Charlie Angus

[Privilege, June 20th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

[Points of Order, June 20th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond to that point of order. I have great respect for the House of Parliament and also great respect for my hon. colleague. I love to get up in the morning and know that we are going to clash. As the great Tommy Douglas said, there is nothing like a good fight to make one want to get up in the morning. That being said, I think the member has always handled himself in a very classy manner and I am honoured, actually, to be able to cross swords with him.

Yes indeed, our families are from the same region. I will not say I was the worst hockey player ever born in Timmins, but in the top 10, I am definitely there. He, on the other hand, comes from a much greater lineage in terms of hockey players. However, we do certainly disagree, and I would like to wish him the best of the summer.

[Carbon Tax Proposal, June 20th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the people of northern Ontario will certainly take a massive hit from the Liberal carbon tax plan because the tax on home heating fuels will affect rural residents and seniors. They will be treated as if they were the Athabasca tar sands. There is nothing in this plan to deal with massive pollution.

I dealt with families and seniors in northern Ontario who were paying crippling heating bills last year and there is nothing in this plan to help them shift to more alternative fuels. When we talk about a green shift, it is really a blame shift. It is taking the blame away from the big polluters and putting it on the people who cannot afford to pay.

What we are dealing with is no plan from the Conservatives, a bad plan from the Liberals, or the plan that was actually seen as becoming the model, which is the plan supported by the New Democratic Party, the cap and trade system. This is the way they are going in Europe. This is being supported in the U.S. Unlike my Conservative colleagues, I do not attack the Liberals and believe the Liberal leader has a nefarious motion; I think he just does not get it.

[Points of Order, June 20th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised that the Conservative House leader has brought forward this pernicious motion today because it speaks to one of the fundamental dysfunctions of what has happened in this Parliament.

I sat on the procedure and House affairs committee for a period and I must say that I have never in my entire life sat in a more malignant and toxic environment than what was allowed to happen at that committee under the Conservative chair from Cambridge. He was often unilateral in cutting off microphones, cutting off debate and interfering with members whenever it suited him. However, when it came to irrelevant filibustering, obstructionism and a completely poisonous atmosphere by the Conservative members he turned it into a mockery.

What the Conservative Party is doing here is basically shutting down all the areas of committees where we are doing necessary work because it wants to control this Parliament from the BlackBerries and the war rooms of the PMO.

We are parliamentarians and we need to protect the right of the committees and the members of Parliament to undertake investigations, regardless of whether the little pointy heads in the war room want to reduce it down to black and white, one syllable or one slogan issues.

What we saw at the procedure and House affairs committee was an absolute disgrace. It was hour after hour, day after day, month after month of interfering and shutting down the work of Parliament. This committee is a very important committee.

The ethics committee is another committee that plays an important role in Parliament. We were attempting to examine at the procedure and House affairs committee the question of the potential illegality of the Conservatives election financing scheme. It is an ethical issue that should have been and could have been debated in the procedure and House affairs committee and yet the Conservatives took over that committee and ran it into the ground.

When the chair of the committee, the member for Cambridge, lost the confidence of the committee and the Conservatives brought in the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London, he refused to sit as the chair because he said that he did not know how. We are professionals here. We are here to do the legislative business of the country.

What we see is an undermining of the fundamental confidence of Parliament.

I appeal at this point on the issue of allowing the ethics committee to do its work and not be undermined by the continual filibustering and game playing by a party that is now attempting to portray itself as somehow a wounded minority.

The member said that there was a tradition of allowing reasonable length and delay tactics. Certainly, reasonable delaying tactics is a fundamental tool. However, when we see an entire committee shut down for an entire parliamentary session, that does not meet the test of reasonableness by any standard of imagination.

Mr. Speaker, if you were to look at the record of the ethics committee, I think you would see that the chair, who is well-respected, acted properly. The record will show the poisonous and pathetic game playing that went on. The chair made a ruling, not on partisan grounds, but on the fundamental issue of parliamentarians being able to do their work.

