Welcome to the new autocracy of Canada, an autocracy being defined by Merriam Webster as government “in which one person possesses unlimited power”. Our autocracy only differs from a pure autocracy because every few years the public gets to choose which potential autocrat to give all the power to. In fact we in BC have two autocrats set in authority over us – The Right Honourable Stephen Harper and the Honourable Gordon Campbell. Both of these autocrats subscribe to the theory that the more humungous private companies doing their thing on our rivers, the better. They also believe in avoiding all contact with the public – after all, they might not like it and stir up a terrible fuss although the Autocrats must know that they’re safe because their tame media can be counted upon to be silent.
Harper has employed parliamentary trickery by including changes to The Navigable Waters Protection Act in the Budget Bill making the amendments of the Act a matter of confidence so that the only way so The Commons can defeat the amendments is to defeat the government. The Senate, if it had had any backbone, could have severed the Amendments to the Act but the parliamentary poodles forbore doing so.
Let’s look at what the Navigable Waters Protection Act was designed to do and what the amendments will do.
Back in 1882 the federal parliament passed the Navigable Waters Protection Act which, was “designed to protect the public right of navigation in Canadian waters, as defined by the law, by prohibiting the building, placing or maintaining of any work whatsoever in, on, over, under, through or across any such navigable water, without the authorization of the Minister of Fisheries and Ocean Canada. The expression « navigable water » designates any body of water capable, in its natural state, of being navigated by any type of floating vessel for the purpose of transportation, recreation or commerce and includes a canal and any other body of water created or altered for the benefit of the public, as a result of the waterway assigned for public use. The public right of navigation also includes the use of both pleasure craft and commercial ships as well as all other types of boats.
Now Autocrat Harper wants to amend this act, because, he says, the Act is out of date. Continue Reading »
