Mr. Speaker, my colleague has given a very balanced speech. I took the bill back to the riding with me and spent a lot of time studying it right after it came out for first reading around April 13. I took it back and read it through over the Easter weekend, and I shared with my constituents what I distilled from it.

It has that sense of balance. I was concerned about a number of aspects. I also want to make sure that public health is central. I am a mom and a grandmom, and I may be the only person who grew up in the 60s who never smoked cannabis. I have concerns about putting anything in my lungs. I have always been cautious, and I am cautious with my kids.

That is why I thought the bill did a good job in terms of having public information and having strict controls. If anything, as I mentioned earlier in this place, the one concern I have about the bill as drafted is that the punishments are overly harsh in some of the criminal aspects for someone who is over 18 and is distributing marijuana to someone under 18.

How does my colleague think we will confront what I think are some fear-based tactics? I have looked up the Colorado experience online, researching it since we have been sitting here, as I had not been able to get in on the debate. It seems to me that what we have heard about Colorado—and perhaps the hon. member can throw some light on it—is not the case; rather, the teens in Colorado were already consuming cannabis much more than teens in other states before it took the measures to legalize. Their experience thus far appears to be cautiously optimistic. They are not seeing more fatalities or car accidents. They are not seeing more organized crime.

The governor, who did not want this to pass when it came forward as a referendum, now says that he would not want to go back to prohibition. He describes the war on drugs, in his words, as a train wreck.

Getting this right is going to be important for Canada, because I think we are going to lead the way for a lot of jurisdictions.

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Committee members asked questions to departmental staff on the estimates and changes to fisheries protections under bills C-38 and C-45. Of particular interest to committee members were changes to habitat protections included in these omnibus bills, changes in the management of the coast guard, and the departmental role in regulating commercial aquaculture.

On Thursday March 7th, vice-chair Robert Chisholm introduced a motion that the committee undertake an assessment of the closure of the Kitsilano coast guard station in Vancouver in light of lack of public consultation. In response, MP Randy Kamp introduced a motion to move deliberation on Chisholm’s motion in camera. Once Kamp’s motion was carried, the committee resumed in camera where the Kitsilano motion was defeated.

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Did the support of 24 per cent of the electorate on election day give the federal government a mandate for its radical project to gut environmental protection? Apparently. In our apathy-inducing first-past-the-post political system a small minority can translate into a big majority, which can disregard public opinion and do whatever it wants.

Here is a list of what the feds have accomplished so far in their three-pronged environmental strategy of deregulation, cutting information and research and targeting dissenting voices:

