Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North is right. Port authorities are important. They are critical pieces of infrastructure in making decisions about how ports will operate, whether they are safe, and whether they enact certain types of regulations.
It seems to me that it is incumbent, if we are actually going to do it and make appointments to port authorities, that we look at a few things. We should be transparent about it. We ought to vet people. If the last couple of appointments were vetted, I would like to know who the people were who vetted them; it is time for them to find something else to do. They ought to be capable and competent. What is the point of having people who really do not know what they are doing when it comes to a port authority?
I can imagine being the master of a vessel coming into a port and thinking, “I wonder if the chair of the port authority actually thought that maybe we should not put that pier there because I cannot get into the port now. Why did they build that there?” It is because the person in question who authorized it did not know anything about a port. He or she just said, “Well, we need some extra place to tie stuff up; we will tie another ship there.” The person did not think about the supertanker coming in and not fitting in that little aisle.
That is the great undoing for us in central Canada and the Great Lakes, the fact that the locks in the Welland Canal only take ships of a certain size. They take large ships, but they do not take the ships of today that are huge. Consequently, in a place like Port Weller in the city of St. Catharines, the dry docks, they could not build the ships of that magnitude. It is not because they are not capable. They are very capable, but they cannot get them out. They cannot get them through the canal, so they cannot sail them back into the North Atlantic. That is the unfortunate part of Port Weller being where it is, that the ship builders are not capable of getting a ship out after building ships of that magnitude.