By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Municipalities and Indigenous communities will soon have access to a faster and easier process to regulate navigation on lakes in their jurisdiction, Compton-Stanstead MP Marie-Claude Bibeau announced last week.

Bibeau, Brome-Missisquoi MP Pascale St-Onge, and Sherbrooke MP Isabelle Brière gathered alongside municipal officials and lake preservation advocates near Lake Massawippi in Ayer’s Cliff on Oct. 12 to announce upcoming policy changes.

Navigable lakes and rivers in Canada, even those on the territory of a single municipality, fall under federal jurisdiction. For many years, municipalities that wanted to regulate lakes on their territory – for example, to ban a certain type of boat or impose a boating speed limit – had to apply to Transport Canada for authorization, a long and involved process that could take two to three years. Transport Canada can now approve municipalities’ requests by decree, making the process much faster.

Bibeau said she had been determined to reform the process since 2016. “Our challenge was to change the Canada Shipping Act, which I was jokingly told was harder to change than the Constitution … that gives you an idea of the challenges we faced. We recently proposed modifications to the Act which received royal assent in June.” She said the new regulations that will be developed in the wake of these changes will clarify the role of municipalities and streamline the authorization process. In the interim, Transport Canada has eliminated several steps from that process. “It’s now easier and faster for municipalities and Indigenous communities to seek restrictions on local waterways if they have safety or environmental concerns,” she said.

“For those who haven’t been following the file closely, the changes aren’t super clear, but in essence…a municipality that wanted to ask to regulate a lake had to submit an application which would go through two or three levels of jurisdiction, and that would take a year or two,” explained Pierre St-Arnault, the president of the Comité de sauvegarde du bassin versant du lac Davignon and a longtime advocate for a streamlined process, who attended the Ayer’s Cliff announcement. “Now, the city will fill out the same forms, and if the ministry decides the application is sufficient, it can issue a decree authorizing the municipality to regulate. You submit something before the end of the year, and it can be authorized by this summer.”

Jacques Demers, president of the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, said the changes were “a positive step” after years of discussions and consultations on the issue.

In Cowansville, city officials have been in discussions with Transport Canada since earlier this year with an eye to ban motorboats on Lac Davignon. Cowansville communications director Fanny Poisson told the BCN the reforms announced last week were “good news” but that the city would not comment further while discussions with the ministry and public consultations were ongoing.

St-Arnault said the Lac Davignon motorboat ban needed to be authorized as soon as possible, for the safety of swimmers and kayakers and for the good of the lake. “Our goal is to ban all motors, fuel or electric, even the smallest ones. We have a small, shallow lake and motorboats stir it up – they stir up sediment which contains a lot of phosphate, and that’s bad for the lake. They’re an important [vector] of invasive species. … and they affect the safety of swimmers, kayakers and paddleboarders. We can’t have boats zooming around at 70 miles per hour if we care about the health of the lake and the safety of its users,” he said.