Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on Bill C-94.
We introduced the amendment simply to allow time for the topic to be studied and assessed in light of what has happened in the U.S. and to avoid embarrassment for the government and the country.
The move to ban MMT at this time clearly has little support in evidence. Everyone on the committee, including the government members, raised substantive doubts on the validity of the evidence.
The presentation of the previous speech we heard was very well done. Nevertheless it was a presentation that again accepts unquestionably the evidence provided by the auto manufacturers in spite of the fact that they refused to table any of those studies for us to look at.
We are told that the minister intervened personally to try and bring about a settlement on this issue. I would question how the minister could intervene personally to negotiate a settlement on this issue when she refused to meet with one of the parties involved. In spite of several attempts by that side, that party in the dispute, the minister refused to meet with them.
The member says she personally intervened to try and bring about a settlement. What hogwash. A settlement cannot be brought about by only meeting with one side. Again she says they have had plenty of time to settle the dispute, that the government has given ample time to do that.
In the 1993 campaign the Liberal party, before it became the government, committed in its red book to ban MMT if an agreement was not reached. In the dispute the motor vehicle manufacturers lost all will to negotiate any kind of agreement because it was there in writing: if an agreement was not reached, the government was prepared to ban MMT.
We again hear how there is no time to let the National Research Council or the Department of the Environment conduct independent tests. There is this urgency because of the technology on the 1996 cars. The 1996 cars are here. They are on the market. They are being sold. The OBD II system is onboard. It is functioning and has not been disconnected. Why are we in such a terrible rush?
Yesterday we heard from the member for Davenport that if these OBD II warning lights were disconnected and the system was malfunctioning, it would somehow contribute greatly to more pollution and would be a health hazard for Canadians. My response to that is: What about the millions and millions of cars on our roads that are pre-1996 and do not have OBD II systems and seem to be functioning quite well? This OBD II technology is not vital to the operation of a car. Whether or not it functions is not how we judge the pollution that is coming from the car. They are simply warning devices. They have no effect on the pollution produced from the tailpipe of that car.
There is not that great a rush and we do have time to do that testing. It is important in the interests of this country to wait. Certainly if MMT is allowed to be used again in the United States in the coming year, this bill and this movement by our government will truly be embarrassing. Certainly it will be embarrassing to the country to have the Minister of the Environment go down in history as the minister who passed a bill to increase ground level ozone and smog. It is truly ludicrous.
We have introduced the amendment to appeal to the common sense of the House to let the bill rest somewhere at least for a couple of months or a year. Let us do some independent testing to verify the evidence. Let us wait and see what happens in the U.S. so we can truly move toward harmonization of fuel, an objective the Minister of Industry clearly stated in the House as being crucial.
Whatever happens in the U.S. and however small an amount of MMT is or is not allowed in, to ban MMT in Canada is to move away from the goal of harmonization and not toward it. It only makes good common sense to wait until we see what happens and to do independent testing so that we have concrete evidence one way or the other.
Certainly this party supports the banning of MMT if it can be shown in independent testing that it is a problem. Ethyl corporation and the petroleum refining industry stated in committee that they are perfectly willing to withdraw the product from the market if independent evidence shows that it is detrimental. That is certainly a more reasonable position than the one presented by the government.