Matthew speech on Motion 502 - Canadian Waterways and lack of investment June 16th, 2014 - 11:14 Matthew Kellway speaks about Canadian waterways and the Government of Canadas failure to invest in this vital infrastructure. ___________________________________________________________________ _____ Mr. Matthew Kellway (Beaches—East York, NDP): Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise in the House today and speak to Motion No. 502, which calls on the government to consider the advisability of measures to strengthen and deepen the vessel navigation channel that provides access from Georgian Bay to the westerly limit of the Trent-Severn Waterway at Port Severn. What the motion is attempting to address is a bit of a hazardous part of the trip through the 386 km. waterway. The channel that these folks are having to go through is rock-faced, quite narrow and subject to swift currents from the operation of the locks and also from winds. The boats that travel through that narrow channel often get shifted around by both the currents and winds into rock faces and experience problems. I am very pleased to speak to the motion for a couple of reasons. First, I spent three happy summers on the Trent-Severn Waterway as a summer student and another year on the Rideau Canal, again as a summer student. These were great jobs. Students, frankly, could not ask for better work. It was outside. It was well paid. That work went a long way in helping me through those years of university. I have to acknowledge I was not lock staff. I was an interpretive guide. On the Trent-Severn, I spent most of my time in Peterborough at the lift lock, the highest lift lock in the work, as I am sure all of us in the House know. However, I did get the opportunity to see the full length of the waterway, sometimes dressed as Boomer the beaver, sometimes just in my Parks Canada uniform. It was amazing. I got to see the Kirkfield lift lock too, which is the second highest lift lock in the world. Who knew? I also got to see the marine railway up at Big Chute. These are engineering marvels, top to bottom, on the Trent-Severn. My time on the Rideau was similarly spent as an interpretive guide and split between the blockhouse at Kingston Mills and the blacksmith shop up at Jones Falls, where, by the end of the summer, I became pretty handy at bashing out a few standard household items over the forge. Neither of these jobs had the cool factor of lock staff, it goes without saying, since I had to dress as Boomer the beaver from time to time and run around in militia uniform firing off muskets in the dark. However, they did afford me the opportunity as a young person to get some insight into the history of our country and, indeed, into the history of the first nations and how they lived on these lands and used the natural waterways before the canals actually linked them. There are a couple of lessons in all of this that stand out for me. We have before us a relatively modest motion. I think the member has priced it at $600,000 and change. Of course, given the numbers we deal with in the House, that strikes us as relatively small. What I want to talk about is the issue of ambition, and this is why I support even this smaller proposal in the motion, the ambition required of nation builders and the ambition that Canada once had to build the infrastructure that makes a nation. These waterways were carved out of some very difficult and unforgiving land and they remain marvels, national historic sites, both the Rideau and the Trent-Severn. Of course, the Rideau has the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation as well. They remain, among other things, marvels of engineering. The lift locks along the Trent-Severn still captivate and perplex people. It is so simple, yet people stand at the bottom wondering how these things work and how they were built. The waterways are but two examples, outstanding ones albeit, of an infrastructure that built our country. Laying railroad track across the country, across beautiful but hostile territory, through equally difficult and often deadly summers and winters, was no less a feat of course. It is not just about rural and remote infrastructure that built this country, it is also about urban infrastructure in Toronto. One need only look at the Bloor Street viaduct built almost 100 years ago. It was designed to facilitate mass transit at the beginning of the 20th century, long before we needed mass transit. Its upper deck was built to accommodate streetcars while the lower deck was built for rail transportation. It was controversial at the time because of the high additional costs. However, the bridges designer and the commissioner of public works for Toronto at the time, R.C. Harris, were able to have their way and the lower deck on that Bloor Street viaduct proved to save millions upon millions of dollars when the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission, ultimately opened the Bloor-Danforth subway almost half a century later and they were able to use that bridge with no major structural changes. Just down the road from my home in Toronto, and ever so slightly outside my riding unfortunately because I would like to call it my own, is the R.C. Harris water filtration plant. It tells a similar story. Early in the 20th century Toronto was plagued with water shortages and unclean drinking water, so a plant was built in the 1930s to purify water. That is the R.C. water filtration plant. It still functions today, providing almost half the water to Toronto and York region all these years later. It is interesting that Michael Ondaatjes novel In the Skin of a Lion tells the story of how in the 1930s water intakes were built more than 2.5 kilometres out under the lake, offshore, in 15 metres of water and connected to the plant through pipes running under the bed of the lake. These were the kinds of ambitions that we had at one time to build the infrastructure upon which we built great cities and a great country. It is forward looking, it is courageous, and it understands that infrastructure needs to be built now to service serve as the foundation for a prosperous future. We are falling short on this. I talk all the time in this House about the impact of this lack of ambition of successive federal governments on our cities but here let me restrict my comments to our waterways. Recent estimates suggest that Parks Canada is letting our cultural, economic and environmental assets go. Recent reports on Parks Canada and its assets suggests that there has been poor stewardship of its vast holdings, estimated in 2012 to require some $2.9 billion in deferred repairs. Deferred work on the Trent-Severn Waterway alone is estimated to be almost $700 million. In a recent letter made public by retired managers of both the Trent-Severn and the Rideau Canal point to many problems emerging out of the cuts made in the 2012 budget. Some of those cuts have been restored, but they have left a devastating impact on these two canals. The managers speak to the natural and cultural resources of the two waterways. They speak to all the complexity of uses of these waterways and the complexity of the watershed that the waterways run through, all the recreational uses, and they challenge the government to ask themselves whether they are really paying attention and respecting the heritage that we have here. The second point, just to conclude, is a more modern one. This letter points to this issue that these waterways are not remote any more. They serve many functions and many people and fall under the jurisdiction of more than one government, that is to say that management is always a complex issue and many important interests need to be served. The cuts to the hours of operation of these canals that flowed from the 2012 budget have had a devastating impact. As someone who worked on the waterway at one point in time, I know that the rolling crews through these locks was devastating to the economies along the waterway. To support the motion, one thing I would like to see come out of it is greater consultation with all of the competing but many complementary interests that exist along the waterway.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 03:40:53 +0000
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