Environment committee  I would also argue, as I've said, that all the good work being done by the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Ducks Unlimited—

Environment committee  But we don't count it. I don't know why we don't count it.

Environment committee  Obviously, Canada is a big country, and however you designate and define what is protected and conserved, we have a lot more land beyond that amount in a natural state. There's no question about that. The conservation question becomes, where do you need to focus the efforts of habitat conservation?

Environment committee  Certainly. Basically the way we do it is by focusing at the moment on these 82 natural areas. Within those natural areas, you'll have various properties. We're trying to have conservation arrangements on a core of those properties, and then to be able to link them within that natural area that's been deemed important from a conservation planning point of view, because there are species at risk there or whatever other ecological values we're looking at.

Environment committee  Thank you. For those of you who are not familiar with the IUCN categories, there are seven categories of protected status of lands, but generally the ones that are used to calculate whether lands are protected in countries and measured internationally are the top four categories.

Environment committee  I might ask Michael to help me answer that question. I'd say that with the work we're doing on the ground, what we're dealing with is the potential that perhaps at some point there might be, say, oil found under that particular property and therefore we wouldn't be able to conduct our conservation the way....

Environment committee  Thank you. Good morning, bonjour. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. I'm John Lounds, president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Joining me today is Michael Bradstreet, who's our vice-president of conservation, and Lisa McLaughlin, who heads up our securement and stewardship practice for the organization.

Finance committee  We wouldn't have a sense of what it would be in terms of a calculation. Clearly, all growing material sequesters carbon. The more that happens, you will end up with a...except for all the buffer you have to build into it with regard to disease, fire, etc., that may impact upon it.

Finance committee  The 3,200 square kilometres that we have, to give a sense of size, is actually about more than four times the currently mined oil sands area in northern Alberta. It's not an insubstantial amount of land that is being conserved. If we can figure out how to both develop our economy and put forward conservation measures at the same time, we are off to the races.

Finance committee  We're a member of the Green Budget Coalition, and every year there are proposals that are prepared by the Green Budget Coalition and presented to the committees and various others. That said, the coalition also has each individual group present their own interest areas, so that's why the Nature Conservancy itself—its expertise—focuses on land conservation.

Finance committee  That's not an area of expertise that our particular group has, so I wouldn't be able to speak to that. We're an on-the-ground conservation services organization, so basically we focus on what we can achieve for habitat conservation. That's what we do.

Finance committee  Yes. As a pilot project, we've taken a look at whether this is an area—as you may know, in British Columbia there's a system for carbon credits, and we took a look at whether there is something here that can help with providing funds for the ongoing stewardship of lands. It's not only the cost of acquiring properties that's important, but you have to take care of them over the long term.

Finance committee  I haven't looked at it. Sorry.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  Part of it is not just convincing people to do it. What we have found is that if you scratch people just a little bit...you'll find there are a lot of people who are actually quite keen about conservation underneath all the other things they do. What we've been finding over the past decade or so is that there are more and more folks who have become interested in not only saying that they're interested in conservation, but actually putting their money where their mouth is.