Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some of the comments raised by members from the rural Liberal caucus in regard to clause 64. I have looked at clause 64 and the amendments under that clause. The members seem to have the impression that landowners need not worry now, that there is going to be protection in law for fair compensation, perhaps even fair market value compensation.
From what I can see in this legislation, if a landowner is standing before a judge and has to rely on what is in clause 64, with all due respect I do not think they have very much to stand on. There is a lot of wiggle room and discretion involved in the clause. There are no clear guarantees of property rights under those provisions. The word “may” is a permissive word. There is no mandatory requirement with that word. I really think they are misreading the impact of these amendments under clause 64.
The real problem with the legislation is a heavy-handed, command and control approach with respect to affected landowners. I have said this before, and I certainly believe it: The government believes that it can get results by simply ordering and commanding those results. I think that in the modern age it is becoming more and more clear that if a person wants results, a person manages those results and relies on co-operation and an understanding of all the processes involved to get those results. Just simply ordering results will not get those results.
This type of approach, as the member for Lethbridge pointed out, has been employed in the U.S. We have that as a laboratory we can use to see how this sort of command approach has worked. There are hundreds of cases in the United States that show how this approach actually threatens endangered species.
I want to share just one case. There are many, but I just wanted to go through one case to underscore the problem. The name of the individual in this case is Ben Cone. He owned 7,200 acres of woodland in North Carolina. The 7,200 acres had been clear-cut in the 1930s and through good management practices it had been restored in the 1970s and 1980s. The Cone family had managed that woodland and made a living out of it by a careful, selected harvesting of that woodlot. In 1991 the wildlife service entered his property and declared that approximately 1,500 acres were to be set aside as a habitat to protect 29 woodpeckers that had been listed and had been identified in that area.
The effect of this was that Mr. Cone could no longer harvest the 1,500 acres of property. He could not really do very much with it. It lost its economic value. It lost its use to the Cone family. The value of the property was something like $2.3 million. After this process was over, the value had dropped to $83,000. They had lost that much value. What did Mr. Cone do with the remaining 5,800 acres of land? He clear-cut it. He abandoned his selective forestry practices and reverted to clear-cutting practices because he did not want the wildlife service coming in, finding another species at risk in his area and having it affect more of his land.
However, Mr. Cone also had a lot of neighbours who had woodland and timberland just like he had. We can guess what they did. They clear-cut the land. Thousands and thousands of acres were clear-cut in this North Carolina area for one simple reason: They did not want the wildlife service coming in and in effect expropriating their property by declaring any portion of their land habitat.
I think this underscores the point that this heavy-handed, command and control system does not protect species at risk. In fact it endangers those species, and this case simply underscores that fact. There are a lot of cases like this, and I am surprised that the government is not aware of those unintended consequences.
I have a few other comments about the legislation. There are no guaranteed compensation rights in Bill C-5. Relegating it to regulations and bureaucrats is not reassuring to landowners. There is no clear process in the bill for determining compensation and it should have been dealt with. Another deficiency in the bill, something that was missed, is the fact that there is no co-operative approach for creating and funding good conservation and stewardship programs.
However, there is something that would not be missed. I do not know of any initiative taken by a Liberal government over the last 30 or 40 years whereby a seed was planted and did not grow into a large empire, an empire with a lot of civil servants and bureaucrats. The firearms registry legislation is a recent history of this fact. I do not know of a single seed planted in this town for any type of legislation that did not lead to a bureaucracy.
There are government departments in every province and territory in this country. Departments like fisheries and oceans are armed with people heading out into rural Canada to intrude into the lives of people who are just trying to make a living. I can see a big shift of wealth. People who create the wealth and pay the bills in this country are seeing their money going to the government to fund another empire. That is another area of the legislation that concerns me, and I do not think the committee paid much attention to that aspect of the bill. I do not think the committee looked into the economic impact of this sort of legislation and what it entails.
I want to emphasize the fact that Canadian Alliance members and the Canadian public want effective policy and legislation to protect species at risk. Unfortunately, this legislation, because of its failure to accept and recognize some basic rights such as property rights of owners, will drive those folks underground and the real victims in this legislation will be the very thing that the legislation intends to protect: species at risk.
It is really unfortunate that the amendments proposed by the committee to address these concerns were not dealt with. I think the government wants to push this stuff through and put the cost of species at risk onto the shoulders of landowners in rural Canada. In all fairness, urban people probably cause far more harm to wildlife through their overconsumption and the toxic waste, pollution and so on created by urban life. Those things have probably caused more problems for animals and species at risk in this country than any rural individual has, but the cost of the legislation is being imposed on the rural population and the landowners of rural Canada, not on urban people, and that is very unfair.