James Lunney

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, February 10th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague's speech today and the concerns that he has raised. I know he has real heart to see the health care system improved in the country.

On the issue of accountability, he mentioned statistics about adverse events. Just yesterday we had the Canadian Patient Safety Institute at committee. There have been a tremendous number of deaths and casualties from medical treatment. That is just in the hospitals.

Is the member aware of an issue that came up recently with regard to C. difficile in Montreal area hospitals and across the nation. About 600 deaths were reported from this bacteria, a hospital based infection. Related to that was handwashing, overcrowding and use of antibiotics. However, there was another issue and that was the use of a commonly prescribed class of medications that people were on when they entered the hospital. That is gastric acid inhibitors that people take for heartburn and to reduce gastric acidity. There is a 250% increase in risk for people on these medications.

However, no one wanted to address the accountability in the system even though the CMA Journal had raised the issue in July. By October, they were reporting 600 deaths and no public warning and no warning to doctors that if a patient was on this class of medication, they should not go near a hospital with C. difficile. It surprised me that Canadian public health officials did not see that as a public health issue. They saw that as a practice guideline issue.

Along with his concerns, would he care to continue his remarks? I know he had remarks on his concerns about safety. Would he care to comment on that one.

[Natural Health Products, February 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-420 is back on the parliamentary agenda. With the help of my colleague from Oshawa, Bill C-420 was reintroduced on October 21, 2004. The second hour of debate will soon be occurring before a second reading vote.

The bill is about natural health product regulation. It is about freedom of choice in personal health care.

Canadians want the government to understand that vitamins, minerals, herbs and amino acids are not drugs. They are what we are made of. They want their natural health products regulated under a food style directorate, not as drugs. That is what Bill C-420 is all about.

Bill C-420 would amend the Food and Drugs Act. It would open the definition of food to include natural health products. It would open the definition of drug and exclude food. It would also scrap antiquated sections 3(1), 3(2) and schedule A that prevent health claims for natural health products, even when they are based on sound science.

Under Bill C-420 we would develop good manufacturing practices, inspections and quality assessments for health claims.

It is time to let natural health products take their place as a foundation for a wellness and disease prevention strategy that can help put Canada on the forefront of real health care reform.

[Textile and Clothing Industry, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, “Since he became Prime Minister we no longer exist. We feel unwanted”. Those are the words of the former Liberal minister, Gilbert Normand. Nonetheless, the textile and clothing manufacturers feel the same way. This week, the town of Huntington is losing six plants and 800 jobs, a number that, unfortunately, is likely to go into the thousands.

What nice little trinket will the Minister of Industry be putting in the Christmas stockings of the affected families?

[Bethlehem Walk in Parksville, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, Parksville on Vancouver Island is a city of some 10,000 people. This week a local Baptist church will attract more than 10,000 people to a four day special Christmas event.

There are shepherds and lots of real, fluffy sheep. There are donkeys and chickens and a stable scene with a real newborn baby.

Reproduced are the shops, smells and sounds of the historic, dimly lit streets of Bethlehem. More than 200 people are dressed in period costume as Roman soldiers, blacksmiths, candle makers and fish mongers. There is a period bakery producing Dead Sea rolls. There is Sotheby's auction house where people can bid on Goliath's sword or Moses' staff, which still turns into a serpent when it is thrown down on the floor.

Afterward there are cookies, hot chocolate and Christmas carols.

It is all in good fun and sets the stage to help the less fortunate. Last year the Bethlehem Walk raised more than $10,000, all given to the Society of Organized Services to help needy families.

It is the spirit of giving. It is the Christmas story. It is light coming into darkness. It is joy to the world, peace and goodwill.

Congratulations to Parksville Fellowship Baptist Church.

[Supply, December 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, we have had so much opportunity to address these issues in the past. We had the standing committee out there on the coast with members from all sides of the House. We had an excellent chair. I note that the former chair of the fisheries committee is here as well, the member from Prince Edward Island.

We have reported on these problems in times past. We made recommendations to the government, yet the recommendations have been ignored. In times past we had John Fraser, who did an excellent report. He was a man who knew a lot about this fishery and was a former Speaker. Those recommendations were ignored.

