Bernard Bigras

[The Environment, June 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, World Environment Day can be marked in many ways. We have chosen to remind people of the Canadian government's inaction regarding climatic change, of its refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol and of the fact that it is considering selling fossil fuel to the Americans.

Since this government took office in 1993, sulphur emissions have constantly increased. Over half of the acid deposits in Quebec are caused by Ontario and American companies using fuel oil, a major contributor to acid rain. Let us not forget the devastating impact of acid rain on Quebec's maple trees.

World Environment Day also provides a unique opportunity to remind people that, according to the auditor general, there are over 5,000 federal contaminated sites in Canada.

The Bloc Quebecois is inviting Quebecers and Canadians to take advantage of this day to look at the state of our environment.

[Genetically Modified Organisms, June 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, recently, Unibroue thought it had federal government certification that its products were GMO free.

Now we learn that the government is refusing to give Unibroue this certification, which it needs to export to Europe, because no GMO labelling policy exists in Canada.

Will the government not admit, in the light of this example, that businesses need a labelling policy, because Europeans, just like Quebecers, want to know what they are eating and drinking?

[Immigration And Refugee Protection Act, May 30th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, thank you for allowing me to take part in debate on Bill C-11, even if my time will be quite limited.

Bill C-11 deals with immigration to Canada and the granting of refugee protection to persons who are displaced, persecuted or in danger.

I am very glad to have this opportunity to speak to this bill. I remind the House that when I was the critic for my party a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to debate this bill, which was called Bill C-31 at the time.

The purpose of Bill C-31 was to amend Canada's immigration law, which dated back to 1976.

We all agree that the time has come to review the legislation. Why? Because, as my colleague from Laval Centre pointed out earlier, those who live in an urban riding, especially in Quebec and in the greater Montreal area, realize that many citizens and families must face incredible tragedies and go through hardship because of the inconsistencies in the current immigration legislation.

With regard to the Immigration and Refugee Board, the minister tells us that from now on it will take 72 hours for a refugee claim to be filed with the IRB, which will have to bring down its decision within six to nine months. Why do we support an improvement in the process? Because the present system is much too slow.

IRB figures from December 1999 indicate that the average time to process a claim is about ten months. Right now, there are 7,000 asylum seekers waiting for a decision from the Immigration and Refugee Board, and this is in Montreal alone.

We can imagine that while a person is waiting for a decision from the IRB a certain degree of integration into the Canadian and Quebec society inevitably occurs, and we must not be indifferent to that. We agree that it is important to reduce the processing time.

Motion No. 2, brought forward by my colleague from Laval Centre, is an attempt to prevent the government from making regulations outside the legislative process. We would like the government to include these regulations in the future federal immigration act. Why? So that the legislation will be understandable and consistent with needs.

When I was my party's citizenship and immigration critic, I remember meeting privately with organizations such as the Canadian Council for Refugees, which is located in my riding. I took the trouble to meet with them in my office.

I started off by asking them “What do you think of the bill to amend the Immigration Act?” Representatives of these organizations replied “This is not an easy question to answer, because the bill is difficult to evaluate. The government wants to pass a series of regulations, rather than include important measures within the bill”.

This is why the member for Laval Centre's Motion No. 2 is important. As parliamentarians, we must not be cut out of the loop. We must ensure that the bill is as complete as possible and not leave a large number of measures outside the process, outside the bill, in draft regulations.

Another important aspect of this bill has to do with automatic detention. It will be recalled that when the minister announced her bill a few weeks before the last election was called, her intention was clear. She was introducing a tough bill. Why? Because she naturally wanted to respond to the repeated demands from certain provinces west of Quebec seeking a tougher law.

This is consistent with other legislation, such as Bill C-7, which aims for tougher treatment of children. When I asked the government in committee to exclude minors from the detention process, I was told that this would be included in future regulations. What I wanted was for this to be a provision in the act. This would be a clear sign of the government's willingness.

A number of international conventions are mentioned in the bill. I am thinking of the convention on the rights of the child—

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the hon. member for her speech. She has drawn my attention to an aspect of the bill that has not been covered and that I would have liked to have talked about earlier in my own speech but did not have the time.

This is quite ironic, since in principle the legislation is supposed to cover projects solely under Canadian jurisdiction, pursuant to section 5 of the law.

How is it that the Export Development Corporation is exempted from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act when about two weeks ago a group published a report demonstrating clearly that the Export Development Corporation gives a financial hand up to businesses that violate environmental legislation contaminates and threatens the environment in certain other countries?

How is it that this corporation is exempted from this legislation in spite of the fact that many organizations are demanding that it be subject to it? That is my question for the hon. member.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

It is too twisted.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this is one of the reasons why Quebec did not sign the harmonization accord on environmental assessment.

Back then, successive Quebec environment ministers, whatever government they were part of, agreed on one thing: There will be no harmonization agreement on environmental assessment as long as bills, legislative amendments and the legislation itself do not recognize the right of provinces to get involved in this area.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, in a few words it must be understood, and we acknowledged the fact, that environment is a shared jurisdiction. We recognize that fact and we are ready to admit that the federal government has a right to intervene in environmental matters.

