Debates of June 1st, 1999

Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999

[Keith Martin, Reform, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her question.

We are supporting this bill because something is better than nothing. We are putting forth constructive leadership solutions that the government can take if it chooses, which exist not only within our country, within our own departments, but also internationally. These measures could dramatically improve the environmental programs which I hope the government would like to pursue.

There is so much more that we could do on the environment that we are not doing. Again, pragmatic solutions exist. They are found in South Africa, Central America, Europe, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The World Bank is starting to institute some fine programs. Indeed, the World Bank is engaging in a very innovative program of marrying the private sector with the public sector. It has taken as an example what UNICEF has done in Botswana, which has taken a leadership role on this issue. I encourage the government to look at what Dr. Steve Simon, the UNICEF representative in Botswana, has done on this issue. It has been really innovative.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a delight to be able to rise to speak to a matter which is of the greatest importance to all of us.

I am sure that every member here, especially all those myriads of Liberals on the other side, represented mostly by their green suits today, would definitely agree that we want to protect the environment. We want to protect the people of our country from being poisoned. That really is what environmental protection is about. I do not think there is anybody in the House who would disagree with that basic fundamental principle.

If I may be so bold, Mr. Speaker, I would like to open my favourite magazine to the centrefold. It happens to be the blue book of the Reform Party. Right in the centre is our policy on pollution and the environment. I would encourage people to get a copy of this book.

I am holding it so the camera does not pick it up. It is not being used as a prop. It is not even as bad as a flag.

I would encourage people to pick this up because there is much misinformation about Reform's commitment to the preservation of the environment. The reason is that some people keep perpetrating the myth of what they think they would like to criticize us for, instead of looking at the facts. The facts are, what are the policies and principles—

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I do not wish to interrupt the hon. member, but he has made reference to the Reform Party's blue book. I wonder when he is finished using it for his speech if he would be so kind as to table it so that all hon. members could—

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

That is not a point of order, but I am sure the hon. member for Elk Island will find it very hard not to comply with the invitation.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am quite willing to table 301 copies with the clerk. We do not need 301 because 59 of us already have them. Certainly they are available. They are in the public domain.

Some may want to have it quicker than that. Maybe there is somebody right now in the wonderful provinces of Alberta or Saskatchewan listening to this speech, saying “I sure wonder what the Reformers say about the environment”. Get on the old Internet and go to www.reform.ca and there it is. Our blue book is right on our web page and anybody in the country can look.

I want to point out that there are some very important principles that are given here. I will read a few of them because I will not have time in my limited time to read the whole section. It is a wonderful centrefold. It states:

The Reform Party supports the principle of establishing and regularly reviewing standards that are based on sound science and which are technologically and socio-economically viable.

That is the only responsible statement that can be made on the environment. People can become extremists on one side of the story or on the other, saying on the one side that we do not care about the environment, or that we will not allow anything on the other side. There has to be some reasonable middle ground. We need to balance all of these various factors.

I have been listening all day to the debate and it has been very interesting, especially because of the different points of view that have been presented. While I was listening to these speeches today I wondered what we would really have to do to make our planet totally pristine again.

We would definitely have to stop using vehicles which pump an awful lot of pollution into the environment. It is now generally known that I am now six-tenths of a century old, but in my short lifetime I have noticed how much we have decreased the amount of pollution per vehicle.

We had a car when I was just a young man with a family. I will not mention the make because it is not nice to pick on any particular make or model. However, it regularly delivered 15 miles per gallon. I did a little calculation. Every time I drove that vehicle 100 kilometres, although we did not measure distance in kilometres in those years, I would use 18.8 litres of fuel with the corresponding amount of pollution that came from them. This was at a time when we were bringing in non-leaded fuel.

I have purchased one or two or three cars over the last 34 years. The big car we have now uses exactly half as much fuel. The old one got 15 miles per gallon; this one gets 30. It is still a reasonably big car suitable for four or five people. It uses 9.4 litres every 100 kilometres.

