Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has a deep love of his constituency, which would potentially bear the brunt of the major risk of proposed tanker trafficking of raw bitumen.
The member raises a lot of cogent points. One of the most important ones is the abject failure of the government to respond to even its own officers' recommendations. The commissioner for sustainable development has made recommendation after recommendation for either improving the legislation or improving the monitoring and enforcement of that legislation.
The question is this: why is the government not responding to those independent recommendations coming from the leading experts in the country?
Deeply troubling is the emasculation of federal environmental legislation, which I am very privileged to have had a part in preparing.
Scientists and technical people and even the industry are deeply troubled with the direction in which the government is going. Throne speech after throne speech and budget after budget have been clear. The government's intention is to fast-track resource extraction. What it has promised is balanced development.
However, in committee yesterday, we heard from the MPMO, which is a body created relatively recently specifically to override all environmental protections and fast-track. It was very clear in its presentation that it no longer really saw its role as this double one of both ensuring efficient reviews and ensuring they were effective, in other words, ensuring the environment was protected.
Evidence of that is found in the Center for Global Development report issued yesterday, which stated that Canada had dropped from 12th to 27th place out of 28 wealthy nations in the world, for our environmental record. That tells us right there.
How can the Canadian public have confidence in the government? It is one thing to enact legislation that would put into effect an international convention; it is another thing to actually put into place the mechanisms that would ensure Canadian safety on the three coastlines.