Pat Martin

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, November 29th, 2006]

I wonder whose side they are on.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, time will not permit me to correct a great deal of the misinformation that my colleague has shared with us today, but let me start at least with one point. There are over 40 countries that have banned all forms of asbestos, not 9 as my colleague stated. That includes the entire European Union, including France, Australia, Japan and many other developed nations that have banned all forms of asbestos.

When my colleague said that the type of asbestos they are mining is different, he was being misleading as well. This is chrysotile. Chrysotile is often found with a grey slurry of tremolite asbestos. In the mine that I worked in, the green fibrous chrysotile often had the tremolite asbestos with it. It is found in similar veins. This is perhaps where my colleague is getting mixed up. Perhaps the vein they are in is different. The tremolite asbestos is seen as the most deadly of asbestos and is different from chrysotile definitely.

The home insulation product he was talking about is the brand name Zonolite. It has nothing to do with Quebec. It has nothing to do with Canada. It is mined in Libby, Montana in the United States. It has nothing to do with Canadian asbestos, so he is being misleading. It is loaded with tremolite.

Zonolite is in fact tremolite asbestos. It is in many hundreds of thousands of homes in Canada. It is a health hazard. It has nothing to do with Quebec and nothing to do with Thetford Mines.

I too have been to conferences, but the conferences I have been to were not put on by the industry and were not put on by the Chrysotile Institute. They were put on by the scientists around the world who are trying to put an end to this global tragedy, the misery that is the asbestos industry in Bangkok, New York City, et cetera. I do attend these conferences. I get the truth. My colleague--

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will summarize. I believe that Canada should get out of the asbestos industry. It is the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known.

When I was a trade union representative, I would not let the employees I represented anywhere near that material. When I worked in the asbestos mine, we kicked out our union and brought in a new union because the old union would not admit that asbestos was a killer. There is union representation and there is union representation, and I believe the first obligation is to look after the best interests of the employee, not the employer. Whatever working representative is trying to defend the asbestos industry is looking after the best interests of the employer, not the men and women who deserve to be saved from exposure to asbestos.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, misinformation and faulty and tainted research have been the biggest part of the problem in the struggle to have asbestos banned. The studies my colleague talks about were paid for by the industry, the institute. When we look at the rest of the world, we see that it is only a couple of Canadian scientists who say that chrysotile is benign. I know the studies the member is talking about. These are well known and well documented and they have been exposed as being false and wrong.

The best one to look at has been done by the institute of national health in the province of Quebec. In June 2005, finally, the lie was exposed by scientists who are not bought and paid for by the industry, scientists who are genuine and sincere. They make the argument that chrysotile asbestos kills, that it is a known carcinogen and no one should be exposed to a single fibre. The only safe threshold limit of asbestos to humans is zero, and no industry can guarantee that it will not expose people to it.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's question gives me the opportunity to explain to him how terribly wrong he is. The asbestos that was mined at Thetford Mines, Jeffrey Mine and all those mines, frankly, was chrysotile, then and now. The Yukon asbestos mine that I worked in was chrysotile. The asbestos mine that closed in Newfoundland recently was chrysotile. It has always been chrysotile in Canada. We do not mine any other type of asbestos.

There are five types of asbestos. Chrysotile is right in the middle of the range, but it is a type of asbestos. It is misleading and it is part of the spin that the industry is trying to put on it to isolate and separate chrysotile and say that this asbestos is benign and all these other types of asbestos will kill us.

It is the same asbestos. It is the same fibre. We put it in the fluffing machines. We make it into materials. We mix it with cement as a binding agent. All those uses are the same, so whoever got to my colleague has been giving him misinformation and trying to convince the world that there is something okay about Quebec asbestos. There is nothing okay about Quebec asbestos. It kills just like any other asbestos kills.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, hope we get around to the second motion we put forward today which I will speak to very briefly and explain. I perhaps am one of the only members of the New Democratic Party who does not believe we should abolish the Senate, or at least I did not until the last couple of months. I have had many arguments with my colleagues about our long-standing policy within the New Democratic Party that the unelected, undemocratic Senate should be scrapped and abolished. Until my frustrating experience with Bill C-2, the federal accountability act, I was a defender of the Senate to some degree.

