Jocelyne Girard-Bujold

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I can only repeat what I told the hon. member opposite.

From a constitutional point of view, the management of water resources is a provincial responsibility. It is up to them to pass legislation in line with what the public wants—

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Pardon me, Madam Speaker, but I did not quite catch the beginning of the member's question. Could he please repeat it?

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, before replying to the member opposite, I must say that I do not see the point of his comment. Right now, we are talking about drinking water, and which level of government has jurisdiction over that.

My response to the NDP proposal is to again refer to the Constitution of Canada, which says that:

Ownership of lands and natural resources rests with the provincial crown.

My authority is a constitutional document that says, beyond any doubt, that responsibility for the management of water resources rests with the provinces. This leaves the provinces free to develop a mechanism for managing the resources within their territory and ensuring that members of the public are truly protected and involved in decision making.

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, permit me to start with a quote from Plato. This Greek philosopher proved unequivocally the value we should place on this wealth, and I quote:

Water is the greatest element of nutrition ... but is easily polluted. You cannot poison the soil, or the sun, or the air, which are the other elements of nutrition ... or divert them or steal them: but all these things may very likely happen in regard to water, which must therefore be protected by law.

Water then has been of concern to humanity for thousands of years.

The Bloc Quebecois cannot support the NDP's motion. It means a significant step backward for the provinces in the area of responsibility for water, because the NDP is asking the federal government to intervene in two areas: to place a moratorium on the export of bulk fresh water and inter-basin transfers, and to introduce legislation to permanently ban fresh water exports and inter-basin transfers to affirm Canada's sovereign right to protect, preserve and conserve its fresh water resources for generations to come.

We cannot agree with such a motion and such a procedure, which impinge on the rights of Quebec and the other provinces to legislate and manage their own water resources as they see fit. Once again, Quebec and the provinces of Canada are responsible for this resource and must remain so.

One thing is certain: this responsibility must be assumed by the provinces and they must legislate and manage this resource in co-operation with regional stakeholders, because it is they who are familiar with the problems and are close to the realities and consequences of good day-to-day management.

Section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1982, provides, and I quote:

Ownership of lands and natural resources rests with the provincial crown.

Quebec must protect this resource the best way it knows how.

In my remarks, I will show, with two examples from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, the importance and the absolute need to have those closest to the resource, such as our rivers, lakes and underground waters, manage them and be responsible for them.

Humanity's need for water has skyrocketed in the 20th century. In 50 years, the world's water consumption has increased more than fourfold. Meeting our need for water in the centuries to come is the challenge for which we must prepare. Each of the provinces therefore has a responsibility to manage this resource carefully, in co-operation with the public, for one thing is sure: it is a resource that will be highly prized in the future.

Just as an example, there are various approaches that the provinces could consider and where the federal government would be of no help: create structures, functions and responsibilities with a view to integrated management of water resources; recognize users of environmental water in order to get them more involved, and be able to identify minimum water requirements of aquatic ecosystems; develop exchanges of information and educational strategies in order to improve the dissemination of information, the results of pilot projects, best practices, case studies, and much more; develop environmental impact assessment procedures in order to improve the water resources management knowledge base; and, finally, encourage the public to get involved and give it additional responsibilities and a greater say in the planning and management of water resources.

The objective of all of these is to clearly illustrate the necessity for the provinces to be masters of their own water resource legislation.

Water belongs to everyone. It must be managed intelligently by the proper government levels. The Government of Quebec offers an excellent illustration, moreover, of responsibility in this connection. It has just announced broad public consultations on water management in Quebec, to be carried out by the Bureau des audiences publiques de l'environnement, a body which has unequivocally demonstrated its efficiency and its readiness to listen to public concerns. This body is one of the best examples of successful public consultation anywhere in the world.

Its purpose in carrying out consultations in all regions of Quebec encompasses four basic and fundamental orientations: improving the quality of life for Quebeckers; responding to the social needs and individual aspirations of the people of Quebec; respecting environmental quality and the need for sustainable resources; and, finally, achieving the greatest possible equity.

Attaining this is possible only if four major objectives are given priority: ensuring that the health of the public is protected, since water is necessary to life, health and well-being; seeking the sustainability of the resource, since it is our duty to leave future generations with the water supply needed for their development; raising awareness of the resource on the social, environmental and economic levels; focussing on balancing uses, so that legitimate needs are met.

Promoting and raising awareness of water means also raising awareness of the great diversity of its uses and the conflicts that can ensue.

This set of objectives are a clear illustration of Quebec's desire to have its own water policy, one that reflects the concerns of the people of Quebec. This resource belongs to us, and we are fully in charge of deciding what we want to do with it.

As for the expectations of the Government of Quebec with respect to this consultation, to quote Minister of the Environment Paul Bégin: “Our bottom line is to define a water policy to serve the interests of Quebeckers, while at the same time ensuring the protection of a vital resource that is part of the heritage of humankind.” This ultimate goal illustrates clearly Quebeckers' intention to determine the use of this resource according to the need for it.

In addition, the Quebec premier said in a speech that water management should be built on sustainable development, hence the need for careful and responsible management. This management must serve the public and its needs.

