Bob Mills

[Finance, January 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as the senior environment critic it certainly is my privilege to stand in this prebudget debate to talk about what we would like to see in the budget regarding the environment.

My background is as a biologist. My involvement has gone a long way back with speeches in the 1970s on the conserver society and what we should do with landfill, rivers, streams, soil and all kinds of management issues.

When I tried to think of what I wanted to talk about on the government's upcoming budget, I thought I could turn it into somewhat of a fairy tale, but then I thought that might be making light of the issue too much. I could say that once upon a time in 1992 at the Rio accord when climate change was first identified and the present Prime Minister was there as the senior environment critic along with his cohort and white knight Maurice Strong, they basically signed on as they have signed on to some 100 other international agreements on the environment. The environment commissioner has told us that we have not lived up to very many of those. That is largely because we seldom if ever have a plan when we proceed on environmental issues.

In 1997 it was not much different. We met with the premiers in Regina and then rushed off to Kyoto. The whole purpose was to sign something and to look better than the Americans. The Americans said that they would agree to 5% below 1990 levels, so we went with 6%. There was no plan. There was no consideration that this is a very large country, that this is a very cold country, that we have few people relative to many other countries and that we have very little infrastructure for transportation that would allow us to make some of the savings that we might want to make. The U.S. obviously came to the same conclusions and made the decision that it could not live up to this, particularly without having countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and other developing countries as part of it. Again the government had no plan.

We went through the period of 1997 to 2002 and still the government had no plan. It is now 10 years since agreeing that climate change is a major issue. There were closed door consultations. The government talks about prebudget consultations. I hope they were not anything like the ones that went ahead on the Kyoto protocol. There were 14 meetings in 14 cities. There was an invited guest list. The media was not invited. Members of the opposition were not invited; we had to literally crash the meetings. No one was allowed to speak unless of course the person agreed with the government's position. If that is consultation in Liberal terms, I can see why there is no plan.

In Johannesburg in 2002 again our Prime Minister was present. I was there. I spoke to him prior to his making the announcement that we would ratify the protocol. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, where is the plan?” He said, “It is going to come”. We are still waiting. It is now two weeks before the whole implementation and we understand that in this budget there may be up to $3 billion in more spending, but where is the plan? I think everyone can understand the degree of frustration for many of us who really would like to see something happen.

By 2004 we were 25% above where we were in 1990. The bureaucrats have announced that we will be 30% above our 1990 levels within the next two or three years. We are going the wrong way. We have committed $3.7 billion. In this budget we understand through leaked documents that we are about to commit another $3 billion. That will be a total of $6.7 billion. That makes it at least three times the gun registry. Do we have another such program being rolled out by the government in this budget that will end up like that?

On the plane last night I read Rex Murphy's comment about the one tonne challenge and the big advertising scheme that is going on right now by Rick Mercer. He said, “I'd say Rick has about as much credibility on the one tonne challenge as Céline Dion has selling us the virtues of Air Canada”. There is a lot to be learned from yesterday's article. That is where the government is at. It is interesting to note that a comedian was hired to promote what it is about to do.

We have known for a long time that the heavy emitters could not achieve 55 megatonnes. We understand it is going to be 37 megatonnes. If we all reduced our use of carbon it would only make up 20 megatonnes of the now 300 megatonne commitment. If the heavy emitters are down to 37 megatonnes and Canadians at a maximum are expected to account for 20 megatonnes, where is the rest going to come from? Obviously we hope to learn that from the budget, but I doubt very much that we are going to.

Instead we are going to see the government allocating more money, another $3 billion to a whole bunch of programs. That is exactly what we do not need. We need to commit directly to Canadians that we are going to give them the incentives to do something about the carbon that is being released. We do not need a bunch of programs. We do not need more bureaucracy. What has plagued Kyoto all along is program after program after program.

The Europeans are going through the same thing. We learned that in Buenos Aires in December. They are setting up programs. Their big scheme is carbon trading. If that is not one of the biggest hoaxes and biggest non-environmental ways to deal with the problem I do not know what is.

