Dennis Bevington

[Business of Supply, February 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the gas tax idea for municipalities came out of a lot of work that the leader of the New Democratic Party did when he was president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We support the concept of consistent per capita funding to municipalities for the work they require on new projects. That is exactly what the gas tax does.

The Conservatives have chosen a different approach, which not only requires the municipality to identify the project, but to get the money together, complete the project and then apply to have the dollars reimbursed. This has caused municipalities a good deal of grief in getting the money out of the building Canada fund for the past number of years. We have seen evidence of this in terms of the 4% of dollars that have been released out of billions of dollars that were promised over the last few years.

The NDP agrees that the gas tax methodology is the one to follow to get money to communities.

[Business of Supply, February 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, if he is confused about my speech, I am a little confused about his question.

Quite clearly I said in my speech that the NDP supports the motion. We put similar motions forward in committee where the Liberals would not support them. I outlined in greater detail the reason why we were not very happy with the budget, because that is the larger issue.

I hope the hon. member now has a clearer understanding of what I said. I will have to get back to him later to get a clear understanding about the nature of his question.

[Business of Supply, February 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to the speak to the motion. The NDP will be supporting the motion of the member for Parkdale—High Park.

I will be splitting my time today with the member for Trinity—Spadina. Her expertise as a city councillor for many years has given her a great understanding of municipal financing and the difficulty in bringing forward projects that can really benefit a municipality in a very short period of time.

As a former mayor for many years in a smaller community, I have the same understanding of this issue. I was involved in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' green fund for five years. This role gave me the understanding of how long it took to put forward projects that could turn the direction of a community toward more greener and environmental purposes.

The reason we will support the motion because in the finance committee our party has called for similar action from the Conservative government. We put forward amendments in committee. Unfortunately the Liberals sided with the government and those amendments were not brought forward. They were very similar to what we are dealing with today.

Why do the Liberals think it is important today to take up an opposition day when they would not consider the time in committee, when proper amendments could have been brought forward that would have changed the nature of the budget bill?

The real reason is the Liberals need some cover on this issue. Therefore, today is spent to provide that cover for the Liberals to show they really do care about these issues. Their support of the Conservatives' attack on women, on collective bargaining and on the environment is really not their heartfelt desire. Rather they have moved forward with a motion today to show that they do have some differences from the Conservatives.

We cannot have it both ways. Either we support the Conservatives, like the Liberals, or we work, like the New Democratic Party, in opposition and speak up about the things that are not appropriate in the budget bill. The municipal infrastructure program, as a stimulus package, is simply not appropriate.

There is little difference right now between the new leader of the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister and his cohorts in the way that they think about issues. The coalition that has been established between the new Liberal leader and the Prime Minister is one based on similar thought.

In a 2007 study commissioned by the FCM, the municipal infrastructure deficit was found to be $123 billion. Under the Conservative plan, this deficit will grow because municipalities will be unable to access the funding because they will be unable to come up with the kind of matching funds required under the building Canada plan.

In the last election we committed to increasing the gas tax fund and to creating new funding for municipalities. Fixing the infrastructure deficit must be a priority. However, I do not think it will solve all our economic woes.

The world's economy is in need of change. The current economic situation was created by governments' deregulation that was driven by one thing, and that was greed. Deregulation was carried out mostly by the Liberals and cheered on by the Conservatives. Look at the mess we have today.

The great recession of the 21st century is growing worse day by day. We cannot afford to sleepwalk any more and think that because somehow our banks have done okay, the rest of the country is okay. It is not.

We have had massive job losses in Canada and around the world. Businesses are failing and banks are going under all over the world. For example, just today one of the biggest banks in Britain, the Royal Bank of Scotland, reported the biggest loss in British history. Because of this, Britain has announced a bank bailout plan of over $700 billion.

What we need right now is a vision of the long term to restructure our economy. The President of the United States is correct when he says that our current economic situation should be seen as a chance to rebuild and restructure, a chance to build a better economy, one that is sustainable. This is our vision for the economy.

What would this new economy look like? It would be greener, that is for sure. We should create a green collar jobs fund of approximately $750 million a year to train new workers and retrain displaced workers. Moving people in the direction of the new economy is so important. It is not simply good enough to house them on EI or on make work programs. We need to see their skills move in the direction that will lead to energy efficient renewable energy technology.

