Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak to Bill C-5, the species at risk act. This is the third or fourth try by the government to bring the legislation to the floor. It seems to create more controversy than substance in a lot of these situations.
Patrick Moore, one of the founding members of Greenpeace, was speaking at the Saskatchewan Cattle Feeders Association meeting in February. He said:
I made the transition from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus.
That is a tremendous quote. That is exactly what the government should be doing with legislation like this. It needs to build consensus with the provinces, landowners, land users and so on in order to make this type of legislation palatable.
Mr. Moore is a native of Vancouver Island. He went on to say that the federal government's proposed species at risk act should be a positive program that should reward not punish farmers for living near these species. He is absolutely right. That is at the crux of the debate. He stated that costs for such programs should be borne equally by both urban and rural people. We all want to protect these species at risk.
This fellow has the right idea on this legislation. He has seen situations where people on Vancouver Island spent huge amounts of time and energy saving eagles. They did it; it worked out very well. They were able to bring back that population of eagles. It is just tremendous to watch them flying around.
The unintended consequence was that the eagles started feeding en masse on blue heron nests. The blue heron was of course an endangered species. They corrected one problem and the eagles started redirecting their feeding habits on to the blue herons so that now they have another problem on their hands. It looks like mother nature is more than able to take care of a lot of this on her own and when people get involved we have these unintended consequences.
I woke up the other morning to the radio and the announcer was talking about flocks of up to 4,000 crows around the city. Everybody knows that a crow is a bit of a pest. They do not just wake us up early. These birds are predators that feed on songbirds. They feed on the nests and the young. We have saved the crows. We are not allowed to shoot them any more or use poisons. Now we have these huge flocks of crows feeding on songbirds, the very birds we want to entertain and bring into the city. When we start to muddle with things there can be unintended consequences.
SARM, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, is having its annual meeting coming up between March 4 and March 6. There are a number of resolutions that have come forward that speak to these unintended consequences.
I know that my counterpart from Selkirk--Interlake this morning talked about a Ducks Unlimited project that was having an adverse effect on areas of his land. He has less hay land to farm. He has plovers that are now endangered because their habitat is being flooded.
We see loons in Saskatchewan being moved off Lake Diefenbaker where the water rises and lowers so much because of the dam at the head of it that there is not a loon population there any more. We have seen adverse effects and unintended consequences.
The RM of Rodgers submitted one resolution. It claimed that some municipalities were concerned about the risk of prairie fires that non-grazed or uncut long grasses presented, and neither the RM Act nor the Prairie Forest Fire Act gave the RM specific authority to direct owners of such land to create or maintain satisfactory fire guards to prevent the spread of fires. They wanted the act to be changed so that the RM would have some intent or some excuse to go in and look after that.
That is directed at some of the areas that are going back to habitat, that species can then carry on in.
There was a resolution submitted by the RM of Three Lakes. It claimed that the best use for arable land in Saskatchewan was for agricultural purposes. Much of the land owned by Ducks Unlimited and the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation had uncontrolled weed growth, and non-arable land was much better suited for the purpose of Ducks Unlimited and the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation. They wanted some laws or some sort of regulatory body to control where Ducks Unlimited and the wildlife federation could expand.
We are having problems with weed growth in some of these untended areas where the seeds are blowing out across the rest of the arable land and creating a problem. The species at risk bill does cover grasses and weeds as well so there are unintended consequences there.
The last resolution came from the RM of Langenburg and the RMs of Spy Hill and Churchbridge. They claimed that the municipal land tax base was gradually being eroded by the conversion of agricultural land to wildlife habitat whereas the North American waterfowl management plan, and that is what the member for Selkirk--Interlake was talking about, identified five million acres of land in western Canada that was to be returned to wildlife habitat. That is not all bad. We do have an excess of crop grown in our country.
A lot of people have talked about taking arable land out of production and putting it back into grasses and so on. Perhaps there is something good there. They are also saying that this North American waterfowl management plan has budgeted $2.7 billion Canadian for this task. No one can bid against these folks. They have only spent 21% of the money that is allocated to secure 46% of their target. With a 60 cent dollar, that land is very accessible and very easy to buy out. No one can bid against them.
The work is being done by local and international conservation groups such as Ducks Unlimited, the largest single landowner in the province of Saskatchewan. Farmers and the provinces are making the changes without threat or punishment from the federal government.
Statistics Canada reports an excess of $6 billion benefit to the economy from wildlife and related activities. That has been harmed a little with the long gun registry. The hunters are not out there the way they used to be. It is great to create all these habitat and wildlife areas, but unless there are actual hunters out there, we end up with an excess.
There is a huge problem in Saskatchewan at this time. The chronic wasting disease, CWD, which infiltrated our domestic elk herds has now shown up in wild deer. Hunters and wildlife federation officers are eradicating whole herds of deer. When we start to mess with mother nature, these unintended consequences start to boil over.
We saw that with the government deregulating the use of strychnine to control pocket gophers. There was a huge resurgence of gophers. A family of these little guys will clear off a tonne an acre of forage. We talked about that issue here. We passed a motion to reinstate the use of strychnine to control gophers. I hope the government will follow through on that on the spring seeding. We are looking at another drought in western Canada and gophers are going to be a huge problem again. We will have to have unlimited access to that strychnine in order to get on top of the problem.
There are some unintended consequences when we start to play with poisons. There was a huge hue and cry which actually shut it down the first time. Eagles, hawks, swift foxes and ground owls were feeding on the same poisons. It is very hard to prove that was actually happening.
Studies have been done. A lot of them were done by Senator Herb Sparrow who is a known environmentalist. He has won awards. He has done studies which say that a hawk would have to eat seven to eight gophers at one sitting in order to be harmed by that amount of poison. It is physically impossible. They just cannot digest that great a number. A fox or a coyote would have to eat 35 or 40 gophers. The bulk of them die in the hole so they would not be accessible to begin with.
We have regulated a huge problem in western Canada with respect to the gopher by taking away strychnine because some people said it was poisoning carcasses and that coyotes and the odd eagle were dying. If that is happening, then go after the bad guys. Hit them with every law on the books that can be thrown at them, but please do not throw the baby out with the bath water and regulate us all.
That is what Bill C-5 seeks to do when we do not talk about proper compensation and when we talk about criminal liability and that people are guilty before they have a chance to prove themselves innocent. It is a huge problem.
Years ago I had a lumberyard and I had a truckload of lumber coming from the west coast to my lumberyard. While going through Banff National Park, an elk bull jumped out in front of the truck. The last thing the truck driver wanted at two o'clock in the morning was to have an accident but it happened. Who was at fault? He was on the highway and the elk jumped out of the ditch. It took out the radiator, the front tire and the bumper of my truck. They are expensive repairs when it is a Kenworth truck. The driver spent more time filling out paperwork for the elk that committed suicide than it took for me to get the truck parts from Calgary, bring them out and put the truck back on the road.
The elk is not an endangered species. It just happened to be in the park. That type of thing happens.
The criminal intent outlined in the bill is that a person is guilty until the person can prove that he or she is innocent. We see no compensation and the usage of land is being taken out from underneath the farmer, the rancher, the woodlot owner, the miner, the oil patch and so on.
We really have to look at some of the amendments that have come forward and which are rightfully placed. They are non-partisan in nature. Let us get the government back on track with the right purpose here, to protect endangered species, some of which are farmers out in western Canada.
