- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Green Party
- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,862.18
- Government Page
- May/7/24 1:36:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, when my hon. colleague and friend from Nunavut speaks, she shames us all.
My partisan instinct might be to jump up and say, but I am from the Green Party. I want to be a good ally more than I want to make empty claims. I want to be there, as we all do, along with my colleague from Kitchener Centre, to stand up when it matters, to insist that we do more than use “land back” hashtags and that we actually pursue land back as a key step in reconciliation. We have to recognize that decolonializing this country is the project that would save settler culture people.
We have to fight together to create a fair country, and it is an honour to work in the same place as the hon. member for Nunavut.
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- Nov/2/23 12:00:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the debate on home heating, sometimes people express a belief that natural gas is more environmentally friendly than heating oil. That is not true. For the most part, natural gas is shale gas. The method for producing shale gas leaves a bigger carbon footprint than heating oil. It is not a good choice for our climate.
Can my colleague comment on the issue of the carbon footprint of shale gas?
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Madam Speaker, I could not agree more with my hon. friend, the parliamentary secretary. We should get Canada to work together, to think like a country, and get all of our orders of government to work together just as well as the European Union does, with 27 separate sovereign nation states and 30 official languages. Canada operates like a group of separate fiefdoms, each going in their own direction and not wanting to co-operate with each other. I do not understand why, but that is the nub of many issues, from the climate crisis to the affordability crisis.
Just to make a quick point about Airbnb, yes, it is municipal. The City of New York has been brave and put in a rule that short-term vacation rentals cannot be for less than 30 days, because they were seeing too much available housing being sucked up into the market for Airbnbs.
We do need to act. Municipalities need to act, but they are going to need supports, provincially and federally, to take on what is essentially a multinational giant.
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- May/2/23 10:31:52 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I am honoured to respond to the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre. I can add nothing to her words. I hope that I can be worthy of her thinking of me as a good ally, and I agree.
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Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member is well-meaning in his suggestions in terms of economic development, so I do not mean to suggest anything other than good intentions.
However, the reality of the Trans Mountain pipeline is that it is neither economical, nor are there markets, nor is there anything long term for any part of our population. I will say to him that in terms of the hearings that were held before the National Energy Board, the Kinder Morgan corporation put forward that it plans to create through its project fewer than 100 permanent jobs. It also put forward that it was going to be the 100% backstop for costs. The corporation then carved off its Canadian operations, kept the money it had raised towards building the pipeline and used it to pay off the debts of the parent corporation, at which point it told the federal government it was not going to build it. There is no case that it is economically viable.
Meanwhile there are many nations all along the pipeline route that want it stopped because it violates their rights under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I would just suggest to the member that the particular example he gave is rather fraught.
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I should not digress from my digressions when I have a five-minute speech.
This is a critically important issue that we make progress—
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- Jun/16/22 7:02:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, we have complex crises and emergencies: the climate crisis, the pandemic, an energy crisis, the war. All of them are affecting food insecurity. When so many complex systems present themselves in crises, there is more we can do than provide food aid, as his department can do. How do we think strategically to actually confront these multiple crises?
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- Jun/16/22 3:10:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, regarding government financing of the TMX pipeline, in written answers to Questions on the Order Paper, the government is claiming that BMO and TD reviews make this project financially viable, but due to commercial confidentiality it will not release them. Previous TD reports on TMX were public. Why hide them now? It is entirely likely that the government plans to write off financial risks and debt and leave us financially exposed. If it is so commercially viable, why can we not see the reports?
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- May/31/22 10:59:20 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, many years ago—in 1988, to be precise—I was recruited by the spectacular scientist who headed The Royal Society of Canada, which is Canada's premier scientific body. He was Dr. Digby McLaren, and he realized they had a problem. The Royal Society had fellows, and they happened to mostly be fellows, so they asked this question: Why do we have such a high proportion of men? This was the beginning. It is hardly diversity and inclusion to recognize that white men dominated everything. Bringing in more white women is an improvement, but our society has overwhelmingly failed to have institutions that look like Canada.
In the context of this debate, the research councils and the tri-councils have made it a priority to look at diversity and inclusion. Was that their decision or was it politically dictated by the Liberal Party, as some have suggested in this debate?
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- Mar/21/22 4:07:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I really am in favour of this motion, and one of the things I want to highlight in it is the last point: a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry. Just within the last few days, an important report was released called “Snow-washing, Inc: How Canada is marketed abroad as a secrecy jurisdiction”. This is not just federal. I want to emphasize that this happens provincially too. However, non-Canadian corporations can register and take housing out of our markets for speculators.
Does the hon. member have a comment on that?
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- Feb/16/22 6:49:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to pursue a question I initially asked in question period late last year, on December 2, 2021. The question ended up with the Minister of Fisheries. This topic that I am going to raise again tonight crosses several different departments federally. At its core, it is about environmental racism. It is about the illegal dumping of toxic waste on Mohawk territory. I cannot imagine any non-indigenous or non-Black community allowing it, but we do have an environmental racism problem in this country. I hope my private member's bill, Bill C-226, will be passed soon. It is a non-partisan effort to make sure the federal government adopts a strategy to deal with environmental racism, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has done for decades.
To my specific example, this was part of my question on December 2:
On the Mohawk territories of Kanesatake, there is a toxic waste dump. It has been leaking harmful chemicals, and it also affects the wildlife and the fish. It is not as though the government has not said something about it.
There was a directive delivered to the toxic waste facility from the federal government on November 18, 2020, to call for the toxic waste site to be cleaned up and for the dumping of toxic waste to stop. I asked the government, “Could the minister update us on what is being done to remove the toxic waste facility from Kanesatake?” The answer came from the hon. Minister of Fisheries. I think her answer was sound, but we did not have the details. The minister said that disposing of waste in this manner is dangerous to people, fish habitats and fish, and said, “We will hold any individuals who violate this act to account.” As things progressed, it is clear that the illegal dumping continues.
The Province of Quebec allowed dumping outside the confines of the specific permit that was given in 2015 for a recycling landfill, which is what it was originally licensed for. The Province of Quebec gave that permit to G & R Recycling in 2015 and by 2016 the complaints had begun. They continued as residents nearby smelled toxic and nauseating fumes and became sickened by these fumes. Finally, in September 2020, the Province of Quebec revoked the licence. Again, as evidence of environmental racism, it was not until the black ooze from this toxic waste facility began seeping onto settler culture farms outside of the Mohawk community that the province took action.
The federal government is still looking at this situation and the figures are just astonishing. This facility was licensed for storing up to 27,800 cubic metres of waste and it now has 400,000 cubic metres of waste, or 15 times what it was originally licensed for. This should not be tolerated. The community of Kanesatake is calling out for justice.
Chief and former RCMP investigator, Jeremy Tomlinson, has said that these facilities are being built and people are paying to haul the waste away, but “instead of getting rid of it at a designated site, they’re dumping it here. Think about it, they’re building on land that was stolen from us and dumping on what little land we have left. People have had enough.” I am hoping in the late show we can get to some solutions for this community.
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Mr. Speaker, I am happy to answer the question. I struggled with the decision to go. I work hard at those events. They are not junkets. I was part of a very careful COVID protocol, which involved testing before I left and daily testing on site. The British National Health Service did an amazing job of preventing that event from being a superspreader event.
I think we all worked hard, and it is certainly the only trip I will take internationally. The only trip I ever take internationally is to go to a climate negotiation, because the threat of the climate crisis, as I mentioned, is the only thing that eclipses COVID right now, short of a nuclear war.
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