Environment Committee on April 27th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

We're going to call this meeting to order. We have quorum.

I apologize for the delay. I believe everybody was in the House listening to the ruling by the Speaker, which of course is still taking place. We'll have to catch up with the news after the committee meeting.

We do want to welcome everyone to our twelfth meeting. We're going to continue with our study on the Species at Risk Act, under section 129, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2).

We have a number of the NGOs joining us today. From the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, we have Éric Hébert-Daly, national executive director.

Thank you for joining us.

From the World Wildlife Fund--Canada, we have Peter Ewins, a senior officer for species conservation.

Welcome.

Presenting together, we have, from the David Suzuki Foundation, someone who's no stranger to this committee, and that's Rachel Plotkin, their biodiversity policy analyst; and from Ecojustice Canada, via video conference from Vancouver, Keith Ferguson, staff lawyer.

You have someone there with you, Mr. Ferguson.

[Dr. Keith Ferguson, Staff Lawyer, Ecojustice Canada]

I do, Mr. Chair. I have Susan Pinkus, staff scientist, with me.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Perfect. We have her on the agenda as well.

With that, we're going to open the meeting with the opening comments.

Mr. Hébert-Daly, I'll turn it over to you to begin.

You have ten minutes or less. Thank you.

[Éric Hébert-Daly, National Executive Director, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society]

Thank you very much and good afternoon.

First of all, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to share the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society's views on your five-year review of Canada's Species At Risk Act.

My name is Éric Hébert-Daly and I am the National Executive Director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, or CPAWS. With me is Aran O'Carroll, National Manager, Legal and Regulatory Affairs and CPAWS' national lead on our Boreal Campaign.

Our presentation will focus on the challenges and opportunities of implementing the Species At Risk Act, based on our longstanding interest in conserving Canada's boreal forest, and in particular, on our work to protect the iconic boreal woodland caribou. The image of the caribou appears on your 25 cent coin. The caribou is also a barometer of the health of the boreal forest.

CPAWS is Canada's pre-eminent community-based voice for public wilderness protection. We've played a lead role in establishing over two-thirds of Canada's protected areas since 1963. That includes, of course, one of the big campaigns around the Nahanni, and the big success that we had by this particular Parliament.

With 13 chapters in nearly every province and territory, and the support of over 40,000 Canadians, CPAWS is one of the larger grassroots organizations in Canada. Our vision to keep at least half of Canada's wilderness and public wild spaces wild forever is a vision that we've been promoting for the last little while. It's certainly one that we share with our partners at Mountain Equipment Co-op, who have worked with us on the “Big Wild” campaign, people on the Boreal Leadership Council, which includes oil and gas companies as well as forestry companies, conservation organizations, and first nations.

CPAWS has played a supportive role in the establishment of SARA. It is something we've been taking very much to heart. We're members of the minister's species at risk advisory committee, and my colleague Aran co-chairs the national advisory group on the recovery strategy for the woodland caribou.

Across Canada, CPAWS staff have been instrumental in developing recovery plans and gaining habitat protection for woodland caribou in their regions.

We fully agree with the comments of our SARAC colleagues in their presentation to this committee to the effect that SARA is fundamentally well designed. If we take a closer look, we see that it is the implementation of SARA that has proven to be the biggest challenge for us. I have provided the clerk with a document that goes into more detail than I ever could in the ten minutes allotted to me.

We'd like to put three recommendations before you today. First, ensure you get SARA implementation correct, particularly around the boreal woodland caribou; second, adopt a bold new federal leadership role in wilderness conservation and look particularly at issues of collaboration; and third, take immediate action in a very urgent case that's happening right before our eyes, which is the work that's happening around new park establishment and how SARA can tie into that.

Critical habitat is defined under SARA as the habitat necessary for the survival or recovery of a species at risk. The minister is responsible under the act for approving recovery strategies for species that identify critical habitat, to the extent that it is possible to do so, based on the best available information and the measures outlined to conserve this habitat.

Woodland caribou are a perfect example of why we need a more coordinated approach to conservation in Canada. With a vast range, woodland caribou in the boreal are listed under SARA throughout the country, with the exception of the populations on the island of Newfoundland, although even those populations are on the decline.

