44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 3, 2023 02:00PM
- May/3/23 3:20:18 p.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I extend my condolences for the loss of the people and the firefighters in this climate event.
My question is for the Prime Minister. In relation to the business that we will take up later today, the amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, known as Bill S-5, there is still time to improve this act by increasing the opportunities for public participation for science and indigenous knowledge to inform the act.
The amendments by the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby and myself need to be supported by the government. Will it stand for public participation and indigenous knowledge?
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- May/3/23 4:01:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place today to speak. I want to let people watching know that the reason we are all wearing red carnations is for multiple sclerosis awareness.
The petition I am honoured to present today is from a rather specific and unusual group of petitioners, medical doctors who are also mothers. The Physician Mothers of Canada are calling on the Government of Canada to recognize that the World Health Organization has identified climate change as “the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.”
They are calling upon the Government of Canada to view the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the special report on 1.5° as the call for urgent and transformative change.
In short, the petitioners, being the Physician Mothers of Canada, call on the Government of Canada to act on the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment's calls for action to decarbonize our economy rapidly and to recognize that we must ensure green energy policies at every level. Every minister in the Government of Canada should view their actions through the climate lens.
There are other elements of this petition. I am summarizing a really important work rather quickly.
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- May/3/23 4:10:04 p.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill S-5
, seconded by the member for Victoria, moved:
Motion No. 2
That the amendment to Clause 39.1 of Bill S-5 be amended by replacing subsections 108.1(1) and (2) with the following:
“108.1 (1) If the information that the Ministers assess under subsection 108(1) or (2) is in respect of a vertebrate or a prescribed living organism or group of living organisms, the Ministers shall ensure that the public is provided with the opportunity to bring forward any relevant Indigenous knowledge and scientific information before the expiry of the period for assessing that information.
(2) If the Minister is provided under paragraph 106(1)(a) with information in respect of a vertebrate or a prescribed living organism or group of living organisms, the Minister shall publish that information in the Environmental Registry within five days after its receipt.”
Motion No. 3
That the amendment to Clause 44.1 of Bill S-5 be amended by adding the following after paragraph 114(1)(g.1):
“(g.2) prescribing processes for the consideration of Indigenous knowledge and scientific information provided to the Ministers under subsection 108.1(1);”
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- May/3/23 4:22:30 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Victoria for voting, in committee, for a number of the over 24 amendments that the Green Party tried to put forward. We worked on Bill S-5 from mid-December right through to March. All those good amendments were defeated, as were the many good amendments that had been brought forward by the Senate.
By the way, I cannot vote for this legislation. We are asked to believe that the legislation is so important, but the government knows it is flawed; if we just wait a minute, any minute now, the Liberal government will bring forward a new version of amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Nobody has touched this act for 20 years. It stretches credulity to the breaking point.
Has my hon. colleague from Victoria seen any evidence that there is a likelihood of any new legislation from the government on the various sections of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act that were not touched in this amendment review?
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- May/3/23 4:25:08 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I want to start with the matter before us right now and hope that members will decide to support the amendments that have been put forward in today's debate at report stage. My hon. colleague, the member for Victoria, has just walked through some of them. I want to stress that it is important to vote in favour of the reasoned NDP amendment put forward by the hon. member for Victoria, which is to restore a change that was made in the Senate.
Anyone watching this could be confused. Are changes made in the Senate? Are they going back to the Senate? What is going on here? This is a fundamental concern I have about the bill. The Minister of Environment had the amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act put forward in the previous Parliament, in June 2021. This was when the Liberal government was pretty sure it was going to bring itself down and have a snap election in midsummer. Therefore, it was put on the Order Paper with no intention of really pursuing it. However, this did give people, environmental law groups and others a chance to read it and say that there is more that needs to be done here. There were a lot of efforts in that regard, to which I will refer later.
