Sheila Malcolmson

[Business of Supply, June 12th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member of Parliament for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.

I graduated from Trent University in 1989, where I studied the Mackenzie Valley pipeline inquiry as well as renewable energy. For years I studied pipeline politics in environmental and resource studies. I really believed we were in a new time of understanding, that we understood that forcing projects on communities that did not want them and not recognizing indigenous rights and title was not good. I believed that time was behind us.

The year 1989 was also a politically powerful year. The Berlin Wall fell. It was the year of the velvet revolution and Tiananmen Square, a democracy uprising with a brutal police response. It was also the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, which hit the headlines in a phenomenal way. It was a time of great political imperative for change and activism, and a time of real hope.

However, I have spent my entire professional life since then fighting bad energy megaprojects: nuclear plants in Ontario, the GSX pipeline through the southern Salish Sea, and the Duke Point power plant off Mudge Island. It took our community four and a half years to fight off that pipeline and power plant.

I hear again and again from my home island of Gabriola, and also from constituents whom I am proud to represent in my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith, that people are hungry to implement a sustainable, renewable, locally based, worker-focused economy. They want to stop fighting off projects they do not want.

I honestly thought that getting elected to this Parliament and beating Stephen Harper and the Conservatives was what we needed to do to stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline. I am frankly astonished that we are still here two and a half years later, still debating last century's energy project that was approved for all of the wrong reasons.

It is deeply disappointing to people on B.C.'s coast to have the Liberal government, with all its goodwill, its sunny ways, and its innovation promises, invest $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money into an obsolete, 60-plus-year-old, leaky pipeline, let alone committing taxpayers and perhaps even Canada pension plan money to the expansion of the pipeline. It will increase sevenfold the number of bitumen-carrying oil tankers going through the ridings we represent.

I am astonished that we are here still discussing that, but I am delighted that our leader Jagmeet Singh and our party have brought this motion forward and taken over today's agenda to talk about our hope for a renewable and sustainable, worker-focused economy, and all the benefits that can come from that.

We have examples in my riding of great success stories, despite all the impediments that have been put up by the B.C. Liberal Party over the last 16 years and the federal Conservatives for 10 years. Despite these impediments, I am really proud of the local innovation.

Nanaimo's Harmac Pacific mill has a generation capacity of 55 megawatts of power, which it produces from biofuels and waste wood in its facility. The Greater Nanaimo Pollution Control Centre captures methane, which would be a fairly calamitous greenhouse gas exaggerator, and converts it to electricity that powers 300 homes.

Nanaimo is home to Canadian Electric Vehicles Ltd., which for 25 years has been making industrial vehicles, including electric Zambonis and electric BobCats. That has been happening for some time in my riding.

People are now moving into a fantastic affordable housing facility that has just been built. It is a beautiful facility. It was built by the Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre on Bowen Road. It has a passive energy design, which was started in Saskatchewan. Our federal government failed to keep the passive energy program going, and it moved to Europe, where it has expanded and become more innovative. The Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre affordable housing project uses 80% less energy than traditional home construction, so the residents have fewer expenses. Their cost of living is more affordable, but the homes are also clean, with wonderful air quality. We are really proud of the centre.

This is a Canada-wide phenomenon. Canada's green building sector has $128 billion in gross annual income, and the green building sector employs more direct full-time workers than forestry, mining, and oil and gas combined. That is not a story we tell every day, and we need to tell it again and again. This is where the jobs are now, and if we have the right priorities and support the right trend and direction, we can do even better with that.

The Vancouver Island Economic Alliance has an annual summit. A few years ago, I talked to energy entrepreneurs at that conference in Nanaimo. They said the provincial and federal governments put more barriers in front of their business than anywhere they have seen or experienced in the world. We have local entrepreneurs trying to manufacture and sell on Vancouver Island and across Canada, but they are having to move their manufacturing as well as their sales focus internationally, because they cannot do business at home. That is so discouraging. It is one of many things Canada should be able to do well but has not.

Another great example we are so proud of in Nanaimo is Vancouver Island University. It is right now building a geothermal project. It is inserting down into old coal mining shafts in our riding. Nanaimo was originally built on coal, so that coal history will now move to geothermal, where they are going to be able to pull from the natural heat of the ground to heat the whole university complex and new residences. It's going to be a real showcase, and it is going to be a way to show young people the possibilities in innovation and the jobs they can generate.

I have also met people out in the community, in Ladysmith in particular, where we have a lot of people who have been migrant workers within our own country, living on Vancouver Island and flying to Alberta for work. It is very dangerous and hard work. It is hard for them to be away from their families. Often, people come home with addictions or injuries.

I now bump into people who have returned, whether they learned vertical drilling in the oil and gas sector and are now bringing that back to our region to utilize that same technology and expertise for geothermal power, or whether they are simply doing residential solar installations. I hear these young men in particular tell their friends to come home, that it is safer, the work is steady, and they can sleep in their own bed and keep their family together. That is the work our government should be doing to encourage such a transition.

