Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak today in the debate on second reading of Bill C-11, an act to authorize the divestiture of the assets of, and to dissolve, the Cape Breton Development Corporation, to amend the Cape Breton Development Corporation Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
The reason we are having to debate this bill is that, on January 28, 1999, the federal Minister of Natural Resources announced the closure of the Phalen Mine and the privatization of the Price Mine, both of these being coal mines located in Cape Breton and operated by the Cape Breton Development Corporation.
Bill C-11 means the withdrawal of the federal government from coal mining in that region.
As a result of this decision, once the closure and privatization have taken place, some 1,000 people will be without work in a region where the unemployment rate is already close to 25%.
I believe we should take advantage of the debate on this bill to properly examine how this could happen. Our role as parliamentarians requires us to question the economic development choices made by the federal government in the past, so as not to keep on repeating the same planning errors.
Today we have an example of this in the coal mining sector. In recent years, the fishers have also had to pay a high price for the federal government's lack of planning and poor resource management.
We must also ask ourselves how the government needs to act in future to ensure regional development, and we must wonder, in light of its numerous failures, whether it ought not to leave this to the provincial governments, which are often in a better position to know what a population to which they are closer needs.
In closing, I shall focus on the importance of planning replacement industries when the decline of others is predictable, and particularly on the replacement of polluting energy sources such as coal by renewable and cleaner energy sources.
But I would like first to return to the situation of the workers, who, after years of work in the harsh conditions of the mining industry, find themselves without work and with few prospects for the future.
That moves me, because last year, with some of my colleagues, I met the representatives of these workers, who were very concerned about their fate. They had come to Ottawa to tell parliament and the government that they should do something to save their community. To my way of thinking, they are the victims of the lack of vision of the federal government, whose economic strategy for this region hinged solely on the mining industry.
Since 1967, the federal government has injected over $1.5 billion in coal mining by the Cape Breton Development Corporation. However, by the end of the 1960s, a commission on the future of the industry on Cape Breton Island indicated that coal production should be phased out and the local economy diversified. Unfortunately, the Liberals of the day, like the Liberals of today, lacked political courage. Instead of planning a change in the economy in co-operation with the provincial government, the federal government preferred to keep its little empire, which assured it maximum visibility.
And so the federal government continued over the years to encourage hundreds of young workers to go into the mines like their father. It said to them “Trust the federal government, you young men, you will have jobs for the rest of your days. Keep on mining”. We can see what happened. Today, the government is putting the key in the door and proposing an early retirement program that, however, excludes some 230 miners with over 25 years' seniority. These events are serious, very serious.
In my opinion, the federal government has a moral responsibility to these workers and to the some 6,000 people living off coal mining, since it is in large measure responsible for this situation. I encourage my colleagues who will be examining this bill in committee to remember this responsibility when they address the issue of pensions and acquired rights.
This situation totally upsets me, since I have seen the federal government behave this same way in many other sectors of the economy, dropping them overnight, with no transition, with no alternative, when its visibility was threatened.
One only has to think about the program for older worker adjustment. That program was designed to help workers who were often the victims of the federal government's mismanagement and of plant closures. That program helped workers, in spite of being underfunded and in spite of criteria which were sometimes inflexible and which did not take specific circumstances into account. But at least there was a program.
Unfortunately, this is no longer the case since 1997. The then Minister of Human Resources Development stubbornly refused to maintain the program. And the new Minister of Human Resources Development did not have anything concrete to propose to these workers, even though a unanimous report from the human resources development subcommittee recommended that measures be taken for workers, including the 230 miners. But the government has nothing for these people. This is how caring this government is.
The government abandons these workers, but it has no qualms about using employment insurance surpluses, about using money that belongs to workers and to which they are entitled. These workers are even more frustrated when they see that the Department of Human Resources Development uses their money for political purposes and distributes it so freely that it is unable to know who got money and for what purpose.
In order to avoid other human dramas such as the closing of the Cape Breton Development Corporation, this government must absolutely have greater long term vision. If mines in Cape Breton had to close, other coal mines elsewhere in Canada could suffer the same fate.
Alberta produces 50% of Canada's coal and British Columbia produces 35%. And even if western coal is of better quality than eastern coal, the fact remains that power plants, which are the main users of coal, are gradually replacing it with natural gas.
Moreover, the price of coal on the international markets has declined sharply over the past 20 years. Between 1981 and 1994, prices of the two leading types of coal dropped by 40% to 50%. And this trend is expected to continue because this is a source of energy that leaves a high level of very polluting residue in the air.
Even the report released last September by the federal government appointed task force said that coal use was coming to an end. It felt that Canada should rapidly cut back on its use of coal to produce electricity if it was to meet its commitments to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions.
The report also concluded that, in order to produce more electricity while reducing pollution, coal would have to be replaced by energy sources that produce less atmospheric pollution, such as hydroelectricity and natural gas. An analysis suggests that Canada should reduce its production of coal-generated energy by 38% over the next decade.
I point out in passing that while Canada, by signing the Kyoto protocol, undertook to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 6% annually to 1990 levels by the year 2012, Canadian emissions increased by 13% between 1990 and 1997 and that, without a radical change in government policies, greenhouse gases could increase by as much as 41% by 2020.
In light of the predictable decline in fossil fuels and given its international greenhouse gas reduction commitments, it is high time the federal government invested substantially in the development of alternative forms of energy. The government must have a long term plan to favour the use of energy that is less harmful to our health and our environment, such as hydroelectricity, wind energy and solar energy.
If the government had acted 25 years ago, we would not see what is happening now in Cape Breton. We would not be faced with the fact that 1,000 workers will lose their jobs and that an entire community is threatened because of decisions that were not taken 25 years ago.
I will take this opportunity to mention that the federal task force report I referred to earlier asked the federal government to harmonize its environmental assessment process with the provinces' processes, so that it will no hinder the development of new sources of energy, particularly hydroelectricity, which could help Canada meet the targets set out in the Kyoto protocol.
Therefore, I encourage the federal government to start planning now, in co-operation with provincial governments, the transitional measures that will be required to reorient the economy of areas that are in decline such as Cape Breton, particularly in the energy sector.
The federal government can no longer afford to close down entire industries or regions by walking away from its responsibilities to workers and communities.