Joe Comartin

[First Nations Governance Act, June 3rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I suppose I am not surprised that I am up on my feet at this point, as opposed to the member for Calgary Centre, given the way the bill has been handled from its inception.

In that regard I must admit as tragic as the bill is, and the way first nations have been treated, the process they have been put through is equally tragic. That was continued today in the ruling we received from the Speaker. Although I know in his thinking that he conducted himself with all good faith, I could not help but think, as I listened to his ruling, that in effect he was saying that it was okay that we had these prior decisions, which I do not think are applicable.

The issue today, in terms of the process, is whether people whose primary first language is French will be treated equally. That was the point he missed, and so much of the bill reflects that.

I think the Speaker, if he had thought this through more thoroughly, there was an option to say that there was some systemic discrimination in the process against people whose primary first language was French, and they were not being treated equally. Those of us whose first language is primarily English get an advantage because we get access to the transcripts of the committee in total. Having sat in on part of the committee discussion, almost all of it was in English.

On the record to the Speaker, if his ruling will stand, as it appears it will at this point, the House has to look at the process. There is no way we can have systemic discrimination against one of the two languages in the country. We cannot have that perpetrated in the House, which I believe is the effect of the ruling we received today.

Going back to the manner in which the first nations have been treated, I am sure members will hear repeatedly from members on the government side about how they consulted. What members will not hear from that side is that the consultation resulted in a ratio of people who made presentations either as witnesses in person or testimony and briefs in writing. I believe that ratio was 191 to something like 10: 191 were opposed to the bill and opposed to the governmental approach contained in the bill and only eight or ten people supported the approach.

[First Nations Governance Act, June 3rd, 2003]

moved:

That Bill C-7, in Clause 16, be amended by deleting lines 15 to 20 on page 13.

[First Nations Governance Act, June 3rd, 2003]

moved:

That Bill C-7, in Clause 10, be amended by replacing lines 16 to 23 on page 9 with the following:

“(3) The Council of a band shall, by band law, authorize an impartial person, or an impartial body established under section 18 to carry out an assessment of a band’s financial position and to require that remedial measures be taken when any of the following circumstances become known”

[First Nations Governance Act, June 3rd, 2003]

moved:

That Bill C-7, in Clause 4, be amended by replacing line 34 on page 4 with the following:

“least 30 days before the vote is conducted”

[First Nations Governance Act, June 3rd, 2003]

moved:

That Bill C-7, in the Preamble, be amended by replacing lines 15 and 16 on page 1 with the following:

“nance that are in accordance with their individual traditions and customs”

[The Environment, June 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, when smog season hits or when sustainable transportation is not in play, the Liberal government acts like it has not been in power for a decade, but it has been. Canada had record smog last summer, and our public transit and rail infrastructure is in shambles.

Will the environment minister get serious about meeting Kyoto targets and mark Environment Awareness Week, which we are celebrating this week, by announcing that 5% of the gas tax will be dedicated to communities to build public transit and freight rail services?

[Public Service Modernization Act, June 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I think that some of the Liberal members and I have a few problems with the oath or affirmation. I will read the affirmation contained in the bill. It reads as follows:

I, (the name of the person), do swear (or solemnly affirm) that I will faithfully, truly and impartially, to the best of my judgment, skill and ability, execute and perform the office of—

Then the job description follows.

I would like to know what the member thinks, whether or not she has a problem, since she comes from the province of Quebec, with this oath or affirmation.

[Public Service Modernization Act, June 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to take my colleague from the Liberals back to the issue of the oath. I look at the composition of Canada now and I must admit I am having some difficulty, if I understand him, with his position that the oath should be comprised of swearing allegiance both to God, and I assume he is referring to a Christian God, and to the Queen of England and of Canada, when we have so many in our population who do not have those types of relations with either the Queen, in terms of historical association, or Christianity.

I think of my experience in the courtroom, where we have over the last several decades become much more flexible on administering the oath for witnesses in that setting. We always have at least the Christian Bible, the Torah, the Koran and other religious documents on which people can swear an oath in the religion with which they are affiliated. In addition to that, we have an oath or an affirmation that can be made for those people who do not believe in a god at all.

I am asking my colleague, if we had a flexible oath would he be comfortable with that?

[Member for Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough, June 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of Jack Layton, our caucus and the 85,000 members of the New Democratic Party, I wish to congratulate the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough on his leadership victory this weekend.

I had the pleasure of being an observer at the convention and can attest that it was an exciting ride. I am sure the new leader has been finding the ride just as exciting over the last 36 hours.

Though the NDP and Tories may disagree on much--and then again maybe not, I guess we will see on that--we are both national parties and we both have a proud tradition of building institutions that serve Canadians. Together with the new leaders of the Alliance and the Liberals and the member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie, I hope we can present Canadians with an invigorating debate in the next election.

The NDP caucus wishes to sincerely congratulate the new Conservative leader and wishes him well.

