James Bezan

[Selkirk—Interlake, October 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my riding of Selkirk—Interlake has had a very challenging year. We have had the threat of water contamination from Devils Lake. As well, spring flooding and the record precipitation levels have left fields flooded and created the worst crop year on record. The excess moisture also has created major damage along riverbanks and shorelines. All of this has caused concern and great hardship for many people in my riding.

The communities along Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba are now facing the threat of flooding from the high water levels on the lake due to fall storms and gusty winds. The residents of Selkirk—Interlake have responded to these challenges. With cooperation of property owners, residents and municipalities, we have been able to secure dikes and protect our communities.

I want to thank all who helped sandbag and build dikes. I also want to thank all the municipal officials for their hard work protecting our communities and establishing emergency plans to deal with this latest flood threat.

[Spirit Drinks Trade Act, October 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I know we want to move this bill through Parliament on an expedited basis because there are some deadlines to meet to honour the negotiated trade settlement we have with the European Union.

The one thing I forgot to ask in committee and would like to ask the parliamentary secretary now is whether there are any businesses here that are going to be ill affected by this bill. Are there any distillers or wineries here that are producing products that carry protected names by European standards? How is that going to be negatively felt in Canada? That is something we need to know.

[Wage Earner Protection Program, September 29th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad we are debating the bill today and I thank the member for Mississauga South for his interventions and representation today.

There is no doubt that wage earner protection is crucial and important. We have been debating this in the House for quite some time. Wage earners deserve to be protected in case of bankruptcy and insolvency. They need to be covered, and I am glad we are considering this under the bill.

The Conservative Party wants to see this get to committee so we can have a good debate. We should have the proper witnesses with a balance of labour and employee representation as well as witnesses from the financial industry, the chamber of commerce and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. We will see how this all comes into play when we have those expert witnesses before the committee.

There was talk about how this might affect capital. We see in the bill so far that it does have that balance and should restrict capital investment from a majority of different sources, including lenders and investors going into our businesses. Our small business built our country. We want to ensure that continues and that our small businesses succeed, grow and prosper.

Could the member for Mississauga South, especially with his expertise in financial matters, allude to how he sees this playing out from the standpoint of security to the investment industry and how that will play out in our business community?

[Gasoline Prices, September 26th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am glad that we are having this important debate. This definitely is the issue that has rocked Canada over this past summer. All of our constituency offices had had our phones ringing off the wall and our phones at home are ringing with people concerned about the rising fuel costs. We are hearing a lot about future possibilities but people want relief right now.

I represent a rural riding. Contrary to what the hon. member over there was saying about his urban industrial area, there is no doubt that the people who are feeling the pinch the hardest right now are rural Canadians. People in rural ridings have the farthest to travel to get to work and to school. Our school boards are now dealing with a huge increase in costs to run their buses in rural ridings. In some cases it is adding on over $50,000 to their operating budget which they did not budget for and which they do not have. They cannot go back this year to the municipalities and ask for more money and to increase the mill rate retrospectively. They have to deal with the problems right now. Rural Canadians, such as the farmers and the truckers, are the ones who are really taking the hit here. There is a cumulative effect here that all comes down to the consumer and we have to offer some relief right now.

We have the GST which is excessive right now. We are only talking about a few pennies a litre right now but that type of relief put back into the economy and into the people's hands would have a lot more benefit.

The one thing that we have always adhered to as kind of a policy in government is that we should not be taxing food production. Most provinces already recognize that when we are producing food the provincial excise taxes are exempt from that fuel. It is time that we started considering maybe doing that at the federal level for people who use farm fuels because we do not want our food to have that excessive tax built into it.

I would like to hear some of these types of comments coming out tonight, something that we can do immediately as government, to offer some relief to industry, to farmers, to rural Canadians and to consumers so that the cumulative effect is negated as much as possible.

There is no doubt that this is a world market price spike that we are seeing. As somebody who is in farming and who has been in business, sometimes we get to enjoy those price spikes as well but there are also downturns in industry. There is no doubt that the oil and gas sector has gone through downturns as well. It was not that long ago that the price was selling at below cost production when it was sitting around 45¢ to 50¢ a litre.

Even though things are up, let us talk about some real advantages. Tax rebates to low income and fixed income Canadians with huge heating bills this winter is another way that we can deal with it. Let us talk about what we can do as government right now and that is in how we design our taxation and those policies for Canadians. That is the type of information I think Canadians want to hear coming from this place.

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague from the Bloc is a very learned individual who has done a lot of great work on the environment committee. I appreciated his comments on the IJC, his recognition of the beauty of Lake Winnipeg and the importance of the commercial fishery and how it could be negatively impacted. The fishery in Lake Winnipeg is the largest for pickerel outside the Great Lakes region. It is a resource that we have to protect.

He said that this is going to set a very dangerous precedent on all other environmental treaties we have across this country and that we should ensure we make use of all legal means.

I want to thank all participants tonight who took the time to be here to talk about Devils Lake. I appreciate all the input and the interventions that were made. Hopefully, unanimous consent will come out of this and we can move ahead on the issue.

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Madam Speaker, we are actually going through negotiations here to develop a resolution. The Conservatives had already drafted one to bring before the House. It is a resolution that would probably find unanimous consent. I think we will be able to work out a resolution with my colleagues across the way. We did have one prepared. We will work together to come up with wording that is acceptable to all and include our friends from the Liberal Party.

