Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Environment): I am rising today on the occasion of Earth Day. This event is being celebrated around the world to remind us that our natural environment is fundamental to our quality of life and indeed to our very existence.

When the first Earth Day was held almost 30 years ago, it was held less as a celebration than a protest, a protest at the time against the obvious degradation of the environment that was occurring around us. It was part of a movement that ultimately led to the creation of the institutions and the laws that safeguard our environment today.

This coming Sunday at The Forks, Manitobans will have the opportunity to come together to celebrate our own made-in-Manitoba Earth Day. Our own Fort Whyte nature centre has been instrumental in organizing Manitoba's Earth Day. It is a very fitting role for this world-renowned environmental education centre. Fort Whyte's participation in the events of the day will emphasize that we have come a long way in our environmental actions and thinking.

Fort Whyte itself is a case in point, Madam Speaker. They have turned abandoned gravel pits and wasteland into a world-class environmental education centre which has influenced the environmental awareness of a generation of Manitobans. They have undertaken the restoration of tall grass prairie lands and they are involved in the innovative reclamation of an old industrial site in Transcona. They are striving to make every day Earth Day.

The first Earth Day marked just the start of the awareness and involvement for many. Today in Manitoba it marks the celebration of a very high-level awareness and involvement in environmental issues. Over the past several years literally thousands of young people have been involved in environmental projects through the Manitoba Youth Corps, the Manitoba Green Team, and our schools are encouraging and sponsoring a wide variety of environmental activities. Environment and sustainable development is an accepted part of our schools' curriculum. Tens of thousands of school children visit facilities like Fort Whyte and Oak Hammock Marsh each year to learn about their environment and what they can do to help preserve it.

Madam Speaker, we have had to learn that there are limits to the stresses we can put on the environment, limits that only became apparent as our populations and economies grew. Our children, on the other hand, are learning about the concepts of ecology and stewardship at an early age. Environmental stewardship is for many of them a fundamental part of their value system.

So we celebrate. We also have a time of introspection to ask ourselves what more needs to be done and what challenges lie ahead. We have done much to promote the principles of sustainable development, but we still have a long way to go before sustainable development becomes second nature in everything that we Manitobans do.

Many of our challenges are external–climactic change and other issues of that sort, greenhouse gas emissions. All of these are things that will require fundamental shifts in the way we do things in our society. So let us celebrate Earth Day, because we have come a long way in the past 30 years, and indeed we do have much to celebrate. Let us remind ourselves that this is a work in progress and that we must now apply the lessons we have learned from our past successes to meet larger challenges in the future. Thank you.

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Mr. Gregory Dewar (Selkirk): Madam Speaker, I would like to respond to the minister's statement on Earth Day.

Earth Day is the day that we recognize the importance of maintaining the quality of our air, land, and water, and the key element of that is public participation in decision making, in a statement from a government that has cut funding to the Department of Environment by $5 million since it was elected, 1988, a government that we do not know where the status of the Household Hazardous Waste Program is. I raised the issue earlier on this week with the minister with on off, on off. Individuals out there are doing the responsible thing. They are collecting their household hazardous waste–paints, solvents. They do not know what to do with them, because the minister has yet to come forward to make a statement about that.

Manitobans are paying a two-cent environmental levy on containers, and now currently the government has about seven or so–maybe even higher–million dollars in that fund. Yet, there are still Manitobans who do not receive recycling opportunities in this province. This is a government that used the Sustainable Development Innovations Fund as a political slush fund, where 90 percent of the grants went to projects in Conservative ridings, a government that never once supported any of our private members' resolutions on this side of the House pertaining to the improvement of our environment. This is what we have from the members opposite.

Earlier today, I had a chance to take part in an event in my constituency where a group of students, along with their teachers, reclaimed a portion of their school yard, and they were turning it into tall grass prairie. They put aside a part of the project to grow vegetables for the Selkirk Food Bank. This, to me, is what Earth Day is all about. It is about grassroot action to protect and to save our environment. Thank you very much.

Hon. James McCrae (Minister of Education and Training): Madam Speaker, I have a brief statement for the House.

Madam Speaker, I would like to say a few words about the senseless deaths of 14 students and one teacher at a high school in Littleton, Colorado. As a parent, my heart goes out to the staff and the students, family members and friends who are struggling to come to grips with this most unfortunate tragedy. We tend to look upon our schools as safe havens for our children. When we send our children out the door each morning we hope that they will be nurtured, challenged and stimulated and come home a little wiser each day, but the life lessons doled out in Littleton are the types of lessons we hope our children never have to learn.

