44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 26, 2022 10:00AM
- Apr/26/22 3:29:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am really happy to hear my hon. colleague from Perth—Wellington speak to the issue of food security, which is not mentioned in this budget. I would have thought that after the pandemic and what we have experienced, we would be more conscious than ever in this country of the need to promote local food and local agriculture. Are there any other comments from the hon. member?
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- Apr/26/22 3:43:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think it is common knowledge that the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Louis is a champion of water and water policy in this place. I know this question might make him discomfited, but was he as disappointed as I was that the federal budget 2022 so badly ignores the previous commitments the government has made to deliver on the Canada water agency and to properly fund the neglected area of freshwater science, research and capacity in this country?
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- Apr/26/22 4:22:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to start by acknowledging that we are here on the traditional territory of the Algonquin peoples. Meegwetch for tolerance and patience in the path of reconciliation.
I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mirabel.
I am addressing the budget late this afternoon. There are things in the budget I like quite a lot, so I am going to start with the things I like quite a lot and then explain why I cannot possibly, in good conscience, vote for this budget.
Among the things we like quite a lot, yes, is that we have the New Democratic Party's confidence and supply agreement. It has been a Green Party policy since 2015 that dental care is health care and should be part of our health care system, so we are pleased to see it in this budget.
We also are pleased there is a repetition of some sort of aspirational goal to deliver pharmacare to Canadians. There is not enough in this budget for me to believe it yet. We want to see the actual path to pharmacare clearly laid out, and fast.
I am very pleased to see a number of other items here, such as the follow through on child care. I suppose “I am old enough to remember” will be a theme in this speech. I start sentences with “I am old enough to remember”. I am old enough to remember 2005, when then minister Ken Dryden achieved what the now new government, which is not that new anymore, has done.
Ken Dryden had gotten signed agreements with every province and territory to deliver affordable child care to every Canadian. Many years later it was derailed by the decision the NDP made in those days to defeat the Liberals and put Stephen Harper in place for a very long time. We lost Kyoto, we lost Kelowna, and we lost the child care plan in 2005 and the election in January 2006.
I am really pleased child care is back. Affordable child care is going to make a difference to every Canadian family that has children and desperately needs to have child care. When I was a single mom, I earned $24,000 a year as executive director of the Sierra Club. I spent half of it on child care. The woman who was hired to do the child care in a program in the neighbourhood is a wonderful woman who became a good friend. My salary was split in half and I paid her through a child care program. Because she earned only $12,000, her child care for her children was free. I was making $24,000, and half of it was going to child care. These things are sort of unbelievable to people with good incomes, like those of us in this place, all of whom are paid so handsomely as members of Parliament. I do not take it for granted.
I am pleased with much that is in this budget, and I am pleased to see the government keep its promises in a couple of areas. On housing, the thing that made me most pleased was to see co-op housing back on the agenda. It is not enough money; we need to do more, but there is $1.5 billion to bring back one of the most affordable, socially supportive ways that we can house ourselves, which is through co-ops. That is good.
I know there are a lot of good intentions behind things like the tax measures against flipping. There are many good measures, including one of the promises, which was to bring in for the first time a searchable public registry for beneficial ownerships. Let us hope that helps deal with the problem of snow washing and of overseas interests buying up our housing.
We still really need to deal with things like Airbnbs and the ability of people to buy homes, residential properties, and take them out of the marketplace. At the same time as they are making it harder to find affordable housing for Canadian families, they are undermining the tourism business, in which hotels and real B & Bs have to pay staff, buy insurance and be regulated. We need to protect our housing market from Airbnbs, but I also think we need to protect tourism industry employees and owners from the competition of Airbnbs.
Let me move on to areas that were token and inadequate, and where we need to do so much more. It really was a broken promise on the mental health strategies and the need for mental health and addictions. The hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George has done so much good work on this. Why do we not have the suicide prevention line? Why do we not have supports for mental health in this budget? We should have seen them.
Another key gap is the commitment that was made in the Liberal platform to put $1 billion toward fresh water. This budget is such a bitter disappointment. This title comes from The Hill Times and was signed by some of Canada's leading advocates for fresh water. Ralph Pentland, who used to run Environment Canada's freshwater programs, signed this article, as well as Oliver Brandes and Bob Sandford, who are eminent people in the field. The headline says it all: “Federal budget a failure when it comes to addressing the water crisis”.
