Joyce Murray

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, April 29th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to join my colleagues who have spoken so eloquently for equality for those individuals in the military who serve Canadians. This particular legislation purports to update our military criminal justice system, but in fact has some significant gaps.

It is always good to review our laws to make sure that they reflect present realities and that they are equitable, appropriate and consistent with our Constitution. The military criminal justice system is no exception. This legislation has been worked on for a long time but the Liberal Party of Canada believes it is not where it needs to be in order to get our support. The members for Winnipeg North, Halifax West and York West made that case in quite a specific and compelling way. We are being asked to support something that still has so many flaws; that is politics.

Clearly, many aspects of the military justice system remain inexplicably unchanged or give unnecessary powers in this bill. For instance, the bill enshrines in law a list of military offences that will carry a criminal record in the future, which is not necessary in many cases.

Given that the pardon system was recently revoked and that summary trials are what they are—with no record and no means of meaningful appeal—the members of the armed forces will find themselves with criminal records and unable to find employment upon release.

Clearly there are some flaws in the bill. The one I want to focus on in particular is the issue of human rights and equality. It really boils down to what kind of society we want to have in Canada, and I think Canadians are clear. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada is widely supported right across the country and is a very proud part of our framework for protecting rights but also for enshrining responsibilities in our country, to make sure those who are vulnerable have the law on their side to protect their right to equality.

It has been shameful and disappointing that the Conservative Party of Canada has chosen to minimize the importance of this very important part of our Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, essentially dismissing and not celebrating its great anniversaries. Last year was the 30th anniversary, and there was not much of a murmur from the government, but hundreds of millions of dollars went into celebrating the anniversary of a war.

That goes down to what kind of society we want to have. Do we want to have one that protects rights and freedoms, or do we want to have one that is all about punishment? We see changes to immigration. We see in Bill C-10, that grab bag of bad public policy, that the Conservative government is much more focused on punishment than on equality. That is reflected in this bill as well.

In his testimony before committee, retired Colonel Michel Drapeau noted:

...someone accused before a summary trial has no right to appeal either the verdict or the sentence. This is despite the fact that the verdict and sentence are imposed without any regard to the minimum standards of procedural rights in criminal proceedings, such as the right to counsel, the presence of rules of evidence, and the right to appeal.

In Canada, these rights do not exist in summary trials, not even for a decorated veteran, yet a Canadian charged with a summary conviction offence in civilian court... enjoys all of these rights. So does someone appearing in a small claims court or in a traffic court.

He goes on to say:

I find it very odd that those who put their lives at risk to protect the rights of Canadians are themselves deprived of some of these charter rights when facing a quasi-criminal process with the possibility of loss of liberty through detention in a military barracks.

Clear questions of inequality have arisen here. There are problems with the bill that are fundamental to the kind of society we want to have, not just a few tweaks that we could have put into the bill and that the government has not done. This does go down to fundamentally what kind of society we want to have. This kind of inequality is being unfortunately cemented into other bills and other laws brought forward by the Conservative government.

I want to refer to some comments made by my colleague from Mount Royal recently on the occasion of the 31st anniversary of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

According to Justice Létourneau, soldiers are citizens and they should enjoy the same constitutional rights guaranteed by the charter as any other citizen.

This is what he said:

“We as a society have forgotten, with harsh consequences for the members of the armed forces, that a soldier is before all a Canadian citizen, a Canadian citizen in uniform.”

In other words, they should be able to count on all of the rights and protections that citizens enjoy in our country.

Referring to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the member for Mount Royal raised a question of privilege in the House this past March and expressed concern that the government is failing to live up to its own statutory obligation, which is expressed in section 4.1 of the Department of Justice Act.

In law, this is requiring that the government, that the Minister of Justice, examine each and every government bill introduced in the House to ensure it is consistent with the charter. That would seem like a simple step to respect our fundamental constitutional obligations as parliamentarians and as government in law-making and public policy-making.

How often has the government actually done that? How often has the government checked and done a review to ensure that its bills introduced in the House are consistent with the charter and receive the constitutional seal of approval? How often has the government reported any inconsistencies, or otherwise, to the House?

Does anybody have an answer to that question?

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, this issue is clearly related to health and the well-being of Canadians and people all over the world. It is not just a matter of the economy and the environment. It also plays a key role in the health of our people in the future.

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, could the member repeat the last part of his question?

