This is our final amendment. The west coast local governments, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities , the City of Victoria, the Islands Trust Council , and the Regional District of Nanaimo all had the same elements in their pieces of legislative change, namely, fixing vessel registration, looking at a vessel registration fee that would owner-finance removal of boats, implementing a vessel turn-in program that would include designation of disposal areas for vessels, implementing recycling facilities, supporting local marine salvage to help dispose of wrecks, and putting all this in a report to Parliament. These are the elements of my legislation that was blocked back in December. However, many of these pieces are embedded in the government's commitment we see in its website. We are moving forward behind the scenes, but not within a legislative framework and not with the accountability that reporting to Parliament would entail.
My argument to fellow committee members reflects the advice we've had for about 15 years of pressure. The reason we have this legislation is that coastal communities on both coasts have been pushing hard and quite rightly identifying big holes in jurisdiction in Canada. In the absence of federal leadership, the burden has fallen disproportionately on coastal communities.
Why not enshrine all of these elements in the legislation? This is a perfect opportunity to do so. In reporting back to constituents five years from now, we could say these are all the measures taken by the government, and this was the experimentation. The proposal from Minister Garneau is entirely consistent with the individual commitments made in the abandoned vessel strategy in the oceans protection plan. With only two more years in this government's term, however, I'm concerned that these commitments will not last beyond the government, as long as they sit only on the website and are not embedded in legislation. For the sake of transparency, accountability, and visibility, when this issue dies away a little bit, we will still want to have the government's commitments locked in and to have action implementation. As we see in Washington state, Oregon, and Florida, as well as in Norway and other countries, it is possible within the frame of Parliament to revisit, re-evaluate, and make amendments to regulations and legislation as time goes on. We'll all end up better off if we lock those commitments into the bill.