We got back from the election, and there was nothing on the Order Paper for the long-promised amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Therefore, the minister and the Liberal machinery for putting forward legislation decided they ought to start this one in the Senate. Why was this? It was because it was not such an important bill to the Liberal Party that they would start it in the House. It could not get House time, so it was started in the Senate.
Then there was this convoluted process. The Senate worked hard. By the way, having worked on this bill, the Senate sent a letter to the House that said it could not get to some of the key amendments it really needed to make, particularly to make the right to a healthy environment enforceable. This is outside the scope of the bill. What does that mean to people who might be watching this and wondering why I would be voting against the Canadian Environmental Protection Act amendments? In order to make the right to a healthy environment enforceable, one would have needed to open up section 22, which is the section of CEPA that deals with enforcement.
That was not before the Senate as a possible place for an amendment any more than it was before the House of Commons environment committee. This is because section 22 has never been used, in the entire long history of this act; it is unusable. We really needed to open that up.
Those were the many amendments made in the Senate. The Senate then said there were some things that really needed to be changed that it could not get at. However, the Senate succeeded in amending this bill to say that we have to pay attention to tailings ponds; that point was then deleted by the House of Commons environment committee. This is why the hon. member for Victoria has put forward the amendment that we find in Motion No. 1 before us today. The amendment to clause 9 that was made in committee restores what had been done in the Senate. I know the procedural path here is a bit circuitous.
I have brought forward amendments, and I want to credit those groups that did the work on them. Nature Canada, the Canadian Environmental Law Association and a number of other groups wanted to see meaningful public participation in this legislation. In order to make sure of this, the amendments put forward at report stage changed the bill substantially. In terms of language, we move away from saying what the bill says now, which is that there will be a consultation with interested parties. “Interested parties” has a particular meaning in law, which might not be the public or necessarily scientists. It would not be indigenous people. The amendment is a compromise.
I want to stress that this is a compromise from what we wanted or what we hoped to get at report stage, which is to allow that when there is a decision to genetically modify a living organism, indigenous knowledge is an important component to looking at that kind of a decision. That is the first amendment. For instance, we have had genetic modification of salmon in this country. We are the only country in the world, by the way, that allows genetic modification of a fish that is intended for human consumption. Pacific salmon are sacred to indigenous peoples in the territories I represent. The second amendment deals with the processes for considering indigenous knowledge and scientific information.
It is really important that we identify where the barriers to this kind of thing lie. Some of them, unfortunately, are in the advice the minister received from people within Environment Canada. This should be a process with significant public participation. However, there is a counter-argument from John Moffett, who is the senior Environment Canada expert in this area. In the evidence given to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development on February 16, John Moffett said, “This is not a public participation process. This is a science-based process.”
That would all be very well and good if scientists could also intervene at this point, but it is not clear they can. To say this is not a public process flies in the face of commitments Liberals have made that there will be public participation, there will be indigenous knowledge and we will listen to scientists.
Before my time expires to speak to the rest of the bill, I really urge members on all sides of the House to give favourable consideration to these three amendments at report stage. They will substantially increase the chance that we will have meaningful public participation, including incorporating indigenous knowledge into the bill.
I am going to go through the deep disappointment I feel in Bill S-5. It is tragic, really. Members may believe it or not, but I worked on this bill before first reading in 1988. I know I do not look old enough for this to be true, or at least I would like to believe that.
I worked on this bill in 1988, when it was brought forward in the time of the Mulroney government. A majority Progressive Conservative government brought forward the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. It brought together many disparate pieces of legislation, including the ocean dumping act and the air quality act, and it created part 5, which is all we are really dealing with here today.
We are dealing with part 5 of the original Canadian Environmental Protection Act, on toxic substances. We are not dealing with part 6, which we should, to modernize genetically modified organisms and how we regulate them. We are not dealing with the parts on the ocean dumping act, which are crying out for amendments. We have a lot going on right now with our ports with cruise ships.
We know we are going to hear the trumpets, the horns and the hallelujahs that we have put a right to a healthy environment into this bill. What kind of a right is it if it is not enforceable? A non-enforceable right is a bumper sticker. It is good to have in the bill, and people can point to it and say it is improvement; however, it is not a right if we cannot enforce it.
