Nathan Cullen

[Canadian Human Rights Act, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question concerning consultation. The member made this one of the key elements, that is, the lack of consultation by the government, particularly with a group that is most affected by the piece of legislation being discussed.

It is reminiscent of what had happened, and on which we heard testimony just recently, on another government bill, Bill C-30, the alleged clean air act, where the AFN came before the committee and was asked directly by myself and others what level of consultation it had received. The government had made a whole series of presumptions about first nations involvement around the environment, particularly around carbon sinks and the use of massive tracts of land. The AFN had a longstanding dispute with the previous Liberal government and the current Conservative one. The element of consultation had been left off the table. The government just proceeded to go ahead with legislation and decision making before consulting.

Many Canadians watching this will be confused. The reason this is such a critical point is it has been proven time and time again in the courts, from coast to coast to coast in this country. First nations have gone to seek rights and due diligence from government, and the courts have interpreted our Constitution and our laws, and said that the government has an obligation to consult prior to making those decisions.

I know the member has a number of first nations in his riding. With respect to mining in particular, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which his government brought in, had no real basis for serious and concrete consultation, which led the Tahltan and the TRT, the Taku River Tlingit, and a number of other groups, to long litigation battles, seeking just the common decency of consultation.

Is it not time that we do a broad cast across a number of pieces of legislation, not just this badly designed one, but a series of them, because government is clearly not willing to listen, no matter which political side of the spectrum it is, to the courts, to the first nations people? Should we not truly engage in real consultation with the first nations people?

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, let me tell my colleague and namesake that, having lived in the riding of Etobicoke North for a number of years, I know his riding well. I know the diverse community that he represents. There are a number of different views and a number of different origins. People from around the planet have chosen to reside in what is no longer the city of Etobicoke after amalgamation but the great beast of Toronto.

The question I have for the member is a serious one. A government member just rose to say that committees must have more teeth. Since coming here, I have felt that committees actually have quite a bit of influence over the direction of government. A minority Parliament certainly helps with that. In the dark days of Liberal majorities past, we know that committees could be whipped into a frenzy and directed by the central powers of the PMO, which was unfortunate for democracy, but right now committees have quite a bit of influence.

I am perplexed, though. The committee sent out 10 recommendations and the government has chosen to take up two, but my colleague seems satisfied by that. That is my first point.

Next, the sunset clause, he said in his speech, was in a sense a trade-off. This was born directly out of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To that point, the conversation had not been held previously, to any great degree, in Canada or in America. I was not in the House at that time, but I remember watching and listening with great interest. The tone of the debate was elevated. It was heated. We had never seen something like this before so close to home. Canadians had been killed. The intensity of the debate was quite extreme. The need to build this legislation was called for, but there was some measure of a cooling off period, with the five years given to re-decide.

The member raised the Arar case, which is what my question is about. We saw with the Maher Arar case that mistakes were made. Assumptions were made on the basis of ethnicity and location. Wrong information was spread by our own authorities, with no oversight at all, yet built into the act and into these provisions is the same room for it to happen again. I do not know how he can call forward the name of Mr. Arar as an example. The NDP defended him from the start while other members in this House were confused as to his guilt. Why would the member see this bill as not needing a proper review and--

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening, with interest, to this debate. It seems to me that we are talking about striking a balance between personal liberties and public security.

The member has put forward, and it can be framed and termed in legalese or in more common parlance, the notion of some kind of pre-emptive arrest, which is contained in the bill, where someone can be taken into custody without charge and without presentation in front of the public or without representation. The personal security we all hope to enjoy, the ability to have freedom of movement and to not be arrested without charge, is offset against the notion of some potential future security threat. It seems somehow to parallel, and I do not say this glibly, the notion of pre-emptive war, the idea of a perceived threat from another nation would thereby condone an attack against that said nation.

This seems to have raised greater security threats in our world. It seems to have made our planet more insecure. One of the principles of dealing with each other, whether it is nation to nation or the citizenry to its government, is we presume innocence until proven otherwise. The notion of taking someone into custody, not presenting any charges, certainly not presenting anything into the public sphere, seems to tip the balance too far, that security must trump all individual pursuits. In a sense this allows the terrorists to truly win. When the U.S. changed its constitution, changed the notion of war and who had the right to do it, the terrorists won. He called up the spectre and images of 9/11.

