Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege for me to rise today in the House to speak to Bill C-7. While it has been referred to in a number of different ways by various members in the House as a technical move and a piece of housekeeping, it also affords us the opportunity to refocus our attention on the importance that we place on national parks and heritage sites.
The importance that we have been placing on this in a lot of respects has been mere words and nice intentions. Some questions have been put to the government asking what its intentions are with respect to the budget, moneys, and the serious intent that will follow this so-called housekeeping procedure.
We support the move of Parks Canada to the Department of the Environment. This makes perfect sense with respect to protecting the ecological integrity and administration. That is where it started out and that is where it should go back.
I am a new member and the process that we went through in terms of addressing this bill, taking a look at it thoroughly in committee, making some changes to it, and how those changes came about, was very informative to me in terms of how the House could possibly function. There is a certain measure of cultural experience going on for certain political staffers within the government as to how the House may or may not function in the future.
In the past there may have been some tendency to steamroll things, to push things through committee, heaven forbid, or to use non-elected representatives to push a certain political agenda. We bumped into a bit of that in the process of this bill coming forward. It was very interesting to watch how the House functioned as a whole, how we were able to get support from the other opposition parties, talk to members within the government who also found some agreement toward the changes that we were looking for, and receive enough support to have proper and good amendments come forward.
We started with a good bill. It was potentially a housekeeping bill and we made it better. That is the idea of this place, not to simply accept what comes forward but to make changes that we feel represent the views of our constituents across this country. That is the work of the committee and the House.
Herein lies an opportunity for us in this minority government to address other more significant pieces of legislation. I am thinking of Kyoto, water and air quality across this country, and other aspects of the environment, which other members have spoken about today, that need addressing and need the influence of all members of the House in terms of drafting legislation. I am encouraging the government and its political machine to consider conferring with the other parties prior to tabling bills.
There was a suggestion put forward last night in a small committee about green papers, the reintroduction of discussion papers from the government, allowing them to approach other members to have discussion points rather than presenting take it or leave it bills, and going through the arduous process of making serious amendments. There seemed to be a great receptivity among those who were involved in the committee work last night toward a move where the government would come forward with a series of questions and proposals which members in the House could toss around back and forth, and then legislation could derive from that.
I believe this legislation is stronger for a number of the points that have been raised by other opposition members and by members of the government. This piece of legislation firmly affixes where the control and responsibility lies. Who, in a sense, holds the bag for parks in Canada? It is with the Minister of the Environment. The minister is in the best position to understand the importance of ecological integrity and is put in cabinet to protect those aspects that have been talked about so much in the House and in committee, namely, how important parks are to our national identity.
I believe the member for Red Deer was referring to how important parks are for people just to refer to places. There are certain parks that people can bring forward in their minds. Clearly, it is a part of our makeup in this country. Oftentimes Canadians fall back and forth trying to find some point of identity. How do we distinguish ourselves on the world stage? Clearly, we have some perception of ourselves as protectors of the environment. We have some perception of ourselves as having great open spaces that we take care of and manage on behalf of future generations and on behalf of the globe, quite frankly.
Are we properly funding these things? Absolutely not. We have been hearing this from former environment ministers. We are hearing it from the parliamentary secretary. While the words and the platitudes are nice, that these parks are important, that species are important, that we care about future generations and these historic sites, we seem to lose the will along the way, when we head to the budget process, to actually find the dollars identified by the Auditor General and the minister's own staff that are needed to protect both the ecological integrity and the historic sites within this country.
I want to ask a question of the parliamentary secretary in terms of the reconstruction, redesign and rebuilding of many of our monuments and sites. When I look around this particular site here with the asbestos in the walls, the terrible footprint that this place leaves in terms of its actual harmony with the environment, the buildings that we stand in and work in are not healthy buildings. They are not healthy for the people who work here. They are not healthy for the environment as a whole because they leak so much energy.
I would certainly encourage the government, as we are looking to make some real investments in the future, to think of the ecological footprint of all these buildings we are hoping to restore. I hear the Prime Minister is having some problems with some drafts in his residence. We would be more than open to the suggestion of actually fixing the environmental catastrophe that the Prime Minister's residence has become.