The deep disappointment gets deeper when we look at the changes to the schedule for toxic chemicals. The Canadian Environmental Law Association talked of this in its briefs. I agree with it, having worked on this legislation for longer than I care to mention. This bill survived constitutional challenge in the Hydro-Québec case in the 1990s in the Supreme Court of Canada because it focused on toxic chemicals as a health issue and because the Minister of Health and the Minister of Environment jointly administer this act. Therefore, it was seen as a legitimate exercise of federal jurisdiction.
Why would it be changed now? That would be thanks to the lobbying of the plastics industry, which did not like the idea that its products could be described as toxic. We know that, for many decades now, courts have understood the concept of “CEPA toxic”, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act's version of toxic. This means that in adequate amounts and sufficient quantities in the environment, something is a threat to the environment and human health. It does not mean that if someone picks up a piece of plastic, they are going to poison themselves. It means that the enormous amounts of plastics we dump into the environment are a threat to our environment on a planetary scale.
To help the plastics industry with a potential reputational public relations problem, this bill weakens the constitutional foundations of the act. I am unable to support a bill that takes any risk with the constitutional underpinnings of the act to help an industry out with a public relations problem.
There is also the elimination of key sections of the original CEPA. Actually, the virtual elimination piece came in later, after the first passage of the act in 1990, and so on. We have had a lot of improvements to this act over the years, but Bill S-5 is not one of them.
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- May/3/23 4:36:14 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I have to start by saying that the member for Guelph thanked me for coming to the environment committee. I was coerced into being at the environment committee. I am not allowed to be a member of the committee. The motions passed in every committee in this place give me 48-hours notice to submit all my amendments to the committee for clause-by-clause, but I am not allowed to participate. I am not allowed to move my own amendments, so they are deemed to have been moved.
This is not an opportunity I have ever sought because, if not for the motions passed in every committee, I would have a right today, right now, to submit all of my amendments to the committee, argue them out and discuss them here at report stage. We would then have to vote on them. That is why Stephen Harper's PMO invented this motion, which every committee passes without thinking about the fact that the party in the House that has the least procedural fairness in the one right we have to put forward substantive amendments at report stage, had that right reduced because we knew how to use it.
The watch-list is a small improvement within an act that, overall, reduces the effectiveness of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in a way for which the only word I can use to describe it is tragic.
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- May/3/23 4:38:38 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I thank my dear colleague from Repentigny. I absolutely agree with what she said about NGOs like Nature Canada that have worked on the issue of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
It is unbelievable to think that we now have the opportunity to make changes to part 6 of the bill in order to modernize the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, but that the government is choosing to do nothing. We could protect the public against risks related to GMOs in food. It is outrageous.
We really need to try to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act with regard to the management of toxic substances in order to protect Canadians from big corporations that are a danger to our environment and human health.
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- May/3/23 4:40:18 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, relying on my previous work as a practising lawyer, the words “interested parties” definitely mean the chemical industry would be an interested party. They do not mean Nature Canada would automatically be an interested party.
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- May/3/23 5:23:58 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I have a question.
In this afternoon's debate, we heard about the Senate amendments, which were great amendments, about collecting information on the oil sands and tailings ponds. The Liberals have opposed that amendment.
It is a little complicated, but what we are talking about is that including tailings ponds in Bill S-5 is so rudimentary and obvious that it is deeply shocking that the Liberals do not like it, because what they are proposing to change is—
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- May/3/23 5:25:08 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, the question is this: Does the hon. member agree with me that the mere fact of asking for information gathering about the tailings ponds should not have provoked a reaction that it had to be removed?
