Transport committee  Thanks. I believe you all have a copy of the brief that Lake Ontario Waterkeeper submitted. I'll just walk you through our proposals and our comments from that brief. As well, I have had an opportunity to review some of the transcripts from the previous committee hearings, so I

Transport committee  Yes, that would be a grave concern. One of the reasons I chose the Petitcodiac River as an example is that the federal government did do an environment impact assessment on that river. The findings were that if the causeway were removed, the river would be completely restored, an

Transport committee  By way of illustration, I'll give you the story that Mr. Kennedy tells about the founding of the Hudson Riverkeeper, which was the first public interest Riverkeeper organization on the planet. In the 1960s the Hudson River was completely destroyed. The fish were inedible. The pla

Transport committee  In response, there are a couple of examples. There's the Don River in Toronto. It would be questionable whether or not the Don River is considered a navigable waterway. My hunch would be that most people would consider it a minor waterway. It's navigable once a year when it's flo

Transport committee  I see your point. Without having a proposed definition to work from, it is difficult for us. In our recommendations we did suggest that if the transport committee or Transport Canada is very committed to moving forward with these amendments, a more specific wording should be prov

Transport committee  So conceptually, just making sure that the broader the definition is to protect future uses...that's what we're hearing from the public is really important.

Transport committee  I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, which is on Lake Ontario just outside of Toronto. It's a fairly industrial city. I grew up in an environment where we assumed that Lake Ontario was supposed to be dirty. We assumed that the Oshawa Creek was not supposed to be something that we would

Transport committee  The boating community is really important. Every area you go to, you have a slightly different community. For the Ottawa River, there's an Ottawa Riverkeeper program. That's one of the world's greatest rafting rivers. There's a strong boating community there that has very partic

Transport committee  The American system is completely different from the Canadian system when it comes to environmental protection. They have the Clean Water Act, which actually encourages citizen involvement. And it encourages big lawsuits, which to Canadians sounds extremely litigious and very con

Transport committee  Lake Ontario Waterkeeper is a registered Canadian charity. We're based in Toronto. Our membership program is not a paid membership program in the way that you would think of an organization. We represent thousands of individuals and grassroots organizations on Lake Ontario. We al

Transport committee  We do have paid members. We have people who do give us $30 or $50 annually. We host fundraising events that hundreds of people attend.

Transport committee  These are people who would call themselves members of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper either because they have paid us a $30 annual membership fee or because they work with our staff on a regular basis. We don't do the kind of cold-call direct mail that you may be implying. We would nev

Transport committee  Our mandate is to restore and protect Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes watershed. We work on a legal approach so we are involved with federal and provincial laws, commenting on certificates of approval and teaching law students. We've mentored about 100 law students in the last s

Transport committee  That's correct.

Transport committee  I think it depends on how you define infrastructure. We've seen how important these waterways are. They are fundamentally the natural infrastructure for Canadian communities. You cannot win back waterways across Canada if you don't make sure that environmental laws are respected.