Good morning, everyone.
The perspective of the Conseil régional de l'environnement de Laval is mainly regional and local, but the purpose of our presentation today is to show you that, in spite of the big federal and provincial machine, when it comes down to actual situations at the municipal level, we see that wetlands are not well protected. Something is not working in the system, as the information we have presented to you shows.
The problem, in my opinion, is that wetlands are constantly threatened because people still feel they have no value. People see them as mere swamps. And yet they have very high value. I believe Andréanne talked about that earlier. They provide many goods and services to the community.
In the major metropolitan areas, the problem is that wetlands are often situated on private lands. Consequently, we must convince their owners to conserve them or else provide conservation organizations such as the CRE with the necessary tools to acquire them. In many instances, that is costly because these are private lands. That is a problem. We have to examine this issue. There are many potential solutions.
I will take this opportunity to show you a few photographs to give you an idea of what we experience every day, particularly in Laval. Beautiful wetlands like this, which have high ecological value, are completely filled in. As you can see, the compensation required after they are filled in is not necessarily equivalent to the ecological loss incurred.
As I told you, our mandate is mainly regional, but we believe the problem across Canada is that there is considerable inequality among the provinces. There is a Canadian policy, but it has not really helped achieve specific conservation or standardization objectives. Consequently, the provinces are somewhat left to their own devices. We think one solution would be to implement a framework with specific major policy directions. Then each province could, in a way, compare itself to the others.
In our view, the Canadian approach to compensation is very flexible. However, the definition of "compensation" differs depending on the province or territory where we work. Can you compensate for the loss of a wetland with a land environment? Not necessarily, but it is done. Can you compensate for one hectare with another hectare? There are some ratios. Some scientific research is currently being done on that.
In addition, compensation is rarely monitored. Wetlands that have been altered are restored, but no monitoring is necessarily done to determine whether that compensation has been successful.
On that subject, I am going to tell you about the watershed-scale perspective. People currently examine the land, restore the wetland and go away. However, if a large plant is polluting the water upstream, the wetland is not restored because other pollutants seep into it. So you have to work on a much more comprehensive scale. The watershed scale is both geographic and ecological.