Mr. Speaker, I have always considered it an honour and a privilege to rise in the House to speak to bills and to discuss matters of concern to Canadians.
Today, though, when I stand to speak to the Conservatives' latest mammoth omnibus bill, which is being jammed through the House of Commons in the fashion of the last one, I feel that I am speaking at a point when our democracy is changing and not for the better. Standing here, I feel very sad and a little angry.
The speed of the bill can only be due to one reason. The Conservatives want to move quickly so that the people of Canada do not have an opportunity to understand what the changes mean to our country. Very serious changes are being made to laws that will not be easily understood by Canadians until those laws are put in practice. I am speaking about the changes to the environmental system that have been made by the Conservatives over the past year.
I will speak for a while on the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act. With the exception of three oceans, 97 lakes and 62 rivers, the law will no longer apply to projects affecting waterways. This is being done for the convenience of developers who want to move ahead. It is not being done for the convenience of farmers and fishermen. We could have had a different law that would have taken care of the little problems in the system. That would have been a law that we would have all stood up and supported.
Canadians are going to be outraged when their lakes and rivers, major waterways, are being damaged just so that a few quick bucks can be made. When we do not do a proper job on the environment, in the end all will pay, including industry and the Conservatives' friends.
In the Northwest Territories, the Conservatives removed navigable waters protection from rivers such as the Liard River, the Peel River, the Hay River and the Slave River, all of which are used today for navigation purposes. In fact, on the Hay River is the largest docking facility north of 60. The facility includes the Canadian Coast Guard base for the western Arctic region, Northern Transportation Company Limited's barging terminal and the float plane base anchorage.
Once the bill is passed, this particular river will no longer be under the protection of the Navigable Waters Protection Act. What is going on? Why did the Conservatives do this to a very important waterway for the people of the Northwest Territories?
There is oil exploration on the upper reaches of the Hay River. That is where we can go if we want to find the answer to why the Hay River was taken out of the Navigable Waters Protection Act. It is the same reason that there will be no navigation protection for the Peel and Liard rivers. I am sure when a barge runs aground on one of these rivers, the owners will be happy to acknowledge their suffering is justified because the oil companies are not inconvenienced.
With the Slave River, we know very well what that is about. We know that the Alberta business interests in Calgary, ATCO, are very interested in developing a 1,500 megawatt earth-fill dam across the Slave River. They have been after this for a long time.
Eight-two per cent of the outflow from Alberta is in the Slave River, at 3,000 metres a second. This is not a farmer's stream. This is a major waterway that has supported navigation and transportation for 100 years. It is not in the bill. Why is it not there? Whose friends are being rewarded here? Now that it is not in the bill, does that mean that Alberta is solely responsible for any environmental assessment of the project?
The changes to protecting Canada's natural beauty contained in Bill C-45 are part of a broader strategy to remove any wilderness protection. There were changes to the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in the Conservatives' first massive omnibus budget bill, which they jammed through Parliament last spring. They rushed that job so much that they had to bring in amendments in Bill C-45 to try to deal with some of the problems that they created with their reckless moves with Bill C-38.
Haste makes waste. When will Conservatives learn? I do not think they will learn because their agenda is not to protect Canada. Their agenda is to exploit Canada. Fair enough, just put it on the table and say it as it is.
This is going to create so much uncertainty in industry because the current government will not be around after 2015 and we will be putting back the regulations that are required for the protection of the environment in Canada. How is that going to give certainty to industries?
In Bill C-38, they removed the prohibition against the alteration, disruption—