Megan Leslie

[Justice, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, earlier today the minister doubled down on his comments, saying that women have a greater bond with their children. Well, women have babies. This is not news. What is news is the minister's disrespectful attitude, his government's failure to accept responsibility for the appointment of women and minorities to the courts. The Minister of Justice is blaming them for not applying. I am not looking for an apology here. Can the minister outline what actions he is taking and has already taken to ensure our courts are more representative of our communities?

[Justice, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, dinosaurs still walk among us.

According to the Minister of Justice, there are not enough women and visible minorities in the top jobs in our courts because they do not apply for those positions. Instead they stay home with their children because they have a greater bond with them.

Why does the president of the old boys' club not try to achieve gender equality in our courts instead of talking nonsense?

[Privacy, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, he said, “I always respect the decision of the Supreme Court.” When the government gets a decision that it does not like from the court, the Conservatives ignore it altogether, they make stuff up, or they attack the courts.

The Supreme Court was clear. Collecting personal data without a warrant, something the minister has defended, is in fact unconstitutional. Instead of respecting that decision, he turned around and misled the House and claimed it as a victory. Well, he is wrong.

Will the minister now accept that the only legal way to protect our children and respect legitimate privacy rights is to split Bill C-13?

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker it is an exciting idea to create a national park in an urban space. I have been waiting for this legislation, because it has been promised for a while. I have to say I have been waiting for the speech, because the bill was just tabled on Friday, the departmental briefing was yesterday, and I have not even had time to do a proper analysis of the bill; so I was really looking forward to the speech today to figure out some details about it.

I am very disappointed that the minister is not the first to speak to this. I am also disappointed that more than half the speech was about the conservation plan and not about this park.

I have so many questions, but this is the question that I would love to have answered right now. We have a National Parks Act that says, “Maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity...shall be the first priority of the Minister...”.

The Ontario Parks Act, where this park is located, says that these areas “...shall be managed to maintain their ecological integrity...”.

The Rouge Park management plan says “The vision of the park has, as its primary focus, the continuing health and integrity of natural systems and habitats....in protecting the ecological integrity of the Rouge River watershed.”

The bill before us says, “The Minister must...take into consideration the protection of its natural ecosystems...”. How is taking consideration of a natural ecosystem actually going to fulfill the focus of all these other policies and pieces of legislation?

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that makes me a little shy. I thank my colleague for the great work she does, standing up for her constituents here in the House. We sit close to each other, and she talks to me a lot about environment, the hopes and passions of her constituents around the issue of environment.

In 2015, first up on the endangered species list would be Conservative MPs.

It is easy enough to talk about some of the big-picture visionary things we would do. For example, we would put a price on carbon; we would bring back the ecoENERGY home retrofit program; we would take that $1.3 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies, which do not need our help to make money, and we would transfer that money to the new, incredible, innovative start-ups in the green tech industry.

Why are we subsidizing companies that are making billions of dollars, and not giving that leg up to those great new start-ups in the green tech world that will help us make the transition to the green energy economy?

Some of this is a little tougher. When it comes to CEAA, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, would we bring back the old bill? There were actually problems with the old bill, so we would make sure we consulted with people, consulted with scientists, and consulted with experts, and took that evidence before we made those decisions.

It will be tough. Mark my words. Government has done a fantastic job of absolutely gutting our scientific capacity. It is going to be hard. I do not know that we have the scientific capacity right now. We need to start by rebuilding that scientific capacity and then taking that information and actually making changes to legislation.

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the member for Jeanne-Le Ber for his question and also for his incredible advocacy on environment in this House. He stands up for the interests of his constituents. They care very much about the environment, as does he.

The member brings up a good point, about the fact that it is not about a species. It is not about a tiny tract of land that we can protect. It is about these full ecosystems. As I said earlier, how can we protect a fish if we are not protecting its habitat and if we are not protecting the fish that it eats or its other food sources? There is a chain here, and we have to look at things in this chain, in this holistic way.