This is one of those sentences that starts with, “I am old enough to remember”. I am old enough to remember that, when I worked in Environment Canada in the 1980s, the Inland Waters Directorate in Burlington, Ontario had a staff of 1,250 people who did nothing but work on freshwater science and regulatory policy work. They had an annual budget of $60 million, so when this budget says the Liberals are going to provide $43 million over five years on fresh water and $8.7 million to the new Canada water agency, I would laugh if it was not so sad. It does not even begin to start adjusting dollars for inflation.
This is an abject failure, and I do not know how this has happened when there is such urgency and when the government had already pledged to do this. The promise of a Canada freshwater agency is now more than two years old, and here we are with flooding and drought and fires. Water policy is also climate policy, and I want to just take a moment to say to the people of southern Manitoba, who are right now being walloped by climate crisis events, that a Canada water agency could help anticipate, prevent and adapt. I just want to give a shout-out to those people right now, because I know that in Manitoba things are very tough for many families.
Also, in this budget there are things that are completely missing. There is nothing for ground transportation. Many people will say that is provincial jurisdiction, but so is municipal public transit. It was really great that the Harper government made the gas tax a permanent predictable fund for municipal transportation, but where are we as a federal Parliament in responding to Canadians from coast to coast who have lost their bus service, and whose service on VIA Rail is down to an occasional antique train that rumbles through? I am talking about between Vancouver and Toronto and Montreal to Halifax. We have not seen any significant investment in that ground transportation in at least a decade. All the money that has gone to VIA Rail in all these years has gone to the Windsor-Quebec corridor. That is great. We need decent train service in the Windsor-Quebec corridor, but we also need decent train service with spokes that run off this hub.
We need bus service across Canada. Again, this is more than transportation and this is more than climate policy. This is justice. One of the key recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was that people need to be able to get access to safe and affordable public transit so they are not hitchhiking. The most marginalized people in our society are forced into hitchhiking because we act like there is not a problem. If people want to get from Kamloops to Prince George, if they want to get from Kamloops to Vancouver or any of these routes, or if they want to get from Moncton to Campbellton, they have almost no way to travel if they do not own a car. Also, for seniors and for a lot of us, being forced to drive on unsafe roads, particularly during hazardous winter blizzards, to get to doctors' appointments does not suggest we are a wealthy industrialized society. In fact, our public ground transportation system is worse than in any developing country I have ever visited.
Moving on to what else we need, there is nothing in here for the tourism sector, which I would submit has been the hardest-hit sector in the pandemic. What we hear is that there is going to be a tourism strategy developed, but there is no money in this budget for it. We really need to do something to make sure that since, and I will say it out loud, the pandemic is not over, small businesses in the tourism sector can survive.
Why can I not vote for this budget? It is a complete failure in responding to what, three days earlier, was laid out by the IPCC. On April 4, the lead author said it was now or never. The panel never gave the option of later. It is now or never for a habitable planet, and this budget fails in that fundamental threat to our survival.
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- Apr/26/22 4:33:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first, in my riding, one of the reasons that local businesses have to close earlier and more often is that there is no affordable housing for workers to come in and use. A very real concern of local businesses in my riding is that places that used to rent to summer students and workers are no longer available because they are Airbnbs, so we can pursue that conversation later.
Meanwhile, the difficulty with carbon capture and storage is that it works far less than advertised. It can sequester some carbon, but in no project around the world has it ever met its goals or targets. It is about the most expensive way, and one of the less reliable ways, to do what is needed to be done reliably, quickly and affordably.
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- Apr/26/22 4:35:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Salaberry—Suroît.
I voted in favour of the Bloc Québécois budget amendment specifically for the reasons she outlined in her question. The Bloc Québécois added that we must have a concrete program to combat the climate emergency. As for the question of funding for our seniors, I do not have an answer to her question. Ignoring the needs of our seniors makes no sense.
