I am grateful to Minister Ritz for listening to our concerns and for re-thinking the earlier decision to move its quarantine and virus testing functions to Summerland, which is the heart of British Columbia’s fruit and wine region.  This is a victory for our community, and for all those elsewhere who fought to protect the excellent science done here for 100 years.

Residents from Saanich-Gulf Islands and from across BC signed petitions, asking that the Centre remain open, including the following petition that I presented on October 29, in the House of Commons:

“Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to present a petition from constituents in my riding, from Salt Spring Island, Galiano and throughout Saanich. The petition calls upon the Minister of Agriculture with whom I have had several personal conversations on the matter, to reconsider the closing of the plant health centre, which for 100 years has served the interests of science in understanding viruses. Since 1960, it has been the national centre for the quarantine of plant viruses. It is simply not feasible to pursue the current plan to move these facilities to the Okanagan. Therefore, I table this petition, which is calling for the Centre for Plant Health to remain open, on behalf of my constituents.”

The Centre for Plant Health is a crucial site for the quarantine and virus-testing of new plant stock, and has been strategically located across the Salish Sea from the province’s mainland in order to prevent the transfer of viruses or pests to British Columbia’s primary agricultural regions. And while 6 positions are being moved to Agriculture Canada’s facility in Summerland, 23 full time positions are being saved, and the Centre for Plant Health will remain open.

This is a wonderful 100th birthday present to the Centre for Plant Health and proof that a group of determined and engaged citizens can have a real impact. Thank you to all those residents of Saanich-Gulf Islands who took part in this campaign.

Visit my MP website at http://www.elizabethmaymp.ca/get-involved to download and sign other petitions.

The post Centre for Plant Health Saved! appeared first on Elizabeth May.

There are a zillion reasons to support local agriculture – reducing greenhouse gases (shipping apples to BC from New Zealand doesn’t seem to make any sense), supporting our local economy, being sure our children are eating healthy food, taking good care of the land on which it is grown.  And now we have another reason. The E.coli outbreak at the XL slaughter house in Brooks, Alberta, shown a spotlight on the risks of going for the opposite of local — one giant facility slaughtering up to 5,000 cattle a day.

I had a great time at an auction on Salt Spring Island this fall to support the building of a local abattoir. The local abattoir is needed to allow the production of Salt Spring Island lamb. The alternative is to add the huge financial burden of trucking the lambs by ferry to an abattoir up island. Considering I became a vegetarian when I was eight and adopted a pet lamb, I never really saw myself as someone willing to donate for an abattoir. However, with what is going on in the increasingly industrialized, corporate concentrated world of food production, I am ready to chain myself to the next cannery or abattoir I see being shut down. Of course, food contamination can occur in large or small operations. But in small operations, the impact is limited and local and quickly traced. Public health was compromised in the XL case because the key federal agency took nearly two weeks to sort out what products were contaminated and because the scale of the outfit made them hesitate for fear of undermining the image of Canadian beef. We need to fight for local agriculture, for local farmers making a decent living and to assure Canadians that the food we put on the table is safe.   

In This Issue…

• Centre for Plant Health Saved!
• XL Foods – a Few Facts on the Biggest Food Recall in Canadian History
• XL Foods – Moments from the Emergency Debate in the House of Commons – October 3, 2012
• Town Halls Coming in January
• National Food Policy Vision: to Improve Food Safety, Security, and Sovereignty
• Statement on Remembrance Day
• Your opinion matters!
• Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal Awards Ceremony

The post Winter 2012 Newsletter – Food Safety appeared first on Elizabeth May.

In spring 2012, Ritz announced that the Plant Health Centre on East Saanich Road would be shut down as part of budgetary austerity measures. The axe was swinging wildly in the wake of the March 2012 budget. We lost jobs in Parks Canada, losing critical capacity in the Gulf Islands National Park. The entire Marine Contaminants Programme, with 80 scientists across Canada under the leadership of Dr Peter Ross at the Institute for Ocean Science, was cancelled. The National Round Table on Environment and Economy was killed. And critical science and research facilities, from the PEARL lab in the Arctic to the Experimental Lakes Area in western Ontario, were on the hit list.