The government has no plan, but we have a plan. We have a long term plan, one that involves air and the sequestering of CO

2

. It involves the removal of sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, particulate matter, those things which cause real pollution. The Conservative Party has a plan that involves clean water, that involves mapping our aquifers and understanding the positive and negative charge of those aquifers. The Conservative Party has a plan for soil, for brownfields, for clean up, for all of the issues that affect every municipality throughout the whole country.

We have an energy plan based around conservation. There is much we could do there. The government has some good ideas, but its method of implementing them I do not believe will work.

We also want to talk about transitional fuels, about alternate energy, and about the many ways we could provide for the development of new technology. There is lots of new technology out there that could deal with our environmental problems.

There is no vision from the government. There is no plan from the government. The government simply wants to throw money at the problem and hope it will go away. That is not the way to deal with environmental issues. They are dealt with through cooperation with municipalities, through cooperation with the provinces, and by giving Canadians a vision of where we want to go regarding the environment.

We have to reward industry for the new technologies. We have to develop those new technologies so we can transfer them to other countries, so we can help India, China, and the developing world that is not part of the Kyoto plan.

We need to provide incentives to consumers. We need to provide incentives for wind energy, solar energy, tidal biomass, geothermal and all of those other things.

As the environment commissioner said, there is a lot of talk across there but very little action has been taken over the last 11 years of Liberal government. The Conservative Party will commit to doing that through a solid plan, not this make believe plan and this fairy tale that the Liberals have been living.

[The Environment, January 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I think the minister knows how to spend well enough without getting results without getting the message from us.

Liberal cabinet documents released to the media in the last couple of weeks really demonstrate the bungling on the Kyoto file. The Liberals have wasted $3.7 billion with no results. CO

2

emissions have steadily climbed. The Liberals are in no way ever going to reach their targets.

The Prime Minister was the environment critic in 1992 during the Rio conference. He and Maurice Strong have had 13 years to come up with a plan. When is the minister going to--

[The Environment, January 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this is Kyoto in a nutshell: too bureaucratic and we cannot reach our targets. Those are not my words; they are from the Prime Minister and the environment minister in recent weeks. They were the last ones to know what all of us have known since signing Kyoto in 1997, but they still wasted $3.7 billion with no results. Enough is enough.

When will the Prime Minister act like a leader, cut our losses on Kyoto, and develop a real plan to reduce real pollution in Canada?

[Supply, December 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member put it very well. If this inquiry were genuine, we could say fine, this would be good. Too often we have seen inquiries that are rigged to take care of the turf wars of a particular department. They are set up by the department. The people are chosen by the department. I do not know these individuals, but they are there to protect the department. How often have we seen that, where the department can do no wrong. Yet I can give hon. members many examples in Alberta where they have done wrong.

Now, with the fish stocks the way they are, I think they have done things wrong there as well. I do not believe the Environment Commissioner is using a bunch of bafflegab when she says that DFO has failed totally. She condemns them totally in her report. If she does that, the government will try to cover it up.

Let us have an independent judicial inquiry outside of politics. It can examine all aspects of it and come up with a report--

[Supply, December 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, obviously the understanding of ecosystems is a definite science. It is something that biologists have spent years and years developing. We can put all the factors together, look at what the problems are and we can easily come up with what the solutions would be.

Instead of playing the political game, the name blaming game, as the member suggests, if we were to understand that science, in that science would be the solutions. I am certain those solutions could be put forward and I am certain as well that the local people know what it is without ever having taken a single biology course or a single course in ecological understanding.

The bottom line is, base it on science, talk to the people, get the professionals who are there and have them put forward the recommendation. I think what we will find when we do this is that DFO is to blame for not putting things together. In fact, it has played a bit of a shell game and in the process of this shell game, we have lost the salmon fishery of the Pacific coast.

