Dennis Bevington

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, May 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the speech by my colleague across the way. He may have touched, in some ways, on why the Conservatives included the immigration business in the budget.

The budget seems to deal dishonestly with figures. It also deals dishonestly with the figures when it talks about the impact on immigration that it will achieve with this particular set of amendments.

Does the hon. member not agree that we need decisive action to reduce the wait list, not this reconfiguration of the rules to change the basic nature of our immigration system?

[Climate Change Accountability Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to speak to Bill C-377, a bill that would help Canada and would make Canada assume its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change gas emissions.

Over the last day and a half, I had the opportunity to travel to Greenland on the issue of northern sovereignty. While I was there with the Minister of Natural Resources, I had the opportunity to travel to the Greenland ice cap, which is an amazing place. It is a huge expanse of ice that has been in place for hundreds of thousands of years. There is an enormous volume of moisture tied up in the ice cap, but it is quite clearly under severe strain right now.

The scientists we met with on the ice cap talked to us about the conditions they are seeing within this massive and seemingly eternal landscape of ice that is thousands of metres thick and is covering a whole continent. However, right now it is moving. The movement within the ice is accelerating.

The rate of loss of the ice cap is accelerating as well. It accelerated over the past decade to a point where it had between 250 and 300 cubic kilometres of ice loss each year. Last season, it achieved 500 cubic kilometres of ice loss. That is a massive increase.

Any discussion of northern sovereignty, of course, links to climate change. We had the opportunity to hear presentations on climate change from very respected climatologists in large research institutions. They said that the situation right now with the Arctic ice is likely to mean that if we have another warm summer this year, they will be able to sail a boat across the North Pole, from Norway through to Russia.

That is an extraordinary statement. It may not come to pass. We may have a cooler summer. However, the direction that our climate is taking is extremely disturbing. We must recognize that. As Canadians, we have a tremendous responsibility to lead ourselves and the rest of the world toward solutions, toward mitigation as well as reducing our impact.

This bill sets out the kinds of goals that are required to achieve what the scientists have said is a sufficient reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for the world by 2050. Setting out the goals for Canada to achieve those things is extremely important. It is part of what we have to do here.

I am dedicated to this. I will dedicate the rest of my life to working to achieve the kinds of things we have to do in Canada to preserve our life and the chance for our children and grandchildren to continue to prosper. That is certainly a worthwhile goal and I have total faith that this country can do that. It can move ahead in a fashion that can achieve our goals in this way. I do not see why we cannot.

I had an opportunity to talk to the Danes. I like the Danes. The Danish minister of energy said to me last year that if we want to accomplish something on climate change and energy, we need to build a non-political consensus within our Parliament of the directions we have to take. That is so important.

The relentless sniping over climate change that we have seen in this last two years really does not accomplish all that much. However, we did accomplish one thing on climate change already. When we sent the clean air act to a special committee, we got a majority in Parliament to agree on the directions we should take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We got a majority in Parliament to agree to the mechanisms that we should use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What I heard from the members of the other party who did not quite agree with us at the time is that they were pretty well on side with most of those mechanisms anyhow. We said in the clean air act that we wanted to put a cap on emissions, put a price on carbon, and create a massive retrofit program for this country so the first step we would take would be to reduce people's use of energy. We would see rapid and substantial decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. We would have a mechanism to fund this and these things would come to pass.

We did that work. The bill is sitting there, waiting to come back to Parliament, waiting to spring into life and to provide that direction to this country. We have done that work and we need to see that kind of plan in place.

Sometimes we find that other parties change in regard to that. They start to talk about other ideas like they are picking fruit from a tree. Here is a different fruit, they say, let us try that one. What really is required is a consensus on action. We worked on that for a long time.

I would say to the Liberal Party members that they should remember what they worked on in this Parliament. They should remember the effort they put into this, the good ideas they put forward and that we supported, and the good ideas that they have accepted from us. When they move forward with anything on this issue, they should remember that.

We need consensus and we need to build from consensus in the government and in this country to accomplish these rather difficult paths that we have ahead of us. However, if we accomplish them, we will do a major and wonderful thing for the world, for our own society and for our children and grandchildren.

Bill C-377 is setting out the goals. It is giving us a framework with which to analyze the goals and make sure that we are on track. It is a planning document of the first order. It is an opportunity to layer in the mechanisms, to understand how they work and to ensure they are meeting the targets as we move along.

Why would we not have a process like this, a process that will take the politics out of it and will mean that we can move ahead very carefully?

