We claim--for financial reasons right now, I think--that we don't have that jurisdiction. Again, the age of the act...it doesn't define it.
The other jurisdictions come at us and say, “You're responsible for removal of obstacles and hazards.” When we claim that it's not an obstacle, it's not a hazard, it's not in the navigational channel, they reply, “It is an obstacle to me, an eye obstacle, and it's a hazard to our enjoyment of the beach, so come and clean it up.” The argument continues in that grey area.
What we're saying is let's stop the arguments. Especially when we start to have threats and to have experience with these things being dragged off the beach and sunk out in the waterways, to become navigational hazards that we have to come out and clean up, let's stop the arguments. It's not getting anybody anywhere.
So let's go out and start to clean these things up. We recognize that indeed they can become hazards--much like the Canima in Shediac Bay, and I can name a number of other ones across this country--so let's clean them up. We are in the navigational safety business, and as long as we have the finances to do it....
It's not that we're against doing it, but nobody has ever been funded nor clearly, within legislation, had the responsibility to do it.
I'm not speaking here, by the way, of just the stuff that's on the shoreline or sitting at docks, left abandoned and sinking, blocking the small east coast docks—or wharves, as they call them there. I'm talking as well of accidents that occur. In the Ottawa River here, at the mouth of the Richelieu, we had a tanker that cut a concrete sailboat in half, and the two halves of the sailboat went down. Unfortunately there were souls lost. But it costs money to go and pull those things up, and they were blocking the mouth of the Richelieu River and could have posed a very serious threat to navigation.
Well, we don't have any funding aside to go and do that right now. The argument that always comes around is where are we going to get the funds if we do it? If we had an obstacle removal fund, we could say let's contract it immediately and get those halves lifted and out of here. Truthfully, navigational safety is our number one priority.