Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to emphasize a point that has been missed in this debate and that members opposite on the Liberal benches should be interested in.
When I say the bill misses the boat in terms of the real threats facing Canadians, I want to address it both in terms of the threat of terrorism and the broader threats facing Canadians in terms of health and safety. That issue was astutely put by Ken Rubin in a recent issue of The Hill Times. He said:
Ottawa misses the boat by obsessively dealing only with potential security safety risks rather than tackling actual lethal health and environment problems including how to deal with dangerous drugs and toxic wastes.
It is a point well taken and I hope members across the way are hearing that. When it comes to serious threats to public safety, such as adverse drug reactions, threats to the food supply, the state of our water, or the presence of toxic elements in the Sydney tar ponds, the government refuses to act. I will leave that aside as there is time for debate on that in other places.
Today we are talking about terrorism. The bill misses the mark when it comes to protecting the public with respect to terrorist threats. I refer again to the dangerous and real threat of chemical, nuclear and biological terrorism.
Report after report has said Canada is ill-prepared to deal with bioterrorist threats. The government has had the benefit of study after study suggesting it has known about the problem and has refused to act. In the last several years the solicitor general's report has stated Canada was unable to respond to major terrorist attacks and lacked everything from vital protective equipment for emergency personnel to properly trained teams to free victims inside collapsed buildings. An internal Health Canada report warned that cuts to the country's health care system would make it difficult to provide medical services to victims of terrorist attacks. A national defence report found Canada was years behind its allies in its ability to handle a biological or chemical terrorist attack.
That is where the government should be putting its attention, not jeopardizing Canada's rights and freedoms by giving itself and the police force inordinate powers. It should be putting its resources and energies into protecting the public in the event of bioterrorism.
We heard the Minister of Health announce with a lot of fanfare back in October that $11.59 million would be going into programs to protect Canadians against a bioterrorist attack. We have yet to hear an accounting of that money. We have yet to hear that the money would be going to where it is needed and making a difference.
Canada should be putting its resources and energies into a number of different areas ensuring that we have an emergency preparedness strategy and a trained public health care workforce who will be able to respond should a terrorist attack occur.
That point was recently driven home by the firefighters who gathered on Parliament Hill to talk to all of us about their concerns. They made an important recommendation about the requirement for training of Canada's first responders in the event of a terrorist attack or any kind of incident involving hazardous materials. In their report they said:
While a military-based response to a chemical, biological or terrorist attack is hours, if not days away, professional fire fighters will be on the scene in mere minutes. However, a serious problem has been identified: that, while a small handful of Canadian cities, such as Ottawa, do have appropriate hazardous materials or chemical-biological response teams in place, the vast majority do not. This means that the majority of Canadians are completely vulnerable to the aftermath of a terrorist act involving chemical and biological weapons. The situation therefore exists that Canadian fire fighters, police officers and other emergency medical services personnel will be called to respond to a chemical, biological or radiological incident without the proper training and equipment. An inappropriate response to the incident would only compound the potential impact on the public and the responding fire fighters. The effectiveness of Canadian first responders depends on their ability to apply the skills learned during hands-on training. No matter if the incident is a typical hazardous materials alarm or one that involves intentional dispersal of biological agents, first responders need to rely on a solid base of training in order to formulate a safe and effective response strategy.
That should be the priority for the government. That is the first task the government should be involved in with respect to responding to terrorism. It should put $500,000 into a training program run and co-ordinated by the International Association of Firefighters to provide our firefighters the necessary training to respond in the event of a bioterrorist attack or any incident involving hazardous materials. Of the $11.59 million promised by the government on October 18 for a response to bioterrorism why can the government not find $500,000 to ensure that firefighters can train their members to respond in the event of a bioterrorist attack or any serious incident in our society today?
I challenge the government to face the real issues at hand, to put its money and its mouth where the problems are and start giving our first responders, our firefighters, paramedics and police, the resources they need.