Joe Comartin

[The Environment, March 13th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, a detailed independent report prepared for the Dutch government demonstrates that the cost to Canada of reducing greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol would be $200 million to $700 million, not $40 billion as predicted by Alberta and the oil companies.

The report also finds that the concessions which have already been made to Canada allow us to meet 25% to 30% of our reductions with little or no impact on our economy.

I would like to ask the Prime Minister, why is it that other governments are able to provide this type of scientific and economic analysis that would debunk the fearmongering of some provinces and big business but this government cannot?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2001, March 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I will start my comments with regard to Group No. 1 on the issue of parliamentary democracy. In the last few weeks the government has run roughshod over that concept. We saw it at the environment committee regarding the endangered species legislation. We saw it at the finance committee with the way it manipulated the election of the chairman. Now we are seeing it in the bill and the motion with regard to representation from the labour community on the airport authority that will be established should the bill go ahead as proposed.

From the sequence of events, it is clear that the parliamentary committee that reviewed this issue felt very strongly about who should be represented on the agency. It indicated that and passed the information in its proper format on to the minister. Either the minister or, more likely the Prime Minister's Office decided to heck with parliamentary democracy and the knowledgeable work the committee did, and the recommendations which came from all parties on the committee were ignored.

I also want to address the importance of labour representation on the authority. A number of major issues which directly affect workers in the airline industry will come up in front of the agency, for example, decisions on health and safety matters, general work standards and training which will require input. Labour representatives will bring their experience to the table. Based on what we have heard from the minister, he has deemed that as not important enough to have them sitting at the table.

Originally the committee recommended to the minister that there should be two members on the authority from the labour community. What we got initially was floundering by the government which argued for maybe one and now it is an absolute no, that labour does not deserve to be at the table.

One other issue which I want to raise is right in line to be affected by the authority once it is established. That is the whole issue of who will be responsible for the workers in the industry and providing security at the airports.

As it stands, various unions represent the workers. Depending on what decisions are made by the authority, that representation could be completely wiped out. The issue of successor rights, should the responsibility for these workers be transferred from where it is now, is very important to the unions and bargaining units that represent those workers at present. It is another reason that they should be represented on the authority once it has been established.

Another issue with regard to Group No. 1 of Bill C-49 is the $24 fee which of course is a tax in everything but name.

Looking specifically at the airport in my city of Windsor, that airport is marginal. It is doing okay right now. It is actively promoting itself to be used more extensively. We lost Canadian, but several smaller airlines are currently looking at providing service which is badly needed not just to Toronto where we are really confined to now, but to and from a number of areas around the country.

I have been speaking to a number of officials at the airport in the last few days in anticipation of speaking to Group No. 1. They have raised serious concerns about the impact the $24 fee will have on the short runs.

These are the areas at which the new small airlines are specifically looking. Because they work within very close margins, the concern is whether the fee will be enough to dissuade them from further exploring coming into the Windsor airport. They have done an excellent job promoting the airport and now they are being confronted with this fee or tax which is a much more severe burden on the people who are travelling than on the general public.

Everyone recognizes that sufficient security has not been provided at our airports in the past. I have had many conversations with the workers over the years. They would probably be the first ones to tell us that they are not paid or trained well enough and are not provided with enough equipment, and any equipment they have is out of date.

We know it is going to cost money. That is not the issue and everyone accepts that. However, in order to bolster security, should the individual passenger have to bear the full brunt of that?

Security is not just an airline issue. The tragedies in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania showed that all sorts of other people were affected, a great many of whom lost their lives as we well know.

In doing the tax planning to deal with the social issue of security, the issue then becomes, from where does the government derive the revenue? The issue should be one of fairness, obviously, as in all cases of taxation. How do we spread the cost of the security fairly across the whole of society?

The obvious answer is it is not done by putting the entire burden on the travelling public. One can accept that some of it should be borne by them, almost on a user fee basis, but not the entire amount as is proposed in the bill. It is unfair to the travelling public. Society as a whole should bear more of the burden from general tax revenues.

