Thank you Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the committee on behalf of our organization for the opportunity to appear today and to make submissions. My name is Jeff Surtees. I'm the CEO of Trout Unlimited Canada.
Our organization is a national habitat conservation organization. We were created 40 years ago, in 1972, with the mission to conserve, protect, and restore Canada's freshwater ecosystems. We were started by anglers, by people who like to fish, and we're now supported by anglers and non-anglers alike across the country. We're governed by a volunteer board of directors and have volunteer chapters in the Maritimes, in Quebec—well, we have one in Quebec, but we're going to have a lot more soon—in Ontario, in Alberta, and in British Columbia.
We work with communities and we work with local volunteers. We take pride in being an action-oriented organization. We are completely non-partisan and non-political. The bulk of our funding comes from Canadian individuals and corporations, and only a small amount from government sources at this time. We've always worked cooperatively with industry and governments of all stripes. Our members believe we've earned our place at the table by being an organization that fixes things. We like to do more than to talk about doing.
Our habitat work involves stream restoration, monitoring, and assessment, all based on sound science. To our members, a cold-water stream or river is a place of almost infinite beauty, a place where life begins. Our work also involves educating schoolchildren through our Yellow Fish Road program. In that program, thousands of participants go out with their class or community group and paint a small yellow fish on a storm drain in their community to remind people that everything in the physical world is connected. Storm drains are connected directly to rivers, and by pouring something down a drain you're pouring it right into some animal's house.
We were provided with five questions to guide our submissions today, and I'm going to focus my remarks on just the third and fourth of those questions, which were: what should the guiding principles of a national conservation plan be, and what should the conservation priorities of a national conservation plan be? Then we'll make a short comment on the fifth question, which is, what should the implementation priorities of a national conservation plan be?
The first question—which is the third question—is what guiding principles should govern in a national conservation plan. We have four guiding principles to suggest. They are very consistent with the comments that have been made to you by the other people giving testimony today.
The first guiding principle that we suggest is that the national conservation plan must be based on sound science. Conservation and restoration require a deep understanding of the biophysical conditions and processes that create habitat where animal and plant populations live. A conservation plan must use the best science available to ensure that we maintain and restore these biophysical functions. When we say “based on sound science”—and we hear that phrase in a lot of contexts these days—to us it means that the plan is guided by information that is measurable and is measured; that it identifies the links between physical structure and the actual functioning of a watershed or landscape; and thirdly and very importantly, that it addresses the cumulative effect of all activities within the watershed or landscape.
The second suggested guiding principle relates to scale. Conservation planning must be done at an ecologically relevant geographic scale and on an ecologically relevant time scale. We submit that the proper geographic scale for the individual components of the national conservation plan must be, at a minimum, the scale of the entire ecosystem or the entire watershed in question. The proper time scale must be very long. The decision has to be based on thinking that is at least decades, if not hundreds of years, into the future rather than on the expediencies of the day.
The third suggested guiding principle is that the national conservation plan should strive to educate all Canadians about ecology. We just have to raise the bar of common knowledge. Increased ecological literacy should, we believe, lead to a deeper level of caring, which should, we believe, lead to positive participation in community action. People who care and people who know a little more will care more and will do more in a positive way.
The fourth and final guiding principle that we suggest is that the implementation of a national conservation plan must be adequately funded and resourced. It absolutely must have long-term support from all levels of government. If the plan includes work to be done by groups like all of ours here at the table, there must be mechanisms in place to help those organizations within the non-profit sector to remain sustainable. Many very good organizations spend a great deal of time and effort just trying to stay alive.
I'm going to move to question four, the conservation priorities that should be included in the national conservation plan. Our belief is that if we get the guiding principles right, the conservation priorities should flow directly from them. I'm only going to comment on conservation priorities that fall under Trout Unlimited Canada's mandate as an organization, which is dealing with small freshwater streams and rivers. Many other priorities that other organizations will probably put forward will be equally valid.
Guiding principle number one that we have suggested is that the plan must be based on sound science. The science that we have put together shows that work can be prioritized and be made more effective that way. The prioritization we use is this. The highest priority work to be done on small streams and rivers is that work which improves water quality. First, you think about quality. The second highest priority is work that maintains or improves the quantity of water in a system. The third and fourth highest priority work would be to improve physical habitat, and to work directly on managing fish populations through stocking or removing fish from a system, and in both cases, focusing on the maintenance and restoration of native species before non-native species. Again, the conservation priorities to be consistent with the guiding principles would be implemented on a minimum of a watershed scale in a manner that can be sustained indefinitely.
I'll move to question five. I have a brief comment on it. What should the implementation priorities of a national conservation plan be? This is a very difficult question for us. We had a lot of debate among our board members, and I have received a lot of calls from our members about it. It's a difficult question for us to address right now because, Mr. Chairman, we were asked to stick to the agenda—the matter directly before the committee, and I will do that—but everything is connected.
The work that is being done under Bill C-38, the changes that are being made, directly affect the work of this committee. It's a fact. When we're asked for recommendations about implementation plans, we think, “How we can do that?” We have to know what the regulations are going to say that are being brought in under the changes to the pieces of legislation in the bill. That's where the implementation is going to be. It is connected to the national conservation plan. As I say, we will work cooperatively with whatever system our elected representatives put in place. We will work under that, and we will offer our services to help. We believe, as an organization, that if an activity, industrial or otherwise, causes harmful alteration, disruption, or destruction of fish habitat, an environmental assessment must be triggered. That is being changed, we think. We have to be against that.
A national conservation plan, to live up to its name, has to be a big thing, a grand thing, a thing of great vision, something the whole country can be proud of, and something that is supported across all levels of government—municipal, provincial, and federal. The whole of government has to act in a way that is consistent with that theory, or little will have been accomplished.
I thank you for your work on this committee and look forward to participating further. Those our submissions.