Mr. Speaker, I will speak briefly to Bill C-33 because for the people who live in cities and are really driving this bill it is very easy to legislate away someone else's property.
In a moment I will read into the record a letter I received from one of my constituents, Earl Campbell, who will be greatly affected once Bill C-33 is passed. He wrote a very good letter to the minister on April 25.
It is a pity we do not have the same rights to property as American citizens have. Our constitution, unfortunately, does not give us property rights so it is possible for a government, like the Liberal government, to just run roughshod over people's property rights. It can take away something for which people may have spent their whole lives saving to purchase some sort of land that they could retire on only to find that a government can take it away without even giving reasonable compensation.
I will now read Mr. Campbell's letter into the record which was sent to the Minister of the Environment on April 25, 2000. Mr. Campbell indicated that he had read the bill which he had located it on the Green Lane website. He read again the executive summary from December 1999 provided by the government and the material in a folder that had been sent to him by the minister, obviously promoting the bill.
Mr. Campbell wrote:
My main objections to the detailed wording are still the same. The enclosed editorial from the National Post says it rather well. Any individual rights are totally abrogated.
I will read the National Post editorial in due course, but I will continue with Mr. Campbell's letter at this point.
It is clear that you do not expect that this land use legislation is going to affect you personally, or restrict your future income or lifestyle, or you would be more concerned with the draconian nature of the regulations already proposed, and the absence of any appeal process.
All the talk in the world about what you or the Canadian government may do for the environment still leaves me in the same unenviable position; namely, some of my property is used seasonally by species listed in the lists in Sec 129 under regulations so far established, ironically enough because I protected some of their habitat under my control.
Bill C-33 says the minister may compensate individuals whose property use may or will have to be changed, making an economic difference to the individual owner. Nowhere does it say the Minister must compensate private individuals, adequately, completely, and promptly, for loss of use or benefits of their lands. Nor is there any provision for compensating the landowner for the costs arising from any damage caused by empowered officials entering or crossing private property as an access to other property which they may wish to enter or inspect; nor other costs.
This difference may be small to you.
It is not small to me. It is the difference between careful modest enjoyment of my retirement years and a penurious existence.
I am sure that I am not alone in this position.
Further, there are powers in the proposed bill which allow the Minister (or apparently even persons delegated by the Minister of Environment) to make further regulations from time to time. These would not necessarily ever be publicly debated, either. Potentially more dangerous.
I have already seen the effect of such omnibus powers as used by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Clearly, any individual landowner has to be both vigilant and lucky not to have some perceived infringement under these regulations cause a major problem with some enforcement officials.
I have little expectation that you, the minister, will ever see this letter—
Today, because I am reading it into the record, the minister will get it firsthand.
—or that it will in any way change the course which you and the Liberal government have embarked upon.
That is why my faint praise is on page 2.
I think that you may be making an honest effort, not just a political one, to do some real habitat protection for at least some of the threatened and endangered species.
Further, I agree that the government must make the final judgement on which species, and even which portions of a habitat, must be protected and conserved. To that degree, I think the introduction of socio-economic factors into the factors affecting any decision is prudent. The absolute protections as found in the United States laws, while they may soften the criticisms of the wildest environmentalists, offer no chance for rational decisions about the greater public good. It will still be a political can of worms to even discuss a decision to abandon some protection somewhere, for anything, I am sure; but the option needs to be open.
That is a heartfelt letter from someone who will be directly affected by this bill. There is something wrong with a proposal for a government to take away something that a person has worked his entire life to produce: a retirement farm that could be taken from him at a moment's notice, especially when he has taken the trouble already to provide habitat for a protected species.
As I mentioned, the position he took was backed up by a National Post editorial dated April 14, 2000. I am not sure I will have time to read the whole editorial but I will read it as far as I can. It is headed “Unsustainable” and reads:
Protecting endangered species and their habitats makes sense educationally, aesthetically, ecologically, even spiritually. But for a rancher or logger who finds such a species on his land, his immediate thoughts turn to personal risks. Will he lose economically if the government finds out he is working in an endangered habitat? Will his land be seized? Or just as bad, will he be allowed to keep his land, but forbidden to use it?
These are not just theoretical concerns. In the U.S., heavy-handed legislation has led to a “shoot, shovel and shut-up” mindset, where property owners view endangered species as creatures to be destroyed, not preserved.
Any workable conservation effort must recruit property owners to the environmental cause.
This is just like my constituent. From the tone of his letter, he clearly supports the idea of protecting these endangered species. All he asks is for reasonable and fair treatment by the government. The editorial compares the situation with the new federal species at risk act. It says:
Compensation for landowners is specifically not guaranteed: The bill says the government “may” choose to pay a landowner for taking his property—not “must” or “shall”. This is no trifle; it is the only line a landowner has to read to know that endangered species are his economic enemy.
As with the colleague who went before me from the Canadian Alliance, I would beg and plead with the government representatives to please read the bill. They should think about what it would do to people in their ridings who have saved their entire lives to buy property to prepare for their retirement and now find themselves faced with the possibility of seizure of their land without any reasonable compensation. I ask them to vote against the bill and send it back for revision.