These statements and this consultation in Quebec on water will provide a clear picture for future Quebec water policy. The aim of the Government of Quebec is responsible management of this invaluable and vital resource.

I would like to quote remarks made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Lloyd Axworthy, on February 4, 1998:

We now have to determine the most effective means and mechanisms for ensuring Canada can effectively manage its water resources. That includes the very active involvement of the provinces because within their own jurisdictions they have full authority over water resources.

The remarks by the minister are reassuring, given that not very long ago, the federal government, with its Bill C-14 on potable water, unacceptably meddled in provincial jurisdictions by setting up national standards on the quality of drinking water.

It is clear, even for the federal government, that our resource should be protected under the aegis of each of the provinces, which are responsible for this resource.

[Program For Older Workers Adjustment, February 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, there is no time to waste. Instead of shedding false tears over those who have been excluded, when will the minister take action and introduce an improved version of POWA to do something about the poverty and exclusion of older workers who have lost their jobs?

[Program For Older Workers Adjustment, February 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, last Friday, on Zone Libre , the Minister of Human Resources Development finally admitted that the active measures he is now offering older workers who have been laid off, such as those of the BC mine, are not the answer to the special problems of this category of worker.

My question is for the Minister of Human Resources Development. Are we to understand that the minister is going to quickly throw together a new and improved version of POWA, a program that he himself cut?

[Supply, February 4th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to join my colleague, the member for Lévis-et-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, in thanking our colleague from Drummond for all the information and support she has been providing the Bloc Quebecois. She has helped us improve every piece of legislation dealing with health care we have debated in this House over the years.

If we had not had people like the Bloc Quebecois members here in the House of Commons, Quebec would have been penalized ten times more. We are dealing with people who do not consult, take money that does not belong to them out of people's pocket, and use it to reduce their deficit and drive us further into poverty.

Our colleague from Chicoutimi keeps on saying “With this deal it has just signed, I am not sure the Quebec government is going to reinvest this money in health care and redistribute it among the regions”. The cuts the federal government made to health care transfer payments to the provinces created a $38 million shortfall in the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean area. This is a lot of money, $38 million, this is not peanuts. This is money it took out of our own pockets.

It said “We do not want to know, you deal with it”. We in Quebec had made the move toward ambulatory care. We were going to get health care under control.

But the federal government would not let Quebec do its own thing. It said “Let us play a dirty trick on them and cut $38 million”, which is what it did in my area alone. This was a contemptible move on the part of the federal government.

This was not a gift from the Government of Canada to the Government of Quebec. It represented only a third of what they owed it. I think they should give us back the two thirds they still owe. Since 1993, the federal government has cut provincial transfer payments by $6.3 billion. This affects the Government of Quebec. The battle is not over. Quebeckers are proud. We listen to our people. We are attuned to what every member of Quebec society thinks. We are proud of what we are and we are proud of our desire to become a sovereign nation.

I would like to ask my colleague, the member for Lévis-et-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, if he too, in his region, has heard equally contemptible examples of what the federal government has done to the Government of Quebec.

[Export Of Water, December 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, we recently learned that a coalition is calling on the federal government to introduce a bill prohibiting the export of water from Canada.

Since water management comes under provincial jurisdiction, will the minister promise to obtain the approval of the provinces before passing any legislation with respect to the export of this resource?

[Canada Customs And Revenue Agency Act, December 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-43, an act to establish the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

I will begin my remarks by saying that the government's insistence on creating the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency against everyone's advice, starting with the vast majority of provincial governments, including the Government of Quebec, gives the impression that certain Liberal ministers are suffering from what I would call “acute neroitis”.

This disease is named after the infamous Roman emperor Nero who, as members will remember, played music while watching Rome being devastated by raging fires that were set at his own command.

At times, I even wonder if this Liberal government does not have among its members firebugs of such talent that even the former Roman emperor would be red with envy. One has to be a real hot head to insist so doggedly on setting up an agency that will result in a 20% reduction of the Canadian public service as soon as it comes into being.

Under the guise of modernizing the state, our Liberal Neros are establishing a new structure which will translate overnight into a 20% cut of our public service.

For the sake of what interests is the government taking steps it knows full well are meant to take apart the government apparatus? Where is the public interest when, in this era of electronic communications, the government is getting ready to transfer to a private agency an incredible amount of personal and financial information on our fellow citizens in Quebec and Canada?

I must admit this government worries me. It worries me a lot. Its policies worry me because sometimes they seem to come from nowhere, as is the case with this Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. Or rather, and this is even less reassuring, it would appear the government is taking orders from some interests unknown to you and I, that would rather remain behind the scenes and are in any case contrary to the best interests of the Canadian population as a whole.

I cannot for the life of me understand why the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency is such a priority for the government at this point in time when there are more urgent issues we should be dealing with. If only this government's ministers would leave their ivory tower to go and see what goes on in the real world they would realize that, as we speak, a real social crisis is ripping the country apart, leaving behind an increasing number of unemployed workers, something which unfortunately does not seem to matter for this government.

