Peter Julian

[Export and Import of Rough Diamonds Act, October 25th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it stems from how we move this process along. Under the Kimberley Process we have moved from a high of 6% of blood diamonds in the world diamond trade down to 1% or slightly lower, as most estimates have it. We are looking at a review on that next year. The question is, how do we move it along more quickly?

If we are looking at 2006-08 as a window, I would perhaps suggest that given the size and scope of the impact of blood diamonds on the countries that I mentioned in my speech, the quicker we act the more effective it would be. That is why I was suggesting that the review should perhaps take place at the same time that these amendments were brought forward.

The member may agree with that or not, but that was my hesitation. We have a review coming up, but the review is next year and we are talking about amendments now. It would seem to me that the review should be done at the same time.

[Export and Import of Rough Diamonds Act, October 25th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill S-36, an act to amend the export and import of rough diamonds act. The act would serve to help us meet our commitments under the Kimberley process certification scheme.

I would like to say at the beginning that in this corner of the House we are in favour, in principle, of the bill moving forward but we are hoping at the committee stage there will be an examination of this important legislation, perhaps looking at the potential for improving it.

As the member for Sherbrooke mentioned, we are a bit concerned about the fact that the act in general will be reviewed in 2006. We are therefore making changes to the act, as proposed by this bill, even though we will not have the opportunity to review it until next year. This seems like a rather difficult procedure.

That being said, even if the process is of some concern to us, we are fully in favour in principle. There is not doubt about that.

I would like to go back to the principles of the Kimberley process and give a bit of the history of that process. The issue of blood diamonds, or les diamants du conflit, is something that has been a front and centre conflict, particularly in Africa, over the past decade. It was in 2000 that the first actions were taken to deal effectively with this issue of how to, in some way, cull or prevent blood diamonds from being distributed around the world and helping to fuel those conflicts.

A little later in my presentation I will outline the impact of the blood diamond trade on some of these civil wars. It has had absolute horrific results for the populations in these African countries. However for the moment I will just trace the history of it.

It started in July 2000 when the International Diamond Manufacturers Association and the World Federation of Diamond Bourses sat down at the World Diamond Congress in Antwerp and first started to address the issue of blood diamonds and how to create an environment where these diamonds were not trafficked and marketed in other countries such as Canada. That led to the formation of an active process and, as we know, we had 43 participants, including members of the European Community, who were part of the negotiations that led to the Kimberley process implementation. Canada chaired that process, which undoubtedly was important because it started to resolve the issue of blood diamonds and the impact of blood diamonds on these horrific civil wars.

As a result, we had a process that was implemented. We had a working group chaired by Canada and that process led to the creation of these voluntary standards that have now been put into place.

I will say that we are not talking about a perfect process. A little later on this afternoon I will mention some of the weaknesses of the existing process. However the process is undoubtedly better than what existed before, which was absolutely nothing to prevent the trafficking of these diamonds.

The issue really has to do with the impact the diamond trade had on the civil wars in Africa. I would like to mention four particularly horrific conflicts where very clearly blood diamonds sustained those conflicts and led to even further loss of life and further atrocities than what otherwise might have been the case.

What has often been cited is the Liberia Civil War which started in 1989, went through to 1997 and then started up again in 2000 and went until 2003. During this bloody dictatorship and the civil war that followed, about 200,000 people were killed and about one million civilians were displaced. That civil conflict was fueled by blood diamonds.

Second, the Angola Civil War started in 1975, after Angola acceded to independence and went right though to 2002, in other words, over a 30 year period. Some 500,000 people died, hundreds of thousands were displaced and thousands of civilians in Angola and combatants were maimed. The main rebel group in Angola, UNITA, controlled 70% of the diamond mines and that allowed for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue coming into UNITA to actually sustain that civil war and the war effort. I will come back to Angola in a moment because I think here is a case where blood diamonds fueled that conflict and contributed to the appalling loss of combatants and civilians.

A third example that is often cited is the Sierra Leone civil war which started in 1991 and ran through to 1999. Fifty thousand people died in that conflict. It is estimated that the main rebel group, the RUF, mined between $25 million and $125 million in diamonds annually to finance its war efforts, which were attacks on the civil population in Sierra Leone. That country is still recovering from that brutal civil war.

