Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-5 on behalf of the NDP caucus. I also want to recognize and pay tribute to the Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Butler-Jones, a resident of Winnipeg and a resident at the federal virology lab in my riding, the only level 4 biological laboratory in Canada. It is a dubious thing to have a level 4 lab in the middle of a residential neighbourhood but we do not have time to dwell on that today.
Many of us were moved as we watched Wendy Mesley, on her program special, talk about her personal struggle with cancer. She made a very compelling point about public health in the process of that very personal exposé. Many of us have been led to believe, and it has been the prevailing wisdom, that if we have cancer it is probably because of something we did, such as we smoked or we did not take care of our personal health. In other words, and I say this with the greatest of respect, it has been a bit of a blame the victim mentality about the exploding incidents of cancer in our society.
I would like to put it to the House, through the context of this debate, that there is a secondary reasoning that we have to accept. It could be, and I argue it is to a large degree, our environment which is increasingly a chemical soup that we are exposed to. I say this as a way, I hope, of sounding the alarm and in the context of speaking to it for all of our benefit but within the context of public health.
The question I put to my colleague from Kildonan--St. Paul is in this vein. I recognize that the Public Health Agency has been preoccupied with infectious diseases, the SARS emergency and crisis after crisis, but I urge us, as MPs, and the Public Health Agency to be seized of our public health as it pertains to exposure to known harmful products around us every day.
In that light, I have put forward a private member's bill, which I hope to expand on at some other date, to ban the non-essential cosmetic use of pesticides everywhere. Over 90 municipalities have done this unilaterally. Ottawa tried and failed. I believe it should be a federal initiative because some smaller municipalities cannot stand up to the incredible lobby that hits them. As soon as they have the temerity to suggest that they might want to ban the use of cosmetic pesticides in their communities, the lawyers and the chemical producing lobbyists show up and, more or less, slap-suit them into silence or submission. It is a role that the federal government could play to help these communities.
The entire province of Quebec has done it. Community after community started banning it until the province recognized that was the will of the people and simply banned it.
Fifty per cent of the 200 million kilograms of chemical pesticides used in Canada every year is for non-essential use. That is the first point I would make.
The second issue concerns another dangerous carcinogen, a health hazard that we have within our ability to do something about and have turned a blind eye to, and that is the fact that Canada is still the third largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world. The province of Quebec, where it is produced, has the highest rate of mesothelioma among women in the world and the third highest among men in the world. That is a cancer caused only by asbestos.
I used to work in the asbestos mines and I can say from experience that they were lying to us about the health hazard of asbestos then and they are lying to us about the health hazard of asbestos today. The Government of Canada should not be spending millions of dollars a year, as it does, subsidizing and underwriting the production of asbestos to dump into third world countries where there are very few health and safety measures and, what measure there are, are not enforced.
First, on behalf of Canadians and through the Public Health Agency, I would like the agency to be aware of and take action on the exposure to asbestos that continues to take place today in Canada, especially in the province of Quebec where the threshold limits are appallingly high and the exposure is epidemic. However it is also for the rest of us because Canada's bizarre affinity and affection for asbestos has led us to contaminate virtually the entire country, including the very buildings that we occupy here today.
I would suggest to the House that the asbestos industry is the tobacco industry's evil twin. It has been lying to us and putting us at risk for the better part of the last century and it continues to do so today. I ask the federal government to, for God's sake, stop supporting this dying industry and let the industry die a natural death.
The asbestos mine in which I worked died a natural death because no one wanted to buy this poison any more, except for underdeveloped third world countries. The whole European Union has banned all forms of asbestos. Australia, Japan and South Africa have banned it but not India. India is one of our biggest markets for dumping Quebec asbestos.
I know it is awkward for the federal government because it has just taken over the seat in Quebec that has all the asbestos mines, Thetford Mines. However, as a former asbestos miner, I ask the government to do the miners a favour and shut down these horror pits and do the rest of the world a favour and stop exporting this killing product. It is like exporting 1,000 Bopals every year. That is how cruel and negligent this is. The Public Health Agency should have a role to play in the broader public health and not just in the emergency preparedness for communicable diseases.
If members have not seen Wendy Mesley's special on CBC about her personal experience with cancer, they should make a point of seeing it. Those who have seen it, I ask them to reflect on this and consider that it is not just what we do and it is not always our fault that we get cancer. We are being poisoned and pickled by a chemical soup as we speak and it is irresponsible to allow that to continue. It is irresponsible to expose another generation to that type of chemical contamination.
It has been well researched in the post-war years that the use of chemical pesticides grew exponentially and, correspondingly, the incidence of certain types of cancers grew exponentially. We will never be able to prove the direct causal link between this particular chemical and that particular cancer, but we know enough now that the precautionary principle must prevail, especially when it is our children who are being exposed as they tumble around innocently on the lawns of the city park that was just sprayed with 2,4-D. We owe it to ourselves.
My bill calls for an absolute moratorium on the non-essential use of chemical pesticides until such time as one by one the industry can come before a parliamentary committee and prove to us that they are absolutely safe. It reverses the onus. It puts the burden of proof on the industry, Instead of us having the impossible task of trying to prove this chemical is dangerous, we want that company to have the equally difficult task of proving to us that the chemical is absolutely safe. It can then put it back on the shelves and sprinkle it around the countryside. I do not care what they do with it. That is one concrete thing we could do today that would substantially reduce the incidence of chemical related cancers.
In summary, there are steps we could take and, with our newly ratified changes to the Public Health Agency through Bill C-5, Parliament could actually make great use of our Public Health Agency by facing up to the reality that the asbestos industry is a corporate serial killer and it should be stopped in its tracks. We also can clean up our municipalities by stopping the cosmetic non-essential use of pesticides.