[Supply, December 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to share my time with the member for Newton—North Delta.

I first would like to focus on the environmental aspects of the issues. Our fish and salmon stocks are a major part of our environment, and environmental issues go right to the heart of economy, the well-being and the vision of our country.

When it comes our environmental position in the world today, we can look at some of the reports see what the rest of the world is saying about us. The OECD rated 24 countries and rated us last. We could look at the Fraser Institute and the environmental issues that it has raised. The Conference Board of Canada rates us in the bottom quarter. The Environmental Commissioner has found many flaws in our environmental policy. She basically says that we are great talkers, but we do not do very much. This example today is the perfect one. Canadians have been totally misled Canadians about our great environmental conscience. We have failed in preserving another fish stock, for which should take responsibility.

On the ground, we have brownfields or contaminated sites in most all of our areas. Three cities are dumping raw sewage into the ocean. We have boil water warnings in over 300 of our locations in Canada. We have smog days in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver. We have leaky landfills. In Ottawa we have a $45 million lawsuit for a leaking landfill into adjacent property. That is starting to happen right across the country.

We are not the pristine wonderful environmental place that we like to think we are. We like to hide behind international agreements and say how wonderful that we signed them. Yet we have done nothing to live up to those kind of commitments.

Now we have DFO. The Department of Fisheries in my area and in parts of Alberta have a rather different connotation than they do in Atlantic or in B.C. To us, DFO represents a group of people who come out in flak jackets and guns on their hips. They say that because there are minnows in little ditch, we had better spend $200,000 or $400,000 to ensure they are protected. Lord knows, they might be part of our fisheries in the future.

In my constituency a bridge could not be used because it put shadows on the river and the fish might not swim through the shadow, even though it did not touch the bank.

DFO people burst into a provincial government office, guns in hand and flak jackets on, because they were collecting information. DFO does not have a very good reputation in many parts of the prairies, and now in British Columbia. What is it doing with a very important resource, the salmon fish stocks in British Columbia? I am afraid it is not a lot different. While the flak jackets and guns may not work in B.C., the mismanagement of the fish, particularly of salmon, certainly fits.

I have to go on the reports of the Environment Commissioner. In 1997 she identified the very fact that the salmon stocks were in crisis. She said that the science had to be put in place and that action needed to be taken immediately. That would be the only thing that would save these fish stocks. She again identified that same problem in 1999 and again in 2000. Again she said that action had to be taken and that the science was needed. The situation needed to be studied to determine what was happening. We needed to have our ducks in a row, if we wanted to save the fish stocks.

Lo and behold, a wild salmon policy was put in place in 2000, but never implemented. That is again a lot of talk, a lot of posturing and a lot of “we care about the environment”, but no action.

Will we have to wait until there are no more salmon and then look back in a historical sense and say that if we would have had the science, if we would have done the studies, if we would have listened to the public, we could have saved the fish stock. That is not a very good record or process in terms of saving eco-systems.

I have to look again on page 4, in chapter 5. I have a lot respect for our Environment Commissioner. She is dedicated to the Canadian environment and what we should do for it. She said that in the past seven years her office conducted three audits on the management of Pacific salmon. In 1997 she reported that Pacific salmon stocks and habitat were under stress. Canada's ability to sustain Pacific salmon at the existing level and diversity was questionable, given the various factors influencing salmon survival, many of which were beyond its control, while Fisheries and Oceans Canada helped build up major salmon stocks, other stocks were declining. She said that habitat loss may have contributed and she went on to explain that.

In 1999 she reported that the Pacific salmon fishery was in serious trouble. Long term sustainability due to overfishing, habitat loss and many other factors were the reasons why this is not a sustainable fishery.

Then in 2000 she reported again that nothing had changed, that the Department of Fisheries had not reacted to these reports or to what the people were telling them on the ground, which implies that there is an awful lot of incompetence, unwillingness, laziness and sheer stupidity in terms of how the fish stock is being handled. When people care about the environment, when they have been involved in environmental movements for the last 30 some years, they get pretty upset when they read those kinds of damning statements by a government official.

