Great.
Overall, I'd just like to highlight that the David Suzuki Foundation has a strong interest in habitat conservation. Our mandate is to try to realize a balance between running a dependable economy and maintaining a core infrastructure of habitat, diversity, and ecosystem function.
Just so that you know a little bit about me, I have worked for about 27 years in the conservation field. I've worked with freshwater fisheries out of Winnipeg. I've worked with Ducks Unlimited and with the World Wildlife Fund on the endangered species program. I've worked with Sierra Club for many years, and I've been about 11 years now at the Suzuki Foundation, working on terrestrial conservation and on freshwater and marine conservation of fisheries.
I'll cut to the questions directly. The first one is about looking at what types of stakeholders are involved in habitat conservation. There are many people involved. I'd put them in two different categories. There are those who work on the ground and are involved in Streamkeepers; or in habitat conservation of local, natural areas; or in Friends of Parks, who help manage parks for wildlife conservation. Then there are the other groups that work on policy, legislation, and amending and reforming regulations at a broader scale. They look at habitat issues for large industries and across larger landscapes. It's really important that both of these stakeholder groups be recognized as part of what is needed to engage habitat conservation at a higher level. I believe we can do more by including the many people who care deeply about habitat conservation and work through industry, NGOs, community groups, and within government. The magic lies in trying to combine all of that energy into a process where stakeholders have the knowledge of what can and should be done as well as the logical and economical priorities necessary for moving forward with habitat conservation.
On the second question about the availability of knowledge and expertise in habitat conservation, when you look across the databases within provincial and federal governments, there's a lot of knowledge out there. There's a lot information. Unfortunately, a lot of the information we had in the past is sometimes lost with the evolution of websites. The history of trends and conservation initiatives is also sometimes lost. I believe we could do better at trying to integrate and provide a more common repository for habitat conservation. Some of it is regionally focused. Some of it is focused on species, according to endangered and threatened species management and conservation plans. Overall, if you're really for habitat information, you have to dig deep into the various organizations. Sometimes that includes individual groups, municipal governments, and a variety of federal agencies that hold the information you need.
In regard to the most effective habitat conservation groups and organizations, there are so many groups out there that work at a range of scales and on different types of habitats that the measure of effectiveness is difficult, unless you confine yourself to talking to the groups about whether or not they're meeting their own objectives. On a large scale, the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Ducks Unlimited do fantastic work on trying to protect private lands and working with landowners to protect habitat. Despite all the on-the-ground efforts of these organizations, we continue to see a loss of habitat, both on private land and on crown land. An example I'll use is in the context of farmland, where the increasing value of farmland drives farmers to try to maximize their yields. They'll often develop the last remaining natural habitats, whether it's wetlands, hedge rows, or remnant pieces of bush on their lands. Those are often the last refugia for wildlife that remain on the landscape. We're seeing an ongoing decline in that type of habitat, particularly in areas near urban centres.
In that context, many of the other organizations that work on improving environmental policies at all levels of government—those that work on new legislation or regulations associated with legislation—are very important because it's sometimes the overarching limits and boundaries set by these regulations that are the only feasible way to protect habitat at a larger scale.
Overall, I look at the large indicators and trends in wildlife, and here, when we look at our commitments under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, we're failing to meet those targets—and to me, that's the measure. Regardless of all the effort and goodwill, we're still losing the battle or we're not living up to our commitments.
You could say that conservation organizations have not been very effective, but I believe it's truly a reflection of the failure of governments to move on habitat conservation agendas in a timely and effective way. I believe much more investment is needed to really focus that effort.
As for the next question, how conserved land is defined and accounted for in Canada, it's defined through provincial and federal agencies, and associated maps and data are housed in all of the different places. The Canadian Council on Ecological Areas tracks large-scale protected areas. We have national parks, national wildlife areas, provincial parks, conservancies, and ecological reserves. These large habitat conservation areas are quite easy to identify and define. The smaller-scale protection is more difficult and it takes a lot more digging to piece together any kind of data on the scale of protection involved there.
One complicating factor in accounting for habitat protection is the diversity of designations and permitted uses within these. Across the many provinces, with all the different types of parks and conservancies, there is a variety of uses permitted within these and different scales of habitat conservation within them. We refer you to the IUCN, which provides a useful scale of protection classifications and defines the degree to which certain designations of habitat are actually protected within different areas.
When it comes to recovering species, how do we best manage stewardship initiatives compared to prescriptive government mandates? I say we clearly need both. Best management practices alone should be a baseline for commercial and industrial activity. But best practices are often not enough. For example, logging companies employed best management practices in the boreal forest area in regard to caribou habitat over the past decade, but the caribou continued to decline. It requires a federal government effort to develop the recovery strategies to determine the disturbance threshold for caribou and to really put a tighter requirement on habitat conservation.
Even though we have science behind us, industry does not always do the right thing: it has other interests to satisfy, obviously. As we develop large-scale activities, whether it's boreal forest or oil or agricultural development, we see the need for a tighter regulatory framework on habitat conservation.
In the case of private land conservation, best management practices are often not economical for landowners. In these cases, it's not only restrictive regulations that can help realize conservation of habitat but also improved financial and tax benefits that will incentivize conservation. These are needed, again, at a broader scale to really do the job for habitat conservation that most Canadians are expecting.
The last one is, how does the federal government improve habitat conservation efforts? I'll just go through a quick list here. How many minutes do we have?