Currently, because the agricultural industry operates largely on either private land or provincial land and SARA specifically speaks to federal land, we haven't had any direct challenges in that way. Our concern is that we want to get the act right, because we assume that the jurisdiction that falls under the act is going to grow either through federal initiatives or provincial initiatives.
To date, we haven't seen any instances of appropriate compensation or need for compensation, but what we run into is the colonialism aspect of 1,000 years of history of our species, namely, humans. The only cost they factor in is the extraction of the resource, and we haven't learned how to factor in the real cost to the environment of that extraction. That's the compensation we haven't, so far, worked into our thinking. We've built up a deficit in the environment and we don't know how to repay it.
Our concern is that if we do find a species and it becomes at risk not necessarily from anything we're doing here. Many of the species on the prairies, where I come from, are migratory. What does the act do when a species becomes listed not through actions taken here but actions that occur elsewhere, like in a species' wintering ground? How do you deal with that? So far we haven't seen or heard anything to do with that. If it does take a major change in the method of operation of an agricultural organization or business, then we--the bigger “we” as in society and the administrators of this act--have to develop appropriate compensation so that the production of that good to society or that species to society then becomes a revenue stream for the producer of that.