Madam Speaker, it is a great honour for me to rise this morning to speak to Bill C-33. I would like to begin by thanking my dear colleague, the member for Richmond—Arthabaska, for supporting my amendments this morning.
I am very pleased to finally be standing at report stage of the bill. I will recount Bill C-33's history briefly, but it has not been brief. The bill came forward for first reading in November 2022, so we are coming up on two years. We have to get the bill passed and through the Senate before an election occurs.
I want to thank the previous minister of transportation, who did the heavy lifting on this, the member of Parliament for Mississauga Centre. In the summer of 2023, it shifted to being the member for Honoré-Mercier, and yesterday it shifted to being the hon. member for Oakville.
The bill is critical legislation. It deals with rail safety and with issues relating to our ports. There are many sections to it, and obviously it deals with such substantially different issues.
This bill has to do with rail safety and the Canada Marine Act. It also has to do with anchorage, which is a key issue for my riding.
There are a lot of issues bundled up in the legislation, and I want to specifically, of course, address my own amendments. However, before I get into that, I really do want to salute the work of members on all sides of this place, particularly with respect to contributions from New Democratic members of the committee and from the Bloc Québécois members, for major improvements in the bill, following support from some Liberals on the committee and Green Party amendments at committee to improve the legislation.
For instance, some of my amendments that were accepted would make part of the fundamental purpose of the Marine Act to also respect the environment and indigenous rights. These are important elements because the system that is used out of ports along the B.C. coast significantly impacts indigenous rights and significantly impacts the environment, but the impacts have never been recognized before.
Some of the things that would be done here, and which are terribly important, are to try to improve the efficiency of ports along the B.C. coast. It would not be extra paperwork and extra regulation. It is trying to make sure that our ports operate efficiently in the interests of everyone from prairie grain farmers to first nations, indigenous peoples including Coast Salish peoples up and down the B.C. coast, particularly on southern Vancouver Island.
They have been negatively impacted by the failure of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority to ever consult first nations about the appropriation of their lands, their territories and particularly their traditional rights in the waters of the Salish Sea, which have been completely ignored for a very long time. Therefore, initially at first reading in November 2022, I was pleased and excited to see it and glad we finally had some improved legislation.
I will that say one of the things I am encouraged about, which came forward with the legislation and with some amendments, is that the minister of transport, if they have reasonable grounds to believe that a vessel is a threat or poses a direct or indirect risk to the security of marine transportation or to the health of persons involved, would now be able to direct the vessel to proceed to a different place.
Why does this matter so much? For members who are not coastal and who have not heard this really quite horrific situation, I will explain the inefficiencies, particularly in shipping goods in bulk. Container ship containers basically have computerized systems and bar codes along the side. When they come into the port authority, whether it is a port up and down the coast, Prince Rupert or Vancouver, the containers are read quickly and moved to the right place. They tend to be shipped out quickly.
The difficulty comes with shipping of goods in bulk, primarily coal, metallurgical and thermal; and different categories of grain, whether barley or durum, the wheat and barley that show up at ports. They do not get shipped efficiently, and then they have to be loaded into freighters that can have three or four different holds.
What happens, and I am sure prairie farmers who are watching today will know that this is the case, is that CN Rail and CP Rail seem to be surprised every year by something called fall, and by the grain harvest, and they do not have the cars lined up to ship the grain efficiently to ports where it is going to go to other countries to make sure farmers can recoup their costs and other countries can buy our grain.
What happens is that one hold of a freighter gets loaded. The Port of Vancouver then says that there is no room for it in that port and to go sit up sit up near Galiano Island for a while, or near Pender Island or Gabriola Island. That is fine. They are told to just sit there and cool their jets. They get free parking there. There is no benefit to the local community at all. They just drop anchor and destroy the benthic organisms below. They make a lot of noise and contribute to the threatened status of the southern resident killer whales.
There are a number of things that the bill would do that would be improvements. One is to allow the minister of transport to redirect where ships are sitting, and I put it to my friends on the Conservative side of the House to think about this, because they want accountability. Why is it that our harbour authorities are so unaccountable, do not talk to local communities and do not have to care about it? They are a law unto themselves. The bill would begin to represent the concerns of indigenous peoples and communities up and down our coast.
I really want to get to my amendment before I run out of time. The amendment is to do something that was promised by the Liberal Party in the 2021 election campaign, which is to ban the export of thermal coal. Thermal coal, unlike metallurgical coal, is being shipped to other countries for the purpose of burning it, releasing greenhouse gases for electricity.
More galling than the export of thermal coal is that the thermal coal being shipped out of the port of Vancouver is coming from the United States. It comes up on rail cars. It contributes to coal dust through communities like Tsawwassen. It contributes to immediate negative health impacts. Why is it coming up from the U.S.? It is because the United States, up and down the west coast, has banned the export of thermal coal for climate reasons.
U.S. coal is being shipped up to Canada to be moved to our ports, and it slows down the efficiency of the ports because it is a bulk export with the same problem of getting it into different holds of different vessels to ship to another country. Meanwhile, the United States and the states up and down its west coast will not do this anymore.
There is the burden of a climate impact that is negative, a negative impact on the survival of our southern resident killer whales and an affront to indigenous rights, and all of this is contributing to the inefficiency of the port of Vancouver. There is an amendment to the bill that did get through committee at clause-by-clause, but it would not take effect until the year 2030.
My amendment tries to align the interests of existing and previous government promises in all these areas: climate action, protection of endangered species and respect of indigenous rights. In one fell swoop, the amendment would bring the banning of thermal coal up to 2025 instead of being postponed to 2030, and the current language is quite permissive in that regard.
Again, there are more aspects of Bill C-33 than I can cover in a short speech at this moment of finally getting to report stage, but I want to ask all members to consider how important it is to get to the bill finally, considering that clause-by-clause took place in December 2023. Here we are in September 2024. Let us get the amendments passed; I urge colleagues.
I would be very grateful for support for the amendment that I am bringing forward today on behalf of the Green Party to accelerate the banning of thermal coal from Canada. Metallurgical coal would still be going through our ports, but not the specific coal that, as I said, the U.S. states have already taken action on for climate reasons alone and that they will not ship.
Let us make sure Canada stops shipping thermal coal overseas. At the same time, let us take significant action to reduce the amount of noise driving our southern resident killer whales to extinction, and respect indigenous rights. I thank the W_SÁNEC Leadership Council for its work on this issue. I thank the citizen groups up and down southern Vancouver Island that track the freighters, and I urge all colleagues to expeditiously pass key amendments for the environment and approve Bill C-33 at report stage and then at third reading.