Dennis Bevington

[Nááts’ihch’oh National Park Reserve Act, December 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have to admit that I was talking about the Liberals and Conservatives together, and perhaps when I said “you”, the Conservatives did not realize that I was lumping them in with the Liberals for their refusal to deal with the north respectfully when it comes to this particular aspect of northern development in the Normal Wells oil field. The Conservatives have stuck with the Liberal line.

Regarding the “you” that I was referring to, I apologize for any confusion I might have caused my Conservative colleagues this close to Christmas, because I know they are probably thinking about mistletoe and Christmas pudding and all the rest of that. I am really happy for them because it is a good time of year and I am sure we will all enjoy ourselves at Christmas.

However, I want to go back to tourism because with oil at $60 a barrel in this country, we are going to have to do something other than resource development. Sixty-dollar oil is not going to make this country run properly. Let us talk about tourism and what the government has done for tourism over the last years since the Conservatives have been in power.

With regard to tourism, the marketing investment made by various nations in tourism in 2011 was as follows: Ireland, $211 million, a 14% increase; Mexico, $153 million, a 4% increase; Australia, another resource-developing nation, $147 million, or a 30% increase; France, a similar increase, Canada—we should be up there—$72 million, a 10% decrease in our marketing effort by the current government. Every other country in the world has taken tourism seriously. What is wrong with the Conservatives? Do they not understand that bringing people into this country helps our balance of trade, that it creates jobs and opportunity for real people? Whether it someone working in a gift shop in Victoria or paddling a canoe for a visitor in the Sahtu Region, or whatever people are doing, they need the support of the federal government.

We need to sell Canada. We need to sell these beautiful national parks that we have created. We need to put that on the table. Yes, perhaps some national parks have seen increases in their tourism, and we could pick out a few of the smaller ones and say that is great. Yes, national parks are going to be a selling point for Canada, but we have to sell them. We have to invest in them. We have to make the marketing decisions that will improve the opportunities for tourism to increase so that we can actually benefit from them.

Perhaps we should simply invest in oil, which jumps from $147 a barrel down to $60, back up to $100, and now down to this. How is this going to work for Canada? It is not sustainable. This type of activity cannot be the main stem of our economy. We need to go back to the basics of how we make a living in this country. We cannot be living high off resource development when prices are so fragile. Some days resources are going to make a lot of money for people and those people will put more money into housing, causing the price of housing in Calgary to rise to a point where sooner or later it will fall and hurt everyone. However, what happens when interest rates go up and all those young people who have resource-development jobs paying them $180,000 a year and have bought expensive houses no longer have those jobs anymore? We are going to see the same situation that occurred in the 1980s.

Why should we be so focused on resource development? Why not invest in things that we can control? Tourism is a great opportunity.

Let us think about it over Christmas. As people are eating their plum pudding, as they are enjoying the love and affection of their family, which I am sure all of us are going to do and look forward to so much, let us think about tourism. We should think about the opportunities that exist for this country to share what we have. We should think about the beauty of the Sahtu Region and about the incredible nature of the Nahanni National Park.

I remember Jack Layton, Olivia Chow, and I went down the Nahanni River in the summer of 2007. We wanted to promote the expansion of the park. What an incredible area Nahanni National Park is. One of the reasons it is so incredible, and I do not think many people in this country realize, is that it is an area that was never glaciated. When we go down the canyons of the Nahanni for 200 kilometres, the rocks we see up on either side, a thousand feet into the air, are the rocks that were there a hundred million years ago. The patterns of change that have occurred over those years through erosion have created the most magnificent spectacle one could imagine.

What a treasure is Nahanni National Park. What an opportunity—

[Nááts’ihch’oh National Park Reserve Act, December 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise and speak to Bill S-5. Of course, we support the development of national parks, and as a national party, we are very much in favour of Parks Canada.

As an MP from the Northwest Territories, my job in Parliament is to make sure that the people in the Northwest Territories get the deal they agreed to with the Conservative government. That is my job, and if I do not do that, I am not doing my job. Therefore, when the hon. member said that somehow this is linked to the flowery thought of all these national parks and that I am opposed to it, that is not the case at all. My job here is to represent the people of the Northwest Territories and the people of the Sahtu. That is what I am here for, and I know that job.

We are pleased, and we hope that the bill will pass later today and that we will all agree to get it done before Christmas, because really, this expansion of the Nahanni National Park Reserve is a Christmas gift to Canada. It is not necessarily simply from the government; it is from the people of the Sahtu Region. The first nations, the people who have settled their land claims, had the ability to say to the Government of Canada that they were willing to enter into a partnership and create a national park reserve in their territory on the land their ancestors lived on, which is theirs to use. They went ahead with this for the good of Canada and for the good of everyone. I think that is who we should be celebrating here today: the people of the Sahtu Region. They are the ones who are ultimately responsible for this national park.

