Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to support the motion by the member for Lac-Saint-Louis. I was pleased to hear him say that he would also be supporting the motions that two of my colleagues have before the House, the member for Parkdale—High Park and the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.
Water is a very precious resource. It is one of the real necessities of life. It is one that we often take for granted, but it is not always in plentiful supply. We have seen, with climate change around the world, areas of the world that are in dire need of water.
In fact, we can reflect back on our own history and think of the time in the thirties in Saskatchewan when there was a real drought for a number of years. We can recall how devastating that was to the people of the prairies when that drought went on and really contributed to the whole period that we call the dirty thirties in Canada.
As I said, the NDP will support this motion. I want to say that for many years New Democrats in this place before me have talked about the issue of water. I remember the member of Parliament for Kamloops who was here during the eighties and nineties, and the early part of 2000 who raised this issue repeatedly in the House of Commons, Nelson Riis.
We also know that there are pressures and demands for water being placed on the U.S. and that the issue of water exports is at the top of mind for many of us as Canadians.
Last year I had the pleasure to attend a workshop in my community that was put on by KAIROS, which is an ecumenical, social justice movement. The people in KAIROS had been committed to social justice issues and are promoting the whole issue of water as a basic human right. That event took place at St. Laurence Anglican Church in my community and I was very pleased to participate in that. I was invited by Ross Bremner and other activists in the community. The title of their workshop last spring was “Water: Life Before Profit”, and it relates quite well to this motion, as does the work that that organization is doing.
In the New Democratic Party election platform in 2006, we committed to laws that would crack down on big polluters and help guarantee a healthier environment for both our current generation and future generations. We said that Canada should have a clean water act to establish national standards and protection for drinking water, including those jurisdictions under federal control such as first nations communities and reserves.
We need federal standards for solid waste disposal, dump management, mine site operations and rehabilitation, forestry and farming practices and pesticide use.
We can see again, with climate change in my province of British Columbia, the devastation that the pine beetle infestation is having on the pine forests in B.C., the significant danger of slides, and degradation of our water supplies and our rivers in British Columbia. We do not have the forests there to hold onto the soil and stop the slides from happening.
We need to provide infrastructure financing to provide funding for badly needed improvements to public sewers and water systems in Canada. That would make a real improvement in water quality. We have the horrible example and tragedy of Walkerton that I think brought to the front of people's minds in Canada the necessity for prevention and purity of our water, something that when I was growing up we basically took for granted. We now realize that we have to take this issue seriously.
In British Columbia, we have more and more boil water advisories happening all the time. In fact, in the greater Vancouver region last year we had a boil water advisory that went on for weeks, something that had been unheard of anywhere in the Vancouver region previously.
We support this motion and we want to establish a Canadian water strategy that would include federal legislation supporting pollution reduction and prevention, watershed planning, research and development, investment in water infrastructure and support for standards for safe drinking water.
We do support the idea that water is a public good and that it has an inherent importance to Canada's ecosystems and for future generations of Canadians.
The people of Canada recognize the vital importance of freshwater and are committed to its protection, its conservation and environmentally sustainable use. We also believe that we should declare water as a basic human right and work nationally and internationally to ensure action to implement this policy for all Canadians for in fact people throughout the world.
Bulk freshwater diversions and removals from Canada will not address the future water needs of ordinary citizens elsewhere in the world and would have a potentially devastating ecological consequence for Canadians and Canada.
At the time of the debate and negotiations around NAFTA, the government of British Columbia opposed the passage of the NAFTA, in part because of the threat it proposed and still poses to democratic control over water.
The B.C. government repeatedly urged the federal Liberal government to obtain a clear and definite exclusion from the NAFTA for water. Sadly and unfortunately, the Liberal government of the day did not obtain that exclusion for water. I know my colleague from the Bloc Québécois has raised that issue today in her remarks to this motion.
She talked about the fear in Quebec that the law that the government of Quebec passed to protect water could be challenged because of NAFTA. I can tell her and people in the House that it has already happened in British Columbia.
We do have in B.C. a water protection act that was passed under a New Democratic government in 1995 and a very troubling development has been the attempt by California based Sun Belt Water Inc. to seek $200 million in damages from the B.C. government. It says those are lost potential profits because of the B.C. water protection act and so it is suing and trying to get compensation.
If the Liberal government of the day had ensured that we had an exclusion on water of course this would not have happened. We hope that the Conservative government today will deliver on a commitment to ban freshwater exports. Where these governments have failed us in the past, this has to happen in order to ensure Canada's water supply.
Today we ask the government to protect our freshwater by passing federal legislation to ban water exports from Canada and to obtain an unequivocal exclusion in NAFTA for water. As I said earlier, this should have been done years ago. We want to urge the government of the day to move on that file.
We oppose the deregulation and privatization of water resources. We do not support any existing or proposed trade and investment agreements that threaten our democratic control and public ownership of water in this country.