I am going to use the name of my little runabout because it is a wonderful little car. I will do some advertising for them. My little Mazda 323 gets about 45 miles per gallon. That is 6.3 litres every 100 kilometres. We are down to approximately one-third as much pollution for every 100 kilometres driven. That came about without any government regulation and without any inspectors. There are hundreds of vehicles like mine that are now being driven on the streets of our country.

My proudest moment is when I hop on my little Honda 125. It has a nice little 4 cycle engine. It is totally clean burning. It is difficult to believe, but I get 100 miles per gallon with it. That works out to around 3 litres every 100 kilometres. When I am going somewhere all by myself I use that bike or my slightly larger bike which is just a little less economical in fuel. I feel so good when I do that because I am not polluting the atmosphere.

I feel that it is a personal responsibility to do whatever we can individually. I agree with legislation like Bill C-32 which says we should have regulations to prevent those who would blatantly break the law. There are some. I have met them myself as have all other members, I am sure.

I have heard speeches today by people whom I have seen just outside the doors here huffing and puffing on a cigarette. It is incredible. It is the greatest concentration of air pollution. Those burning leaves are approximately 20 centimetres from the nose and mouth. The smoke is being sucked in instead of blown out. It is absolutely absurd. Yet they are here talking about pollution, Bill C-32 and regulating the environment. Let us get real.

I feel very good when I use my little vehicles and I do not pollute the air. That is a personal responsibility. Just as with cigarette smoking we ought to improve education in that regard.

In our school rooms across the country more and more attention is being paid to educating and informing our young people not only about the evils of smoking and that form of pollution but all different kinds of pollution.

It is difficult to believe, looking at me sideways, that I am a physical fitness nut. My favourite form of transportation is my bicycle. I used my bicycle to go to work for many years, long before it was fashionable. There were not even bicycle racks at the place where I worked when I started using my bicycle to go to work every day, 6.8 miles each day. It was a wonderful physical workout. That is why I am in such fine aerodynamic shape today. It was wonderful to travel along and to realize there was almost zero pollution when I was using my bicycle, depending on how close someone was following me.

I remember also when catalytic converters came out. I really do not know what it is about them but I have had the personal experience of travelling behind vehicles with them. For part of my trip I had to go on public roads. I was pumping away and breathing hard because to get this old motor going uses a lot of oxygen.

If I got behind one of the old vehicles, even though it felt a little uncomfortable it did not stop me from breathing. When the catalytic converters came out they choked me. All the scientists said it was much better, but I still remember when I was following a car up the hill from the high level bridge in Edmonton that if a car passed me with a catalytic converter I had to drop right back because I could not breathe it in. My body rejected the pollution coming from that vehicle.

We must do what we can in order to reduce pollution. I recommend that we go to bicycles, every one of us. This week for the first time I was surprised to see a fellow member of parliament on one of the city's buses. It happened to be a fellow Reformer.

I am amazed. We talk about it but who uses public transit in order to reduce pollution? Each of us likes to get in individual cabs or big limousines and drive around. We use these large vehicles one at a time. Why do we not personally take the responsibility, as I do whenever possible, to use public transportation?

[Jocelyne Girard-Bujold, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know where things are headed today, but something is up.

The Reform Party member has just said that the only platform that could be a responsible statement on the environment is to be found in his party's blue book. It contains all the answers, if I understood him correctly.

I would therefore like to ask the Reform Party member why he is going to support Bill C-32. Will he say, like his colleague with whom he shared his time earlier, that half a loaf is better than none, and that that is why he supports Bill C-32?

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, in the short time I had I could only speak on one topic and I chose to speak about transportation, one of the larger contributions to pollutants.

There are industrial processes and others that use chemicals. Bill C-32 begins to address in a realistic way some, not all, of our concerns with industrial processes.