While I have the floor, I need to do a bit of myth busting on the Kinder Morgan investment. I keep hearing, including just now from the parliamentary secretary, that we need to find the Asian markets. Crude exports from Vancouver to China topped out in 2011. They were at that time only 28% of outbound shipments. By 2014, they had dropped to 6%. By 2016, they were essentially zero. Right now, we do not have Asian markets hungry for our unrefined bitumen. It is simply not borne out by the facts.

We also hear about the imperative for jobs. In fact, the experts say that every time Canada ships 400,000 barrels of unrefined bitumen abroad, it is exporting approximately 19,000 refining and upgrading jobs every year to other countries.

The $15 billion that we are apparently losing by not accessing foreign markets has been rebutted again and again. Robyn Allan has done this powerfully. The natural resources minister keeps saying it is a $15-billion differential. In fact, the original source was Scotiabank. It says $7 billion, and it is a deep investor in Kinder Morgan. Therefore, we must be extremely careful about agreeing with any of the Prime Minister's promises about economic output.

It is to the deep dismay of British Columbians that this investment would risk the $2.2-billion fishery and aquaculture sector. It risks tens of thousands of jobs that exist right now in British Columbia, whether they be in film, tourism, or fishing, and billions of dollars in economic activity that results from a clean coast.

I ask the government to please let us truly innovate with green jobs in the next century's work and energy, not the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

[Petitions, June 11th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, large commercial freighters anchored for long duration and in close proximity to residential and recreational areas can disturb a community's quality of life, enjoyment of property, and public space, say the petitioners from Saltair and Ladysmith in my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith.

Three large commercial bulk anchorages were established in the 1970s, but they have not been used since. The Minister of Transport established a pilot project, an interim protocol to redistribute anchorages throughout the Salish Sea, because there is so much heavy use. Basically, freighters are dropping anchor and staying for weeks on end. The light, noise, and oil spill risk is a detriment to the high reliance of this community on ecotourism and on a clean environment.

The petitioners urge the House of Commons to call upon the Government of Canada to protect Saltair's rural and coastal community character, and exclude the historical anchorages, LSC, LSD, and LSE, from the interim protocol for use of southern Gulf Islands' anchorages.

[Justice, June 7th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I think the difficulty with this is the bureaucracy of the federal government. It should be able to facilitate the work of the inquiry, but that has just not happened.

The inquiry, in its interim report of November 1, said that eight of the 10 problems they were facing were all with federal government bureaucracy. None of those problems were addressed in the government's response. The minister said yesterday that “We're well on our way”, and that they were within a week of that November 1 report. However, the evidence does not back that up.

On May 1, the inquiry sent a letter to the families, saying that the payment delays were unacceptable, that the Privy Council Office was responsible, and that the guidelines were laborious. The families say they have phoned the inquiry and that nobody returns their calls.

How can that be the headline, given the imperative of doing this important work that my colleague cites?

[Justice, June 7th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, l will add some context for people watching at home. British Columbia is three hours behind, so maybe people are still up.

These late show debates are an opportunity to follow up after having 30 seconds to ask a question in question period and the government side having only 30 seconds to answer. Sometimes we do not really get a full answer. Maybe it is because 30 seconds is not long enough to ask a good question. I remain hopeful and I take advantage of these opportunities to have four minutes to ask a more extensive question, and then the government can take longer to respond.

When I asked my question, it was just after the terrible story of Tina Fontaine, a young girl in Manitoba who weighed only 72 pounds. She was murdered. Her trial was a mess, and it was a terrible disappointment when her accused killer was not convicted. There was no hope for the family of what might happen with her case. It was a real blow to the hope that the country would—through the justice system, the social support system, the social safety net, by repairing the damage of the residential school system, by repairing the damage of the child welfare system—give the families of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls some hope.

It was in this context that I asked the government how it would support the inquiry to ensure there would no more Tina Fontaines and to ensure we supported the families and survivors.

We had great hope in the murdered and missing indigenous women and girls Inquiry. We need it to do its work. We need this from a social justice point of view, but we also need this to move forward as a nation.

Since that debate, some other terrible news came out. The families that were working with the inquiry, trusting it with their stories, were encouraged to ask for the kinds of counselling and aftercare that would help them after they had gone through the trauma of telling their stories.

Then this was reported by CBC on May 8: families that were submitting bills for aftercare were being nickel-and-dimed by both the inquiry and the Privy Council Office. An elder was hired by the family of Joan Winning, the aunt of Nicole Daniels, a 16-year-old girl who was found murdered. She died of hypothermia, but there were complications. People were concerned this was a violent act. They were told they needed an invoice from the elder. It was completely disrespectful to the family, but also the elders, who are not business people.

