Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to this bill before when it was called Bill C-48, in 1998-99. I have attended some of the committee meetings where the bill was discussed. I have ensured that we had some witnesses from the west coast because essentially their voices were not being heard and had not been heard in the so-called consultation process.
I thought that somehow I could help to have their voices heard in the committee process, but I still have a thing or two to learn about the process. Even though I had witnesses from the west coast at committee, they certainly were not treated with the deference that I thought witnesses should be treated with. Their input basically was rejected as being inadequate for the process the government had set up, which is a ridiculous posture and a ridiculous point of view to take.
That point of view was promoted by the chair of the committee. I took issue with the chair of the committee with regard to how the witnesses were being treated. Rather than achieving what I thought was neutrality from the chair, I ended up being lectured as well. I have not had happy experiences with the bill.
The last time I talked about the bill I complained about the fact that 29 regions in the country were going to get these trophy marine conservation areas under the Minister of Heritage, previously the environment minister. This is an environmental bill, not a heritage bill. We did not know where these 29 areas were.
How can we respond to the government? How can industry groups and other groups respond to a piece of legislation without knowing the specifics?
When I challenged the government to do that, the parliamentary secretary suggested that I was somehow being very controversial and asked if I could name a single area where I would object to a marine conservation area. My response at that time was that if the parliamentary secretary could tell me which industry would be targeted by the Americans as a result of the government's then split run legislation which was so ill considered, I would be able to return in kind and that would be a good barter. Of course neither myself or the parliamentary secretary were prepared to take that any further.
At this point we have received a lot of information from the coastal perspective. A marine conservation bill obviously has to consider the coastal stakeholders. We have heard from some stakeholders from Nunavut, from the Atlantic provinces and from the Pacific coast. Overwhelmingly they talk about the negative consequences of this proposed legislation.
I can talk about mining, for example. We cannot create areas that restrict activity except by special permit when we have not even done an inventory to see what is there. As one of the proponents for undersea harvesting said, if we had had this kind of legislation a long time ago Columbus would have never sailed to America, because it is so exclusionary in terms of what activities are allowed and what activities are not.
When we look at the potential mineral resources and other resources on the seabed, it is not right to restrict activity. One of the proposals has taken some shape since the last debate in the House of Commons. We are talking about 9,000 square kilometres of lake bed in this case, I think, in the Great Lakes. Without an inventory we do not even know what we are locking up. Locking it up pre-empts an inventory in a sense, because why would anyone bother? This has been pointed out.
I want to very quickly make reference to some of the witnesses we heard from in committee. Mr. Ainsworth from the west coast is the one I was referring to in my Columbus point. He said:
Columbus would never have left port if constrained by this principle. We would never embark on an airplane to soar en route to Ottawa with ozone-eating exhaust gases, injected right into the base of the stratosphere, if we really believed in the precautionary principle.
The precautionary principle is behind the way the legislation has been brought forward.
We heard from the mayor of Prince Rupert at the time, who said that west coast residents were not aware of any areas that required conservation on the north coast. He said that there was only consideration of an extension of South Moresby Park on the Queen Charlotte Islands, and that without adequate consultation the federal government has made north coast residents very suspicious. The park the mayor mentioned was created without the need for proposed legislation.
We heard from Pat Green, who is with the regional district in that area. Despite very good intelligence in terms of what the government was thinking of proposing in the way of marine conservation areas there, despite the fact that Mr. Green tried to give some shape to that in the discussions, despite the fact that the very bureaucrats responsible for administering this were available to the committee, there was a complete denial that there was any shape or form or contemplation of a marine conservation area for that part of the world.
That marine conservation area, if it proceeds in the way this legislation conceives of it, would pre-empt what has been a traditional fishery, the gillnetters and some of the other fishing activities in that area, without special permit. It would pre-empt what is looking to be more and more like a project that British Columbians will decide is a viable and worthwhile project, that is, north coast oil and gas.
This is very large area of concern. The concerns that have been expressed by industry, by local politicians and by the stakeholders really have not been brought into this whole discussion. They need to be. Here is a statement from the testimony at committee, which illustrates what I am talking about. This is from somebody with the International Council on Metals and the Environment:
To my knowledge, in western Canada in the industry, I'm the only person I've found who knows Bill C-48 [the predecessor to Bill C-8] in any way, shape or form. It's interesting to note as well that I don't see anybody from the Maritimes here on the witness stand. I don't know if that reflects the selection of witnesses at all, but I know there is concern in the Maritimes for the use of mineral potential in the offshore environment.
There has been undue haste, on the one hand, to make sure that this piece of legislation goes through this place without criticism. On the other hand, the government has been very slow to push it ahead because it knows there is a lot of opposition to it.