Robert Sopuck

[Cannabis Act, November 9th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I was astonished to hear my colleague opposite talk about the health benefits of marijuana. Here is the position of the Canadian Medical Association:

The CMA has longstanding concerns about the health risks associated with consuming marijuana, particularly in smoked form.

Children and youth are particularly at risk for marijuana-related harms, given their brain is undergoing rapid, extensive development.

I would like to focus, however, on the government's claim that somehow legalizing marijuana will put paid to the illegal trade. A perfect policy experiment just happened in the last decade or so, and that is the case of cigarettes. Cigarettes are legal. They are so-called controlled. They are kept out of the hands of children, and so on. However, the illegal trade has not only flourished, but it has expanded, and that is because, as the taxes on “legal” tobacco are increased, it is very easy for organized crime to undercut the so-called government cigarettes. The exact same thing will happen with marijuana. The government wants to increase the tax. It will make the price so high that organized crime will easily—

[Criminal Code, October 24th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleague for his speech and his years of service in law enforcement. He is truly a tremendous addition to our caucus, and his wise counsel is very important to us.

Is there any test available to determine the concentration of drugs in a person's body?

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, let us take a forest that has been harvested. It looks bad initially. In fact, a clear-cut has been described as a bad haircut, but haircuts come back. What happens in forest succession is that an old forest starts to become a young forest. The biodiversity in a young forest is significantly greater than it is in an old forest. What I mean by biodiversity is the number of plant species. What happens when the biodiversity in a forest increases in terms of the number of plant species is that the number of wildlife species increases as well. Species that people really want, such as ruffed grouse, moose, white-tailed deer, and many songbirds, prefer young forests. The creation of young forests from forestry is actually a good thing, under the proper management regimes.

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, the member's kind words are certainly reciprocated. I have a deep and abiding respect for her work in mental health, and in my view, she is a member of Parliament for all the right reasons.

I am not going to dispute what she said in terms of how important it is that we get a good agreement, but quite clearly, the sooner the better.

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I deeply respect the hon. member's attachment to his constituency and the rural community he comes from.

We do not trust the Liberal government, to be quite honest. For the last couple of years, the government has talked about getting an agreement. It has not done so. Again, one of the reasons we lost some of our mills was the lack of an agreement with the Americans in terms of the softwood lumber dispute.

The government had better come forward with something concrete, or else we will not support it.

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Durham.

The forestry industry is extremely important. The amount of forest land in Canada is 347 million hectares. We cut 594,000 kilometres a year, about 0.6%. That is all, and 60% of the land we harvest in the commercial forest industry is reforested. The forest industry has a great environmental track record.

In fact, I am going to focus on the environmental track record of the forest industry. Previous speakers spoke at great length about the economic issues related to the forest industry. I will look at the environmental side.

Some 321,000 people are directly and indirectly employed in the forest industry, with $8.6 billion in wages and salaries. The value of exports is about $28 billion a year. That is the economics of the forest industry, which is truly remarkable.

In my own life, I had the honour of being the environmental director at a forest company. It was the Pine Falls Paper Company in Pine Falls, Manitoba. It used to be part of the venerable Abitibi-Price Inc., the greatest newsprint company in the world. It fell on hard times and divested itself of the mill in Pine Falls. The employees bought the mill. It was a tremendous experience. I joined the mill shortly after the employees purchased the mill, and I became the environmental director at the mill. I managed the environmental operations of the mill itself. I managed the waste-water treatment plant. My comments on the forest industry are coloured by my direct experiences with the forest industry.

In my own constituency, I have two great forest products companies. There is Louisiana-Pacific, which produces oriented strand board, and now produces SmartSide siding for the international market. The other is Spruce Products, which is a softwood lumber company. Both are extremely efficient producers.

In addition, I had the honour of owning 300 acres of forest land myself. I have lived on my farm since 1979. One needs to do that in order to understand forestry from the standpoint of forests having a life cycle of their own, and very few people have experienced the life cycle of a forest.

For example, in 1987, on our own farm, my wife and I clear-cut a small piece of the farm, about half a hectare, for firewood for a year. This writ large is forestry, but in our case it was very small. Nevertheless, about four or five years ago, I went back to that clear-cut and saw a stump we had cut. I could see it was rotting away. It was about 30 years after we had cut it. Standing beside that stump was a brand new tree. I felt so heartened by that, because it told me the management that I was doing on my land was appropriate. I actually knelt beside that stump, grabbed that tree, and had my wife take a picture of me. I will admit to the House of Commons right now that the member of Parliament for Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa is a tree hugger, and I am very proud of that statement. Conservative and conservation, the two words work well together.

Let us expand this small example of my own little farm to forestry across the country. There has been an ever-increasing improvement in technology in the forest industry. I saw that as the environmental director at the Pine Falls Paper Company. For example, before a forest company can harvest forest over a large piece of land, it goes through an environmental process. There are hearings and licensing, and what comes out of that are terms and conditions that the forest company must follow.

The notion that it is a free-for-all in the forest is nonsense. Every single commercial forest company has to follow the terms and conditions of a publicly provide licence, and there are inspections.

Reforestation in Canada is largely a responsibility of the forest companies. For example, in the last couple of years 594,000 hectares of forest have been harvested in Canada and forest companies replanted 347,000 hectares of forest land. The rest of the forest land was regenerated through natural regeneration. Our industry exemplifies sustainable development.

