In fact, Mr. Speaker, the issue is with the spirit of the regulations.
In order to amend the regulations, the applying municipality must prove beyond any doubt that all other options have been attempted. That implies consulting dozens of stakeholders. It would also require tremendous resources. A town of 1,500 people cannot undertake willy-nilly a process that could take years. It would need to retain legal counsel, which is resource-intensive. Worse still, the solutions it would find would never have any legal value. If the vast majority of people who live by a lake agree to impose a restriction, a single person can disobey the order and ride his 300-horsepower motorboat on a lake no bigger than this chamber. That is the problem. The process is too cumbersome and needs to be simplified. I am not saying it should be trivialized, but simplified in a way that communities would have a real chance of using that piece of legislation that already exists and that has already been used in hundreds of cases all across Canada, including some involving lakes in my own riding.