John Duncan

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, there are some legitimate concerns about Bill C-49. It goes to the heart of some of the things that were being said prior to question period.

The British Columbia Native Women's Society has complained quite bitterly about this legislation. I want to quote a few of the things they have said in their letter. They are very important.

To put this in context, B.C. native women have already been through an experiment promoted by the federal government in 1992 and 1993. A native justice pilot program was started on southern Vancouver Island. It came to a rapid, screeching halt after a lot of politically correct thought went into trying to create a system that would be sensitive to the native communities.

What ended up happening in that grandiose experiment was that people who committed grievous offences in aboriginal communities in that area, largely men, were found right back in the same community the day after their sentencing. The old rules were thrown out, the justice system was thrown out, and a new system more sensitive to the needs of that community was put in place run by the very cronies of the people that were perpetrating the offences.

Guess who were the loudest complainants and the ones that got this travesty stopped? It was the native women. When we look at who is organizing, who tends to be out front in trying to correct the wrongs that are happening in great abundance on some of our reserves, who do we find at the forefront? We find native women. They may not belong to a formal organization or they may be fighting to establish a formal organization. Whatever the case may be, we had better listen because they have something to say and they have everything stacked against them.

The Canadian Human Rights Act is a basic and fundamental piece of legislation which we would assume covers all Canadians. It does not. It excludes any discrimination flowing from the Indian Act. That is a big problem. It does not protect native women from many of the things they are complaining about. They cannot win if they have everything stacked against them. I will quote from the letter:

—women living on reserves lack the protections available to all other Canadian women when their marriages break down. They cannot get an order for occupation or division of the matrimonial home—. The Indian Act provisions governing their situation were struck down by the courts in the early 80s and the federal government has done nothing to correct the inequality—

Whenever we find inequality under the terms of the Indian Act we find that the Indian Act is dependent upon defining who is a status Indian. In order to do that it goes through great gyrations. When governments certify ethnic or racial status it can become very complicated. It does not matter how hard government tries. There will be inequality in the definition of status Indian. I does not matter who designs the system. It could never be designed not to lead to some form of inequality. It tends to be stacked against Indian women. It is also stacked against others.

This has many permutations in how other legislation that affects aboriginals because the definition of status Indian is a basic building block. It is an inappropriate way to do things.

Every piece of legislation over time has taken away sections of the Indian Act, including the most comprehensive and contemporary treaty in Canada, the Nisga'a agreement in northwestern British Columbia. Only one part of the Indian Act is kept under that agreement. We do not have to guess what part of the Indian Act it is. They kept the part that defines who is an Indian because the whole thing will unravel if they do not have some form of definition. It is an artificial definition. The longer things go on and the more human nature exhibits itself, the more dysfunctional the whole arrangement will become.

Many things have been said today by members of other parties. There is always an attempt to pigeon hole and stereotype. It very discouraging that people like to do that when talking to an issue that is potentially charged with racial overtones because we are talking about status Indians and the Indian Act. They love to stereotype and try to pigeon hole where one is coming from. This is why I was greatly concerned about what the member for Churchill was saying earlier concerning what motivates members of the Reform Party in terms of some of this legislation.

There is an unholy alliance which I describe as a love-in between the Liberals and the NDP on some aboriginal legislation. I remind members of the House that we are now in the second parliament of this administration and we have yet to see a piece of aboriginal legislation that originated with the government.

All the legislation we saw in the last parliament and what we are seeing in this parliament is legislation initiated in the days when Brian Mulroney and the Tories were in government. All their initiatives are still being milked. All their excesses are still coming out from the legislative boiler room, wherever it might be. There are no original ideas. There is no new direction. It is apparent that is what is needed.

Further, the bill we are dealing with right now dates back a number of years. I cannot locate all the details, but this legislation under different formats has been worked on for a number of years. A lot of money flowed to participants who were developing a proposal that was turned into legislation. It is a very expensive initiative. It probably cost several millions of dollars. It could be over $10 million. It seems like that is always the case. Very little is accomplished for an awful lot of money, and I have concerns about that.

We all know that there is very enlightened band governance in Canada. We could all name examples. We recognize that the current policy framework of the department of Indian affairs is ineffective in allowing people to get rid of unenlightened governance.

