Mr. Speaker, what we have advocated all along is that we need a graduated approach to protecting species at risk. Just because a species is found on a particular property, whether it is federal, provincial or even private land, it is not an automatic situation where that land becomes completely unusable. Sometimes the actions that need to be taken can be extremely benign. It may be just a matter of informing the landowner or the province that there is a species at risk located at a certain spot and to tell them what actions they can take to avoid further harming that particular species. Sometimes it is just a matter of sharing information among various levels of government.
We could even have a systematic approach to creating an awards or recognition program where all Canadians are committed to preserving our biodiversity. If that were a token gesture of the Government of Canada or a provincial regime to do that, it would make a lot of sense.
We could have provisions for information respecting methods to formalize commitments to land stewardship, including conservation easement to agreements and government programs, whether it be technical or scientific advice, to actually help out the landowners. We could even have a commitment to regularly examine the tax treatment and subsidies to eliminate disincentives for actions taken by persons to protect species at risk.
We saw that just recently when the Government of Canada went in a very good direction by removing one of the most draconian taxes when an individual inherits land that is a private woodlot. Sometimes it was cheaper to actually cut all the wood at once in order to pay the taxes to maintain that property. The Government of Canada changed the tax code in the last budget, which was a positive step in that direction.
There are things we can do and a stewardship approach is far better than a command and control aspect.