She concludes that DFO has failed miserably in its actions in this whole area. I am sure if I knew more about the cod industry and Atlantic Canadian fish stocks, we might say the same. Maybe that is why we do not have a cod industry. I am sure there were local people crying out back then saying that the stock and habitat were in trouble. There are all kinds of reasons why and the government needs to manage it. Obviously, that is what we are pleading for today. We are asking that the government take notice of these reports and the situation and immediately do something about it.

Above all, the fisheries critic, the natural resources critic and certainly myself as environment critic want to emphasize that need to get the science in place. We need to understand the science of these fish stocks. I do not believe this is a massive study. I believe a lot of work has been done, but somebody needs to take notice of that science, put it together and look at such things as climate change and all the other things that have an impact. Then we need to have a management strategy. We need to be sure that it is managed efficiently, effectively and equally so everyone is treated equally in the fishery.

Above all, what I have learned in the entire environmental area, is that consultation is probably the number one heart of this. The former environment minister, for instance, would think of public consultation as having a select list of usually Liberals who live in a certain area come and consult with the public. It is not about that. It is about talking to the stakeholders, the environmental groups, the professors, the fishermen and the people who work on the ground. Those are the people who need to be consulted. When they are, we will get the answers as to what is wrong and what should be done immediately.

We ask for a full investigation. That is the least the government can do in an make an attempt at this eleventh hour to try to save this fish stock.

[Department of Canadian Heritage Act, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it fits in environment much better and there is a much greater chance that the environment department will understand the whole ecological picture of endangered species. We went through the endangered species legislation, debated it 11 days in the House, and spent many hundreds of hours working on it, with over 300 amendments, et cetera.

We believe we need to preserve endangered species. The problem we had with that legislation, and a majority of the committee had a problem with many aspects of it, was who would made the decisions in classifying. If we take a piece of private land out of production, there should be a definite means spelled out in the bill for compensation, and not just in the regulations because that is not in them. There should be a mens rea clause, as opposed to a due diligence clause, where a person needs to show intent for the destruction of that endangered species.

The biggest problem with the issue has been this. Alberta has had a great many fisheries officers show up all of a sudden. Those fisheries officers carry guns and wear flak jackets. Why are they there? We did not all of a sudden have a fisheries. Therefore, it is one of two things. They ran out of fish in the oceans, so they had to come somewhere or they were there for some other reason, maybe to enforce legislation that had just become law.

In talking to the Canadian Wildlife Service, it has a very few answers to how officers are actually going to administer this--

[Department of Canadian Heritage Act, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, obviously I identified the $500 million round figure for the shortfall in infrastructure. We are in this situation because of the underfunding for many years, probably since the sixties. That is 40 some years that parks have been underfunded. Obviously we have to look at that.

As well, we have to make the point that humans are part of the equation in parks. It scares some people a little when we talk about ecological integrity. Some people would define that as meaning no humans in those areas. We have to clarify that because we need the public on side. To get the public on side to support this, any government needs to say that humans are part of the equation. Yes, there are protected area and fragile areas, but that can be controlled. However, we must always let the public know that those parks are for them and for future generations.

I think we will get full cooperation and thus support for the funding. I do not know whether it is $200 million or $500 million that is necessary, but I would say that the environment department, which now will be responsible for parks, should very quickly analyze that, come back to our committee and let us take a look at those numbers. Then we can make a recommendation to the minister.

[Department of Canadian Heritage Act, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, obviously I think there are many areas where we could work together.

Let us look at Toronto where 400 trucks a day go down the highway to Wisconsin. That has to end. It makes no sense from a trucking standpoint, a safety standpoint or an environmental standpoint. There is no argument for that. I do not understand why that happens and why we would not change that.