When we do away with our personal civil liberties, we then truly give in to what the other side hopes to take advantage of. Could the member comment on that?

[The Environment, February 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, apparently the environment minister's road to Damascus led him all the way to Paris where he woke up with the astounding revelation that humans were, in fact, causing global warming. Now that he has finally passed through climate change 100, perhaps the minister is ready to lean over and teach the Prime Minister a few things about this.

The time for action is now. Now that we are all in agreement that we are in the middle of an environmental crisis, Canadians want to see action. Will the Prime Minister agree to keep our Kyoto commitments, yes or no?

[The Environment, February 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are confused when they hear Conservatives profess their new found love for the environment. What they really need, however, are a few basic commitments.

The president of France is creating a panel of watchdogs to force governments like the Conservative government to keep its international commitments. That is because the minister, like the Liberal leader before him, failed to get the job done.

Will the minister commit today that Canada will be part of this international panel proposed by President Chirac so the government gets the adult supervision it so desperately needs?

[Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to enter into the debate. It seems to be, and I hope it is not the first and only, a week of talking about the environment.

It gives me particular pleasure because the issue has been one on which I do not think Parliament has been seized with the proper energy over the last number of years, certainly over the last number of decades. While the debate today is somewhat representative of where we need not to be on this issue, Canadians have heard the Liberals time and again claiming that the Conservative Party members do not believe in climate change or that they are climate change skeptics. While I do not necessarily doubt the allegation, the fact is that they need to respond.

I am not sure any party in this place has a choice any more. We cannot stand on the side of the biggest polluters or on the side of those who wish to continue to be irresponsible in their decisions. We must stand on the side of responsible governance.

We saw the report out of Paris today that was made by 1,200 leading scientists, more than 2,300 contributors of the best and brightest our world has to offer and more than 113 countries. For those of us who have been involved in the United Nations process, we know that getting language into a document can be onerous because it needs to be done by consensus. When we have all these different views and countries represented with their own narrow national interest, it is hard to establish strong language. However, even under those conditions, the language that came out of the United Nations today compels every one of us to work within our parties, to work within our constituencies and to work with all the groups and businesses on this issue for a common cause, which is the reduction of the amount of pollution that is produced by our economy.

We have had many witnesses. For more than two and a half years the former environment committee heard witnesses and now the present environment committee, which was looking at Bill C-288 and is now looking at Bill C-30, will hear more witnesses. Something that has been consistently brought to the attention of members of Parliament is that Kyoto is not so much an environmental protocol as it is an economic one. It goes to the very heart of the decisions that are made about our economy and about the way that certain costs are captured.

The costs for pollution have never been properly captured in this country. That has been true for many other nations as well but they have been moving ahead of us, particularly on the European front but other nations as well, to capture the actual costs of production, one of those costs being how much pollution is emitted into the air.

If anyone remains doubtful of the science or doubtful of the impacts I would gladly invite them for a tour of my riding in northwestern British Columbia where the foresters have come to me and said that they are witnessing the impacts of climate change. The forestry experts have said that the changes they have seen in their weather are causing an infestation of parasites that they have never see the likes of before. They are losing virtually every pine tree in the province and it is now sweeping over the Rockies into Alberta into the boreal forest. The consequences are serious.

We have also heard in the debate today, which I am not sure is helpful, the Conservatives disclaiming the record of the Liberals. Something calls to my mind when I look at Bill C-288. Where was this bill in 1998 and where was it in 2000? Where was the demand for an accountable plan? I know the hon. member was not here but his party was in power.

This is important to point out because timing is important when we talk about the adjustments we need in our economy. I had an excellent meeting with a group of mining executives in the last Parliament. They were upset and frustrated with the government at the time on the question of energy. They were smelting a great deal of ore and it is very energy intensive.

They watched us go through the Kyoto debate, sign on in 1988 and ratify later on. They saw this coming, because they heard from the government that this was coming, and they started to make some changes to the way they used energy and the way that they were polluting. They have been reducing that pollution and their energy uses, which was mostly natural gas in their case, and yet they were not getting any credit for it. There was no level playing field created because the government kept waiting and waiting.

