Parliament In Review: October 31, 2011

Monday, October 31 saw a study in contrasts as two matters were debated in the House of Commons: a private member's bill which understandably saw broad agreement, and an opposition motion which should have but was instead met with a painful level of denial from the Cons.

The Big Issue

That of course would be Claude Gravelle's motion calling for Canada to end the mining, use and export of asbestos. But you'd never know it from the Cons' response - as the first two Con speeches stuck so dutifully to the party's talking points that they didn't even deign to mention the word "asbestos" once in dealing with the motion. Which surely speaks volumes as to how indefensible the Cons know it is to stick so stubbornly to their defence of the industry.

Mind you, the streak was finally broken in a response from Wladyslaw Lizon in defence of dangerous substances generally. And even that may not have been the most jaw-droppingly callous moment from the Cons, as Christian Paradis argued that we should keep encouraging the use of substances which have been proven to be unsafe by pointing to a lack of data about possible substitutes.

Not surprisingly, Pat Martin played a prominent role in the debate - highlighting the amount of public money and time the Cons have used to tar Canada with the reputation as the lone developed country which refuses to acknowledge the dangers of all forms of asbestos, duly mocking the lone study supposedly supporting the use of chrysotile asbestos on the basis that it's harmful enough to boost the immune system of those exposed to it, and proposing that the public money now going into propping up the asbestos industry instead be used to remediate buildings still laced with it. Elizabeth May questioned why the Cons are willing to ignore hundreds of thousands of asbestos-related deaths while shedding crocodile tears over much smaller humanitarian crises. May also pointed out the environmental damage that asbestos mining has inflicted in Quebec, while Anne Marie Day noted the health impacts of asbestos mining. Dennis Bevington countered the Cons' attempt to paint the motion as an attack on the mining industry as a whole by noting that we'll have a much tougher time exporting anything at all if we send the message that all of our products are as unsafe as asbestos - which figures to be a particular problem as the Cons turn Canada into an international pariah. Joe Comartin, Nathan Cullen and Francois Lapointe all noted the entirely justified concern expressed about asbestos by Cons past and present. And Cullen nicely summed up the the dangers when a government sees itself primarily as a lobbying arm of an industry (as the Cons are doing just as much for asbestos as for the tar sands):

I have some experience with this argument because I introduced a private member's bill in a previous Parliament to ban a certain type of chemical in plastics, a softener that was an endocrine disrupter and a known carcinogen. As it moved through Parliament, the government raised the same issues, as did industry. They said there were no good replacements. Government members said there were no known replacements and that any replacement they could find would be very expensive. This is exactly how industry, which is being targeted for exposing people to risky products, always responds. It is the same argument in reverse that the tobacco industry used for years. It asked for proof that smoking gave people cancer, said it could not be done, and said it would provide experts who would say otherwise.

Of course, industry is going to defend itself to the nth degree, because that is what it does, but the role of government is to defend the rights and interests of Canadians and, as a further extension, to stop promoting the use of something that we know kills people and at the very least to slap a label on it that says it is dangerous.

First Contact

Meanwhile, Con MP Patricia Davidson spoke to her legislation to regulate non-corrective cosmetic contact lenses - which received support from all parties who spoke to it. But it was hard not to suspect that if exactly the same bill had been introduced by an opposition member, the Cons would have received orders to vote against it en masse as an attack on Canadian jobs.

In Brief

Nycole Turmel mused that oil and gas is the only sector of Canada's economy that hasn't been stagnant under the oil-backed Con government. Cullen spoke against the Cons' determination to torch the data from the federal gun registry. Helene Laverdiere challenged the Cons to take the lead against the criminalization of homosexuality in the Commonwealth. Harold Albrecht's bill on an suicide prevention strategy received positive responses from all parties. Charlie Angus raised the e-mail in which Tony Clement directly stated that he'd be flowing funds to municipalities, only to be met with the usual change of subject from the minister not responsible. Jean Crowder questioned the Cons on their cuts to Service Canada. And finally, Rathika Sitsabaiesan's question about the lack of jobs available for new graduates struggling under the burden of massive student debt was met with the Cons' usual spin about providing tax breaks for those lucky enough not to face that problem.