Maurice Vellacott

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have some questions for the member opposite with respect to his speech. I will be quoting Robin Sears, the former NDP campaign director. He makes a few comments with reference to the NDP and also with respect to the Liberals. He said:

Various New Democrats' filings reveal that in their more centralist structure, more money flows up than down, but they too mix national and local spending freely....

Many Liberals and New Democrats are horrified by all of this. They know that it could be their turn next.

I think it is important as we look at the matter before us today to be aware that all the parties were involved in similar types of transactions. I think it is quite safe to say that in regard to numerous constituencies across the country, mine included. I have in four elections run national advertisements with the little tag at the bottom. It is not really the right of Elections Canada to decide if I am to use hot air balloons or ads on the back of men's bathroom stalls at the university. That is my choice and it is in terms of the funding of it as well, or if the national party deems to give me money in that respect. I would suggest to the member that this is something that other parties have been involved in. He would want to respond to that.

[Criminal Code, April 16th, 2008]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-537, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (protection of conscience rights in the health care profession).

Mr. Speaker, this conscience clause private member's bill would prohibit coercion in medical procedures that offend a person's religion or belief that human life is inviolable. The bill seeks to ensure that health care providers will never be forced to participate against their will in procedures such as abortions or acts of euthanasia.

Canada has a long history of recognizing the rights of freedom of religion and conscience in our country, yet health care workers and those seeking to be educated for the health care system have often been denied those rights in medical facilities and educational institutions. Some have even been wrongfully dismissed.

The bill would make those conscience rights explicit in law and would safeguard the fundamental human rights of health care workers.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, April 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite comes from Prince Edward Island. Not a lot of wheat, barley or such things are grown there.

Would he be advocating that wheat and barley straw, for purposes of the bill before us, be put under the Canadian Wheat Board, yes or no?

[Christian Population in Iraq, March 14th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday morning the body of Mar Paulos Faraj Rahho, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosel, was found riddled with bullets in northern Iraq. He was kidnapped in late February as he left church.

The death of Archbishop Rahho is a tragedy that illustrates the difficulties faced by Iraq's Christian population. This gruesome murder is just one example of the tragic persecution faced by Iraqi Christians. I would like to take this opportunity to draw the House's attention to the community's struggles.

Iraq's Christian population is dwindling in size because of this new wave of violence levelled against them. This community constitutes only a small fraction of Iraq's predominantly Muslim population. They are one of the oldest communities in Iraq, being distinguishable by their Christian religion, unique culture, and Aramaic language, which was spoken at the time of Christ.

Our government sends condolences to the Chaldean community and all the Christians of Iraq who suffer persecution.

[Petitions, February 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have a second petition from the good constituents of my riding of Saskatoon—Wanuskewin in Radisson, Langham, Saskatoon, Borden, and Dalmeny.

The petitioners are asking to draw attention to a particular concern that they have and that others share. In current federal criminal law an unborn child is not recognized as a victim with respect to violent crimes. When a pregnant woman is assaulted or killed in Canada there is no legal protection offered for unborn children and no charge can be laid.

The petitioners point out some polling results which show that 72% of Canadians, according to an Environics poll, support laws that would protect an unborn child from acts of violence against the mother and that also injure or kill the child.

The petitioners call upon Parliament to enact legislation which would recognize unborn children as separate victims when they are injured or killed during the commission of an offence against women, allowing two charges to be laid against the offender instead of only one. The petitioners ask for this particular protection in combating violence against women and their unborn children.

[Petitions, February 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, from the good constituents of Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, particularly the city of Saskatoon, Martensville, Borden, Langham and Warman, the good folks there, I wish to present a petition calling on Parliament to immediately hold a renewed debate on the definition of marriage, reaffirming as it did in 1999 that marriage is and should remain a union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.

The petitioners wish to state that Parliament should take the necessary steps to return to that traditional and heterosexual definition of marriage.

[The Budget, February 27th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, budget 2008 demonstrates responsible and prudent leadership but it also delivers for the people of Saskatchewan like never before under the old Liberal government.