We will fall behind the United States if we do not move in this direction. President Obama has committed $150 billion over three years for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. That is so much more than what we are putting in. We need to take hold of the new economy developing in the United States. The North American continent has an integrated economy. We need to invest in our country in the same types of projects and the same types of direction.

We also need to invest in Canadian production of low emission cars to ensure our auto industry remains viable. Aggressive incentives for manufacturers that develop and manufacture in Canada cars with low or zero greenhouse gas emissions should be a priority of the government. That is what is going to bring our car industry forward in a good and acceptable fashion.

All over the world industries, governments and workers are collaborating to build new opportunities for jobs in innovation. Canada has taken the opposite approach. Experts agree we need a proactive plan to keep our country, our industries and our workplace in leading global position. That should be our job here. This should be the direction that is provided by the budget, rather than the scatter gun approach to investing a little here and a little there, maintaining the status quote with some increased expenditures.

We need pan-Canadian sector based strategies. These sector based strategies will come through a systematic review of sector specific tax measures. We need to eliminate those that are economically or environmentally counterproductive. We need to add new measures to stimulate investment in the broader public interest. We need to commit to a better building retrofit and energy efficiency strategy, perhaps modelled on the city of Toronto. We need to undertake an immediate top to bottom review of how banks, insurance companies and other financial service providers are regulated in our country.

On a more local basis, in my own constituency in the Northwest Territories the federal Minister of the Environment has been pushing the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline as though that is all the Northwest Territories and Canada needs. This is an example of muddy thinking.

Yes, we need the pipeline. However, it needs to be thought out as a larger plan for the creation of a gas industry that will stretch up and down the Mackenzie Valley, a plan that should include the construction of a highway along the Mackenzie Valley as an equal or greater priority for the government than a pipeline. The highway will set the stage for proper development of a pipeline.

We need forward thinking, not cynical political damage control as we have with the motion today, which really will not accomplish much and will not move us forward in the direction in which we need to go. We do not need the blind attachment to the past that we see from the Conservative Party, exhibited with its approach to energy where most of the expenditures it will make are simply not appropriate.

We have discussed those at great length in the House of Commons, but we have not brought that discussion out to the country yet. We need to have a discussion in the country about how our energy systems will develop and what direction we will take, and not enclosed in a special interest group around the Prime Minister and his Minister of the Environment, which will not solve the problem.

I look forward to questions and comments.

[Business of Supply, February 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the minister when he talked about some of the programs the government was putting in place on the energy front.

He said that the Conservative government invested $2.2 billion in the biofuels program. This is a pork-barrel program. This program in this climate and with what is happening in the world is going to deliver zero dollars toward renewable energy. It is going to put a lot of money into corn-based ethanol, which is not the way to go. Those dollars are being badly invested.

In the latest budget most of the money that should be going into energy will go into carbon sequestration. This process has been totally unproven on a commercial scale. It is going to take many years to develop the technology. The companies that want to invest in this have not decided how they are going to invest. This is not a stimulation idea.

The U.S. is putting $150 billion into proven renewable energy technologies, such as wind power and solar power. These things are really what President Obama was talking about in his address--

[Marine Liability Act, February 25th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the Marine Liability Act amendments.

In my research on this particular subject, it appears that this legislation has been on the books for consideration for some time. In May 2005, Transport Canada put forward a maritime law reform discussion paper in which it put forward many of the points that are in this bill.

Many of these protocols have been in existence, as we have pointed out, since 1976, 1992, 2001 and 2003, and they have not been ratified. Many of the aspects within them have been implemented within the Marine Liability Act in one form or another. We have seen that Canada, over the years, has taken international conventions from international marine liability work and has implemented them into its legislation but has not ratified the actual conventions in many cases. These are amendments to the law that would bring things up to date.

Under the Constitution of Canada, Parliament has the exclusive authority to make laws in relation to navigation and shipping but the provincial legislatures have the exclusive legislative authority to make laws in relation to property and to civil rights. It is worth keeping in mind this division on power because it does play out in terms of some of the issues around liability and some of the issues that are important in this bill.

