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Context: House Hansard - 213 - Jun/14/23

Jun/14/23 5:49:03 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5 Bill C-219

Madam Speaker, I am assuming that the member was referring to how this bill extends these rights further than Bill S-5 and in a stronger way. This covers all federal legislation, not just the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and it provides, as I mentioned, mechanisms for citizens, if they feel that the federal government is not responding to environmental issues, such as companies that are breaking the law with regard to the environment, citizens could demand an investigation. If that proceeds to a certain point, they could even take environmental action. If we are giving people the right to live in a healthy environment, we must uphold that right and we must hold the government accountable with transparent measures so that people know that they can enjoy this right.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Jun/14/23 5:31:16 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5 Bill C-219

moved that Bill C-219, An Act to enact the Canadian Environmental Bill of Rights and to make related amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee. He said: Mr. Speaker, it is with great pride that I stand in the chamber this evening to begin debate on my bill, Bill C-219, the Canadian environmental bill of rights. I first want to thank Linda Duncan, the author of this bill, who introduced it on four occasions over 11 years during her time as the member of Parliament for Edmonton Strathcona. On one of those occasions, it passed at second reading, but it unfortunately died when an election was called. There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but until last night, there was no federal law that explicitly recognized the right to a healthy environment in Canada. With the passing of Bill S-5, which updated the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, we now have a federal statement of rights to a healthy environment, but those rights are limited to the scope of CEPA, basically to toxins within our environment, and those rights have no accountability processes or powers associated with them. Bill C-219 would expand and strengthen those rights to the rest of the scope of federal jurisdiction. Last summer, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. With Canada voting for that resolution to join the rest of the world and 92% of Canadians agreeing with it, it is certainly high time we had federal legislation that recognizes that right. We are behind the rest of the world in that regard. Over 80% of UN member states already legally recognize the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. International efforts to recognize this right go back to the 1972 Stockholm declaration, which recognized the right to an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being. After that came the United Nations Aarhus convention in 2001. This multilateral agreement, more fully known as the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, protects every person's right to live in an environment adequate to his or her health and well-being. The Aarhus convention links environmental rights and human rights. It acknowledges that we owe an obligation to future generations. It establishes that sustainable development can be achieved only through the involvement of all stakeholders. It links government accountability and environmental protection, and focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities in a democratic context. According to the Aarhus convention website, it is, at its heart, about government accountability, transparency and responsiveness. It grants the public rights, and it imposes on parties and public authorities obligations regarding access to information and public participation in and access to justice. This is what this bill would do as well. Bill C-219 would extend the right to a healthy, ecologically balanced environment to all Canadian residents. It would do this by amending the Canadian Bill of Rights to add the right to a healthy environment; by providing a bundle of rights and legal tools to all residents of Canada, including accessing information around environmental issues and decisions, standing before courts and tribunals, transparent processes that will help hold the government accountable on effective environmental enforcement and on the review of law and policies through investigations and, if necessary, environmental protection actions; and by extending protections for government whistle-blowers who release information relevant to health and environmental impacts. This bill would apply only to federal jurisdiction, and would not change provincial environmental law. The bill would not take away from the rights of Canadian indigenous peoples, as recognized and affirmed in section 35 of the Constitution. The bill would specifically exclude the Canadian Environmental Protection Act from its ambit, as that act, after the passage of Bill S-5 last night, provides rights to a healthy environment, although restricted to the scope of that bill. Bill C-219 would extend those rights to the rest of federal legislation. Why do we need this? For one thing, Canadians want it. As I mentioned, in a recent poll, 92% of Canadians agreed we should have the right to live in a healthy environment. However, the right to a clean and healthy environment is a hollow promise if it does not come with accountability measures. That is because, unfortunately, governments often simply do not live up to the legislation they pass. They do not take action to enforce that legislation, including legislation meant to protect our environment. I will mention two quick examples of this, and I am sure everyone here in the chamber could add to that list. Ten years ago, in July 2013, a tanker truck rolled into Lemon Creek in the beautiful Slocan Valley, in my riding, and spilled its entire load of 33,000 litres of aviation fuel into this pristine water source. Although this clearly caused environmental harm, not only to the stream and the life within it but also to the residents of the Slocan Valley who relied on that water source, the government of the day refused to act. It was left to a courageous local resident, Marilyn Burgoon, to initiate court action against the trucking company under the federal Fisheries Act. Eventually, perhaps shamed by Marilyn's powerful example, the federal government did agree to step in to help fight this battle, which dragged on until January 2020, for seven years, before finally being resolved. Sadly, Marilyn passed away a few weeks before that case was concluded, but her legacy in