Thank you.
For those of you who are not familiar with the IUCN categories, there are seven categories of protected status of lands, but generally the ones that are used to calculate whether lands are protected in countries and measured internationally are the top four categories. Within those categories, in order to be included, you need to have ensured that subsurface rights have been removed so that there's no opportunity for any mining or side drilling or anything like that.
This is the problem that I related to you about the provinces having jurisdiction over subsurface rights in this country, and not the federal government. It's going to be very difficult to actually come to some kind of agreement about that. Ten per cent of Canada's land base is under that protected status. I have the numbers here. By area, we'd be second in the world. By rank, we'd be fifth among G-8 and G-20 countries.
In regard to my reference to other lands, including those owned by Ducks Unlimited and us, many of them are not included because subsurface rights still exist for those particular properties, even though the likelihood of actually having any drilling or mining taking place is quite low. So we're trying to encourage.... How do we come up with another way of thinking about this that actually works for a country like Canada?
If you think about commitments that have been made by the Province of Quebec, for instance, to conserve half of its boreal forest, and with the Province of Ontario doing similar things, I think there are probably opportunities to think about new ways in which those could be included within our thinking about what is actually conserved across Canada.
Adding those types of conserved areas into what we do would change the ranking and probably bring Canada to number one status in terms of area, no questions asked. If we did that, it would bring us to about third in terms of rank. It's a combination of getting more habitat conservation work done as well as rethinking a bit how we look at what is conserved and what isn't.