Madam Chair, this committee is considering the Navigation Protection Act, which is primarily a safety act. It ensures the oversight of works that can interfere with navigation, and its priority is to ensure this can be done safely and with minimum impact on navigation.
There are other legislations that also provide regulatory approvals. There's a review of the Fisheries Act under a separate committee, and it would look at the fish and fish habitat impacts in many of the same waters, but from a very different lens in terms of looking at the changes that were made to the Fisheries Act, which defined the scope of that act and the protections it affords for fish and fish habitat.
While they both concern waterways, they take a very different focus and approach in terms of the purpose of the legislations.
The environmental expert panel will be looking at the environmental assessment process, and it will be posing questions: what are appropriate projects to be subject to the environmental assessment, how should those assessments be done in a way that builds confidence and trust in the process, and are there gaps in the way that legislation is currently functioning?
These are very different lenses, Madam Chair. I think the minister has stressed that, for the Navigation Protection Act, the top priority is safe navigation for Canadians.