I appreciate your gesture, Mr. Speaker. As always in the House, the work that the Speakers do to keep us on track is great. I also appreciate the fact, Mr. Speaker, that you shared that green chair with one of my colleagues, who I am sure will always relish the memory of that opportunity.

To get back to the subject at hand, how can we continue to work on this together? We can continue by passing this legislation. The bill is a planning document. It allows us all to agree on the process that we will follow. It is a document that gives us the flexibility to look at how we are making decisions and to ensure that those decisions are moving us in the right direction. By its nature, it is a non-partisan document.

If we all support this, we can move ahead. We can make a difference in this country. We can make this Parliament sing a different tune. We can say, “Here is the reality of what we are dealing with in this world and in this country, so let us make it work together”. Let us make a better place for all of us. Let us put aside the politics on this particular issue for a second, a day, a week, a month, a year, and let us move ahead with this for the good of Canadians.

[Nuclear Liability Compensation Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, once again I rise to speak to Bill C-5, the nuclear liability act. It is an act that has been rattling around the House of Commons for the better part of a year and, in that year, our position has not really altered all that much on the bill.

Yes, we recognize the need to increase the liability limits for nuclear power, very much so. We know that the liability limit that was in place before is simply not enough. However, the $650 million is a number that we have not been able to accept as a limit to the liability within the system and we have talked about that to a great degree.

I will not get into that right now because it is only part of the bill. We put forward many amendments on numerous other subjects, which I will get into as I go along, but they show that this bill, in reality, limits liability in more than one way. It limits liability and continues a Canadian practice of ignoring the impacts of nuclear accidents in the country, the impacts on workers in the uranium mining industry over many years and the impacts on our soldiers when they were put in harm's way in the face of nuclear explosions in the 1950s and 1960s.

There has been a consistent pattern over many years of downplaying the impacts of nuclear problems in the country. At the same time, contrary to what many of my colleagues have said, the nuclear industry is one that has never really made its way. In the half century that it has been a big part of the energy system in Canada, it has relied consistently on subsidies from government. It is an industry that has been plagued with overruns. We see this once again with the cancellation of the MAPLE reactor, a simple, small nuclear reactor going in place way over budget, to the point where we have now given up on it.

In the nuclear industry we have in place right now, we are looking at massive retrofits to existing plants at huge costs that are continuing to escalate as we move along. When we think of the nuclear industry, we are not thinking of an industry that has a great track record of performance in providing cheap energy for people across this country, and that is a reality. Therefore, when we talk about setting up a nuclear liability act to put things on a level playing field, we should take that seriously and we should look at how we are doing it.

At the same time, we should look at our record of dealing with people who have been exposed to nuclear radiation in this country in the past and ask if we are doing enough in this bill to protect them. To that end, I will go through some of the amendments that we proposed within the bill, taking away from the liability amount and speaking to some other items.

We proposed a number of amendments, such as to clause 24 which talks about alternate financial security that companies can put up in place of insurance under this bill. Up to 50% can be provided in alternative financial security. Once again, it is in the hands of the minister to deem correct the conditions by which the security is put up. Therefore, the minister has a great deal of latitude to choose what the financial security is for the nuclear plant. It does not all have to be insurance. Fifty per cent can be alternative security.

What is wrong with that? If there is an accident, the victims need to wait for the liquidation of the financial security in order to get compensation. The government, which puts up 20% of the funds for compensation, is on the hook at the very beginning with the money that it puts forward to the people who are seeking compensation out of the system.

We have problems with that because it clearly takes away from the notion that we would get away from government supporting the industry and the industry would stand on its own two feet through the insurance companies.

Then we could go to subclause 30(1), which states:

An action or claim must be brought

(a) in the case of an action or a claim for loss of life,

(i) within three years after the day on which the person died...

It does not talk about the survivors. The wage earner dies in an industrial accident at a nuclear site and the survivors have three years to effect that claim. Is that fair to the survivors? Perhaps the industrial worker simply gets cancer 10 years after exposure to the accident in the plant and dies. Does that mean his survivors do not get compensation?

Subclause 30(2) states:

No action or claim may be brought

(a) in relation to bodily injury, after 30 years from the day on which occurred the nuclear incident to which the action or claim relates...

Thirty years is not enough. We see that with the soldiers who were exposed to the nuclear weapons in the fifties. They are coming back now today with claims, long after 30 years, because it has shown up in their system. Once again, this is limiting the liability and it is limiting the ability for compensation to be paid.

