Bob Mills

[Kyoto Protocol, May 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure as well to speak about Kyoto. I have been doing that for a number of years now, and I need to refresh everyone's mind in terms of the Kyoto protocol.

Climate change was recognized in Rio in 1992. All countries signed on stating that this was a problem with which we needed to deal. Many countries immediately took up the challenge and started work on it. For example, countries like Germany, Denmark and et cetera asked what they could do to develop new technologies. Unfortunately, at that point Canada did nothing.

Then 1997 came along and the Kyoto meeting was held. A week before Kyoto a meeting was held in Regina where all provincial premiers and environment ministers met. The government said that it would not sign anything until it came back, had a full discussion and developed a full plan. Then it would look at the economic costs and impacts to the country.

The environment minister of the day, Christine Stewart, got wound up in the excitement of Kyoto and signed on to it. Again, there was no consultation with the premiers. The main motive seemed to be the fact that the United States said it could achieve 5% below 1990 levels, so the prime minister of the day, Mr. Chrétien, decided to do one better and made it 6%.

On the other hand, the Australians had a plan and costed it out. They said that they could only achieve 8% above 1990 levels. Subsequent to that, they found they could not achieve that so they opted out. The Americans found that the economic impacts would be too great and they opted out. Many European countries are also saying that they cannot achieve their targets. Japan has said that it would be 6% above its target, and so it goes.

Here we have a government which still says it will meet its targets. However, I guess we should expect that kind of misleading of the Canadian public. It seems to be the modus operandi of the government.

We still do not have a plan. Nothing much was done after 1997. Then in 2002 in Johannesburg the prime minister of the day decided to ratify Kyoto. The government did not know what the cost would be nor did it have a plan. It did not recognize the fact that Canada has a cold climate. It is a huge country with not much transportation infrastructure and it does not have many people. The government did not want to bother with those details or to develop a plan with realistic targets and realistic costs.

In the meantime the U.S. and the Australians have dropped out and the EU has admitted now that it is having difficulties. The developing countries of China, India, et cetera are not part of it. Therefore, we have a plan that is not likely to work globally and certainly will not work in Canada.

In 2002 the government came out with a plan. It was less than 100 megatonnes, but the target at that point was 240 megatonnes. Therefore, we had a piecemeal plan.

Now the government has gone one step further and has come out with a new plan, the 2005 plan, which is even more vague than any of the non-plans it had before.

Let us look at the numbers because we can translate these. We are now some 30% above 1990 levels. We have spent over $2 billion and we have gone up in terms of CO

2

greenhouse gas emissions. Something is wrong.

Now we have this so-called plan about which the parliamentary secretary brags. Let us look at the numbers. The auto industry will be five megatonnes. The Rick Mercer all-Canadian fund may be 20 megatonnes if everyone does what Rick Mercer says, which is not to idle our cars, do not heat our homes, wear sweaters, et cetera.

Then we have the large final emitters that have gone from 55 megatonnes in the 2002 plan down to 36 megatonnes. We have sinks, which were agreed to in Bonn in 2003, a giveaway to keep us onside, at about 30 megatonnes, maybe only 20.

We are under 100 megatonnes in this plan, yet our target now is between 270 and 300. The simple mathematics would tell anybody with any sense at all that we will not hit our targets. It is time for the government to come clean with Canadians and say that it recognizes climate change and that it will act on it but with a realistic, long term, made in Canada plan.

What has the government in this plan really offered Canadians? Other than no plan at all, and I emphasize that, it has given industry and Canadians four choices.

The first option is to modernize technology or reduce production. What does that mean? A fertilizer plant making nitrogen fertilizer is using 21st century technology. On the other hand, China is using 1940s technology and the greenhouse gases produced from the production of that nitrogen is tremendous. We can look at the coal industry, which has moved a long way and in fact is now in the early stages of developing coal gasification. What is happening in China and in India? They are introducing 1950s technology and are building 500 plants, where we are talking about building one or two.

I think members get the point that to modernize technology, option one, is pretty difficult when using 21st century technology. The gains we could possibly get are pretty minimal. However, if we could develop the technology in Canada and transfer that technology to the Indias, the Chinas, the Brazils and the Mexicos, then we could make a real environmental impact. That is if Kyoto was about the environment, but it is not. Let us go further to develop that point.

