Well, to assuage your disappointment, we have, in fact, been working on that quite considerably. The act, as you know, defines a wildlife species as a sub-species variety or a geographically or genetically distinct population of animal, plant, or other organism. So the act makes it very plain that the taxonomic or biological species level is not where you stop when you assess the status of a species. It recognizes, basically, what biologists across the world recognize, which is that if one of your objectives is to protect biodiversity, then you need to identify what we might call biologically relevant units of biodiversity to protect.
That is why, given the direction of the act and the definition of wildlife species in the act, COSEWIC has taken a tremendous amount of time to define criteria. They determine the conditions under which it would identify a unit that it would use for assessment purposes in accordance with the definition provided by the act. These are called designatable units. These criteria are exactly in concordance with what the United States uses under their Endangered Species Act to identify distinct population segments for vertebrates and evolutionarily significant units for Pacific salmon.
Specifically, you need to meet two criteria. The first has to do with the distinctiveness. That could be evidence of genetic distinctiveness, distinctiveness in traits that are related to fitness, and other means of evolutionary persistence. But it's not sufficient to simply show that something is genetically different. Under those circumstances, you might list every population of white fish in Canada, which would not be particularly helpful.
Rather, the second criterion pertains to significance, and more precisely, evolutionary significance. There are means by which the United States scientists and we in Canada have agreed that there are proxies for identifying evolutionary significance. The purpose of doing that is to identify biological units that, if they were snuffed out, if they were depleted, they would not be readily replaced. For example, they wouldn't be replaced by dispersion or migration from another area. If a group of populations, or indeed a population, meets those two criteria, then it's eligible for assessment.
We also have an obligation under the act to assess those wildlife species at the greatest risk of extinction. We have a series of criteria. We have about 250 pages in our operations and procedures manual for COSEWIC, which is much longer than the Species at Risk Act. We use it to interpret the act and to guide our operations and procedures in accordance with the act.
All of our operations and procedures have been submitted to the Canadian Endangered Species Conservation Council and to successive ministers of the environment for their information and for their feedback. We have a series of criteria that we use to prioritize the assessment of new species, which include things such as the percentage of the global range that's found in Canada, the extent to which it's found within an endangered ecosystem or not, the degree to which the species in question is considered to be globally endangered.
So I think your question, at a certain level, reflects a concern that many people have. Is this an act that's going to lead to the assessment of every lake population of nine-spined stickleback in this country? The answer is no. One of the reasons why that won't happen is because COSEWIC has a set of criteria it uses to prioritize the new species it will evaluate. The act doesn't have it. We already have an application under the act to re-examine those we've already done, and we have criteria for identifying populations or groups of populations for assessment purposes. It's entirely consistent with what's done in the U.S. They've been doing it since 1996. We looked at it and we thought it seemed like a reasonable basis upon which to identify such units.