Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this bill.
We call it a bill but it is a Trojan Horse. Buried inside this budget bill are a series of measures that the government could simply not have passed had it not put them in the budget bill.
We have a golden opportunity to open up this Trojan Horse and take out the nefarious legislation that is within it and to move ahead with the consideration of those important proposals but it will require the government to split out these pieces of legislation so we can deal with them separately. I would like to address why that is so important. I think the government should do exactly this.
I would like the leader of the official opposition to behave like a real opposition leader and use his power to prevent the Prime Minister from sneaking major legislative changes through by hiding them in this budget bill. Passing bills on the sly like this is a last-resort strategy for a government trying to make changes that do not have unanimous approval. Knowing that Canadians would not support each of these changes individually, the Conservatives tried to sneak them into its budget bill.
Some of the most disturbing changes in Bill C-9 are those to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act giving the Minister of the Environment the power to determine the scope of environmental assessments and to turn responsibility for reviewing power generation proposals over to the National Energy Board, which has close ties to the business sector. This bill includes a hodge-podge of unrelated elements and looks a lot like American budget bills, which tend to include hundreds of clauses added as a result of political manoeuvring.
Some of the most significant provisions buried in the Prime Minister's budget bill are: authorization to sell Atomic Energy of Canada Limited without any public debate or scrutiny; a measure to privatize Canada Post that takes away the crown corporation's exclusive international remailing privilege; and approval for having cleaned out the employment insurance fund, which had a surplus of $57 billion in contributions from employees and employers over the past 10 years. That was one of the largest thefts in this country's history.
We hope that the Leader of the Opposition will stand up for his convictions and vote against the measures in Bill C-9. It is important that he do so.
I want to speak a little further about some of the key elements that are buried in the budget bill. We can agree or disagree with some of these budget measures, but buried in this bill are projects and initiatives that the government could simply never pass through the House of Commons any other way.
The first that we want to discuss here today is the gutting of our environmental assessment process. The environmental assessment process for major projects including major energy projects is absolutely vital. We do not have to look any further than the crisis that is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico right now to see why an environmental assessment is so important for major projects.
Yet, what is the government proposing to do? The government is proposing to give to the Minister of the Environment, without any accountability to Parliament, the power to simply waive any environmental assessment requirements and to ask the National Energy Board, for heaven's sake, to conduct the environmental assessment such as it might deem fit.
This is exactly the reverse of what our friends the Americans are doing as they realize when there is one agency responsible for getting approvals that ultimately generate revenue to government, that generate business for business, that are related to energy projects, that it has an exclusive focus and jurisdiction, that what is needed is a separate set of eyes and a separate process to deal with the environmental consequences, dangers and issues that can arise from an environmental project, particularly of a major magnitude.
Why empower the minister to limit environmental assessments at a time when Canadians and our neighbours to the south as well are asking governments to be more vigilant when it comes to environmental assessment, not less? This bill will open up greater risk for our Canadian environment and we could see the same kind of disaster unfolding in Canada on one of our coastlines or even in the Arctic as we are seeing unfold in the United States.
Mark my words, I do not want this to come true. I do not want this to be a prediction of something that is actually going to happen. I want us in this chamber to take responsibility to ensure that it does not happen, that it never happens, and that it could not happen here.
That is why I am calling on my colleagues in the other parties of the opposition to stand up and be counted. In fact, I would call on them to stand up and speak because I notice that even though this is a vitally important bill and even though there have been pronouncements on the part of both of the other opposition parties that they oppose some of these measures like the weakening of our environmental assessment process, we find that they are not willing to stand up and speak.
It is only New Democrats now, according to the list we have before us, who are prepared to keep fighting the bill. I call on my colleagues in the opposition, on the opposition leader, and the leader of Bloc Québécois to ensure that the members of Parliament from those parties are speaking to this issue and are standing up for Canadians when it comes to the environment. It is time for us to do our job.
Furthermore, I call upon them to bring their members to the House when the vote comes and to ensure there are sufficient numbers in the House to defeat this clause so that we can protect environmental assessment in Canada.
Some would say, “Oh, that would mean that it would take us into an election”. An election is not going to happen on top of the G8 and G20. Why not? Because the Prime Minister has already spent $1.2 billion to have these international guests come to ensure he can have his photo opportunity. There is no way that an election is going to happen on top of that.
It is time for the opposition parties to use the leverage and power that we have, and that Canadians sent us here to use in order to ensure that the government is kept under control. Conservatives think the opposition is weak. They think the opposition is unwilling to stand up to them.
Prove them wrong, that is what I say to my colleagues in the opposition. Let us stop the gutting of environmental laws here in Canada.
I could make exactly the same case when it comes to another element of the budget bill. This has to do with the sale of AECL.
AECL is a very important public enterprise. If it were to be debated here, I doubt very much there would be support of this chamber for it to be sold off, especially in tough economic times and without any sense of what would happen, in terms of environmental protection, not to mention the future of the jobs.
It is an obnoxious precedent being set here by the government. I call on the opposition parties to stand up and fight.
It also argues that we should privatize Canada Post. That is the wrong direction to go when we are talking about an essential public service. Taking profitable overseas mail distribution and turning it over to big companies that compete with Canada Post would undermine the ability of our public post service to do the job that Canadians expect it to do, and have expected it to do for many decades. It is a vital corporation.
In closing, I call on my colleagues from the opposition parties to understand that we have a key historic moment here to use the leverage given to us by 62% of Canadians who did not vote for the current government to put a stop to what it is trying to do in this budget bill.