1. Eliminated Canada’s international commitment to mitigate climate change, including the repeal of the 2007 Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act.
2. Undermined global climate negotiations to avoid climate action.
3. Failed to create a plan to address climate change.
4. Eliminated energy conservation and efficiency and renewable energy funding while continuing subsidies to fossil fuels.
5. Eliminated funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.
6. Eliminated the climate adaptation research group within Environment Canada.
7. Eliminated scientists in Natural Resources Canada to study ice core data.
8. Cut hundreds of millions of dollars from Environment Canada.
9. Repealed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, weakening the federal environmental assessment process.
10. Eliminated accepted criteria for compulsory environmental assessments, leaving such reviews to the discretion of the Minister of the Environment and political appointees.
11. Eliminated the jobs of hundreds of scientists working for various government departments that focus on the environment and wildlife.
12. Weakened elements of the Species at Risk Act.
13. Amended the Species at Risk Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act to allow the National Energy Board to assume jurisdiction of endangered species or navigable waters in the way of any pipeline.
14. Allowing the federal cabinet, rather than the National Energy Board, to make decisions about approvals for major pipeline projects.
15. Introduced cuts to ozone monitoring.
16. Ended monitoring of smoke stack emissions.
17. Eliminated the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission.
18. Weakened the Fisheries Act in the areas of habitat protection and eliminated the marine contaminants program.
19. Fired all DFO habitat officers in British Columbia.
20. Killed the Navigable Waters Protection Act, replacing it with the Navigation Protection Act, which effectively makes major pipeline and interprovincial power line projects exempt from requirements for proponents to prove they wouldn’t damage navigable waterways.
21. Reduced federal protection of waterways to a small number of water bodies and rivers.
22. Parks Canada no longer has to conduct periodic environmental audits or management plan reviews.
23. Eliminated funding for the National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment.
24. Eliminated support for the Experimental Lakes Program.
25. Eliminated funding for a dozen Arctic science research stations. Closed the Polar Arctic and Environmental Laboratory and the Yukon Research Lab.
26. Started privatization and eliminated ecological staff positions in National Parks.
27. Made a systemic effort to cut research, information and analysis with respect to environmental issues.
28. Attacked environmental and First Nations organizations for critiquing resource development.
29. Provided the Canada Revenue Agency with an extra $8 million to crack down on environmental charities.
30. Provided oil companies with unprecedented access to senior government leaders.
31. Muzzled government scientists who have been conducting research on various climate and environmental issues.
32. Cut funding to the Network on Women’s Health and the Environment.
33. Cut funding of the Canadian Environmental Network.
34. In addition to changing the definition of “aboriginal fishery” in the Fisheries Act, without consulting First Nations governments introduced changes to the Indian Act designed to make it faster and easier for First Nations to “take advantage of economic opportunities” by leasing designated reserve lands based on a majority of votes from those in attendance at a meeting or in a referendum, instead of waiting for a majority vote from all eligible voters.
35. Gave the aboriginal affairs minister the authority to call a band meeting or referendum for the purpose of considering a surrender of the band’s territory.
36. The minister can accept or refuse the land designation after receiving a resolution from the band council.
37. Eliminated the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, the Indian Head Tree Nursery and the PFRA pasture management program on millions of acres of sensitive grasslands.
38. Provided unprecedented support to industries to exploit natural resources with minimal environmental oversight.

Originally printed in the Star Pheonix.

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I am very concerned about the aspects of the bill that work against our inclusive culture as a nation, particularly the new requirement that even visitors on vacation in Canada would have to fill out a form and receive permission from the Minister of Immigration before they are to allowed to come here as tourists on vacation.

Has the hon. parliamentary secretary reviewed that within his department to consider its implications for multiculturalism?

Chungsen Leung: Mr. Speaker, Canada’s border needs to be secure. In this increasingly globalized world, it is very easy for visitors from all around the world to come to Canada. We are still a very generous and open country. However, we need to put a modicum of pre-arrival security checks in place to ensure that our borders are secure, such as with the United States within the framework of the North American security perimeter.

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A spring 2012 poll released by the charitable organization Samara revealed that Canadians are less satisfied with their democracy than they were in 2004. Seventy-five percent expressed some degree of satisfaction eight years ago, but that has since dropped to 55 percent.

“Canadians have made it clear that they are not happy with the way the Harper Conservatives are whittling away at our democratic system,” said May. “This is especially relevant today when C-45, a 457-page bill, is being forced through the House of Commons.”

Bill C-45 is the Conservatives’ second omnibus “budget” implementation bill this year. Between 1994 and 2005, such bills averaged 73.6 pages; under the Harper Conservatives, they have averaged 308.9 pages.

In spite of the fact that it affects 74 existing bills, C-45 was given just six days’ review by parliamentary committees; Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan has invoked time allocation at Report Stage and Third Reading – limiting debate to a few hours.

Time Allocation, the most powerful restriction of debate, allows the ruling party to set a deadline when all motions in a stage or stages must be voted on, leaving the bill’s passage through the House entirely at the minister’s discretion.

According to Michael Behiels, a political historian at the University of Ottawa, the Conservatives regular use of time allocation is an abuse of power. He told The Globe and Mail in September – before Bill C-45 – that they are “using a blunt instrument which is supposed to be used very rarely,”

Before gaining power, Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews once said: “For the government to bring in closure and time allocation is wrong. It sends out the wrong message to the people of Canada. It tells the people of Canada that the government is afraid.”

