Joe Comartin

[National Defence, April 8th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General's report indicates that the Department of National Defence does not have a comprehensive list of contaminated sites. It warns that some of the unaccounted for contaminants may pose serious health risks to our military personnel.

The cost of conducting these site assessments would be about $9 million but only $500,000 per year has been allocated, meaning it will take 18 years before we find out how bad the situation is.

Is the Minister of National Defence satisfied with that allocation that provides nothing for cleanup and requires our personnel to wait 18 years before they find out if they are working on contaminated sites?

[Infrastructure, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister for International Cooperation. The evidence seems to be mounting to suggest that the border infrastructure file has changed hands from the Minister of Industry to the Minister for International Cooperation.

It has come to our attention that the minister was a participant in a so-called secret meeting in early March with a number of Windsor area councillors to discuss border infrastructure funding.

What role did the minister's office play in facilitating this secret meeting?

[Supply, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was interested to hear the Deputy Prime Minister speak with words of non-participation in the war in Iraq, and then also listen to him quote former Prime Minister Pearson.

The reality is that we are participating. We are participating because the government is allowing our troops, sailors and airmen to be involved. Doing it in a fashion that is unsafe for our troops is simply not fair to them and not fair to the Canadian people either. If we have taken a position based upon our principles of multilateralism and support for the UN that we are not going to be involved, then we must pursue that.

When former Prime Minister Pearson had the opportunity to be involved in a similar situation regarding the Vietnam war, he did not allow any of our troops to participate. I want to ask the Deputy Prime Minister, is that not a precedent that the government should be following?

[Terrorism, April 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, looking at this list of seven additional banned groups, the obvious question that jumps out is, why these? Why, for example, the three groups from Colombia and none of the paramilitary groups that have clearly been responsible for the torture and death of numerous labour leaders in that country?

There are more labour leaders killed in that country by those paramilitary groups that are closely attached to that government and to the military. Why are they not on the list? We have no reason to believe that these groups should be on the list because there is a lack of information. There is inherently a fault in the way this system works.

The resources that we have for the intelligent services are not adequate enough to tell us whether any of these groups should be on the list. There are not enough resources to go after all the other groups that might be terrorist groups. We do not have the ability to do that from a financial standpoint. Yet we go ahead and do this.

We are trying to convince the country that somehow this protects us from terrorism. It is a total falsehood. It is simply a situation where the government is building this smokescreen implying that it is trying to do something about terrorism. It is not moving our battle against terrorism whatsoever. When we look at it from a civil liberties standpoint, there is no basis on which we as parliamentarians can stand here and have any comfort that the civil liberties of this country are being protected. It is just the opposite. We must be very concerned that there may be many injustices coming out of this system.

[Parthenon Marbles, April 1st, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it actually is with some significant degree of pleasure that I rise to speak to the motion. I want to acknowledge the lobbying that I received from one of my constituents who is of Hellenic background and who has been pressing me to see if this issue could be raised in the House. I was very pleased when I saw that the motion would be coming forward.

This particular constituent has encouraged me to educate myself somewhat on the issue. I think it is worthwhile noting the nature of the marbles because we have all heard the jokes and the puns on this particular issue. We probably should not have called them the Parthenon marbles because these in fact are great works of art.

When the Parthenon was originally built there were actually three separate components in the marbles: the sculptures themselves; the frieze, which is probably the greatest number of pieces that are left in the marble collection; and then the pediment statues.

One of the tragedies of the history of the marbles is the fact that they are divided. Part of them are being cared for in a museum in Athens and the other bulk, almost equally, are in the British Museum, as we have heard this evening. Of the frieze, 36 are in Athens and 56 are in the British Museum. Of the sculptures, and the sculptures were the items that it is very clear Lord Elgin took from Athens in 1806, 39 of the statues remain in Athens and 15 in London. The marbles are roughly equally divided. One is in the Louvre. Quite frankly, I have not heard whether any attempt has been made by the individuals in the committee, which is pressing for these to be returned by England, to ask France and the Louvre to return the one it has.

The point is that it is crucial that these items be returned at this period of time, recognizing the significance that the Olympics will once again be held in Athens, Greece to commemorate the fact that they began there thousands of years ago.

The Alliance has asked why the House of Commons, as the legislature of this country, would get involved in this. The principle here that is becoming more adhered to is that items of this nature, which have such historical, architectural and archeological significance to another culture, as these marbles clearly do to Greece, should in fact be returned.

