The House leader asks what that has to do with reinstatement. I am trying to explain to him why my party and I have disquiet about reinstating specific bills. I will move toward the specific bill that I personally want to focus on today and why I have disquiet toward that specific bill.
The re-introduction of Bill C-5, the species at risk bill at the stage where it is at gives me disquiet and, more important, gives my constituents disquiet. Effectively, prorogation results in that bill being stopped. My constituents say, “Please stop it where it is at. Please listen to our concerns about this bill.”
From the perspective of someone who loves the environment, species at risk is important. It is a broad societal goal. Diversity of species is important and is a broad societal goal. The trouble with this bill is that species at risk are not being looked after by society as a whole. They are being looked after by certain specific individuals. When I say looked after, I mean economically.
Genuine diversity has enormous benefit. I think of tourism. I think of people coming to visit our country specifically because of grizzlies in a wild state in our mountains. It is an indication of how man-made activity affects the planet. We can make a change in that regard. Man-made activity does affect the planet. We can have an impact in that regard.
I think of the success story of the whooping crane, a bird that Canadians decided to look after, to protect. It was almost extinct. What a wonderful success story that was; protecting them, finding out more information, tracking them, raising whooping cranes in a tame environment, releasing them to an external environment. We now have a population of whooping cranes that is much more likely to survive. For these reasons and more, I support protection of and action on species at risk and their habitat.
If this is a broad societal benefit, it should be paid for by society in the broadest sense. I believe that Bill C-5 will be a failure because society as a whole is not taking the responsibility. One group in our country will be asked to inordinately bear the burden. That group is the landowners.
I listened to the Prime Minister talk about establishing new national parks. I know that in some cases those new national parks are going to take in land where there was previously private interests, forestry interests. Forestry companies went in, explored, spent money putting in roads and had started to harvest timber. There is an economic interest in that area. What will the government do as it takes away those interests in establishing a brand new national park? It will extinguish that right of the timber company and it will pay for it. It will pay back the lumber company for that interest. What would happen in the instance of a species at risk where there was an economic interest? There is no provision for compensation.
I think of another example of a landowner who buys a property on a beautiful habitat by a river to build a senior citizens home. He goes to the architect, goes to the municipality, gets approval for all those things and is ready to build. Suddenly it is found that there is a special habitat in that area and the process cannot proceed. It is reasonable in my view if there is a societal benefit to protecting that habitat, to give that landowner fair compensation for the purchase of the property, the architectural design, the municipal process, and the time and effort expended in that process. In the bill there is no provision for that to take place.
In the bill there is no provision, and I will say this as plainly as I can so that everybody--