Olivia Chow

[Nuclear Liability and compensation Act, June 19th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to speak to Bill C-5 regarding nuclear liability.

What is the cost of cleaning up a nuclear accident? We had a nuclear accident in the 1940s in New Mexico and a series of nuclear accidents in the 1950s in Russia, in Chalk River, Ontario and in Illinois. If I have time later, I will go through some of the examples.

However, the nuclear accidents that captured the public's attention the most were Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Windscale.

I pay a lot of attention to Chernobyl because we have seen a huge increase in the rate of thyroid cancer in children and families in Chernobyl. I know a lot about thyroid cancer because I have thyroid cancer and after studying the disease I noticed that one of the causes was exposure to nuclear reactors, nuclear waste or nuclear radiation.

Thyroid cancer is one of the fastest growing cancers in the world, aside from skin cancer, although both have a growth rate of about 5% per year.

What is the cost of helping survivors of this disease? Once the thyroid has been removed, people will need to take certain types of drugs for the rest of their life. The cost of the drugs, in a country where there may not be adequate health care or pharmacare, could be enormous. Therefore, it is absurd that the bill would limit the liability of a nuclear accident to only $650 million. It costs so much more, not only for each individual, but also to repair all the damage that is inflicted by a nuclear accident.

The liability for a nuclear accident in U.S. is $10 billion. The Canadian amount of $650 million is at the bottom of the heap according to the international standard. Yes, Canada is well known to be at the bottom of the heap with regard to the international standard, not only on nuclear liability but also with regard to nuclear waste. Nuclear waste lasts for thousands and thousands of years. It is a good comparison to look at something that lasts for that length of time versus something that is so much about our future, our children.

The children of Canada are our first concern because they are our future. Canada is not only at the bottom of the heap in terms of nuclear liability and the $650 million limit if this bill passes, but we are in fact putting our children, in terms of our investment in a national child care program, also at the bottom of the OECD heap.

In terms of liability, in Germany there is no limit. Not only Germany but a lot of European countries are moving more toward unlimited liability limits. As the world is going in one direction, Canada is going backwards as usual by saying that we are going to cap the liability at $650 million. Also, no private insurance would be made available.

That actually says to a lot of the cities and areas around nuclear plants that they are only worth $650 million. If there is a nuclear accident, it would cost billions of dollars in damage, personal injury and death, so who would pay? Let me answer that question in a minute, because this is the critical situation. If it is not the corporation that is paying, who is paying?

That is why the New Democrats, at the committee and at report stage, moved 35 amendments. We took the Liberal Party at its word. In the House of Commons in October of last year, the Liberal critic said:

--this is a very important bill and I will be recommending to my caucus and my leader that we support it and send it to committee. In committee we will be doing our job as official opposition listening to stakeholders and experts, and we will review the bill in detail.

However, as usual, the Liberals are missing in action. They try to say that they really are worried about the nuclear industry, but they are not sure whether they are saying yes to nuclear industry expansion. They were saying that maybe the liability was too low, maybe they would amend this, and maybe they would study it.

After all of that discussion, what did they do? They did not bring in any amendments whatsoever. We are not surprised, are we? The Bloc did bring in a few amendments, which were nothing that would fundamentally alter the bill, but it did not matter, because the amendments from the Bloc and the New Democratic Party were defeated. Why? Because the Liberals did not support any of them, even though they said publicly that they were extremely concerned about nuclear safety.

As members may recall, when there was a shutdown at AECL, the Liberals were saying that safety is really important. They said that we must invest in safety. As for the history of AECL, for example, there was hardly any investment in the last 15 years. What the Conservative Party is doing right now, after firing Ms. Keen because she said that perhaps it was not very safe, is to sell AECL and privatize it.

I notice that the Conservatives have not met an issue that they do not want to privatize. They are privatizing the airline industry safety measures in Bill C-7, which we are debating. It is about privatizing airline safety so that the airlines would police themselves. The Conservatives are saying not to worry, to let them do their own thing.

