Joe Comartin

[Pest Control Products Act, June 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would like my address today to be designed in two or three parts, some specifically on a couple of the amendments that the department has moved subsequent to the committee's work, which again represents the attitude of the government that the committee work generally is useless work, that it is to be ignored, that any changes to legislation that are sent from the bureaucracy or the minister's office, or in some cases the PMO, are sacrosanct, not to be altered by the plebeians of the House of Commons in the form of members of the committee, in this case the health committee.

It shows up in what was really a fairly important but small amendment that was made by the health committee with regard to the giving of information to the public, requiring producers of these pesticides to disclose in detail the contents of the product they were putting out for consumption in the general marketplace and which many times has a negative impact on our natural environment, as well as the health of Canadians.

In that regard, it was simply saying that we, as intelligent members of society, citizens of Canada, have a right to know what is being placed in the natural environment. We have a right to make decisions as to whether we will expose ourselves or our dependent children to these chemicals. If we are going to make intelligent decisions we need to know the contents, not just the main ingredient, which the bill does provide for, but all the other ingredients.

The first motion today in effect makes that much less likely to happen as a result of the intervention by the minister and the department to reverse the work done by the committee, a committee which was working not just from this bill as drafted by the department, but also from a lengthy report that was done a year and a half to two years ago by the environment committee which had put forward in great detail the type of legislation, set out what the problems were as far as regulating pesticides and set out in very extensive detail what would be required in legislation to provide a legislative and regulatory system to protect Canadians and our natural environment.

To some significant degree the bill does not represent the recommendations that were in that report. One of those recommendations was to give individual citizens who would be exposed to these chemicals as much information as possible. This would have been just one way they could have done it. As I said, at least that was accepted by the health committee. However it is now being reversed by this subsequent amendment from the government.

We need to appreciate the significance of this. There are other parts of the bill that do not go far enough. For example, it does not go far enough in giving workers who will be using these chemicals and who will be exposed to them quite extensively, in some cases, on a daily basis, such as horticulturists and farmers, sufficient information they need. As well, it does not give the doctors who will be treating those workers should they develop health problems enough knowledge about what they have been exposed to.

As I say, the position of the government is that we are forcing producers to tell us the main ingredients. I heard an example used at the health committee. This is like saying to an individual who has a very high intolerance level to the peanut, “Here is a salad. There is lettuce in it”, and then forgetting to tell the person that ground peanuts are also a part of that salad. Therefore the person has a very negative reaction to the salad. We are doing exactly the same thing. We know there is a major chemical in the pesticide but do not mention all the other ones.

We have to consider, with this proposed amendment, the whole question of the cumulative effect. We may have a chemical that forms 75% of the product and three or four others that form 5%, 6%, 7% or 8% of it. How can a researcher analyze the impact of the cumulative effects of 5% of this chemical and 2% of that chemical on the human body, on animal tissue and on the natural environment, when this information is not available? Researchers, whether they be biologists or medical researchers, will not be assisted at all in their ongoing scientific work and analyses when they do not know to what people, animals and the natural environment have been exposed. The bill does not require that to occur.

We have to put this in context. There is something like 6,000 to 7,000 chemicals that are regulated and permitted in Canada as pesticides. We must think of the potential cumulative effect of those and the potential danger from interaction. We now know more and more about the potential danger, and in many cases real danger, of the ill-effects of the interaction of various chemicals, whereas in the past we ignored them. A small amount of one chemical acting independently may be of no concern to human health, animal species or to the natural environment. However, if it is combined, sometimes in a very small proportion, with another chemical there might be a very negative impact on human health.

Another point I want to make is a more general one. We would have liked to have seen in the bill a regime for phasing out the use of pesticides by general consumers on gardens and around households and schoolyards, basically in an urban-suburban area. One major recommendation in the report of the environment committee of couple of years ago was that the phase out and absolute ban of cosmetic pesticides be a cornerstone of any legislation of this nature.