Mr. Speaker, when you rule on this, as you most certainly will do in a very judicious manner, you will be cognizant of the fundamental issue here. Is this a pattern of obstructionism and contempt for Parliament or is the committee actually trying to do the work of Parliament? That is where the decision needs to come down.

Mr. Speaker, if you look at the record from the ethics committee, you will clearly see that reasonable delaying lengths and reasonable debate were allowed, even when it was extended into contempt and interference. It went on for a fairly long period of time. Mr. Speaker, you have always recognized that committees are the masters of their own house. The chair had to make a ruling that it was time to move on.

I think what we are seeing from the Conservatives is that they are simply trying to walk the clock down on Parliament by throwing more interference into the work of Parliament. Mr. Speaker, I appeal to you to basically throw this out.

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I believe the member has a good understanding of the problem with this bill. He was once Quebec's environment minister. Therefore, he has a lot of experience with the need to develop a long-term plan, with environmental requirements, and with the effects of power-generating projects. The NDP is opposed to this bill and to the development of the nuclear industry.

The reason for our opposition is there are so many issues of liability as well as unanswered questions.

Clearly no one has never come up with a plan for the waste, for the MOX fuel, for the spent rods and for the contamination that is created in the nuclear industry. It is shipped in barrels and moved on trucks. Continually the great lands of the north are looked at as an ideal dumping ground. I am proud to say the citizens of Timmins—James Bay will stand steadfast in ensuring that such waste is never dumped on us. However, there is lack of a plan for contaminated substance that has thousands of years of liability and impact on the environment.

From his many years of experience with the Government of Quebec, could he explain to us, if this process is so safe, why we still have not found anybody, any jurisdiction or any way of addressing or accepting the waste left from these projects?

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I was very interested in the points my hon. colleague raised about these aging facilities and the real serious questions about safety.

I want to be very careful. As someone who is closer to 50 than 30 now, I am a little more sensitive to the issue of age. However, I would not drive a Studebaker. I would not use a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I would not use an IBM adding machine. I would not wear a ducktail or have my wife go around in a poodle skirt.

Now I know that members in the Conservative Party probably figure Canada peaked mid-1950s and it has been downhill ever since, but I certainly also would not want the safety of our country to be dependent on facilities that were not meant to last past 50 years, facilities with incredible risks of liability.

Given the fact that the Conservative government, which again probably still is in the black and white world, fired the head of the regulatory safety commission that is looking over these aging energy behemoths, I would like to ask my hon. colleague if she has any concerns about the state of our present facilities.

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague asks a very in depth question. I was actually thinking about that after I sat down. I thought that perhaps I had finished my comments too early, but I sometimes think it is very important to be brief, direct and to the point in the House. I did feel that things certainly were being left out of the little exchange that I had with my hon. colleague from the Bloc Québécois.

Certainly there were serious concerns raised about the limits on liability, because the Canadian taxpayer will be on the hook. If something goes wrong, the municipalities and provincial governments will be faced with the costs. Talk about the ultimate intervention in the affairs of Quebec: we would be talking about a nuclear accident and the citizens of Quebec being left on the hook. So why the Bloc Québécois would not stand up--

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I was sorry that in my speech I did actually focus a fair bit on the Conservative Party and not on the Bloc Québécois. I did not want to show any disrespect for the Bloc in not mentioning it as part of mega boondoggle energy projects. I have been on the James Bay coast in Quebec and I have seen the massive flooding and the mercury contamination that has been done by the Bloc's love of mega environment and energy projects.

I am surprised that the member, who is on the committee, says that she does not remember any testimony. I was looking at the testimony of Professor Michel Duguay from Quebec's Laval University in Quebec City. He said that he thought the $650 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money that would be needed in case of an accident.

