Bill C-230 (Historical)

National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism Act

An Act respecting the development of a national strategy to redress environmental racism

This enactment requires the Minister of the Environment, in consultation with representatives of provincial and municipal governments, of Indigenous communities and of other affected communities, to develop a national strategy to promote efforts across Canada to redress the harm caused by environmental racism. It also provides for reporting requirements in relation to the strategy.

National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism Act

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, before getting into the Bloc Québécois's reasons for not supporting this bill, I want to emphasize a few points.

First, we recognize that problems related to geographical disparities affect people's standard of living and their access to a quality environment. Second, we are concerned about the fact that newcomers and indigenous communities are more directly affected by these disparities. Last, we fully support government measures to rectify inequalities experienced by the entire population vis-à-vis the environment.

However, Bill C-230's provisions create a lot of problems, starting with a direct attack on the environmental sovereignty of Quebec and the provinces. It will therefore come as no surprise that the Bloc Québécois will oppose anything that undermines Quebec legislation and its jurisdiction. Also, it is not at all clear that the federal government would have the constitutional authority to implement the measures proposed in this bill.

That is not all. As my colleague just outlined, there is no definition. As we understand it, there is no definition of environmental racism. When a new concept is introduced into a law, especially when it comes from a very specific theory, it must be clearly defined. In society and in academia, the meaning of concepts may change over time, but the meaning within the law must always be clear, known and recognized.

For instance, Bill C-230 makes extensive use of the word “race”. We understand the hon. member's anti-racist and anti-discriminatory intent, and we are not in any way questioning that intent. However, we do have some concerns. The sociological construction of race from such a perspective is not a process on which there is scientific or social consensus.

This concept, yet another one that comes to us from the United States, is based on the analysis of a relationship between the social, that is, the classes, gender and race, and nature. Some folks might remember the film Erin Brockovich. It was about a woman fighting an industry, but she was talking about financial precariousness. Today her struggle continues in Greece, but she is still talking about poverty.

Ingrid Waldron, a professor and author who has high hopes for Bill C-230, looks at the real and important issue of environmental discrimination through the lens of race and colour. I do not want to contradict Dr. Waldron, but we must recognize that environmental injustice, which disproportionately affects minority communities, is more in line with a fundamentally anti-capitalist ideology.

Furthermore, in her research she addresses the conditions that fuel environmental racism:

The combination of sociopolitical factors that enables environmental racism include poverty, lack of political power and representation, lack of protection and enforcement, and neoliberal policy reform.

She does recognize that there are many vulnerability factors. Why talk about racism, then?

The term “systemic racism” is politically and theoretically charged. If we are to have an open debate, we must not be already attached to restrictive theoretical premises influenced by sociological approaches that are firmly rooted in activism. As my colleagues know, I was a teacher and a union president. I am well versed in activism. I will be the first to say that it is important. However, activism must not be the motivation for introducing a bill in Parliament.

Dr. Waldron cites the inequalities between minority languages, including indigenous languages, of course, and the majority language of English as one of the factors contributing to the environmental burden:

While some provinces and territories have “environmental bills of rights” and legal frameworks for addressing environmental rights, gaps remain in areas related to federal jurisdiction.

Here we are. There certainly are gaps.

Last week, I spoke to Bill C-225 introduced by my colleague from Jonquière. The public engagement I was referring to and the social movements that lead to political battles have the desired impact on government action. These battles are often quite distinct from one another depending on the realities experienced.

However, the legislator faces an entirely different challenge. The legislator's responsibility is to make laws that serve justice, of course, but that must apply to all citizens. A good policy is a universal policy. It serves the common good and applies to the entire population. Moreover, universal public policies also end up dismantling inequality structures and discriminatory practices. Choosing the parameter or the lens of race to look at an intersectional phenomenon such as environmental discrimination seems inappropriate in a legislative context.

Quebec's Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse has ruled on the matter as follows:

The idea that socio-economic, cultural and political differences between groups of individuals can be based entirely or in part on biological and genetic disparities has been widely rejected by most researchers in the social sciences.

The commission added that, in its view, the relationship between the social sciences and the notion of race is a dangerous one.

Canada needs to do some soul-searching, given the reality of the work described by Dr. Waldron, if only with respect to indigenous peoples and the unacceptable conditions that exist in far too many communities across Canada.

