On September 19, 2012 Liaquat Ali Shaikh was arrested in Jacobabad City, Sindh Province, Pakistan, while overseeing the distribution of relief materials for flood-affected people. No official charge has been made nor case registered against Mr. Ali Shaikh so far. Since the time of arrest, Ali Shaikh has had no access to communication and his exact whereabouts are unknown. It is feared that Liaquat Ali Shaikh may be subject to physical torture during his detention.

Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, wrote yesterday to the High Commissioner of Pakistan to Canada Mian Gul Akbar Zeb as well as to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Deepak Obhrai asking for the support of the governments of Pakistan and Canada.

“I am very concerned for Liaquat’s safety and well-being. I would be most grateful for any efforts that can be made to ensure his safety and release,” wrote May in her letter.

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I want to make it clear that I certainly support the idea that we have better ties with China. This is not a statement about our relationship with China and the importance of raising human rights in Tibet and the situation for dissidents in Chinese jails. Our opportunities for raising these issues are enhanced with having a respectful, strong relationship. This is about how Canadians should respond to ensure that foreign investment reviews are clear, that the information is transparent and available and that there are national security reviews that go along with this, particularly where strategic Canadian resources, such as oil sands and uranium, are being traded with the People’s Republic of China’s enterprises.

I would like to put this into context. The hon. Minister of Natural Resources has said there is not very much investment from China directly in the oil sands. Of the $73.6 billion invested in the oil sands between 2007 and 2011, oil sands investment from China was approximately $12 billion, or 16%. This is not a small percentage.

The involvement of Chinese companies, particularly PetroChina, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and largely Sinopec have been strategic. In the case of Sinopec it has managed to buy a 9% share in Syncrude for a cost of just about $5 billion. It managed to have a seat on the board of Syncrude and be in a position to veto any decision that Syncrude might otherwise make to process the bitumen crude in Canada, thus creating Canadian jobs in Canadian refineries. That strategic advantage for Sinopec does not seem to have been studied in the way that I think Canadians would have expected.

When I asked this question in relation to the oil sands last week, the Minister of Industry claimed that back in 2009 “we improved the transparency”. This was in relation to my question about the national security aspects of this kind of investment. In fact, when we go back to the decisions in 2009, we find that the cabinet rejected the advice of the expert panel that had been put together in 2007. It was a competition policy review panel that had been mandated to review these arrangements.

According to the Canada Gazette of September 30, 2009:

The term national security should be explicitly defined and national security reviews should take place according to concrete, objective, and transparent criteria. This recommendation was not accepted…

In addition to the oil sands investment, we now have the Prime Minister coming back with a deal for uranium. This deal for uranium has much more lax accounting procedures than was offered in previous deals with China, which is why in the past Canada has not continued to trade uranium in China. The strategic concern is not just for what China would do with the uranium, but for China’s relationship with the civilian nuclear industry program in Pakistan and the potential for nuclear proliferation. These are strategic concerns.

I would like the government to tell Canadians exactly what national security review—

The Deputy Speaker: Order, please.

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry.

Mike Lake: Madam Speaker, I took note of the member’s questions, both last week and again this week. Both questions are important in light of tonight’s debates.

Last week, she asked the minister about foreign security provisions in the Investment Canada Act. The minister responded that the national security aspect was included in the law in 2009. Unsatisfied with the answer, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands stood up in the House yesterday and asked the following. She said:

Mr. Speaker, last week I put a question to the Minister of Industry relating to the Chinese takeover of Canadian resources.

He said I was unfamiliar with the Investment Canada Act changes of 2009. 

She went on to say:

In fact, the Canada Gazette of September 30, 2009 said:

Then the member quoted from the Canada Gazette, just as she did now:

The term national security should be explicitly defined and national security reviews should take place according to concrete, objective, and transparent criteria. This recommendation was not accepted— 

Then the member said today, “close quote”.

The trouble is, if you read the Canada Gazette it is not a closed quote. It actually goes on to say something else. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands was wrong for two reasons. First, she was quoting from a summary of comments and responses to the gazetting of national security provisions in the summer of 2009. She was not quoting from the regulations themselves. Further, she cut the quote in half, as I just mentioned.

The full quote from those comments and replies is as follows. The Canada Gazette states:

4) The term national security should be explicitly defined and national security reviews should take place according to concrete, objective, and transparent criteria. This recommendation was not accepted since national security threats are dynamic in nature and, therefore, constantly evolve. Neither Part IV.1 of the ICA nor the Regulations define the term “national security” since future threats to national security cannot be predetermined and any such definition may limit the government’s flexibility to respond to future threats.

That is the complete quote.

However, that does not mean that national security provisions do not exist. How do I know that? Because they are not hard to find. We just have to grab a BlackBerry or an iPad and go to www.ic.gc.ca. If the hon. member wants, after we are done here she can come over and I can show it to her on my iPad. They have been there for more than two years. I would ask the member to go and read that section of the website and the associated regulations before getting up to ask her next incorrect question.

