Mr. Chair, I would like to make two points. On the first point, about what are we not doing, we are having a scientific challenge to understand what is critical habitat. We can understand what habitat is, but what is the habitat that's absolutely critical to the survival and recovery of the species? It sounds simple in legal terms, but it's often very difficult in complex biological terms. As I said, fundamentally we don't have a lot of knowledge about a lot of these species. Pardeep mentioned that we often have enough to assess the status but not how to go forward on recovery. That scientific challenge remains.
That being said, considering the precautionary principle and considering where we're at in habitat protection, not necessarily critical but habitat protection, there are a couple of points the committee might want to consider. This piece of legislation doesn't act in isolation. Collectively, governments in Canada have protected almost 11% of terrestrial habitat through parks, federally and provincially, etc.
The government's natural areas conservation program, which gave $225 million to NGOs to protect ecologically sensitive lands, is well on the way to its goal of over 2,000 square kilometres of ecologically sensitive land. They're almost at one-third of that already, and they only started in 2007.
The other program I mentioned, the habitat stewardship program for species at risk, is funding Canadians, particularly private landowners, to protect habitat for species at risk. It has already put over 200,000 hectares into private protection and done an improvement on roughly the same amount of habitat. So while we're struggling with the challenge of designating critical habitat under the act, we're not sitting idle in actually protecting habitat.