So many cuts all at once have the effect Naomi Klein described in Shock Doctrine–it becomes hard to think clearly with the repeated body blows of repealed laws, omnibus bills and lost programmes and facilities—radical agenda can be imposed as civil society is shell-shocked.

It is even more difficult to fight back in Harper’s Canada because civil servants are not allowed to speak to Members of Parliament–even their own.

In the case of the Plant Health Centre, the new plan was to transfer all the functions of the centre to Summerland, BC. It would mean the loss of about 40 jobs in the area, including contract and part-time staff. I have learned a lot about the Plant Health Centre (PHC) since the announcement of its pending execution, but I knew then that it is the national facility for the quarantine of viruses for fruit growing-plants and trees. Not being able to speak to personnel at the PHC, right after the news of the cuts, I stopped by the centre and helped myself to all the public information brochures in the lobby and went online for the description of the mandate of the Plant Health Centre.

Two things immediately struck me. Firstly, that the Plant Health Centre is run by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, while the Summerland facility was run by Agriculture Canada (potential for inter-agency rivalry?) and, secondly, that the isolation of viruses on Vancouver Island made more sense than having that function in the heart of the fruit growing Okanagan region. I began to see the possibility for persuading the minister to change his mind.

Now, before I share all the rest of the developments, I want to emphasize that I do not know which factors swayed Minister Ritz. As my mom always said, ‘you can accomplish anything you want if you do not care who gets the credit.’ So, at the request of our dauntless Island Tides publisher, Christa Grace-Warrick, I will share what steps I took, while not claiming saving the centre was due to my efforts. I can be sure that, at least, my efforts didn’t hurt!

I wanted to assemble a science package supporting keeping the quarantine centre on the Island to share with the mostly Conservative MPs from the Okanagan. I hoped they would review the information and speak to Minister Ritz to suggest leaving things as they are, rather than risk a quarantine facility in the Okanagan. My first hurdle was finding a credible scientist willing to help me. Every scientist I approached currently working in plant virology has some relationship with Agriculture Canada and was unwilling to attach their name to my background package. But as I kept calling experts, I was told of the retired scientist, holder of the Order of British Columbia, Richard Stace-Smith. Dr Stace-Smith turned out to be my saviour. An octogenarian living in Vancouver, Dr Stace-Smith was intimately involved with the decision to place the national quarantine centre with the Plant Health Centre in 1965. At my request, he wrote a detailed, foot-noted, letter to the Prime Minister, noting:

‘The Centre for Plant Health was selected for its location because there is always a danger of serious pathogens being imported together with the plant hosts from other parts of the world. Despite using extreme precautions, pathogens may escape and the danger is reduced when imported material is tested distant from the commercial agricultural industry. It made sense in 1960 when the Plant Quarantine and Diagnostic Services was established in Saanichton and it seems to me that it makes no sense to move it to Summerland today.’

I hand delivered the letter to Stephen Harper, as well as Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. I also put together more background details and gave packages to the five Okanagan MPs. Fortunately, through one thing or another, I was already friends with all of them. Within days, Ritz told me he would reconsider the matter.

Meanwhile, the Summerland facility was shown to be inappropriate for other reasons. It would need at least two new large greenhouses to handle the work done by the PHC, and there was not enough space for them in the current facility. The idea of cost savings began to fade.

So, for the last few months, whenever I have seen Gerry Ritz I have asked him how the review was going. I have to say, on any issue on which I have ever approached Gerry Ritz, he has been accessible and fair. And on this wonderful reversal, I can only thank him for being willing to re-examine a flawed, hasty decision. I wish the same dynamics could work to get more money flowing back to our parks and to science. But, for now, a victory is very sweet.

The post Spared the axe: the arguments that helped save the Plant Health Centre appeared first on Elizabeth May.

“I am grateful to Minister Ritz for listening to our concerns and for re-thinking the earlier decision to move its quarantine and virus testing functions to Summerland, which is the heart of British Columbia’s fruit and wine region,” said May. “This is a victory for our community, and for all those elsewhere who fought to protect the excellent science done here for 100 years”.

