Joe Comartin

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the Progressive Conservative Party caught me on this once before during a take note debate. I went back to take a look at this because I did not have an answer for him then, but I have one now.

The answer is that in fact Germany does buy from some of the other countries, France in particular. In France, by the way, active consideration is being given to phasing out its nuclear industry. Germany has seen the purchase of that, and the continued use that it is making of its own plants, as temporary. Germany has set a quota for alternative energy sources, which I have asked our Minister of Natural Resources to do, and I am still waiting to hear back from him on, and in fact has a specific quota for wind power.

If Germany achieves that, which it fully expects to do over the next 10 to 15 years, it will be able to phase out its own industry and cease purchasing electricity in the form of nuclear energy from France and other countries.

With regard to the time limit, my friend is wrong. It is grossly unfair to impose that type of time limit on anybody when we know there are other options that may be coming.

I want to talk about the storage bins that I saw at Pickering. They are designed to last for up to 50 years and are monitored on a 24 hour basis. If there are any problems with them, any cracks or deterioration in the material, they are identified immediately and can then be placed in another storage bin. There is no reason whatsoever for us to impose that type of time limit other than to dump this stuff on some community in the Canadian Shield and let the industry off the hook for the cost of it.

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP is quite pleased to see legislation come forward on this issue, not this legislation in particular but at least some legislation.

If there is any area of the environment that speaks to the necessity of having the precautionary principle applied before an industry such as the nuclear industry is allowed to develop, this is it. It is necessary when one is considering the legislation to look at a bit of the history. As we all know the nuclear industry was an offshoot of the development of nuclear weapons flowing from research and work done during the second world war. It began to be used for non-war purposes subsequent to the second world war. We got our first small nuclear reactors in the 1950s and 1960s and in the process of doing that began to identify even back then the very serious problem of the byproduct, nuclear waste.

However identifying the level of seriousness seems to have come to the attention of governments only after the huge expansion that occurred in the 1970s, particularly in Canada with the Candu reactors. At that point there was a recognition that we would have to do something about nuclear waste.

Because we allowed the continuous development of this industry, what did not happen at that point was an economic assessment of the real cost of nuclear power. In fact, we have not even done that up to this point. That is one of the problems with the bill. However, we did allow the expansion and there was very substantial expansion through the 1970s.

At the end of the 1970s the atomic energy commission of Canada was prompted to begin to seriously look at what it would do with all the nuclear waste from the nuclear plants. Over a period of extensive research and time, it came up with a proposal which was, in simple, man on the street terms, to dump it. It put some fancy words around it and talked about deep rock burial. That is the phraseology. In essence, they wanted to dump it in the Canadian Shield.

As this proposal came forward, as I think any sensible person could imagine it got a less than overwhelming response from local communities that might have been the site of this dump. Because the reaction was so strong from the Canadian citizenry, a commission was appointed, chaired by Blair Seaborn, and it became generally known as the Seaborn commission. The commission studied this over an extensive period of time, almost 10 years, and reported in 1997 with a very damning summary of the AECL proposal.

The government, in response to that, to a great extent rejected the commission but pretends now in the legislation to allow for the implementation, or at least the potential implementation, of the recommendations from that commission.

To some significant degree the bill is a fraud if its intent is in fact to implement the Seaborn commission recommendations because it does not do that. What it does do is allow the industry to make all of the decisions, to do that in a relatively short period of time given the level of intense research required and probably using a methodology that will be relatively inexpensive for the industry but totally unsatisfying for the Canadian public.

As I said when I began my remarks we welcome the legislation coming forward because this issue has to be addressed by the House. We will be supporting the bill on second reading to have it passed on for committee review. The work in that committee hopefully will get us to a result by way of significant amendments that in fact would make the treatment of nuclear waste something in which Canada can be a leader in the world, as opposed to what we see in the bill now.

I want to deal with a few of the specifics in the bill that we will be looking at and attempting to alter at committee stage. The first, which I have already made reference to, is the composition of the decision making body. The bill provides for the establishment of a waste management organization. We welcome that. It was part of the Seaborn recommendations that a body of that nature be established. What we are opposed to and will attempt to get changed is the composition of the panel that will form that commission, because as it stands now the only people who would be on it are from the industry. Those people who need regulation would be doing the regulating.

