Joe Comartin

[Border Security, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, U.S. Attorney General Ashcroft confirmed today that place of birth remains one of the criteria for U.S. screening at the border. This means that Canadian citizens born in foreign countries are still facing arbitrary arrest, detainment and interrogation.

In light of these developments, could the Minister of Foreign Affairs tell us why he pulled the travel advisory warning Canadians about the potential trouble they face if they cross the border?

[Ramadan, November 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of Canada's New Democrats I wish to extend our very best wishes to Canada's 650,000 Muslims who have begun their annual spiritual journey of Ramadan.

This ninth month of the Muslim calendar is considered to be a particularly holy time, during which worship and reflection are meant to bring peace and illumination to the mind and purity to the soul.

Tragic international events have led to misrepresentation and false characterizations of Islam here in Canada. It is my hope that during Ramadan Canadians of all faiths would take the time to learn about the rich culture and heritage of their Muslim neighbours. Let us all recommit to better understanding of diversity to promote international peace and harmony at home.

May Allah, peace be upon him, bless all who seek his guidance.

[Kyoto Protocol, November 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to Kyoto there is one area of unanimous agreement. Ratification will bring about a change in the Canadian workforce. The NDP and the labour movement believe it can be a positive transition, but we must have a component in the implementation plan that will include adequate funding.

Given the substantial and maybe even illegal accumulation of surplus in the EI fund, will the Minister of Human Resources Development commit to a fund to a just transition program for displaced workers?

[Kyoto Protocol, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians know that we have been waiting for five years for the government to finally put Kyoto before the House. The time is over. It has the plan. It is having the meeting next week. Will it commit next week to bring that resolution before the House so that we can vote on it and get on with implementation?

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, there are two aspects to the science which the opponents to Kyoto want to ignore.

The reality is that carbon dioxide is part of smog. We know that because we see how dramatically the smog levels climb in the summer when it is particularly hot. That is because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for longer periods of time when the temperature is hot.

While it is there, it also holds other toxins in the atmosphere. It absorbs them. If I can say it this way, it is like a sponge or a magnet. It brings toxins in and keeps them in the air that we breathe for a longer period of time as a result.

Obviously, that air we breathe and those toxins along with the carbon dioxide get into our lungs. That is why there are so many severe problems with asthma. My area of the world is the asthma capital of Canada because my area has so much air pollution, including carbon dioxide that comes across from the American side of the border.

The other part that is ignored by those people who oppose Kyoto and say it has nothing to do with health is that as we do the cleanup, as we eliminate carbon dioxide, we will be eliminating other toxins. For instance, as we stop burning coal, we will be reducing the amount of mercury that gets into the atmosphere because coal gives off mercury as well as some other toxins when it is burned. When we stop burning that coal, those toxins will be out of the atmosphere as well. Those are two points that they miss.

With regard to the other part of the question about the Minister of Health who has been very silent, I remember asking her a question in the House earlier this year and getting a blank stare from her. The question was about the costs of not implementing Kyoto, the $500 million that it is costing us right now annually in extra health care costs. Are we taking that into account? I do not think she knew that was the cost of health care because we have not cleaned up our atmosphere.

The Canadian Medical Association and the Ontario Medical Association are saying that if we fully implement Kyoto, not only will there be dollar savings but of course much more important, there will be savings in ill health and the loss of life. In my home province alone, 1,900 lives a year end prematurely because of the pollution in the atmosphere, a good deal of which is related to the burning of fossil fuel.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to indicate that I will be splitting my time with the member for Winnipeg Centre.

When we look at the motion that is before the House today we must appreciate that behind it are a number of different agendas. What those agendas reflect from the various parts of the House and the various political parties are strategies that have been deployed by all of the parties for some period of time.

I want to go through those strategies from the perspective of the various political parties as I see them. We have the strategy of the mover of the motion and his party which is one of delay, a delay that will allow that party, the Ralph Kleins of the world, following the lead of the Americans, President Bush and his cadre, the fossil fuel industry and frankly a whole bunch of other fearmongerers who are spreading and attempting to expand on the spread of fear across the country of what Kyoto might mean in its implementation. That clearly is their strategy.

Then we have the strategy of the government which, to be fair to it and to be accurate, is a non-strategy. It has been since 1996 when we committed as a country, the first country in the world, that in principle we would adopt and implement Kyoto.