However, the Supreme Court of Canada and especially Justice La Forest ruled in the Oldman case that the federal government cannot use a decree or any other measure to intervene in areas which are not in a federal jurisdiction.

Consequently, it seems clear to me that this bill represents, in terms of environmental assessment, a scandalous federal encroachment on Quebec's jurisdiction, all the more so if one considers that the environmental process put in place by Quebec is working very well.

I remind the House that councils of environment ministers have in the past directly denounced the federal strategy concerning environmental evaluation assessment. Therefore this is not something new. Since 1992 Canadian environment ministers have been asking the federal government not to intervene in that area.

Nevertheless, through this initiative the federal government is obviously continuing to encroach upon provincial jurisdiction in the area of environmental assessment and to create undue duplication.

This will not necessarily mean improved efficiency but will rather slow down certain economic projects which could improve the quality of life of our fellow citizens.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the impact of this bill and of the federal legislation more broadly passed in 1995 arises precisely from the concerns of the government of Quebec of the day.

I quote documents of the Quebec minister of the environment from 1992:

Bill C-13, if passed as it stands, will mean submitting to federal evaluation many environmental projects that have already gone through the Quebec environmental impact examination and assessment procedure. This situation will therefore create a serious duplication problem in Quebec.

Once Quebec has a guarantee that the environmental assessment process is solid, rigorous and includes public participation, I see no reason to support the one that comes under a federal law, that would simply, in the end, delay viable economic projects that are important to the infrastructure of the Outaouais region, for example.

I think therefore that, in this case, the Quebec environment assessment process should be the only one to apply in the case before us.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it takes some nerve to say such things in the House. I would say to the member from western Canada that the western provinces contribute and are preparing to provide to the United States all the fossil fuels, the oil, the natural gas and the tar sands.

We have nothing to learn from western Canada as far as the protection of the environment goes. I believe that if in fact western Canada were to use Quebec as a model in the area of acid rain, of environmental protection and of the production of greenhouse gases, the environmental picture would be quite different.

On the contrary, western Canada has decided to provide fossil fuels to the Americans. We need no lessons from the hon. member on this score.

[Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, May 28th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I speak today to Bill C-19 to amend the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

This act was passed several years ago, in January 1995, but not without debate.

I will remind the House in the few minutes that I have left of the history of the Canadian environmental process as opposed to the history and claims of Quebec in terms of environmental assessment.

It is quite ironic to see former members of the Quebec national assembly, members of the Robert Bourassa government that defended Quebec's interests and who are now federal Liberal members, getting ready to pass this bill which goes against everything that Quebec wanted under Robert Bourassa, René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, Pierre-Marc Johnson and every Quebec government since 1975, since the beginning of the environmental process in Quebec.

The federal environmental assessment initiative is not new. On June 18, 1990, the federal government decided to introduce a bill, Bill C-78, dealing with the federal environmental assessment process. In many respects, this bill represented duplication and invaded provincial jurisdictions. It was a bill of which, at the time, Quebec's national assembly was very critical.

Quebecers were so firmly opposed to the bill that in 1990 Quebec's minister of the environment, Pierre Paradis, well known by members of the House—he always defended Quebec's environmental powers and prerogatives—wrote a letter to the federal minister of the environment, Robert René de Cotret, to ask him for two things.

On the one hand, what we wanted in 1990 was for Bill C-78 to introduce some flexibility with respect to Quebec's environmental assessment process.

On the other hand, Quebec's then minister of the environment, Liberal Pierre Paradis, asked that the legislation not duplicate the process because we had an environmental assessment process responsive to Quebec's initiatives, and we still do.

Following the letter, unfortunately,—and as usual it was a Liberal government in Quebec that realized this—the federal minister of the environment refused to amend the bill dealing with the environmental assessment process. Given the federal government's systematic refusal, Quebec's then minister of the environment even wrote a second letter.

On December 17, 1990, the Quebec environment minister wrote a second letter to the same Canadian environment minister clearly demonstrating that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act encroached on provincial jurisdictions. In this letter, of which I have a copy, the Quebec minister demonstrated this invasion into provincial jurisdiction and the negative impact of the Canadian legislation.

In spite of repeated requests, the Canadian government of the day did not seem to get the message. In May 1991, the government came back with essentially the same legislation, Bill C-13, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

Because of the federal government's lack of understanding and recognizing that the Canadian environmental assessment bill was essentially an exact copy of the old one, Quebec's environment minister wrote a letter dated November 22, 1991. To whom was this letter addressed? To the Canadian environment minister, Mr. Jean Charest.

Pierre Paradis wrote to the federal environment minister, Jean Charest, to reiterate Quebec's position. What was Quebec's position at the time that prompted Quebec's environment minister to reiterate it to the federal minister? First, it recognized that the environment was a shared jurisdiction. We recognize that, we even recognize the federal government's power to do environmental evaluations of projects for which a federal decision is needed.

For that matter, the Quebec government has drawn the federal government's attention to a supreme court judgment, the Oldman decision. In his decision, Justice La Forest said, and I quote:

Thus, an initiating department or panel cannot use the Guidelines Order as a colourable device to invade areas of provincial jurisdiction which are unconnected to the relevant heads of federal power.