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Glenn Thibeault: Mr. Speaker, I really do wish I could figure that riddle out. When we are looking at 97 lakes and 62 rivers that are being protected right across the country, that is not even half of the lakes and rivers that are in my own city.

We call our city the city of lakes. We have done a great job in Sudbury of re-greening. If we look at how we used to smelt and how we used to mine, I am very proud of my community and what we have been able to do to change. I take my kids swimming right in downtown Sudbury. We fish there. People have drinking water there. Unfortunately, the millions of lakes right across our country, which we are so proud of, are no longer being protected under the Navigable Waters Protection Act. That is shameful, because it truly is scary what kind of country we will be leaving for our kids if the government continues to go down this path.

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The hon. member for Western Arctic spoke directly to the Hay River situation and the fact that it was a very busy port that required regulation over navigation. I wonder if he would like to return to that point if it were not understood the first time.

Dennis Bevington: Mr. Speaker, yes, we did refer solely to rivers in the Northwest Territories that we engage in navigation on. Those were removed from the act. Those were the only ones that I spoke to.

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This is a big country and the reality of what the current government has done is an appalling assault of negative action for protecting our wilderness and the air and water that we need to live.

Pierre-Luc Dusseault: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to ask the Green Party leader a question about the Conservative Party’s intentions regarding the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act in Bill C-45.

Can she tell us what she thinks is behind those changes? Personally, I think those changes are meant to speed up the pipeline approval process and ensure that there is no legislation standing in the way of that development.

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question.

In my view, the motivation behind the huge changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act is to eliminate the protection of most of Canada’s lakes, rivers and waterways. It is not meant only for pipelines, because before Bill C-38 was passed, developers had to obtain a permit issued by Transport Canada for any pipelines that went through navigable waters. Since Bill C-38 was passed, pipelines are no longer included in the groups known as works and undertakings.

Pipelines were specifically excluded in Bill C-38.

The decision in Bill C-45 to reduce the protection of navigable waters has to do with mines, dams and all other aspects that present a danger to Canada’s waterways.

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“At this conference, even more than the previous 17, the carbon-reduction negotiations will have a real sense of urgency – as nations negotiate a follow-up to the Kyoto protocol after a year of destructive, often tragic, climate-change-related weather,” said May. “I sincerely regret that I cannot be there at this historic time.”

May cancelled her planned participation in Doha at the last minute when it became clear that her 80 substantive amendments to the Harper Conservatives’ second omnibus budget implementation bill would be in the House of Commons over the next few days.

In Doha, countries are aiming at an agreement by 2015 to establish a new global, climate-change protocol by 2020. As well, countries are negotiating the second phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which targeted emission reductions for developed countries between 2008-2012, commencing January 1, 2013.

At last year’s UN Climate Conference, in Durban, South Africa, the European Union, other European countries, and Australia agreed to participate in phase two. Russia, Japan, and Canada refused to. (The US never ratified Kyoto.) On the day after the conference, Environment Minister Peter Kent announced Canada would drop out of Kyoto completely. This comes into effect on December 15.

“Incredibly, despite having announced our legal withdrawal from Kyoto, Environment Minister Kent plans to participate in the Kyoto process as though we were still a full party,” said May. “After turning their backs on the entire process, what will they have to offer? My fear is that, as with past years, they will obstruct the proceedings.”

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The Green Party leader said it was a bad indication of things to come that Canada received the Fossil of the Day award Wednesday after Kent refused to contribute new funding to help poorer countries tackle climate change, in spite of a commitment at the 2009 UN conference in Copenhagen to do so.

May pointed out that scientists are now concluding that the speed of climate warming is faster than they had predicted. Canada and most of the world committed to reducing emissions to ensure global climate would stabilize at less than a 2-degree increase above pre-industrial levels. Instead, scientists are warning we could stabilize at 5 or 6 degrees. This will spell disaster for civilization.

