Thank you for allowing me to come before the committee.
I'm a councillor for the District of Kent in British Columbia. Our community has about 6,000 people living here. We're very interested in this process, and in this bill.
We have approximately 142 kilometres of ditches in the District of Kent. Most of those are on agricultural properties. They help with flood infrastructure, and with drainage of farmland.
We have two federal prisons in the District of Kent. We also have the Agassiz research facility, which is also a federal complex. Some of the challenges we face around our flood infrastructure and drainage are the compensation requirements that are often imposed on us. Some of the habitat alteration or destruction of habitat is often difficult to mitigate.
Oftentimes when we do drainage work, it really does result in habitat improvement, yet we need to compensate for that, mostly by planting other plants, which help with fish habitat.
One of the main problems with that is the maintenance of that compensation. There isn't really a plan for that. We always end up maintaining that. It becomes something that our local government always needs to budget for. We feel that's a little bit of downloading from other government levels. We're really interested in this process, and how it's going to look.
I welcome the opportunity to answer any questions that any of you may have.
Thank you.