Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the Kyoto protocol and represent the people of Nunavut on this important issue, I want to move the debate back to the topic at hand by putting a human face on the matter. I want to talk about what climate change is doing to a way of life and culture.
Inuit and northerners, people of the Arctic, live hand in hand with the environment and they are feeling the effects of climate change in their lives. Their lives are changing constantly because of the different factors that are happening in the world. They are not immune to it. They are experiencing it, just like every other group of people in the world.
The northerners and the people of my riding have been consistently supporting the government's intention to ratify the Kyoto protocol. I am sure we have all seen the first ministers' conference where the Premier of Nunavut took a strong position and urged the Government of Canada to ratify the Kyoto protocol.
One of the main reasons that people in the north are supporting ratification is that we are already experiencing the impact of climate change. We are living the changes every day. We all talk about the effect climate change would have on the people of tomorrow, but I want to stress to the people of Canada that the changes are happening now and we are feeling the changes today as I speak.
It has been documented by our people. We have heard from different sources like the hunters who go out every day and see the changes. My father is one of those people. He has lived in harmony with the land. He is 72 years old and has seen tremendous changes in our lives, not only affected by climate but also other factors. This is someone who I admire greatly and whose knowledge I trust. I would put my life in his hands because of his knowledge of the land, the climate and the weather.
He and other hunters are telling us today that they cannot predict what the weather would be like day to day because all the traditional knowledge that they have, that they use to rely on to determine their survival, is not consistent today with what they know and expect of the weather because nothing is reliable as far as the weather is concerned. The changes are so drastic that their knowledge is undermined by what is happening today.
We talk about melting permafrost. We live in an area where we do not have any basements for the houses because in some areas of the north we have permafrost only six feet below the ground. All our houses are built on this permafrost that is threatening to melt, as some people in Grise Fjord have noted.
The government of Nunavut is doing a study on its own on the different changes that people are talking about. It is documenting these changes. One piece of information received was that the glaciers were melting and this can be noticeably seen as the landscape changes before our very eyes.
The other area that we are hearing about is the way that travel is changing in our part of the country. I can attest to that myself because the ice is melting so soon in the spring and freezing very late in the fall. That affects how people go out and travel in our part of the north, especially with the lakes or sea ice freezing so late. This in turn affects the animals, mammals and fish and whether we can even count on the species being where we normally expect them to be at certain times of the year.
In many of my interventions and speeches I always talk about how the people of the north are so adaptable, but I can say right now that these changes are happening so fast that we are caught in a time where we are finding it difficult to adapt. One can imagine what effect this is having on other living things in the north.
When the summit was taking place in Johannesburg we had people from the Arctic as part of the Canadian delegation. They were honoured to be there and that Canada recognized that the Arctic was one of the main indicators of climate change. We were pleased to have that recognition because that is where most of the changes are being felt today.
The changes that are happening today are very much a threat to our culture and way of life. We talk a lot about living in harmony with the environment. If the environment were to change, then our lives would change. We are a group of people that have undergone many changes. We feel that this is a direct threat to Inuit culture because of all the changes that are happening.
We are put in actual physical danger because of the changes to the weather and ice conditions. This is undermining traditional knowledge that has been passed down for generations. If the climate keeps changing at this accelerated rate we fear great changes would happen to our way of life, the lives of animals and the Inuit way of life overall.
We are concerned with the carbon dioxide emissions and how the temperatures might rise over the next while, even by 5°C in the summer, which may not seem like a lot, but to us it is.
With regard to health factors, we have the highest cancer rates and we have other detrimental health effects that people are experiencing in our part of the world. We have had many studies done where contaminants were reaching our people. These contaminants were coming from other parts of the world. We talk about pollution from different factories around the world and those contaminants were reaching the Arctic where the fragile ecosystem is greatly affected by these contaminants.
We have different researchers telling the people of the north that they must keep eating their traditional foods even though they are contaminated today because the harmful health effects of not eating them are greater than eating the contaminated food. That is the reality we have in the Arctic. We are being told to continue with the lesser of two evils. Even though we see contaminants from different sources from around the world entering the food cycle, it is still better for people to continue eating the traditional foods that we have always relied on for our survival.
Different research has proven that there were harmful effects of contaminants entering the breast milk of Inuit women. That is disturbing for us to hear. Again people are telling us that it is healthier to continue to use breast milk even though they know there are harmful contaminants in the mother's breast milk. Those are the realities that we are living with today.
So for the north, we very strongly urge the ratification of the Kyoto protocol because the expense of not doing something to improve the lives and the health of people is greater, and as a country we have to take the initiative to deal with the harmful effects in the environment and to help with the survival of a group of people and their culture.
As I said at the beginning of my intervention, I want to put a human face on this debate. We very strongly support the ratification of the Kyoto protocol because we feel that our very culture and our way of life is at stake, on the top of the human life that will be affected if we do not do anything.