Mr. Speaker, congratulations on your election. As this is the first opportunity I have had to speak in this honourable House, I would like to thank the voters of Halifax.
The hon. member referenced his time in the gold mines in the Yukon. He actually used the phrase, “the buck starts here”. I am originally from a gold mining town in northern Ontario called Kirkland Lake. The irony is there is no lake. The lake is filled with mine tailings. We have poisoned lakes and rivers. Workers are living in poverty. Hundreds of miners have died underground. This is the kind of legacy the government wants to see, bucks made at the expense of health, safety and the environment.
How can the hon. member talk about doing our part for the environment when the Speech from the Throne is silent on mining regulations, silent on the impacts of resource extraction and silent on the impacts on our environment?