Richard Cannings

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak here this afternoon in favour of the motion because I am concerned about the future of Canada's forest industry.

I come from British Columbia, which, as most people know, has some of the most magnificent forest resources anywhere in the world. From the rainforests of cedar and hemlock on the coast to the vast pine, fir, and spruce forests of the interior, British Columbia produces more than half the softwood lumber in Canada.

The forest industry has been a critically important part of the British Columbian economy for over a century. Today, it contributes $12 billion every year to the B.C. economy. It provides $2.5 billion in direct government revenue in British Columbia. It creates 145,000 jobs in British Columbia alone. That is one in every 16 jobs in British Columbia. That figure was touted to be closer to one in every two jobs when I was younger, but the industry has been hit hard over the past few decades.

The softwood lumber agreement of 2006 came after over 20 years of disputes between the two countries. At the heart of those disputes was the claim by the United States that the Canadian forest industry was subsidized by the way companies paid for the harvesting of wood from public lands. That claim has repeatedly been repudiated by both international and American tribunals. I think we won something like 14 legal decisions in a row between 1982 and 2005. Despite these victories, the actions of the U.S. industry brought uncertainty to the lumber export market and cost our industry billions of dollars.

The softwood lumber agreement did bring back certainty to lumber export access and costs, but the Canadian industry paid a very high price for that certainty and many mills did not survive those added costs and quotas; especially, after years of wearying trade battles with the United States.

In my riding, the Weyerhaeuser mill in Okanagan Falls closed in 2007, putting over 200 people out of work. The Pope & Talbot mill in Midway closed in 2007 as well, but fortunately, has been reopened by the Vaagen Brothers, which has invested in new equipment to create a highly efficient mill that uses the smaller logs that are easier to find in today's wood supply. The Atco lumber company in Fruitvale closed its lumber operation around the same time to concentrate on veneer products for plywood, which are not subject to softwood lumber quotas and tariffs. The surviving mills in my riding strive to be as efficient as possible, trying to get the right logs to the right mill. It does not always work, the system is far from perfect, but for the moment the mills are doing well.

As elsewhere in Canada, waste wood in all the local mills is usually chipped and sent to the local pulp mill, in my case, it is the Celgar mill in Castlegar, to add a bit to the bottom line for the mills. The pulp mills also depend on the input of those chips. I heard testimony from a pulp mill representative, a couple of weeks ago, at the finance committee pre-budget consultation in Alberta, that pulp mills in Alberta would be hooped, in his words, if local sawmills closed because of inaction on the softwood lumber agreement.

As I tour my riding today, I see a forest industry that is innovative and efficient, each mill specializing in some niche that will allow it to survive and hopefully thrive. I imagine that is the case across British Columbia and across Canada.

The industry faces challenges from all sides today, and one of the main challenges these companies face is uncertainty. When I ask representatives from the forest industry about a new softwood agreement, they agree that the former agreement has brought some amount of certainty and stability to the lumber market in Canada, but feel that it failed, in some areas, to protect Canada's interests in an unfair trade negotiation.

The forest industry would like to see the agreement renewed, but not at any cost. It does not want to see a new agreement that is more punitive than the last, since it is clear that countervailing duties are not legally warranted at all. It recognizes that we need an agreement that is flexible to the needs and circumstances of the different regions in Canada.

The Liberal government promised quick action on this file. It repeatedly said these negotiations were an example of how things go right when the President of the United States is a good friend of the Prime Minister, but it has failed to deliver and the Canadian forest industry is clearly worried about the future. We need to get a new agreement in place. The government can and must do more for the forest industry than just get this softwood agreement.

The industry, especially in British Columbia, has been working hard to build new international markets for our lumber products. It has been working on innovative new wood products and new ways to use wood in buildings. It would be a great boost to the Canadian forest industry as a whole if the federal government instituted a wood-first policy that promoted the use of wood in government building projects.

In my hometown of Penticton there is a company called Structurlam, which builds huge glulam beams for beautiful structural supports for large buildings. It also manufactures crosslam wood panels, which combine with the beams to allow the construction of very tall buildings without steel and concrete. The company just completed an 18-storey project at the University of British Columbia, called Brock Commons. It is the tallest wood building in the world, and because the parts are built off-site, the Brock Commons building took only 66 days to construct. The UBC project used 1.7 million board feet of British Columbia lumber. Structurlam gets its lumber locally at mills such as Kalesnikoff in Castlegar, so the benefits are widespread.

If we could support domestic markets in this way, it could really help the forest industry in our country and partially shield us from the political vagaries of American trade negotiations.

