Natural Resources Committee on March 18th, 2010

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

On a point of order, I just wonder if Mr. Martin is going to allow us to have a vote today on this motion. He may not be familiar with the activity of this committee, but in terms of our travel agenda, we have an important motion that we need to pass. If he is going to filibuster through this, then that trip is not going to be taking place when we expected it might.

I wonder if he can give us some sign of his intentions as to whether we're going to be able to vote on the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thanks, Mr. Anderson. I appreciate that.

I will have to gavel this meeting to a close in two minutes. We have to get out of the room because another committee will be meeting here.

Mr. Martin, do you want to vote on your motion or not? It's up to you.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Chairman, if I had an indication that the motion would succeed, I would yield the floor immediately, but I have a sense that the Liberals don't want an election and the Conservatives actually approve of corporate welfare for corporate welfare bums, for corporate serial killers. So I'm not willing to cede the floor. I do have the floor legitimately, and I think it is in the interest of this committee to address this issue in greater detail. It's the one time per year that we get to examine Canada's asbestos policy, and it is in the best interests of the nation and the best interests of this government to use the time well and send a clear message that we should stop funding asbestos in all its forms and we should certainly stop funding the Asbestos Institute, which is, as I said, a registered lobby group that does nothing but promote asbestos around the world.

I noted today that we had an observer in the gallery from the Sierra Club of Canada. They sent out a press release today saying that the Sierra Club of Canada is joining with the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and other environmental and health organizations in calling for an end to government funding of the Chrysotile Institute.

Civil society has spoken. The medical community has spoken in abundance with a unanimous consensus, if that's not a contradiction, that asbestos kills and the Government of Canada has no place being the world's cheerleaders for the asbestos industry.

Let me explain how the asbestos cartel dines out on the good reputation of Canada.

Around the world, Canada has a boy scout image; we are the international good guys. The asbestos cartel tells small, developing nations, “Look, if the Government of Canada says that asbestos is okay, and they are a nice, developed nation, then it must be okay.”

I urge committee members to look at the Government of France. The Government of France in 1999 decided to ban asbestos, and the Chrysotile Institute spent a fortune supporting a complaint to the World Trade Organization interfering with France's sovereign right to protect its own people from the hazards of asbestos. Thankfully, Canada lost that appeal and the Government of France won, and now the good people of France are at least living in an asbestos-free zone.

For the same reason, the entire European Union, all 40 nations, unanimously banned asbestos in all its forms. They are stuck with the unfunded liability of contamination and the cost of remediation of all their public buildings, just as we are. All our hospitals--

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Harris, a point of order.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Chair, could you ask the member if it's his intention to speak for the rest of the day, so we can try to change the plans and appointments that we already have? If that's his plan, he should at least have the courtesy to advise us. Or is he going to wrap it up so we can vote on this motion?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Harris, that's information we would all like, and I will ask the member that, but it's not a point of order.

Mr. Martin, we have another committee coming into the room. It would be very helpful if we could wrap this up one way or the other.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Chairman, I'm not finished making the arguments in support of my motion, and the motion is to reduce vote 10 by the amount equal to the amount that they subsidized the Chrysotile Institute.

I am presenting materials in support of that motion. I legitimately have the floor, and I'm not ready to cede the floor for the convenience of Mr. Harris. I've seen Conservative members express their views 12 hours at a time--

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

You got your headline already.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

—Mr. Chairman. I think this is reasonable. I've had a total of 10 minutes to explain an issue that I feel strongly about. Had we had more opportunity to question the minister, it might not have been necessary to explain my position to committee members, but I'm trying to garner the support of committee members for a vote on the main estimates of the Department of Natural Resources. When I finish explaining the compelling reasons to support the vote, then I would welcome the chair's putting the vote to the committee. But until that time, I have the floor and I legitimately have a number of points that I want to make.

I didn't have a chance to question the deputy minister as to how she plans to deal with or cope with the federal government's freeze on departmental budgets. But I would be interested to know how she plans to cope with it, because there's a 1.5% wage increase that's agreed to in the collective agreement of the Public Service Alliance. Somehow, somewhere, the Department of Natural Resources is going to have to trim its budget. I'm suggesting that as the oversight committee—the committee that supervises the expenditures and gives permission for that department to spend money—we could helpfully suggest that one place they might save $250,000 is to stop the direct subsidy to the Chrysotile Institute, for reasons that I welcome the opportunity to explain.

