Dennis Gruending

[Petitions, June 6th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by approximately 375 people, consisting of 25 pages, regarding Bill C-33, the species at risk act, which is before the House at this time.

The petitioners ask that the bill be strengthened and they make the following suggestions. A legal listing of species should be done by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, COSEWIC. Politicians should not make this decision. Habitat protection should be automatic. When the provinces fail to provide protection for species at risk, the federal power to step in must be mandatory and not discretionary as outlined at the moment in Bill C-33. Finally, they ask for a guarantee of available and adequate funding to support stewardship options, which of course are attempts to protect habitat for animals and plants.

The petitioners are really saying that they have looked at Bill C-33 and it is not adequate. I mention in passing that our NDP caucus also feels that the bill as it exists is not adequate and we fully agree with the petitioners.

[Cape Breton Development Corporation Divestiture Authorization And Dissolution Act, June 5th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again in this debate, but on a new group of motions, and speak to Bill C-11.

Before I get into the specifics of those motions, it is obvious to anyone watching that we in the NDP caucus feel passionately about what is happening in Cape Breton. It is for that reason that we are speaking in this debate in relatively large numbers, since we have a small caucus. Most of our caucus members have been here either this afternoon or this evening talking on the bill.

We in the NDP felt that before the legislation went forward, and this goes back a bit in time, that Cape Bretoners should have had a chance to have a say about what was happening. That was one of the reasons we and they felt aggrieved in this process and why we have stood here this afternoon and this evening. It is also why the NDP proposed amendments that would have allowed the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Government Operations to hold hearings in Cape Breton before the legislation was voted on at second reading.

In its haste to ram the legislation to close Devco through parliament, the government rejected that legislation, and not only that, rammed it through in a way that really limited the debate. We were opposed to that in other cases and in this case we are opposed to it even more.

There are a number of things that the government did not do right by the people of Cape Breton. As I said, it squashed the debate on second reading of the bill, which was not right in this place and not right for the people in Cape Breton.

The government also decided to end debate before a settlement had been reached on the issue of miners' pensions and severance. As many other people in our caucus have mentioned today, the arbitrator slapped the government on the wrist over that. If it is not feeling embarrassed, it well should.

The legislation was pushed through before any decision was made about the remediation of mines sites or long term economic development to replace the jobs that would be lost. In question period earlier today, one of my colleagues asked the Minister for Natural Resources if the money for severance would come out of the existing package for economic development or would it be new money.

I do not know how many ways there are to evade answers but that is just what the minister did. We still do not know this evening whether the extra amount of money that will come for pensions will actually be new money, which is as it should be, or whether it will be skimmed from the existing package that has been put forward.

I cannot help but think of some similarities between what is happening in Cape Breton and what has happened in my own area of the country, in western Canada, in the way in which the government has dealt with getting its way on some major things, with a great relevance to the economy of the regions.

In this bill it is the Devco mine which is a fixture in Cape Breton and terribly important to the economy and to the lives of individuals in the community.

In western Canada, to take one example, we had the Crow's Nest Pass freight rates on moving prairie grain. I will not go into all the details of how and why western Canadians were able to negotiate that in confederation, but it essentially relates to the fact that we are a large landlocked area and there was no competition in the moving of grain over large distances from farm to port. I might also add that over time the railroads have been given immense subsidies in land, money, and other things that accrued to them for building the railroads. We thought we had this benefit, one of the few benefits to our farm community, forever.

The government began a move to get rid of it. The ways in which it did that bears some resemblance to the ways in which it has operated here. It made its plans in the dark of night and behind closed doors. It was only when it had something to announce that it told people and then it would announce it in such a way that it was very difficult for the community to mobilize.

To make a long and sad story short, the Crow rate was taken away from us by the Liberal government in the 1990s. It said it would tide the farmers over by giving them a payment. The one time payment was made but it was kind of like buying people with their own money. The one time payment was made and then along came this government which got rid of the Crow benefit.

What have we seen happen? We have now seen freight rates for moving western grain move up, depending where the benchmark is set, from three to six times. Now when farmers get a green slip, as they do when they send grain out, they find that between 30% and 40% of that gross amount goes to freight rates.

