44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 15, 2023 11:00AM
- May/15/23 5:48:05 p.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, once again, I thank my colleague, the member for Repentigny, for her exceptional work on the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. I was fortunate to work with her. We worked well together and collaborated closely with the community and environmental groups that came to share their ideas.
I think that all of the parties and the Government of Canada did a great job of including most of these groups' recommendations in Bill S‑5. I believe that extremely positive changes will follow for all Canadians.
Of course, there are other things we could do, but I think that we have made a lot of progress in terms of protecting the environment for the good of Canadians. I am very proud of the work we did.
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- May/15/23 5:49:50 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for his advocacy. I know he works very hard on environmental protection.
The one thing I would say, and I think my hon. colleague knows this very well, is that the reason those references were removed for those specific activities is that they were already captured under subsection 46(1) as activities that may contribute to pollution. The reality is that information on tailings ponds is already collected and reported under CEPA and Canada's public inventory of releases, known as the national pollutant release inventory. This is already being done, so the committee decided not to single out one particular industry because this information is already being collected and shared with Canadians.
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- May/15/23 5:51:16 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I know my hon. colleague is a strong advocate, and I very much enjoy working with him and having discussions about how we can improve environmental protection in Canada.
I would be honest to say that I would like to have seen more robust inclusion of a right to a healthy environment in this piece of legislation. I would be lying if I said anything different, but this is a huge improvement. Every time we put forward a piece of legislation in this House, we need to be doing right by Canadians by moving the needle forward and always advancing. That is what we have done here. Hopefully, by working with the hon. member and other members in this House as this moves forward and is reviewed every couple of years, we will be able to do that in the years to come.
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- May/15/23 6:05:42 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, the right to a healthy environment is set out in the bill's preamble. Therefore, it does not apply to other laws.
Does my colleague believe that the government lacked the courage to establish a real right to a healthy environment in its modernization of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act?
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- May/15/23 6:06:04 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, when the government implements small measures, it often does so to ease its conscience. Had it had the courage to act, it would have overhauled the environmental law. We are among the laggards. It is embarrassing when we go abroad and are told about the state of our law. I believe that answers my colleague's question
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- May/15/23 6:19:13 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, the Bloc Québécois agrees with some points, especially with regard to territorial sovereignty. Quebec already has its own law, the Environment Quality Act.
The smooth-talking Liberals are in government. I will remind members of their track record. Canada has the worst record of any G7 country for the average per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Since the arrival of the Liberals in 2015, Canada is the only G7 country whose greenhouse gas emissions have increased. That is quite the record.
However, I can say what the government is good at. Canada is second among the G20 countries for public investment in fossil fuels. Trans Mountain now has a $30-billion price tag. That is a significant sum.
Yes, we agree with respecting environmental laws. However, how can this government, which boasts about being a green government, justify this type of bill today?
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- May/15/23 6:21:22 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I just want to bring up the business of enforcement, which the member talked about at the end of her speech.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act is widely held as unenforceable. It has not ever been enforced in any reasonable way by the public. Bill S-5 would not change that. Ontario has had an environmental bill of rights for many years now, with an enforcement mechanism. Again, under that bill, it has not had anybody complaining about backyard bonfires.
I am wondering if the member could comment on the fact that this is really not going to happen, but that we really need this. If we have an environmental bill of rights, we have to have some way to enforce it.
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- May/15/23 6:34:27 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. I would like to extend condolences to everyone in his riding who has experienced this disaster. It is important to recognize that they are victims of climate change.
My colleague talked a lot about the Senate, but I would like to remind him that the Liberals and the Conservatives did not listen to any environmental groups, unlike the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party, which made proposals based on information from environmental groups.
I completely understand that the people of his riding want to promote economic development, but I am tired of people pitting environmental protection against economic development. I look forward to a day when the two are finally reconciled. In this case, unfortunately, the Liberal-Conservative coalition rejected everything the environmental groups were calling for.
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Madam Speaker, Canadians care about the health of their environment. According to polling, 92% of Canadians believe the government should recognize the right to live in a healthy environment. Canada has several major pieces of legislation on environmental protection, but the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is the centrepiece of that commitment.
Bill S-5, which we are debating here today, is the long-awaited update to that act. It has been 24 years since the last update, and there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Some of that water likely contained some of the many new toxins we have invented in the last two decades, and that is one thing that needed to be updated with this bill. We have also learned a great deal about the cumulative effects of even tiny doses of these toxins. We literally have to run to keep up with the ways we are damaging the environment here in Canada and around the world.
People concerned about the environment welcomed the effort to update the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, or CEPA, as it known for short, and the NDP welcomed that too. It is long overdue.
I want to spend a bit of time talking about the history of this particular bill, as I think it puts some of the efforts to fix CEPA in a better context.
