Hon. Grant Mitchell

Honourable senators, I would like to make several points about this report. It is a good report, done by a great committee. We worked hard, heard from a lot of witnesses and enjoyed working together. It was a very healthy environment — pun intended — and we came up with this report.

There are a couple of points that I would like to emphasize. One is that some of us — not all of our members — were unhappy that it was included in the Budget Implementation Act. That is ground that has been ploughed many times in this chamber. I would just like to add my voice to the chorus of voices that expressed their dismay about that process.

Second, this piece of legislation, or the element that addressed the Navigable Waters Protection Act in Bill C-10, seemed more ominous to people than perhaps it necessarily had to. I think, in part, that was because the way that the argument was made in its defence was ultimately misleading and contradictory — unnecessarily so.

The government was quick off the mark to say that these changes were necessary simply to streamline the process of review — environmental, navigable waters and other review — of projects because there was so much pressure to get projects under the stimulus package approved and under way. However, at the same time, in the process of defending this, many witnesses kept saying that, yes, we need to do it because we have to streamline projects, but really it is only small projects and minor waters that will be affected.

There is an inherent contradiction here. If the projects are small and if they are on small waters, how could speeding them up to get them done have any real impact on the question of getting projects out to stimulate the economy? These are small projects that will not stimulate the economy.

As we raked our way through that contradictory position, it finally became clear — and it was stated forthrightly by one of the officials — that we will be able to get a lot of minor projects off the list, thereby freeing up resources to deal with major projects.

That is a legitimate argument. It remains to be seen whether that will have a profound impact, but it is at least a hypothesis worth testing. We will see. It begs the question that we may need to revisit the process in a year or two to see if it has worked in the way the government said that it should.

The second feature of this legislation that many people felt was ominous was that a Navigable Waters Protection Act review triggers other environmental reviews. If you do not do the former, you will not get to the latter. That was the problem for many people. We do not want to miss out on environmental reviews of projects that absolutely and fundamentally require them.

It was argued that some measures would protect us against that concern. One measure is that all the standards for a Navigable Waters Protection Act project have to be adhered to even if a project is exempted from specific review, or the project can actually be knocked down. That is the penalty, a powerful one.

Again, it remains to be seen whether we actually do miss out on environmental reports or reviews that need to be done. It also begs the question that in a year or two, this committee needs to go back and do a reassessment to see if what we were being told turns out to be true. I want to thank everyone for their work on the committee, and I would urge honourable senators to support this report.

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