We had a great deal of this. In fact a number of the museums in Britain returned items, for instance, to Egypt, that were taken going back for extended periods of time through the British Empire, brought to England and then on request from the Egyptian government were returned.

It is very perplexing why the principle is not being adhered to by the British Museum with regard to the marbles. It has clearly been assured that the museum in Athens is capable of properly caring for them.

I will conclude my remarks so the parliamentary secretary will have enough time to address the issue.

This is an important period in time for the marbles to be returned. There is no reason that the principle, which is being adhered to more and more right across the globe, should not be applied to the British Museum to return the marbles to their rightful place in Athens.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, before question period I was in the midst of doing the report card on the budget as seen by environmental groups. I was just concluding my comments with regard to the tax break that was given to the mining industry which will benefit specifically the coal industry, allowing it another tax incentive in effect to continue to pollute the environment.

As part of the goal of the environmental groups, there was also a request that a fund be established to deal with the agricultural sector, in effect to foster and encourage the development of organic agriculture. It is interesting that on its own it is the fastest growing industry within the agricultural sector. Even though it is a very small proportion, it could go some distance, we have been told. As much as 10% of the Kyoto target could be achieved if organic agriculture were allowed to expand to a significant degree.

I have a couple of more points with regard to the report card. That takes us over to the funds that were allocated for national parks. We had heard from the Prime Minister in the throne speech in the fall of 2002 about the expansion he was proposing in particular with marine conservation areas. When the budget came down the allocated funding was somewhat less than one-third of what would be necessary to obtain the desired results in terms of establishing those new national parks and marine conservation areas. There is no indication whatsoever where those funds will come from to establish them. The budget as proposed is simply not sufficient to meet those goals.

There was also a proposal to establish an information system for the environment. This would allow us much greater capacity in this country to monitor the state of the economy and whether we are achieving our goals on sustainability, on cleanup and on preparing the environment for future generations. There was absolutely no provision for that.

Finally, one item we had pressed for was a relatively modest one from a financial standpoint. It was to encourage ecological gifts and to allow them to be tax deductible. There would be a tax incentive to encourage private owners to make ecological gifts, mostly in the form of land transfers to governments and authorities. Again, a very modest amount was estimated. It was estimated that it would cost approximately $5 million per year in lost tax revenue. That was not proceeded with in the budget.

Coming back to my opening comments and the government's touting of this budget as a green budget, it is anything but that. Many additional items could have been put in, some that were of minimal expense and others that would have required significant financial contribution and commitment by the government. It did not do that.

Again, we are left way behind where we need to be in terms of meeting our Kyoto requirement, meeting our requirements to biodiversity and meeting our requirements to clean up the environment. It is just not there. The budget did not accomplish any of those ends to any significant degree. The government should be ashamed of its record in that regard.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to specifically address the budget as it impacts or does not impact, as the case may be, on bettering our environment.

We have heard from the Minister of the Environment and other government members that this is the greenest budget that has ever been passed. Historically one could take some issue with that but if it is, it is sorely lacking.

There was an opportunity for the government to address some of the issues that confront this country with regard to bettering our environment, cleaning up the environment, providing for a cleaner environmental future for subsequent generations.

The background work I did in preparing for this debate was interesting. Some of the environmental groups have prepared a government scorecard. They listed a half a dozen to a dozen issues that need to be addressed, longstanding concerns. They assessed the situation, determined what was necessary in government policy to deal with the issues and whether the budget addressed those issues to a satisfactory degree.

Not surprisingly, the results are not very favourable as far as the government is concerned. Let us look at some of the issues.

Do we have a meaningful energy efficiency building retrofit strategy? That one had a partial check mark as opposed to a total no. The only reason is that there is some money in the infrastructure dollars which may provide for a retrofit program but we do not know about that. It was not detailed in the budget at all. Part of that is because it is part of the whole Kyoto plan which the government has been so slow at getting off the ground.

The next point was whether there was a renewable energy strategy. Again, they could not really quantify this or give it a score other than to say that it is addressed but there are no particulars. They do not really know what the government is doing. That of course comes to the same point. There is supposed to be a Kyoto implementation plan, but in fact it does not exist. It was interesting to see how little material there was in the budget as far as implementing the Kyoto protocol in Canada is concerned.

Another issue which follows along the same lines of energy efficiency but also begins to address the issue of clean air is whether we are going to phase out the massive subsidies provided to the fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries in Canada. There were no changes in this regard at all from past practices. Those subsidies which run into the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars each year will continue to be accorded to those industries and will continue to allow them to pollute the environment.

