Mr. Speaker, as a municipal councillor, the member has lived through the horrors, the cost, and the headaches of having to deal with DFO over things as ridiculous as a water hole on a golf course. I experienced that myself in my riding, where farmers who were flooded all of a sudden had carp swimming out of Lake Manitoba across their fields. Now, is that fish habitat? It has fish on it. The legislation would give power to the government to say that it is fish habitat and it cannot be touched.
We have white mullet, which we call sucker fish back home, that swim up the ditches every spring in the runoff to spawn. Does that stop the cleaning out of the ditch in the fall when there are no fish in it? I do not think it should, but the powers given to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans would give him the type of capability to stop regular planning and resource use on the prairies.