Government members should feel ashamed to expand so much energy today on debating the creation of a new structure nobody wants when so many of our fellow citizens do not even know where their next meal, and their children's, is coming from or whether they will have a place to sleep tonight.

I will be blunt: this government should be ashamed of talking about creating a new private agency that 40,000 Revenue Canada employees will have to rely on for their jobs. These are fathers and mothers who, in two years, could very well see their salary reduced, their working conditions changed for the worse or their job simply disappear without being able to do anything about it. It is as though the government were set on imposing economic uncertainty on the largest possible number of our fellow citizens.

It is the same government that cut transfers to the provinces, transfers aimed at helping students, social welfare recipients and the sick.

It is not surprising that Jean Chrétien's Canada is a country where injustice and inequity are commonplace, a country where the worst thing that can happen to someone is to lose one's job or to be poor and unemployed, because this country is run by a government that does not care about its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.

The worst threat facing the people of this country does not come from the nasty separatists who were elected in Quebec and who create political and economic uncertainty. No. The threat does not come from this side.

For thousands and thousands of Canadians, the enemy is not in Quebec City but rather in the federal capital, in Ottawa. The enemy is this Liberal government, whose employment insurance reform has reduced the rate of contributors eligible for benefits from 80% to a mere 42%. Thousands of our fellow citizens who had paid EI premiums lost the right to receive benefits when they needed it and were forced onto the welfare rolls and into poverty by this government.

As if that were not enough, after denying access to EI benefits to thousands of our fellow citizens, thereby generating a surplus of billions of dollars in the EI fund, this government is now contemplating the robbery of the century and is trying to get its hands on this surplus and use it for its own ends.

Despite what some ministers across the way might say, thousands of our fellow citizens are convinced that the worst threat to our country does not come from the PQ government in Quebec, but rather from the federal Liberal government.

Just last Saturday evening, I attended a function where I met around 150 senior citizens from my riding. These people unanimously told me that they are outraged and deeply offended to see that, while poverty is rampant in this country, the only concern of the government is not to save the poor. That would be too much to ask of them. Its only concern is, believe it or not, to save the millionaires in Canadian professional sport.

As far as I know, none of these sports millionaires are wondering how they will manage to put food on the table for their families. I can assure the House that the privileged few who feed off the system do not have these kinds of worries. Still, the government has decided to help them out, to save them. But to save them from what? Is it not normal for people who earn millions of dollars to pay taxes accordingly?

The Liberal government does not seem to think so, because it is about to reduce by hundreds of millions of dollars the taxes paid by these poor sports millionaires. The government wants to fund these measures at the expense of the real poor from the middle class, in part by drawing billions of dollars from the EI surplus that belongs to them.

Would someone please explain to the leader of this government and to his ministers that millionaires are not poor? There is a limit to being out of touch with the reality of those who elected them and whom they wooed by promising to represent them well and defend their interests, only to forget everything the day after the election. I think it is high time the Prime Minister start listening again to what ordinary people have to say.

I urge him to visit seniors in my riding of Jonquière and listen to what they think of his plans to help professional sports tycoons, while at the same time dropping 40,000 loyal government employees, including 1,000 or so in the Jonquière tax centre, employees with whose services the government is about to dispense by shifting them to a private agency that will not be obligated to them in any way two years from now.

Before rushing to the rescue of professional sports tycoons, this government must scrap Bill C-43 and reassure the 40,000 affected employees that they no longer have to fear for their future. If it fails to do so, it will mean that the government has a hidden agenda, which is completely different from the one it sold Quebeckers and Canadians in the last election campaign.

In the 1997 election campaign, the government never told Revenue Canada employees that, as a reward, 40,000 of them would fall into the clutches of a bureaucratic structure. The government never said that, and therefore had no mandate to do so.

This government never told Quebeckers and Canadians that, if they voted for it in 1997, it would set about dismantling Canada a little at a time, and yet this is what it is doing by privatizing 20% of the federal public service. This government never said so openly and therefore was never mandated to do this.

I repeat, this government has no mandate to do this. If the Liberal government still understands the meaning of the word democracy, it has only one option open, that of abandoning the establishment of the Canada customs and revenue agency. I realize it is not an easy decision.

It is not easy, because I suspect that the Liberals have probably already promised some of their friends in the private sector, no doubt themselves poor millionaires too, that the new structure would benefit them. Today, however, they have to turn to their friends and say they cannot keep their word.

They cannot keep their word because they had already given their word to the people of Quebec and Canada that they would act in their interest. The Canada customs and revenue agency is not in their interest. They cannot keep their word because they had already given their word during the election campaign to the officials of the department of revenue, including those in my riding, that they need not worry about their jobs under a Liberal government.

If the government of Jean Chrétien has any honour left, it must keep the promise it gave to the people of Quebec and Canada and kill its proposed Canada customs and revenue agency.

[The Environment, December 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, for the second time since 1996, the auditor general concludes in a report that the federal government still does not have a complete picture of the various environmental hazards posed by the 5,000 contaminated federal sites.

What is the Minister of the Environment waiting for to adopt a comprehensive environmental policy to remedy this serious problem?