House of Commons photoWon his last election, in 2015, with 51% of the vote.
Government Programs September 27th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, with the cuts they have made this week, the Conservatives have said no to families working for a better life, no to affordable housing for seniors, no to the first nations and no to Canadians learning to read and write, but with a wink, wink, they are continuing to pay $1.5 billion to their friends in the oil industry, who are turning profits hand over fist.
Will the minister do what is important for Canadians and promise to put an end to this pollution scandal?
Mr. Speaker, the need is for this government to come forward and come clean on plans. In particular, I will ask the parliamentary secretary to speak specifically to the need for confirmed and fixed targets to reduce CO2 emissions in both the short and the long term.
Will the Conservative government be willing to commit to Canadians here this evening that, first, he said climate change is in fact happening. I am not sure whether he was willing to admit that it was caused by human activity. This is an important distinction that many climate change doubters will profess. They will say that climate change is happening but it has been happening for thousands of years. It is nothing to worry about, business as usual. Will the parliamentary secretary confirm that in fact humans are participating and accelerating climate change?
Second, will he be able to confirm to us this evening that whatever plans his government has been formulating, and they have claimed to have a plan for more than a year and half, so time has been available, that they will commit to short and long term targets to reduce CO2 emissions in this country?
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to enter into what we may call a debate this evening. The brevity on the side of the government this evening is startling and shocking, and a bit like jumping into a cold body of water. It is not necessarily the most pleasant experience either.
Looking for answers about the government's intention and direction when it comes to climate change was the subject of my question on September 20 and the reason that I rise again in the House tonight.
A number of ridings in British Columbia invited Tim Ball, a professor in the sense of the professor on Gilligan's Island, to various debates where the notion of climate change was put in dispute. A recent study by the national centre for research in the United States compared the number of peer reviewed articles that had appeared in leading international journals throwing serious dispute on the science of climate change as to whether or not this phenomena was actually happening. This study came up with zero. Media observations of this particular debate found that nearly half of all articles appearing in major U.S. dailies cast some doubt on the science of climate change.
If the Conservatives are looking for the opportunity to deny the existence of climate change, they will certainly find the odd professor or two who will allow them some amount of refuge. The overwhelming and overarching consensus around the world is that climate change is happening and that it is a serious issue, and dealing with it has been delayed too long. Delaying any longer is not an option.
We hear rumours and rumblings that the government will be releasing its so-called green plan within the next number of weeks, and I am sure the parliamentary secretary would be delighted to tell us the exact date of that release.
To this point in time, the government's intentions have been wanting. The current minister, as president of the UNFCC, showed up at the international meetings in Bonn, Germany, the latest gathering of climate change efforts internationally, and declared to the world that Canada no longer had any intention of meeting its Kyoto targets.
I can understand the minister's dismay, after having seen the evidence put before her, because the previous government was unwilling, unable and inept at dealing with the issue of climate change. While that government had many programs, it had few results and pollution rose.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the gathering of municipal leaders from across this country, met in Montreal. The minister was invited and agreed to attend. She had a speaking spot in front of a couple of thousand decision-makers in our country, and at the very last minute bailed for no given reason.
The largest conference of leading scientists in this country was held in Toronto just after the meeting in Montreal to discuss smog and what needs to be done. The minister was the first minister in Canadian history not to attend this conference. She did not send a representative or a delegate.
My question is very simple. Is this so-called green plan, that the government is going to announce in the next couple of weeks, going to follow the path of the apologists for the biggest and most polluting industries that are looking to deny and throw doubt on the issue of climate change and the veracity of the science that has been looked at by world experts? Is the government going to continue to subsidize the biggest and most successful oil companies in Canada in the tar sands, or is it going to actually recognize the validity of the science of climate change and the need to act in a deliberate and purposeful way?
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan for expressing her passion for this issue and the experience she brings to it. Many members of the government seem lost on what it is to process a stick of wood and what it is to add some value and create the type of wealth for communities like hers and for many of the communities that I represent. This deal is an excellent sell-out. It is quite remarkable in its consistency page after page and in its depth of advocating the interest of exporting more jobs to other countries and then buying the products back.