The similarity I see here is that we have people saying, “This will be better for you in the long run”. Is it not interesting how the people who think something will be better for us in the long run, short term pain for long term gain, are seldom people who are suffering from short term pain. They always think it will be better for us but they do not mind the very difficult transition period that is necessary which can break communities, families and individuals.

My colleagues in the NDP caucus, especially the members from Cape Breton, have moved a number of amendments. Regarding this third group, I would like to describe them as amendments that would really soften what seems to be the inevitable, the privatization of this company. By and large these amendments want changes, if changes are being made, to be made in a way that will guard and take into consideration the needs for employment in the region. We are not at all convinced by what we have seen that the privatization of this company will put any priority on that.

These amendments in Group No. 3 really speak to what we believe may or may not be the government's intentions as to what it is doing. We believe and know that the corporation is for sale. We do not know to whom. We do not know under what conditions.

Coal has been mined in Cape Breton for decades and decades but we do not know if a new buyer will mine coal there anymore. A new buyer might simply be buying what one of my colleagues described as a franchise, the right to supply coal for Nova Scotia Power and others, but will it put any priority on employment? We do not know that and that is the reason we are standing here and the reason we are prolonging this debate to the extent that we are. We do not know if we are getting, as we used to say in farm country, a pig in a poke. We do not know if the new buyer will continue mining. We do not know what will happen to people's jobs. We know that people will get laid off but we do not know what the conditions will be.

In the previous group of motions we wanted to ensure that at least some of the people involved in the boards of directors would have some sensitivity to the local community. We had the audacity to suggest that people on the board of directors for Devco, which is important to Cape Breton and has been over all these years, would actually be from the community and represent the community's best interests. We do not have any such guarantee.

In a sense we might say there are privatizations and there are privatizations. None of us in this caucus are arguing that everything always has to remain the way it has been, but there are ways in which one can deal with people and then there are other ways in which one can deal with people.

We are very concerned in this case that the government is taking privatization to mean something much different than what we in this caucus and members of the community would consider it to be. That is the reason that we feel so passionately about this.

This government's record on privatization is anything but reassuring. I think of CN rail. It used to be a national company. It has long since ceased to be a company that takes the needs of its customers much less their communities into account. There are two things we can now say about the new CN rail. First, it has had a record profit, and second, it has been gobbled up by an American conglomerate. We are afraid that will happen here.

There are many other examples we could give. I could give the example of Air Canada which is a raw nerve for many of us. What has happened to Air Canada? What has happened to its social responsibility, its knowledge that it was performing a national function? That is out the window. All it talks about now is shareholders.

In summary, this group of motions put forward by my NDP caucus colleagues want to ensure that if there is going to be a privatization, that there is a priority put upon employment of the people who are affected by this in Cape Breton. We will not rest until that happens.

[Cape Breton Development Corporation Divestiture Authorization And Dissolution Act, June 5th, 2000]

It is a dubious pleasure to speak to Bill C-11, the Cape Breton Development Corporation divestiture act. I say dubious because of the great hardship which the government and this bill have put upon the people of Cape Breton.

My colleagues from Cape Breton have dealt with the details of the entire bill very well in many speeches, as well as the groups of amendments. Group No. 2, which we are now on, relates to ensuring that people from the community and pensioners are on the board. This speaks very directly to a responsibility to the community and to a transparency and accountability which has been sadly lacking in the way in which the government has dealt with this legislation, and specifically the Minister of Natural Resources. I heard someone say earlier that every time we ask a question about this subject, it almost seems as if he has gravel on his seat. He does not seem to want to talk to it and he is very uncomfortable with it.

The way the Liberals have dealt with this whole issue speaks reams to their callousness and their ability to manipulate events and people in the regions.

There was an astounding lack of consultation in this whole matter. The benefits, when they were announced, were completely insufficient. I am speaking of health, pension and economic development benefits. The Devco arbitration decision, which was released on June 2, made it entirely clear that the package was inadequate, which our members, in particular our members from Cape Breton, have been saying all along.

The way in which the government dealt with the legislation, quashing the debate at second reading, was undemocratic in the extreme. It is completely uninterested in holding public hearings. That should not surprise us a bit, because that is the way it has dealt with a whole lot of other information in the recent past.

I want to concentrate on something a little different tonight, which also speaks to the heart of the matter in the second group of amendments.