I have former constituents who are working as part of the United Nations relief effort in Sierra Leone to address the appalling results of that war, including establishing housing and helping to integrate many of the child combatants into their villages. The effects of that brutal civil war are still being felt today.

We then have the Republic of Congo civil war, which started in 1998 and ran through to 2003, but is still very endemic today. Over three million people have been killed in the Republic of Congo and it has been expelled from Kimberley membership. We will come back to that in a moment but it is clear that the appalling civil conflict in the Republic of Congo was fuelled by the diamond trade.

I will now go back to Angola. An interesting article was published in Drillbits and Tailings, a publication concerned with the diamond trade and mining. It linked up in a series of articles the Angola civil war and diamonds. I would like to read a few paragraphs from that because I think it is illustrative of exactly how blood diamonds fuelled the conflict.

It said that the United Nations estimated that UNITA, the main rebel group in Angola after independence, earned between $3 billion U.S. and $4 billion U.S. over the last eight years of the conflict from diamond sales after Angola was engulfed in the civil war in 1975 after gaining independence from Portugal.

When UNITA relaunched the war in December 1998, it relaunched it with money made from investing profits from diamond sales. In fact, the head of the UN peace building support office, Felix Downs-Thomas, said that the conflict was referred to as a diamond war. Diamonds not only allowed UNITA to finance the war, it was the principal reason for the fighting. In fact, ongoing wars in Angola were being fought because of the pursuit of those mineral riches.

The article goes on to say that diamonds had spawned a culture of violence in Angola, including the hiring of mercenaries, as confirmed by a United Nations report that came out in October 1998, and that the mining company, DiamondWorks, had well established connections to mercenaries and that Tony Buckingham of Branch Energy, a British company that owns one-quarter of the shares of DiamondWorks, is known for brokering entry of the corporation into Angola.

Executive Outcomes, which was the company that came into Angola, was a South African mercenary army that included former members of apartheid death squads. Half a million Angolans lost their homes in that conflict and became internal refugees as the war to seize control of the mining regions continued.

Angola is a clear case of where the intense search for blood diamonds fuelled the war and, because of the immense riches generated by these blood diamonds, contributed to deepening and widening the conflict.

I could speak about Sierra Leone and the similar impact the diamonds had in that civil conflict, but I would like to read a couple of paragraphs of the Human Rights Watch report on Sierra Leone at the height of the blood diamond fuelled war.

Human Rights Watch has documented numerous rebel abuses committed in 2000 in the Port Loko district, which was an area allegedly under government control. The abuses included cases of rape, 118 cases of abduction of villagers, three murders, cases of mutilation, of forced labour, of massive looting, of ambushing and the training, as I mentioned earlier, of child combatants. Most of the victims were civilians living in camps for internally displaced people who were attacked when they ventured out to get food, wood or water.

The atrocities taking place in Sierra Leone, Angola and Congo are all fuelled by these blood diamonds. That is why, in this corner of the House, as previous speakers have mentioned, we fully support the intention of the Kimberley Process and the idea that the Kimberley Process will lead to a better situation and a partial resolution of this trade in blood diamonds that fuels these horrific civil conflicts. We know that it is civilians, women, men and children, who are the victims of these horrific conflicts.

We should say that the blood diamonds, even though they have been reduced through the Kimberley Process, have not been eliminated. Kim Sutch, who is the director of the Diamond Information Centre in Canada, says that the blood stones are still believed to make up about 1% of the legitimate diamond trade, while conflict diamonds were believed previously to comprise as much as 5% or 6% of the global rough diamond trade.

This trade has now been reduced, but we cannot say it has been eliminated through the Kimberley Process. We must say that the Kimberley Process is a significant step, but it is not a final resolution of the trade in these horrific blood stones. If we have reduced the trade from 5% or 6% to just below 1%, we have not completely resolved the issue.