the Slocan Valley lives on, and her memory is cherished by many. If we declare that Canadians have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment, we must make sure the federal government is accountable for holding up its part of that all-important bargain. Bill C-219 would do that. Another example is a more personal one to me. I used to work as a consulting ecologist, and much of my work involved species at risk. For eight years, I was one of the co-chairs of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, or COSEWIC. Under the Species at Risk Act, or SARA as it is called in the trade, COSEWIC has the task of assessing wild species in Canada and advising the government, through the Minister of Environment, of its decisions. Every year, COSEWIC writes a letter to the minister and lists the assessments it has made. Some species might be listed as endangered. Others may be listed as threatened, and still others may be listed as not at risk. Under SARA, the government has nine months to make a decision about listing a species after receiving the advice from COSEWIC. It can adopt the advice or not, but the decision is public and transparent. If a cabinet decision is not made, the decision defaults to the COSEWIC-assessed status. All this sounds perfectly logical, but what happened under the Harper government was unexpected. It decided the clock started ticking when the minister told cabinet, so it came up with the cunning plan that the minister would not tell cabinet at all about COSEWIC assessments, even though they were on the public registry. Therefore, that government listed zero species for four years, despite having been advised to list over 80. It avoided the transparent decision part of the deal. I pressured the current Liberal government to at least change that in policy, though it was reluctant to support the bill I put forward to change it into law, so now it is public policy that listing cannot be put off indefinitely. Bill C-219 could help in that situation too, since it covers all federal legislation, including SARA, the Fisheries Act and others. This would be for all legislation I mentioned except the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which is carved out because it has a similar promise when it comes to living in a clean and healthy environment. Like most members with private members' bills, I have talked to each party about my bill and about why its so important and what it would and would not do. In one of those discussions, the issue of constitutionality came up, so I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about that issue. I will say right off the top that I am confident this bill is constitutional. For one thing, this is the fifth time the bill has been introduced, and as far as I know, this is the first time this concern has been raised. As I mentioned before, the bill passed second reading in a previous Parliament, and the bill is explicitly concerned with actions based on existing federal legislation. None of the rights here apply to matters that are found only in provincial legislation, so I was confident this concern had no real foundation. However, to be sure, I asked the House of Commons legal department to provide an opinion on this matter. This is the conclusion of its opinion: After having reviewed the bill carefully, we are of the opinion that the main subject of the bill is not the environment. Consider that the bill would not regulate any aspect of the environment, such as water quality, air quality, species at risk or toxic substances. Rather, the bill relates to civil liberties, which may be regulated by either level of government, depending on which level of government has legislative authority over the institutions and activities to which the civil liberties apply. In the case of Bill C-219, most provisions explicitly apply to federal matters only. The opinion also explains why three provisions, while not explicitly applying to federal matters, would be considered by any court as applying to federal matters. Accordingly, the opinion states that no amendment to Bill C-219 is necessary. In summary, the environment is a jurisdiction shared between the provinces and the federal government. Some people might therefore be concerned that this bill treads on provincial jurisdiction. However, since this bill deals with human rights and civil rights, and deals with them on matters of federal issues only, this bill is constitutional. I am confident of that and I do not think we need to amend it in any way to deal with that issue. I am going to conclude with a plea. We are so proud of this country. We are proud of its size, its beauty and all the resources it provides for us in ways that keep us living in a healthy way in this clean environment. It gives us jobs and also keeps us healthy. I think everybody in the House would agree that we have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment. If we have that right, we need legislation to uphold that right. That is what Bill C-219 would do, and I hope that everyone here will support this bill and provide that right to all Canadians.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/29/23 5:24:57 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I have a lot of respect for the member for Milton and his work on the health file. Health Canada has found that air pollution is a factor in 15,300 premature deaths and millions of respiratory issues every year in Canada, yet this bill has nothing in it about air quality standards. We need to have enforceable air quality standards in Canada, but this bill does not mention it at all. The air flows between provinces. We see that with the smoke coming out of Alberta. Why did the government leave air quality completely out of this bill and vote down proposed amendments to fix this?

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May/29/23 1:52:14 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I think it is a good idea that we have a right to a healthy environment embedded in some legislation. I would say that the government was so timid about this that when they first brought forward Bill S-5, that right was only in the preamble. It had to be moved into the body of the text to have any legal impact at all. However, we are hearing now that it is unenforceable, as all kinds of civilian actions towards this bill are, and we need that changed. Yes, this is a step in the right direction. As in so many things with the government, better is always possible. I would hope that we would see some movement very quickly to fix this so that Canadians can truly have that right to live in a healthy and clean environment and back it up with some accountability for government actions.

