That was the point of view of a Special Committee on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment created by the British Columbia Legislature in 1998. Its December 29^th report stated that:

• “It must be emphasized that provincial governments are not simply another set of ‘stakeholders’ to be consulted by the federal government en route to treaty signature and implementation. Under the Canadian constitution, the federal government is incapable of unilaterally implementing international treaty obligations in areas that fall within provincial jurisdiction. Nor is it acceptable for the federal government to use its treaty-making powers to do an end run around the federal-provincial division of powers or in a way that diminishes Canadian federalism and democracy.
• “How is it that the federal government can expose provincial measures to binding international arbitration without the province’s consent? […] Who will pay if a provincial measure is found to violate the federal government’s treaty obligations?”
• “In the committee’s view, if the federal government fails to gain the express consent of the Legislative Assembly, then the Province must vigorously defend its authority on behalf of all British Columbians.”

“These are exactly the kind of issues the Green Party of Canada has been raising since the Conservatives quietly tabled the Treaty on September 26^th. We are the only party in Ottawa opposed to the Treaty. Our online petition against ratification has been signed by 22,637 citizens,” said Elizabeth May, Green Party of Canada Leader and MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands.

“The Treaty pays lip service to provincial authority by stating that provincial and

territorial representatives were ‘updated’ on the progress of the negotiations with China and ‘did not express any opposition to the Agreement.’ What kind of Federal government is Harper’s? An ‘update’ does not meet the federal obligations under the Constitution,” added the Green Leader.

“The provinces should be very worried of having Harper signing this without their consent. We have attempted to reach premiers across Canada. We now have 9 days to prevent Harper’s Conservatives’ attack on our democracy,” concluded May.

Green Party’s webpage against the Treaty: http://www.greenparty.ca/stop-the-sellout

The post The Canada-China Investment Treaty Cannot be Ratified Without Provinces’ Approval appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Does he not agree that the provinces will be forced into arbitrations where they do not have the right to appear? Do arbitrations for damages against Canada for decisions at the provincial level not demand explicit agreement within the treaty before it is approved?

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Right Hon. Stephen Harper: Mr. Speaker, once again, the foreign investment promotion and protection agreement establishes reciprocal obligations between the parties. Canada has had a situation with the People’s Republic of China for some years where the latter’s investment has been virtually unrestricted here and we have had more difficulty with our investment there.

This agreement is an important step forward. That is why it has been so well received by the Canadian investment community. I would urge all members to look at it carefully and support it.

The post Oral Questions – Foreign Investment appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The question that leads tonight’s adjournment proceedings was a question I put in June, before the House rose for the summer. Unfortunately, the response came from a minister whose areas of responsibility do not actually fall within the parameters of the question I asked. It means that this time the representative for the Minister of Transport is here. However, my question did not specifically relate to transport. It was a tangential issue.

My question was one of constitutional authorities. In particular, I put it to the Prime Minister that since he was well known in opposition as an individual who believed that the provinces should exert their jurisdictional authorities to the maximum to press back against heavy-handed federal intrusion into their areas of authority, I wondered if he had now changed his mind. Those of us in British Columbia felt very clearly that the Prime Minister was pushing a particular project on the people of British Columbia whether we liked it or not.

Just to make it clear to all present today, to refresh their memories, the question I put was the following:

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister for many years expressed concern as an Albertan about the heavy-handed intrusion of federal policy on the will of Albertans.

Right now, British Columbians oppose supertankers on the coastline, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities opposes supertankers and today’s polls show by a margin of three to one that British Columbians do not want oil tankers on their coastline. Will the Prime Minister run roughshod over the will of British Columbians for his pet project?

In that brief question I was alluding to something that is famously known as the firewall letter. This was back in January 2001, when our current Prime Minister was not serving in the House but had left a position as MP to become the executive director of the National Citizens Coalition. In that capacity, he co-signed a letter with University of Alberta professor Tom Flanagan; with Ted Morton, who was described in the letter as Alberta senator-elect; with the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation; and with other Albertans, particularly Ken Boessenkool, who is now an advisor to Christy Clark.

The irony is not lost on British Columbians. This famous letter was designed to do the following. The current Prime Minister wrote in 2001 about what could be done to extend provincial powers to “limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction”.

Perhaps I will have better luck tonight. I will put my question again.

Has the current Prime Minister lost track of his previous concerns that provincial rights, privileges and powers, and particularly the will of the people of a province, should be respected and that in fact he should be guided on the matter of the Enbridge proposal and the supertankers, which British Columbians do not want, by the will of the people of British Columbia and not his own preference for expansion of bitumen production?

