Mr. Speaker, as I was studying the budget document in preparation for this speech, like others in the House, I found that the title is a bit of a misnomer. The title reading “Leading the Way on Jobs and Growth” perhaps should be, in my opinion, “Missed Opportunities: Letting Others Take the Lead”. That would more appropriately describe this budget.
The reason I say that is that the budget is a missed opportunity to begin or, in some cases, continue laying the groundwork for solutions to many of the problems we face today and will face in the future. As my main area of interest as a member of the environment committee is water policy, I of course look at the budget through the lens of water. A good starting point in terms of comparing the weaknesses of this document to what it could have been would be to look at the Ontario throne speech, which was delivered only a few short days ago and which, contrary to the throne speech that was delivered here on Parliament Hill on March 3, has only half as many words yet says so much more. Let me read a few lines from that throne speech:
As part of its Open Ontario Plan, your government will introduce legislation that will build on Ontario's expertise in clean water technology.
The Water Opportunities Act would lay the foundation for new Ontario jobs and make our province the North American leader in the development and sale of new technologies and services for water conservation and treatment.
The Conference Board of Canada estimates the global market for water technology at more $400 billion US per year—and doubling every five to six years.
The question becomes: Why do the federal budget and the throne speech that preceded it not include visionary statements such as that? The reason is that the government does not believe in vision. It believes that vision is Liberal philosophy's evil twin and therefore does not think in visionary terms. When we do not think in visionary terms, we miss opportunities. There are things staring at us that we cannot see, and that is the problem when we do not have a vision.
Here is an example of how the government has eschewed the whole notion of vision. I presented a motion in the House a few years ago calling on the government to create a national water strategy. Now if the government were thinking in terms of a national water strategy, it would see the opportunities for actions like those the government of Ontario has mentioned in its throne speech. The motion passed because I guess many of the members on the government side did not feel they could look their constituents in the eye if they voted against such an obvious and important motion.
However, that was three years ago, and on the government's website today there is no national water strategy. There is a PDF file called “Federal Water Policy”, but if we click on that file, we see that the national water policy is the Pearse report that was commissioned in 1987 by the Mulroney government. As a metaphor for the way the government looks backward, just go and look at the website and see that it has posted as its national water policy a task force report from 1987. I think that says a lot.
The budget also forgot to mention the St. Lawrence River, which is one of the 15 largest waterways in the world. Its watershed occupies one-third of the territory of the province of Quebec. About 40% of Quebec's municipalities draw their drinking water from the river, and more than 75% of Quebec's industrial facilities, including its large hydroelectric plants, are located on the St. Lawrence River. Finally, the St. Lawrence valley contains 70% of Quebec's population, yet we do not hear a word about the St. Lawrence River. Why is it particularly important in March 2010 that the budget mention the St. Lawrence River?
It is because the fourth installment of the St. Lawrence action plan, which extended from 2005 to 2010, ended on March 31, 2010, and there is still nothing to replace it. It is one of the most important rivers in the world, one of the most important rivers in Canada and North America, and the government has not even begun to think about extending the St. Lawrence action plan. That is what happens when we do not have a visionary mindset. We do not see the obvious, and that is very unfortunate.
The budget also will give extraordinary powers to the Minister of the Environment to undermine environmental assessments in Canada. Let me give the House a bit of background on this.
There is a practice going on, especially in northern mining communities, where mining companies, to save money, instead of building impoundment areas for mine tailings, take those mine tailings and dump them in freshwater lakes, thereby killing the lakes. This has been permitted by part of the metal mining effluent regulations, which allow a mine to be listed on schedule 2 and therefore be given permission to use a lake basically as a tailings pond.
Ever since the government took power, the number of mines that have been added to this list has exploded, while the opposite has happened in the United States. One of the first things the Obama administration did was to put on hold some 200 coal mining permits from companies that wanted to dump waste in streams and wetlands. While the Obama administration is protecting its water bodies, in Canada the government is rushing to destroy them, and that is really unfortunate.
The solution to that would be to make environmental assessments stronger. In the past when a project went to a federal department for environmental assessment, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in this case, it would split up the project into different pieces and then it would do a cursory assessment of each piece. If the project were looked at as a whole, a much more comprehensive assessment, maybe even a panel assessment, would be needed. But officials in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans were not doing that. They were in fact undermining the principles of environmental assessment.
What happened? About a month ago some environmental groups took the government to the Supreme Court of Canada and won. How did the government respond to that? In the budget it gave the Minister of the Environment the legal power to basically reverse that Supreme Court decision. The minister would now have the power to define the scope of a project. The minister can now do what fisheries officials were doing before. This was found to be against the spirit and the letter of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act when the Supreme Court looked at the issue.
Now we have a government that is going to make sure mining companies can still use freshwater lakes as dumping grounds for toxic mine tailings, and that is an awful development. I hope more attention will be given to that by environmental groups that are already doing good work on trying to underscore this problem and also by the media and other parliamentarians.
The budget mentioned the government would be investing in a RADARSAT project called the RADARSAT Constellation Mission, which is essentially a process for linking up satellites. That is all fine and well, but the government has been dragging its feet with respect to RADARSAT on another issue, a water issue.
Ducks Unlimited, in partnership with Environment Canada and the Canadian Space Agency, had begun phase one of what is called the Canadian wetlands inventory. This is a project to map all of Canada's wetlands. The reason it is important is that Canada contains about 25% of the world's wetlands, more than any other country in the world. Wetlands are very important to us. They are an essential part of the hydrological cycle. This project had begun but was then starved of funding by Environment Canada, so it never went beyond the point of establishing the methodology for mapping Canada's wetlands.
Why did the government not take the opportunity in the budget to mention that it would relaunch this project and that it would fund phase two? This is an extremely important issue, especially in the oil sands. Last week we found out that the oil sands companies now say that they cannot afford to restore the wetlands they are destroying even though they previously made commitments to do so.