The inquiry was stuck in between the families and the government and Privy Council Office bureaucracy. This blew up on the front pages of the news across the country just when we needed to build some faith for the families that they would be well cared for.

Again, what is the government doing to ensure families do not have these terrible experiences of being disrespected by our federal government bureaucracy at the time when they need us to treat them with the most sensitivity possible?

[National Security Act, 2017, June 6th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the government, for the second time today and the sixth time in a week has shut down debate, doing the bare minimum on major bills that Canadians have been waiting for years. Members have just voted on time allocation for Bill C-59.

This is a quote from the previous Parliament. I invite the minister to tell me who said this, and if it was a Liberal or a Conservative. It reads:

Canadians do not like it and they are waking up to the way the government is doing things. Who would have thought that Canadians would be familiar with procedures such as prorogation or time allocation during debates or the use of in camera in committees? Slowly but surely, Canadians are beginning to understand these procedures and beginning to question what the government meant when it promised, six and a half years ago, to be open, transparent and, most of all, accountable. I believe Canadians are beginning to feel that there is a contradiction between what has been promised and what is actually being done by the government.

I want to hear the minister's guess if it was a Conservative or a Liberal who said that, because it is hard for me to tell.

[Impact Assessment Act, June 6th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, it is an alternate reality being described by the environment minister about the process that got us to this point.

The Harper Conservatives gutted these environmental laws. Both Liberals and New Democrats promised to amend them. The NDP's promise was that we were going to do it on day one if we formed government. The environmental community had rewritten the laws already. They had given them to us so that whoever got to form government would be good to go.

However, the Liberal government dragged its feet for two and a half years and then presented an omnibus bill. When the bill came to the environment committee, some committee members quite reasonably asked, “Why not send this bill to all three committees, because it is three different pieces of legislation in one?” That was voted down by the Liberal majority. The witness list was truncated. Witness briefs came in after the deadline for committee members to submit recommendations. My colleague, the member for Edmonton Strathcona, proposed 100 amendments that all came from the environmental witnesses; not one of them was accepted.

In what world could the Liberals say that now they are going to shut down debate on this bill, since they have already shut it down in every way possible?

[Ovarian Cancer, June 5th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I had no idea that ovarian cancer was the most fatal women's cancer until Ovarian Cancer Canada told me that virtually no one lives long enough to lobby or fundraise for it. The fatality rate is terrible. More than half the women diagnosed die in five years. There is no screening and no vaccine, and there have been no treatment breakthroughs for 25 years and no outcome improvements for 50 years.

Katrina died of it this spring. She was a professional geologist and the best, most grounded young woman ever. She made waves, got things done, and brought people together. On Sunday, her son Calvin turned three. Before she died, she said to her mom, Sabine Jessen, “Don't let Calvin forget me.”

That is up to us. Research funding is a fraction of what other cancers get, and few survive this disease in order to lobby and fundraise for it. Let us give the $10-million budget that Ovarian Cancer Canada is asking for. Let us donate and find a cure.

[Oceans Day Sunday, June 4th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, to celebrate oceans and defend the coast, Oceans Day Sunday on my home island of Gabriola drew hundreds, and on Friday, Nanaimo celebrates too. We are all in this together. Healthy oceans keep us healthy.

Clean coastal waters generate tens of thousands of B.C. jobs and billions in economic activity, from tourism to film to fisheries.

However, the ocean is taking the brunt of climate change, and oil tanker spills from the Prime Minister's pipeline risk everything, so B.C. people are taking action.

Thirty-six thousand businesses just voted for the Liberals to include recycling solutions in their abandoned vessel bill. New Democrats built plans to end marine plastic pollution and move open-net salmon farms on land. Coastal folks want endangered orcas protected and oil spill response tightened. We are going to stop freighters' free parking in the Salish Sea.

We owe our oceans everything. It is far past time to honour them with action.

[Business of Supply, June 4th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, on a point of order, I believe I was next in the speaking order.

[Business of Supply, June 4th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, while the government breaks promises at an increasing rate of speed, the whiplash is extreme. A week ago, the government agreed with my colleague, the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, and now the parliamentary secretary has said that the government is not going to support the motion.

A solemn promise was made on Vancouver Island during the election campaign that the Prime Minister was going to redo the review for the Kinder Morgan pipeline project. I heard that a lot of people voted for him on that basis. The Prime Minister did not do that, but instead he added a ministerial panel. Whenever we ask about this in question period, the minister tells us that the ministerial panel, a process that had no recorded minutes, no translation, was badly organized, and where most of the content was about how bad the NEB review was, made recommendations. The question it asked back to the Prime Minister was, “How might Cabinet square approval of the Trans Mountain Pipeline with its commitment to reconciliation with First Nations and to the UNDRIP principle of “free, prior, and informed consent?”

Can the parliamentary secretary give any evidence that the advice has been taken? Why on earth, if she so believes in UNDRIP, has she not built it into Bill C-69, the Canadian energy regulator—