Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the government, I want to respond to what the hon. member for Laurentides said and to the amendment she moved to the bill.
I think I should read the section the hon. member wishes to remove from the bill.
It is section 21.1, which reads as follows:
21.1 The purpose of the Commissioner is to provide sustainable development monitoring and reporting on the progress of category I departments towards sustainable development, which is a continually evolving concept based on the integration of social, economic and environmental concerns, and which may be achieved by, among other things,
(a) the integration of the environment and the economy;
(b) protecting the health of Canadians;
(c) protecting ecosystems;
(d) meeting international obligations;
(e) promoting equity;
(f) an integrated approach to planning and making decisions that takes into account the environmental and natural resource costs of different economic options and the economic costs of different environmental and natural resource options;
(g) preventing pollution; and
(h) respect for nature and the needs of future generations.
I find it really surprising that the hon. member for Laurentides has decided to move such an amendment to the bill at this time.
She knows perfectly well that her leader, the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Jean, was a minister of the environment and supported all these same principles. She comes into the House today while he is occupied considering his future and proposes an amendment that undermines the whole concept of sustainable development and a way of treating it in Canada.
I am absolutely astounded that the hon. member for Laurentides is getting away with this. I suspect that if the Leader of the Opposition were in Ottawa he would hound his colleague, the member for Laurentides, for proposing such an amendment as this. She has tried to claim this amendment is one that affects provincial jurisdiction but on its face it most patently does not.
It says that the commissioner will provide sustainable development monitoring and reporting on the progress government departments are making. How can government departments be making progress on things that are not within their jurisdiction? They must deal with matters within their own jurisdiction. If they were dealing with matters beyond their jurisdiction, they would be doing something unlawful. Everyone know that government departments do not do things that are unlawful, at least not very often.
The hon. member who is making these claims is saying that government departments are in fact dabbling in provincial matters all the time and therefore this section is bad because the commissioner in his work might impinge on provincial jurisdiction if the government department was doing so and he was reporting on it. Presumably if he thought the federal government department was overstepping its bounds he would report that.
After all, he is an officer who has some authority, according to my reading of this bill. I do not claim to be terribly familiar with it. I was not on the committee where the amendment was brought in but I understand the commissioner is given certain authority, which in my view is very sensible authority, to deal with a whole host of issues, all of which are of great concern to Canadians. Every one of the items I read from the list is of concern to Canadians.
Yet we have a situation where a party headed by a former minister of the environment who supported all of these things when he was minister-