Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Surrey Central.
I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to Bill C-32, an act regarding pollution prevention, protection of the environment and human health in order to contribute to sustainable development in Canada.
Though other concerns have replaced the environment at the top of Canadians' list of issues, I am sure we will all agree that the environment will always be a serious matter across the political spectrum both federally and provincially. Canadians who are unfortunately the most prolific users of water can be called upon to do the right thing to clean up and protect that resource. They look to governments to provide leadership in that area.
Like recycling and conservation efforts in solid waste management, Canadians have shown themselves to be responsible, concerned and enthusiastic. However, I do not think they have much respect for big buck, one size fits all, government imposed solutions that feature the federal government competing against and overriding provincial and local initiatives.
My colleagues in the Reform Party have dispelled the notion that our party does not care about the environment and have made it very clear that successful programs to clean up the environment and keep it that way have to use a balanced approach.
As on so many issues that have a direct impact on the citizens of the country, the idea that one party or philosophy is against and their opposite numbers are for a certain item is simplistic and outdated. There is nobody here in the House or in the country who is for dirty water or dirty air, or somehow in favour of the chemicals in our food and in our soil.
In my corner of the country we struggle daily to grow the best quality food to feed Canadians and the world. We are more than aware that water is a precious resource. We are also aware that many government initiatives meant to clean up or control problems simply end up making things worse or creating new ones. That is why we look at these massive bills and all their amendments very carefully. Quite often it is more important to put the right system in place than to have no system at all.
The title of this bill suggests that all the elements are here to address this issue properly. But titles, like book covers, do not always tell what is inside.
This act is meant to address prevention of pollution and that is a noble effort by all measures. It would make our job so much easier if we had been successful in regulating chemical use in the past. We want to protect the environment and human health which cannot be more important. Then we see a reference to sustainable development which has become a bit of a political football between industry and environmental lobbyists.
To have successful legislation, we believe that all these elements must be included and that they must be addressed in a balanced manner. One way to do this is to ensure that what regulators and industry have at their disposal is good science.
We have seen with the health protection branch that when big money interests combine with butt-covering bureaucracy the result is often the political use of science on a selective basis and the undermining of credibility for the whole process. When we are dealing with chemicals used for industrial and agricultural purposes, we have the potential for the same thing.
With billions of dollars at stake, it is vital that players on both sides and the consumers who have to live with the consequences are confident that the process of identifying, regulating and approving substances be open and accountable. As with the tax system, when producers and consumers lose confidence they resort to avoidance and to reactions that might make problems worse rather than better.
It is no better when we have a powerful lobby on one side or the other. The perception that big industry has government in its pocket is contradicted when environmentalists step up to the plate.
I remember a few years ago when there was a panic in the U.S about the chemical alar. This was sprayed on apples and other orchard fruit to keep them on the branch longer. I am sure the developers of the chemical felt they had a good thing. The fruit would be better developed and more nutritious the longer it grew on the tree.
Nobody sets out to invent a chemical to cause human cancer but before long there were scientific tests that suggested that is what that chemical did. Very quickly there was a panic. Millions of mothers stopped buying apples and a year's crop had to be destroyed at a loss of billions of dollars to the producers. Farmers in the American northwest were devastated and it took years to get their customers back.
What was the so-called scientific basis for this panic? Like saccharin just a few years earlier, doses of alar so high that a child would virtually have to eat the stuff by the plateful were fed to rats until they developed tumours.
Because of a clause inserted in the Environmental Protection Act in the 1950s, any chemical that even hinted that it had anything to do with an illness of any sort had to be banned. It did not matter that the chemical had to be ingested by the truckload, it was just enough that one rat in a hundred seemed to get sick as a result. Saccharin by the way is back on the market, although it will never catch up to some of the other products after its fiasco.
Somebody might say “If it was your kid being saved, you might think it was worthwhile to ban certain chemicals before they got going”. Maybe, if anybody could ever pin down exactly what the relationship was between any one chemical and any given illness or combination of those.
We know that there are tens of thousands of chemicals in the environment. This fact is one reason for updating CEPA through Bill C-32. We should also be aware though that there are millions of natural chemicals everywhere we look. Just because they are from nature does not make them benign.
Tobacco for instance does not contain nicotine for human enjoyment. It is in fact a pesticide produced by the plant itself to ward off certain organisms. Try as we might to tell people of the terrible damage that this chemical and the hundreds of others found in tobacco smoke can do to their health, millions still light up daily. From that billions of dollars go to governments and multinational companies which shows what we are really up against here.
Would it be balanced to simply take the so-called right to smoke away from people? There are plenty of non-smokers who might like to go that route. But prohibition usually leads to increased use rather than the intended results, and governments would be forced to pay for an anti-smoking campaign at the same time as they were missing out on all those excise revenues they have come to enjoy. I am not suggesting that tobacco is a good example for Bill C-32; it is just an example of the jumble of health and economic issues that comes with most human activities.
When we consider what to do about thousands of chemicals, we cannot assume that blanket prohibition based on an agenda driven science and backed by the arbitrary powers of ministerial orders in council will be the answer to environmental problems. We need only look at the recent MMT fiasco to see where this leads.
The auto industry did not want MMT. Some lobby groups did not want MMT. But the producer of that chemical claimed to have extensive evidence that MMT was not the bogeyman it was made out to be. Millions of tax dollars later, the member for Hamilton East has another blunder on her record and the public is no closer to knowing whether or not there is anything wrong with this gasoline additive.
I am sure there are other gas additives out there that deserve closer scrutiny as well. There are environmentalists who would approve of banning the use of gasoline altogether. But unless we line up industry, consumers, scientists and regulators into a co-operative open system of examining chemicals and the processes that they are used in, the system will not work. It will break down.
We may think it is good enough to put arbitrary powers in the hands of a minister, but ministers can be influenced by powerful friends. We may think it is enough to hire scientists to do studies, but we have to be clear about what we are asking our scientists to look for and who is funding those results. We may think it is good enough to shut down agriculture or industry because a few are not being responsible, but the suffering throughout the economy would be enormous.
After Bill C-32 we still have disagreements about who is responsible for what. Industry hates uncertainty, and yes, that is important. Empirical studies indicate economic prosperity leads to a cleaner environment. When there is a profit to invest in better processes, there is less pollution, less waste.
Governments with successful economies can devote more money to infrastructure, like new water treatment plants and water transmission systems that do not leak water at the rates we see in many jurisdictions.
Agriculture and industry need profits to research and develop new products and technologies that will be more efficient. Anyone who thinks profit is a dirty word should think twice about what they are asking Canadian businesses to do or do without. We all want to clean up the environment and we should all have input into how that is done.
My party and I will be voting in favour of Bill C-32 with some caution. The version of the bill that went to committee we feel was on the right track. We want to see an environmental regime that reflects a multiparty approach to environmental issues. Ask all the stakeholders.
We can leave a cleaner country to our grandchildren than the one we inherited but we cannot ignore other responsibilities as well. We have to leave a record of responsible research, a model of intergovernmental co-operation, an economy that provides the greatest good for the greatest number and a tradition of open participation and involvement of all the stakeholders.