With regard to the Windsor airport, it is expected that a number of new flights also may not proceed from Air Canada and Air Ontario as we have them now. Not only are we dealing with a situation where the new airlines may not proceed with new flights, but we may lose more of our flights. We recently have lost some. Rather than having any increase, we may lose more short hauls. The biggest number of flights out of Windsor go to Pearson in Toronto. There is some risk that we may lose those as the cost of flying goes up.

Going back to the parliamentary democracy issue, this is a flagrant example of the government running roughshod over it. There is great reason to have proper representation on the agency. There cannot be proper representation unless the labour movement and the workers in the industry are represented at that level.

[The Environment, March 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, those standards will not be tougher. Let me talk about another point that is more pertinent to what is happening now. As I said, the government has already waffled on Kyoto. In addition it has refused to renew the funding for the research group that did the research which I referred to earlier.

Will the federal government commit today to extend the funding for the toxic research initiative under Health Canada and Environment Canada to ensure that the work of this lab and others continues? Yes or no.

[The Environment, March 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, a new study by the University of Toronto has uncovered clinical evidence directly linking air pollution to heart attacks. Those findings follow a study published last week by the American Medical Association linking air pollution to lung cancer and heart disease. Despite the growing evidence of harmful effects of greenhouse emissions and air pollution, the federal government's proposed clean air quality standard is only half that of the U.S., and in fact it continues to waffle on Kyoto.

Will the government today take immediate actions to toughen our air pollution standards to at least meet those of the U.S. and perhaps even think of making them a little stronger?

[The Environment, February 26th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, we keep hearing about this consultation and cost analysis by the government. In fact, we have been hearing about it all the way back to the 1997 Liberal red book when they said “The costs of climate change are too high for us not to take action now”.

Will the Prime Minister keep that commitment in the red book and assure the House that a full and comprehensive analysis will be completed before the G-8 meeting in June, including the cost of not ratifying Kyoto?

[The Environment, February 26th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, a week ago the Prime Minister was humiliated in Moscow on Kyoto. In response he said he wanted Canada to ratify it by the G-8 summit in June. Now the Minister of the Environment says there is no deadline for ratification. The Prime Minister has been humiliated once on Kyoto and it looks as though he will be again at the G-8 summit without ratification.

My question is for the Deputy Prime Minister. Will Canada ratify Kyoto by June? Yes or no.

[Species at Risk Act, February 26th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I begin my comments today on Group No. 3 by referring to a letter I received from a constituent as the SARA legislation was brought forth to the House.

My constituent is a teacher. He was recognized and received an award as being one of the best teachers in the country in 2001. That is a rare award. He was rewarded primarily, if not exclusively, for all the work he has done in the classroom, the school and the community on environmental issues. He has taken a whole generation, if not a generation and a half now, of students through their education process and imbued in each one of them in a very enthusiastic way a love for the natural environment and a sense of responsibility of protecting, as each one of us have, in a stewardship fashion that natural environment. He writes:

Amendments made by the environment committee would have strengthened mandatory habitat protection in areas of federal jurisdiction, and would have provided--

And this is relevant to Group No. 3:

--an independent scientific panel the opportunity to determine which species in Canada are endangered.

I am deeply troubled that the bill being brought forward for third reading rejects the work of Canada's parliamentarians, and chooses to do next to nothing to protect Canada's endangered plans and animals.

That commentary is a reflection of how a great deal of the people who have worked on the legislation from all walks of life feel. We constantly hear that it is just environmentalists complaining about the nature of the gutting of the bill by the government. That is not true. It is people from all walks of life.

The comment I read from his letter is reflective of the attitude. Some 60,000 to 65,000 people have signed petitions asking the government to not proceed with the amendments that it is proposing, but to allow the amendments that the committee prepared and put into place at committee stage. He goes on to say in his letter:

Failure to reconsider these proposed amendments will result in international embarrassment for Canada when it attends the Rio plus 10 Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in the spring of 2002.