An umbrella species that really signifies the health of the boreal forest and its wetlands, woodland caribou require large intact wilderness areas to survive. If their habitat is fragmented by roads, farming, logging, mining, and/or energy development, the predator-prey dynamics change, because it allows the predators to have better access to the caribou. It tips the balance against the caribou, which, as we've seen, can disappear within a few decades.

We've been trying for about seven years to in fact address this particular problem. We know that the problems of implementation of SARA have been at the heart of our issues. The good news is that the effort has resulted in a state-of-the-art scientific assessment of the critical habitat needs of the species. The bad news is that we still await recovery strategies under the act, and while they were originally expected in 2007, they are now expected in the fall of 2011. Meanwhile, caribou populations continue to decline.

We have learned from this experience that the Species At Risk Act has great potential as a federal tool to conserve the habitat of species at risk. However, on it own, the legislation is inadequate. Wilderness conservation on the vast scale required by wide-ranging species such as the woodland caribou calls for concerted action by many stakeholders.

As a country, we really need to apply our collective abilities to become a global conservation leader. That means we need to bring together governments’ legislative powers to protect species and establish protected areas, industry’s ability to adopt more sustainable practices, aboriginal people’s traditional knowledge of our ecosystems, scientists’ growing understanding of conservation biology, and the citizenship of conservation organizations such as our own.

We recommend that the federal government kickstart a new era of integrating nationwide and federal government-wide initiatives for conservation and work collaboratively with provincial, territorial, and aboriginal governments and major industrial and conservation groups to find a world-leading conservation vision for Canada that will protect our natural heritage.

An important part of this process would be the development and implementation of a joint strategy, one that involves all stakeholders and not just people who work in silos, with a view to conserving the critical habitats of boreal woodland caribou. Such a plan would go a long way toward securing resilient, healthy ecosystems that will provide a future for generations of Canadians.

Last year, as I mentioned earlier in my remarks, with the support of the Dehcho First Nations, the Government of the Northwest Territories, and CPAWS, Parliament unanimously approved a significant expansion of the Nahanni National Park Reserve in the southern portion of the South Nahanni River watershed.

Now Parks Canada is planning in fact to create another park, called Nááts'ihch'oh, a national park reserve in the headwaters of the South Nahanni watershed. This is in fact a park that covers a pretty important part of caribou habitat, breeding grounds, and in fact it is a place where caribou spend winters in the adjacent Nahanni National Park Reserve. With the right boundaries for Nááts'ihch'oh, virtually the entire range of the woodland caribou herd could be protected within these two parks put together. But the current proposed boundaries for the park leave out parts of the South Nahanni watershed that are in fact critical to the future of woodland caribou in the Nahanni.

By ensuring that the boundaries of this latest park protect the critical woodland caribou habitat, the federal government could, in a very real way, demonstrate what it is that we need to do in terms of a coordinated approach to conservation so that the work of Parks Canada and the work of this particular act can achieve real outcomes for wildlife on the ground.

In summary, we urge your committee to take the following action: show that SARA can be effective and can work well with a national recovery strategy for boreal woodland caribou; adopt a new federal leadership role in wilderness conservation, while working of course with the provinces; take immediate action as a new national park is established in the Northwest Territories to ensure that federal conservation tools work together, in this case, SARA and the creation of new parks.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much.

We'll continue with Mr. Ewins, who will give his opening comments on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund.

[Dr. Peter Ewins, Senior Officer, Species Conservation, World Wildlife Fund (Canada)]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, and thank you all for this opportunity to share WWF's experience and views with your committee.

We have supplied a full 12-page written submission to your committee, but here we will present only highlights. We've also supplied for the translators today a copy of these shorter remarks.

My name is Peter Ewins, senior officer for species conservation. With me is Jarmila Becka Lee, who's our conservation science adviser.

SARA and its associated programs have great potential to help recover Canada's disappearing species and prevent more species from being added to the list. However, the steadily lengthening COSEWIC list signals very clearly that the combined efforts of international conventions, domestic laws, accords, agreements, policies, programs, stewardships, and partnerships are not yet working properly. Efficient and effective implementation of SARA has yet to be achieved. Today we'd like to elaborate on four main recommendations.

