Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to join the debate on Bill C-52 on behalf of my NDP caucus colleagues and the people of Winnipeg Centre.
Mr. Speaker, I intend to split my time with my colleague from Burnaby--New Westminster.
Bill C-52 found its origin when the scrutiny of regulations committee virtually stumbled across the fact that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans had been setting regulatory conditions of licensing without any statutory authority to do so. It begs the question: Is this the way the government has been running the DFO for the last decade or more? If that is true, it explains the absolute mess the fishery is in from one coast to the other.
A number of speakers who have spoken tonight have listed a myriad of grievances about the mismanagement of the fisheries from one end of the country to the other and the middle in the great freshwater fisheries such as we enjoy in my home province of Manitoba.
Lake Winnipeg is the fifth largest lake in North America and is home to the largest surviving freshwater fishery in North America and is valued at almost $30 million American per year. I am very concerned that inaction on the part of our federal Liberal government may sound the death knell for that important economic engine for the province of Manitoba.
As of July 1 of this year, the United States intends to divert, by inter-basin transfer of water, the dirty polluted water from Devils Lake, North Dakota into the Cheyenne River, into the Red River and flowing north into Lake Winnipeg. If Bill C-52 were to grant regulatory authority to the minister, I hope he would use whatever authority he might have to intervene on behalf of the people of Manitoba to counter this egregious breach of Canadian sovereignty, an environmentally disastrous move of the wholesale inter-basin transfer of water from polluted Devils Lake, North Dakota ultimately into Lake Winnipeg.
Let me explain some of the frustration that Manitobans feel. Not only is this a catastrophic move environmentally, but as far as diplomatic relations between Canada and the United States are concerned, this single unilateral action by the United States could be the death knell of the boundary waters treaty of 1909, an international instrument that has proven critically important in protecting the interests of both signatories to that treaty from the unilateral actions of the other.
The International Joint Commission, of which the House I am sure is familiar, deals with complaints regarding the boundary waters treaty. Both parties have to refer an issue to the International Joint Commission and the Americans have refused to do so. It is a diplomatic slap in the face to have them say that they will solve their flooding problems in Devils Lake by cutting a channel and diverting all that water into Lake Winnipeg.
One of the serious problems that comes to mind with this is the invasive species aspect. At least one well-known parasite exists in Devils Lake called the gyrodactylus hoffmani which is a flat worm that parasitically attaches itself to the gills of channel catfish, minnows, et cetera. No environmental assessment has done on the Devils Lake diversion and so the scope and magnitude of this invasion by this species is unknown.
The scale of the spread of it is unknown because we are talking an inter-basin transfer here and the drainage basin that flows into Lake Winnipeg is most of western Canada. It is from the Rocky Mountains to Hudson's Bay essentially. This drains into all of Saskatchewan and most of Alberta. A great deal of the northern country in Nunavut directly to our north flows down and toward Lake Winnipeg. That same parasitic invasion could flow the other way and infect vast regions.
Not only that, in recent years the Americans, as do Canadian prairie farmers, have been overloading their fields with chemicals and pesticides to such a degree, and the wetlands have been drained, that a lot of this runoff goes into Devils Lake.
By the cruelest of ironies, the Americans have chosen Canada Day to turn the tap on for this diversion of water into Canada and when they do, an extra 40,000 pounds of phosphorous water a year will be going into Lake Winnipeg. It is bad enough that we already have our own agricultural contaminants going into Lake Winnipeg from Canada but we also have mercury, sulphates, nitrogen, diammonium phosphate, some of the popular fertilizers. All of these nutrients will be flowing into Lake Winnipeg seriously compounding the algae problem that exists there already with floating algae beds that are acres in size. The U.S. army corps of engineers has ignored the well-being of Canada in digging this diversion.
We had a similar problem in 1977, called the Garrison diversion, where the Americans again wanted to solve their water drainage problems by diverting through Garrison. They had a plan to divert their water north into Canada to follow the drainage into Lake Winnipeg. With a great deal of protest we managed to stop that.
We have tried everything this time. I personally went down with Lloyd Axworthy when he was the minister of foreign affairs to meet with senators and congressmen in Washington, D.C. and implore them to reconsider the disastrous and catastrophic idea of the inter-basin transfer of water. They simply accepted our representations to them, acknowledged that it was a serious environmental threat and then said, “If it ever comes down to doing what is best for North Dakota and what is best for Canada, we will do what is best for North Dakota. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out”. Essentially, that was all they would do for us.
Now we are desperately urging Canada to use every diplomatic measure possible to appeal to the Americans to block this catastrophic move. Our Minister of Fisheries and Oceans has a role to play. Surely there is a joint interest, an international element to the Department of Fisheries. There always has been, whether it is offshore with our fishing limits or, in this case, the interprovincial and international flow of water that can have a devastating effect.
However one of the most frustrating things is that reason and logic do not seem to penetrate this barrier we are getting from the Americans. Even their own research shows that by diverting this water they will lower Devils Lake by 1.5 inches per year. It has risen three feet in 10 years. They will devastate the largest freshwater fishery in Canada, possibly, all for the sake of making their water levels static and dropping it by 1.5 inches per year. At what cost?
Some day we have to start looking at ourselves as global citizens. We cannot let this arbitrary 49th parallel be the place where reason stops. That is simply not progressive thought and there is no future in that way of thinking.
When I see Bill C-52 and I think of the pattern of unilateral and arbitrary powers that the government likes to give ministers and the lack of respect for Parliament when it squirrels things away, it reminds me of a saying that the devil is in the details of any piece of legislation.
The government has put all the details into the regulations and very little of the specifics into the legislation. We rarely get to debate all the facts surrounding a piece of legislation in this House of Commons. We end up debating the shell or the outline of a bill but the regulatory changes, where the real meat and potatoes are, remain the exclusive domain of the minister to introduce at a later date.
In this case, we are appealing to the government to become seized of the issue of the crisis that is looming in the Devils Lake diversion and use whatever arbitrary powers that it has granted this minister to intervene on our behalf.
We are at the eleventh hour. The clock is ticking. July 1 is almost here. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is about to turn on the faucet and flood Lake Winnipeg with a bunch of invasive species and chemicals that we do not want or need. It will be the end of an era for Manitoba tourism and fisheries. It will be the death knell for Lake Winnipeg.
I urge my colleagues to please help us address this issue. I certainly implore the government to use whatever is in its power to help us save Lake Winnipeg.