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May/29/23 1:50:05 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. However, I am not holding my breath. I think that if the government wanted to do this right, it would have done it right the first time. All I would say is that my private member's bill has that enforceability part baked into it and extends it to the other parts of the Canadian federal legislation on the environment. It carves out CEPA, because of issues around that legislation, but I would hope the government would use this as a model to fix CEPA once and for all.

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May/29/23 1:48:07 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I spent much of last week in Washington, D.C., with the international trade committee. We talked to quite a number of legislators and congressmen, and almost every one of them brought up this issue: How are we going to get materials mined so that we can get the clean tech of tomorrow going? They all said that what the United States needs is a mining impact assessment system like Canada's system. They held up Canada's system as the shining example of how things should be done. Therefore, I do not know what concerns the Conservatives have. Apparently, from the outside world, we are seen as leaders in developing mines and developing them properly, so that we have not only a clean environment but also the materials we need for the future.

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May/29/23 1:46:35 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that I was not there at the committee stage to hear that, but I have heard comments in debate here about it. It was an issue during the debate at report stage. However, the member would have to ask the Conservatives that question. I can only guess, and I would rather not put my suppositions onto this. However, I am disappointed.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/29/23 1:30:34 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5 Bill C-28

Mr. Speaker, I am happy once again to rise and speak to Bill S-5, a bill that updates the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. I have spoken a couple of times on this bill at various stages, and I will repeat some of the messages I gave in those speeches. Here we are at third reading. We have responded to the committee report, which brought forward a few amendments, including one from the NDP that was voted on at report stage. At committee, Conservatives and Liberals took out a statement about tailings ponds in particular. The NDP proposed a report stage amendment that put those words back into Bill S-5 that were put there originally by the Senate, which dealt with this bill before us, and I was happy that amendment passed. Now, I am a bit discouraged that Conservatives seem to be indicating they are withdrawing their support for this bill just because of those two words, “tailings ponds”, going back into it. I am not sure why they consider the words so toxic that they cannot support the bill, but we are very much of the opinion that it really needs to be highlighted as one of the points in protecting the Canadian environment. We have had so many issues around tailings ponds, not just in the last few months at the Kearl project in Alberta, but in British Columbia with the Mount Polley disaster, and various other situations. This bill, Bill S-5, and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act really deal with how we should deal with toxins that are put into the Canadian environment, and tailings ponds are one example of where, when we have disasters, an inordinate number of toxins are poured into the environment at once. I think that requires special mention, and I am glad we see that wording back in this version of the bill here at third reading. Just to give some background, this bill was first introduced in the previous Parliament as Bill C-28. It was never brought to the floor of the House to debate, and, months later, the government called an election, so it died on the Order Paper. However, it gave Canadians and environmental law experts and scientists a chance to look at this long-overdue bill to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as it has been over 20 years. Those people found a lot to be concerned about that was missing from the bill. The government had a year to answer those concerns, yet in this Parliament it introduced the bill exactly as it was in Bill C-28, so there was no attempt to fix things ahead of time, which has caused real problems. I have even heard Liberals saying in debate at report stage that we need a new version of CEPA, so we need a new bill to update it as quickly as possible to fix those things, because they were found to be out of scope. We cannot expand the scope of bills here in this place once they come to us, and this bill requires some of that desperately, which I will talk about later. Since CEPA was first introduced over 20 years ago, the number of chemicals that people in Canada are exposed to in their daily lives has grown exponentially. I think it has grown by over 50 times since 1950 and is expected to continue on that trajectory. All these chemicals are toxic in their own way. These are brand-new chemicals that natural environments have no experience with, and we are only discovering, year after year, the impacts of these chemicals on our environment, our health and the health of plants and animals in our environment, even at very small levels. Over the last two decades, science has discovered more about the cumulative effects of even small doses of these toxic chemicals, and without this modernized legislation, Canadians would continue to be exposed to unregulated and harmful chemicals. This is long overdue. Environmental scientists and environmental legal experts have long recognized that. Some of the changes that Bill S-5 would make to CEPA that are significant are the recognition of the right to a healthy environment, and I will talk more about that later; the commitment to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, under the act; strengthening the chemicals management plan, including to take into consideration vulnerable populations, cumulative effects, reproductive and endocrine toxicity, carcinogenicity, mutagenicity and neurotoxicity; alternatives and class-based assessments to avoid harmful substitutions; and labelling and other-risk communication. I would like to back up now and just say how Canadians are so proud of this country, and one of the great sources of that pride is our environment. We are blessed to live in a vast country, and our relatively