Mr. Speaker, I am pleased, on behalf of New Democratic Party, to join in the debate at third reading of Bill C-5, an act respecting the establishment of the Public Health Agency of Canada and amending certain acts.
I and the people of my riding are proud to have the federal virology laboratory located in the riding. We have taken a great personal and professional interest in following the evolution of the realization that our public health initiatives are equally important and perhaps even of more importance than our health care system generally in that our health care system dedicates so much of our resources and energies to fixing people after they are broken. The public health regime is dedicated to elevating the standards of our general health and, hopefully, preventing people from getting sick.
I think all the authorities in the field of delivering health care have come to the realization that it is all about finding better ways to create a healthier population. We support Bill C-5 and this initiative because it would take us one step further in prioritizing the public health of Canadians at least equally with the priority of helping Canadians once they have been stricken with an illness and helping them to cope with it.
In giving thought to the issue of greater public health, this debate gives us the opportunity to review some of the accessible things without a great deal of expense and resources spent that would have a direct impact on public health.
I note that the creation of the new Public Health Agency of Canada would also create the chief public health officer whose mandate surely would be one of education, to help Canadians understand and realize what steps they can take to create a healthier population and enjoy a better quality of life. As a secondary benefit, it would take enormous pressure off our overtaxed public health care system.
A couple of obvious things come to mind, which I sincerely hope the newly appointed chief public health officer would be seized of. One is the fact, and I say this with some shame, that Canada is still one of the world's leading producers and exporters of asbestos. It is hard to imagine in this day and age of scientific awareness of the health hazards of asbestos, but we continue to produce and export it at an alarming rate of 240,000 tonnes per year. We know that one fibre can and has caused devastating health conditions for those who, after a terribly cruel and long incubation period, are struck down with mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos.
We should encourage our newly created public health officer to address the asbestos issue because there is no business case to continue supporting the asbestos industry the way we do. We are one of the world's largest producers and exporters of asbestos while the rest of the world is banning it. The entire European Union has banned asbestos, as has France.
In fact, Canada went to the WTO to stop the banning of asbestos, if anyone can believe that, which is why I said that I had introduced this issue with some trepidation and some shame. Canada tried to intervene to stop the good people of France from banning asbestos by claiming that it would be a trade barrier. We would not be able to sell our Canadian asbestos to France anymore. Fortunately, Canada lost and France won at the WTO and France continued in its logical step of trying to get this poison away from its citizens.
France is now calling for a global ban on asbestos. It is rare for a nation state to appeal to other nation states in this era of delicate diplomatic relationships but France is calling, very overtly, for a ban on asbestos globally. I hope Canada heeds the message and takes note of that.
Last week the ILO, the International Labour Organization, passed a resolution calling for a ban on all forms of asbestos. The world should no longer be exposed to asbestos and yet we continue to dump corporate welfare into the crippling asbestos industry in the province of Quebec.
I know the hazards of asbestos because I used to work in the asbestos mines. I have friends who have died and friends who are dying of asbestos related diseases. I know how we were lied to about asbestos and how that industry continues to lie to Canadians and to the world about the effects of asbestos. It is not overstating things to say that the asbestos industry is the tobacco industry's evil twin in the damage it causes to the general public health in Canada where the countryside is littered with asbestos, even in the buildings that we work in on Parliament Hill and around the world.
The only place Canada can find a market for its asbestos is in the third world, developing nations, that rarely have health and safety measures at all, much less ones that are enforced. We do not see HEPA filters on a day labourer in Pakistan who is shovelling Canadian asbestos from a wheelbarrow into a pile of cement to make asbestos cement tiles. I have seen the pictures. The labourers are barefoot, bare chested and have no health protection whatsoever. It is happening as we speak with Canadian asbestos.