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- May/3/23 9:29:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, I did actually put forward, in a previous Parliament, a private member's bill called “think small first”, but have not been able to get it back through the legislative drafting. It was designed for small businesses, to ensure that there would be a regulatory review of any new regulation and to consider specifically how it would affect small businesses. It is based on a similar bill that was brought forward by the Green Party in the European Union. Therefore, I have a lot of sympathy, but not for cutting deeply without figuring out where we need regulations, because they help protect health and safety.
I just met with representatives of the College of Family Physicians, and they pointed out that there is a federal regulatory burden that costs our health care system because of forms that doctors have to fill out for the federal government. I wonder why that is not in this bill, and whether the member has any thoughts.
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- May/3/23 9:54:30 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, I think we are all astonished by the turn this debate has taken on modernizing regulations.
I just wanted to express to the member some degree of sympathy that the electoral boundary redistribution will deprive him of representing the town of Ashcroft and the extraordinarily vital and engaged citizenry. As well, I think he is losing Lytton, which we already lost in action. It has not moved. I am not being facetious about losing Lytton. We shall never lose Lytton. It must be rebuilt.
Does the hon. member think it is inevitable that his boundaries are redrawn in that fashion?
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- May/3/23 11:52:37 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, I was just recently in Edmonton for Earth Day and toured a home that had just cut the gas line supply to the House. It was in Edmonton, where they get rather cold winters. They have an air source heat pump that was installed. They have also installed solar panels on their roof.
The installer was there to talk about the current demand. They cannot keep up in Edmonton with homes that want air source heat pumps installed, because they work so well in cold climates and cut the heating bills substantially while also keeping air quality in the home safer.
I just thought the hon. member would be thrilled to know that this is actually something that happens and does not spring from the imagination of the member for Kingston and the Islands.
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- May/3/23 11:54:31 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, tonight, we are looking at Bill S-6, which would not be cutting regulations; it is about modernizing regulations. We missed some opportunities where we could have improved various aspects of Canadian society by actually cutting some regulations and streamlining some other regulations.
This may just be my own childhood and background working in a small business. We had a restaurant and gift shop on the Cabot Trail. We had a lot of tourists come through. My father, who was rather funny, kept getting notices from the Government of Canada. One day, the notice would be about tariffs on T-shirts made in Bangladesh, and another day it would be about something else. He finally decided to start a wall along where people had to wait to get to the washroom. He posted all the notices that we received from the Government of Canada. He then made a lovely sign so he could keep it up to date. It said, “The Government of Canada never sleeps.” Perhaps I have been thinking of it because it is approaching midnight, and I suppose I never sleep, but the truth is that we could use some sense in regulations.
I recently met with a wonderful group that was here meeting with many members of Parliament, The College of Family Physicians of Canada. This is one area in which I wish we would see action. I generally believe we need regulations to protect health and safety, but some regulations simply do not make sense. The ones that generate unnecessary paperwork for doctors hurt our health care system because they tie doctors and their staff up with unnecessary, unproductive work. This includes, for example, having to write a letter every five years to say that a patient still has an amputated leg. There is also paperwork that has to be issued over and over again to help veterans. It takes up a doctor's time to fill out forms and write letters that are completely unnecessary. Often, especially in the case of the CRA, the patient ends up paying for the service separately, and that is the person who is least able to pay. There would be a great deal of sense in trying to figure out how to reduce the regulatory burden, especially where it is impeding our health care system.
We have been talking about this piece of legislation in terms of modernizing. Only one party, the Conservative Party, has put forward speakers tonight. Why am I standing here? It is because I am a bit worried about this bill. It is not necessarily just routine, regulatory modernization. My concern is that this bill, which affects 29 different acts, will go only to the industry committee for review. Most of it is pretty uncontroversial, which is why there has been very little interest in it tonight.
My concern is about what happens with the Species at Risk Act changes. When I read this over, I am not entirely sure they are not substantive. They do not appear to be entirely about modernizing; they appear to be substantial or at least substantive changes to the Species at Risk Act. We do not have a great record with the Species at Risk Act. For instance, the southern resident killer whale was listed as endangered in 2003, and the full recovery plan did not come out until 2018. Any changes to the Species at Risk Act that are more than purely routine must go to the environment committee, not the industry committee. We can send it to committee and study it there, but there are 29 different acts. What if something in there is a mistake and we just go ahead with it because these are just normal changes? What about the change to the Fisheries Act to give a fisheries officer the discretion to not lay charges? What if that is substantive, and what if that is a mistake? It is going to go only to the industry committee.
