Jonathan Wilkinson: Mr. Speaker, provincial and territorial governments are responsible for approval, licensing, and monitoring of waste-management operations in this country. The Province of British Columbia issued a permit relating to the establishment of a soil remediation facility in Shawnigan Lake. Environment and Climate Change Canada officials have conducted a review and are monitoring the situation. However, at this time, no potential Fisheries Act violations have been identified. Potential pollution issues and prevention issues related to the issuance of the permit should be directed to the environmental protection branch of B.C.’s Ministry of Environment.

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Tabled in the House of Commons this week, May’s Private Members’ Bill C-484 amends the greenhouse gas emissionsregulations on coal electricity brought in late last year. “This Bill is what the Harper Conservatives would have done if they were serious about climate change,” said Elizabeth May. “Despite his talking points, Peter Kent bowed to the pressure of energy companies and weakened his already-weak greenhouse gas regulations on coal-fired electricity. C-484 shows how easily they could fix the regulations if they wanted to.”

These regulations, roundly criticized and wholly inadequate, sought to limit the greenhouse gasses produced through burning coal to generate electricity, yet contained gaping holes such as a 50 year grace period for plants built after 1986. Bill C-484 would insist that all coal-generated power plants in Canada adhere to the emissions standard, initially proposed by Peter Kent, of 375 tonnes per Gigawatt hour (t/GWh) by 2025.

“Any energy company executive that built a new coal plant in the last few decades was taking a calculated risk; the facts about climate change were already well known,” said Elizabeth May. “This Bill presents a responsible solution to our dirtiest sources of electricity that is both in line with what the science demands and provides sufficient time for Canada to transition our remaining baseload generation toward cleaner sources of energy.”

“How can we expect other countries like China, India, and the US to stop burning coal, when we can’t even manage to stop burning coal ourselves? We can’t be two-faced,” said Adam Olsen, Green Party candidate for Saanich North and the Islands. “Elizabeth’s Bill proposes that we start with our own backyard. It’s the right thing for our economy and for our environment.”

“With Canada’s high GDP and abundance of renewable energy sources we should be natural leaders in clean energy generation,” said Andrew Weaver, Green Party candidate for Oak Bay-Gordon Head and one of Canada’s leading climatologists. “Elizabeth’s private members bill is an important step in Canada’s much needed transition to a prosperous low carbon economy.”

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Tragically, as with so many issues relating to our environment, this is a day to remind ourselves of the threats to and recent attacks on this very critical natural resource.

“Canada has no national strategy to address very urgent water issues facing our society,” said Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, MP Saanich-Gulf Islands. “Our Federal Water Policy is more than 20 years old and has never been implemented. We need to make use of its excellent guidelines immediately in order to deal with the impact of climate change, contamination, shortages, pressures to bulk export, and more.”

In May, 2012, a report by the Forum for Leadership on Water, a group of academic, NGO, and retired public-sector experts on water policy, stated that decades of policy and funding neglect had left Canada “crippled,” as it confronts growing threats to its water.

Since then, the situation has grown worse with the Conservatives’ aggressive promotion of the extraction industries, leading to the end of credible environmental assessments, the gutting of the Fisheries Act, and the virtual elimination of the Navigable Waters Protection Act – which leaves the great majority of our lakes and rivers vulnerable to development.

Even the Great Lakes are at risk. “The Great Lakes, which hold more than 95 percent of North America’s surface freshwater – 20 percent of the world’s – are continuously threatened by climate change pollution, over-extraction, invasive species, and wetland loss,” said Cathy MacLellan, Green Party Energy and Natural Resource Critic. “As the south and mid-western US continues to experience severe water shortages, the shared Great Lakes and Canada’s other fresh water resources are vulnerable to weak legislation concerning bulk water exports.”

Recent reports that Lake Erie is in trouble again, after having nearly died and then being revived in the 1970s, are disturbing. Earlier this year, Lake Winnipeg was given the title of Threatened Lake of 2013 – the most threatened lake in the world – by the Global Nature Fund (GNF). It is being poisoned by blue-green algae feeding off sewage and agricultural chemicals.

At the same time, small freshwater lakes are being used as toxic dumps. The Fisheries Minister has allowed certain lakes to be reclassified as ‘tailings impoundment areas. This absolves mining companies from having to build man-made containment ponds designed to protect natural water systems, and fish.

Our wetlands, too, are in danger. “Canada has about 25 percent of the world’s wetlands – lakes, rivers, swamps, wet grasslands, peatlands,” said Janice Harvey, Green Party Fisheries Critic. “Historically, we have played a key role internationally in protecting them. With the gutting of the Fisheries Act and the aggressive expansion of the Alberta tar sands this is no longer the case.”