I was thinking of Mr. Edwards who spoke. He said that he felt “it is important for elected representatives to ensure that the nuclear industry is held publicly accountable and to ensure that the best interests of Canadians are not compromised in order to serve the interest of the nuclear industry”.

We believe that the figure of $650 million has no sound scientific or financial basis and that this arbitrary amount serves to distract the committee from the much more important question. I do not know, but perhaps my hon. colleague was distracted.

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry to hear that I have only 10 minutes. I was led to believe that I was going to speak for 20 minutes. I do not know if I can raise all the issues that I really wanted to raise in 10 minutes, but I will do my best. If we allow each other just a little leeway, we can probably get through this in a very healthy fashion.

It is very important to talk about this issue of liability. I have some background on the issue of liability in terms of megaprojects. I will speak to that in a moment.

The issue here is that we have to address the problem we are dealing with, which is of course whether we need to move toward a much larger nuclear strategy, along with the mega tar sands development. It is the problem of how to address energy. Once we start to address a megaproject, we of course have to deal with the liability. We have to look at what is driving this.

We get this strange schizophrenic response from the government party all the time. It tells us that we always oppose things that it brings forward. We normally do, because it seems to be a party, as G.K. Chesterton said, that is completely blinded by “the horrible mysticism of money” and pays no attention to community or the values of a balanced approach.

The government accuses us of opposing, but when we propose alternatives, it says we are speaking about things that are irrelevant. We are somehow boxed in. If we try to actually propose things and engage the government members in a dialogue, they often get upset and leave, or they try to raise points of order. So I will stay very focused.

Of course, as we know, the issue of liability with the nuclear industry is that the present liability is woefully inadequate. This is probably the one point that we will agree on with the government. We have a real problem with low liability in this country.

Where we begin to diverge almost immediately is that if the government is going to move toward the privatization of nukes, we know it needs to have some very large industrial partners that will step into the breach and assume this mercantile approach to nuclear energy.

The problem being faced is that there is a very low liability, so what the government does is peg a new standard for liability. What is that standard? It is the minimum norm of the international average, which is $650 million. If we agree with this new norm, we suddenly would be in a position whereby U.S. investors would now start to take interest in privatized Canadian nukes, whereas before they would not because of their own liability problems and their inability to protect victims from lawsuits.

We have already begun to diverge from the Conservative track. The Conservatives are obviously interested in privatizing nukes. They are obviously interested in opening that door as quickly as possible. They need to be seen raising the liability issue just so they can actually get credibility with investors.

Yet from the democratic point of view, we are looking at how we ensure that a development is sustainable and how we ensure that development actually protects the interests of Canadian communities, Canadian individuals and the Canadian environment.

We look at the $650 million liability and the record of industrial nuclear accidents across the world and we recognize that $650 million is a pittance if something goes wrong. We look to other jurisdictions that actually have set serious standards for liability. In Germany, there is unlimited liability. In Japan, there is unlimited liability. The U.S. has a limit of $9.7 billion. That is a heck of a lot more than the $650 million being offered by our government.

Once again we see the government diving to the basement in terms of standards that would protect communities and then telling the investors not to worry. Do not worry, says the government to them, if something goes wrong, if someone pours a coke down the front of the machine and the whole thing goes ballistic, guess who will be on the hook for it? It will not be the plant, the investors or the corporation. It will be the Canadian public who will pick up the tab.

Of course that is a win-win if one lives in the world that these gentlemen--and some women--live in, which is the world of being there to privatize and support the complete interests of the big energy interests, whether it is the Athabasca tar sands or the nukes.

We are looking at pathetic minimal standards. We are also seeing that this is a very lax and very loosey-goosey bill. It would allow the government and the industry to get through the approvals process like a groupie with a backstage pass.

The New Democrats tried to bring forward a few clear amendments that would actually begin to address this imbalance. We brought forward 35 amendments to try to bring about balance. That is our job as opposition members. It is not our job to be toadies to the Conservative Party. Our job is to bring balance to a very unbalanced government approach, so we brought forward 35 amendments.