The Seaborn commission recommended that there be experts on that panel, that it involve extensive public consultation, that it be at arm's length and independent from the utilities that provide the services and the product, from the other vested interests or offshoots of those utilities, and from government itself, in other words, that it be completely independent. We will be looking for those recommendations to be incorporated in the bill.

There is a second group that is established under the bill, advisory panels and committees. Again, that was recommended by the Seaborn commission. These would be more broadly based and somewhat localized to the areas where there are current nuclear facilities. The bill would restrict participants to being from just that area. In effect the local community would be given a chance to sit on these committees but would not be given any resources either in the form of personnel to act as secretaries or money for things like travel or hiring experts. The bill does not provide for any of this. Again, the Seaborn commission recommended all of that. In addition, any people from the outside who may be able on a volunteer basis to provide expertise would not be allowed to sit on the committees. We will be looking for some significant changes in that structure.

It is important to note that after all its research, study and consultation, one of the Seaborn commission's major conclusions was that even though deep rock burial may be technically feasible, not one community in Canada would risk accepting the nuclear waste.

The credibility of both the waste management organization and the advisory councils is extremely important. Ultimately, the only way nuclear waste will be adequately dealt with and dealt with to the satisfaction of the Canadian public, both generally and specifically in some of these communities, is for it to have absolute credibility. Bill C-27 goes in the opposite direction.

I want to spend a few moments on the funding for nuclear waste disposal. I had the opportunity to spend some time at the nuclear site in Darlington, Ontario, which has currently four reactors operating and four more that are idle. I spent the better part of a day looking at the system. The current system is simply that it is stored, first in water and then it is moved into containers, very high tech in both cases, but obviously short term in that it does not deal with the waste itself. It is strictly storage. That is the only methodology we have at this point.

The financing that is being recommended in the bill, I believe, and it is where there is some shortfall, is based on the original AECL proposal of deep rock burial. I am not entirely convinced that the proposed funding will even be sufficient to do that because of what I expect will be very strong opposition from whatever community in which the site may end up, if that ever proceeds.

However, I am convinced that it is clearly not enough money if we continue short term storage. The reason for that is that this waste has no end in terms of its lifespan. The best scientific minds in this field cannot tell us what the life expectancy is of this material.

We may be storing nuclear waste above ground or in limited, below ground facilities for centuries and millenniums, and that has not been costed into the bill at all. This is very clear from the dollars. We are not talking about peanuts. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars that are being proposed but the amount will be nowhere near adequate for long term storage. That is a matter that has to be looked at very closely.

If the government were serious about paying attention to the work done by the Seaborn commission, it would do a number of things in this legislation as opposed to the smokescreen it is creating here. If it set out the legislation along the lines of what the commission recommended, we could have a real independent agency, one that would be arm's length from the nuclear industry and from the government.

That independent agency would be entitled and authorized to look at the various options. This is another real flaw in the legislation. It really only provides for two options: the storage that is going on now, short term, or the deep rock burial.

There are other potential options. Extensive research has been going on over what is called a transmutation of the waste. It is believed there are ways of reprocessing it. This has not been done yet, I would hasten to add, but it is believed that we may be able to run the waste back through the system. At this point it would be very dangerous to do that but if it can be developed, it may reduce the volume of waste quite significantly and, subsequently, storage capacity requirements would be dramatically reduced.

The other research that has been going on has to do with using the waste as fuel repeatedly and eventually completely eliminating the issues of storage and disposal. The forecast of us ever being able to do that, either in this country or any place in the world, is long term. The point is that there are some other potential options to look at rather than just the two that the waste management organization, which will be authorized by this bill, are supposed to look at.

The other problem with the bill is that it only allows the waste management organization three years to come up with its proposal. Again, what we will be faced with is an organization that is completely dominated by the industry, which has already taken the industry's position of what it wants to do with it, and it will be given three years to come up with a recommendation. We already know what the result will. We will be going back to the original AECL proposal of deep rock burial.

As I have said, if the bill remains the way it is and is passed into law, this will be, to a great extent, a charade that the government has put us through.