If I may give a bit of context and background, this past weekend the Prime Minister of our country was in Berlin speaking to a group of what I consider to be largely social democratic governments about progressive governance. We might question initially what he was doing there. We found that it was due to his good friend, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, that he was even invited.

One may also ask what Bill Clinton was doing in a meeting talking about social democratic governance, the third way, or as the Prime Minister calls it, the Canadian way. I was reading in The New York Review of Books this past winter an article by an esteemed American economist, Robert M. Solow, called “Welfare: The Cheapest Country”. The cheapest country was the United States.

He ends his article by saying that what really distinguishes the United States is the equanimity with which the majority contemplates the poverty of a minority. So one might ask what the president of the United States was doing in a meeting talking about the third way, and secondly, what he was doing inviting our Prime Minister to talk about the third way when clearly he does not know the first thing about it. The way in which the Cape Breton Devco situation has been handled speaks entirely to that.

This weekend the Prime Minister was boasting about Canada's “mixed economy”, the third way; not private enterprise solely, not development by the states solely, but a compassionate and intelligent mix of the two. That is what our Prime Minister was talking about, but as I said, I do not really know what gives him the credentials to talk about it.

I briefly want to give a couple of examples which really do relate to Cape Breton and to the Devco situation. He says that the challenge is to seize opportunities, believing that private economic growth has to be complemented by public investment, yet we have a situation here where a mine which has been publicly owned is going to be sold off. We do not know to whom. We have no idea whether they will keep mining coal. We have no idea who will be employed. We do not even know if someone might buy this mine and shut it down, simply because they do not want to have competition from it. This does not speak to me of a government which comes at a mixed economy with any integrity or knowledge whatsoever.

The context here is that he is lecturing governments from other countries of the world, like the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Our Prime Minister is lecturing them about the mixed economy and the third way. This might be a good standup routine for Yuk Yuks comedy, but it is not exactly what we would expect at a meeting of august members of governments from other countries.

In this context, the Prime Minister says that Canada's governments make a clear commitment to preserving the Canada pension plan. It was not that long ago, a couple of years back, when we were fighting tooth and nail to keep the government from downsizing the Canada pension plan. When it got pushed to the wall and could do nothing else, the government did not cut it as badly as it was planning to. Suddenly now it is taking credit for enhancing it. That is the way it always goes with the Liberals.

He talks about a progressive income tax system. We know from the last budget all about the progressive income tax system. Yes, it is very progressive for people who have capital gains to pay, for the more affluent in our society and for people who are dealing with stock options. It is very progressive for them, but there is not very much for the rest of us. As our party has pointed out again and again, there is very little for health care.

He brags about the employment insurance program. That will make my colleague from New Brunswick double over with humour. We have had to fight the government on the employment insurance system tooth and nail again. Even having done so, the benefits are much more difficult for people to get. It has caused a great deal of hardship for people, in particular working women.

I could go on. He talks about the government's support for students. We know all about that support. The government does admit that student debt has increased. That is about the only ray of truth I see in the document.

He finally says that governments have to find new ways to engage citizens. The government certainly has done that in Cape Breton with Devco. People are engaged in anticipating their own demise.

It is a bit rich when the Prime Minister of Canada goes to another country to, I suspect, set himself up as some wise person who will return home and call an election on the things he is talking about. When and if he does that we will be here to remind him that, despite the highfalutin words, these are mainly false and hollow promises.

In the couple of minutes left to me I want to refer to another thing which is a cruel deception being practised on the people of Cape Breton. We have been told that these mines are being shut down. We are not sure whether the coal which still exists in reserves will be mined in Cape Breton to supply coal for power generation in Cape Breton. What we do know, and it is already happening, is that coal is being hauled from Colombia to be sold to Nova Scotia Power, being hauled on ships owned by the Minister of Finance I might add. However, that is not my main point. What I want to talk about is the race to the bottom being perpetrated by this government on the people of Cape Breton and how it will impact other countries.

A mine leader from Colombia where this coal is being purchased, Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, was in Canada recently. He told us that he feared for his health and safety when he went home because he was coming to Canada to speak out about what was happening. We now have information from the inter-church committee on human rights in Latin America, dated May 29, 2000, concerning an urgent action about renewed threats against this Colombian trade unionist. As he had suspected and feared when he went home, he was followed. It says that there were at least two attempts when people in utility vehicles tried to pick him up. If they had he probably would have lost his life.

