I'd like to thank everyone here for the opportunity to speak before the standing committee. The organization really does appreciate your time and your interest in what we have to say.
Trout Unlimited Canada, or TUC, is a national not-for-profit conservation organization founded in 1971. We're an on-the-ground conservation organization that's focused on conserving, protecting, and restoring Canada's freshwater ecosystems and their cold water resources for current and future generations. We're a science-based but volunteer-driven organization with volunteer chapters across Canada that adopt and work to conserve their local waterways, not only for the fish that inhabit them and the fisheries they support, but also to ensure clean water for the communities that depend on them.
TUC's science, policies, and program direction come from our national conservation agenda created by input from our chapters, our members, and our supporters, and from a national resource advisory council made up of academics, professionals, and policy-makers from across the country. Canada's landscape of lands interconnected by rivers and lakes constitutes the natural infrastructure of Canada, providing enormous ecological and economic benefits to all Canadians. Our organization recognizes that proper management of Canada's natural areas and biodiversity includes the continuum from protection, to conservation, to restoring damaged environments as part of ensuring the sustainability of the natural system that ensures our own health and prosperity.
Ensuring the protection of critical areas and their ecological functions, natural biodiversity, and habitats for wildlife, migratory birds, and species at risk is one component of an integrated environmental management strategy. Restoration of endangered aquatic species also requires the protection and restoration of their endangered habitats. TUC believes that the maintenance and acquisition of protected areas is one critical major step in better protecting Canada's natural biodiversity and the health of its natural systems.
The ongoing maintenance and establishment of new protected areas, whether as part of the national parks strategy, national wildlife areas, migratory bird sanctuaries, national marine conservation areas, or national marine protection areas, will require significant resources to maintain existing areas and also to strategically acquire new areas. Funds need to be ensured for the medium and the long term to manage and to acquire these protected areas into the future.
There is a strong need for a national strategy—not just an agency one—for the management and identification of future protected areas. This requires collaborative strategic planning and the linking of various protected area initiatives by Environment Canada, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada into a cohesive integrated planning initiative that would direct a longer-term protection program. The program would include critical terrestrial and aquatic habitats for both species at risk and threatened species, as well as examples of sensitive ecosystems and environments essential for the survival of all Canadian biodiversity.
This form of collaborative planning would increase the justification for the acquisition of specific protected areas, reduce duplication of effort, and demonstrate a more cohesive rationale for why specific areas are protected. Expansion of collaborative management to other organizations, nations, and private landowners will help ensure a broader strategic planning approach to better protect critical ecosystems beyond the capability of the federal government alone.
An ecological network needs connectivity. To increase the capacity for resiliency, especially with more climate variability and adjacent human activity, we need to actively create a set of connections to link protected areas to create a true ecologically active network of land- and waterscapes. We suggest that protected areas, whether freshwater, marine, terrestrial, or wetland, should be linked to corridors of connectivity where possible to ensure that they act as ecological networks, not just administrative or physical ones. In addition, there is a need for a stewardship strategy which ensures that the remaining landscape, whether working or not, is as functional as possible, especially in those areas near, connected to, or adjacent to protected areas. Some of these discussions date back to wildlife policy in the 1990s.
Stream and river corridors are one type of network system. One of the major elements lacking in Canada's legislation currently is legislation such as the wild and scenic rivers legislation in the U.S., which not only protects critical aquatic habitats in riverine systems, but also ensures connectivity through their linear corridors to protect landscapes. This is a major component in resiliency on the landscape, and it is currently lacking in Canadian legislation. While not the direct focus of this standing committee, this form of legislation would help to better link federal mandates and responsibilities for protecting both terrestrial and aquatic environments and could be considered another tool in achieving an effective protected area strategy.
Protected areas will not remain viable in the long term without ensuring that surrounding lands and waters have better management to ensure critical physical, chemical, and biological functions are maintained and that, where degraded, they are restored to some sense of ecological function. Trout Unlimited Canada focuses on working with others to ensure that Canadian landscapes that are not directly protected and are mostly private are managed to ensure critical functions where possible and restored to some level of ecological function. The roles of provinces, first nations, and private landowners are critical to ensuring these functions are maintained while these lands and waters are used for other purposes.
All lands and waters need some level of management and support to ensure various levels of stability, especially those lands in private ownership. Where acquisition is not possible or appropriate, incentives and support for complementary land use practices on private lands would extend the protection in and around protected areas. This is not a regulatory approach, but more of a co-operative approach.
There should be a federal strategic planning exercise for protected areas in Canada that is a collaboration among the three federal agencies and jointly implemented. The plan, reflecting the success of Parks Canada's approach, should focus on simplicity and clarity of message for why we create and manage protected areas. It should have clear objectives that are measurable and realistic timelines to ensure ongoing implementation. The exercise should be linked to strategic collaborative planning with provincial, territorial, and indigenous organizations that also wish to act proactively to better manage and protect critical environments.
People and monetary resources need to be made available to manage protected areas and maintain them so that the ecological and biophysical functions are maintained. Nation-to-nation collaborations and co-management opportunities should be explored and established to extend the range of these protected areas.
With that, I'd like to thank the standing committee again for the opportunity to speak.