Mr. Speaker, we are talking about Bill C-10, an act respecting the national marine conservation areas of Canada. The Canadian Alliance supports sustaining and developing national parks and marine conservation areas that exist for the benefit and enjoyment of everyone. The Canadian Alliance also supports sustainable development and environmental protection regulations that have been fully debated by parliamentarians.
The bill is bad legislation in that it strengthens the power of cabinet while diminishing the effectiveness of elected representatives. No valid argument exists at this time for the need for the legislation.
It is obvious the government is not fully committed to the file, as legislation has been allowed to die on the order paper at least twice previously. We know it is unnecessary in that the regulatory framework already exists to accomplish what the bill purports to want to achieve. To sum it up, it is a power grab by the heritage department, and other government departments are not saying anything when they should be.
I have a living example from when I was in the Atlantic provinces last week with the fisheries committee. There is a fisheries department with its set of regulations for marine conservation. There is a lot of offshore oil and gas development off the coast of Newfoundland and off the south coast of Nova Scotia. There is a board called the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board which has full representation from the province and from the federal government for joint decision making. Its job is to issue the leases for oil and gas development.
If there is one thing that would be at complete conflict with oil and gas development, it is obviously the creation of a no-go marine conservation area. One would think that would also have joint federal and provincial administration and decision making. Guess what? It does not.
Where is the natural incentive for the province if it is fully represented on the offshore petroleum board and unrepresented on marine conservation areas as envisioned under the Fisheries Act or under the fisheries department and by this legislation? Obviously, it sets up a federal-provincial problem and an incentive that is unbalanced in favour of offshore oil and gas development at the possible expense of the environment. It is hardly a balanced approach to take and an obvious shortcoming of this and other marine conservation legislation.
In my question to the Bloc member for Trois-Rivières I spoke about my concerns regarding knowing where these 29 parks contemplated by the marine conservation legislation of the Department of Heritage existed. The legislation should describe the location of the parks it intends to create and insert the information into the schedule.
There was lots of time to do it. If the department did not have time when it first submitted the legislation to the last parliament, it certainly has had time by now to fill in lots of the gaps. However it does not want to because it might mobilize even more people concerned about the legislation.
Right now if the government was going to create a land based park, a new national park, it would have to bring it to this place. If the bill goes through and it wanted to create a new offshore park, order in council or cabinet could make that decision. It never has to come here. That is totally inappropriate. However, if we ever wanted to reduce or remove one of those areas from that status, then it would have to come back here. That is what I call hypocrisy, a double standard and any other number of negative terms.
I spoke on the bill before in its previous form. It has not changed a whole bunch. There are things that are not well known to the public that need to be known. For example, fishing activity, aquaculture or fisheries management, marine navigation, marine safety plans are all subject to the approval of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and the Minister of Canadian Heritage under this bill. That is a power grab.
One can see there is already difficulty, and I saw examples of this last week, between the agenda of the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the agenda of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in terms of which one is the lead agency, which one deals with the stakeholders and all that when it comes to offshore oil and gas development on the east coast. We are going to get there on the west coast in terms of oil and gas development. The debate and the discussion is going to move forward. Quite honestly, it is a mess. We do not need this piece of legislation.
Right now it is very clear whose mandate and responsibility some of these activities are. It is going to become diffuse, subject to competing agendas. We are going to see the special interest groups and the lobbyists using leverage on various government ministers and departments. They can go to one department and ask for their wish list. If they do not get it, they can threaten, cajole or do other things to go to the other department. They can handout their Brownie badges to whoever they think is appealing to their special interest, and the greater good gets lost. This is a way to fudge the ability to act in the national interest. It compromises the ability to act in the national interest and increases the viability of special interests to win the day rather than the greater good.
The bill, without any social economic studies, could for example prohibit exploration or exploitation of hydrocarbons, minerals, aggregates or any other inorganic material.
Let us think about what I just said a few minutes ago. To set up one of these areas which excluded or prohibited fishing, the minister of fisheries and the minister of heritage would have to say it was okay. Why would the minister of heritage be asked if it was okay for fishing to be allowed some place on the British Columbia coast, or off the coast of Nunavut or off the coast of Nova Scotia? This is a problem. Any stakeholder that has looked at the legislation is very concerned about the implications. Those are all problems.