It is hard, very hard in fact, to explain how Bill C-230 can include a provision that puts “the administration and enforcement of environmental laws in each province” back into the hands of the federal government, when we have clear examples of the federal government demonstrating its indifference to the legislative mechanisms that are already in place in other administrations. That once again brings me back to Bill C-225, which we debated last week, and to the sad reality of the undue precedence federal legislation takes over environmental concerns and provincial laws.

Canadian laws are much more permissive than Quebec's laws when it comes to environmental protection, and yet they take precedence over Quebec's laws. We will not give the federal government another opportunity to have even more precedence over the provinces. It already has too much. Canada needs to examine its priorities when it comes to protecting its population from climate change, pollution-related issues, health impacts and all of the inequality that permeates its environmental action. Yes, the federal government needs to address the gaps that Dr. Waldron referred to.

Like her, I call on members to think about the sad legacy of neo-liberal policies, those that adversely affect the welfare state. We need to be firm in our legislative intentions of looking out for and eliminating discrimination, but we must do so from a perspective of unity, not division. Take, for example, pay equity, gender equality, universal access to life-sustaining resources, such as drinking water in indigenous communities, and access to justice. In short, we must continue to always fight to ensure that we stop the divide from growing.

I want to remind members that the right to live in a healthy environment has been enshrined in a multitude of constitutions and national charters. The member noted it in her introduction. Why could we not consider the same thing in Canada, that is, including the right to a healthy environment alongside other fundamental legal guarantees, regardless of our biology, the community to which we belong, our socio-economic status or where we live?

Would this be another argument for discussing the Constitution? We are ready.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Cumberland—Colchester for bringing forward Bill C-230. It is an honour for me to second it.

My home was originally in Nova Scotia, and my first experience in understanding environmental racism was the horror of the Sydney tar ponds in industrial Cape Breton. They are now sort of cleaned up. They are at least buried. I am flagging that what was called the tar ponds was originally an estuary of the Mi'kmaq fishing grounds. The Mi'kmaq were forced off that land and put in Membertou in order to build a steel mill and coke oven, and the only African, Black, community in Cape Breton was between the coke ovens and the steel mill. The population had huge levels of cancer. It was the biggest toxic waste site in Canada.

I wish we had had the bill here in place then. I would ask the hon. member if she has any reflections on that, and thank her again.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

, seconded by the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, moved that Bill C-230, An Act respecting the development of a national strategy to redress environmental racism be read the second time and referred to a committee.

She said: Mr. Speaker, “The land is our Mother, so when we lose value for the land...people lose value for the women.” Thus says Vanessa Gray of Aamjiwnaang first nation in Ontario, and I agree. It is also my firm belief that, like systemic racism, environmental racism is something that has been ignored for far too many years. The time has come for us to act to redress the problems of the past and make sure they do not continue. Surely it should be enshrined as a human right for all Canadians to have clean air, water and earth.

I first became aware of the issue of environmental racism five years ago when I first met Dr. Ingrid Waldron, a professor in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie University, at a coffee shop in Halifax near the provincial legislature where I worked as an MLA. At that time, Dr. Waldron explained what her research and data gathering was proving about the reality of environmental racism in Nova Scotia.

I suggested that creating a legislative bill to address the issue would be of help at that point in time in bringing it to public awareness and to the floor of government in Nova Scotia. Dr. Waldron and I worked together for several weeks on my very first private member's bill, Bill No. 111, the environmental racism prevention act, which I introduced in Province House in 2015.

Later on, Dr. Waldron wrote a book entitled There's Something in the Water, which highlights environmental racism in Black and indigenous communities across Nova Scotia. She recently partnered with Nova Scotian actor Elliot Page to create the 2019 documentary based on that book.

Upon my arrival in Ottawa as an MP a year ago, my first personal order of business was to introduce a similar bill, but this time as a national strategy, in order to address environmental racism across Canada. The scope of Bill C-230 is therefore broader and more comprehensive than my original provincial bill.

Bill C-230 would collect data, including socio-economic circumstances, physical and mental effects of communities affected by environmental racism across this land. These effects are wide-ranging, from skin rashes and upset stomachs to more serious ailments, such as respiratory illness, including asthma; cardiovascular disease; reproductive morbidity, including preterm births and babies born with Down syndrome; as well as cancers that disproportionately impact women. There is evidence that many chronic diseases in indigenous communities, for instance, are not primarily due to genetics or internal factors, but instead, to external factors, such as what is in the air, in the water and in our environment.

