Bob Mills

[The Environment, June 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Ontario Medical Association says that 6,000 people will die prematurely in Ontario this year due to smog and the government is doing nothing about it. During Clean Air Day, all the environment minister did was announce the formation of a new website.

We can imagine the disappointment people in Toronto felt when they realized just how little the government was doing. What does the minister plan to do to clean up our dirty air?

[The Environment, June 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, whether one lives in Ontario, the Fraser Valley, Montreal or any of our big cities, the message is the same. Our air quality is worse now than it has ever been and people are getting sick and suffering chronic diseases because of it.

So far this year Toronto alone has suffered through a record 20 smog days. Our air quality is worse now than it has ever been. The OECD has ranked Canada nearly dead last in environmental integrity. And where is the environment minister in this? On Clean Air Day last week he announced the formation of a website. Now we can sit inside and read about how filthy the air is. The environment minister has no will to see the problem solved.

When will the government finally realize that Canadians depend on immediate and real action, not just talk?

I call on all our colleagues and fellow Canadians to support an effective Conservative plan to clean our air and promote health for generations to come.

[The Environment, June 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, even a Liberal member did not support the technology fund in the vote yesterday in committee.

Two years ago the OECD rated us 26th out of 29 industrial countries in terms of environmental integrity. Last year we dropped to 28th out of 29. We have boil water warnings. We have smog days. We have raw sewage going into the ocean.

When will the minister stop talking and do something about the environment?

[The Environment, June 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, today is Clean Air Day. Our air quality has never been worse. People are dying from smog related illnesses in our major cities, in the Fraser Valley and in southern Ontario. Air pollution and greenhouse gases are on the rise.

How can the minister be happy presiding over a legacy of pollution?

[The Environment, June 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on Clean Air Day to highlight the Conservative Party's plan to set Canada on a path toward reducing air pollution.

Unlike the smog blind Liberals, the Conservative Party of Canada has a real plan to deal with air pollution. We will legislate caps on smog-causing pollutants like nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide and volatile organic compounds. We will also propose a cap and trade system within Canada that will give companies incentives to actually reduce smog-causing pollutants.

The Liberals have spent billions of dollars on an unattainable Kyoto plan. This week four major Canadian cities woke up to heavy smog. A recent university study has shown that smog kills about 800 people a year in Toronto and Montreal. We should be dealing with that, rather than buying hot air from Russia, as that corrupt government proposes.

We have drawn up an effective and working made in Canada approach to eliminating smog and cleaning our air for generations to come.

[Income Tax Act, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to the private member's bill, Bill C-306. Listening to the last speaker, I cannot help but comment a little about the bragging that went on as far as the Liberal government. Let us quickly look at the facts.

In terms of Kyoto, we are now 30% above 1990 levels. Our commitment was to be 6% below 1990 levels. We obviously have a big failing grade on that one.

We have all kinds of programs that were announced. Yet as far as the OECD is concerned, of the 29 industrialized countries, in 2003 we were 24th out of 29. In the last report for 2004, we are now 28th out 29 countries rated in environmental integrity by the OECD, the industrialized world. The last speaker probably should not be bragging about the Liberal record.

We have three cities still dumping raw sewage in the ocean. We still have about 10,000-plus federal contaminated sites, 50,000 other contaminated sites and no action on brownfields. We have the Sydney tar ponds.

I have been here since 1993. Every year I have heard the government say that it will clean them up. Guess what? Two or three weeks ago, we heard there would be another two year study on the Sydney tar ponds and that the government would clean them up. The poster child of the Liberal government is the Sydney tar ponds. I guess if I manage to survive here another 10 or 15 years, I will probably hear the government say that it will clean up the Sydney tar ponds.

We have boil water warnings. We have all kinds of environmental problems, such as smog days in Toronto, et cetera.

Before I got to the bill, I had to set the record straight from our last speaker.

The bill plans to give a tax credit for public transport. This is probably a good measure in the sense that it would go directly to the people who would be using it. Hopefully, it would have some effect on changing individual behaviour so public transit would become the way to go. Those are the kinds of things that we have to do.

For instance, I have a son and daughter who both live and work in Vancouver. They have great difficulties now because of increased costs. They are both using cars, both using transportation to take the kids to the babysitter, then going to work. In big cities like that it costs about $600 to $700 a month of cost for gasoline. They are still doing that.

