Pat Martin

[Sport, May 16th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, successive federal governments copping out has led to the expansion and escalation of the problem.

In my home province of Manitoba we have trained all 10,000 of our amateur coaches using a program designed by former NHLer, Sheldon Kennedy. The program is accessible, affordable and effective.

Why would our Secretary of State for Sport not promote and implement a national program to elevate the standard of coaching right across the country? Instead of opting for doing nothing at all and abdicating her responsibility, she has a golden opportunity to use her office for something positive, yet she does absolutely nothing that we can determine.

[Sport, May 16th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, there is no place in amateur sports for violence, bullying, exploitation or abuse. A safe and healthy sports experience starts with competent trained coaches to create an atmosphere of fair play and respect.

In light of recent incidences of violence in amateur sport that horrified many Canadians, why is our Secretary of State for Sport not using her office to ensure that Canada's 300,000 coaches are promoting fair play and fun and preventing this culture of bullying and violence that so disturbs many Canadians?

[Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, May 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, as a final wrap-up, I just want reinforce a point. When the first nations governance act was introduced there was a touring task force, so to speak, but on the idea of consultation, the minister of Indian affairs at that time claimed he had met the test and that he had truly done a consultation. The government at the time would staple a notice on a telephone pole in a certain community telling people that at 7 o'clock in the evening they would be talking about the first nations governance act and then there was a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo. Maybe three, four or five people would come out. Then the minister would say that they had consulted with that community. That cannot be called true consultation by any definition and I accuse the current government of the same thing.

[Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, May 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have a brief comment and a question for my colleague from Mississauga South.

I think he would be the first one to agree with me that the social condition of Canada's first nations is Canada's greatest shame and that is why many people view the time we are spending on this fairly narrow issue of matrimonial real property as somewhat of a red herring if the real problem lies with the Indian Act, a document unworthy of any western democracy.

The Indian Act has been responsible for 130 years of social tragedy, which is the only way to phrase it, and yet we are dealing with a fairly narrow Eurocentric, simplistic notion of matrimonial real property. When there are circumstances of abject poverty, it becomes less relevant and less important for Parliament to be seized with this one issue.

Does the member agree with me that something about this bill shows a lack of sensitivity to the traditional culture and heritage of aboriginal people? I will give him one example to illustrate this.

I took part in the constitutional discussions around the Charlottetown accord, the aboriginal round. We met with a group of aboriginal women elders who did not want us to pass the provisions of the Charlottetown accord as it pertained to aboriginal people, partly because of this Eurocentric lack of recognition. They told us that their culture was a lot older than ours and that they had ways of dealing with things.

One aboriginal woman elder told me that in her community, women were not allowed to run for chief. Many of us at the discussions shook our head and said that was terrible. She went on to say that the men were not allowed to vote. It was clear that in their community, they had, over thousands of years, developed a fairly egalitarian way of ensuring that men were not dominating the culture and tradition of that community. Yes, the women could not run for office but the men were not allowed to vote for the chief.

If we were to take that issue before the Human Rights Commission, some tribunal would be wrestling with that and would probably rule that the thousands of years of culture, tradition and heritage in that community would be invalid, not in keeping with Canadian values and would be interfered with. That is the type of nuance that probably would have come out were there genuine consultation taking place in the crafting of this bill.

I would agree with my colleague that consultation has legal meaning and part of true consultation means accommodating the legitimate concerns that are raised by those being consulted. Consultation is not just telling people what is going to be done to them. Would he agree with that?

[Specific Claims Tribunal Act, May 12th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Vancouver Island North for perhaps helping the general public to understand the scope of the bill we are debating here today, Bill C-30.

One of the most important things she pointed out, and what I might ask her to elaborate on it, is the fact that we are not talking about comprehensive land claims, which the general public might think of when people hear the words “land claims”. We are talking about very specific claims that are in fact legal obligations by the federal government.

One example I know of is during the second world war the Government of Canada went to a reserve and said that it needed to use 40 or 50 acres of the land as a training base for soldiers to get ready for the second world war on the condition that as soon as the war was over the land would be returned. The war ended in 1945 and the first nations asked about the promise of getting their land back. It fell on deaf ears for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years. They tried everything.

That is the frustration. This is one key example of the type of frustration first nations have faced in trying to have their voices heard on very specific, narrow points of law, “You promised X dollars and we only got Y dollars. Where is the rest”, or, “You promised us you would give that land back. You didn't and we want justice on that issue”.

If Canadians understood that, I think they would be more supportive of trying to expedite this process so more of these legitimate claims could be dealt with in a fashion where it was not justice delayed was justice denied. Decades and decades of deaf ears to a legitimate legal obligation is justice denied no matter how one slices it up. I want my colleague to comment further on that specific difference.

