Thank you very much.
Let me go straight to an example. We have a situation in a river where there used to be a port. The port has been closed. It needs to be reopened; there's silt in the port. It has been determined that there is a species at risk.
This species at risk is a particular mussel. We've been trying to bring a business into an area that had a population of 12,000 and has lost over 6,000 jobs, and we've basically lost that business coming in. In your presentation, you talk about how you cannot “Kill, harm, harass, capture or take [an] individual” or “Damage or destroy the residence of one or more individuals”.
DFO's own engineers have said that the habitat that is there now because of silt isn't one that this particular individual would live in. We could take you up the stream, where there are millions of them plugging up drains, and yet this was about the law. It was about the written word. The field people--not all of them--don't seem to have any co-relationship, quite honestly, between the balance of an economy and the balance of a species at risk. I mean, we don't even do this to humans. We can't have laws that say that if I were to harm or harass, it almost becomes criminal.
Then we were asked for not tens of thousands of dollars, but tens of thousands of dollars plus, up to $100,000, and it was, “Well, you can do this scientific research”. We had an individual who said, “I can do that for $2,500”. That individual said, “I'll take my boat out, I've lived here all my life, I know what the river is like, I know what's in the bottom, and I know there aren't any”. Said that individual, “I'll put the small pole down and I'll measure the bottom because I can feel it”.
All I'm saying is I that agree with the species at risk, but somewhere along the way we've lost our perspective about the balance in some cases. We always talk about the difficulty in listing. I'm asking about how we delist those species that are not at risk. I would just ask you this: how do you determine the thresholds of species at risk in regions and areas where I can take you and would be glad to show you? I don't know what the threshold is; it must be beyond...
But if the people I was dealing with harmed or harassed one of these little mussels, it was almost to the point that there were going to be criminal charges, or a $200,000 fine, I think it was. How do we get to a threshold in areas? Who determines what that threshold is? Who determines the critical habitat evaluation? Who does that and is it in fact a stumbling block to delist?
So there are four questions for you, and then I have another one.