- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Oshawa
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,288.05
- Government Page
- Nov/2/22 4:46:22 p.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill S‑5.
I will give a bit of background for people listening this afternoon.
Bill S-5 is an act to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, to make related amendments to the Food and Drugs Act and to repeal the Perfluorooctane Sulfonate Virtual Elimination Act
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, CEPA, has not been significantly updated since it was passed in 1999. Bill S-5 is the first major update of this very important bill.
I just want to remind people watching that if they look at the word “conservative”, the root of the name of our party, it means to conserve. We have always been committed to protecting our ecosystems and our environment.
There are some things in this bill that are good and there are some things that are not so good, which I want to explain. Let us start by talking about what is good and what is supportable in this bill right from the start.
This bill modernizes our environmental regulations in the act. As I said in my opening, it has been a long time and it is definitely overdue. It also reduces some of the red tape. This is a good thing. It helps our competitiveness. It helps people do business. It helps the environmental assessments get done and done properly.
It also allows other ministers to manage substances where another federal act is more appropriate. Again, these are more efficiencies.
It allows environmental risk assessment for drugs to be done solely under the food and drugs regulations and it removes duplicate monitoring under CEPA. Again, as someone who has served as the parliamentary secretary for the environment and health, I see how these work together. I see these as very positive things.
There are some things in here that are not so good.
The bill does introduce the concept of the right to a healthy environment. Again, this is a good thing. However, the bad thing about it is that it is not defined. What is the right to a healthy environment?
The Liberals have had a long time to approach this and define it so that it gives certainty. Unfortunately, they are going to have two years to define that. Anything that adds uncertainty, I find, is not a good thing.
The bill also has several amendments put forth by the Senate that really are not in the best interests of Canadians. I will talk about one of them.
One of the amendments introduces a new term called a “vulnerable environment” without defining it. This is more uncertainty. It gives a little bit more power to the minister, which is very subjective. Business and environmental institutions want some certainty, so that is a bit of a problem.
What I find is a big problem with it is it allows anyone to request that a minister assess whether a substance is capable of becoming toxic. Let us look at this a little more closely.
That means that anyone in Canada can bring forward a letter or request to a minister and the time this would take and the number of people who would be interested in doing this could be unbelievably large. In one part of the bill, it does help remove red tape but then in another part like this, it increases it.
I would like to talk about the plastics industry. I am from Oshawa where we like to manufacture stuff. One of the things that we have a history of manufacturing is automobiles. Plastics are one of those substances that allow automobiles to be lighter and more efficient, which, when we are thinking about the environment, is a good thing.
With this bill, what we have now is that plastics manufactured products are listed in schedule 1, part 2. The Alberta government is actually taking the government to court over this because it is very, very serious. The government renamed schedule 1 so that it is no longer called a list of toxic substances. However, substances are still referred to as toxic in the act. This is problematic.
To explain it to the House, I looked up the definition of “toxic”, so I would like to read it into the record. Toxic means containing or being poisonous material, especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation; it is also defined as being of, relating to or being caused by a toxin or another poison.
This is a problem. We just came out of a pandemic, for example, and plastics were an extremely important part of our being able to manage that. As I said, for car parts, where I come from, this is going to be really important, and I do not think the government has looked at the economic cost of changing this and calling plastics toxins.
It is something I am really worried about. I think we have to look at this in committee and make sure we change it, because I wonder what the motivation is here. I think it is going to cause a lot of fear. We can pick up anything here in the House, and whether it is a phone or an earpiece, they are all plastics. Again, I wonder what the motivation is.
I mentioned that Alberta is taking the government to court over the legislation. It seems the government, whenever it gets the chance, wants to beat up Alberta. It is horrible, because plastic is another economic driver, and I am very uncomfortable with the legislation.
We can elaborate a bit on the plastics. What do people think about in this past pandemic when they think about plastics? They think about PPE. They think about something that is very sanitary. It has trusted performance. We can be sure it is going to do what it has to do, and it is very convenient, so if we start to call these things toxic and we are dealing with them in health care, it does not even make sense. What are going to be the options for physicians in hospitals, if they cannot use plastic?
In Oshawa, we see what we can build cars with, but sometimes there is no real option other than plastics, so what is going to happen if we enforce the legislation? What I see happening is that it is going to drive plastic manufacturing outside the country. A lot of it is going to be driven to areas that do not have really great environmental laws and protections, like we have here. I could mention China, and maybe I will talk a bit more about that, if I can get to it.
