The Sixth Estate

Continuing Sixth Estate’s fall 2012 budget coverage, which began with a look at what appears to me to be some appalling chicanery in the MP pension “reform” scheme, I thought it would be nice to look at the end of the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Symbolic of the shift in emphasis by this government, the Navigable Waters Protection Act is technically no more. Henceforth it will be known as the Navigation Protection Act, which, you will note, is not quite the same thing, is it?

More to the point, and quite incredibly, the Navigation Protect Act reduces its scope from covering all bodies of water (lakes, rivers and oceans) that you can move a boat along, to just those bodies of water that appear on a special list maintained by the Minister of Transport. That list now appears as Schedule 2 of the Budget, and, incredibly, it contains just 97 lakes and 62 rivers, in addition to the three oceans. According to Wikipedia, Canada has about 32,000 lakes that are larger than 3 square kilometres.  So obviously there is a great deal of legislative carnage here.

Of course the whole thing is out of order, since it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a budgetary measure and therefore cannot be included in a budget bill. There may even be a challenge to the Speaker on the subject, but since the Speaker of Parliament — one of the most sacred offices in the history of Parliamentary democracy — is now a far-right-wing, under-educated, 33-year old insurance broker, don’t expect any challenge to the Harper regime from that particular corner.

Anyhow, more to the point, I thought it would be nice to look at the list of lakes and rivers to see what we’re going to lose protection of. Today we’ll do the rivers; tomorrow, we’ll do the lakes.

Both lists are a shambles. They’re not in alphabetical order. They don’t define river or lake (is a river just the main stem running all the way back to the source? Does it include tributaries?) Even more absurdly, that list of “rivers” doesn’t actually include 62 rivers. Some of the “rivers” are actually canals. Some of the canals are listed more than once. The Trent Canal is listed four times (#32, #35, #40, and #43), covering different segments.

Most importantly, this is obviously an absurdly short list of rivers. Leaving aside the virtual absence of any surveillance north of the 60th parallel in the future, there’s also the obvious question of just how many rivers are going to be entirely unprotected going forward. The Conservative drafters clearly live in Ontario. Nine of the 62 “rivers” aren’t rivers at all: they’re canals. The list also includes some short streams you’ve probably never heard of (because they’re hidden in rural southern Ontario), like Stevens Creek. The drafters also took pains to protect a puddle in the middle of Ottawa called Dow’s Lake.

But the most obvious way to show the shortcomings of this bill, I think, are to look at the major rivers, not the minor ones. (After all, a navigable waters law ought to cover both.) Wikipedia says there are 47 rivers in Canada that are at least 600 kilometres long. 30 of the 47 longest rivers in Canada do not appear on the new list of protected rivers; many of these are in the North, which, with the exception of the Mackenzie River and the Yukon River, the Harper regime appears to have simply written off. The unprotected major rivers include the following:

1. Albany River
2. Attawapiskat River
3. Back River
4. Churchill River (Manitoba)
5. Churchill River (Newfoundland)
6. Coppermine River
7. Dubawnt River
8. Eastmain River
9. English River
10. Riviere Grande
11. Great Whale River
12. Hay River
13. Horton River
14. Kazan River
15. Kokosak River
16. Liard River
17. Milk River
18. Nelson River
19. Nottaway River
20. Peel River
21. Pelly River
22. Riviere Pend d’Oreille
23. Porcupine River
24. Red Deer River
25. Rupert River
26. Saskatchewan River (below the confluence of th eNorth and South)
27. Severn River
28. Slave River
29. Stewart River
30. Thelon River

Those, plus somewhere around 99.9% of rivers in Canada, are no longer considered navigable or protected by the Government of Canada. And some of the others are important too: in B.C., for instance, of the significant rivers, the Fraser, Columbia, and Skeena are protected, but the Nass, Stikine, Nechako, and Liard are not. There also appear to be no protected waterways left on Vancouver Island or the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Which is good news if you want to build a dam, or a bridge, or a pipeline, or just about anything else. A pipeline, for instance, across a bunch of rivers in northern B.C.