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite has some arguments to make that completely ignore the fact that it is imperative to actually do something that works. The Conservative government has failed to do that. While positioning itself as a government that has gone half the way to meeting its obligations under its own rather weak targets, it turns out it was wrong. The Conservatives were actually calculating what would happen if oil and gas emissions and other carbon emissions skyrocketed and counting halfway down from that. They actually are on track to increasing emissions since 2005, not reducing them by 17% as they had proposed.

The International Energy Agency, which represents energy industries, says that low-carbon energy technologies must be developed, so we can avoid the potentially devastating effects of global warming.

That is the IEA saying that. What are the Conservatives doing besides trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the Canadian public?

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is a very accurate observation. The Conservatives ran twice, in 2006 and in 2008, on a promise to do a cap and trade system, which is a carbon market system, which is one of the principal ways of putting a price on carbon. Therefore it is true, the public must have perceived that the Conservative Party and its government might be willing to act, but unfortunately that was not the case.

Not only that, many of the organizations that are pointing at the best way to manage this and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is fair, effective and efficient are organizations like the government's own appointed National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. As soon as its members use the word “climate change”, that is it, it is history. This is not a government that anymore is interested in having advice and counsel on how to be effective.

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to tell the member that we implemented a number of real measures.

That is why greenhouse gas emissions levelled off in 2005 and began declining in 2006. That happened because measures were implemented and not because there was a recession. It happened because of real measures that were implemented by people in our society and major industries and also because there were negotiations with the provinces. In addition, communities began putting in place measures to decrease their emissions.

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I think I may have hit a bit of a nerve on the other side of the aisle. I have not seen the Minister of Canadian Heritage this excited in a long while. I would note that it is out of the mouth of that member that some very negative characterizations of the public have come, not from mine. Perhaps that is what the member thinks of the public.

However, I will answer one part of that diatribe and that has to do with our carbon resources. Our carbon resources are important assets and it is the oil and gas industry itself that is saying it wants a level playing field. It is the industry itself that is saying pricing carbon through a carbon tax is actually a more cost-effective way than through this cumbersome, red tape, regulatory framework that the government is talking about and has yet to even launch. Seven years of government and it has done nothing.

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have an opportunity to be part of this important debate on an important subject: climate change. However, I am also very disappointed to have a debate that is predicated on one of the parties in the House, the New Democratic Party, playing politics with such an important issue. The time is long past when we should be using this as a topic to divide parties, to insert into the motion some text that makes it an egregious insult to those in the Liberal Party of Canada who have done so much good work on this issue and have advanced this issue so far. Frankly, this is not worthy of the good intentions and the integrity of the members of the New Democratic Party. I was very disappointed to see this issue being used in this way.

The time to debate the science of climate change is over. Apparently there are some Conservative members who are speaking out because perhaps they still think that climate change science should be denied or mistrusted. Frankly, they are in such a small minority on this planet at this point that they are marginalizing themselves.

What we have is an issue that crosses countries, crosses cultures and crosses everything. It is a human species issue. As a species, we need to co-operate to solve this issue. This issue is so complex that it touches people in the whole range of our society, the whole range of the global community, and we need to work co-operatively together. We cannot advance on this issue with the kind of divisive tactics that frankly this motion itself embodies. That is my disappointment.

It is not a Canadian issue; it is a global issue. The atmosphere does not have national boundaries. We will be experiencing the effects of American, Chinese, French and every other country's greenhouse gas emissions, and vice versa. This is an issue that is costing lives. It is costing species, and it is costing the security of our future on this planet.

It is not just low-lying islands such as Tuvalu or low-lying deltas in South Asia; it is also the forests of British Columbia, where we have 70 million cubic metres of pine that have been decimated by changing climate and warmer winters. It is not just the floods in Manhattan that cost billions; it is also floods in Winnipeg, in first nations communities around Winnipeg, and in low-lying suburbs of greater Vancouver. It is not just droughts in the mid-west or the huge costly drought in Australia and China; it is also droughts in the Nicola Valley in British Columbia, droughts that are costing the Okanagan Valley wineries and having an impact on the Great Lakes and Lake Winnipeg.

Salmon is the iconic species of British Columbia and first nations. We saw a 90% drop in the Fraser River sockeye salmon returns, and climate change is part of that impact. Do we accept a world in which we might not have salmon in British Columbia in 50 years because of acidification of our ocean, because of the warming of the streams in which those young salmon fry have to survive and because of the change in the food cycle that nourishes the salmon when they come into the ocean? That is impacting our salmon right now, and the situation is already desperate for many salmon species.

