Bill C-52 (Historical)

Canada Consumer Product Safety Act

An Act respecting the safety of consumer products

This enactment modernizes the regulatory regime for consumer products in Canada. It creates prohibitions with respect to the manufacturing, importing, selling, advertising, packaging and labelling of consumer products, including those that are a danger to human health or safety. In addition, it establishes certain measures that will make it easier to identify whether a consumer product is a danger to human health or safety and, if so, to more effectively prevent or address the danger. It also creates application and enforcement mechanisms. The enactment makes consequential amendments to certain Acts.

Canada Consumer Product Safety Act

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Minister of Health and Minister for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario]

moved that Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, it was a little more than two years ago that Canadians elected a government that had clearly set out its priorities and that began to fulfill its commitments. Not only did we make good on our promises, but we also took measures to tackle new issues that require a quick response.

The safety of consumer products is a prime example of our commitment to act in order to get results. This is why I am pleased to launch the debate at second reading on Bill C-52, an Act respecting the safety of consumer products.

Put simply, the Government of Canada cares about consumer safety and acts accordingly.

The bill we are now debating follows through on our Speech from the Throne commitment to “introduce measures on food and product safety to ensure that families have confidence in the quality and safety of what they buy”.

This bill is a key component of Canada's new food and consumer safety action plan which the Prime Minister announced on December 17, a plan that budget 2008 supports with $113 million over two years. Our plan's objective is simple: to modernize and strengthen Canada's safety system for food, consumer products and health products. Let me take a few moments to remind fellow members about the circumstances leading to our action plan and this proposed legislation.

The fact is that the vast majority of suppliers that make, import, distribute and sell consumer products to Canadians take safety seriously. Those businesses value their reputations. They appreciate how important those reputations are to their success. However, problems can and do arise, perhaps even more in a time when so many different companies in different countries may be involved in creating and distributing a single product before it reaches a store shelf.

For example, we saw problems last year with reports of children's toys with high levels of lead. As minister, I can tell this House that when we heard reports of threats to consumer safety, our government responded with all the tools at our disposal within the existing regulatory framework, but even so, I could see that our processes had not kept up with the market.

The Hazardous Products Act has not been thoroughly reviewed by this chamber in 40 years. As a result, consumer product safety in Canada has been based on a legislative framework that takes a one size fits all approach to regulation. Often the federal government can do little more than react to problems. Even something as important as product recalls have been up to individual companies.

The time has come to use a new approach. The time has come to use the approach advocated in the food and consumer safety action plan. In fact, this is the approach that the government intends to use under the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act.

In addition to the legislative changes we are seeking through this bill, we have already started taking action to better protect consumers. For example, our new children's products and food safety website enables Canadians to search online for recalled food and children's products.

Bill C-52 seeks to provide even more tools. Let me take a few moments to describe the legislation.

This proposed act would replace part I of the existing Hazardous Products Act. It reflects our new approach, updated for the globalized economy, based on three priorities: first, active prevention, to stop as many problems as possible before they occur; next, targeted oversight, so the government can keep a closer watch over products that pose a higher risk to health and safety; and finally, rapid response, so we can take action more quickly and effectively on problems that do occur.

In terms of active prevention, the new legislation seeks to establish a regulatory framework that would enable our government to offer better safety information to consumers. It seeks to encourage industries to build and improve safety throughout their supply chains. It seeks to encourage problem prevention.

The proposed legislation includes a key step forward for prevention. It would prohibit the manufacture, importation, advertisement and sale of consumer products that are a danger to human health and safety. This commitment to prevention is strengthened even more by the stronger compliance, promotion and enforcement activities found within this bill.

This bill proposes stiffer fines of up to $5 million for serious contraventions, and would leave the ceiling open to a court's discretion when the supplier is found to have acted wilfully or recklessly.

To encourage compliance, this bill seeks to give inspectors the option to use administrative monetary penalties as a less expensive, more efficient alternative to criminal prosecution.

In terms of targeted oversight, we need a much more focused approach and a much more informed approach. Accordingly, Bill C-52 would enable the Government of Canada to require suppliers that produce consumer products to conduct safety tests and to provide the results of those tests to us to verify compliance. This data would enable inspectors to focus on products that could pose the greatest risk to consumers.

In terms of ensuring a rapid response, Bill C-52 would allow the government to take faster action than ever before to protect the public when a problem occurs.

As I mentioned earlier today, there is limited government authority currently to pull unsafe consumer products from store shelves, but largely, it is up to the suppliers. In practice they normally respond quickly because that is the right thing to do, of course, for their consumers and for the good of their brands, but there is no guarantee of that in the law. Under this proposed legislation we would gain that authority. If we have access to much better information and records for the businesses involved, our product safety inspectors would be able to respond more rapidly when the need arises.

This bill would require industries to keep records so that they and federal inspectors can trace consumer products from manufacturer to importer to wholesaler to retailer so action could be taken quickly and effectively when needed. This would be a major step forward and one that is seriously needed in an era of complex global supply chains.

These three elements of our new approach—preventing problems, targeting higher risks and taking immediate action when a problem occurs—confirm that the Government of Canada cares about protecting consumers and acts accordingly.

Does the existing safety net for Canada's consumer products work? The numbers show that it does, but Bill C-52 seeks to ensure that the system works even more effectively.

I hope that all parties in this House will stand in support of consumer product safety. I expect that they will agree with me when I say that the vast majority of industry takes consumer safety very seriously. It is only a small percentage which act irresponsibly and whom we will go after, allowing law-abiding Canadian businesses to compete on a more level playing field.

I believe that all members should join with me in supporting Bill C-52, proposed legislation for updating a safety system so that it becomes second to none in the world, because Canadian consumers and Canadian businesses want and deserve nothing less.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking the health minister for bringing this subject before the House.

There are a lot of questions to be asked about the bill. I look forward to seeing the bill at committee. We will be supporting sending the bill to committee so that we can look at the details. We generally agree on the principles.

I would take this opportunity to ask the minister, while he is available, to answer questions on two elements of the bill.

First is the introduction of the power to effect a recall. As the minister mentioned in his opening remarks, currently it is being done on a voluntary basis and with quite good effect. Industries have recalled their products quite willingly.

My concern is that if we go to a power to recall, over time will it become an obligation on the inspectors to recall? To protect the people of Canada from potential lawsuits in the future, rather than negotiating a recall or action with the private sector as is done currently, will they find themselves in an obligation to recall situation? Has the minister considered this or had discussions about it?

Second is the staffing requirement. The way the bill is structured, it will require collaboration from border security agencies, Health Canada inspectors, as well as CFIA inspectors. Of these three groups, the one with the least ability currently would be Health Canada, which has the lowest number of inspectors, and the bill puts a lot of responsibility on Health Canada. How will the staffing shortfall be handled? Has he given this serious consideration?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to discussing the particularities of the bill in committee as well so that parliamentarians can have an opportunity to get into the guts of some very important legislation.

In terms of the obligation to recall, I would expect that if there is a concern about health and safety, the first obligation is to work with the industry, as is done today, to effect a recall. We want to have the power to recall if those discussions break down. If for some reason that we cannot ponder in this place because it would be so counterintuitive and diabolical, the manufacturer or the distributor refused to take into account the evidence of health and safety risks, then the Government of Canada would have an ability to recall. It is only in those cases that I believe the legislation would kick in in its new form.

In terms of staffing requirements, the hon. member is quite correct. There is a need for more inspectors as well as the higher fines. Upon the legislation becoming law, we would be staffing up in that respect.

I would mention to the hon. member and to the chamber that this bill is budgeted for in budget 2008. There is indeed over $500 million over the next five years budgeted to enact this law, should it pass the chamber.

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

Mr. Speaker, the Bloc has been asking for legislation like Bill C-52 for a long time. We are very happy and will support it. We will also work hard on it in committee.

Since we are fortunate enough to have the minister here introducing his legislation, I would like to ask him why it says that the minister may, under the stated conditions, exempt anyone from the requirement to keep records or traceability information in Canada when he deems it pointless or inconvenient. I would like the minister to tell us what the circumstances are under which he will do this.

The minister should also tell us whether he is prepared to increase the number of inspectors. Legislation like this can only be enforced if there are more inspectors. What are the minister’s plans in this regard?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for his questions.

I would like to tell the House that it is important for this bill to be studied in committee.

In reply to my colleague’s questions, it is possible under certain circumstances that our government already has in its possession documents or other information to answer these questions. Depending on the circumstances, there could be a requirement to obtain other documents. There may be another way, though, of protecting the documents. I am open to a discussion.

In regard to the Health Canada officials responsible for protecting the documents, as I told my colleague, it could be other officials.

I expect that as soon as the bill is passed by Parliament, we will draw up an action plan to hire other employees in the future.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, further to my colleague's remarks, we certainly are looking forward to this bill and to seeing it go to committee where it can be discussed in detail. It is certainly a positive step forward.

I look at the two bills, Bill C-52, which we are dealing with here today, and Bill C-51, as intertwined. A lot of the concerns we hear on the agricultural side of the equation are about the definition of “product of Canada” and the requirement for truth in labelling in terms of food and so on. One can buy product of Canada olives, but we do not grow too many olives in this country. I think that shows the fallacy of the current definitions.

In the intertwining of the two bills and the requirement for Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which falls under Agriculture Canada, to work together and be properly resourced, is the financial ability going to be there to resource both sides of the component? Also, looking at the two bills together, are we going to get to truth in labelling so that when Canadians buy a product they can be sure that the definition applies to the products they are buying?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member raises some very good points. I can say a couple of things about them.

First of all, obviously Bill C-51 also will be debated in this chamber. I would have liked to do so tomorrow, but we have an opposition day tomorrow. We defer to our friends in the opposition, but the hon. member can expect debate on that bill at some time in the near future.

I share the hon. member's concern about resources. I can assure the hon. member that this is budgeted for in budget 2008, with more inspectors and more assistance for CFIA. I think it is important that we also move forward on the product of Canada issues. My friend, the Minister of Agriculture, is taking the lead on that file, but I am encouraging him, as the member is, to move forward. He will indeed move forward.

I agree with the hon. member. Certainly in my riding of Parry Sound—Muskoka we do not grow olives. It must be the same in Malpeque. Perhaps in Pelee Island there is an opportunity to do so, but that might be the only place in Canada where it is the case.

In all seriousness, these issues do have to be addressed. It is certainly our intention to do so.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to this bill. I think it is an important bill. It is a welcome action from the Government of Canada. As an opposition party, we look forward to playing our role within Parliament to improve this bill: to ask the proper questions and to hear from Canadians who may have concerns. They may or may not be supportive and may wish to suggest amendments that can be brought to the committee or to the House to ensure that this bill achieves what it attempts to do, which is to protect Canadians.

I am sure the minister will recognize, as will every member in the House, that it is easy enough to protect Canadians. We can make every commercial activity in this country so restrictive that nobody will ever get hurt, but ensuring the protection of Canadians while permitting trade and business to happen, and allowing farmers, producers and manufacturers to do their work, requires a balancing act. As we look at the implementation of this bill, we are going to have to look at whether we can achieve both of those things and make sure that in the future they continue to happen properly and that we do not go too far one way down the slippery slope.

There is a case in my riding right now with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency risking the ongoing success of a long term employer because of an issue of product safety. It is an issue of perceived product safety and how we deal with it. In this case, it has been shown that the product is quite safe, while we cannot give the same level of assurance to the products we buy off the shelf that compete with it. That creates great concern. I look forward to examining how we will do it.

As the member for Malpeque has brought out, we are dealing with two bills. I do not think we can look at these two bills in isolation. That is probably one of the reasons why the government brought forward Bills C-51 and C-52 at the same time. While in the House today we are dealing with Bill C-52, I am looking forward to dealing with Bill C-51.

Bill C-51 has been in the discussion stage for a long time. It has been in the consultation stage and there has been work with industry to bring it forward, but it is a lot less so for Bill C-52, which seems to involve more knee-jerk reactions because of problems that arose, especially in the fall. When we do things quickly or on that basis, there is always risk. As a Parliament and a committee, we are going to have to ensure that we study this properly and make the necessary modifications so that it achieves what it wants to do, which is to protect Canadians.

The principle of the bill, as I suggested, would be difficult to argue with. I think everybody would agree with it. If I were to term it in any one way, it would be to say that it makes people become responsible for their actions and puts some serious financial penalties on people who do not. If people are trying to profit from legitimate activity, they have some responsibility for that. The first responsibility would be the safety of their consumers and customers, as well as their workers and anybody who comes in contact with their products. I think everyone would agree with that principle.

We have to be careful, because here we are talking about the importer, manufacturer, retailer, distributor or whatever person possible being inspected by Health Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or the Canada Border Services Agency at any time. In my mind, under this law they would all bear the same responsibility.

What we are telling them is that they have to keep a registry and have knowledge of the chain of supply. That is easy enough to do as a distributor who brings into the country a number of products and distributes them. It is easy enough to do as a manufacturer bringing in the inputs, doing some manufacturing changes, transformation, alteration, repackaging and whatnot and putting them out on the market. Then it is easy enough.

It gets a bit more difficult for a retailer who is not part of a large chain. An independent or a smaller operation may have similar products that it buys from a few places. When it is selling from its business it might be difficult to know exactly where each and every product was sold. It might not able to track them.

I am looking forward to seeing what is meant by this and how this tracking would be applied. Are we creating a system that would be very expensive to operate, so expensive that small entrepreneurs will be forced out of the market, especially at the smaller retail level, those that we would typically call “mom and pop” operations?

We have seen it in the feed store industry already. Out of our concern for BSE and our requirements to label and track all the feeds and all the inputs into those feeds, we have come to those sorts of problems.

If we do not do this correctly, we could bring that type of a problem into where it is not warranted. I will agree that where we have risks to human health, we have to take the appropriate action. If it means that under certain conditions certain individuals or businesses should not be in possession of certain products, then that would be understandable. However, we can very easily throw the baby out with the bathwater if we do not do it properly and if we do not have the proper safeguards.

I have a bit of concern with one of the areas. I had the opportunity to raise it with the minister. I agree with the principle, and I think we all should, that there should be a power to order a recall. I think we understand that. However, if we look at the situation where we are now, we do effect those recalls by negotiations and by discussions. I have not been advised of any situation where the current practices have not worked and where an unsafe product has remained on the market because a distributor, a manufacturer or a retailer refused to remove it from the market. I do not know of any situation like that in Canada. However, it could happen, so the power to recall makes sense.

Sometimes if we give a minister or a department the power to do something, over time it evolves into an obligation to do things, because people test it in the courts or suggest that if that operation had not been done and the minister had effected his power to recall in such and such a case, then we would not have had this operation. Then what happens is that the next time there is a case that looks remotely similar, the minister's inspectors, to protect the Canadian public, as they should, effect or force a recall. That is the risk.

I am not saying that this is what would happen in this instance or in this case, but I would want to be sure that our first actions at all times are negotiations, that they are on the lines of where they are going now, where the inspectors of Health Canada or CFIA are working with the importer or the manufacturer on the Canadian side to see if there is a way to do it without effecting a recall. What happens is that quite often we are able to resolve the situation without human risk, without risk and without bankrupting Canadian corporations. If we effect or force a recall, we could create undue market fears, loss of shelf space for companies and those types of activities, which could become very dangerous. Those are things we absolutely want to avoid.

Let us remember also that we do not have the same sort of power over the people our Canadian manufacturers, distributors, entrepreneurs or importers are competing against, because the regimes in the domestic markets of our competitors might not be the same. I think we have to remember that.

We also have to look at the way it would be administered. Would we be doing this in a way that maximizes the use of the current bureaucracy? Or would we have to replicate everything else and therefore make it more complicated? Are we going to have an importer working with multiple departments to do the same process? Would we have some coordination?

When the finance committee looked at counterfeit products coming into the country, we saw that the Canada Border Services Agency was unable to inspect these products because it was understaffed. There is no way it can do an active inspection so it needs some sort of system that triggers a look at certain imports, stocks or lots. If we expand the requirements without creating a coordinated administration of it, we run the risk of having an overly bureaucratic process.

We have said over and again that we want smart regulations in this country, that we want to streamline red tape and administration processes. This is an excellent opportunity to do it from the onset as we are establishing a new program.

On the question of the penalties being higher, I do not think anybody would argue with that. I think it is a good idea but what people question is whether this has any effect because the penalties are never applied. As there are never charges under the current system, would it be meaningful to increase the penalties? I would suggest that it would be but we need to look at why they are not applied now and whether there are other ways, other than the court process, that we can use.

I was very pleased to see that in the bill the administrative sanction route is being considered where the minister and his inspectors would be able to apply monetary and administrative sanctions on the importer or manufacturer outside the court process a lot faster and more efficiently. I think that is a good idea.

The other thing is the use of injunctions rather than having to charge an entrepreneur, that an injunction can be applied for in court to cease an import, the distribution or certain manufacturing processes or procedures. I think it is a lot better way to go than having to charge and having a long, drawn out court battle that is unsure in all cases and certainly would lead, not necessarily to the protection of an individual's well-being, but certainly would have a negative impact on our capacity to compete.

The question on the effect on competitiveness is important. In that respect, I would like to see the bill dealt with not only by the Standing Committee on Health but also by the industry committee. I have a feeling that at the health committee we will be able to accommodate the people who want to give us that perspective.

How do we implement these principles and not reduce the competitiveness of Canadian business? I think that is what we should be seeking. Our first responsibility is the protection of human health and we cannot for any reason abdicate on that responsibility but we must look to do it in a way that protects our competitiveness in our domestic market, as well as in our exports. I am looking forward at the committee to be able to do these things.

I am pleased that the bill has been brought forward for debate and I believe our party will be supporting the bill going to committee. I look forward to having these discussions at committee, seeing the specifics of the bill, seeing how the implementation will happen and having the opportunity to present amendments at the committee or in the House. I hope officials of the Government of Canada will be prepared to indicate to the committee the order and types of regulations that are called for and what they would look.

We do take a bit of a leap of faith in the House of Commons as members of Parliament when we give powers to the minister or to the government to enact regulations to affect the intent of a bill that is passed by the House because we do not see those regulations again. They are done, in most cases, by order in council and, in very few cases, are they ever brought before Parliament again, either directly or through one of these committees. I think it would be quite useful if government officials could give us an indication or an idea of the type of regulations that will be required in this case.

I look forward to having a more fulsome discussion of the matter at committee.

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as the health critic for the Bloc Québécois, I am very interested in this bill on consumer product safety. The act has not been revised since 1969. The Bloc has been asking the government for a bill to clean up the old legislation, which is no longer adequate for today’s needs. There were gaps that needed to be filled and requirements that needed tightening and we needed to ban the manufacture, promotion and marketing of products that are a health hazard and sometimes even fatal to people who come into contact with them. There is currently no requirement for manufacturers to test their products. With this bill, the onus will be on them to prove that their products are safe.

The Bloc Québécois has repeatedly raised the issue of consumer safety over the last few years. Canadian standards cannot be different from those in other countries, for example, when unusual amounts of lead are found in certain products. There is good reason, therefore, to wonder about the effectiveness of the current legislation. Many products have been recalled over the last few months. There was the toothpaste from South Africa containing substances that were a danger to human health and the Fisher-Price products containing materials that were dangerous and toxic to children. Mattel, the American toy manufacturer, also recalled several million toys made in China in this case. There was too much lead in some toys that many children have, such as Barbie dolls or GeoTrax toys. Fortunately, all these products have been recalled because they were dangerous to children.

The Auditor General looked into this back in 2006. She pointed out all the problems with Health Canada and its ability to control dangerous products. She said that the managers of the product safety program were unable to fulfil their mandate because they lacked the tools. They did not have enough human resources. The resources they had were not used very well and the legislation was not very effective at protecting Canadians. The government has known about all this ever since 2006.

The bill is certainly a step in the right direction, but as my colleague, the Liberal health critic, said, we still do not know anything about the regulations. It is the regulations that will show how the bill will be fleshed out and implemented.

There are five measures in the bill to reverse the burden of proof when it comes to safety. The first concerns consumer product safety. The second extends the powers of the inspectors. The third gives the minister a new power to recall products. Fourth, the penalties will be quite onerous, and fifth, products will have to be traceable.

Let us take a look at what the first measure about burden of proof means. Currently, no constraints are imposed on manufacturers. They do not have to prove that their products are not dangerous and do not pose a threat to consumer safety. Bill C-52 would reverse the burden of proof and impose it on manufacturers. Even today, Health Canada itself must conduct tests to prove that a product is dangerous and poses a threat to consumer safety. Bill C-52 proposes forcing manufacturers and importers of consumer products to test the safety of their products regularly, and, most importantly, to disclose the test results. The bill would also require businesses to declare all measures taken or illnesses caused because of their products. This puts the onus on manufacturers and importers, because it forces them to prove that their products are safe, which is what the Bloc Québécois has been calling for since last September.

The second measure has to do with increasing inspectors' powers. As the Auditor General stated in a report, in order to ensure that this bill is implemented and effective, inspectors on the ground will have more powers when Bill C-52 comes into force.

For that to happen, consumer products will have to be subject to recall, relabelling or a licensing amendment. These inspectors will be the means to enforce this bill's most important provisions. As we will see later on, we are concerned about adding to duties and responsibilities, and we have a lot of questions about this.

The third measure is the minister's new recall power. Until now, health authorities did not have the power to recall consumer products found to be dangerous. Recalls were issued on a voluntary basis by manufacturers and importers themselves. Bill C-52 would give the minister the power to recall any products that are defective or endanger consumer safety. It is high time Health Canada took this kind of action. We will have to see whether the minister's discretionary power turns out to be effective or not. For the time being, we do not know how that power will be managed.

The fourth measure is intended to provide for real, deterrent penalties. Manufacturers could have be fined $5,000. For a manufacturer that imports or sells a lot of products, that figure was laughable and trivial. Now, the offence could lead to a fine up to $5 million, and the offender could be liable to imprisonment for two years.

Deterrents in the United States and the European Union are said to be much tougher. In the European Union, fines can be as high as 5% of the company’s annual revenue. The United States imposes fines that go as high as several million dollars. It is therefore plain that this will be one measure that could be effective in dealing with a company that failed to comply with hazardous products regulations and standards.

On the question of products being traceable, it is important to know where the product was made and the route it travelled before it arrived here. There will have to be safety reports regarding all supply sources and all components of a particular product. This system has all the features of a traceability system. We shall see what happens when the regulations are made. For the moment, we cannot see how this entire traceability process will be regulated.

This measure seems to us to be fine for now. However, the bill will be studied in committee where we can ask questions and hear from the industry and from organizations that work to ensure the quality and safety of the products that consumers buy.

