Keith Martin

[Interparliamentary Delegations, June 2nd, 1999]

That is correct, Mr. Speaker.

[Interparliamentary Delegations, June 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present Motion No. 634, that in the opinion of this House, all parliamentary secretaries be removed from all standing committees and that they not be allowed to be on these committees again. The reason is that they have become mouthpieces—

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her question.

We are supporting this bill because something is better than nothing. We are putting forth constructive leadership solutions that the government can take if it chooses, which exist not only within our country, within our own departments, but also internationally. These measures could dramatically improve the environmental programs which I hope the government would like to pursue.

There is so much more that we could do on the environment that we are not doing. Again, pragmatic solutions exist. They are found in South Africa, Central America, Europe, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The World Bank is starting to institute some fine programs. Indeed, the World Bank is engaging in a very innovative program of marrying the private sector with the public sector. It has taken as an example what UNICEF has done in Botswana, which has taken a leadership role on this issue. I encourage the government to look at what Dr. Steve Simon, the UNICEF representative in Botswana, has done on this issue. It has been really innovative.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, in my view Bill C-32 misses the mark completely. Sustainable environmental management are pretty words but they lack substance. What the World Wildlife Fund did in Belize, Central America, and what was done in KwaZulu/Natal are models of sustainable environmental management. Unfortunately we have not adopted this in our country. We have not embraced the concept, nor have we, in my view, engaged companies in the private sector to make them understand the benefits on their bottom line of having stable socioeconomic conditions and a stable environment. If that stabilization takes place, it will translate into more money on their bottom line.

I would be happy to speak to the member at length, but I draw his attention to those examples because they have saved dozens of species of flora and fauna and indeed have improved the health and welfare of the people, which has resulted in greater profits for the companies working in those areas.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-32. After what I have heard today I must say the government is falling far short of the commitments it has made. I bring to the attention of the House numerous studies on the abysmal activities of the government on the environment.

Unfortunately I only have 10 minutes so I will get to the heart of the matter. The Department of the Environment has been an utter failure in the enforcement, monitoring and control of the environmental policies it has enacted. I will divide the environment into two sections: domestic and international.

The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development put forth a very concise and specific report with specific solutions on how to revamp and improve the environment within our country and our activities abroad. After all, as we know, the environment is transboundary. It affects not only ourselves but other countries in the world.

In the first part, managing toxic substances, over 23,000 substances have been approved. Many of them were approved before 1960, which means we really do not know the effects of these substances on human health. We need to re-examine that.

One of the greatest obstacles toward a sustainable environmental program is the lack of co-ordination between departments and within departments. Turf wars, lack of co-ordination, lack of common vision, lack of agreement and lack of a dispute resolution mechanism on agreements have ensured that the agreements reached are unenforceable, are not being listened to, and are simply in many cases not worth the paper they are written on.

That is an issue of public service, public management and the failure of management in many of the ministries today. There is the lack of monitoring and the unfulfilled commitments. Commitments are made but not adhered to.

How can we have a sustainable environmental policy when the government's own departments are simply not listening to what they have been told to adhere to? Furthermore, no one is monitoring them and no one is saying that if two departments are not agreeing on something an independent dispute mechanism will be put in place to ensure that they do. If that were to happen it would go a long way to fulfilling the commitments we have made on the environment.

There is no common vision and there is a lack of consensus among departments. The commissioner said that the single greatest impediment to a sustainable environmental policy was the lack of departmental co-ordination which exists today.

On the issue of federal-provincial agreements there is no ongoing analysis of whether the federal and provincial governments are actually fulfilling the commitments they have made. No one is watching them. There are no dispute resolution mechanisms among provinces or between the federal government and the provinces.

Commitments are made and no concrete action is taken. Only 11% of the commitments made by departments have been fulfilled. Some 89% have not been fulfilled. There is a lack of co-ordination among departments and inadequate review is endemic.

We need to turn talk into action. The federal government has 64,000 buildings, 25,000 vehicles, and disposes of 95,000 tonnes of waste every year. The commissioner said that if the government were to adhere to the principles that have been put forth it would save taxpayers some $300 million over the next 30 years, not to mention making our streets, our air and our land a lot safer for everyone.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We can look at what is happening in other countries. In the Netherlands and Denmark the agricultural sector has done an outstanding job of putting together concise environmental plans. The World Bank is starting to do it. South Africa has done an outstanding job with respect to its endangered species legislation and in terms of garnering, improving and expanding habitat.

With the consent of the House I will be sharing my time with the member for Elk Island.

Internationally we have to look at what will happen in the future. There is an increasing population growth rate. Currently our world population is 6 billion people. In the middle of the next century the world population will hit 11 billion. How will we make sure that we have an environment that is liveable with a population of 11 billion? People will strive for an improved standard of living.

The largest democracy in the world, India, has an incredibly expanding middle class that will number over 300 million people in the next century. Approximately 300 million people, 10 times the population of Canada, will be demanding the same standard of living as we have. That will put an extraordinary demand upon not only renewable, but also non-renewable resources. If we do not institute sustainable environmental policies and adhere to those policies we will have a degraded environment in which it will simply not be worth living.

