It is certainly the case that finding a way to work between the federal government and the provincial government on issues of land use planning needs to be a priority. In fact, it is an international priority because we have exactly the same land use change issues happening in the western United States.
My suggestion would be that we implement an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada jointly with the NRC, the National Research Council in the United States, to develop a strategy for land use planning in western North America. It is a very complicated problem. In fact, I went to Wikipedia to figure out what you would call it, and it's called a “wicked problem” because no matter what you do, there are going to be consequences for economics, agriculture, forestry, and so on. We have so many different interests on the land base that to balance those in a strategic way, to know how we should be coordinating industrial development in particular, is a very complicated problem.
It is not one for which I am prepared to offer a clear path forward because almost every one of these species is being affected in a big way. For example, the management response to caribou is very different from what it would be for grizzly bears on the same land base, as it would be for sage grouse in southeastern Alberta. Finding a strategic way forward to wisely engage land use planning is one of the most complicated problems that we have in ecology today.
Again, my suggestion would be support for the Royal Society of Canada to engage in an expert panel to deal with this very difficult issue of land use planning.
In my testimony, I mentioned suggestions on how we can increase support for wildlife and trapping through the Pittman-Robertson fund, for example, as well as Dingell-Johnson on the fishery side. Those would go a long way toward engaging support at the provincial level.
In the United States, those funds are an excise tax on ammunition, firearms, and fishing tackle, which is then distributed by the Department of Interior to each of the states on a matching basis. The state has to come up with funds to match the federal funding. It ensures a continuing flow of money for doing aerial surveys, for supporting research projects, and for education programs in the United States. Something like that would be a tremendous advance in Canada to provide continuing funding.