Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of the Environment.
Bill C-65, the Canadian Endangered Species Protection Act, is the first federal piece of legislation dealing with listing protection and recovery of a variety of endangered species to fall within federal legislative jurisdiction. It covers migratory birds, fish and marine mammals, species that cross international boundaries and all species found on federal lands or within Canadian coastal waters.
The bill prohibits the killing, harming, harassing, capture, taking or possession of an endangered or threatened species as defined in the bill, as well as the destruction of residences of individual members of such species, including their dens or nests. It creates several means of enforcing its provisions, including citizens' rights to take civil actions in some circumstances and penalties for breach of the offence provision such as fines of up to one million dollars.
The bill is intended to put the federal government in a leadership position in a national endangered species regime that will involve the provinces in a number of key areas. Four provinces already have endangered species legislation in place but may have to update it to meet the obligations which the governments have all agreed in principle to meet under the National Accord for the Protection of Species at Risk signed at Charlottetown on October 2, 1996.
In the accord the provinces and the federal government have agreed to establish complementary legislation and programs to provide for effective protection of species at risk throughout Canada, including the provision of protection for habitat of threatened or endangered species. Also agreed was their participation in the Canadian Endangered Species Conservation Council which would be established under Bill C-65.
The bill reflects many years of hard work by environmental groups and other stakeholders who have advocated the adoption of federal legislation to protect endangered species as part of an approach to conserving biological diversity within Canada. Witnesses representing the agricultural community have made an important contribution to the debate.
There are currently 275 species of wildlife included in the COSEWIC list, which is an organization that identifies species which are endangered or threatened. Ten of these 275 species are extinct and 11 are extirpated, which means they no longer live in the wild.
For a number of years opinion polls have shown that Canadians have expressed a consistently high level of concern about endangered species. It is widely seen as an area in which the federal government should exercise a strong leadership role.
The majority of species at risk are in trouble because of threats to their habitat by human activity. Biological diversity, sometimes called biodiversity, means the variety of life in an area, and the area could be as small as a decaying log or as large as the entire country. It includes the variety of species and ecosystems on Earth, and the genetic differences of organisms, communities and populations.
There are many reasons to preserve biodiversity, including its intrinsic value, the rate at which it is disappearing, its value as a source of scientific knowledge and aesthetic pleasure, human dependence on it for food, medicines and other products, its contribution to moderating climate, soil conservation and pest and disease control, and our lack of knowledge about the biodiversity that exists in Canada and the consequences of failing to preserve it.
Canada was the first industrialized country to ratify the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity signed at the 1992 earth summit in Rio de Janeiro. The convention entered into force in December 1993.
The bill deals with critical habitat, a concept that is key to the American Endangered Species Act. The habitat aspect of the bill is limited by the bill's primary focus on the residence of a creature in a number of key areas, in that a residence is a much smaller area than a creature's habitat and preservation of the residence alone would often be insufficient to ensure the survival of an individual let alone a species.
I ask the parliamentary secretary, what are the stumbling blocks to providing more comprehensive protection for habitat and should the bill be amended in this respect?