In Canada’s north, not only the ice cap is melting, but, in the Arctic and throughout much of the Canadian boreal, water once trapped as ice in glaciers, permanent snowpack, and permafrost has begun to melt.

The “refrigeration effect” of the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories on the rest of the continent is declining, and we may have lost up to 300 glaciers in the Canadian Rockies between 1920 and 2005. Based on September averages, water levels in Lake Huron have declined by 115 centimetres between 1997 and 2012. Over the last twenty years, the increased area of algal blooms and growing presence of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Winnipeg are a warning of larger eco-hydrological problems throughout the region.

“Given the already disastrous impacts of climate change in Canada, I hope the Harper Conservatives find it in themselves to reverse their previous conference direction and join with the EU and others to, in effect, save the planet,” concluded May. “Even a recent issue of the respected business magazine Bloomberg Businessweek stated: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.’”

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I want to first make a few comments on the subject of omnibus bills and what we have seen in this one year. We essentially have seen budget 2012 used as an excuse for the tabling of 900 pages of legislation largely unrelated to the budget itself. This exercise is both illegitimate and undemocratic in combining 70 different bills in Bill C-38, allegedly related to budget 2012, and now 60 different bills in Bill C-45.

I have fewer amendments today than I had tabled for Bill C-38 and Canadians might want to know the difference. Bill C-38, while a couple of pages shorter, did far more damage to the fabric of environmental laws in Canada. Bill C-38 took an axe to our Fisheries Act, destroying habitat protections; , repealed the Environmental Assessment Act; and put in place a substitute piece of legislation that would be an embarrassment to a developing country. It was absolutely abominable.

In Bill C-38, we also saw the explicit removal of pipelines as a category of obstruction under the Navigable Waters Protection Act. I would have thought that the Conservative agenda toward pipelines was satisfied with Bill C-38, but we go on to Bill C-45 and see that the attack on environmental laws includes the evisceration of the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

In Bill C-38, I made the case, as members may recall, to ask the Speaker for a ruling that the bill was out of order and not properly put together. I think we need to revisit the rules and to create some rules t around omnibus bills because this is clearly illegitimate.

In Bill C-45, we have proof of how appalling the process was in Bill C-38 in that some of what we are voting on this week are remedies for errors made in the drafting of Bill C-38. These were obvious errors that could have been caught if the normal legislative process had taken place.

Now we are asked, in Bill C-45, to correct drafting errors made in Bill C-38 where the English does not accord with the French, or where, under the Fisheries Act, they forgot to protect certain aspects of navigation through the fisheries corridors where there are weirs and other fishing apparatus. We also have changes to the Environmental Assessment Act because of poor drafting the last time around. Why was the drafting poor? It was because 70 different laws were put together in one piece of legislation and forced through the House without a willingness to accept, in 425 pages of legislation, a single amendment.

This is not proper parliamentary process. No previous Privy Council in the history of this country has ever equated an amendment to a bill between first reading and royal assent as some sort of political defeat that must be avoided at all costs. This is a level of parliamentary partisanship that takes leave of its senses. It is essentially a form of parliamentary insanity for the government to decide that it cannot possibly accept an amendment from first reading to royal assent and then to come back and give us this which finally provides some of the corrections.

I will speak to my amendments relatively quickly. I want to stress that neither Bill C-38 nor Bill C-45 are really about jobs, or growth or the budget. I will highlight the things in Bill C-45 that I hope to amend because they will hurt jobs.

Bill C-45, the omnibus budget bill, would hurt jobs in tourism through this quite extraordinary proposal, which is not a proposal but will be passed into law unless we are able to persuade Conservative members of Parliament that they should vote for what they think is right and not how they are told, ordered and instructed to vote.

When tourism in this country is such an important part of our economy, it makes no sense to pass into law a requirement that tourists from around the world, from countries that do not currently require a visa to come to Canada, regardless of whether they have any aspersions on their character, whether they are considered to be a risk, every tourist to Canada, except those from the United States because of our agreements over a shared border security process, would need to fill out a form to find out if they are allowed to come here for a vacation. This is a terrible change and it would significantly hurt tourism.