Despite the challenges it has faced over the past 30 years or so, the British Columbia forest industry is very much alive, and is still very important to British Columbia and the Canadian economy. However, it faces serious challenges: a future with a declining wood supply, a future with more frequent catastrophic forest fires and insect epidemics due to climate change, a future with increased uncertainty around the demand for wood products, and a future with rising costs associated with trade disputes with the United States.

We need the government to do everything in its power to support the forest industry. We need a new softwood lumber agreement that is fair and flexible across all regions of Canada, an agreement that will bring certainty to the forest industry. British Columbia and hundreds of thousands of Canadians across our country depend on it.

[Softwood Lumber, October 7th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, in less than a week, the softwood lumber agreement grace period will run out, and this could mean massive export tariffs on Canadian lumber, anywhere from 25% to 30%. If we do not get a new agreement, we could lose up to 22,000 jobs in British Columbia and across Canada. Yet the minister has refused to give any assurances this week.

As the deadline looms, what is the government doing to protect forestry jobs in British Columbia?

[Standing Orders and Procedure, October 6th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am from British Columbia. My riding is between my colleague's Vancouver riding and the riding of the member for Yukon. My travel time is about 12 hours each way, so 24 hours of my time going home for the weekend is spent on planes and in airports. I do not mind that too much because I get some work done. It is a bit of downtime. However, it is time away from work and away from my wife and family. Every time I fly home, I arrive at midnight and have jet lag the next morning. If I leave on a Thursday or Friday, the next day is pretty difficult. For that reason, I tend to only go home every other weekend or so. I would rather stay here in Ottawa and catch up on valuable work that I need to do here. I am not sure whether taking Friday off would help my situation. A lot of us already leave on Thursday evenings.

The member for Vancouver Quadra mentioned at the end of her speech about the effect on women and their families. A lot of MPs have moved their families to Ottawa. I wonder if my colleague could comment on how having Friday off would affect them if they had to work more during the week.

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I had the pleasure of accompanying the minister to the clean energy ministerial meetings in San Francisco this spring. It was a very positive meeting. There were attendees from, I believe, 27 countries from all over the world. He mentioned mission innovation. One remarkable moment I remember was when George Shultz, the former secretary of state with Ronald Reagan, someone who probably would not vote NDP if he lived in Canada, exhorted the world leaders there to put a $200-a-tonne price on carbon.

The other message that was repeated again and again was that we have to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industries.

When is the minister's government going to do just that, as it promised during the election campaign?

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, as an ecologist I am quite familiar with a lot of the predictions and projections around the increase in climate change over the next few decades. One of the clearest projections in British Columbia especially, as my colleague mentioned, was the warming of our rivers. Just last year in my riding in the Okanagan Valley we were predicted to get a record run of sockeye salmon, over 400,000 fish. Almost all of them—all but 10,000—died in the pools of the Columbia River because the water was too warm.

We hear a lot on the price of action, especially from the Conservatives. I want to know what the price of inaction is, especially with regard to salmon.

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned in his speech the decline in carbon dioxide emissions in Canada while his government was in power in the 2008 to 2010 era. Everyone knows that those emissions only went down because the economy tanked in 2008 and Ontario took coal-fired plants off the grid. I wonder why his government cut funding for climate action, and why his government failed to act when it was in power.

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to say that I am in favour of the Paris agreement.

I was glad that the Canadian government accepted the necessary temperature targets of between 1.5º and 2º Celsius to keep our earth below those temperature increases. It is a real concern in my riding of South Okanagan—West Kootenay, where we are facing depleting water resources, increasing irrigation needs, and increasing forest fires. All of those things are of great concern.

However, I am concerned about how the government is planning to tackle this. How is it actually going to get to these temperature targets?

In particular, the Liberals took the NDP platform on ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry as a really important part of their own platform. Since then, they have done nothing. What are the government's plans to end those subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and turn them into subsidies for clean tech and green technology?

[Modernizing Animal Protections Act, September 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-246 today and I thank the member for Beaches—East York for bringing it forward. It deals with three rather loosely related issues: animal cruelty, the importation of dog and cat fur, and shark finning.

I have received a lot of feedback on this bill from constituents, most of it in favour of the bill because it seeks to strengthen animal cruelty law, but I have also heard serious concern from outdoor enthusiasts who felt that the bill might have inadvertently caught up hunting, fishing, and trapping in the web of animal cruelty provisions.

I have had meetings with three hunters' groups in my riding who expressed this concern clearly. I assured them then and I assure them again that this is certainly not the case and if it were, I could not support it. That said, I would be happy if the committee would explore amendments that would make that crystal clear, and perhaps list the legal activities that would be excluded, as the previous member stated. This is really about criminal cruelty, not legal hunting, fishing, trapping, or agriculture.