small population, concentrated at the southern border, has given us the impression that our environment will remain clean, healthy and sustainable, no matter what we do to it and no matter what we throw at it. That attitude has, obviously, gradually changed over the last 50 years or so, and now over 90% of Canadians believe that it is important that we have the explicit right to live in a clean and healthy environment. It is very timely that this bill finally recognizes that right. Last year, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. One hundred and fifty-nine countries already have legal obligations to protect the human right to a healthy environment, but Canada does not. There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there is no federal law that explicitly recognizes the right to live in a healthy environment. Bill S-5 would change that, so it is a positive step forward, but it is important to back up declarations of rights with legislation that enforces those rights. Unfortunately, the previous version of CEPA was considered unenforceable, and this one is no better. In fact, the Senate committee studying Bill S-5 wanted to fix this enforceability and, quite remarkably, the senators attached this note to the bill when they sent it forward to the House. After they had passed it with the amendments that they could make, they attached this message. I have read this message in each of the speeches I have given, but it is so remarkable that it bears repeating. This is what the Senate committee said: This committee would like to state their concern that the right to a healthy environment cannot be protected unless it is made truly enforceable. This enforceability would come by removing the barriers that exist to the current remedy authority within Section 22 of CEPA, entitled “Environmental Protection Action.” There is concern that Section 22 of CEPA contains too many procedural barriers and technical requirements that must be met to be of practical use. As Bill S-5 does not propose the removal or re-evaluation of these barriers, this Committee is concerned that the right to a healthy environment may remain unenforceable. As I said before, the reason the Senate did not amend this bill to make it enforceable is that it was considered out of scope. The real disappointment here, of course, is that the government had a year to fix this. It knew that this enforceability was one of the main concerns people had about Bill C-28 in the previous Parliament, but the government did not fix it. I don't know whether that was just out of incompetence or whether it really did not want to fix it. This relates directly to the welcome new declaration in Bill S-5 that Canadians have a right to live in this healthy and clean environment, but we need a transparent and open process to hold the government to account with respect to that declaration and to that right. As I have said, CEPA is primarily concerned with protecting Canadians and their environment from the toxic chemicals we are so good at inventing, producing and pumping into our environment. There has been a fiftyfold increase in those chemicals over the past number of decades. However, CEPA does not concern itself in general with other matters of federal legislation around the environment, such as environmental impact assessments, fish habitat, migratory birds, species at risk, etc., so this declaration of the right to live in a clean, healthy environment has rather narrow coverage. It covers only matters within the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. I have a private member's bill, Bill C-219, that is called the Canadian environmental bill of rights. It was first written and presented by Linda Duncan, the former NDP MP for Edmonton Strathcona. Ms. Duncan is an expert environmental lawyer who produced this environmental bill of rights and introduced it over three Parliaments during her time here. It passed second reading in 2009 or 2010 and went to committee, but each time she presented it, it did not make it through the full Senate procedure, so it never became law. I was very honoured and happy to present it again as Bill C-219 in this Parliament. Among other things, it basically takes that right to live in a clean, healthy environment that Bill S-5 talks about and expands it to the other Canadian federal legislation that we have that deals with the environment. It is not a broad-brush approach, but specifically attached to those pieces of legislation. In fact, when the House of Commons legal team was asked whether it was constitutional, the answer was that of course it is constitutional because it is not really an environmental bill; it is a human rights bill. It holds the government to account for doing what it should be doing under those different environmental pieces of legislation that we have at the federal level. I would like to make it clear that the NDP will be voting in favour of Bill S-5. We are happy that the government has ceded to some of the amendments that we wanted bring in to improve Bill S-5. We did not get all that we wanted, but we think this is an important step forward, and we are certainly happy that there is language about the right to live in a clean and healthy environment that is finally recognized within federal legislation. We are happy that this bill confirms the government's commitment to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the act. This bill has many shortcomings, some of which I have listed, but one that I have not mentioned is the total lack of anything around air pollution, toxins in the air. This is something that we really have to get into federal legislation, because it is just as important, if not more so, than some of the other forms of pollution we have to deal with. I am heartened to hear comments from Liberal members that they would welcome a new version of Bill S-5, a brand new update to CEPA that would bring in some of the problems that have been considered out of scope here, especially around enforceability. As I say, most Canadians, including myself, would be happy to see this bill pass. I know that most parties will be voting for this bill, albeit some reluctantly. I am disappointed to hear that the Conservatives seem to be pulling their support over the tailings ponds issue. I hope that the Senate will deal with it promptly, so that we can enjoy its benefits and quickly start the process of crafting that new bill that will make CEPA even stronger. That act would truly protect Canadians and ensure that we, along with our children and grandchildren, can continue to live in the clean and healthy environment that is our right.

