Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech. He went into a lot of detail, which sometimes needs to be brought to bear in these debates.
In terms of the legislation surrounding protected marine areas, there are three federal departments that can protect marine areas, Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and this bill will enable Heritage Canada to do the same. Can the member give me an impression of why he thinks it is that way?
The member for Davenport is the chair of the environment committee. He made a lot of detailed comments about this bill which falls under the heritage department. My colleague from Dauphin—Swan River and I were saying that this is really an environment bill and not a parks bill. I am adding to that same question by making that statement.
The member talked about his concern about navigation and the question of navigational alternatives. That is a very interesting question for me and the area I represent. Let us think about traffic control and some of the big ships that now utilize the inside passage on the west coast from Vancouver up to Alaska. There is a lot of cruise ship traffic, freight traffic and marine traffic of every size and shape. To control all of that there are vessel traffic control centres which are similar to the air traffic control centres.
The problem is twofold. The reality is that we are operating in two dimensions only when we are operating on the water. In the air we have three dimensions so things can be a lot more limiting and in many respects a lot scarier.
Another factor has come into being lately. Federal funding for the coast guard, federal fisheries and other areas that affect all of the marine oriented activities has been chopped to the point where we were not navigating for our freight traffic, our cruise ships or our large ships for a period of 12 hours just about a month ago. This was very scary indeed.
If we cannot do that for everything from cruise ships to oil tankers to major log transports and so on, how in heck are we going to enforce a new arrangement where we are trying to deal with navigation in a specifically declared conservation area?