One, critical habitat should be identified in recovery strategies based on best available information, recognizing that at least for currently occupied species ranges, key habitat needs to be fully protected. The federal government's reluctance to do this to this point has been contrary to the purpose of SARA and some of the legislation's underlying principles and requirements.

Two, the multi-species approach, using ecosystem-based management tools reflective of regional variation, should be utilized widely now in order to swiftly address the backlog of required recovery strategies and action plans, and thereby to efficiently achieve SARA's goals.

Three, conservation agreements under SARA sections 11 and 12 should be used widely by the Government of Canada as well-proven mechanisms for enhanced stewardship and fair incentives for achieving multi-species recovery, including by designing an approach that integrates the section 73 permitting with conservation management needs.

And four, on conservation financing, the federal government must promptly review the available innovative mechanisms and then develop and sustain significant new funding vehicles in order to radically improve implementation of SARA via effective partnerships and financial leveraging.

The WWF has learned a few things in conserving Canadian species at risk in the field over the past 40 years, including co-founding COSEWIC, serving on various recovery teams, and funding hundreds of species at risk projects, especially via the multi-partner endangered species recovery fund, ESRF, which we administered for that period. This and our global experience on similar issues will underpin our submission to you today.

For 20 years, since 1988, the ESRF provided support to high-priority species projects that assisted in the recovery and protection of at-risk wildlife in Canada and their natural habitats. Over that period of time, $10 million was awarded to over 770 species at risk field research and recovery projects, led by scientists and local conservation partners. Further, matched at least one to one by the recipients, over $25 million was ultimately invested into species recovery efforts across the country.

Sadly, two years—2007 and 2008—of delayed federal funds to the ESRF partnership model forced field project crews to front-end the costs of approved projects, and with no firm evidence of major change to this untenable situation, WWF has since been unable to continue with the ESRF partnership funding model. The federal government's main SARA funding vehicle, the habitat stewardship program, HSP, is similarly hampered by consistent delays in project approvals and funding delivery.

Turning to critical habitat, since 2003 there has been abundant evidence from various species with good ecological survey data that, contrary to the wishes of Parliament in enacting SARA, government departments have been highly resistant to identifying and protecting critical habitat. Clearly, SARA goals cannot be achieved until this situation is reversed.

Your committee will already have read of this in the 2006 Stratos evaluation and the 2008 Auditor General's office report, and heard it on June 2 of last year in the submission by the minister's advisory committee, SARAC, of which I am a member.

It has been suggested to you that federal protected areas and habitat protection and stewardship programs were taking care of habitat needs of SARA-listed species--i.e., instead of identification and protection of their critical habitat. However, a recent Conservation Biology journal paper by the University of Ottawa clearly refutes this, as regions in Canada with the most threatened species have few or no protected areas.

The multi-species approach, currently, relating to 359 endangered, threatened and extirpated species listed by SARA, really tells us that there are only 76 finalized recovery strategies posted on the SARA registry, of which 65--or 86%--are single species, and only 11 are for multi-species strategies, with a range of two to nine species per recovery strategy.

In other words, we have a huge backlog in the system of now overdue recovery strategies, and the multi-species approach has been totally underutilized to help clear this backlog.

Past federal reviews have recognized that the single-species approach to recovery is slow and inefficient overall, but four years later remarkably little concrete progress has been made. Two good multi-species recovery initiatives under way include those for the 34 endemic freshwater mussel species in southwestern Ontario, and also for the 100 species at risk in the Garry oak ecosystems of southern British Columbia.

The multi-species ecosystem-based approach should be applied much more extensively in Canada. SARA goals can only be achieved with very strong integration of long-term species recovery strategies and values into regional land and resource use planning, the comprehensive regional strategic environmental assessments that are required now, and careful sequencing and coordination with other government department programs, policies, and financing. This will all greatly help reduce the recovery strategy backlog and prevent the addition of new species to schedule 1.

Conservation agreements: SARA sections 11 to 13 clearly outline stewardship and conservation agreements as very important tools for species recovery and prevention of species from becoming at risk. But as of April this year, no conservation agreements are in place under SARA. This is very troubling, given the experiences in Canada and elsewhere in the world.

