Madam Speaker, it is good to be able to again speak to the bill. We have spoken to the previous two sets of amendments and this Group No. 3 deals with the social and economic interests and the public consultation process.
Before I get into some of that I want to refer to, the member for Davenport and also the member for York North, both members from the government side of the House, spoke up and brought to the attention of Canadians the fact that a lot of the amendments that the government has brought forward at report stage are to reverse agreement on amendments brought forward at committee. There was the committee doing its work and bringing forward witnesses to explain the detail of the bill and give their opinions. The committee members worked together to formulate some amendments to improve the bill. Then when it came back to the House at report stage, the government introduced amendments to reverse all that. If that is considered democracy in this day and age, there is something definitely wrong with the process.
We cannot support the bill if it does not address fully the issue of compensation for affected landowners. If this is not in the bill we will not support it. It is critical to the protection of endangered species. If we do not do this, we will be endangering endangered species more than we will be helping them. There was also the mens rea issue that we dealt with in Group No. 2 about how a person is guilty until proven innocent in that a person who unknowingly alters the habitat of an endangered species is guilty. Some means in the bill has to absolutely reverse that so that a person found guilty must be shown to have had some intent in mind when he went out to destroy an endangered species or the habitat. Those two issues are vitally important to our party and to the people we have been talking to.
Quite early this morning when I was in my office I got a phone call from a rancher from back home. It was two hours earlier for him. He had just come in from feeding his cattle and phoned me to see how the bill was progressing. He has had an interest in this issue since it was first talked about many years ago. This gentleman was raised and educated in the United States and he knows what has happened in the United States with the heavy-handed type of legislation there. He knows that it has not worked. He has kept on top of this issue and he is so fearful that if this happens in Canada we indeed will be putting species at risk instead of helping them. All Canadians are supportive, as our party is, of species at risk legislation that truly works and will truly protect species and their habitat.
I want to address some points about the social and economic interests. We have put forward Motion No. 3, which would require the socioeconomic interest to be considered in the legal listing of the species. The bill already provides that, to be considered in developing recovery methods. We think it is important that these issues all be balanced off. As we always see in legislation that comes before the House, it is a balance of social issues, economic issues, protection of the environment and the concerns of Canadians. We must bring in all of that and make a bill which brings in a balance that can work.
The Canadian Alliance also proposed in Motion No. 15 that:
The purposes of this Act...shall be...accomplished in a matter consistent with the goals of sustainable development.
That is absolutely critical. Where else but in an environment bill should we have legislation that deals with sustainable development? If a bill does not promote that then it is not doing its job. This is closely related to socioeconomic interests because it requires that this balance be struck between the environment and the needs of Canadians. As we know, it would be easy for all of us to move back into caves and not carry on the kind of lifestyle we have developed, but we have to do things another way. We have to be able to live the lifestyle we have developed and deal with environmental issues, together. If we do not do that then we are going in the wrong direction.
Often when I am speaking to high school and grade school classes I feel that my generation and the generation before us have done a very poor job on the environment and I encourage them as young people to pick up that issue, bring it forward and try to maintain something that perhaps we can start here. I encourage them to realize that we cannot go on affecting the environment the way we have in the past. We have to come to terms with living with the environment.
I refer again to the rancher who phoned me this morning. I do not believe there are any better environmentalists in the country or the world than the people who make their living from the land. Farmers, ranchers, fishermen and resource people know more about what needs to be done and how to do it than anyone else does, more, I would suggest, than people who live in the concrete jungles.
It is essential that the costs to industry and property users and the costs to the government in terms of enforcement resources be known before the government introduces legislation with such vast implications. This has been alluded to many times in other presentations, but we need to know these issues up front. We need to know the costs. Canadians have to be clear on the costs this legislation would bring into effect before they and we can honestly and with a clear conscience support the measures. In particular, we must know what the bill will cost the farmers, fishermen, loggers, ranchers and even the cottage owners and people who live in the country. Many people now choose a rural lifestyle and have a few acres. They have to know how this bill would affect them and what the government compensation provisions would be if it is implemented.
Here I come back to the whole issue of compensation if one's lifestyle and means of income change. I believe that all of society supports protecting species at risk and that all of society should be responsible for the costs of doing so. However, at this time the government has no idea of the total socioeconomic costs of the bill, so those avenues need to be explored and clarified in a lot more detail.
Then we get into COSEWIC, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and I think everyone knows about it now. It is a panel of scientific experts appointed by the minister whose chief function is to classify species at risk and to recommend to determine the scientific list of endangered species. Quite frankly, that is who should decide what the endangered species are: people who are experts in the field. They should bring forward that list.
I want to go further with this. This is where the main controversy erupts. Environmentalists want the scientific list determined by COSEWIC to automatically become the list that would be enforced by law. The government wants cabinet to have the final decision as to which scientific recommendations are accepted and which are not and the government wants to have political control over which species are protected.
In committee, the Canadian Alliance proposed a balanced compromise which was accepted by the committee and has now been reversed at report stage by the government through an amendment. We argued that the scientific COSEWIC list should become the legal list within 60 days if the cabinet did not act to prevent it. That is a bit of a reverse onus, but under this approach cabinet would have the final say and would have to act to overthrow a scientific recommendation. That would mean that cabinet would have to say that the scientists have given it the list but cabinet does not believe it. As it exists now, by not acting, the list goes astray. We felt that was a really good method of putting in place the whole issue of government and cabinet responsibility. We felt it would force them to act, but if they were to act they would be acting against the scientific listing.
Then there is the whole issue of public consultation. When we started with this process many years ago compensation and consultation were two things that were very key to us. We feel that the Canadian public must be engaged at all times in this process if we indeed are to come up with a bill that will be acceptable to Canadians and that will work to protect endangered species.