I ask myself and I ask members across the way what kind of development it is when we have these kinds of situations occurring, when people in Cape Breton are being played off against people in the third world. What are they being played off against? They are being played off against regimes which will torture and murder people who dare to unionize to improve the situation for their workers.

This is a shameful situation. When we look at the motions being put forward to improve the sad situation which this government has perpetrated upon the people of Cape Breton, the amendments that my party is putting forward are the least we could ask. I humbly ask members across the way to give these motions consideration and to at least pass them so that we can hold our heads high eventually when we talk to the people of Cape Breton, rather than having to hang our heads in shame because of what we have done to them.

[Cape Breton Development Corporation Divestiture Authorization And Dissolution Act, June 5th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, before I begin I would like to call for a quorum count.

[Canada Transportation Act, June 1st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that simple question.

Perhaps I could answer by way of discussing, and my colleague knows this situation well, the case which was brought before the Canadian Transportation Agency within the last couple of years about whether or not the railroads were fulfilling their obligations for moving western grain. Without going into all of the details, after a lengthy process in which everybody had a chance to say their piece, it was deemed that the railways were not meeting their obligations to move western grain.

I believe that the railways would take any chance they could to improve and increase their leverage. That is what we saw in the kinds of recommendations which came out of the Estey report. I argue now, as I have argued in the past, that if we take away that entire function from the Canadian Wheat Board of marshalling cars to move its own grain, we will severely cripple its ability to market grain on behalf of Canadian farmers.

This legislation already takes away much of that power and authority from the Canadian Wheat Board. I would ask my colleague, who will speak next, how much of that authority he wants to strip away from the board.

[Canada Transportation Act, June 1st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that question.

I believe that people in the farm organizations are looking at this and saying “We do not like this, but it is the best we think we can get at this time and we will settle for it”. I respect them for doing that.

It seems to me that our role as an opposition party would be to squeeze as much as we can out of the legislation for farmers. I am quite surprised, frankly, that the Canadian Alliance members are not trying to do the same thing. I wonder if this is not because they have an ideological predisposition which hampers them.

Every time we get into any situation where we want to support farmers, all Canadian Alliance members can talk about are tax reductions. As a matter of fact, to use another example, the New Democratic Party caucus on the farm income issue has been arguing strenuously for the last two and a half years that we have to support farmers in their time of need.

The Canadian Alliance, which was until now of course the Reform Party, in its taxpayer budget of 1997—and I have it in front of me, but I will not hold it up because that would be using a prop—would take $1.2 billion out of the departments of agriculture, forestry and fisheries. This is how those members want to help farmers.

When we ask who speaks on behalf of farmers, I am not about to say that we speak on behalf of farmers, and I would hope members of the Canadian Alliance would not say they speak for farmers, although they always do. I think the question we might want to ask is, why are they not proposing the kinds of policies that would help farmers? That is a question they should ask. I ask again if it might have anything to do with the corporate friends they keep, including Canadian National.

[Canada Transportation Act, June 1st, 2000]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-34, amendments to the Canada Transportation Act.

This bill has a great potential to influence the income of western Canadian farmers. It is in this context that I wish to begin speaking to the bill.

We know that the incomes of western Canadian farmers in the past couple of years have been at Depression era levels. It was distressing to learn within the last couple of weeks that in Saskatchewan the income in the early part of this year dropped a further 10%.

When we look at where farmers spend their money, we find that grain farmers spend at least one-third of their gross income from grain on transportation. Any improvements that can be made to help them on the cost side in transportation are very important indeed.

The legislation does offer farmers a break on freight rates. In that respect it is very important. I might add that this is a break the railways can very well afford. CP Rail announced for the first quarter of 1999 profits of $187 million on rail. That is a 33% increase over the previous year. Can the railways afford to give farmers a break on transportation costs? You bet they can. This legislation promises that but the question we have to ask ourselves is at what cost to these same farmers in the medium and long term?

We heard from my hon. colleague from Palliser about the Crow rate and the Crow benefit. When the Liberal government took away the Crow rate it did something very similar to what it is doing here. It said it was going to give farmers a payout. The government gave them a payout for one or two years and took away the Crow rate in perpetuity. Farmers are huge losers on that score. In Saskatchewan we estimate it is to the tune of $320 million every year in perpetuity scooped out of our economy.