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- Apr/26/22 4:36:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I reflected on in my statement, for virtually all of my daughter's childhood, I was a single mom, and if this program had been in place, it would have been much more affordable. Early childhood education and good child care are not just about parking your kid somewhere. They are about actually creating an enriched, educational experience for children, and it should be available to every Canadian child, regardless of the economic status of their parents or parent, and it is about time we brought this forward. It is catching up with many other countries in terms of the social safety net. Let us make sure we continue going forward. We know this was a she-cession. We know that a lot of people who quit their jobs were not the dads but the moms. This was not always, but a lot.
We have a huge chunk of our workforce right now that is not able to go to work until they know for sure that they have reliable child care. This is something that was a long time coming, and I am really happy to see it.
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moved that Bill C-226, An Act respecting the development of a national strategy to assess, prevent and address environmental racism and to advance environmental justice, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
She said: Madam Speaker, I thank my colleagues who are here this evening because this is a very important private member's bill.
I am very honoured to stand here to present Bill C-226 in the first hour of second reading. I want to begin with a very heartfelt meegwetch and a recognition that we stand on the territory of the Algonquin nation. It is their land.
I want to take a moment to describe how we got to where we are today, because it is rare for a private member's bill entering its first hour of second reading to have already had any parliamentary history at all, and this has a lot of parliamentary history.
I will start by saying that this bill received wide support under a different mover in the last Parliament, as Bill C-230. It was moved by the magnificent former member of Parliament for Cumberland—Colchester, Lenore Zann. Lenore was elected as a Liberal member of Parliament here, but she is quite a non-partisan individual. She also served with distinction in the legislature of Nova Scotia as a New Democrat MLA and has carried with her a concern for environmental racism for a long time. She did me the great honour of making this a non-partisan bill, and I am very honoured to have the hon. chair of the environment committee as the seconder of this bill now. We wanted to make this a non-partisan effort from its very inception as Bill C-230.
Bill C-230, with the same title, was an act to address and assess environmental racism and move forward to environmental justice. It received support at second reading and actually got to committee. Amendments were made at the environment committee, and I adopted those amendments in Bill C-226 at first reading. What we have in front of us therefore represents work already done by Parliament.
It is my deep hope and desire that all of us here, regardless of party, will find it in our hearts sometime in the near future to give this bill unanimous consent so that it can skip through stages that were already done and be sent to the other place. It would then become law, and we can start working proactively to advance environmental justice. That is the hope with which I speak to members tonight.
I am grateful for the non-partisan support the bill already has, and members will hear that in the speeches that are coming up. We also know from a question that I put to the Prime Minister in question period that the government's position is to support this bill. We feel optimistic that it will become law, but we would rather it was sooner than later.
I will now turn to the history. This is not a recent issue, and we are late to act. However, before I start on that, I need to dedicate this bill to the memory of a friend of mine: Clotilda Coward Douglas Yakimchuk. She was a magnificent woman and a hero in the community. Her parents came from Barbados in the earlier part of the last century to work in the Sydney steel mill.
Clotilda was a proud Black woman. She was the first community activist with whom I ever worked on the issue of environmental racism. Clotilda Yakimchuk died just about a year ago on April 15, 2021. She died of COVID. She was the first Black person to receive a nursing degree at nursing school in Nova Scotia. She was the first Black woman to be the president of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Nova Scotia. She was aware of and fought against the pollution of the coke ovens of the Sydney steel mill and the steel mill itself, which led to high cancer rates in the community of Whitney Pier. When this bill becomes law, I hope people will remember that it is dedicated to the memory of Clotilda Yakimchuk.
One of the things I know from cleaning up the Sydney tar ponds with Clotilda is that we can recognize as a reality that toxic chemicals do not discriminate. They do not pay attention to the colour of our skin when they lodge in our body, when they pass through placenta to children, when they cause cancer and when they cause birth defects. They do not care about the colour of our skin. However, the public policy that puts indigenous peoples and communities of colour far more frequently at risk of being exposed to toxic chemicals does notice skin colour. It does notice whether we are marginalized or not. It does notice whether we have money or not.
Therefore, this is absolutely the case in this country, with all of the evidence that we have of racism that cannot be denied. I know this bill makes people uncomfortable. Is there racism in Canada? Yes, there is. We just had a report today about the racism that repulses people as new recruits out of our military. Every institution in our country experiences racism. Environmental racism is not something new.