When we cannot get rid of the bad apples the barrel tends to get tainted. That is what we are trying to change. We want all accountability mechanisms to be put in place because that is what people deserve. In actual fact we are finding out that is what people want. It is only the established powers that tend to resist because the status quo serves them quite well.

Bill C-49 purports to provide for the establishment of an alternative land management regime that gives first nations community control over the lands and resources within their reserves. In other words, Bill C-49 was drafted to give aboriginal people more control over the lands they occupy.

I have some very major concerns about the bill. The framework agreement on first nations land management will be ratified by Bill C-49. It extends to band governance broader powers than those extended to municipal governments under the various provincial-municipal acts. This is very troubling, especially from a local perspective. After all, it is at the local level that lives are lived. That is where things get done. That is where co-operation is developed. That is where families grow. That is where everything happens.

The bill has the potential to significantly impact relations between bands and local governments in a number of areas such as land use planning, environmental regulation and protection of third party interests. Again the federal government is imposing its will in terms of creating legislation that will destruct local and provincial relationships without saying what it is doing.

This kind of legislation is always wrapped up in a pretty package and the contents are allowed to seep out over time. There is no attempt to quantify what the consequences of the legislation may be even though the implications are vast and potentially far reaching.

Last year the union of B.C. municipalities and the lower mainland treaty advisory committee both expressed major concerns about the predecessor piece of legislation, Bill C-75, which was introduced in the dying days of the last parliament. It died and has now been resurrected a year later. To summarize their concerns, there was little or no consultation with the British Columbia government, local government and the public in general.

This was my critic area in the last parliament. The minister of Indian affairs, Indian lobbyists, backbench Liberal MPs and the minister's staff hounded the opposition House leader, the Reform House leader and me in the dying days of the last parliament prior to the election call. Everyone knew the election call was coming on the last weekend of April 1997. Everyone knew the June 2, 1997 election would be called in April. There was incredible pressure brought to bear on us to allow Bill C-75 to go through all three readings and obtain royal assent before parliament recessed due to the election call.

We refused to be stampeded because of our concerns, as I have just explained, about the lack of consultation with anybody involved other than the aboriginal band leaderships set out in the agreement. Despite this major and serious concern no substantive change has been made to Bill C-49 which evolved from Bill C-75 to ensure a smooth and harmonious relationship between local and band governments, which I also consider to be local governments.

The department of Indian affairs works in mysterious ways. I must admit that I have lost my grapevine having moved on to another portfolio. What has happened with this legislation is typical of many other pieces of Liberal legislation. The government gets stampeded by internal lobby groups. The minister commits himself or herself to action. Pressure flows from the minister's desk to staff and caucus. They all try to infect the opposition with a sense of undue haste and urgency. Then, if the legislation does not go through either in the dying days of a parliament before an election or prior to a recess, when we come back to the House, lo and behold the haste and urgency have dissipated.

It has been more than a year since the election and we are just seeing this piece of legislation slowly winding its way through this House.

I do not like this piece of legislation because it fragments the statutory framework whereby we have about 630 bands across Canada administered under the Indian Act.

We are trying to take 14 bands out from under some of the provisions of the Indian Act. However, far too much of the Indian Act will still apply to those 14 bands. It is piecemeal, partial, non-satisfactory legislation.

Another concern I have is about the leaseholders on reserve lands. The leaseholders have had, in some cases, multiple decades of holding their leases under agreements supervised by the department of Indian affairs. Perhaps there has been an eroding federal presence, but certainly this is a tremendously significant departure from previous lease arrangements for homeowners, cottage owners, long term land leases and other situations.

These people are going to be faced with a whole new set of rules with attendant uncertainties. Should they be unhappy with the new arrangements, should they consider that they have a legitimate beef, their concerns are not really addressed in this bill.

There is no protection against one sided land quotes which may totally devalue the investments they have made in improvements. That could really be considered a form of expropriation.

I think we can argue that natural justice would say that compensation should occur if land quotes impact negatively on people, but there is no mechanism for this to happen in the bill.

This bill is coming back to us again a year and a half later and not a thing has changed in terms of band, local or provincial protocol on environmental or land use issues.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is tough to be brief when there has been so much said that reflects on this side of the House. The NDP-Liberal love-in on this file seems to continue.

The member talked about the chiefs not trusting the government. I have news for the member. In The First Perspective , a first nations magazine, a survey was done and in that survey 83% of the band members who responded said they did not trust their own chief and council.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about fee simple ownership. It is a rather critical sticking point with a lot of discussion in terms of how things should be structured to make them better.

