Mr. Speaker, my support of Bill C-94 on the abolition of MMT in the gasoline we Canadians use every day comes out of a strong conviction.
For me it is not a question of backing this or that kind of production, this or that manufacturer.
I have no brief for the automobile industry nor have I a brief for Ethyl Corporation. That is not my business. I believe very deeply in the environment. I have always done so. I am convinced that the bill will go a long way to solving a very significant environmental problem relating to gasoline in our cars.
For me it is a question of pollution prevention. I have satisfied myself, not because I believe in Toyota, General Motors or any other company. Frankly I do not care.
Unfortunately there are more and more cars on the road. I wish we had cars that used ethanol, electricity and hydrogen rather than gasoline, but that is a fact of life. As long as there are cars the only way to ensure that they perform with the least damage to the environment is to ensure, first, that they are equipped with the latest technology and that they are inspected and maintained properly.
That is why all provinces across Canada have an inspection and maintenance service which ensures that the drivers of cars, especially older cars, go to inspection stations in order to verify that their cars are safe and sound for the environment. The idea of putting new technology on board the cars is to prevent damage before it occurs, to ensure that we have less need for inspection and maintenance stations and the cars will tell the drivers when the systems have failed.
I have satisfied myself that MMT does not help the systems. The fact is that the manufacturers in Canada have said that if we continue with MMT they cannot and they will not install the latest diagnostic systems in these cars. That is not hypothetical, it is a fact.
If we are conscious of the environment, and if we use a precautionary system, we have to make decisions in favour of what is the most environmentally and technologically sound decision.
Acting to ban MMT makes us uniform with the United States, paradoxically. The speaker before me was pretending that we should do exactly the reverse. He was quoting the Ethyl Corporation's many appeals to the United States' courts-which it eventually won-to force the EPA to permit MMT to be added again to gasoline.
I will correct the member because the EPA has still not agreed. Contrary to what the member stated, in August 1994 Mrs. Carol Browner, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, indicated the EPA had concerns about the potential effects of manganese emissions on public health, especially in light of the broad exposure of Americans to car emissions.
A risk assessment on manganese emissions conducted by the EPA determined there were important unanswered questions about potential public health risks and that studies on health effects and exposures are needed.
The EPA has said: "Despite the appeals of Ethyl Corporation we want a risk and health assessment to be completed before we will okay MMT".
Some time ago, our standing committee on the environment and sustainable development held environmental hearings where Ralph Ferguson, a former MP and colleague, gave testimony on the MMT issue. He raised a number of points relating to health. I know that they will tell us that Health Canada has found that MMT presents no significant problem for health. This is their decision. Still, according to many experts we ought to be very careful. I would like to quote from this hearing we had on the environment, where Mr. Ferguson spoke of a hearing that the American EPA had held on June 22, 1990. Helen Silbergeld of the University of Maryland and the Environmental Defence Fund gave the following testimony:
"Manganese, like lead, is a cumulative toxin in that both its absorption and retention as well as its toxicity increase with time".
She also cited well-known Canadian scientists specializing in neurotoxicity, Dr. John Donaldson and Dr. Frank Labella and others who have carried out experiments at the University of Manitoba on the manganese question. Dr. Donaldson also stated the following at that same EPA hearing in Washington:
"I believe that manganese is such an age-accelerating toxin and I believe it is the answer to manganese's ability to produce biochemically, pathologically and clinically the picture that is very similar but not identical to Parkinson's disease".
Later on, the health and environment committee of the United States House of Representatives also appeared before the EPA. Its representative said:
"Like lead, manganese is not only neurotoxic, it is an element and thus does not degrade or lose its potency with the passage of time. As a result the manganese released into the environment through the use of MMT in a given year accumulates over time with all the MMT released in the next year and all subsequent years".
The University of Pittsburg, the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, said the following in a report to the EPA:
The 15-page appendix to their waiver application, parlant de la corporation Ethyl, that deals with health, nowhere mentions the newer toxic properties of manganese, nor does it attend to the
extraordinary risks to the brain of alkali manganese compounds. This document cannot be taken as a credible submission in support of this application. It is incomplete, biased and tendentious.