The tragedy of Littleton, Colorado, is one that we do not wish to see repeated anywhere. We must come up with strategies to prevent these types of incidents from happening. We much reach out to our children, our families and our friends when they are in need. The events at Littleton, Colorado, cause us to pause and think about how much we cherish our families and our friends and how important it is to listen to and to be aware of the feelings of others. We must be aware of subtle signals others send out, signals that may indicate they want us to reach out and help them. We must answer that call. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

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Mr. Gord Mackintosh (St. Johns): Madam Speaker, perhaps I will just repeat some of the comments that I made yesterday in Members' Statements. I think it is important to begin by acknowledging that when a family sees a child off to school, they expect that child to spend the day learning and growing and building a stronger future, and to instead come to grips with the eradication of a future at school is one of the most troubling events that can transpire. As I said yesterday, the only good that can come from such a horror is it gives us the opportunity to re-examine not just our personal behaviour perhaps as parents, perhaps as mentors, but it does provide us an opportunity to re-examine our systems, how we collectively deal with challenges in the community, and it allows us to re-examine our social development as a community.

I note that it was the Minister of Education who made the statement. Just to draw on that for a moment, we indeed have to make every effort to ensure that our schools are safe places for learning, but at the same time we must recognize that the scourge of violence and hatred is not bred in the schools but is brought in from outside. At the same time we all must also recognize that schools can be a greater part of the solution through such programs as nonviolent conflict resolution programs. We are seeing conflict mediators in the school grounds. We are seeing restorative justice programs develop in our schools. We are seeing safe school policies initiated through consultations with the students, the greater community, parent councils, educators and administrators, and we have, I think, some good models to go forward on, not just where nonviolence and tolerance and respect are taught but where it is indeed practised.

Madam Speaker, to go outside of the school to where indeed the hatred and the violence are bred is the greater challenge. I think it is incumbent on each of us as community leaders in our own way, those in positions of authority, to question how we can deal with those big issues out there. I cannot help but think of how we must re-evaluate the virtually unchecked growth explosion, if you will, of a violent, popular culture. It is a popular culture characterized by the glorification of violent so-called heroes in movies, of video games that actually enlist children in violence against human characters. As I said yesterday, the sanctity of human life is therefore relegated, denigrated to mere body counts in movies, on television or to a score in a video game.

It is hard here in Manitoba, one relatively small jurisdiction, to do something about that, but now is the time to think about what we can do. Closer to home, we know how important it is to constantly re-evaluate our responses to violence in the home through our policies regarding domestic violence, for example, how well we learn from past tragedies, even in this jurisdiction. We must re-evaluate how we deal both on the prevention and the suppression side of violent gang activity, and we must re-evaluate how well we deal with the challenge of youth despair.

In this province where we suffer record levels of youth despair, if you rely on the measurements that are available to us, whether it is violent youth crime–I understand the largest increase in violent youth crime in Canada, the province's–we look at the teenage suicide rates, and we look at risk factors such as the rate of children in care, the rate of teenage pregnancy, Manitoba is not faring well. So we have work to do.

I will conclude with yesterday's comments that, while we indeed mourn the loss that this tragedy has brought, we also hope that from this school in Colorado some most profound and unintended lessons will be taught and that in some way we will progress. Thank you.

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Inkster): Madam Speaker, I would ask for leave just to add a few words in regard to this issue.

Madam Speaker: Does the honourable member for Inkster have leave to make comment on the ministerial statement? [agreed]

Mr. Lamoureux: It is indeed something that I think has touched the hearts and souls of individuals young and old from coast to coast on this particular continent. It is a very sad occasion and a lot to be learned by it. In fact, we should never believe that an incident of this nature could never happen north of the United States. We can recall a number of years back where there was a student that was killed in a high school situation in Sturgeon Creek. It happened some 15, 20 years ago.

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When we think of our schools, we like to believe that these are safe and secure premises, that they are there for our young people to learn, to challenge their abilities from an educational standpoint. I think that all of our hearts and condolences would go to the families and friends and all the young people who were so dramatically affected. What we have seen through the media has had an impact on people here in Manitoba. You listen to radio shows or you read newspapers or get commentaries from television, you will see young people who have been torn apart and do not know what to think. It goes right to our seniors, that whole element of fear.

Hopefully all of us, as legislators, will gain something from this tragic occurrence and see the importance of doing what we can to provide that safe and secure atmosphere so our children feel safe in our public and private schools. Thank you.

Madam Speaker: The honourable Minister of Finance, with a ministerial statement.

Hon. Harold Gilleshammer (Minister of Finance): No, I have some tablings.