Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I too have heard words that raised my level of anger. I feel very passionate about this issue because it directly affects constituents of mine. People I know, people I feel for and people I care for have been displaced as a result of this. The same kind of thinking that went into the creation of South Moresby park has gone into the creation of this nonsense.
We who live in regional parts of Canada, we who live in the north depend on access to resources for our livelihoods. We have to have it. People do not go up to northern British Columbia to go shopping. They do not go to northern British Columbia to bask in the sun. They go there primarily to work in a resource industry or in some other commercial venture that is most likely there to support a resource industry or the commercial industries that support the resource industry. Everything feeds on each other; it is a domino effect.
If we are going to have an economy in northern B.C., if we are going to have an economy in regional Canada, we have to have reasonable access to resources. We have to have reasonable access to water. We have to have reasonable access to the land base. This bill is specifically designed to prevent this from happening. This bill is cobbled together by a bunch of misguided politically correct soft heads on the other side who are listening to the environmental agenda and the radical preservationists. They are not considering what the impact is going to be on ordinary Canadians.
In the case of South Moresby we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of people. We are not talking about a political voice that is going to be loud and vociferous and heard in Ottawa on a regular basis. We are talking about a community of 500 or 600 people, but that community is dying on the vine. That community has been blindsided by government. How do they feel about mother Ottawa forcing on them something they had no involvement in? They are not in agreement with it. This has been forced down their throats.
Frankly, I am tired of seeing the people of the north who have put everything they own, their life, their property, their future and their children's future on the line only to have the rug pulled out from under them by this kind of nonsense.
In the last parliament the government was asked to basically rubber stamp a decision that was made by the province of British Columbia. The Tatshenshini River is in the northern part of British Columbia. It is on the Yukon border. There is a copper-cobalt deposit in the Tatshenshini which is probably one of the top two or three copper-cobalt deposits ever found in the world.
I talked to one of the senior geologists at the Geological Survey of Canada who told me that they do not even know the whole extent of that deposit. Conservatively it was estimated that the deposit contained, at a minimum, $10 billion worth of copper-cobalt ore. It was estimated that, at a minimum, it could provide 1,600 permanent, full time, year-round jobs for approximately 40 years.
The geologist I talked with said that in his experience, based on some of the further testing that was being done and some of the samples they were starting to see, this deposit could actually be anywhere up to four times as large as they had actually proven. Just consider that for a minute.
When we go to a manufacturing facility that closes down and people are put out of work, it is easy to see the sadness, the pain and the hurt because these people have been displaced. We can put a name and a face to that. However, we cannot go around and interview the 1,600 people who never got jobs up in the Tatshenshini region because of this ridiculous decision.
This government rubber stamped the NDP government's ridiculous decision to create a park by having this nominated as a world heritage site at the United Nations. I cannot fathom what was in their minds when they agreed to this.
Let me give the House more examples. In British Columbia the Fisheries Act, which is an act of this parliament, is a very powerful piece of legislation. That act states that there shall be no development of any kind on the coast of Canada that would involve any net loss of fish habitat.
If we carry that to the extreme it means we cannot walk down to the beach and kick a stone over because somebody could come along and argue that was fish habitat. If anyone thinks I am being ridiculous, let me assure them I am not. I have had meeting after meeting with constituents in Prince Rupert who cannot get access to the waterfront because every time somebody comes along and proposes to develop the foreshore, to build a dock, a berthing facility or a log dump, or proposes any kind of access to the waterfront, the first person on the scene is the local DFO biologist who shuts it down and says that it poses a danger and a threat to fish habitat.
Prince Rupert right now, because of the downturn in the fishery and problems in the forest industry, is looking at very serious unemployment and economic situations. Prince Rupert is not alone. The people in the larger communities in the riding that I represent are suffering and they are suffering a great deal. They are looking for alternatives. They are looking for ways to offset some of the downturns that have taken place. They cannot get access to the waterfront to do anything because DFO will shut them down.