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May/15/23 6:51:34 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5 Bill C-28

Madam Speaker, again, we had 22 years before Bill C-28 to fix this. We have had two years since then. This should have been a much better bill. We now have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment within the scope of CEPA, not within the scope of the rest of the federal mandate, so it is a tiny step. We should be doing better. We could have done so much better if the government had done so.

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May/15/23 6:49:54 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, I totally agree with the member. This bill is one of the steps in the right direction. It is something we feel we should support because we want to make a step in the right direction. We just wish there were several steps or bigger steps. At least with the right to a clean and healthy environment, for instance, we now have that enshrined within legislation. However, we do not have a good method of enforcing it. That is one thing we should do next, one of several things I outlined. A lot of these issues could have been fixed if the government had listened to what people were saying, after Bill C-28 was introduced, about ways to fix it. It should have made Bill S-5 a much better bill from the start.

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May/15/23 6:48:22 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, indeed, one of the major problems with Bill S-5 is that the enforceability of the right to live in a clean and healthy environment is left up to the minister. It is not up to the residents of Canada, who should be able to bring forward concerns to the minister and then follow a transparent and timely path so we can make sure this right is upheld in a proper manner. It should not be left entirely up to the minister, as it is now.

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May/15/23 6:46:56 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, I agree that we have seen a gradual improvement in the way we treat animals broadly, especially within the research context, and I am happy to see that included in the bill. The bill has a lot of good things in it. That is why I think it is important that we support it. It just has many shortcomings that make me feel disappointed about it in other ways. I hope we will see a new bill, a fresh bill, on CEPA shortly, but I agree that it is a good step forward.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/15/23 6:37:42 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5 Bill C-28

