I want to thank you for the opportunity to present to the body today and give some of our perspectives on the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Just for a little bit of background, AAMDC, the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, represents all the rural municipalities in Alberta. We cover 85% of the land base in this province. We cover the province from north to south, east to west, touching all other borders. We manage almost 4,400 bridges, which account for more than 60% of the total bridge inventory in the province.
For years rural municipalities have been working with the Navigable Waters Protection Act, so AAMDC has a strong position to speak to the impacts of the changes made to it from the 2012 rural municipal perspective. The former NWPA posed considerable challenges for municipalities, including that many water bodies that had not recently supported any navigation still required costly impact assessments. Many water bodies in Alberta are either used exclusively for irrigation or are not high enough to support navigation through seasonal runoffs. They would never actually be navigable, and yet they're still subject to the costs of an impact assessment.
Municipalities are often required to build much costlier bridges than they had originally planned in order to support navigation even though the water body is not actively navigated. In many cases a proposed culvert would have been upgraded to a much more expensive bridge.
Municipalities are often faced with excessive delays in having their applications reviewed and approved by Transport Canada because of the broad scope of the previous legislation.
The definition of navigability has often varied from project to project, which would make municipal costs in complying with the previous legislation even less practical.
Repairs and modifications to older structures would often trigger the need for an impact assessment, even if the water body had not been navigated in recent history.
Rural municipal concerns with the previous act were not about their being closed to navigation or about federal oversight, but rather the unreasonable scope that the previous legislation placed on water bodies that obviously did not support navigation. The previous legislation did not utilize local knowledge on how water bodies were being used and therefore increased the cost to municipalities and to the Government of Canada.
The new legislation balances federal oversight with municipal autonomy. The new legislation allows the minister to add more water bodies to the schedule as they see fit and allows owners of works that have work [Technical difficulty—Editor] subject to the NPA, even if it's not on a scheduled water body, by opting into the process.
Clearly many different organizations manage works that cross water bodies. The municipalities are similar to the federal government in that they operate in the best interests of their constituents. If a non-scheduled water body is used for navigation, it is highly unlikely that the municipality will ignore that function when building a bridge or a culvert. Navigation is important to local economies and the quality of life, and the current NPA empowers municipalities to make those decisions locally.
With this background in mind, the AAMDC has a few recommendations for the committee to consider in reviewing the NPA.
First, the use of a schedule is a good idea and should be maintained. Including every water body in Canada is simply impractical. It showed in the extra work and cost that it caused municipalities and the capacity challenge it caused to Transport Canada.
Second, there may be value in expanding the schedule to include more water bodies, based on conversations with first nations, aboriginal groups, and other stakeholders who may be involved. The development of a formal process to propose and evaluate additions may be an effective compromise.
It is important that municipalities be treated as distinct from other owners and managers of works that cross water bodies. Municipalities make decisions in the best interests of their constituents and typically have a strong knowledge of whether a body is actually being used for navigation.
If the scope of the NPA is broadened to include more waterways, it must be matched by an increase in federal capacity to process the applications in a timely manner. It is important to remember that the NPA is ultimately about the safe navigation of Canada's water bodies. Other acts address environmental and land use concerns associated with works over water bodies, and expanding the NPA to address this will increase confusion among those who interact with the legislation.
Thank you for your time. I'll entertain questions at your call.