Thank you very much, Chair.

Again, the topic that I keep harping on is the protection zone under this amendment.

Continue to scroll down to Kawartha Conservation. This is not anything negative against them. Lots of good friends work there—close friends, in fact—but the reason I keep bringing this up is to reinforce the point I'm trying to make. Under Kawartha Conservation's questions and answers, we see, “What is source water protection?” The answer is:

In 2000, the town of Walkerton, Ontario's drinking water was polluted. A total of seven people died and thousands got sick. After this, the province took action to make sure that all municipal drinking water sources are safe to drink. One of the main suggestions was protecting the water source itself, which is how the source water protection program began.

That's it. There's no real definition. This is even on just the provincial and local levels. They have a source water protection plan, which is under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act in Ontario and allows this plan to be updated annually at the local level through Kawartha Conservation and their partners. It's similar.

First of all, this plan regulates the application of road salt, the storage of snow and the application of agricultural source material, and the list goes on. There are 22 items on the list that can be updated annually, not by elected lawmakers but by the departments involved, Kawartha Conservation and the bureaucracy itself.

We are implementing policies with the force of law—whether through fines or, in the worst case, prison, potentially, depending on how severe this is—and they are imposed, so to speak, at the federal level. We are not defining this, but this legislation provides the minister, among others, with the power to continue to update this list. We, as elected officials, get to sit back and say, “Well, gee, it's the department. What are we going to do?” Meanwhile, people on the ground are impacted.

Again, we all want clean water for everybody. I think that's the goal, but not defining things is potentially going to lead in a direction that potentially will have unintended consequences, so I really think....

Again, I plead with this committee: Let's get that definition done. Perhaps organizations like local conservation authorities might be able to use it, because right now even they are having an issue defining this, which gives broad power.

When we're trying to ensure certainty for industry, while we're trying to ensure certainty in this legislation and the ability to provide clean drinking water, if there's no definition, we have no idea of what we're talking about. This is all big thinking here. Please, before this gets done, I'm begging this committee: Let's define some of these things.

Jamie Schmale

$608,463.00