The second choice is to donate money into a technology fund. That is just great. We have not seen the targets yet. When there is no plan, how can anybody be given targets? They will come later some time, maybe. We now have these mythical targets out there. If a company is over those targets, company A can transfer money into company B. Company B is a competitor, but it has developed some technology that we decide to fund. I cannot help but believe that with the board that does this, the 12 member board that will be created by the government, will we not simply get another Gomery inquiry down the road? Who will these 12 members fund? They will fund the company that is Liberal-friendly. How can we expect anything else from a dishonest government like that? This is option two. Company A transfers to company B to develop technology projects chosen by a government board.

What is option three? Option three is even more dramatic. It says that if companies are over their targets, targets which have not been set yet, they can buy credits. Where do they buy the credits? They could buy them from some countries at a cost of $30 a tonne, but the minister has said that they will buy them from poor countries, from developing countries. Poor Zimbabwe, we will keep it non-industrial forever. That is not a very liberal philosophy.

The fourth option is we will implement CEPA, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and fine companies $200 a tonne when they are over their targets, the targets that have not been set yet. How can industry plan anything?

What will it do to jobs and our economy when there is that kind of lack of planning from the government? Obviously, the provinces are frustrated and would like to take over. Who could blame them?

[The Environment, April 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, after years of Liberal dithering, we finally have a pseudo-Kyoto implementation plan, and what an unrealistic and impractical plan it is.

This plan is nothing but an expensive half measure designed to make it look like the Liberals are doing something in the face of rising CO

2

levels. It is enormously expensive and lacks detail, accountability and transparency. Instead of focusing on domestic reductions, this plan encourages the purchase of billions of offshore credits that will not improve our environment. Finally, it paves the way for a backdoor carbon tax by using CEPA, which is a toxic reductions bill. All of this betrays the Liberals' ignorance of the economic and energy realities of our country.

Canada's emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto accord are clearly unattainable and the Liberal government's plan comes nowhere close to reaching them.

We have a made in Canada environmental policy that will set out our own targets and timelines for eliminating smog and bringing cleaner air to Canada.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I certainly agree with the hon. member about the international record. It is pretty disgraceful. It is kind of embarrassing. When his leader and I were in Buenos Aires, we sat with representatives from 150 other countries. They told us we were a bunch of laggards. It was pretty embarrassing to be put in that situation. All we could do was point to the environment minister and say that he was to blame, that it was not us.

On the Kyoto plan, yes, my party has one. Yes, I have reviewed the NDP's plan. I think it has some problems. What I have learned is that there is a party in government which, if given everything up front before an election, it steals what it wants and discredits the rest. It does that on everything. It is best to hold one's fire, get that party right in one's sights and then pull the trigger, but do not pull it too soon because one just might miss.

As far as climate change is concerned, we have always maintained that our environment is in great need of help. There are boil water warnings. The aquifers are becoming polluted. The air is polluted. There is an increase in asthma cases caused by particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, all of those things.

Just as a precautionary principle, we have to deal with greenhouse gases. Climate change is occurring. It is occurring every day. It has occurred 33 times before and will probably occur 33 times again. We are probably having an impact on it and we should deal with it. Just as a precautionary principle, we should deal with it. My party's plan deals with it in a clean air way.

We cannot pull out of Kyoto. Section 26 of the Kyoto protocol says that we have to give one year's notice and then wait three years before we can opt out. It takes four years to get out. It is not practical to waste time doing that. Lawyers get rich. The WTO would punish us. Instead of doing that, it would be much better to come up with a real solid plan and go for it. Get industry and the provinces on side and go for it. We can achieve those targets and better. We could be leaders, but we are not leaders now, I guarantee that.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Niagara Falls.

Before I address the environment parts of this budget, because after all, this was a green budget, I would like to quickly summarize the Liberal record.

First of all, on the environment, earlier we heard mention by a member of the opposition that the OECD does a different rating for child poverty. I have checked its rating for the environment and we are rated 24 out of the 24 countries in terms of environmental integrity. It used a whole bunch of criteria which are accepted internationally, have been peer reviewed by a number of scientists, and basically agree that in terms of environmental integrity we are lacking dramatically.

We have over 300 boil water warnings at any given time. We have increased smog days in our major cities. We have more and more contaminated sites and brownfields right across the country. I do not think that the members over there should be bragging too much, certainly not on the environment.

We also have a $500 billion debt. That amounts to about $40,000 per man, woman and child in this country. To hear the government members speaking about this, they talk as if, “We have three credit cards. They are all at the max, but we have $20 in our pocket so we have lots of money. We have a surplus to spend”. Actually our country has a $500 billion debt for our future generations.

