Jack Harris

[Afghanistan, October 5th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, we have a DFAIT report of June 2007 released under access to information that says three of the four detainees it interviewed said they had been whipped with cables, shocked with electricity, or otherwise hurt while in NDS custody.

Any reasonable person would consider this a pattern of abuse. Yet Canada transferred 96 detainees that year and did not stop until November when they saw the cables themselves.

Canadians have a right to know the truth. Why will the government not call a public inquiry?

[Afghanistan, October 5th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday at the MPCC we learned of a report stating that one in five Canadian detainees reported abuse at the hands of Afghan authorities. Yet Major General Laroche testified that he needed hard evidence of abuse before halting transfers.

According to international law, it works the other way around. We need to be satisfied that the transferred detainees would not be risking torture or abuse.

Can the Minister of National Defence tell us what advice on torture was provided to Major General Laroche and why his government continued to authorize the transfer of detainees?

[Newfoundland and Labrador, October 5th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, hurricane Igor swept Newfoundland and Labrador on September 21 with widespread wind and water damage and wreaked unprecedented havoc on the Burin and Bonavista Peninsulas. One man died.

The damage was so severe to roads and bridges, some 90 communities were left isolated without access to hospitals and services and, in many cases, food supplies. All available emergency services came to the fore, especially volunteer fire brigades and the unselfish assistance of neighbours and friends prevented the situation from getting worse.

The Canadian Forces responded magnificently to the Newfoundland and Labrador government's request for assistance. Three ships and nearly 1,000 forces personnel, along with helicopters and equipment were engaged in reconnecting washed out roads, erecting temporary bridges and bringing medical supplies, food and clean water to the isolated communities.

Nearly all are reconnected, but the work is temporary. It is estimated that the damage exceeds $100 million and will not be fully repaired for a year. The extent of the damage requires significant federal assistance beyond existing programs and we call on the Government of Canada for a full commitment to help.

[Afghanistan, September 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative-Liberal-Bloc committee set up to review the Afghan detainee documents has provided neither the information nor the accountability called for by your historic ruling last spring.

With the help of their partners in the big red tent, the Conservatives have put the cone of silence over investigations of their handling of Afghan detainees.

This is about accountability. They are not getting the job done. It is time to face the music. Canadians have a right to know.

Will the government stop hiding the truth with this faulty process, get rid of the cone of silence, and finally call for a public inquiry?

[Hurricane Igor, September 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, Newfoundland and Labrador was just hit with the devastation of hurricane Igor, with record rainfalls and winds in excess of 170 kilometres per hour. Sadly, one death has occurred. An 80-year-old gentleman was washed out to sea. We share in his family's sorrow.

The storm caused severe damage to infrastructure such as roads and bridges, municipal water supplies and has downed power and telecommunications lines. We have seen the pictures of flooding and severe damage and whole communities, including the 20,000 people of the Burin Peninsula who have had their road connection severed. Cleanup and repair by households and the provincial and municipal governments will take weeks and months.

I want to acknowledge the Prime Minister's timely assurance to Premier Danny Williams that the federal government will assist in relief through the existing disaster financial assistance arrangements. However, more assistance may be required after a full assessment.

It is one more reason for the Prime Minister to rethink the arbitrary deadline to complete infrastructure projects under the stimulus program. Unless this happens, millions of dollars in federal stimulus assistance will be lost to communities in Newfoundland and Labrador and throughout Canada.

[Privilege, June 15th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on a question of privilege in response to your ruling of April 27 regarding the decision and the question of privilege raised by me with respect to making available to members of Parliament and to Parliament itself the unredacted documents related to the Afghan detainee issue.

I wish to inform you, Mr. Speaker, that despite extensive negotiations and discussions over the last several weeks, as you suggested, there is no resolution to this issue with respect to the four parties sitting in the House. I wish to advise you of the concerns that we in the NDP have raised throughout these proceedings and wish to put on the record today.

Fundamental to your ruling, Mr. Speaker, was that parliamentarians would have access to unredacted documents as requested by the House order in December of last year. Three of the parties in the House have decided to reach an agreement for a process, but that does not include access to unredacted documents as outlined in your ruling.

