Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-469.
Surveys with Canadians regularly rank environment and economic issues as number one or number two and what they want the government to place on the government's agenda. It is their high priority, as it is with this government.
These two issues, the environment and the economy, also have an important link in C-469.
First, we understand that the bill's intention is to ultimately provide better environmental protection in Canada. However, although it is a good objective the effectiveness of these rights compared to those which already exist still need to be proven. Canadians have watched as Parliament and successive governments have passed several laws and regulations to protect the environment. However, without a serious enforcement of the laws and regulations, environmental protection remains theoretical.
To achieve real goals in environmental protection, we need to have better enforcement of the laws and regulations that we already have. Our government is proud to have concentrated its efforts in the area of enforcement, notably through the adoption of the Environmental Enforcement Act nearly a year ago. We are already seeing a positive effect from that legislation.
As I mentioned in my introduction, Canadians also place an importance on the economy. In particular, Canadians expect the government to manage public funds effectively and with the greatest of care. However, we see that the impact of the rights proposed in Bill C-469 on Canada's economic growth and especially on the government's budget have not yet been documented.
With the perspective of sustainable development, it is imperative to evaluate each legislative measure so as to ensure the best possible synergy between environmental objectives and economic security. However, the creation of individual environmental rights could, depending on how they are written, lead to high cost and significant delays resulting from legal battles that would unduly delay the achieving of the planned objectives.
Furthermore the litigiousness of the environmental protection caused by Bill C-469 should in our view be questioned. The creation of individual rights to a healthy environment could cause in the transfer of environmental decisions from elected members of the government to non-elected members of the judiciary branch, who are not required to report to Canadians.
It should be remembered that Bill C-469 essentially proposes the creation of three types of environmental rights.
First, the bill proposes the creation of a right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment for each Canadian resident in addition to creating a corollary obligation of the government to protect this right and to act as a trustee for Canada's environment. Legal actions would allow Canadians to enforce the execution of the obligations.
Second, the bill proposes a series of procedural environmental rights, including measures for the public's participation in the decision making process and the right to demand inquiries and access to information rights.
Third, the bill proposes civil action where any Canadian resident can ensure environmental protection from another person who has violated or who may violate the law, regulation or any other federal regulatory test.
In the first hour of debate, my opposition colleagues placed a lot of emphasis on the first type of right in Bill C-469 as proposing to create; that is to say the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment. The opposition colleagues gave a grim picture of the current situation in Canada. It was mentioned several times that, unlike Canada, more than 130 countries had included environmental rights in their constitution. The member for Edmonton—Strathcona notably quoted the example of India and Bangladesh, which have incorporated such rights in their constitutions. Given the serious impact of this bill, this comparative analysis needs to go a bit further.
First, it should be remembered that Bill C-469 would do nothing to amend the current lack of environmental rights in the Canadian Constitution. Rather the bill proposes to add the right to a healthy and ecologically-balanced environment to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and to add this right to the new Canadian charter of environmental rights.
Second, it should be pointed out that of the 31 member countries of the OECD, 19 have not included any explicit right to a healthy environment in their constitution. Among the countries that have not explicitly recognized environmental rights, there are Australia, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, The Netherlands, Sweden, the U.K. and the United States. Furthermore, even in the number of OECD countries that have inserted explicit environmental rights in their constitution, this right is sometimes subject to limitations.
When we take a closer look at Bill C-469, we realize that it is an original proposal, different from most environmental right instruments being used currently around the world. For example, the obligation that would be given to the government to protect the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment and the corollary recourse by which legal action could be taken against the government because it did not ensure the enforcement of its law in a specific case is unprecedented. The discretion to enforce a law usually rests with the government.
During the first hour of debate, the member for Ottawa South referred to the Yale-Columbia environmental performance ratings. The ratings have countries, such as Bangladesh and India, ranked 139th and 123rd respectively in terms of environmental performance. In contrast, other countries which do not have environmental rights included in their constitution are countries such as Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden and the U.K. and they are ranked first, second, fourth and fourteenth in the report.
Without making any statements on the accuracy the Yale-Columbia rankings, it is obvious to me that whether environmental rights are included or not in the constitution is not in itself a determining factor on the state of the country's environmental protection measures. That is why we think we need to be very careful making a comparative analysis of Bill C-469 with the environmental rights placed in other jurisdictions.
Bill C-469 is unique because it is placed within a specific context, the Canadian legislative system, a system that already includes several environmental laws and several environmental protection measures. A thorough analysis of Bill C-469 requires participation from legal and scientific experts in order to evaluate the true impact of the bill on environmental protection, economic growth and social fairness in Canada.
By comparison, it should be pointed out that in France, the adoption of the environmental charter in February 2005 was done after four years of preparation from the Coppens commission, a commission composed of two committees, one legal, the other scientific. The commission also consulted more than 55,000 stakeholders during the course of its work.
It should also be mentioned, by the way, that the French environmental charter stipulates procedural environmental rights, such as access to information and participation in public decisions that have an impact on the environment, but only under conditions and limits defined by law. This type of express limitations is reminiscent of the environmental rights inserted into Ontario and Quebec law, which were defined within the limits stipulated by law.
We believe the measures included in Bill C-469 are unique and complicated, making it a bill whose consequences on the environment and the economy are not known. It would therefore be essential to wait for the stakeholders involved in this bill, including legal and scientific experts and economic stakeholders before making a final judgment.