The bill was first introduced in the previous Parliament as Bill C-28, tabled in April 2021, two years ago. However, the government did not bring it to the floor of the House for debate that spring and then called an election in the summer, so that ended that version of the bill.
Environmental law experts across the country analyzed that bill and began to drop ideas to make it better when it came back to Parliament. There was some hope that the government would take some of those ideas and amend the new version before reintroducing it so that things would not be considered out of scope. Instead, it tabled the exact same version of the bill, the same as Bill C-28, in the Senate in February 2022, where it took on its life as Bill S-5, the bill we are debating today. The Senate took a long, serious look at the bill in committee, improved it in several ways and sent it to the House at the end of June last year, and the House took it up last fall. It has since been through second reading debate and committee, and we see it here at report stage.
This bill, at its heart, is about allowing Canadians to live in a clean, healthy environment. Much of its detail is in regulations around toxic chemicals, chemicals we have invented and continue to invent and chemicals released into the environment, whether knowingly or not, that can directly affect our health and degrade the ecosystems we all depend on.
One new and very important part of this bill is the long-overdue inclusion of language that declares that Canadians have the right to live in a healthy environment. Last year, on July 28, 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that recognized the right to a healthy environment around the world. A hundred and fifty-nine countries around the world have legal obligations to protect the human right to a healthy environment, but Canada does not.
There are environmental bills of rights in Ontario, Quebec, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but there is no federal law that explicitly recognizes the right to a healthy environment in Canada. Bill S-5 could change that, so it is a positive step forward, but it is important to back up declarations of rights with legislation that enforces those rights. Unfortunately, the previous version of CEPA was considered unenforceable, and this one is no better.
The Senate committee studying Bill S-5 sent the bill to the House with the following message:
This committee would like to state their concern that the right to a healthy environment cannot be protected unless it is made truly enforceable. This enforceability would come by removing the barriers that exist to the current remedy authority within Section 22 of CEPA, entitled “Environmental Protection Action.” There is concern that Section 22 of CEPA contains too many procedural barriers and technical requirements that must be met to be of practical use. As Bill S-5 does not propose the removal or re-evaluation of these barriers, this Committee is concerned that the right to a healthy environment may remain unenforceable.
The reason the Senate did not fix this enforceability issue with amendments is that apparently it would have been considered out of scope, so I would say the government should table separate legislation as soon as possible to remedy this. Again, the government could have missed all of this if it had fixed this problem with CEPA and Bill S-5 before tabling the new version of the bill.
Similarly, there were other major shortcomings in Bill S-5 that were out of scope for amendments, including a lack of legally binding and enforceable air quality standards. It is really quite surprising that the first draft of Bill S-5 made no attempts to address air quality at all. It also lacks a more open, inclusive and transparent risk assessment process for the evaluation of genetically engineered animals in the environment, especially wild salmon. Salmon are a critical part of our aquatic ecosystems and are sacred to first nations that have relied on healthy salmon populations for millennia. The risk of introducing genetically engineered salmon into the wild environment should set off alarm bells on all sorts of fronts.
I would like to mention here that I have a private member's bill, Bill C-219, the Canadian environmental bill of rights, that would extend the right to a clean environment across the federal mandate, not just for toxins and other aspects covered under CEPA, but for all aspects of the environment covered by federal legislation. The heart of Bill C-219 is a transparent accountability process that would allow Canadians to ensure their government is actually upholding the right to a clean environment. That accountability process is missing from Bill S-5 and CEPA. It could have and should have been included. I am hoping that the government and all parties will support my bill and use that part of it as a model to strengthen the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
In conclusion, I would like to make it clear that the NDP will be voting in favour of Bill S-5 at this stage. We are happy that the right to live in a clean and healthy environment has finally been recognized within federal legislation, and we are happy the bill confirms the government's commitment to implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples under the act. However, the bill has many shortcomings, only some of which I have listed above.
I was heartened to hear the speech from the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, in which he admitted these shortcomings and called for a new bill amending CEPA to fix them as soon as possible. Why they were not included in the bill before us, which has been 24 years in the making, is beyond my comprehension, but I would certainly welcome such a bill.
Most Canadians will be happy to see the bill pass, and I know that most parties will be voting for the bill, albeit some reluctantly. I hope the Senate will deal with it promptly so we can enjoy its benefits and quickly start the process of crafting a new bill that will once again make CEPA a stronger act, an act that will truly protect Canadians and ensure that we and our grandchildren can live in the clean and healthy environment that is our right.
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- May/15/23 6:49:09 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay for his leadership in introducing a true right to a healthy environment through Bill C-219.
I think this is the third speech I have heard sharing an interest in introducing better legislation before we even get this bill passed. We know that the Conservative Party intends to support this legislation, but it does not even support a carbon tax as a starting point, the simplest environmental policy of any to begin with. What does he think this says about the quality of the legislation in front of us now?
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