The alarm was sounded by the Auditor General in 2006: there were not enough inspectors to enforce all of the regulations. There were 40 inspectors in Canada, 10 of whom were in Quebec. That is a very small number for this very big job. Because this bill will expand their responsibilities, the Minister is not yet in a position to tell us how many inspectors he will need, to ensure that the task to be assigned to them by this bill can be properly carried out. He is therefore not in a position to tell us what kind of support they will be given, how their responsibilities will be increased or the human resources that will be required to meet this need.

This was one of the criticisms levelled by the Auditor General in respect of all of the responsibilities assigned to officials.

It is therefore important that resources be increased, and that proper training be provided for these officials, who will see their duties grow. We are well aware that training was not adequate. For example, some of them did not even have training to do food inspection in agriculture. These were people who worked in plants, but who had no specific training to do the job right when it came to the quality of certain foods.

Will there be sufficient funds? Here again, no one has an answer. There was $113 million allocated for enforcing the law in the next two years, for new proceedings, but not for hiring and training new inspectors. So we have a lot of questions to ask the Minister and his officials when this bill is discussed in committee.

As I said, the bill appears worthwhile at this stage, in terms of the broad principles and the desire to have safer products. The public has been very concerned for some time now about the high number of recalls and about products that have affected public health.

We need to act quickly, but is the government prepared to make regulations to tell us how this legislation is going to operate? Will there be adequate funding? The Minister could not give us a satisfactory answer today. We hope that in committee someone will be able to tell us how this money will be allocated. Will it be allocated to training? How much money will be allocated, given the number of inspectors?

There are also two new structures. How much will they cost? Do we not expect most of the money to be allocated to them? We hope it will not be allocated solely to administration, and that it will also be spent to provide proper support for the officers who will be responsible for overseeing the food safety evaluation process.

We know that the government has been making mistakes for two years.

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

They are shaking their heads, but it has been making mistakes. I will provide a specific example for the Minister who is shaking his head on the other side of the House. At the end of November he brought out a personal analysis kit for consumers, so consumers themselves could make sure that consumer products are harmless. Really! We opposed that measure. The government was shifting responsibility to consumers. Every consumer had a testing kit and responsibility now lay with the consumer. Imagine! The government made a mistake, and because of that we can see that it was not very realistic to think that consumers could be their own product safety watchdogs. Shifting responsibility to consumers like this was a mistake, it was kind of out in left field.

Then, in December, he brought out his Food and Consumer Safety Action Plan. There again, we asked questions to find out what human resources were going to be needed. If so, we wanted to know what kind of training these new inspectors were going to receive. We have to admit that introducing Bill C-52 seems a little bolder, but we will have to see what comes of the regulations.

I would also like to raise another aspect of the question that has not been addressed in relation to this bill. I have introduced a private member’s bill dealing with expiry dates for food products. There are no expiry dates on some consumer products now available. In other countries, like France, there is an expiry date on all products. I hope the Minister will be listening when he comes to the committee. I would like him to make this amendment to the Food and Drugs Act, so that the expiry date for all consumer products can be read on a label or could be added to the nutritional content label.

I would like this information to be available to consumers so they can make the most informed choices possible about the products they buy.

Bloc members will be voting in favour of this bill on second reading for the reasons I mentioned earlier. The purpose of this bill is to reassure consumers and make changes to the process for evaluating dangerous and harmful consumer products.

We cannot speak today about the way these five measures will be covered by regulations but we hope that the minister will be able to table the regulations. We cannot simply indulge in wishful thinking and give the minister carte blanche. We have questions to ask him.

Earlier, we wanted to know how the problem of the number of inspectors would be resolved and what kind of training they would receive. In addition, we wanted to know how the minister’s discretionary power would be used to carry out a recall and how, in certain cases, the minister might decide not to recall a product for various reasons. How will the minister decide whether a product is dangerous? What will the limits be for recalling one product rather than another? On that score, we still have questions for the minister and we hope that he will make his intentions clear in committee and that his officials will enlighten us about the regulations.

As I said previously, the Bloc Québécois is in favour of approving this bill on second reading. However, this is an issue we will watch closely in the coming months as the bill progresses toward third reading.

We still have questions that need to be answered before we give final approval to this bill. We also want to hear from the various consumer rights groups, as well as from the business community. At the same time, we must keep our guard up. We realize that we are no longer in a market where we know who has produced a product, especially with all the imported products coming in from all over the world. We know that in some countries the standards are not as safe or as easy to identify.

So, we must not close our eyes but rather try to balance the danger from a product against the viability of a company. Earlier, a member of the Liberal Party said that companies must not suffer either. However, the owners of companies all have a duty to ensure that the food and products they provide to the public are safe. We cannot put aside the primary objective, which is to reassure the public. Above all, products for children must be safe. We must also eliminate the dangerous elements of some products.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Kitchener Centre, The Economy; the hon. member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, Transparency in Afghanistan.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Winnipeg North.

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in this first debate on Bill C-52, which is long overdue, long awaited legislation dealing with protecting consumers from dangerous toxic products. I say long overdue because this matter has been before the House on a repeated basis, year after year, for as long as I have been in this place, which is some 13 years, and I am sure long before that.

On the one hand, we welcome the Conservatives' move to bring forward legislation that on the surface appears to be concrete, proactive and significant. I say on the surface because as we start to pore through this very detailed legislation, many questions come to mind. We will be carefully scrutinizing the legislation to ensure that all this tough talk about standing up and protecting consumers and getting tough with the industry is going to matter and is going to mean something.

To this point it is hard to fathom that a Conservative government is prepared to stand up to the big toy manufacturers in our country and to the big producers around the world, which are actively bringing their goods into our country as quickly and as expeditiously as possible. It is hard to imagine that the Conservative government is prepared to stand up to this industry and say that Canadians come first, that the safety of people comes first.

However, I will give Conservatives the benefit of the doubt. My colleagues and I will be very interested in seeing how the bill measures up to the tough talk. When I say tough talk, I point out that the government is very good at using the language the health protection movement has been advancing for many years and for which the Canadian Health Coalition has called and for which the New Democratic Party has called for many years. They talk about strengthening and modernizing Canada's safety system. It certainly sounds good on the surface. If there is anything behind those words, it will make a big difference to Canadians who have waited a long time for something to finally happen at the federal level of government around safety of consumer products.

We went through this for so long with the Liberals. It is impossible to recount how many attempts we made to try to move the Liberals, when they were in the government, to the point where they would take some action. Year after year we presented private members' bills. We raised serious incidents, yet we could not bring the Liberals to practise what they preached, which was supposedly believing in the do no harm principle, the precautionary principle, the belief that products on this market should be safe beyond a reasonable doubt, that people, especially young children, should not be exposed to dangerous toxins and that we had to be very careful about testing products and ensuring industry was responsible.

Canadians, after all these years, are getting a little tired of all the talk and no action. When I was first elected in 1999, we heard then about the dangerous toys on the market. We heard about lead or cadmium being in many children's products. We tried to get the government to move. It would not, so we brought forward private members' legislation.

I want to refer to March 10, 1999 when I introduced Bill C-482, an act to amend the Hazardous Products Act. This was very specifically to deal with the fact that toys for young children and babies contained phthalates. There was substantive scientific evidence to show that exposure to phthalates was very dangerous to the health and well-being of children.

Since then, other colleagues have pursued legislation. My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley has introduced similar legislation dealing with exposure to phthalates and other dangerous substances. My colleague from Ottawa Centre has been raising the issue of bisphenol A, just as I and others in the House have done. Repeatedly over the years we have tried to get government, Liberal or Conservative, to act in the face of this dangerous exposure to our children and young people and adults in our society today.

We have something of a possibility today. We have a sign of legislation that could in fact do the job. Listening to the dialogue between the Liberals and the Conservatives, I get the feeling that I am at some sort of board of directors meeting where people are weighing the question of how far we should go to protect consumers without disturbing the profit margins of these companies. It seems like we are talking about bottom lines in terms of corporate survival and corporate health and profit margins as opposed to human health and safety.

Let us not forget that today is a special day for all of Canada. This is a day of mourning for workers in this country who have been injured or have died on the job. When we are talking about exposure to toxic substances, whether it is in terms of workers who are producing the products or consumers who are buying and being exposed to these products, we have to take action in a substantive concrete way. We can no longer simply afford to say nice words and pleasantries around this issue. It is time to actually make a real difference.

We need more than legislative change. We need more than what the Conservatives have brought forward today, even if it is a flawed piece of legislation. We need a cultural change. We need a philosophical change. We need an understanding from government that all processes have to be in place to protect Canadians from dangerous products and toxic toys.

The Conservatives say that they really believe in law enforcement. We hear it all the time. We hear it in terms of crime on our streets and neighbourhood safety. We hear a lot of tough talk. Do we ever hear that kind of tough talk when it comes to producers of toys and consumer products? I do not think we have. The minister will try to say that in this bill the government is getting tough, that there are going to be big fines, that the government will have the power to recall and it is going to send a strong message.

If we look closely at this legislation, we will realize that it is very open-ended and without obligation. There is no requirement on the part of the government to be tough. It says it may be tough, it may recall products, it may fine corporations, it may take action, but there is absolutely nothing explicit in this legislation that says when a toxic product gets on to our shelves and consumers are exposed to that product, the government must and will take firm action. There is nothing that explicit, nothing that definitive in this legislation.

The Conservatives have generated so little trust among Canadians on every front, especially when it comes to the health and well-being of Canadians, especially when it comes to health protection in the face of dangerous drugs, toys, food, exposure to all kinds of toxic chemicals in our environment today. The government has not taken the kind of action that would warrant Canadians believing that it is prepared to go all out, to be tough when it comes to the health and well-being of Canadians.

We have to devote today to talking about the importance of being tough, the importance of doing what we say we are going to do. We have to devote today to the importance of standing up for workers who are killed or injured on the job, and the importance of standing up for Canadians who are exposed to dangerous products and who suffer serious consequences as a result, something that lasts a lifetime. All the talk in the world around recall and tough regulations will not fix the problem, unless we are prepared to make sure that the products coming into this country are as safe as possible.

Unless we apply the do no harm principle, we are no further ahead. If we simply say we are going to continue this buyer beware model that the Liberals started and the Conservatives seem so endeared about, wrap it up with a few little bells and whistles around recall and around big fines, it will not matter, because the products will stay on the market, the danger will be done, and it will be too late.

Sure, it is great to get tough after the fact, but what does that do for the Canadian who is exposed? What does it to for the little baby whose health is ruined for life? What does it do for a whole population whose quality of life has been jeopardized because of this attitude of buyer beware, survival of the fittest, let the market forces prevail when it comes to health and consumer products? That is the challenge we face today.

Our job today is not like the Liberals want to do, to simply give a blanket statement of approval to the Conservatives and say, “Yes, this is good, let us get it to committee. We support it but we just want to fine tune it”. The onus on us today is to really question and dig deep around what it means and what impact it will have.

What good is this legislation if the government does not put in place the resources that are required at the borders to make sure that potentially toxic products do not enter this country? What guarantees do we have from the government that it is so serious about this issue it will put in place the kind of inspection labour force that will do the job?

There was a bit of money in the last budget. By all accounts, if we put it all together and look at the requirements for Bill C-52 in terms of toys and consumer products, and Bill C-51 in terms of food and drugs, the money the government is promising to expend in this area is probably a drop in the bucket when we look at the requirements and the kind of framework that the government has presented to Canadians.

In fact, if the government is that serious about a proactive piece of legislation, then it has to have resources in the field. It has to have inspectors at the border. It has to have the determination to actually test and label and be absolutely rigorous in this field if it is to make any difference.

It is hard to mesh the tough talk from the Conservatives with their wide open, easy as it goes talk around trade. Many of the problems we are facing today have to do with governments that have failed to understand the importance of putting in place fair trade practices. Our borders have been opened up to all kinds of products about which we know very little or have done little in terms of testing and scientific research. It is time, as so many have already said, to take that seriously.

Let us look at the number of products over the last three or four years that have appeared on the market, but which should have been recalled. Since 2005 there have been 34 products that contained a lead risk, 26 products that were a risk in terms of choking, 5 products that led to head injuries, 5 that led to risk of laceration, 3 that could have meant internal damage from magnets, 3 that put people at risk of being burned, 3 that put people at risk in terms of entrapment, 2 that put people in danger in terms of puncture or impalement risk, 2 that could have caused strangulation, 2 that led to bacteria risk, and 1 a toxic chemical risk. That is an incredibly long list of products that we know about, where there has been some documentation, where consumers raised concerns and where government was forced to react.

How in the world is the government prepared to actually get a handle on this area and apply this bill to make a real difference? Is it going to put a ban on any product that consumers identify as dangerous, which has been backed up by scientific evidence? Do we have a government that is prepared to get that tough? Will it ban a product?

Let us look at the example of bisphenol A. That plastic has been around for a long time. We have been talking about it in the House for many months. There are 150 peer reviewed studies on bisphenol A which talk about the dangerous complications for people's health and well-being, about hormonal imbalance and problems in terms of young kids. There are all kinds of scientific studies showing that that plastic is toxic and dangerous to people's health and well-being. Was there a ban on the products right off the bat? No. What we got last week was a statement from the Minister of Health that the government might ban it, but it was going to give it 60 more days of study. The minister went on to tell parents that the government was going to ban baby bottles made out of bisphenol A but parents should not worry, they should not pull the products off their kitchen shelves, they should just avoid putting boiling water in them.

Is that a proactive approach that guarantees people's safety first? Is that health protection, or is it simply another variation of buyer beware? Consumers have to check out these products and do their own tests. They have to go down to the hardware store and get the tests that tell them whether there is lead in a product. They have to go to a lab to have products tested for other toxic chemicals. They have to take it upon themselves because the government is all talk and no action. Is that what it is all about, or is the bill really going to make a difference?

As I said at the outset, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the government and I look forward to a very serious study of this bill at committee, but I can say that there are some serious problems with the bill as we look at it today. One is the question of the power to ban when products are presented as dangerous. What in the bill will require the government to take very quick, prompt action to ensure that the bad experience of one person does not have to mean a horrible experience for a whole lot of other people?

What in this bill will actually ensure that toy producers, manufacturers of products overseas are being watched closely and required to live up to certain standards? We will never under the present government have the kind of inspection requirements that are needed at the borders to make sure that every product is safe. What is the government doing to indicate to producers overseas that there are certain standards that must be met, or are we simply following a country like China that says it is up to the country receiving the products to make those determinations? How in the world can we continue to operate on that basis?

We have raised many questions over the last few months about the importation of toys in particular, because for young kids and babies, exposure to these toxics is that much more serious at the early stages of life when compared to adults who can tolerate a greater risk.

We have to be very careful if we are serious about preserving and protecting the health and well-being of Canadians. We have actually said in the House that we cannot simply stand back and act tough when big companies like Mattel suddenly decide that government means nothing when it comes to health protection. We are talking about companies that make huge profits. It is up to us and the government of the day to actually stand up and make a difference.

My time is coming to an end in this first round of the debate. I want to conclude by saying that there are many parts of the bill that cause questions and concerns. We will be proposing amendments. We will be looking for some positive response from the government to those amendments. We will be looking forward to working with the Conservatives to make this bill live up to its name of being very tough legislation when it comes to the health and well-being of Canadians, one that is firmly grounded in the do no harm principle as opposed to the buyer beware risk management model. I look forward to the ongoing debate and discussion.

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

Mr. Speaker, first, I want to say that we really appreciate all the points raised by the hon. member for Winnipeg North. We fully agree that a lot of work will have to be done in committee on this legislation. However, I would like to put a question to the hon. member.

It seems to me that she referred primarily to imported products. How does she envision the committee's work as it relates to made-in-Canada products? I am thinking of products such as cosmetics, that are made here. It may take a long time before these products are found to be harmful or totally harmless to the health of those who use them.

Does the hon. member think that the legislation should include some provision to ensure that products are absolutely safe, before they are put on the market?

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Bloc member for his very relevant question. The principle that I want to apply to products made outside Canada is the same as the one I want for products made here in Canada, and that is the do no harm principle.

The do no harm principle is fundamental. Whether the product is made overseas or here in Canada, it is absolutely imperative that we test, study and supervise the production of products to ensure they meet the highest standards possible and that the minute there is a problem in terms of a toxic reaction, a carcinogen present in a product, there is an immediate action, whether it is banning the product or clear warnings to consumers, but much more than simply providing some websites for consumers and talk that we are going to fine people if they do not live up to certain standards.

We want to see the do no harm principle applied every step of the way here in Canada and overseas.

I want to add one thing. If we in this House put more time into thinking about revitalizing our manufacturing sector and putting these products here in Canada under the overall framework that our Parliament provides in terms of manufactured goods and products, we would be a lot further ahead in terms of the health and safety of Canadians and the jobs and growth for our economy.

[Mario Silva, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I believe we as legislators have a duty to not just believe in the principle of do no harm but to actually enact whatever legislations are necessary to that principle and to make it a reality.

Bill C-52, which is the Canada consumer product safety act, is something I believe all of us in this House should support. It is about protecting our citizens before these toxins get into people's hands.

I believe there is a willingness on the part of the government to introduce the legislation, which is laudable and supported. However, does my hon. colleague believe there is a willingness on the part of the government to commit the necessary resources to make this a reality? That is also equally important. If we are to be clear about our intent, we need to ensure that the resources are in place.

The member made some very articulate remarks about her concerns specifically around the issue of the principle of do no harm and ensuring that our citizens are protected and that we have laws that, as we say every day in our prayers, are just laws but also protect the citizens and health of our country.

Does my hon. colleague feel that the government would provide the necessary resources to implement this legislation?

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by questioning the member when he states that this bill is, by virtue of the paper it is written on or the words in it, do no harm.

What I am saying today is that we are not sure this is a do no harm approach. It talks tough and has the appearance of following the precautionary principle but I think it has many flaws and weaknesses, one of which is the question of resources. All the tough talk in the world without actual inspection resources will make it meaningless, which is one area of concern. I do not believe that what the government announced in the budget will be sufficient for the task at hand, both in terms of the consumer product legislation and in terms of food and drugs.

I want to mention a couple of other concerns. There is concern around the fact that this bill only allows us to react to problems, as opposed to being proactive and doing something in a concrete way ahead of the exposure. The use of counterfeited approval labels, also primarily associated with offshore products, has not been dealt with in this bill. In fact, the United Steelworkers has suggested that we have an explicit ban on products containing toxic substances, enforced through a pre-entry testing system and financed through a service fee applied at the border. That is an option that we should look at that is not part of this bill.

The bill is wide open in terms of discretion. Much of it is based on the fact that the minister and the government may intervene or may act. There is no explicit requirement for the government to act. The government is not required to inform consumers of safety issues that have been identified, and that certainly needs to be tightened up through amendments.

We have a lot of work to do on this bill before it actually meets the standards and expectations of Canadians.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I guess the question that average Canadians are asking themselves anytime a story hits the news about toxic toys or toxic products is the fact that we have system set up whereby our factories are shut down in Canada, factories that have good paying jobs and have for years provided these corporations with excellent profits. They have good safety standards and yet these same companies move overseas and set up under jobber firms where we have all kinds of toxic products. We do not know what is in them. The products are then re-imported back to Canada where they pose a threat to our own citizens and we are supposed to, after the fact, run across and put up band-aids.

Since it has been a deliberate strategy by the corporate sector to move to sweat shop, third world conditions where there are no standards, should we not hold them accountable? I am saying that we should hold them accountable for the damage they do to ensure that any time any of these products come into our country that the giant companies that have been allowing these shenanigans to take place will actually be held accountable.

We have workers in this country, standards in this country and we can produce these products in this country. It is just this perpetual race to the bottom that this government and the former government have been allowing.

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has identified the nub of the issue and a central theme throughout all of this health protection talk by the government, a government that fails to address the issue of globalization and deregulation in the face of trade deals that know no parameters, that puts aside the questions of human health and safety in the interests of creating a level playing field for corporate entities around the world and without regard for the environment, human health and job protections.

The best way to summarize that is to repeat what my colleague, the member for Parkdale—High Park, said in the House recently. He said that years of poorly drafted trade deals have caused a rush to deregulation. It now threatens Canada's economy and the safety of Canadians. We have exported good, family supporting manufacturing jobs and imported products that put our families at risk. The long term solution is joining contemporary debate in the Americas and asking why trade deals are so imbalanced and why they do not protect workers, our health or the environment that we share.

In that context, some of the critiques of this bill to date coming from the labour movement suggest that we need to get much tougher when it comes to--

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

We will need to move on with resuming debate. The hon. member for Malpeque.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-52, the Canada consumer product safety act.

I was here earlier and I listened closely to the minister's remarks. He did go to some considerable length to make it sound like the government was taking strong action where maybe previous governments had not taken the kind of action necessary. I do think it is important that I set the record straight in that regard. It was several times that we recognized in the previous government that greater consumer protection was necessary and that there needed to be new authorities implemented in terms of the protection for consumers and consumer products and, in particular, in the area of food.

In the previous Parliament, there was the introduction of Bill C-27 which would have moved forward in a lot of those areas, taking strong measures, especially in the area of labelling, of bringing up to date quite a number of bills that required modernization and giving greater authorities for CFIA and other agencies to deal with imported product, hoaxes and threats of putting foreign products into food or threatening that on the grocery store shelves. It was really the Conservative opposition of the day that prevented that from happening.

I am glad the Conservatives have now seen the light and are bringing forward a bill that we very much believe is a step in the right direction.

I agree with many colleagues who have previously spoken that this does need to go to committee. We need to look at the details to ensure there is nothing in the fine print that we should be concerned about. As a party we will be moving this forward to committee. We see it at this stage as a step in the right direction. It is an issue that exploded after, basically, the lead scare on toys from one nation that exports those products to Canada.

In reality, we have to look at both bills. We are here to speak to Bill C-52, but we have to look at both Bills C-51 and C-52 because they are intertwined and both have to move forward to committee.

As I indicated, we are committed as a party to improving the safety and health of Canadians. We believe this debate should occur at committee. We believe it is important to strengthen the regulatory process to ensure that Canadians have access to the safest consumer products that can be made available and to ensure that the products are labelled properly so that consumers do in fact know what they are buying.

As I indicated, we also think it is necessary for these bills to have a proper review and also necessary to ensure that witnesses on both sides of the question, people with the technical and the legislative expertise, be invited to committee to go through the bill in detail.

Currently a lot of the information about consumer products is done on a voluntary basis. I think we know that this is just not as adequate as it should be.

This new bill, then, will prohibit the sale, import, manufacture, packaging, labelling and advertising of consumer products that may pose a risk to consumers. While voluntary recalls will continue to happen, inspectors named under the act or by the minister will now be able to order the recall of a consumer product.