In the first place, Mr. Chairman, the Chrysotile Institute was created to take the stink off the asbestos industry, and we've given them $25 million in direct subsidy and an immeasurable amount of money in indirect subsidy to that effect. They have not been successful in taking the stink off the asbestos industry. In fact, the asbestos industry stinks more than ever. I think we owe the media a great deal of gratitude, in that they have successfully exposed what really happens to Canadian asbestos when it winds up in its natural state of repose in foreign marketplaces.

There was a myth being perpetrated by the Chrysotile Institute that they had supervised the safe use of asbestos in underdeveloped and third world countries. We had no way of contradicting them at the time. We had no way of proving them to be wrong, except when CBC sent Mellissa Fung over there to track and follow the use of asbestos. She came back with irrefutable graphic illustrations of how Canadian asbestos is really used. I think you may have seen the images, Mr. Chairman, of bare-breasted workers in India—bare feet, no shirt, no mask—busting open a bale of Canadian asbestos. I used to bag that stuff. I know how those bales are created; I worked in the bagging room. They bust it open with a spade, they spread it out on the floor, and they fluff it up with their hands in order to turn the fibre into the fluff that they can then turn into textiles and weave into asbestos products.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, when asbestos is found in the ground, often in a quartzite vein—serpentine and quartzite often lead to the discovery of asbestos.... When it's found in the ground as a mineral, it is in fact a rock, but if you rub your hands on that rock, fibres separate from the rock. Our first task after extracting the ore was to bring that ore to the crusher, and then the crusher would smash that rock into essentially a crude form of fibre. But another step had to take place, and that was taking the fibre and putting it into hoppers, giant three- and four-storey bags that agitate and fluff this material up to turn it from rock to crushed mineral to fibre, which can then be processed into whatever products it may be used for.

One of the problems with the use of asbestos in these Parliament Buildings, in our own West Block, is that one of the uses of chrysotile asbestos was as a spray coating onto iron girders.

I'm a carpenter by trade, Mr. Chair, and I've come across this in many, many renovations of commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings that I've been involved in. The iron girders, the beams, are sprayed with this stuff called MonoKote, which was the trade name. MonoKote was the brand name for a sprayable asbestos fibre that would be applied onto the girders.

What they didn't foresee, Mr. Chair, and what leads to the problem we have today is that the material was friable. As that material dried, it would crumble, and bits would fall off and then they in fact sit. As we speak, on the top side of these ceiling tiles you will find friable, loose asbestos fibre, to the point that if you want to change a light bulb in West Block, you have to call a haz-mat team. They circle the area with tarps and put in an air exchange unit to positively charge the atmosphere, so that no fibre can be released into the hallway. This is the absurd situation that we find ourselves in, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Could we have order, please? There is a lot of background noise. Could it be reduced somewhat?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

This is the almost insane situation we find ourselves in. We're the architects of our own problem, in that our irrational affinity for asbestos has led to the contamination of virtually every public building in the country, and there's no corresponding funding for us to remediate this contamination. Yet this committee sits poised to exacerbate this problem by promoting the export of this same asbestos all around the world.

Now, it's morally and ethically reprehensible, in the words of Keith Spicer, who now lives in Paris. It's also irrational and it's economically stupid, in my view, Mr. Chair—without using too strong a word—that when the Department of Natural Resources is faced with a budget freeze imposed upon it.... I just wonder what cutting they will do in order to preserve the corporate welfare they intend to hand to the Jeffrey mine, represented in this case by the lobbyist firm called the Chrysotile Institute, Clément Godbout and his thug friends—the very friends who call the National Institute of Public Health “a little band of Taliban”.... I believe their noses are out of joint.

The one single research paper that they've done, by Dr. David Bernstein, at the cost of $1 million—the best science money can buy—is being—

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Martin, seeing no quorum, this meeting is adjourned.