What is the lead agency? If we have a marine conservation area, which agency? With this we would have three federal departments that could set up marine conservation areas. Which department would set it up? How would they make that determination? Which would be the lead agency of the three to help chair this discussion?
I asked those kinds of questions last week in Halifax of fisheries officials and others. There were no answers. We are debating legislation that would change the status quo, which has been long contemplated. Nobody is even trying to respond to this kind of request in the public domain. This is nuts. The government members should be embarrassed at the mess it has created on marine conservation areas.
I have a major problem too in that provincial responsibility is potentially being completely co-opted by the federal government. I already talked about the natural incentive for the provinces when it comes to the offshore petroleum board, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board. However it has major implications. Let me talk about west coast oil and gas again.
We will have a new provincial government this week. The election is on Wednesday and I think even the governing party has conceded of which is unheard. So we will have some new directions.
British Columbia worked long and hard and fought the federal government over who owned the seabed between Vancouver Island and the mainland coast. It went to the supreme court. This was a very long, detailed, expensive debate and proceeding. Guess what? The province won, it owns the seabed.
There is nothing in the legislation that excludes the ability of the Government of Canada to pre-empt that provincial jurisdiction by creating a marine conservation area in that area. That is a very clear conflict of jurisdiction and one that should be automatically clarified in the bill but it is not.
However the other parts of the coast where the province does not own the seabed are still problematic in terms of a federal power grab and a federal administration that is largely out of touch, particularly with remote coastal concerns on the British Columbia coast. I can speak to that with great authority, so can virtually all of the municipal level politicians and many of the provincial politicians from that part of the country.
We will have a major debate and a major initiative on things like what we will do on west coast oil and gas development. We do not need this piece of legislation hanging around in the current format to muddy that whole debate.
We know the heritage department has an agenda, but it will not fess up and tell us what it is. I have already said why it will not. One reason is because it does not want to stir up people who would be very upset with the specifics of what it is contemplating. Therefore, it wants to keep it general and broad, then it will only have to deal with the large, urban based groups that will look at the legislation more as a framework or a legal document rather than as something specific that is affecting a bunch of stakeholders. Somebody called it the mushroom syndrome, and that is right.
The bill requires provincial governments to obey it. The bill impinges on provincial jurisdiction in many ways. It will prevent honest fishermen, hardworking oil and gas exploration workers, local anglers, recreational boaters and others from being able either to earn a livelihood or enjoy themselves, at the possible expense of achieving almost nothing. If this were truly going to do something for the environment we would be more than happy to support it. The reality is quite different.
I did attend some of the heritage committee meetings. I was party to helping bring some witnesses to that committee. I was embarrassed at the treatment they received from some of the government members. The chief of the Campbell River Band was at the committee. The North Coast Oil and Gas Task Force was there. West coast fishermen were there. Rather than hearing the committee accept their legitimate face value concerns, what did we hear? We heard a lecture from the chairman of the committee. Quite frankly, I was amazed at the treatment meted out to people who had travelled so far. I expressed my great concern at that time. Now, much later, I am still out of sorts about what happened on that particular day.
This is a sloppy piece of legislation. As I said, we would have three federal departments that could protect marine areas, two being Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and this bill would put Heritage Canada into that picture as well. Any time we have more than one party responsible for managing something, we get diffused management and diffused objectives and things tend to fall apart. I learned that during my long working career. I think most Canadians would understand that precisely.
Also we have provincial governments that have legislation. Believe it or not, we have had provincial governments far-sighted enough to create marine conservation legislation. I ask members to guess what they have done under that legislation. They have actually created marine protection areas. We have quite a few in British Columbia that have been set up under the provincial government. Is that not marvellous, Mr. Speaker?
The legislation does not appear to deal with all of that. Yes, the government has had a very complicit government in British Columbia to deal with in the last 10 years. Hopefully we will have a new government in British Columbia that will set some new directions and new initiatives in terms of dealing with the federal government on a much more equivalent basis rather than in terms of the mushroom syndrome.
We are very concerned that we will be pre-empted from an opportunity to fully develop industry in British Columbia and in other jurisdictions by legislation that blindly creates parks without taking a lot of stakeholder interests into account. It is clear from the way this bill has been developed that those things have not been taken into account.
We recommend that the municipal level of government be put into this legislation in a meaningful way so that it can have a decision making role in whatever these specific areas are that municipalities are interested in. There has been no movement in that regard.
In summary, this is a bad bill and we should kill it.