That is what we fear here. The government is giving us a carrot. It is giving farmers a carrot of $178 million in freight reductions next year, but we ask ourselves what is going to happen in two, three, five, ten and twenty years? It is for that reason the NDP caucus is going to oppose this bill as it is currently written.

I would like to explain our parliamentary rationale for this. It goes to the heart of our role as an opposition party in the parliamentary system. We believe that this is flawed legislation. It is our responsibility to point out those significant flaws and to try to get some improvements in the legislation. That is what we are going to be doing. It is not simply for parliamentary reasons.

This bill has the potential to affect farmers' income for many years to come. We believe that it has to be as good a bill as possible. That is the reason, as a parliamentary opposition party, we feel disappointed with the bill. We will oppose it at this reading. My colleague from Palliser has indicated that we will not try to delay this process, but we want and are obligated to point out the flaws in the bill because it is in the financial interests of tens of thousands of Canadian farm families.

My colleague from Palliser has spoken about how squeezed and telescoped this whole process is. It was two and a half years ago that Mr. Estey was appointed to study the whole matter of grain freight rates. We have come to the point now where we have two or three weeks left before the parliamentary summer break. This is when the government decided to introduce the legislation, in the full knowledge that it will not receive a thorough airing, and that the committee process, which is often where amendments and improvements are made, will be severely hampered. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the opposition parties to squeeze any decent concessions out of the government on the most important aspects of the legislation. We are keenly disappointed by that.

My colleague from Palliser has talked about some of the big problems with the legislation. I want to give a bit of context and background. Mr. Estey did his job and was followed by Mr. Kroeger. From our perspective, Mr. Estey listened to the last best offer of CP Rail and put it into his report, saying that it would freeze freight rates for six years, that it did not want them dealt with in the longer term. There has been a rate cap in place. My colleague has indicated why it has been so important over time to have a rate cap in place. The railroads did not want that. It was our observation that Mr. Estey gave the railroads almost everything they wanted. Interestingly, it was pressure put on the government by members of this party and farm groups which led to a mini revolt in the Liberal western caucus at the Liberal meeting last spring, which began to wring out a few concessions. I believe that is why we actually have a decrease in freight rates rather than a simple holding of the line.

I might also add that the railroads are always talking about the need, as do our colleagues in the Canadian Alliance, for competition. They do not want regulation; they want competition. They do not want regulation when it applies to them, but they do not want competition either. We were calling for open running rights, where anybody who could put together a rail company could use these lines, just as we all use the telecommunications infrastructure. Of course the railways did not want that because that would introduce competition. I note in this legislation that we do not have that. We will have somebody look at open running rights in the long term.

Let us be clear. The railways do not want regulation; they want competition, or so they say. What they really want to do is maintain an oligopoly, which they have done for the last 100 years. That is precisely why the government has to intervene with some form of regulation. We are in a situation, which will not change, of monopoly and duopoly. In this type of situation, if we cannot introduce competition, which so far has not happened, the government has to play a role.

In the remaining few minutes I want simply to talk about the two or three things that are most important from our point of view about this new legislation. First, it significantly removes the Canadian Wheat Board from its role in co-ordinating the transportation of grain for export. We believe now, as we always have, that removing the board from a transportation role will erode the power of farmers within the system and will undermine and cripple the board's ability as an exporter of grain.

I will not go into more detail on that because I want to get to what is the single most important thing, and that is the replacement of the current freight rate cap with an annual revenue cap. The are two problems, which my colleague from Palliser outlined. We saw this happen, if I might say, this past April when the railroads were granted a 4.5% increase in freight rates based on the cost of things like fuel. That is fair enough. What did not happen is that we did not look, and the Canadian Transportation Agency is no longer mandated to look, at what are the railways' real costs.

As my colleague mentioned, they have made great savings through efficiencies. They have fewer and fewer elevators all the time, so farmers have to bear the cost of hauling the grain farther. The railways save money. The farmers pay more money. However, when it comes to the rates, that is never reflected.

That is the single most important problem. We have a situation set up where there is a revenue cap, but the government will not look at what efficiencies the railways manage to capture, and they do not have to share those with farmers. If we set up a system like that for the long term, farmers will be set up in perpetuity as losers.