When we consider what the bill has done under part 4 of the act, it sets a per capita limit of liability that would limit the liability for the carriage of passengers, in particular the treatment of participants in adventure tourism activities. That was something in the act that was of great concern to adventure tourism operators. In 1992, legislation under the Marine Liability Act caused the waivers used by many adventure tourism people in their businesses, waivers to limit their liability for their customers engaged in recreational activities where there was some degree of hazard, to become invalid.

This bill attempts to bring those back so that these waivers for the adventure tourism sector can be used and are valid. This is a very important thing and certainly will be a subject of discussion at committee when this bill moves forward. We would like to see it move forward. It has been many years in getting to this point.

If there is blame, we can blame the previous administration, the Liberal government. Obviously, it formulated the Maritime law reform discussion paper with the questions that were carried out at that time and we can see that many of these conventions, not ratified over many years, are in place. Governments, obviously, have been slow in moving on this.

I would like to understand in committee why governments have been slow and get to why this has not happened in a fashion that would have provided some of the protections that are now being put forward. That may clear the air in much of this regard.

Other parts of the bill will amend part 6 of the act to implement the protocol for the International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage,1992; as well as the International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Oil Pollution Damage, 2001. It would change the liability regime in the ship source oil pollution fund. It would do a number of things that would change the way major things like oil spills in our waters are handled, but will it actually provide the protections required?

Interestingly enough, the parliamentary secretary indicated that the fund that is established will provide perhaps $1.5 billion toward oil spill remediation but when we look at the Exxon Valdez, we see that the total cost for the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill 20 years ago and onward was some $2.5 billion.

Therefore, even within the context of what we are putting forward here, we have examples of accidents that have cost more to clean up than what would be available under this fund.

The fund, interestingly enough, if it is drawn down, will need to be replenished by states that import oil on a levy basis. Within the act, there are various considerations about who will be liable, what conditions the liability will extend to the owners and what conditions the owners will find themselves without the wherewithal to provide compensation to the people who have the oil spill damage.

We are entering into a complex business with this bill and these conventions. I look forward to having the opportunity to have expert witnesses come before us and present their case for these conventions. These conventions have not been adopted quickly by our government. We have been operating under a particular regime for some considerable time.

I talked about oil spills the other day and, in the case of Arctic waters, I mentioned that we do not have the capacity or the ability to deal with oil spills in waters that have more than 35% ice content. We cannot get the oil out of the water with the present technology. When we talk about the development of the Arctic and the Arctic waters and bringing in more ships and commercial activity, such as drilling rigs, service vessels, and transshipping through the Northwest Passage, which, even when it is ice free, is a very dangerous passageway, this is not wide open ocean. It has shallow areas with much of the charting that is not conventionally carried by ships. We have significant concern in the Arctic about what is going to happen with shipping in there. We do not have the capacity to deal with oil spills in waters that have a great percentage of ice but that is the kind of water that the ships will be going through.

When we talk about Canada's ability to act in an environmental sense, which the parliamentary secretary suggested the bill would somehow deal with the environment and protect the environment from damage, in reality it would simply assign costs, in a variety of ways, to either funds that are internationally set up or to provide mechanisms to identify and to make the shipowners who caused the spill responsible for that.

This is not really an environmental bill. It is a bill about who will be responsible. We already have some provisions in our acts to deal with some of those aspects.

When we come to actually examining this bill, do we want to push ahead with all speed on these provisions or do we want to understand completely what they will mean to us, as a country, in relationship to the vast ocean and coastal areas we have from sea to sea to sea in Canada?

We want to make sure that we cover all these issues in great detail as the bill moves forward. For that reason we are quite interested in seeing the bill move forward to committee. Dealing with the bill in committee is not going to be a slam dunk affair. The bill has a variety of ramifications and it has been around for a considerable period of time. We want to understand why the bill has not come forward before this time. What are the positive aspects of these international conventions? What are the things that may not be as we want them to be for our country?

