Thank you, Doug.
I think Doug is maybe a little too modest about his speaking. I'm Rich Smith. I'm the executive director of Alberta Beef Producers. Doug Sawyer is the chair of our organization, and he's a cattle producer from near Red Deer.
First of all, I would like to thank you and the members of your committee for the invitation to come and make a presentation here.
By way of background, Alberta Beef Producers is a democratic and representative organization that works on behalf of more than 25,000 cattle producers in the province of Alberta. Our job is to work to try to make the industry more competitive and sustainable. We are an organization of producers working for producers, and we have been a strong and consistent voice for the industry in Alberta for over 43 years.
Cattle and beef producers across Canada depend on land and water for their livelihood, and we believe that the vast majority of these producers are good stewards of the land and water resources of the province. While producers use our natural resources for the sustainable production of food for consumers in Alberta, across Canada, and around the world, cattle and beef producers are also concerned about protecting and enhancing natural areas and ecosystems. They understand the importance of these landscape features to society and to the public, and within the economic constraints of a competitive industry, they are prepared to provide some level of conservation for the benefit of the public.
A national conservation plan that recognized the contributions agricultural producers can make to the conservation of natural areas and ecosystems, along with the need to maintain agricultural production in many of these areas, likely would be supported by most cattle producers. If a national conservation plan included a comprehensive program that provided fair and significant compensation to landowners for conserving natural areas and ecosystems, the acceptance and adoption of this plan by cattle producers would be enhanced considerably.
To address the questions that were presented as the scope of the study, in our view, the purpose of a national conservation plan should be to conserve valuable and important natural areas and ecosystems while ensuring that an appropriate balance is maintained between the societal and environmental benefits provided by the national conservation plan and the economic benefits generated by the productive and sustainable use of our natural resources in real working landscapes. The goal of a national conservation plan should be to provide a level of protection, enhancement, and restoration of natural areas and ecosystems that truly reflects the priorities and thresholds that are established by government, industry, and the public.
We spent a considerable amount of time on the principles we thought should govern a national conservation plan. We thought this was one of the most important of the questions, and we identified a number of principles. We think it is very important that there be a clear identification of priorities and thresholds for natural areas and ecosystems to be conserved.
The national conservation plan must identify which landscape features are to be conserved and how much or how many of these features will be covered by a NCP.
A national conservation plan must be developed and delivered by a partnership of government, industry, and the public. Local and community-driven partnerships will often be more effective than national agencies in achieving conservation goals. This has certainly been our experience in this province.
A national conservation plan must recognize the contribution that agricultural production and agricultural producers make to conservation. The most effective and widely used conservation strategies will be complementary to, not in competition with, agricultural production.
For it to be really effective, a national conservation plan must apply to both public and private land, but it must also respect the property rights of landowners. Well-managed private lands can make a significant contribution to the conservation of natural areas and ecosystems.
The national conservation plan must identify and assess the value of the landscape features and ecosystems that are to be conserved. The plan must recognize that not all landscape features and ecosystems have equal value, and very few of these features are in a historically natural state. A national conservation plan that tries to conserve all natural areas and ecosystems or attempts to return these areas to some perceived former natural state likely will not be successful.
While some level of government legislation and regulation will be necessary to establish the framework for a national conservation plan, the primary driver for the plan should be voluntary incentives and market-based mechanisms. If the conservation of natural areas and ecosystems in a plan represents realistic and defined ecological goods and services, an effective and comprehensive program that provides fair compensation to landowners for supplying these services will encourage widespread acceptance of the plan.
The legislation, policies, and programs of a national conservation plan must not encourage significant purchases of land or the removal of land from food and fibre production to meet the requirements of the national conservation plan. The conservation strategies must be largely consistent with the continued production of food and fibre from working landscapes.
Establishing the conservation priorities in a national conservation plan must be done through consultation with key stakeholders from government, industry, and the public. There certainly does not seem to be a shortage of priorities that have been identified by a wide range of stakeholders already, but establishing appropriate priorities for a national plan will be a challenging task, and it will require a great deal of collaboration and consultation among the stakeholder sectors.
Similarly, the implementation priorities will become apparent through the development of the plan, but the implementation priorities must follow the principles governing the national conservation plan.
The strategies for conserving various natural areas and ecosystems will have differing levels of urgency depending on the current state of the features and the degree to which they are threatened. This circumstance will clearly have an impact on the implementation priorities of a national conservation plan. Implementation priorities and the effectiveness of implementation will be greatly affected by the perception of the process. Using an effective consultation process that creates a true partnership of government, industry, and the public in the development of the national conservation plan will help ensure the commitment of these partners to the implementation of the plan.
We suggest that the minister must consider an open and transparent collaboration and consultation process based on the meaningful involvement of a broad range of stakeholders. This should probably be a staged process of consultation building from regional to provincial and finally to national discussions and culminating in a national conservation plan that reflects the input from all of these stakeholders.
For this process to be most effective and efficient, there will be a need to balance the desire to include a broad range of stakeholders with the equally important task of restricting the involvement of people who may represent narrow societal and environmental interests, small segments of society, and stakeholders who are not directly affected.
That concludes my presentation.
Doug and I are prepared to answer questions.