We wanted to work with the government and say that if there are going to be nukes, let us look at liability and let us look at how we can ensure that the public is protected. Of course the Conservatives were not interested in balance. They were looking at opening the door to the massive expansion of the nukes.

Of course, as has been suggested here and by many people in the media, this is an agenda that is really driven by the fact that whatever the Athabasca tar sands development needs, the Athabasca tar sands development will get. Therefore, we have a government that will suddenly bring in a bill on limiting the liability of the nukes so they can be privatized and we can move forward in that direction.

This is the problem we are dealing with: an unbalanced approach by the government. What is driving it, of course, is the fact that the Conservative Party has presented itself to the Canadian public as a front for big energy projects at any costs, without any scrutiny, for whatever there needs to be, whether it wants to dump the waste in a lake or approve massive expansions of projects that increase massive amounts of greenhouse gas without proper scrutiny.

Then, of course, we are expected to sign off on nuclear liability that does not have any of the real clear provisions that will protect the public.

We have the problem and we have what is driving it, but the real issue, as I have said, is that if we are going to oppose, we have to propose. The issue the New Democrats are very concerned about is the billions and billions of dollars that are spent on nukes. We consistently have seen massive overruns time and time again.

There has never been a nuclear project that has come in at even close to costs. Billions have been spent in Ontario, and now billions are going to be spent in Ontario under Dalton McGuinty's government, and that money would actually be better spent in limiting the energy environmental footprint from one massive project to many smaller projects.

My colleague had begun to speak about this earlier. He spoke about the need for retrofitting and for looking at alternatives. In the region I live in, we have mine shafts in the centre of town that go down 8,000 feet. This is a perfect climate. Any community that has had coal mining or hardrock mining is a perfect climate for creating geothermal energy. Geothermal is sustainable. It does not rely on the nuclear industry. This is the proposition that we are trying to raise and it is perfectly in line with this.

However, I want to get back to the issue of liability because it is very important. We had a megaproject boondoggle in the Abitibi-Temiskaming region in Ontario. It was the Adams Mine dump. It was created as this wonderful gift for investors, whereby the largest dump in North America would created using an abandoned iron ore mine on the heights of land above the farm belt of Temiskaming. Millions of tonnes of garbage would be dumped in there even though 350 million litres of groundwater flowed through every year and the risk of contamination was over a 2,000 year lifespan.

However, the reason this crazy crackpot scheme was allowed to get to first base was of course that it was under the government of Mike Harris. Many of his cronies are here now in the House. The other thing was that the government limited the environmental assessment. It refused to let the public have full disclosure, but two things eventually killed the project.

One was massive public protest by farmers, forestry workers and first nations people. I am very glad to say that I was one of those people involved in that, but when it came to city council, written in the very fine print of the contract, which was not supposed to be made public, was the issue of liability. Who was on the hook if something went wrong?

It was actually the New Democratic members of the Toronto city council who stood up and said, “Wait a minute”. They said it was the consumer who would be on the hook, the taxpayer. Then that whole chimera, the whole deck of cards, came tumbling down, and the mega boondoggle fell apart. Once the members of the public knew that they and the City of Toronto were on the hook for the unlimited liability if something went wrong, nobody wanted to touch it, and not an investor in North America or the world would pick up the project.

The issue of who is on the hook for the liability is always crucial. If we actually went to the kinds of liability provisions that are needed with any nuclear project, not one private investor in the world would be loony enough to get involved in such a project.

The NDP remains absolutely opposed to this bill. We remain absolutely appalled that the government is not interested in dealing with the amendments necessary to protect the public interest. We remain very vigilant against attempts by the government to fast track any privatization of the nuclear industry that limits liability.

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise to speak today on behalf of the New Democratic Party on the issue of Bill C-5 and--