I could say the same thing about the Dehcho Region during the first expansion of the Nahanni national park. It would not have happened without the support of the Dehcho people.

Now we have a third park in the Northwest Territories that our first nations people are looking to develop and create. That is the Thaidene Nene, which is located on the eastern edge of Great Slave Lake. It is a beautiful area, and these people are working very diligently with Parks Canada, with everyone they can, to promote and develop this sacred area, which they understand will be a world-class national park in the future.

Our people in the Northwest Territories are onside with national parks, but we want to make sure that the Conservative government is onside with what it takes to create a national park. It is not just an agreement on the land that will be put in a reserve. It is the understanding that we need to build the infrastructure. We need to make the opportunities for that national park, one of many in the Northwest Territories, to flourish and provide the people of the Sahtu Region with an opportunity to show the beauty of their region, to bring people into Canada, and to offer something that is unique and wonderful in an ever-shrinking world: wilderness that is well preserved and is part of a natural ecosystem. That is what we have with Nááts’ihch’oh park. It is a wonderful opportunity.

We are onside with this endeavour. We look forward to the bill going through third reading here today and leaving this place, with the understanding that it can go to the Governor General for final approval. That would be a very good thing to happen.

It is not that we agree with everything that has happened with the park. There are people who have said that the boundary should be larger, but that is something the government has made a decision on. That is the role of the government. It chose not to listen to the people. Therefore, the Conservatives are moving forward with this reserve, and we have to accept that. That is fine. We will deal with it. There will be other governments in the future that may make the changes required to completely control the ecosystem in that area and make sure it covers the whole watershed. Those are issues we can deal with later.

The national park reserve sets out an area whose final boundary will be renegotiated. There will be opportunities to deal with that. Therefore, this is not a problem and we can move ahead.

I want to switch gears and talk about the Sahtu Region. The Sahtu Region in the Northwest Territories is an amazing area. It has natural resources that have been exploited for many years by Imperial Oil at the Normal Wells oil field. When we think of it, the current government and the Liberal government before it have always refused to allow the royalties, the dollars collected from the Normal Wells oil field, to be returned to the people of the north.

The government tells us what is in the devolution agreement. It says it owns part of that oil field and that it is not going to share it. How did it get ownership of it? It traded the rights to take royalties from Imperial Oil for a one-third share of ownership. Therefore, on a deal that was struck between the Liberals and Conservatives—I do not know who struck this deal, but they made a deal—the government collects the money as ownership rather than royalties, and tells the Northwest Territories government that it is not going to get a penny out of it. This has been going on for 40 years.

When we talk about putting a little money into a national park in the Sahtu Region, that is after the government has fleeced the people of the Northwest Territories, taking all the money out of their pockets from the oil field. That is what the Conservatives did. They cannot deny it; that is the history. With the Liberals and Conservatives, it is the same old story. It is really an unfortunate aspect of the development of the Northwest Territories that this resource is not considered part of any devolution agreement and has been taken out of the equation.

What happens in the Sahtu Region? There is limited infrastructure development, there is a high cost of living, people have less than adequate community resources. That is the situation in the Sahtu Region. No wonder people are looking to a national park for an opportunity to improve their lot in life.

There was some talk in the last couple of years about fracking oil. Shell went in and other companies were fracking oil there. That is fine. At $60 a barrel now, that is over. It is finished. It is not going to happen. Nothing like that is going to happen in the Sahtu Region for a long time. We have an opportunity now to develop other resources, most of which have been identified as tourism. Local people can be involved in this and we can see some sort of economy creeping in on that basis.

It is a sad fact of northern development that these kinds of arrangements are made. Governments take and do not return. Resource development in every other region of the country is used to develop the region. Royalties are used to improve the situation so that the region can develop. In this case in the Sahtu, those monies have amounted to about $120 million to $150 million a year over many years. That might be reduced a bit now with the price of oil going down, but those are the kinds of dollars we are talking about that have been kept out of the Sahtu Region.

The government has not reinvested. It says it owns this resource, but does it put the money back into the region to make sure that it is good? Any normal public government with the right and responsibility to collect money from a region generally puts something back into the region.

I am glad that the government has agreed with the Sahtu people to create the national park, but it might explain why my concern lies more with the promises that are made about the development of the park and the investment that the government is willing to make in national parks in the Northwest Territories.

In the case of the Nahanni expansion, the dollars were actually cut back. There were some seven years in which infrastructure was not developed, and then the dollars intended for infrastructure are cut by 50%.

