Mr. Speaker, to pick up on some of the points made by the last speaker, the chairman of the committee and member for Davenport, I will begin by indicating that I have been through all the amendments in Group No. 2, and in keeping with the spirit and wording of the committee, I cannot find any to support.
However, given that we have such a short period of time to speak to these amendments and given the fact that a number of them are quite critical to the bill and to the work done by the committee, I will address them in a summary form, issue by issue, as I see them.
The first amendment I want to address, again in terms of trying to maintain the integrity of all the work done by the environment committee, which at this point, in spite of what we hear from the parliamentary secretary and the minister that there were various attempts here to strengthen the work that we did, that is not the case. It is just the opposite. A great deal of the amendments proposed by the government would, in effect, gut the bill and the work done by the committee. So much for parliamentary democracy.
Let me deal with COSEWIC, the scientific body that designates whether a species is at risk. We took a great deal of evidence around a number of issues of the work that COSEWIC does: its existing list; how it has the list; the number of species not on the list that it would like to get at in terms of determining whether they are at risk. The list we saw contained over 200 species but COSEWIC told us that there were as many as 1,000 species at serious risk but that the analysis had not yet been done.
COSEWIC brought a great deal of credibility to the process and specifically to the work done by the committee. What was very clear from what we heard from COSEWIC and, more important, from any sector that was concerned about the bill and about protecting species, was the importance of having the list done scientifically, not politically. The amendment that has been proposed would do just the opposite. It is to say that the government will do this politically not scientifically and that the scientists will have an almost insignificant role to play if the amendment goes through as proposed by the Minister of the Environment.
What we simply did was tell the scientific community that we accepted the very good work it had done historically, that we wanted them to continue to do that and that we would authorize and empower them to continue that work in a much more formal way.
The government is saying that if socio-economic issues have to be brought in, any decision that has to be made about protecting a species is something it would do, but the determination of whether a species is at risk or not is purely and simply a scientific one. The amendments that the committee proposed, which are now being gutted, would have achieved that end.
The next issue I want to address deals with discretion, or lack of same, that is in the bill as amended by the committee. What we were saying here, based on a lot of past experience, was that we had to present to the public, the citizens of Canada, an image and a reality that we as a government would carry out the purposes and intent of the act. We are serious about protecting species in this country.
If I can digress for just a minute in that regard, Canada has a major responsibility here.
We are a developed country but we have a large expanse of land where we can protect species. In terms of developed countries, we may be in the very best position to do that because we still have so many of our species that have not been destroyed. An undeveloped country simply may not have the ability to do this. A developed country, where a lot of species may already have been killed off, no longer can do this. Canada is in a very unique position and, I would suggest, we have a responsibility to the rest of the world to be very careful about what we are doing here and be sure that we are going to protect species.
The amendments that have now come from the Minister of the Environment and his department do just the opposite. They portray an image to the citizens of Canada of a government that is not serious about protecting species. They have taken out all sorts of time limits. They have introduced discretion all over the place. They have introduced consultation that at times is meaningless and at other times it has been taken out. What that consultation really does, if we look at the approach that is taken, is it benefits the government at every turn to delay the process, which I suggest was the government's intent. It wants the ability to delay as much as possible implementing the bill and the law that we hope will flow eventually from it.
I also want to address some of the Bloc amendments and some parts of the bill which the government supports, especially around critical habitat. It is the issue of provincial-federal jurisdiction. The committee spent a lot of time on this and heard from about 150 witnesses. The chair was unrelenting in keeping us working on this. The meetings were often lengthy and often held several times a week. That was the pattern we followed since last January.
During the committee process it became very clear, from opinions we got from lawyers and a former supreme court justice who had actually written some decisions in this area, that the federal responsibility, authority and jurisdiction was very clear. As a federal government, we do have the right and, I would submit very strongly, the responsibility to protect species. We have the jurisdiction to do that. Several Supreme Court of Canada decisions confirmed that opinion. I and my party reject the Bloc amendments that try to dilute that responsibility.
We reviewed every one of the provinces' histories of protecting species and by no means were they great histories. If the federal government did not do it, it was pretty obvious that the provinces would not do it. There are provisions in the bill that if the provinces are doing it we stay out of it, but if they are not going to do it, then we need the authority in the bill to move in and protect those species.
The work that the committee did is reflected in the amendments we put to the original draft which does in fact empower the government to step in when appropriate to protect species and save them from extinction. We totally reject the proposed amendments that try to dilute the federal power.
I want to spend a few more minutes on critical habitat. We did not understand, and to this day I do not understand, why the department and the minister were so adamant about not protecting and not intervening to protect species when they had the authority to do so. We heard what I would suggest are lame arguments as to consultation and co-operation.
This bill as amended by the committee is very strong in that regard but we have a fallback position in that we have the authority to step in. If it is a choice between offending a landowner, a provincial government or a territorial government and the loss of a species, we have the responsibility to step in at that point.
I have not covered at least two of the other major areas but I see that I have run out of time.