Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is certainly creating a challenge of the jurisdiction of water and for the federal government to act.
I wanted to highlight for the record and for the knowledge of the hon. member that the legal status of Canadian water law seems to encompass riparian rights under common law that there is no right to ownership of water found in its natural state. The underlying policy to this rule is that the public at large has a right to reasonable use of water, in such cases as fishing and navigation.
It is only when water is contained or controlled by someone that the characterization of personal property can apply. Examples would be swimming pools and bottled water and that personal property can now be sold. In its natural state under our law, nothing is said on the ownership of water.
We can look at surface water and surface bodies. We know that rivers flow and lake bodies hold the water that flows into them. But the underwater, the aquifers, is a situation where owners of land not adjacent to water have no common right to the water. But when groundwater is governed by the rule of capture, an owner of land can take as much subterranean water as he can capture. That is a question of our law.
When we use the legal term capture, does that mean it is contained or controlled? That is a major concern of the privatization and potential purchase of our water resources, either they are subterranean, underground, or surface. That is the uneasy journey we are taking as Canadians here.
Unless the federal government acts and clarifies these jurisdictions, responsibilities and rights, we are going into the millennium with uncharted water so to speak, because we are not protecting it for future generations of Canadians.
I think the challenge is to deal with that now.