I'll take a stab at this. It's a hard question.
I would preface my comments by saying that most land use planning is within the jurisdiction of the provinces and territories. I think what we can do as federal officials and a federal government is provide information that can inform how provinces and territories might wish to think about planning the land we are going to be living on in a city or maintaining it as rural.
Certainly from an Environment Canada perspective, within the Wildlife Service, we could look at areas that are important for birds, for example. For example, we've been producing bird conservation region plans and have been working to develop which areas we want to focus on for conservation outcomes, as opposed to other areas that are perhaps still important, but are perhaps of a lower quality habitat for birds.
I think a role that federal governments can play is to provide information. I'm speaking about one type of information. Other parts of government would also have information that would be helpful to provinces and territories as they're planning where urban expansion will be and so on.
At a federal level, we can also facilitate that dialogue about best practices. I've spoken quite a bit about Edmonton. Montreal has a very good reputation for having thought through how to build conservation and biodiversity into the city.
How do we connect a city that might not be as far along in its thinking in that regard? That's a role I think governments can play, to facilitate that type of dialogue.
Another thing that can sometimes help is to provide tools and best practices. In some cases we've done that through the habitat stewardship program. We provided some funding to help develop a green bylaws tool kit, some model laws. Certainly that's not how you should do it, but if you are thinking about doing it, that's how you might go about it.