Another thing I want her to comment on is the composition of the tribunal board. If we are dealing with a nation to nation respectful relationship, why does the Government of Canada get to appoint all the members of the tribunal? Would that not be like the United States telling Canada, yes, there is a trade agreement, but that it will name all the tribunal members and control the process for any disagreements that may arise out of the trading relationship? That is something she could expand on as well.

[Questions on the Order Paper, May 7th, 2008]

With respect to the study convened on November 13 and 14, 2007, chaired by Trevor Ogden, by Health Canada on the dangers of asbestos: (a) what are the mandate or guiding principles of this study; (b) why was this study initiated; (c) who has been assigned responsibility to ensure this study is completed; (d) how much funding has been allocated to this study; (e) what resources have been made available to this study; (f) what consultations will be taken by this study; (g) who will this study consult with or be receiving contributions from; (h) what compensation will the participants in consultations for this study receive; (i) what new research will be used in this study; (k) will a review of Canadian consumer products containing asbestos be included in this study; (j) is it the intention of the government to change its policy on asbestos as a result of this study; (l) what is the expected time frame for this study; and (m) when will this study be made public?

[Firefighters Memorial, May 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, all men and women are created equal, and then some become firefighters. The day a person becomes a firefighter, he or she becomes a hero in my books.

Today the leader of the NDP is speaking to Toronto's firefighters, but he has the sad duty to report to them that despite a vote in the House of Commons over a year ago to approve a firefighters memorial, the government has failed to erect this memorial to Canada's heroes.

I ask the government: when will the firefighters memorial finally be built as specifically instructed by the House of Commons? A grateful nation wants to honour its heroes.

[Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, May 1st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, in the middle of his remarks, my colleague from the Bloc made some points that warrant us revisiting and asking him to elaborate.

I think he was making the point that our consumer safety, to some extent, has been sacrificed on the altar of laissez-faire capitalism and the globalization of capital that has led to the free movement of goods and services but without the corresponding health and safety protections that we used to enjoy when more products were made in Canada.

The point we need to reinforce is that our vulnerability to the consumer threats that we face from some of these toxins is partly based on the fact that we lost control of what is on our store shelves when we lost our manufacturing sector. We need to remind people again that this is a predictable consequence that we warned people about. I have heard members from the Bloc warn Parliament about these predictable consequences, that as we let our manufacturing sector disappear and we allow everything that we use to be made offshore, we had better have very stringent controls because there are people in far away places who are not operating by the same standards.

I am a socialist, a trade unionist and a fiercely proud Canadian nationalist and I decry, I lament and deplore the fact that we cannot find anything anymore that says “made in Canada” on the bottom. It is to our great discredit that we have allowed that to happen.

The connection, I believe, is direct and undeniable. I would ask my colleague to expand on that if he believes that is one of the root causes of the vulnerability that we face today.

[Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, sadly, there is only a few minutes left for me to point out the concerns I have with Bill C-52. I will cut to the chase and build on the comments of my colleague from the Bloc Québecois, who pointed out, quite rightly, that the root of our problem today can be found in the laissez-faire capitalism associated with free trade, which has led to further and further deregulation and, in fact, a reluctance for governments to regulate in the sense that it would have and should have to protect citizens of our country.

I note the Hazardous Products Act was put in effect in 1968 and has been virtually unchanged since then. That was a period of time when we made things in Canada. We were not worried about the import situation quite as much. We could control, modulate and regulate the input into the products. When it had the stamp “made in Canada” on it, we could assume it was probably fairly safe.

We have yielded that control now. The globalization of capital has made that irrelevant. In fact, we are condemned when we raise these issues. We are told that we are trying to put up non-tariff barriers to trade whenever we say that we should at least harmonize our standards, so the expectations are that we are not being poisoned by our trading partners.

However, my colleague is right. We are poisoning another generation of children in our zeal, in our enthusiasm to close down the last manufacturing plant in Canada and export every last job. We are in such a hurry to do this that we are not even being careful enough to ensure it does not have health consequences to the point where we are pickling the innards of our kids with some toxic super-chemicals that they are being bombarded with in this post-war era.

The petrochemical industry has gone nuts in our country and in the world in the post-war years. Mark my words, in the very near future one in two Canadians will die of cancer. It never used to be that way. Fifty per cent of all the people will die of cancer when my kids are my age. That is absurd. That means we have done something terribly wrong.

If anybody watched Wendy Mesley's show on television, the very sensitive investigative journalism done about her personal struggle with breast cancer and the questions that were not asked about what happened when we ingested chemical A and chemical B and it turned into chemical C inside our internal organs, those are the questions that are not being asked. We are being far too casual.

The one thing we are being extraordinarily casual about is the biggest industrial killer the world has ever known, which is asbestos. Canada not only allows the import of asbestos, it is the world's second largest exporter of the world's greatest industrial killer. Asbestos kills more people than all other industrial toxins combined, but yet in Canada not only exports it with great and wanton abandon, it heavily subsidizes the production and export of asbestos.

