Mr. Speaker, I was very interested in what my hon. colleague had to say when he talked about the balance between the environment and the economy.
I continue to receive emails from constituents in the northwest, throughout Skeena and across British Columbia, who are concerned about the Navigable Waters Protection Act that was stripped away in the previous budget. I see my hon. colleague is nodding.
Under the guise of a budget bill, the Conservatives chose to insert a provision that would actually weaken some of the environmental protections for our rivers and waterways. Communities that use those rivers and waterways, and I would particularly note some of the fishing and hunting communities, are absolutely outraged that there was no public debate about this and that the process that was followed in the House of Commons was fundamentally undemocratic.
My colleague from Yukon has been hearing about this as well. His constituents and mine do not think that this is what is required in an economic upheaval. The government was going to allow a whole series of projects to go ahead with no environmental assessment at all because the immediacy of the moment trumped the environmental concerns. In the future we will be cleaning up messes and mistakes that are made now.
I cannot imagine a government proposing this as a survival plan for the Canadian economy. Why would it go back in time and repeat the errors of the past? It will only find that in the distant future it will be cursed by the generation to come. They will ask why in this moment of uncertainty the government of the day hit the panic button and removed environmental conditions.
The government is scraping away more environmental regulations and protections. Why, for heaven's sake, did my hon. colleague support this? It seems so counterintuitive to raise issues about this particular bill or others when he so recently supported the stripping away of the protection of Canada's rivers and lakes.