I sat in on some of the hearings of the committee. It was really quite sad to hear about people who were on occasion confined to their homes. They could not go outside due to danger from cosmetic pesticides.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the bill at report stage. I ask that the House not approve the amendment contained in Motion No. 1.

[Canada Post, June 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the new finance minister.

Does he know why our Canadian stamps are being made in the United States? Does he know why they do not contain a country of origin label, or is he just too busy with all his other responsibilities? Could the minister give us an answer?

[The Environment, June 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, on the eve of Clean Air Day, Canadians have nothing to cheer about.

The federal government has still not ratified the Kyoto protocol and joined with the international community to combat global warming and climate change by reducing harmful emissions. Last year we saw more smog warnings and bad air days around the country than at any time in our history, and the number of Canadians suffering and dying as a result of air pollution is on the rise.

We should be celebrating progress on cleaning up our environment and improving the air quality for all Canadians. Unfortunately the government continues an appalling record of inaction. In fact, over the past decade our air quality has gotten increasingly worse.

I call on the government today to ratify Kyoto and take aggressive measures to clean up our air quality so that next year at this time we will have something to celebrate.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick question. In the legislature of Ontario yesterday it came out that there were political donations made by the hydro company in Ontario, both to the provincial Conservatives and the provincial Liberals. I do not know if any investigation was done to see if there were similar federal contributions. With that bit of backdrop, I just wondered if my friend could comment about whether he thinks there is any consideration there in regard to the bill being put before us and us being asked to get it rammed through very quickly.

[The Environment, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it has been almost six months since the Canadian government completed the consultation process on a national progress report regarding sustainable development. We are required to submit this report to the UN in advance of the world summit in Johannesburg this summer.

It is widely believed that the report reveals Canada's abysmal performance in protecting the environment. The government has had several opportunities to submit the report, including at the current preparatory meetings in Bali.

Could the Minister of the Environment indicate why we do not have it yet? Where is it?

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I commend the hon. member for Davenport for his analysis. He said lending money to the nuclear industry may take it away from other energy sectors where it may well be needed. It brought to mind a company whose representatives I talked to at a show. The company was trying to develop an industry around wave power but could not get financing in Canada. It is an excellent point.

Is the hon. member concerned that if we provide an exemption for financiers in the nuclear industry we may be faced with a series of requests from lenders who want to lend to pesticide companies or chemical companies and are concerned about liability? Is he concerned that we would be developing a trend?

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, that is a difficult question to answer. The concept of privatizing the nuclear industry did not exist in this country at the time the bill was originally passed. I do not think there is any way of determining what was in the mind of the government when it passed the legislation at that time.

There are a number of wells in my constituency that have been drilled in the farming area so farmers are faced with this problem and there are lenders. If we were to look at the way the law was generally applied in Canada I would say it was contemplated that the industry would be treated the same and it would be liable if it were a lender, and it borrowed or defaulted.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if there was a question in the member's comments, but allow me respond to the commentary with a comment of my own.

I reject the argument or the fearmongering about the loss of thousands of jobs in the member's statement. The reality is that no jobs will be lost if the bill does not pass. Bruce Power is operating now and employees who are presently there will continue to be there. The member is correct that if funds were being advanced and the expansion was to take place there would be a relatively modest increase in the number of jobs.

To suggest that we should be concerned about pension funds is again fearmongering. As it is right now, those pension funds invested in the British Energy arrangement are about 2% of the operation. Those are secured funds. If this were not to go ahead the funds would not be any less secure because they would have already been taken care of. It would prevent the industry, which is a good idea, from putting more money into this type of operation because I do believe this industry is dying and eventually will be phased out.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Sherbrooke for his question.

It is a fear that I have. I have it in a number of other areas with regard to the huge, black hole across the boundaries with the United States and its demand for power. We cannot pretend any innocence here. We actually consume more energy than the Americans do on a per capita basis, so we have a tough time pointing a finger at them.