There is a class of documents, which the government has the ultimate and unilateral right to indicate as being matters of cabinet confidence or matters of solicitor-client privilege. These documents will not go to the committee that has been proposed, so the committee will not see them. These documents will go to a panel of jurists who will decide whether or not they are indeed matters that are considered cabinet confidence or solicitor-client privilege, in which case they will not be seen by parliamentarians.

Fundamental to your ruling, Mr. Speaker, is that Parliament, in exercising its right to hold government to account, would have access to these documents. Fundamental to holding government to account is the ability to answer the questions: What did the government know? What advice did it receive? What decisions did it take in response to that advice and information? None of that information will be available to members of Parliament.

The process that appears to have been agreed to is that one member of Parliament from each party would sit on the committee, but the second fundamental problem with the process is that the committee is designated as that of a committee external to the House of Commons. In other words, it would not be a House of Commons committee charged with holding the government to account. The people on the committee are members of Parliament, but the committee is designated as being external to Parliament. It would not report to Parliament. It would not report to you as Speaker. It is not in keeping with the traditions of Parliament itself of holding the government to account.

This committee will not be able to make reports on any substantive matters that obviously holding the government to account involves and will really be a vetting committee that cannot reach any conclusions whatsoever. It will merely report on procedures and any methodology that it wishes, but there is no mechanism for reporting to Parliament or to you as Speaker.

This disrespects Parliament. It disrespects the role of parliamentarians in holding the government to account by instead substituting a judicial role to look at the documents and make decisions about them.

We advocated during this process that there was a need, if we were going to have a proper process, for a committee of parliamentarians to have access to staff. It is a very simple matter. We are talking about thousands of documents, some have suggested even hundreds of thousands of documents. But the constraints put on this process include: no support from any staff; no ability to bring any notes into any meeting; no ability to bring any notes out of any meeting; or as we suggested, experts in this area, such as special advocates who are already designated with the secret classification and are experts in arguing before courts, particularly the Federal Court, as to the whole process of balancing the need for disclosure with the claims of confidentiality.

In fact, there is no balancing process in the process that has been set out. It is only a question of whether a matter is a national security issue or not, not whether it should be disclosed despite the fact that it may have national security implications.

We see as well in the issue of cabinet confidence or the solicitor-client privilege category that once again, the decision is not whether something ought to be disclosed, despite the fact that it may come under that category, but the issue is whether it is or is not a matter of cabinet confidence. If it is a matter of cabinet confidence, it will not be disclosed even for parliamentarians who are given the job of playing the role of Parliament in holding the government to account which they will not be able to do.

We had certain other issues with respect to how the committee was established. We also had issues that were matters of procedure that were very important to us. However, the fundamentals are what I have stated. What we see in fact is a group of parties that has reached this agreement and is looking desperately for an agreement, even though it significantly interferes and undermines the historic ruling by you on April 27.

This ad hoc committee, even though it is external to the House of Commons, will be covered by the in camera rules and will not be allowed to discuss what goes on nor complain about matters of substance. We find this to be unacceptable.

Mr. Speaker, in light of all of the above, and the fact that we do not have an agreement as you provided for in your ruling of April 27, I am asking you today to indicate to us, as you said in your ruling, “if in two weeks' time, the matter is still not resolved, the Chair will return to make a statement on the motion that will be allowed in the circumstances”.

In these circumstances where there is no agreement or resolution by the four parties in this House, I am prepared to move a motion that would incorporate the matters that were proposed by us, in keeping with your ruling, which is a different memorandum of understanding than the one which I think you will see later today which provides for the protection of national security, provides for ensuring confidentiality, provides for an oath to be taken by members of the committee, provides for proper reporting to you as Speaker and to the House, and provides for access to all unredacted documents.

These are missing from the agreement that appears to have been entered into by the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc, but we are not prepared to enter into such an agreement. We are not prepared to ask our leader to sign such an agreement. We would like you to advise what motion you would consider appropriate in these circumstances.

