Mr. Speaker, I will reiterate in the House the co-operation we had in committee and how disappointing it is to see the reversal of so many things, particularly this group of amendments. We now have a bill we in my party are convinced would not work for Canadians or for landowners. The talk we heard about co-operation, consultation and so on was just words as are so many things in the House.
We in the Canadian Alliance will definitely not be supporting the bill because it would not work. Had we got the changes that were necessary the bill could have worked. We want it to work. We need species at risk legislation. However the gutted bill we are looking at today would not work.
I will talk about two major areas in Group No. 2. First, I will talk about the mens rea amendments, Nos. 39, 44, 80, 86, 90 and 122. Second, I will talk about the federal-provincial safety net in some of the amendments.
First, I will deal with the mens rea amendments. If we think farmers, ranchers and corporations would be unhappy because they would not get compensation or because it would be left to the discretion of the minister, let us think how unhappy they would be when they found out they could be fined $250,000 for harming something they did not even know was there. Corporations could be fined up to $1 million. That is the problem. The federal government has said it would be a criminal offence to in any way harm, harass or kill an endangered species.
I want to make it clear that people who traffic in endangered species, hunt illegally or these sorts of things should have the book thrown at them whatever the fine. The government should go after them. However we are not talking about those people. We are talking about the farmer, the rancher, the little guy who may inadvertently destroy a worm, snail or plant without knowing it was there. The bill has been gutted so the government would not have to tell people a species was there. That is even worse.
I will quote from the bill:
No person shall kill, harm, harass, capture or take an individual of a wildlife species that is listed as an extirpated species, an endangered species or a threatened species--
Similarly, it says no person shall damage or destroy the residence of a species and so on.
Protecting species and their habitat is what should be done. That is what we are attempting to do. We want to catch dishonest people who destroy endangered species or their habitat.
How do we do that? The bill says even unknowingly harming species or habitat would be a criminal offence. How does a farmer know what a western spiderwort is, what a sand verbena is, what a tiny whatever the name is and so on? How are average Canadians to know about endangered species? Yet they could get criminal records because the burden is all on them. The burden is not on the government to tell them the species are there. It is on them to know they are there.
For a large corporation with an environmental impact study due diligence may be a possibility but it is not a possibility for the average landowner. The average landowner could be convicted of a serious offence for not showing due diligence.
What must happen? We must get information out to people so they know what endangered species are. What is the government's plan for doing this? It does not know. It has not budgeted for it. How will it inform people so they do not become criminals without knowing it?
Is there a solution? There is. The answer is to follow an old Roman piece of law that says they must have had a guilty mind: mens rea.
In other words, in order to commit a criminal act individuals would have to know they were doing something wrong. It has been a standard piece of law for all that time and yet all of a sudden we are putting in legislation that says individuals are guilty until proven innocent. It says they are guilty even if we did not tell them that that particular animal, bird, plant, snail or whatever was there. There is something wrong when we have a piece of legislation like that. It will not help endangered species.
The safety net is another part of Group No. 2. What about getting together with the ministers? There are a lot of worried provincial ministers. Our consultations with them have told us that they are concerned. They have put in endangered species legislation in their own governments and they are saying this is a piece of top down legislation where the federal government would impose its will on the provinces. The bill does not reflect co-operation and consensus building as we would expect it to. Instead it talks about how the federal government would impose its will on them if it decided they were not doing things right. Bill C-5 would give the federal government the power to impose its will on provincial lands with disregard for provincial rules or practices.
How would that possibly build co-operation between the provinces and the federal government? This concept of a safety net is largely a federal criminal law power and Bill C-5 would give it all to the minister. He would have absolute discretion and the right to decide whether a province provided effective protection. It would be up to the federal minister to decide. This is a top down approach which means the provinces who have the people to enforce this law would have to follow whatever the federal government says. They would lose control of their own provincial lands.
We must bring this point to the House and to Canadians. The federal government would be the judge and jury. It would enforce the legislation even though naturalists say five provinces have better legislation than the proposed federal legislation and three provinces have at least as good as what Bill C-5 would have. Eight provinces are as good or better than Bill C-5.
The federal government would take total power and control and the minister would have absolute discretion to determine if effective protection existed in that province. There is something wrong with that picture. There is something wrong when a federal government can ignore the provinces that way and try to put this legislation in.
What did we try to do? We introduced motions that would reverse this whole process and would say that the federal minister must consult, not may, with provincial governments to decide whether the species was being protected or not and to decide if in fact there was something the province could do to help save the species.
The government in Group No. 2 is reversing that whole thing and saying it wants all the power to tell the provinces what to do and it does not care about their particular species at risk legislation. That is a recipe for disaster and is the number two nail in the coffin of Bill C-5 to hurt endangered species in the country. We have a U.S. piece of legislation. It has not worked in 30 years and this one will not work either.