On immigration, it is the same thing. They are saying to privatize it, to give the contracts to the visa office and let those private companies deal with it.

It is the same thing here in Bill C-5. If there is a problem, the government is saying, we will let the taxpayers pay for it. But $650 million is not enough. It will take many billions of dollars. Who is going to carry the costs of cleanups?

Who is going to carry the cost of cleaning up of the Great Lakes if Pickering has some trouble? Who is going to clean up the environment? Who is going to deal with the people who develop ill health? It will be the taxpayers, not the industry. The government does not worry about taxpayers. It will let the industry do its own thing. In fact, this legislation is a big yes to the nuclear industry.

I note that the Conservatives want to sign on to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and turn Canada into a nuclear waste dump for those who do not have space for nuclear waste. Canada is a big country. Maybe they can put some of it here, because after all, if there are any problems, the liability would be capped at only $650 million. Do not worry about it, that is the attitude, and do come to Canada, even though we know there is no long term nuclear waste storage solution in the world.

For example, let us look at cleanups. There are huge and expensive cleanups. Port Hope is stuck with a huge number of problems that it has to clean up. The Northwest Territories is another example.

Nuclear waste remains deadly even after thousands and thousands of years. The bill in front of us is saying that the government will not have to worry about this waste, that taxpayers can handle it. That is extremely unfortunate. Why? Because many of the municipalities in southern Ontario are saying no to this kind of reckless behaviour.

Let me give the House an example. Twenty years ago, Guelph had a record of being one of the best cities in terms of dealing with waste management. Now, with the new mayor, the entire city is focusing on how to have zero waste. Guelph wants a big reduction in the amount of waste.

Last weekend, a conference was held in Niagara Falls. It was put together by the Ontario Zero Waste Coalition. The coalition is looking at a situation in which companies that have waste take on the responsibility for that waste. For example, Interface is a big carpet company. If someone buys a new carpet from Interface, it takes the old one back.

We are seeing a trend toward this, which is that people and companies must take care of their products, whether it is the waste or the packaging. That is the direction the world is taking. We should do the same thing with nuclear waste.

If there is a nuclear installation, we want make sure that its waste is taken care of and that if there is an accident, the liability limit is unlimited, or at least to a standard that is extremely high, in the billions of dollars, for example, not this measly $650 million in Bill C-5.

That is why I am astounded that the Liberals and the Bloc will not do everything they can to block this bill. This bill really limits the civil liability and compensation for damage in the case of a nuclear accident. We know there has been a series of accidents in the past. I have a long list of them. How can it be possible that on the last day of this sitting of the House of Commons we get no debate but only complete silence from both the official opposition and the Bloc?

Are they not worried about their residents, their voters, discovering that in the last few sitting days of the House of Commons before the summer break we allowed a bill of this nature to pass? How can we possibly do that?

Do we think that people in southern Ontario, where there are big nuclear plants, are not worried that if there are even more nuclear reactors being built the company liability would be only $650 million? What is the worth of a city? Let us look at Guelph. What is the worth of the Great Lakes? What is the worth of Aurora, right beside Guelph? I went to the University of Guelph for a short period of time. There is the city and the zoo and a great number of places. In Pickering, it is the same thing.

How can we say that if there is an accident it would cost $650 million and we could repair everything that is damaged? Just for the lake itself, cleaning up the water would cost $650 million, never mind the health damages and contamination of all the buildings in the area.

Let me tell members about some of the nuclear leaks. I will start with recent ones. In Tennessee in March 2006, 35 litres of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during a transfer into a lab at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin. What happened? The incident caused a seven month shutdown and required a public hearing on the licensing of the plant.

A company wanting to build a new plant and seeing a liability of only $650 million perhaps might think that it could skip a few safety standards. Maybe it would not do everything that it should to ensure that it has the safest nuclear facility because, after all, the liability is only $650 million.

Further, by the way, the bill also says that a person would have to take action within three years of becoming aware of damage, with an absolute limitation of 10 years after an incident. In the case of bodily injury, the limit is 30 years.

