Mr. Chair, I think it's important to emphasize that neither of these statutes is designed to provide comprehensive environmental protection associated with waters in Canada.
Jurisdiction over waters in Canada is shared federally and provincially. Provincial governments have considerable jurisdiction over the management of water within their own territories. The federal government asserts its jurisdiction over those waters in a variety of ways, not just through these two statutes but also, for example, through environmental assessment requirements, through the Fisheries Act, and other statutes. These are not the only two statutes associated with environmental impacts of water quantity and water flow in Canada.
Similarly, the amendments proposed in Mr. Miller's bill and the amendments proposed by the government through Mr. Dechert are not intended to expand the environmental scope of these two statutes. They're simply intended to clarify and make effective the specific focus of these two new prohibitions, which are focused on avoiding the potential environmental impact of increasing the flow of water out of Canada into the United States. Through these amendments we're only focusing on that particular environmental impact.
As to the trade implications, again I'll come back to the first amendment that we discussed both for the IBWTA and the IRIA. The primary focus of the prohibition is on preventing that environmental risk as opposed to addressing or regulating international trade in some way.