Madam Speaker, I have a serious question to ask the member who just spoke. He did a great job in his presentation. However, before I ask the question, I remember reading not long ago on the Internet a dilemma: What does one do if one finds an animal that is an endangered species eating a plant that has been defined as being endangered? It is one of those deep thoughts to ponder.
My serious question pertains to a question that one of my farmer friends in my constituency asked. He wanted to know, if he could somehow be shown, either directly or indirectly, to be responsible for the danger and perhaps the killing of a member of an endangered species, and if he could lose his farm over that, because the proposed fines are of the magnitude that would basically put the farmer out of business, what would be his recourse?
He said that perhaps there would be a series of unintended consequences from the bill, that when farmers make sure that the margins of their sloughs and so on become totally uninhabitable so that those endangered species do not even go there, there will actually be less available land for endangered species than there is now.
I would ask for my colleague's comments on that, if he has some knowledge of it.