“Our freshwater is in a fragile state for a variety of reasons, which might have been adequately dealt with before climate change,” said May. “Now, the fight to stop the rise in temperatures globally is crucial to saving this resource for future generations.”

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“This report has nothing to do with the crisis of climate change and in no way vindicates the Conservatives and their anti-environment policies of the past six years,” said Ms. May.

“As Scott Vaughan, Canada’s highly respected Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, noted two weeks ago, the NPRI actually exempts releases from oil and gas exploration and development. How then can Mr. Kent and others claim the report’s figures justify their pro-extraction policies?”

The report also contains no emission information regarding hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – projects across the country. “Not only are Canadians being kept from the truth about the toxic chemicals used in this process, but we are being prevented from knowing the full impact of fracking on the environment and climate,” Ms. May noted.

The Conservatives are also trying to take credit for a decrease in lead, mercury, and cadmium levels, but this is not due to any recent federal policy changes.

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Work at Harvard from Michael Porter made the case in 1995 that those countries with the toughest environmental laws and regulations also score highest in competitiveness. In the groundbreaking analysis, co-authored with Class van der Lindt, “Green and Competitive: Ending the Stalemate,” Porter made the case that those countries with the toughest environmental regulations are those rated highest in competitiveness.

“Properly designed environmental standards can trigger innovations that lower the total cost of a product and improve its value.”

Those types of “good” regulations and standards are those that Porter classifies as “innovation-friendly.”

Put simply, pollution is a sign of market failure. It is a waste of energy, value, and resources. And it can create long-term liabilities. The most pressing of all issues (and this is not intended to be narrowly read as all “environmental issues”) is the threat of the climate crisis. The dumping of pollution in the form of greenhouse gases into the global atmosphere is at no cost to polluters because the cost is not internalized.

However, that is not to say there are no costs. The costs to societies are real. Costs are felt in billions of dollars of insurable losses, and billions more uninsured in poorer regions, due to increasingly severe and frequent severe weather events.

A report of the now-shuttered National Round Table on Environment and Economy estimated that annual costs in Canada are already serious and could climb to a significant portion of GDP on an annual basis. If any other economic trend line suggested the economy would suffer, government would be expected to have taken action.

Tragically, the warnings appear to have no impact at all on the Prime Minister as he is so deeply rooted in the binary notion that we can either have the environment or the economy not both.

The first step, carbon-pricing, is accepted as necessary by virtually all international agencies from the World Bank to the International Energy Agency. Even CEOs from major oil multinationals, such as Shell and BP, have called for carbon-pricing, yet still the Prime Minister rejects the idea.

Carbon pricing has been consistent with increased economic growth. Sweden adopted a carbon tax and has reduced greenhouse gases to below its Kyoto target while, over the same period, experiencing substantial growth in its GDP.

As suggested above, the climate crisis is no longer an environmental issue. It is a security threat. As it is ignored year after year, the current warnings of scientists are for levels of global warming that put in doubt the survival of human civilization. Some scientists now speculate about the possibility unimaginable a few decades ago that inaction could result in human extinction.

British scientist Sir Martin Rees puts odds of homo sapiens surviving into the next century at 50-50. I think it is premature to talk about extinction of humankind, but it is not re-assuring that any scientists think the possibility is now open. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine how human civilization, our institutions and rule of law, would possibly survive the chaos of a planet besieged with the events unleashed at 4 C warming.

And that is the level of warming now projected based on the range of anemic actions of industrialized and hugely polluting developing countries. And we are told we cannot take the actions necessary to act on the climate crisis because it might hurt the economy.

It is totally false to say that we cannot reduce greenhouse gases and move to a low carbon economy without killing our economy, but the flip side is definitely true. If we do not act to move to a low carbon economy we could destroy our children’s future. Inaction will cost our economy more than the prudent actions to address the crisis, but shouldn’t we be motivated to act knowing that our failure could rob our own children of their future?

Elizabeth May is the Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands and Leader of the Green Party of Canada.
Originally printed in the Hill Times.

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The IJC nuclear task force undertook an inventory of nuclear pollutants in the Great Lakes in 1997 indicating that there was a need for greater follow up on many concerns identified.   (http://www.ijc.org/php/publications/html/invrep/index.html)

“Given the history of concerns about nuclear contaminants including Port Hope on Lake Ontario, and decades of nuclear waste storage on the shores of the Great Lakes at various nuclear facilities, the Green Party demands a scientific and citizen partnership to provide oversight of these impacts on water quality,” said Elizabeth May, MP Saanich-Gulf Islands, and Leader of the Green Party of Canada.

