Yes, thank you very much.
Our vision for ALUS is as a private-public partnership to do conservation. I draw the analogy with infrastructure, where the federal government has a long history of working with the provinces, with municipalities, and more recently with the private business community to deliver roads, bridges, and needed infrastructure. I don't look at this issue as anything different from that.
We have to make conservation mainstream. We can't have it as something that is marginalized or sort of an afterthought. Dr. Boyce mentioned earlier in his testimony the concept of offsets, that if you build and affect habitat in one area, you should be investing back more than that to replace that habitat, or manage it in a way to replace that ecological footprint. I think with those concepts we can develop a national program that involves federal, provincial, municipal, and private investment for this purpose.
The other element of ALUS, which is critically important, is that it engages the local governments. We do have a project in Manitoba, we have two in Saskatchewan, and we have three and growing in Alberta. In Prince Edward Island, it is a province-wide program that enrolls more than 85% of the island's agricultural producers. It is done in a way that encourages what I call super-buffers around potato fields to prevent runoff into tributaries, which are often salmon and trout streams. It is off-the-charts popular with landowners, as compared to the other approaches we've talked about today, in which as you have heard, we are in battles out there.
We are now in a fight with the City of Medicine Hat. Is that a smart result? I mean, patently, the answer to that is no. Do you really want to be sued by the City of Medicine Hat, which lives closest to the sage grouse? In my view, that is a policy disaster.