Pat Martin

[Business of Supply, May 16th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am please to have the opportunity to join in the debate on the NDP's opposition day motion.

First, let me recognize and pay tribute to the member for Toronto—Danforth, the leader of the NDP, who tabled the motion. It was very fitting that he was the leadoff speaker. He has a long history in Toronto municipal politics in being the champion of this issue, coming from the very municipality that was the first in Canada to take the step of banning the use of cosmetic and non-essential pesticides. It has been a very important part of his career to date.

I will be splitting my time, Mr. Speaker, with the member for Winnipeg North.

I will being my remarks with a shocking statistic. Our children now have a fifty-fifty chance of getting cancer. It was not always that way. In fact, it was only in the post-war years that the use of chemicals grew exponentially. Correspondingly we know now it is no coincidence that there is a direct causal link of many cancers to that exponential growth in the use of chemicals.

For years now, as the incidence of cancer has increased, we have struggled with this. I do not know of a family who has not been touched by cancer. More often than not, we are told by the medical community and the establishment that we probably got cancer because of something we did. Perhaps it is our lifestyle, or perhaps we have been a smoker or we do not exercise enough. Those are true, but we have to consider as well the environmental factors, beyond the control of most Canadians, but within the control of members of Parliament, which are adding and contributing to this alarming incidence of diseases.

Let me be clear, our motion today does not deal with agricultural use of pesticides. It does not interfere with herbicides used by farmers or any other commercial application. We are trying to address the decorative, non-essential use of pesticides which represents about 40% of all the pesticides used. Of the 200 million kilograms of chemical pesticides used per year, about 40% is in that category of non-essential, decorative, cosmetic lawns and gardens, golf courses, et cetera. It is unnecessary.

When it comes to pregnant women and children, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of chemicals, surely the precautionary principle must prevail. Up until now, the burden of proof has been on us to show beyond any doubt that a specific chemical causes a specific cancer. It is an impossible test. It is a bit of a mug's game because no one is able to do that given the compounding effect of the many chemicals to which we are exposed. On that basis, the chemical companies have been allowed to continue to sell these products to the point where they are ubiquitous.

Our initiative reverses that burden of proof. It calls for an absolute moratorium on all non-essential, decorative, cosmetic uses of pesticides on Earth Day, April 22 of next year, until such time that each individual chemical manufacturer can come forward and prove to us beyond any reasonable doubt that its product is absolutely safe. Why should be have to prove that its product is hurting us? Why does it not have to prove that its product is absolutely safe? The burden of proof is turned upside down and stood on its head.

Some would argue that there already is a regulatory agency that takes care of the regulation of dangerous chemicals. We argue that the current regulatory regime has been woefully inadequate. For instance, 2,4-D was just recently reaffirmed as an okay chemical to use. I have a report here from the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, published two weeks ago, that overwhelmingly makes the causal link between 2,4-D of not only childhood cancers but also of neurological and developmental disorders and other health conditions.

We know enough now that the precautionary principle should kick in and make every member of Parliament nod their heads. We have to stop this. We have to stop soiling our own nest and contaminating our environment to the point where our children are being exposed. We know enough about early childhood development to know that their little brain cells have thinner walls than ours and that they are much more vulnerable to contamination by the exposure rates. The threshold limits for adults are 10 to 20 times higher than they should be for children. It is children who are exposed by tumbling around on the front lawn.

Over 50% of childhood exposure to pesticides is actually in the house. Chemical agents bond with molecules of dirt and get tracked into the home where they get circulated and recirculated for a much longer lifespan than that same chemical would have if it were left out in the open.

Therefore, we believe this issue is common sense. We have to look at the other contributing factors to our public health. Above and beyond taking care of ourselves and watching what we eat and quitting smoking, we also have to take steps to protect us from environmental contaminations.

