That is a good question. Thank you very much for that.
There were three questions, I believe. If you wish, I can deal with all of them to some extent.
One question is the compensation for ecological services. We see this all the time. For example, there was a large corporation that was saying that it could buy huge amounts of land in Australia that had been totally ruined, and it could get credit to restore that land. We see that kind of thing all the time. There's a lot of money from government as well as corporations to be able to do that.
However, we also work in southern Alberta with a lot of stewards, as has been talked about, for example, by Mr. Sawyer, where we have good stewardship for what we call a good land ethic already. Yet when we as a land trust ask how we reward the people who have done a good job, we find that everybody says “Not us. We don't want to do that. We don't have any money for that.” It's a very real problem.
We have actually as a land trust developed a protocol for being able to do that. It touches on some of your other questions. One is the restoring, for example, in a defined timeframe. We all know that corporations and people who dig up the land, a gravel pit, the tar sands, an open pit mine, or whatever it may be, would prefer to put off restoration until the last minute, because in a sense, they are not carrying it on their balance sheet. They can say to their shareholders, “Look at the profit we're making.” That's perfectly fine, but if you want them to restore on a timely basis, that is, to restore as they go, especially in large-scale circumstances, then the best thing to do is to make them carry that liability of restoration on their balance sheet. Then their own shareholders and their accountants will be pushing them to get this stuff restored, because then they could get it off the liability side of their asset or balance sheet.
That would be a very good thing to look at within a national conservation plan as to how to do that. We will be extracting resources. The question is not whether we will, but how we restore afterwards.