Yes, I can hear you guys.
Thanks for having me in today. I am the Manitoba campaign director for the Wilderness Committee. The Wilderness Committee is the largest environmental citizens' group in the country that is member-based and citizen-funded. We believe in healthy nature and a healthy wilderness, and we support healthy communities in rural areas. That is what is going to sustain our well-being in Canada.
Our goal in the work we do is legislative protection for nature and wilderness. Speaking today to the committee, I will say that the simple, tough answer to the discussion regarding federal lands and their role in meeting Canada's targets to protect biodiversity is that we can't do it with the federal lands that exist. I am going to mention just a couple of species as an indication of problems that we would have.
One is the western chorus frog. In Ontario and Quebec, 2.8% and 8% of its habitat is on federal lands. Protecting that species, which is listed under the federal Species at Risk Act, couldn't be done only on federal lands.
Where I work, in Manitoba, there are no boreal woodland caribou on federal lands. There are 15 ranges and perhaps 5,000 animals in the province, or half that number, and we simply can't protect them with the work being done on federal lands.
What is left, then, in the view of the Wilderness Committee, is to look at the federal scheme of legislation and how we can apply the existing laws across Canada so that we can protect more of nature and wilderness.
With regard to the work that I have done in Manitoba, in 2013 we did a lot more work on the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Manitoba is filled with water, and when the Navigable Waters Protection Act was cut and its effect was limited to certain water bodies, a lot of the water in Manitoba was no longer protected. Of course, what went along with the Navigable Waters Protection Act was the gutting of the Fisheries Act. We have a document in Manitoba that was produced by the provincial government, which was used for industrial development on crown lands, public lands. It called out two pieces of legislation that were used to address actions around streams and stream crossings, and those two pieces of legislation were the Navigable Waters Protection Act and the Fisheries Act. We don't have provincial legislation that works on water, because there has always been federal protection.
Backing up a little, there are two things that transcend provincial borders and become federal jurisdiction. They are water and species—and air, of course, as well. They don't pay attention to provincial boundaries. That is why the federal government's role in protecting water has been so essential, and now that we have had a rollback on federal water protection, why it is essential that we have that protection replaced and in fact increased.
You can envision Manitoba as being downstream from everywhere, and Lake Winnipeg being a catch basin for water coming from the Rocky Mountains, from the south in the United States, and from Ontario. Everything flows downstream to Winnipeg, so everything that happens in all these other jurisdictions—Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario—affects Lake Winnipeg and the waters we have here, and of course, the rivers flowing up into Hudson Bay.
The decisions the Saskatchewan government makes about what they want to do with their water and what type of developments they are allowing along their shorelines affect Manitoba. We have no jurisdiction in Manitoba to say to Saskatchewan, “We want you to do something different.” What we need is for the federal government to have a strong hand in protecting our waters.
It is the same for Ontario. If things are happening in Ontario, we don't have any say in what happens there. We really need the federal government to protect the waters we have.
There's another piece of legislation that the federal government works on, the heritage rivers system. In 2006 the Hayes River was designated as a heritage river. That's a federal designation.
To preserve biodiversity, to protect the environment, and to work on our protected areas goals, the heritage river system could be, I suppose, improved. The protections it allows could be increased, perhaps protecting riparian areas. In a few instances in Manitoba, we look at protecting one and a half kilometres on either side of a river. That riparian area is far richer in biodiversity, especially in bird species, than most other forest areas. The federal government's protection or expansion of the heritage river system would be a real boon to protected areas goals in Canada.
I guess I should step back again. My notes aren't quite in order; I've been working on a few other campaigns.
We have two goals that we'd like to talk about.
In Manitoba, we've just published a report called “Keep it Wild! A Conservation Vision for Manitoba”. It comes out today. At the United Nations, one of the initiatives is a global goal of protecting 17% of lands and waters by 2020. The previous Manitoba government signed on to that, or decided that they were going to meet that goal. The wilderness committee has been calling for years for a further goal of 20% by 2020, and this conservation vision that we've just published lays out exactly how we would go forward in doing that.
Federally, across Canada we're sitting at around 10% for protected lands. We believe that hitting the 17% goal by 2020 is the right thing to do, and there are ways, by conservation agreements with the province and in some of the legislation that I'll talk about, for us to do that.
The second goal is about the boreal forest. It is a large supplier, I guess, of the things that we need in life. It's a carbon sink. It's one of the greatest sources of fresh water in the world, and we have vast sections of it. Scientists have been saying that 50% of the boreal forest needs to be protected in order for us to continue to get the sorts of building blocks of life that come out of the boreal forest. The wilderness committee has qualified that statement by saying that we really need to ensure that 50% of the biologically rich and culturally important areas of the boreal forest are protected.
We have two goals here. People have said that nature needs half—that's one organization—but 50% of the boreal forest and 17% of our lands in general need to be protected. Of course, in Manitoba you have a lot of provincial public land, or crown land, as it's referred to, and there are opportunities for protection, but that's not the case across Canada. As we get into developed regions of the country, we see that a lot of the land has been developed for agriculture, and the existence of nature really only occurs in ditches and small forested areas that haven't been plowed under. The last federal government abrogated its responsibility to protect some of the natural lands that we had when they got rid of the community pastures. In Manitoba alone, that meant 25 pastures and about 400,000 hectares.
If that federal land were still under the control of the federal government, conservation agreements could be written. There are agreements written for places like the Langford community pasture in Manitoba. It allows the land to be used for intensive grazing, and that's how the grasslands of that region would have lasted. That would have been the natural process as herds of bison had gone through. It would require some prescribed burns to keep the woody species down, but it would also improve the biological diversity. In terms of agricultural land in the developed regions, these sections of federal land that existed are the exact sort of thing that we need to look at to preserve nature and wilderness and meet the protected areas goals in Canada.