We are in a race against time. The climate change issue is urgent.

Canadians and people around the world are driving a car with a broken engine. Arguing about it is not going to fix anything. We need to work together to have a car that will win this race, because it is a race for humanity.

It is not just future generations as some theoretical concept. It is the people who are alive today. Think about the projections. There is a 10% chance that the vast majority of this planet will not be able to support human habitation—not be able to grow food, not have adequate fresh water, not have fish protein for human consumption—by the end of this century.

My niece's son is one year old. That means that he will be 88. It is the people alive today who are faced with the risks that our society is imposing on their future, and that is completely unacceptable. We need to co-operate to deal with this. We cannot keep playing political games, which this motion embodies.

The motion talks about a grave concern about the impact of a 2° rise in global average temperature. For all the lack of commitment on the Conservative Party's part, that party did sign the Copenhagen accord. The Copenhagen accord, which is operational immediately, states:

We underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. We emphasize our strong political will to urgently combat climate change in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

Where is the urgency in the government's action? There are urgent communications that try to convince Canadians that it is doing something, when, in fact, it is taking us backward with every month that passes. In the Copenhagen accord the Conservative government signed, it further states:

We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and as documented by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with a view to reduce global emissions...so as to hold consistent with science and on the basis of equity. We should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible...

This is what the Conservatives actually signed, but what they are doing is completely antithetical to that supposed commitment. Unfortunately, this is a government that has consistently embarrassed Canada on the international stage and has been obstructive in climate change negotiations,. It has even ripped up its binding legal international agreement under Kyoto.

One would think that it is not an issue of concern to take that kind of step and smear Canada's reputation on the world stage. One would think that would suggest that this is not an issue for the Conservatives. In fact, that is what their actions would suggest.

The new president of the International Monetary Fund has been very clear that climate change is one of the major economic threats facing the future of the global economy. The government does not seem to consider it a concern at all.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, a former Conservative finance manager of France, stated that the real wild card in the pack of economic pivot points is “increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption”. As I said, she called climate change “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century”. That is something one would imagine the Conservative government would actually take account of. On the contrary, this is a government that has a focus on accelerating the development of Canada's fossil fuel commodities, from oil sands to shale gas to coal, at the expense of capturing virtually any of the market investment in the thriving clean energy market.

I am quoting from a study called Competing in Clean Energy. Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy. This is a market that is set to grow much more quickly than the other aspects of our economy. “In Canada, our venture capital investment”, especially from large institutional investors in terms of the clean tech sector, “has declined from around $3.3 billion in 2000 to less than $1 billion this year” with Canadian “companies securing only two per cent of clean energy patents granted in the United States since 2002 (compared to Korea’s five per cent, Germany’s seven per cent, Japan’s 26 per cent...).”

The advice of the Canadian clean energy sector is to have a level playing field, have some certainty for business, get rid of the subsidies for the oil and gas industry, subsidies that include the absence of a price on carbon, that include the absence of actually regulating that industry.

There has been a lot of talk but there has been no action. The Conservative government's plans in that regard are also considered to be amongst the most ineffective and costly approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I do want to add that there are enormous opportunities to take action on greenhouse gas emissions but there are also economic costs to not taking action, and not just environmental costs as the member for Etobicoke North has been so eloquently able to lay out for us today.

Those are the kinds of tariffs that other countries are putting in place, carbon taxes, like Japan's on our coal exports to Japan. Canada now has a massive wealth transfer of approximately $400 million every year into the Japanese treasury because Japan has a price on carbon and Canada does not. That is just the beginning.

Japan is poised to put the same legislation in place for oil, natural gas, and bitumen, so that for all of those products exported to Japan the Japanese government will collect a tariff. There will be a massive wealth transfer into the Japanese treasury, a competitor nation, because of a failure to act by the government in Canada.

I want to go to the section in this motion, “condemn the lack of effective action by successive federal governments since 1998 to address emissions and meet our Kyoto commitments”.

I will start by asking the member for Windsor West, who was celebrating the reductions that Lafarge cement has made. That is to be celebrated. In my province it is not just the cement industry, it was the aluminum industry, the pulp industry, the transportation industry, and the oil and gas industry.

These industries began to make changes to their processes and technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They started to do that back around 2000, because of the Liberal government's voluntary reduction registry. It worked. There was up to 35% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the pulp sector.