As I have indicated, I am prepared to move a motion that would set out a memorandum of understanding or a process whereby the committee of parliamentarians could have access to these documents with the kind of support that is required and with the full access to the documents as outlined in your historic ruling to Parliament, which we believe has been significantly watered down by the government and agreed to by two of the opposition parties.

[National Defence, June 10th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the government is rushing into a multibillion dollar fighter jet procurement, just after modernizing the fleet. It is forging ahead with what amounts to a sole source contract, cutting out competitors, and sidetracking a transparent bidding process that would have produced strong industrial and regional benefits, creating jobs and supporting aerospace industry in Canada.

Does the Minister of National Defence still plan to go ahead with the advanced contract award notice, and can he explain the rush and the recklessness of this deal?

[Business of Supply, May 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to join the debate today on the motion put forward by my colleague from Edmonton—Strathcona. I will repeat it for the benefit of the House and the people watching who have perhaps just tuned in. The motion states:

That this House notes the horror with which Canadians observe the ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and their call for action to prevent such an event in Canada, and therefore calls on the government immediately to conduct a thorough review and revision of all relevant federal laws, regulations and policies regarding the development of unconventional sources of oil and gas, including oil sands, deepwater oil and gas recovery, and shale gas, through a transparent process and the broadest possible consultation with all interested stakeholders to ensure Canada has the strongest environmental and safety rules in the world, and to report to the House for appropriate action.

When we consider the wording of the motion itself calling for a thorough review and for revision of the laws to make them the strongest environmental and safety rules in the world, you would think that this would be an absolute no-brainer. In light of what we have seen in the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it seems pretty clear that a review is called for.

A spokesperson for the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, a federal-provincial body that looks after the offshore oil and gas regime in Newfoundland and Labrador, said within a matter of days after the events in the Gulf of Mexico that it would have to review its regulations in light of that incident. It is pretty clear that the people of Canada want to see a review.

I will quote a Newfoundland environmentalist of long standing, a gentleman by the name of Stan Tobin. He has been active in environmental matters over the last 20 or 30 years, particularly in Placentia Bay, where there is a lot of tanker traffic, an oil refinery, a transshipment port, and a lot of concern about the environmental consequences of oil and gas. Mr. Tobin said that it is time that the federal government did a complete review.

He is talking about the tanker traffic here. He said:

It's been 20 years since the last one was done. A lot has changed. If government and the oil industry believe that we are in a position to adequately respond to something like what happened down in the [Gulf of Mexico], they are the only ones who believe it. No way are we prepared.

That is a sentiment expressed by a lot of people across the country, both lay people and people who know what they are talking about, having studied the issue for many years, and even by those who have a lot of respect for the technological expertise of people in the oil and gas industry.

There was, in fact, an admission by Chevron, which is doing the Orphan Basin project, the deepwater well that was started just a couple of weeks ago, when it put forth its proposal for drilling five years ago. It candidly acknowledged that it would not be able to clean up an oil spill of any significance if one were to occur. It did not have the capability to do it because of the weather and wave conditions in that particular area, because of the fact that the oil would disperse very quickly, and because the containment measures were likely to be inadequate. However, it said that the chance of it happening was so rare that it did not think the risk was too great.

It candidly admitted that on the technological side, it did not have the capability of doing an oil-spill cleanup. I think that is sobering news for a lot of people to come to realize.

After hearing the government talk and after listening carefully to the Minister of Natural Resources today, one would think that it would not be difficult for the government to actually support this motion and engage in this review. The Minister of Natural Resources said this morning that he and his department are constantly reviewing their rules and regulations and that they want to be assured that they are the best in the world. How is that different from the motion before the House today? It is not enough to have assurances from the government. There has to be an open and transparent process.

If the minister truly believes that we are in the forefront of the world in terms of environmental protection and environmental safety and operations in this kind of oil and gas activity, then what does he have to fear from a transparent process that would allow stakeholders or others, other than the government officials, to examine the issues and pronounce on them?