My frustration with this whole issue has been this. When I first came here, I went to Environment Canada. I asked officials what we could do to change the way we dealt with garbage. They told me that as a member of Parliament I could not talk about that because that was a provincial issue. They told me to go and see the province.

I talked to officials in a number of the provinces. They told me not to talk to them about garbage, or research or ask questions. They told me I should go to the municipalities.

I went to the municipalities and they said that they did not have the money to do any kind of research or development on that. They said that it would be too costly, and referred me back to the provinces.

That is the problem. The technology is there. The federal government's job is to show people the technology and show them the vision. Show them where we want to go, how we want to treat garbage and provide them with that background. Who does not have a problem with garbage?

The difference is we have to think of garbage as a resource, not a waste. We have to do some educating. We could cooperatively do that with the provinces because everyone has a problem. I am meeting with two mayors this weekend from small towns. On January 1, they will not have a place to put their garbage, and they do not know what to do. Europe dealt with that situation 35 or 40 years ago by containerizing it and sending it to major incinerators. As the member has said, the new incinerators are perfectly clean.

Yes, we would cooperate on that and, yes, we should work on that immediately.

[Department of Canadian Heritage Act, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly my pleasure to speak to the bill again and to let the House know that we support the bill in terms of transfer of parks from the heritage department to the environment department. We think it makes a lot of sense and obviously it can be administered better.

Today we also need to make a commitment to parks and to heritage sites so that in fact they will not become the poor cousins of the environment department and will be considered an important part of this whole portfolio.

The parliamentary secretary has mentioned cooperation between municipalities and between provincial governments. That is something in which our party believes very strongly.

It is interesting, too, when we talk to the general public. I just had the pleasure, along with my colleague from the Bloc, of addressing a group of university students who are here visiting the House this week. When we listen to their questions and concerns, what we hear is that environment certainly plays a very large role in what they think is important for their future, their families' future and their concerns. It is very rewarding to speak to a group like that because of their comments, their questions and their encouragement.

As well, I think it is important to talk about the heritage of parks and what they mean to different Canadians, their importance from an economic and an ecological standpoint, and of course we can get into tourism, what it means, and the image it creates for our country. Many of us who travel a lot and have for many years are very concerned about what people think of our country. Many of them do think about the parks and the parks system. Any number of times when I tell people where I am from they ask if that is close to Banff, Lake Louise or whatever, so it is an international thing that people know about.

I am very concerned as well about the $500 million deficit in infrastructure. The fact is that through the 1950s and 1960s we committed to preserving these parks, to having proper signage, to having a proper system of parks, and we have let that decline for various reasons. I think that for many parks we have done a disservice to future Canadians by letting this happen.

As well, when I visited the parks, I met with chambers of commerce that are close to the parks. I think most specifically of Jasper Park. One of the major comments I heard was the fact that cleaning of snow and repair of highways in parks comes out of the parks' budget, yet many of these roads are through the park and are part of transportation. A great deal of the parks budget is being used up for maintenance of highways, which is a transportation issue and really has nothing at all to do with the park.

Those are the kinds of issues that I hope Environment Canada takes a look at. I hope this department will manage better than the heritage department has done. As the critic for this area, I hope to hold the government's feet to the fire to be sure it makes parks the priority that I think most Canadians want them to be.

As well, having a long term vision and knowing where we want to go in terms of environment and the parks system becomes critical. It does not matter whether we are talking about the Great Lakes or the salmon fishery on the Pacific or of course the serious problems with oil spills in Atlantic Canada. It does not matter where we are talking about. No matter where it is in this country, I believe that we have had a relatively short term vision for what we want to do environmentally.

If anything, ecosystems do not work in the short term and changes to the environment usually happen over much longer periods of time. Again, I would encourage the government to come up with a much longer term plan for parks and for heritage sites throughout this whole country, and it will be our job to make sure that it does.