In budget 2008, this Conservative government is building on the already significant support we have given Saskatchewan: $4.2 million for the cull breeding swine program; $10 million for Saskatoon's own Canadian light source synchrotron; $12 million to hire new front line police officers; $15 million to help improve public transit; $36 million to support vulnerable communities and laid off workers; $240 million for carbon capture and storage in Saskatchewan; and, the landmark tax-free savings account benefiting every Saskatchewan taxpayer.

All these measures and many more will make Saskatchewan and its residents big winners in budget 2008. No wonder Saskatchewan's premier, Brad Wall, is full of praise, saying that this demonstrates an understanding of Saskatchewan priorities by the Prime Minister and the MPs from the area.

We agree, for when it comes to understanding Saskatchewan, unlike the Liberals, we are up to the job and getting it done.

[National Sustainable Development Act, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to the bill put forward by the hon. member for Don Valley West.

I first want to put on the record that the Conservative government believes in sustainable development. We do not just give lip service to it. We have taken some real action in the areas of water, air quality and climate change, which is why we are implementing comprehensive regulations of industrial air emissions. For the first time ever, we will be regulating the big polluters so they do their part as well.

As I said, we are taking action on protecting the water quality across our country, including tough new regulations against the dumping of raw sewage into our lakes, rivers and oceans, and by improving sewage treatment in municipalities. I was kind of taken aback when I realized that we did not have laws in place in respect to that already. It just makes a lot of sense. I think most of the public would be quite appalled or taken aback if they knew that we did not already have laws in place, that 13 long years of Liberal governments had not put something in place or previous governments before that.

Now we are doing that. We also are regulating chemicals that are harmful to human health and to the environment. Our approach to toxic chemicals management leads the world.

It does not end there. We have done our best in terms of protecting Canada's natural heritage. In terms of those protected areas, major expansion is occurring as well.

We are also working on a new approach to sustainable development planning in Canada that builds upon the existing legislative framework, the framework that we already have. Indeed, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development has already made the point that significant improvements to the current process can be made within the existing legislative framework and with the existing tools that we have. All it really takes is the will to act and to move ahead on it.

When our Conservative government came into office, federal departments had started into the preparatory process for the fourth round of sustainable development strategies. The government acted to make immediate improvements where possible. The Minister of the Environment, in tabling the fourth round of sustainable development strategies, was clear that there was a lot more to be done in advance of the next round.

This Conservative government recognizes that what is needed is action, not more legislation, more paper and so on, and certainly not more time and money spent on government processes.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others have recognized Canada's current legislative tool as having a great deal of merit, even if it has suffered from some challenges in terms of its implementation.

It would be shortsighted to repeal what has the potential to be a real contribution to the federal planning process prior to completing a thorough analysis of it to determine how it might be better implemented. We have the tools needed to make substantial improvements for sustainable development and that is fully what we intend to be doing.

The proposed Liberal private member's bill that is before us today is unnecessary and it is problematic on a number of levels. Some of those have been sketched out already but I will draw members' attention to a few more.

First, the scope of the bill is unclear. Although it is called the national sustainable development act, the stated purpose of the legislation is to “...accelerate the elimination of major environmental problems and make environmental decision-making more transparent....”.

I am certain that my colleague is fully aware of the fact that the environment and sustainable development are not one and the same. They are not synonymous. To be sure, they are mutually exclusive, but there are some different facets involved.

Second, the bill calls for the government to enshrine a set of sustainable development goals in legislation. The legislation itself, however, contains two rather different sets of sustainable development goals. One is in the text of the bill and another one is in a schedule appended to the bill, the latter of which includes some vague goals that are outside the stated purpose of the bill, as in the preface, one of those being creating genuine wealth.

Third, the bill states in its title that progress would be reported in “against a standard set of environmental indicators”. However, those indicators are not mentioned anywhere in the bill, nor is there any mechanism noted for the development of those environmental indicators.

Furthermore, one of the sets of goals in the bill includes goals that are not environmental in nature. If the legislation really does mean for there to be environmental indicators, exactly how non-environmental goals can be measured against a set of environmental indicators is rather unclear.