With all due respect, I am sure that Mr. Bryan Williams, the former B.C. chief justice, is going to want to do his best, but we have problems. People's confidence in the DFO is at an all-time low and that is hard to beat; it has been down for a long time. It seems that it is lower than ever now. Public confidence is at an all time low, frankly, when the department appoints people to investigate; we on this side of the House of course know that the members would never use partiality or patronage to choose who might be investigating this matter.

Frankly, where I come from people have a hard time accepting that the department will appoint people to investigate itself and will come up with real answers when the department has ignored the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for numerous years. It has ignored our previous reports. That is why people are mad. We know it is going to cost money. We know it is going to take time. That is the level of the frustration that people are experiencing over the mismanagement of these resources.

I fail to have a high level of confidence that the measures the minister is taking in response to this crisis are sufficient to satisfy the level of public concern and the crisis in public confidence about the importance of this resource to British Columbia for many years to come. If we do not address these problems now, the whole fishery in 2008 is in question, and then there is the fishery in 2012. We do not know how many years it will take to recover, if it will recover at all, and frankly we have a great concern.

If this is not bad enough, in my own riding we now have Parks Canada wanting to get in on the act and ban fishing within parks. That is a big concern, because part of one of our great national parks, Pacific Rim National Park, includes Barclay Sound. That is right at the opening of the Alberni Inlet where all the fish come in for those great million sockeye runs that come into Port Alberni. Now Parks Canada wants to shut down all fisheries passing through Barclay Sound. As if it is not bad enough with DFO mismanaging things, now Parks Canada wants to step in and add more confusion to the mix.

Fisheries management is seriously out of control. We need to have a proper investigation into this. We know it is going to cost money and we know it is going to take time. We are frustrated. We would like to see some real solutions come forward more quickly. I think the minister has an opportunity to bring in some real enforcement, to do some proper supervision, and to make some significant changes, even without an inquiry, but people are not satisfied with those actions alone.

[Supply, December 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to stand to enter this debate tonight. It is an important issue we are discussing here tonight. It is the Fraser River. It is an important resource to British Columbia and an important resource to many hundreds of families and thousands of people on the west coast, and it is reflective of the mismanagement in DFO that affects people from coast to coast.

This is a matter of great concern to the B.C. caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada. We have been concerned about this issue since the fishery this year resulted in such disastrous outcomes, but sadly it is not the first time. This is a problem that has been cycling around and around. It has gone on from year to year and there have been reports on it. There have been reports from the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.

I was on the committee myself in 2001 and 2002. We had hearings on these matters of the Fraser River fishery. Back then we heard about the problems from commercial fishermen, aboriginals and others affected by this fishery. We tabled an excellent report in 2003, as the fisheries committee before us did in 2001, and as others did before that, going back to 1992.

We heard the member from Delta talking about this. He probably knows more about the Fraser River fishery than anyone in the House, including the minister, I would suggest, because his career has been based in that area for many years. He knows fish probably better than anyone. We heard him talking about problems going back to 1987 and 1988.

So when we talk about the need for a judicial inquiry, it is not because this is a new problem. It is because we have had committees looking at it and we have had inquiries in the past, but we want to get some action on this problem while we still have a fishery to protect.

The debate has been going on for a while, but in case someone has just tuned in, I want to review the motion that we are addressing today. It is a Conservative Party motion and reads as follows:

That the House recognize that the maintenance of the sockeye salmon stocks in the Fraser River is crucial for conservation and for commercial, recreational and aboriginal users; that the Government's investigation into the collapse of this resource cannot be considered independent; that this resource has been mismanaged; that past decisions have been made without the proper science; and that, as a consequence, the House call on the Government to establish an independent judicial enquiry to determine the cause of the collapse of the sockeye salmon stocks on the Fraser River.

We have heard the words of member for Victoria, who stood up just a short time ago. I was surprised to hear him, a former environment minister, talking about the cost of a judicial inquiry. He talked about other inquiries like the Krever inquiry into hepatitis C, which we were just talking about in the health committee today, the APEC inquiry and the Somalia inquiry.