Residents from Saanich-Gulf Islands and from across BC signed petitions, asking that the Centre remain open, including the following petition that was presented by Elizabeth May yesterday, October 29^th, 2012, in the House of Commons:

“Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to present a petition from constituents in my riding, from Salt Spring Island, Galiano and throughout Saanich. The petition calls upon the Minister of Agriculture, with whom I have had several personal conversations on the matter, to reconsider the closing of the plant health centre, which for 100 years has served the interests of science in understanding viruses. Since 1960, it has been the national centre for the quarantine of plant viruses. It is simply not feasible to pursue the current plan to move these facilities to the Okanagan. Therefore, I table this petition, which is calling for the plant health centre to remain open, on behalf of my constituents.”

The Centre for Plant Health is a crucial site for the quarantine and virus-testing of new plant stock, and has been strategically located across the Salish Sea from the province’s mainland in order to prevent the transfer of viruses or pests to British Columbia’s primary agricultural regions. And while 6 positions are being moved to Agriculture Canada’s facility in Summerland, 23 full time positions are being saved, and the Plant Health Centre will remain open.

“This is a wonderful 100^th birthday present to the Plant Health Centre”, said May, “and proof that a group of determined and engaged citizens can have a real impact. Thank you to all those residents of Saanich-Gulf Islands who took part in this campaign.”

The post May Celebrates Decision to Keep Plant Health Centre Open appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On May 9 my husband and I were part of a tour of the Centre for Plant Health organized by Elder College. It was very informative and we were shocked to hear at the beginning of our tour that the federal government plans to close this facility.The research they are conducting at the centre is vital in regards to our food safety in Canada.

The testing of viruses related to tree fruit and grapevine is an essential to preventing viruses entering our country.

We wish to thank our MP Elizabeth May for “fighting tooth and nail to stop the closure”.

We would rather be part of their 100 year celebration.

Jan and Robert Carroll
Saanichton

View the full original article >>

The post Plant health centre critical to food chain appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Given limitations of words and space, let me cover some of the main points.

Budget 2012 cuts government spending, overall, by about $5 billion for next year. (Green Scissors, my submission to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, cut by $6 billion, but went after very different things—like government advertising and the Prime Minister’s Office budget.)

Budget 2012 delivers the expected news of increasing the age of entitlement to Old Age Security to 67, while deeply cutting CIDA, CBC, Environment Canada, Statistics Canada, Parks Canada, Library and Archives, and DND (cuts there largely due to the end of involvement in Afghanistan). It also cuts $7.5 million from Elections Canada, $14 million from tourism, and over $50 million from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (leading to the announced closing of the Canada Plant Health Centre on East Saanich Road). It also did away with the youth volunteer-service program, Katimavik.

There is no mention of climate change. The hoped for extension of the eco-Energy home energy retrofit programme was not to be, ditto hopes for funding to keep the Polar Environmental Arctic Research Laboratory–Canada’s critical research lab on Ellesmere Island and the world’s closest to the North Pole–from closing. No reprieve there, nor for funding of climate science. Scientific research through the National Research Council is now directed to focus on work that is ‘business-led and industry-relevant.’ (I can just imagine what Einstein would have said about that.)

Also announced in the budget was the surprise termination of the National Round Table on Environment and Economy– the only effort remaining within the government to develop consensus between industry and environmentalists to pursue sustainable development. As I was feverishly reading the budget document in ‘lock-up’ (the invitational, embargoed preview of the budget), I scanned for any reference to climate change, I got excited when I saw the word ‘climate,’ only to focus and realize it was a discussion of the ‘investment climate.’

Instead, Budget 2012 commits the country to expansion of fossil fuel production: oil sands, pipelines, super-tankers, seismic testing and off-shore drilling. Consistent with that is the funding of an attack on environmental charities with a new $8 million to spend on going after groups alleged to be conducting ‘political’ advocacy, a charge which has been directed at groups opposing the Enbridge super-tanker scheme.

The budget was very grim news indeed, but did not really prepare me for the introduction of the omnibus Budget Implementation Bill. It’s bizarre tabling was without prior notice—not even the usual advance ‘lock-up’ with technical briefing.

