Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I was talking about what this act does in terms of the introduction of U.S.-style litigation and I had just quoted Mr. Chris Hanks, who is the director of environment and social responsibility for the Newmont Mining Corporation; he talks about the increasing avenues for litigation in this particular act as opposed to resolving issues or conflicts.
I maintain that this emphasis on litigation is definitely not in keeping with the Canadian system of government. I think colleagues across the way mentioned approvingly, in a couple of cases, how U.S.-style litigation seems to work there.
I'd like to talk about an agricultural community in California as an example of how U.S.-style litigation works. It's the agricultural community of Mendota, California. In my remarks I started to talk about how it is rural resource communities and agricultural communities that are always the targets of these campaigns. Quite an ugly picture emerges when you look at all of these environmental activists' campaigns in their entirety. You'll see that it's rural communities and rural economies that are always the victims--and I mean always the victims.
The town of Mendota, California, in an article entitled, “Mendota: a town scraping bottom”, has an unemployment rate at this point of 38.5%. This particular community relied on irrigation and agricultural value-added enterprises. One of the reasons, apart from the difficult economy in the U.S., to begin with...they talked about how “water deliveries from the Westlands Water District to Mendota farmers were cut to 10 percent of normal, with federal officials blaming the...drought”--and this is the important part--“and the need to protect” the endangered “delta smelt and other threatened species”.
So don't ever think that environmental legislation, poorly crafted, does not have human consequences.
In terms of these public interest groups, one always wonders and asks the question, who elected them? They always claim to be representative of the people and the grassroots, and so on. Quite frankly, the only legitimate and true representatives of the people are those of us who have been elected, all of us around this room here.
Many Canadian activist groups, for example, receive a lot of money from U.S. foundations, and it's in the millions right now--the David Suzuki Foundation, $10 million; the Pembina Institute, about $3.7 million.
Vivian Krause, writing for the Financial Post on October 15, 2010, in an article entitled, “U.S. cash vs. oil sands”, talked about 36 Canadian environmental organizations that are funded by a common foreign source. In this case, it was the Tides Foundation. Their multi-million dollar campaign, with paid full-time staff, expensive billboards, and state-of-the-art websites, is anything but a grassroots operation.
Again, in terms of the Moore Foundation, out of the U.S., for example, they have an explicit direction to their grantees. They are expected to influence British Columbia's resource management decisions specifically with regard to oil and gas. I find it quite ironic that in yesterday's debate in the House about the border discussions Canada is having with the U.S., the parties opposite talked at great length about the need to protect Canadian sovereignty, but in this particular case, it's all right to have foreign-funded Canadian activist groups interfere in the sovereign right of Canada to determine how to manage its own resources. Quite frankly, what chance do poorly funded rural communities and small businesses have when confronted with that kind of firepower?
For example, I have a community in my constituency. The total budget for the town is $300,000 per year. Again, one sees a very unfair fight here in terms of foreign-funded Canadian activist groups descending on rural communities and rural economies, something that this particular act will exacerbate. One wonders, in terms of the parties opposite--especially the Bloc and the NDP, with rural constituents and single-industry towns in their constituencies--how they will explain this to their constituents.
Even though there are assurances in the act against litigants ostensibly making too much money directly from lawsuits and litigation, keep in mind that just the fact that litigation occurs will allow these groups to advertise on their websites for funding from their sympathizers, because just the act of suing somebody is an opportunity to fund-raise.
I'd like to zero in for a minute on the definition of what is a healthy and balanced environment because that's key to this whole act. If an environment is not healthy or balanced under this particular act, then litigation can follow. The notion of balance is something that scientific ecologists abandoned long ago, given that disturbance is a feature of every ecosystem--wildfires, avalanches, mud slides, floods, and so on--and how an ecosystem adapts is the key. The environment is never balanced, and the phrase is meaningless, but it will be subject to judicial fiat.
The other thing, as far as a healthy and balanced environment is concerned, is the notion of environmental change versus environmental harm. To some, all human-induced environmental change is harmful. Not so. New equilibrium can be achieved after human use of the environment. An old forest becomes a young forest. Some reservoirs become fisheries, and so on.
The problem is that one person's change is another person's harm. It's something that will be fought over in court, in the absence of common sense and scientific information on what the actual impact may be. However, in clause 23, which allows for lawsuits by any Canadian entity against various developers, I think we should be careful about what that entails