Mr. Speaker, I will begin with a story. I will roll back to pre-2012.
My community of Abbotsford is the foremost farming community in the province of British Columbia. Somewhere in the order of 20% of all farm-gate revenues emanate from our community. Much of that is from two beautiful areas with A1-quality soil, Sumas Prairie and Matsqui Prairie, where there are all kinds of different farming operations under way.
I used to be a city councillor in Abbotsford. One of our farmers, who I will call Henry, was one of the pillars of our community. He was one of the originals in our community, one of the pioneers. He had farmed Sumas Prairie all his life. One day, he came into my office in a real fit of anger. He related to me that he had been on his land cleaning ditches that he himself had dug. A couple of years later, of course, those ditches were filling in with leaves, twigs, and other debris. He wanted to clear them so that his property could drain properly. Anyone who knows Sumas Prairie knows that it is an area that needs to be properly drained. It is a former lake bed, and it needs to be managed properly. However, Henry was in my office very upset, because as he was cleaning his ditch, a fisheries officer had approached him. By the way, he was a fisheries officer with a gun. He had accosted Henry and said, “Sir, don't you dare touch that ditch anymore. You're harming fish habitat.”
Of course, Henry said that this was a ditch he dug for drainage purposes, and there were no fish in this ditch. “It is fish habitat we are protecting”, said the fisheries officer, “and Mr. Farmer, you're not entitled to do anything with that ditch of yours.”
We heard this from farmers across Abbotsford. My colleague, the member for Langley—Aldergrove, who served on city council with me, can verify those facts. Of course, city council had no power. This was federal legislation under which these officers were acting. That is why our former Conservative government, in 2012, stepped up to the plate and addressed this problem. We removed the focus on what at that time was fish habitat, and we replaced it with a focus on protecting fish, because that is what it is all about.
In light of the situation I just described, our government first of all looked at what is called the harmful alteration, disruption, or destruction of fish habitat, or HADD. We said that HADD was the wrong standard to apply. What we should be applying is any activity that results in serious harm to fish, not fish habitat, that are part of a commercial, recreational, or aboriginal fishery or to the fish that support such a fishery. That is the way the new legislation read, and it was warmly received.
My colleague for Saanich—Gulf Islands, the leader of the Green Party, suggested that Canadian municipalities did not support our 2012 amendments at all. That is patently false. What we should do is ask those of us who were in municipal government at that time, or in the years leading up to it, and we can tell members exactly why this legislation was introduced, and we had the strong support of municipalities across Canada.
Another one of the challenges of the legislation we have before us, which is a big step backwards, is the use of what is called the precautionary principle, which is basically better safe than sorry. The precautionary principle sounds great. We should always be safe rather than sorry. The problem is that it does not work in real life.
I refer the House to an article written in 2011 by Jonathan Adler, in which he talks about the better safe than sorry approach, the precautionary principle. He says, “We all accept this as a commonsense maxim. But can it also guide public policy? [Some people] think so, and argue that formalizing a more 'precautionary' approach to...health and environmental...will better safeguard human well-being and the world around us.”
He goes on to say:
If only it were that easy. Simply put, the precautionary principle is not a sound basis for public policy. At the broadest level of generality, the principle is unobjectionable, but it provides no meaningful guidance to pressing policy questions. In a public policy context, “better safe than sorry” is a fairly vacuous instruction.
Taken literally, the precautionary principle is either wholly arbitrary or incoherent. In its stronger formulation, the principle actually has the potential to do harm.
He goes on to say, “Efforts to impose the principle through regulatory policy”, which is what our friends are doing here, but they are doing it in legislation, “inevitably accommodate competing concerns or become a Trojan Horse for other ideological crusades.”
The problem with the precautionary principle is that it becomes a Trojan Horse for ideological crusades. Let me give the House a great example.
We have a government here that has been beholden to the environmental movement. In fact, the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts, used to lead the World Wildlife Fund in Canada. Think about it. When we have a precautionary principle, it is people that have influence in government that are able to, unnecessarily through their influence, direct decisions in a way that suits their interests. If we have an ideological predilection in a certain direction, like Mr. Butts does, imagine how quickly we would find ourselves in a situation where it is speculation and ideology that replace true science as a basis for making decisions.
This legislation would establish remunerated advisory panels. When Liberals establish advisory panels, especially ones that are remunerated, they are used basically to allow insiders and friends to benefit from government.
Look at the surf clam issue in Newfoundland where the fisheries minister intervened. He provided special gifts to his friends by taking a surf clam licence away from one company that had pioneered the surf clam business in Newfoundland and giving it to another company that had connections to insiders in government and to friends and family.
What was the end result? This new company, which did not even exist and is still not incorporated, had no boat. Imagine that. It had no boat, but was awarded this licence, thereby depriving the people of Grand Banks, Newfoundland, of their opportunity to benefit, to have livelihoods, to have income from this business.
This is what happens when legislation like Bill C-68, which would amend the Fisheries Act, is twisted in a way that benefits the Liberal government, insiders, and friends of the government.
Canada as a country can do better.