I hope our new chief public health officer listens to the world and ignores the asbestos industry, stops giving corporate welfare to these guys and stops using our Canadian embassies to promote asbestos. One hundred and twenty conferences in 60 different countries were paid for by the Asbestos Institute, which is funded by the federal government, to promote Canadian asbestos. At the most recent one in Jakarta in May, the Canadian embassy was used to host this asbestos promotion event which was paid for by the Government of Canada. I think it is appalling.
The second issue I would like to touch on in terms of public health is in the context of the new Public Health Agency of Canada and the role of the chief public health officer. I hope the new chief public health officer will take note of the fact that over 90 Canadian municipalities have banned the cosmetic non-essential use of pesticides in their municipalities. I hope he takes note of the courage and tenacity that it takes on the part of often volunteer reeves and councillors of small municipalities and cities who only work part time in many cases.
Those individuals have to stand up to the massive chemical lobbyists who pounce on communities. As soon as they indicate that they are interested in banning the non-essential cosmetic use of pesticides, they get inundated with the lawyers, the lobbyists and the threatened lawsuits that the cosmetic use of pesticides cannot be banned because it is an unfair trade restriction and they have no jurisdiction. They bog them up in the courts for years trying to stop them from doing what common sense dictates they do.
That is the situation that over 90 municipalities in Canada have had to struggle through. The City of Ottawa failed by one vote after two years of trying. I hope our new national chief public health officer can recognize the problems the municipalities must struggle with and encourage the government to do nationally what municipalities are forced to do municipally.
Parliament had an opportunity to pass an NDP opposition day motion to ban the cosmetic non-essential use of pesticides and to lend support to those courageous municipalities. I should point out that Hudson, Quebec was the first municipality in Canada that managed to do this. It was in response partly to two young men in the area of Hudson, Quebec who lived in the vicinity of five golf courses that were regularly sprayed with these chemical pesticides. The cluster of chemical and environmentally related cancers in that area was astounding.
Those two young men both contracted brain cancer in their early teens. They made a pact with each other that if either of them survived the other would go on to be a champion of having these pesticides banned. One died and the other went on to be a champion. I have heard him speak and I wish everyone in the House of Commons could hear him speak.
Those communities, one by one, were banning cosmetic pesticides until the entire province of Quebec did so, to its great credit. The province took it out of the hands of those struggling municipalities. It said that it would stand up to the big chemical companies, that it would fight the court cases on behalf of the municipalities and that it would do away with the hundreds of thousands of kilos per year of usage of non-essential cosmetic pesticides.
True public health is when we take steps to try to improve the general health of our population. It does not make sense to wait until more and more people contract environmentally triggered cancers and then scramble for the money to find better treatments for those people. I do not think we will ever keep up.
My home province of Manitoba now spends 42% of its provincial budget on health care, and it is not enough. We still have waiting lists. We still do not have enough CAT scans. I do not think it will ever be enough until we turn off the tap at the front end and have less people coming into the system with catastrophic diseases, these appalling cancers.
There is a terrible statistic of which we should all be cognizant and of which we should all take note as members of Parliament. My children are in their twenties. Of their generation, 50% of them will die of cancer. People say that it is because they are living longer. That is not true. It is because they are being exposed to a chemical soup that is unprecedented in the history of mankind. It is only in the post-war years that the petrochemical industry has exploded and the exposure to new chemical compounds has exploded as well.
The burden of proof to prove that they are dangerous is on us, and that is the problem. We tried to put forward a motion in the House of Commons that would put the burden of proof on the manufacturers. They would have to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a product would not harm us before the product could be sold. Instead, it is innocent until proven guilty for chemicals.
Manufacturers are allowed to put chemicals on the market with very little oversight, other than their own testing, which has self-interest to it. Then, after 20 or 30 years of usage, if we can prove there is enough people affected with cancer from their product, maybe then we can start to fight to get it taken off the market. We want the onus to be reversed. I hope we have an ally in our new Chief Public Health Officer, through the Public Health Agency of Canada. We will be appealing that to the person who takes the job. We will be asking for help to keep Canadians safe from this rampant exposure to the chemical soup.
