Mr. Speaker, I rise with great honour today to recognize my hon. colleague from Windsor--St. Clair, colleagues from Fundy Royal, York North, Lac-Saint-Louis and Davenport and others who did outstanding work on the committee. They brought to the forefront a very technical and very difficult bill, with all those recommendations and concerns, were able to get input from provinces, industry, environmental groups and politicians together and come up with something that has broad based support.
One would assume that when politicians can get competing sides to agree on something they would want to run with it. Unfortunately this government, with its agenda, will gut the bill completely.
I tremendously appreciate the efforts of the member from the Alliance Party who just spoke in support of the small family farm. I think it is a good tribute to him to do that, but at the same time that he talks about drought his party does not want Kyoto. He talks about money for farmers and agriculture but it was his party in a previous election that was going to gut hundreds of million of dollars from the agriculture department. I wonder if he told the people in his town halls and his riding that when he was talking to them. That is the last thing I will say about it.
The problem is that the environment minister stood here in question period and said that we cannot move on Kyoto until we have consultation. Kyoto has been around for five years and now we are to have consultation. What have the Minister of the Environment, his department and his government been doing for five years? Absolutely nothing.
Now we have a bill supported by the Liberal members on the committee along with other members of the opposition. They worked their guts out on the bill, only to have the government, in a very backhanded, very mean and vindictive way, tell its own backbench members of parliament that their work does not mean anything. All the money they spent, all the time and all the effort mean absolutely nothing. That is unacceptable in a parliamentary situation. If the Liberals treat their own members that way, no wonder they treat the rest of us in parliament the way they do.
We have talked about species at risk. The reality is that the committee considered over 330 amendments to the bill and tabled its report with over 125 of them. The bill in its current form, prior to the government getting its hands on it, represents the absolute minimum in terms of what we are willing to accept and falls far short of what was originally called for.
The bill that was brought back to the government is the minimum. What is ironic is that this is a government that downloads everything in sight to the provinces, but when it comes to classification of endangered species, oh no, it does not want scientists or experts to talk about that. It wants bureaucrats and politicians to decide on what is an endangered species. That is absolutely unbelievable.
I represent riding that is very suburban but very rural as well. I can assure the House that many of these farmers, fishermen and people in the logging industry support initiatives that protect endangered species. Everybody knows that for every species we lose or that becomes endangered, be it plant or animal, that goes up the food chain until it finally reaches us. Every time we lose an animal or we lose a plant or we lose a valuable protected space for habitat, we are signing our own death warrants. That is a fact.
The bill done by the committee was the bare minimum that people were willing to accept and the government has the audacity to just rip it up and have its own agenda. That is absolutely unbelievable.
Off the coast of Nova Scotia is one of the most beautiful underwater canyons on the planet, the Sable Gully. For close to three years the government has been dithering around on whether to make it a protected area or not.
The government cannot decide. The oil and gas industry is saying to protect it. The fishing industry is saying to protect it. The provinces are saying to protect it. However what do we have to do? We need to have more studies. For three years we have been asking for this to be protected. There are 15 species of whales. It is an area larger than the Grand Canyon. Many varieties of fish and plant life live in the gully. All we are asking is that it be protected. What does the government do? It waits and waits. The environment cannot wait. The people of our country, and for that matter people from around the world, require legislation that is broad based and protects spaces for our endangered species and other species to inhabit. We share the planet and ecosystem with many other species. Our role is not to dominate and rape and pillage the planet on our own.
If we continue on this path, the government's eight year legacy will be a scorched earth policy. When the Liberals get out of government, and one day they will, what will happen is that the people of Canada will ask them what they did for the environment. Absolutely nothing. The government looks at other species and just ignores them. It wants to give control of this and the scientific listings to bureaucrats and politicians. It is absolutely unbelievable that the Liberals could do that.
For the absolute life of me I do not understand how a government could treat nine members of its own committee in this way. However, I remember very well the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans a few years ago, which was chaired by the member for Gander--Grand Falls. We spent over $180,000 on the east coast fisheries report. We consulted widely and broadly across the east coast. We told the people of those fishing communities that we would bring their recommendations to the House of Commons. All five political parties on the committee spent a long time on it.
It was the first time that five political parties in the House of Commons unanimously agreed on a report, word for word, and as we know, in committee it is difficult to get unanimity on most things. This report would have protected an awful lot of fish stocks. It would have protected coastal communities. It would have done an awful lot of good. Nine Liberals signed that report. We moved consensus for the report in the House only to have those same Liberals stand up and vote against their own report. They did not do it with just the east coast report; they did it with the west coast report as well.
Therefore, what we basically told the people of Canada is that we will fly on luxury aircraft to their communities, talk to them, promise them the moon and the stars, go back to Ottawa and write a report. However, unbeknownst to the people of Canada, especially people in rural Canada, the Liberals do not tell them that they have an agenda that completely ignores their future needs.
The day will come very soon when the people of Canada will wake up and understand that, because every species we lose, be it plant or animal, brings this closer to us ourselves. If the government and the Prime Minister want to leave a legacy for the people of Canada from coast to coast to coast, I will tell him now and I will tell the Liberal Party that I would support their initiatives if they did the following: if they made their legacy one of leaving the country in a very healthy condition, a condition in which we can drink the water, breathe the air, eat the natural food and maintain a livelihood from the labour and sweat of our brow for farmers, fishermen, loggers and so on.
I encourage the government to reverse itself, to accept the recommendations of the all party committee and to move forward in a positive light to protect the fellow species we share the planet with.