Nathan Cullen

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2010]

Madam Chair, that is simply not the case. When a company under Canadian law goes to do an exploratory well, just like the Deepwater Horizon, there is no regulatory requirement for an environmental assessment. There is no regulatory requirement for a cleanup plan. There are no specific regulatory requirements for any of these things. This is in fact the matter. This, in 2005, was given over by the NEB to say that these are objective based.

In 2009, the government moved to goal-based regulations from prescriptive ones. The terminology is important. In the U.S. the government requires the “best available and safety technology”, while in Canada the rules require that it be “adequate” and “reliably operating”. These are guidelines, not regulations. There are no regulations guiding this. Is the minister concerned at all about that fact?

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2010]

Madam Chair, in the gulf, British Petroleum was exempted from detailed environmental study because it thought a spill was unlikely and the spill response capability was not sufficient. In Canada this is not the exemption, it is the rule.

In 2005, oil companies were given the right not to do a comprehensive study at the exploratory drilling stage, which is what the deepwater was at, but just to hand over a two-page screening to the government. Is the government comfortable with such a weak environmental assessment of the potential damage from the drilling process?

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2010]

Madam Chair, I thank the minister for being here, and his fan club, too. I think if the minister were to announce the time, he would get a cheer. We have slightly higher standards on this side.

We have all been horrified by the British Petroleum leak. The government in the U.S. has decided to suspend all drilling for six months until it can be determined why the leak occurred in the first place. The minister said he was glad to see the U.S. suspend drilling. Is the government considering a similar measure here for Canada?

[Offshore Drilling, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, soon after the spill, President Obama announced a six month freeze on new drilling and a massive investigation into what exactly what wrong.

Meanwhile, the Conservative government continues to pretend that it was just an isolated accident that cannot happen here. However, the government's own regulator testified that a spill could happen in Canadian waters with the only difference being that it would be worse under our conditions.

Will the minister pull his head out of the tar sands long enough to realize that his agenda of gutting environmental protection and letting industry self-regulate is leading us to catastrophe?

[Offshore Drilling, May 31st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, last weekend, British Petroleum announced that its latest plan has failed. Thousands of gallons of oil continue to spew into the ocean unabated and the disaster in the gulf only gets worse.

The fact is that a similar or worse catastrophe could easily happen here. In this country, experts report that after years of deregulation, Canada actually has even weaker environmental laws than those governing the offshore in the U.S.

Will the minister finally take action to close this industry loophole, stop listening to his friends in the oil lobby and get on with the job of protecting Canadians?

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, here is the mismanagement of this particular industry by the government. We are aware of 120 new nuclear builds right now around the world and zero of them are coming to Canada and zero of them are being made by Canadian operations. That is 0 out of 120.

We would imagine that the government will address this bill this afternoon but I will make a prediction that it has no rationalization because it has presented no evidence and no reason to sell AECL right now and no reason to sell it this way. I will make a prediction that this afternoon, in the parliamentary secretary's speech, the government will continue to offer nothing to Canadians, nothing to the workers and nothing to those families who will be affected by this fire sale because it does not have any evidence. It does not have a process put in place to say that now is the best time to sell AECL for these following reasons: it studied it and asked around and this is the best deal for Canadians.

The government is doing it as a matter of convenience. The entire bill is about political expediency and convenience, ramming everything that it could not get individually through, put it all in one bill, hold up the threat of an election to the opposition and watch the Liberals cave again.

This is no way to run a country. It is undemocratic. If there is nothing more fundamental than that, I beg the government to reconsider the bill, break it up and allow us to have a debate.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, what the opposition members should be doing is their job. Our job, when we see irresponsibility and an unaccountable government, is to stand up and oppose that on behalf of Canadians who sent us here to do this.

We saw the Liberals at committee sneak one of their members out the back door to ensure that the vote would pass to allow Bill C-9 to come back to the House. We suspect that the same thing will happen here when the final vote on this outrageous bill comes.

We have seen this pattern of shutting down committees through the monkey-wrench manual the Conservatives produced. We saw it on the Afghan detainee documents. We saw it with the government's abuse of prorogation, shutting down the entire Parliament when questions arose that the government did not like.

