Mr. Speaker, I am proud to sit on the environment committee because I consider it to be a great committee and members I have worked with have been great. It should be a paying committee because we can learn a great deal on it.
I said earlier today that I believed the bill was moving in the wrong direction. I do not oppose the bill as much as I oppose the approach taken with the bill.
My hon. colleague who just spoke listed various groups that are working at the present time and doing a tremendous job without the bill, and therein lies the key. Co-operation should be first, not confrontation first.
Having lived on the prairies as a boy and going back 50 years, I never once saw a sign in rural areas telling people that no hunting was allowed. That has become a recent sign. I never saw a sign telling people that they could hunt with permission only. However today we see lots of no trespassing signs. I mention that because landowners are sick and tired of people who do not respect their property.
I agree with my hon. colleague that the first thing that should be done is the identification of species as well as their habitat. Hopefully the people involved in the identification process will go to the owner, be it the provincial government, a rancher, a farmer, or whoever and discuss the habitat situation with them. They must not walk away from the person who owns that farm or that ranch before a species or its habitat is identified.
Before the property is listed as a habitat, some agreement must be made to compensate that person for the loss of their property. That has to come first. If government people identify a species, declare the property its habitat and talk to the individual involved after the fact, the bill will not work. One of my hon. colleagues opposite said he knew the bill would work. I hope it does but it will not work if we go about it in a backward way. Let me give the House an example.
This spring I received a fax from an administrator in the rural government who asked me to go to his area immediately because the government was in trouble with DFO. I told him he had to be kidding because he was in an area considered grain growing country. I thought it was a joke. DFO officials had gone down to his area to look at a long ditch farmers had put in to drain the headwaters of the run off down to the Souris River. Individuals were angry about this because of the approach taken by the federal government. I would like to suggest that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is king of the cabinet. That department overrules the environment department almost every time and that ought not to be. If cabinet cannot agree on this, then how is the bill going to be successful?
To make a long story short, the people from DFO trespassed in some cases on private land. They prepared their report, which by the way was a joke. Guess what? That rural municipality received a bill of $43,800.
The government cannot take that approach with this bill and make it work. It will not work, at least where I come from it will not. What the government has to do is to work on the co-operative side first, not the confrontational side. I have seen this work, as my hon. colleagues said, with burrowing owls. I have seen it work with other species.
The bill does not talk about one thing. Say a half section is declared a habitat and is taken off the farmer's tax title. He will not pay taxes on that half section any more. Nothing is mentioned in the bill about grants to the government in lieu of taxation. Therefore we have a lot of work to do with the local people first.
I want to go back and suggest this to the House. The habitat must be identified with permission from landowners. It must be discussed with them. The impact on the operation of the landowners must be discussed, if this piece of land is to be extracted. I am thinking of one now which is what we call a coulee. Half way down that coulee is an aquifer which provides the water for over half a section of grazing.
What would happen if that coulee and aquifer were declared as part of the habitat? Would only the coulee be paid for with the water on it and the rest of the acreage would be worthless for pasture without water? All these things must be done across the kitchen table, with a cup of coffee and agreements must be reached or it will not work.
I have dealt with people on many issues for many years. Things will be solved when there is compliance and when we start at the bottom. Then we report back, a declaration is made and the farmers or ranchers know exactly for what they will be compensated. They sign it or perhaps a lease is drawn up until they see what happens with the endangered species. It all has to be done at the grassroots level first or the bill will fail just like it did in the U.S. That is exactly why it failed in the U.S. and that is what this bill would do.
Nobody, including myself, wants to see any more erosion of endangered species.
I heard a very good rumour. They say that if we have not heard a rumour by four o'clock, then we should start one. I just heard a rumour that deer mice will be on the endangered species list. I hope they become totally extinct. They kill children and they kill other animals. Let us get rid of them in total.
What we really bothers me is all this nonsense we hear from people on the radio or on the TV. They are all environmentalists. Driving to the airport, I heard an environmentalist say that the shoot-out of the gophers had thrown the ecosystem of Saskatchewan out for four years. What a bunch of nonsense. However that is the problem. People are listening to the wrong people.
I plead with the government to take a look at this. Take a look at the strategy of the bill. Understand that the federal government should sit down with the landowners, the local governments and the industry and identify the habitat. The endangered species has to be identified. The government has explain the importance of that to them, then it will work.
The government has to advise landowners how long the land will be taken out of production. If it is permanent, then it has to be talked about. The government should know what the lands means to the person's business. The person has to be told that the money will be upfront. We all know that it will not work if the people are asked to sign and are then told that maybe they will be paid.
I plead with the government to go to the grassroots. I have worked with these people all my life and it will work this way. It will not work as the bill is currently written.