I have now put forward this notice of opposition to the Senate. I think we should scrap the whole kit and caboodle after my experience, frankly. I have come around four-square with my colleagues of the New Democratic Party. It is a waste of money, a waste of resources. It is an obstacle and a barrier to democracy. I am furious with that other house, the other chamber.

I put forward a motion that does not scrap the Senate completely because the building itself is beautiful. My motion says that we should eliminate all the salaries, all the office budgets, all of the expenses and certainly the travel budgets of every senator. We might still have a Senate--we would not need a constitutional change for this--the senators just would not be able to do any harm any more because they would not have a budget to screw up what we do.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I trust that will not be counted against the time of my speech.

If I am using strong words of language, it is because I am personally ashamed and frustrated at my government and what it is doing with this industry. As I said, we send teams of Canadian lawyers at great taxpayers' expense to Rotterdam, Geneva, all around the world. Wherever people are working to have asbestos banned, we send these expensive teams of lawyers to resist it.

When France announced it wanted to ban asbestos in 1999, the Government of Canada went to the WTO and intervened. It claimed it was an unfair trade limitation. Where would we sell our asbestos if France banned it? Fortunately for the French people France won and Canada lost at the WTO and banned asbestos in all its forms, including the chrysotile asbestos mined at Thetford Mines in Quebec.

There is no safe level of this killer product. This is what motivated me today to move this motion in the natural resources mines and minerals category of the main estimates. I want my country to stop promoting the asbestos industry. I want my country to be able to hold its head high when it goes to international forums. I want my country to join the global campaign to ban asbestos in all its forms.

We are so stupid about asbestos in this country. We have contaminated our own Parliament Buildings to the point where they are not really fit for human habitation. My office in West Block is so riddled with asbestos that we really should not be in there. Asbestos was sprayed on virtually every commercial and institutional building in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. In our zeal to be boosters of asbestos, we contaminated schools, hospitals, public government buildings and our own Parliament Buildings.

We were spraying it on to steel beams for fireproofing not realizing that it crumbles 15 or 20 years later. It becomes friable and it comes down on our suspended acoustic ceiling. When we change a light bulb now, we get a face full of asbestos fibres. These fibres are so small and dangerous. It takes eight hours for an asbestos fibre to drop from the ceiling to the floor. That is how tiny they are. They are invisible. We cannot see them but they can and will kill us.

The province of Quebec has the highest rate of mesothelioma among women in the world. The province of Quebec has the fourth highest rate of mesothelioma among men in the world. This is from a 2005 report of Quebec's national institute of public health. So do not tell me that Quebec asbestos is somehow benign because it seems to kill Quebeckers just as readily as it kills people in Thailand, India and the other places where this killer material is sent.

I worked in the asbestos mines. We worked in clouds of the stuff. Not everybody gets sick. Fortunately, God willing, I will not get sick from asbestosis, but the latency period of 25 to 30 years means that everybody in this room could be affected from their exposure just because of their tenure in these buildings.

I will never support an estimates process, a budget or a bill that contains money, corporate welfare for corporate serial killers. I will not buy it. I will not be a part of it. I refuse to vote for it. All of the laudable things that our Minister of Natural Resources talked about are spoiled by the fact that he continues to subsidize, promote and spend taxpayers' money on this evil industry.

I have read a great deal about the history because I feel personally affected by this. It was McGill University that first started raising questions about whether or not asbestos is bad for people. Why? The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company paid for and created a new laboratory at McGill University to study asbestos. Guess what? The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was having trouble underwriting asbestos workers because they were dropping like flies, so it needed somebody to put the big question mark there. The same way the tobacco industry did. Any issue has a scientist somewhere it can buy to tell people what they want to hear.

The latest report being pushed by the associate deputy minister to the minister is a report that cost $1 million. The Chrysotile Institute paid $1 million for a report to raise the question saying that chrysotile maybe should not be viewed in the same way that other categories of asbestos are viewed. The rest of the world does not agree.

I gave a speech this year at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, among the world's leading authorities in asbestos related disease and I asked everyone that I could whether it was true that chrysotile kills. Every one of them, from Dr. Selikoff's own assistants down the line said, “Yes, chrysotile asbestos kills in the same way that crocidolite and tremolite and the other asbestos categories kill”. There is no safe level of asbestos. I will not tolerate voting in favour of any particular budget line that includes asbestos.