Pierre Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, I will begin by addressing the constitutional and jurisdictional questions that the member posed. I would point out the very obvious, that even the most strong believer in the principle of subsidiarity would accept that the federal government is responsible for regulating shipping and the associated industries. That is because ships cross borders. It is an international business and it would be impossible for it to be adequately regulated on a province-by-province basis.

The member mentioned oil tankers and the safety-related issues around them. The reality is that oil tankers have been moving safely into west coast waters since the 1930s. This, contrary to the member’s remarks, is nothing new. In fact, a total of 82 oil tankers arrived at Port Metro Vancouver in 2011. During the last five years there were 1,302 tankers that arrived at that same port. During that time period, nearly 200 oil and chemical tankers safely visited the ports of Prince Rupert and Kitimat. They follow international and Canadian requirements, including double hulling of ships, mandatory pilotage, regular inspections, and aerial surveillance. With double hull, the bottom and sides of the vessel have two complete layers of water-tight hull surface. Tankers that are not double hull are being gradually phased out. For large crude oil tankers, like the Exxon Valdez was, the phase-out date for single hull vessels was 2010, which means that all large crude oil tankers operating in our waters today are double hull.

In compulsory pilotage areas, the pilotage authorities require tanker operators to take on board a marine pilot with knowledge before entering a harbour or busy waterway. The department ship inspectors are on board and they inspect foreign vessels, including oil tankers, entering Canadian ports to ensure they comply with all of our rules. In 2011, there were 1,100 inspections carried out across Canada, 147 of them on oil tankers.

We also have the eye in the sky which watches tankers as they approach our shores. Transport Canada performs aerial surveillance over Canadian waters to detect pollution from ships. In 2010-11, crews observed more than 12,000 vessels, nearly one-third of which were over west coast waters. It is an effective prevention tool because potential polluters know that Canada is watching and we have the power to prosecute.

What I am about to say is very important, so I ask that the member listen carefully. The good news is that over the last 20 years there has not been a single major oil spill in Canadian waters. We will work to ensure that the next 20 years are as successful as the last.

The post Adjournment Proceedings – Transport appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Back in January 2001, our future Prime Minister sent a letter to Premier Ralph Klein in which he called for Alberta to exercise its Constitutional provincial powers to “build firewalls around Alberta.”  The letter was co-signed by Harper’s mentor from the University of Alberta Tom Flanagan, Ted Morton (at the time described as Alberta Senator-elect), the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other Alberta luminaries, including Ken Boessenkool, (described in the letter as former advisor to “Stockwell Day, Treasurer of Alberta,” who is currently none other than Premier Christy Clark’s Chief of Staff.)  Stephen Harper, who claimed top spot in the list of signatories, was at the time President of the National Citizens’ Coalition.

The letter set out what the signatories believed to be Constitutionally allowed steps Alberta should take,  including: withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, ending the provincial contract with the RCMP,  a provincial take-over of health care decision-making, and collecting revenue for the province from income tax.  The aim of this bullish use of provincial powers was “to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach on legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”   

What a difference a decade makes.  Now Stephen Harper is so confident of the right of the federal government to insist on an over-land pipeline to a tanker route through the most treacherous waters on earth that he committed to the project’s approval and completion before the provincial government had so much as uttered a word on the project’s acceptability.  (I leave it to Patrick Brown to set out the nature of Christy Clark’s rather belated demands, but at least she has asserted that British Columbia has something to say in the matter. I leave for another day that other Constitutional objection to the Enbridge project – the constitutionally protected inherent rights of First Nations.) 

NDP leader Adrian Dix has announced he has a high powered legal panel, led by the well respected lawyer Murray Rankin, reviewing the province’s legal options.  The ugly reality is that if Stephen Harper is prepared to push this through, he can.  The Constitution allows the federal government to over-ride provincial powers under Clause 10 of Section 92.  If the federal government declares the Enbridge project to be “for the general advantage of Canada,” provincial rights are trampled.

In a recent piece in the Ottawa Citizen, Stephen Maher recalled the last time a premier approached a prime minister with the idea of requesting provincial objections be squashed through the invocation of Clause 10 of Section 92.  In 1966, Newfoundland’s first premier, Joey Smallwood, had gone to Prime Minister Lester Pearson to ask for the federal muscle of Clause 10, section 92 to force Quebec to accept transmission lines across that province to bring electricity from the Churchill Falls project in Labrador to be sold to Canada and the US. Smallwood recalled later that Pearson had begged him not to make the request because, “if you ask me I’ll have to say yes, otherwise we would not really be a country.  But I am asking you not to ask me, because we will not be able to keep the towers up.”    Smallwood did not ask and suffered the impact of a lop-sided deal to sell power to Quebec ever since.