How does that work? Did you not think about inflation? Does inflation not come into developing infrastructure? Do you not—

[Nááts’ihch’oh National Park Reserve Act, December 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his speech and for coming here and presenting the government's viewpoint on the bill, which has certainly not come from the front benches of this establishment. That is something that should always be considered when presenting such an important bill.

I want to talk a bit about Parks Canada, because having lived next to Wood Buffalo National Park for my entire life, I know very well what has happened with national parks in our country.

Under the Liberals' administration, national parks were the whipping boy for program cuts. They have continued that way through this government. In the year 2000, I remember the park superintendent at Wood Buffalo telling me that the park's budget in real dollars was less than it was 20 years before. We are dealing with very large pieces of land that do not have a lot of support in terms of financial resources to do the job that has to be done.

In the Nahanni expansion, I asked Jim Prentice, the minister at the time, to give me a letter outlining what he was going to do for this expansion. He said they were going to put $5 million into capital projects for the Simpson and Nahanni Butte region. That was seven years ago. Nothing has been spent yet. I talked to the director the other day in committee. He said they have $3 million put aside, so over seven years the $5 million has turned into $3 million, and nothing has been built.

What is the best indicator of future performance? It is past performance. How is the government going to improve on its past performance when it comes to putting infrastructure into our national parks?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, December 11th, 2014]

With respect to the Northern Greenhouse Initiative (NGI), and to the Call for Expressions of Interest to access NGI funding that closed on September 30, 2014: (a) how many applications were received; (b) who applied; and (c) when will the successful applicants be announced?

[Correctional Service of Canada, December 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in 2010, Eddie Snowshoe of Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, committed suicide in the Edmonton Institution's segregation unit. His mother still grieves. Though he had been diagnosed with mental health issues and as suicidal, he was in solitary confinement for 162 days straight.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has stated that solitary confinement is contrary to one of the essential aims of the penitentiary system.

How many more Eddie Snowshoe's will there be? How many more deaths will it take before this minister takes some action?

[Petitions, December 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present these petitions from Canadian citizens dealing with the issue of impaired driving. The current impaired driving laws are too lenient and in the interest of public safety, these citizens are looking for more action from the government.

[Drug-Free Prisons Act, December 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I too was troubled by the article in The Globe and Mail about Edward Snowshoe. In many ways we could look at putting mentally ill people in solitary confinement as torture, and by doing so we are engaging in an act that is reprehensible and should not be part of a civilized society. What does my colleague think about that?

[Aboriginal Affairs, December 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the people of Rankin Inlet do not need to deal with a lawsuit by their own member of Parliament, but that is what counts as representation from a Conservative member of Parliament.

The Minister of the Environment's first response, when she heard about people eating out of the dump, was not to provide help. We heard her first response, which was to repeatedly shout in the House that the story was not true.

The Auditor General's review of Nutrition North showed that the program was not based on the needs of every community. There are 50 needy communities that get nothing from the program.

The Conservatives keep claiming that food prices are going down. The Auditor General says those numbers cannot be verified because “...the Department did not systematically verify the accuracy of prices reported”.

It is time to end the charade. It is time for the hon. member for Nunavut to do something other than sue her constituents. Canadians deserve better.

[Yukon and Nunavut Regulatory Improvement Act, December 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for her presentation on this bill. Coming from a northern region, I know that she has the same concerns about protecting the people and the land from changes that they do not want, and allowing the people in the north to make valid decisions about how changes should happen. This is what is at stake here.

We are talking about a public process here. We look at the past record, where the government took the time to meet and engage with communities right across Yukon on the original bill. It had public hearings on these original bills, prior to the bill going before the House of Commons.

This is the relationship that we have now. The bill has gone through the Senate. The government has hardened its position on the bill that has been created. Now the government thinks that by going and giving people in Yukon Territory five minutes to speak to the bill, one after another in committee, and maybe giving them an hour or two for debate on it, that it is somehow going to replace the process that the government should have gone through years ago.

What does my hon. colleague think about this process, which is already flawed?

[Yukon and Nunavut Regulatory Improvement Act, December 1st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, let us look at the record.

To this day the government has not had any public hearings in Yukon on this proposed bill. The MP for Yukon has not held any public hearings on the proposed bill. The bill is now in front of us in Parliament. It has been moved through the Senate. We still have not seen the government do any public process in Yukon.

At this point, the government is saying that a particular procedural issue within the House, of which we have many, needs to be solved. I agree, it should be solved by good will on both sides to get this process back to where it was. However, where is the government with its commitment to public process? Where is it on holding public meetings in Yukon. The government is absolutely nowhere.