The member quoted the statistics from British Columbia, 10,000 jobs out of a sector. If there are other sectors maybe a little more politically salient for the new government and for the previous government, we would have had a deal that would have actually met the requirements of our country and our interests.
Could the member comment on what the effects are in the community of Nanaimo and those surrounding it when even a single job or a set of jobs from a particular mill are lost and moved across the border or overseas?
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, let me talk about the NDP budget a little bit more.
The important thing to consider, when we look at raw log exports, is to understand the vastness of the economic damage done when we take what is Crown property and simply chop it, chuck into the ocean and ship it down in massive booms to the United States, and sometimes to other countries by putting it on container ships, only to have the Americans process the wood and sell it back to us. This is a large amount of revenue that is lost to federal, provincial and municipal coffers when processing jobs are moved out of the country and put somewhere else.
I actually do not share my hon. colleague's concern about the Americans wanting to pull out of this deal in the next 18 months because it is such a good deal for them. When they can use many different elements to hammer away at us and destroy the very basis of the manufacturing base in British Columbia and other provinces, it would be insane for them to pull out of this agreement. Our government could have arranged a better deal, and it knows it, but the previous government did not even try.
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I heard the call out around the House that it was a fantastic deal.
Let me talk about the NDP budget for a moment because it was a remarkable moment in parliamentary history. For those of us in the House who have studied the history of this place in any fashion whatsoever, we know that never before has an opposition party rewritten a budget, and what a budget it was.
We had $4.5 billion in an unannounced tax cut for the largest and most successful corporations in Canada that had not even asked for. It was not even mentioned in the pre-consultation arrangements by the government. The previous Liberal government suddenly popped up and said that the money was an early Christmas present. The NDP stood up on principle and said “absolutely not”. This was the first time in Canadian history that something like this happened. It was remarkable to watch the Liberal Party of Canada follow through on a commitment that it had made in an election. Thank goodness it took the New Democrats to actually make that happen. We saw $4.5 billion being invested into what Canadians actually wanted, such as post-secondary education, environmental initiatives and in overseas funding of international programs, which were things we all talked about and wished for.
I remember when the leader of the New Democratic Party stood in the House and asked the then prime minister if he would consider changing his budget. Lo and behold, the prime minister said that we should make him an offer and did we ever. We made an offer that worked for Canadians. It is just one of the most remarkable things to still talk about.
I thank my hon. colleague for the opportunity to once again talk about what was one of the most remarkable moments in our history as a House of Commons.
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I have very much looked forward to my time to enter this debate. For a lot of members of this House, but now fewer and fewer of them, the ability to speak on the experience of watching what mills in their ridings have gone through in the last five to ten years is difficult. It is an extrapolation of the idea. It is an imagination of what it is for communities when they are faced with such trying times.
The reason that there are now fewer members of Parliament who have had that experience is that there are fewer mills across this country. In my region alone, not 30 years ago, there were 280 independently operated sawmills. The consolidation has left us with three or maybe four significant mills after all that time.
It is important for Canadians to understand the context of this deal. Many Canadians, particularly those living in urban ridings, may not have come to appreciate the magnitude of the destruction to the basis of our rural economy over the last decade. Not only have these illegal and punitive duties been slapped on by our American counterparts, but there has been huge devastation to the industry in an amalgamation process that has left small and medium operators completely out of the picture.
As I was saying to a colleague earlier, there are so many aspects to the so-called deal we are looking at today that it is amazing a sellout takes this many pages to be written. I would think that the words “100% total capitulation” would have taken a page to a page and half at most, but I suppose that a lot of legal text and jargon was necessary to keep government lawyers funded.
For far too long, the communities I represent have been suffering under a burden of neglect by the previous Liberal government. Just when things were as bad as they could be, a pine beetle epidemic has swept across our region and now is heading over the Rockies. Unfortunately, the rest of Canada may come to appreciate what it is to watch entire forests devastated.
We have a provincial Liberal government in Victoria that is interested only in massive raw log exports, which does little. For people who are not familiar with the industry, let me say we truly know that the best and greatest advantage and benefit to chopping down a tree is what is done with it once it hits the ground. We simply must manufacture and add value. We have talked about this. Every politician across this country who is dealing with primary resources in any way, shape or form says that we need to transform our economy to add further value to the resources we are endowed with, to the endowment this country has.