Anyone who saw the recent television show on CBC with Wendy Mesley could not help but be moved at the compelling argument she made and how shocked she was at the pervasive nature of chemical exposure and how little regulation there really was. It is almost as if we are interfering with the chemical companies' right to market products if we question them.

Chemical companies are not necessarily our friends in terms of our public health. Their business is to sell product. They do that very capably and have very powerful lobbies to try to stop anyone who may have the temerity to suggest their product is not healthy.

I have seen Wendy Mesley's show repeated three or four times now. She makes the argument, better than I have ever heard, that we have to put the brakes on this. We are irresponsible if we do not do all we can to minimize the exposure, especially of children. We have to do something about the alarming statistic that 50% of our kids will get cancer. That in itself should stop up dead in our tracks.

I know we are going to get pushed back from the chemical companies. Believe me, I have been getting it already in my office. However, I will point out specifically the fault we find with the current health assessment practices of the PMRA, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency.

The PMRA relies basically on animal toxicity studies and human exposure estimates. Many of these studies are never peer reviewed from a scientific point of view. I am not a scientist, but I do understand these studies should be reviewed. Moreover the extrapolation from studies on rats may not be as valid as formerly thought. We now know that rats have genes that do not exist in people, which detoxify chemicals differently than what people do. If we are measuring toxicity and threshold limits in rats, it is not as applicable to humans as we once thought. It is certainly not applicable to children who recent research has shown absorb and are susceptible to contamination by chemicals at a far greater rate than we originally believed.

It has been pointed out that over 90 municipalities, and I believe it is now over 100 municipalities, have already taken these important steps, including the city of Toronto and the city of Halifax. However, many other municipalities and cities have tried and failed, for example the city of Ottawa. Ottawa city council tried for three years to get the cosmetic use of pesticides banned. It was overwhelmed by a forceful lobby from the pro-pesticide use community. The vote failed just recently. It was lost by one vote. Therefore, Ottawa is not protected.

This is why it is appropriate for the federal government to intervene, within its jurisdiction at the regulatory level, to reverse the onus and protect the communities that do not have the wherewithal to fight the lawsuits and the aggressive lobby by the chemical companies.

For the rest of Canadians who are not already protected by their own municipal bylaws, the House of Commons could take action and make this a blanket universal protection. I dearly hope that members of Parliament see fit to do so, whether their own communities are covered or not.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 15th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will briefly add my support for this idea. This budget really does disappoint the whole population. It disappoints the global movement to try to address climate change.

I remember when Nelson Riis, a former NDP colleague of mine, had the transit pass idea as a private member's bill. It then became an opposition day motion in the House and was passed back in 1998, I think, when we all agreed that there should be a tax deduction for transit use to encourage more people to do so. This is not a radical and revolutionary idea. Drastic change is required and then bold action is required. There was a paucity of that in the budget.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 15th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for an opportunity to perhaps clarify my remarks. At no point in my speech did I really say much about corporate tax cuts or corporate taxes, other than that it would be wrong to allow corporate tax havens and these tax fugitives who do not pay any corporate taxes and in fact gain an unfair competitive advantage.

There are two negative things about these tax havens. First of all, these people are not paying their fair share of taxes in Canada. When I say “fair”, it is whatever the government says that tax rate should be. If it is brought down to 10%, so be it, but I want them to pay it in Canada.

The second thing is that profits that are funneled through tax havens are taxable only when they are brought back into Canada, so they are not brought back into Canada. There is an added incentive for that business to then invest those profits further offshore and never repatriate that money.

That is what we are talking about when we mention tax motivated expatriation of dollars. It does not benefit the Canadian economy if that money leaves the country in the avoidance of paying Canadian taxes, gets further invested offshore and is never repatriated. That does not grow our industries and it does not grow our job base.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 15th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, as we go through the debate on Bill C-13, the budget implementation bill, it strikes me as I listen to the debate that we seem to be missing the big picture here.

