Thank you, Madam Chair.
Minister, Ms. Higgens, thank you for being with us this morning.
If you don't mind, Minister, I'd like to share our position on the study that the committee was mandated to undertake. You should understand that this study, which totally disrupted the committee's planned business for the fall, strikes us as pointless since the conclusions are already known. Like the Prime Minister, you have repeatedly made those conclusions known.
Allow me to refer to the mandate letter you, as the Minister of Transport, were given. In fact, you mentioned the letter in your opening statement this morning. I'm going to read you an excerpt from your mandate letter. I know it's something you talk about regularly, Mr. Garneau, and it seems to have guided your work as minister since your appointment. On the issue of rail safety in Lac-Mégantic, I've had the opportunity to see just how important abiding by your mandate letter is to you.
Sometimes that's a good thing, but sometimes, it can be problematic, especially in this case. Your mandate letter clearly states that you will “work with the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard to review the previous government's changes to the Fisheries Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act, restore lost protections, and incorporate modern safeguards”.
As I see it, that priority not only refers to a study, but also, to some extent, dictates the committee's conclusions. Given the mandate letter you received and the information we have, it's clear that the decision has been made, meaning that the lost protections have to be restored. We find that request questionable since the committee already had a very full schedule. The committee had wanted to focus its efforts on a national transportation strategy with a view to accelerating economic development in Canada and building on the recently announced infrastructure plan to make sound investments that would stimulate economic development in every community and region around the country.
Allow me to read two paragraphs from the letter sent jointly by the two ministers to our chair and committee and, in fact, to both committees concerned. “As part of our mandate from the Prime Minister, we have been asked to work together to review the previous government's changes to the Fisheries Act and to the Navigable Waters Protection Act to restore lost protections and incorporate modern safeguards.” It appears not only in your mandate letter, but it's also repeated in the letter sent to the committee. In other words, the committee is being told, “here are the conclusions you should reach”.
Here's another excerpt from the letter, in reference to the Navigation Protection Act: “the amendments that came into force in 2014 concentrated the application of the Act on 162 of Canada's busiest navigable waterways. It is suggested you focus on these changes as well as the types of interferences to navigation that should be regulated or prohibited, and how to best implement these under the legislation.”
In the face of such clear directives, Minister, you should understand why we would assume that the previous studies carried out by the Senate and House of Commons committees were based on sufficient evidence and, hence, why we would conclude that there was no need for a new series of hearings or further evidence.
I reviewed all the evidence or just about—I wouldn't want to get tripped up on some point I had missed—collected by the two committees, and I was able to see that numerous statements had been made. It was clear that considerable input had been collected, that municipalities, aboriginal communities, and environmental groups had all had the opportunity to comment on the legislation in question.
Why ask the committee to spend its time and energy redoing work that has already been done multiple times, if not to justify the government's political will to amend acts that were duly amended in the wake of consultation? Why do so if not to undo what the previous government did?
The act gives you an opportunity to intervene. You can make the changes yourselves without having to amend the act. It is clearly indicated in the act that you have all the tools needed to respond to the various requests you may receive.
I remind you what the objective of the first amendment of the act was, in 2009. The legislation was amended to help accelerate Canada's economic development and to ensure that projects can be carried out more quickly.
As a former mayor, I can tell you that it is sometimes very hard to comply with all the regulations and to overcome all the difficulties just to build a small bridge across a stream. A stream is a stream. We don't need a federal study to check whether boats can pass under that bridge, as the stream is tiny.
If that is what you want to bring back, if you want to go back to that time....