Yet the government is forcing industry, the provinces and various players to sign on to a deal that works in a direction that is opposite to the investment needed to actually add value to that wood. In cahoots with the Liberal government in British Columbia, it continues to raise the number and the amount of raw log exports that leave our region. When those logs leave, so too do the jobs.
For small communities in the hinterlands of Canada, there is a struggle to understand why so little attention is paid to them. These communities understand that they might not have the great subway systems, huge art galleries, and the scatterings and smatterings of MPs around every street corner that Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal do, but they cannot understand why, after having contributed so much to the wealth of this nation, they are given so little due and so little attention.
Let us get to the deal itself, for while it is complex, the reading is fine and the conclusions are disturbing. Bill C-24 continues the unfortunate legacy of sell-offs and sellouts that Conservative governments have left Canada with.
The government initially went to the table for the FTA and then NAFTA. In that negotiation, the Americans wanted access to our energy. That was one of the clear negotiating pieces of the American interests. We know this because the negotiators who were at that table have since written books, essays and discourses on what it was like to be there.
I remember one chief American negotiator calling it not so much a negotiation as a capitulation and a dictation from the American side. The Americans were dictating to us. They wanted access to Canada's vast energy resources. Energy resources were clearly seen as something important for the growth of the U.S. economy, but Canada was reluctant, knowing how important these energy resources were for our own growth. The trade-off became that the Americans would offer us a dispute resolution panel because they understood that the two negotiating partners were not in balance, that one was clearly economically stronger than the other, with the Americans having a larger, more powerful and protected market.
A dispute resolution panel was established to allow us to settle our disputes and now we have a deal that takes that dispute resolution panel and tosses it out the window. It simply says that when we win, when we are right, in fact we lose and we are wrong. All it takes is a certain amount of political pressure and opportunism by a government for us to get the short end of the stick one more time.
Oftentimes the government will try to talk about certainty and that the industry is looking for certainty. The investments that the softwood industry has to make are large and expensive and can only be paid off over a certain amount of time. Certainty for their products is important and yet, having just cut a cheque for $450 million to put into the war chest of the lobbyists who first launched this agreement against us, leaving over $400 million in the coffers of the very same people who are fighting and illegally pushing the U.S. Congress and Senate to put tariffs on our own duties, we have ensured anything but certainty. We have ensured that this fight will continue another day, because what else is one going to do with $450 million, if one is a lobbyist for the U.S. softwood industry, other than go after the Canadian industry and ensure that a fair fight cannot be fought?
We have also left half a billion dollars for President Bush's electoral campaign in November. I am not sure if such a sizeable cheque has ever been written by a Canadian government to assist a Republican president, but certainly the Americans are thankful. This is money well needed by an administration in the United States that is on the verge of bankrupting its own nation. It is so-called conservative economics at play once again.
What about the money returning to Canada? I have spoken with some of the CEOs who have been advocating for this deal and I asked them what encouragement the Canadian government gave them to take the 80% of the money that will be returned and actually invest it in Canada. Their reply was that the government had given them no encouragement to invest a single dollar in Canada.
While the money is supposed to be returning, many of these companies involved in this negotiation, due to the consolidation that has happened in this industry for the last decade or more, work both sides of the border. They have plants and operations on both sides of the border. Canadians need to ask themselves, if a company has mills both in Washington state and in British Columbia, why would it process a stick of wood in B.C. if it can move it across the border as a raw log and avoid the punitive tariff that our own government is placing upon a processed piece of timber or product. Why would anyone invest a nickel in an operation where they eventually will be punished for processing that wood?
It has created a disincentive for Canadian and multinational firms that operate in Canada and actually invest in Canada and create the types of jobs that we all hope for, for all these communities that have been through so much over the last number of years.
As time runs down, it is important to talk about the producers who are actually affected. I am thinking of a sawmill in one of my communities, which is Terrace, that has been through much. It is struggling to get reasonable access to timber to provide 60 or 120 jobs. For a community of 10,000 people that has struggled so much with an absolutely disastrous housing market and little space and room for companies to invest, this was important. They are looking at this deal as a small producer and wondering where they are in this.