We hear a lot of specifics about various minutiae of the budget, but I have with me a chart that shows total family incomes, adjusted to real 2004 dollars, from 1989 to 2004. This bridges some Tory years, but it mostly shows Liberal years. I was shocked to see that the real family income or take-home pay during that period of time for the lowest quintile, the lowest 20% of all Canadians, actually went backwards by 9%. We actually slid by 9% over 15 years. Even though the economy grew and the business climate was favourable for many of those years, the redistribution of wealth did not reach the bottom quintile.

There is that common yarn we hear about how a rising tide lifts all boats, but the rising tide did not lift the boats on the bottom quintile. It did not lift the boats of the second quintile either. The families in this column made about $26,000 or $28,000 a year. Their real family incomes went down by 4% from 1989 to 2004. That was a lesser amount, but they were still going backwards.

In the next quintile, for those making around $45,000 a year, on average their real earnings and real family incomes, all adjusted to 2004 dollars, went down 3%. It is only when we get into the fourth quintile, those making about $65,000 or $70,000 a year, that real family incomes, their real earnings, went up by 2%. In the highest quintile, the wealthiest of Canadians, real family incomes went up by 15%.

I do not know if it is the goal or the objective of either the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party to elevate the wages and living conditions of all Canadians. That is the stated objective of the NDP. I do not know if it has been a priority or if those parties had other competing interests and priorities, but if that was their objective, if that was their economic strategy, it has not worked for the last 15 years. This goes back to 1989.

I think that maybe this is what we should be reflecting upon in this debate. We live in the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, but we are not sharing the wealth. We are not showing a meaningful increase in the financial quality of life of fully 60% of Canadians, and the other fourth quintile only marginally. It is only the very wealthy who got richer. It is almost a cliché that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but unfortunately that is the empirical evidence to date of the economic strategy of the last many years in this country.

All the other issues that we are complaining about here kind of pale in comparison to this failure in what we in the NDP see as the single most important thing: sharing the wealth, sharing one's birthright as a Canadian, and growing forward. The next generation will be the first ever to not have the economic well-being that their parents did. I did not state that very well, but members get the idea.

I am going to move on to something that I think should have been in this budget. We did hear quite a bit in the budget about tax cuts. I will concede that there were many, many small and medium sized tax cuts, but there was very little about tax fairness, and there is one point I want to raise.

I am reading a book called Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America. I argue that the same applies to Canada. This book talks about a trend that is very popular in corporate Canada and America. It is called tax motivated expatriation. It is a chartered accountant's term for what I say is a sleazy, tax-cheating loophole, where businesses use offshore tax havens and actually become tax fugitives. They set up dummy companies offshore so they can funnel the profits of their activities and avoid paying Canadian taxes.

During the Liberal years, the Liberals tore up 11 such tax treaties with offshore tax havens, but they left just one. The one they left in place is the one where Canada Steamship Lines has nine such paper dummy companies used as a tax haven for corporate tax fugitives. It is estimated that between $7 billion and as high as $15 billion a year in tax revenue is lost just because of that one remaining tax haven that people use.

I thought the Tory government in its first budget may have wanted to address that. I am optimistic that the Tories might want to revisit this at some time. If the Conservatives are going to lower corporate taxes, and I accept their word that they believe that is the right way to go, they should at least ensure that those remaining corporate taxes that are still left are paid, that the application of their tax regime is fair and that there are not people being tax fugitives in tax havens.

The last thing I will address is the corporate welfare bums. The former leader of the NDP, David Lewis, coined the term. We in the NDP are not fans of this and we are against corporate handouts. It seems contradictory, especially with the current government, whose political philosophy is to let the free market prevail, to not prop up failing enterprises, to let them rise and fall based on their merits and their abilities. Yet we still see, beyond reason, what we in the NDP call “corporate welfare” being doled out to specific sectors, especially sectors that do not need the support.

