I will speak to some of the challenges around critical habitat identification, to start off, and then move on from there.
Identifying the habitat that species need sounds straightforward, but in some cases it is not so straightforward. The woodland caribou boreal population is an example, and I'm sure you're very familiar with it. We've done quite a bit of work in trying to figure out what the habitat is that needs to be protected--that is, what the critical habitat is--but the species is, as you know, wide-ranging and uses large swaths of land, essentially the boreal area, or about one-third of Canada. It would be pretty hard to say that all of that is off limits, so the instinctive notion that there's a plot of land...
One of my colleagues always talks about the Banff Springs snail. It's fairly easy--protect this little patch of land and you've nailed it--but it's not the same thing when you're talking about a species such as the caribou. This is a species that's wide-ranging and can tolerate disturbance on the landscape, but how much disturbance, and in what conditions? We are spending a fair bit of effort trying to make sure we understand that, because our belief is that if we can get it right for the boreal woodland caribou, we can probably get it all right.