In Campbell River on Vancouver Island, the community I live in, the Campbell River Band has a unique circumstance. When the agreement was signed by the band to put the four lane bypass through the reserve, a land transfer was effected. The bottom line is the reserve now has reserve land and a big section of fee simple land. The band had a business proposal that included all of the land. After several years it is now one of the major developments. It is a major shopping area in the community and serves the whole community. It is highly successful.

The difference to the band is that it has a much easier time administratively dealing with the fee simple land. It does not have to go through the minister, through the Indian Act and all of the red tape and bureaucracy. That is the upside. The downside is that there are taxation ramifications. In actual fact what I have heard from some who are in that business is they can spend so much avoiding taxes that they end up not running a very good business.

With the test of time we may see demonstrated that despite the rap it has received from what is essentially a collectivist static encumbrance placed upon land ownership by the Indian Act, fee simple ownership may turn out to be the way to go in the long run. Philosophically I agree with that.

I wonder if the member would like to comment on what he thinks about what I just said.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, some of the rhetoric I have heard from the member for Churchill is not worthy of an intelligent conversation. Prior to the last parliament in this House there was not a single piece of aboriginal legislation that did not get all-party consent in this place. Nobody ever challenged the status quo. There are do gooders and people who do good. I place myself in the latter category. I challenge the status quo which has led us to the reserves having the worst statistics in the nation.

The member for Churchill has blinders on in terms of thinking we cannot challenge the status quo and fix what is wrong with many of the aboriginal communities in Canada.

If it is wrong to challenge the fact that we do not have accountability in many areas, if it is wrong to challenge that we do not have a democracy in full flower in many of those communities, if it is wrong to say that equality is not something to strive for, if it is wrong to be opposed to sexual and other abuse which is rampant in some of these communities, if it is wrong to think that we can fix fetal alcohol syndrome, I would apologize to the member.

Those are all worthy goals. Members of my caucus and I are pursuing these things with vigour. We are getting better results than the all party cloak of silence that resided in this place prior to our arriving in the last parliament.

We are challenging what is wrong and we are starting to see major fixes. That is not to say that the signatories, the bands that are signatories to the legislation, fall into that category. In many respects I am quite sure they do not. Some of them may not at all. I do not want to be appearing to tarnish all as the same because they are not. One of the reasons the legislation exists is that these are some of the more progressive, wealthier bands that have a lot of private property concepts and other things going for them.

In many respects there are objectives in the legislation which I find admirable. I have some problems with the legislation and I will talk about them later. If the member wishes to comment on my comments, she is welcome.

[Criminal Code, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk for a minute about some of the things the member talked about with regard to cutbacks to the RCMP on the west coast. This is a major ongoing concern and it is not going to go away.

We are now going into the winter months and these so-called temporary measures that have been enacted to try to make up for what the government is calling overspending are going to take us to at least April. We are now in a circumstance, well described by my colleague, where the airplanes and helicopters are in the hangar and the boats are docked.

In the past, for example, we had members who would work a shift and then would be on call for eight hours for which they would receive one hour of overtime. That was precious little compensation for being basically on tap for an additional eight hours. That one hour of overtime is now gone and the members of the RCMP in our area are expected to carry on as if this is fine. In actual fact, none of this was created by them.

This was all created by Ottawa and by not forwarding moneys through E division. The reason we ended up with an $8 million so-called shortfall has everything to do with court costs and with extra things that happened. For example, there was a multiple murder in my riding. One case like that can put the taxman's budget well over. We cannot plan for contingencies like that. These are major investigations.

The public is becoming more and more uncomfortable. Basic policing is something that government should be providing. That is a prime responsibility. I am glad to see that the solicitor general is in the House to hear what I am saying, because this cannot carry on. It is affecting overtime monitoring, our helicopters, our boats and our airplanes. It is affecting capital spending. It is affecting the future of the RCMP. The training centre in Regina is now shut down. It is affecting morale on an ongoing basis. This is just not acceptable. Anyone who has small communities in their riding knows that what used to be slim coverage is now skimpy or non-existent.

We have huge areas on the coast where the Criminal Code, drug interdiction and other things are not being enforced. They cannot be enforced because there is nobody there. That is my comment.