There is a time when we may want to support certain industry sectors to stimulate growth because we are trying to develop a certain region or sector, but the oil industry? It boggles our minds in the NDP as to why there is still $1.5 billion in subsidies to big oil when it is going through a period of such record profits. We do not believe that big oil needs that economic stimulation and we think it is wrong.

The other one is the asbestos industry. A lot of people would be shocked to learn that Canada is still third largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world. Even though it is a deadly product and no good can come from being exposed to even a single fibre of asbestos, we still export 200 million tonnes per year.

We do not use it in our own country. We do not use it in the European Union or any of those countries that have banned asbestos completely, such as Japan, Australia, Great Britain, the entire European Union and even South Africa. They banned asbestos because it is deadly.

What we do is export it to developing nations and third world countries.

This is an industry that should die a natural death because it is killing a lot of people. There is no market for it anywhere in the developed world. Anywhere safe handling practices have to be applied makes it uneconomical, and the health costs compound to the point where people are made sick by it to such a degree that there are other cheaper alternate products available.

For some reason, though, the federal government continues to prop up, support, underwrite and promote asbestos in developing nations where there are no safety rules and regulations. Or if there are safety rules and regulations, they are not enforced at all. In fact, there is not just the direct subsidy to the asbestos industry. The government spends tens of millions of dollars sending lawyers around the world to challenge any country that may want to ban asbestos. When France wanted to ban asbestos, the federal government went to the WTO to argue that France was interfering with our ability to market this product. Fortunately for the French people, Canada lost the appeal and France did the right thing and banned asbestos.

There were 120 conferences to promote asbestos put on in 60 different countries and paid for by the Canadian government, the most recent one in Indonesia, where the Canadian embassy hosted this, paid for by the Canadian taxpayer, to foist this killer product on the poor people of Indonesia. Another one is to be hosted in Montreal on May 23 as we speak, to try to deny the fact that asbestos is deadly, to try to say that there are safe uses of this horrible, horrible mineral.

We should be out of the asbestos industry. There should be no more corporate welfare for the asbestos industry, these corporate serial killers. The asbestos industry is the tobacco industry's evil twin. We should not be subsidizing the development of this horrible product.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 15th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am sure my colleague from the Bloc has heard many members point out the shortcomings in the budget. Even those who were complimentary about some aspects were critical of the glaring oversights within it.

I point out to him that negotiations on how to make that budget better ended the very moment the leader of the Bloc Québécois walked out of this chamber and into the camera scrum area and said, “I support this budget”. All of a sudden all negotiations died right on the table. There were no more improvements to be made because the deal had been done.

Why did the Bloc roll over so easily? At least when the NDP traded its support in a minority Parliament, we got $4.8 billion worth of tangible benefits for Canadians. The Bloc got nothing, a big goose egg. I think my colleague from the Bloc is agreeing with me, that the Bloc got a big fat goose egg in exchange for its loyalty.

It is mystifies me. It is like Jack and the Beanstalk, I suppose, when one trades the family cow for three beans and none of those beans sprout. What was it about the budget that the Bloc would give up all of its political leverage and ability to influence?

[Devils Lake, May 15th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, our beloved Lake Winnipeg is choking to death, grievously injured by generations of human ignorance and neglect and pollution ranging from mercury from pulp mills to nitrogen and phosphorus from chemical agriculture.

This massive and magnificent body of water may not survive its latest indignity, the Devils Lake diversion, which diverts water from the northern United States into the Red River and Lake Winnipeg.

The inter basin transfer of water is a crime against nature. It offends the natural order. It is scientifically negligent and wholly irresponsible. Additional chemical pollution, combined with the risk of invasive species entering our Manitoba aquatic ecosystem, may be the end of one of the world's great freshwater lakes.

I urge our Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs to use every diplomatic measure possible to stop the governor of North Dakota from opening the floodgates and the Devils Lake diversion and killing our great Lake Winnipeg.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think it is helpful to watch my colleagues point fingers at each other and blame one another for the recent state of affairs, or even the state of the nation, because they are both to blame to some degree.