He talked about the cost of these inquiries, but I think we need to consider that with the collapse of this fishery there may not be a fishery at all four years from now in 2008. The cost to the fishing industry, to the people who depend on that resource and to British Columbia will be in the neighbourhood of some $150 million, compared to maybe a $10 million cost for an inquiry. Maybe it will cost some money to do a judicial inquiry, but I can tell the House that the members on this side, the B.C. caucus and other members of the House, I know, share the concern about the mismanagement of this fishery.

I want to address some of the same problems that occur in my own riding. I will do that in a minute. They relate to the same type of mismanagement issues, but that is not even unique to the west coast. When I served on the fisheries and oceans committee a couple of years ago, we travelled to the east coast, one of the most prolific fishing grounds in the world, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, which Newfoundland brought into Confederation. It is one of the greatest fishing resources on the entire planet and we saw how we have mismanaged that resource, at a great cost to the people of Newfoundland who depended on it and to other Atlantic provinces as well.

To this day mismanagement goes on under the guise of NAFO because we lack the tools for proper enforcement and because we have a 200 mile limit but the Grand Banks go beyond that. Our continental shelf goes beyond that 200 mile limit and we continue to allow overfishing on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks.

The people in Newfoundland and the fisheries committee recommended that we take custodial management of that resource so that we could protect what remains of the stocks and allow them to have an opportunity to recover, yet the government has failed to act on the committee's reports just as it failed to act on the committee's reports from 2003 and from 2001.

And the problems have continued on the Fraser River as they continue in my own riding. The issue with the Fraser, just to summarize, is that in this past year, 2004, the reason for this discussion tonight or what has brought it to a boil here, we had an estimated run of some 4.4 million fish, but if we look at the catch, including the U.S. allocation, the test fisheries, the Canadian commercial catch, the aboriginal catch, and the recreational catch, it amounts to some 2.25 million fish.

Arriving at Mission upriver were some 2.6 million fish. They were reported as making it at least that far. It is believed that between there and further upriver some half million were reported caught, but there are some missing fish there. Some 1.9 million fish that should have arrived at spawning grounds did not and of course that is the subject that has brought this matter to a boil today.

Where are these fish? What happened with this fishery and what has gone wrong?

I want to suggest that this government has so mismanaged the fishery, by creating conflict. Our aboriginal people, and God bless them, traditionally have used these fish and we respect that. They have had access to fish for cultural and ceremonial reasons and for food. However, a number of years ago the government decided to go with a pilot sales program that would allow them to enter the commercial fishery. The wisdom of that program is to be determined, but it was not managed well.

Was it constitutional? A provincial court judge decided it was not constitutional. That created some problems. Then a Supreme Court judge overturned that decision. That created a whole range of confusion about who is allowed to fish and who is not. Then we have a problem with DFO officers who are supposed to be supervising this. They are over-regulating one sector of the fishery and turning a blind eye to another sector of the fishery.

It is such a mess that it is hard to say where the fish went. It is a real problem. In order to determine that and untangle this thing, we feel at this stage that we want action. We wish we could sort this out.

The fisheries committee recently went out to the coast. Our caucus pushed for that. Our B.C. caucus wanted to get the fisheries committee out there right away. I commend the chair of that committee, the member for Scarborough Southwest. He is a man of integrity. He has done a good job as the chair of that committee. I know the members of that committee have the concerns of fisheries at heart. No matter whether the issues involve Newfoundland or the Great Lakes or our west coast fisheries, the members of that committee do care. The 2003 report of that committee, which the member from Scarborough was chairing at that time, was a good report. Sadly, the recommendations of that report have not been honoured or respected by the minister.

I will briefly reflect on similar issues in my own riding. We have a huge sockeye run in the Alberni Inlet. We have a huge chinook run. They are chinook, the big ones, the king salmon, the 50-pounders. I caught one the last time I was out. It weighed 22 pounds. I was proud of that. The guy next door caught one that was 46 pounds. These are huge salmon. They are king salmon. They are the best.