There is an error there. The conference will actually take place in the fall of 2002. He goes on to say:

Canada proudly signed the international biodiversity protocol at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, becoming the first country in the world to endorse this convention. With our failure to pass a strong, effective endangered species act, we also will fail in our commitment to protect the web of life internationally.

He is very accurate in that last statement. We will be embarrassed with the legislation because it does not go far enough. It does not deal with real protection for the environment.

In Group No. 3 there is a glaring inconsistency in the government's position that shows up in some of the proposed amendments. I am referring specifically to Motion No. 136. We heard from the parliamentary secretary today that this was a good development on the part of the government.

Motion No. 136 would provide that the existing list of species developed by COSEWIC, the scientific body that has been responsible for this for more than two decades now, would be incorporated holus-bolus into the act in one fell swoop.

That was a change on the part of the government because originally it was not even going to do that. The Minister of the Environment came to the committee before it got to the end of clause by clause and announced that he would do this as his one concession to the committee. As a committee we had been pushing for a holus-bolus acceptance of the list. It only made good sense because of all of the good work that COSEWIC had done over the years on that list.

The inconsistency arose when the minister accepted the list from this independent and qualified body. What did he then do? This goes back to some of the amendments in Group No. 2. He said that he did not trust them to do it on an ongoing basis. All the work done over the last 20 years, which the government recognized and incorporated into the bill in an amendment we fully support, was good enough but it was not good enough on an ongoing basis.

Nothing has changed. The way scientists are appointed to the board has remained the same. If anything it may be a little better as more aboriginal and first nations people are brought into the group, using some of their traditional knowledge. This is a positive development by COSEWIC and it should be praised for showing more progressive thinking in that regard than the government.

There is a glaring inconsistency. We urge the government to withdraw the amendments in Group No. 2 with regard to that and follow the pattern established in Group No. 3.

I want to recognize one thing that does appear in one of these amendments. It is in Motion No. 134. A bill was passed in the House last year, I do not believe it has become law yet, that would create marine conservation areas in the country, something again the government has been slow about doing. That bill is also wanting in a number of ways.

The positive part is that the government recognized that its federal jurisdiction should be extended into these marine conservation areas as we develop them. There are four or five, perhaps as many as ten, that are close to being developed, both on our shores in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as well as in the Great Lakes area.

The amendment, which we support, would extend the SARA legislation to those marine conservation areas. That is a good development and I applaud the government for it.

I want to go back to some other concerns we have with this group of amendments. There are a number of amendments in Group No. 3 that would allow the government to do nothing, if I can put it that way. The environment and sustainability committee recognized it in the original draft of the bill. In a number of ways it tightened up the bill significantly by putting limitations on the government, imposing in some cases time limits and using in many cases specific wording as opposed to general wording.

There are a series of amendments that would gut all that work and gut the bill. Taking out that type of specific language and replacing it with generalities would allow the government, as it has in so many other areas of environmental legislation and action, to do nothing.

[The Environment, February 25th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Canada's commitment to the Kyoto accord has come under continued attack from Premiers Campbell and Klein yet the Liberal government has done nothing to counter these baseless attacks.

Does the industry minister have any concrete data on what the real cost would be to Canadian industry of not proceeding with our Kyoto commitment to reduce those harmful emissions? If he does have that data, has he given it to the environment minister and will he share it with the House today?

[Species at Risk Act, February 21st, 2002]

After lots of hard work.

[Kyoto Protocol, February 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, recently we have seen Canada's commitment to the Kyoto accord come under increasing attack from the oil industry and premier Ralph Klein, both of whom are saying that meeting our emission reduction targets will impact negatively on the Canadian economy.

Why does the federal government not counter these attacks with the facts of what it will cost Canada if we do not proceed with the Kyoto accord? Could the Minister of Health indicate whether there is any data within her department about what it would cost the health of Canadians and what the financial costs would be to the health care system if we were to reduce those harmful emissions? Will she share those facts with the House?