When we are looking at plastics, everybody would like to see less plastic, for example, go into the oceans. Everybody is okay and in agreement with that, but Canada is not the problem here, so we would be putting something in, when 93% of the plastics dumped into the oceans come from 10 rivers, and seven of those are in Asia. One is the Yangtze River in China, and two are in Africa, so the government would be driving jobs out of Canada. It just does not make sense. We do this really well. Canada is not the problem. We should not be getting punished because the government really has not thought this through.
Let us take a look at the competitiveness issue. No matter what, if we are not manufacturing plastics here in this country, we are still going to have to use them. I know the Prime Minister does not really talk about monetary policy, and he does not really think about it, but other MPs in the House have to. We really have to look after our communities that are going to be hit really hard, for example, this winter, so let us take a step back here and allow the legislation to go to committee, because having these plastic bans, sometimes, sounds good, and the Liberals like things that sound really good. However, the bans may have a negative effect on the environment, because we would have to substitute different products.
Maybe I could talk about how this is starting to happen and affect everyday people. I took my mom out for dinner last night. She is 94 years old. One of the places she loves to go is Swiss Chalet, so we had a drink. Instead of a plastic straw, we got one of these paper straws, and I will just go into a bit of statistical analysis here. We go into this restaurant, and instead of a plastic straw, which takes 39 kilojoules of energy to make and emits 1.5 grams of carbon dioxide in its life cycle, we now have a paper straw that takes 96 kilojoules of energy to make and emits 4.1 grams of CO2 over its life cycle, so the problem with a lot of these Liberal policies is that they sound good, but they really are going in the wrong direction.
I would like to continue. I know I am running out of time, but I welcome questions from my colleagues.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the member for St. Albert—Edmonton for asking me to speak to Bill S-206. It has a personal part in my life and in my family. I also want to thank him for his tenacity. He has a gift of identifying an injustice and also suggesting a solution. He is able to recognize a weakness in our system and offer a very sensible, common sense remedy.
Some people may think this is a very small change, but it is going to make a huge difference in the lives of Canadians who have done their civil duty to serve as a juror, which is the last mandatory civil duty. As was mentioned, conscription was previously the other mandatory civil duty, but it was abolished.
This bill would carve out an exception to the jury secrecy rule and allow the disclosure of the deliberation process by jurors to a health care professional who is bound by confidentiality. I can only imagine these trials and deliberations subject jurors to traumatizing evidence and stress. We heard about Paul Bernardo and some of these other trials, and it has been proven that these can cause post-traumatic stress disorder.
These jurors almost always have mental health challenges, and they need the services they deserve. Sadly, today they do not have access to them. As an advocate for victims' rights, I am so proud to speak to this bill because sometimes these jurors, who are stepping up, become other victims of these crimes. I want to thank my colleagues in the House for speaking positively to the bill, as well as those in the Senate. Senator Boisvenu was acknowledged.
The goal here is to help Canadians who step up to accept the duty of being a juror and perform these essential services to the Canadian public. Our system of justice, sadly, often forgets the victims of these crimes. These jurors become victims because of the jury experience, and it is only right we support them. We can and we must do better.
The member for St. Albert—Edmonton originally introduced this initiative in October of 2018, so it has been going for almost four years now. It is about time, and maybe the third time we will be lucky and we will get this passed. This is an example of a bill supported across party lines. It is a solution brought about from witnesses who were listened to at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Parliamentarians heard first-hand from jurors who had lived through some of the most difficult trials in Canadian history. These are jurors who were exposed to horrific evidence, evidence that in some cases has made permanent changes in their lives.
Imagine someone who sees these horrible pictures. They cannot unsee them. They cannot unhear the screams and the victims' stories. We need to be there to support these people who are so essential to our justice system. There are incessant questions when they go back to their ordinary lives, their work and their families. I ask members to imagine dealing with these incessant questions and repetitions after their duty has been done, as well as the suffering that can occur. There are also the questions from their loved ones who are wondering why they are not the same person they were before jury duty.
Can members imagine being diagnosed with PTSD and not being able to talk to a professional who could make a real difference in their life? This is something that is affecting each and every one of us. As I said earlier, it has affected my family. I have one family member who was asked to be a juror in a child pornography case. That case was only two weeks long, but that was two weeks away from work, family and friends. One cannot not be affected by the things one sees, yet he says he would do it again. He was proud to do it and to step up.
However, we need to make sure they get the support they need. I have another family member who was a juror in a horrible murder trial that was on for two months, and she was in the same situation. She said that it was a horrific case and that one could not go through this case and not be affected after. She realized that Canadians who serve as jurors should not become sick themselves.
With that, I support this bill. I want to thank all members in this House, particularly the member for St. Albert—Edmonton, for allowing this bill to go through.
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