Meanwhile, their competitors in the industry were allowed to continue business as usual. They were not making those types of investments. They became frustrated, and rightly so. The timing of the thing, the fairness and the certainty that businesses have been requiring for so long is critical for moving across our economy.

Despite all the failures of the previous government to set a fair and level playing field for all those competing, on their way out I asked the Liberals one last question: “By the way, how is it going? How is business?” They said, “It is great. Natural gas prices went through the roof in the last couple of years. We used far less than our competitors and we are beating the pants off some of them”, and then they walked out.

At some point we need to debate the environment versus the economy. I often hear some of my colleagues on the benches to my left ask what we have against Alberta and what we have against jobs. That type of thinking needs to end. At some point, with the water crisis that we had in Alberta and when the mayor of Fort McMurray and her council pass a unanimous resolution begging, pleading with the provincial and federal governments to put a halt to any new projects in their area, one begins to question the economy versus the environment debate and see that it is not true.

We see the IPCC report today, the UN's report. We are no longer debating if the seas are rising, we are debating how much. We are no longer debating if the earth is in fact warming, we are debating how much.

An important thing for Canadians to realize, when they look at the numbers and the estimates go from a little less than two degrees to potentially as much as six degrees average temperatures, is that the average temperature for the entire globe is felt most in the northern hemisphere. The further north one goes the more intense those degrees move and the greater they are. For the people who live in the far north and who depend on the resources for resource extraction, we have seen the number of permafrost days and ice road days go down. Mining companies are closing up shop for longer and longer periods of time.

We need to understand and appreciate that this is a battle we must all be seized with. We need to realize that to continue this ping-pong debate back and forth in question period and in debates like this between who is doing worse on the environment between the Conservatives and Liberals, I do not think Canadians are all that interested, to be frank. I do not think Canadians are as interested anymore in hearing that the Liberal record for 13 years led to 30% above, which is true, or that the Conservatives are not seized with the issue of the environment, which is true.

I encourage my colleague who is introducing this bill to hand over some of the amendments that exist in his private member's bill and we can stuff them in, or cram them in or force them into the government's bill. I constantly hear some opposition members at the committee and here in the House say that they want to hear more about the government's plans before they can make decisions about the government's bill. My goodness, courage my friends. The opposition parties have a majority on the committee, as they do in this place, and we should tell the government what we want to do. We should not be waiting for government plans or for this hopeful Kyoto strategy that may or may not come from the government. I am not holding my breath. I waited a long time for the previous government to do it, and I kept waiting and waiting. One gets bored of waiting and just wants to make the changes and do the things that we know are right, in particular, in the debate around Kyoto and whether we are staying in.

Kyoto is a contract that we have with the international community. We are in this protocol. Unless the government steps forward and says that it is tearing it up, we are in this protocol and we must honour our commitments. I know the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment and the Prime Minister have not said that we are tearing it up. However, if the government is not suggesting that we step out of it, then we are in, and, if we are in, there are penalties that are incurred for missing the targets. That is how it was written.

The world community thought this was so serious that we could not just have another international meeting, have more politicians standing up at more microphones making more pronouncements and yet continuing down a disastrous path when it came to pollution and to climate change. Because they knew this was not an option, the leaders of the day, who signed on to this agreement and drafted this, made sure there were penalties. They are the penalties we abide by.

The debate over the science of climate change is over. The debate over whether Canada is in this protocol must be over. The only debate that now exists is on the measures we as parliamentarians together need to take to change course in this country to once again be proud of our international reputation, particularly when it comes to the environment. We absolutely owe it to ourselves, to the constituents who sent us here and to future generations.

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the hon. member for Burnaby—Douglas, for his passionate defence of trying to strike some balance in the approach whereby the government seeks to allow citizens to participate fully in electoral processes and vote with a clear conscience.

It seems to me that in many of the decisions we take in this place, we are constantly trying to strike a balance, personal liberties versus security, questions of economy and the environment. Here we are trying to strike a balancing point between allowing true voter participation, allowing people their charter rights. That is one of the basic rights, the third right in our charter. It has been very clear and upheld continuously by the Supreme Court of Canada: the right to vote, the right to participate as a free engaged citizen.