The IJC in its Report of Bioaccumulation of Elements to Accompany the Inventory of Radionuclides in the Great Lakes Basin identified the need for further work.  http://www.ijc.org/rel/boards/nuclear/bio/index.html

“The Green Party is joining the call from a number of concerned citizens and environmental groups to urge this government to take a serious look at radioactive impacts on Great Lakes water quality,’ said May.

The IJC has responded to requests from various groups stating that it will not re-instate the nuclear task force until it is directed by governments to do so.

“Protection of the Great Lakes must be a top priority.  The government has a legal duty to ensure that it protects water quality for Canadian citizens.”

“The IJC has in the past studied nuclear energy and waste issues in the Great Lakes basin and has made recommendations to governments. The Commission reviewed nuclear issues in the Great Lakes in the context of its biennial reports.  In the 1997 publication The IJC in the 21^st  Century, the Commission identified a number of nuclear issues for which the Canadian and U.S. governments might consider issuing a reference to the Commission, under the Boundary Waters Treaty, “ said Lorraine Rekmans, Aboriginal Affairs Critic for the Green Party of Canada.

A reference requires the Commission to examine and report on questions and concerns shared by the governments or matters of difference arising between them. Governments have not issued such a reference to the Commission.

The IJC was briefed on April 24, 2012, by both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission on nuclear energy and waste issues in the Great Lakes region. In addition, they heard from a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

However, in the absence of a specific reference from governments, the Commission will not be taking action on the matter of nuclear facilities and nuclear waste storage in the Great Lakes Basin.

“We need informed oversight,” said Rekmans.  The IJC must create a new IJC Nuclear Task Force and report on nuclear issues impacting the Great Lakes.  This has to be addressed as part of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and we need a new IJC Nuclear Task Force to produce such a report.”

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I will be very brief as I know time is running out on this debate.

Today, over 120 environmental lawyers from across Canada issued a statement warning that the destruction of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act through Bill C-38 would cause more delays, more uncertainty, and more court challenges.

I want to draw the attention of members to what good environmental assessment has done over the years. The fact is it is a tool for planning.

If it had not been for an environmental assessment that allowed the cumulative effects of the Honshu Paper-Mitsubishi plant in northern Alberta called Alpac to be studied, that huge multinational factory would not have decided on its own to offer to improve its environmental regime during the process. The same thing happened with Louisiana Pacific in Saskatchewan with its oriented strandboard plant.

With this current bill, we will have more pollution, more environmental devastation. We will lack the tools to plan and prepare for projects that mitigate their environmental effects.

Charmaine Borg: Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her remarks.

When it comes right down to it, yes, we need this information, this knowledge and these data. How are we supposed to plan and make responsible decisions when we do not have any data or expertise in the field? If we want to plan for the future, if we want to have a prosperous economy in the future, we need such expertise and data.

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As Farley Mowat documented decades ago in Sea of Slaughter, we have already caused a drastic loss of biodiversity in our oceans.  The Magdalen Islanders once hunted walrus, we had Orcas on the east coast, seabirds once blocked out the sun in their enormous numbers, while the coho, sockeye and steelhead salmon runs kept hundreds of B.C. canneries humming, and sea otters existed in large numbers, hanging on to their kelp moorings to munch on abalone.  As beautiful as our oceans are today, what we see is a tragically decimated and threatened water world.

Our oceans are facing numerous threats — over-fishing, pollution from both land-based and marine sources, astonishing levels of plastics circulating in the oceans — an estimated 143 million tons of plastic currently imperils life in the seas, and the dual climate change-related threats of increased temperatures and acidification are the most dangerous of all.  On top of all this we have the increased threat of oil and gas development in fragile ecosystems.

Recently, we have seen a growth of off-shore oil and gas, creating conflicts in some areas between fishing and fossil fuel industries.  The US-Canada agreement to keep oil drilling off Georges’ Bank on the east coast was extended in May 2010 to December 31, 2015.  A similar measure is urgently needed for the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  The Gulf is the most biologically productive marine region in Canada and is essentially an inland sea, as it is surrounded by four Atlantic provinces, with Prince Edward Island in the middle.  Any oil spill would be caught in the counter-clockwise currents of the Gulf, bringing disaster to a multi-billion dollar fishery.   Despite this and despite the fact the promised regional environmental review promised by the Minister of Environment in June 2011 has not yet taken place, the Gulf of St. Lawrence is specifically targeted in Budget 2012 for oil and gas development.

