Bill Blaikie

[The Environment, April 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, at a time when so many other issues dominate the domestic and Canada-U.S. political scene, I rise to ask the House to focus for a moment on the fact that an entire Canadian ecosystem is in imminent danger because of the Liberal government's failure to get the American government to refer the Devils Lake diversion project to the International Joint Commission on Boundary Waters.

Premier Gary Doer has been working all out on this issue but he needs a federal counterpart who is fully focused on this issue.

The Prime Minister came back from Texas empty-handed. Time is short. Lake Winnipeg, our sixth great lake, is in danger of being permanently contaminated and soon.

I urge all MPs to join in the campaign to save Manitoba from this disaster. It is not a regional issue. It is an issue of national environmental integrity. Security is a two-way street. Violating Canada's environmental security by trans-boundary water pollution is not an example of what good neighbours do to each other.

[Oscar Romero, March 24th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, 25 years ago today Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was gunned down by a hired assassin while saying mass for a community of nuns. Archbishop Romero had developed a reputation for the faith and the courage to criticize El Salvador's American backed military for various murders and disappearances.

For defending his people and for engaging in such biblically prophetic activity, he paid the price that sometimes tragically befalls those who speak the truth to brutal power. Indeed, there were many Christians, and particularly Catholic clergy and activists, who suffered a similar fate for their commitment to social and economic justice in Central America.

At this time the NDP joins all those in El Salvador, and the tens of thousands of Salvadorans in Canada, who celebrate the memory and sacrifice of this great disciple of Jesus Christ. He continues to be an inspiration to all who seek justice and resist evil.

[The Budget, March 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the minister would care to comment on when we are going to get the defence policy review. I remember, as a member of the defence committee, being told that we would have it by mid-November. I thought at the time the government meant mid-November 2004, but I must have been mistaken because we are now in March 2005 and we still do not have the defence policy review.

Yet, the budget has laid out considerable changes and expenditures in the Department of National Defence. This has all been done in a context in which we do not have the promised policy review. Earlier in the day we were talking about promises made and promises broken. We have had the promise of a policy review for a long time.

In terms of the 5,000 new peacekeepers, does the department have a plan for ensuring this happens in a hurry? I say in a hurry because we have a lot of senior, experienced and very capable peacekeepers in the Canadian army right now, but they are not going to be there forever. They are going to retire. It is critical that this happen as soon as possible so that the new peacekeepers can have the benefit of the experience of those who have been peacekeepers in Bosnia, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Haiti, or wherever. That is another concern I want to put on the floor for the minister.

I happen to have a very high opinion and great expectations for the new chief of defence staff. I noticed at the time of the budget that he was out in the foyer in uniform commenting on the budget. I am not raising this in any particular antagonistic way, but he was commenting on the budget like he was from a chamber of commerce or the CLC or some other NGO. Presumably he was saying nice things about the budget.

I wonder if the minister of defence would have been so content with the presence of the CDS if he had been out there slagging the budget. I am a bit concerned about the politicization of the role of the CDS. I wonder if the minister has given any thought to that as well.

[National Defence, February 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there is a point at which dithering morphs into deception and duplicity.

First, we have not been asked. Then the president asks us. Then we have not made a decision. Then Frank McKenna says we are part of it. Now the Prime Minister seems to be announcing that we are not part of it. The government's position has not changed. It is still trying to have it both ways.

I ask the Prime Minister, when is he going to put himself out of his misery, announce what he is going to do about this and show some respect for Parliament and the Canadian people?

[Foreign Affairs, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there have been a number of occasions on which the Prime Minister sent the Minister of Foreign Affairs in various incarnations outside to explain himself and to retract what he had to say, most of the time when he was saying the right thing.

Why does the Prime Minister not apply a little of his own discipline to himself, do what he often asks the Minister of Foreign Affairs to do when he says things that are contrary to government policy, and retract what he had to say about Syria being in Lebanon to keep the peace?

[Foreign Affairs, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, anything I said I have heard said before and I never heard it ruled out of order. Some of the things the Prime Minister said about Syria should be ruled out of order and he should get up and retract those things.

