Mr. Speaker, when I was elected I had a vision that when I would be making this address to the House at third reading we would have, as a total government, approached the bill with an environmental prism. We would have looked at the bill through that prism and as a government we would have said this is what the environment requires. We have a responsibility to future generations to protect endangered species not only for ourselves as a sovereign state but for the rest of the world.
I envisioned that we would have taken into account the crisis that we are faced with in this country with regard to endangered species. We now have approximately 400 species on the list and we know that list is nowhere near complete. We have heard testimony that it is much larger than that. I thought we would have acted in good conscience with the best interests of Canada and of endangered species.
I would have envisioned that we would have recognized the work that we did with the international community dating back to 1992 when we were the first country to sign on to the protocol after the earth summit. It required us as a sovereign nation to protect the species and biodiversity of Canada for ourselves and the rest of the world; and to use that as a guiding principle. We would have taken into account the overwhelming support in this country for strong, effective legislation to protect endangered species.
I would have expected that I would be standing here saying, yes, we did all those things. We did take into account, would have been my thinking, the interests in the country including the provincial governments, the rights of the first nations, aboriginal communities and the Metis, to self-government and control of their land and their land claims as they exist now, as well as the interests of private owners of land and users of land. We would have taken them into account, but they would not have been the primary consideration. The overriding question being: How do we effectively protect our endangered species?
As I entered into the process as the environment critic for my party I believe the general community had a number of specific points that had to be considered and we had to get, at the end of the day, each one of these points to be part of the legislation.
There was the scientific listing of the species. There was the issue of the need for mandatory critical habitat. There was the question of jurisdiction; that is, how extensive would that mandatory critical habitat be. Would it be limited to certain areas of the country or would it have a broader range. Finally, there was the issue of compensation for those individuals, groups and communities negatively impacted in an economic sense by the legislation.
In my opinion the results in the legislation generally fail to meet effectively the requirements of each one of those issues. Before I go into that in more detail, it is important to address the issue of what happened with the bill. That of course raises the whole question of democracy in the House, specifically at the committee level. I suppose one should say the lack of democracy.
Even though I was only elected in November 2000, I am proud to say, and maybe a little arrogant to say it, I was really quite prepared for what would happen at the committee level. The government confirmed that I was quite prepared, because the democratic process at the committee level is generally a sham. However in the environment committee it was not and I was really surprised.
I saw members from all parties, members on the government side, from the Alliance, from the Bloc and from the Progressive Conservatives, come to the committee with a democratic framework in their minds. They came with fixed ideas and strongly held fixed opinions. However they came with open minds. In a number of cases, and I include myself in this, we were convinced either by other members on the committee, but most often by the testimony we heard, to change or at least moderate our opinions and those strong positions that we had brought to the bill and to the committee.
It sounds almost idealistic, but the environment committee is what parliamentary democracy and specifically the committee process within parliamentary democracy is all about. One has to credit not only the members, which I have already done, but specifically acknowledge the work of the chair and both vice chairs of the committee. They provided leadership and the framework by their rulings in the way they conducted the meetings and they allowed the democratic process to work.
The result was we received a bill from the environment department. These individuals collectively modified the bill significantly. We spent a lot of time on it, with well over 100 hours of hearings, a great number of witnesses and we changed the bill using the expertise of those witnesses and the expertise reflected in the individuals who sat around the table.
People ask if I am enjoying my work in the House. My answer universally is yes, I am very much. I would not give this up other than if I had to give up my wife and kids. They are the only ones that I would not sacrifice for this experience. Because of the people I have encountered and more specifically in the process on this bill is one reason I can say that.
We heard from concerned scientists. Their whole life has been dedicated to protecting endangered species and to researching and developing plans as to how we best protect them.
The other group that was most impressive were individuals from first nations and aboriginal communities. These people are on the frontlines. Yesterday and again this morning we heard the minister speak about the people who would carry this out. If anybody will save our endangered species, it probably will be first nations. It will not be this government. They are already doing good work.