Some, such as Tad Homer Dixon from the University of Toronto Institute of Conflict Studies, have claimed that the diminishing of non-renewable resources will result in conflict. We can see as an example the water situation in the Middle East and how this is an issue on which wars may be fought. It is something that we need to look at and, indeed, the countries in the area need to look at very carefully.

On the issue of endangered species the government's behaviour is abysmal. This issue affects not only the federal government, but also the provinces. Because of the balkanization of our country, how things have been divided between the federal government and the provinces, there is an enormous amount of overlap between those two levels of government, as well as the municipalities, and endangered species are not being protected.

The federal government's great tome to endangered species is to protect less than 5% of the land in this country. That is nothing. Species rely upon land to survive. The degradation of land, damage to the environment and the shrinkage of their habitat are the greatest threats to these species.

I know there are members across the way who feel very passionately about this. The federal government clearly needs to work with the provinces in developing a strategy that will involve a much larger area of land over which the federal government or the provinces, one or the other, will have distinct control so that laws can be applied, people will adhere to them and the laws will be enforced.

There are two topics I would like to broach. One is co-ordination between government and the private sector. Not enough has been done about that. Again I bring up the subject of South Africa. The people of the province of KwaZulu/Natal have done an outstanding job of marrying the needs of the private sector and the public sector. Co-operation between the private and the public sectors has led to a huge increase in habitat and has greatly improved the safety of the flora and fauna. It is the last repository for large mammals in that area of the world. If it was not for what has been done in that province, many of these mammals would have been extinct a long time ago, as well as much of the flora.

I ask the government to look at the innovative ways in which South Africa has engaged in public-private partnerships and conservancies and how the parks and habitat have been used to benefit the people in the surrounding area. This has done a great deal for the sustainable environment program, which has benefited people as well as the flora and fauna and the environment.

The government needs to turn talk into action. It needs to implement the strategies. It needs to monitor the strategies. It needs to establish clear targets. It needs to develop interdepartmental co-ordination, not the hodge-podge situation we have now, with the infighting which is making the environmental policy of the government a pox on its house.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the parliamentary secretary. There are over 23,000 substances in the country today. Many were found acceptable prior to the 1960s when our ability to analyse their effects on human health were less than they are today. What does the parliamentary secretary feel about that?

The departments have made commitments to engage in sustainable environmental actions but only 11% of those actions are being fulfilled. What will the government do to ensure that governments live up to the commitments they said they would live up to?

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the government has over 64,000 buildings, over 25,000 vehicles and disposes of over 90,000 tonnes of waste every single year. It was also stated that the government could save over $300 million over 30 years if it was able to adhere to the principles of sustainable environmental consumption that it agreed to but is not fulfilling.

How is the hon. member's government going to ensure that the federal government and the ministries themselves adhere to sound environmental principles and save $300 million and a lot of waste?

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her fine speech. I have a number of questions for her.

Much of this comes from the work by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development who excoriated the government in many ways on its failure to co-ordinate interdepartmental activities on the issue of sustainable environmental management and on the issue of developing a common policy and a hearing for those policies. The indictment was quite scathing. It went all the way from a lack of interdepartmental co-ordination to a lack of agreement. In fact the commissioner said that the single greatest impediment to fulfilling and living up to our agreements within our country is interdepartmental warring, a lack of co-ordination between departments on a horizontal level and within a department on a vertical level.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague what does her government plan on doing to rectify this very important problem that we have within the government today?

[Criminal Code, May 28th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague allowing me to share his time.

Again I would like to compliment the hon. member for Surrey North on all the hard work that he and my colleagues have done in trying to change the justice system to make it a more realistic, pragmatic and effective justice system to ensure that there will be a balance: those people who are a danger to society will be dealt with strongly and forcefully so they will not be able to victimize innocent civilians again and new initiatives can be utilized to prevent crime from occurring. That is something in which my colleagues and members of other political parties have been taking a leadership role. I hope that one day the government will listen.

Bill C-79 has some very important points in it in terms of ensuring that victims have rights. It ensures that we will be able to make a change to reverse what a Liberal government did some years ago. I want to bring to the attention of members that in the early 1980s the justice minister of the then Liberal government said “From now on we are going to change our justice system from one of protecting society to one of rehabilitating the criminal”. As a result, we have seen the faith of the public and the police forces in the system substantially eroded. It is our job to change that; not to do it in a grossly punitive and blind fashion, but to do it in a manner which strikes the balance that I spoke of earlier.

We have to ensure that victims have a greater role within the justice system than the convicted. In many cases we have seen convicted criminals who have greater access to social programs, rehabilitation and care than the people they victimized. I can tell members of some tragic cases of families, adults and children who have been victimized and left out in the cold alone with little or no help, while the person who victimized them receives the lion's share of the help.