[The Environment, June 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by acknowledging the good work that the member for Leeds—Grenville, the author of the motion, has put into this issue and, as he indicated to us in his opening remarks today, for quite an extended period of time.

There is no question that the intent of the motion is to get in place and then implement indicators of progress, wealth and well-being that are not, in any significant manner, assessed at this point, so again I congratulate the member for Leeds--Grenville for having brought forward the motion. As my colleague for Windsor West has indicated, he is working to a smaller degree in another area. We hope that all members on the government side will support both of these motions.

However, in that regard, and it gives me great cause for concern, this type of index and the promulgation of these types of indicators is not a new idea. We heard that it came out of Australia and New Zealand in the late 1970s when it was first enunciated in a general way that we assess our wealth and our progress in a holistic fashion. That goes back well over 30 years now.

Canada has looked at this issue repeatedly. More specifically, I would point out that in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the current government was in opposition, their environmental critic, the member for LaSalle—Émard, indicated very clearly that this methodology, these indexes or these indicators, had to be proceeded with and he was in full support. Then, after the Liberals became the government and that same member became the minister of finance, and was until quite recently, he was regularly lobbied by environmental groups and social activists in this country to begin to establish this index or these indicators. Right up until this time, we do not have it and in fact very little work has been done at the federal level to deal with this issue.

Again, the member for Leeds--Grenville has worked on it and one may only hope that with a change in the administration of the government perhaps that member will become the minister of the environment and be able to implement it at a much faster rate than his predecessors have, if he is allowed to do that by the new prime minister.

There has been a lot of work done on this issue in Nova Scotia. I want to draw the attention of the House to that. Professor Ron Colman has been working on developing this index. In fact, he has been taking what I consider to be very impressive steps to establish what this index would look like and in fact how we would put in place these measurements. He has been receiving some assistance in this work, a lot of assistance from other people in Nova Scotia and some from Statistics Canada in terms of providing some resources and a lot of the data that is necessary to build this index. I have to be careful not to give him all the credit because I am sure he would be the first one to say that it is not all his work, but he has broken down the index into a number of headings.

The first heading is time use. Under this heading, a person would actually determine the economic value of civic and voluntary work and the economic value of unpaid housework and child care, work hours that are not now assessed, and in addition, the value of leisure time.

Next is natural capital, which I have always had the most difficulty in grappling with, because it takes into account esthetic values in some respects. How do we quantify them and assess them? Quite clearly I do not have the ability to do that, but people with perhaps greater creativity can. Under natural capital, Professor Colman talks of the value to the human species of soils and agriculture, forests, the marine environment and fisheries, and non-renewable subsoil assets. Dollar figures can be put on some of them, but for others it is much more difficult. In fact, even moving away from the dollar figures and just trying to quantify the value of that to any given society is going to be difficult. Again, Professor Colman is working on that.

He then goes on to deal with the next heading, which is environmental quality. Again we get into the same issue of the value of certain items to society, not using a dollar figure and not in an economic way, but oftentimes in an esthetic way and even by looking at the beauty of the natural environment. How do we put that into some kind of an index so we will have a clear indication as to whether the quality of the beauty in the natural environment is being augmented by our activities or to some degree being desecrated by it?

Under environmental quality is a number of subheadings. One of the prominent subheadings, which we are all trying to deal with now, is the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. Professor Colman also addresses the issues of sustainable transportation, air quality, water quality and solid waste. One of the indicators he is using is one that has become quite prominent in the environmental movement and that is the analysis of an ecological footprint. I think that is a real test and an indicator that in fact we will be able to use. More research is being done on that. It is becoming clearer how we could use that analysis in this overall index.

Professor Colman then moves on to socio-economics and the issue of how we would use the tax system to re-address issues that at this point in time are warped in many respects. This is one of the issues raised by my colleague from Leeds--Grenville. Oil and gas and the nuclear industry are subsidized to a very significant degree in this country, but we do not do likewise for wind and solar power, sources of energy that of course have much less impact, if any, on the natural environment. Under socio-economics, we deal with a number of traditional issues found in the GDP.

Finally, he deals with social capital. Under this subheading are health care, educational attainment, the costs of crime and the human freedom index. Here we would be bringing in within our society those social activists who have looked at these issues and see the benefits to quality of life by enhancing health care and education and by reducing crime and violence, and there is the whole issue of our civil liberties and civil rights. This would benefit all members of society

Members can see, then, that the province of Nova Scotia has gone a very long way toward establishing this index and these indicators of social progress that would measure human progress much better than the use of the gross domestic product index does now.

In conclusion, I will say that the real tragedy here is that this issue has been worked on for a number of years now, and numbers of people in this country have worked on other indexes of a similar nature. The real issue is why we as a country and as a government in 2003 are now looking at these indicators and saying they sound like a good idea when what we really should be saying is that all the research has been done, we have the indicators, here is the index and now let us implement it.