With regard to a sustainable transportation strategy and fund, there is some money so the government received a partial plus on that one. Again it comes back to what the Kyoto implementation plan is going to look like. It was impossible to tell how meaningful the approach would be.

One of the issues the budget could have addressed has been raised by environmental groups and by our party for quite some time, I would say going back three to five years. That has been to address a taxing figure for toxic waste and toxic substances so that there would be incentives to clean up the use of toxic substances and to clean up toxic waste sites. A very small amount of money was put into the budget to encourage that.

There was nothing done with regard to the ongoing use of toxic substances. There was no tax to discourage their use at all.

Of particular resonance for my community is the use of coal as an energy source. Rather than doing anything to discourage the use of coal, this budget would provide a new tax incentive for the mining industry. The coal industry would get part of this subsidy and Canadians will be encouraged to continue to use coal as an energy source.

[Petitions, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition to present today containing approximately 40 names of members from the City of Windsor. The petition deals with the cross-border traffic problem, and specifically with the problem of traffic on Huron Line.

The petitioners ask that the government respond to their needs.

[Yukon, April 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we in the NDP are very happy to support this development of Bill C-39, devolving these additional powers and authorities to the government of the territory of Yukon. It is a clear reflection of the desires of the people who live in Yukon to take on this additional authority to control their local affairs and not have to deal directly with Ottawa on matters that are much more appropriately dealt with at the local level. It has been some time in coming. The negotiations have gone on for well over a decade. We welcome this day, as I am sure all of the people of Yukon do.

[Canada Health Act, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the hon. member for Ottawa—Vanier for having introduced this bill.

I want to inform the House that the New Democratic Party will support this bill.

The proposal in the bill is quite simple. It is to bring in an amendment to the Canada Health Act to introduce a new principle, which is the right to be served in this bilingual country in the language with which one is most comfortable and most conveniently able to communicate.

There are only three parts to the bill. It is a directive that where there are sufficient resources, facilities be available in both the official languages; that where there are sufficient resources, all health services be available in both official languages; and where the community is primarily anglophone or francophone, that the control at the local level of the facilities and health services be in the hands of that community.

We almost have to stop and think about why we even have to do this. Do we not already have this right in Canada. The answer, obviously, because this bill is before this House, recognizes that we do not as a right have the ability to go into a hospital and use either of the official languages. We do not have the right to go into other health care facilities a and use both of the official languages. That is the reality.

I want to make one particular point about the question of control and if the community is sufficiently of either anglophone or francophone constitution, that the board of the hospital or facility would reflect that community.

Just in the last month in my community in Windsor the board of directors of one of the hospitals have taken it upon themselves to finally engage in an active campaign to get members of the francophone community represented on that board of directors. The merged hospital has a history that is close to 100 years. For the first time, at the start of this century, they are actively trying to engage the francophone community, which is reasonably sizeable in the city and county around Windsor.

One cannot help but think that this type of legislation would say to other people who run hospitals that is something they would have to do on an ongoing basis and much more extensively than they have in the past.

There has been some suggestion that somehow this amendment to the Canada Health Act would lessen the quality of services. I am sure my colleague from Ottawa—Vanier does not intend that nor do I think there is any logical way that one could interpret that consequence from these amendments.

I would argue that by the very fact that we are a bilingual country, that we have large populations who speak both of the official languages, that we have large populations who speak both official languages who do not have available medical services in their official languages, that the quality of services are much more impacted by that reality.

My background is as a civil litigation lawyer. I did a lot of personal injury work. I know how important it is for people giving medical services to communicate as perfectly as possible with their patients so that the best diagnosis and the best treatment can be rendered.

Obviously if people speak one official language that is not available in that hospital or medical service area and they are trying to communicate in the other, they will not be able to do it nearly as effectively. That is simply a reality.

The quality of service argument is a red herring and, in fact, just the opposite would be true; the quality of service in the country overall would be heightened by having both official languages available to all citizens of the country.

I would like to make one other point and that is that within an historical context is it not time that we do this? Look at what we have done in providing services in other areas. We are entitled to be educated in one of the two official languages. We are entitled to have our legal services, both criminal and civil, available to us in our courts. We are entitled as members of the House to speak both languages. Is it not logical that the next step in that road to provide full services would be in the medical area?

The bill is not a complicated bill. It is quite straightforward in terms of an amendment to the act. I think even more important, it is time that we take this step forward.