In any other case, it is after 10 years from the day on which the nuclear accident occurred. If it is not bodily injury, if it is contamination of a site, if it is the fact that someone uses contaminated material from a site to perhaps build another site somewhere, or to use it in the building of residences, which has been a very common occurrence right across the country, and I can point to Uranium City where that happened, the liability and the ability to be compensated for mistakes that have been made is gone after 10 years. Once again, it is the limitations.

Then we could go to clause 32. A person who started off suing the operator, but after a certain period of time had not seen action, would have to start all over again. People who are suffering from things which are very difficult to determine or may take years to determine, such as cancer or radiation sickness, will have great difficulty going through multiple processes to get fair compensation.

This clause would allow a nuclear operator to delay having to pay compensation by throwing legal roadblocks in place. Wait long enough and working Canadians will suffer and compensation for the people who look for it will be unavailable.

Once again, the bill creates a situation where the claimants are at a greater risk than the company.

Clause 34 states that the maximum amount paid may not exceed 20% of the difference between the totals set out and total amounts paid by the operators. Therefore, interim compensation for people who are previously ill can only amount perhaps to 20% of what they require to cover their compensated loss. Once again, this speaks to favouring the company over the people who may be involved in the claims.

We also had a lot of trouble with clause 47. The tribunal, which has been set up to review these things, may refuse to hear any claim referred to it if it considers them to be frivolous or vexatious. This is patently unfair under the rules of our courts. Federal courts can only reject an action if a person has persistently instituted vexatious proceedings or has conducted a proceeding in a vexatious manner and only with the consent of the Attorney General of Canada. A tribunal will simply be able to say to a victim looking for compensation that the claim is vexatious, that it does not have deal with it. Where is this serving Canadians when it comes to establishing compensation?

Once again, this is the part of the bill with which we have a great deal of difficulty. I guess my colleagues in the other parties seem to be quite comfortable with it.

Subsection 50(2) states:

The Tribunal may, in order to process claims expeditiously, establish classes of claims that may be determined by a claims officer without an oral hearing and designate as a claims officer anyone it considers qualified.

A claims officers circumvents accountability, creating an easy opportunity for the system to be corrupted. A claims officer is used when small amounts are contemplated. When a tribunal is created, it means the damage from a nuclear incident is massive on a scale that we could tie with Three Mile Island, or Windscale or something of that nature. Therefore, where does this sit for claims officers?

Subclause 63(1) states:

If a regulation made under paragraph 68(b) respecting pro rata payments or establishing maximum limits is amended, the Tribunal shall inform the Minister of any change to applicable reductions that is to the advantage of any claimant who was not fully compensated in accordance with the previous regulation.

These are simply weasel words. This is something that we could not support because it opens up too many opportunities for the situation to be misused.

Clause 65 talks about the fines that could be levied on somebody who did not achieve the proper liability insurance. Subclause 65(2) states:

No operator is to be found guilty of the offence if it is established that the operator exercised due diligence to prevent the commission of the offence.

In other words, if somebody tried to get insurance and did not get it, that would be okay. If a company were unable to get insurance, if the previous insurance company, which had agreed to the risks, determined those risks were getting greater and chose not to reinsure with that company, it would be okay because it had tried.

That is not the kind of legislation we like to see. We want companies to have insurance, no exceptions. If they want to run their plant, they need to have all the paperwork in place. What is wrong with that, in a Canadian context?

I see we are pretty well finished now, so I will leave the rest for later. I am sure the debate will continue.

[Nuclear Liability Compensation Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I want to refer to subclause 26(1) in the bill. It states:

The Minister may enter into an agreement with an approved insurer under which Her Majesty in right of Canada reinsures some or all of the risk assumed by the insurer under insurance referred to in subsection 24(1).

Subclause 26(2) states:

The risks that may be reinsured are those that, in the Minister’s opinion, would not be assumed by an approved insurer without the agreement or those that are prescribed by regulation.

Subclause 26(3) states:

The reinsurance agreement may provide for the payment of premiums to Her Majesty in right of Canada.

Quite clearly, we see that the government then becomes the reinsurer. It is collecting the premiums. It is assuming the risk. This is not a question of a guarantee. This is a question of the government actually providing the services of the private sector in insurance.

We tried to remove this from the bill so we would have a more level playing field for nuclear energy, where nuclear energy had to stand on its own two feet. Does the member not think this should be excised from the bill?

[Nuclear Liability Compensation Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to some of the issues that my hon. colleague brought up. We were concerned with many of them. We put forward amendments, both at committee and in the House, over the time we dealt with the bill, which is a considerable length of time. One of them is the reinsurance provisions.