In the past, I have expressed in the House some concerns about the way some of the ministers in the government use their authority. I have just a note of caution. These authorities are there for a purpose, not for an ideological agenda. They are there to protect consumers and to ensure that consumers have the safest products available. They are not there for purposes other than that. I want to point that out at the beginning.

On the area of labelling, we read about it in the press almost daily now, and it relates mainly to food products. With the intertwining of the bills, I think it is important to mention this. I did have the opportunity in December and January, with a colleague, to meet consumers and the farm community on the whole issue of our regulatory system in Canada as it applies to, yes, consumer products, but certainly and mainly to food products that are on grocery store shelves.

One area that Canadian farmers are really concerned about is that a double standard applies to them. They face a tougher regulatory regime than do their competitors, yet their competitors' products end up on Canadian grocery store shelves in competition to those of our farmers, who face that tougher regulatory regime.

Canadian farmers face double standards from their own government regulations by taking on costs to meet high food safety and environmental standards only to watch imports that do not meet the same standards price them out of the supermarkets. There are a lot of examples in that regard.

We have to ensure that with this bill coming in, and with tougher regulations and more inspections, Canadians who are meeting these standards are not disadvantaged. We cannot allow that to happen. I will use a couple of examples that I know well from the agricultural arena.

For the health of Canadians, Canada has established rules to eliminate feeds using specified risk materials from cattle in order to eradicate BSE, yet the United States has not imposed those same rules, and Canadians continue to import and consume those beef products from the United States. We cannot allow that situation to continue.

Gencor, a plant in western Ontario, closed about five or six weeks ago. It was killing 700 older cows a week. The reason it closed was that its cost regime for removing specified risk materials put it at a disadvantage with U.S. plants. It went out of business, with the loss of 120 jobs and a processing plant for Canadian product.

With these new regulations on consumer protection and under Bill C-51 on food protection and labelling, et cetera, we have to ensure that at the end of the day our industry is not put at a disadvantage. We have to be on a level playing field with the United States.

As well in the farm sector, although this bill does not specifically relate to the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, the bill does relate to Health Canada. It has authority over the PMRA, which is responsible for pesticides in this country. Some pesticides are banned in Canada because they are deemed unsafe for the health of farm workers applying the product, yet Canada allows imports using these pesticides because they meet Canadian food residue limits.

Here is what we have. We do not allow the use of this pesticide or herbicide because it may have an impact on workers. Therefore, even though it may be a cheaper product, a producer is not allowed to use it in this country because of its impact, as I say, on workers. Yet we will allow the product produced with that herbicide and by foreign workers onto our grocery store shelves, and again our farmers are not competitive.

I make this point. As Canadians consume these imported products, Canada is no longer protecting the safety of farm workers. We are simply exporting the problem to foreign workers in exchange for cheaper foods and undermining the potential of Canadian farmers. It is another example of how Canadians are disadvantaged. They are important measures, yes, and they are measures that need to be taken in terms of workers. We should not be exporting--we can, I guess, but we should not be--our moral responsibility to other countries and disadvantaging our own in the process.

What I am saying is that Canada cannot have it both ways. Imported products that do not meet or do not even have to meet Canada's domestic production standards undermine Canada's high domestic standards for food safety. Canadian farmers are not only competing in a regulatory system that impedes them in the international markets, but they are operating in a regulatory environment that gives their international competitors the advantage in domestic markets.

I have to make that point, because with these new bills and these new regulatory authorities, with greater authority for the minister, all of which are important, we have to ensure consumer product safety but we also have to ensure that Canadian producers and, indeed, Canadian importers are not disadvantaged as a result.

The last point I would make is one that we have heard a lot about recently. In fact, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food is holding hearings in this area. The Prime Minister, along with the Minister of Health and the Minister of Agriculture, mentioned this issue when they announced the introduction of these bills. It is the whole issue of product of Canada labelling.

I raised this question earlier with the Minister of Health. The fact of the matter is that one can buy product of Canada olives in Canada. One can buy product of Canada grapefruit juice. One can buy product of Canada orange juice. I do not know of anywhere in this country where we grow olives. I do not know of too many grapefruits or oranges being grown in Canada, so why would such a package on a grocery store shelf read “product of Canada” when those products are being sold here?

The fact is that the definition is wrong. When Canadian consumers go to the grocery store shelf, they should feel confident that what they are buying is indeed a product of Canada. Under the current definition, that is not the case. The current definition is that 51% of the total package costs occurred in Canada. It really has nothing to do with what is in the package.

That has to change. As the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, we are looking at it. It has to change and relate to the product that is in the package itself, because I firmly believe that if Canadians are given the choice, they will veer toward buying the product that is indeed produced by Canadians, knowing the kind of regulatory and environmental regime we are under and knowing that it is supporting other Canadians in their economic activities.

Certainly I want to emphasize to the minister and to the government as a whole the absolute urgency of dealing with product of Canada labelling. It is a very serious matter. It has to be dealt with in a comprehensive way.

There has been some suggestion that we could go to voluntary labelling as well and that may be a possibility. The bottom line is that Canadians need a strong regime to define what indeed is a product of Canada and what is not.

We do see Bill C-51 and Bill C-52 as important in that they modernize our regulatory regime for consumer products in Canada. The government has to go further than what is currently stated in these bills. We must get a definition of product of Canada. The bottom line is that there has to be truth in labelling. That is what consumers want and it does not matter whether it is a widget, a computer, an apple, an orange or a piece of steak. People want absolute certainty that there is truth in the labelling on what they are buying. There has to be a regulatory and enforcement regime around that to make it stick.

Our party is committed to improving the safety and health of Canadians. We have attempted to do that in the past. As I mentioned earlier, there was some opposition from members in the Conservative government. We support measures which strengthen the regulatory process to ensure that Canadians do have access to the safest consumer products.

We look forward to reviewing the details in the legislation at committee to ensure that it is as accountable, transparent and effective as possible for Canadians. We do see this as a step forward. We look forward to the discussions in committee, some of the technical briefings, and some of the witnesses who will come forward with information that will be useful to all of us in the House to ensure that at the end of the day this is the best legislation possible for the interests of Canadians and for Canada as a whole.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, President of the Treasury Board]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to hear that the member will be supporting the legislation.

One of the statements he made has me quite concerned and it deals with the issue of labelling. While I support product safety and assurance that we meet all safety standards, the issue that is devastating for western Canadian hog producers is country of origin labelling. As we in western Canada see it, that is basically a non-tariff barrier for our products going into the United States. I hear from hog producers in my riding and across western Canada that this is devastating.

I hope that the member's comments are not to be interpreted as support for the kind of country of origin labelling that the Americans are utilizing in order to keep Canadian products out of the United States. If we insist on similar types of country of origin labelling, what would that do in terms of the argument that we are making that the Americans are imposing a non-tariff trade barrier?

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the minister raised the question. Country of origin labelling, COOL, in the United States is indeed a very serious matter, and no, I am not proposing anything similar in any shape or form.

What I am saying is that labelling that is currently on food products in this country that states it is a product of Canada when it is not should not be labelled as such. The definition has to be changed, so that consumers know. If the minister is in a store and, as I said, picked up a bottle of olives and it said product of Canada on it, then it would be his assumption in his head that it is indeed a product of Canada. It is not. It means that 51% of the cost of that packaging, labour, et cetera. went into the process to get that product in the bottle and on the grocery store shelf. That is misleading and we cannot allow that to occur.

I do want to point out and say that I agree with the minister that the country of origin Labelling in the United States is, I believe, certainly a non-tariff barrier. Many of us from all parties on the Canada-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group have been to the United States. I know most of the ministers have been arguing with the American administration and indeed with Congress and Senate members that this is a non-tariff barrier.

I would hope that the government challenges it under NAFTA or under the free trade agreement, either one, as such, because it is creating a barrier for our products going down there. Sadly, in the minister's province, and I have talked to Manitoba hog producers several times over the last six weeks, they are seeing their market for weaner pigs dry up. Good contractual arrangements have been broken because American producers who buy weaners from Canada are worried that the product cannot be stated as grown in the United States or as a product of the United States under this new legislation. As a result, they have broken those contracts, violated contracts, and have a legislative policy that, I think, is a non-tariff barrier.

For those producers in Manitoba, they now have thousands of small pigs that they have no facilities to feed them in and they have no feed to feed them. What is going to happen to these producers? It is a financial difficulty and, I think, a legal difficulty. The Americans have to be challenged on it.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Malpeque for his speech. We sit together on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. The hon. member mentioned the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Like me, he meets the representatives of the agency quite regularly in committee.

I was wondering about something—and I would like the opinion of the hon. member for Malpeque, who was once the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. In Bill C-52 specifically—and Bill C-51 as well—it is a matter of having more power for inspections. When representatives of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency come to committee—and the hon. member for Malpeque can certainly confirm this—we always ask them whether they have the means to conduct enough inspections.

The hon. member spoke of the reciprocity problems the beef producers were experiencing in terms of specified risk material. There was also talk of the problems related to the pesticides and insecticides used on imported fruit and vegetables. Those products are banned here. However, we end up with fruit and vegetables from countries where those products are still being used. I have always felt that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency does not have enough inspectors or resources to do its work properly.

Does the hon. member see any improvement to that problem in this bill? Having greater power of inspection is one thing, but we probably need to provide more inspectors and more money to the agency for it to do its work properly.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. We do meet with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency many times at committee. The minister earlier, in response to my similar question, said there are resources in the budget to cover added personnel for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

That is a positive thing if the added personnel are there to be able to do the job adequately. But as my colleague notes, it is not just a matter of having more personnel to do the inspections, it is a matter of the extra cost burden that Canadian farmers have in order to pay some of the cost recovery fees for these inspectors that our fellow farmers in the United States do not have. They cover their costs for food, health and safety for their farm community. We put a cost recovery fee on Canadian farmers that puts them at an unfair disadvantage.

We tabled an all party committee report in December and we asked the government, in terms of the beef and hog crisis, to take on some of these costs and to take them on seriously. It failed to respond in that regard. I would put on the record that we believe we need to re-align Canada's regulatory inspection fees and cost recovery rates such as those applied to border measures, to traceability, to food inspections, but to be competitive and on a par with our major trading partners, including the United States.

We also need to work with the CFIA and other industry groups to improve approvals for new medications, et cetera. We cannot have a higher cost regime in Canada than elsewhere for our primary producers because they put on grocery store shelves the best food that can be found in the world. They should not have to pay a burden of cost that is different from other competing farmers in other countries in order to do that.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products. My colleague from the Bloc Québécois who is our critic for health issues made a speech earlier today. She confirmed that the Bloc Québécois approved the principle of the bill since the Bloc had already asked the government to make its safety rules concerning dangerous products more stringent to prohibit the fabrication, promotion and marketing of any product that present an unacceptable risk to health. I will come back to that.

Unfortunately, we know that some people succeed in selling toys, food and other products containing dangerous substances. They end up in Canadian markets, on our grocery shelves, and in our children's hands. That should not happen in 2008. One can understand that a few, rare cases may happen, but it seems that the problem has now reached alarming proportions.

The Bloc also called on the government to require manufacturers to inspect their products and show they do not pose a danger to consumers. This burden of proof did not exist—and still does not exist, because the bill has not yet been passed—but it is change we called for some time ago.

I should point out that consumer groups reacted fairly positively to the announcement of this bill, but remain cautious. We always say that no government should be given a blank cheque, especially not this one. We do not know what is going on behind the scenes, and it is always disturbing when we do not know all the ins and outs of a bill. One thing is certain: we can give the government the benefit of the doubt for the time being. Consumers remain cautious, as I said, just as we do.

That is why we will refer this bill to the committee, so that we can hear testimony and examine everything this bill encompasses, just like the related bill, Bill C-51. We will look at the regulations to see how serious the government is in its approach.

Geneviève Reid of the consumer group Option consommateurs stated that it is a step in the right direction, provided there are resources to back it up, the regulations are solid and there is good communication with the public. She was quoted in La Presse on April 9, 2008, after the government announced that it was going to introduce these bills.

As for the obligation for companies to declare any major incident involving one of their products, Ms. Reid says that there will also need to be an incident register where consumers can report incidents. It makes a difference if there is such a mechanism for consumers who have bought items containing dangerous substances or foods unfit for human consumption that have made those consumers ill. People need an easily accessible way to let the government know that there was a problem with a product.

Clearly, this information will not necessarily be released immediately. The necessary checks will be made to determine whether this product did in fact pose a problem. If consumers are involved in the process, the result could be even more information about certain incidents that might happen.

I do not question the relevancy of the bill. With all those recalls in recent months and years, whether they involve toys or food, there is reason to be concerned. It was time the government did something about this issue.

Earlier, I had a discussion with the hon. member for Malpeque, because we both sit on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. We are very concerned about food recalls. These recalls always target food that comes from other countries. This was the case with spinach, cantaloupe, carrot juice, pear juice, and pork that came from abroad and contained melamine.

It was not intended for human consumption, at least I hope, but animal feed was contaminated. As regards this specific issue, there is still a void in the legislation. No one is responsible for ensuring that we feed safe food to our pets.

The result is that some pets have died. And we know how people are attached to their animals. Personally, I have always lived with a cat. I have always had a cat since I was born. I still have a female cat that is almost 15 years old now. I feed her well and she weighs 17 pounds. She is a little overweight.

All this to say that pet owners expressed their concerns when that happened. I would like the government to take note of it, so that we can fill this void in the legislation when we have the opportunity to examine these things in committee, whether it is through this bill, or another one.

Food safety has been seriously challenged in recent years. In a few moments, I will share some numbers with those who are listening. As I was saying earlier, during questions and comments, whenever officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency appear before the committee, we always ask them questions about food inspection, not only once it is in Canada, but also at the border, and even abroad.

Earlier, the reciprocity in standards was mentioned. That is important. Some pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals used in producing the fruits and vegetables we eat are forbidden for use in Canada. In some cases, it is a good thing. There are too many products that have been used without their safety being truly established. Measures are being taken to make sure that some products are used under surveillance and some products are prohibited.

Unfortunately, some products come from China, India and even the United States. I do not want to single out only developing countries. The United States also made the political and social choice to authorize the use of some pesticides and some chemical products. That is their decision.

In Canada, we do not allow these products. Unfortunately, foods grown in those countries can get through all testing and end up in our stores. That is an issue we raise every time the Canadian Food Inspection Agency appears before us. We are told that the issue is under scrutiny and that the products sold here are up to our standards and that inspections are done.

However, we know that there is a lack of inspectors. The hon. member for Malpeque was right when he said earlier that every time there are talks about increasing the number of inspections and inspectors and raising the budget the agency has to do the job, we must not make the farm producers pay for it. It is the government's responsibility to make sure that all food and other products entering Canada are safe.

We too often see that foods produced using pesticides that are forbidden in Canada can find their way into our grocery stores.

Earlier, I spoke about the lack of inspectors. I wonder if Bill C-51 solves this problem. They say they want to increase the number of inspectors or improve the chances of having an inspection. However, upon reading the bill, I have serious doubts about the government's willingness to actually conduct more inspections.

Knowing that we import goods from China, India or even the United States—they come from all over—and the source of a product, why do the inspectors not go there to see what is happening? In terms of the environment, you do not need to watch TV for long or read about what is happening to know that in China, for example, environmental standards are quite lax. Personally, I would not even drink the water used to grow these products, these fruits and vegetables. Some concerns expressed by consumers are certainly understandable. We could do an on-site check of what is used to grow crops. It would be an advantage to have more inspectors to do that.

Therefore, it is not the relevance of the bill that concerns me, but the lack of resources allocated to the front lines. It is one thing to increase fines for guilty parties, but the priority should be given to inspections and reciprocity of health standards. We spoke about reciprocity earlier. It goes without saying that our beef producers, for example, have to deal with unfair competition. We know that, in the United States, beef producers are not required to dispose of specified risk materials, as are our beef producers, who presently absorb the costs. That is a serious problem.

Earlier today we debated Bill C-33 on biofuels. We think there may be an interesting opportunity for biodiesel, but nothing is officially in place yet. It is not yet possible for our producers to make money with specified risk materials. Right now these represent an additional expense for them. Consequently there is unfair competition from American producers. We need to examine reciprocity.

I also wonder about the Conservatives' lack of judgment with respect to the safety of toys and foods.

[Jean-Pierre Blackburn, Conservative, Jonquière—Alma, QC]

Oh, oh!

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

The Minister of Labour and Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec reacted and that is understandable. I will explain to him why I said there was a lack of judgment. The government has known since 2006 that the act did not adequately protect Canadians. When the new government took power in 2006—it was brand new for almost two years—it knew from the Auditor General's report that the act was lax. We have had all of these recalls and all of these products have entered the country under this act. All the government did was react. It took a long time. As for calling it a lack of judgment, the Minister of Labour and Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec can take a look at his dictionary, but he cannot deny what I am saying.

The Auditor General pointed out that Health Canada was short on inspectors. How can the Conservative government justify its lax attitude since 2006, when this is a matter of health and safety for Canadians, and particularly for children, when we are talking about contaminated toys? This government likes to use its announcements as a marketing tool, targeting very specific audiences.

We saw the Prime Minister visiting the Salvation Army surrounded by gifts during the holidays to say that the government would now be focusing on toys. For more than a year, the Auditor General had been sounding the alarm. It makes for a good photo op, but perhaps the government should stop bragging about solving the problem, when it took far too long to do so. Clearly the problem is still not solved, but a step has been made in the right direction. The fact that it took so long was one of the problems. The Prime Minister announced that he intended to amend the legislation in September 2007. Why did he wait so long? That question remains unanswered. And because of this, consumers now feel much more insecure.

Bill C-52 was tabled one and a half years after the Auditor General's warning in November 2006. The report notes:

8.21 Product safety program managers considered many of their regulatory activities to be insufficient to meet their regulatory responsibilities. We found these opinions were confirmed in an internal study of the program's resource needs, documents relating to resource allocation, and in interviews conducted as part of our audit.

The report also notes:

8.22 The product safety program has requested additional funding, but it received very little funds for special initiatives in 2005–06 to address the shortfalls presented above. Program managers indicated that their inability to carry out these responsibilities could have consequences for the health and safety of Canadians and Quebeckers, of course, [the member's emphasis] such as exposure by consumers to non-compliant hazardous products. There is also a risk of liability to the Crown.

Thus, it took the government over a year to announce even its intention to do something, and a year and a half to introduce the bill we are discussing here today in the House.

How can the government justify this laxity? It was probably too worried about its four or five priorities with a quick election in mind. Everyone knows what the government did. As the Bloc Québécois agriculture critic, I can say that agriculture was not one of its priorities. It set a few priorities and really laid the groundwork for a very quick election, and when there was no election, it did not know what to do and no longer had any priorities. I do not understand why this was not a priority. I mentioned agriculture earlier, but there are many others. That was obviously one of them. Public health and safety should be one of this government's priorities, just as they should be a priority for Parliament as a whole.

And it is not as if there were no warnings. I was talking to the Minister of Labour earlier about a lack of judgment. It goes without saying that the government needed to take action when so many toys were recalled. Why the government did not act more quickly is totally beyond me. There were recalls by Fisher-Price and Mattel. In August 2007, Mattel recalled 18.6 million toys made in China. Members certainly remember that saga. The most deplorable thing in this case was that, in order to maintain a good relationship with its Chinese supplier, Mattel apologized to that company for the prejudice this may have caused. Had I been in Mattel's shoes, I would have apologized to the consumers who ended up buying toys contaminated with lead paint. There was too much lead in the paint used on these toys.

What do children do with these toys? They handle them and put them in their mouths. When that happens, it can obviously become a problem if the paint used on the toy contained a dangerous substance. There is no problem with a child putting a toy in his or her mouth if that toy is safe. However, a danger was discovered and I think Mattel should have shown more compassion toward its customers by apologizing to them. I can certainly say that if it turns out that diseases are linked to the use of these toys, the company will not only have to apologize, it will also have to pay. So, as I was saying, the most frequent problem is the presence of too much lead in the paint.

Although I have criticized the fact that the government took a lot of time before introducing this bill in the House of Commons and although the Bloc Québécois had to make repeated requests before the government finally took action, Bill C-52 is a step in the right direction. We will see what the government's intentions are in committee.

One of the positive points that I wish to emphasize is the obligation to document the product's history. The traceability of the product, if you will. In Quebec, Agri-Traçabilité Québec allows us to track our meat from the farm to the table. Thanks to that agency, Quebec is far more advanced than the rest of Canada. We should follow Quebec's example in these things, because it is important for the safety of consumers. I spoke earlier of the pork products imported from abroad in which melamine was found. Thanks to Agri-Traçabilité Quebec, that would not happen in Quebec.

Previously, the hon. member for Malpeque spoke of country of origin labelling. Some products we can find on the shelves that are marked “Product of Canada” are not made in Canada at all, like olives. He spoke of grapefruit juice and we could also mention orange juice. There are many similar products. There are even some pickles, which could have originated in Canada, but the only Canadian parts are the jar, the lid and the vinegar; the pickles themselves come from India. We should not be able to put a “Product of Canada” label on such products.

I would like to end on some positive points. The manufacturer or importer will have to inform the government of any incident that should arise, in Canada or elsewhere. As I mentioned previously, inspectors will have greater powers to intervene. We will also need to adequately fund those measures and ensure we have the necessary staff to carry out the inspections properly.

[Louise Thibault, Independent, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to my colleague from Richmond—Arthabaska and I appreciated his speech. My question is very simple. He painted a complete picture. I understand why he talked more specifically about inspection needs. It was really necessary to talk about contaminated food not only for dogs, but also for other animals, and about the issue of toys that do not even come close to meeting our standards.

My question is entirely related to agriculture and to the fact that we have here, in Quebec particularly and in the rest of Canada, very strict standards as far as production is concerned. In Quebec, we have mechanisms, including traceability and others, to ensure that the food that appears on our plates and goes into our bodies will be totally safe.

My question is very simple. Why are the Government of Canada and the parliamentarians in this House not imposing standards as binding, as strict and as safe for our people? For imported foods and ingredients to be used in food products, why do not we require at the source the same quality and the same standards that we apply here? Obviously, there would be quality controls and inspections. Why do we accept less than what we demand here, at the price it costs here? We would have a good quality, absolutely safe food basket at a reasonable price.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her excellent question. I would send it right across the aisle because it is the same thing we have been asking this government and even the previous one. When I arrived here in the House of Commons, the Liberals were in power and we were already asking these kinds of questions.

To answer the hon. member’s question more specifically, I think that consumers are entitled to know exactly where the products they buy come from and how they were produced. There is a lack of information here. The reason is very simple. It is for purely commercial reasons. The government allows this because it wants to continue trading with other countries.