Stephen Harper has already hinted that he is prepared to use the federal over-ride power.  In a January 2012 interview he said, “What I think I’d make clear is that I believe selling our energy products to Asia is in the country’s national interest.”

In addition to the Constitution, the prime minister has a precedent of expropriation.  Back in 1999, the federal government expropriated the seabed under the Nanoose torpedo testing grounds when British Columbia decided to end the contract allowing testing.  In that case, the Expropriation Act was used.  225 square km of BC territory was expropriated to allow the military tests to continue.  That was a first, but would Stephen Harper get away with expropriating the whole territory required to build the Great Pipeline of China?

Commentators like Stephen Maher will say that so long as BC objects, no federal government will force the construction of pipelines over provincial lands, nor force ports to accept high risk supertankers for bitumen and diluent.  And it is true, that to force such a thing would tear at the heart of Confederation and do real damage to our sense of ourselves as a nation.  But that does not mean Stephen Harper won’t do it.  No previous Prime Minister was sufficiently reckless and ruthless as to shut down Parliament to avoid a confidence vote he knew he would lose.  The Prime Minister has promised Beijing this project will proceed.  He has declared that those who oppose the project are “radicals.”  

Has Stephen Harper abandoned the idea that provinces have rights?  Is he prepared to ride roughshod over the wishes of the vast majority of British Columbians?  Has he reversed himself or is it merely the case that provinces only have rights when they seek to promote fossil fuel expansionism, never to manage such development?

Perhaps it is time for Mr. Harper’s former colleague, Mr. Boessenkool, to brief Premier Clark on how to build a firewall.  And maybe he could remind the Prime Minister of how he once urged provinces to resist and object “to an aggressive and hostile federal government … encroach(ing) on legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

The post British Columbia “firewall” anyone? appeared first on Elizabeth May.

According to the Canadian Press:

Under the new plan, the government would have 45 days to decide if an assessment is needed, and if it’s required, the review would take a maximum of two years.

The changes also include recognizing provincial assessments if they meet federal standards.

They would also cut the number of agencies responsible for reviews to three, down from 40.

First, it is a fallacy to suggest that the environment is provincial jurisdiction. Fish fall under federal regulation, even if the water is provincial. Since the 1970s and the Environmental Assessment Review Process Guidelines Order of the Federal Cabinet, the Federal government has played a strong role in the assessment process.

Second, not all organizations find the process “cumbersome.” The Mining Association of Canada lobbied the federal government to leave CEAA alone. The association has found that the agency works well and is actually more predictable to deal with than other federal government agencies.

The most dangerous change is not the shortening of timelines — although it is disconcerting since proponents missing their environmental impact statement deadlines cause a majority of delays. The biggest worry is downloading the assessment process to provincial governments. For example, former Minister Jim Prentice turned down the Prosperity Mine proposal after the B.C. government had approved it. Their plan was to turn a whole lake (Fish Lake, ironically) into a tailings pond. The difference was due to federal responsibility for health of fish populations.

The changes announced today may be open to a constitutional challenge. The issue was litigated in 2010 with a B.C. Supreme Court decision (Morton v. British Columbia) where the federal government had attempted to download jurisdiction of fish farms to the province. The court ruled that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans could not do this; protection of fish habitat is squarely federal, and it seems Harper and company want to abandon this responsibility.

The post Keep Fish (and Other Environment Issues) Federal appeared first on Elizabeth May.

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Right now, British Columbians oppose supertankers on the coastline, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities opposes the supertankers and today’s polls show, by a margin of three to one, that British Columbians do not want oil tankers on their coastline.

Will the Prime Minister run roughshod over the will of British Columbians for his pet project?

Hon. Denis Lebel: Mr. Speaker, our government is confident that sound regulations are in place to ensure petroleum products are transported safely along the B.C. coast.

In the last five years, close to 500 supertankers have been close to the shores with no accidents. All tankers arriving in Canadian ports are inspected by Transport Canada to ensure that they comply with all Canadian and international regulations.

The post Oral Questions – Transport appeared first on Elizabeth May.

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Does the hon. member think we can expand CPP right now to deal with those people who do not have pensions?