However, we know, and I know personally, that cancers and genetic mutations, et cetera, will not appear for at least 20 years following exposure. That is why in Chernobyl for the first 10 to 15 years it was not very obvious. It was only 20 to 30 years later that we began to see the huge rates of thyroid cancer, other cancers and genetic mutations in the future generations, with the children suffering.

By that time, according to this bill, it would be too late. No one could sue or do anything because of the time limit.

The bill also restricts liability to Canadian incidents except when there is an agreement in place with another country and the operators are Canadian. What happens if the operators are not Canadian? They could be German, Chinese or American. Does it mean that the operators would not be liable? That is outrageous. How can we possibly allow this bill to pass?

I have at least 14 pages of nuclear accidents since 1945. There are hundreds of them, and each of them has had serious implications. Let me list another one. In 2005, in Illinois--

[Food and Drugs Act, June 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the way the bill is drafted, we know that probably 60% of natural health products will fail. As well, the inspectors will have huge powers to look for compliance. In fact, we have heard that Health Canada is trying right now to recruit more health inspectors from universities. There is great concern in the community that the way the bill is drafted would cause great harm to the natural health products industry.

I heard the Conservative government say that it wants to change the preamble, have a different enforcement mechanism, restrain the inspectors, have the third category legislative area, have a different definition of health products, redefine what traditional use means, including native, first nation and the 5,000 years of Chinese herbal medicine history, and a separate advisory committee.

It begs the question: why would the government not just withdraw the bill, redraft it properly and bring it back when the fall session starts? Right now we are being asked to vote for or against the bill the way it is drafted now. Even though there is some promise that amendments will be put forward in the committee, we do not know, first, whether the committee will accept these amendments and, second, whether these amendments will even be in order given how fundamental these changes are and how extensive they would be.

Why would we not say no to the bill before us, pick the good parts, redraft the bad parts and start all over again? Certainly the bill as it is now is not acceptable. Even the Conservative government says so. Why would the Liberals not join with the NDP and say no to the bill the way it is crafted now?

[Food and Drugs Act, June 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to what the member had to say. I counted at least seven amendments, if not more, that would change the bill, whether it is the legislative or third category, definition of health product, traditional use, the recognition of, separate advisory committee, compliance, et cetera. The health critic for the NDP had a lot of concerns right from day one. It as if the way the bill is drafted now is not acceptable.

I hear many concerns. Rather than passing the bill as it is at second reading, why would the House not send it to the committee without recommendation and then have those amendments put in at the health committee after some hearings? If we say yes to Bill C-51 the way it is structured now, how can anyone blame the natural health product industry, or the herbal medicine practitioners and all those folks who are extremely fearful because of the way it is structured and written? There is a lot of fear out there and I do not blame them because of the history.

The hon. member also said that he understood because of the past history of this industry being attacked. There is a lot of misunderstanding out there. Would it not be a much better approach for the House to not say yes to the bill as it is drafted? The government is already proposing all these amendments? If we approve the bill as it is at second reading, then during the summer how will anyone understand and know for sure these amendments will be accepted at the health committee?

[Food and Drugs Act, June 9th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the member read many articles and letters, but will the Liberal Party and this member stand up and say no to this bill as it is drafted now?

Really, it is a power grab for the health minister to have an inordinate amount of discretion on the whole natural health products industry. Lumping natural health products with drugs causes all sorts of problems. Yes, there is a huge backlog of licensing but that is partially because of the way past regulations have been implemented by both the previous Liberal government and now the Conservative government.

Many of the amendments that may be necessary and that the member read into the record, if this bill were to pass the way it is at second reading, and if it gets to committee, I am afraid they will be ruled out of order by the health committee chair.

By that time it might be too late, even though I understand that there will be concerns from all across the country. Therefore, will the member vote against this bill now or at lease not say yes now and not send it to committee, or if it is sent to committee send it without a recommendation?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I want to point out some facts about what the Bloc members have done in committees.

