Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our officials for appearing.
Greetings to our new deputy minister. We look forward to ongoing work with you.
I want to direct my questions towards the Navigation Protection Act, an act originally brought in, if I understand it, in 1882. Do I have the year right on that one?
This committee has looked at that issue previously. In 2008 we conducted a number of hearings for several weeks as the build Canada plan was being rolled out. We were looking for some efficiencies to the existing Navigable Waters Protection Act. We settled on, for example, amendments to exempt minor works from consideration. There were a few other things.
But witnesses at the time—we had representatives not only from municipalities but of seven provinces and two territories—were looking for a complete overhaul of the act. It wasn't possible at the time with building Canada plan being rolled out. Now we're at the phase where, as we're looking to the next set of infrastructure programs, it is the right time to restore this act to its original intention, which was to deal with navigation.
We faced two questions at the time: do we try to define what a waterway is, or do we simply move to a listing of waterways or the exclusion of other waterways?
Can you describe for us the decision to move to listing versus trying to define a waterway? What are the problems? We had difficulty as a committee trying to define what a waterway was, as did our witnesses. Can you explain that decision as briefly as possible for us?