I would like to talk a bit more about the options. We have heard some hair-brained ones. I thought that one of the most interesting ones, which was quite star trekkie, was to load the nuclear waste onto a spaceship and shoot it into the sun. With this option we would not only have Star Wars , we would also have all this nuclear waste that potentially could end up in our outer atmosphere. This is not an option that I think any reasonable commission would follow, but there are others.

A fair amount of research is going on in this area and it should be pursued. We are not the only ones doing it. A number of other countries are very active in this regard.

With regard to the timeframe, whatever the waste management organization eventually ends up looking like, there is no way it should be mandated to come back with a report within that timeframe. We have been working on this issue since the late seventies, although it probably should have been longer, and to mandate the organization now when we have this type of controversy, is grossly unfair however it is composed.

In conclusion, I just want to make one additional point concerning the whole issue of the phase out of the nuclear industry.

Although I think most of us are already aware of this, I want to bring to the House's attention that Germany has now moved on this issue. The German government has formerly reached an agreement with the industry that it will phase it out. A number of other countries in Europe are following suit. This waste issue with which we are dealing cries out for Canada to do the same. We have a major problem on our hands that may go on for centuries or even millenniums. We do not need to compound that by increasing the volume of this waste.

As I said earlier, we will support the bill at second reading to get it to committee and for us to make those significant changes. It is obvious from my comments that if those significant changes do not come forward we will be vigorously opposing the legislation at third reading.

[International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, there is nothing in the existing treaty, as I read it, that prevents water from being dumped in that way. In that case the water is highly polluted and would flow north into Canada. However, there is nothing in the treaty that would prevent the United States, and I believe it is the state of Minnesota, from doing that. The amendments being proposed in Bill C-6 would also do nothing to prohibit a U.S. state from doing it or, in the converse, a Canadian province from doing it.

[International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, what we require goes well beyond the legislation. As I said earlier, the legislation is geographically restricted. It does nothing to mandate the provinces to prohibit the export of water. We need an all-encompassing bill for the whole of the country which is an absolute ban on the export of water. That deals with the domestic issue.

The second requirement is an actual amendment to NAFTA to incorporate wording that would be binding on both governments and private investors and that would allow Canada, the United States and Mexico to control their water without any challenges from other governments or private investors.

[International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the points made by my friend from the Progressive Conservative Party are well taken with regard to the very specific aspects of that case. We have not had a ruling on it, but we must be very careful.

It is quite clear that we could not stop the application in the Sun Belt case. We cannot say that there is a ban, even though that is what the province British Columbia did. It did not protect the province from it, so the case went ahead.

I am also struggling with another case that I remember where a Mexican community was challenged on having to accept a toxic dump by a private investor from the American state of California. There are a great number of similarities. The award in that case was not pennies. It was millions of American dollars against a very small community in Mexico.

There is a provision for licensing the export of water. In effect we have set up a framework, which I realize has been an historical past practice. We have now incorporated that into the legislation. The framework was there for Sun Belt to bring forth the application.

As I said earlier in my address to the House, most of the trade experts to whom I have spoken are very uncomfortable about the outcome of this case. They are very concerned that Sun Belt is likely to win.

[International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, as I have made clear in the past, the bill would not meet the commitment made by the government and the entire House in February 1999 when it declared to Canadians that it would introduce legislation to prohibit, and I emphasize prohibit, bulk freshwater exports and interbasin transfers. Bill C-6 would not do that. It is a failure with regard to that commitment.

At the same time that commitment was made the NDP put forth a motion in the House that was unanimously adopted and supported by all parties. The motion stated that Canada:

--should not be a party to any international agreement that compels us to export freshwater against our will in order to assert Canada's sovereign right to protect, preserve and conserve our freshwater resources for future generations.

Bill C-6, which is before the House today for debate, fails to address the vital concern that we would be compelled by international agreements to export our water.

It is appropriate to set in context the pressure Canada is under with regard to conserving and preserving its fresh water. I draw to the attention of the House two issues that are very current.

First, the whole issue of climate change and specifically climate warming could have a potential impact on our fresh water and our freshwater reserves and supplies.

Second, flowing in part from that and in part from a number of droughts around the continent has been pressure to export water to other parts of North America and the world to deal with drought conditions elsewhere. Statistics show the pressure the international community is under with regard to supplying fresh water to its citizens. We must play a leading role in dealing with the problem.