However, I think if they were provided some kind of incentive, even though it might not be quite convenient, having rapid transit, or bus passes, or the subway or whatever, they probably would consider changing how they run their lives. The incentive of a tax break would probably have some effect on them.

We are trying to convince people that there are environmental benefits as well in using something like public transport. If we look at Canada's transport sector, we find that 27% of the greenhouse gasses released in this country come from transportation while .03% come from the various types of public transit. There would be a tremendous saving, whether it is sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide or particulate matter. All those things that result in smog obviously could be helped greatly if we were to improve our urban transit system and the use of it.

As well we must also try to find a way to do something for rural people who feel the effects of increased fuel prices and the difficulties of getting around. I must admit I do not have a ready answer but I have some ideas. As well we should be emphasizing the clean air that could be brought about by various types of rapid transit.

As the critic for this area, I have a lot of people who lobby me, as I am sure they lobby many of the members in the House, on behalf of the fuel cell industry, the fuel cell buses, the propane buses and the natural gas buses. Almost all of them say that we do not have them Canada. They have them in Los Angeles and Beijing. They have orders for 1,000 for the Olympics in Beijing, but there are none in the big cities in Canada. Something is wrong with our system of promoting rapid transit.

It is interesting that Calgary, as an example, is using wind energy with its light rail and has promoted it as “ride the wind”. It is one of the major purchasers of wind energy which runs all the light rail system in Calgary. That has become a major promotion item. It is amazing how many international guests comment on the fact that it is one of the first cities they have been in which uses a renewable energy source for its public transit. There is a great deal of pride there and an awful lot of bragging goes on by the people of Calgary. They are the envy of a lot of places.

What are the economic and social impacts of rapid transit? It reduces congestion, as the Bloc member pointed out. Congestion is a major problem in our big cities. Without building new roads, ultimately it becomes impossible to carry the loads of traffic that we might expect. There would be a saving there.

I have mentioned clean air and cutting out the pollution associated with that. There is more social mobility and reduced health problems. One of the reasons that countries like China and India are looking at some of these environmental problems in rapid transit is because of that health issue.

What we always have to remember, when we talk about Kyoto, air and what we might do, is we are a cold climate. We have large distances, few people and relatively little infrastructure to help us solve some of those problems.

A bill similar to this has been in the House before. It passed by 240 to 25. However, as with so many of the private members' bills that pass in the House, no action is taken on them. We hear about other programs and that there will be action. They are re-announced over and over, but the dithering that goes on in dealing with many of these is quite remarkable. I hope this bill passes and when it does, I hope something will done about it and there will be direct action to help people in this area.

We can go to corporations and ask them to provide some incentives to their workers to take different means of getting to work. They give them incentives now like free parking spots or covering some of their costs. That is part of many contracts under which people work. Maybe if we could use rapid transit as a carrot for some of these people, it would be something that industry might buy into, particularly if we were to give them some tax credits for that kind of a promotion. There is so much that we can do in this area.

If I have one fault with this bill, it is the lack of detail in terms of how we would do this and how much it would cost. All of that would have to be worked out.

When we look at the G-7 or G-8 countries, we find that most of them, with Canada being the one exception, invest quite heavily in public transit. Public transit becomes one of their major conservation issues and one of the major ways to deal with smog and pollution in their large cities. We can learn a lot. We could go south of us and we would find quite a bit.

There is a lot of benefit to this. I believe it needs some fine tuning. I see the chair of the environment committee here. I would hope the environment committee could deal with this, fine-tune it and come up with some real solutions that would help solve our air problems in our major cities, and let us not forget the rural people whom we might be able to help as well.

[Petitions, May 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the second set of petitions asks Parliament to withdraw its proposal to ban many kinds of fishing tackle containing lead.

[Petitions, May 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, today I rise with a number of petitions. The first several thousand signatures are on a petition asking that Parliament recognize the institution of marriage in federal law as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

[Question No. 109, May 2nd, 2005]

Giving details for each with the department, a description, its date of introduction and any other useful information, what regulations have been introduced to prepare Canada for the coming into force of the Kyoto Accord on February 16, 2005?

(Return tabled)

[Question No. 107, May 2nd, 2005]

Specifying the details of each contract and operational or capital expenditure of funds by department, date, program, amount, recipient and description of the goods or services involved, how much money was spent between the signing of the Kyoto Accord and its coming into force on February 16, 2005, to prepare Canada to meet its Kyoto commitments?

(Return tabled)