We have a justice system that becomes weaker and weaker. Day by day more and more offenders are released, who everybody says will reoffend. We have less influence in the world because of poor leadership. We have an EI fund that overcollected $43 billion and basically less than 40% can collect that.

We have an immigration system that is close to collapse. A friend of mine who works in Qatar says that a person can go to an office building there, have a guaranteed Canadian passport within one year and have an apartment in either Toronto or Montreal given to him or her. He knows of families who have received their Canadian passports simply by going to an office in Qatar.

We have a gun registry that was estimated to cost $2 million but it has gone to $2 billion. That is our first black hole. The second black hole was announced today where there will be $10 billion instead of the $5 billion that was estimated for Kyoto. It will probably be 10 times that and will be our second deepest black hole that we could have.

There is the sponsorship scandal where organized crime is involved with a political party in this country.

When I first came here in 1993 we had a budget of $140 billion. This budget is $210 billion. Think of the spending increase. How many Canadian families have been able to increase their spending by that kind of percentage?

We have higher taxes. They keep going up. Our tax free day occurs later and later. We have a back-loaded budget. We have a defence that has collapsed. We have, as I say, an environmental record that we really cannot say very much about.

What about this budget? Let us talk about the government's lack of planning. In 1992 we went to Rio and said, “Clean air is a major problem. Climate change is a major problem. We recognize it in Canada and we are going to do something about it”. Well, it took from 1993 to 1997 before anything was done. No planning, no budgeting, nothing was done.

In 1997 we went over to Kyoto, we signed something, no planning, no idea of what it was going to cost, no economic projections, no understanding of what that even meant, and we signed on. Then we did nothing.

In 2002, because the whole international community was putting pressure on us, we came up with a plan. The plan of today is a quarter as big as the plan of 2002. It has less detail. It does not even attempt to be a plan. It does not tell where anything is going to come from. It does not tell us how we are going to achieve any of our targets, but it says we are going to spend $10 billion doing nothing. Ten billion dollars is an awful lot of money for Canadians to absorb.

How are Canadians going to absorb that? The only way is by doubling the cost of their electricity, doubling the cost of heating their houses, and probably doubling the cost of driving their cars. That affects everyone. Whether we buy lettuce, the trucking costs will be more, whether we heat our home, whether we are a senior citizen on a fixed income, it means we are going to pay.

What are we paying for? We are going to pay for something that is not going to achieve any targets. What should we be doing? I will get to that in a few minutes. Obviously there is an answer to this, but the government is not going to find it.

If we examine the budget, we would find that part 13 talks about a climate fund. What is it? It is basically $1 billion, only $1 billion. The Liberals are going to take this money and buy emission credits. What the minister said was that we are not going to buy emission credits in Canada probably because they would be too expensive. We would not want to give farmers something for their sinks for agriculture practices. We would not want to give the forester something because of his forestry practices. That would be too expensive. We would not want to do that.

We would rather go to Zimbabwe, Africa and tell them, “You guys never industrialize. We will keep you poor and we will buy your credits and you can give them to us cheap”. We are going to get them for $2 or $3 for a tonne of carbon because after all, the European market is at $30 and we do not want to pay that, so we are just going to boot some of the poor guys, maybe Mexico, Africa or whomever. That is a real Liberal way of dealing with the climate change problem; let us buy cheap credits because after all we are a powerful nation.

I do not know about the buying of emissions credits. It is full of holes. How are we going to administer it? We say to the people of Ukraine, “We will send you about $100 million and you will do an environmentally clean project and we will get credits for it and we will monitor you”. Yes, we are going to monitor them. How can we monitor things that are happening in Canada? We know $100 million goes missing in Canada pretty easily; just imagine in Ukraine or Zimbabwe or Mexico. It just does not make any sense.

Obviously we are going to have a clean fund. I think the name has changed but I have a hard time keeping up with the names because they change every week. We are going to buy these credits and most of them by the minister's admission will be international. I would like to see that in the budget. I hope Canadians ask a lot of questions during the next election about the climate fund and where it is going.

Part 14 is about greenhouse gas technology investment, which sounds good until we look at it. Twelve Liberals are being appointed to a board to take money from one company and distribute it to another company which develops clean technology. That is a great idea too. It is really good to develop new technology, but imagine the Transaltas of this world which are working on clean coal technology. They are the second heaviest emitters in Canada and we are telling them that they will pay millions of dollars into a fund, that 12 Liberals are going to sit on a board in Ottawa and are going to distribute it to new technology funds. Who are they going to be? They are going to be Liberal friendly firms. It is shocking that they would even consider doing that, but they just might.

