Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to engage in the debate. I want to thank my colleague who spoke earlier and did such a good job of outlining the problems that Canadians are facing at the hands of the government as it goes about hacking and slashing away at science, facts and knowledge.
When we raise concerns about various programs that are being cut, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of state gets up and talks about the money that the government is giving to a program or a university or the like. What he is missing is the real crux of the problem here.
It is not that those programs that the government is investing in are somehow wrong or bad; they are not. However, the danger is that it is cutting away research being done by government departments that is crucial in so many ways. I want to talk a bit about that in my few minutes that I have here today.
We are talking about environment science and fisheries science that enable us to understand two things. One is what development is doing to fish stocks and fish habitat—in other words, not just the fish but everything they eat, where they live and how they survive. That is what the government is attacking in the changes to the Fisheries Act. However, it is important science in that it allows us to know what impacts our activities are having on our environment, on other species, on plants and on the air we breathe.
I just participated in a discussion a few moments ago about the decision of the government, through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to cut the Experimental Lakes project. This project has been in existence for four decades in northern Ontario and is made up of 58 small lakes. It does not just perform freshwater science in the laboratory; it has access to the ecosystem. It has access to living, breathing lakes on which it performs important research to determine the effects of various things we as humans do and the effects of development on that ecosystem. The government has decided to cut that.
I do not understand it. Scientists from around the world have condemned this decision, because they recognize the kind of contribution this one organization makes to research and science in the world with respect to how the animals within that ecosystem exist.
The other day there was a little story told by a former director of the Experimental Lakes Area, or the Freshwater Institute, as it is sometimes known, at our subcommittee. He talked about a study they were doing on acid rain and the acid rain levels that were being proposed to be set by government. They found that the levels did not affect the actual fish that were under review, so if they limited their study to that aspect, they would find that those levels of concentration were fine.
However, they went beyond that. They looked at the organisms, the other fish that those fish ate. They determined that the concentration level of acid rain that was being permitted did not affect that particular breed of fish, but it affected everything else that fish ate. In other words, if they had approved that concentration level of acid rain as permissible, it would not have directly killed that fish, but the fish would have starved to death, because all of the food that sustains that fish, allows it to thrive and reproduce, would have gone.
He made that point to underline the changes in the Fisheries Act which focus no longer on fish habitat, in other words the whole ecosystem, but focus most specifically on commercially viable fish. He pointed out that it is completely wrong-headed. He also made the point that the research that is being done by this institute, by the Experimental Lakes Area project, is so valuable. It has made so many important contributions, not only to this country, but to countries around the world in terms of its research.
It is just one example of the projects that have come under attack from the government. Just in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans alone there have been $80 million of cuts to the departmental budget. Much of it has been staff cuts to science and research, which undermine our ability to manage threats to the fisheries.
There is a whole host of things in here: libraries, archives, the elimination of DFO's ocean pollution monitoring program, which will cut 75 staff, including Canada's only marine mammal toxicologist. The Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research will not close, but its work will be seriously curtailed as a result of cuts. That makes me crazy.
I am from Nova Scotia, and there is under consideration the development of the old Harry site in the Gulf to drill for oil. There is talk that the government will ram through whatever it needs to ram through this House in order to ensure that bitumen gets shipped out to the west coast. There will be a whole plethora of tankers running up and down that dangerous coastline, running the risk of serious oil spills, on the east coast, on the west coast. We have not even started talking about the Arctic.
At the same time that it is moving forward with that kind of development, without the necessary checks and balances, it is cutting the science that is available to make sure we know what we are doing and how to go about it.
My time is up, but I want to share this with the House. Yesterday the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans was in Dartmouth, the community I represent. It appears from the media that he was not particularly well received. One of the questions he was asked was about the decision to cut funding for the Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research.
People asked him why he would do that, and he said that it would not close and that work would be done by the private sector. I thought to myself, who, Exxon Mobil? Maybe the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers would now be the scientific watchdog with respect to offshore oil development and drilling and the effect it will have on our coastline. These are the kinds of things--