The hon. member alluded to the reinsurance provisions within the bill and said that the insurance companies could reach out to other insurance companies. If they felt they could not take this risk on themselves, they could reinsure with other insurance companies.

However, in the bill the federal government is empowered to be the reinsurer of the nuclear facilities. If they are unable to accomplish the insurance with the insurance company, the government can step in and become the reinsurer. In other words, it can take over the liability of the insurance for the particular facility. We had a lot of trouble with this clause. We did not see this as setting up the nuclear industry as separate, distinct and on its own two feet. We saw this as the government would be brought into insuring high-risk nuclear facilities.

How does this match up to understanding that the industry will work in an unsubsidized, unsupported manner from the government? How will this phase, which we tried to eliminate, prevent government from holding the liability for the nuclear plants that are not up to the standards that regular insurers would cover?

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, in reference to my previous question to the hon. member, I want to go back to that because he stated that the insurance companies would not be able to put forward the type of coverage that would be required for the industry if they had a larger amount than $650 million. In the United States, the Americans extend the coverage to almost $10 billion. Certainly, many of the reactors in Canada are located in areas that are adjacent to cities, much like the United States.

The position of the industry has been that the insurance companies are not willing to cover the larger amount. How can we be sure? How do the companies that run the reactors in the United States achieve this level of liability insurance within their country? Why is it so that we as Canadians in our country cannot achieve the same thing through our insurance companies?

[Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act, May 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from the Bloc for his presentation. I have worked with him over the past two years and I know his great concern about creating an environment and an economy where we can move to a green future. It is certainly within the context of this debate. I know his concerns around the expansion of the nuclear industry. He spoke to the need to bring these new energy forms onto a common playing field. That is something I agree with as well.

It is one of the reasons we have put forward so many amendments to this bill, to try to get to a point where we could have a bill that truly represents the real costs of nuclear energy. Across the world, many other countries are taking a different tone about the level of liability that needs to be held by the industry. In Germany, for instance, there is unlimited liability. In the United States, the liability limit is some $10 billion.

Why does my honourable colleague support this bill even though it does not really bring the nuclear industry to a level playing field in terms of its own responsibility for the liability that may ensue from any kind of accident occurring within a plant?

[Price of Petroleum Products, May 26th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, competition is failing us in Canada on energy issues because energy, by and large, is run by the international market, by very large companies that set their price as the market will bear within the context of the larger world price.

With either of the approaches that the other parties have, the chances we have of really accomplishing something with the Competition Act are unlikely. If we put our hope in possibly changing the price at the gas pump, that might work to some extent, but it still leaves us short of the larger problem which is that energy prices are escalating, that the world supply is being chased by more customers, and we need to make a stronger effort to reduce energy use.

The Japanese economy is smiling because incredible energy efficiency work has been done there over the last 20 years. The price of oil has gone up, yet their products are now much more competitive in the world marketplace because they depend less on fossil fuels.

[Price of Petroleum Products, May 26th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is not my pleasure to debate such a terrible issue for Canadians. I will be splitting my time with the member for Windsor West.

In my time in Parliament, I have spent a lot of time talking about energy issues, ways we can reduce costs for Canadians and ways we can move from our reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy, many of the good things that are possible in this world.

However, I have yet to see this Parliament take hold of the energy issues in any meaningful way. In some respects, it goes back to the Liberal government of the past, since 2000, that worked very hard to establish a continental energy plan with the United States under the aegis of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and then it carried on with the Conservatives afterwards who were pleased to continue the work of a continental energy plan for Canada. We are now so linked into that in their minds that we cannot make the kind of moves in Canada that could ultimately lead us to much lower energy costs and a better situation for Canadians as a whole.

Having said that and having laid that out as part of the problem that we have in Canada, I would like to move on to more of a national perspective, which is the energy problem. We are talking about the cost of petroleum products. I would first like to say that in the situation we are in, with the Conservatives standing and talking over and over again about the reduction in the GST, we are talking about very little. It is only 2¢ off the enormous cost increases that we have seen in the price of oil and gasoline. Those things will not be impacted by that 2¢ reduction in the GST.

Problems with natural gas have been around since 2003 when Natural Resources Canada indicated that we were in a position of running short of natural gas. The November 2007 outlook shows that we will have a serious problem by 2015 and that by 2020 we will have nothing left to export. We will be importing natural gas to heat our homes. This problem, however, seems to be of little concern to both the Liberals and the Conservatives in their times in office. We have yet to see the Department of Natural Resources, under either of those parties' direction, actually put some effort into understanding what is required for Canadians.