The idea has never been to forbid trade with other countries, unless their products are unhealthy. There are some foods that cannot be sourced anywhere else. Bananas, oranges, grapefruit and olives just do not grow around here. Some products will always have to come from abroad.

The great problem, as we have long known, is in the area of reciprocity and what we demand of our own products but not of those that land on our shelves from abroad. I have never been able to understand why we do not have the same requirements for these products, other than the big bucks involved.

We are told that these requirements exist. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency will come and say that products cannot enter the country if they fail to meet the safety standards. However, we regularly find products right beside our own good stuff that consumers might be tempted to buy because things are put on them to make them last longer and make the fruit and vegetables look better.

I can say, though, that increasingly consumers are not necessarily looking at the colour and beauty of a product, one that has been waxed or produced with pesticides. They are looking more and more for what seems most natural and comes from somewhere close by. At some point, we will have to give our own farmers the space they deserve. When products are not up to scratch, they will have to be stopped at the border. They simply cannot enter. That is what we should do.

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to come back to what my colleague from Richmond—Arthabaska said about the lack of judgment of the Conservatives. With all the other examples that we already have, I think that it reveals that they are not interested in an issue if there is not enough marketing, if people are not talking about the issue and if it is not on the front page.

That is more and more obvious in this case. And we have proof of it: back in her 2006 report, the Auditor General sounded the alarm. There were also other events after that. We did wait for a long time. Finally, that lack of judgment has turned into irresponsibility and incompetence. Examples of that are unfortunately numerous. I would like the hon. member to come back to this topic. We are under the impression that the Conservative government is more likely to act when the issue is purely a question of marketing.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question. I believe he just put his finger on the problem. Let us give credit to this government. It is a master of communications. When the Prime Minister announced the reduction of the GST, he was in a car dealer's showroom standing beside a $40,000 minivan, with a big label showing a one percentage point reduction of the GST. This is just a series of photo-ops—excuse me for using the English term in French but I do not know any other one. The government makes big announcements, but does very little. In this case, as I mentioned earlier, the Prime Minister ended up at the Salvation Army, with gifts all around him, saying that children ought to have toys which are not dangerous for them. We are in favour of that. However, when he made that announcement, surrounded by gifts, a full year had already gone by since the Auditor General had sounded the alarm. I wonder why the government took so long to act.

I would also like to remind my colleague of the recalls which occurred. The government cannot pretend it did not know. In all, there were 32 recalls in 2006, and 90 in 2007. To this day, in 2008, there have been 37 recalls. Obviously, in the case of one single recall, millions of toys can be involved. And I am just talking about toys. I read this in the Protégez-vous magazine, which aims at protecting Quebec consumers. The recalls include millions of toys—21 million toys—most of them made in China, that have been recalled since last August. If this is not enough for the government to act, I wonder what it will take. In my opinion, making announcements in places where good photographs can be taken is just not serious. What is needed is legislation which will really protect people. The government must make this a priority and stop showing off.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is with great interest that I rise to speak to Bill C-52. For at least a year and a half, the Bloc Québécois has asked the minister to reinforce its hazardous products safety requirements in order to ban the production, promotion and marketing of any product that could present an unacceptable danger to health.

We are not only talking about health, or about situations where people get sick all of a sudden; we are also talking about long term effects, and that is what is pernicious. The legislation should be able to find a way to trace poisoning cases back on a long-term basis. I would even go as far as to say that the legislation should be able to trace back mental health problems that people could have developed after contact with certain products. This information is not always easy to find. This is why we would like to improve this bill because some of its provisions seem somewhat simplistic.

Obviously, we realize that this bill comes along after the legislation the Americans just passed. When the United States passes a law, Canada finally decides to legislate on the matter.

The government has known since 2006, since the Auditor General's report, that the legislation did not properly protect the public. This is not something new, and my colleague pointed that out earlier. I am emphasizing this because they would have us believe that they just realized that the public needs to be protected. The Bloc Québécois has been calling for this for a long time now.

We would also like Ottawa to give manufacturers the burden of inspecting products and demonstrating that they will not compromise consumer health and safety. I am talking about imported products, because the discussion with the hon. member for Malpeque earlier was very interesting. He was saying that Canadians are not asked to do inspections or pay for them because they would no longer be competitive.

However, when it comes to products imported from Asian countries—China and India in particular—producers of those products, and not the government, should have to prove that their product is acceptable. I am all for the government paying for the inspectors, but it should not have to pay for the tests to protect the public.

We know that some products are entering the Canadian market. These are products we have not had the privilege of consuming before because they came from abroad. I am thinking of commercial and residential paints in particular. Apparently, there is a whole movement by companies who are getting ready to import paint. Certain paint can be very harmful to one's health. Here in Canada, we have taken very important measures with respect to VOCs, volatile organic compounds, and also with respect to all the products that bind paints.

Naturally this makes paint more expensive. Therefore, if we produce paint here that respects our standards, foreign paint also has to respect our standards.

Will we protect people from this paint before it ends up our shelves, or will we do so once the paint has ended up on our shelves and people have proof that this paint is dangerous?

In my opinion, Bill C-52 should be clear enough on the fact that the imported products must be proven to be suitable and compliant with our health standards.

These health standards are not always very high in Canada. I am thinking in particular of lead and radiation coming from radioactive materials. Our standards, which are not very high, are not even being met. As was said earlier, standards are high in agriculture, but for other products, they are not. Therefore, we should review the quality of our standards.

I would stress that what I want to know is if we should let the products come in and then, determine whether they are acceptable or not, or if we should stop them from entering the country.

In Japan, a very well organized country, inspectors are sent to the point of origin of the product. If the product does not meet the Japanese standards, it does not leave the port and is not even taken aboard the ship. It is very important to understand that it is much easier to have inspectors applying our standards in foreign countries than to let the goods come in and then make sure they are properly inspected. Yet, presently this is how inspections are carried out: we let meat, vegetables and fruits come in.

I used to know someone at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Sometimes, it is difficult to inspect a large quantity of vegetables or meat once it has arrived, because these products are distributed very quickly across Canada, even before inspectors have time to see them.

It would be much easier to use a system similar to the Japanese one, that is to inspect, approve and seal the products, and then let them enter the country. This method would ensure that the products arriving in Canada meet the standards. If we fail to do this, there is a much greater risk that unacceptable products could be distributed across the country.

So, it is important that we improve this bill. It is also important that we preserve the spirit of the law at its highest degree of effectiveness. This means that we should not simply think about having more inspectors to implement the legislation. The implementation of the act is just one step in the process. Afterwards, we must have more inspectors to preserve the legislation's high degree of effectiveness. Sending inspectors abroad, at the departure point of the products, could significantly help maintain the high effectiveness of Bill C-52, which is currently before us.

There is a similar problem with pesticides. It was mentioned earlier. My riding produces a lot of apples, but it is not the only one. It is also the case for the ridings of other NDP members. Currently, the United States is sending us a lot of its apples, because its producers use organic pesticides that are accepted by Canada, as long as they are mentioned on the apples, and these pesticides are cheaper than the ones that we use here. However, the pesticides used in the United States and accepted once they are mentioned on the apples are not approved here in Canada as pesticides that can be used by apple growers.

So, we should not think that Bill C-52 alone will ensure a very high degree of safety and competitiveness. It is absolutely necessary that our producers be on a level playing field with producers abroad who export their products here. So, this issue will have to be examined very carefully. The legislation will have to make a distinction between imported and local products.

A cosmetic—cosmetics are indeed included in the bill—made in Canada must be inspected before it is put on the shelves. However, we cannot wait until production is completed. On the other hand, if that product comes from abroad, production will be completed. That is why I am insisting that we must absolutely inspect products on the premises, before they are shipped.

Bill C-52 includes safety requirements for dangerous products. It almost prohibits manufacturing some of them. I talked about importing, but there is also the selling, advertising, labelling and packaging of consumer products. Of course this impacts on labelling costs, which will be very significant, but we will know whether the product is imported, or manufactured here.

The 51% we were talking about earlier may no longer apply. Apparently, the packaging for Van Houtte coffees—not that I am naming names—constitutes 51%. It says “Made in Canada”, but it is coffee. As far as I know, Canada does not produce coffee, but because packaging represents 51% of the price of the coffee, it says “Made in Canada”. If people can put “Made in Canada” on products that are mostly made elsewhere, we will never be able to implement Bill C-52 because its priority is ensuring that imported products comply with Canadian standards. There is some work to be done on this bill. I am sure that the members who are going to be working on this in committee will come up with a special label to identify imported products and Canadian-made products more clearly.

Naturally, nobody believes that recalls are the solution. As I was saying earlier, it has to happen before the products even get here. The system has been too lenient. When toys were found to be dangerous, they were recalled. But they had already made it to the market. People had bought them and taken them home. Bill C-52 simply has to make it impossible for such items or materials to be distributed.

I would like to revisit my paint example. It will be difficult to determine whether four litres of paint—which is still known as a gallon—is imported or not, especially if the packaging is made here and is a well-known brand. Right now, Sico, a Quebec-based company, has to comply with American standards on volatile organic compounds before its products leave Quebec. I think that Bill C-52 should demand exactly the same thing of products being imported here.

We are talking about consumer products, particularly things as unusual and varied as cribs, tents and carpets. They are currently allowed to enter with no standards in place. There are no standards for tents. Does everyone know that there are no standards for tents, apart from flammability? Someone could suffocate in a tent. A tent could fall on top of you. They pose all sorts of dangers, but we are not protected by legislation. When it comes to products of this nature, all standards should be stricter and show greater concern for users.

The same is true for carpets. There are very few standards concerning carpets. Manufacturers are allowed to use nearly any chemical to prevent dust from settling or to preserve the colour. These are some of the products people breathe in unawares, when they are sitting at home, watching television. People can gradually develop illnesses that are hard to diagnose but that result from products made from just about anything, because of this laxity.

I am using carpets as an example, but I could also be talking about certain kinds of flooring that are currently being imported, such as plastic flooring. One rule of thumb nearly always holds true: when a product has a strong odour, it is toxic to some extent. Pick up the plastic flooring that is imported and sold in stores. If it was subjected to rigorous tests, it would be refused because it is toxic.

Thus, this would cover a wide range of products. Consider, for example, batteries used in toys or flashlights. We received some in Canada that exploded.

Such a battery exploding can burn the eyes of a child with the chemical products it contains and greatly affect not only the physical health but also the mental health of that child.

In fact, adults would react the same way. Recently, people bought imported rifles—always from the same country—and at the first, fourth or fifth shot, the rifles blew up. One can imagine the trauma for a person not used to handling firearms.

This bill is therefore very broad in scope and must be based on standards which will have to be stricter than the present ones.

The bill also deals with protection against the radiation coming from clinical or consumer products, such as X-rays or laser beams. As incredible as it may seem, cheap watches are still imported with dials emitting dangerous radioactivity. Even some cars from Asia have luminous dials which emit radiation harmful to human health. They can cause cancer. It can be particularly damaging for taxi drivers whose car is be equipped with such a dial, since they are always exposed to it.

This is harmful and it will be difficult to control. A little test upon entry into the country will not suffice. People will have to perform many more tests. Our standards will have to apply to everything produced outside of the country and they will often have to be made stricter.

We are not the first to adopt such legislation. Earlier I spoke about Japan, a country that is more advanced than ours in terms of domestic standards for all goods purchased from other countries.

As I mentioned before, the United States has just adopted regulations, in cooperation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, that respond to the serious problems caused by these products. It is a veritable plague given that the U.S. imports 80%—if not more—of its toys, as does Canada. Dangerous toys are becoming a plague. On Radio-Canada, I heard some people talking about whether it was possible to find toys made in Canada. The woman answered no, that she had none in her store even though she carries a large selection of toys.

Europe is also addressing this issue. It will be important for the committee to look at what is being done in Japan. It is easier to see what is happening in the United States because we are much closer. However, what about Europe? The EU has proposed making standards more stringent and lowering allowable limits for other substances such as lead and mercury. It has prohibited about forty allergenic perfumes, perfumes not made of natural essences. We permit higher levels of lead and mercury in our products than Europe does. Europe has taken a stand and we should follow suit soon.

I would like the precautionary principle to apply to Bill C-52 and to truly serve as our guide to improving it. At the same time, we should examine our standards, which are sometimes lacking. We absolutely have to do this if we wish to protect all our citizens. Neo-liberal globalization is a new phenomenon that we did not have to reckon with previously.

We are proud to participate in this bill and we hope to be truly able to provide more money and more locations for inspectors to do a good job.

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my question is not very complicated. With our good judgment and our sense of responsibility, we in the Bloc Québécois have had occasion to chastise the Conservative government about this issue.

I want to go back to the question I asked my colleague from Richmond—Arthabaska earlier, and I am sure my colleague touched on it briefly as well. Since August 2007, nearly a year ago, there have been numerous product recalls. The Auditor General sounded the alarm on this issue in 2006. Now it is nearly May 2008.

This is like a breach of contract, and confidence in the current Conservative government is eroding more and more. We could look at other events and issues on which the “new government”—as the Conservatives referred to themselves for quite some time, a little too often for my taste—has not kept its word.

I would like my colleague to comment on the fact that it took action by the Auditor General and repeated recalls for the government to come up with a bill. At the same time, we are wondering whether there will be enough inspectors to do the work and what regulations will be associated with the bill. Many questions have yet to be answered.

I am certain that my colleague is capable of mentioning it, but it is important to say that people in our party and other parties will act responsibly and pay close attention to this bill. They will examine this bill very thoroughly in committee. Voting for this bill does not mean automatic kudos for the Conservatives for introducing this bill, because they should have introduced it much earlier.

My colleague is certainly able to speak about this government's lack of judgment and its irresponsibility in waiting until numerous products had been recalled and had made the headlines before it finally took action.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his remarks and for his very pertinent question.

Clearly, we do not share the same ideology. Members of the Bloc have an ideology that prompts us to think and work for the people in our ridings, not necessarily for the people who organize society, who make money, who engage in free trade with other countries. We are closer to the workers and labourers, and therefore, to consumers.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Conservative Party's ideology means that it is in no hurry to introduce this kind of bill because it could hurt private enterprise, which may want certain privileges. The bill calls for traceability and documentation, but the minister may choose not to ask for these things if it is not in the companies' interest.

There seems to be a huge abyss between our two ways of thinking. We have before us a bill that we think is very important and should have been introduced a long time ago. But the government thinks that this bill, whose goal is to protect the average consumer, is not as important as a bill to protect the weightier interests of the people who are maintaining the neo-liberal capitalist status quo in this country.

We have to wonder if the Conservatives are doing everything they can to drag this bill out. They should have introduced it a year and a half ago. There would have been enough time to have it passed before an election. Now they might try to drag it out until after the election, which could happen who knows when, but possibly a while from now. It takes some time for a bill to be passed, and when it is introduced late in the game like this one, obviously there is a good chance it will never be passed.

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this is in the same vein as what my colleague was saying. During question period today, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages spoke about how the market ruled. Why would the market rule? What should rule is justice, a sense of responsibility and the possibility of straightening out a situation that is wrong or that has become intolerable.

There are many examples of the problems we have had with products. I remember very well. Last week, I was in my riding, and once again we had to sound the alarm. People had to demonstrate in the street. They do not do this for fun. The cod fishers who were asking for a shrimp quota were forced to take to the streets to demonstrate in order to get it. Why did this not happen three weeks earlier, so we could have avoided the stress and the demonstration?

The Conservatives seem to be fond of the wait and see approach, where they let things go and let the markets rule. They wait for problems to come up, or rather they wait for problems to make the front page. When a problem makes the front page, they will do something. Otherwise, they do not.

I wonder if my colleague agrees that there are many examples that lead us to believe there are ideological differences.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague from Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine sees the situation quite clearly. Ideology is what separates us from the Conservatives. A bill like this one is a bill that was introduced because of international markets and because almost anything goes. Trying to be on equal trade footing has brought us to our knees. We are prepared to sacrifice everything and do anything for trade.

Commercially speaking, it does not matter to us where our products come from. If we lose jobs it is not so bad. Trade with a capital “T” as big as this House is controlled by the market. That is what is happening. At some point, when we have compromised too much, we end up poisoning our citizens. That is what we are seeing. We are poisoning our children, our people and we are creating the possibility of long-term illnesses.

We used to talk about workplace illness. Now we talk about consumer illness. Because we have allowed the markets to spiral out of control, we are now dealing with consumer illnesses.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, sadly, there is only a few minutes left for me to point out the concerns I have with Bill C-52. I will cut to the chase and build on the comments of my colleague from the Bloc Québecois, who pointed out, quite rightly, that the root of our problem today can be found in the laissez-faire capitalism associated with free trade, which has led to further and further deregulation and, in fact, a reluctance for governments to regulate in the sense that it would have and should have to protect citizens of our country.

I note the Hazardous Products Act was put in effect in 1968 and has been virtually unchanged since then. That was a period of time when we made things in Canada. We were not worried about the import situation quite as much. We could control, modulate and regulate the input into the products. When it had the stamp “made in Canada” on it, we could assume it was probably fairly safe.

We have yielded that control now. The globalization of capital has made that irrelevant. In fact, we are condemned when we raise these issues. We are told that we are trying to put up non-tariff barriers to trade whenever we say that we should at least harmonize our standards, so the expectations are that we are not being poisoned by our trading partners.

However, my colleague is right. We are poisoning another generation of children in our zeal, in our enthusiasm to close down the last manufacturing plant in Canada and export every last job. We are in such a hurry to do this that we are not even being careful enough to ensure it does not have health consequences to the point where we are pickling the innards of our kids with some toxic super-chemicals that they are being bombarded with in this post-war era.

The petrochemical industry has gone nuts in our country and in the world in the post-war years. Mark my words, in the very near future one in two Canadians will die of cancer. It never used to be that way. Fifty per cent of all the people will die of cancer when my kids are my age. That is absurd. That means we have done something terribly wrong.

If anybody watched Wendy Mesley's show on television, the very sensitive investigative journalism done about her personal struggle with breast cancer and the questions that were not asked about what happened when we ingested chemical A and chemical B and it turned into chemical C inside our internal organs, those are the questions that are not being asked. We are being far too casual.

The one thing we are being extraordinarily casual about is the biggest industrial killer the world has ever known, which is asbestos. Canada not only allows the import of asbestos, it is the world's second largest exporter of the world's greatest industrial killer. Asbestos kills more people than all other industrial toxins combined, but yet in Canada not only exports it with great and wanton abandon, it heavily subsidizes the production and export of asbestos.

We can be critical of allowing toys coming in from China with asbestos and lead in them. When I said that there were toys with asbestos coming in to Canada, the Minister of Health stood and said that I was exaggerating, that the government would never tolerate it. A few short weeks later we found toys with asbestos in them, 5% tremolite asbestos in the CSI fingerprint game, which was such a popular seller last Christmas.

We are so cavalier about asbestos, we are not only mining it, producing it, selling it, exporting it, we are importing it as well. I believe the government is afraid to condemn the use of asbestos because it does not want to offend the province of Quebec, from where asbestos comes, the last remaining asbestos mine in the country.

The asbestos mines that I worked in are all closed. They were closed by natural market forces. Nobody will buy this toxin any more unless, for some magic reason, it is the benign asbestos that they mine in that province when all of a sudden it is subsidized and its export is promoted.

We send Canadian Department of Justice lawyers around the country like globe-trotting propagandists for the asbestos industry to find new markets and new places to pollute with Canadian asbestos.

We are just as guilty of that but we are not taking the steps to protect our own people from the import of toxins because, unlike Europe and the United States, Canada does not even have the power to issue a mandatory recall of a product. The United States can. In California and in a number of states they clearly take their hazardous materials more seriously. In a properly functioning public health protection system, when a problem comes to light about a product on the market there should be an obligation on the part of the government to inform consumers and remove it from the market. However, under this new law, the government may do this but there is nothing to require it to do this. It is still optional. The word “may” is used throughout.

Bill C-52 is inadequate on a number of levels, one of which I was just illustrating. I believe it should require the government to take positive action when it comes to light that a product on the market is harmful.

In the current context of the bill, if the government is made aware of a toxic chemical in a children's toy there would be no legal requirement for it to even make people aware of it. In the case of the asbestos in the CSI fingerprint toy, it was denying it. It would not even suggest that asbestos was bad for us. I made the government aware of it but there was no attempt by the government to recall the toy. We had a press conference downstairs in the 130-S room. To this day, the government has done nothing about it because for it to say that the asbestos in that children's toy is bad, it would need to admit that the asbestos it is subsidizing and exporting around the world is bad for people. It would be caught and hoisted on its own petard, as it were.

There is no legal requirement in the bill for the government to make people aware of a bad product and I think that is wrong. I suppose there would be political consequences if we exposed the government, which I did in the CSI thing, but it is hard because, as we know, after the fact accountability relies on the government getting caught.

Similarly, the minister would have the power to order companies to conduct studies to ensure that a product is safe but nothing in the proposed law would ensure that products are regularly tested for toxicity. This is the subject of another bill, Bill C-225, in my name, a pesticide bill where we believe there should be a reverse onus on the companies that want to sell pesticides, herbicides and fungicides and that it should not really be up to us, or even the Government of Canada, to prove beyond a doubt that the product is absolutely safe. It should be the company that must prove the chemical is safe before it is sold. There is no such obligation now. The company can sell anything and only if someone does all the testing and determines it is unsafe will the company be curtailed in the sale of products.

That is completely arse backwards. That is clearly the lobbyists and the petrochemical industry. The pesticide producers have done a very effective job in tying the government around their little finger. This reverse onus notion would put the burden of proof on the manufacturers that the products they are selling are safe and the precautionary principle should surely apply, especially when we are dealing with children and pregnant women who are that much more susceptible and vulnerable to chemical contamination. The cell walls of a developing child, as the cells are multiplying, are so thin that they are like little sponges for these chemical pesticides.

We cannot put a tonne of pesticides on our lawns and let our children go out to roll in the grass and not expect them to be affected and affected permanently.

We also believe and are calling for the nationwide ban on the cosmetic, non-essential, non-agricultural use of pesticides. The provinces of Ontario and Quebec have now done it but that is only in the absence of leadership and direction from the federal government that should have done it without having to wait for other jurisdictions to do its regulatory job for it.

I want to simply say that there are a number of independent agencies in civil society that are critical of the bill. I seem to have misplaced my press release from the United Steelworkers of America but it is certainly one that has had a campaign on toxic imports partly because of the job issue. I would be happy to continue this at a later time.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

When we return to the study of Bill C-52, there will be 10 minutes remaining for the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.