We need Bill C-7, but we need to work on it. I am sure all of the members on the transport committee will be looking forward to spending time on this legislation. As my Bloc colleague on committee pointed out, this is the fourth bill that is working its way through the system and the transport committee. We will have to set priorities for handling these bills. We have to make sure that they move forward. At the same time we cannot ignore the details of such an important bill.

[Marine Liability Act, February 25th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to touch base with my hon. colleague on the nature of how the fund will work with respect to compensation for oil pollution damage as outlined in the bill. Perhaps he could discuss that.

[Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, February 25th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to ask my colleague a question on probably the sidebar of the impacts of the changing environment on the Arctic, and that is Arctic research.

There was a story in the press today containing commentary by the executive director of the International Polar Year. He spoke about the excellent work that had been done by scientists in accumulating data over the past year under an International Polar Year convention but went on to say that it was in some jeopardy because there was no further funding to do the analysis, to do the research and to carry on with the collection of data.

This is a moving target in the Arctic and we cannot be satisfied with one year. We must continue the programs of research and development, research in the Arctic and the development of strategies to combat the changing climate conditions there.

How does my colleague see, within the Conservative mentality within the budget that we are seeing now, the required direction to researchers to continue the very important work that is going on now and was going on in the past in the Arctic?

[Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, February 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to talking about northerners, I like to think of all Canadians as northerners, because they are in a true sense. We all experience many of the same things that happen in a northern climate.

The port of Churchill is above the tree line. That is a very northern place. The people there represent northern tradition and history, which is remarkable. They are very good at working in an extremely inhospitable environment.

We are all northerners and that is a good thing, but when it comes to our ability to understand the Arctic and what is happening there, we have to recognize more and more that the northern territories are political entities. We do not do that enough here. We still have a paternalistic attitude toward the northern territories that we can solve these debates by ourselves, that we can tell them what a northern strategy is.

What is needed is full cooperation from the federal government with our territories in a positive fashion and with absolute respect for our rights as Canadians. Just as all Canadians are northerners, all northerners are Canadians. We are proud of it. We demand for our land the same rights as other Canadians have for theirs.

[Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, February 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot guarantee that I will be there that long, but I do hope that we see progress on this.

I do not look at the Arctic issues as partisan issues at all. I look at them as areas where we can bring Canadians together. We can have the opportunity to do something right in a region of this country that has not had things done wrong to it yet. I am very strong on that, just as with the territory I represent, the Northwest Territories, I feel very strongly that what we do there has to be a model for the future. It cannot be the answers that we have seen in the past. It cannot be done less than wholeheartedly.

When it comes to devolution and the responsibility of northerners, I say to all Canadians that if they want to have a real stake in the development of the north, they should come up and live with northerners. That will give them the same right to say things about the north as northerners have.

I do not want us to be considered anything less than full citizens of this country. If the minister and the government want to decide what to do about the Arctic, they must take into account what the people of the north want and what the people of the north think about their land. That is the primary direction the government should be taking with northern policies, and if it is not, members will see me standing here over and over again. If it is, members will see a spirit of co-operation and a spirit of goodwill.

[Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, February 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-3. It is one of many bills that I am sure will be in front of our transport committee, given the hard-working minister we have in charge, one who is perhaps more hard-working than hard-thinking on many issues. All opposition critics have a responsibility to ensure that ministers think about bills in front of them in a reasonable fashion. Hard work does not replace smart thinking.

Bill C-3 is an interesting bill. It has merit within it. It comes out of quite a bit of work directed toward the Arctic and the northern waters by the Conservative government.

For instance, I could talk about the cabinet's trip to Inuvik last August. The entire cabinet, the Prime Minister as well, took time to visit my riding. They certainly excited the population there with the thought that there were going to be announcements of some significance.

What we did see coming from that trip to Inuvik and the trip to Tuktoyaktuk by the Prime Minister was the announcement of the name of an icebreaker that was going to be built a number of years later.

People in Tuktoyaktuk live on the Arctic coast and are experiencing the ravages of climate change on their own community and the degradation of the community washing away into the sea. They were hoping for a little more. They were hoping to hear about a land connection to Inuvik, tying them into a highway system that would allow them some additional economic development and perhaps make life easier for them there on the coast. They did not get it. The Prime Minister made a very simple release that really had no content to it.