Just the other day we finally had it confirmed where the Conservatives learned it from. They justified this bill, this outrageous abuse of democracy, by saying that the Liberals did it. They learned too well at the feet of the Liberals when they were in power and said that they did not like all the debate business, the discussions, the counterpoints and the views so they just rammed things through. That is not a lesson the Conservatives should have learned from the previous government and they should unlearn it quickly.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately it is seven minutes. We are always in a deficit of time here, particularly when dealing with something as outrageous and undemocratic as what we have contained in these near 900 pages of Bill C-9.

I say undemocratic because within this Trojan Horse of a bill, the government has conspired to lump in just about everything it found to be too distasteful to see the light of day. Rather than have a fair debate about each of these important measures, and there are two or three that are actually laudable but the vast majority are not, the government has decided to make a Trojan Horse, an omnibus bill in which everything is crammed, and then point the gun of an election at the opposition to force a vote on something that probably many members in the official opposition, the Liberals, find distasteful as well, but will obviously cave into once the vote actually comes, because that has become a call-in response from the government almost since time immemorial. The government suggests something, the Liberal Party says that it does not like it, the government dares it to go to an election, and the Liberal Party gets out of the way as fast as it can and votes with the government again. It is a coalition by default and by any other name and function.

I will list for Canadians what is in this bill that we find so outrageous. One thing on the list is the sale of AECL. Yesterday 130 workers from AECL were here in Parliament, in the galleries watching the debate, demanding some sort of fairness. What struck me most in meeting with the workers after question period was how abandoned they felt by their government that would not even allow a fair and free democratic vote on the idea of selling their corporation. It is the largest crown corporation in Canada. It has received more money than any other crown corporation in history, some $22 billion of Canadian taxpayer dollars. The legislation says that when the government seeks to sell it, it must bring it before Parliament in a separate bill.

What did the government do? It went around the rules and the legislation and rammed it into Bill C-9 so there can be no debate about the sale of AECL. There can be no bringing of witnesses to hear whether it is a good thing for Canadians or this is in fact a fire sale of a crown asset.

The government, of course, will not get that $22 billion back. It will get far less, but maybe what is worse is that with no debate, no discussion and no evidence, the government presents nothing about the likely brain drain of the experts who work around AECL to competitors who do not support the Candu reactor system. This was expressed clearly by the workers who were here recently. What are they going to do and who will do the upkeep on the Candus that Canada currently has on the books? That is just one piece of this outrageous and offensive bill.

Another piece of the bill is the raising of airport security taxes. This is from a government that says that it is into lowering taxes while at the same time it increases them. If raising taxes for the travelling public were not enough, it is also seeking to finish off the completion of the hated HST for Ontario and British Columbia, thereby putting it on any duties or any transactions that Canadians have when dealing with brokers. Buying mutual funds will now see further taxation from the government.

Is there any debate allowed about this? Is there any free and standing vote on this particular issue? Of course not, because it is a take-it-or-leave-it bill. It is 900 pages of a threat from the government, 900 pages saying to the Parliament of Canada and the people of Canada that if we do not like the idea of selling AECL without a debate, that is too bad for us, if we do not like an increase in taxes when buying a plane ticket, that is tough for us, and if we do not like the HST in Ontario or British Columbia, that is tough.

We see that type of political arrogance even within British Columbia right now. We are finding out today that every provincial riding in British Columbia have signed up enough citizens to a petition to revoke the HST. What is the arrogant response from the government and that in British Columbia? They do not care. They simply do not care about the functioning of democracy.

We have recall legislation in British Columbia that allows citizens to stand up, and it is a very high threshold, a very high bar to achieve, and British Columbians appear to be achieving it. Now that they have gone through all that work and all the volunteers out canvassing, and I am one of them who goes out and asks people to sign on, we find out that the government does not care about something called democracy, it does not care about representation and our voice mattering because it will ram the HST through anyway with no debate, no discussion, no voice for common people.

It has often been said that the best disinfectant is sunlight and we believe that to be very true when it comes to Bill C-9. We New Democrats have a proposition. With Democrat built right into our name, we like democracy. We like the idea of debate and free votes. We have said that we should take out the parts that need to be taken out and then have a debate about them. We implore other members in this House to see the wisdom of having a fair and free discussion on the elements of this bill.

