Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise during report stage of Bill C-5 to speak to the amendments in Group No. 5.
I have been listening to and following the debate. A number of issues have been raised by the government to which I and other members in the House take exception. Part of the responsibility of the government is to pass legislation that is workable and recognizes the diversity represented not only in the House but across the country. Recognizing diversity will be necessary to protect species at risk.
As a number of government members have said, it has been a nine year process so far. Quite frankly, it has been a process of trial and error. From what I have seen it has involved mainly delay, obfuscation and deception. We have still ended up with a less than satisfactory piece of legislation. We have seen the government force closure 76 times in the House. It is now doing so again.
I will speak directly to the amendments. I will use an example of a species representative of all species at risk in Canada to illustrate the government's lack of political will to do anything about species at risk in a workable, concrete or coherent manner.
The fact that Motion No. 109 has been dropped is commendable because it allows the hard work done by the committee to be noticed. The amendment was brought in with the consent of committee members including a number of Liberal members. It is nice to see the motion back in the legislation.
Motion No. 75 would enable the minister to make regulations for critical habitat for aquatic species or migratory birds on federal lands. It would remove the enabling authority for aquatic species and migratory bird protection through regulations. It would allow the minister to recommend regulations to the cabinet for the protection of critical habitat at which time the cabinet could choose whether or not to act. That is totally unacceptable. Either we protect wildlife in Canada or not, but we should not leave it to cabinet to decide.
The committee was uniform in its declaration that there should be a third party scientific agenda. It is not a problem. It is a simple issue. Protecting endangered species or habitat in Canada is absolutely no problem. The only problem is lack of political will. The government has come up with a fantasy that the co-operative approach would somehow work. Co-operation is fine and important. In the long run it may be the key to successful legislation. However the legislation must have teeth. There must be a reason for private landowners and people to buy into it.
The issue hinges on compensation. It is the key to the legislation. However the issue has not been addressed. If we provide compensation for landowners who must take land out of production because an endangered species is found on it we will have found the key to a successful piece of legislation.
The public has bought into the idea of protecting endangered species. However Bill C-5 would not provide the tools to do so.
I said earlier that I would like to take one species to show what the inaction of this government has done toward making that single species extinct, because it is still barely hanging on. There is still just a little bit of a gene pool that allows a few Atlantic salmon, which is the species I am talking about, to actually return to the rivers in Atlantic Canada, spawn, go out to the ocean, come back and spawn again. It is inconceivable that the government, in the time it has been here, has done as little as it has done to protect Atlantic salmon.
Atlantic salmon are extinct now in 14 rivers in Nova Scotia's southern uplands, the area of Nova Scotia that I represent. When I was a kid those rivers had thriving populations of Atlantic salmon. We are talking about one generation here. We are not going back to the turn of the century or the 1850s. We are talking about 25 years ago when there were thriving populations of Atlantic salmon.
Those rivers today have 10% of their salmon remaining, the ones that are not extinct that is. Another 50 rivers in Nova Scotia are in serious danger and have seriously threatened salmon populations from acid rain. While salmon stocks remain in some of the rivers, it is a barely viable population base and has been recognized for some time as a species at risk.
In their own brochure, the Nova Scotia Salmon Association criticized the government. It wanted to show the negative impact of acid rain on fish stocks, which it called the silent killer. The association notes state that like the canary in the coal mine, Atlantic salmon is the biological indicator that signals loss in water quality. If we do not have good freshwater quality, we cannot have Atlantic salmon reproducing.
What has the government done about Atlantic salmon? It has shut down the hatcheries in Atlantic Canada, in New Brunswick and in Nova Scotia. There is no such thing as restocking the rivers unless it is strictly a private restocking effort. It has done enough genetic research to find out that the Atlantic salmon stocks in the rivers in the inner Bay of Fundy are distinct species, a subgroup of Atlantic salmon, and it has done nothing to protect the critical habitat for that subspecies.
The Atlantic Salmon Association, a privately run organization, raised $500,000 to study the genetic make-up of those salmon in the inner Bay of Fundy. The government, which is supposed to protect endangered species, managed to find $150,000 to dedicate to the project and it has not even given the money over yet. It is scandalous.
In 1960 we found out Nova Scotian salmon, eastern Canadian salmon migrated to the west Greenland Sea and overwintered there. In the late sixties, early seventies, eighties and nineties, the fishery that developed in the offshore made that whole group of species nearly extinct.
In 2001, 40 years after we found out where the salmon were going, Greenland set its harvest at 200 tonnes of salmon, or approximately 70,000 salmon. However low numbers and low prices resulted in a catch of only 40 tonnes, representing 15,238 salmon, 9,800 of those salmon were from Nova Scotian and eastern Canadian rivers. Nothing has been done. This is just one species. We can name a dozen.
My point is that one species alone tells the story and sets the record of the government on protecting endangered species.