[5] It was assigned the short title of the Navigable Waters Protection Act on the publication of the Revised Statutes of Canada, 1906.
The Act was "administered by the Navigable Waters Protection Program (NWPP) under the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In Friends of the Oldman River Society v. Canada,[18] La Forest J of the Supreme Court of Canada considered what the proper scope of federal jurisdiction with respect to environmental matters, and declared: Until recently, the Act was relatively silent about what constituted navigable waters, saying only that they included "a canal and any other body of water created or altered as a result of the construction of any work.
"[20] The Supreme Court of Canada, however, adopted the "floating canoe" threshold in 1906, holding that any water that was navigable and floatable was within its scope.
[22] In 2019, the definition was replaced by the following: navigable water means a body of water, including a canal or any other body of water created or altered as a result of the construction of any work, that is used or where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be used by vessels, in full or in part, for any part of the year as a means of transport or travel for commercial or recreational purposes, or as a means of transport or travel for Indigenous peoples of Canada exercising rights recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and This was held to have ousted the common law definition, according to a judgment of the Superior Court of Ontario in 2020.
In 1911, perhaps with renewed determination in light of a major typhoid outbreak in Ottawa, Senator Belcourt reintroduced legislative measures.