I'll jump in.
When you look at the front end of COSEWIC, I think you're totally right; it's well resourced, it has a great bunch of people involved, and it does its job. The faltering starts progressively as you get further down--i.e, let's implement this thing on the land when we haven't even got the prescriptions in place.
I think the process tune-up that's needed starts once the species...“big time”, when species actually make it onto the list, and its implementation.
I think you've heard today, certainly from a number of us, what our priority recommendations are for doing that. They're not incisive--“Right today, here's the prescription”--but it does logically involve the federal government initiating exercises to take the best of world experience and put it into play in form of a plan to implement. It is tied to finances. That's just the way it works.
In the U.K. when I was there, to reflect social values, which were quite high for biodiversity, the government put a significant amount of money on the table in the form of management agreements and compensation with tenure holders. The fact that we have nothing on the record yet shows me that Canada hasn't really started trying to implement this thing.