Mr. Speaker, I have a few comments on this extremely important piece of legislation. I will be speaking in favour of the hoist motion.
We feel that this is a bill that has been rammed through under threat by the minister to pull the legislation if there is any movement in relation to amendments or adjustments. That certainly is not the way to handle not only a piece of legislation that is important and as sensitive as this, but any piece of legislation.
We might say that this legislation will become as quickly extinct as some of the species if we do not soon get our act together and do something about it. The government cannot ram through legislation just because it is an arrogant government in power when it affects so many people and so many species.
There are a number of agencies that have grave concerns about what is happening in relation to our existing wildlife. These are not people who are just concerned from an environmental point of view. Many of them are very ordinary citizens who are not necessarily caught up in the protective groups. They are people who love what this country has to offer. They are members of industry who realize that even though their livelihood sometimes depends upon hurting the environment or destroying habitats, they are beginning to be aware only too well that in order to preserve our great country and continue to make a living they also have to be very conscious of the environment and the habitats that surround them.
We are seeing, as we never saw before, a coming together of the different fragmented groups for the purpose of preserving what we have and what we are rapidly losing. These agencies have a tremendous amount to offer if we give them a chance, if we listen to them and if the committee goes out and hears their presentations. If we pick the best of what each group has to offer, if we look at putting together the solid recommendations that are coming to us and if we listen to the concerns that have been expressed, surely we can come up collectively with legislation that will not only do the job but will do it well.
When many of us were growing up in this great country, particularly those of us who grew up in the rural parts of the country, we remember living in a society where we worked and operated hand in hand with nature.
If we take time to listen to our elders we hear them talk about how they practically lived off the land. They did that not by raping what the land had to offer but by taking carefully as they needed while always making sure that there was something left for tomorrow because they knew the food they put on the table and their livelihood and the livelihood of their children depended on it.
If we go back to the opening up of the country and the days of the fur trade, perhaps in those days people thought we had so many animals that we could take more than was necessary or more than we should to preserve the species. However they quickly learned. As the animals they were hunting at the time became scarce in the areas in which they operated, they moved farther afield.
Perhaps we could even thank them for their concern about not depleting different groups of animals. They were forced westward and the country was opened up, not just because of curiosity of seeing what was beyond the next mountain but because these people pushed forward, in the fur trade in particular, in order to make a living for themselves and in order not to destroy what existed closer to the places where they had originally settled.
We should learn from the past. For years and years the country continued to produce the different species that were here originally, but it seems that somewhere along the line we forgot about it. With our concentration on opening up great towns, cities and building freeways we sometimes forgot the damage we were doing to the habitats for a lot of these species.
In my own province of Newfoundland everybody remembers the great auk, which is as extinct as the Liberals will be in Newfoundland after the next election. The only people who will survive are those who will not run.
My great friend from Bonavista—Trinity—Conception must be delighted this morning that the effort by the provincial Liberals to rid themselves of his colleagues did not work. The member for Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte will be back for a while in the House. The member for Labrador will also be back, I understand. Both of them won their nominations handily, as they should. It shows that the other agenda that is working certainly has not paid off for those who were perpetrating it.