Speaking about fish habitat, we heard very quick testimony at committee during those omnibus budgets on changes to the Fisheries Act. We heard quick testimony. We were sitting until quite late at night. There was a limited amount of time and a limited number of witnesses we could actually bring to testify.

However, we brought those witnesses. Some of them, representing incredible science-based organizations, said that the answer is no. The answer is not making an amendment to this. The answer is no; this change cannot be made, about protecting fish habitat.

We did the responsible thing. We moved amendments. I cannot remember how many hundreds, but there were hundreds of amendments. Not one was accepted. Not a single one was accepted. We do our due diligence on this side, but unfortunately the Conservatives are not listening.

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I will answer it, but I first want to get to the point on why I moved a concurrence motion on this topic. Any chance we have to talk about climate change in this House is a chance that I will take. We have a Minister of the Environment who, until I asked her a direct question in the House after her appointment, had never publicly uttered the words “climate change” that we can find on the record. Therefore, I will take any moment I have to talk about climate change, which I think is the most important issue facing us today.

When I was appointed the environment critic by Jack Layton, I asked what my mandate was. He said, “climate change”. This was the thing I had to work on. It is the most important thing. However, there are other important things going on, and the question about pipelines is relevant.

One thing I did not talk about in my speech was how agitated the Conservatives get any time someone talks about the Species at Risk Act. It is like they visibly start to twitch, because they do not want to talk about that act, which is directly related to pipelines, and oil and gas exploration generally.

If we look at the sage grouse, I think there are 12 left in Alberta. Why? It is because they need big spaces to roam, and those big spaces are being interrupted by oil and gas development. If we look at something like pipelines, the fact is that they can bifurcate the existing grazing area of caribou, which is a species at risk. However, the Conservatives do not want to talk about this.

When we talk about conservation, especially terrestrial conservation, we have to talk about the full ecosystem, which includes animals. I think that we did miss an opportunity to talk about the impact of pipelines on our conservation efforts.

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

It is a conspiracy, Mr. Speaker. We are not protecting fish. We can destroy their food source, we can destroy their breeding grounds, we can have a fish with three heads and that is okay, as long as we do not kill them. We can kill a lot of fish, just not the protected fish that do not exist and that are secret. It makes no sense that we have done this to one of the greatest environmental protections that we had.

We did a study on terrestrial conservation. Why? We do not want to talk about fish habitat because it agitates the Conservatives when people come and say that it was a bad decision, that we are not going to have a fishery anymore if we do not protect fish habitat.

We have a very narrow study on terrestrial habitat. The terrestrial habitat conservation in Canada report that came out had no mention of fish habitat. I will say that the New Democrats were crafty. We talked about that liminal space between the terrestrial habitat and the marine habitat, and we managed to get some soggy land in some of the testimony. We asked, “What about that soggy area in between the lakes and the land?” That soggy area can sometimes be fish habitat. We were tricky and we managed to get in some important information about fish habitat.

We have a supplementary opinion to this report. It is a dissenting opinion that is on the record. It is worth a read. It is two pages. I want to point out that one of the things we said clearly was that there is no greater threat to our ecosystems or barrier to habitat conservation than climate change. There was significant consensus from witnesses on the need to address climate change issues in order to protect our biodiversity, and to design strategies for habitat conservation and the preservation of biodiversity in the context of a changing climate.

The Conservatives can control the reports. They can control the outcome. They can control what it is that they say happened at committee, but they cannot change committee witness testimony. They cannot change the fact that we had witnesses saying that we need to address climate change if we are going to do anything about habitat conservation in Canada.

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

What about the other fish, Mr. Speaker? That is a great question. They are not protected. What about the fish that the protected fish eat? They are not protected. If we talk to anybody at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, they cannot tell us what fish are on the list. It does not exist. They do not know which fish are protected. It is a secret. Secret fish are being protected. Their food stock is not being protected.

[Committees of the House, June 19th, 2014]

It is incredible, Mr. Speaker. Now we are not protecting fish habitat. We are protecting fish, but not all fish. We are only going to protect fish that we name, and they are going to be fish that are of commercial significance, first nations significance, and recreational significance.