A fourth point is that clause 13 of the bill calls for the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development to report on the state of the Canadian environment nationally and also by province and to report on progress in meeting each of the listed sustainable development goals nationally and by province on an annual basis relative to the performance of other industrialized nations.

What is troubling about this part is that the bill implicates the provinces in terms of reporting on both the state of the environment and on their progress in achieving the sustainable development goals. However, the bill does not provide for any tools to engage them in acting on the goals, such as by providing new resources, nor on the results of any report findings. This is quite unworkable and amounts to a recipe for conflict with the provinces and our territories.

Fifth, the timeframes associated with this piece of legislation are wholly unworkable. The government would be thrust into an ineffective cycle of continuous planning and preparing with no time left for implementation before the cycle would repeat itself again. The Conservative government believes in action, not just planning for action as the Liberals have sometimes done.

One of the most outstanding examples is in clause 10 which states:

Within 30 days after a National Sustainable Development Strategy is tabled in each House of Parliament, the Minister shall make regulations prescribing the targets and the caps referred to in the National Sustainable Development Strategy and revoke any regulations prescribing targets and caps referred to in the National Sustainable Development Strategy that was tabled previously.

Anyone familiar with the regulatory process, as the member no doubt is, knows that this is completely unworkable. Good pieces of legislation take time to prepare. There are notices and there are various things in that process. They require true and genuine consultations with the stakeholders. They are not something that can be drafted in just a matter of days.

A sixth problem with the bill before us today is that the process outlined for consultation in the bill in reference to the development of the national sustainable development strategy is ineffectual and unnecessarily onerous. It calls for consultations only once a draft of the strategy has already been written. Every guide to meaningful consultations will tell us that consultations need to be started early, well before the approach is decided upon in respect to what we are going to do.

The approach outlined in the legislation before us today only brings in consultations late in the process. It requires an onerous level of ministerial involvement and response, and is a staggering waste of time and resources for an uncertain result.

Regarding the ministerial duty to make regulations, this piece of legislation is highly and unnecessarily prescriptive. It enacts upon the minister a number of duties, leaving no room for ministerial discretion. It is unproductive and does not enable the minister to make effective improvements to the sustainable development planning process. Therefore, such rigidity is a hindrance to the process, not a help.

In summary, the bill is unnecessary. Its scope and its intent are unclear. The authorities and processes it describes are not thoughtful and not thought out in a clear and deliberate way.

What is needed to make progress on sustainability is not new legislation. It is the ability to set national federal level objectives in a reasonable manner and within workable timeframes, and to have a clear mechanism for measuring the government's progress. We can do that under existing legislation and with existing tools.

This Conservative government is committed to sustainable development. That is why we are taking concrete action to make improvements rather than spending time and resources on instituting new and unnecessary legislative processes. That is why we will not be supporting the bill. We feel it is flawed on a number of points as we have outlined here.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, November 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the member across the way talked a lot about promises in trying to harangue our members and actually members all around the House on the matter of keeping promises. However, let me ask him a direct question. Does the member intend to keep his promise to resign his seat and step away? Is that a pledge that he feels he should honour and follow through on for the members of his constituency?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 22nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as the member opposite has made reference frequently to the Nunn Commission, I will ask him specifically on a matter that he skirted around, when asked by my colleague just moments ago.

As the member opposite knows, in December 2006 the Nova Scotia Nunn Commission of Inquiry expressed concern that pre-trial detention provisions under the Youth Criminal Justice Act were too restrictive, making it very difficult to detain young persons who pose a risk to public safety.

As the member also knows, the changes before us today, the proposed amendments to the YCJA in the area of pre-trial detention, will make it easier to detain before trial a broader range of young persons who pose a risk to public safety. This would include those who have committed an offence that creates a danger of causing serious bodily harm or who have breached previous conditions of release.

Could the member respond to that? Does he not at least agree that this then follows through with respect to the Nunn Commission and that we have now a serious amendment to take into account the suggestion from the commission with respect to detaining young persons who pose a risk to public safety?