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Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
I am on a point of order. I have not even said anything yet.
The House leader for the NDP quickly rose on the very subject the member is talking about. She came into the House immediately because it was an inadvertent admission as to what had happened at the subcommittee. It does not provide the House any benefit to return to something that has already been addressed by the House. It is unfortunate that the member chooses this as his line of argument on this bill today.
Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
Madam Speaker, I apologize for interrupting my friend. I think he knows full well that the—
Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
Madam Speaker, my colleague asked why New Democrats have consistently forced this issue with the previous government and now again in this Parliament. The answer is that the consequences of unmitigated climate change are disastrous for the global community and for Canada in particular. The government is sitting on a number of reports from natural resources that talk about the effect of climate change particularly on our far north. As the sea ice melts in the Antarctic, the effects are felt the strongest in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the Arctic.
My colleague talked about results on the ground. We know that the fund the government set up to enable wind energy has been completely exhausted. There was a small brief period of wind energy investment across Canada. The investment climate was not as good as what the U.S. and Europe were offering, but Canada was starting to move closer to what those countries were offering. The Canadian wind industry was moving forward on a huge suite of announcements. Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and that member's own province of Alberta were moving forward as well. We have now come to realize that the fund has been completely exhausted well before the intended date and there are no more dollars in the fund.
Does he understand as a businessman himself the uncertainty his own government has created in that critical industry will be anathema to Canada matching the other countries that are moving forward? Every critical number shows this. Every way we cut and slice this, the developed countries are far surpassing Canada's own investment ratio. They are far surpassing Canada in terms of the renewable energy we are putting on line.
On the specific topic of the funds available to the wind industry to allow it to build the generation capacity this country requires, would the member agree that the funds have been depleted at the federal level, or can he reassure us otherwise?
Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, in the event of my colleague attempting to split hairs over the notion of what the consequence is for a time allocation, which was his first and most important point on this point of order, it is clear that the motion the Conservative members moved in 2005 allowed for the exact same thing to take place. Now he is going to go further down the excuse line to find another reason that we are not going to deal with a bill on climate change which his government has failed to move on. This is simply no longer tolerable to the Canadian people.
He should get over it and get on with it. We are moving forward on this issue and this debate. I encourage the member to enter the debate, offer up reasons or excuses for his government's lack of action on climate change, otherwise he should let the House get on with it.
Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the points my colleague made. My question is with respect to the timing of the bill and the timing of the legislation moving forward this fall on the eve, which I think is less than 60 days away now, of the Copenhagen round, the Copenhagen conference in which Canada will have a place. It is critical for the Canadian people, never mind the global community, to have Canada come forward with legislation like this that would actually put Canada on side and in line with where the rest of the world is moving, as opposed to the alternative option, as the member described in his comments, a Canadian government without a plan, without a set of real targets and without any notion of being able to play with the other kids in the sandbox to address and to fight dangerous climate change.
I am wondering if the member could speak to the timing of the motion as much as anything else.
Bill C-311--Climate Change Accountability Act October 8th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order that will be instructive to members, as I believe the table and the House are deliberating on the Conservatives' motion to defeat this process that we are in.
I call members' attention to a decision from May 30, 2005 concerning Bill C-43. The member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl and the member for Niagara Falls, who are now sitting on the Conservative benches, instructed the House through a motion that it give instruction to the Standing Committee on Finance to divide Bill C-43, which was an act to implement certain provisions of the budget. It was obviously an important bill. I will just read the last part of the motion because it is relevant to what we are dealing with today. It reads:
...that the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel be authorized to make such technical changes or corrections as may be necessary to give effect to this motion; and that Bill C-43A be reported back to the House no later than two sitting days after the adoption of this motion;
My point of order is that we have had precedence for the motion that we have moved and are now debating today. The government has stood against the motion. We just had a vote over that very issue and it lost the vote. It then said that it was not in order, where clearly a motion moved by some of the government's own members, not four years ago, addresses this very thing, which is to divide a bill and seek the committee to return the bill by a prescribed date to the House so that it can have a free and fair vote in this democratic place.
Aboriginal Affairs October 6th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, more than 500 aboriginal women have gone missing in Canada, most of them presumed murdered or kidnapped. Highway 16, the so-called “highway of tears”, cuts through my riding. The families of the victims have been forced to endure not only their loss but the indifference of their governments.
Recently, vigils were held across the country to remember the victims and to demand that the Conservative government create a national plan of action.
For a Prime Minister who believes that colonialism only happened in other countries, will he finally do what these desperate families need: a real plan to end violence against aboriginal women in Canada?