In the Globe and Mail , London-based Global Witness stated, “Despite improvements, the Kimberley Process is still having difficulty in stopping conflict diamonds from entering the legitimate diamond trade” completely. Global Witness mentioned this in a June report. The Global Witness group, whose campaign helped trigger the Kimberley Process, said that diamonds continue to fuel conflict in areas such as the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and also play a role in the conflict in the Ivory Coast.

As we know, the Democratic Republic of Congo was kicked out of the Kimberley Process for non-compliance in 2004, but the Ivory Coast continues to be a member of the Kimberley Process. Even though this is a vast improvement in a situation that very clearly needed to be resolved, even though we needed to make a substantial gesture and the international community has come together for voluntary compliance, even though these are significant steps, that is why I have to underscore the fact that this does not resolve completely an issue that continues to exist.

We have to monitor it and look at furthering our international commitments so that indeed we can say, perhaps in the next few years, that we have entirely eliminated the trade of blood diamonds, that blood diamonds cannot squeeze through the loopholes that exist in the process.

In other words, the Kimberley Process must be a gigantic stepping stone to ultimate resolution, so that in no part of the world, especially in Africa, given the recent conflicts there, can there be trade in blood diamonds. That must be the ultimate objective.

I believe this is something that all four corners of this House would agree with. All members of this House believe that we must ultimately completely eliminate the trade in blood diamonds. This is a fundamental goal that we all share.

Since we have had a lot of discussion about diamonds and conflict, I would like to quote an article that was in La Presse a few months ago. It was an interesting article that raised the whole problem of blood diamonds. It said:

Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone were posing a problem in the late 1990s when the UN Security Council decided to act. The sanctions that were provided have been easy to circumvent and have not had much effect. The diamond industry soon smelled a huge problem with them: the most coveted stone in the world was in danger of being boycotted, like fur 20 years ago. Already some NGOs like Oxfam and Amnesty International were decrying the abuses. The Kimberley conference, taken from the name of the city where it was held, produced an initiative: the certificate of authenticity that makes it possible to trace diamonds from their extraction in one of the 17 producing countries to the world markets. The diamonds leave the country with a seal of compliance that is required further down the line. “The process is doing its job, it works,” says Mr. Van Bockstael.

Mr. Van Bockstael chairs the committee in charge of the implementation of the Kimberley process.

The article also said:

For the rest, however, it is another matter. The big mining companies would try to ensure good conditions for their workers, but how could the unauthorized mining of local people in African villages working with spades and sieves be controlled?

For the time being, only the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Liberia and Lebanon are excluded from the process. The Republic of the Congo, for example, produced only 50,000 carats a year but sold 5 million. A patent case of trafficking.

This is an interesting article because it brings up the point that that the legal production represents 1% of everything sold on the market. There is a problem in the Republic of the Congo. Even if production was a certain amount, what was sold was mostly blood diamonds, which amounted to 100 times the legitimate production.

I would like to conclude by mentioning that the Canadian industry is growing by leaps and bounds as well. Our adherence to the Kimberley Process also helps to legitimize our strong Canadian domestic production. We have a number of mines that have started production in the past few years. In fact, we are now the world's third largest diamond producer.

Even though we still have additional steps to take, for us to participate in a process that ensures as much as possible a legitimate diamond trade, a trade that stops the blood diamond trade as much as possible, and hopefully one day completely and entirely stops it, is something that also helps our legitimate domestic diamond trade.

For all those reasons I will stand in support in principle of Bill S-36. We are hoping, as I mentioned earlier, that we will be able to look at this in committee, of course, and examine it in more detail. However, we are completely in agreement with the principle of the Kimberley Process and any amendments that allow us to keep our commitments on the Kimberley Process.

[Firefighters, October 20th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to stand and urge all members of Parliament to support Motion No. 153 as amended, which would recognize fallen firefighters across the country.

Since Confederation hundreds of firefighters have died in the line of duty and yet we have not to this date fully recognized those firefighters or their families. For 12 long years firefighters have been coming to Parliament 1 out of 365 days to ask for that recognition. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year those firefighters put their lives on the line to protect members of the community. Since Confederation we have not as a Parliament recognized firefighters nor their families.

