Mr. Speaker, it is with some relief that I rise in the chamber today to speak to Bill C-9 in that this bill is long overdue, at least that part in dealing with the issue of transportation of dangerous goods.
The riding that is immediately adjacent to mine is held by the NDP member for Windsor West. It contains several border crossings that are the busiest not only in Canada and the United States, but we believe the busiest between two sovereign countries anywhere in the world. More passenger vehicles and vehicles carrying cargo cross that border daily in numbers that are not matched anywhere else in the world.
The issue of moving dangerous goods in this country has been a long-standing problem from an environmental standpoint. I can remember dealing with this issue over a good number of years. The municipal levels of government, the city of Windsor and the county of Essex, were greatly concerned about the movement through their jurisdictions of goods that were not properly regulated. Safety regulations were not in place. There were no requirements in provincial or federal legislation to identify that dangerous goods were moving through their jurisdictions. Over the years there were a number of incidents where it came to the knowledge of the municipal governments that on a regular basis certain dangerous goods, toxins, and in some cases even radioactive material such as medical isotopes, were moving through their jurisdictions and they had no idea it was happening.
This has been a great concern not just to the elected officials in the municipal governments in my area, but also to our firefighters and police and emergency responders. Oftentimes they are called to scenes of motor vehicle accidents involving goods that are unknown to them in terms of the quantity and how dangerous the goods are. Historically, on a number of occasions, we have been very worried as to whether our emergency responders, police and firefighters have been exposed to toxins and other serious pollutants that would damage their health and the environment in the region around the accident.
This is not something that has been going on for the last few years while consultation on this bill has been going on; it has been going on literally for decades in our area because of its geographic location. Much vehicular traffic moves through our area on a daily basis. In order that people can appreciate the significance, in terms of the numbers, more goods and vehicular traffic goes through our city and crosses to the American side and vice versa on a daily basis than all of the traffic that goes across the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island in a year. Having to cope with that traffic has been a major issue, and perhaps the major issue, in our community for a long time.
It became even more of a concern when the incident of 9/11 took place. It moved from being an environmental and health and safety issue to one of national security. Since 9/11 there has been a significant slowdown in the traffic patterns across the border, at the bridge, at the tunnel, and even with regard to the rail tunnel that moves a huge amount of cargo between the two countries on a daily basis.
The United States has been very adamant and protective of its side of the border. The U.S. refuses to accept that our standards, our safety and precautionary measures are sufficient to respond to the concerns the Americans have. Again, this is around the transport of hazardous waste and goods, but also with regard to the potential for that transportation network to be used by terrorists to attack the United States.
It has been a grave problem for us since 9/11, one to which the government has finally responded. In the last few years the Conservatives and the Liberals before them were very slow to pick up on it. In a number of other ways, we have spent huge amounts of money to deal with national security issues. One can argue that it was probably spent unwisely in a number of areas and that it would have been much better to have spent some more time and to have been more focused on this particular area so that the legislation and standards would have been in place and we could have been moving to deploy and enforce those standards.
I am going to use one example to highlight one of the concerns. The City of Toronto has been transporting huge volumes of municipal waste, general garbage from households in particular, to the state of Michigan. In the last few weeks the City of Toronto has announced that because of some recycling programs it has put into place and other policies around the reuse of items, it has been able to reduce the number of trucks crossing at the border crossings in Windsor and Sarnia by almost 50% in the last year. That is a good development, but one of the reasons it was pushed to do that is that the state of Michigan had taken some very strong measures to prohibit the importation of that garbage into its jurisdiction.
Michigan specifically used the example of the number of times that hazardous goods had gotten through the Canadian side and the American side of the border and ended up in the landfill sites on the Michigan side, and it was discovered only at that point that there was hazardous waste in that garbage. The state of Michigan has now taken steps to pass legislation that has curtailed the amount of garbage that is being transported into its jurisdiction.
This legislation is badly needed from that perspective with regard to environmental and health and safety factors. It is also badly needed to satisfy our concerns on this side of the border with regard to items that are coming in from the U.S. side. By raising our standards here in Canada, we would be able to prohibit goods coming in from the United States that we do not want in our country. That part of the legislation is badly needed. It is a good step forward.
