Mr. Speaker, first of all, we will read and reread the law that we are changing.
After that, we will have noted that the Navigable Waters Act is a law about navigable waters. If the honourable member had read the act before giving her speech, she would have known that. However, she did not read it.
She obviously thinks that the Navigable Waters Act is a piece of environmental legislation. She could even have searched the terms “environment”, “fish” and other terms related to the environment on the Internet, and she would not have come up with the law we are debating.
In fact, the law we are changing is a law about navigation. I will repeat that navigation has to do with boats on the water. There are fish in the water and that is why we have a law to protect fish. We have another law to protect the environment in general. We have yet another law to protect habitats.
We have laws for the ships that go over the water and then laws that protect the fish that are under the water. We are talking about a law that deals with those ships on top of the water. Changes to that law have no impact whatsoever on the fish under the water, because they are protected by a different law.
I would be happy to share with the member all of those laws. When we do, she will have occasion to find out that there are very powerful laws protecting fish habitat, including environmental protection and environmental assessments, that are all deeply embedded in our statutes and that are very successful at protecting wildlife and fish habitat.
The reason we have a Navigable Waters Protection Act right now, and have always had, is to create a legal manner in which one person can build a bridge over a river and another person can still float his or her ship down that river. In order to balance the competing interests of those two hypothetical parties, we have a law to deal with navigable waters.
Unfortunately it applied to a whole series of waters that were not navigable. That is because the law goes back to the time of Confederation, when many people still went to work by canoe. Therefore, we have many little streams that have no navigation on them whatsoever, and those little streams do not need to have an assessment for navigation because nobody navigates on them.
The good news is environmental laws still protect those streams. The ecology is well regulated. Our officials have the ability to prevent any action that can do damage to their ecosystems. None of that has changed. What has changed is we do not need to check if a tanker ship can go down a farmer's stream anymore before the farmer can build a footbridge across that stream.
I would hope the member, having now heard the details of the proposal, would come around to supporting it.