Thank you, Madam Chair, for the invitation to appear before committee today.
The Canadian Wildlife Federation supports much of what is proposed in Bill C-68, including support for the requirement to rebuild fish stocks, and strong support for the provisions that deal with modifying commercial fisheries to address impacts to marine mammals or marine biodiversity. However, our focus today is on the habitat provisions.
In our testimony before this committee in October 2016, we emphasized what we see as the goals of the fish habitat provisions: to protect fish habitat, to restore past harms, and to compensate for future losses.
With respect to protecting existing fish habitat, the act goes a long way to achieving strong protection. We are very pleased to see the creation of a public registry in the proposed amendments, though its scope should be expanded. In our opinion, Bill C-68 falls short on strengthening the fish passage provisions. We would like to see fish passage as a mandatory requirement with provisions for exemptions. Bill C-68 also falls short on dealing with minor works that cause harm. We will go into this in greater detail.
On the restoration of past harms, we are pleased to see the inclusion of language around habitat restoration, and to hear the minister say before committee that Bill C-68 will create a positive obligation for the department to work to restore fish habitat. To this end, net gain should be established as the goal of the fish habitat protection provisions. The strengthened requirements around offsetting will also contribute to restoration, especially if this is guided by watershed-level goals.
Finally, regarding compensating effectively for future harms to fish habitat, we are seeing broad agreement in testimony before this committee that Bill C-68 does not create a comprehensive legal framework for dealing with small projects, and that the act needs to be applied consistently and appropriately across all works that cause harm. To quote Mr. Pierre Gratton of the Mining Association of Canada on the cumulative effects of small projects, “these stresses cannot be addressed by focusing the department’s attention on a few mining projects.”
I would just modify that to say: a few major projects. Mr. Gratton stressed the need to address all works with residual harm, and he highlighted forestry, agriculture, hydro, and municipal works.
Small projects are the crux of the act. Successive governments have struggled to provide a regulatory and policy framework to Fisheries and Oceans that effectively and appropriately deals with the harm to fish habitat resulting from small projects. They are a major—if not the major—cause of fish habitat loss across Canada on a cumulative basis.
Several witnesses have brought up the example of works that clear shoreline vegetation, or the works of farmers and municipalities in routine clearing of drainage infrastructure such as ditches, channels, and retention ponds, as problematic areas of regulation. They have suggested that all of these activities in all locations do not require oversight, beyond guidance via a code of practice. We would disagree that such a blanket and hands-off approach can prevent significant impacts from such a wide range of activities.
I want to be clear that we agree that a code of practice with no requirement for compensation is appropriate for many types of water bodies and many types of activities on farmland or municipal land where harm can be avoided. But we have the science to classify water bodies and activities. We know that the department could specify which locations and which works do result in residual harm and do require oversight and compensation, in order to move toward a policy goal of net gain. In these cases, we argue that the act does not contain the tools to regulate and manage HADD from small projects.
I’ll ask Dr. Lapointe to go into more detail.