Mr. Speaker, it was one of my great fears when the first draft consultation paper was put out about repairing the damage and restoring the original Navigable Waters Protection Act that it looked as though we might just hold to a schedule only. I was very gratified to find the definition had changed to say that navigable waters means “a body of water...that is used or where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be used by vessels, in full or in part, for any part of the year as a means of transport...”. This is a much broader definition, so it does not go back to the one we had from 1881. Under Bill C-45, in fall of 2012, we lost protection on over 98 point something per cent of the interior waterways of Canada.
My question for the hon. parliamentary secretary is this. This is a good definition. We probably got protection back on something like 89% of all the interior waters in Canada, but the nature of the protection is different, because the impact assessment legislation in part 1 of this omnibus bill did not restore the requirement that the minister of transportation would have to have an impact evaluation, an environmental assessment, and impact assessment before granting a permit to interfere with navigation on these waters. What is the nature of the protection, given that that gap was not replaced?