One day a year for 12 years they have come to this place and have asked members of Parliament to recognize their families. For 12 years there have been photo ops but there has not been any recognition.

With Motion No. 153 as amended, all members of Parliament, presumably next Wednesday, will have the ability to stand in the House and show the country that they recognize Canadian firefighters. Every member of the House will have a choice to make. They will either be voting for the recognition of firefighters who have fallen in the line of duty or they will be voting against the recognition of firefighters who have fallen in the line of duty. The choice is very clear and I hope all members of the House will vote to recognize firefighters.

When I stood to speak in the House on June 10 in the first hour of debate on Motion No. 153, I recognized at that time the family of James Peter Ratcliffe, a firefighter in Hudson, Quebec, who died in the line of duty four days before that first hour of debate.

Since then, over the course of the summer I and other members of Parliament have urged the government to act in this regard and recognize firefighters. I participated, as did the member for Gatineau, on September 11 here on Parliament Hill in the annual memorial service for fallen firefighters. At that time we recognized a number of firefighters who died in the previous year.

I would now like to read the names of the fallen firefighters into Hansard : Captain Ernest Paul Wyndham, Edmonton Fire Department; Firefighter Chad Jerry Schapansky, Clearwater Fire Department; Platoon Chief Gerald McNally, Sault Ste. Marie Fire Department; District Chief Dale F. Long, London Fire Department; Firefighter Dustin Douglas William Engel, Sahtlam Fire Department; Captain/Pilot Kerry J. Walchuk, Clearwater, British Columbia; Captain Robert Campbell, Toronto Fire Services; Firefighter Brent Hugh Dempsey, Youngstown Fire Department; Captain John L. MacFarlane, Scarborough Fire Department; and Firefighter Walter Drake, Toronto Fire Services.

The list of names that I have just read is the names of firefighters who have fallen in the past year. Hundreds have fallen since Confederation.

Tonight we have had an historic debate. Next week we will have an historic vote to recognize Canadian firefighters and to recognize their families.

I urge all members of the House to vote to support our firefighters, to support their recognition and to support the recognition of their families.

[Firefighters, October 20th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to state unequivocally that as the mover of the main motion I support the amendment. This amendment was drafted in consultation with the Table.

[Trade Compensation Act, October 19th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise as well, as trade critic for the New Democratic Party, to speak in favour of this important private member's bill, Bill C-364.

Like the previous speakers, the member for Joliette and the member for Fort McMurray—Athabasca, I regret that this measure is necessary, but it is necessary because Parliament has to act where the government has not acted. That is the reality.

We need to support our softwood lumber industry. We know that the softwood lumber industry is bleeding $4 million a day in punitive tariffs. This affects my home province of British Columbia more than any other province in this country.

We are talking about lost jobs. We are talking about punitive tariffs of $4 million a day. Five billion dollars now is gone in punitive tariffs to Washington. Much of that money has disappeared entirely through the Byrd amendment. It has already been paid out. Millions of dollars have been paid out to American competitors through this unjust amendment, yet the government has done absolutely nothing.

We are talking about $5 billion in punitive tariffs. We also know that the legal costs are mounting rapidly. The softwood lumber industry has assumed over $350 million in associated legal costs around this same issue.

The House has to take action because the government has done nothing. The House has to take action because people are hurting in communities across the country. The softwood lumber industry is hurting. We have lost billions of dollars in punitive tariffs and hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees and yet the government has refused to act.

I would like to put my remarks in context by talking a bit about the history of both the free trade agreement and NAFTA. I think it is important to talk about the origins of this agreement, going back to 1989 with the FTA and 1993 with NAFTA.

At that time, we sat down with the Americans to negotiate a dispute settlement mechanism that would make sense. The objective of the Canadian government in those negotiations was to have a dispute settlement mechanism that would be binding on the United States. In return, we saw the Americans looking, in those same negotiations, to have privileged access to our energy resources.

As members know, we have the largest energy reserves in the world. For the Americans to put that negotiating point forward is understandable. What is not understandable is that we gave that privileged access to our energy resources in return for a dispute settlement mechanism which for all intents and purposes has been ripped up by the Bush administration. Yet our government has done nothing.