I'll give you just three examples of how conservation agreements are working quite well for multiple species and their habitat needs.

Firstly, in the mid-1980s, as part of the broader prairie conservation action plan, WWF initiated Operation Burrowing Owl, which engaged 2,500 farmers and landowners in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta.

Secondly, Ducks Unlimited Canada has secured and enhanced millions of acres of wetland habitat through such conservation agreements with private landowners, ensuring strong implementation of the North American waterfowl management plan.

And thirdly, for the past 30 years in the U.K.—and I was involved with these programs—under legislation comparable to SARA, successful species habitat conservation has been achieved via conservation agreements with numerous landowners.

Therefore, WWF recommends that the Government of Canada quickly initiate a top-priority global review of conservation agreements used in biodiversity conservation, and then develop and implement plans for using SARA’s conservation agreements with tenure-holders across Canada, ideally linking to any section 73 permitting.

And finally, conservation financing: past reviews of SARA have all recognized that implementation and results have been challenged by low financial priority afforded to species recovery programs. WWF has been at the forefront of some major initiatives around the world, working to set out creative new approaches to financing. These initiatives illustrate very well the biodiversity and local livelihood benefits of creative conservation financing mechanisms.

One example is the monarch butterfly conservation fund, which involves an expanded forest reserve to protect the monarch's wintering habitats in Mexico by addressing the socio-economic needs of local communities. Endowed with a $5-million grant from the Packard Foundation, $1 million from the Mexican government, and $0.25 million from local states, and facilitated by WWF Mexico, most of the 38 communities living within the reserve boundaries have now signed up with the fund and are committed to protecting the forest, and hence the monarchs.

Also, a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme, the Global Environment Facility, U.S. Forest Service, and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation highlights how market-based schemes can preserve species at risk by incorporating the cost of habitat destruction into the costs of development.

We urge the Government of Canada to look very thoroughly at the spectrum of financing mechanisms available for species recovery and to develop and sustain significant new conservation-financing vehicles in order to radically improve on SARA's implementation.

In conclusion, Mr. Chair, all recommendations of the past reviews of SARA's implementation should be addressed swiftly and in full by the federal government. Canadians clearly do not want to see the species at risk continuing to grow. We urge your committee to make bold recommendations for the Government of Canada to elevate the priority and efficiencies afforded to SARA's implementation.

Thank you. We'd be happy to answer questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

We'll turn it over to Ms. Plotkin and Mr. Ferguson.

I understand you'll be going back and forth with your presentation. We'll see how this high tech works out.

Rachel, you have the floor.

[Rachel Plotkin, Biodiversity Policy Analyst, David Suzuki Foundation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to present before you today.

I'm Rachel Plotkin, with the David Suzuki Foundation.

On the screen before you are Keith Ferguson, staff lawyer for Ecojustice, and Susan Pinkus, scientist for Ecojustice.

As the chair mentioned, Keith and I will be going back and forth delivering the presentation.

Our four organizations—the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Environmental Defence, and Nature Canada--submitted a comprehensive written brief to you in July 2009. We submitted an update to that brief to you last week. As well, hopefully you have before you the deck from which we're going to be making our presentation today.

Three of our organizations are also members of SARAC, and we helped draft the documents you received from SARAC, which represent the first stage of industry/NGO collaboration to assist you with your review.

We do hope that further collaboration will allow us to provide you with an additional collaborative brief.

Please note that throughout our presentation, when we say “scientific”, we mean western science, aboriginal traditional knowledge, and community knowledge on the biology of a species.

If you're following your deck, on the second deck there is a slide is entitled “General consensus: SARA shortcomings”. As you have heard, implementation of SARA, to date, has been disappointing. The good news, however, is that we do believe that things are starting to improve on some fronts.

I will now hand over to Keith, who is going to walk you through some of these recommendations.

[Dr. Keith Ferguson]

Mr. Chair, can you hear me? We are having a few technical difficulties at this end. If I do cut out, perhaps Rachel could take over for me.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

We can hear you, so you're good to go.

[Dr. Keith Ferguson]

Okay, thank you. Let me jump in.