We tend to take some of these freedoms for granted and yet over the course of human history and human governance, the right of each and every individual citizen to vote is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I can remember when I first started campaigning in 2003, I would visit first nations communities in my riding. They would recall the name of Frank Howard, an MP that stood in this place and represented Skeena for many years. It was Mr. Howard who along with a Liberal colleague and with some support from the then Progressive Conservatives filibustered for almost three years, every Friday afternoon, to ensure that first nations in our country had the right to vote, because at that time they did not.

At the time, the first nations people, particularly those living on reserve, were deemed to be less than other citizens. Clearly, there is no one in this place, none of the candidates who run for any of these parties or any parties not represented here, who would suggest that we would return to that. The fight was a long fight. The fight was a struggle. There were many so-called wise and ancient experts in this place who debated against Mr. Howard's proposal and said first nations should not have the right to vote; as there were, years before, those who argued against the women's movement and their right to vote.

It seems to me that we have come to a certain enlightened place. We know that every person who is a citizen of this country deserves the right to vote and should be respected for that right.

I think a lot of us, as elected officials, are thinking back to our own election processes and whether we saw discrepancies or challenges.

I am reminded of the recent provincial election. There are five provincial ridings that go into my federal riding. There was one in particular where we had a fellow running for the New Democrats provincially. We won two out of three main ones. His was unsuccessful in electoral terms, but was extremely successful in another term, and this was a condition that they set out for themselves at the beginning of their campaign.

There is a strong first nations presence in the Bulkley Valley: the Gitksan and the Moricetown Bands of the Wet'suwet'en. Yet, the voter turnouts have been just absolutely abysmal for many years. This fellow, whose name is Doug Donaldson, was a candidate for the New Democrats. He has been adopted into the Gitksan community. He made as one of his campaign efforts to go door to door and help people register to vote.

As I was chatting with some of my Liberal colleagues and I have talked to some in the Conservatives as well, particularly on first nations reserves, the connections of an address and photo identification are very difficult to come by at times. There can be more than one family living in a household. So, if the phone bill comes, it will identify one person who is paying that bill, but not another.

So, when a first nations person shows up at the office to vote and is required to show a proof of a phone bill, that might not be forthcoming, and the identification given out by Indian Affairs shows a photo, but does not show an address.

Then in rural Canada, as in my own case, we use box numbers for a lot of the identification. We have seen that when there is more than one voting office in a community, a box number does not suffice. It does not tell the Elections Canada person where the people actually live. Are they at the right polling station? Should they be at another one? Under this bill, these people are not able to vote.

It seems to me that in our efforts at striking a balance between fairness and allowing people to access our democracy, we want to remove the barriers from people who have traditionally not participated in a democratic process. That seems like an intention I would hope all my colleagues would agree with.

The reason I bring up the case of Mr. Donaldson in the Bulkley Valley is because they were starting to run out of ballots at some of their voting offices. Their signup campaign of going out door to door and saying, “Please make sure you register to vote”, was so successful that Elections Canada had almost been lulled to sleep. It had gotten so used to first nations people in that part of the world voting 10% or 20% of the time that it just simply did not expect a 50% or 70% turnout at the polls. This was an encouraging thing. This was an encouraging thing for every party that was participating in that race, particularly for fist nations people. If people do not vote, politicians do not tend to pay much attention to them.

The currency of our fare is in the voting process and knowing that people will support our positions. But we can also look at those who are economically constrained. We know the statistics, they are not in dispute. They do not tend to participate. Therefore, the decisions that get made in this place do not tend to reflect the interests of those who are not participating in our democratic elections.

There has been a constant allusion to the massive electoral fraud some of my colleagues have talked about. Yet when the Chief Electoral Officer of this place testified before the committee, a fellow who is charged with working on behalf of Parliament, who is non-partisan and does not work for any party, when he was asked about fraud, he said it was not a leading concern. When his officers come back from the field, are briefed on the last election, are asked about what went wrong, whether there were enough polling stations and if they were in the right place, the people who are actually at the polls overseeing our democratic process are not referring to these massive cases of fraud.

