I'll have to explain. In fact, I will be presenting on behalf of a number of different groups.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, members, for having us here. My name is Will Amos. I'm staff counsel with the University of Ottawa and Ecojustice Environmental Law Clinic, so I'm an environmental lawyer by trade.
Today I will be representing a variety of ecotourism, paddling, environmental, and outfitter groups. Among the groups that I am speaking for today is Mountain Equipment Co-op, with its several million members; Sierra Club of Canada; the Canadian Environmental Law Association; the West Coast Environmental Law Association; Fondation Rivières; Nature Canada and some of its affiliates; and the Canadian Rivers Network, with 35 groups underneath it, which include a number of outfitters and ecotourism enterprises. Effectively, I'm speaking for a large number of groups here, and I wouldn't characterize my remarks as strictly coming from the “environmental community”.
To start, I'd simply like to point out a very important statistic, and it is that the Census of Canada report from 2003 indicated that 2.3 million Canadians paddle every year. This is a lot of Canadians. This is an act that actually impacts upon many interests. These are real people, real voters, real interests.
There are a number of issues that I'm going to try to raise. Some of them have been touched upon by my fellow presenters, and I do hope that we get to touch upon them in the question period. The main points I'd like to make are the following.
First, fundamental changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act and to protection afforded to the public's navigation rights should not be bundled into a budget bill. They do require an adequate consultation process, and we would posit that the process of consultation was simply not adequate last spring. The dozens of groups that I'm representing were not contacted, not aware, and not able to make comments, and I would hazard a guess that if they had been consulted, the amendments proposed might have been better and a streamlined NWPA might have been improved.
Second, the amendments that are proposed would weaken the right of navigation, sacrifice outdoor recreation opportunities, and compromise the federal environmental assessment role through the use of non-transparent ministerial exemption provisions.
I'd also like to spend some time today, if time permits, exposing what we perceive to be the myth of environmental overlap and duplication with the provinces.
First of all, I'd like to say that many of the groups I represent would have loved to appear last spring. They weren't invited to the transport committee hearings. I understand that the transport committee did consider a cross-country tour. That would have been a fabulous idea, and I think there are a lot of paddling groups operating at the local level that would have greatly appreciated that. While I'm grateful for the opportunity to make last-minute representations on behalf of these organizations, this does not compensate in any way, shape, or form for the inadequate opportunities that there were last spring.
Thank you for the opportunity, but we would like to do this again, and our main ask at the end of the day is going to be that, as other groups have mentioned, the proposed amendments be removed from Bill C-10 and that they be discussed again in the context of a broader reform initiative of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
We understand that the government is proposing reforms. The Navigable Waters Protection Act amendments speak directly to those reforms of environmental assessment. We believe they should be discussed in the same context, at the same time, and that this will yield a more effective series of changes.
I think that if the federal environmental role in protecting the public right of navigation is to be transformed, it does behoove the government to follow a normal legislative process such as a bill that's tabled, that can be examined by civil society, that can be discussed before committee, and not a process where no bill is in front of an incomplete group of civil society.
I think that in the context of discussing our request that these proposed amendments be taken off the table, it's worth noting that in 2005 there was a precedent for this kind of withdrawing of proposed amendments to environmental law. In 2005, the Liberal minority government proposed a number of changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and after discussion, they decided they would remove those because of the kerfuffle it caused. I think there is room to believe that this is a process that can be done again.
In terms of provincial overlap and duplication, I think we're getting a lot of rhetoric about red tape, a lot of rhetoric about what the provinces are able to do and what the federal government is able to do. I think it's really important to note that the federal government has constitutional jurisdiction over navigation and the provinces do not. No provincial environmental assessment process is going to look at navigation. By creating these exemption provisions, the federal government will allow the transport minister potentially to issue an order to take out certain works, take out certain kinds of waterways, from the approval process, which thereby removes them from the environmental assessment process, which therefore means the provinces will be left to do the EAs, and they won't be looking at navigation.
Thank you.