Similarly, recently the Harper Conservatives have launched an oil rush for license bids in the Beaufort Sea.  There is no ecosystem more fragile than that that is ice-covered (at least at the moment) for much of the year.  It is worrying that the National Energy Board has recently accepted industry demands to remove the requirement that any project must be capable of drilling a relief well in the same drilling season to cap any blow-outs.  This is conditional on industry having another viable technology to achieve the same end. So far, the industry has not explained how it will meet this relaxed requirement.

At the same time as the Harper Conservatives aggressively promote off-shore oil and gas development, as well as super-tanker traffic with bitumen crude heading west from Kitimat through some of the most treacherous waters on earth, they are also cutting the emergency response measures to cope with disaster.

Environment Canada’s Environmental Emergency Programme has been shrunk from regional offices, including one in Vancouver, to one office in Quebec.  Ten Coast Guard operations are being shut down.  In BC alone, we are losing the search and rescue operation in Vancouver plus marine communication operations in Kitsilano, Comox and Tofino.  The cuts affect the ability of the Coast Guard to monitor and deal with marine pollution offences. As well, the safety of mariners could be affected.

Meanwhile, the entire contaminants programme within DFO has been shut down.  Nearly all of the DFO scientists studying marine toxicology across Canada are being laid off – 75 scientists. Dr. Peter Ross, a globally respected scientist from BC, recently dismissed from DFO, lamented, “The entire pollution file for the government of Canada, and marine environment in Canada’s three oceans, will be overseen by five junior biologists scattered across Canada – one of which will be in BC.”  (quoted in Times Colonist, “Ottawa sinks pollution checks,” May 20, 2012)

Most shocking, as the Prime Minister presses on to put super-tankers in the Hecate Strait, ranked by his own government as the fourth most dangerous body of water on the planet, scientific studies to determine DFO’s Centre for Off-shore Oil, Gas, and Energy Research (COOGER) is closing, ending work in progress in many areas, including a “Baseline Hydrocarbon Study in Hecate Strait.” It was studying impacts of oil and gas leaks, counter-measures for an oil spill, restoration of environment after any spill, among other key areas.

For Oceans Day, June 8, 2012, our Prime Minister is land-locked.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.
Originally printed in the Hill Times.

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Others in this House might not have been thinking throughout this debate of the famous palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal — Panama. As members know, a palindrome is something that reads the same forward and backward. Unfortunately, I cannot read this trade deal as anything but backward. When the man is the Prime Minister and the plan is this free trade agreement, we do not get anything very progressive. We do not get a canal; we get a ditch.

We have a very small level of trade with Panama. While we see the Conservatives trying their best to gather up as many small trade agreements as possible, such as the one we passed with Jordan and this one with Panama, it is worth bearing in mind the level of trade that is currently at stake.

In 2010, there was just under $214 million in trade in goods between Canada and Panama. We do not expect this to go up very much even with a free trade agreement. If we look at previous free trade agreements with countries like Costa Rica and other small bilateral free trade agreements, we find that in a number of cases our trade has declined after signing the agreements.

We have a global trading framework already which includes the general agreement on tariffs and trade, and under the Uruguay round the creation of the World Trade Organization. We are not labouring any longer as a global society of nations under high tariffs and protectionist measures. They have been mostly slashed.

What would one want in trading and approving a trade agreement with Panama?

We have heard much in this House of the need to improve labour rights within Panama. We have heard that Panama continues to be a nation that traffics heavily in narcotics and drugs, and the rest of the world would like to stem their flow. We also know that Panama is a country that has extensive money laundering problems. This agreement does nothing to address these issues.

When we look at the ways in which Panama has operated as a tax haven, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Panama is one of 26 jurisdictions in the world that have not yet fulfilled their promise as of 2002 to provide tax sharing information. That would provide a greater understanding of when a country is operating unfairly and illegally to harbour revenue and wealth so that the country of origin cannot tax it properly.

The trade agreement with Panama unfortunately does not deal with any of these issues. It does not deal with narcotics trading. It does not deal with the tax haven problem. It does not deal with money laundering. It does have a side agreement to deal with labour, but we can already measure from previous efforts with such side agreements that they have no real effect on improving labour conditions in a country. 