I need to tell the member and others that in my riding I have some very important petrochemical industries. If we are to be so hard on them that they can no longer operate, are we then ready to stop flying our airplanes, driving cars and having houses heated with hydrocarbon fuels? Will we put out our fireplaces and our bonfires? They are also a form of pollution. There is a limit to how far one can go.

Bill C-32 is a step in the right direction. It does not perhaps go as far as it ought to in some areas. Again, looking at me sideways, better half a loaf than none.

[Rick Laliberte, NDP, Churchill River, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member raised the topic of regularly reviewing environmental regulations based on sound science. The evidence I have seen in committee over the past year leads me to believe he is referring to political science. By no means have they strengthened the CEPA bill as it has been presented.

The closing clause of the respective amendment says that a review would take place in the other House. The next review of CEPA may not take place here. By that time the Liberals could dominate the other place and elected members would not have a say on what the next CEPA review would be like. Could the hon. member comment on that?

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am a very firm advocate of sound science as I am a math-physics major and I know just enough about chemistry to get me into trouble. The member is absolutely right when he says that about the Reform Party. We are committed to that.

I would like to refer to a personal view which I do not think is in our policy. I would like to see an auditor general of the environment, totally independent of the political world, so that decisions on the environment are not based on who has the strongest lobby group.

I talked about my little Mazda. I did not replace the spark plugs for 75,000 kilometres. Then I put the same ones back in because they were still good and used them until 100,000 kilometres. Yet I was being told that MMT, which was in the fuel ever since that vehicle was new, would foul these things up in 20,000 kilometres. That is not sound science. If that were true it should have happened right away and it did not. I believe in sound science.

[Paddy Torsney, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, did the member opposite get his information or a copy of the bill on the government green lane at www.ec.gc.ca/cepa?

Was the member opposite at our committee hearing the other day when the auditor for the environment, the person we put in place, Mr. Brian Emmett, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, made his report? He audited the government and made recommendations, some of which we have already followed through on and many of which are in the bill.

Was he thinking about the red book commitment which we fulfilled when he was talking about that auditor position?

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, that is wishful thinking. I have not read the pink book. I think it is starting to fade a little, with some of the records in it going awry. Unfortunately I have other duties in committee. I am on the finance committee and I seldom get to the environment committee. It is really quite a shame.

My understanding of the commissioner is that he is a political appointment. There is a problem with that because one knows where one's bread is buttered. I would like to see a totally—

[Elinor Caplan, Liberal, Thornhill, ON]

Shame on the member.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Am I wrong? If I am wrong I want to be corrected. I think that position should be totally non-political, apolitical, dedicated to accurate and true science.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know in a couple of minutes we have to break for the vote. I would like to be on record, as I will later when we vote, as being in support of Bill C-32. It is a very important step in the history of improving the relationship between people and the environment.

There is a famous Chinese proverb which says that a journey of 1,000 miles starts with the first step. This is not a first step. Previous governments over the years have tried to deal with the needs of society and the needs of the environment.

The bill certainly is not perfect. Maybe it will take generations for us to find the best way to deal with the environment, but it is important that Bill C-32 pass and that this very important step be taken.

My northern Ontario riding includes the north shore of Lake Huron and the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It is a beautiful area. It is important to my constituents that strong, effective environmental legislation be in place. I have confidence that Bill C-32 will be that important step which my constituents need as we enter the next millennium.

Many of my communities depend on the forestry and mining sectors. At all times we have to balance the need for jobs and economic development with the needs of the environment. We cannot go back to the days when the population was small, when numbers were few. We are where we are. I believe that Bill C-32 provides us with the best balance possible at this point in time.

I encourage my colleagues across the way to support the government in this initiative.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

It being 5.15 p.m., pursuant to order made Monday, May 31, 1999, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to complete the third reading stage of the bill now before the House.

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Some hon. members]

No.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

In my opinion the yeas have it.

And more than five members having risen:

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)