Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the bill which would seriously amend the enabling authority for the existence of the National Capital Commission and its mandate, and would deal with a number of pressing questions that have arisen more recently and have arisen over time.
However, before addressing the merits of some of the changes, I want to quickly review the history and the accomplishments of this crown corporation. It did celebrate 100 years, a century of achievement in 1999, from 1899 to 1999. It was established in 1959 and it had predecessors: the Federal District Commission of 1927 and the Ottawa Improvement Commission of 1899, so its roots go substantially back.
I think Canadians and parliamentarians know that the capital region was founded in the early 19th century as, effectively, lumbering and industrial centres. My own grandfather was a night watchman on LeBreton Flats, just a stone's throw from here, working the midnight shift, carrying his lunch-pail to work, carrying on his back a burlap bag of kindling back to the rooming house which my grandmother operated in downtown Ottawa at a time when Ottawa was very much divided between founding peoples at the time. Of course, it moved on and improved.
In 1899, Parliament created the Ottawa Improvement Commission. Its focus was to beautify Ottawa as the national capital. It created driveways along the Rideau Canal and Rockcliffe Park, and Minto bridges and several new urban parks.
From 1927 to 1959, governments established the First Federal District and transformed the organization into a more powerful Federal District Commission. It focused on working to the general advantage of Canada. It built the Champlain Bridge, the National War Memorial in Confederation Square, Gatineau Park, and the famous Gréber plan which sets out and maintains the existence of the green space in this region.
From 1959 to the present, the more recent generation, more recent time, the National Capital Act of 1958 doubled the size of the national capital region, bringing more of Quebec and Ontario together in the capital, as well as new expanses of natural land, rural land, and finally established the National Capital Commission in 1959, as I mentioned. Its focus was to create pride and unity through Canada's capital region.
What did it do during that time, 1959 to today? It removed the railway lines from downtown, something that, from time to time, we lament today given the importance of public transit, particularly light rail systems in our urban centres. It has built much infrastructure, expanded the Gatineau Park, created a protected greenbelt in the Ontario part of the capital region, decentralized government offices to campuses throughout the capital region and developed urban parks, things like the tulip displays and beyond.
The NCC has had a profound impact on our national capital region on behalf of all Canadians. It is all Canadians' whose tithes contributes to the NCC's budget. It is they who are shareholders in this national capital region. Some of us have the privilege and the benefit of serving as elected officials in this area. My own riding of Ottawa South is touched by NCC properties, the greenbelt, an international airport and more.
The NCC is here and it is here to stay. It has an undeniably important role in strengthening Canada's national capital, a G8 economy and a G20 economy. We want set up our capital here and we want to improve our capital that is becoming of our city, our region and our country.
The mandate and the activities of the NCC have not been without controversy in the more recent history in this region. There have been debates swirling about funding levels. Is the NCC sufficiently funded or has it been acquiring and developing properties on behalf of Canadians in order to provide the necessary funding levels to achieve its other responsibilities in its mandate?
What about its governance structures? How many people sit on the board? Do they meet publicly? What is their decision-making process? Is it open? Is it transparent? Is it closed door?
What about transparency itself? What kind of information is being accessed, links to consultation? To what extent is the NCC intervening appropriately, not only with other federal government line departments and central agencies, but other levels of government, the Corporation of the City of Ottawa, the Corporation of the City of Gatineau, the provinces of Ontario and Quebec and municipalities across the region as well?
Its property disposition has been quite successful over the years. The changes proposed in the bill make significant changes to the powers and the quantum, the amount of money involved in these property deals. The bill speaks also to the question of expropriation of properties, for example, in the Gatineau Park.
There are, of course, other outstanding questions. What role should the National Capital Commission play in its 10 year plans? What role should it play with respect to transportation master plans and transportation infrastructure?
There is a new context that is important to situate as we debate this legislation. The new context is this: Ottawa-Gatineau is now the fourth largest census metropolitan area in the country and it is at least the second fastest growing, following, I think, just behind the great city of Calgary. It is growing quickly. In many respects our larger census metropolitan areas are re-emerging as city states. They are re-emerging as city states, not only competing one against the other, but they are competing against American city states, Chinese city states, European city states and beyond.
Why is this important? It is important because we know from the work of important academics, like Richard Florida, that the question of how we do metropolitan areas is critical to our economic success. We know that the higher the quality of life in a census metropolitan area, like the Vancouver district, the greater Toronto area, Halifax, Dartmouth and beyond, has a direct bearing on the ability of these regions to attract and retain capital.
This region used to host some 2,500 high tech firms. Last year, under the watch of the Conservative government, only one new start-up high tech corporation was created using venture capital.
We are in a venture capital crisis. Our ability to attract that venture capital to give rise to those start-ups, to innovate, to compete and win, is directly affected by the quality of life that an organization like the National Capital Commission impacts upon.
Our ability to retain and attract skilled and educated workers is fundamental, which is what the experts tell us we need if we are going to compete and win in the race for a clean economy and the clean jobs of today and tomorrow. Therefore, quality of life in cities is paramount if we are going to win that race to the top.
The bill would make some changes to the NCC that, ultimately, in the context I have just set, has a bearing on that quality of life. Let us examine, for example, what the bill says about the environment. It speaks about environmental stewardship in clause 10.