Through the 1990s there was a great increase in trade agreements and a great wave of globalization. Its triumphalism was the creation of the World Trade Organization, but things have slightly stalled since Doha and there is a little less triumphalism. Some people feel that trade, trade liberalization and greater economic activity, particularly greater strength and power to corporations, will raise all boats. Gus Speth, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme, famously said, “This kind of trade raises all yachts”, but it does not do much for the poor. It certainly does nothing to improve labour conditions. If we negotiate a trade agreement while turning a blind eye to the things about our trading partner that worry us, things like drug trafficking, money laundering, human rights abuses, tax havens and places to shelter income that should be taxed under public revenue elsewhere, it is unlikely we would be able to fix them later.

Turning to the text of the agreement, in article 106 there are some carve outs so that the agreement would not unfairly target multilateral environmental agreements. I wish the trade negotiators for Canada had listed all the agreements that are important. They certainly have carved out the ones that were listed in NAFTA, such as, CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Montreal protocol on the ozone layer, the Basel convention on the transport of hazardous materials, the Rotterdam convention on trade in hazardous goods, and the Stockholm convention on persistent organic pollutants. 

A startling omission, since both Panama and Canada are parties to the framework convention on climate change, is that the framework convention on climate change is not listed as an agreement that would be protected against any incidental accidental implications from this trade agreement to climate policies. As we speak, both Canada and Panama remain parties to the Kyoto protocol, although we know that Canada has signalled its intention, quite shamefully I may add, to withdraw from its legal commitments there. I would not expect to see the Kyoto protocol in this agreement, but I certainly expected to see the United Nations framework convention on climate change, to which both countries are currently committed.

More concerning are the sections that appear in chapter 9 of the Canada-Panama free trade agreement. Chapter 9 deals with the quite devastating investor state provisions.

It sounds like the most boring of topics, an investor state provision. What could it be and why do we care? I want all Canadians to care. This provision is our innovation. We were the first anywhere on the planet to create this provision. It was done in NAFTA. In NAFTA, it is chapter 11. In the Canada-Panama agreement it is chapter 9, but it has the same effect.

There was an effort to make this kind of provision global. Some may remember the efforts were negotiated within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It started within the World Trade Organization, but it stalled there. At the WTO they were called multilateral investor agreements. They regrouped and went to the OECD and called them the multilateral agreement on investment, the MAI instead of the MIA. It stalled and failed there. Thank goodness. It was the result of widespread grassroots opposition.

It is the first truly global campaign I have ever seen where grassroots groups using the Internet reached out to each other. I remember one parliamentarian saying to me at the time, “I can’t imagine that any Canadian citizen is really worried about something called the multilateral agreement on investment”. He came back to me a few days later, after he had been on an MPs’ study tour and said that while he was paying for gas at a station in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, he saw on a clipboard a petition to stop the MAI. It contained several pages of signatures.

Why do Canadians at the grassroots and people globally not want more investor state provisions? I should say that once it failed at the OECD, largely thanks to France, but other countries ran to catch up, once it failed there, they abandoned it. By they I am referring to the corporate entities that are pursuing the notion that corporations should have powers superior to those of elected legislatures. The essence of an investor state provision is that multilateral corporations should be able to trump decisions made by democratically elected parliaments and legislatures around the world and they should be able to sue a country if that country passes legislation that a corporation does not like. That is the essence of it. It is not in any traditional way an expropriation.

They have taken it from global to doing it BIT by BIT, literally the acronym BIT, bilateral investment treaty, such as this one. They are collecting up by BITs to replace what they could not do directly, a global agreement that allows corporations to sue governments when governments take action, even when that action is not in any way designed to inhibit trade. It is as such when Canada banned a toxic gasoline additive, or when Canada took steps to ban the export of PCB contaminated waste pursuant to the Basel convention I mentioned earlier, or in the very sad and tragic case of Metalclad, a U.S. corporation. Metalclad wanted to put a toxic waste site next to a little community in Mexico called San Luis Potosi. The people of San Luis Potosi said no, that it was too close to their water source and they would not let that giant U.S. corporation, Metalclad, put its toxic waste disposal facility there. Under chapter 11 of NAFTA, Metalclad sued the federal state of Mexico. 

This agreement means that any corporation with a mailbox in Panama can claim to be an investor and sue Canada at the municipal, provincial or federal levels for any decision it does not like, that it feels impedes its expectation of profits.

In the case of poor little San Luis Potosi, Mexico ended up owing Metalclad just under $17 million.

I fear that my time to speak to this agreement may be coming to a close. I want to conclude by saying firmly and clearly that we must learn from what has gone wrong with chapter 11 of NAFTA and stop including investor-state provisions as an automatic, unthinking addition to every single trade agreement we negotiate.

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