The House resumed from April 28 consideration of the motion that Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are now moving from the world food crisis to something that I believe is equally important for the House to address, which is consumer product safety.

We all have a responsibility to protect and promote the health and well-being of all Canadians, but there are some circumstances where the system we have today has not met that need.

Bill C-52, if I may just highlight the summary, modernizes the regulatory regime for consumer products in Canada and creates prohibitions with respect to the manufacturing, importing, selling, advertising, packaging and labelling of consumer products, including those that are a danger to human health and safety. The bill will make it easier to identify whether a consumer product is a danger and more effectively prevents or addresses the danger.

The Liberals will be supporting the bill at second reading to go to committee. There are some very serious questions that need to be addressed, which cannot be fully handled at second reading because we do not have the opportunity to have the opinion of the expert, the stakeholder and a broad range of people. I suspect that the committee, should the bill pass at second reading, will have a very lively debate and hearings on the issues related to consumer product safety.

I reviewed the minister's speech when he introduced the bill. He noted that the vast majority of suppliers that make, import, distribute and sell consumer products take safety very seriously. He also noted that it is basically because these businesses value their reputations. I suspect that is a logical conclusion.

However, problems can and do occur, and Canadians will recall that there were a number of incidences. One which I even raised in the House with the minister at the time had to do with high levels of lead in the paints on children's toys. Those were, I believe, coming from China, if I recall the details.

The fact remains that there are problems that can and do occur, and there have been a number of them. The bill is timely and appropriate for Parliament to look at, particularly since the Hazardous Products Act has not been thoroughly reviewed in some 40 years.

Issues are changing. Technology is changing. We have a responsibility to ensure that the regulatory framework that we have is in a position to prevent and detect, so we can protect the health and safety of Canadians.

As I indicated, there will be some questions regarding the bill. One of those would be with regard to the issue of introducing the power to effect a recall of products. That does not exist right now under the current legislation. This is done on a voluntary basis.

Members and the public will know that there are numerous examples of where companies voluntarily recall their products because they have identified a problem through incidents that have occurred that have been brought to their attention and that indicate that there is a prevalence which is unacceptable. If they value their reputation, obviously there are companies which will want to remediate the problems quickly so that they do not have any other significant impact on their ability to provide goods, services or otherwise conduct their business.

The concern about the power to recall is that it may turn out that this would be used excessively by inspectors. That becomes a problem if there are complaints. Depending on the criteria and the assessment process, there may in fact be a situation where the pendulum swings very far to the other side, to the extent that there are some unintended consequences to businesses, maybe some harm to a business simply because recalls are becoming more prevalent.

There is a significant move toward the American way, a litigious society. People are going to start going to the courts. There is the potential for lawsuits in the future rather than to negotiate a recall or action by the private sector that is currently done.

The point is whether or not there has to be some clarification about when the power can be used and some of the options we may want to consider. These are important areas that the committee would be able to explore with expert witnesses. The committee would be able to call specific witnesses to find out what is happening not only in other jurisdictions but in similar circumstances with other legislation with regard to remediating or dealing with a problem area.

The second area that would require some discussion at the health committee has to do with staffing requirements to deal with this new power of product recall. I have had an opportunity to look at Bill C-52, at least up to the section where it requires regulation, and I am going to speak about those in a moment.

The way the bill is currently structured, it will require the collaboration of border security agencies, Health Canada inspectors, as well as CFIA inspectors. Of these three groups, the one that is currently least able to deal with this on the inspection side is Health Canada. It has the lowest number of inspectors and the bill puts a lot of responsibility on Health Canada.

The first committee I was ever on was the health committee. I have had substantial involvement with Health Canada, whether it be on tobacco labelling, aboriginal health issues, or reproductive technologies. Bill C-13, the reproductive technologies bill, I think took about three years of our lives and, incidentally, the regulations that were required under Bill C-13 still have not been fully prepared, implemented and promulgated. The regulations in that bill on which we spent so much time still have not been fully implemented. I will speak a little more about regulations in a second.

There certainly is that issue of staff. Those are two of the items that should be dealt with regarding the committee consideration should this bill pass at second reading, which I believe it will.

It is easy to protect the health and well-being of Canadians and to ensure safety if we are prepared to go to the nth degree and establish all of the checks and balances and procedures using all of the tools that Parliament could authorize Health Canada to put into place. However, if we take it to its logical extreme, we get into a situation where the commercial activity has been impeded and all of a sudden a business cannot provide the goods and services it normally would because of the regulatory environment.

A very serious issue for parliamentarians to consider not only with this bill but with many others is whether or not there will be the unintended consequence of impeding economic activity by increasing a regulatory regime that is not justified by the issue we are trying to deal with. It is never black and white. It is never a matter of touching one thing to take care of another. We have to look beyond that and find out what the consequential implications may be.

The issue here is whether or not we are moving into a new regime of policing the commercial activity to the extent that it will impose a regulatory regime. We do not know what that is right now and we do not know the extent to which it is going to be used. As a matter of fact, we will not know that until after the bill goes through all stages and receives royal assent because that is the way things are happening.

However, committees can, as the health committee did with the reproductive technologies bill, say that no regulations shall be promulgated unless they are sent to the health committee for review and comment in advance. Unfortunately, in the case of the reproductive technologies bill, the committee had no authority specifically in the bill or from the minister to make any changes to the regulations. The committee could only review and comment, and that is a problem.

If regulations are enabled by the legislation, but the detail gives us something different that we did not understand to be the case, Parliament has no tools whatsoever to deal with what I would call, and maybe it is strong language, draconian regulations. There may be some unintended consequences, such as an impact on legitimate businesses by increasing the burden of the regulations, the responsibility of the businesses to know what those regulations are, to monitor them and to ensure that their businesses are compliant. It is a very significant cost to business to understand and to know the law.

We are dealing with an area which, from a lay perspective, Canadians will certainly want to ensure that Parliament and the Government of Canada have taken appropriate steps to provide for the safety of consumer products. There are certainly a number of areas in which there will be some concern by the stakeholders who will be impacted by this bill.

I did not have a copy of the bill readily available so I printed out a copy. The bill itself is at least 48 pages long, but I was scanning it and I came to the part dealing with regulations. This is something that I raised previously in the debate on Bill C-33. Under “Regulations”, clause 38(1) of Bill C-52 says that the governor in council may make regulations for carrying out the purposes or provisions of the act. It does not say it will, or has to, or shall. It says may. I have always questioned that.

In this regard, because there is the potential that we are expanding the responsibilities of the border services agency, Health Canada and CFIA, all of a sudden the regulatory activity, and the cost and coordination of it, is going to create a significant demand of human resources and a significant risk in some respects to impeding or slowing down the current velocity of commercial activity, particularly with regard to imports.

There will also be differences in standards around the world. Certain products sold to Canadians have components made in various jurisdictions, but there is a final producer who puts them all together. Where the legal obligation and the rights and responsibilities lie also become very interesting questions to deal with.

It is important to remind members that the purpose of the bill is to protect the public by addressing and preventing dangers posed to human health and safety by consumer products that are circulated within Canada and those that are imported. As I indicated, we have products that are imported as finished products, but also components which go into other products. The bill covers everything that we should be concerned about in terms of public safety.

The current consumer product safety system functions on a voluntary basis, as I indicated. If a product is dangerous or poses a health risk, the corporation can issue a recall. This bill would prohibit the sale, import, manufacture, packaging, labelling, and advertising of consumer products that may pose a risk to consumers. While voluntary recalls would continue to happen, inspectors named under the act or by the minister would be able to order a recall of a consumer product.

I must admit that when I hear about a product recall in the media, I have often wondered how much it really costs. I have often wondered how much of that cost is effectively passed on to the consumer. Public safety is certainly an issue, but in terms of adding to the economic cost of a product increases more in recalls that may not be totally warranted and may be adding to the cost of the consumer product as well. Obviously due diligence should be used in exercising this extraordinary power.

The bill would also create a tracing mechanism. It would force corporations, manufacturers and importers to keep all documents containing information needed to identify the origin of the product and where it was distributed. This would ensure that when a recall was made, the products would be easily removed from the store shelves. Knowing the origin of the product would help to enforce the act and would prevent further occurrences. These provisions make some sense.

The bill would also substantially increase the fines and penalties, something that this House has dealt with significantly in a number of ministries not just through the amendments to the criminal justice act, but I can think of other ministries where fines or penalties are proposed.

Deterrence is an important aspect of the dialogue. At committee I am going to be looking for an assessment of whether or not the proposed increases in the fines and penalties when a product is deemed unsafe would have the intended effect based on the experience of other jurisdictions, other countries, or the experts who are proposing them, if there is not any research on that particular aspect.

The bill would also allow the minister to seek an injunction when an act is being committed or to prevent someone from committing an act that contravenes the bill. There is an enabling provision in the bill regarding the minister.

Inspectors would be given extraordinary powers to search and seize. They could effectively search any place they believe is involved in manufacturing, importing, packaging, storing, advertising, selling, labelling, testing or transporting consumer goods. A warrant would only be necessary in cases where an inspector wished to search the dwelling.

This is very serious. When there is that kind of list of broad-sweeping regulatory powers, we want to be absolutely sure it is not going a little too far.

This is a very difficult bill. It is a very long bill for us to assess and on which to give informed opinions on some of its aspects at second reading, but I will look very carefully, as I am sure all members will, to the proceedings at the health committee to find out what the facts are. Hopefully we will have better consumer protection for Canadians.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was interested in the member's comments on Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products. One of the areas that I am concerned about, and I know from his remarks that he is as well, is the whole question of the safety of imports into Canada.

One of the problems that I see with Bill C-52 is that it lacks any comprehensive system to ensure that items are safe before they enter Canada. The system it contemplates targets high risk sources for higher surveillance, but it depends more on reacting to safety problems that are identified through use after the fact. It relies on identifying a problem once the product has already been distributed in Canada. This seems to be a major problem. It might be better to try to identify those problems before the product reaches consumers in Canada altogether.

I wonder if the member might comment on that. Does he think it might be better to have some kind of pre-entry testing system or some pre-distribution testing system for imports that might make Canadians safer overall? That would not make the Canadian consumer the testing ground for whether there is a problem with a product imported from outside of Canada.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an excellent question. As a matter of fact, when the minister was here to propose the bill, it was a question that I posed to him at that time. There were a number of examples, particularly coming out of China, for instance, where product safety issues were raised. In fact, I think I quoted from a letter from a constituent who asked me why we did not have these things, every one of them, checked before they got onto the shelves for Canadians.

I think I addressed it to some extent in my comments by saying that we could protect the safety of Canadians 100% by putting into place absolutely everything we can possibly think of, including rigorous testing on every product, but we do not do that now. The member asks a good question: why do we not do more or should we be doing more to protect the safety of Canadians with regard to consumer products?

However, we do establish guidelines and requirements for the materials that are used, for the content. The lead content would be an example that people would understand. Products coming in with leaded paint is one example. Those are proscribed. We have to understand that if somebody is importing that product, where does the liability lie? Where does the responsibility lie with regard to imported components or finished products for distribution and sale in Canada in ensuring compliance with Canadian law and Canadian standards? That is where it is.

I think the member probably would agree that if we have an indication that a certain distributor or certain kinds of products become clearly problematic, and that is where some of the issues have arisen, there may be some middle ground where in fact there is a monitoring process of those areas in which there have been examples of product safety violations, as it were, or risks to product safety or the health of Canadians from products.

However, the question still becomes whether or not we want to guarantee 100% protection. I can tell the House that in the case of the U.S. Army, its threshold is to look at and check about 1%, I believe, between 1% and 4%, of products it purchases. Of course, it is one of the major consumers within the United States in terms of product acquisition, and statistically that is as effective as checking 40%. It is kind of interesting. I do not know what the science is and all of these other things, but I think we have to be careful about imposing requirements that may in fact have some serious unintended consequences on the economic side and may not get significant benefit improvements in terms of the safety side.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to have a supplementary question for the member. I appreciate his thoughtful response. My other question is around the resources that go toward actually enforcing this kind of legislation. In the past, we have had consumer protection legislation, but often there have not been the resources to actually enforce that legislation. I think there is some attempt in this legislation to improve the situation and to see a stronger approach to product safety, but without the resources to do the appropriate enforcement, that really does not make much difference at all.

I wonder if the member would support ensuring that there is something in the legislation that might hold the government responsible for maintaining an adequate inspection capacity, for instance, with adequate staff to process, investigate and respond to problems that do arise, and to make sure that the new reporting system contemplated by the legislation is actually effective.

Is there something we can do to make sure that the capacity is actually there to back up the legislation?

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is also a very good question. Coincidentally, we are facing that kind of situation in the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which I chair. Right now, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has a staff shortage. It has only about 70% of its authorized staff complement and has new responsibilities under the Federal Accountability Act. It has requested and is authorized to have another 20 employees. As it turns out, the privacy commission has had to rely on contracting people in because it cannot hire people quickly enough to fill some of these jobs.

In fact, we found the same thing in the Information Commissioner's office. From my work on the government operations and estimates committee, I have found that this is prevalent in a number of departmental areas where there simply is not the qualified and properly trained staff to discharge the responsibility.

In my conversations and directions to the Privacy Commissioner, I told her that she is asking for increased powers, more sweeping powers for the Privacy Commissioner to report more often and to initiate criminal investigations, et cetera, but she does not have the staff to do it. As a matter of fact, the backlogs in terms of investigations are so large that it is going to take her an awful long time to address them.

Therefore, the member raises a very important question. It is easy to add those powers, but can the responsibility be discharged in a responsible fashion? Can the job be done? There is no point in giving someone the responsibility unless there is the commitment not only of the dollars but of having the capacity in place to discharge those responsibilities. One makes those undertakings to the Canadian people that it is being put in place, and I think the member is quite correct, in that it has to be with the assumption that it can be delivered.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, the bill gives the power to the government to enforce recalls, which I think on the surface appears very reasonable. One would think that we would want our government to recall dangerous products, but there are ramifications.

Now we have voluntary recalls. The government seems to have been able to convince industry to do this when necessary. However, I have a question. Once we put this in as a government authority, is it possible that with the increased litigiousness of our society it will become almost a requirement? An inspector will want it so that he is safe, so that government does not get sued on the slightest bit of questionable recalled products, to the extent there could be chaos in the markets and, if not, exceptional costs to industry and lack of competitiveness in Canada when it is not really necessary. I am wondering if there is any way of mitigating that or if the member thinks that might be a problem.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, of course there is. The issue has to do with whether or not we abandon the current process, where there are negotiations and working with those industries to find a resolution. We negotiate resolutions. If we have the power of recall, the question becomes whether we are going to abandon the efforts on a bilateral basis to resolve issues. This is a question that will have to be dealt with by the health committee.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to speak at second reading on An Act respecting the safety of consumer products, the bill introduced by the Minister of Health. The first thing I would like to say is, “finally”. Finally, there will be legislation governing hazardous products. In a way, we do not have Parliament to thank for this bill, but the Auditor General of Canada, who sounded the alarm on this issue in November 2006 in a fairly substantial report.

However, there is no one in this House who has not heard about dangerous toys in the past several years, especially with the significant rise in imports from countries whose environmental standards are not necessarily as high as Quebec's or Canada's. This is the downside of globalization. There are some very positive aspects of globalization and market expansion. But although in the past we were concerned about protecting our domestic market, today we have to make sure we are properly protected against products from other countries.

In the Auditor General's November 2006 report, one chapter, entitled “Allocating Funds to Regulatory Programs”, clearly indicated that product safety program managers cannot fulfill their mandate, for several reasons. Let us look at this report in a bit more detail.

First of all, consumer products such as cradles, tents and carpets are very concrete things that children and families use. Cosmetics, deodorants and soaps are also part of our daily lives. There are also workplace hazardous materials information systems, which provide information on corrosive materials, for example, and protection against radiation from chemicals and clinical and consumer products, such as X-rays, laser beams and sun lamps. Lastly, there are new substances such as fabric dyes and fuel additives. These are very concrete things that were not adequately covered, according to the Auditor General.

Moreover, product safety program managers, the officials responsible for running the program, believe that many of the activities related to regulation do not allow them to discharge their responsibilities adequately. These conclusions are based on an internal study of what is needed in terms of resources allocated to the program, documents concerning resource allocation and interviews conducted during the Auditor General's audit.

Clearly, an effort needed to be made. It is unfortunate that the government took so long to react, but at least we have this bill now. We hope that it will be passed quickly, but only after the committee has studied it, because the committee might improve it. At least the people will get the message that we want to provide adequate basic regulation.

We have already had several warnings, such as when some toys were found to have high lead levels. A week or two ago, a product that was in almost all water bottles that people bought to use while exercising or going about their daily activities was suddenly banned. There are more and more of these kinds of products in the things we use every day that are not subject to enough regulatory control. This bill should help fix that problem.

Currently, Canada does not require manufacturers of dangerous products—such as the cosmetics, cradles, tents and carpets mentioned earlier—that fall under its jurisdiction to test their products or prove that they are not a danger to consumer health and safety. Before this bill was introduced, the government had no way to intervene. As you can see, it is high time we moved forward on this.

Consumers do not have any real protection against incidents like the forced recall of thousands of toys made in China or the discovery of toxic, prohibited substances in tubes of toothpaste from South Africa. Those are very concrete examples. After the incident is over, after there are very negative and unfortunate consequences, including death, is not the time to monitor these operations. We must move as much as possible towards zero tolerance in this area, in order to minimize these incidents.

In our society, if we can afford to spend so much money on defence, for example, we should have the money for proper monitoring of these kinds of measures.

In our society, it is rather absurd that we have no legislation to monitor these substances, although we seem to find the money to take military action overseas, offensive action that, in my opinion, is unjustified and must end. Enough of that comparison, however. It is obvious that major improvements are needed.

Furthermore, in the summer of 2007, thousands of toys made in China were recalled by manufacturers because they contained lead. The Bloc Québécois urged the minister to take immediate action. It proposed tightening all hazardous products safety requirements in order to ban the production, promotion and marketing of any product that could present an unacceptable danger to health.

It only makes sense. That is what we were calling for. It took several months, nearly several years after the Auditor General's recommendations, before anything was done. And here we are today, considering this bill.

We also called on Ottawa to make manufacturers responsible for inspecting their products and proving that they pose no danger to the health and safety of consumers. Clearly, a manufacturer of products of this nature should ensure their quality and be accountable.

Last December, after four months of inaction, the government finally said it would introduce a bill—sometime in early 2008—to change its strategy for regulating product safety. That is the bill we have before us.

The Conservatives' inaction in this federal jurisdiction has caused growing concern among many Quebec and Canadian parents about health and safety issues when buying toys.

The bill is now before us. What will it do? The purpose of Bill C-52 is to tighten the safety requirements for dangerous products by creating prohibitions with respect to the manufacturing, importing, selling, advertising, packaging and labelling of consumer products, including those that are a danger to human health or safety.

Holding manufacturers and importers accountable is another very important aspect. The mechanism for tracing the person responsible in the chain of production has to be as clear as possible. Manufacturers and importers must ensure compliance of their products and report to the minister.

This problem seems to be more prevalent in the food industry, where wholesalers make large purchases from countries all around the world. It becomes very difficult to determine who was responsible for importing a dangerous product that was not properly inspected. There needs to be proper monitoring to avoid mistakes.

Under the bill, the government will be able to require safety reports on all supply sources and all components of a product. These safety reports are like a traceability system to be used in the event of a product recall. Merchants must keep records of the purchase and sale of products and the minister must be informed within two days of an incident involving the product or country concerned. Clearly they were starting from scratch.

These important elements are currently missing. It is hard to understand how products ended up circulating freely in our consumer system without any monitoring, except that we had satisfactory domestic rules. Now that we are part of the global market, these rules need to be reinforced and the people who manufacture goods have to know there will be consequences if their products do not do comply with standards.

In fact, the government could demand the withdrawal—or recall—of products that may prove harmful to consumers. At present, this occurs on a voluntary basis. There have been cases where manufacturers, acting voluntarily, took their time in providing replacements or decided that it was not urgent enough. Now, there is the possibility of imposing the recall of products and that is a step forward.

On conviction on indictment, the penalty would be a fine of not more than $5 million and imprisonment for two years. On summary conviction, a first offence would result in a fine of not more than $250,000 and imprisonment for a term of not more than six months. A subsequent offence would be punishable by a fine of not more than $500,000 and imprisonment of not more than 18 months. We are sending a very clear message that the fun and games are over. We will no longer tolerate the type of behaviour exhibited in the past. We wish to ensure that there is adequate protection.

Naturally, there is a difference between passing a bill, allowing its entry into force and ensuring that there are sufficient resources to implement it. In the past, we did not get the job done.

This can be seen with the inspectors. It can also be seen in the field when inspections are carried out, when speaking to those who do inspections at customs. There was a great deal of criticism about the lack of regulations and legal tools, but there was also not enough money and too few inspectors to achieve the objective.

The bill clearly states that there is a need for the resources. We have seen the government estimates for the budget. However, we will have to quickly evaluate all components to determine if the amounts are sufficient. Otherwise, it could have the opposite effect of what was initially expected if we create a law, impose regulations with possible fines and then, in the end, no one is monitoring it. It would be a little bit like having a system for traffic fines but no one was ensuring that a driver who broke the speed limit was fined. The driver needs to know that there is a system and that there are adequate controls. For that, sufficient resources are needed.

Officials with the product safety program have asked for funding. Program managers have indicated that their inability to discharge their responsibilities could have repercussions on the health and safety of Canadians, such as exposing consumers to dangerous, non-compliant products. Unfortunately, we have already seen this happen.

There is also the possibility that the government could be held responsible for certain repercussions. The government is responsible for providing adequate regulation. We cannot just say that companies are responsible for regulating themselves. We can see that attitudes about this are changing. Years ago, it was about voluntary recalls, but now, the government can demand a mandatory recall. At the other end, we have to ensure that the government discharges its responsibilities.

In November 2006, the Auditor General's report revealed that the Government of Canada knew that consumers were exposed to risk because of lack of funding for the program. It took the government a long time to act on that, which makes us wonder about the government's level of interest and competence with respect to its own files. That gives people real cause for concern. We hope that passing this bill will help allay people's concerns. We need concrete examples to show that we are achieving results.

The government's repeated failure to act gives us good reason to be very vigilant about this. For example, on August 2, 2007, Fisher Price issued a voluntary recall of some of its products—including figurines and toys sold separately—manufactured by foreign suppliers between April 19 and July 6, 2007. The products listed may have been painted with paint containing too much lead. Lead is toxic when ingested by young children and can have undesirable effects on health.