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act October 5th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, I would remind my colleague that those very dictatorships that have since been removed from Latin America established trade negotiation parameters with this country and with the U.S. That is what enabled many of those dictatorships to thrive and survive. Let us not make the mistake of saying that trade for trade's sake will always give us a positive result.
We traded with Pinochet. We sent our merchandise there and bought from him. We traded with South Africa until, finally, public pressure forced the Brian Mulroney government to switch policies. We are seeing the same thing here.
We have no problem with trade. Canadians are simply asking that if we are going to trade with these countries that we trade for ultimate purposes. There should be a lightening of the load for the people in places like Colombia. It should not be some trade policy for trade's sake. We should not be absolutely blind to an arms race going on in the country. We might end up exacerbating the problem.
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act October 5th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, if my hon. colleague is trying to understand the mind of someone as diabolical as Chavez, he should go to other places. Maybe a house filled with psychologists would have a better shot than a house full of parliamentarians would.
His supposition is that a trade deal with Canada would somehow subvert the efforts of Hugo Chavez.
This trade deal would give access to Canadian arms manufacturers, point in fact, into a place that is buying more weapons per capita than anywhere else in the world. It is not mentioned in the trade agreement whether any consideration has been given to that fact.
Canada must understand the level of violence in these countries, the escalation of an arms race like we have never seen before. We must also remember that there were so few arms purchases in the last 20 years in Latin America because all the dictators the western world supported getting into power in the 1960s and 1970s eventually got the boot by activists on the ground, the same activists we are trying to protect by destroying flawed labour agreements.
There are few arms being traded right now but it is increasing exponentially because of trade agreements with countries like Canada that produce the very arms that some of these countries are looking to import. Obviously this should be a consideration we should be seized with in this House.
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act October 5th, 2009
Mr. Speaker, I commit to you and the House to make no such gestures whatsoever, regardless of how passionate I become around this debate, the so-called Colombia free trade agreement. Right now we are dealing with a subamendment that was moved by my colleague, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster.
I spent, as did many Canadians, a number of years working in Latin America as a volunteer and as a student. I was trying to, at first intentions, help out a subcontinent friend but I learned that the help was coming back to us. So many Canadians and Americans have benefited from their experiences in Latin America and have learned that the context there is critical for our engagement as a country. Having some understanding of the local lay of the land, some of the politics and history of the place is absolutely essential, whether we do business at a formal level or we do trade agreements as proposed.
The context of Colombia, which I spent some time living and working in as well, is so utterly different than the context that we work in, legally through the actual system of how voting happens or does not happen, the use of paramilitary forces, the drug trade, which the demand from North America and Europe throws, literally and figuratively, a grenade into the societies that produce these drugs. There is so much demand in our countries. Rather than properly deal with the issue at home, in the U.S. and Europe, where the primary markets are for these drugs, we joined the Americans in the war on the drugs and went there to impose upon them our ideas about how to stop the drug trade, which was napalming a bunch of fields and going after folks at every level rather than going at the demand side of the equation.
Knowing the context is so critical to the way Colombians see Canadians and North Americans, in general, and their European trading partners, when we get to the table that describes how we will trade with one another, the Colombian context has bearing.
We also have to understand the opinions and attitudes of the Colombians toward trade deals in general. How has it worked out for other trading nations, both within Mercosur and the trading blocs within South America, and the experiences of NAFTA in North America or the European Trading Union? When a developed country and a developing country get together, hopefully in a symbiotic trade relationship, the people particularly in the developing nation, nations like Colombia, Peru, Mexico, have a very keen interest because the impacts are much greater there than they are here.
We have not recognized this in our debate to this point. The decisions that we make, the and yeses and the noes that we implicitly put into a trade deal with a country like Colombia, have far greater impact there than they will for Canadians.
That is not to say there will not be an impact here. That has also been felt, obviously through agreements like NAFTA. We have watched the hollowing out of our manufacturing base in our country. We continue to lose value-added jobs and replace them with service sector jobs. The great economists within the Liberal and Conservative Parties, if there are any, say that this is a fantastic trade policy, this continual sliding slope of just not making stuff any more, allowing it to be made somewhere else. We buy it and send them raw resources instead.
The records of trade policies and instigating some of the change that the Liberal and Conservative members have talked about has been poor. To not recognize that pattern is critical. It then says that the negotiators on behalf of Canada did not recognize that context, did not recognize that history as well. They have brought forward an agreement that will continue the disastrous record of the so-called free trade policies that we have seen so far.