Some of the improvements in implementation are, we believe, a result of some of the legal challenges brought under SARA. The number of such court cases brought by environmental groups has been small and they were brought as a last resort to address draft policies and decision-making that appeared clearly inconsistent with SARA. For example, two court cases addressed the identification of critical habitat. In both cases, the court found the decision-making to be contrary to law and commented on the inconsistency of draft policies with SARA.

As these cases show, failure to identify critical habitat has in a number of cases been due to draft policies that were inconsistent with SARA rather than due to the lack of science. We provide details on these cases in appendix 23 to our original brief and update.

If you'd like to follow along with me in the slides, I'm now at the slide headed “Recommendations”, with a list of ten recommendations. We do not recommend a change to the fundamental structure of SARA, but we do have what we call the top ten. These we believe are the most important and feasible recommendations at this time. I'll briefly go through each of the ten.

Number one is “listing”. Obviously, great care needs to be taken if a species assessed as at risk by COSEWIC is not to be listed, given that not listing could result in the eventual disappearance of the species from Canada. However, we have seen significant inconsistencies in listing decisions between different types of species, between species located in different provinces, and among the agencies, as detailed in our brief last summer. One of the reasons for such inconsistencies appears to be a lopsided consideration of costs and benefits. Potential short-term economic costs of listing are considered, but the long-term cultural and ecological benefits are often not taken into account. Our recommendation for listing is that all such costs and benefits must be carefully considered before any decision to not list a species.

Moving onto the next slide, recommendation two is “critical habitat”; as you've heard, loss or degradation of habitat is the primary reason for about 84% of Canadian species being at risk. Identifying critical habitat and recovery strategies is a key first step. Only after being identified can it be protected or at least considered in decision-making.

Now, some presenters have proposed to you that socio-economics should be explicitly required at this identification stage. We disagree for two reasons. First, there appear to be some misconceptions as to what happens after critical habitat is identified. Identification of critical habitat does not lead to automatic protection in most cases. Protection of critical habitat is totally discretionary other than for aquatic species or if the critical habitat is on federal land. The second reason is that socio-economics are already taken into account at three other stages under the act: first, at listing; second, if an order to protect critical habitat is passed and if so, a regulatory impact analysis statement is required; and third, socio-economics are again taken into account at the action plan stage. We therefore submit that there has to be at least one step in this sequence that remains scientific, and that should be the identification of critical habitat.

Moving along to number three, “recovery strategies”, there are a few improvements we recommend. First, we recommend they should, to the extent possible, include tolerance thresholds for disturbance. This would help clarify what can and can't go on within a critical habitat if it is to support species survival and recovery. It would also help interpret later steps under the act, such as what would destroy and what would effectively protect the critical habitat. To ensure that the best possible science is included, we recommend that all recovery strategies be drafted by teams that include independent experts from outside of government.

Moving on to number four, “definitions”, as you know, there are a number of key terms that are not defined in SARA. I would refer you to the SARAC definitions text for collaborative recommendations on a number of these terms. Two of the most important ones included in that text are the terms “survival“ and “recovery”. We recommend that survival should be defined as a high probability of long-term persistence, and we recommend that recovery should be defined as a well-distributed population to meet the values of the species as noted in SARA's preamble, such as to perform its natural ecological functions.

Moving on to number five, “action plans”, as you've heard, there's very little experience to date with action plans. Only one has been completed. We therefore simply recommend that a mandatory deadline for action plans be added to SARA, and we also recommend that SARA require both recovery strategies and action plans to be updated when significant new information becomes available.

On number six, “safety net”, as I've already mentioned, for most species across the vast majority of Canada SARA's protections do not apply automatically. In such cases, SARA relies on the provinces to provide primary protection, although of course SARA does allow the federal government to step in and make a safety net order if a province is not effectively protecting. This might be thought of as an equivalency provision.

Unfortunately, this safety net has never been used in the six or seven years under SARA, and it's never been used despite, for example, the environmental community asking for it to be used for the spotted owl. At the time, there were only about 20 or so in the wild, but no safety net order was issued. Today the number of individuals in the wild is down to just seven, and the species is expected to be extirpated from the wild in the near future. We recommend, as an important first step to making the safety net process work better, clarifying the meaning of effective protection. Again, I would refer you to the collaborative SARAC definitions text, which provided the recommended elements of such a definition.