We believe that should change. The first priority of the justice system should be the protection of innocent civilians. The second priority should be to ensure that those who have been victimized are taken care of and get the help which they require. The third priority should be to ensure that rehabilitation takes place so that we can break the cycle of crime, punishment and incarceration that we have been unsuccessful in accomplishing in so many unfortunate cases.

The other side of the coin is how we deal with people who are in the justice system now and what we can do to prevent these situations from occurring. I draw the attention of the House to the National Crime Prevention Council. This council was enacted by edict from the justice department. It has done excellent work in looking at ways in which we can prevent crime. I want to outline a pragmatic way of doing it, which is to implement a national headstart program.

This program was in a motion that was passed in the House last year. The motion was based upon existing programs that work, such as the Hawaii healthy start program, the Ypsilanti Perry preschool program and the Moncton headstart program which the Minister of Labour and her husband took a leadership role in constructing in 1974.

These programs are modelled under the premise that if we can ensure that children have in the first eight years of life their basic needs met, then those children have a greater chance of developing a normal psyche than those who are subjected to child abuse, violence or more subtle negative factors such as improper parenting.

If we ensure that children have their basic needs met, if we also ensure that parents have the parenting skills to be able to do the job, to raise their children in a well defined system with boundaries and good discipline, where their children are in a caring, loving and secure environment and where they have proper nutrition, then those children have the greatest opportunity of being well adjusted, productive, integrated members of society.

That is the model and the basis of the three programs that I mentioned. Do they work? Let us take a look.

In the Hawaii healthy start program the child abuse rate dropped 99%. What they did was very innovative, which I think we can do in our country. They brought mentors, women who had children and good parenting skills, and they linked them up with parents who had children at risk. By engaging in this mentoring program, by developing a trusting and secure relationship with these families, we saw a 99% reduction in child abuse, massive drops in drug abuse rates and an improvement in the socioeconomic welfare of these families. It was a huge saving for the taxpayer.

In the Perry preschool program, which has been in existence for some 30 years, there has been a $6 saving for every $1 invested. There has been a 50% reduction in youth crime. There has been a 40% reduction in teen pregnancy, which, as we know, unfortunately is usually a one-way route to poverty for both the mom and the baby. We have seen children stay in school longer, with less dependence on welfare, which again results in savings to the taxpayer of $6 for every $1 invested.

The Moncton headstart program, which the Minister of Labour championed with her husband, has shown similar effects. All three of these programs are based on the premise that if we work with parents and families, if we ensure that their basic needs are met and if we encourage them and teach them how to do this for their children, we have a better, more integrated, safer and productive society because individuals are able to develop their psyches in a normal fashion.

It is not a guarantee that this is going to happen by any stretch of the imagination, but the cold, hard facts prove that headstart works. If this government is serious about preventing crime, it can do this.

I am calling for over 70 groups in the country to put pressure on the federal government to enact a national headstart program using existing resources. We can use the medical community at time zero, because every pregnant woman goes to the doctor to have prenatal exams, and then we can address issues such as drug abuse. Hopefully by doing that we can prevent the devastating effects that fetal alcohol syndrome have on our society.

Secondly, we could use the mentoring programs in the middle years, from the time the child is born until about age four, and then use the school system between the ages of four and eight.

The Moncton program was ideal in that it brought parents into the school system. Parents came to the classroom once a week to learn basic essentials, such as proper discipline, setting boundaries and proper nutrition. They would learn that a bag of chips and Coca Cola is not dinner and is bad for the child.

That is what we are asking the federal government to do. That is what we are pushing for. We started a massive campaign last week to push the government to pursue this. It is a win-win situation for everybody.

I will digress a little on the issue of victims. As we said before, victims need rights. Victims need to be appropriately represented within the justice system. They do not at the present time have official status. My colleague from British Columbia, our House leader, has put forth a victims bill of rights that would entrench the rights of the victim. I hope the government pursues this because it is an act of fairness.

I also want to ensure that the government listens very clearly to us to ensure that victims get the care which they require because they are not getting it now. They are being excluded from the social services that they need to patch up the sometimes extraordinary damage that has been inflicted upon them through assault, rape, battery, abuse and so on.

We have an opportunity to truly put balance into the justice system. I hope the government takes it. I also hope that it listens to our judiciary. I hope it listens to the police departments who are saying very clearly, as the police chief from Vancouver said as a parting shot before he left, that we have a revolving door justice system. Criminals come into the justice system who have made some serious errors. Some of the hardest criminals go into the system and are tossed out the other end as quickly as they came in. Justice is not being served.

If we separate those high risk criminals who are dangerous to society and put the full force of the law against them, we will be saving people's lives. If we take the rest who are low risk people and try diversionary tactics, diversionary methods through the justice system, if we try alternative methods to ensure that they pay back and engage in restitution with their victims and society, we will have a chance of building a safer, fairer society for all.

[Criminal Code, May 28th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, what initiatives does my colleague feel can be taken to ensure that victims have a greater say within our justice system? Does he feel the federal government should move away from focusing on the rehabilitation of criminals to protecting innocent civilians?