I do not know how members can stand up in this place and keep referring to fraud when in 2000 there were three charges, in the 2004 election there were none, and in 2006 there was one. The Chief Electoral Officer and the people working for him are telling us as witnesses that this is not a problem. Yet we are tipping the balance too far in the direction to catch these four people in the last three elections. One has to question whether the balance is being struck. For the first nations people in particular, those of lower income, those with greater mobility who are moving between houses, and who do not own their houses, it seems that we have gone out of bounds.

The NDP proposed what we thought were reasonable amendments based on witness testimony and we were consistently voted down 11 to 1. We must reconsider this bill. We must establish something that strikes a better balance, more fairness, and allows first nations people, people of lower income, people who traditionally have not voted to be part of the voting system, so they can influence our decisions here and make for a better country.

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I know my hon. colleague from British Columbia has some first nations reserves in his riding.

The last time the member went out visiting, door knocking or held any community forums on a first nations reserve did he take much account of the street signs and the house numbers that existed or did he do any sort of a plebiscite on the number of first nations people who had telephone numbers, addresses and letters from the telephone company ready to go? I have 19 different first nations communities and I know he is getting some help from a colleague in my riding.

Our first nations have many challenges to participating in our electoral process. It is without dispute that first nations people participate far less in the voting process than non-first nations, and that needs to be fixed. The first nations in my communities are expressing great concern over the suggestion that they need to go to the band council office to get a letter that will allow them their charter right to vote. At a basic level, the bill opens it up to a charter challenge, quicker than the member can stand up, for impinging upon an individual's right to vote.

The hon. member talked about voter photo ID. I am not sure if he has checked any status cards lately but he can let me know if he has seen voter photo ID on those cards or if he has seen phone bills that will account for every first nations person on reserve.

The point is that we in this place must do everything we can to allow first nations people to participate in a democracy and to allow more first nations representation in this place.

I am just not sure of the hon. member's experiences. I want to know his personal experiences of being out in the reserves, of going door to door and talking to people and finding out what capacities and abilities they have right now to participate in the process, and what the effects of the bill will be.

This is a very serious concern and we cannot dismiss it with glib anecdotes. We know that we need a real enumeration in this country. His party, when in power, refused to participate in it. The current government refuses to spend the money on our most basic rights, which is to know where the electorate are and to have a proper enumeration. We have absolutely nothing to tell other nations about a voting system until we perform that basic function, which we have not done for years.

I wonder if the hon. member could comment on this simple idea and, again, allude to the many experiences I know he has had on first nations reserves.

[The Environment, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the effects of dangerous greenhouse gases are being felt in every region of Canada, and my riding in the northwestern corner of British Columbia is no exception. The devastation of the pine beetle is possibly the most tangible example of how global warming is impacting our day to day lives.

The people of Skeena—Bulkley Valley are demanding action and they are demanding it immediately. Last week I had the opportunity to tour across my riding, showing An Inconvenient Truth. Over 500 people came out to watch this film, discuss the issues and stayed to find out from where the solutions were to come.

Time and again I heard them tell me that we, as national leaders, cannot sit idly by. They insisted that we act and act quickly. They are committed to doing their bit and making personal choices that will help, but they are also insisting that government and industry also pull their weight.

On a day in Europe, when the international community is gathered to release the most condemning report ever issued by the world scientists, we as leaders in this country must act. On a day when it is reported that the biggest oil company is earning more than $40 billion, regulations must come in to prevent the biggest polluters from continuing their harmful ways.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is an interesting comment by the member from the Bloc. We have to be very careful in this debate to not pit province against province. Under that splitting of common interest, and I believe the interests on climate change are common, climate change does not identify provincial boundaries or notions of potential sovereigntist boundaries. Climate change works across this. It is a nation that must be seized with this issue, no less.

It is confusing when my hon. colleague talks about choices. The last federal budget, which his party supported on the record, was one that absolutely slashed and crumbled funding for climate change programs in Quebec. That party also supported the softwood lumber sellout, hurting people in Quebec.

It is a confusing debate to try to suggest that the NDP are not believers in the environment. There is nothing further from the truth. We have worked consistently and adamantly across the country to get something progressive for our country when it comes to the environment.