However the export of bulk water from Canada is not the answer. As I pointed out during second reading, I found it somewhat odd that the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of the Environment led the debate on the bill instead of the Minister for International Trade. I was surprised because the bill is to a great extent about trade and, more specific, the failure of the government to protect our fresh water from trade challenges.

As I noted previously in debate, the bill is about trade. The Minister of Foreign Affairs said Bill C-6 is “consistent with Canada's international trade obligations”. That is the problem. Bill C-6 represents the government's continued failure to keep our freshwater resources off the international bargaining table and safe from the unfair trade deals it has negotiated. During debate on Bill C-6 earlier this week the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra stated in the House:

Canadian governments have full sovereignty over the management of water in its natural state, and in exercising this sovereignty are not constrained by trade agreements, including the NAFTA.

The reality, contrary to what the member and those in his government claim, is that the strategy of the Liberal government is not necessarily NAFTA proof. Bill C-6 is part of a water strategy designed more to protect NAFTA than to protect Canada's water.

The 1993 joint statement on which the government's argument is primarily based is not legally binding. That statement was made by the three NAFTA partners and their governments, namely Canada, the United States and Mexico. However, the way NAFTA works, under the investor state procedure investors have the power to challenge Canadian water protection laws.

In fact we have seen that. We have the outstanding challenge by Sun Belt Water Inc. against the province of British Columbia that is still pending. We have seen the ability of a private company to come forward and make that challenge, specifically on fresh water.

That joint statement was not agreed to by the investor sectors. There would be no way of doing that. Therefore it offers no protection whatsoever against claims made directly by investors.

We could say to the governments of the United States and Mexico that they agreed to this, but we cannot say it to Sun Belt Water Inc. because it was not at the table and is not bound by the letter exchanged among those three levels of government.

It is important to look at the history under NAFTA because international trade tribunals, and I should not just say under NAFTA but under a number of other international agreements that we have entered into, have been very willing to strike down environmental protection laws if they are simply disguised as trade barriers. That is open to very wide interpretation, as we have seen.

For example, a GATT tribunal rejected Canada's ban on the export of unprocessed fish even after it was redrafted. We went through it and we lost. We redrafted it and focused it exclusively on environmental conservation, and we still lost.

Simply stating that a bill is motivated by environmental rather than trade concerns will not likely be enough to withstand a trade challenge. The fish case is a clear precedent in that regard.

The bill is fairly limited in the geographical area that it covers. The strategy of the government has been to say this is what it would do and this is how it would do it. As I have indicated, that is nowhere near sufficient. It does not do anything to prohibit a province from exporting bulk fresh water.

I would assume any province that wishes to seek a financial opportunity in that regard is in no way prevented from doing so.

The bill, if it becomes law, would not be binding on the provinces. We could change that. Enough jurisdiction has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in this area indicating that we could do that as a legislature at the national level. That is what we need to do. We need to provide a legislated ban that would be binding on all provinces that would prohibit the export of bulk water. This is not a fancy. It is not something out there in the ozone. Newfoundland is currently looking at the export of bulk water.

My next point concerns NAFTA. It was raised when the bill was before the foreign affairs committee. One of the witnesses suggested much more forcefully than I did how questionable the interpretation was and how out of touch the government was with the reality of how we saw NAFTA functioning.

There are very strong legal opinions that the bill would not protect us from a NAFTA challenge. The government, therefore, should not be so confident that its approach would withstand those challenges. What it should be doing is looking at how to fix NAFTA, how to incorporate into NAFTA the real protections we need, because that is where we need them and not in this type of legislation.

We have heard explanations from the government on how the bill would work if it became law. The government is saying that the bill contains a ban, but there is also a licensing provision to allow for the diversion and export of water. We are hearing that there are regulations, which we have not seen, that would define more extensively when that licensing would be allowed.

I say to the government and to the House that we should take the government and the minister at face value in that they would not allow for this type of licensing for the diversion or export of water.

What about the next minister? What about the next government, whether it be this party or some other? Rather than putting into place an absolute ban, what it has done is left the door open to what could very easily be major diversions of our water and abuse of our environment in that regard.

