Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to speak to Bill C-32, an act respecting pollution prevention and the protection of the environment and good human health in order to contribute to sustainable development.
I would like to speak on the issue of children's health and the impact of pesticides and pollution on the lives of our children.
I was interested in the eco-summit which was held here two weeks ago. It was a very interesting, worthwhile and provocative event that was put on at the House of Commons to draw attention to environmental issues.
Entertainer Raffi opened the summit and I think everyone was expecting him to break into a song like Baby Beluga . However, he was there for a much more serious reason. He was there to talk about a child centred world and the importance of the starting place for absolutely any of our decisions being new life and the children who we have and are guarding for the future.
He talked about the radical idea of making each and every one of our decisions from the perspective of the child and the health and well-being of the child. He felt that all of our actions, legislations, laws and all the creativity that we have should be focused on children and geared toward children. As we all know, we have much to answer to our children.
I am sure all of us have had our children asking why the water is so dirty, why all the fish are dying, why there are no more rain forests, why half of their classmates have breathing problems and why some of them have asthma. They have all of these whys about the environment. They also want to know why we, the adults who are supposedly the guardians of this globe, are not protecting the environment.
Native people speak about the idea of making decisions for seven generations. Nothing should be put out there that has not been thought through for at least seven generations. I love the idea of using all of our collective wisdom to make decisions which will not bring shame, disgust or recriminations from our children, our children's children or our great-grandchildren's children, or even worse, that will not bring illness or death.
What a concept that we could be making decisions in the House, which is exactly where it all starts, that could bring illness to our own children and the children of our children. I do not think there is anything that quite gets me more in the gut and in the heart than contemplating that thought.
All of these questions bring about enormous shame and sorrow but they must obviously go much further than that. They cannot just stop with a sense of shame, sorrow and powerlessness. We cannot just turn off the radio at night when we hear David Suzuki speaking eloquently and with enormous detailed research about the fact that we are at the eleventh hour with the globe in terms of the health of our environment. We cannot just close that out. We have to listen to the people who are doing the work on the environment and we have to listen to the danger signs.
At the eco-summit Raffi talked about the fact that there is no baby born now on the globe who is free of the impact of toxic chemicals which just float around in our water, our food and our air. Pollution does not discriminate. It begins to work on tiny lungs as soon as they take their first breath. We know it even works on them while they are still in the mother's womb.
Wealth, power and influence in gated communities do not protect people against a polluted environment. We cannot protect ourselves in any way from this issue other than by doing something about it.
At this point I would like to look at some startling statistics which came out last week. They concern the impact of pesticide residues on Canadian produce, on the apples our children eat at the day cares and on all the food we are eating. Children have a much smaller system and they are more vulnerable in terms of the buildup of pesticides. The amount of pesticides left on fresh fruit and vegetables has grown in Canada. According to unpublished government statistics obtained through the Access to Information Act, pesticides have more than doubled since 1994.
Studies indicate that produce grown commercially in Canada now have pesticide residues at nearly the same rate as imported produce. If we have grown them ourselves or have purchased them at the local store we take some comfort in thinking that if we wash them everything will be all right. For some reason we are trying to deny the fact that we are not personally ingesting enormous amounts of pesticides. We seem to be able to let this problem build in our lives without addressing it head on.
The report by Eli Neidert and Glenn Havelock of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency dated November 6, 1998 states:
The evidence clearly indicates that both the contamination rates and violation rates for domestic and imported produce are moving closer together.
Studies show that nearly a quarter of Canadian produce randomly tested bears traces of pesticides, even after inedible skins are peeled off. Although the report states that just 1.2% of domestic produce showed residues at illegal levels, the violation rate is triple what it was at the beginning of the decade.
Kathryn Boothby, communications manager of the Pesticide Producers and Marketers' Crop Protection Institute of Canada, cautioned against becoming needlessly alarmed about pesticides, saying that consumers should take into account the well-documented health benefits of eating fresh fruits and vegetables.
After having read that, I had to ask myself what the spokesperson was saying. The good news is that an apple a day keeps the doctors away but the bad news is that pesticides will almost surely kill us at some point if we live long enough. I could not believe that she actually said that. If I would have had a phone nearby I would have called her for a reality check on what she was saying about the food we eat.
Julia Langer speaks well on that issue. She is a pesticide expert at the World Wildlife Fund Canada and a member of the federal government's Pest Management Advisory Council. She said that the trend toward the widespread findings are extremely disturbing. She also said that it should be a wake-up call to change pest management practices so we can move the trend in the opposite direction.
The chemical present in fresh Canadian and foreign grown produce includes carcinogens, suspected neurotoxins and compounds known to cross the placental barrier and affect growing fetuses. These also include long banned chemicals such as breakdown components of DDT and several others so dangerous that they merit a place on the international dirty dozen list. Although they are not registered for use in Canada, they are nevertheless legal in the food Canadians eat, as long as they are not present in quantities above 0.1 parts per million.
In closing, I will simply make an enormous plea for us to stop everything and try to get back to the basics. As Raffi said at the eco-summit the other night, let us think about our children. Let us think about the poisons going into our environment. Let us talk about a decent environment bill that is going to start reversing the pollution and the devastation that we have wrought on our globe. I will push for that at every turn in terms of the amendments that the New Democratic Party are putting forward to the CEPA bill.