Also in this context, again utterly ignored by the government, is a Latin American arms is race going on, basically hinged between Colombia and Venezuela, with Peru and Ecuador getting involved. Now Brazil has come in as well as Chile and Argentina and they are buying more weapons per capita than anywhere else in the world. This is after two decades of not having done so. To enter into that context and not recognize those realities for a place like Colombia, where weapons and violence against union activists, labour activists, NGOs, environmental groups and indigenous groups has been on the rise for the past 15 years, seems to me folly.
It seems to me to be that we are putting on blinkers and saying that all we are doing is a trade deal. On the other hand, we are saying that this trade deal will lead to so much benevolence for the people and that the good people will be so much more secure, better off and so much richer after it happens.
It is also a question of asking what we actually want in our trade deals. The New Democrats have asked time and time again in this House for environment and labour accords, basic social justice that our party fights for in a Canadian context also to be implicit and put into the central agreements in the trade context. Yet time and time again we see them as after the fact footnotes to trade agreements. The central parts talk about other things, but at the end of the day when the government feels a little bit of heat and pressure from some NGOs, a little side agreement is thrown in to deal with serious issues such as the environment and labour.
To suggest that trade is a path toward a more benevolent, fair and equitable world is to ignore the many decades that these trading patterns have existed, all the way back to the sugar and spice trades in the Caribbean, and the African slave trade. All of these were great trading patterns that went on. They were trading for trading sake, and the benefits were declared in parliaments around the world, saying that it was good for business and therefore it must be good for the general population. We know the sugar and spice trades did not work out that way. We know the textile and mercantile trades did not work out that way.
We have seen the elites of two societies get together and hammer out a deal but they do not return to the general populace for any type of confirmation or understanding. The current government has done this and the previous government did it as well. There is no information campaign by the government around this trade proposal, nor is there any in the lead-up to a South Korea trade proposal which it is suggesting. Members of the Canadian public have learned about this trade deal through other means, through non-profit organizations and through MPs like our friend from Burnaby—New Westminster. They have engaged the public town hall by town hall, in church basements. They have talked to Canadians in a much more respectful way about what is being done on their behalf. That is what this place is meant to stand for.
The government spent $35 million on its outreach about its economic turnaround program. It spent $35 million to say how wonderful it is. It spent not a dollar to talk to Canadians about the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement, not a dollar to talk to Canadians about the impact on their communities and their homes. It suggests to me that rather than being proud about it, the government hopes this slips through under cover of night.
Negotiating a trade deal for its own sake is folly. We know this. To go into a negotiation to simply be able to say that there is a negotiation one or that another deal has been made does not make any practical sense. One has to go in with a certain intention, a certain principle and purpose that one hopes to get in the end.
We hear all the lamentations and cries from the two parties. The Conservatives and the Liberals say that this will improve trade. One point that was raised earlier was that the fierce and violent drug trade in Colombia would somehow be alleviated by the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. I would point to Mexico. Mexico signed on to an extensive trade deal with this country and the United States. Mexico's narco-traffic trade has gone through the roof. The violence amounts to a state of civil war in many states in Mexico. It has a trade agreement in place, which has rules defining how trade is meant to cross the boundaries. Yet colleagues from the Liberal Party this morning said that if we enter into a trade deal with Colombia, it should help alleviate the pressure on those citizens who are dying at the hands of narco-traffickers. That is truly living in another dimension.
We know that the connection between the narco-traffic trade and free trade represents two other worlds. If we want to talk about how to curb the violence and the trade in elicit drugs in Colombia, we could have that conversation, but let us not pretend that the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement could do anything about it.
On the environmental side, I have spent a great deal of time working with Latin American environment groups and their perspective of countries like Canada is not exactly exemplary. Many of the companies that work in countries in Latin America and South America do not have a great record. Every parliamentarian should check the Omai gold spill.
There is a good bill by a Liberal member to enforce Canadian environmental laws on Canadian companies when they operate overseas. That is a trade policy we would support. That is a trade policy that actually talks about having some sort of equivalency when we are dealing with other countries. However, to suggest that a blanket trade agreement will somehow cause Canadian companies and their Latin American counterparts to do better by the environment is an absolute falsehood and must be pushed to the side.
In fact, it is a side agreement. It is not nearly as enforceable as the main body of the agreement that Canada has negotiated. It shows the relative lack of importance the government and its supporters in the Liberal Party have placed on the environment and the treatment of labour activists in the Colombian context. This so-called trade deal is not a deal for the Colombian people any more than it is a deal for the Canadian people. We should instruct our negotiators to make these issues front and centre. If we believe in them so much, they should be the first two chapters of the trade agreement, not two throwaway subamendments at the very end of it.