Thank you for asking that question.
I'm not an expert in endangered species listings, but my understanding of it is that the proposal to list this was published in the Gazette and there was a one-month public comment period. We had one month to do our legislative review and respond. I think the deadline was April 22. There was not time for us to do the legislative review and then communicate with our community and local government partners and get their feedback to the minister.
What we've done is we've sent in a very detailed letter explaining all of the issues and why we did not feel there had been (a) enough public consultation or (b) even enough research. There had been research papers done in 2015 that weren't even considered and were showing that there were many more of these native mussels in the system. We've sent out a lot of communication to the local governments, the chambers of commerce, the yacht clubs, boating associations and different public entities, and we've asked them to write letters directly to the minister talking about how the listing would impact them.
We support the continuance of this northern range of the Rocky Mountain ridged mussel in our valley, but we feel that if we are rototilling a small fraction of the lakeshore, we are not going to be severely impacting the mussel. We also feel that the public benefit of controlling the invasive species really needs to be balanced with the moral question of protecting the endangered species.