I picked up my copy and made for my desk in the House, where I sat, reading, near tears, for the next three hours. C-38 is over 400 pages repealing, amending or otherwise revising 70 different pieces of federal legislation. Aspects never even hinted at in the budget itself include removing oversight from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, changing entitlement to Employment Insurance (this is still vague but appears to allow refusing EI to anyone if there is any job available, even one not in their field), and allowing the Cabinet to overrule the National Energy Board (NEB).

Not Mentioned In the Budget

Nearly half of the budget implementation bill is directed at rewriting Canada’s foundational environmental laws. The Budget itself never mentioned that the Fisheries Act was to be re-written, gutting habitat protection and restricting federal action in many instances to commercial, recreational, and Aboriginal fisheries. This essentially means that if humans aren’t catching a fish, there is no protection for its habitat.

There nothing was mentioned in the budget speech about the changes to the Species at Risk Act which put the NEB in charge of permitting destruction of endangered species and their habitat along the proposed route of a pipeline; nor about the supplanting of the NEB as arbiter of pipelines under the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The NWPA is amended such that pipelines are no longer considered an obstruction to navigation–even if they are.

Although it was abundantly clear that a large focus was to be ‘streamlining’ the environmental assessment process, the advance hype focused on time limits for hearings. It was nowhere mentioned that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act was to be repealed. C-38 wipes out the entire CEAA and introduces an entirely new law. Under the new act, ‘environmental effects’ (that which is to be studied under a federal EA), is, for many circumstances, restricted to fish and migratory birds.

Not Clear On the Concept

With so many new laws and the repealing of old laws and complex text, the Conservative ministers speaking in the House in support of C-38 frequently claim the budget implementation act will include measures that are simply not there at all, or misstate how the new laws will operate.

I go up to them afterward and, for example, ask ‘I cannot find any reference to increased tanker safety in C-38. Can you show me what section you were referring to?’ Or, ‘I can’t find anything that says environmental reviews will only be transferred to the province if the environmental assessment in that province is ‘as good or better’ than the federal one. Where is that?’ Of course, when I ask these specific questions, it is because I am pretty sure that I haven’t missed anything.

The ministers tend to look back at me, blinking slightly. They mention that it is a very long and complex bill. Yes it is, but I have read it and I missed the section they just told the House was in the Act. Where is it? Then the look on their face is like the ‘lapine’ word from Watership Down for a rabbit caught in headlights on a road: ‘tharn’.

There is much more, but for now, I urge constituents to join growing calls for removal of environmental laws from Bill C-38. The Harper Conservatives have gone too far. Previous Progressive Conservative Fisheries Ministers Tom Siddon and John Fraser have both spoken out against the horrifying changes to the Fisheries Act.

Write letters to the editors of the nation’s newspapers. Contact the other Opposition leaders (Rae and Mulcair) and urge that they join me in a strategy to derail this juggernaut of abuse. For more details about Bill C-38, go to www.elizabethmaymp.ca. Together, we can make Stephen Harper regret taking aim at nature.

The post Budget 2012: environmental laws run over by an omnibus appeared first on Elizabeth May.

I am sad because this bill is worse than any other this Parliament has debated, and that is for two reasons.

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First, without consulting Canadians, the government chose to introduce sweeping changes to many laws that affect environmental, social and economic aspects of Canadian life. This approach is illegitimate and outrageous. The process is unacceptable and an offence to true democracy.

Second, beyond the process that is so offensive, the bill that purports to be a budget bill is, in substance, something quite different. The substance of the changes is equally alarming.

Laws this bad take some explanation. As I have sat through the truncated debate on this process at second reading, what we have had are presentations from the Conservative MPs providing lists of things they like in the legislation, and presentations from the opposition benches providing lists of things we do not like in the legislation. That leaves out a big piece of the puzzle.

We have also been confusing measures that are a budget measures that are not in Bill C-38, things like fighting the deficit. There are things we do not like, like killing the Centre for Plant Health in my own riding, which is necessary to protect the health of the economy, particularly in the grape growing regions and wineries, and killing jobs in national parks, again in my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands, the Gulf Islands National Park jobs in ecological work.