Under item number seven, “permitting”, there are a few obvious gaps that we recommend be filled, such as explicitly requiring that subsection 73(3) preconditions be met before all types of permitting. As you know, these preconditions require that impacts be minimized and that there be no jeopardy to the survival or recovery of the species.

Some presenters before you have suggested that long-term permits be made available. We certainly understand industry's desire for more certainty when they are making investment decisions that cover decades, compared to the kind of certainty that a three- or five-year permit can only give. However, we stress that if long-term permits are to be allowed, there must be sufficient safeguards in the act, and in particular, we recommend three things: first, a requirement for ongoing monitoring and reporting; secondly, regular review and sign-off by the competent minister as to whether the preconditions continue to be met; and thirdly, if those preconditions are not met, the minister must be required to amend or cancel the permit.

With that, I'll hand it back to Rachel to finish this up.

[Rachel Plotkin]

Thanks, Keith.

We're now on the slide entitled “Conservation agreements--incentives”.

We agree with other presenters that the lack of any concluded section 11 conservation agreements is an enormous missed opportunity, and that they should be utilized. However, we believe that conservation agreements should not, on their own, provide exemptions from the Species at Risk Act. The carefully drafted preconditions for permitting under SARA, such as not jeopardizing survival or recovery of the species, were intended to be the primary safeguard for exemptions. These preconditions must apply to all exempted activities. We do encourage further investigation of the use of conservation agreements in conjunction with permitting.

Now we move on to “compensation”. Similarly, we believe that species at risk and the ecosystems they compose provide important benefits to all Canadians and that no citizen should face an extraordinary burden from protecting them. We recommend, therefore, that government develop regulations to allow for fair and effective compensation in such cases.

Finally, on the last slide, is the recommendation “another review”. We recommend that there be another SARA review in five years, because right now that is not provided for in the act.

Thank you very much for your time. We'd be happy to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you both, Mr. Ferguson and Ms. Plotkin, for that informative presentation.

We're going to our seven-minute round. I remind witnesses to make your responses very concise, to make sure you get the information on the record that you wish to have there, and to answer the questions that the members are putting before you.

With that, Mr. McGuinty, would you start us off on the seven-minute round.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

Thank you very much for being here, everyone. Merci d'être ici aujourd'hui.

And thank you for coming in by camera; you look good on TV.

I want to explore a couple of themes that I think cut across all three of your briefs and your comments today. I take from a lot of what you said here today that SARA isn't working. It's not working. I think that's conclusion number one.

Number two, I take from all three of your briefs--you've all said this explicitly or implicitly--that there's a real opportunity for federal leadership through a national approach to conservation and species at risk.

I also see frustration with the fact that in the last several years you've seen all kinds of processes undertaken that haven't made a dent, whether it's the references to previous recommendations or past reviews of SARA by Stratos, the minister's round table in 2006, the non-advertised minister's round table of 2008, or the commissioner's report for 2008.

I want to ask you how important it might be for a federal government to convene a very serious first ministers meeting on species at risk. We've already called on the government, for example, within 90 days of the motion that was passed in the House on climate change recently. We asked the Prime Minister to call together a first ministers meeting to deal with the issues of climate change and the crisis in energy. We haven't heard back from the government, but on this file, given the federal-provincial differences, some of the very creative mechanisms that have been designed in the United States using ecological fiscal reform are fiscal measures that can help us achieve good habitat protection and other goals.

We've got SARAC, we've got NACOSAR, we've got ministers' round tables, we've got COSEWIC, and we've got an aboriginal traditional knowledge subcommittee of COSEWIC. Those are five processes that I can count. Would it be beneficial for us to have a national government admit that this is not working and that we need to re-examine how we do species at risk and conservation in the country? Would that be helpful to all three intervenors?

Éric, what are your thoughts?

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

As I mentioned in my brief, I think the important thing is that we do need to bring people to the table and make sure that the duplication that exists in the system and the many different processes is simplified.

