Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place, especially on this day, on behalf of and representing the good people of Davenport in the great city of Toronto.
I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing.
Some might wonder what a guy from Toronto is doing speaking on a bill about a national park in the Northwest Territories. What I would like to talk about today is how the issues that this bill underlines should concern all of us, whether we live in big urban centres like Toronto or aboriginal communities in the north. I am talking about the issues around public engagement, ribbon-cutting policies that do not have the backing of budgets, and the promises that the Conservatives make and do not fulfill.
This park is one that we want to see created, but the proposal on the table underlines some of the deep concerns we have on this side of the aisle around how the government does its business. I would like to enumerate some of the connections and the systemic issues that this bill underlines.
Right now in this country, we have a crisis around social access and public engagement. In my city, we saw the public literally shut out of the consultation process around the reversal of the Line 9 pipeline. If the government had the full confidence that this was a fine idea, it should have allowed for a full debate and access to public consultation. As it stands now, many people in my community do not support the decision to reverse the flow of Line 9, and I present petitions in the House almost daily on that subject.
The issue is the same, when, for example, we talk about a nuclear fuel facility in my riding which operated for 50 years, and as part of its licence had an obligation to inform and engage the public about the work it had been doing. It was discovered, because no one knew about it for 50 years, that the facility had not been doing the job that its licence required of it, and the government seemed to be nonplussed by the whole affair.
We have other—