Since 2004 the government has spent an extensive amount of time on consultation. However, that consultation was over in a meaningful way sometime around 2006 or 2007, at least two years ago. This legislation should have been before the House in that period of time. It should have gone through committee, been amended, clarified and refined as necessary, gone back into the House, passed through the Senate and given royal assent. We should have been at that stage at least a year and a half ago, perhaps even as much as two years ago. We could have been at the stage now of deploying the bill and the law and, in particular, putting in place the regulations that would flow under this law so that we could dramatically increase the safety in our communities. I mean safety in terms of the natural environment of my city and county and the national security items that this bill addresses.
There is one significant negative in this bill. Generally, members of the NDP are supportive of this legislation, but we have a significant concern with regard to the methodology that is going to be used by the government with regard to security clearances for truck drivers, but also for personnel at our border crossings such as in my area, but also at our airports to some lesser degree, and most important, at our shipping ports on our coasts. The difficulty we have with the legislation is it would appear on the surface that a good deal of the methodology that will be used to institute the surveillance of employees will be done in secret.
If we are trying to satisfy the Canadian people that we are serious about these security clearances, they will have to be done in an effective, efficient and state-of-the-art way. We have to do it as well as anybody in the world does, and hopefully better. It is hard to imagine how we are going to instill that confidence in the communities most affected by these types of goods being transported through them that we are doing it effectively. We cannot convince people that we are doing a good job unless they can see it. It is an issue of transparency.
I have heard no argument on the part of the government as to why there is this insistence on these regulations that will govern how people will be cleared for this type of employment. How does not telling the general public the criteria that people have to meet and the process they have to go through in any way enhance that sense of confidence in our government and our government institutions, that we are doing a good job in protecting our citizens? I say protecting them both from a personal security basis, that their personal security is assured in this country, but also that the natural environment around their homes and businesses will be protected as well as it can be, and that our emergency responders will be protected as best they can. This insistence on secrecy makes no sense to us in the NDP.
However, there has been a history, and it has been particularly true that some of the tools that we have tried to put in place at our ports to screen employees and the types of methods that were being used were, quite frankly, offensive to our charter of rights, basic human rights and civil liberties. I am going to use one example that came up, I think it was a couple of years ago, when I was a member of the public safety and national security committee.
Transport Canada was proposing at the time to do clearances not only on the employees but on a very wide range of people who were associated with candidates for employment, the candidate's immediate family and extended family, without any reasons for doing that. There would be no suggestion that the person had an extensive criminal record or was associating with people with extensive criminal records. Transport Canada was going on the assumption that everybody was a potential criminal or a potential terrorist, rather than doing the reverse and assuming that unless there was at least some indication that the person was a security risk, it would do a fairly conventional security clearance for the person through our regular police forces.
We are concerned and we will need to take this up, to a significant degree, assuming we can get the government to move beyond its secrecy, almost paranoia, to understand why the security clearances are being done, it appears from the legislation and from some of the comments we have heard from the government, behind the scenes in total secrecy. That does not advance the level of confidence and security in the country. It certainly does not give our citizenry additional assurances that things are being done properly and that we are advancing the level of security, both with regard to environmental issues, health and safety issues and national security issues, if they do not know what is going on.
I can well understand, because of the extensive amount of work I have done in national security since 2004, that there are times when we do need to do things behind the scenes, to do them undercover and to maintain them that way when national security is at issue.
However, I also learned throughout that period of time that oftentimes national security is used as a cloak for breaching civil liberties in this country. It is used as a cloak to, at times, cover up mistakes made within the public service. This, obviously, is a rare exception, but if we start with a system that says that we are entitled to keep everything behind closed doors, that we will not tell the citizenry anything about it nor will we tell members of Parliament about it, we will not even give access to this kind of information, then that is the wrong approach. It is one the NDP will be looking very closely at in committee and moving amendments, if that is necessary.