[Foreign Affairs, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we just want to say to the Minister of Foreign Affairs that we support the kinds of things he was saying in the Middle East. We just wish his Prime Minister was supporting the kinds of things he was saying in the Middle East, instead of saying dumb things, then being even dumber and not retracting them. Instead of digging himself deeper, why does he not just get up and say that he misspoke and withdraw it?

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, no one has ever suggested that any one particular sector by itself, even if it was completely removed, could meet the Kyoto target. To me, this is kind of a straw man set up by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters or anybody else who simply does not want to engage in the kind of change that is required in order to prevent climate change.

In the end, those people's children and grandchildren are going to live in the same screwed up environment as the rest of us. Why can they not see that? Why are they caught in this paradigm paralysis that they cannot see beyond the way they have always done things to see that we have to change our way of doing things instead of coming up with these rather petty reductio ad absurdum arguments that are supposed to lay us to waste. We are supposed to listen to them and say, “Oh, wow, let us forget it then. Let us just go on doing things the way we have been doing them”.

The fact of the matter is that we can meet our Kyoto commitments by having the kind of comprehensive plan that the NDP itself has put on the table. It is a combination of things, from very simple things like having a tax system that would allow people to deduct the cost of their bus passes, to massive retrofitting of buildings, to building the east-west hydro grid that has been waiting to be built for so long, to getting serious about public mass transit. The list goes on of things we could be doing. We could invest in renewable energy, solar and wind power, instead of continuing to subsidize the oil and gas industry. No one thing is going to do it. We need to do all these things together.

To do that, we need to have a government that has the will and a government that has a plan. So far we have neither.

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member is right in that our motion is based on a perception of failure. It is based on a perception of persistent failure on the part of the government to do its job, and the persistent failure on the part of the corporate sector to do its job. Yes, we do not have any confidence in the people who are negotiating on behalf of the government.

The parliamentary secretary may have confidence in the people who are negotiating on behalf of the government, but that says something about his gullibility, not ours.

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I first want to respond very briefly to my colleague in the Bloc. He mentioned being able to deduct transit passes. Even though it is not in our motion, that is something the NDP has supported in the past. Members will recall that a private member's bill or motion sponsored by the former NDP member for Kamloops, Nelson Riis, which called on the government to do that actually passed in the House. This is all the more reason for us to be critical of succeeding Liberal finance ministers and Liberal budgets for not putting into a budget something which the House of Commons itself at one time encouraged the government to do.

I will start my speech with a bit of a historical overview. Mr. Speaker, I also want to indicate that I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Windsor West.

I remember when the first mention of greenhouse gases was made in the House. It was around 1983. At that time 90% or even higher of the members of Parliament thought that maybe the member who raised it, an NDP member from Regina, Simon de Jong, was talking about some kind of new greenhouse in which to grow tomatoes or something. There was a look of absolute bafflement on the faces of many members of Parliament, at least those who were paying attention.

Here we are 22 years later, the day after a major international accord on greenhouse gases has come into effect and I wish that we were better positioned as a country and better positioned as parliamentarians to have something to celebrate. We celebrate the accord, but we have nothing to celebrate in the Canadian context yet, because we do not have a government that is fully committed to implementing that accord. We have a government which is committed to the appearance of implementing the accord, but not a government that we get the feeling at all is committed in its gut to really making this happen. It is absolutely critical that this be made to happen.

I want to tell a little story which I read in a book years ago when I was reading about the environmental crisis as it was seen then in the 1970s. The story may have been in Barry Commoner's book

Closing Circle.

Anyway, I ask hon. members to imagine a lily pond. The lily pond will be covered in lily pads in 28 days, but it will be covered in the following way. It will start off with one lily pad, then two lily pads, then four, then eight, then 16, then 32 , then 64. I do not want to go any higher lest I tax some of the Tory backbenchers, but members can see what I mean. These problems tend to grow exponentially. This is the problem with climate change and a lot of other environmental problems.