However, again, these are not in Bill C-38. The debate has been combatting lists. We like this and we hate this.

I want to step back and try to understand what is going on here. Why do we have this enormous package of measures, most of the substantial changes being those that unravel environmental law in our country? 

I have been involved in the development of most of the laws that we now see being unravelled, particularly the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy Act. What I see behind all this is a shift in mindset.

I worked in the Mulroney government. The Progressive Conservatives understood that conserving involved conserving the environment. This is not necessarily the current mindset of the current brand of conservatism, which I find alien from the traditions and roots of people like former fisheries ministers John Fraser and Tom Siddon. Both have spoken out against the devastating changes to the protection of fish habitat in Bill C-38 and the unintended consequences that this will surely have.

This mindset reminds me most of what the former senior economist to the World Bank, Herman Daly, used to describe as “treating the earth as a business in liquidation”, an everything must go mentality and it must be done fast. He offered the opposite view. He said that we needed to understand that the economy was a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, that these things were not in conflict and that it was so wrong-headed to say that we would only get jobs if we destroyed the environment. It boggles the mind.

When we understand that this is the way this entire omnibus budget bill has been prepared, then it begins to make sense. Then we understand the narrative and then we can understand that someone in the PMO picked up the phone, called the Department of Justice or maybe just sent an email, said that it should find all those things for which the federal government is responsible for the environment and find ways to withdraw from them to the maximum extent possible without offending constitutional requirements to protect such things as migratory birds, because we have a convention with the U.S., or fisheries, because that is in the Constitution.

For example, there is no other way to understand why the Conservatives repealed the Environmental Assessment Act and put in place an entirely new act. Most of what we have heard is that they wanted to have timely assessments. I do not think there would be much debate over that.

In 2005 I proposed to the minister of the environment that in order to get a review of the proposed cleanup at the Sydney tar ponds, which itself presented risks, a timeline would be a good idea. In fact, a 12-month timeline was put in place for the joint review panel of the cleanup proposed for the Sydney tar ponds back in 2005. That could be done under the existing legislation. We do not need to repeal the act and start over.

To all these complaints, the Conservatives claim that industry was demanding this be done, I have in front of me a briefing note from the Mining Association of Canada from January of this year in which it praises the current process under Environmental Assessment Review. It says, “the amendments that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act made in 2010 were implemented quickly and competently by the agency” and it has “provided mining project proponents with relief”. It says that for the first time “provincial and federal assessments are synchronized”. This is from the Mining Association of Canada, allegedly one of the interest groups for whom the Conservative government is destroying all of our environmental laws. The Mining Association of Canada says, “our primary interest in the review of the Environmental Assessment Act is to convey support for the new system brought in…and to renew funding for the Environmental Assessment Agency”.

It is critical to understand that the government did not have to repeal the Environmental Assessment Act in order to have a process that worked for all the players. It looks as though this desperate attempt to be in a hurry is where the problem lies. What the government has done is so egregious. The Environmental Assessment Act being repealed and replaced with a whole new scheme that will never get proper review through the process we have in an omnibus project.

The Conservatives are removing what had always been a federal trigger for a proper environmental assessment, if federal money was being spent. That is no longer there. They are removing comprehensive studies. They are no longer there.

There is no real definition of what an environmental assessment would be. We have a reference in the budget document to something called a “standard environmental assessment”, but Bill C-38 has removed all definitions of what the process would look like.

Killing the comprehensive studies and creating panels that can be substituted with the province without criteria, in my view, would have the industry coming to government asking what it had done as the process had worked pretty well. In fact, the Mining Association of Canada says, “very well”. Now we will not know what project has to go to review or what project does not, when we go to the province or when we do not.

At the same time, in order to unravel the federal responsibilities that trigger an environmental assessment, the government has created a crazy scheme for fisheries. It still requires a permit to add substances “deleterious” to fish, but the protections for fish habitat have been removed.

This means, and as we all know this is a real-life example, that if one wanted to have a large-scale project, for instance, to put tailings into an existing lake, we would be better off, if the lake were in a remote area where no one fishes, to drain the whole lake, kill all the fish and destroy the habitat because that would be legal without an authorization. Whereas adding substances “deleterious” to fish into a lake currently would require authorization. This is the ultimate example of haste makes waste.