Madam Speaker, Canadians care about the health of their environment. According to polling, 92% of Canadians believe the government should recognize the right to live in a healthy environment. Canada has several major pieces of legislation on environmental protection, but the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is the centrepiece of that commitment. Bill S-5, which we are debating here today, is the long-awaited update to that act. It has been 24 years since the last update, and there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Some of that water likely contained some of the many new toxins we have invented in the last two decades, and that is one thing that needed to be updated with this bill. We have also learned a great deal about the cumulative effects of even tiny doses of these toxins. We literally have to run to keep up with the ways we are damaging the environment here in Canada and around the world. People concerned about the environment welcomed the effort to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, or CEPA, as it known for short, and the NDP welcomed that too. It is long overdue. I want to spend a bit of time talking about the history of this particular bill, as I think it puts some of the efforts to fix CEPA in a better context. The bill was first introduced in the previous Parliament as Bill C-28, tabled in April 2021, two years ago. However, the government did not bring it to the floor of the House for debate that spring and then called an election in the summer, so that ended that version of the bill. Environmental law experts across the country analyzed that bill and began to drop ideas to make it better when it came back to Parliament. There was some hope that the government would take some of those ideas and amend the new version before reintroducing it so that things would not be considered out of scope. Instead, it tabled the exact same version of the bill, the same as Bill C-28, in the Senate in February 2022, where it took on its life as Bill S-5, the bill we are debating today. The Senate took a long, serious look at the bill in committee, improved it in several ways and sent it to the House at the end of June last year, and the House took it up last fall. It has since been through second reading debate and committee, and we see it here at report stage. This bill, at its heart, is about allowing Canadians to live in a clean, healthy environment. Much of its detail is in regulations around toxic chemicals, chemicals we have invented and continue to invent and chemicals released into the environment, whether knowingly or not, that can directly affect our health and degrade the ecosystems we all depend on. One new and very important part of this bill is the long-overdue inclusion of language that declares that Canadians have the right to live in a healthy environment. Last year, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. A hundred and fifty-nine countries around the world have legal obligations to protect the human right to a healthy environment, but Canada does not. There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there is no federal law that explicitly recognizes the right to a healthy environment in Canada. Bill S-5 could change that, so it is a positive step forward, but it is important to back up declarations of rights with legislation that enforces those rights. Unfortunately, the previous version of CEPA was considered unenforceable, and this one is no better. The Senate committee studying Bill S-5 sent the bill to the House with the following message: This committee would like to state their concern that the right to a healthy environment cannot be protected unless it is made truly enforceable. This enforceability would come by removing the barriers that exist to the current remedy authority within Section 22 of CEPA, entitled “Environmental Protection Action.” There is concern that Section 22 of CEPA contains too many procedural barriers and technical requirements that must be met to be of practical use. As Bill S-5 does not propose the removal or re-evaluation of these barriers, this Committee is concerned that the right to a healthy environment may remain unenforceable. The reason the Senate did not fix this enforceability issue with amendments is that apparently it would have been considered out of scope, so I would say the government should table separate legislation as soon as possible to remedy this. Again, the government could have missed all of this if it had fixed this problem with CEPA and Bill S-5 before tabling the new version of the bill. Similarly, there were other major shortcomings in Bill S-5 that were out of scope for amendments, including a lack of legally binding and enforceable air quality standards. It is really quite surprising that the first draft of Bill S-5 made no attempts to address air quality at all. It also lacks a more open, inclusive and transparent risk assessment process for the evaluation of genetically engineered animals in the environment, especially wild salmon. Salmon are a critical part of our aquatic ecosystems and are sacred to first nations that have relied on healthy salmon populations for millennia. The risk of introducing genetically engineered salmon into the wild environment should set off alarm bells on all sorts of fronts. I would like to mention here that I have a private member's bill, Bill C-219, the Canadian environmental bill of rights, that would extend the right to a clean environment across the federal mandate, not just for toxins and other aspects covered under CEPA, but for all aspects of the environment covered by federal legislation. The heart of Bill C-219 is a transparent accountability process that would allow Canadians to ensure their government is actually upholding the right to a clean environment. That accountability process is missing from Bill S-5 and CEPA. It could have and should have been included. I am hoping that the government and all parties will support my bill and use that part of it as a model to strengthen the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. In conclusion, I would like to make it clear that the NDP will be voting in favour of Bill S-5 at this stage. We are happy that the right to live in a clean and healthy environment has finally been recognized within federal legislation, and we are happy the bill confirms the government's commitment to implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the act. However, the bill has many shortcomings, only some of which I have listed above. I was heartened to hear the speech from the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, in which he admitted these shortcomings and called for a new bill amending CEPA to fix them as soon as possible. Why they were not included in the bill before us, which has been 24 years in the making, is beyond my comprehension, but I would certainly welcome such a bill. Most Canadians will be happy to see the bill pass, and I know that most parties will be voting for the bill, albeit some reluctantly. I hope the Senate will deal with it promptly so we can enjoy its benefits and quickly start the process of crafting a new bill that will once again make CEPA a stronger act, an act that will truly protect Canadians and ensure that we and our grandchildren can live in the clean and healthy environment that is our right.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/15/23 6:21:22 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, I just want to bring up the business of enforcement, which the member talked about at the end of her speech. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act is widely held as unenforceable. It has not ever been enforced in any reasonable way by the public. Bill S-5 would not change that. Ontario has had an environmental bill of rights for many years now, with an enforcement mechanism. Again, under that bill, it has not had anybody complaining about backyard bonfires. I am wondering if the member could comment on the fact that this is really not going to happen, but that we really need this. If we have an environmental bill of rights, we have to have some way to enforce it.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/15/23 6:03:47 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Madam Speaker, we just had a question about some of the amendments that were not considered. Some of the amendments that people wanted to put forward were considered out of scope. We even heard one of the Liberal speakers today say that he hoped we would go back to this bill as soon as possible, as soon as we passed it, and create another bill that would fix the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. After 24 years, the government did not include these important provisions in this new bill. They include things like the enforceability of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, something obvious that should have been done. Can the member comment on why these things were not included in Bill S-5?

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/15/23 4:48:26 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-5

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague mentioned at the very end the things we need to fix about this bill that were considered out of scope, and I assume that is why they were not fixed in this iteration of the bill. However, Bill S-5 was introduced as a different bill in a previous Parliament. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act has never been enforceable. People knew that. One would think this would have been the first thing to be tackled by the government when it was fixing this bill after 24 years. I am just wondering why that did not occur to the government and why we now have to have another piece of legislation. I agree with him that we need it done as quickly as possible to make this bill enforceable. What is the point of having environmental protection if it is not enforceable?

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