Madam Speaker, I begin my comments today on Group No. 3 by referring to a letter I received from a constituent as the SARA legislation was brought forth to the House.
My constituent is a teacher. He was recognized and received an award as being one of the best teachers in the country in 2001. That is a rare award. He was rewarded primarily, if not exclusively, for all the work he has done in the classroom, the school and the community on environmental issues. He has taken a whole generation, if not a generation and a half now, of students through their education process and imbued in each one of them in a very enthusiastic way a love for the natural environment and a sense of responsibility of protecting, as each one of us have, in a stewardship fashion that natural environment. He writes:
Amendments made by the environment committee would have strengthened mandatory habitat protection in areas of federal jurisdiction, and would have provided--
And this is relevant to Group No. 3:
--an independent scientific panel the opportunity to determine which species in Canada are endangered.
I am deeply troubled that the bill being brought forward for third reading rejects the work of Canada's parliamentarians, and chooses to do next to nothing to protect Canada's endangered plans and animals.
That commentary is a reflection of how a great deal of the people who have worked on the legislation from all walks of life feel. We constantly hear that it is just environmentalists complaining about the nature of the gutting of the bill by the government. That is not true. It is people from all walks of life.
The comment I read from his letter is reflective of the attitude. Some 60,000 to 65,000 people have signed petitions asking the government to not proceed with the amendments that it is proposing, but to allow the amendments that the committee prepared and put into place at committee stage. He goes on to say in his letter:
Failure to reconsider these proposed amendments will result in international embarrassment for Canada when it attends the Rio plus 10 Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in the spring of 2002.
There is an error there. The conference will actually take place in the fall of 2002. He goes on to say:
Canada proudly signed the international biodiversity protocol at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, becoming the first country in the world to endorse this convention. With our failure to pass a strong, effective endangered species act, we also will fail in our commitment to protect the web of life internationally.
He is very accurate in that last statement. We will be embarrassed with the legislation because it does not go far enough. It does not deal with real protection for the environment.
In Group No. 3 there is a glaring inconsistency in the government's position that shows up in some of the proposed amendments. I am referring specifically to Motion No. 136. We heard from the parliamentary secretary today that this was a good development on the part of the government.
Motion No. 136 would provide that the existing list of species developed by COSEWIC, the scientific body that has been responsible for this for more than two decades now, would be incorporated holus-bolus into the act in one fell swoop.
That was a change on the part of the government because originally it was not even going to do that. The Minister of the Environment came to the committee before it got to the end of clause by clause and announced that he would do this as his one concession to the committee. As a committee we had been pushing for a holus-bolus acceptance of the list. It only made good sense because of all of the good work that COSEWIC had done over the years on that list.
The inconsistency arose when the minister accepted the list from this independent and qualified body. What did he then do? This goes back to some of the amendments in Group No. 2. He said that he did not trust them to do it on an ongoing basis. All the work done over the last 20 years, which the government recognized and incorporated into the bill in an amendment we fully support, was good enough but it was not good enough on an ongoing basis.
Nothing has changed. The way scientists are appointed to the board has remained the same. If anything it may be a little better as more aboriginal and first nations people are brought into the group, using some of their traditional knowledge. This is a positive development by COSEWIC and it should be praised for showing more progressive thinking in that regard than the government.
There is a glaring inconsistency. We urge the government to withdraw the amendments in Group No. 2 with regard to that and follow the pattern established in Group No. 3.
I want to recognize one thing that does appear in one of these amendments. It is in Motion No. 134. A bill was passed in the House last year, I do not believe it has become law yet, that would create marine conservation areas in the country, something again the government has been slow about doing. That bill is also wanting in a number of ways.
The positive part is that the government recognized that its federal jurisdiction should be extended into these marine conservation areas as we develop them. There are four or five, perhaps as many as ten, that are close to being developed, both on our shores in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as well as in the Great Lakes area.
The amendment, which we support, would extend the SARA legislation to those marine conservation areas. That is a good development and I applaud the government for it.
I want to go back to some other concerns we have with this group of amendments. There are a number of amendments in Group No. 3 that would allow the government to do nothing, if I can put it that way. The environment and sustainability committee recognized it in the original draft of the bill. In a number of ways it tightened up the bill significantly by putting limitations on the government, imposing in some cases time limits and using in many cases specific wording as opposed to general wording.
There are a series of amendments that would gut all that work and gut the bill. Taking out that type of specific language and replacing it with generalities would allow the government, as it has in so many other areas of environmental legislation and action, to do nothing.