Sure. The issue, Mr. Kram, relates to property rights and incentives. Right now, all of the incentives to producers and farmers are to produce as much as they can. Mr. Leslie, for example, who represents a major farm community—and Mr. Mazier, as well—knows that farmers are under the gun to produce as much as they can.
On a piece of farmland, for example, Mr. Kram, there are also “public goods”, and those public goods are water, wildlife and so on. The private goods pay the bills on a piece of farmland, for example. The public goods are primarily a cost. As you well know, farming around wetlands—and I've done it myself—is very difficult, so in this day and age of all the incentives to produce more and more, farmers are responding to those incentives and draining wetlands.
The only way to deal with this—and there's no other way to do it—is to publicly subsidize the maintenance and restoration of wetlands on private lands. We'll end up with a win-win situation whereby farmers are recompensed for the conservation and enhancement of public goods while, at the same time, being able to maintain their private livelihoods.
One very last point I'd like to make is that Canada is the only industrialized country in the western world that does not have a large-scale program of incentives for producers. The United States Department of Agriculture, for example, has a $6-billion conservation fund, making it the largest conservation agency in the world.
That's how I would solve that problem, Mr. Kram.