Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague's discussion. He raised two issues that I felt had to be spoken to. One is he spoke at the beginning about changes to the mining act and the other is the effects that we need to look at in terms of seven generations.
I can tell the hon. member, that coming from the mining communities in northern Ontario, we see the effects seven generations on with the Great Lakes and the Cobalt area that have been completely poisoned with arsenic. There are some Great Lakes still going, but there have been other lakes that have been completely destroyed. In those days the tailings from the mill were simply dumped into the lake because it was so cheap and easy. We have learned a lot of lessons since then, but we still saw immense tailing ponds and damage in other hard rock mining communities, Elliot Lake, Timmins and Kirkland Lake. As we went along we realized that if we were going to do mining in the 21st century, we had to find better ways of doing it.
What astounds me at this point in our history is that we have a Conservative government that still abides by the flat earth theory on the environment and is completely turning back the clock. It will actually have a detrimental effect on mining development in the north.
What we have been trying to do in the north is build partnerships between the first nation communities and the Mining Association of Canada. Various miners are now recognizing that they have to have a proactive plan to work with first nations.
If the Conservative government thinks that it can go with a plan to dump tailings into freshwater lakes, if that is in any way going to open up any new areas in the north to mining, it has another think coming. The Conservative government was completely absent from any meetings that we have seen with first nations and the mining industry in order to build these partnerships.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague to comment on the issue of using the freshwater lakes of the north to dump tailings in the 21st century.