It is a real concern around the whole issue of privatization. I see it not only with the nuclear industry, but quite frankly, and I feel this personally because of the region of the country I come from, I see it with the attempt on the part of the Ontario government to sell off coal-fired plants. I am concerned about that in terms of it being privatized because of the temptation for both those industries if the demand is there.

I want to be clear about this. The demand in the United States will be there and it will be at a value greater than what we are paying for energy in Canada right now. There will be great incentive for private operators to increase production in the existing plants. Corners may be cut in coal-fired plants where a number of those plants have alternative fuel sources. In some cases they will be able to use natural gas and in others they will use coal.

The demand will be there. For example, if Chicago were to have a hot summer Illinois Power would say to Ontario that it needs an extra thousand megawatts. We would dump more coal into those plants and crank it up, or if it were a nuclear plant, we would say that we probably should not be reactivating it because there are a couple of problems but we will do it anyway because we will make so much money.

There is a real fear that with privatization that type of conduct will be coming because of the profit incentive that is built into those private plants.

[Nuclear Safety and Control Act, June 4th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, this is an interesting bill because it is being camouflaged as just a minor amendment to protect financiers. However it is really about the Liberal government getting in bed with the Ontario Conservative government to cover up a huge mistake it made when it moved to privatize Bruce Power and British Energy about a year and a half ago. It missed a little section.

However the bill is about the future of the nuclear industry as far as generating power for the country.

Those are the two issues and both are very important issues in the short term and may be more important for the long term environmental health of the country. Therefore, to suggest, as the government has, that we just need to slide this through to deal with a little technical problem is really a sham.

Let us look at what happened around the whole issue of privatization. We had a very right wing Conservative government elected in the province of Ontario and one of its mandates as it interpreted it was to downsize government. It looked at a number of areas to do that and one of them was in the field of production of hydroelectric power and energy more generally.

We have heard some of the recent boondoggles around the Ontario government trying to sell off Hydro One that in effect was stopped by the courts. There is a real analogy here. The Ontario government thought it had the ability to do it. What really happened was that it had not looked at the legislation. There was no empowerment legislation in Ontario that would allow that government to sell off Hydro One.

Now the courts have told the Ontario government that it does not have the authority to sell Hydro One. The Conservative government recently introduced a bill in the house to allow it to go ahead with the sale although it is obvious that the new premier of Ontario is getting cold feet because of all the opposition from Ontario to privatize. It looks like he may be backing off.

It is clear that the Ontario government did not know what it was doing. It is also clear, as more and more analysis falls on the deal that was made by the Ontario government with British Energy to let it manage and control Bruce Power, that it was a very favourable deal to British Energy. Much like this legislation, it was drafted in such a way that ultimately, if things do not go so well for British Energy, the Ontario government and obviously the Ontario taxpayer will be left to pay the tab. That is such a consistent pattern with the nuclear industry, not just in Canada but across the globe.

Over the last few months, as British Energy looked to expand and re-open part of Bruce Power, it was being told by its financiers about this section in the act. In spite of some of the allegations we have heard in the House that somehow we were just going to treat those financiers of nuclear power the same as we treat everybody else, the opposite is true.

I am not clear whether this is true in Quebec but as it sits in the common law in the rest of Canada, if an operation is financed, whether it be a mortgage or some other security against land, buildings, equipment, and the company defaults on its payment, the lender is responsible for the cleanup.

I will bring this down to a basic level. If I were to purchase a home only to find out later that there was a problem with toxic waste on the site, I, as the subsequent purchaser of that home, and my mortgage company would be responsible for the cleanup. That is the law in Canada with, as I say, perhaps the exception of Quebec, because I do not know that.

We are not rectifying some discrimination here against lenders who want to lend to the nuclear industry. The law, as it sits now, treats them no differently than they are treated in every other aspect of their lending.

