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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 123

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 2, 2022 02:00PM
Context: House Hansard - 123 - Nov/2/22
Mr. Mark Gerretsen (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Senate), Lib.)
  • Nov/2/22 5:27:42 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill S-5 
Mr. Speaker, yes, I have a question for the member, because I always get a kick out of when the Conservative plan for dealing with the environment is to talk about dumping sewage into our rivers and lakes. It is a very important issue; I will not dispute that, but I will forgive the member if he does not understand how the sewage system works. Basically, we have pipes in a municipality, and they all lead to a pool. When that pool fills up, we have to do something with the water. Unfortunately, the legacy of the way municipalities have been created over the last number of decades and centuries in our country is that the stormwater is connected with the sewage water, so when we have increased storm events, those pools fill up faster. There are various different ways that we can control and deal with that problem, and this is what I would like the member to comment on. We could have grey infrastructure solutions, which basically would be to build larger tanks to hold and deal with the increased flow. We could have green infrastructure that tries to localize the sewage more individually, to deal with it before putting it into this network of sewers and pipes that lead to this pool. I know the Conservatives are against dumping the sewage, and they should be, as we all should be, so I am wondering what their solution is to deal with it. Can he propose a solution?
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Context: House Hansard - 123 - Nov/2/22
Mr. Warren Steinley
  • Nov/2/22 5:29:06 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill S-5 
Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the presentations of my friend across the way. One thing I put forward, if he was listening to my speech and its relevance to this, was to use the infrastructure bank to ensure municipalities got some of that money so they could upgrade their infrastructure. What I would not have done is use an omnibus budget bill to make sure Montreal could continue to dump millions of litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence for another 10 to 15 years without talking to anyone about that. I appreciate the lesson in municipal infrastructure. I live in a municipality as well, and I thank him very much for that, but there is a way the federal government had the capacity to help municipalities make sure they could use that money and not dump raw sewage into our lakes, rivers and oceans. I would say he should take that back to his cabinet and to his Minister of Infrastructure and say that instead of the money leaving here and maybe building pipelines in China, maybe they should build some water infrastructure in Canada.
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