What happened? We heard testimony at committee and the committee did its job. The bill was changed to reflect what was really needed.The bill came back to the House at report stage with 75 plus amendments, the majority of which came from the government. Those amendments were clearly designed to reverse almost all the work done by committee and not to strengthen the bill. The amendments would not make the bill more effective. In fact they would do just the opposite, in every case.
Let us look at the scientific listing of endangered species. We repeatedly heard the minister ask us to trust him, the government and the framework built into the bill. What has happened with that list? Initially the scientific group that prepared the list was shoved off to the side. The list compiled by it would not be incorporated into the bill. Only at one of the very last meetings we had with the minister before the committee did he finally concede the point that the list should be included. That is not from where he or his department started.
As recently as a week ago, another amendment came forward. Somehow the light shone on the government. The amendment strengthened a bit more the role of the scientific group. What is before the House today is not what the scientific community wanted and it is certainly not what the committee wanted.
What about critical habitat? This was an issue that we felt was of the utmost importance and it should be mandatory. The amendments put forward by the government a couple of months ago, which reduced the effectiveness of the bill, were slightly modified a week ago with a last minute amendment. However that is not enough. The mandatory nature of the bill is still extremely weak in many ways.
I want to use one example and that is extending the protection of the bill to migratory birds. In spite of some really strange legal opinions we received through the environment department, including one from a former supreme court justice who is an expert in this area plus other constitutional experts, we were told that the Government of Canada had the right to protect migratory birds. Is the government doing so? The answer is no. That is just one example of the lack of mandatory critical habitat protection.
What did we do about jurisdiction? Of course given the historical nature of Canada, we could not have gone through the bill without dealing with jurisdiction. There is constant friction between the provinces and the federal government over who does what.
I said in the House yesterday that if we looked at the role the provinces had played, because they clearly have some jurisdiction, it was not impressive. Not all the provinces have legislation. Those that have it do not have anywhere near the number of endangered species they should have on their list. Their enforcement mechanisms are wanting in almost every case.
It was very important, if one again applied that environmental prism, if one really believed that we would do something to protect endangered species, that the federal government extend its jurisdiction, which it clearly has the authority to do.
What have we ended up with? With this legislation in terms of federal lands, we cover approximately 5% of the country. We cover approximately one-third of all species. Therefore, two-thirds are left to the provinces and, in most cases, are left to nothing because they are not covered. We did not meet that standard with regard to jurisdiction or mandatory critical habitat.
The final issue we felt was very important was that of compensation. We heard a lot of evidence about this at the committee. The New Democratic Party of Canada was very clear from the beginning. If as a society we were going say that this was our social responsibility, then we could not dump that social responsibility on only certain individuals. Collectively we had to share that burden.
We heard again from the government mostly “trust us”. We made one minor amendment as to how the compensation would work. The government told us that we would get regulations to cover the rest of it. We never saw those regulations. It said it would do that later but “trust us”.
We should look very closely at how we handle the compensation. We should look very closely at who we compensate. We have nowhere near that in this legislation.
My time is running short and I want to go back to the issue of the “trust me” syndrome with which we are faced. We had the opportunity with the bill to move away from that and say that this would be the law. There is no question about co-operation, we will do that. There is no question about stewardship and the co-operative stewardship that already exists to some degree, which the bill enhances. That is recognized. It is the whole question of what do we do if we do not get that co-operation.
I already indicated why we cannot trust the government. I talked about the late amendments. We saw a late amendment, for instance, just to add to that list, covering aquatic species which we did not have earlier. The committee wanted it, put it into its report but it was taken out. It was put back in about a week ago.
We had a whole list of these things coming to plate late in the day. If that is an indication of how much we can trust the government, we have to say it is not good enough.
There was a whole history as well, before the bill came to the House, under other pieces of legislation where the government did not act when it could have.
In conclusion, the environmental prism with which I came to this House and wanted applied to the bill, and I believe Canadians wanted applied to the bill, was not used.
We have simply taken a look at this and the government has said “We promised this back in 1993 in our red book. We have to deliver. It does not matter what we deliver, let us just get a piece of legislation through. If it is a sham, if it does not do what it is supposed to do, we will still go out and spin it. We will convince Canadians that we have done something”. That is not the reality. We have not done enough here. We have failed.