What is really offensive, other than this attempt to cover up the mistake made by the Ontario government, which the Liberals seem to be willing to help out with, is that we have favoured the nuclear industry for a long time. Our Prime Minister runs around the globe as a salesperson for it. He is its biggest booster. We give it all sorts of breaks, and by that I mean royalties, tax breaks, any number of things. It is also subsidized at the provincial government level.

If the Ontario government privatizes Ontario Hydro a huge debt will be left behind. The vast majority of that debt, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 75% to 80%, was accumulated through its overspending when it first opened some of the nuclear plants in Ontario. Cost estimates ran 200%, 300% and, in some cases, almost 400% over what the original estimates were. We in Ontario will be paying for that.

What we are now doing is saying that we will give the industry another break. We cannot do that. This is an opportunity for the government and the country to say that we have been wrong about nuclear power all along. We need to face the fact that this is not a sustainable industry and, as have a number of other countries, we have to look at phasing out the industry.

We are sitting with a huge bill that we will need to pay somewhere down the road. How will we deal with the existing waste, which we are continuing to produce, and then the decommissioning of the nuclear power plants in the country?

In the fall and early winter we went through a review of the nuclear waste disposal bill. In spite of the fact that there are some trust funds being established to deal with that, they are grossly inadequate.

What we are doing here today as we look at this bill is burying our heads in the sand and pretending that we can let the financiers of this industry off the hook. We can pretend that the government does not have to assess this industry with the same type of risk assessment it uses for every other industry.

Before I was elected I sat as a member on a credit union board. We gave out fairly substantial commercial loans. We had to do risk assessments. Certainly one of the risk assessments we had to do was environmental. We needed to know if we were taking on a piece of property as security for a loan that could potentially end up back in our laps. We were no different about this. Every credit union and financial institution in the country does the same thing. Therefore we now regularly do an environmental assessment of the site.

If we do not impose the same standard, we again are pretending that the nuclear industry is risk free from an environmental standpoint. That is what we are saying to the financiers and the financial community. We are saying that it is okay, that they do not have to treat this industry like they treat every other sector of the economy when they are considering advancing funds, either by way of investment or loans. That is what the amendment to the act would do and it is wrong. That is not what we should be about as a country. We should not be facilitating either the privatization or the expansion of this industry, which this amendment would allow.

Again, to suggest that there are no particular major issues here is an attempt on the part of the government to grossly mislead the House. It is really about going back and covering up the mistake that was made. It is pretending on an ongoing basis that the nuclear industry does not have these costs associated with it. That is in fact how we have conducted public business in Canada for the better part of five decades. It is time for that to stop. We cannot allow ourselves to continue on in this way. We talk a lot about sustainable development. This industry is not sustainable.

We have heard where we will go with this. I just want to say one more thing about privatization. If we allow the amendment to go through, it would open the door to privatization. By that I mean turning over either ownership and control or control of every nuclear plant to the private sector because the private sector would not have to worry about its liability and it would not have to do that risk assessment.

I want to be very clear about this. We could say that maybe to be fair to the financiers we should not impose this on them. We should think about it from the other angle. We are private sector persons. We have entered into an arrangement where we have taken over either ownership or management of a plant. We know now that we can go out into the financial community, because this amendment has been passed, and say to the financiers that they should not worry about liability because it all rests with us.

There is no accountability. There are no standards for operators. The operators do not have to worry about it. They would have their financing from the financiers because they did not have to worry about any liability. They could expand plants without doing all the safety things. They could cut some corners here and there to save some money and make greater profits. At the end of the day they could shut down the plants and walk away.

Before anybody tells me I am crazy and says that this does not happen, we should think about how many mining industry sites, including uranium mines, have been abandoned and sitting with tailings. I just came from committee this morning. We heard about tailings that had been dumped from uranium mining and how they were now leaching into waterways in Saskatchewan and up in the territories. It has happened specifically in this industry and we know it has happened in a number of others. We should think about all the brown sites in our cities, toxic sites from which people have walked away. It does happen and the costs with regard to nuclear are so phenomenal. We should be doing absolutely nothing that would make it easier for those operators.