It may be something of a cliche to say that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but I now have the empirical evidence here that in fact this is true. The average total income for all families might be the best measurement of how we are doing economically.

The average total income for all family units from 1989 to 2004, in quintiles, was: in the lowest quintile, the bottom 20%, the standard of living went down by 9%; in the second lowest quintile, $30,000 a year, it actually dropped by 4%; in the third quintile, the standard of living dropped by 3%. These figures are for 1989 to 2004, so there were some Tory years and some Liberal years. The only quintile that went up is the highest quintile, which went up 23%. These are not left-wing pinko figures; these are statistics. This is the truth. This is what really happened. Canadians are not better off.

For all the equality measures that we talk about and the successive budgets that are designed to make Canadians' lives better for most of us, 60% of us at least, we are dropping and only the rich are getting richer.

I would ask my colleague, does he not agree that equality should be the goal here and elevating the standard of living of all Canadians should be the goal and that something has gone terribly wrong?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things about this budget is what I think of as the lack in the opportunity to plug one of the most egregious tax loopholes out there. What I am talking about is what is called tax motivated expatriation, which is in fact the transferring of money offshore to tax havens, whereby companies can avoid paying their fair share of taxes in Canada.

I sense that the Conservatives are generally sympathetic and think this practice should be stopped. It was used most notably by the former prime minister when Canada Steamship Lines was set up in the only tax haven left. The Liberals tore up all the tax treaties except for the one haven where Canada Steamship Lines happened to reside.

If the Conservatives did not see fit to plug that tax loophole in this budget, would my colleague at least agree that companies that take advantage of these tax havens should not be able to get contracts from the federal government while they are taking advantage of this tax fugitive situation?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question about corporate welfare, out of deference to the former leader of the NDP, Ed Broadbent, who coined that term.

I do not know if my colleague is aware, but Canada is the third largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world. Even though most of the world is banning asbestos, we continue to subsidize and underwrite the costs of the asbestos industry in direct subsidies and in travelling the world challenging anyone who wants to ban asbestos by sending teams of Department of Justice lawyers to Rotterdam and The Hague. Anywhere they are trying to limit and contain the use of asbestos, we try to block them.

We even sent our lawyers to the WTO to block France from banning asbestos saying that we would lose the trade. Does he agree with me that asbestos, in all of its forms, should be banned first of all, but at the very least, we should stop underwriting and subsidizing this deadly substance, tobacco's evil twin, and stop these corporate serial killers from polluting the planet with asbestos?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, May 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my view is that the Bloc Québécois made a really bad deal. I honestly believe, and I say this with all due respect, there was more on the table that it could have used its bargaining power to achieve. This is a missed opportunity not just for the Bloc but for all of us, because in this minority Parliament the three opposition parties have all the power. We have the bargaining leverage, but it was given away. All negotiations stopped the very moment the leader of the Bloc Québécois walked out of this room and, in front of the microphone and the cameras, said, “I support that budget”. Negotiations ended. Kyoto, good-bye.

We could have forced the Tories to accept Kyoto had the Bloc only held its ground and stayed tough. It did not for some reason. It is beyond me. I cannot see the benefit. At least when the NDP traded our support to prop up the Liberal Party, we held our noses and supported the Liberal Party but we traded it for $4.8 billion worth of spending.

Some people argue that the Liberals did not follow through with their promise, but in fact the Tories are fulfilling the promise the Liberals made by putting that money in trust to fulfill Bill C-48. We got something for our vote. The Bloc got nothing for its vote. It is like the Jack and the Beanstalk story, where we trade the family cow for three beans, none of which sprout.

I have a great deal of respect for my friend and colleague from the Bloc. Will he tell me, though, what did the Bloc get for this to sell out so early and to sell out on all of his opposition colleagues?