This kind of thing does happen, and we want to prevent it from happening in the future. We are seeing an international movement toward doing something about this. The United States took steps that are very similar to what we are doing here in the federal Parliament. For example, 413 different products were recalled last year in the United States, and 231 of them, more than half, were toys. In the United States, 84% of toys sold are made in China. In Europe, the European Commission proposed making toys safer by prohibiting the use of carcinogens in manufacturing them and by increasing monitoring. That measure will not come into effect until the end of 2008. The entire western world seems to be moving forward with measures like these because we have had serious warnings. It is high time we took action with these measures.

Europe is planning to ban chemicals, carcinogens, mutagens and toxins that affect reproduction from toys made for children under the age of 14. They are lowering allowable limits for other substances such as lead and mercury and have prohibited about forty allergenic perfumes. The EU wants to broaden the rules to prevent the risk of ingesting small parts and also wants to tackle toys contained in food—because of the danger of choking—and ban toys that could be ingested along with food.

The legislation in the United States, Europe and perhaps other countries in the world may have information or other elements that could be incorporated in the bill at committee stage. Based on the testimony we hear, we may be able to improve the principle of the bill, the general framework—which in and of itself is fine—through appropriate amendments to ensure its effectiveness. This is an area where we have no right to fail. It is essential that this legislation, which will surely be in place for many years, produce the desired results. Unfortunately, if in two, three or four years we still have cases of lead poisoning in children, or any other similar negative outcome, it will most likely be because we did not study this bill closely enough and give it enough teeth.

The committee will have to keep that in mind.

One new thing in the bill has to do with preparing and maintaining documents.

13. (1) Any person who manufactures, imports, advertises, sells or tests a consumer product for commercial purposes shall prepare and maintain:

(a) documents that indicate:

(i) in the case of a retailer, the name and address of the person from whom they obtained the product and the location where—and the period during which—they sold the product—

We often hear about additional documentation, about the paperwork required by governments, but it is clearly necessary sometimes.

Some people may rant about government requirements always being there to trip up businesses and create more restrictions. But in this case, experience calls on us to implement these things, and we must ensure that we have everything we need.

The bill warns that if things are not done right and documented properly, there could be a penalty. Requiring people to document a product's history makes it possible to quickly track down a product's origin as well as the stores that have the product in stock.

I already spoke about increasing fines. The bill's preamble has a definition that is very similar to the precautionary principle.

Whereas the Parliament of Canada recognizes that a lack of full scientific certainty is not to be used as a reason for postponing measures that prevent adverse effects on human health if those effects could be serious or irreversible;

According to this version of the bill, toy manufacturers cannot claim that there is no clear, certain, scientific evidence that the toy is dangerous. It will be possible to say that there is sufficient doubt to ban the product or require that appropriate corrective action be taken. This is a good thing. It would be useful to apply the precautionary principle in a number of bills in different sectors.

For this situation, it is important to give more power and money to inspectors so that they can do their jobs properly.

In conclusion, the government knew as far back as 2006 that the law did not adequately protect the public. Still, the government waited until now to introduce this bill. The Bloc Québécois has long called on the minister to tighten hazardous product safety requirements in order to ban the production, promotion and marketing of any product that could present an unacceptable danger to health. We will be extremely vigilant, to make sure the bill achieves that goal, not only in principle, but in practice.

We also demanded that Ottawa require manufacturers to inspect their own products and show that they do not pose a danger to consumer health and safety. The legislative approach in the bill answers the Bloc's requests. We will wait for the regulations and examine them to see whether they produce the desired results.

In my opinion, we owe the Auditor General our thanks for producing a report on this issue, because it helped move things forward more quickly. In fact, we heard from businesses and families that the Auditor General's report had spurred the government to finally take action.

Even though the bill requires that companies make sure their products are harmless, the government will have to ensure that there are enough inspectors to implement the legislation.

In conclusion, in our society, the federal government finds money to do many things and has invested in numerous areas that are not its responsibility. The government needs to make sure it invests enough money in this area to exercise adequate control.

The Bloc Québécois supports this bill and hopes that it will be amended and strengthened further. As I said in my introduction, “finally”. I repeat, “finally”. Let us hope that parents, children, families and consumers in general will feel safer about the products they purchase. It will be a challenge to continue to feel safe about new products, especially those coming from all the other countries of the world thanks to globalization.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to hear that we have the support of the Bloc in principle on the nature of this bill. I think one of the primary obligations we have as parliamentarians is to ensure that the products Canadians buy are safe.

I want to point out that the overwhelming majority of the suppliers in this country do take seriously their responsibility and obligation to provide Canadians with safe products. However, we do know that some recent high profile cases have caused some concern about the safety of the products that are available on the market.

However, the problem is that this regime we are currently seeking to amend has been in place for over 40 years. It is time that it gets modernized and takes into account, not only the punitive approaches, but the preventive approaches that this bill encompasses. It also proposes requirements for suppliers to keep documentation on the source and destination of their consumer products. This is to aid in the tracing of the product should a recall or other measure be necessary. I agree with my colleague that it is inconceivable this was not already part of the system, that we should have been able to trace it.

I am a fairly recently elected member here having only been here about two years. How often in the past 15 years did the member and his party pressure the previous government to change this and bring it up to modern standards? Why does he think it took a Conservative government to finally take decisive action on this to ensure the safety of the products that Canadians purchase?

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question.

I agree with him that the vast majority of suppliers—the people who create, manufacture and sell toys—are honest, as are those who make other products. But the reality is that there is no room for error in this sector. Risk management is needed. We have to ensure that the percentage of dishonest people is reduced to a minimum. That is why I was talking about an near-zero tolerance.

In response to the second part of his question, it was not so long ago that we allowed Chinese products to enter the market. China became a member of the WTO three or four years ago and that resulted in a massive increase in imported products. I am not saying that Chinese products are not good, generally speaking, but we know that 80% of toys imported to the United States are from China. We see that people constantly seek to make a profit every step of the way, from the U.S. parent company that awards contracts or subcontracts, to the people who have to produce at a lower cost and pay meagre wages. We are all well aware of global competition.

There have been concrete examples and, in my opinion, public pressure, more than the Conservative government or any of the parties here, has prompted us to take action. There have been some appalling examples. When we buy a toy for a two or three year old child who puts that toy in his or her mouth and we are not sure whether the toy is safe, only to find out that there are unacceptable levels of lead in that product, that is what prompts us to react.

In an ideal world, when we opened up the markets across the planet, we would have considered not only the benefits of having more trade, but also the conditions under which this trade ought to take place. There is a message here.

I will close with that. I think we should apply this same type of reaction in a number of sectors when it comes to globalization. I am all for international trade, but it has to be well regulated and well monitored to avoid unacceptable extremes that produce results that may be the opposite of what is desired, namely, having a population that is healthy and well-protected in the purchases it makes and ensuring that it gets high-quality products.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, in the middle of his remarks, my colleague from the Bloc made some points that warrant us revisiting and asking him to elaborate.

I think he was making the point that our consumer safety, to some extent, has been sacrificed on the altar of laissez-faire capitalism and the globalization of capital that has led to the free movement of goods and services but without the corresponding health and safety protections that we used to enjoy when more products were made in Canada.

The point we need to reinforce is that our vulnerability to the consumer threats that we face from some of these toxins is partly based on the fact that we lost control of what is on our store shelves when we lost our manufacturing sector. We need to remind people again that this is a predictable consequence that we warned people about. I have heard members from the Bloc warn Parliament about these predictable consequences, that as we let our manufacturing sector disappear and we allow everything that we use to be made offshore, we had better have very stringent controls because there are people in far away places who are not operating by the same standards.

I am a socialist, a trade unionist and a fiercely proud Canadian nationalist and I decry, I lament and deplore the fact that we cannot find anything anymore that says “made in Canada” on the bottom. It is to our great discredit that we have allowed that to happen.

The connection, I believe, is direct and undeniable. I would ask my colleague to expand on that if he believes that is one of the root causes of the vulnerability that we face today.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think our society has suffered, and in fact is still suffering, from the negative effects of neo-liberalism. People believed that simply opening up trade would solve all the problems. People thought poverty would disappear with open markets. People believed that products would suddenly be much better. We know that, in reality, that is not how it works. We have seen it in the past and we must remember that.

We have some concrete examples from before globalization. Here, at the beginning of the 20th century, workers, people who were worried about their own environment, fought hard battles just to obtain the slightest protection. They earned those things, which improved our quality of life.

I think it is important to learn from the current example of the toys. This is the obvious factor to consider: if a toy is dangerous for our children, we want to ban that kind of toy.

There is another, less obvious factor, which is not as much of a concern for us, because it affects us less. The person at the other end of the production line making those goods probably earns $1 an hour and works in terrible conditions that might even pose a danger to his or her health.

In the months and years to come, we will have to develop the control mechanisms identified around the world to guarantee the quality of products. Quebec and Canadian businesses and workers are ready to compete against the entire world as long as the playing field is level. If not, the environment will suffer and we will be moving away from the desired results. We lower the bar when we allow people to manufacture goods with inadequate consideration for the environment and for inadequate wages. As a result, our citizens who fought for decent wages and decent working conditions are forced to accept unacceptable working conditions.

We have to try to reverse this trend. We have to find original approaches, such as this bill, for dealing with hazardous goods. But we must also give some consideration to labour relations and working conditions of people all over the world.

This affects our families and our daily lives. However, we have to have the same consideration for an individual who, thousands of kilometres away, is forced to work for wretched wages because in Canada we drink their coffee and eat bananas produced elsewhere because we want to pay as little as possible for these goods.

We will have to move from a free trade system to a fair market, and that should become the rule in international agreements. We have work to do on that front.

As the saying goes, you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. We have taken a step in the area of hazardous goods. In the months and years to come, we should be open to the idea of additional legislation to protect our working conditions.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to speak to Bill C-52, the Canadian consumer product safety act. I will touch on some points that others have briefly mentioned.

The bill would modernize consumer protection in Canada and deals with prohibitions related to manufacturing, importing, selling advertising, packaging and labelling consumer products, including those that are a danger to human health and safety. This would make it easier to identify safe products.

On the surface, everyone would agree with that particular philosophy. However, the devil is in the detail and we need to talk about the details of a fairly complex act. I look forward to hearing some of the government members who have not yet spoken to the bill.

This area has not been revised since 1969. However, as the previous member from the Bloc mentioned, a number of crises have occurred and the government needed to act.

Before I begin my remarks, I must disagree with a comment made by an NDP member when he said that he could not find products labelled “made in Canada”. Sometimes there is the opposite problem. In agriculture, in particular, we can buy a bottle of olives that says “product of Canada” but olives are not grown here. The big problem in the agricultural industry and other industries is that, depending on the number of components, it appears to Canadians that they are buying something that was fully produced in Canada when it was not. Separate from this initiative, we need to take a close look at labelling to ensure that Canadian agriculture and business are protected by labelling.

A number of problems with products have occurred recently in Canada that are good examples of the necessity for this act. We had the toothpaste from South Africa that contained substances that were a danger to human health. We also had Fisher-Price products containing materials that were dangerous and toxic to children. Mattel, the American toy manufacturer, had to recall several million toys in the U.S. that were made in China. Some of the toys contained too much lead, such as the Barbie dolls and Geo Tracks toys. Fortunately, all these products have been recalled because they were dangerous to children.

The Auditor General looked into this in 2006 and pointed out all the problems with Health Canada and its ability to control dangerous products. She said that many of the managers of the product safety program were unable to fill their mandate because they lacked the tools. She said that they did not have enough human resources, that the resources they had were not used very well, and that the legislation was not very effective in protecting Canadians. The government has known about this since 2006.

Obviously, there have been problems with a number of products in Canada, and later in my speech I will talk about some more products, but there is also the issue of human resources. A number of members in the committee have raised the concern that it is fine to put in all sorts of new regulations and have inspections at every level of the process but if there are no inspectors and no funds to do that it does not change anything. There will be a lot of questions asked as to how the government plans to implement this because it has not really provided that detail yet.

In relation to inspectors, we want to ensure they are not overridden because they caused a problem. In the case of nuclear safety, an inspector found there was something wrong and the government simply proposed legislation to overrule the chief inspector and, in fact, eventually fired her. Therefore, that regime would not work if that is the type of attitude the government would bring to this bill.

A lot of regulations are involved. I am not against regulations but the bill I was talking about earlier today, Bill C-33, would have allowed the government to legislate certain things by regulations.

I have a constituent in my riding, Tony, who often approaches me and says that Canada is very dangerous because it rules by regulations, unlike Europe where everything has to be done by law. Regulations of course can be done by governor in council. Fortunately, we do have a committee, chaired by a very able chair right now from Scarborough, on the scrutiny of regulations, that has parliamentary overview in that respect, but it does not make policy decisions and regulations can be made out of public oversight as far as policies go.

That is why in relation to all the bills we are discussing today and any bills that have regulations, members would like to see what the government is planning, what the general plans are related to those regulations and when they are coming. If the whole bill, like the last one, depends on regulations, then once again nothing will happen if they are not coming forward. They can have such a dramatic effect, as we talked about in the last bill related to a world food shortage. Members of Parliament would really like to know what those regulations are.

In this particular bill there are a number of things that will be decided by regulation. Certainly in committee, I am sure the three opposition parties will be asking the minister and government officials more questions about that. This will give them a head's up to be prepared in committee to explain the implementation of this, because it is a fairly complex and lengthy bill, and has a number of resources attached to it but there is no outline in the plan. I think it is $113 million, but there is no outlined plan on how those resources would be used.

Would it be deployed on inspection resources? As I was saying earlier, this certainly needs a number of new resources to allow this bill to have any effect. How much money is there for that? I am sure the officials will be able to give us more information on that.

This bill would also reverse the burden of proof and impose that on the manufacturers, and of course it should be the duty of manufacturers to make sure that what they produce is safe for Canadians. I do not think anyone would disagree with that and I look forward to the agriculture committee to hearing from the Canadian Manufacturers Association on these types of conditions.

The legislation will also force manufacturers and importers of consumer products to test the safety of products regularly, and most importantly to disclose the test results. Once again, if dealt with effectively and efficiently, this will increase consumer protection for Canadians while still allowing the products to be available.

It is a bit of a question or a concern though, and once again we will want to see how the plan will work. A positive aspect of the bill is that it deals with inspections through the entire chain of production: advertising, shipping, assembly, labelling, and putting the product out. There are all these different stages and they have to be traceable. They must be documented. Of course, I hope there is not too much bureaucracy there for the business, but all this has to be documented and it is good that these stages can be traced.

We will have to discuss this more at committee, but my question is, how will there be a level playing field between Canadian products and products from overseas?

This would not always be the case, and often is not the case, but if all the components of a particular product were made in Canada and all the stages occurred in Canada, then it would be much easier for us to inspect and regulate that process. However, in this internationally competitive world, where everything is crossing borders and components are crossing borders with just in time production, there are all sorts of components and processes that are not in Canada.

How does the government plan to ensure that those parts of the processes can be dealt with so that the products that are coming from overseas have the same type of scrutiny as the ones in Canada at the various levels? If that is not possible, because of individual sovereignties, would there be inspections coming into the country with an increased enhancement in that respect? I would like an outline of how that would all work.

Another item that the bill allows is increased fines. I do not think anyone would disagree with that. I think $5,000 was the limit before and that could just be considered as a cost of doing business. Some huge manufacturers could accept that as just a cost of business, just a charge that they have to pay. Now the fines have been increased up to $5 million and two years in jail. If they are putting lives of Canadians at risk, putting the health of Canadians or their children at risk, obviously we want severe penalties for that.

These types of deterrents in other countries are higher at this point, until the bill passes, if it is to pass. They are higher in many places other than Canada. Deterrents in the United States and the European Union are much tougher. In Europe the fines can be as high as 5% of the company's annual revenue. At this time the United States imposes fines that go as high as several million dollars.

There will also be safety reports regarding all supply sources and components of a product. The system has all the features of a traceability system. Once again, I think this is good and important as long as it does not get into the hands of overzealous officials who were to make it a huge impediment to the business surviving.

We want to be able to trace it. If a product is determined to be dangerous and the company were then to go out of business because it was a shady-type of company, maybe organized crime, a gang, or an organized type of operation, that brought in a whole bunch of cheap, dangerous products and then just vanished, then the government would have these traceability documents. It would be able to do the effective recall and find out where the products are. In fact, with the voluntary recalls that are occurring, how are we to know that everything has been recalled? If we have the traceability elements, then we know where the product is, so we know it has all been recalled.

I have just a couple of examples about the cost of making these conditions and why it has to be effective and efficient. We have an issue right now with fertilizer retailers in Canada. Fertilizers can be dangerous, they can be explosive. Fortunately, there are very good regulations, some that the industry is imposing on itself which is excellent, to ensure safety. Of course, to put in these provisions, these increase huge prices for farmers and retailers. We have a program in the Canadian ports to put those provisions in to help to pay for those. We could also have similar government provisions to help put in the provisions to protect fertilizers and those types of chemicals. I encourage the government to review that issue.

Another example we have in my riding pertains to an international product coming in from the United States related to housing. It needs the Canadian safety standards approval, which is good. It should be done thoroughly, efficiently and effectively. In the north we only have a several month building season, and this is during a housing crisis where people are without homes. If it is not done in a timely fashion, if it is not done quickly and effectively, as I hope it will be in this particular case, this could result in people being left homeless for another year until construction could start.

Above all in our considerations, and I do not think anyone would disagree, we have to make absolutely sure that products are safe for our children. Some of the examples I will give later on are related to children. Children are not always underfoot of their parents, and they do things that adults would not necessarily do, like chewing everything under the sun, or putting everything in their mouths. We have to ensure that things are absolutely safe for children, and that this law will be used to that particular effect.

There are millions of products on the market produced in Canada or imported. In modern times the manufacturers would not want to produce anything that is dangerous. Nevertheless, products do slip through the cracks or there is the rare criminal element or a person who is not caring. Therefore, there are products that show a need for this bill.

Since 2005 there have been 34 products that contained lead risk, 26 products were a risk in terms of choking, 5 products led to head injuries, 5 that led to the risk of laceration, 3 that could have meant internal damage from magnets, 3 that put people at risk of being burned, 3 that put people at risk in terms of entrapment, 2 that put people in danger in terms of puncture or impalement, 2 that could have caused strangulations, 2 that led to bacterial risk, and 1 toxic chemical risk. That is why it is important that we put the bill in place and that it is done in a realistic and effective manner.

The bill is somewhat intertwined with Bill C-51 which we will be discussing next. I will be bringing comments forward in more detail when we get to Bill C-51, but we have given some feedback about the onerousness of the controls in these bills. That is something we will be looking at in committee.

A couple of my constituents have sent me emails that they think these bills are targetting at substantially reducing or putting huge barriers on natural health products; that they give almost police state-like powers to the government; that they have huge fines; that there can be seizing authority without warrant which is actually in Bill C-51; that the government wants to bypass Parliament approval, which is what I was talking about earlier with regard to regulation; that it can seize one's property, charge storing and shipping charges; and that it can do these things by entering one's property without warrant and so on.

I will be bringing forward those concerns from my constituents. They will be more related to Bill C-51 but these bills are connected.

Similarly, other feedback I have received is from a corporation called Truehope which has products related to people with mental illness. Once again, it wants to raise the alarm related to gross changes to the Food and Drugs Act as outlined in Bill C-51 and as referenced in Bill C-52. I will not go into all the details, but I have them available if someone would like to read them. These are things that should be discussed at committee.

I also want to give some input on the bill from the Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. This organization is certainly in support of the bill but it wants it amended to remove the proposed statutory exemption for tobacco companies. It states:

The era of special deals for tobacco companies is I hope long behind us. Yet this bill proposes a unique concession for tobacco manufacturers, one which would not be extended to any other manufacturing sector.

The Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada certainly wants this amendment put in the bill and we hope it will be called as a witness and we can explore that particular item. I hope the members of the health committee will ask the government officials when they appear before the committee with the minister as to the purpose of that exemption.

In closing, I would like to summarize three of my issues that need to be dealt with. One is the type of inspection and the number of inspections. The second is how we are going to protect the various chain of processes for products that come from overseas. The last issue is that right now, with the system of voluntary recalls, the government negotiates and the products are voluntarily recalled, and that has never been a problem.

I do not have a problem with the government having this authority, in that it should be able to act quickly, but often when people have the power to do something and do not do it they will be taken to court and will be involved in all sorts of litigation. I would not want inspectors constantly doing recalls for protection.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as always, the member for Yukon has made a thoughtful contribution to the debate today. I wonder if the member could comment on two important areas related to this particular legislation on the safety of consumer products.

First, in the past, Canada has been heavily dependent on the United States for initiating action around consumer product safety. In fact, about 40% of product recalls were a direct result of U.S. initiated action. I wonder if the member thinks this bill will do anything to strengthen an independent Canadian response to product safety issues. Does he think that is sufficiently covered in this legislation? Or is it even an issue that needs to be addressed?

Second, does my colleague believe there is too much discretion for inspectors in this legislation? They are given greater authority under the proposed legislation, but a lot of their actions are optional even if they believe that human health is at risk in the situations they are investigating.

Under the legislation, the government would not be required to inform consumers of safety issues that have been identified. I wonder if the member thinks that needs to be addressed as the bill goes forward to committee and perhaps is strengthened before it comes back to the House.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, the member has raised excellent issues. I certainly think both of them should be explored further.

As for us and the United States, the member asked whether I think this bill provides Canadian authority. This bill certainly is all about providing independent Canadian authority to do things. The question there, I think, is whether the resources are going to be available to do things sufficiently in Canada. As I said in my speech, if we do not have the person power, then we will not be able to do those types of inspections in Canada.

I definitely think we should also develop communication links with all countries that are doing such inspections. There is no use reinventing the wheel; I do not care who finds out that a product is dangerous. I met with ministers of justice of the Americas at a meeting on Monday in Washington, where we shared information with respect to problems in other countries. It would be good if we could learn about problems in other countries and then add them to our own database, but we must make sure that we have sufficient resources to deal with that.

With regard to my colleague's second question about discretion, it can be a problem in two ways. One of the good things about discretion in the bill is that it would require the test results to be made public, and I think that is good. I agree with the member that if an inspector finds something that is obviously dangerous then it should be made public. However, discretion can be a problem in the opposite direction. If there is too much latitude, then an inspector could unnecessarily harass a particular company more so than another company.

We have to give the people who are knowledgeable and who are experts in the area enough discretion to make reasonable decisions, but there also has to be some type of oversight, some type of appeal process, and public information. We have to provide some type of appeal process if it is felt that inappropriate action was taken by an inspector. We also have to keep the public informed.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the member's speech. It never ceases to amaze me how he can tie any particular subject that happens to be on his mind to bills under discussion.

