Thank you, Chair.
My name is Tony Maas. I direct the freshwater program for WWF-Canada. We are one of Canada's oldest and largest conservation organizations. We have staff and offices across the country. In our 40-plus years working in Canada, we have partnered often with governments, business and industry, and others in the not-for-profit sector to protect ecosystems and sustainably manage natural resources.
I am going to limit my comments today to issues related to the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act included in Bill C-45. For reference, that is clauses 316 to 350.
I want to start by saying that I do believe there are some positive amendments to the Navigable Waters Protection Act proposed in Bill C-45—for example, prohibiting dewatering of any navigable water, and relating to new enforcement mechanisms—but it is my opinion that the positives are quite limited. Overall, I believe, the proposed changes to the act are likely to result in negative consequences for navigation, for people, and for the waters that make navigation possible.
Let me just give you three specific concerns. I'll shorten my presentation a bit, just to allow time for questions.
The first, which we've heard some conversation about already, is the separation of navigation from the health of the aquatic environment. That Canadians depend today—often unknowingly—on the protection of navigation rights as a means for protecting the health of our rivers and lakes is really, in my view, a simple reflection of a natural fact: the two are inseparable.
Picking navigation apart from the waters that enable it is very much artificial. The two are part of a bigger whole. Their separation is as artificial as thinking you can protect a fish without protecting its habitat—the waters in which it lives—or suggesting that our economy and the sustainability of the natural resources our environment provides are unrelated or inseparable.
I do have some concerns in this respect—that the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act proposed in Bill C-45 may leave unforeseen gaps in environmental protections when piled on top of the changes proposed in Bill C-38, in particular changes to the Fisheries Act. The provinces and territories may lack the capacity, including the financial, technical, and human resources, to effectively protect aquatic ecosystems.
More importantly, I think, my deeper concern is what this means inevitably for the health of ecosystems and people. What I am still not quite clear on is if these gaps have been assessed by the federal government, and, if gaps exist, how they are working with provinces and territories to address them.
The second point I would like to raise is the narrowing of the geographical scope of the act to those waters listed in schedule 2 of Bill C-45. Limiting the scope of the act to the country's so-called most significant waterways stands to leave, in my view, a pretty significant gap in protections for navigation and, yes, for the environment in most of the nation's waters. I'm confident in suggesting that most if not all the waters not listed in schedule 2 are frequented by navigators of some sort.
The St. John River in New Brunswick, where we at WWF have an active project, is a case in point. According to schedule 2 of Bill C-45, only the portion of the river that runs from below the Mactaquac dam to the Atlantic Ocean is currently deemed significant for navigation. I can attest that there's certainly navigation upstream of that dam, despite the barrier it presents. There are tourists and recreational fishers who keep houseboat operators and marina owners in business. We are helping send a group of youth down the river by canoe next summer.
All of this, of course, depends quite clearly on the protection of navigation in the waters upstream and downstream of the dam.