We have a huge sockeye river run there, but I am saying that this fishery has been mismanaged. There are problems in the fishery because there are misguided closures. The department will move in and suddenly decide to close the sports fishery at midnight on a Friday. Basically what happens then is that all the campgrounds full of Americans and others who have come here to fish this fishery are suddenly told that the fishery is closed. The next day, the campgrounds are empty. A couple of days later the fisheries people decide that the run is bigger than they thought, so they open it up again. In the meantime, the people are gone and the economy of the region suffers. This was a huge issue a few years ago.

We have a chinook closure in the Barclay Sound. We have complex regulations that no one can understand and decisions that are made without any scientific basis. The timing of fisheries announcements does not make sense in many cases.

Now we have proposed cuts to the SEP, the salmon enhancement program. We are trying to see these stocks supported and the runs maintained, but the funding is being cut. Much of the work in salmon enhancement is done by volunteers and the little bit of money that has gone into the salmon enhancement program is now being cut. I suppose that is so that they can arm fisheries officers to go out into Saskatchewan where they are really needed.

Frankly, I do not understand why we have armed fisheries officers running around rural Saskatchewan and Alberta and yet on the coast where the big fisheries are we have places are that are under-watched. The resources on the coast have been cut while they hire more here at 200 Kent Street. Why do we need an inflated enforcement or fisheries management crew here at 200 Kent Street in Ottawa where they have not seen a fish for a long time except what arrives on a plate if someone is lucky enough to catch it?

Mr. Speaker, I want to remind you that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Fleetwood—Port Kells.

I want to say that the fisheries have been mismanaged. We want to see proper fisheries management restored. We need an inquiry to sort out this mess. I hope all members will take this matter seriously.

[Justice, December 7th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, a recently declassified RCMP document indicates that some 600 women, many just girls, are lured into Canada's illicit sex trade each year. It is estimated that reporting only identifies one in ten women so victimized.

Against this dismal backdrop, the minister of immigration has been providing incentives to foreign women to apply as exotic dancers, leaving them extremely vulnerable to further exploitation.

When is the government going to get serious about Canada's illicit sex trade and take action to stop the exploitation of these most vulnerable women and children?

[Petitions, December 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition deals with the subject of autism. The petitioners, again largely from my riding, are calling on Parliament to recognize that families with children suffering from autism spectrum disorder are greatly affected and highly vulnerable. They talk about the alarming increase in the diagnosis and presence of autism in our population, currently at about 1 in 195 children. They draw attention to the therapy which has been made available largely through the United States, intensive behavioural intervention, IBI, and also applied behavioural analysis. These programs are taught in the United States and currently not taught in Canada. They are quite expensive. The petitioners are calling for these programs to be taught and to be available in Canada.

[Petitions, December 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions today.

The first deals with sexual exploitation and makes reference also to child pornography. In particular, some 360 petitioners are calling for protection from sexual exploitation. They would like Parliament to protect children by taking all necessary steps to raise the age of consent from 14 to 18 years. It was the Catholic Women's League that was largely responsible for raising this issue, but I know that many citizens beyond that group are also deeply concerned about this matter.

[Nanaimo, December 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the citizens of Nanaimo registered a historic vote on November 20 endorsing a major downtown renewal initiative. The $200 million program involves a new Nanaimo convention centre, a 140-room Marriott hotel, a new and expanded museum, commercial space and a multi-purpose community auditorium. Spinoffs include choice waterfront condominiums and a multi-purpose twin ice arena.

In recent years, the Nanaimo Port Authority and the city have done a great job transforming Nanaimo's spectacular waterfront through enhanced park space, walkways, a sea plane terminal, the Port Theatre, accessibility and parking.

The new project will expand that renewal into the downtown core. This ambitious proposal is seen as a great and historic opportunity to permanently transform the core area with economic spinoffs that will impact the entire mid and north Vancouver Island regions.

With a fledgling cruise ship industry on the rise and with the 2010 Olympics coming our way, Nanaimo is preparing to receive the world. We are now looking to the federal government to shoulder its share of the financial burden that this historic opportunity presents.