When he spoke in Inuvik, the Prime Minister announced that the government was going to make the registration of ships in Arctic waters mandatory, something that we in the New Democratic Party have been requesting for the last two years. It was a good thing to do that, but it certainly was not what the people in the north were looking for.

Is the bill in front of us now what the people of Canada are looking for in terms of Arctic waters protection? It does extend the boundaries, and that is a good thing, but does it create any more protection for the Arctic, or is it simply another gesture on the part of the Conservative Party toward our deepening interest in the Arctic?

Canadian Arctic waters are changing fast. The condition of the sea that is now not covered with ice in the Beaufort area up through the Arctic Islands is getting worse. Larger, more severe storms are hitting the area. There are more hazards to navigation now than in years past, when the Arctic ice was over the water for longer periods of time. The permanent ice pack was further south from the pole. These things have changed, and now massive weather disturbances in the area are causing extreme problems.

This legislation deals with Arctic transportation in difficult and changing times. We are allowed to do this under the United Nations law of the sea convention. It is part of a practice that I am sure the rest of the world would be happy to see us do. However, once again, in the bill we do not see any indication of where we are going with respect to our ability to protect the Arctic.

We are also currently having disputes about much of our Arctic waters. What is the impact of this legislation going to be on our current dispute with the United States over a large chunk of the Beaufort Sea? Who is going to be responsible for those waters? Where is the diplomatic effort to solve this issue, which has been in place since 1983? Where is the effort to come to a conclusion with the United States about the delineation of the line between Alaska and the Yukon?

Increasing the size of the area under protection in the Arctic is meaningless unless there is an increased effort on enforcement. However, enforcement is difficult in the Arctic. It is expensive. It requires an effort that I do not see our government ready to put in yet.

However, there is a pathway to protect the Arctic waters, and it is through international diplomacy. I had the chance to travel to Ilulissat last year, and to see the foreign ministers of the major Arctic nations agreeing to a treaty on the UN law of the sea applying to the boundaries between countries. The one foreign minister who was not at this gathering was the minister from Canada. He was replaced by the Minister of Natural Resources.

We are not taking an active role in diplomacy. We are not putting diplomacy up front. Our Prime Minister is putting an aggressive, confrontational attitude out front, rather than using international cooperation and diplomacy as the way to solve some of the issues facing us.

We need compliance on international treaties. We need a working relationship of the highest order between the Arctic nations to accomplish our goals in protecting our Arctic environment. There is no question of that. That should be the number one element in the Canadian strategy in dealing with the Arctic.

We need Arctic search and rescue. The other countries are talking about Arctic search and rescue. There are even agreements being formed between the U.S. and Russia to protect the Bering Strait so that they can work cooperatively to deal with the problems that are inherent in shipping in hazardous waters. We should be doing the same thing with the United States. In fact, at a lower level in our system, we have no choice but to do that. We need the effort at the top end, through the highest officials in this country, to stress the importance of international diplomacy.

When it comes to protecting the Arctic, mandatory registration of shipping is not all we need. We also need to accept the International Maritime Organization's regulations for shipping in Arctic waters. We need to make it an international fact that ships traversing the Arctic waters all have the same level of regulation relative to the kinds of hulls they use and the kinds of equipment they use to protect the environment and themselves. We need to ensure that the ships that are increasingly going to be entering the Arctic have the correct and best technology available for this type of work. We need those types of international agreements as well.

The Arctic is not a place where defence and aggressive military action are going to solve our problems. We are not going to solve our problems with the United States over the Northwest Passage and the Beaufort Sea by getting into military confrontations. There is only one way to deal with these problems with the United States, and that is through diplomacy and the actions of our government in concert with the U.S. government in coming up with agreements. Those are the only directions in which there is any hope for getting ourselves solid on those issues.

An international report on shipping is coming out very shortly on the use of Arctic waters. It has been co-authored by a number of countries. We are expecting it in the next year.

This document can be the basis of building an understanding among Arctic nations about how to deal with Arctic waters, how to protect Arctic waters, and what to expect with the development of fishing, mineral exploration, oil and gas, and tourism. The increase in cruise ship passages in Arctic waters is astounding.