The environmental implications we are learning now as we go forward are extraordinarily important because we are now recognizing that the environment is more than simply a limitless carrying capacity system that can provide without any end for our needs to be able to assimilate our wastes, provide our natural resources, give us our crops and our foodstuffs, maintain ecological integrity and so on and so forth. We now know that fiction is over.
We know, particularly through the phenomenon of climate change, that we are now butting up against carrying capacity challenges. We are asking the atmosphere, for example, to carry 450 parts per million of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, at a time when the scientific community is quite certain that we are playing Russian roulette with our atmospheric carrying capacity, temperature and other climatic patterns on the planet. This is linked, believe it or not, to the NCC.
The NCC has a mandate. not only in an urban context but, as we have heard in debate here earlier, with respect to a major park called the Gatineau Park, which hundreds of thousands of Canadians enjoy each and every year, tour, visit and ski through. It is filled with lakes and it is developed to a certain extent.
What happens within that park, as the NCC is given new marching orders with respect to ecological integrity and environmental stewardship, in terms of decision making made by the NCC, is fundamental. In one of the earlier questions I posed, I made it perfectly clear that what we now know about the national park system, despite our best efforts in setting up isolated zones across the country to represent different ecozones and ecosystems, we now really know, as the biological evidence tell us, that our park system is failing. It is failing because our parks are not connected. They are not connected because the predatory species cannot move easily. That is why I am so proud of my colleagues from Alberta who have launched the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative, finally overcoming the fiction and stopping the denial that this question of integrating our land masses to be able to allow for connectivity is so important to maintaining our flora and fauna.
We also know that our parks not only need to be connected but they need to be buffered. If one mines up to the edge of a park, despite the short-term attractiveness of turning that natural capital into financial capital through profit, we also know that without being buffered our parks are being compromised which draws down, once again, on our natural capital.
I know these terms, this concept, this idea and this thinking are foreign to many in the Conservative government. In fairness, the Prime Minister only admitted that the science of climate change was in fact correct after the chief scientific advisor for former President Bush told him so. Up to that point, the Prime Minister was in wilful or non-wilful denial about the risks inherent with climate change, temperature increases, species disappearance and so on and so forth.
Canadians would be forgiven, I think, if at face value they see these changes with respect to the environment in this bill and be skeptical about the government's serious intentions and whether or not they can trust the government to do the right thing.
The bill, for example, does not speak at all to the question of watershed management. We have in the Ottawa River one of the mightiest rivers in the world. The daily flow of the Ottawa River is larger than every western European tributary combined. It is a massive and mighty river which much of this region was built on. Much of the lumber used to create this beautiful chamber was derived from the Ottawa valley and floated down the Ottawa River.
How is this question of watershed management, if we are going to move for example to a watershed management approach, as they have in British Columbia, how will this impact on the NCC's mandate?
As I mentioned earlier, if we do what happened in Boston, where the city of Boston grew up and around a park area, we see that within some 150 years every indigenous species of flora and fauna in that park has disappeared and something new has replaced it. That is hardly ecological integrity.
Ecological integrity and the movement toward it began under our previous government, when former environment minister Sheila Copps struck a national panel. Prime Minister Mulroney understood the importance of this. He mentioned it in speeches in 1992 at the Earth Summit. By the way, the Prime Minister is the first prime minister not to participate in international negotiations for climate change, biodiversity or otherwise in recent Canadian history, in over 35 years.
Therefore, the bill does not answer fundamental questions about responsible environmental stewardship and what it means. It does not answer questions about what ecological integrity looks like. It does not seriously, in my view sufficiently, guide the executive of the NCC in its difficult decision making on how it is going to move forward.
How will the NCC expropriate properties even if we lift the ceiling and allow it to expropriate property for millions of dollars? Will it do so using fair market value? If I owned a property in the Gatineau Park that was being expropriated, would I not go out and get the most expensive possible listings, bids that I could possibly muster, turn around and pass it on the federal taxpayer and say, “Please indemnify me”?
Another issue which I have not raised yet and I would like to close with is this. How will the NCC deal with the important question of public transit, light rail and moving our citizenry in this area? Just today, the city of Ottawa settled a $37.5 million lawsuit for breach of contract for a light rail project which had been approved by this city, and by the way had been approved by the former minister of transport and President of the Treasury Board. After all this was done, after $45 million of acquisitions were pursued by the city, now a $37.5 million settlement and $2.5 million worth of legal fees, all of which came from the unprecedented and reckless behaviour of the present Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities while he was Treasury Board president.
This is why I am calling, for example, on the city of Ottawa to release its legal opinions to the Canadian people, to the citizens of Ottawa, and to Canadian taxpayers who pay for the NCC, whether there are legal opinions as to whether or not the federal government should be indemnifying the city of Ottawa for the reckless behaviour of the member for Ottawa West—Nepean.
Will the NCC's participation in this kind of transportation planning prevent this kind of reckless behaviour in the future? We do not know, but that would be very important to address, given the NCC's important responsibilities and its mandate to the shareholders of Canada. The taxpayers of Canada provide the tax dollars every year to allow the NCC to pursue its mandate on behalf of all Canadians to have a beautiful, healthy, high quality of life in our national capital, so it can continue to thrive for all Canadians and that all Canadians can be proud of.
