I wouldn't be here tonight and wouldn't have come up on such short notice if I didn't think that if the changes go ahead, they would take away something so valuable in Canada.
What Mr. Amos says is 100% right. You know, when you change something with the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which really wasn't giving Canadians the right to navigate their waters; it was just putting into words, into statute, that which Canadians had in common law.... So to take that away because government doesn't want to do the work any longer, or because they want to move faster and they don't have the resources--that's wrong. This is something where the decision should not be made in Ottawa or by the Minister of Transport. The tool is that every single time you go to block a river, put a dam or a causeway in, you need to go to the people who are affected and seek their consent and you need to do the research to provide to those people first.
To do otherwise would leave us with two-tier environmentalism. It wouldn't trigger environmental assessments under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act anymore, and ultimately it would leave protection of our waters to the people who are most powerful, who have the most money or the most influence. And those...it may be one or two people in the middle of a 200 or 300 square kilometre empty space, and they'll be lost. And those waters might be what really makes them feel Canadian and might make them really feel they're part of a special country.
That's why this act is so important, and that move from a right to a discretionary right is probably one of the most serious and fundamental shifts in law you can have.