I will not dwell on this much longer because I know I have to speak directly to the bill. However, there is a compounding effect of which none of us are aware. Even if we accept the chemical companies at their word, that compound A, in and of itself, is not harmful to us, there is another chemical company selling compound B to us. When compound A and compound B join forces in our kidneys, our livers and other organs, they create compound C, which kills us.
That is what we are faced with this and that makes it difficult for us to prove any one chemical causes this reaction. Our bodies are saturated with a chemical soup of 20 different compounds. We need to minimize the exposure, especially among infants and pregnant women, and we do that by proactively reversing the onus. The burden of proof has to be on the manufacturer.
I welcome the creation of the new Chief Public Health Officer because it gives us somebody to whom I can appeal. Parliament rejected our idea out of hand. It is let the free market prevail, people will not buy the product if it is killing them. If it kills them, then they will not be buy it so the company will go out of business. That is not good enough for leadership in terms of our public health.
The last thing, in the context of public health and achievable doables, to which this Parliament could attend itself, is the issue of trans fats. Many of us who were here in the last Parliament know NDP put forward an opposition motion on my private member's bill to eliminate trans fats, to take them right out of our system.
The Liberal government put in place measures to require mandatory labelling of trans fats. In other words, the Liberal Department of Health acknowledged that it was desirable to get trans fats out of our system or to at least eliminate Canadians' exposure to trans fats. Its proposed methodology, though, was to require labelling.
We are grateful the government at least acknowledged the issue, but it is not okay to put poison in our food just because it is properly labelled. I will not accept that. Labelling is inadequate. A hungry teenager, standing in line at a fast food restaurant, will not spend a lot of time to compare the technical Latin terms of one chemical versus another in the concentration of that component of the french fries he or she buys. They are hungry and they will eat them. As a result, these deadly manufactured trans fats have poisoned a generation.
There is a class issue involved with this too. It takes a fair amount of economic security to eat well in Canada, to buy healthy fresh foods and to keep cupboards and fridges stocked with good food. Low income people, with less organized lives due to the pressures they face, are more likely to eat fast food. Canadians eat an average of 10 grams of trans fats a day. Teenagers eat as much as 35 grams of trans fats per day. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, one gram per day increases the risk of heart disease by 20%.
Scientists, who address research on trans fat, use the term “toxic”. It meets the literal definition of a toxin, yet it is common throughout all our processed foods. Western prairie farmers would thank us if we eliminated these partially hydrogenated oils. Certain strains of canola oil are the best alternative to trans fats in terms of shelf life and to maintain quality and taste without changing the product directly. If we were to ban trans fats, it would create an enormous burgeoning industry. Our three Canadian prairie provinces are the best places in the world to produce these strains of canola oil. We could provide the world with a safe oil so french fries could still enjoyed by our children, but would not kill them.
Even though I am pleased that we are seized of the issue of improving public health, it frustrates me that three achievable things are in front of us today, but we are not acting on them.
We should ban asbestos. We should stop mining and exporting asbestos to the Third World. Canada is viewed as being an international piranha. If we think we have a bad reputation for the seal hunt, ask other countries what they think about Canada dumping asbestos into the Third World. It is shameful that the federal government continues to undermine this dying and deadly industry. The asbestos mine I worked in closed. It died a natural death due to market forces. I do not care if the remaining asbestos mines are in Quebec, but they should be shut down and allowed to die a natural death too. By staying open, they are killing a lot of people.
We do not need to read Silent Spring again to know that chemical pesticides have a dilatory affect on our organs and our quality of life.
We need to ban trans fats. For Heaven's sakes, what is the holdup? Members do not have to listen to me, but they should listen to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. They should listen to Dr. Wilbert Keon and Senator Yves Morin, a Liberal senator and a Conservative senator, who worked with me on the trans fat initiative. These gentlemen are heart surgeons; I am just a carpenter.