On the bigger issue, I will comment about the government's performance in environment. It is interesting that we are now rated 24th out of 24 of the industrialized countries by the OECD. We have an analysis done by the Conference Board of Canada. We have the environment commissioner, who for the last number of years has reported on our environmental standing. We are not doing that well. We have a number of major and serious environmental problems. Most of the world thinks of us as being that pristine, clean, pure air and pure water place, yet when we actually pull off the cover we find something quite different.

Therefore, I am disappointed that we are dealing with very minor environment bills. Obviously I am waiting for some substance in terms of the government's plan for the environment. While Bill C-7 is important, it could really be called a housekeeping bill. It is something that we are going to support but basically it is little more than housekeeping.

As for Bill C-15, which is basically about oiled birds in the Atlantic and Pacific, I think I asked my first question about oiled birds in 1996. The number of dying birds was 300,000 a year minimum and was probably more like a million, and I was told that the government would have legislation very soon. That was in 1996. I did a private member's bill in 1997 and here we are in 2004, almost 2005, and we finally have a piece of legislation on the oiling of birds.

That is not very quick action. If we do the mathematics, we see that this is an awful lot of birds. Those populations cannot withstand that kind of loss year after year with a government that is moving so slowly on environmental issues. I would hope that Parks Canada will not undergo that same tedious performance that we have seen to this point on a bill like that.

I want to come back to the environmental issues of our country. To be rated 24th out of 24 by the OECD is quite a shock. To be rated anywhere from 23rd to 15th or so by the Conference Board of Canada and to be rated by a number of other notable boards and groups in the very low part of the industrialized world is not something that I am proud of. Certainly as the senior environment critic, I hope we will change this and dedicate ourselves to change.

Let me give some examples. The first is the issue of raw sewage being dumped into the ocean. It is not a first world, advanced and developed country that dumps raw sewage into the ocean, yet we have three cities dumping raw sewage into the ocean and we call that environmental integrity. We have to change that, if for no other reason than just the reputation of our country.

I worked on the Sumas 2 issue, testifying in the U.S. as an intervenor on the Sumas 2 project and then again in Abbotsford on the same project.

Mr. Speaker, I know you are very familiar with that issue.

When I went to see the governor of the State of Washington it was very interesting. I went there to tell him they were taking water from our aquifer, that they were going to pollute the second most polluted airshed in Canada, the Fraser Valley, and that they were going to dump sewage into the Sumas River, which drains into the Fraser River in Canada. The most important issue was the location, which was wrong because of those factors.

The governor listened and then he commented. His comment was that he was very glad I went to see him. He said that he understood the air quality issue in the Fraser Valley, but he said, “Why don't you and I get in my car and drive down to the Seattle Harbour and you let me show you your sewage coming from Victoria?” He said that when we did something about our sewage, he was ready to talk about our air.

That is a pretty tough argument to follow up on. It is pretty tough to say, “No. My air is more important than your water”. It is not an argument that one is going to win. As a result, we left it at a draw. I came back home and said that I was going to fight like heck to stop that from happening in my country.

We talk about the pure, clean water we have and yet we have over 300 boil water warnings at any given time. Who would have thought that in a country like Canada we would not be able to drink the water wherever we are in this country? I am embarrassed that this is the case. I believe we must dedicate ourselves to fixing that problem because it is a serious problem.

Why did we not get a bill on that issue instead of this one? We could have very quickly transferred our parks. That has been done anyway. It is not a major thing. It is a housekeeping item. Let us talk about sewage. Let us talk about water. Let us talk about those kinds of things.

We have over 50,000 contaminated sites. We have a minimum of 8,500 federal contaminated sites. Let us talk about identifying, prioritizing and going after them. That would be a piece of legislation that a lot of Canada would be very interested in.

Let us talk about the record of cleanups. I do not think the people of Sydney will tell us that they are all that impressed with the speed at which the Sydney tar ponds have been cleaned up. Yes, there have been plans, and yes, there have been failed plans, but really there has been little else.

Let us talk to the parents of young children in Toronto. Let us talk about the smog warning days when little Johnny should not go out and when grandma should not leave her home because of the air that is not clean enough and could in fact damage their health. Obviously this something we can deal with.