If that lily pond is to be covered in lily pads in 28 days and that process is taking place exponentially, on the 27th day of that 28 day process, how much of the pond will be left? Fifty per cent. We are sitting there on the 27th day and somebody is saying that if we do not do something about this, some day the lily pond will be covered and we will have a problem, because it is important to us to have open water. There will be people, whether they be Liberals, Conservatives or others, who will say, “What is with you guys? Half the pond is left. What are you worrying about? There is nothing to worry about”. Then on the 28th day, bingo, the game is over. The system has collapsed and it is too late to do anything about it.

This is the kind of process we are in when it comes to climate change. I do not know whether we are at the 27th day, the 26th day or the 25th day; I hope that we are at the 19th or 20th day, but we know that we are in a position where things could happen very fast. We could be putting the whole planetary environment at risk.

I am not under any illusions about the fact that Canada can do this by itself, but it would be a shame if a country with the resources that Canada has, the political, civil, spiritual and other resources that we have, could not bring itself to meaningfully implement the only global environmental accord that is there at the moment and on which the future of the planet depends. If we cannot do that, what kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? Countries that have fewer resources than we do, in that comprehensive meaning of the word resources, why should they even try?

We have a responsibility to the world, to the world's environment, even if we do not feel a responsibility to ourselves.

This is why we have urged the government to finally get serious about this. Getting serious about this means regulation.

We have already tried voluntary compliance. We have had this same story from government after government over the time that I have been here, “Let us just have those in the industry do it on their own”. They do not do it and they are not doing it now.

It does not bother us to regulate individual behaviour. We have regulated smokers almost out of existence. Why is it that it is okay to regulate and mandate the behaviour of individual Canadians, but when it comes to corporate behaviour, that is a different story? That would have economic effects.

Banning smoking has had economic effects on community clubs, on legions, on all kinds of things, but that is okay. Why is it okay? Because there is a higher environmental goal or health goal to be met and we expect those organizations, many of them community organizations that are being hurt by this, to abide by that in the name of the larger interest, but not corporations, no. When it comes to mandatory fuel emission standards or other kinds of emissions, whenever corporations do not like it then all of sudden, let us make it voluntary. What if we did that with the smoking bans that have been put in place across the country? Some restaurants can have smoking bans and others cannot.

On the face of it there seems to be a double standard. This is what bothers us. It bothers us because the empirical evidence has accumulated to the point where we know that depending on the industry to come up with voluntary emission standards and to actually implement them is just a fool's paradise.

I would like to think it is a fool's paradise, but it is actually a cynic's paradise. What it is is a Liberals' paradise, pretending that they are doing something when we know full well that it is not going to happen and therefore they are never going to have to answer to their corporate friends for making them behave in a way that they should be behaving anyway.

Apparently the Minister of Natural Resources said that they do not want to pass this motion because they are right in the middle of negotiations. Would it not be something for the Minister of Natural Resources and the Minister of the Environment to have in their back pockets a motion passed by the Parliament of Canada, by the representatives of the people of Canada, which says that we want mandatory regulation of emission standards? Would that not be something to have on the table when they are negotiating? What kind of negotiator is he anyway? Does he want to go there with his hands tied behind his back, or does he want to go there with something in his hand that matters; the will of the people of Canada to have their government finally do something about this problem?

The Minister of the Environment apparently said that California brought in compulsory emission standards but it only did that after voluntary emission standards did not work. Where has the Minister of the Environment been? He thinks it is working here. Apparently he said, “We are not there yet”.

Why should we have to wait? It is almost an admission that he has to go through this process. He knows in advance that it is not going to work, but he has to go through this process first. In the meantime the air gets dirtier, more people have asthma, more people die, but that is okay because we would not want the Liberals to have suffered any discomfort in their relationship with their corporate friends.

For all these reasons, and lots more could be said, I would certainly encourage individual members to support this motion. Even if their parties cannot bring themselves to support this motion, perhaps there are Liberal and Tory backbenchers who could bring themselves to support the motion because they know that ultimately this is what is going to have to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better.