Linda Duncan

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, among the first nations chiefs I had the privilege of working with, one was Joe Johnson, the former chief of the Kluane First Nation. The many times I worked with him on his land claim, he told me stories of the trauma he felt from residential schools, how he suffered from having to work away from home in British Columbia, and how he wished that jobs could be provided along with healing services closer to his community.

He tried for many years to establish a healing centre and I am not sure if he ever managed. He just could not get the funding. I noticed that there is no money remaining for any healing centre in Yukon, only one in the Northwest Territories.

I am wondering if the member could speak to the need to provide healing centres close to the communities where first nations continue to work.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have had the absolute privilege of working in many jurisdictions in Canada. I have worked with first nations and Métis people in Alberta. I have worked with first nations and Métis people in Yukon.

Of all of my experiences in my life as a lawyer I could share a couple of profound experiences that really struck home to me personally why we need to provide these exact services, why the government which has unilateral responsibility for first nation peoples needs to be committing this. In the 1970s I witnessed a young aboriginal woman run into the middle of traffic. I pulled her out from there and saved her life and took her home to her family. That is when I had my first experience with the trauma that several generations of first nations are suffering.

I am told that the last healing centre open in Alberta is going to be in southern Alberta. How are those young people going to get to Lethbridge or to Cardston throughout the far north of Alberta to go to a healing centre?

[March 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, contrary to what the member alleges, I would like to suggest to the House that, in fact, what the government is doing is creating duplication. We now have the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in Canada whose singular role is to coordinate among the various federal agencies. So it is now creating three agencies we are supposed to coordinate.

The one thing that the Commissioner for Sustainable Development did recommend strongly in his 2009 report was that we should give the mandatory power to that agency to require the various agencies to actually respond in a timely fashion and that is what is causing the delays.

Another thing I would point is, yes, from time to time the National Energy Board does provide intervenor funding, but let me point out to the House the difference. In the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, where there is an environmental impact assessment, there is a mandatory obligation to provide public funding.

In the amendments in the new budget bill it is optional that those two authorities may provide intervenor funding. So, I do not call that a very fair system. It shows very clearly that we are going to have an unfair system when we are dealing with international pipelines and international exported power.

[March 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, on March 9, 2010, I asked the government why it was handing over even more environmental responsibilities from agencies legally mandated to protect the environment to agencies mandated to promote industrial development. In other words, why is the government putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse?

The recent budget clearly reveals the government's agenda to diminish the federal role in environmental assessments and regulatory controls over major projects when it declared its intent to “modernize the regulatory process”.

The first step by the government was creating the MPMO within the natural resources department. Despite several decades of a very effective role by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in coordinating environmental assessments and providing information on environmental review processes, the government in its wisdom established another agency to do precisely that role, but more from the perspective of pro the project. That was the first step.

The second step was in last year's budget where the government took a piece of the responsibility for federal environmental assessment under the Navigable Waters Protection Act and, instead of coming to an open public review to the House through the budget, did away with that responsibility for environmental impact assessment.

This time around, in the budget, the government is removing Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency oversight over nuclear and major energy projects, shifting coordination of those projects to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

In this year's budget, the government took an even greater broad brush exempting all of its infrastructure projects, recreation projects, projects on first nations lands, energy retrofits and rural infrastructure.

Absurdly, the Minister of the Environment may actually exempt a project that is exempted from federal assessment if that project may cause significant adverse environmental effects. But of course we can never figure that out because the government has already exempted the projects from environmental impact assessments.

Who has recommended this? When I asked the question, the reply from the minister was that a number of people have recommended these massive reforms to diminish the federal role in environmental impact assessments and to transfer that role from a long-standing federal environmental assessment agency, which has had a very magnanimous role, a very important role in co-operating with provincial governments and making sure that they were coordinated, to other agencies.

The minister responded that the commissioner for sustainable development, in his 2009 audit report, recommended this very change. His report, however, makes no such recommendation. He does concur that there could be more timely delivery and a screening of projects and so forth, and he recommends, as does the agency itself, that these matters ought to be reviewed by the parliamentary committee in their statutory required review which is coming up in several months.

The question that I would have again to the government is, why is it superceding the very review processes that are set out in federal law for the parliamentary committee to review changes to federal assessments, including law and policy, and instead doing it through a budget bill where there is very diminished opportunity for public input and comment?

[Petitions, March 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege to table a petition in the House on behalf of first nations people across Canada, including Swan Hills and Cold Lake, Alberta.

I am fully aware of the success story of these healing centres and the hard work of first nations people to establish them. They beg the government to continue this process. Ten years is not enough to deal with the many generations of people suffering from the abuse at residential schools.

[The Environment, March 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, after years of drought and unmitigated industrial expansion, Albertans know how precious water is and yet, after four years in power, the Conservative government's actions to protect our water amounts to a drop in the bucket.

In honour of the United Nations World Water Day, will the government finally table the long promised aboriginal safe drinking water law, a law to ban bulk water exports, and assert federal powers to address serious climate and pollution threats to Canada's precious water?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 22nd, 2010]

Oops. Mr. Speaker, I would like to put a question to the hon. member in view of the question that was put to him from the member for Edmonton—Leduc.

The member and his party have spoken of their great support for innovation. It has been proven through empirical studies, one important one done by a group called NESCAUM, an association of eastern United States air monitoring organizations, that the empirically proven best trigger for investment in new clean technologies is regulation.

I would like to ask the member if he thinks that perhaps this budget has failed in that it has not come forward with the regulatory agenda, which will spur the investment, rather than using Canadian taxpayer dollars to subsidize the work of industry?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to put a question to the hon. member across the way for whom I have great respect. I think he does a great job on his committee—

[Business of Supply, March 17th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I will give the hon. member the opportunity to correct what I consider an incorrect statement made in his speech on the motion.

He stated that the business of government does not end on prorogation. In fact parliamentary hearings and the parliamentary committees are shut down, as were two critical hearings in my committee, about which the public was very upset. The government bills die.

Either this suggests a lack of sincerity in the government on the role of Parliament or on its own legislative agenda. Which is it?

[March 16th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I have done my homework and I have plowed through every line of the budget hoping to find some hope. I have not found it. Apart from the fact that the budget mostly talks about what the government did last year and does not give a lot of detail on what it will do this year, it also makes it clear what it is cutting.

If the government were truly committed to helping homeowners reduce their energy costs and reduce the need for building big, dirty generation facilities, it would extend that program over many years. I think it would get lots of letters of support from homeowners in Canada. If it really cared about small business, why not extend that program to small businesses? They need the savings right now, when they are suffering in the recession.

How can the member claim that the clean energy fund is working toward clean electricity, when the only thing it is financing is the subsidization of the coal fire power industry and two oil and gas companies to test one technology? Not a cent of that fund is going into really investing in renewable power. As a result, I am told by the sector that the investment is all going south, with the exception that some provinces have taken the initiative the government has not taken to genuinely give incentives for moving toward cleaner electricity generation.

For the forestry sector and pulp and paper, we absolutely need to give them incentives, including incentives to go to cogeneration. However, the member should check into the litigation going on in Alberta right now. The industry that has tried to move to cogeneration and would like to tie into the grid cannot compete with coal-fired power on the spot market.

I would encourage the member to examine in more detail the way the deregulated electricity regime is run in Alberta. It is not a fair game, and there needs to be a lot more federal support going in. We need to talk to the provincial government to get them on board on this agenda.

I would add to that the cutting—