I would like to personally thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands at this time for seconding Bill C-230. I suggest this is an example of what Canadians truly want to see in their government, especially in these dangerous times, which is parliamentarians working together.

I would like to thank Dr. David Suzuki and the David Suzuki Foundation, the Blue Dot movement and The ENRICH Project for their endorsement for and support of this vital bill. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Ingrid Waldron for her passion, dedication, research and assiduous study, as well as for sharing her notes with me this evening, because environmental racism and its effects on racialized communities need to be heard by everybody.

As MP for Cumberland—Colchester, I would like to explain what environmental racism is. It refers to the disproportionate location and greater exposure of indigenous, Black and other racialized communities to polluting industries and other environmental hazards. These toxic burdens have been linked to high rates of cancer, as I have said, and other health problems in these communities.

From the decision approximately 60 years ago to off-load pulp mill effluent into Pictou Landing first nation's once pristine boat harbour and toxic landfills and dumps placed in the African Nova Scotian communities of Shelburne, Lincolnville and Africville to mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows First Nation, petrochemical facilities in the chemical valley of Ontario and in British Columbia, the legacy of environmental racism can no longer be ignored.

Bill C-230 is asking the Minister of Environment and Climate Change to develop a strategy that must include measures to:

(a) examine the link between race, socio-economic status and environmental risk;

(b) collect information and statistics relating to the location of environmental hazards;

(c) collect information and statistics relating to negative health outcomes in communities that have been affected by environmental racism;

(d) assess the administration and enforcement of environmental laws in each province; and

(e) address environmental racism including in relation to

(i) possible amendments to federal laws, policies and programs,

(ii) the involvement of community groups in environmental policy-making,

(iii) compensation for individuals or communities,

(iv) ongoing funding for affected communities, and

(v) access of affected communities to clean air and water.

I would contend that indigenous and Black women have been building grassroots environmental and social justice movements for decades to challenge the legal, political and corporate agendas that sanction and enable environmental racism and other forms of colonial violence in their communities. Colonial gendered violence continues today and includes the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women, the displacement of indigenous people from their lands by corporate resource-extraction projects, anti-Black and anti-indigenous police violence and other forms of state-sanctioned violence that make it difficult for indigenous and Black peoples and women to meet their basic needs with respect to employment, income, health care and other resources.

Colonization and genocide are tied to the intersections of indigenous lands and bodies. Women experience violence because they are the ones who are responsible for taking care of the land and holding it for future generations. Therefore, gendered violence that harms women specifically, also harms nations which makes it easier to take possession of the land.

For indigenous women specifically, production and reproduction, land and life, resistance and survival are all intimately connected. There is no separation. Therefore, the indigenous role in fighting against environmental racism by defending their land and territory and protecting their water are acts of resistance against gendered oppression.

What is environmental racism exactly? How do we define it?

Environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate location and greater exposure of indigenous and racialized communities to contamination and pollution from polluting industries and other environmentally hazardous activities, as I said, but also in in the lack of political power these communities have for resisting the placement of industrial polluters in their communities; in the implementation of policies that sanction the harmful and, in many cases, life-threatening presence of poisons in these communities; in the disproportionate negative impacts of environmental policies that result in differential rates of clean up of environmental contaminants in these communities; and in the history of excluding indigenous and racialized communities from mainstream environmental groups, decision-making boards, commissions and regulatory bodies and in the feminist movement.

Regarding the health effects of environmental racism in Canada, the health risks associated with that include, as I have said, all of these various different types of serious illnesses. Studies provide evidence that health effects of environmental racism are both gendered and racialized and impact indigenous women in specific ways, most notably the impacts on reproductive health. One of the most significant ways that environmental racism impacts indigenous women specifically is through the detrimental health effects of toxic contaminants that include high levels of toxins in breast milk, placenta, placenta cord blood, blood serum and body fat as well as infertility, miscarriages, premature births, premature menopause, reproductive system cancers and an inability to produce healthy children due to compromised endocrine and immune systems while in utero.

This bill, Bill C-230, is important. Why is it important? It would play a significant role in addressing the legacy of environmental racism in Canada and ensure that these communities would have access to clean air and water, to which all Canadians have a right.

It would also help address environmental health inequities in indigenous and Black communities that are outcomes of these communities' proximity to environmental contamination and pollution.