Let me go through some of the history we have of that in this country. I am going to turn to books for a moment. The first book that really focused on this problem was in 1977, by one of Canada's great journalists, Warner Troyer. The book is No Safe Place, and it is the story of the contamination by the Dryden paper mill of the indigenous community at Grassy Narrows. We are still dealing with that mercury contamination.
Another book on the same topic of the mercury contamination of Grassy Narrows is A Poison Stronger than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community, by Anastasia Shkilnyk. She was one of my constituents and, also in her memory, I bring this bill forward today.
In 2000, actually, I co-authored with Maude Barlow, who was then the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, the book Frederick Street: Life and death on Canada's Love Canal, dealing with the issue that I mentioned, and I referenced it. That is where Clotilda Yakimchuk and I first became friends. The contamination of the Sydney tar ponds led to the highest cancer rates in Canada. They were in industrial Cape Breton. The place that became the tar ponds was an estuary where the Mi’kmaq community had traditionally had summer fishing camps. The land was stolen, of course, and then became the worst pollution zone in Canada with the pollution from the coke ovens and the steel mill.
In between was a community called Whitney Pier, which was virtually entirely immigrant Canadians, including a lot of people from Ukraine. I mentioned Clotilda's last name was Yakimchuk. Her husband, Dan Yakimchuk, was a steelworker from Ukraine. Whitney Pier is a melting-pot community. It is a fantastic place, but the cancer rates are through the roof. The land was stolen from the Mi’kmaq. They got the contamination too. So did the only Black community in Cape Breton. As Clotilda described it to me, and I recorded it in the book, it was impossible to find housing anywhere but in that community, so the racism was enforced. We did not have Jim Crow laws in Nova Scotia in the 1970s, but we might as well have, because an experienced nurse who was Black, having moved back from Grenada with her children after her first husband passed away, could not get housing anywhere except in the most contaminated neighbourhoods. That is called environmental racism. That is what it is.
Therefore, we have a history here.
Looking at books, the most important, without a doubt, is the 2018 publication of Dr. Ingrid Waldron's book There’s Something In The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities. It has changed the conversation in Canada. That was fortified a year later, when Dr. Waldron co-produced the film, with the brilliant Nova Scotia actor Elliot Page. They introduced people to this concept. That is part of the history.
Let us look at where else people have done anything on environmental racism. I have been a bit shocked and perturbed, as has been my friend Lenore Zann, by some of the social media reaction to us tabling this legislation, as if we are kind of weird lefties and we made it up because we just want to make racism a thing. No, this is empirically established. We know this is true.
In 1994, the U.S. government took action because it was clear on the evidence that if people lived in a community of colour or an indigenous community, they were far more likely to be exposed to levels of toxic contamination that imperilled their health and the health of their children, their family, their neighbourhood, their community and also other people who were not of colour but who were marginalized. Therefore, it has to do with a bunch of different issues. If people have power and money and they live in Shaughnessy or in Westmount, nobody opens a toxic waste dump in their backyard. That is the reality. In Canada, as in the U.S., if people are marginalized, without economic power, if they are people of colour or indigenous, they might be much more likely to be exposed to toxic contamination. The U.S. recognized this and, since 1994, the U.S. government, through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has had a program that is well resourced for environmental justice.
What does that justice look like? It looks like putting tools in the hands of marginalized people to fight for their own health, making sure there are resources for epidemiologists, making sure there are resources for toxicologists and making sure that governments spend the money to clean up the mess.
We are late in Canada. The U.S. took action. Again, I ask that members hear me: the U.S. took action 28 years ago. This is not a new issue. We are late, so we need to get this bill passed. We need to see environmental justice being championed in this country with a well-resourced program in environmental justice where we take our blinders off and say, yes, there is a thing called environmental racism. We are not going to water it down and ignore it, because it is still happening. It is happening today when they try to reopen the Pictou mill and reopen the contamination that has so affected the people of Pictou Landing.