That being said, the member did urge us to move quickly on this bill to get it in place, and that is good.

One of his main concerns was about the traceability of goods coming into Canada. As he knows, this bill proposes a requirement that suppliers keep documentation on the source and destination of the consumer product. My question is very simple. This has not been part of the regimen for over 40 years. Why did his government not take action in the past 15 years to address this glaring loophole, which should have been addressed long ago?

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I would not answer such a silly, partisan question, but I will comment on the mistake the member made in saying that I could get anything that is on my mind into a discussion of a bill. Actually it is not anything that is on my mind: it is anything that is on my constituents' minds. They are very happy that even if it is not related to the bill and they have come to me I can put it into the discussion.

Some of the concerns I brought forward around this bill were actually emails from my constituents. I always try to put things forward for the people of Yukon, who I hope are listening, any time people approach me. In fact, I was here until 4 o'clock this morning trying to ask them to put more detail in their emails to me so that I could bring it up in debate today on the next bill we are going to be debating.

However, on the substantive point the member was talking about, here is what he should have been asking on the traceability. As I said, that is excellent, but I have a question. If we have a retailer in Canada that is bringing in a whole bunch of products from all over the world, we can trace a product to the person who sent it to that retailer from another country, but how do we then trace the components throughout that country and the rest of the whole chain?

It will be interesting to hear from the officials what their plans are in that area and how we might monitor that, because it might help us make sure that products are safe. That will be a more difficult challenge than looking for components that are all made in Canada.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is precisely the question I was going to ask the member. As he indicated, there is an obligation under the act for those who distribute or sell the product to track where that product came from. Of course, when they are part of a large chain or a manufacturer, there are ways to do that.

The problem I see, and which may have to be addressed, has to do with the condition of a small retailer that is not part of a large chain. If it is an independent or smaller operation, it may have similar products that it buys from a few places, but when it is selling from its business it might be difficult, as the member says, to track the product sold. These people may not be able to do it.

The concern here is that it may be very expensive relative to the operation, particularly for small retail outlets, the so-called mom and pop shops. Therefore, if this is fully implemented and fully applied, it may have a significant impact on the economic viability of small business in Canada as well. I wonder if the member shares that concern. Does he have any thoughts on how we might be able to address the unique circumstances of small operations?

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a very good point that should be looked into more at committee. I really look forward to the comments of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business on this bill.

Liberals, and I am sure all members, believe that small business certainly is a major part of the backbone of our economy in Canada. Sometimes it is a mom and pop operation. Sometimes it is a single operator. They are scrambling to get products from all over the place to add a few cents to the margin or, if they are creating something, to put out enough to feed the family. If we add onerous testing and evaluation of these various products, or if they have hundreds of products in their stores and a guy is trying to run the cash register yet has to trace the products and components all over the world, how will all of that work?

These are very important questions that we have to ask at committee. Of course, to keep Canadian companies competitive, we have to make sure that things are safe, the environment is clean and labour rules are followed here. Some other countries do not do that, so we have to put into the equation how we can do all of that and, as a member from the NDP said, keep Canadian businesses in business so that we are getting made in Canada products.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in this long overdue debate on Bill C-52 regarding the safety of consumer products.

I say it is long overdue because it is an issue that has been front and centre for many Canadians and for families right across the country. We have seen many high profile recalls of products in Canada. That has very much worried Canadians and they have been calling for government action.

Ninety consumer products, many used by children, were recalled just last year, and there are already 37 more this year. These are products that were on the market, that consumers were purchasing, such as toys, for example, that children were playing with. They were circulating in our economy, in our homes and within our families and had to be recalled after the fact.

Many of these products were not made in Canada. Many of them were imported. Certainly many were identified as originating in China, where increasingly our manufactured products are coming from.

The current Hazardous Products Act, which dates back all the way to 1969, certainly has not been effective in identifying and removing dangerous products from our homes and communities. In the majority of cases, it has left Canadians dependent on product alerts and recalls by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission instead of Health Canada.

In 2005-06 more than 40% of the recalls were U.S. initiated. In other words, they were alerts and recalls that were coming from south of the border rather than from our own government through our own regulations protecting Canadians here in Canada.

In fact, the recalls here in Canada have been company initiated recalls. It has been the companies themselves, based on incidents of harm to consumers, that have prompted those companies to recall their products. Of course, they would want to recall their products to protect themselves from legal action when they are actually harming the consumers who are using their product.

I think many consumers believe that the government is recalling products on their behalf, but that has not been the case. These have been manufacturers' recalls. The best that Health Canada has done is post these company initiated recalls on its website.

Consumers believe they are protected by laws in this country, that we are a developed country. We have had parliamentarians at all levels of government debating and passing laws for decades and for centuries. Consumers believe they are protected when they purchase food and consumer goods, yet the reality is that they are not necessarily protected.

That is particularly true with imported products, because there are certain standards for the manufacture of goods here in Canada. However, when goods are imported from Asia, Europe or wherever, there is no mechanism for ensuring that those goods meet the regulations and the standards that we have set here in Canada.

I will give a good example, which is that of lead. Lead has been banned from use in consumer products in Canada. One would like to think that if one is buying a toddler a toy at a neighbourhood store, the toddler will be protected from exposure to lead.

We no longer paint our houses with lead paint. We no longer make our toys with lead contaminated products. Yet products that are available for purchase in Canadian stores and have been imported from other countries have been found to be contaminated with lead.

My kids played with the Thomas the Tank Engine, a very popular children's figure. There are many toys made in the image of it, yet, Thomas the Tank Engine trains imported from China have been found to be contaminated with lead paint.

Clearly, consumers have not been protected and the laws designed to protect consumers have not been enforced when it comes to consumer products, especially, imported consumer products.

We have called for tougher regulations, tougher laws, when it comes to consumer products. In fact, I had a news conference in Ottawa not too long ago. I joined an Ottawa area family and we used lead testers to test the toys of the young children in that family. A toy we purchased, which is available in Canadian stores, was contaminated with lead paint, which was easily identifiable with the lead testing device we brought with us. I think for the reporters at the news conference, and through them Canadians at home, it was a very chilling experience to find a very commonly available toy, with which a toddler would quite easily play, could damage a child significantly because it was contaminated with lead.

First, my colleagues have called, very fundamentally, for the government to be empowered to order the recall of dangerous products. It seems like a very basic obligation on the part of the government. I think most Canadians believe their government is already empowered to do that, but it is not. We have also called for an increase in the authority of government to require information and action from manufacturers and importers. When goods are imported into Canada, because they are not manufactured here and they may not meet the standards required for domestically produced products, there should be an additional obligation on manufacturers to offer information about the content of those products. There should be mandatory reporting by manufacturers and importers of incidents involving death or injury from a product's use and violators should be heavily penalized.

While we will be examining Bill C-52 in more detail, it seems many of these goals have been addressed by the bill, and we see that as a positive thing. However, other areas of the bill do concern us, and I will spend a couple of minutes going over them.

I want to return to the issue concerning the safety of imported goods. Sixty-five per cent of Canadian consumer goods are imported into Canada and Bill C-52 lacks a comprehensive system to ensure that these goods, when they are brought into Canada, are safe. It is not simply a question of allowing the goods into the community and waiting to see who gets sick or injured by these products. It is about putting some obligation on the manufacturers of these products, or at least the retailers of these products, to ensure that before these products reach consumers, they are safe. We need a better system for identifying risks. To react after the fact is to put too many Canadians at risk.

There is an approach used in occupational health and safety, which is control at the source. In other words, one wants to do the maximum to prevent injury, illness or death by controlling a hazard at the source rather than at the person or individual who could be affected. This is needed with respect to the importation of consumer goods.

We have seen many imported consumer goods with counterfeited CSA approved labels. It is another reason why we need to ensure that when goods are imported, they do not just have a counterfeited label but that they are CSA approved and that they pose no risk to consumers.

In Bill C-52 there is too much discretion for inspectors. While they have been empowered with a greater authority, many of their actions are optional, even when they believe human health to be at risk. The government is not required to inform consumers of safety issues that have been identified. This needs to be tightened up. Amendments need to be made to the bill to remove that discretion. If an inspector believes a consumer is risk, how can the inspector in good conscience allow the risk to continue?

My colleague from Winnipeg North, who is the NDP health critic, is very eloquent in speaking against a buyer beware approach when it comes to our health. She advocates, instead, a do no harm principle. We believe Canadians elect their government to ensure that when it comes to their health and safety, that we do no harm. This should certainly govern the approach of the inspectors who are implementing the rules for our safety.

Also, more resources are needed to enforce the bill. If we look at the inspection process, more resources need to be made available to ensure the inspection and enforcement process is not just something written on paper, but that we have the resources to make the enforcement a reality. It does take resources. It takes people and people power to carry out the inspections. We need to ensure we are not just reacting, but that we are preventing problems before they occur.

We know certain hazards have a disproportionate impact on women. Bisphenol A for example, the plastic baby bottle material, is a hormone disrupter affecting reproduction later in life. There are health implications, primarily for women, and other safety differentials of products based on gender. This is not mentioned in the bill and it needs to be considered. Women are disproportionately impacted by the health effects of not only consumer products, but health products as well. This has been an issue of debate and discussion under another government bill, Bill C-51.

Another aspect not addressed at all are the issues of product origin and manufacturing jobs. The government has ignored the manufacturing crisis across Canada. It is especially devastating in the province of Ontario, my home province. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs are going out the door. As I said earlier, there has been a flood of imported products. We have seen a growing number of product recalls, a growing danger to public safety and a growing disregard for the public welfare of Canadians.

Canadians should really think about the cost benefit analysis of allowing much of our production to go offshore to other countries and then face the growing risk of unsafe consumer products here in Canada. Is the cost benefit analysis a risk benefit analysis that we are prepared to accept? Does it not make more sense to support and help our manufacturing sector through the crisis it is currently experiencing and to do our best to ensure we continue to manufacture products in Canada rather than throwing open our market to the world, increasing the likelihood that products will be imported into Canada that pose health and safety risks?

Just this week a plant closed in Listowel, Ontario. The Campbell Soup company has, for decades, processed what Canadians do so well, which is create food. This was yet another example of raw agricultural materials, which have been produced in Canada very effectively, that through the manufacturing process added value. We were able to use those manufactured products to supply our own market and export abroad. Now, with the closure of that plant, we will have to find a source for the processing of those agricultural products elsewhere. Again, there is always the danger that with imported products, we are courting a greater public risk.

We cannot have enough inspectors to inspect every product that is or could be imported into our country. Therefore, we abandon our manufacturing sector at our peril as consumers and at the peril of our children because we do not have control over the quality of those products, whether it is consumer goods, toys, food, or whatever.

The manufacturing process is not something that happens elsewhere, something that other people do and that has no impact on our daily lives. It is about the products we use, the food we eat, the pharmaceutical products we use in our health care system and it has a great effect on our daily lives.

While I appreciate the bill is a response to the public outcry about the lack of government action and the hazardous products that have been recalled voluntarily by manufacturers, it is one small step and it certainly is not the answer to the crisis we face because of the loss of our manufacturing sector.

I know there have been other initiatives, such as private members' bills, and attempts by other members of Parliament over the last several years, prior to my being elected as a member of Parliament, to try to bring in legislation to tighten up the laws around consumer products. All have failed and we have been left with archaic legislation dating from 1969. Canadians believe action is long overdue.

I have received a letter from Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, which has raised with me the issue of the exemption of tobacco manufacturers and cigarettes under this law. Its belief is that all products should be covered under the bill, should it become law. That is another aspect that we need to look at.

The government has prided itself on getting tough on crime. I know there are many vulnerable people in my community in Toronto who are disproportionately negatively affected with some of that tough talk, but I would like to see the government get tough on the crime of losing our manufacturing jobs, allowing Canadians to be subjected to hazardous products, and to back up that tough talk with tough action.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member made a statement that effectively, Canadians who purchase goods from abroad do so at their own peril, because those products do not have inspections, so it would be better for everyone just to buy Canadian produced products and there would not be a problem. I am not sure if that is a solid hypothesis. It is good for Canada in many ways to buy Canadian products, but there are some products that we cannot and do not produce, whatever they might be.

I do not think this bill is calling for 100% inspection of everything that comes in. It is taken to the logical extreme. When I delivered my speech, I indicated we could have 100% safety by doing everything 100%, but we would basically close down business and industry because of the onerous regulatory costs. We do have to look for a balance.

In the absence of having a government member to answer a question, I will pose one to the member and it has to do with the power of recall that this bill would provide. Right now it is on a voluntary basis, which seems to have worked reasonably well. The concern may very well be that if Health Canada gets into the business of having the power of recall, it opens up the possibility of significant lawsuits if due diligence is not done prior to issuing a recall notice and a recall is implemented. There could be substantial risks by not having rigorous criteria, rules and due diligence in terms of exercising that authority.

I do not know whether the member shares that concern but I would appreciate her comments.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I believe that Canadians elect their parliamentarians to act in their best interests.

Of course, we cannot produce everything we need right here in Canada. We are a trading nation. We always have been. We always will be. We have worked hard over the last century to move from a strictly commodity based economy to a more value added economy. We have been very successful in doing that. That success in recent times has been undermined by a hands-off attitude toward our basic economic fundamentals and a lack of decisiveness in ensuring that the key value added sectors of our economy are doing well during a time of high commodity prices and open markets.

While I have never said that everything produced here in Canada is absolutely fine, and I would never say that, I do believe that many of the recalled products in fact were imported. If the hon. member checks the record, I think he will find that as well.

Canadians elect us to act on their behalf. I think they believe they are already protected from many of the hazards that we have been discussing here, but in fact they are not. Canadians expect that their officials in the Ministry of Health should be able to act on their behalf to ensure that if hazardous products are circulating through our stores and in our homes, those products ought to be recalled and consumers ought to be protected.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my colleague from Parkdale—High Park could expand on two of the points she touched on in her debate on the consumer product safety legislation.

I was glad that she talked about how the loss of manufacturing jobs in Canada relates to product safety. I think all Canadians would appreciate that a product made here is made to our standards and is made by Canadians who want products that attain a high standard of quality and safety. This is very important. The record right now is that 55,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost just in this year alone. This is so very serious. It threatens not only the living standard of Canadians but also product safety in Canada. I wonder if she might expand on that a little.

I wonder if she might also talk about how trade deals with other countries need to include protection for consumers and need to include product safety standards. We have talked about toxic trade deals and toxic products. I wonder if she might expand on that a little as well.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague probes an area that is very important. As he said, 55,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost this year and not coincidentally, there have been 37 product recalls this year. When it comes to product safety, most Canadians expect that their welfare is assured by their governments. To just say it is buyer beware, how could someone possibly have the capacity to check for lead content in products and to check the components of a plastic, and check the scientific research? They expect governments to do that for them and to provide that basic protection.

When we engage in trade deals, surely we cannot just be guided by the lowest price. There has to be more. There has to be fairness in trading arrangements. Rock-bottom prices cannot be subsidized by poor environmental standards, by lack of human rights and by lack of consumer protection. These are fundamental issues. If we are trading with a country that does not have strong consumer protection laws, that should signal to us that perhaps the products we are importing from that country may potentially pose a hazard to Canadians. Our trade negotiators need to be much more conscious of these concerns in order to protect Canadians.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, the member brought up a good point about enforcement requirements. I think there is $113 million to deal with the implementation of the bill. I wonder if the member has any further details on that. Is she convinced there are sufficient resources for the enforcement and inspectors and such things as training? The Auditor General raised this as a concern in 2006. Is the member concerned about that and will she be asking her party's representative on the committee to delve into that further?

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I did not have time to delve into that important question as much as I would have liked, but my colleague from Winnipeg North, our party's health critic, certainly will be raising the lack of resources for inspection because the 2008 budget provided $113 million over two years for both food and drug, and product safety as well as $33 million to regulate natural health products.

There are two bills before the House, Bill C-52 which we are presently debating, as well as Bill C-51. Concerns have been raised by those who are fearful that perhaps they will no longer be able to get access to many natural health products they currently are enjoying. That is an area we will want to investigate. There is real concern that the $500 million over the next five years that is being put toward the enforcement of both these pieces of legislation is simply not going to be adequate to provide the kind of consumer protection that Canadians need for their consumer products and for their pharmaceutical and natural health products. That is something we will be probing into further at the health committee. My colleague from Winnipeg North will be asking many questions about that.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to join the debate today on Bill C-52. As you are no doubt aware, I had the pleasure of serving on the Standing Committee on Health for some time and this subject has been on the committee’s agenda for a very long time. Quebeckers, like Canadians, are very concerned about the products that come into the country and are consumed by residents of Quebec and Canada without any assurance that these products are not harmful and that they will not cause health problems.

We have seen in the past three or four years that Health Canada has recalled many products. Unfortunately, very often that is done very late because Health Canada did not have enough inspectors or enough laboratories to conduct the necessary testing, as the Auditor General has reported. As a result, many products were not subject to testing and wound up on the shelves of various stores, either food markets, superstores or shops where one finds toys, other objects and even products such as toothpaste. These products have been identified as being very dangerous to health. We have also seen products for babies that are very dangerous. They could even harm their reproductive capacity in the future. With the declining birthrate that we are experiencing, we certainly should ensure that our children are also able have children. We must ensure that the products used to bathe children and make them beautiful are not dangerous or toxic.

The Bloc Québécois believes it is important that this bill be referred to the Standing Committee on Health so that the different measures can be examined in depth. For a long time, we have been asking the government to strengthen the requirements, to conduct more thorough and more stringent testing to ensure that the products we consume are quality products. There are still serious gaps in the bill. That is why we agree that the bill must be referred to committee so those shortcomings, at least, can be corrected.

It is very unusual for a bill to give special status to some company, manufacturer or particular product. Bill C-52, though, gives special status to manufacturers of tobacco products. They have had special status for a very long time, even though the costs of tobacco consumption are very well known, especially for the young people in our society, who are smoking more and more. We know too that the manufacturers have developed roundabout ways of attracting young people to tobacco. They sell individually packaged cigarillos tasting of banana, oranges, vanilla and chocolate. We have a real problem on our hands when tobacco products are being individually packaged to develop a dependency in young people.

A number of provinces have put a stop to smoking in public places, restaurants, parliaments, schools, school grounds, and hospitals. Smoking is being stamped out everywhere because it is a danger to human health. Tobacco is one of the products that cause the most deaths per year. I know very well because I myself am an inveterate smoker who is having a hard time quitting.

I know how addictive tobacco is and how hard it is to stop. But the bill before us exempts tobacco. Tobacco will not be regulated under it and will not be affected. How is that possible? If we really want to protect the health of Quebeckers and Canadians and take a hard look at the harmful effects of various products on our health, we should also legislate against tobacco products. How can we possibly not do it? This is one of the things we are most concerned about in this bill.

It is not the only one though. As my colleague said just a little while ago, we do not have enough inspectors to meet the increased needs under the bill to ensure that all consumer products imported into Canada are checked. There will not be enough inspectors, even if the bill says that companies will now have to keep a record of all the consumer complaints they receive and the problems found with products, as well as all the times that products have to be recalled. We will therefore have more information about products.

People who manufacture, import, sell or test products will now be required to have documents that will give us detailed information about the retailer so we can know the person from whom they obtained the product and the location where, and the period during which, they sold the product. Those persons will also have to have the prescribed documents, and keep the documents at their place of business in Canada or at any other prescribed place and, on written request, provide the Minister with those documents. The Minister could, subject to any terms and conditions that the Minister may specify, exempt a person from the requirement to keep those documents if the Minister considers it unnecessary or impractical for the person to keep them. We are probably talking about genuinely important bundles of documents.

The requirement that documents about the history of a product be kept will certainly allow for better traceability in respect of the various products that may be harmful to consumers here. We agree with this. There are several other aspects of this bill that we agree with, but as I said, we will have to study several points very carefully. The general public did not feel that they were involved in the development of this bill, either in the drafting or in the way consultations were conducted before it was prepared.

People are sending us letters and memos to let us know they are not satisfied with the way the consultations were held because there was no consultation, properly speaking. This summer a number of toys containing lead were recalled, as were several products that were harmful to health.

Recently, we saw what happened with bisphenol A. I am very sorry about this because a number of businesses have come right to the Hill here and given us these lovely clear plastic bottles we could use to carry our water, without knowing that those bottles might contain bisphenol A. Companies do not procure products because they are not operating out of goodwill, they do it from lack of knowledge and information. Health Canada should be capable of providing that information.

The only way we can be sure that we have a bill that truly meets the needs of Quebeckers and Canadians is by making sure that all of the people affected by the issues that this bill is meant to address, and not merely a few people, are consulted.

We will certainly be making sure that we do our work in committee responsibly, as always, and that we ask the Minister and his representatives the necessary questions so we can be satisfied that the bill will contain everything that is needed to respond to our concerns.

And we will certainly also be putting the subject of tobacco back on the table to see whether there is not something that can be done to include that substance, like any other toxic product, in the products that we want to see better identified and against which we want to be better protected. We know that if we do nothing to ensure that tobacco products are strictly regulated, there are people who may still be harmed by those products.

My main concern is for children, who were affected so much by recalls last summer and fall and this past winter and will continue to be affected, because recalls are still being made. These recalls involve mainly products from foreign companies we know little about and have not assessed. As the Auditor General put it so well, there were not enough Health Canada inspectors to do the work they had to do.

Mattel had to recall thousands upon thousands of toys. This is very disturbing, and it is very worrisome for parents, who buy Christmas gifts for their children or gifts for babies to make them as comfortable as possible, when they do not know whether they can have confidence that the product will not make their child sick, because unfortunately Health Canada has not assessed these products.

Certainly, when the bill goes to the Standing Committee on Health, our representatives on that committee—including the member for Québec, who is doing an excellent job—who know a great deal about the situation, will do whatever they can to amend the bill so that it really does what the public wants it to do.

For example, the heavier fines provided for in the bill are a good idea. It is important that companies pay much heavier fines when they fail to comply with the standards in effect. The precautionary principle the government wants to include in the bill is also very important. Compliance with the bill, which contains a statement about the precautionary principle in its preamble, will be very positive for all consumers.

The bill also gives more power and more tools to inspectors. More inspectors with more power will ensure that consumer products are healthier and less harmful. We will also ask a number of groups to testify and tell us what they would like to see in the bill.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the hon. member raised the tobacco issue again in her comments. I was curious as to whether she has any idea why the exemption is there. However, that is not my main question.

As the member knows, Bills C-51 and C-52 are linked and we have had input from people relating to both bills.

The member talked about stronger enforcement, with which I generally agree, but I wonder if she has had concerns raised by her constituents about the enforcements in these bills being overbearing.