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Last week the European Union announced a boycott of Iranian oil, delayed until July, to pressure the Iranian regime over its disputed nuclear program.  The Iranian government has in turn threatened to disrupt oil tanker shipping from the Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz in the event of economic restrictions on its own oil exports.  The United States government has indicated it would militarily oppose such an action.  At the same time, Asian nations that import 75% of Iranian oil exports are resisting joining the boycott for either economic reasons or because they consider the boycott counter-productive.

“This kind of brinkmanship diplomacy is more likely to build resentment and solidarity among the Iranian people and strengthen the hand of the government,” added Green International Affairs Critic Eric Walton. “If Iranian authorities are being honest with their own citizens and the international community about their nuclear program – and we should start with the good faith assumption that they are – they will suffer no financial penalty on oil exports.”

Combined with this pragmatic shift in tactics would be an agreement to address Iranian regional security concerns and commence Regional Nuclear Arms Reduction talks with neighbouring nations already possessing nuclear weapons, including Pakistan, India, Russia, China,  and Israel.

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The newspapers along the route are finally noticing that the climate is getting hostile. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix has a story “Pakistan floods, Russian heat fit climate trend around the globe: extreme weather events become more frequent: scientists,” while the Globe and Mail front page shows a dramatic image headed “Crisis in Pakistan: 13 million: The Pakistani floods have now affected more victims than the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami…”

Bill McKibben writes in Eaarth that these catalogues of global events, inventories of disaster, are how we most often describe climate impact. “The trouble with this endless collection of anecdotes,” he writes, “…is that it misses the essential flavour of the new world we’re constructing.” He calls that new world “Eaarth” in an effort to distinguish it from our old planet. The message of his book is sobering. We do not live on that old planet anymore. Everything we had taken for granted — relatively stable climate, changing over millennia, not decades — cannot be taken for granted anymore. It is not exactly the “Brave New World” of Aldous Huxley, but it is a new world and we have to be brave to figure out how to live on it. We have to be resolute in moving off fossil fuels quickly to keep the world liveable.

Maybe this summer’s round of news clippings will wake people up to the climate reality. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released data demonstrating that June 2010 was the hottest June on record — for both land and sea temperatures. If you look at NOAA’s global maps (www.westcoastclimateequity.org) you will see that our part of the world was about the only place on the planet not super-heated through June. June was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th-century average. NOAA data put the first decade of the new millennium as the hottest decade on record, with the last 12 months the warmest 12 months, the last six months the warmest six months, and April, May and June 2010, the hottest April, May, and June on record. Highest ever temperature record for Asia, a record set in May in Pakistan, was just under 130 degrees F. As Bill McKibben commented, “I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.”

Russia’s heat wave caused a doubling in the daily death rate due to heat stress and from the smoke from fires that ringed the city. Wildfires covered 1,740 square kilometers. The street temperature in Moscow was 40 degrees C (104 degrees F). And the drought decimated the Russian wheat crop. President Putin ordered a ban on wheat exports. Ukraine also has suffered serious crop failures. It is simply too hot for the wheat to grow well. The Russian export ban will cause the price of grains to rise globally, threatening global food security.

Drought has also gripped much of Africa, with Niger reporting the worst drought in its history with villages being abandoned, leaving dead livestock behind.

Torrential rains hit much of Asia, with significant downpours also impacting Poland and Germany. China and Pakistan were hard hit. Nearly 1,500 people have died in the landslides in China. Approximately 1,600 people have died in Pakistan due to the flooding. The humanitarian impact extends far beyond the death toll. Thirteen million people have been affected. Millions are displaced. The floods due to a combination of torrential rains and illegal logging. Warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. We are all seeing the results of our changed atmosphere in more frequent, extreme events of torrential rainfall.

Glaciers have collapsed. From July 6-7, Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier lost a nearly 7 square kilometre chunk of ice and retreated one mile. On August 5, a different Greenland glacier, the Petermann Glacier, lost a 251 square kilometre “ice island.” Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent ever for the month of June.

Climate scientists are always careful to say that any one event cannot be blamed on the climate crisis, but they are clear that it is highly unlikely that the spate of climate disasters could have occurred if not for the dramatic changes in global climate caused by human activity.

The first task on this new Eaarth is to end our addiction to fossil fuels – quickly. We must avoid those “tipping points” in the atmosphere that condemn us to an unlivable planet. Its grim characteristics were described by scientist Stephen Hawking who fears Earth “could end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulphuric acid.” Such an end point remains unlikely, but possible. Avoiding it requires a dramatically different course than that set by the current government of ever expanding tar sands and no domestic plan to cut carbon. Once that new course has been set, the next steps require figuring out how we live on a new and less hospitable planet. We need strong, resilient communities, greater local food security, a green energy revolution. And we need governments around the world to wake up to the reality that there is no larger threat to our economy, our society, our future—and our present—than the climate crisis.

Elizabeth E. May is an Officer of the Order of Canada, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and nominate candidate for Parliament in Saanich Gulf Islands.

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