I am not making this up. I am telling members that DFO will not allow a pile to be driven in the water, will not allow a dock to be constructed, will not allow somebody to build the most rudimentary access of any kind from the foreshore to the water because it might interrupt fish habitat.
Let me tell members that British Columbia is a province which has literally thousands and thousands of miles of waterfront. Let me say as well that British Columbia is a province which, outside of the lower mainland, does not have much of a population base and has not experienced much development. Really there is no threat to the integrity of the environment in British Columbia, but that is contrary to what most of the preservationists and radical environmentalists would have us believe. That is the truth.
This legislation is one more chink in the armour. It is one more step down the road.
The radical environmental agenda is becoming clearer as time goes on. These people are profoundly anti-human. These people think we are nothing better than pestilence. Some of these people have even voiced that thought.
David Suzuki, who is the founder of the Suzuki Foundation, has opined that what should take place is a mass die-off of human beings in order to preserve the environment. Can we believe that? I am not making that up.
I should point out that this environmental movement is a very well-funded movement, controlled predominately by large estates in the United States. Most of their money does not come from Canada. Most of their money comes from the United States.
Their agenda is becoming clearer as time goes on. Some of them have publicly said: “Would it not be great if human beings were all living in rural communes with rudimentary housing and no hydro-electric power?” Some of them have said that all the dams that have been created in British Columbia should be dismantled. Can we imagine that? There would be no power. There would be no means for people to generate electrical power for industrial or commercial use. But that is what these people see. That is their vision for the future.
I say that this legislation is driven by that kind of mentality. The goal is to further limit human activity of almost any kind and this is one more step in that direction. These people want to limit economic activity with the eventual goal of eradicating it altogether.
As I have already said, the environmentalists and the preservationists have been saying a lot about the environment in British Columbia and across Canada. Let me tell members that there is very little truth to any of it.
They have been saying, for example, that we need to stop logging in order to preserve habitat for wildlife. I know a little about wildlife, since I have spent most of my life hunting and fishing in the backwoods. Do members know what the aboriginal people did in this country when wildlife was becoming scarce? They went on a controlled burn. They burned the forest because they knew that a heavy forest canopy did not allow for the growth of small deciduous plants and berry bushes, the plant life that is important for wildlife to live on.
If we go into the so-called old growth areas of British Columbia, I assure members they will find very little wildlife. I can take a boat down the Douglas Channel, which is down from my home town of Kitimat, and see every place where some logger has a-frame logged old growth. There is regeneration and the berry bushes are reappearing. That is where we would find the wildlife, the bears and the deer and the moose, because something is available for them to eat. If we went to where the old growth was, there would be nothing available for them to eat.
The wildlife population in British Columbia is extraordinarily strong at the present time. As much as the people who run the bear watch campaign would have us believe otherwise, I can say from living in the Kitimat Valley all of my life that the bear population in that region is as high as I have ever seen it.
When I was a kid, prior to logging in the Kitimat Valley, it would be a very rare occasion that a moose would be seen. Now that the valley has been logged and we have a nice regeneration taking place, the moose population has probably quadrupled.
When the radical environmentalists and the preservationists talk about old growth logging and how it hurts wildlife, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Their agenda with this bill is to further limit human activity on Canadian soil. Their eventual agenda, if this bill is adopted, is to make sure that we do not have access to the waterfront at all any more. There will be no chance to revise the Fisheries Act to bring some sense to the development of the Canadian waterfront.
I am a British Columbian. I am a Canadian and I love Canada. I would not be in this parliament if I did not feel strongly about the federation, but I have to agree with my friend in the Bloc Quebecois. This is provincial jurisdiction. Why in the name of God is the federal government getting involved? Does it not think that when it gets involved it puts up big red flags, not only for members in the Bloc but for members in other parts of Canada as well?
I say this bill should be defeated on its face for those very reasons.