Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to pick up on a comment from my colleague, Monsieur Choquette, who raised the spectre of Conservatives destroying fish habitat.
What you're talking about at this stage is, of course, speculative. You have situations recently.... In Quebec, there was the flooding.
It was the Richelieu River.
In 2003, I had a farmer fined for draining his field after the flooding, because some fish had come from the river into his field. The same farmer this time had to get a fishing permit in order to drain his own field after the recent flooding in the Richelieu River.
We're concerned that regulation needs to be smart regulation. We can meet our conservation objectives without being punitive and unreasonable in other manners. So what the discussion is actually about is making sure our regulations are smart.
For our friends from Ducks Unlimited, I want to say that I see from your remarks that you have 500 fundraising events hosting 68,000 people. I know, having attended a number of those, that they're very popular in my region, where we have a lot of outdoors people. Both the Pacific Salmon Foundation, for habitat restoration, and Ducks Unlimited raise a lot of money in our area, because people are very enthusiastic about maintaining our wetlands and marshlands on the coast. Estuaries and habitat restoration attract a lot of volunteer activity on the coast, where I'm from on Vancouver Island.
I notice, though, that in your remarks you talk about taking a landscape- and habitat-based approach to conservation.
Would you first just define a “landscape approach”?