On the CEPA clause, the Liberals took it out of the budget. They are going to give us a win. Where does it appear? They are going to administer this new plan using CEPA, a carbon tax on Canadians. That is what it will be. That is how it will end up. It is a blank cheque for them so now they have snuck it into that plan out of the budget.

In conclusion, we do have a better way. We have a solution to this problem. We would have a clean air plan, a clean water plan, a soil plan, an energy plan involving conservation, transitional fuels and alternate energy. It will be a long term plan that will achieve the goals and we will have a clean environment for Canadians.

[RCMP and Law Enforcement in Canada, April 12th, 2005]

I have been for years.

[RCMP and Law Enforcement in Canada, April 12th, 2005]

Madam Chair, I have sat here for part of this debate and have listened to the members across the way. I had a great deal of difficulty when I heard the parliamentary secretary say that people in the community did not ask for any action, that the people did not know. I have here in my hand the record for Mr. Roszko from 1976 showing one offence after another, year after year. How would no one know? Everybody knew.

I go back to the situation in my own riding involving a pedophile who was released. In front of 300 parents the psychiatrist who examined and worked with this man said that he would reoffend within the year. The head of the RCMP in our community said that he would reoffend within the year. The prison warden said that he would reoffend within the year. What did we do? We let him out. He was not named an habitual criminal. We let him out so he could molest some more. We let a guy out so he could finally kill four police officers.

It is sickening to listen to those people. One guy was talking about prostitutes and how he should travel the world more to find out about them. Another guy defended the nobody knew attitude. Where are those guys? Why do they not get with it? People are concerned. They do not want to be victimized any more. They want a tough justice system.

[RCMP and Law Enforcement in Canada, April 12th, 2005]

Madam Chair, that was probably one of the worst weekends of my career here in Parliament when I attended those two funerals.

I think first of Anthony Gordon, visiting with his mother, visiting with his wife who is expecting another child in July, and seeing his two-year-old son who will never have a dad. That hits one pretty hard. It creates a lot of emotion.

When I hear this Liberal namby-pamby about what we are going to do with criminals, it just makes me furious.

I will never forget the Brock Myrol family who gave a eulogy to their son saying what a great person he was and what kind of a young man he was. I am a parent myself, but to hear parents do that I could not do what they did that day. It was very touching.

Here was a young guy being buried in a superman T-shirt because that was what he was like. He always raised the bar. He lived by the Lone Ranger's Creed . It would be my pleasure to read this into the record tonight because this was the creed of this young man who died because of James Roszko with 30 charges and being let out every time and never paying the penalty that he should have by law. The creed states:

I believe that to have a friend,a man must be one.That all men are created equaland that everyone has within himselfthe power to make this a better world.That God put the firewood therebut that every manmust gather and light it himself.In being preparedphysically, mentally, and morallyto fight when necessaryfor that which is right.That a man should make the mostof what equipment he has.That “This government,of the people, by the peopleand for the people”shall live always.That men should live bythe rule of what is bestfor the greatest number.That sooner or later...somewhere...somehow...we must settle with the worldand make payment for what we have taken.That all things change but truth,and that truth alone, lives on forever.In my Creator, my country, my fellow man.

I think that sums it up. Maybe we should give some real serious thought as to how we can improve this justice system. That is the message I got. I do not want those four young men to die in vain without the government getting that message that we must change the way this justice system works. We must make it mean something. We must crack down on these thugs who literally are running our country in many cases because judges are just not doing their job.

That is how it touched me. I certainly talked to the parents and have said to them that we must do something about this. It is our job to carry this message here and to ensure it is heard. I give a lot of credit to my colleague who has done so much on this because two of the officers were from his community as well. We must get this message across.

[RCMP and Law Enforcement in Canada, April 12th, 2005]

Madam Chair, it is my pleasure to speak tonight. I will be sharing my time with the member for Fort McMurray--Athabasca.

The RCMP desperately needs our support. The killing of four police officers pointed that out. They did not die in vain, and that is the message we must get across to the government.

The courts are too lenient. Victims' rights are not paramount. We are always worried about what is going to happen to the poor criminals. We are always worried about whether their rights are going to be defended.

There are dangerous offenders in all our communities. There are the Roszkos with 30 some charges against them and our courts do not do anything about them. The courts keep letting them off. Slick lawyers convince weak judges that these people should be let out. We blame the police. We plea bargain. More and more of these liberal judges are appointed, and look what we get.

