does the university have to file suit to get the money that has been awarded to it? Who will do that?

[Sarah Cosgrove]

If the order was not carried out, there would be a court procedure to ensure that the amount of money was remitted to the university. So it would be the federal prosecutor who would have to get involved at that point in time, not the university.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you.

I want to raise another point. It seems to me that a lot of pressure is being put on judges to decide where that money will go, whereas they don't all have a pan-Canadian line of thinking with regard to the environment. Will they favour the people they know? Wouldn't it be preferable for that choice to fall to the government, which has an action plan for environmental research and scholarships, etc.?

The government could follow its action plan instead of it being left to chance, without it necessarily involving the most important people. In other words, a fuel oil spill could occur in the St. Lawrence River, for example, and the judge could decide to award money from the scholarships to the oil companies, since they had the misfortune to make the oil. That could be highly irrational. As in the case of foundations that have tax deductions, the government takes away the right to continue its action plan and assigns it to individuals who are not aware of its long-term plans.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

In the case you referred to, one might perhaps want to pay the money to the St. Lawrence Centre, for example.

Mr. McGuinty.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, but there's something else that I failed to raise a moment ago.

In the list here, Madame Caron and Ms. Cosgrove, there is no discretion for the judge to allocate what could be very considerable fines to any kind of fund that would permit intervenor funding, which is....

You're caucusing, and that's fine. I just want to finish my comment, if I could.

It's very well known internationally in environmental enforcement and prosecutions and causes of action legally that intervenor funding is often made available--at the provincial level in this country, state level in the United States, and federally. I don't know if the government is ideologically opposed to this notion. I think they have been around the funding.

What was that funding called again? It was funding that was drawn on for the Montfort Hospital, for example. Does anyone recall?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes, it was the court challenges program.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Right.

With court challenges, it was the notion of funds being made available to either enforce charter rights or refine charter rights. For some, they may believe they're inventing charter rights, I don't know.

There has been a tradition in environmental improvements worldwide to occasionally use these resources, these fines, for the participation of environmental NGOs, for example, or community groups as environmental intervenors in legislative processes. They could be regulatory, they could be legal, they could be court based, they could be causes of action, they could be criminal, they could be civil.

Has there been any thought given to that? Now that we're in the business here of trying to tighten up these discretionary options that we're giving to judges, is that not something we ought to be considering?

[Renée Caron]

Mr. Chairman, I think it would be fair to say that none of the elements of the full suite of sentencing apply in relation to funding for intervenors, so I think that is certainly an accurate point.

To my understanding of how this was pulled together, it was to bring all of the existing types of creative sentencing under the various nine statutes together, which then creates the full suite. Then we look at putting that across those nine, so that they have the full suite.

I would just mention, because I don't want to lead the members into error, that a couple of these are particular to CEPA only and don't go into other statutes. Those are the pollution prevention plans and the environmental emergencies. They were put in only some of the other statutes where they could reasonably apply, but those two were not put across all nine statutes.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

But the government has opened the door here. In its amendment, it's opening the door to the reconsideration of all the elements of discretion that it wants to allocate to judges.

Now that we've opened the door, and you've confirmed that there is no explicit reference to intervenor funding, it's something that we can countenance if we take this thing forward. At the back end of this clause-by-clause, we could consider, for example, intervenor funding to help push along the judicial, regulatory, and other processes and allow for the fuller participation of community groups and other parties. Am I right?

[Renée Caron]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, my conferring with my colleagues has interrupted my train of thought.

Could you please repeat the last part of your question?