I want to thank the parliamentary secretary for his intervention and I want to follow up on some of the discussions. Perhaps this is where we have some of the confusion happening out in the countryside and in this House. It is how the Boundary Waters Treaty comes into play when there are federal projects in the U.S. and Canada versus state projects on both sides and provincial projects.

It is extremely confusing that we have a state project in North Dakota that is going ahead without any federal blessing. It started construction back in 2002-03, completely violating everything that was recommended by the environmental impact studies that were presented and done at that time.

We cannot seem to get the Americans to honour the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. We cannot seem to get them to consider any of the environmental recommendations that have been brought forward from the U.S. government and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

One of the reasons that we have not been advocating this issue over the last couple of weeks on Devils Lake is because we had hoped that there were good negotiations going on. Then we were presented with this letter and heard challenges from the governor of North Dakota in the last week. This reminded us that we had to start talking about this again in the House of Commons, since it was pushed to the side with all the other issues that the government is facing.

Essentially, how can we have faith that the IJC can intervene here and stop the state government when it seems to have a mind of its own and wanting to do whatever it pleases? The state has already proven that by building the project.

We are only a couple of weeks away from the state being in the position to throw the switch and start the pumps. Can the parliamentary secretary explain to me, and to any people who are watching, particularly back in Manitoba, that the concern is that North Dakota will not honour the treaty.

Further, it may not even be bound by the treaty since there was the reference made earlier saying that the reason that we never made a referral before is because it was a state project rather than a federal project. That does not seem to wash in both hands.

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I note that the parliamentary secretary has gone back to saying that the letter that was referenced earlier today in question period and again in the House is wrong.

Maybe the member will understand some of the frustration that I have as the representative for Selkirk--Interlake, the home of Lake Winnipeg, and the frustration that I am feeling from my constituents. We are quite upset that there seems to have been an opportunity to make a reference to the IJC about a Devils Lake outlet.

Regardless of what project that might have been, I am at odds wondering why we would not want to make that representation, why we would not want to have the IJC look into the possibility of what the water quality is in Devils Lake versus that of the Red River basin watershed.

We have a situation where North Dakota wanted to go in some way, in some fashion, with some project a few years ago on Devils Lake and we had the opportunity to look at that. I would like to know why we would not have gone down that path then.

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I just want to compliment my colleague and friend from Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia for his intervention. My colleague has been a long time activist in ensuring that environmental issues are taken care of. He also has training in engineering, majoring in hydrology. He knows this issue very well. I appreciated his comments today and the insight he brought to the discussion.

The thing we have to take a look at, and that he alluded to it, is our friends in North Dakota are facing some flooding issues. However, they are also, in trying to alleviate that problem, going to create some violations of the Boundary Waters Treaty, which was established back in 1909 and sets out parameters as to what we can do in the aspect of water quality.

Could he speculate on what might occur if the North Dakota government decides to go ahead and violate that treaty?

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there has been some concern over some of the comments that were made earlier tonight. The House has to understand that this is an issue that I am quite passionate about. It is an issue that is going to have a detrimental effect on the people living in my riding. More importantly, their concerns are being expressed by me tonight here in this House.

I want to follow up on some of the discussion that we are having now on the possibility of having a unanimous decision made by this House and bringing that forward, so that we can take that in good faith to the U.S. administration to hopefully get that IJC referral.

I would even challenge the minister one step further. Would he also be interested in ensuring that we have representation from all parties in this House to go down to present that motion and letter to U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice. We could also meet with the appropriate people in the senate and congress on this very issue and convince North Dakota not to work unilaterally here and make a decision that will violate the Boundary Waters Treaty.

We must ensure that these treaties that we have in place are respected. We must stay away from setting a very dangerous precedent.

I too, like the minister, feel sorry for the people who live around Devils Lake. Due to decisions made in that state, they are now undergoing high waters year after year. In a wet season, such as we are having this year, they will be relocating probably another 20 or so residences. They actually go in and move entire yards, all the homes, to a higher and dryer location.

That is not sustainable either. We must realize that they have a flooding problem in North Dakota, as the minister noted. I understand why they are under pressure to do something about it.

As the science has dictated and as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has said, and as I stated earlier in my speech and quoted from the letter from the director of the U.S. department of natural resources, it is an ill-founded project.

The fact remains that the North Dakota government wants to throw the switch. Whether or not it has the patience that is required to get an IJC referral is another matter.

Will the President of the Treasury Board commit to going ahead with a joint recommendation from this House, presented by representatives from all parties, to the U.S. administration and get the IJC referral that we so desperately want?

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we are not here to argue about the science or the importance of the Boundary Waters Treaty. We all understand that.

On our side of the House and I think everybody in my riding who is going to be detrimentally affected by this decision in North Dakota if it unilaterally decides to turn on the switch and start pumping water, we want to know what plan is there in place? We need to know what we are doing right now today in our negotiations with the U.S. state department. Where are we at with Secretary Condoleezza Rice in ensuring we get the referral from the U.S. to go ahead to the International Joint Commission.

We need to know if that fails, if the Americans for whatever political purposes internally decide not to make that reference to the IJC, what is our next step?