The public and members of the House of Commons should be made aware that we have such blinders on when it comes to this mineral that we even opposed having it listed as a hazardous material at the Rotterdam convention. The Rotterdam convention is the United Nations gathering that lists hazardous chemicals for export, et cetera. It does not try to ban these chemicals. It says that if this product is to be sold and exported, the purchaser has to have prior informed consent.

Canada objected to asbestos being put on that list of hazardous materials. Again, for the third time in a row, we sent teams of Department of Justice lawyers to Rotterdam to oppose even warning the people to whom we sell this stuff that it might be harmful. Imagine, how selfish is the face of greed that we are seeing here. What kind of a business would be so irresponsible as to refuse to put a material that is a known carcinogen and the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known, on a list of hazardous materials so that the people it sells it to have a fighting chance to take some precautions so they will not inhale asbestos fibres?

When I was working in the asbestos mine, my foreman had already had one lung removed and he went back to work. He came to us from Thetford Mines. Ours was a new asbestos mine in Yukon. We needed experienced asbestos miners to show us how to open up this new mine. Frenchie was his nickname, nothing derogatory, but when he came to us he only had one lung. He had already had a lung removed from having worked in the asbestos mines before.

I will simply say that many of us in the NDP will never support corporate welfare for corporate serial killers. The asbestos industry is a corporate serial killer. I am sick of Canadian government officials acting as globe-trotting propagandists, as merchants of death, these guys that are exporting human misery by the tonne. I will not tolerate it. This country should ban asbestos altogether in all of its forms.

At the very least, in a letter I sent to the Minister of Natural Resources, we should never sell it to any country that has not signed the ILO protocols on the safe handling of asbestos. None of the customers Canada sells our product to have ever ratified ILO convention No. 162. This is the irresponsible nature of the industry here.

The final point I will make is there are safe alternatives to using asbestos. Most of the asbestos we sell is used in cement asbestos mixtures to make asbestos pipe and asbestos roofing tile. There is a cellulose wood fibre, Douglas fir, the waste material that rots on the forest floor throughout B.C., which is the perfect binding agent for cement asbestos products. In fact, there is a Weyerhaeuser mill in Kamloops, B.C. that is on the verge of closing. Weyerhaeuser Canada told me that that mill would create 400 jobs if it could only sell its wood alternative cellulose product for a cement binding agent in these products.

We do not have to peddle this killer product mined in Quebec. We could sell this neutral, benign, safe product, an environmentally correct product from the Weyerhaeuser mill in Kamloops. We could satisfy the world's needs for concrete products without exposing unsuspecting third world workers to the misery that is death by asbestosis.

Having said that, I do not want to drag this out any further. I have already said that I think it is morally and ethically reprehensible to be dumping this product into underdeveloped nations. We should do what the rest of the developed world is doing and ban asbestos in all its forms. Let us follow the progressive nations and not be a part of this terrible asbestos mafia any longer.

[Main Estimates, 2006-07, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have this opportunity to speak to the motion. I put forward a notice of motion that the NDP intended to oppose this budget line in the main estimates process for the simple reason that, within the context of this pile of money the minister was talking about, is the budget for the Chrysotile Institute. It used to be known as the Asbestos Institute. I for one will not vote for anything that puts money into the asbestos industry in this country.

I call the money the government keeps shovelling to the asbestos industry corporate welfare for corporate serial killers. I worked in the asbestos mines as a young man. I feel strongly that they were lying to us about the health hazard of asbestos then, just as they are lying about it to this day.

The fact is, asbestos kills. It is the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known. Even though the industry tries to change the name and have everyone believe that the asbestos mined in Quebec is somehow less hazardous or more benign, so to speak, it is not. Chrysotile asbestos causes asbestosis, mesothelioma and all the terrible health hazards that we know asbestos causes.

The fact is most Canadians believe we have banned asbestos. The mine that I worked in closed due to natural market forces. Nobody in the developed world was buying this killer any more. Most of the world is banning asbestos in all of its forms. The entire European Union has banned asbestos in all its forms, as well as Japan, Australia, South Africa. Most developed nations have come to their senses and banned asbestos.