I will make one point with regard to the amendment, and I want to give the foreign affairs committee an acknowledgement in this regard. As originally drafted, the bill did not contain a provision that recognized there would be no derogation to treaty rights of the first nations. As a result of a motion made on behalf of my party at committee stage the committee recognized the necessity of including that, and it has been incorporated into the bill. I acknowledge the work done by the committee and its willingness to respond to that type of amendment.

The NDP is not willing to support Bill C-6. We would not be protected from the NAFTA provisions with this bill. It would not apply to the whole of the country and would not be an absolute bill. For those reasons we will be voting against the bill.

[Energy, June 12th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Wind Energy Association launched an initiative today. Its goal is to create 10,000 megawatts of wind power capacity and provide at least 5% of Canada's electricity by 2010.

At the same time communities across Canada continue to issue smog alerts and thousands of Canadians are suffering from the harmful effects of air pollution.

Will the government take the opportunity today to endorse the association's ten by ten initiative?

[Taxation, June 11th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, when this session of parliament began I called upon the Deputy Prime Minister to explain his government's inaction in addressing the concerns of thousands of Canadians faced with crippling taxes on their U.S. social security benefits.

The Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, and the Secretary of State for International Financial Institutions have all promised that they would take some action. Yet five months later nothing has been done. When will they move on this issue? When can we expect a response from them?

[Criminal Code, June 8th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to the amendments proposed by my friend from Pictou—Antigonish from the Progressive Conservative Party. I would like to indicate on behalf of our party that we support these amendments.

Before I go to the specific amendments, I would like to acknowledge the work that the committee did and the fact that the Liberal government saw its way through to add that provision to protect journalists. Work that has been done by journalists specifically on organized crime has been exemplary. They do that profession proud. The fact that the government has recognized their work and their need for that protection by the expansion of the provisions to prevent intimidation is an excellent one. I congratulate them on it.

The two amendments proposed relate to the necessity of having a judicial review of police officers who commit crimes in the pursuit of the provisions of these amendments to the code. I believe it is really important to take a bit of an historical perspective on the necessity of having this type of protection built into the legislation.

As my friend from the Bloc indicated, no one here has any misgivings about what we are doing with the rest of the bill. We recognize the seriousness of organized crime in the country, particularly in Ontario and even more so in Quebec over the last number of years. It has become a prominent issue. No one is downplaying the significance of the need for this legislation. No one is downplaying the significance of the need to protect police officers in their duties, especially in this area. They are at constant risk for their own safety and at times their lives. So there is no issue with regard to that among anyone in the House or in the government.

However that does not say that we ignore the reality of the structure that we have built in our legal system over the centuries. There has been any number of times in the past where we have gone to excess in dealing with a criminal problem. I am afraid this could be one of those occasions, if we pass this these amendments to the code without the provision of a judicial review for police officers who commit crimes or breach other parts of the criminal code because of the necessity to do their work.

We have had a long history of balancing our responsibility to provide protection in a safe environment for our citizens with the recognition that there are civil liberties in the country. We have to recognize those. We always hear that we are just worried about the criminals. Police officers are human. They can make errors. The whole idea behind our system is that we provide someone else, in the form of judges, to protect us from those errors. Again, I am not going to suggest judges are perfect. I have appeared before too many of them in my career to suggest that. However it is an additional measure, and a very important one, to provide all citizens with that type of protection.

As a result of questions from I think at least three of the four opposition parties, we have heard the Solicitor General of Canada and the Minister of Justice repeatedly say the that it is just too cumbersome, or synonyms of that word.

That is just plain nonsense. We have used this system in providing warrants, sometimes very complicated warrants, and our judges have been able to deal with that. There is no reason, given the skills they bring to their positions, that they cannot do the same thing in this area.

I know a number of groups appeared before the committee when the bill was being reviewed. The Civil Liberties Association and a number of the bar associations made representations. All pushed strongly for this extra protection. Quite frankly, all indicated their understanding of the need for the legislation, but wanted the safety net built in to provide all citizens with this protection. It is our responsibility. We should fulfil our responsibility by accepting the amendments of Progressive Conservative Party and by supporting them.

[The Environment, June 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, in fact they have not done very much. The Mulroney government 10 years ago was spending more money than they are right now, both in actual terms and in percentage terms.

Again, when will they make the commitment to protect the environment and really put their money where their mouths are?