My question for my colleague relates to the fact that this is obviously an omnibus bill. It takes in everything from gambling to homicide, child prostitution, conditional sentencing, organized crime, telemarketing fraud and so on. This makes it very difficult. One can support nine measures out of 10 and get oneself into a bit of knot on a piece of legislation like this.

I guess the prime area of concern would be with conditional sentencing, at least from my perspective. We still have in conditional sentencing a huge loophole. It is being applied to violent offenders despite previous justice ministers telling us that would never happen. We also have a much smaller loophole being closed by this legislation.

I would like to ask my colleague to comment on the omnibus nature of this bill and also to elaborate on the RCMP funding situation.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, October 29th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member from the Bloc for her question. I was trying to point out that the government has very scarce resources that are already fully allocated. Indeed it is suffering some obvious shortfalls that it had not anticipated in the marine field on the west coast. So I thank the member for pointing this out. Indeed when we have three different departments we have diffused management and it is less effective. We have seen that very clearly in the management of the fishery. When there is one manager we can attempt to manage the fishery. As soon as there are two or more, everything falls apart.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, October 29th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I never indicated that I did not want a marine conservation area in any of the 29 areas. Dividing Canadian waters into 29 slots told me that the federal government must be targeting a minimum of 29 marine conservation areas. When we look at the U.S. experience since the 1970s it has only created 12 areas.

I am questioning whatever rationale went into it, whether or not it was a realistic rationale. I will be happy to identify which of those 29 areas I would not want to see designated as marine conservation areas when the parliamentary secretary tells my caucus which industry he would like to see targeted if the split-run publishing bill is found wanting by WTO.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, October 29th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I am opposed to the way in which we have such disparate departments promoting legislation that does not seem to hang together or tie together and which tends to politicize the whole process. I am not blanketly opposing the protection of marine areas.

In terms of talking about dates and when things happen, I remind the parliamentary secretary that in 1957 British Columbia created marine parks. I have been in those marine parks in Montague Harbour on Galiano Island and at Rebecca Spit in my riding. Some of these marine parks actually contain no water, but they protect anchorages and scenic shoreline areas.

There were many activities in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. Now British Columbia manages—this is the west coast after all—73 provincial parks and recreation areas and 15 ecological reserves with marine components. Parks Canada manages 155 square kilometres of marine waters in Pacific Rim National Park. I spent seven years in that area. I am well aware of the plan to create 3,000 square kilometres of national marine conservation area in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

That is not germane to the exercise. It is not whether we have protected marine areas. It is how we go about it. I am saying the legislation is full of holes. There are lots of concerns. If we are to do it, let us make sure we are locally sensitive and that the people with the most potential to be displaced have the most to say, particularly in the beginning, about how they will either be achieved or even whether it is appropriate to do so.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, October 29th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, before I talk about the bill I would like to talk a bit about the area I come from. Almost half the coastline of British Columbia would fall into my riding of Vancouver Island North. That is half the coastline of Vancouver Island and a good portion of the adjacent mainland coastline.

Within the constraints of all that coastline there is a lot of activity going on at any given time. There are certainly a lot of aquaculture operations. There is a lot of fishing activity, commercial and recreational. There is a lot of under sea harvesting. There are a lot of transportation activities. I talked a bit about that during my questioning of the member for Davenport.

There is a history of oil and gas exploration. There is as much oil and gas identified without major effort on the B.C. coast which would exceed the Hibernia area on the east coast.

We have very active waterways. I mentioned cruise ships. When I am at home I very often see six or seven cruise ships go by on any given evening.

I think it is important to recognize that we have a somewhat unique circumstance in British Columbia when it comes to our ocean area. We have established that the Gulf of Georgia, the seabed and all that belongs to the province.

That tends to create some new and different wrinkles on things because generally in Canadian jurisdictions the oceans are federal.

I have great concerns about the politicization of the protection of marine areas. That is one of the reasons I brought up this question about why we have three different federal departments all involved in one way or another in protecting marine areas.

There are many ways to colour the response to that but if people really think about it, if they are familiar with the way this place operates, it probably has a lot more to do with politics than with protecting the marine environment.

The reason we have three different departments trying to protect marine areas is that this is a public relations exercise to various degrees for various ministers.

In the case of this bill, we think it is properly an environment bill. It is falling under heritage because we know who the minister of heritage is, what she is all about and what she wants to promote. She wants to promote the fact that she is out saving marine resources as well as land resources tied in with her parks mandate.