The bill has not properly contemplated the changes to the Fisheries Act, the Environmental Assessment Act, or the changes to the Species at Risk Act. The bill is out of control through the false notion that we will create jobs through waste and haste.

I remind people that it is now 20 years since the Westray disaster in which 26 men died. There was no environmental review at that time, as it was back in 1988 when the project was approved, but there were warnings. The experts in the department of mines said that the area was too high in methane, but no, the local politicians and some federal politicians wanted those jobs. They wanted them so badly that they overrode expert advice. They said that they had to get that Westray mine built come hell or high water, that they would do it and that they did not want to hear complaints about causes or what might happen to get in the way. Therefore, federal money flowed. We created a bomb and put men in it, and 26 men died.

Now we are creating another kind of bomb. The first speaker on the bill was not the Minister of Finance, but the Minister of Natural Resources who brought forward all the reasons to change the scheme. He said that we must hurry as there was no time to waste. He quoted from the International Energy Agency on the current state of fossil fuel requirements around the world, but he never quoted the warning from the International Energy Agency that if we did not act on the climate crisis, it would soon be too late. The quote from the International Energy Agency from earlier this year is this, “Delaying action is a false economy. As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the ‘lock-in’ of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals”. We must change direction. This bill is putting pedal to the metal to go as fast as possible to a very large brick wall.

Going back to the bomb we built for the men at Westray, we are now building a climate bomb, a carbon bomb. The proposed legislation is so wrong-headed it must be withdrawn in its entirety.

The post Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act (Bill C-38) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May will fight tooth and nail to stop the closure of the Centre for Plant Health.

“I’m not accepting we’re losing this battle,” the Green Party leader said this afternoon (May 10).

The MP for Saanich Gulf Islands says she’s spoken to her counterparts in the Okanagan and the Minister of Agriculture determined to stop the closure of the Centre for Plan Health.

View the full original article >>

The post 35 jobs affected by cuts at North Saanich’s Centre for Plant Health: May appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, on its face, the issue of consolidation of facilities may seem to be a way of saving money. However, in reading the budget and listening to the debate, I cannot figure out how it is going to save money.

I ask the hon. member for Medicine Hat this. If we take a quarantine facility, with its scientists, virologists and the expertise that has existed there for decades and we move that function to Summerland, would the 1,000 virus-free trees that have been developed there for studies, for fruit and vineyards, and that is a part of the intellectual capacity and scientific ground that is available there, also move? Is there new money going to the Summerland facility? These viruses must be studied and quarantined and must be done at a world-class level.

LaVar Payne: Mr. Speaker, the member from the opposition is an independent individual. We are relocating a number of scientific areas into greater areas of expertise and more modern facilities to ensure that all of the services we provide through inspection agencies such as Agriculture and Agri-food Canada are the best in the world.

The post Opposition Motion—Health and safety of Canadians appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I would like all hon. members to maintain a critical and open mind on the subject of the superiority of Summerland as a centre for plant virology. Very good science is being done there. The Centre for Plant Health in Sidney and, of course, it is in Saanich—Gulf Islands, but it was placed on Vancouver Island in 1965. I have an email here from one of the virologists who was involved at the time confirming that it was specific to the importation of plant material that represented threats, such as the plum pox virus, which is the kind of thing we do not want in the centre of a fruit growing area. Ideally, we want it on an island so if there is an accident we are not contaminating an economic region of significance and importance in terms of fruit growing as we know in terms of vineyards and other fruit.

Now I am not saying that we cannot do good science in many places but I am hoping that members will look at letters from scientists, as I am able to present them to this House.

Bob Zimmer: Mr. Speaker, I would like to respect the hon. member’s comments and the fact that it is moving from her home riding. I understand there are some concerns she has. It is our responsibility as government, though, to look for efficiencies and to make a program work at a better price, essentially, to save taxpayer money. That is the bottom line. The same rigorous standards will be there whether they are in Sidney or in Summerland, so we look at efficiencies that way.

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