In response, there are a couple of examples. There's the Don River in Toronto. It would be questionable whether or not the Don River is considered a navigable waterway. My hunch would be that most people would consider it a minor waterway. It's navigable once a year when it's flooded for a public event, a paddling event, on the river, but the rest of the year, for the most part, it's not navigable. However, if the conservation authority proceeded with a number of projects over the coming years to remove some small weirs and small causeways, it could again be a navigable river.
So one of the problems with coming up with a concrete list of what is a major waterway and a minor waterway is that for all of these waterways currently threatened, there would be no incentive and, possibly, very little opportunity to restore those rivers. So that's one concern.
My understanding is that the act only applies when the water is already navigable, so I am a little bit confused about what someone would say is a navigable, but still minor, river. A definite concern that we would have—and we get this from the grassroots—with creating a list at the outset, saying, okay, here's a list of the major waters in a province and here is a list of the minor waters, is that for the most part, private citizens who get involved in environmental issues don't consider themselves environmentalists. They're not reading the Canada Gazette every day. They typically find out about these proposals later on in the planning process, and they don't know what tools are available to them to express their concerns or to make a project better. So they're certainly not going to be involved in the policy process at the beginning of the creation of this inventory of major and minor waterways.
It's very difficult to uphold the public right to navigation when you create these concrete lists. It's much better to have the general prohibition on interfering with the public's right to navigate. We do understand that there are tools, such as the class screenings under the Environmental Assessment Act, that can help deal with some of the smaller and more minor projects.