A second important piece of what we have capitulated here is a basic notion of sovereignty, about how it is that we manage the forestry sector. Every member of Parliament will know that it is now provincial jurisdiction. The provinces decide how and where to cut wood and under what stipulations. However, in Article XVIII of the agreement, neither party shall take action that circumvents or offsets the commitments set out in this agreement and specifically any change in a provincial timber pricing or forest management system as it existed on April 27, 2006.
It is black and white. Washington has the ability to dictate terms over the provincial government's own jurisdiction, which our own federal government does not have.
What is important is that the system and the sellout that has been signed determines the cap by region and once that cap is broken then the duties start to increase and the tariffs and penalties go up. When a company chooses to flood any particular region with wood, it will punish a company that chooses not to. This is collectivism gone wrong. It is insane. How can we punish a company down the road that is actually abiding by the law when it is a larger company, which is what it will be, that wishes to glut the market?
This is a bad deal for communities and a bad deal for Canada.
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I have a small question that remains unanswered. I put it to one of the hon. member's colleagues previously. Quite a few years led up to this flawed deal. There were also the previous negotiations by the hon. member's government, only to arrive at an equally flawed deal, one that was maybe even worse according to the government today.
They can decide what cabinet confidences were broken in the delivery of that news, but in all those years leading up to that, there was one thing about small and medium-sized producers in particular. Oftentimes the small and medium-sized mills are family based, with an extremely high ratio of investment dollars per job. This is an important ratio for people to understand, because as the consolidation of this industry has been going on over the last 10 years, it essentially has meant fewer and fewer players in the market, fewer and fewer manufacturers of wood, while provinces, and in particular the Gordon Campbell government in B.C., have increased dramatically the raw log exports going to southern mills and mills in other countries.
Anyone looking at the profile of the softwood industry knows that the greatest good is gathered at the processing level, not at the extraction level. While there are a few jobs out in the bush for taking wood out to the manufacturing level, there are relatively few in comparison to that. With increased technology, there are fewer still.
Through all of this consolidation, this larger format for companies, we have petitioned the hon. member's former government and the current government on loan guarantees, the ability of some of these medium and mid-size manufacturers to acquire the loan guarantees to allow them to compete with some of the bigger players in the market. Those requests fell on deaf ears in the previous Liberal government as well as in the current Conservative government. We simply cannot get anywhere with this. It is something that industry has called for consistently and New Democrats have joined them in that call.
Can the hon. member square this circle somehow and explain to me now how the Liberal Party is actually suddenly interested in those companies and those communities that have suffered for so long?
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I will be corrected by the Chair if I am wrong, but the previous lineup had me following my namesake from across the floor. If that is not correct, we can adjust it. Perhaps you can seek some advice from the list.
Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 September 26th, 2006
Mr. Speaker, I have a question to put to my colleague, the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. Today a good number of Bloc Québécois members have talked about the tensions and grief caused by these negotiations, and the fact that this is a bad agreement causing many problems. My colleague comes from a region similar to mine, a place where people work very hard in the forests.
I will ask my colleague a question about sovereignty in these negotiations between Canada and the United States. I am going to speak in English since the copy I have of the agreement is only in English.
Article XVII, the anti-circumvention section, is very important. For the people who listening and watching understand, under the statutes, the federal government cannot impose any type of administration or delegation of duties to the provinces on how they manage their forestry industry. Yet in article XVII paragraph 1 it says that neither party shall take action that circumvents or offsets the commitments set out in this agreement. Paragraph 2 is very interesting. It states that any change in a provincial timber pricing or forest management system, as it existed on April 27, 2006.
Suddenly we have a clause built into the agreement that even the federal Government of Canada does not have, which is to look at the practices of a province and if they are in disagreement with that practice, it can demand the province to change it. If it does not change it, then suddenly we are on the wrong side of the deal.
So we can easily break the agreement. This is a matter involving the sovereignty of Quebec, of Ontario and of the other provinces, the sovereignty that enables the provinces to manage forest activities on their territory as they see fit.
I would have thought that the Bloc Québécois would want to protect this sovereignty, but it is taking the opposite direction to sovereignty in their province and the country.