The idea that the Liberal government did nothing is completely fallacious. In fact, I was right at the table in those days. I was the environment minister in British Columbia from 2001 to 2004. I had a chance, not as a federal Liberal but as a member of a provincial government, to witness the activities of the federal Liberal government of the day.

What I want to say is that when we have an issue that is this woven through the fabric of our society and requires this much co-operation, it also requires education and understanding. That is what the Liberal government, from 1997, when it signed the Kyoto protocol, began to do. It began to educate the Canadian public who at that point did not know much about this.

I understand some members here have been deeply engaged in this issue for many years, not the ones who have been cackling from across the aisle, but some on this side of the House.

In fact, I wrote my Master of Business Administration thesis on just this issue in 1992.

However, the bulk of the public was not aware of the issue when the Liberal government began working on it, so part of what the government did was begin to bring the public on board and have public understanding of individual actions that could take place, co-operating with the public. Part of what the Liberal government did was work through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, FCM, so that the municipalities understood their role in it. They started to become champions for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Today, we see these municipalities and federations, whether they are provincial or countrywide, as leaders in greenhouse gas reduction because of their partnerships co-operating with the federal Liberal government of the day.

The Liberal government began working with industry, and began industry-by-industry negotiations so that the kinds of reductions that they would make would not harm their competitive chances or their businesses, but would contribute to greenhouse gas emission reductions. It worked, and it worked right across the country. Then they began working with provincial governments, and I was the representative of our provincial government. I witnessed the Liberals of the day in 2001, 2002, and 2003 undertake an extensive set of modelling.

How we can actually accomplish our goals in a way that is fairest for the provinces, the industry, and individuals, and is as cost-effective as possible? The modelling and those conclusions were then brought to me and to the provinces to reflect on, to analyze, and to give input on. Then, the modelling was redone, taking in the information provided by the provinces. That is called consultation. I know that the Conservative government of today does not even know that word. Why consult? It knows better than anybody about everything. Well, the Liberal government consulted and that is how it got the provinces on board.

In British Columbia, I had the privilege of leading an initiative that brought the captains of industry and others who were interested in the issue together to work with our cabinet on how we could move forward on it. Out of that, we came up with a climate change plan in 2004 that involved every ministry reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions and those of its partners.

Following that, in 2007, in the throne speech, the Government of British Columbia launched its greenhouse gas reduction plan, which is widely admired across North America today. An audit has shown that greenhouse gas emissions have actually declined by 15% since 2008 under the B.C. Liberal greenhouse gas reduction plan at minimal or no impact to the economy. That ties into the partnership that the federal Liberal government made with the provinces to create bilateral agreements to support the provinces in bringing forward their own plans and carrying out their own activities.

The Liberal government, in 2005, had project green, the final piece of its road map to action. It was a regulatory tool that would have accomplished the Kyoto targets had the Government of Canada not changed.

The Liberals did nothing? That is one of the biggest fictions of our politics today. The Liberals set the entire framework for the actions that have been carried out, and I was there as witness to it. British Columbia was on board because of it.

What happened next? What happened in the fall of 2005, when the Liberals were poised to put that last piece of the puzzle in place? The NDP made the decision that it knew better. It thought it would be better to have a Conservative government. It thought it would be better for climate change to have the current Prime Minister in charge. It would be better for Canada's reputation to pull down the government of the day and put a Conservative government into the driver's seat. What a mistake.

However, for the NDP to bring this motion forward, claiming that the Liberals did nothing, is the height of hypocrisy. It is very disappointing to me, as someone who works constructively, I would like to believe, with many members of the NDP.

I know my time is drawing to a close. I am just getting going here. I am having a lot of fun, but I remain highly disappointed that we have to have partisan wedge issue motions--

[Business of Supply, April 24th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my NDP colleague for her very clear and interesting speech. I appreciate her words of support for this motion, which strives to strengthen the individual freedoms of the members of the House.

I would just like to know if the member will support our motion, which speaks to an important aspect of the role of members. Will she vote in favour of this motion?

[Employment, April 24th, 2013]

That is simply not good enough, Mr. Speaker. I am trying to find out why the government abandoned young, unemployed Canadians.

Could he explain why the number of young people getting help through the youth employment strategy has plunged from 113,000 in 2005 to 50,000 today and why the youth unemployment rate is double the national average?

Instead of talking points, could the Prime Minister please justify why the Conservatives are killing job opportunities for Canada's youth and punishing middle-class families, all while inflating their own partisan advertising budget?