We cannot hunt and fish unless the habitat for wildlife is healthy. The quality of the wildlife habitat is always the first thing that our federation's hunters and anglers look for. We work as hard as we can to keep the wildlife habitat in extremely good health so that we can use it. Hunting and fishing are a bit like gardening. We have to keep wildlife habitat very healthy so that the animals can live there and we can hunt them properly in order for them to be sustained and to establish some contact with nature. That contact is absolutely vital in fully understanding all the symbiotic relationships between the various inhabitants of the habitat.
Hunters and anglers have often been the first to sound the alarm in the face of certain problems with wildlife, well before conservation and environmentalism was in fashion. Ecology is a very new science. In 1940, people in my region were concerned about some problems with the wildlife and took steps to keep the habitats in good shape, all the while maintaining good relationships with the landowners. We must not forget that, in Quebec, 70% of hunting activity occurs in municipally owned areas.