Hon. Bob Rae: Mr. Speaker, I hope we can. The CPP is a joint plan. It is run jointly by the federal government and the provinces. I agree with the hon. member that we have to recognize that the economy of the past, where people went into the workforce after high school or university and thought their jobs were for life and that they had secure pensions, has changed. Thirty years ago, who would have thought that Nortel would be gone, or that companies we relied on and thought would be there would not be there?

I see my colleague from Sudbury looking at me. When I first started working in Ontario in the 1970s there were 18,000 hourly employees at Inco. There were 15,000 at Hilton Works in Hamilton. Those days are gone. We have to recognize the need for change. The public sector needs to step up with a flexible plan. Until we get the provinces onside, the best we can do is to have some sort of competition for the proposed private plan. We have to recognize that we still have a long way to go to get to a better situation for our current workers and future retirees.

The post Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act appeared first on Elizabeth May.

“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.

“No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

– From your open letter of today’s date, January 9, 2012.

Dear Joe,

Your letter caught my attention.  I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House.  Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine.  The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role.  You should not have signed such a hyperbolic rant.

I have reproduced a short section of your letter. The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts.  I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline.  I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.

I oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project requires over-turning the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline. The federal-provincial oil tanker moratorium has been in place for decades.  As former Industry Canada deputy minister Harry Swain pointed out in today’s Globe and Mail, moving oil tankers through 300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice. In December 2010, the government’s own Commissioner for the Environment, within the Office of the Auditor General, reported that Canada lacked the tools to respond to an oil spill.  These are legitimate concerns.

Furthermore, running a pipeline through British Columbia’s northern wilderness, particularly globally significant areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest, is a bad idea.  Nearly 1,200 kilometers of pipeline through wilderness and First Nations territory is not something that can be fast-tracked.

Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada.  (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)

The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention.  The federal law for environmental review was first introduced under the Mulroney government.  Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts.  In today’s letter, you essentially ridicule the process through a misleading example.  Your citation of “a temporary ice arena on a frozen pond in Banff” requiring federal review was clearly intended to create the impression that the scope of federal review had reached absurd levels.  You neglected to mention that the arena was within the National Park. That is the only reason the federal government was involved.  It was required by the National Parks Act. The fact that the arena approval took only two months shows the system works quite well.

Perhaps most disturbing in the letter is the description of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline as coming from “environmental and other radical groups.”  Nowhere in your letter do you mention First Nations.  (I notice you mention “Aboriginal communities,” but First Nations require the appropriate respect that they represent a level of government, not merely individuals within communities.)

The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to respect First Nations sovereignty and protect their interests.  It is a nation to nation relationship.  To denigrate their opposition to the project by lumping it in with what you describe (twice) as “radical” groups is as unhelpful to those relationships as it is inaccurate.

“Radical” is defined as “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.”  (Merriam Webster).

By that definition, it is not First Nations, conservation groups or individual opponents that are radical.  They seek to protect the fundamental nature of the wilderness of northern British Columbia, the ecological health of British Columbia coastal eco-systems, and the integrity of impartial environmental review.  It is your government that is radical by proposing quite radical alteration of those values.

Your government has failed to present an energy strategy to Canada.  We have no energy policy.  We are still importing more than half of the oil we use.  Further, we have no plan to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, even as we sign on to global statements about the need to keep greenhouse gases from rising above 450 ppm in the atmosphere to keep global average temperatures from exceeding a growth of 2 degrees C.  The climate crisis imperils our future – including our economic future – in fundamental ways which your government ignores.

By characterizing this issue as environmental radicals versus Canada’s future prosperity you have done a grave disservice to the development of sensible public policy.  There are other ways to diversify Canada’s energy markets.  There are other routes, other projects, and most fundamentally other forms of energy.

I urge you to protect your good name and refuse to sign such unworthy and inaccurate missives in the future.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands

Leader
Green Party of Canada

The post An Open Letter to Joe Oliver appeared first on Elizabeth May.

At this point, as the registry is about to be ended, does the member agree there is money invested in the data and that it would cost money to destroy it? As long as some provinces would like access to it, should we not keep that data available for a period of years so that provinces can assess whether their law enforcement agencies would like to continue to have access to it?

Mrs. Cheryl Gallant: Mr. Speaker, the answer to the question is absolutely not.

My constituents and people across Canada want to see the information destroyed and deleted. As it is, with the passage of time, even within days of receiving the information at the Firearms Centre, the information is outdated. This is what police officers tell us. This bill is what our constituents want.

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