All these things are coming together, and the international community is working on them right now. What Canada has to do is take back the lead on international diplomacy and work with these countries to come up with solutions that can deliver us an Arctic policy that, in conjunction with the rest of the world, will protect the Arctic and will make our 200-mile environmental protection act a working document.

The government has many ideas about the Arctic. Unfortunately, some of them are simply ideas that come out of someone's head, rather than out of the consensus-building process that is needed for Arctic conditions. An example is Arctic research. Canada has just announced that a major research facility will be built in Nunavut, which is contrary to what Arctic researchers are after.

A group of Arctic researchers was commissioned by the federal government to make a report on where the research centre should be and what it should encompass. They came back and said that we do not need a report on that; we need a report on the Arctic research initiatives that are required. In other words, we do not need facilities; we need a plan for Arctic research that will allow our scientists to deliver the information we need to protect the Arctic and to understand the changes that are going on there, and that should be the first priority of the government, not building facilities.

Right now we have facilities for researchers in our territories. They are reasonably well used, but they are used in a different sense from what the government is looking for. These facilities are used by researchers as home bases to extend their research out into the Arctic region. The idea of a fixed centre for Arctic research is anathema to most researchers, who are looking for linkages throughout the Arctic for the type of research they do.

By missing consultations, by coming out with policies that set directions without examining what is actually required, and by putting forward ideas that are like building monuments to our sovereignty rather than by looking for the solutions we require for our sovereignty, we are failing Canadians.

I think of the Colossus at Rhodes. Perhaps the Conservatives would like to build a colossus on the Northwest Passage to indicate our ownership of that area. Perhaps it is in their minds that somehow the grandiose gesture is more important than the practical work of government, making international arrangements and directing scientists into research in the areas that are required, but those types of things have a greater potential future for our country.

There is another issue. Right now in the Arctic we are expanding the use of the Beaufort Sea. We have opened up some fairly major drilling areas offshore, and these are going ahead. Interestingly enough, probably the major catastrophic pollution issue that we are likely to encounter in the Arctic is the potential for large oil spills in our Arctic waters, and we do not have the capacity to deal with that. Probably one of the things that should be foremost on the government's agenda right now would be to come up with the technology required to deal with oil spills in Arctic waters.

Wherever there is more than 35% ice in the water, the science of cleaning up oil spills is very limited. We need to have a program that will allow this to happen. This is more likely to protect our environment than any bill we pass here, any Arctic research centre we set up in a single location. This is the sort of effort we need right now to protect our Arctic.

When the drilling sites were sold, when companies were given the opportunity to move into the Beaufort Sea, this lack was pointed out to the government. We have not seen a response yet on this item. We need to see that response.

Our capacity is limited. We do not have the human resource capacity and the technological capacity to protect the Arctic environment. We do not have the capacity to do the research to understand what is likely to happen in the Arctic. We are not going to get that with facilities. What we need is a clear plan for Arctic research, followed up by dollars invested in Canadian scientists across the country who want to perform the research there.

We also need to work with the international community so that we are not doubling up our research. We need to create the linkages between the countries that will allow the research to flourish and so that every Arctic country will understand how to deal with the Arctic conditions.

When it comes to defending Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, we need to stand up for the environment. That is a good direction to take. It is important that we protect the environment not only in the 100-mile area off our coast but in the 200-mile area off the coast. It is also very important, when we think of the Arctic ice melting all the way to the North Pole, to consider how we are going to protect the environment right up to the North Pole. We cannot do that without international agreements. We cannot do that without an international understanding of the issues. We need to see that kind of approach from the government. It is that simple.

Capacity is important, as well. It is not good enough simply to put this bill forward without some understanding as to how we are going to make people comply with it, how we are going to enforce the regulation that is in place, how we are going to ensure that we have the answers to fix what happens to the environment when accidents occur, and most likely they will.

I hope that over the next while we will look at these issues. This bill has merit. It is important. However, the government needs to say more about this issue than it has already. The government needs to come forward with a more detailed plan for the protection of our Arctic waters. When it does that, we will have a solution that all Canadians will subscribe to and support.

I would say to our hard-working minister, let us put some hard-working thought into what we are doing here and we will come up with great answers for Canadians.