Mr. Speaker, I wish to commend the member for Halifax for her speech, knowledge and understanding of some of the opportunities and challenges that exist in our ports, particularly our own. There is not a port city or facility in Canada that is more renowned and thought of whenever we think of marine activity than Halifax, in our own backyard.
The member spoke very knowledgeably about what needs to be done. She recognizes that the bill is not perfect, but it does get us into the conversation in a way that hopefully will get us to a place where we do something that will be meaningful. She spoke very eloquently about how often governments use announcements and bills such as this to gain political favour while at the same time really not having any substance or providing any substance to deal with some of the real difficulties that exist.
I was saying earlier that we need to not only recognize the most obvious ports of entry into our country, where marine is concerned, when we talk about these kinds of bills, but also need to look at the other places along the route into Canada where ships arrive and there is interaction which contributes to a local economy.
That is no more so obvious than in my own community of Sault Ste. Marie which is smack dead in the centre of three of the most important and largest of the Great Lakes. There is Lake Superior to the north, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
We in the Sault are looking to take advantage of that strategic location which gets us into big chunks of the mid-west U.S. where trade is concerned. We know that the transportation and distribution of goods is now, and will become even more, an important facet of industry and the economy in Canada.
Certainly, passing our back door or front door is the CN Rail, the Trans-Canada Highway and route I-75 that runs right down to the tip of Florida, and of course this wonderful resource of water of which we have stewardship.
The member spoke very thoughtfully about the issue of security at our ports and how the Liberals in fact used that as a way to curry some favour going into an election, but there is a very real concern regarding security that the member for Halifax just spoke about. There is also an environmental concern that we in Sault Ste. Marie have identified.
As boats are brought in off the oceans through the St. Lawrence Seaway and up into the Great Lakes, we often end up with species in our systems that get into the water and from the water into some of our other natural resources that become then very difficult to deal with and become a menace to our own natural resources. We need to be doing something to protect ourselves from that.
In Sault Ste. Marie we have been working for a few years now to develop an invasive species centre which would do research and put forward proposals, be a partnership between all of those wonderful institutions in our community: the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, our university, Science Enterprise Algoma, along with other agencies and the private sector to actually come up with responses that will be effective in stopping the onslaught of these species when they happen in the first place.
Is there anything in the bill that the member has looked at that speaks in any way at all to this other concern regarding security where our environment is affected and the possibility that some of these ships coming in might bring with them species that we do not want?