My colleague has mentioned that the estimate is that since 1992 the railroads have saved approximately $700 million in efficiencies. They did not want to share any of it. They are now having to share $178 million. When we look ahead, they will win in perpetuity and farmers will lose in perpetuity.

I might simply say in closing that when the Estey report came out our colleagues in the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance, came out with a news release saying “Do it all and do it right away. We cannot do it fast enough”. I wonder why they always end up on the railroads' side. I wonder if that could have anything to do with the fact, for example, that, in the last year I looked, Canadian National donated $70,000 to the Reform Party.

It is people on this side of the House, people in our party, who are looking out for the best interests of farmers, and I dare say not those groups who are taking funding from the railroads, the banks and probably the international grain companies as well.

We believe this is flawed legislation. We cannot support it at this time. Our interest is in the income of farmers and the health of farm communities.

[Genetically Modified Foods, May 31st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I want to speak this evening about the importation of toxic waste into Canada.

The House may recall that Canadians were stunned about a month ago when they learned that 90 tonnes of toxic waste from an American military base in Japan was bound for Canada. In fact, this shipment of PCBs was on a boat bound for Vancouver. From there, this waste was to be shipped across the country to northern Ontario where it was going to be concentrated and then shipped back across the country to Alberta to be burned. It is really quite remarkable that this material was going to be shipped back and forth across the country and it was not even produced in Canada.

Canadians were shocked to learn that their health was going to be put at risk to take care of someone else's toxic waste, in addition to the fact that tonnes of toxic waste of our own, PCBs for example, sit untreated at thousands of storage sites.

It is quite clear that Canadians do not want their country turned into someone else's toxic waste dump. Yet, we are importing this waste more quickly than we can take care of of the waste we produce ourselves. We should not be importing toxic waste.

The Americans have refused to import PCBs from other countries and I believe Canadians should be worthy of the same protection. The government is not taking the necessary measures to ensure that the importation of toxic wastes into Canada, whether it be PCBs or others, is legal.

There has been a new development on this front. Yesterday a report was released by the commissioner for the Environment and Sustainable Development. He had some startling things to say. I will quote briefly from the report. It says:

There is still a problem in detecting hazardous waste illegally entering or leaving Canada. The extent of possible damage to human health and the environment is unknown. As well, Canada does not know whether it is fulfilling its international obligations to prevent the illegal traffic of hazardous waste at the border. Enforcement continues to be a problem.

The environment commissioner is telling us that we do not know what is coming across our border. We are not looking for it, not finding it and not enforcing it. This is not the first time the commissioner has talked about this. A report in 1997 came to the same conclusions. Two years later he is looking at what improvements have been made. He has a report card and there are only a couple of check marks and many x s. He has failed the government on this one. He is saying that we do not know what is going on and we have to know.

Three years after the auditor general told the government it was not protecting Canadians from illegal shipments of toxic waste, he is telling us that we are still not doing so.

We have signed the Basel Convention, but we still refuse to get serious about ending the global trade in toxic waste. This government refuses to sign a sidebar to that agreement which would put an end to the deadly practice.

What has happened to date on the whole subject of toxic waste is really quite startling, it is quite frightening and it is just not good enough. The kind of crisis management we have seen on this issue is no substitute for good regulation and good administration. Canadians are not getting that today.

The report from the independent Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development proves that. It is not simply things that the opposition parties are saying. The government's own watchdog is blowing the whistle.

I could go into more detail about the government's sorry record on the environment, but I do not have the time to do that. This is simply one more case where Canadians are being let down when it comes to environmental and health protection.

[Petitions, May 31st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by about 125 people in and around Saskatoon, many of them of Eritrean descent. As members might expect, they are extremely distraught about the border war between their country and Ethiopia. They tell us that about one million innocent civilians have been victimized.

They ask this House, among other things, to support and promote the peace package proposed by the Organization for African Unity and they ask our government to respond to the urgent appeal of the United Nations to provide more humanitarian assistance to people displaced by the war in Eritrea, which would be over and above what we have already provided which they do not find adequate.

[The Environment, May 31st, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. minister's efforts and I appreciate his response, but he did not quite answer my question.

I want to know, when he rose to announce the regulations he is putting in place, why he made them voluntary rather than mandatory to help us deal quickly with this death dealing smog.