Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for inviting Ducks Unlimited Canada to follow up on the testimony we gave earlier this month. We are very encouraged by your interest in wetlands because we feel they must be at the very core of a national conservation plan for Canada.
My name is Greg Siekaniec. I am the CEO of Ducks Unlimited Canada, this nation's leading wetland conservation organization. Joining me today are Dr. Karla Guyn and Jim Brennan. Karla is currently our director of conservation planning and she will soon be our national director of conservation. Karla will address the committee's questions about wetland types, values, and conservation efforts.
Jim, our director of governmental affairs, is joining us from our Ottawa office. He will describe the state of wetland protection in Canada and will outline the role we feel the federal government can play to help improve that.
When we've appeared before you in the past, we've described our organization and we've left related details behind in the form of briefs. Today, as you've requested, we will focus our presentation on the habitat type central to our mission: wetland and wetland conservation.
Before I give the floor to Karla and Jim, I would like to emphasize four key points that will be reinforced throughout the presentation you will see today. Wetlands are some of the most valuable ecosystems in the world, in part because of the incredible diversity of plants and animals, including humans, they support. Wetlands are also some of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. In fact, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance states that “the degradation and loss of wetlands is more rapid than that of other ecosystems”.
As we heard earlier, Canada contains the largest wetland area in the world, nearly one-quarter of the globe's supply of this precious form of natural capital. Yet up to 70% of wetlands have been drained or filled within settled areas of this country. Simply put, we are depleting our wetland stock faster than we can restore it. Even organizations such as ours, Ducks Unlimited Canada, which have committed billions of dollars to the cause, cannot keep pace with wetland loss in Canada.
We are in this dilemma due primarily to a lack of several things: political will at all levels of government; uniform legislative and regulatory safeguards; and what we believe to be landowner incentives, which will lead to my fourth and final point, which is that the federal government can help solve this wetland loss dilemma. Although the provinces have legislative authority over wetlands, many interjurisdictional issues arise that transcend these provincial boundaries and responsibilities. For example, as water being drained from the Saskatchewan fields comes surging across the border toward Manitoba during flood season, the provinces have thus far been unable to address this particular issue. The issue is not lost on the voting public; there are expectations that their elected officials will help, will take meaningful steps to help us address this problem.
In addition, as the public learns about the other ways wetlands support them, not only by protecting them from floods, they are asking who will help with a leadership role in safeguarding these natural areas and natural assets. The federal government can drive solutions by making a major landscape-scale investment in conservation, particularly wetland restoration, which will also require a strong commitment to investments in science.
By rising to that challenge, not only will the Government of Canada fulfill its legal commitments, such as the Migratory Birds Convention Act, it will also demonstrate it is taking concrete steps to realize the net environmental, social, and economic benefits of making wetlands the core focus of Canada's national conservation plan.
Last week Professor Howard Wheater from the University of Saskatchewan spoke in Ottawa about rapidly emerging water quality and quantity issues, particularly in the three prairie provinces. In particular, he referenced the 2011 algal blooms on Lake Winnipeg as a great crisis for this country and one that could easily be replicated in the Saskatchewan River watershed—a river system that provides 80% of drinking water to three of the largest cities in Canada: Edmonton, Calgary, and Saskatoon.
As I said in my remarks to this committee earlier this month, choosing not to act is a decision in itself, a decision that will enable the continued loss and degradation of valuable habitats. If we choose to live with the status quo, we must be prepared to live with the consequences, such as historic levels of flooding, loss of biodiversity, as well as a variety of climate change impacts that will only compound the issues we face today.
However, there are solutions. These solutions are based in sound science and effective conservation practices, and we invite you, as leaders in this country, to work with us to meet these imperatives for this generation and, importantly, for the generations to follow
With that, I would like to open the floor for Karla. Thank you again for inviting us to provide this presentation, and I look forward to continuing this very important conservation conversation with all of you.
Thank you.