Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to debate this very important bill, Bill C-68, which deals with changes to the Fisheries Act. I will point out that in general, the government's legislative agenda is floundering. It has clammed up. Liberals are trolling the bottom. They are trying desperately to get through as much legislation as they can, and they are doing it under repeated time allocation. I looked hard, and there are no pearls in this one. The government is putting forward these changes to the Fisheries Act in defiance of good sense.
Now, this bill is very important in my riding. Why do I say that? I represent a riding in Alberta, and there are not a lot of people who earn their living by fishing in Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. However, the framework that existed before 2012 with respect to fisheries protection and navigable waters protection is quite perverse. Members have spoken about this already. It is the idea that it was pretty easy to get almost anything designated as fish habitat. If my kids are out playing in the yard one day, they dig a hole, it rains, and it fills up with water, maybe that is a fish habitat. All of a sudden, that requires all kinds of processes, consultations, and changes. That obviously does not make any sense.
More seriously, there were issues with farmers, people who were building ditches for drainage, very simple normal activities. Things would fill up with water and all of a sudden get designated as fish habitat, which would invoke all kinds of different protections, regulations, and red tape from the federal government.
I do not think it is rocket science or even fish science to say that we should be thinking more rationally and strategically about how we protect our fish stocks. Rather than having this sort of proliferation of designation of fish habitat—and navigable waters was another issue that was drawing in similar kinds of over-regulation—we would try to be strategic about protecting fish stocks. We would think about what those critical points of protection were. We would have strong regulations in those cases, and, at the same time, we would not be protecting things in the wrong way.
On this side of the House, we favour rational, effective, and, as much as possible, surgical regulation; that is, regulation that does the thing it is intended to do, and the repeal of regulation that does not do what it is intended to do, that is not connected to a clear, rational objective. That is why, for instance, when Conservatives were in government, every time we introduced a new regulation, we developed a structure so that there would have to be a corresponding removal of regulation. Any time that ministers wanted to bring in new regulations, they also had to think about removing other regulations. That is a good approach, because sometimes government fails to think about repealing old, irrelevant regulations, trying to tighten up and smarten the rules. Again, it is not about not having those protections in place; it is about ensuring that those protections are rational and effective, and actually associated with the objectives that the regulation is in fact intended to serve.
In 2012, the previous government brought forward changes that shifted the focus from protecting fairly arbitrarily defined fish habitat to actually protecting and preserving our fish stocks. That was a good approach. It was widely supported by civil society. It was not supported by some voices, but, generally speaking, those who saw the practical problems and the practical need for improvement supported our approach. Some parties in this House waved the flag and said that fewer waterways were protected. We were effectively protecting vital waterways and assuring that the farmer's ditch, that hole that my kids dug in the backyard, did not get designated as a waterway. There was an appropriate level of protection for places where fish actually live, and there was no merit in applying those regulations beyond their usefulness.
Unfortunately, the Liberal government has sort of drunk their own bathwater when it comes to these talking points. They have bought into these lines about how they need to go back to the old regulatory system, which piled on unnecessary red tape and made it harder to do any kind of development, but with no discernible objective.
I did want to say if one wants to talk about what actually is harmful to fish and what is harmful to waterways, let us talk about the decision by the former Liberal mayor of Montreal to dump raw sewage into the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the approval he received from the environment minister to do that. Raw sewage and the environment do not go hand in hand. However, the government wants to make it more difficult to do science-based development. It wants to make life harder for the energy sector. It put all kinds of barriers in the way of energy development and pipeline development. It wants to make it harder for municipalities to develop by putting unnecessary regulatory burdens in front of them, unless one is a well-connected, former Liberal MP who is the mayor of Montreal. Then if one wants to dump raw sewage in there, go for it.
How did the fish feel when that happened? Do fish feel? I do not know, but it was not good for their health, is the point.
I know members across the way are excited about this point but they cannot get around it. Our approach was one that actually protected fish habitat, that actually sought to protect fish stocks. It was science-based, it was consistent, and it was safe and effective.
My constituents often ask me about the double standards they see from the government. On the one hand, it talks about the environment. On the other hand, the government's approach to environmental policy is totally disconnected from reality, such as the piling of hurdles on the energy east pipeline. Again, there was Denis Coderre's strong opposition to the energy east pipeline because there might be some spill, allegedly. That was his line associated with that. At the same time, the government was not thinking about the impact on the fish from raw sewage. This is a floundering legislative agenda, indeed. Someone has heard me repeat that joke. However, they are hearing it for the first time. That is good.
There are a few other provisions in this bill that I want to touch on, in the time that I have left. The bill raises transparency concerns and due process concerns. For one thing it allows the minister to withhold critical information from interested proponents. We have heard a lot of discussion from the government about transparency, about sunny ways, and about how sunlight is the best disinfectant. However, we actually see in reality a consistent refusal to apply this lofty talk on transparency in practice. We see that happening and that certainly is disappointing. Again, we see cases of that in this particular piece of legislation.
This bill, as I said, piles on additional unnecessary regulations. It fails the test of being surgical and focused on achieving any clear, discernible result. This bill allows also for the establishment of advisory panels. These have former Liberal politicians and soon to be former Liberal politicians salivating, I am sure, about the opportunities of joining advisory panels for which they will be, no doubt, richly remunerated. However, there is no clarity around the guidance they will be required to give or the limitations on the use of these panels, or the conditions that they will be subject to.
The government, in creating more opportunities for patronage appointments, is not thinking about the fish. It is only thinking about the well-connected Liberal insiders. At the time of clam scam, one would think that it would want to avoid even the appearance of this kind of problem. Alas, it has not.
There are many concerns that we have with the bill: the problems for development, the troubling mechanisms, and other points I have not had time to get to. In any event, I will be opposing the bill.