I strongly favour, Mr. Mazier, the incentive approach when dealing with private land. When you have regulators coming onto your land and basically interfering with farming operations, it simply does not work. It creates nothing but antagonism in rural areas.
I think I mentioned in my previous testimony that when DFO was on the prairie landscape in full force, the officers would show up with guns at municipal meetings. We're a very gun-friendly area where I live, but that's disconcerting. Nobody shows up with a firearm to a municipal meeting, even though it may have been government policy. The point I'm making is that this policy was implemented by people who did not know what they were doing.
I served on the fisheries committee for nine years, and when we were reviewing the changes we made to the Fisheries Act, one of your colleagues, Ron Bonnett, from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, was absolutely scathing in his criticism of DFO officials coming on his farm. This is in spite of the fact that Mr. Bonnett had won many awards for conservation and was exemplary in the field of on-farm conservation programming.