Ramming everything it could think of into 900 pages of one bill and then making an election threat is not an accountable, transparent and humble government. That is a government that says that the will of the people matters little or not at all. That is disastrous, not just for the political fortunes of its party, which concerns me not, but for the fundamentals of how this place is meant to operate, which is that when we have a debate about something, we put it in legislation and bring it before the House. The government could do that with any of these pieces that it feels so proud of that it has to hide behind in Bill C-9.

We have simply said that, whether it comes to employment insurance, environmental protections, the National Energy Board, the airport tax, the HST and all of the other things rammed into this bill, the government must do the right thing and separate them out.

My last point is around the National Energy Board.

At a time when we are seeing a disaster taking place in the gulf, the President of the United States today saying that deregulation had failed them, that companies monitoring themselves was a bad idea, we see in Bill C-9 that the government is moving in the opposite direction, moving to more deregulation. It would give the Minister of the Environment the divine powers to decide what, if any, projects in the country get an environmental assessment at all. The minister can simply, by writ, decide that there is no environmental risk posed, in his or her own fictional or imaginary world, and, therefore, no environmental assessment happens.

We have learned that we need environmental protections, not just to save the environment but also to protect the communities and the economies on which we rely. This is not an economy versus environment debate and the government needs to realize that. It should allow the breakage of this bill, allow it to be separated so we can have a true and honest discussion, with witnesses and evidence, and allow the vote to stand freely and fairly. That is what a democratic government should do and that is what the government should do.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, May 26th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I wish I could say it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-9, but unfortunately we are looking at nearly 900 pages that represent a travesty of justice, and a basic and fundamental attack on the democratic principles on which this place is built.

We find within these pages what some have called a Trojan Horse of a bill. We find everything in the way of a laundry list that the Conservatives want to move through but cannot, in part because they keep shutting down the House and killing their own legislation, and partly because the measures rammed into this bill are unpopular. The Conservatives have threatened an election and have told Canadians to just stick it. They have not provided the option of a democratic and open debate about some of the most fundamental things in front of us.

We know that in this cloak of secrecy the government is going to be raising taxes for the travelling public at airports. It is seeking to gut environmental legislation, which my hon. colleague from Edmonton so eloquently spoke of just recently.

The government is seeking in an omnibus format to cobble together whatever it has at hand to give the Minister of the Environment discretionary, almost divine powers, to decide what deserves an environmental assessment and what does not. Somehow he will know in advance what is going to cause environmental damage and what will not, ignoring the fact that the idea behind an environmental assessment is the understanding of what the damage may or may not be. That is why we put the criteria in there in the first place.

We are paying for industrial projects that went wrong years ago: old mines, abandoned oil shafts. We said that we would learn from all of these things, that we would take account of all of these things before we built, so we would know what the effects would actually be on the environment.

What is in the budget affects real lives and has real consequences for our country. It is a shame and a sham that the government pretends to be accountable, pretends to care about the principles of democracy, while on the other hand does this.

Just recently, more than 130 workers from AECL came to this place to be recognized, to ask government members if they would be allowed a free and democratic debate and vote on the sale of AECL, Canada's largest crown corporation, and into which the Canadian public has put more than $22 billion over the years. Instead, where do we find the sale of AECL? We find it buried in the pages of this Trojan Horse, buried in this omnibus bill. We are allowed no debate, no discussion. There is no democracy from the government.

I sat with those 130 workers after question period. I talked to them and listened to their questions. They are worried, concerned, fearful, and most of all, they disbelieve that a government that ran on such principles as transparency and accountability and the fundamentals of democracy could be so opposed to them in practise. Words do not match the actual actions of the government.

It is often said that the best disinfectant is sun light. We need to bring this out in to the light. That is why New Democrats are proposing today to split this bill, expose it, have the debate, have the parliamentary discussion, and bring democracy back to the House of Commons.

[Offshore Drilling, May 25th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the minister's talking points will not cut it anymore.

Today at committee we heard that the oil industry itself, the Inuvialuit and environmental groups came together with a plan to protect the Beaufort Sea. This plan for the Arctic has been sitting on the minister's desk for more than a year.

We now know that contrary to what the minister just said, the government has weakened environmental protection. A two-page screening just does not cut it for Canada's Arctic. How can Conservatives continue to stand by regulations that simply will not protect our environment?