Subscribe to our Newsletter

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Laurie in Debate

Bill 214: Healthy Futures Act

Alberta Hansard – November 26, 2007

Bill 214: Healthy Futures Act debate in the 26th Legislature of Alberta, 3rd Session by Ms. Laurie Blakeman, MLA Edmonton-Centre

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I am thrilled and pleased to be able to move second reading of Bill 214, the Healthy Futures Act.

I’ve been in this Assembly for 11 years – this is my 11th fall sitting – and I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever actually managed to get a bill into debate. This could be my first time, so I really am delighted. Thank you.

This bill has excellent genealogy. It, in fact, comes directly flowing from the famous red book put out by the Liberal opposition, which is our plan for public health care called Creating a Healthy Future, made famous in this Assembly by the previous Premier, who made it into an airborne missive and had to withdraw that and apologize for it.

I can refer people to page 23 of that document for anyone that would like to read further the policy document that we produced that has resulted now in Bill 214. This is our policy position number one, which is to “require major policies and funding decisions to undergo ‘Health Impact Assessments’.” Essentially, many of the important factors in determining our health really have very little to do with the health care system, but they have an awful lot to do with lifestyle choices, injury prevention, the environment, et cetera. That is what we are trying to capture in this bill, that the government would adopt a policy of doing health impact assessments when they were considering either licensing or giving approval for large projects or looking at funding large projects.

I don’t have to think very hard to come up with a number of situations that we are looking at in Alberta where a health impact assessment could be put into play, I think for very good effect; for example, the situation that we have in Fort McMurray and north of Fort McMurray and the situation soon to come in Strathcona county with the upgraders, what they call Upgrader Alley. Even a little further east from there is the new coal mine that’s being opened up in the Dodds/ Round Hill area. Or even I’m thinking back to the work that I did around the Turner Valley gas plant and trying to make that into a historical public heritage site and the problems they’ve had there with the ongoing leakage from the plant into nearby water sources and trying to test for that and get to the bottom of it. So there are just a couple of ideas of where a health impact assessment would be useful to have in place to help inform our decisions.

I think there’s a fairly wide range that the bill would take into consideration.

The purpose of the health assessment process is

We’re suggesting that there would be a director of assessment review put in place, who could then oversee and administer these reviews, and there would be a screening committee, as well, that worked hand in hand. Proposed activities for the director of the assessment review are: a description of the proposed activity; an analysis of the need for it; consideration of alternatives to the proposed activity; identification of potentially affected populations, including residents, workers, vulnerable populations, and other identifiable groups; an analysis of site selection; identification of existing health status of the population that might be affected; an analysis of possible effects on sociocultural well-being, et cetera.

The list goes on. I encourage people to actually read the bill on this. Certainly, one of the things that I have really come to understand as the Official Opposition shadow minister for Health and Wellness is how important those social determinants of health are. I started out by saying that a lot of the factors in determining our health really have very little to do with the health care system. Well, the social determinants of health take into consideration things like income, economic status, social equity, education, the environment, family life and community support, social stresses, job security.

I think one of the things that we find really important when we look at this policy of health impact assessments is agriculture and food production. If we’re going to protect our food sources and also the farm workers that work with it, we’ve got to be very conscious of what we’re putting into the air, the water, and the soil that they, then, have to work with. I argue all the way through this that it doesn’t get us further ahead if we end up with massive development and a sick population or massive development and we’ve poisoned our land.

You know, I’m not saying that that’s imminent, I’m not saying the sky is going to fall, but I am saying that we’ve reached a point where the level of our development gets larger and larger and larger. Who would have comprehended 50 years ago the kind of development that we are now looking at in Fort McMurray? Who would have contemplated work camps of 5,000 to 6,000 people, and not just one, Mr. Speaker, but many, many, many work camps with that many people in them supporting a number of different developments in that area? [ interjection] Someone from across the way is saying that, oh, they knew about it 50 years ago, which frankly is making the member older than I thought he was. That was an interesting thing to learn today.

The World Health Organization supports the use of health impact assessments. From their point of view, they say that it’s based on four values, and these values provide a platform from which the benefits of a health impact assessment can be derived and link health impact assessments to the policy environment in which the assess-ments are being undertaken: democracy, which allows people to participate in the development and implementation; equity, because it’s examining the distribution of impacts from a proposal on the whole population, not just on the people that are going to expend the money or make the money but on everybody that’s around it, and I think that’s really important; sustainable development, which we with limited natural resources in this province really, you know, understand we need to get a handle on, but those short-and long-term impacts have to be considered for sustainable development; ethical use of evidence. I really believe in evidence-based decision-making using the best available quantitative and qualitative evidence to be identified and used in assessment.

That’s coming out of the World Health Organization. Clearly we’re not the only ones who are anticipating this, but the Liberal opposition issued our policy paper in 2003. That’s when we came out with this recommendation. It’s taken me this long to get a bill draw to be able to actually transform that idea into what you see before you as Bill 214, but I think that those concepts that are behind this bill are very important. We are in second reading of Bill 214, so I am generally speaking about the principles of the bill, but that is what is behind it.

I’ve mentioned some of the places where I think it would be useful when we’re just looking at current development proposals that are in front of us, like Upgrader Alley and Fort McMurray and some of those other areas. But, very quickly, when I go through and look at some of the newspaper articles that have been done around problems that have cropped up, you think we should be able to see this.

Mr. Ouellette: I was daydreaming. Sorry.

Ms Blakeman: Oh, boy. Yeah, you are. Might want to put that cellphone on vibrate.

I think this is a very exciting opportunity for this Assembly. I know a number of times in the past the government has stolen our ideas. I’m happy to have that happen with this bill.

Thank you.