New Democrats want both the immigration committee and the finance committee to go across Canada, including Quebec, to talk to workers who are unemployed and are seeing their EI funds being taken away, or immigrant groups that have serious concerns about the legislation in front of us, Bill C-50. We moved those motions, yet the Bloc members, along with the Liberals and the Conservatives, at both committees said no to public hearings.

In the finance committee we said that we have to speak to these issues. When we were about to deal with clause by clause consideration of the bill in the finance committee, the Bloc was silent. Bloc members did not speak out in the finance committee to say why they are opposed to the immigration portion of Bill C-50, and why they are opposed to setting up a crown corporation which will only be provided with $2 billion, instead of the $15 billion that is needed, as the Auditor General said. They said nothing. There was no response, complete silence.

If the hon. member's party is so concerned about this bill, and I am glad that unlike the Liberals at least Bloc members are standing up, why is the Bloc afraid to agree to conducting hearings across the country, especially during the next few months when we have a bit of time? Why rush this bill through? Why was the Bloc silent in the finance committee where this bill was considered only a week and a half ago before it was reported back to the House? Why the silence?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the damage that this bill would do is irreversible. I have listened very carefully to the hon. member's speech. She talked about the dark history of what we experienced in the past. However, once we turn an immigrant away, once we turn a group of immigrants away, those immigrants will then be denied the right to come into this country. The damages would be irreversible.

How can it be that 92% of the Liberal members were absent the last time there was a vote in this House, only a few days ago, to delete the immigration portion from this budget implementation bill? If we were able to delete the immigration portion, then we would not have to face this kind of situation. Why is it that the member would not stand up for her principles?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, an objective system would have points and people who want to immigrate to Canada would be able to go online to look at the criteria and see if they have enough points to qualify. After doing the calculation to determine that they do have enough points to qualify, they could apply and, of course, be approved, which is the objective of the system.

Under the proposed change in Bill C-50, even if applicants have all the points, completely qualify, have submitted an application and have waited for several months or a year, their application can be returned. It would not even be processed or considered. The applicant would just be told to come back another time.

Applicants would have no right to appeal and no rights under any law to argue that they had qualified so why was their application not processed or even considered. That is what is alarming the Canadian Bar Association and various immigrant communities all across Canada, because it is arbitrary. It does not tell people whether they fit the criteria or not. I understand that we need skilled labour but this is not the right way to proceed.

Instead, we in the immigration committee should study the point system again and say that in 2002, Canada made a mistake. We changed the existing point system to a human capital situation and it is not working. We are not giving immigrants a head start in Canada. Many of them come into this country and become unemployed. We need a better system, with better tracking and a better match. The way to do it is to fine-tune the point system and actually look at the skills.

In Australia, for example, people are given extra points if they have relatives in the country. It does not necessarily have to be immediate family members. We should probably do the same. The system used to be like that. Under assisted relative class, people were able to get extra points if someone was willing to sponsor them.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we know the immigration system is broken and that it needs to be fixed. We also know we have a serious problem when 925,000 applicants are in the backlog. Unfortunately, the direction in which the government is heading is the wrong direction.

I first want to tell the House why there is a problem. During the immigration committee hearings, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business came before us and said that there was a complete mismatch of the people coming into the country and the kind of skills that we need. It said that at least 42% of our immigrants needed to be skilled in the technical category. However, when we look at the number of immigrants coming to Canada with skills in that category we see that only 19% of them were in that category.

If we look at professional and managerial occupations, it accounts for only 8% of the labour shortage and yet 74% of the immigrants coming into this country have that skill set. We are bringing in a lot of people whose skills are mismatched with what we need.

Instead of doing what the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is doing, we need to set up a system where we bring in the skills that Canada needs, rather than what is happening now.

Recently, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration said:

We said publicly it isn't our intention for the bill to negatively impact on family reunification but I can't categorically say it won't. What I can say is that I won't.

The minister is saying that if she remains the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration she will not do anything to harm family reunification. However, the bill in front of us would allow any minister to change the category so much that a lot of families will not be united in Canada.