I would like to spend the rest of my time talking about the third issue dealt with in this bill, and that is shark finning. Finning is the practice of removing fins from live sharks on board fishing boats, and tossing the big animals overboard, where they die a cruel death. In that sense, finning might belong in this bill about animal cruelty, but it is really the impact on shark populations, and how that changes our ocean ecosystems that I think is a deeper concern.

Many Canadians might not know how widespread, important, and diverse sharks are in Canadian waters. There are 28 species of sharks off of our shores, most of them large predators. Some are at the top of the food chain, and play a key role in shaping our marine ecosystems. Like many large predators, they are slow growing, slow to mature, and slow to reproduce. These are all features that make their populations very sensitive to overharvest, especially the overharvest of adults.

Sharks have been suffering serious population declines in recent decades for a variety of reasons. Of the 245 species of sharks in the world, 65, more than a quarter, are on the red list compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They are at some real risk of extinction.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, COSEWIC, has assessed six species of Canadian sharks and listed three as endangered, and three as species of special concern. The two main causes of population declines are fisheries bycatch and shark finning. These two issues are related since many sharks caught in other fisheries, such as the longline fisheries for tuna and swordfish, are routinely finned and tossed back.

Estimates of the numbers of sharks finned each year are difficult to calculate, but all estimates are mind-bogglingly high. One hundred million is the standard answer, but some estimates are over twice that. This practice is changing our oceans forever. Can anyone imagine 100 million bears disappearing from our forests each year, and what that would do to our ecosystems, or what about the loss of 100 million lions from the plains of Africa?

Some species are particularly hard hit by finning. The scalloped hammerhead has declined by over 90%, one study suggesting the loss of 98%, over a period of 30 years off the east coast of North America. Data from the same coast indicates that the population of oceanic whitetip sharks, once one of the most abundant large animal species in the world's oceans, declined by over 70% between 1992 and 2000. That is 70% in only eight years. This species is rapidly becoming functionally extinct, so I heartily support this bill, and its effort to curb the trade in shark fins. It is a good first step, an essential first step, but Canada could and should be doing more on both the national and international stages to make an impact here.

The government has made a lot of effort to get the message out that Canada is back on the world environmental scene, but we are sorely lagging in many aspects of global environmental action. For example, we could be co-operating with other nations in the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which have been calling for meaningful bycatch limits for sharks during the tuna fishery, but both Canada and Japan have been dragging their feet on this issue.

We could take the bold step to promote the listing of all shark species in appendix II of CITES, so that the international trade in shark fins can be better regulated.

In our own backyard, Canada needs to reinvest in fishery science and monitoring. Setting regulations about bycatch, and creating laws about shark finning will accomplish little if there is not a significant government presence on our coasts to actually witness what is happening to our oceans.

We could put more emphasis on science, when government receives listing recommendations from COSEWIC. COSEWIC makes annual recommendations on species to add to the species at risk schedules, and government then decides whether to act or not. Bird species are almost always added as a matter of course, but fish species have only a 50-50 chance of being listed because economics often trumps the science of endangerment. We must rebalance this policy to ensure that our ocean ecosystems remain healthy into the future.

I reiterate that I will support the bill. It is about criminal acts of cruelty, not legal hunting, fishing and trapping, agriculture. I support it both for its strengthening of the animal cruelty law, and for its steps to support the conservation of sharks.

[South Okanagan—West Kootenay, September 28th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there are 41 communities in my riding, and rather than going on the barbeque circuit this summer, I thought that a cycling circuit, riding the riding, would be a healthier alternative.

Therefore, for seven days in late August, I cycled 435 kilometres through South Okanagan—West Kootenay. Each day I had conversations with constituents over breakfast, coffee, lunch, and dinner. It also gave me the opportunity to ride the rail trails of the riding, through the Slocan Valley, along the Kettle River and along the lakeshores in the Okanagan.

I would like to thank the people who joined me, including the volunteer groups that take care of these trails. I heard their thoughts on how to best fund and maintain these treasures, which are so important to the economies of the small communities in my riding.

On a sadder note, I would like to recognize the passing of Fred King of Kaleden, B.C. Fred served as the MP for Okanagan—Similkameen from 1979 to 1988. He served well, and he will be missed.

[Petitions, September 23rd, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to present two petitions on the same subject, the British home children. The citizens who have signed these petitions are asking the House for an unequivocal, sincere, and public apology to the home children and their descendants.

Over 100,000 of these children, orphaned or destitute, were sent from Britain to Canada between 1869 and 1948 to provide indentured labour to Canadian farms and households. The U.K. and Australia have already issued such an apology and last April I tabled a motion in the House for Canada to do the same.

I am happy to present these petitions that support that motion, to issue an apology to these Canadians who were often victimized under the guise of protection.