Pedophiles are being released. I had one in my community who committed 10 offences. I asked the then justice minister, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister, what I should tell the parents of the 11th victim. She told me we were always harping about this, that we always wanted to go after criminals. There was an 11th and 12th victim. They were five and six-year-old little girls. That is what this liberal justice system does for us.

We have to protect the rights of Karla Homolka, who killed her own sister. We sure would not want to do anything to upset her.

Murder suspects are being released. I was in Vancouver this weekend and heard about someone who was here as a landed immigrant and had committed 10 offences. The judge let him out. He had been charged with crimes back home and we certainly would not want to send him back home where he might face some different punishment than what he would receive here.

We are seeing a liberal justice system and Canadians are sick and tired of it. They want us to support our police. They want our courts to enforce the maximum of the law that is available.

James Roszko is a perfect example. His father called him the devil. His brother would not talk to him. His neighbours were afraid of him. The police were afraid of him. Yet, this person was out. Every one of our communities has one of these individuals. They are around because of our liberal justice system.

Why was this man not declared an habitual offender? Why was he not put away to protect innocent victims? When money is seized in drug operations, why is it given back for the defence of the criminal? Why is it not given to the RCMP in order to catch more of these kinds of criminals and to shut down grow ops? Instead, we give it back to the criminals to defend themselves. What kind of a justice system is that?

We wasted $2 billion on a gun registry when in fact we could have put that money into technology for police officers. Gang activity is going on in all parts of our communities. These gangs are infiltrating everywhere. It is time we put an end to that.

It is time we sent a message from this place. We need to let people know that we support our police officers. They are doing a great job considering they have no support from the government. We need to change that.

We need to tell criminals that victims have rights, that we care about the victims. We need to tell them that our system is going to do everything to protect victims, not create more of them. We need to tell gangs that our police have the best technology. Gangs have great technology. In many cases the RCMP will tell us that the technology that gangs have is better than its own.

We have a sex registry with no sex offenders in it. We give them the right to tell a judge this might hurt their job opportunities. We are not worried about the victims. We just seem to be worried about the criminals. The government is sending the wrong message. It wants to decriminalize marijuana. All that will do is tell people that crystal meth or whatever is okay. It will tell people that drugs are okay.

There are four dead police officers, two of them were from my riding. I am here today to say that we should support the RCMP. Let us do everything we can in this place to send the right message, not the message that is being sent by the government.

[Privilege, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my question of privilege will charge the Prime Minister with contempt for his total disregard for the motion adopted on Wednesday, April 6, 2005 regarding the appointment of Glen Murray to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Page 67 of Marleau and Montpetit states that the House can claim the right to punish for certain affronts against the dignity and authority of Parliament.

At what point does Parliament take a stand against a Prime Minister who continually thumbs his nose at Parliament?

In this Parliament the Prime Minister reneged on his very first obligation to the House with respect to the amendment to the throne speech to allow members an opportunity to consider all public information pertaining to the missile defence agreement and to vote prior to a government decision.

My House leader raised a complaint in the House with respect to the defeat of Bills C-31 and C-32. In the case of Bills C-31 and C-32, the trade minister shrugged off the defeat of two bills that would create a new international trade department separate from the Department of Foreign Affairs, saying that the two branches of government will continue to operate independently without Parliament's blessing.

Now we are faced with a situation where a committee has rejected an appointment made by the government. That vote was nine to two. It reported that rejection to the House. The House has concurred in that rejection on a vote of 143 to 108. The Prime Minister has continued to ignore it. We brought this about because the person was not qualified for the position of the appointment.

The excessive power that lies in the Prime Minister's office prompted the Prime Minister in his address to the law students at Osgoode Hall in the fall of 2002 when he was trolling for support for his leadership bid, to state that the essence of power in Ottawa was who you know in the PMO. We thought he was complaining about it. We thought he was promising to clean that up, but if one wants a government appointment in his government, it is not Parliament that matters, it is who you know in the PMO.

In the future why would any member question an appointment and bring it before committee? The Prime Minister does not listen. Why would we debate it in the House with our three hours? The Prime Minister does not listen.

Mr. Speaker, I feel that my privilege has been taken away because of what the Prime Minister has done. I would ask you to look at that.

[Government Appointments, April 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment is quoted as saying the House vote to remove Mr. Murray “was really irrelevant”.

That is exactly what the Liberals think about the House. That is exactly the true colour of these Liberals. Is it not true the parliamentary secretary's words really reflect what the Prime Minister thinks: that he never had any intention of fixing the democratic deficit?