My name is Dave Walker. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Land Trust Alliance.
First I'd like to thank the members of the committee for this opportunity to present.
The Canadian Land Trust Alliance represents 47 land trusts across Canada. These are charitable organizations that can be found in every community across Canada. Their main objective is to acquire property by donation or purchase. Most of these lands are ecological lands. We also have land trusts like the Bruce Trail working to acquire recreational trails. We also have farm land trusts, and we have built heritage land trusts.
Together we have 305,000 members and supporters. We have 26,000 volunteers working for us who are supported by over 800 staff among our members. Collectively, we have preserved over 3.6 million acres of land for the benefit of Canada and its residents.
One of the major programs we work under is the ecological gifts program, a program set up and administered by Environment Canada. The purpose of this program is to enable citizens and private landowners in Canada to donate their properties to help Canada achieve its goals in biodiversity and species-at-risk habitat.
Currently the program allows our donors to carry their tax credits forward for five years. We're finding that many of our donors are rural landowners who don't have the income to use their total tax credit in the five years. So we would respectfully ask the government to consider extending this to 10 years. There will be no additional cost to the government from this. As a matter of fact, there could be a cost saving because in the current situation we have landowners dividing up their land donations or land parcels and donating them every six years so they can re-trigger their tax credits.
I would like to add that in the U.S. right now they are about to make permanent their conservation tax law, which will extend the tax credit to 15 years. They have the majority of members of both the Senate and the House co-sponsoring that bill.
The second item that would be of great help concerns a group of land trusts in Canada that is working with U.S. supporters of land trusts and has formed the American Friends of Canadian Land Trusts. While we are currently able to accept donations of cash from American residents in support of the Canadian land trusts movement, many of our key ecological properties across Canada are owned by U.S. residents. They have owned these lands for several generations. A number of them have agreed to donate the properties, but we need to have the American Friends of Canadian Land Trusts added to section 3504 of the income tax regulations, thereby giving them prescribed donee status. That would allow these landowners to elect to have their land valued at closer to their cost base, which would eliminate the money owing on the capital gains tax. Right now, Canadian residents, through the ecological gifts program, do not pay capital gains on their donations of ecological lands. Unfortunately, our U.S. friends do pay that tax when they want to donate their land back to Canada. So that change would be a help.
Third, we do support Imagine Canada's recommendation to eliminate the disbursement quota governing charities under the Income Tax Act. We agree with Imagine Canada's reason and have one additional reason. When land trusts take these lands, they are promising their community and the ecological gifts program that they will manage these lands in perpetuity. We have to build what we call stewardship funds so that we have the money to manage these lands in perpetuity, but with the disbursement quota in place, that is sometimes hard to do.
Thank you for your time.