Let us talk about landfills. Last week I went to British Columbia. On my way, I picked up a paper. On the front page of the Ottawa Citizen last Thursday, I saw that the City of Ottawa is being sued for $45 million. What is it being sued for? It is being sued for the seepage out of its landfill site, which has contaminated neighbouring property.

What about those brownfields that no one will insure? They have full servicing past them, costing municipalities a lot of money, but they cannot be used because of potential contamination and future lawsuits. Those lawsuits are starting to come.

This is our Canada that we are talking about. This is our environment that we are talking about. This is in the top five issues of all Canadians.

Are there solutions? Yes, there are. There are many solutions. There are solutions to that water problem. We need to understand our aquifers. We need to understand the charge and recharge. We need to understand the quality and pollution issues. We need to look at all of that. We need legislation that will help the provinces and municipalities to do that.

I had an interesting time at the end of August. My wife enjoyed it. I promised her a nice holiday at the end of August and in early September. I said to her, “Guess where we're going? By the way, did I tell you I have a few appointments on our holiday?” Our first appointment was at an incinerator. She has been to many other incinerators, so she knew where we were going. We visit landfill sites. We have been doing that for only about 35 years.

One day, we were picked up about 7:30 in the morning and we went to the most modern incinerator there is in downtown Copenhagen. It is fascinating because it is an incineration plant that is using the most modern technology. It has recycling at the front end, with cement products, building materials, glass and that sort of thing. Then the rest is put into a huge hopper. That big hopper then feeds it into a big turning drum, of which there are six, and that garbage is then turned and rotated. It is brought up to 100° Celsius. In this case, gas was used.

I went on another holiday with my wife to Berlin. We found it was using the methane from the fermentation of sewage for fuel. These cities are recycling this. That garbage is incinerated and the combustion from that goes from 100° Celsius to 1,000° Celsius, which creates steam. Animal waste and sewage can also be burned. The steam then drives a turbine which then produces electricity, which is sold. It takes that steam, cools it down and distributes that hot water.

The particular system travels 104 kilometres. It has a 2% loss of energy in that 100 kilometres, and the heat is sold. Now there is income from the electricity and from the heat. Then that flue gas runs through a number of treatments. Various chemical processes are used in this. One involves using ammonia and the sulfur dioxide from the flue gas, which becomes 85% on the first pass, is turned into gypsum, which is used in making wallboard. That gypsum is then sold, another source of income.

The nitrous oxide is then broken down into its component parts and that nitrogen is then turned into fertilizer, which provides a new source of fertilizer, which is sold to the agricultural community. The CO

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is captured is gasified and that gasified CO

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is then put into titanium containers, which are then sold to the greenhouse industry. Remember that the best use of CO

2

is photo synthesis. By adding more CO

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to greenhouses, production can be greatly increased. It can also be sold to Norway, where it is put into wells and improves the recovery of gas and oil by sequestering it under the ground. Now the CO

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is gone.

Heavy metals now have been precipitated out and those heavy metals then can be sold to industry and recycled. The dioxins are separated out and further incinerated.

The point in this whole rant, if one wants to call it that, is that is the kind of vision and legislation we need in the House. It is environmentally sound and it will make a difference. It will deal with our air quality situation, our water pollution situation and provide income.

This is the final thing on garbage. I enjoy visiting these places. I am not sure my wife has the same joy. The neat part is the plant I visited is owned by 11 municipalities in 21 towns and cities. They took out a 25 year mortgage on it. That is how it was financed. Yes, it is more expensive than a landfill, but think about what they have done. The mortgage has been paid off, and they now have a resource from which they can make profit.

I could go on for a long time on the subject of the environment. I think I have demonstrated that in the past. I look forward to the opportunity of talking about the other kinds of bills that could come forward. Let us get the housekeeping done quickly and move on to some more substantial environmentally sound bills.