Obviously there's a cost to doing conservation work, so I don't want to downplay the financial side of it. On the other hand, there are probably quite a bit of useful savings to bringing people together and looking at solutions together, so both levels of government...I would say there's not only benefit economically, but there's also benefit in terms of the outcomes. When we look at trying to make the type of connectivity that needs to be made for species in a lot of cases, and given the patchwork of federal and provincial jurisdictions, there has to be a way for us to be able to find those corridors and that connectivity in a way that makes sense for conservation on a broader scale. So we're not stepping on the toes of provinces or first nations, but at the same time bringing them together and talking through what those solutions are.

I would say a first ministers meeting is an interesting idea. I might even go further to say that it needs to incorporate industrial partners and first nations. It does need to be a rather interesting and more collaborative approach than I think we've had in the past.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Ewins.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

I certainly think that is one important forum to try to get a different kind of resolve and motivation in here. This one would be particularly helpful because the bulk of the species and the geography, in terms of what the species and their habitats need, are actually within provincial-territorial jurisdiction. The strong federal government leadership to implement this federal legislation clearly has a trigger role to play to bring on high-quality and priority implementation of those provincial-territorial instruments and all associated programs, etc.

I do think overriding all that is the question of values. I want your committee to realize...the sort of comments Robert Bateman has made internationally. When asked to comment on why Canada hasn't solved all this--we are an affluent country with great conservation opportunity in biodiversity--his headline-catching but totally honest lifetime summary was that, frankly, we are too cheap.

So we don't value species in terms of what our moral and even our economic responsibility is. I think you're totally right: the ecosystem services natural capital fiscal reform, to actually value those services that the planet provides, and the species simply are telling us, as barometers, an essential part of that New Age 21st century discussion. I would like to think that not just first ministers but the finance ministers who are interested in this would pay great attention to that.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Rachel.

[Rachel Plotkin]

Thank you for the question.

I think there is a consensus, almost, that the implementation of the act to date has been quite poor. I do hope, however, that it came across from our presentation that we believe the main thing we've been fighting for, which is the identification of critical habitat, has started to happen. I feel we've been fighting this uphill battle to get critical habitat identified, and right now we're at the very tip of the peak and starting to come down the other side. However, that presents a whole new slate of challenges under the act, such as once critical habitat is identified, how is it going to be protected?

I think there is an enormous opportunity for the federal government to work with the provinces as action planning unfolds. I would hate to see another six years of missed opportunities happen before the government gets the proper direction it needs to successfully implement the next stage of the act.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Ferguson, you can give a very brief response, but Mr. McGuinty's time has expired.

[Dr. Keith Ferguson]

I don't think I have anything further to add.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Monsieur Ouellet, sept minutes, s'il vous plaît.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

I would like to direct my initial comments to Mr. Hébert-Daly. Earlier, Mr. McGuinty pointed out that the federal government had an opportunity here to adopt a single piece of legislation that would apply from coast to coast. Mr. Ewins also noted that the federal government had the authority to do just that.

Quebec challenges the federal government's jurisdiction over a number of areas. Therefore, I do not think this comes down to who has the authority to act. As Mr. McGuinty noted, it may have to do with one's overall view of the situation. I think this approach would work well for caribou that are confined to the North.

Why would we need a pan-Canadian approach for species that are also found in the United States? We have not heard anything about a pan-American approach. To my way of thinking that would be more logical since the animals roam back and forth across the border.

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

As a matter of fact, animals tend to disregard borders. That's a problem. In so far as jurisdiction is concerned, whether it be provincial, municipal, Canadian or North American, we need to come up with specific solutions for specific species. The current Species At Risk Act does recognizes the fact that certain species are at risk. A plan is needed to deal with these species and that plan should involve all stakeholders, not only governments, but aboriginals and industries as well. It will depend somewhat on the habitat of the species concerned. As I see it, the point here is to try and come up with sensible solutions. Each case must be dealt with individually. This issue really has nothing to do with borders.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

I'd like to put the same question to Ms. Plotkin. From a legal standpoint, how do you feel about legislation that is designed to protect animals but that stops short at the U.S. border? Do you not find the scope of the legislation to be very limited, given that it only applies to part of the caribou's habitat?