Mr. Speaker, my friend the parliamentary secretary raises an excellent point. Supporting the amendments with $280 million is important, and enforcement is a critical aspect of any of these sections. As an example, the habitat alteration, destruction, and disruption section is central to protecting fish habitat, because without fish habitat, we do not have fish. Logging and other industries on the west coast n particular can devastate a stream on which salmon depend for rearing, and if we do not have people on the ground prepared to enforce those sections, we will never have any benefit from them.
Therefore, I could not agree more with the principle, but what it takes is not money as much as political will. Neither the current government nor the last government has shown itself ready to take the steps. Our environmental laws are replete with sections with large fines and great political commitments, but if we do the statistical analysis and see how often they are actually applied, the answer is pretty devastating: rarely, if ever.