Mr. Speaker, it fits in environment much better and there is a much greater chance that the environment department will understand the whole ecological picture of endangered species. We went through the endangered species legislation, debated it 11 days in the House, and spent many hundreds of hours working on it, with over 300 amendments, et cetera.
We believe we need to preserve endangered species. The problem we had with that legislation, and a majority of the committee had a problem with many aspects of it, was who would made the decisions in classifying. If we take a piece of private land out of production, there should be a definite means spelled out in the bill for compensation, and not just in the regulations because that is not in them. There should be a mens rea clause, as opposed to a due diligence clause, where a person needs to show intent for the destruction of that endangered species.
The biggest problem with the issue has been this. Alberta has had a great many fisheries officers show up all of a sudden. Those fisheries officers carry guns and wear flak jackets. Why are they there? We did not all of a sudden have a fisheries. Therefore, it is one of two things. They ran out of fish in the oceans, so they had to come somewhere or they were there for some other reason, maybe to enforce legislation that had just become law.
In talking to the Canadian Wildlife Service, it has a very few answers to how officers are actually going to administer this--