Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in the House. Today we are speaking to Senate bill S-6, An act to amend the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act and the Nunavut Waters and Nunavut Surface Rights Tribunal Act.
It is interesting that the bill is coming before us the week that the Yukon Supreme Court just struck down the efforts by the Yukon government, another right wing government, to ignore consultation, ignore environmental due process, ignore first nations in its push and attack on the Peel valley watershed. The supreme court said that it cannot do that. There is a social licence issue here when we are looking at development issues, and the court has thrown it back.
This is a pattern, and we are going to talk about it in the bill. The government thinks it can get ahead of social licence by just bringing in omnibus legislation, by stripping regulations, by doing things in the back room in order to kick-start mega development projects on which it has failed to do its basic due diligence and consultation, especially with first nations, who have enshrined constitutional rights under section 35. In doing so the government ends up creating a situation like the one we have now.
The government's militant advocacy of the big oil agenda has created a backlash across the country. It is a backlash where people say “You stripped the waters act of 99.999% of the lakes and rivers in our country so that the pipelines could get through without having to worry that there are basic protections in place.” Then it goes into the communities and they are saying “Are you kidding me? You're going to run bitumen through my town when there are no shut off valves on either side of the lakes and rivers?”
I represent probably one of the largest mining regions in Canada, if not in the world. When I talk to the mining companies in my region they get it. They understand the importance of having what we call “treaties on the ground”. We need to have the support of the local communities. Some of the ways to do that is by meeting environmental standards and through first nations consultation. Talk to anyone in the Ontario mining industry today about the possibility of getting a project off the ground, and they will say that without that consultation, it is not going to happen
We see a bill come forward like Bill S-6 that is unilaterally rewriting Yukon's environmental and socio-economic evaluation system. It is ignoring the issues of first nations consultations. It ignores the incredible economic value of the landscape and natural resource beauty in Yukon. This is another attempt to bypass the people of the country and create consensus on what development should look like. I believe it is only going to end up in another failure and impasse, going all the way back to the Mackenzie Valley pipeline days of these mega projects. If they are not done in a balanced manner, they are not going to get done at all.
Having travelled across the country from one end to the other, having done some of it in the back of a cheap little mini van with a band and other times as a sitting politician, I have never seen a section of the country that has taken my heart as much as Yukon. I love St. John's, Newfoundland, and my family roots—