Here we are six years later almost to the day and we still do not have the vote before the House to ratify Kyoto. This is a classic case of bungling on the part of the government that has given the official opposition and its allies all sorts of targets to shoot at.

Then we have a third strategy which is that of the federal New Democrats, a number of the environmental groups, the Bloc Quebecois and a number of members of the business community, which have said that we must ratify Kyoto, we must do it as quickly as possible and we must move on with implementation.

That strategy was being deployed in the early part of this year with a number of coalitions that came together at that time to pressure the government to stop bungling, delaying, and ignoring its responsibilities, and to get on with ratifying Kyoto and get on with the implementation.

It finally culminated in Johannesburg. I was in Johannesburg with a number of other members and listened to the Prime Minister tell the international community clearly and unequivocally that by the end of the year Kyoto would be before the House for ratification. He made the very clear statement as well, although implied but very clear, that the government would be supporting the ratification of Kyoto.

We still have not seen that resolution. We are still expecting the Prime Minister to comply with the statements he made to the international community in Johannesburg and put that resolution before the House before the end of the year and get it passed.

It is obvious from my comments that we will be voting against the opposition motion because it is only for the purpose of delay. We have heard from the Leader of the Opposition that this is not about waiting and seeing what the plan is going to be like. The motion is about delay because the members of the official opposition are absolutely opposed to Kyoto. That has to be clear. They do not want it and they will never change their position. Again, this motion is all about delay.

It does not matter what is in the plan or how extensive, detailed or favourable the implementation plan is to that political party. It will still vote against Kyoto. There can be no doubt about that.

It is rather interesting to listen to some of the commentaries and questions we have had from the Alliance Party, which are clearly questions and commentaries that indicate its opposition to Kyoto. At the same time we have members of that party in British Columbia who are actively involved in opposing what is an integral part of the American energy policy, which is to build over the next decade some 2,000 fossil fuel fired plants in the United States. A number of those will have their air pollution, toxins and smog dumped into Canada because of prevailing winds. British Columbia is one of the areas and my home riding of Windsor, Ontario is the greatest beneficiary of that policy.

Members of the Alliance are out on the streets demonstrating. We do not see that too often with that party. They are organizing their communities against that, yet they are here in the House opposing Kyoto. Let me say to them that if they were serious about concerns for their communities, they should be supporting Kyoto.

The other point I want to make about the delay that is incumbent in this motion is that we have had way too much of that. As a result we have had some serious negative consequences to the economy of the country. As we try to deal with developing some alternative energy sources we buy technology from elsewhere in the world because we have been so slow and laggard in developing our own.

I was in Calgary this summer. The city of Calgary has, for its public mass transit system, done an excellent job of creating a scenario that has all of the energy for that public transit system coming from wind power, with no assistance by the provincial government. This was all done at the municipal level. I was speaking to the representative from the company that supplies the power out of Pincher Creek. He told me that this was costing between 5% and 10% more because we had to buy the windmills and the generators offshore from Denmark and Germany.

It is the same story with regard to solar power. Japan has leapfrogged us and is now the leading country in the world in that technology. In another five years we will have to buy the technology from Japan rather than having developed it here and be able to export that technology to other parts of the world. We are losing our priority with regard to developing a hydrogen economy. We are losing that to the U.S. and other parts of the world, again Japan and Germany.

In terms of ratifying Kyoto, we have a responsibility at the international level in two respects. First, we have made a commitment. The international community is expecting us to do this because we have committed. We have lost a lot of credibility in the international community around environmental matters. We do not need to perpetuate that type of conduct. Second, we owe every other resident of this planet a moral duty to ratify Kyoto and to begin to implement it as rapidly as possible.

We do not live in isolation, not like the Americans who think they can stay away from Kyoto and somehow the rest of the world will not be affected. That is not the case and it will not be the case if we do that. We have a moral responsibility to them. We have promised it to them and we have to go ahead with it with no further delays.

As I said earlier, we definitely will vote against this motion today. We will continue to press the government to get a resolution before the House that will ratify Kyoto.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Bloc Quebecois member. The Canadian Alliance tells us that Kyoto has nothing to do with the health of Canadians. I would like to know whether the hon. member shares this view, or if he has a different opinion on this issue.

If we ratify the Kyoto protocol, will this make a difference for the health of Canadians?

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I could not help but note in the motion that there is reference to cost but no reference to the cost of not proceeding with Kyoto. Could the member comment on that?