It is up to those with power, and not the people impacted by environmental racism, to address the problem. Those who have the most influence and the strongest voices need to be part of the solution. It is important that all communities have the power to control their environment. Currently, indigenous, Black and other racialized communities, non-white communities, do not have that power. When they do not have a say in what happens in their communities, we all suffer.

Bill C-230 addresses this imbalance of power and benefits everyone. It is good for all of us. It is good for Canada. It would provide an opportunity for the communities most affected by environmental racism to be involved in environmental policy-making.

According to a Lincolnville resident in Nova Scotia, who is mentioned in Dr. Waldron's book There's Something in the Water, community members have experienced worsening health since the first generation landfill was placed in their community in 1974, including increased rates of cancer and diabetes.

This person also says:

“If you look at the health of the community prior to 1974 before the landfill site was located in our community, our community seemed to be healthier. From 1974 on until the present day, we noticed our people's health seems to be going downhill. Our people seem to be passing on at a younger age. They are contracting different types of cancer that we never heard of prior to 1974. Our stomach cancer seems to be on the rise.... Our people end up with tumours in their body. And, we're at a loss of, you know, of what's causing it. The Municipality says that there's no way that the landfill site is affecting us, but if the landfill site located in other areas is having an impact on people's health, then shouldn't the landfill site located next to our community be having an impact on our health too?”

Perhaps no other African-Canadian community has served as a more classic example and symbol of both gentrification and environmental racism than Africville: the former Black community on the shores of the Bedford Basin.

By 1965, the City of Halifax had embarked on an urban renewal campaign resulting in the forcible displacement of Africville's residents, resulting in the area becoming host to a number of environmental and social hazards, such as a fertilizer plant, a slaughterhouse, a tar factory, a stone and coal crushing plant, a cotton factory, a prison, three systems of railway tracks and an open dump.

I ask that all members of the House support this bill. Let us be a first. Let us make this something we can all be proud of, and let us do this for the people of Canada.

Emancipation Day

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We will leave it there for now, but the hon. member for Winnipeg North will have four and a half minutes remaining in his time when the House next gets back to debate on the question.

The time provided for consideration of this item of Private Members' Business has now expired, and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order Paper.

It being 6:30 p.m., pursuant to Standing Order 37(7), the House will now proceed to the consideration of Bill C-230 under Private Members' Business.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ginette Petitpas Taylor]

No. Thank you so much for that. That's great.

Perhaps now we can proceed through each item. To be efficient with our time, we could maybe just go through them item by item, and if there are no questions or comments, we can dispose of them fairly quickly. We'll be able to address the ones for which there is debate.

Does that sound appropriate to everyone?

We'll start off, then, with Bill C-210. Does anyone have any issues or comments about that one? No.

Next is Bill C-238.

I see there are no comments, so we'll move right along to Bill C-224. Good.

Next is Bill C-215. No comments.

Next is Bill C-204, and now Bill C-229.

I'm not going to jinx it, but we're on a roll.

Now we have Bill C-218 and a motion, M-34.

Next we have Bill C-214, Bill C-220, Bill C-221, Bill C-222 and Bill C-213.

I love working with women.

Next is Bill C-223, followed by M-35.

Now we have Bill C-206, Bill C-216, Bill C-208, Bill C-205, Bill C-237, Bill C-225, Bill C-228, Bill C-236, Bill C-230 and Bill C-232.

National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism Act

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

seconded by the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, moved for leave to introduce Bill C-230, an act respecting the development of a national strategy to redress environmental racism.

She said: Mr. Speaker, Wela’lin Al-Su-Sid.

An act respecting the development of a national strategy to redress environmental racism could also be called, in short, a national strategy to redress environmental racism act.

Environmental racism can be defined as the disproportionate number of environmentally hazardous sites established in areas inhabited primarily by members of indigenous and other racialized communities.

The enactment would require the Minister of Environment, in consultation with representatives of provincial and municipal governments, indigenous communities and other affected communities, to develop a national strategy to promote efforts across Canada to redress the harm caused by environmental racism. It would also provide for reporting requirements in relation to the strategy.

I introduced a bill similar to this in Nova Scotia several years ago. It reached second reading and we debated it on the floor of the House, at which point people in Nova Scotia started to understand what exactly environmental racism was. Since then there has been a book written about it, called There's Something in the Water, by Dr. Ingrid Waldron, which has now been made into a documentary by Ellen Page that will soon be available on Netflix.

I look forward to hearing debate in the House, and I hope all parties will support this important bill going forward.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)