I hang my head in shame to say that Canada is still one of the world's largest producers and exporters of asbestos in the world. It varies from second to third from year to year, but I believe it is currently the second largest in the world. The Canadian government is acting like globe-trotting propagandists in supporting the asbestos industry and helping to dump it into unsuspecting underdeveloped nations where there is little or no health and safety legislation.

To me it is morally and ethically reprehensible that the Government of Canada is spending money in the budget of the Minister of Natural Resources to promote the asbestos industry abroad, in both hard and soft money. Even though the budget line seems relatively small on the direct money the government is giving to the asbestos industry, the soft money is enormous because it sends teams of lawyers all over the world to stop other countries from banning asbestos. It in fact uses our foreign embassies as places to hold trade shows to promote asbestos in underdeveloped and third world countries.

My colleague, the member for Timmins—James Bay, calls the asbestos industry the tobacco industry's evil twin and there is good reason for that. Both of these industries have made a fortune selling a product that they know full well kills people. Both have taken part in a wholesale fraud based on phony science, misrepresentation and have promoted their product in this way.

I am sorry the minister is not present to hear this, but part of the problem is there is a rat in the woodpile in the minister's office. His assistant deputy minister, Mr. Gary Nash, is the founder and first CEO of the Asbestos Institute. He is an asbestos apologist. He is a corporate stooge for the asbestos industry. He has weaseled his way into the minister's office and writes the papers which brief the minister on asbestos.

I am here to say that there is no safe level of asbestos exposure. I do not care if it is mined in Quebec. Quebec asbestos kills just like all other asbestos kills. It is just that Quebeckers have been subjected to misinformation to the point where they somehow believe their own propaganda. This is the real shame.

The clinic in Thetford Mines served all five of the active mines. In the 1970s it was found to not be telling victims of asbestos when it would diagnose miners with asbestosis or mesothelioma. Because there is no treatment and it is a death sentence, it would not tell miners so they would keep working. When the clinic was challenged on this, it said that it was out of kindness, that it did not want to alarm the family. It was better to let the guy keep working until he dropped than alarm his family that he was sick.

The horror of asbestosis and mesothelioma is the latency period is cruelly long and the effects are devastating.

I have an article from the Toronto Star on the amount of money that has been shovelled into the asbestos industry. It says, “A $30 million campaign aims to take the curse off asbestos”. It is cursed because the rest of the world woke up.

The rest of the world knows that asbestos is the biggest industrial killer the world has ever known and has ever seen. Yet the government and all previous Canadian governments have been so enamoured with this evil material, which never should have been taken out of the ground to begin with, and they have pushed it, promoted it and dumped it into the third world. They have spent my tax dollars to promote asbestos, to promote death.

We are exporting human misery on a massive scale, with every shipment of asbestos that leaves the country, at 220,000 tonnes per year. One microscopic asbestos fibre can cause mesothelioma. We cannot even get our minds around how much we are dumping this into third world countries.

I know the great asbestos strikes in Quebec were called the first shot in the silent revolution. I know the emotional attachment that nationalists in Quebec assign to asbestos, but it is irrational.

I urge Canadians to finally wake up and see asbestos for what it is. It is a killer. The minister and the rat in the woodpile, as I call him, his ADM, the founder and first president of the Asbestos Institute, is now working in the employ of the minister, advising him about the wonderful benefits of this miracle product—

[Federal Accountability Act, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that kind of bluster from the President of the Treasury Board is not going to clean up the Liberal leadership loans.

If the minister were serious about getting big money out of politics, he would have supported the amendments to Bill C-2 that the NDP put in to try to stop the corruption. Instead, he introduced his own new loopholes to try and backfill the reading of convention fees.

Would the minister agree that these huge Liberal leadership loans are just big money buying influence in Canadian politics, an abuse of the system? Will he promise to take steps to eliminate them, so they will not be around the next time we have a leadership race?

[Federal Accountability Act, November 28th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, nobody should be able to buy an election in this country or a politician for that matter, but big money is still buying influence in Canadian politics through the loophole that allows these huge so-called loans to Liberal leadership candidates. If people can borrow millions from their corporate buddies, they can buy the election, and who knows if that loan will ever get paid back. That is not democracy. That is who you know politics.

Why will the government not step up and plug this last remaining loophole, so that nobody can buy an election in this country ever again?