This is intended to provide a level of confidence Canadians would require for the type of oil and gas development contemplated here, those that are of higher risk to the environment.

We know that the oil sands have an extremely severe negative environmental footprint as they operate today. We know that there are dangers, as we have seen in the Gulf of Mexico, from deepwater drilling. There are dangers from offshore drilling in general.

I think the sensitivity to that is so great in British Columbia, for example, that a moratorium has been in place for some 30 years. It is likely to and should continue, because that is what the people of British Columbia want. They do not want to take the risk of a potential oil spill occurring.

We have had pretty good success on the east coast, I have to say. The oil and gas developments in the Hibernia, White Rose, and Terra Nova projects have had some oil spills. An estimate was given the other day by the CNLOPB chair to the parliamentary committee for natural resources. I think the number was approximately one barrel of oil spilled for every million barrels produced over the years. I suppose that is a good ratio. Maybe it is and maybe it is not. Someone else might have a different opinion on that.

We have seen some spills. On the other hand, we have seen what I would call inadequate environmental monitoring. We have a self-reporting system in the east coast oil and gas industry. The industry is the one that monitors the environmental effects and reports on them to the CNLOPB, which then makes them public.

There has been constant criticism in my province from the environmental scientists, researchers, and academics who work in this area. They say that self-reporting is not the best form of reporting at all. One speaker at a recent event said that if someone asks me how I am doing or how good I am, I will probably give a pretty favourable report about myself. If somebody else is asked how I am doing, it might be a little bit more objective.

This is something that has been recommended in the past. In fact, the environmental assessment for the Terra Nova project recommended strongly that there be independent environmental monitoring of the project. This did not turn out to be one of the conditions of the development of the Terra Nova production platform.

Since then, we have seen some incidents with significant spills, particularly of processed water, that went undetected and carried on for a long period of time. This is something that we find abhorrent. It obviously shows that the rules we have in Canada are not the best they can be and certainly are not the best in the world. We have also seen incidents like this that require attention.

I want to talk about the deepwater drilling being done by Chevron. It needs to be put into perspective a little bit. It is not the first well done. It is the deepest. Chevron did drill a deepwater well in the Orphan Basin in 2007. It is not intended to be a production well. In fact, they are not even going to do a test flow. They are just drilling the well for the sake of obtaining core samples. They will cement it in at the end of the process. This is purely an exploration well, so there is some difference there in terms of what the ultimate risk might be.

It has taken three months to drill the well. The CNLOPB has moved on this very quickly and has said that they want additional oversight requirements there. Interestingly enough, at a certain point, when they actually get into the high-carbon zone, which is considered the pressure zone, they will be taking what the CNLOPB calls a pause. We hope at that time that there will be an opportunity for an assessment of the dangers of continuing based on what happened in the Gulf.

[Business of Supply, May 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps I could move the member to the other coast, to Newfoundland and Labrador, where there is a bay called Placentia Bay. It is a very large bay that is subject to fog and other environmental weather hazards. There is also a refinery at the head of the bay, as well as a transshipment port.

A recent study by Transport Canada has indicated there are about 8,200 vessel movements per year there, including tankers bringing oil to the refinery and refined products out, as well as all of the transshipment for oil from the Grand Banks.

One of the criticisms in this study is that there is not really an effective method of dealing with any potential oil spill which could occur and that there is a lack of coordination by Transport Canada, the official responder, as well as the fact that oil response equipment is centrally located outside of Placentia Bay, in St. John's, and not in the bay where it is mostly likely to be an opportunity for a response.

If this review were to take place, is that also the kind of examination that would be done, which could potentially change these regulations to make them tighter so we could have an effectively oil spill response?

[Business of Supply, May 27th, 2010]

Mr. Chair, I see on the next page, on the other hand, a projected contribution of $2.6 million in last year's main estimates to the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre contribution program. These items are indicated as “Items not required”. In other words, I assume that the money was not spent. Some of the other items are indicated as being ones for which authority will be sought for the renewal of the transfer payment programs in 2010. However, that one item does not seem to be on that list.

Can the minister explain why that is?