Wrapping things up, I urge some caution here. This is a missed opportunity to actually reduce regulations, but it is also not modernizing them. In the reading I have done since working on the bill for this evening and since the bill was tabled in the Senate, I have some concerns. I express those concerns now knowing full well this bill will be sent right away to the industry committee and probably promulgated without changes. I hope members of the committee will ensure that they are at least satisfied that changes to the Fisheries Act and changes to the Species at Risk Act would not, in fact, hurt nature in this country any more than we have seen through recent decisions. This includes the Roberts Bank expansion in the Port of Vancouver, which will surely hurt those very same southern resident killer whales.
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- May/4/23 12:00:13 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to pursue a question that was originally asked on February 6, and I have to say that the circumstances have changed substantially since it was asked.
I wear the Ukrainian flag colours every day. I decided to put on this pin on February 24, when Putin launched his brutal and illegal attack on Ukraine. I want to make it very clear that I personally, and the Green Party as a party, fully support the Government of Canada's actions in supporting Ukraine, both with humanitarian aid and military aid.
It is an unthinkable thing that Russia could invade a country. They have been using drones. They have bombed. They have shelled. Today was a terrible day in Ukraine, particular for the city of Kherson. There was a deadly attack that targeted civilian targets, including a supermarket and a railway station. On this day, as I rise to speak about Ukraine, 21 more innocent civilians were killed and 48 were injured.
The situation in Ukraine is a desperate one. It is very hard for Canadians, with such a large Ukrainian diaspora here, to see friends, neighbours, relatives and family sheltering in air raid shelters and listening to the air raid sirens. Things have gotten much worse within the last week, not that anything has been good since Putin attacked Ukraine.
We need to be thinking about not only winning the war but also winning a peace for the people of Ukraine. Yes, they must win. They must protect all territory. We must be with them as long as it takes, but there is a point where we can also look beyond to see a country that has been fractured and violated through an illegal, brutal war for over a year. The more time it takes to win the war, the more it will be difficult to create a peaceful situation throughout a country that includes some people who identify more with Russia. I hope we will be soon be talking about looking back at what has occurred and not looking forward to an endless war.
We have to continue to support those humanitarian efforts. We have to do more, of course, in a postwar period, to think about stability. We have to think about the environmental damage that this war is doing, the reckless dangerous actions of Putin's army in attacking nuclear power stations. We are in a very dangerous time. Supporting Ukraine is essential, and I think virtually every Canadian understands that. We need to also be looking at what the humanitarian needs will be postwar.
Of course, we had a debate in a late night emergency debate on Sudan, and one of the things that became so clear is that, when there was any hope of looking the other way and leaving Sudan, there was a complete failure to invest in civil society, a complete failure to help keep that society whole.
Whatever happens, we must stay with the people of Ukraine, support them, their military, their NGOs and the civil society. Please the Lord, this will be over, with Ukraine victorious, and we will be able to invest in a peace.
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- May/4/23 12:07:57 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, in reflecting on the situation in Ukraine, including on the future of its people, its culture and survival, and the nature of Ukraine, I have been extremely moved by the fact that my colleague and the deputy leader of the Green Party, Jonathan Pedneault, just went to Ukraine on my behalf and on behalf of the party. He used to work at Human Rights Watch, and he visited with his colleagues from there. He was in Ukraine when the war began, and he went back to see the human rights condition and look at how Canada is helping. Even now, during the war, it is clear that more humanitarian help and more connection are needed to support the people, making sure that our aid reaches the people who need it the most.
I thank the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of National Defence for their efforts. We are in this with the people of Ukraine.
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