We can be critical of allowing toys coming in from China with asbestos and lead in them. When I said that there were toys with asbestos coming in to Canada, the Minister of Health stood and said that I was exaggerating, that the government would never tolerate it. A few short weeks later we found toys with asbestos in them, 5% tremolite asbestos in the CSI fingerprint game, which was such a popular seller last Christmas.

We are so cavalier about asbestos, we are not only mining it, producing it, selling it, exporting it, we are importing it as well. I believe the government is afraid to condemn the use of asbestos because it does not want to offend the province of Quebec, from where asbestos comes, the last remaining asbestos mine in the country.

The asbestos mines that I worked in are all closed. They were closed by natural market forces. Nobody will buy this toxin any more unless, for some magic reason, it is the benign asbestos that they mine in that province when all of a sudden it is subsidized and its export is promoted.

We send Canadian Department of Justice lawyers around the country like globe-trotting propagandists for the asbestos industry to find new markets and new places to pollute with Canadian asbestos.

We are just as guilty of that but we are not taking the steps to protect our own people from the import of toxins because, unlike Europe and the United States, Canada does not even have the power to issue a mandatory recall of a product. The United States can. In California and in a number of states they clearly take their hazardous materials more seriously. In a properly functioning public health protection system, when a problem comes to light about a product on the market there should be an obligation on the part of the government to inform consumers and remove it from the market. However, under this new law, the government may do this but there is nothing to require it to do this. It is still optional. The word “may” is used throughout.

Bill C-52 is inadequate on a number of levels, one of which I was just illustrating. I believe it should require the government to take positive action when it comes to light that a product on the market is harmful.

In the current context of the bill, if the government is made aware of a toxic chemical in a children's toy there would be no legal requirement for it to even make people aware of it. In the case of the asbestos in the CSI fingerprint toy, it was denying it. It would not even suggest that asbestos was bad for us. I made the government aware of it but there was no attempt by the government to recall the toy. We had a press conference downstairs in the 130-S room. To this day, the government has done nothing about it because for it to say that the asbestos in that children's toy is bad, it would need to admit that the asbestos it is subsidizing and exporting around the world is bad for people. It would be caught and hoisted on its own petard, as it were.

There is no legal requirement in the bill for the government to make people aware of a bad product and I think that is wrong. I suppose there would be political consequences if we exposed the government, which I did in the CSI thing, but it is hard because, as we know, after the fact accountability relies on the government getting caught.

Similarly, the minister would have the power to order companies to conduct studies to ensure that a product is safe but nothing in the proposed law would ensure that products are regularly tested for toxicity. This is the subject of another bill, Bill C-225, in my name, a pesticide bill where we believe there should be a reverse onus on the companies that want to sell pesticides, herbicides and fungicides and that it should not really be up to us, or even the Government of Canada, to prove beyond a doubt that the product is absolutely safe. It should be the company that must prove the chemical is safe before it is sold. There is no such obligation now. The company can sell anything and only if someone does all the testing and determines it is unsafe will the company be curtailed in the sale of products.

That is completely arse backwards. That is clearly the lobbyists and the petrochemical industry. The pesticide producers have done a very effective job in tying the government around their little finger. This reverse onus notion would put the burden of proof on the manufacturers that the products they are selling are safe and the precautionary principle should surely apply, especially when we are dealing with children and pregnant women who are that much more susceptible and vulnerable to chemical contamination. The cell walls of a developing child, as the cells are multiplying, are so thin that they are like little sponges for these chemical pesticides.

We cannot put a tonne of pesticides on our lawns and let our children go out to roll in the grass and not expect them to be affected and affected permanently.

We also believe and are calling for the nationwide ban on the cosmetic, non-essential, non-agricultural use of pesticides. The provinces of Ontario and Quebec have now done it but that is only in the absence of leadership and direction from the federal government that should have done it without having to wait for other jurisdictions to do its regulatory job for it.

I want to simply say that there are a number of independent agencies in civil society that are critical of the bill. I seem to have misplaced my press release from the United Steelworkers of America but it is certainly one that has had a campaign on toxic imports partly because of the job issue. I would be happy to continue this at a later time.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, April 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Timmins—James Bay for reducing what was a fairly complicated debate down to its core, down to its visceral roots.

I have a quote that I would like him to take note of and comment on. This is by a woman named Vandana Shiva, the director of the Indian-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources. The quote is:

If...more and more land (is) diverted for industrial biofuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide...It'll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than the climate change itself.

If we are triggering a non-virtuous cycle here, is it not that much more critical that we review it on a regular basis so we can nip it in the bud, if in fact we are contributing to the problem instead of the solution?