That is why Ms. Carol Browner, the administrator of the EPA, said as recently as June 1994 that many health questions remained unanswered and that additional assessments were needed before MMT could be approved.
So there are potential problems. I am not saying that it has been proven 100 per cent or 50 per cent safe, but if we feel that caution must be a guiding principle in health and environmental matters, we must be very careful indeed. If we really believe in climatic changes and are convinced that cars are the main source of air pollution in Canada, it is because it is a fact.
According to a recent study by all deputy ministers of the environment in Canada, cars are the main source of harmful atmospheric emissions. These figures are quite striking. Gasoline-and diesel-powered motor vehicles account for 60 per cent of carbon monoxide emissions; 35 per cent of nitrous oxide emissions, which cause smog; and 25 per cent of hydrocarbon emissions. I know we will be told that MMT reduces nitrous oxide emissions.
As stated by my colleague very recently in a question to the Reform Party, what is the basis of that? In fact our studies show in the Ministry of the Environment that the way this figure is contrived, used in test cars of Ethyl Corporation, in fact results in a completely insignificant factor when explained in actual ratio relating to all cars in Canada.
The gains produced by the use of onboard diagnostic systems in new cars are so much greater in proportion that the environmental advantages far outweigh any disadvantages by the removal of MMT.
We have been debating this issue for 10 years, since 1986. Contrary to what the member from the Reform Party said a few minutes ago, the minister sat not only with both sides, but talked to the Ethyl Corporation directly twice on this issue, and as she stated very recently in the House, offered Ethyl Corporation this compromise: "I won't put legislation through if you will agree with me to produce one type of gasoline blend without MMT to let the consumers make their own choice". Ethyl refused this very fair and open compromise because it did not want to let the consumers judge.
I ask the members here who believe that Bill C-94 is not needed, how is it that environmentally sound countries, leaders in the field, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Japan do not use MMT. How come it is only in Canada of all the countries in the world that is using MMT? Are we supposed to be the smart ones? The irony is that we do not even produce it ourselves. The Americans produce it but do not use it. Then we take the American product and use it on our own soil regardless of the fact that the rest of the world does not want any of it.
The Reform Party will suggest that we be uniform with the United States, co-ordinate so that MMT is used both in Canada and the United States when the EPA has been fighting tooth and nail for 18 years to ban MMT. The only reason they are now faced with the possibility of MMT being reintroduced is court case after court case after court case by Ethyl Corporation.
Does Ethyl Corporation care about the environment? No it does not care about the environment. It cares about its profits, about its existence. It cares about the Canadian market because it is the only market it has for selling MMT. If it was such a good product the Dutch, the French, the Germans, the Finnish and the Japanese would buy it to put in their cars but they do not want any of it. Why should we be the suckers?
Instead of defending Ethyl Corporation and MMT it is time that we started to think, as my colleague from London stated so clearly, about using our talents, our brains, our tremendous resources to use environmentally sound products. There are additives which are beckoning us. We could use ethanol in gasoline tomorrow morning and it would perform even better than MMT and is completely environmentally sound. It is time we started to use ethanol fueled cars, electrically driven cars, hydrogen fueled cars. I do not have any grief for the Ethyl Corporation which fights for MMT and goes back like the dinosaurs into the past. I want to see the future.
Bill C-94 points to a change of habit. It forces all Canadians to look at a different way of doing things and not to accept the dictates of a big corporation that only wants big profits and could not care less about the consumer or the environment.
I am an environmentalist. All I care about is quality of life and potential health dangers if it is slightly possible that there are health dangers. I have read these documents and they prove that there are significant health dangers. Many universities and many doctors of repute have said to beware. They said it about lead many, many years ago and we never believed them.
As a result of what I have heard and because of the weight of evidence I have read, I say let us go with Bill C-94. Let us change our habits and make our gasoline cleaner. Let us go to the new generation of fuels, the clean fuels, ethanol and the new energy patterns of electricity and halogen. Let us live more cleanly. Let us put the environment first. The automobile industry and Ethyl Corporation can come last. I do not care.
To Canadian consumers I say Bill C-94 is one step forward and I hope we all vote for it.