We understand that we need to find people who come to Canada with the skills we need. We can look at the kind of system Australia has and the number of immigrants entering that country. Its work rate is 81%, which means that unemployment for immigrants has dropped. For the families entering the country, 69% of them have decent jobs.

In Canada, however, only 60% of our immigrants have the kind of jobs for which they have the skills and only 60% of them are employed. For families, it is only 39%, which means that we have a lot of unemployed immigrants in this country because they do not have the kind of skills this country needs.

How did Australia manage to increase the employability of its immigrants? It transferred the onshore processing of most of the applications and it changed its point system. It frequently updates tracking for occupations in demand and it gives points for immigrants who have families in Australia, which is divided into four main categories: skilled labour, family, business and humanitarian.

As a general rule, it only takes 6 to 18 months maximum for immigrants and their families to get into Australia. It has a processing centre called Adelaide Skilled Processing Centre that looks at the skills Australia needs and then it gives points accordingly.

In Canada, we have a human capital model that was brought in by the previous government in 2002. It points to immigrants according to the kind of education level they have, not necessarily the kind of skills that we need in Canada.

Australia has a very centralized processing system that looks at best practices around the world. It also has electronic filing. Last night I went on its website and looked at its immigration section. Its e-filing is incredible. If people want a visa, whether they are a visitor or skilled labour, they can file online. They can also check online what is happening with their applications, how long they must wait and what kind of documents they need.

We have no e-filing in Canada. Half the time, a lot of people who have been waiting to come into this country go to the office of a member of Parliament, so we all become immigration officers. We send faxes and e-mails to visa offices asking for status updates. It is like a make work situation, whereas Australia has an e-file system where people can go online and find out what is happening with their applications.

One can just imagine the resources, the efficiency and how effective it would be to have that kind of system. The former Liberal government, five or six years ago, agreed that we needed to move immigration filing online and wanted to contract a company to do so. However, that did not work.

The Conservative government, instead of investing in technology, best practices and in a skills centre to update skills, it has put it all in the hands of one person, the minister. The minister will make decisions, based on what criteria we do not know. How will it speed up the situation if the department does not have the infrastructure?

To make this worse, the immigration section of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration has had a reduction of 32% in its budget between 2008 and the coming year. How will everything be fast-tracked if we do not have the electronic capacity, a decent website and a skills centre to test what kind of skills we need in this country? We do not even have cost effective quality control in terms of caseloads.

On top of that, if a visitor's visa is being denied, there is no appeal process. People would need to go to their member of Parliament who would then need to go to the minister and ask the minister to please allow the person into the country to attend, let us say, a funeral. In Australia, within 28 days people can have an appeal tribunal so that all the decisions are based on law and fact rather than sometimes inconsistent applications of the law.

We have so much that is wrong in our immigration system. We can do a lot in terms of changing our point system, having the electronic capacity to streamline, work with the visa offices, train the staff better, give the right resources and give the right targets.

However, what the government is doing is it is centralizing the sweeping powers in one person's hands, making the minister above the law. Parliament would not have any say over how to reform our immigration department. That is really a shame because we can study the situation and improve on it. Instead, we are going in the wrong direction.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 4th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member used the term “principled position”. How is it that there is any principle involved when in Bill C-50 there is the theft of $54 billion of workers' money that they will need if they become unemployed? We know that Ontario is in trouble. We talked about that earlier. A lot of the unemployed manufacturing workers and their families will need this fund, yet this bill only puts aside $2 billion to set up a crown corporation.

How could there be a principled position when 92% of Liberal members refuse to vote on this issue? Tell me.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I remember the despair on the faces of hotel workers who were laid off when the hotel industry suffered greatly during the SARS crisis in Toronto. Many of the workers had to sell their houses because they had no money to pay their mortgages. They said to me, “We have paid into this insurance. Why are we not qualified to get some of it back? It is our money”. They were desperate. They lost their homes. Some of them were in great despair. That is what happened to ordinary workers when they faced unemployment.