Quite frankly, if we look at the specific operator at Bruce go back and look at its history in England, we will see that it is not a very good one. There have been some monumental problems. Major fines have been levied against it because of the its operation of some of the plants.

I just want to deal with costs for a minute and what we will be looking at if that type of scenario develops. I will use as an example a project that has just been funded by the U.S. congress with taxpayer dollars to the tune of $7.5 billion because the site is contaminated. The engineering firm that developed the methodology to clean it up just won an international award. The end result is that the site will be cleaned up and it will no longer be radioactive. However that waste will be run through another nuclear plant in South Carolina. At the end of the day there will still be nuclear waste. That one site will cost the American taxpayer $7.5 billion.

Right now we are on a curve to produce more nuclear waste by 2010 than will be produced at that time in the United States. We will have by that time more waste than in the United States. That is what we are talking about in terms of this industry.

As my friend from the Bloc, the hon. member for Sherbrooke, has pointed out, we have alternatives. If someone asked he and I if our proposal was that we not do this and that the nuclear industry should be phased out, we both would say yes. If someone then said to us that we did not have an alternative, our answer would be that we did have alternatives. The hon. member enunciated a number of them such as wind.

Canada has the ability and potential to create more wind energy than any other country in the world. That would be wind energy drawn from onshore and offshore turbines. It is interesting that I know this and it is not because of any work done by the government. It is through analyses that have been done by companies and countries in Europe.

One of the great sacrileges is because the government has dawdled on this for so long, we are now at least a decade behind Europe in technology for offshore development of wind power. The British Columbia government has entered into a short term and potentially long term contract with Germany. It bought the technology from Germany to provide one of the first offshore wind generated power plants in the country.

A small country like Ireland, with a population of 3.5 million to 5 million people, opened the largest offshore wind generating plant in the world last fall. England is about to open one in the next 12 months that will be even larger. We do not have that technology. We will have to buy it, which will cost us cost us more money.

We should be moving into that area as rapidly as we can. If we are going to subsidize any industry with regard to energy, it should be renewable energy sources, not these industries that are dead or dying. The bill simply contributes to that.

There are alternative sources. Let us take a look at ethanol and using it as a power source. We have the potential to do great things in that area. Some very interesting experiments are going on right now and they are ready to be used. Again, there has been a lack of government policy either to provide subsidies or to provide the economic infrastructure that would facilitate, encourage and enhance these industries.

The government announced a week ago, 10 years too late, substantial funding and methodology. However it is way behind and it is not enough. We have to move faster and more extensively than that proposal allows.

We have the ability to develop solar energy. We heard from my friend from the Conservative Party who comes from the maritimes about our ability to develop energy from wave power and underwater currents. The indications we have at this point are that we can do that without causing environmental damage while at the same time create substantial sources of new renewable energy.

It is in fact possible to phase out the nuclear industry. It will not be done tomorrow or probably for a long time. However we have to plan for the decommissioning of the plants and how we will deal with the waste produced by that time, including what will be left over from the decommissioning. By that I mean we will have to consider how we will treat the people who work in those plants and that industry.

I want to acknowledge the work done by the Canadian Labour Congress and a number of the other individual unions to develop some standards and methodologies, which is generally referred to as just transitions, and how we will deal with that.

If we continue to hide our heads in the sand and ignore the reality that these plants will have to be shut down and phased out at some point, the real risk is that workers and communities will be very negatively impacted. We have to plan for that now. That concept of just transitions has to be applied to both the employees within that sector and the communities that rely on this industry so that over a period of time they can find new employment in other sectors within the economy and communities can be provided stability.

Members heard my friend from the Bloc, the member for Sherbrooke, talk about the experience of Denmark and Germany with the development of wind power in those countries. It shows very clearly that we can also do that. We can produce a lot of jobs for a new sector of the economy.

I could go on for another 20 minutes on this topic, but I will conclude by saying this is not a simple amendment. It has very severe complications to it.