Another terrible change is reducing the tax credit, the SR and ED, the scientific research and experimental development tax credit. This is where Canada lags. If we listen to the economists, there is tremendous concern about our competitiveness and productivity, which is directly related to research and development, and to why we need to have the scientific research and experimental development tax credit available to Canadians. We think it would be a big mistake to reduce that.

I will now talk about what I like in Bill C-45. The assumption is that every opposition member hates everything in Bill C-45. That is one of the reasons I object to omnibus bills. There are measures here that I would vote for were they not coupled together with so much destruction. I would vote for the actual budgetary measures that one finds at the beginning of Bill C-45, the tax credits to encourage investment in clean energy and energy efficiency. They are too small but I am certainly not against them. Rather, I am for them.

I would vote for the closing of some of the tax credits to encourage oil and gas development, such as the Atlantic investment tax credit for oil, gas and mining, and for the corporate mineral exploration and development tax credit. I would also vote for the closing of the loopholes in transfer pricing and foreign affiliate dumping that have been used by corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Those are the measures I would vote for.

What deeply disturbs me in this bill, in addition to the measure that I had mentioned to create a new requirement for filling out a form to come to Canada under immigration, is the elimination of the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission. My amendments would keep that commission in place.

As well, we could do more with the hiring credit for small business.

The changes to the Fisheries Act are largely to repair mistakes made by the Conservatives to the Fisheries Act that had weakened it. They are now fixing some of what they did not need to weaken so desperately. However, we have suggested an amendment to allow for the definition of “aboriginal fisheries”, on the basis of first nations advice, to ensure that the definition is fully respected and takes into account the constitutional and treaty rights of first nations in any definition of “aboriginal fisheries”.

Before moving on to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, I wish to speak to the Canada Grain Act. My amendments oppose a move to take away the independent bond actors in terms of looking at Canadian grains. The third party inspection that is now being proposed would create a conflict of interest between the private sector and the grain companies. We think that would be a mistake. We have certainly learned from the XL Foods beef scandal that it is important to ensure that inspections are truly independent.

The bulk of my amendments deal with the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The Conservatives have taken three runs at it through three different omnibus bills, the first being in 2009. The objective definition of what is “navigable” was changed to a discretionary definition wherein “navigable” would mean whatever the Minister of Transport says that it means.

In Bill C-38, just this past spring, the Conservatives took another run at the Navigable Waters Protection Act with the specific exclusion of pipelines as works or undertakings. Pipelines are no longer in the Navigable Waters Protection Act. These new amendments are certainly not about pipelines because the Conservatives took care of that in Bill C-38.

What this does is it takes an act that we have had since 1882 that directly comes from the Constitution of this country, that being the federal responsibility for navigation. The Navigable Waters Protection Act, which was brought in by Sir John A. Macdonald, has protected the rights of Canadians to put a canoe or kayak in any body of water and paddle from there to wherever they want to go. As Canadians, we have a right to navigation. This is now being superseded with the false story that there is somehow a burdensome regulatory amount of red tape that offends people in municipalities. Therefore, we need to blow apart the Navigable Waters Protection Act to say that a body of water is only navigable if it can be found in the schedule at the back of the act. Ironically, the 99.5% of Canadian waters that are not listed there are not ones near municipalities, cottages and people who want to build wharfs, but are in our wilderness areas where, without the Navigable Waters Protection Act, nothing stands in the way of obstructions to navigations for Canadians.

The government will tell us that is all right because Canadians have a common law right. If people have a couple of hundred thousand dollars and are prepared to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend their right to use a waterway that is not listed, they can do that. However, this is an egregious abdication of responsibility for a federal head of power that no other level of government has the right to step up and fill the void.

I urge my colleagues on all sides of the House to give due consideration to these serious and important amendments.

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