By the way, I see the minister of immigration in the room, so I am just going to give a shout-out to him for being the first federal member of Parliament from that area, Central Nova, who was prepared to say that this mill should close because the jobs were not worth the damage that had been done to Boat Harbour, the indigenous community of Pictou Landing and the neighbourhoods in Pictou. For him just to say that was brave. They are still trying to open it again.
It is seen in Kanesatake, where there is still illegal dumping of toxic chemicals in and around that Mohawk community. That should not be allowed. It would not happen in other communities.
We are looking still at Grassy Narrows and Sarnia, at the first nation of Aamjiwnaang. I invite colleagues from any party to go to Sarnia and visit the enclaves surrounded by petrochemical plants, where the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Cemetery is. They are completely surrounded, and the industry just got a two-year extension to clean up the sulphur dioxide from that refinery. That affects settler-culture Canadians too, but in that community those toxic contaminants completely encircle Aamjiwnaang's centre.
Look at the Lubicon, and the oil sands that have contaminated the communities of Lubicon first nation now for long enough that we wrote about it in 2000, in Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal.
We do not need to look far. We do not need to look back at deep history, but we do need to be honest about the fact that this is a pressing issue and requires action. I am sorry to say this: Liberal colleagues are supporting this bill, so I say it without malice, but it is a terrible shame that the election was called when it was because this bill, having gotten a lot of support, died on the Order Paper, so we are starting again.
I, and my friend Lenore Zann, who is here in Ottawa today as a former member of Parliament and the original sponsor of the bill, would really love to see the bill go to second reading for the second time. We would really love it. I am sure other members of every party in this place would appreciate that we do not need to take it to committee again and study it again. We cannot make the same amendments, because this bill includes the amendments the committee made last time.
Let us do something for environmental justice. Let us stand up and say there is a better way to deal with a right to a healthy environment that we actually do not have in this country. There is a way to make it real to have the right to a healthy environment for every citizen, regardless of the colour of their skin or their economic status. In the case of indigenous peoples, there is the double horror of having their land stolen and then filled with toxic chemicals. This is not something that any parliamentarian should feel comfortable allowing to continue, so I really beg this of all my colleagues, regardless of party.
I understand that this is an especially difficult issue because it is about racism and inequality, and it is a matter of words. I urge everyone to support this private member's bill.
I have, I think, 35 seconds left, so I just want to say again that this bill will be from all of us. This is not Green Party legislation. I mean, I am completely supported by my colleague for Kitchener Centre, but we do not want to own this. Collectively, all of our hands are on this baby. This bill will matter. It matters for environmental justice. It matters for our future. It matters for who we are.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague, the Minister of Environment, for his decades of activism. I pray they are not over. I do genuinely appreciate his support on this bill and on many things.
The science is clear, but we do not have enough science. That was one of the reasons there was an amendment made at committee that I completely supported. It was an NDP amendment that said let us make sure we are gathering the data. Let us assess. We do not save data as often as we should that breaks down, by discriminatory category, who is most exposed to toxic chemicals. We know who is most exposed to toxic chemicals: people of colour, indigenous people and people who are without economic clout from settler cultures. We know that.
The science is very clear, and a lot of it was put together empirically. Dr. Ingrid Waldron is the pre-eminent Canadian expert right now on mapping where we find high levels of toxic waste. If we map that out, lo and behold, we find that people of colour and indigenous communities are, out of any normal statistical variation, far more prevalent in the categories of people exposed to too many toxic chemicals.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Repentigny for her question.
I agree with some of what she was saying. As I said, it is clear that it is not just people of colour or indigenous people who are exposed to toxic chemicals. I very much appreciate my colleague's work on climate change and other important issues. She works hard for the environment. However, with respect to the bill, I disagree with the idea that it is not important to say the words. Environmental racism is now a threat.
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Madam Speaker, I was remiss in not publicly thanking the hon. member for Victoria for working with me on this bill. I am very grateful for it. I drew a really good number. There is a lottery for private member's bills. Many viewers may not know that. I got a good number and that is why I am up early in this session of Parliament. We are going to get this bill passed, and I thank the hon. member for Victoria for her help.
In the U.S., at the EPA, they call it the EJ program. Everyone knows what it is. People go to the EJ program and get funding. They get support. It is a very robust, professional, scientific program within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and it has operated for almost 30 years.
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