I would like to comment a little about my concerns regarding navigation on our waterways because I asked a question about it to the previous speaker. In the response it occurred to me that there is a non-understanding on the government side that when it comes to monitoring marine traffic we have signed treaties with our neighbour the United States.

We have signed collective agreements with our employees regarding how we are going to monitor marine traffic. This government, this administration chose to break those collective agreements and chose to break the terms of that treaty because it has mismanaged the funding for the coast guard and the department of fisheries for this year.

When it comes to making cuts, the government will make the cuts at the place where service delivery is hurt. It will not make it at the place where the comfortable bureaucrat is continued to be sheltered, protected and coddled. It certainly will not make it in the minister's office. The spin doctors are all still viably employed.

There was one other response I elicited to my question regarding why we cannot have all this legislation fall under one mandate. Why do there have to be three mandates? What is the difference between these protected areas? What will the rationale be?

All we got was “We don't know that. Maybe they will not all be under one mandate. At some point maybe they will all be under the same department”. Those are all fuzzy, feel good statements.

We do know what the current situation is. We know what today's situation is. This is today's legislation. Surely to goodness we can design legislation that maximizes the current structure of government in terms of getting results. That is all I am requesting.

It is useful when discussing this bill to think about how this came about. I realize it goes back to the early 1990s, but in October 1996 the Prime Minister gave a speech to the World Conservation Congress. He announced the federal government's intent to introduce new legislation to establish and administer a network of marine conservation areas in the Great Lakes and in the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.

Where did this great initiative start? Did it start from local concerns, ideas expressed and generated by the grassroots, by the communities or by the provinces? No, it started from the need of the Prime Minister to polish his international stature at an international conference two years ago. Is that not typical?

Afterward we heard the national parks directorate saying it wanted to consult with interested groups and individuals as the first step toward developing the legislation. Should the first steps not arise from a problem or a perceived need that is expressed by those who have a problem? Must we always have legislation imposed on us from above?

Let us look at some of these consultations. When the legislation package came out I sent out a request for comments from 22 groups. All those 22 groups are groups that should have been consulted by the government. These groups found they could not comment in a meaningful way on the legislative package because they did not know where the marine conservation areas were going to be created. It is that simple. How can any local group get its teeth into a piece of legislation that has a vacant schedule I and schedule II that are supposed to identify what the marine conservation areas are? It cannot do it.

We know there are 29 so-called representative areas in Canada with lines arbitrarily drawn on a map. There would probably be at least one marine conservation area established in each of these 29 areas. Where are they within the lines on the map? How big would they be? No one knows.

From previous so-called consultation processes we do know that the federal government has preconceived ideas about the process and about areas it would like to designate that have nothing to do with consultation and everything to do with special interest groups and squeaky wheels in the maintenance of bureaucracy. These are not in keeping with local priorities.

I want to explain something. The recreational sector, which will be heavily impacted by anything that comes out of this, has no effective lobby in many cases. For example, in my constituency fishing is a big thing. The private sector does not include sport fishermen. This recreational sector is composed primarily of individuals anglers. If the federal bureaucracy decides to close a marine area to fishing, this will put a whole bunch of local anglers out without no means of effectively protesting the government's action.

Certain marine areas are being targeted in northern Vancouver Island as sites for marine protection areas because certain squeaky wheel groups want to exclude activity from that area. However, these special interest groups do not represent the general public.

If we invent enabling legislation to create marine conservation areas and then we do not create the areas, we get a bureaucracy that becomes increasingly uncomfortable because it wants to fulfill its minister's agenda for the Prime Minister. So it creates as many of these areas as it has to.

In effect we create a self-perpetuating machine churning out regulations that have no business existing in the first place. We end up with marine conservation areas that have a very weak rationale which flies in the face of common sense and local sentiment.

There has to be a better way. We have to make sure local government is involved in a meaningful way. I am aware of how local government was involved in the consultations on protected areas. We are talking about a DFO mandate here, not a heritage mandate. They are paid lip service but their concerns are not what drives the process. DFO bureaucracy drives the process in that case.

There is nothing in the legislation that tells me the bureaucracy will be held to account in ensuring that the municipal level of government, the one that is in touch with local needs, will have any meaningful decision making power. Indeed that would be contrary to the philosophy of the government and so it is no surprise.

