Thank you very much.
The federal government came here in the 1990s to install riprap over a large stretch of the river to protect Île de Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola from waves generated by ships and boats, in particular. The problem is that it terminated the program in 1997 when roughly one kilometer of riprap remained to be installed to the west of the island and two kilometers to the east. At the time, local citizens couldn't afford to complete the riprap works the federal government had started. They therefore tried to protect their shorelines as best they could, but if you come and look at their properties today, you'll see that some of them have been shortened by 25 or 30 feet since the 1990s, or even much earlier than that. The water has come closer and closer to the houses over time.
Furthermore, when ice forms on the west side, it strikes the riprap section that the federal government completed and, at the same time, the shorelines and all the properties of the local citizens. Let me tell you that, when those big pieces of ice hit the properties, they really scour out the soil. So that's what I wanted to tell you a little about.
We ask that the federal government reinstitute the shoreline protection program because we know that shoreline erosion doesn't just affect Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola. Thanks to information from the Ouranos Consortium, I know there's a lot of erosion from Montreal to Varennes, Contrecœur, Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel and in our region as far as Lake Saint Pierre.
In addition, these days, approximately 4,500 ships navigate the river, and I don't think they always obey the speed limit, especially at night, probably because no one can see them.
Thank you for listening. I'm going to yield the floor to Mr. Grégoire.