[Government Programs, October 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday when the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Works were asked about government energy efficiencies, they provided convoluted non-responses about past initiatives and nothing about what they are doing now.

We are 10 days away from mapping out Kyoto commitments. Canadians want to know what the federal government will do to provide leadership in energy efficiency.

I have a simple question. Will the government commit to requiring 20% of green energy in all federal departments in every province and territory in five years? Yes or no.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, October 10th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, in speaking to the motion to hoist the bill, I always accuse the government of being naive, but perhaps I was a little naive on this one.

In the last session we had the opportunity to see this bill in its prior incarnation as Bill C-57. As I was reviewing some of my notes for today, I looked at some of the comments of the member for Davenport. He asked his own government to take another look at this. My naiveté is that I thought the government might take another look at the bill over the summer and not bring it back, or if it did bring it back, it would be in a significantly different form that would not have allowed for the removal of the liability that extends presently under the act to people who are financing the development or rebuilding of nuclear plants in the country.

Perhaps this is asking too much of them, but I thought they might take a look at an overall comprehensive energy plan. That would have required them to look at the Kyoto protocol and map out in quite significant detail an implementation plan. In addition, it would have required them to do what England has done, which is to develop a long term energy policy.

There are two parts to that. It would require them to do an inventory of our energy sources in the country now, what we would continue to have from whatever sources, and then decide with very detailed recommendations any plan of how they would phase out heavy polluters such as coal and other fossil fuels, how they would phase out the nuclear industry over an extended period of time, and how they would phase in the available alternative sources of energy that require some technological development but in most cases simply need a plan of implementation.

On looking at experiences in Europe and other countries we can safely say that they are moving along those lines and are a decade to a decade and a half ahead of us. That puts us in a very bad position in terms of developing our technology as opposed to having to buy it from Europe or other countries over the next decade or two.

As I said, I expected that we would see some very extensive proposals and plans from the government. Obviously we did not get them.

The attack we have seen against Kyoto centres on the incompetency we are seeing from that side of the House. They are unwilling to face the reality that we need that type of long term planning and are refusing to carry it through. We hear the Prime Minister, for instance, saying that it is no big deal, that we have until 2012 to have the implementation plan in place. I do not know if he really understood how erroneous that was in terms of the requirements we have to meet under Kyoto. It is just dead wrong in a number of ways. We have to do a lot of preparatory work well in advance of 2012.

His comment a couple of weeks ago also reflects the attitude that this is something they will do, probably because of the political pressure in the country. However it reflects that the Prime Minister and the government do not care a lot about the quality of life we will live if we do not deal as quickly as possible with climate change and global warming. It reflects a real unwillingness either to face that reality or to have the sensibility to understand the need to get started right away.

There is lot of criticism of the government. The start of this should have been four or five years ago when we first signalled that we would ratify Kyoto. We were the first country in the world to sign on and we are one of the last countries in the developed world, with the exception of the United States, to begin to deal seriously with the issues surrounding Kyoto.

One of the reasons this hoist motion should go ahead is that the matter would be put off. It would give them another six months to begin to deal with it. I would have expected as part of that plan that they would have dealt with issues around the subsidies to both the nuclear industry and the fossil fuel industry. They continue to be granted to the fossil fuel industry and the bill is a reflection of those subsidies.

I expected that we would have seen by this time a detailed plan of how in fact we are going to subsidize, provide incentives and give the creative juices in this country the ability to move to those alternative fuels that we so badly need. Again, we see nothing like that. It is a strong reason for putting off the bill. That would send a clear message to the government that it has to do this type of planning. It is not in any way simply a method of stalling out the bill. It really would be a serious message to the government to say that this is not the way to go.

Let me in the minute or two that I have left address one final point: the issue of privatization that the bill would permit and in fact encourage, specifically in the nuclear industry. We have seen just so many negative consequences of privatization in the energy field. We have seen some of it in our country. We now are experiencing it in this province. We saw it in Alberta and we will see more of it in the next few months and years. We saw it very extensively in the United States, particularly in California but also in a number of other states that had the same problems as they tried to privatize as well as deregulate the industry.

The bill should be pulled off the order paper, sent back for more work to be done on it and brought back in an entirely different format so that the issue of privatization would be addressed full on. This would make it very clear in our country that we are not in favour of privatization but that in fact energy sources and the energy needs of the country will be met by public bodies, not by the private sector.