My own constituency concerns are primarily about fishing at this point. One thing the legislation does is create a reverse onus, the opposite of the current circumstance. This means that right now fishing is always open unless areas are specifically closed.

Bill C-48 will make a marine conservation area a closed area and the department or minister will have to take steps to open it for fishing. This is a comfortable place for bureaucrats, but it is a terrible place for fishermen.

The legislation is very good in appearances. It gives the minister the ability to say she has created marine conservation areas. This supports the international speech made by the Prime Minister in 1996. It probably will not cost the federal government that much because it is easier to create a water park than a land based park. The real cost of the exercise will be the people whose traditional activities have been proven to be sustainable activities over the decades or over the generations. These people will have a tendency to be dispossessed.

We can be almost certain that no cost benefit analysis and no sociological or socioeconomic analysis of the bill has been done by the government. I would guess the government has no idea what the program will cost. In any event it probably does not matter because the government's first order of business will be to offload any management responsibilities on to everyone but itself. After having taken credit for starting what it has brainwashed everyone into believing is the greatest thing, the federal government will point fingers at everyone but itself.

The U.S. has had similar legislation since 1972. It passed the marine protection, research and sanctuaries act at a time when there was a burgeoning global awareness of environmental issues and a real environmental bandwagon. We were all in the same category at that time.

Since 1972 the United States has created 12 national marine sanctuaries. There are five off the east coast, five off the west coast, one in Hawaii and one in American Samoa. The goal in creating these 12 areas has been to protect vital pockets of distinct and threatened ocean in American territorial waters.

The first such sanctuary made in 1975 consisted of less than one square mile off the North Carolina coast surrounding the wreck of the Monitor from the Civil War. The others include the world's third largest barrier reef, unique waters off California, and coral reefs.

The entire U.S. system of 18,000 square miles of water has an annual budget of $11.7 million and volunteers are an essential component of making sure its system works. There is a lot of buy-in in the U.S. system.

I do not think our government has thought about the cost in terms of capital outlay, human effort and the cost of people displaced by the system. We have created 29 zones and no realistic budget.

When we look at the problems we have had with our fisheries resource and are continuing to have on both coasts, it is very clear that we are unable to police effectively overfishing, poaching and other associated problems. Right now on the B.C. coast police boats have been taken out of service. Police airplanes have been grounded. They are under tight budgetary constraints.

I was in Owikeno, a native village on the mid-coast of British Columbia. It used to get a once a month visit from the RCMP. It does not get any visits any more unless it is an absolute emergency. The police are concerned about drug interdiction. They have all kinds of concerns. They cannot enforce the Criminal Code on the water any more, and there are very limited resources in other departments. I am very concerned about all of that.

Bill C-48 will not prevent or assist any of this. If the funds are not provided the legislation cannot be effectively put in place. I could say a lot more, but possibly in the question and comment period I will be able to say some of it.

[Marine Conservation Areas Act, October 29th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech. He went into a lot of detail, which sometimes needs to be brought to bear in these debates.

In terms of the legislation surrounding protected marine areas, there are three federal departments that can protect marine areas, Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and this bill will enable Heritage Canada to do the same. Can the member give me an impression of why he thinks it is that way?

The member for Davenport is the chair of the environment committee. He made a lot of detailed comments about this bill which falls under the heritage department. My colleague from Dauphin—Swan River and I were saying that this is really an environment bill and not a parks bill. I am adding to that same question by making that statement.

The member talked about his concern about navigation and the question of navigational alternatives. That is a very interesting question for me and the area I represent. Let us think about traffic control and some of the big ships that now utilize the inside passage on the west coast from Vancouver up to Alaska. There is a lot of cruise ship traffic, freight traffic and marine traffic of every size and shape. To control all of that there are vessel traffic control centres which are similar to the air traffic control centres.

The problem is twofold. The reality is that we are operating in two dimensions only when we are operating on the water. In the air we have three dimensions so things can be a lot more limiting and in many respects a lot scarier.

Another factor has come into being lately. Federal funding for the coast guard, federal fisheries and other areas that affect all of the marine oriented activities has been chopped to the point where we were not navigating for our freight traffic, our cruise ships or our large ships for a period of 12 hours just about a month ago. This was very scary indeed.

If we cannot do that for everything from cruise ships to oil tankers to major log transports and so on, how in heck are we going to enforce a new arrangement where we are trying to deal with navigation in a specifically declared conservation area?