Probably what is required for Canadians is to go back to the old days where we insisted on maintaining large reserves of gas for Canadian use.

One of the great solutions that the Conservatives have thrown up, which we have debated in Parliament extensively, is biofuels. Biofuels, ethanol, will not reduce the cost of gasoline in our system. In fact, what we have seen over the last months in the ethanol business is that many plants that were setting up shop, because of the high cost of food, have realized that there is no profit left, even with the subsidies that are being applied to ethanol, to go into the business. We are seeing more and more ethanol plants across North America shutting down. The cost of feed is too high and the huge subsidy that is being offered up by the Americans is not enough to make up the difference. Therefore, biofuels will not solve the cost of energy in Canada.

Cellulosic ethanol, that kind of dream that we have, the dream of the future, of turning waste into ethanol and driving our vehicles around, is actually even more costly. Study after study has shown that we will not see a lowering of our energy bills through the use of cellulosic ethanol.

Where are we talking this country right now with energy? Are we just aimlessly stumbling along in a free market haze, in a free market ideological funk toward what most of the other countries in the world have given up on? Most countries have established national oil companies and have driven their energy policies by themselves, for themselves, while Canada has this ideological haze surrounding it. We are simply buying into the free market idea and moving ahead with it.

When we talk about oil, oil is a product in Canada. As the minister said, oil is a product of the world and 86 million barrels a day are used. It cannot last forever. However, and members can check with Natural Resources Canada, the government has never done an assessment of the world oil supply for Canadian policy making. It has never looked at the situation of peak oil. Has the United States done it? Yes, it has. The U.S. military and Congress did it in the United States. What happens in Canada? There is no analysis.

I held a forum on Parliament Hill in February on the peak oil situation. What can we say about peak oil in the world? We can definitely say that peak oil production is very near. We should remember that. There is a lot of oil in this world but it is getting harder to find and harder to deliver. It takes larger amounts of capital, manpower and equipment to bring it forward. We are replacing oil as if we only had to stick a straw in the ground and oil would shoot out. Now we need to hunt for it and then put an enormous amount of effort into getting it out of the ground. We cannot replace the conventional oil in the world with unconventional oil fast enough anymore. Therefore, we are at a point of peak oil production.

Do members know what Exxon's biggest investment was in the last couple of years? It invested $30 billion into buying its own shares back off the public market because it realized that cheap oil that had already been found was probably the best way to make a profit. Shell did the same thing.

The recognition of the state of the world oil industy is something we must take very seriously. Yes, the speculative nature of the free market system has driven up the price of oil very rapidly in the last year and we are all gagging on it, but in reality we will be out of cheap oil and we will be stuck with very expensive oil products in the future.

For the people I represent in northern Canada, in the Northwest Territories, this year we will see for our consumer and government expenditures a 10% increase put toward oil and petroleum products. That means that out of our whole economy we will lose 10% next year; 10% of the expenditures for governments, businesses, employees. Everyone will suffer. The burden that northern Canada bears because we have not made the progress on changing is enormous.

As well, my government in the Northwest Territories is trying to change. It is investing in solid bioenergy. It is converting buildings to biofuels and that is working. It is talking about large hydroelectric projects. It is talking about things that it can do.

This country needs to develop a very strong program that will talk about energy and provide people across the country with the answers. That is what this party is after.

We worked very hard on Bill C-30. There is a wonderful opportunity in Bill C-30 to develop a national retrofit program using the cap and trade system that was designed and supported by the Liberals and the Bloc. This is the type of thing we need in Canada: good sensible work and good sensible policies supported by all of us that we can move ahead with. We tried to do that with Bill C-30 and we were fairly successful. Why can the government not understand that we need those things in this country?

I know my time is running short, but this debate is very important to Canadians and I hope that we all take this very seriously.

[Price of Petroleum Products, May 26th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have a chance to respond to the hon. colleague from the Liberal Party. His analysis of what went wrong with the government early on is interesting. He talked about measures, after 13 years of Liberal governments, which were not that strong in dealing with the economy.

In the face of the rapidly increasing petroleum product costs this year, with the large, substantial profits being made, does the member think there is some room in the country for windfall taxes on profits, which are extremely high and going higher all the time, yet Canadians are stuck with the bill? With some kind of tax redress for the huge energy costs that we face, we could see a better situation for Canadians. We could see more dollars available for energy efficiency programs, about which the member talked. We could put that money back to work and make a difference for Canadians.