At this time, it means that most of our resources, our natural gas and oil, are actually being shipped to the United States. The proportionality aspects of NAFTA mean that we are obliged to continue to send those energy resources to the United States even in the event of a national emergency and a national shortage.

It also means, as I know members are well aware and as the Globe and Mail profiled yesterday, that if we choose to send our energy resources to another market, we actually have to reduce Canadian supply in order to do that. The proportionality aspects of NAFTA demand that we continue to send the same proportion of energy resources to the United States that we have over a preceding 36 month period.

We are in a situation now where we have what the Canadian government negotiated. In this corner of the House, the New Democratic Party had raised concerns about the agreement and our giveaways, even at that time. Suffice it to say, we are now in the context where the dispute settlement mechanism is dead. It has been ripped up. The binding obligations that should have taken effect in August of 2005 have not. The softwood lumber industry is now left essentially an orphan because of the federal Liberal government not acting in this context.

I would like to touch on what the impacts have been on Canadian families. We often talk about softwood lumber. Certainly most recently we have talked about the impact on the industry, but it is important to note what we have seen since 1989 in 80% of Canadian families, or in other words, in four of the five quintiles. Normally when Statistics Canada profiles Canadian families, it divides them into quintiles, into 20% of the population: the lowest income 20%, the next to lowest 20%, the middle income 20%, the upper income 20% and then the highest income 20%.

Statistics Canada has produced a study recently, but since 1989, over the first 15 years of the FTA and NAFTA, in four of the five quintiles we have actually seen a decline in real income of Canadian families. We are not talking about prosperity. We are talking about the fact that the incomes of the lowest income Canadians have eroded in real terms since 1989 by up to 15%.

Those of us who go out into our communities and knock on doors—and I certainly do that in my communities of Burnaby and New Westminster as often as I can—have heard anecdotally about how families are hurting, how it is becoming more and more difficult to make ends meet and how the extra costs we are seeing are making it very difficult for families to get by. The surprising reality is that Canadians with the lowest incomes have seen a dramatic fall in income since 1989.

That is not all. Let us look at the next lowest and the middle income Canadians. Those families have also seen a dramatic drop in their real income. They are trying to get by on fewer financial resources than existed 15 years ago.

For the upper middle class, the fourth quintile, there has been absolutely no improvement in real income over a 15 year period. From 1989 there has been no improvement. Their incomes have stagnated. Costs have risen, as we know, while their real incomes have had absolutely no improvement.

Who has profited from the trade policy of the Liberal government? Upper income Canadians. The wealthy in Canada have seen their incomes rise by 12% to 15%.

It is important to note this.

The failed trade policy that we see is the result of a number of factors. Yes, there has been inaction by the Liberal government on these important trade files. We could mention the textile industry, but tonight we are talking about softwood.

Most Canadian families are struggling to get by with fewer financial resources than they had 15 years ago, yet we have the largest energy reserves in the world and we have an export surplus which we know is due to the fact that we have resources the rest of the world would love to have and would dearly love to trade with us.

Coming back to recent days, what happened? Two months ago the dispute settlement mechanism was ripped up. It took two months for the Prime Minister to make a phone call, which has been the only action undertaken in the 60 days since the ripping up of the dispute settlement mechanism, that binding obligation under NAFTA. That is indisputable. There is no question that there is an obligation. It is binding. It is clear.

Yet in two months we have seen a phone call and a lot of spin and speeches. My goodness, the industry minister was beside himself, saying the Liberals would take the Americans into the boards. We have seen the result. Not only have they not taken the Americans into the boards, they are not even on the ice. They are hiding in the dressing room.

When Canadian jobs are at risk, where communities across the country are suffering and where real family income has dropped, the Liberals have done nothing except make a phone call.

Very clearly, given the Liberals' complete and utter failure to deal with the issue of softwood lumber in any meaningful way, the New Democratic Party has been putting forth suggestions. We called for a recall of Parliament. We were told it would be considered, but it was not. After a lot of dithering, Parliament was not recalled even though this issue is crucial to the Canadian economy.

We have called for export levies on energy resources, given that we have the largest reserves in the world. There has been no response from the government.

