This bill is from the 41st Parliament, 1st session, which ended in September 2013.
This bill has received Royal Assent and is now law.
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
This enactment modernizes the regulatory system for food commodities.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Bill numbers are reused for different bills each new session. Perhaps you were looking for one of these other S-11s:
Safe Food for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker Bruce Stanton
Members will know that members presenting speeches in the House are given a great deal of liberty in terms of how they wish to draw these arguments in respect of relevance to the bill before the House. I am sure that the member for Winnipeg Centre will be coming around to the point of relevance of the bill in due course.
The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Mr. Speaker, I was simply pointing out the origin of the bill by the unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable Senate. No one chose them to create legislation on behalf of the Canadian people. No one gave them the right. In fact I question what they do over there. All I ever see of them in are parliamentary friendship committees. They seem to clutter up every parliamentary friendship committee like a bunch of globe-trotting quasi-diplomats, gallivanting around the world on behalf of Canada, trying to pretend that they are actually—
Safe Food for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker Bruce Stanton
Order, please. The hon. minister of state on the same point of order.
Lynne Yelich Conservative Blackstrap, SK
Mr. Speaker, that rant had nothing to do with food safety. It was a point the member wanted to make on the Senate, obviously, but I wanted to know if you could rethink your last judgment.
Safe Food for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker Bruce Stanton
As members know, members are afforded a great deal of liberty. The member for Winnipeg Centre clearly is making some points with respect to the origins of the bill that is before the House. He will surely, I am certain in the time that has been provided him, draw those ideas and relevance to the question that is actually before the House.
The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Mr. Speaker, I intend to address the relative merits of the bill, but I wanted to first point out the origin of the bill.
The Conservatives appointed the party president to the Senate, then the chief campaign manager of their election, then the chief fundraiser and then the communications director. The entire Conservative war room is now sitting in the Senate doing purely partisan work and the Canadian taxpayer is paying for it and their staff and their travel privileges. It is an atrocity. It is atrocious that the House of Commons does not rise up and finally deal with Senate reform because it is an international embarrassment.
As I said, the Conservatives lost any credibility when they killed the climate change bill without a single witness being heard and without a single hour of debate in that chamber. It took five years to get it through the House of Commons through careful delicate negotiations and it passed at all stages in the House of Commons.
In fact, that is the direction things are supposed to go. We develop the legislation, the Senate is allowed to check it for spelling mistakes and then we get it back. We do not deal with its legislation, it deals with our legislation.
The best thing to do with legislation like this that has an “S” on the front is to tear it up and throw it in the air. That is all it is good for.
Hélène LeBlanc NDP LaSalle—Émard, QC
Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague who raised a very important point.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture pointed out that this is an important bill, a good bill, and that food safety and inspection are a priority for this government.
In my colleague's opinion, if this is such a priority for the government, why is this bill called Bill S-11?
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for recognizing and acknowledging the fundamental problem I was trying to address in the limited time that I had.
The problem is that those guys are running roughshod over everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy. In the one case, they are sliding legislation in from the Senate or through private members' business when the convention has it, and in fact our Westminster parliamentary democracy has it, that legislation originates in Parliament with the full scrutiny and oversight of the Canadian people subject to rigorous debate and subject to amendment to accommodate the legitimate concerns of the official opposition and the other opposition parties.
I do not care who one is, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.
The Conservatives won a razor thin majority with 38% of the vote, of those who chose to vote. Some say that in fact they stole that election through election fraud and that they have no mandate to govern whatsoever. However, that is yet to be proven and I am not alleging anything of the sort.
Tradition dictates and in fact this fragile construct of our Westminster parliamentary democracy depends on the accommodation of legitimate concerns brought forward by the opposition through amendments to legislation. We brought 11 legitimate amendments to the table at committee. How many did the Conservatives allow? Not one. In fact, they have never allowed a single amendment to any legislation in the 41st Parliament.
Laurin Liu NDP Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Mr. Speaker, speaking of democracy, I would like to thank the hon. member for his very passionate speech.
This afternoon, we noticed that, with the exception of one Conservative member, only NDP members rose in the House to speak.
I am wondering why the Conservative members did not rise in the House to participate in the debate. Is it because they cut the CFIA's budget by $56.1 million? I think we have to ask ourselves that question.
The hon. member also mentioned the amendments that we proposed in committee. One of those amendments pertained to the average 5% fine imposed by the CFIA. The NDP proposed that the maximum penalty be increased to $5 million, which would have greatly improved this bill.
Can the hon. member comment on the NDP's proposals?
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Mr. Speaker, it is quite true that the government moved hastily in getting through the analysis of this bill because its positions would not stand up to true rigorous scrutiny and oversight otherwise. Many of the amendments that we brought forward would have improved and enhanced the legislation and made it the best possible.
When we are dealing with a subject matter such as food safety, it is incumbent on the ruling party to make sure that the bill is as good as it could possibly be. The 62% of the population who voted for the opposition members had some legitimate points of view to bring to the table that they wanted accommodated.
The Conservatives are making a serious mistake, a serious oversight, by saying that no one else has any contribution to make to anything that we ever do in this Parliament, even a single amendment to a single piece of legislation. It is absurd to think that they have all of the ideas on the side of the angels on all these issues. We had a legitimate contribution to make with eleven meaningful amendments and Liberals with four, which would have enhanced the bill and made it better.
If the Conservatives learned to play nice we would have better legislation. Vigorous debate would have tested the mettle of their arguments—
Safe Food for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker Bruce Stanton
Order. Questions and comments, the hon. member for Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord.
Jonathan Tremblay NDP Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, QC
Mr. Speaker, as many of my colleagues have mentioned, very few Conservatives rose in the House to defend their bill or to ask the official opposition questions.
What is more, this bill originated in the Senate. We must therefore wonder who is working for whom, and who is in charge of strategy when it comes to bills.
I would like to hear what my colleague has to say about that.
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Mr. Speaker, as I said, the Conservatives are running roughshod over everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy. They are cutting a swath through tradition, precedent and so forth by asking the Senate to check their bills.
We in the House generate the legislation. The people of Canada elected us for the express purpose of generating legislation in this chamber. The Senate is allowed to check the spelling and make sure it does not offend the Constitution in any way and can send it back for a modest amendment if it sees fit. It does not get to write the legislation. That is not normal. I do not want the people of Canada to think that is normal or right, or that it can even serve the interests of Canadians.
The other piece of legislation that the Senate unilaterally and arbitrarily killed, which is why I believe the other chamber has lost any credibility whatsoever, is the drugs for Africa bill. The Stephen Lewis Foundation and the Grandmothers Advocacy Network to get generic drugs to Africa—
Safe Food for Canadians ActGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker Bruce Stanton
Order. Questions and comments. We usually try to keep the time for responses about the same time.
The hon. member for Sudbury.
Glenn Thibeault NDP Sudbury, ON
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his impassioned speech, questions and answers.
In listening to the debate we heard that eleven amendments were presented by our party and four by the Liberals. The opposition was coming up with ideas to try to make the bill work better for Canadians. Instead what we have is a bill from the Senate, and we know how the member feels about the Senate.
However, when talking about food security and food safety, we also wonder about the loss of the Wheat Board. There was no sober second thought from that other place when it trashed that.
I would like to hear my hon. colleague's comments.