.

Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

NWT - Greg Loftus doesn’t want government bureaucrats telling him where can kayak.

“It’s not right for them to be able to decide where I can and cannot go on the waterways in Canada,” said the avid kayaker and president of Paddlers for Parts, a non-profit organization that raises money for organ transplants.

Western Arctic MP Dennis Bevington says changes to a NWT act will take away people's rights to travel on waterways. - NNSL file photo

Through Bill C-10, the Budget Implementation Act, changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act are expected to give unprecedented power to the Minister of Transportation with regards to what waterways will be open to navigation, threatening the longstanding public right to water navigation.

Western Arctic MP Dennis Bevington tabled a petition Tuesday in the House of Commons with more than 60 Northern names in opposition of the changes to the act. With Bill C-10 through its third reading in the House of Commons and now in its first reading in the Senate, Bevington said this act is likely to pass but the changes to the Waters Protection Act shouldn’t have been included.

“They use these budget bills to get through things that shouldn’t be in there,” Bevington said. “There are good reasons to change the act, but the processes are wrong. I don’t agree how they’ve given the power to the minister without consultation or appeal.”

The Transportation Committee was bypassed and not given a chance to make amendments or changes to the act, something Bevington said is inherently wrong.

“They stuck it in the act so they could get it through without public scrutiny and public consultation,” he said. “There was no chance for people to amend it in the appropriate committee.”

The change will allow the Minister of Transportation to create classes of waterways to which environmental protection laws will no longer apply.

“If they build a dam on a waterway you can be sure that it will affect the environment downstream,” Loftus said. “It gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want on any waterway in Canada. It’s just not right for this to happen.”

With this change, the right of people to navigate waterways will be overshadowed by economic development. Bevington said economic opportunities will come before a persons’ right to navigate water systems in the North.

“The Minister will say your right to travel isn’t there anymore and this project is going ahead,” he said. “But in terms of your right to travel, it’s not going to be under discussion. “This could spring up in any location because we all have small streams. It could be around Yellowknife, or the Dehcho or Sahtu. It applies to everywhere and everywhere in the future there could be conflicting interest between people who use it for transportation or a company who wants to use it for another reason.”

Bevington said the right of people for passage on waterways is an old established right and this change is going to take that right from Canadians, especially Northerners.

“What they’ve done with this act is make it so the Minister unilaterally can declare a stream or river, non-navigable without consultation or without appeal,” he said. “It’s a rights issue. You have the right to travel on a river. Protecting Canadians rights is a very important part of what we do and I don’t see this as working in that direction.”