We have also called for a halt to the NAFTA-plus negotiations. What a mixed message: we are saying on the one hand that NAFTA is not working, that there is a real problem here and that dispute settlement has been ripped up, and on the other hand, the Liberal government is sitting down every day and negotiating lower standards in areas like food safety and air safety.

The Liberals call it “harmonization”, but it is lower standards. It is saying to Canadians that our higher standards will now be lowered to what Washington tells us it wants to have through NAFTA-plus.

We need to take action and, fortunately, this private member's bill is a first step in the action this Parliament needs to take in the absence of any action from the government.

[Health, October 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, maybe this will stir the Prime Minister.

Today, avian flu has spread to Greece and today is the 20-month anniversary of the outbreak of avian flu in B.C.'s Fraser Valley. It ended after 17 million birds were killed, almost every bird there. Quarantine lines were breached twice through incompetence. We waited one week for test results when death rates were increasing 800% every 24 hours.

We need a public inquiry to know what went wrong and fix it now. No more delays. Why the cover-up around the screw-up on avian flu?

[Spirit Drinks Trade Act, October 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we are, of course, very supportive of Bill S-38 because it shows what can be done when we have good, effective trade policy that is win-win.

Basically the European Union wanted access to our markets in the same way that Canada wanted access to its, but at the same time we wanted to protect the appellations that exist in Europe and in Canada for the creation of a market for good Canadian quality products. Bill S-38 is an example of very effective trade policy.

As the parliamentary secretary knows, we have another issue, that of softwood lumber, where the government has clearly been completely ineffective and in fact negligent. We have an industry that is bleeding $4 million a day. Our partner in the United States has ripped up those aspects of NAFTA that the Bush administration does not like and the government has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to defend the interests of the softwood lumber industry, the 20,000 workers who have lost their jobs, and the communities across British Columbia, across northern Ontario, across Canada indeed, that are suffering from this long-standing dispute.

I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary what has worked in this case. Canada very clearly has negotiated equally with the European Union in order to bring forth a bit of trade policy that works for both partners. Why has the government manifestly failed on softwood lumber?

[Softwood Lumber, October 5th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. Communities throughout B.C., across northern Ontario and across Canada are suffering from the government's inaction on softwood lumber.

The Bush administration has ripped up the parts of the NAFTA that it does not like and the government has done nothing. The industry minister famously said that the government would take the Americans into the boards. The government is not even on the ice. It is hiding in the dressing room.

It has been two months since the NAFTA dispute settlement was ripped up by Bush. Where is his response? Where are the results? Where is our $5 billion?

[Wage Earner Protection Program, September 29th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for her question.

There is obviously a crisis, as I said earlier, in our postsecondary education system. More and more students have a hard time finishing their postsecondary studies, especially those from less well-off families in our society. So there is an huge problem.

I agree with much of what the member said. We must address this problem that exists in our society because of government negligence regarding the funding of our postsecondary education system and the support that students should receive.

I think that it is important for the committee to study possible amendments. It is desirable to propose amendments like the one that the hon. member just mentioned. The committee should study how to improve this bill, and at the same time, meet the concerns that have been raised on many occasions by student organizations all across the country. It is important, therefore, to have these kinds of discussions in committee.

[Wage Earner Protection Program, September 29th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, obviously we are facing a crisis in the post-secondary sector. Certainly in the last campaign as I went door to door knocking on doors throughout my riding, I came across students, or people who would like to be students, all the time who are faced with a crushing debt load and the lack of supports that exist in the post-secondary sector. This crisis has been created as a result of government inaction on post-secondary funding and the supports that should be going to students.

What I see virtually every week in my riding are people who have decided not to continue with their education because the supports are not there for them. That is why I believe the committee should be looking at the whole question of discharge, the whole question of hardship. It should be looking at it from the standpoint of the crisis that government inaction has created, which has made it more and more difficult for Canadians to get into the post-secondary system.

I do not know what direction the committee will take on this. It is fair to say, because student organizations have raised this concern, that the bill needs to go further to address the real post-secondary funding crisis and the lack of supports in this country.