The woodland side of forestry is one part of what the forest industry does. The second part is the processing. Again, I use my own example of the Pine Falls Paper Company that I used to work for. Unfortunately, the Pine Falls Paper Company does not exist anymore. It was a newsprint company that only produced 500 tonnes of newsprint a day. As a result of smart phones and the Internet, we are using far less newsprint than we used to. The loss of the newsprint industry in Canada is tragic in my view but inevitable perhaps because of technology. When I think of these venerable mills across the country that are now defunct, I am quite saddened. To see a site that used to be a flourishing town and a paper mill lying vacant is truly saddening.

Nevertheless, I go back to 1995, when I joined the Pine Falls Paper Company. By the way, I would remind the House that Brian Mulroney was named the greenest prime minister in Canadian history. Brian Mulroney's Conservative government in 1989 implemented the pulp and paper effluent regulations that mandated every single pulp and paper company in Canada to construct waste-water treatment plants. The company that I managed for three years did exactly that at a cost of $25 million. Our effluent went from being a somewhat toxic effluent to effluent that you could actually drink. That is the progress that the forest industry has made over many decades. That is a feature of modern industrial societies, constant environmental improvement, and again today, we see the results of that: blue skies and clean waters. We have not solved every environmental problem by far but advanced industrial societies are one of constant environmental improvement.

I have two major forest product companies in my constituency. One is Louisiana-Pacific, which is located in the Swan River area. It has produced in the past oriented strand board but recently it converted to creating a product called SmartSide siding. It is a hardwood mill that uses poplar pulp. What was interesting about the SmartSide siding conversion was that wood consumption was decreased, it increased value-added, and increased employment at that mill, the essence of sustainability.

The other company in my constituency is Spruce Products Limited. It is a small softwood lumber-producing company. Many members, regardless of which partly the belong to, have toured lumber mills to see the laser technology they have employed to minimize waste. I saw logs come off the line and immediately the computer said 2 two-by-fours would come out of it, a two-by-six, and so on. The forest industry is not a sunset industry by far. It is an industry that is on the march.

The last part of our motion talks about the effect of environmental groups on our industry. There was an article in the March 3 edition of the National Post that described the Greenpeace attack on Resolute Forest Products. This was an interesting article. Greenpeace went after one of the largest forest companies in this country. The article reads “Greenpeace admits its attacks on forest products giant were 'non-verifiable statements of subjective opinion'.” One of the largest environmental groups in this country basically lied about what a forest products industry did and it admitted it.

I am going to paraphrase what Greenpeace said in the lawsuit that was filed. The publications used the words “forest destroyer”. It is of course arguable that Resolute did all of this. Greenpeace adds that its attacks on Resolute, and this is important, “are without question non-verifiable statements of subjective opinion and at most non-actionable rhetorical hyperbole.”

[Business of Supply, October 17th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, if this is not an ethically challenged government, it is clearly incompetent: 10.5 million bucks to a convicted terrorist; the small business tax proposals that are falling flat; losing the northern gateway pipeline; the Petronas energy project; energy east, with $50 billion in investment down the drain, and thousands and thousands of lost jobs.

I read an article about energy east, and the author described how it was lost. He attributed it to regulatory dysfunction. I wonder if there is a pill to cure that kind of dysfunction.

The minister's excuse for not reporting his villa was that it was only an “administrative” failure. Imagine that. A minister of the crown is saying that it was an early administrative failure. Would the member have a comment on the minister's excuse for why he did not report his villa?

[Oceans Act, October 16th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, just as an aside, I had the honour this summer to be on leg six of the Canada C3 150 voyage. It was truly a remarkable experience. I will give the government credit for initiating that particular voyage. The icebreaker went from Montreal all the way around to the Victoria. I think it is still on the trip.

My own experience was from Nain, Labrador to Iqaluit. I got to experience the Labrador coast. I spent time in the eastern Arctic in a previous life, but had never seen the Labrador coast. It was truly remarkable. I use that as an example of what Canada has done. The area we went by was Torngat Mountains National Park, a national park created by our Conservative government, I might add.

Canada's environmental track record is exemplary. I happen to live next door to Riding Mountain National Park, which I affectionately refer to as my park, a 1,100-square mile treasure trove of biodiversity that Canada, in its wisdom, set aside many years ago. We have example after example of this.

Canada can stand proud in terms of our environmental record.

[Oceans Act, October 16th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I find it astonishing that the member would compare China's environment with ours.

Canada is an environmental leader around the world. Our Conservative government pushed that agenda extremely hard. For example, the United Nations in 2010, under our government's watch, said that Canada, of all the industrialized countries, is almost at the very top in terms of water quality.

International agreements, unfortunately, do not take into account local considerations. The member for Bow River also talked about the problems with the definition of conservation. There are all kinds of conservation lands in Canada that “do not count” under the IUCN definition.

We need a made-in-Canada conservation, environment, and marine protected areas policy that benefits local communities and local people, and puts Canadians first.

[Oceans Act, October 16th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for Cariboo—Prince George for those kind words. I certainly enjoyed my time on the fisheries committee and if they will have me back, I will visit from time to time.

The issue about MPAs is getting it right. When I describe what the water column in an ocean is, there are a multitude of activities. When we write a law, we proscribe certain activities that are allowed or not. Let us say we want to protect the sponge reefs off the B.C. coast. How would ocean shipping a few hundred metres above those sponge reefs affect the benthic invertebrates? It simply cannot.

We heard at the fisheries committees about the interests from the shipping industry, fishermen's groups, recreational fishing groups, and so on, and about the complexities of setting up MPAs and that if we do not do it right, we will cause more harm than good. I will go back to Mr. Nickerson, who has put hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment in his crab fishery. He is terribly worried about his access to fishing-grounds. What does that mean in terms of his employees, bank loans, and all those kinds of things? The risks he takes are enormous and government should help people like him and not hinder them.