Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning and present to the committee.
The organization that I work for, the Quality Deer Management Association, does cooperatives from a little different end than what we've heard so far this morning. We're dealing with natural resources. I do live on the United States' side but work regularly in Canada. Essentially, the cooperatives that we work with are either landowner cooperatives or deer management cooperatives, bringing hunters, sportsmen and women, and agencies—your Ministry of Natural Resources, for example—together to manage the natural resources.
As we take a look at some of these, we can improve wildlife management programs and habitat management programs by far, benefiting all citizens throughout the province, if we can do a better job managing wildlife habitat. What we have seen by forming these landowner cooperatives—which are essentially groups of landowners or hunters who work collectively together on these small parcels of land to better manage the wildlife that's there and, importantly, the habitat that's there.... If we do a good job of managing that habitat, a multitude of wildlife species will benefit from that. What we see by putting some of these together and forming these neighbourhood or landowner cooperatives is far-improved habitat and wildlife management programs, which certainly benefit the hunting industry, the habitat industry, and the ministry overall with regard to province-wide natural resources. This is important on the United States' side, but it's certainly important on the Canadian side, where you have such abundant natural resources and beautiful scenery, etc.
We have worked with private individuals, state agencies, provincial agencies, and federal agencies throughout the U.S. and much of Canada to help align and provide this model for allowing these landowners and sportsmen and women to come together to create these cooperatives to then enhance their ability to manage these natural resources. We have literally worked with thousands of landowners to do this. We have worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to form a model for developing these cooperatives around federal lands, and with states to develop the same thing around state lands. We are currently in negotiations with a couple of states to develop a cooperative position, whose sole purpose would be to work with these landowners and sportsmen and women to develop wildlife management cooperatives throughout different parts of these states to enhance exactly what we're talking about from the natural resources end.
One thing that's nice about it is that you can take a look at your Ministry of Natural Resources, which oversees the wildlife management within the province and is responsible for setting bag limits, season dates, etc. However, it's the sportsmen and women who have to buy into those programs and play their part to have a full impact on what you have from a wildlife management end, whether you're talking white-tailed deer, moose, bear, waterfowl, etc. The more of those people you can get on board with the ministry officials and the managers of that—buying into what they're doing and allowing that to happen on all of that private land throughout the province—the more successful those programs can be. We see hundreds of thousands of acres on the United States' side now in these landowner cooperatives, which are working cooperatively with the state agencies—in your case those would be the provincial agencies—and allowing the programs to be far more successful. There are literally hundreds of individual cooperatives here in the northeastern U.S. where I live. There are thousands of them throughout the United States, and they are just beginning in Canada.
On our part, QDMA Canada was incorporated in 2006, so we are an educational organization that helps teach people the value of managing habitat wisely, managing wildlife wisely, and the idea of these cooperatives and how they can benefit all.
This is a very new concept in Canada, but it is a concept that is growing and has spread rapidly throughout the last decade across the United States. It's what we see as the future of wildlife conservation on our side, and I'm guessing that the same thing is going to happen on your side. The model is a proven model. It works extremely well and will certainly apply to the situation you have on your side with private versus public land, the number of sportsmen and women that you have, and the natural resources industry.
This fits in well with what the committee is discussing in the talks today. It's something that's been proven here and will work extremely well in Canada as well. As an organization we look forward to being part of that and improving wildlife management and natural resource management in Canada.