Following this decision, Quebec's environment minister wrote to the federal environment minister. In his letter dated February 28, 1992, the minister of the environment, Pierre Paradis, reiterated his concerns. However it is clear that his concerns fell on deaf ears in Ottawa. Consequently, the legislation was not changed.

Because of the constant arrogance of the federal government, and it's repeated efforts to impose by legislative means its environmental evaluation process, Quebec responded through it's national assembly on March 18, 1992. Certain Liberal members who are in the House today were part of the Quebec consensus expressed on March 18, 1992 when the national assembly unanimously passed a motion to denounce the federal government's determination to impose its environmental assessment process.

In today's political context, when men and women elected by the people to represent them want to maintain a minimum of credibility, the one fundamental value that they have to adhere to is consistency in their ideas. One cannot, in 10 years, do a complete about face and say “I supported the national assembly's consensus, I was part of that unanimous decision, but today I am voting in favour of a bill that totally ignores all the work that has been done in Quebec”.

Had the Quebec experience proved inconclusive, I might have understood why some members would be reluctant to vote against the bill. However, let us not forget that the environmental assessment process has been around for a long time in Quebec. It dates back to 1975, when the need for an environmental assessment process was recognized in the James Bay agreement.

When we created the Bureau québécois d'audiences publiques en environnement, the BAPE, it was in response to the following basic expectation: a transparent process that would be open to the public and that would not be a self-assessment of government projects. The BAPE is an arm length's agency, contrary to what the environmental assessment bill is proposing, that is the possibility for the federal government to conduct environmental self-assessments. The BAPE does not do that.

In this regard, transparency in terms of public participation, the fact that the Quebec process is at arm length's as compared to the federal self-assessment approach, the fact that not as many projects are excluded thus providing a better environmental protection, all that proves that it is effective. The Quebec environment minister has regulations and amendments to the act passed on a regular basis in order to be able to adequately protect our environment. It is part of the normal process.

A case in point is what happened last week. The Quebec environment minister announced that from now on any hydro projects of more than five megawatts had to undergo an environmental assessment, whereas only a few weeks ago and for years before that only projects of more than ten megawatts had to undergo one.

The environmental assessment process in Quebec is not static. It changes as projects and their impact on the environment evolve. I think we must be consistent in our approach. It is rather peculiar; I was reading a moment ago notes from a speech by the then Quebec environment minister. This Liberal Quebec environment minister was saying, concerning Bill C-13 on the environmental assessment process, that “Bill C-13 is a steamroller condemning everybody to a forced uniformization, which might in turn jeopardize the environmental assessment process in Quebec and needlessly bring into question all our efforts in this area”.

This is not Quebec's current environment minister, whom opponents would dismiss as a sovereignist and a separatist. This is Quebec's former Liberal environment minister, who is still a member of the national assembly and who was part of the unanimous consensus in that assembly, which has just told the federal government “We have a process that works; leave it as it is”.

For some weeks and months now, there has been a shameless desire on the part of members opposite to introduce legislative amendments or bills in order to destroy the Quebec model, anything produced by Quebec that is working well—from the environmental assessment process to the Young Offenders Act—and move their centralizing agenda ahead.

If there is really a desire to protect youth, if there is really a desire to protect our environment, why not let the Quebec model do what it is designed to do? It is a model which is working well and which has stood the test of time.

I see the reactions of some members opposite; I would not want to name these members, who were part of the consensus in Quebec, who voted in favour of the unanimous motion in the national assembly, but a number of them could be found in this House and are listening to me now. It is a bit surprising to see them reacting in the places.

I repeat, in politics, credibility is based on consistency. If one cannot be consistent about how one votes in this House, one would do better to defend other interests.

The bill before us, it must be remembered, goes against the Quebec model. In 1978 Quebec set up its own assessment system, which it incorporated into the environment quality act. As I said, the environmental assessment process in Quebec had its origins in the James Bay and northern Quebec agreement.

A few years later, three years later to be exact, an environmental assessment system was put into place within the framework of the Clean Water Act. In 1980 the Bureau des audiences publiques sur l'environnement was created. Of course, it called for a renewal of the Quebec environmental assessment act, and the government of Quebec acted accordingly.

I was reading over notes published in 1992 by the government of Quebec at a time where a Liberal government was in power in the province and while the MNA and minister of the environment in Quebec was still a member of the national assembly. The 1992 reports from the government of Quebec said:

There is indeed a risk that the latter—

This refers to the federal Environmental Assessment Act.

—will constantly be duplicated, disputed or subordinated to the application of the federal process. Yet, the Quebec procedure has been well established for ten years already; it is well known by the general public and the promoters from Quebec; and it has proven itself.

The areas where the federal authority can get involved are somewhat limitless, given all the levers one can find in the bill itself to force the mandatory examination of projects by the federal authority.

For months the federal government has been shamelessly tempted to destroy the Quebec model. We hope that all the members from Quebec, at least those who voted unanimously at the national assembly, will be able to vote against this bill.