It seems to me that the people who produce natural health food products are worried that 70% of their products would be removed in an almost police state type of environment, which were the words they used. Police could go on private property without a warrant, dispose of people's property without reimbursement for their losses and seize their bank accounts.

Those were some of the concerns my constituents were raising and I was wondering if the member's constituents were putting forward similar concerns.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my constituents have also contacted me, of course, to express their concerns about this bill. It is not right to pass judgment on people who take vitamins, whether vitamin A, B, C, D or E. I have been taking these vitamins for years. And I continue to take them on the advice of my oncologist. She told me quite openly that my vitamin consumption probably helped me beat the cancer I suffered from eight years ago, from which I have made a full recovery.

Something else worries me even more. The Bloc Québécois introduced a bill to include therapeutic and natural products in a completely different, separate bill. Certain products, such as essential oils, can indeed prove dangerous for certain people, like seniors. I do not want to see a free market for all these products, but I would like to see them monitored better and I would like them to be generally accessible to the people who use them. These products are commonly found in drug stores, and pharmacists are very familiar with the contents of the products they sell on their store shelves. I do not believe they would want their business to sell anything that is harmful to our health.

We must be careful about what we want to restrict. On the other hand, we must also make sure that the products we do not restrict are properly monitored in order to ensure they are not harmful to our health. I am referring to essential oils that can be very strong because they are very concentrated. Some seniors have had very serious problems because of unregulated essential oils.

Thus, I am in favour of a more open market for these natural products. I think that medicine and alternative medicine must come together. However, we must also ensure that not all products are blindly accepted.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question concerning the government's new ability to do recalls. I do not think anyone would argue that that is an important power for the government to have. However, I was wondering if it needs to be fine-tuned in light of a concern raised by the official opposition critic.

People are suing all the time and, in particular, they are suing governments because they know governments have big pockets. If the government were to have the power to do inspections any time there was a sniff of anything wrong, and a recall would be a huge expensive process, does the member think there would be any chance that inspectors, under threat of litigation, would do a lot more recalls just to be sure they had not made a mistake and the Government of Canada would not end up getting sued if something suddenly came up?

I wonder if the member thinks that is something the committee should look at when it looks at this bill in detail.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a rather difficult question to answer. I like to give public servants the benefit of the doubt and assume they do their jobs responsibly and correctly. The problem has not been that public servants did not know what to inspect, but that there were not enough people to do the inspections. There were not enough inspectors. We must also ensure that these people receive extensive training, so that they have the right information and can properly inspect products.

It is true that more and more people are calling on the government to be more diligent. That is fine. It is true that more and more people want to sue the government over products that were recalled too late. If inspectors are more careful and have more resources, I think that we will be in a position to recall defective products much more quickly. If that is the case, we will not have to worry as much about people suing the government.

But I am not sure. I am not yet familiar enough with the bill to know whether it is tough enough to allow for products to be properly evaluated. I hope that it will be tough enough and that inspectors will have the necessary information to do their jobs.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague.

One of the issues this bill, which deals with the safety of consumer products, does not address effectively or thoroughly is the whole question of product safety and consumer protection in international trade deals. This is something that I think is very important to Canadians.

When we enter into agreements with other countries about trade, why would consumer protection, environmental protection, labour standards and those kinds of things not be a serious part of those agreements? I wonder if the member might address that. Does she think this is something that might be included in this kind of legislation to improve consumer safety in Canada?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for asking the question.

That is one of the questions that committee members will have to discuss when they deal with this bill after it is referred to the Standing Committee on Health.

It is true that nowadays, we have a lot of trade with countries that we never used to trade with. These days, many of the products we consume are imported from countries whose manufacturing quality and ability we do not know much about, just as we do not know much about the products they use in manufacturing.

Obviously, we need very clear, specific rules for importing these products to ensure that they can be put on store shelves when they get here and that the consumers who buy them do not have to worry about using them.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, does the member think that committees should get more information on the regulations and the plan to put them in, because they will have a major effect?

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very sorry, but I did not hear my colleague's question because my earpiece was turned off. Would he be kind enough to repeat the question?

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

It is time for statements by members so perhaps the hon. member for Yukon could ask the question after question period.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

I wish to inform the House that because of the deferred recorded divisions, Government Orders will be extended by 10 minutes.

Prior to the question period, the honourable member for Laval had the floor to respond to questions and comments following her remarks. She has one minute remaining.

The hon. member for Yukon has a question, I believe, or a comment.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, just before oral questions I was asking the member about making sure that at committee the plan for the regulations, which would have a big effect, comes out, as well as the plan on the resources to pay for the inspectors and the human resources required.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am certain that my colleagues for Québec and for Verchères—Les Patriotes will ensure that those two points will be given careful consideration when the bill is reviewed in committee.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Bill C-52, which proposes changes to the regulatory regime for consumer products in Canada.

This bill is long overdue. I say that because of the very high number of product recalls in Canada, so much so that Canadian families no longer know about the safety of the products they are buying. What should be at the forefront of public policy is the safety of Canadians, not the corporate financial bottom line, which has too long been the case. There are trade deals which Canada has signed with other countries which afford no protection for consumers. Not only is there no protection, but protection is being traded for rock bottom prices. We have paid a high price for that.

Recently, the member for Winnipeg North eloquently expressed the years of unsuccessful efforts by members of Parliament to bring real change that would give Canadian consumers confidence in the products they buy. Years of scientific studies have shown that there are many products on the market today that pose unnecessary risks to the health and well-being of our children. Today in the race toward market deregulation, greater access to cheap goods has come at a high price.

I am reminded of the Thomas the Tank Engine wooden railway toys my grandson has been playing with for a number of years. As a young toddler he put them in his mouth and was unnecessarily exposed to a toy contaminated with lead. There are more than 1.5 million of these toys in the United States alone and another 325,000 in other parts of the world, including Canada. I mention these toys to demonstrate that there is currently no uniformity in product standards. By consequence there is no assurance that all these products are safe for use. Although Bill C-52 is a step forward, it does not address the issue of standards in these products.

The risk management approach may target the high risk sources for higher surveillance, but overall, the system depends on reacting to safety problems identified through use after the fact. Some have suggested a stated ban on products containing toxic substances enforced through a pre-entry testing system financed through a service, for example, applied at the border.

I am hoping that at committee we will have the opportunity to invite some researchers and scientists to speak to the real gaps that exist in laboratory testing by many companies. We are going to be looking for an amendment to improve the testing system to improve it. While inspectors have been empowered with greater authority, many of their actions remain optional, even when they believe human health is at risk. We believe this should change.

It is simply not enough for the federal government to say that it will deal decisively with these products that prove toxic and bring forward legislation that states the government may act. There must be both the will and the resources to do so. It is not clear that the Conservative government which preaches deregulation and a hands-off approach to government would put up the resources when it is necessary.

What has been presented in the budget is inadequate to do that job. Any attempt to create legislation around this issue must ensure that we have adequate standards in place and that we are ready to enforce them. Anything less will do very little, if anything, to improve the situation.

Like my colleague from Winnipeg North, I am concerned that the interests of large manufacturers and other companies that may be affected by the legislation are being weighted far more heavily than the health and needs of people around the country.

What is required is a proactive approach from the government and this approach must be both people centred and principled. It seems often to many Canadians that Health Canada has become the handmaiden of industry. In some respects it is losing its reputation as the protector of Canadian health. We must do more to bring about greater scrutiny of imported products as well as greater accountability.

It is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that hazardous materials are not used in the manufacture of products destined for the use of people in our country and to ensure that products are properly tested before they reach the markets.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a prime example of a substance that has been in use for many years. It is found in plastic bottles, cans and so on. A recent finding has shown it to have a detrimental effect on health, especially that of babies and children. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers are other substances that are ubiquitous in our environment. They are found in common household items and they are known to be toxic to our health and well-being. They have not been regulated by the government. Canadians would expect the government to ensure the safety of these products.

It is alarming that we continue to hear frequent reports of products that contain these and other chemicals that are noxious to our health. I question very seriously whether Bill C-52 has the teeth to seek a ban of products containing chemicals such as those I mentioned.

Bill C-52 certainly represents a step forward but it needs amendment. We cannot fail in our duty to protect the health of Canadians simply to ensure that there are fewer impediments to trade, or because the government is not inclined to introduce new “trade irritants”, as it calls them.

Canadians must be able to count on their government to properly examine and regulate the products that find their way into our stores. For instance, how could we ask parents to ensure that the toys they buy for their children do not contain lead or other toxic substances?

Unfortunately, I do not see anything in this bill that would allow the government to take rapid and decisive action to ban such products that are found to be dangerous. It is even more unfortunate that this lack of commitment on the part of the federal government may mean that more Canadians will suffer as a result of substandards.

We have an opportunity today to act resolutely to reduce the contamination and injuries caused by chemical products in the manufacture of such diverse items as household goods, children’s toys and other consumer products.

In committee, we will be proposing amendments to ensure the safety of products intended for family use. To do that, we need an absolute commitment from the federal government. The government must be ready to take all necessary measures to protect Canadians.

It remains to be seen whether this bill will really regulate the consumer products we see in Canada every day.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Bloc Québécois to Bill C-52, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products. As we know, our societies are changing. In Quebec, our fondest hope is that families will be able to rear their children in a safe environment.

In 2008, as we are talking here, a year after a major toy recall that I will explain in my presentation, we cannot offer those families any guarantee that the toys and other consumer products made available for children do not contain certain contaminants. This is particularly difficult to understand when it is ultimately a direct effect of globalization.

Our toys and other consumer products intended for children are no longer manufactured in Quebec or Canada. Obviously, that is a choice. With the Conservatives, we see the well-known free market syndrome. That is the Conservative philosophy. Leave things alone. Ultimately, the strong will prevail over the weak in the manufacturing industry.

With globalization, it is no longer the strong in Quebec or Canada who are prevailing over the weak in Quebec or Canada, it is the international giants winning out over our own businesses. How do they manage to win this manufacturing war? Simple: they have their products made in countries where there are no environmental standards, and thus we have the sad fact that today we are having to talk about a bill, Bill C-52, dealing with the safety of consumer products.

It is simple because consumer products are no longer being manufactured and produced in Canada. It is the laissez-faire attitude of the Conservatives, among others, that is largely responsible for this and is the reason why we are having discussions about this bill.

I would like to review a little of the historical context of this problem. As I explained, we have the laissez-faire approach widely adopted by the Conservatives. But there is another side of the coin: there are no constraints when we talk about what is required of manufacturers of products that could be dangerous who fall under federal jurisdiction. We are talking about cosmetics, baby cribs, tents, rugs, and, among other things, toys. There are no rules requiring that they test the products and demonstrate that they are not a threat to the health and safety of consumers. The companies are not required to test the products.

Now, since we do not manufacture them here any more, the products on sale often come from distributors. The manufacturer is no longer here in Canada or Quebec. The distributors sell a product they did not manufacture. There is no rule that requires companies that bring in a product manufactured outside Canada to follow any procedure to verify the content in terms of harmful or dangerous products that might be present in the goods sold.

As long as this law is not in force, consumers have no real protection against the incidents that forced the recall of thousands of toys manufactured in China, for example. There is also the case where banned toxic substances were found in tubes of toothpaste coming from South Africa.

These are recent examples. That is what is surprising, what floors me and surely also floored the Quebeckers who are listening to us, and Canadians, because we should have expected something else. We have gone beyond the year 2000. We should at least be capable of providing the public with a guarantee that what is sold on the store shelves does not contain toxic substances.

To the contrary, in the summer of 2007, thousands of toys made in China were recalled by their manufacturers because they contained lead. We are all very familiar with how Quebec, and Canada as well, fought over lead. At the time, the Bloc Québécois wanted the minister to act without delay. It wanted the safety requirements for dangerous products tightened in order to eliminate the production, promotion and marketing of dangerous products. The Bloc wanted Ottawa to place the onus on manufacturers for inspecting their products and demonstrating that they were not dangerous to consumer health or safety.

That was very clear. There was a huge recall last summer and the media started talking about it. That was in the summer of 2007. It is almost the summer of 2008 now and we certainly felt over the winter that it would still take a while. Once again, the government has shown its apathy. Finally it decided in early 2008 to introduce this bill and try to regulate product safety.

The Conservatives have a stupefying way of doing things. When they see something, they do not act right away, probably so as not to hurt the lobby and their distributor friends. The Conservatives have fewer and fewer friends in manufacturing, of course, because they are being wiped out as 2,000 to 3,000 jobs disappear every week. They have lots of friends, though, among distributors. Just look at their reaction to companies when it comes time to help them.

We saw what happened with summer jobs. The minister in charge was scandalous. The summer jobs in his riding were at Wal-Mart. That is what he wanted. But that is not what happened in Quebec where we had Bloc members. We helped the companies that really needed it. In short, that was his Conservative way of helping business create jobs.

When the manufacturers have finally been wiped out in our ridings, as the Conservatives have done, there will be nothing left but distributors. So what do they do? Once again, the biggest eat the smallest. It is the law of the market, as established by the Conservatives. So there are still Wal-Marts left, and if the minister wanted to help business create summer jobs, it had to be at Wal-Mart. That was his choice.

This is probably what prompted the government not to react in the summer of 2007 when the toys were being recalled.

When there is a recall, product is withdrawn from the shelves of retailers, which are now the Wal-Marts of this world and the big department stores. So they lose money. They had a problem with that. They probably could have been compensated, but they had a problem with taking product off the shelves and returning it. The government decided, therefore, not to act immediately. It decided to give the companies time to do the recall themselves and not impose any standards. So the companies did the recalls. They acted in good faith and without supervision. The government had not established any procedure to follow in anticipation of this problem, even though it could be seen coming.

When manufacturers abandon Canada to set up abroad, especially in developing countries where they do not have to comply with environmental or other standards regarding the products they use in making their consumer goods, it is clear that some day they will be selling items at reduced prices in industrialized countries that are not produced there. Why? Because the materials used are not permitted in many manufacturing sectors in developed countries. Thus, countries such as China, South Africa and others can sell us products that do not comply with the quality standards for consumer products.

That is disturbing. We are trying to help young families. In Quebec, we have established, for example, a network of child care centres. We are trying to establish a balanced concept of work and family that will encourage our young people to have children. Yet, alongside this system of support to families, we allow businesses to distribute products that are dangerous to health. It is completely ridiculous.

We put in place a fine structure that meets people's needs and, in parallel, we torpedo the whole thing because, in the end, someone decided that the free market does not have to guarantee health or safety. That is the reality. Our consumer goods are manufactured in developing countries, where we know very well there is no respect for environmental or quality standards in the materials that go into the products for sale.

Clearly, the products they sell to us wind up causing problems. That is what happened in the summer of 2007: there were recalls. I do not want to name names, but some large retailers buy and sell at discount prices. I have time to mention some examples of the toy recalls. Among others, Mattel had nine toys in its Barbie line that were defective. I have never played with those toys, but there are many young people who do. My daughter enjoyed those toys a lot. Today, as a potential grandfather in a few years, I am concerned.

We did not have these problems at the time my daughter played with those toys because they were made in Canada. However, these goods are now made in developing countries—strictly for economic reasons. I will not be able to even suggest to my grandchildren that they play with the same toys that I bought for my daughter because I will no longer be sure they are not dangerous to their health.

I do not understand why the Conservative Party waited so long. The problems occurred in July. They should have rushed to adopt this bill. There should be a campaign, with lots of publicity, against any sale of these products.

Think of it: in 2008, there is no inspection service for imported goods that our children play with. We are in a process of self-destruction because, for economic reasons, we have decided not to assist our Quebec and Canadian manufacturers and we have given free reign to the free market.

I explained all that earlier and it is important to repeat it for the men and women listening to us. In a free market, the big swallow the little. This was certainly how it was in our communities in Quebec and surely in the rest of Canada too, where larger companies buy up smaller ones.

Now that we have globalization, though, it is international companies that buy up names. We saw it with Crocs, a Quebec idea that was bought up by the Americans, who finally decided two weeks ago to end production in Quebec because they wanted to transfer their operations to emerging countries where they could make more money.

They are not even trying to save a company that is losing money. These are companies that are already making a profit but want to double it because they are listed on the stock exchange and want to give their shareholders more money. All that the chairmen of these companies want is a bigger bonus at the end of the year. Ultimately, they could not care less about the health of the people who buy their products.

I am very happy not to be a Conservative. That is how these people think. I am worried that the Quebec members of the Conservative Party think like that as well. It is totally absurd, but that is how it is when people are illogical.

If the Conservatives were logical, they would have wanted to introduce this bill back in July 2007 and would have immediately required all imported products to be inspected, at least those intended for children.

Even if we members of Parliament are willing to consume products that are life threatening, I would not wish that on the citizens who elected us and we should at least protect the lives and health of our children. At least we would be doing that for future generations.

The Conservative approach, though, is to emphasize profit at all cost, regardless of what happens. They want that dividend in their pockets every three months, and who cares if the rest of the world around them is starving.

I have a very hard time with this. That is why I was anxious to speak to Bill C-52. Is it a good bill that deserves attention? It is a step in the right direction. The Bloc Québécois definitely wants it discussed in committee to ensure that the Conservatives do not just set up a monitoring and inspection system. If they do not provide the money and personnel needed to do the job, not much will change. There will be a law, but no one will be there to enforce it because the Conservatives decided not to provide the necessary budget.

Once again, they want to protect their distributor friends like the Wal-Marts of this world. We have to watch out for that. It is a danger. It is not enough just to pass legislation: we have to make sure that the budget follows.

This is disturbing. It happened in July 2007, less than a year ago. They waited until January 2008. The Americans, and particularly the Republicans, who are like the Conservatives and leave the free market alone, responded faster than the Conservatives. The world must have gone crazy. It is probably the urge to make a profit at all cost for their pals that made them not respond quickly. That is why, for one thing, the Bloc Québécois and the other opposition parties are making sure that we do not just enact Bill C-52, but that a whole range of services is put in place, including mandatory inspection of all products sold. This has to be done.

It is not enough to say in a bill that products must not contain contaminants like lead and so on. We can certainly list them, but with all the products arriving in Vancouver by boat, we need to set up a monitoring system. As we have seen, billions of dollars are being invested in the infrastructure project to build the Asia-Pacific gateway, but nothing will be spent on the St. Lawrence—Great Lakes corridor gateway. I am in a good position to talk about this because I sit on the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

We are well aware that this is because all of the products come from Asia and the emerging countries. The doors are wide open to them. We have to rebuild all of the port infrastructures and build new rail lines to bring the goods in. The only thing we are forgetting is that what we are bringing in and what we are putting on the shelves, particularly when it is intended for children, has been produced with contaminants. This makes no sense.

The Conservatives at least have to be consistent. It is not enough to import products because our distributors are demanding them and the Wal-Marts of this world want stock to sell. We have to be able to make sure that the things intended for our children do not threaten their health and do not contain products we have already banned here.

We will vote for this bill. The Bloc Québécois will be extremely vigilant, to make sure that a whole system is set up to implement the provisions of this bill, including the inspection system. This system will require manufacturers in other countries to guarantee that their products are compliant and send product samples before the products are shipped here, so that we can ensure that they do not contain any contaminants. Then, when the products arrive en masse, inspections will have to be carried out, because manufacturers could send us product samples and then ship other types of products. They may have had products manufactured in two or three different locations, have a distribution centre in an emerging country or have products that come from all over. That is how things work.

We have to be logical. We know that products are no longer made here, so we have to monitor the whole system and conduct random inspections. Inspectors can go to the port, open the boxes and analyze the product. We need to do something for ourselves once in a while and stop thinking about our wallets and who contributed to the Conservative campaign fund. We need to think of ourselves, our children and future generations. We should be proud to stand up in this House and vote for a bill like Bill C-52. That is my message for the Conservatives, because they have no choice.

They know that the Republicans in the United States acted faster than they did. We need to make sure in committee that the Conservatives support the amendments the Bloc Québécois will make, so that we have the money needed for a comprehensive inspection system. One day, our children will thank us for voting for Bill C-52 in this House.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciated my colleague's speech. I would like to ask him a question.

We know that in Canada alone there are approximately 5 million people who smoke cigarettes. We also know that 35,000 deaths a year are caused by cigarettes or by the indirect effects of cigarette smoke, and that these deaths could be prevented if we imposed more restrictions on tobacco producers. We know that tobacco is banned in a number of provinces and in many public places.

However, contrary to all of the other restricted products that are covered by regulation, Bill C-52 would make tobacco the only product exempted by a section of the act itself. All other exemptions are by regulation.

Does the member not find it a bit odd that in Bill C-52, the Conservative government thought to add a clause exempting tobacco, thus allowing manufacturers of tobacco products to continue to produce those products without worry, even though the government knows that health care costs will continue to mount if we do not pay more attention to these products? Think about the new cigarillos that are on the market and that will carry no health warning for another six years.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Laval for her question.

What she says is very important because it concerns the whole principle of adopting the bill so that it can be sent to committee for improvement. At that point, the minister clearly would have to answer this question: why have tobacco products been excluded?

Surely, no one will be surprised that a party such as the Bloc Québécois is calling for tobacco products to be included in this legislation. Increasingly, products containing imported materials are found on store shelves. It is no secret. Tobacco manufacturing has practically disappeared—in Quebec at any rate. There are a few remnants, but not much.

That means that while more tobacco products are being sold, the contents are not produced here. The material comes from somewhere else. What does it contain? Once again, the Conservatives probably know, and that is why they decided to exclude it from the legislation. However, this is the kind of thing that we must be able to improve. We have to make sure that they answer our questions and that the Conservatives do not delay.

I agree with my colleague. If the standards are the same for all the companies that manufacture these tobacco products or all the suppliers, I would hope the companies would be more comfortable in saying the products have been inspected; that what they buy comes from abroad, that their products have passed every test and the products they sell are what they are supposed to be.

Tobacco products will always be harmful to health—I do not need to belabour the point. I have never smoked in my life, so perhaps I have a chance. Some people who smoke have great difficulty in quitting. I wish them a great deal of strength to stop. If there were no more tobacco products at all; if there were no more buyers; none would be sold any more. Once again, we understand that it is difficult for some people. We want to offer our moral support.

At least, we must be able to guarantee that what is sold on our shelves does not contain unknown dangerous material. We know that there are recognized dangerous substances in cigarettes; but there are questions about other things that were used in their manufacture because, after all, tobacco production is no longer a significant activity in Quebec.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[An hon. member]

No.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[An hon. member]

Nay.

[An hon. member]

On division.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

I declare the motion carried. Accordingly, the bill stands referred to the Standing Committee on Health.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and referred to a committee)