Environment committee  At present, recovery teams don't exist in SARA, in the legislation. It just talks about preparing recovery strategies.

Environment committee  Right. It's the way it's done now, but I believe Dr. Mooers said that there is nothing in the legislation that means a recovery team with independent members has to be the way to go. We think it should be, so the point is that getting it enshrined in the act would ensure that happens.

Environment committee  It's the existence of recovery teams with independent scientists on them.

Environment committee  I'm sure it would be very useful for some recovery teams and some species. I don't know if any of us talked specifically about wetlands. I spoke about streamside and riparian buffer strips, which are a bit different, but certainly any inventory on habitat, particularly broad-based things like that, would be very useful to some groups.

Environment committee  The Fisheries Act is very useful in some circumstances, and those circumstances might even include some farms where you have, say, a pipe coming from a dairy, with milk waste going into the stream. You can say “that pipe and that farmer, that's a problem”, but many of the pollution issues that freshwater fish face are non-point source pollution.

Environment committee  That's correct.

Environment committee  The way it's done in the example I used is that they lease the land. They assess the land for its agricultural value, because, of course, all farmland is not equal. There is some excellent farmland and some that is very marginal. They classify the land and assess its fair market value, and the lease pays the full fair market value over a period of 15 years.

Environment committee  Sure. As soon as you ask them what they would do if they were paid a grant just to let it go, there are a lot of questions and details, but it's curiosity in negotiation as opposed to hostility.

Environment committee  I'm not sure about the downloading. In my mind, the grants would need to be federal grants because it's federal legislation and a federal imperative that's being dropped on them. I work quite a bit with municipalities on things like drainage and those kinds of issues. Really, there's not much of a conflict with the drainage issues that we found.

Environment committee  Well, much of that question, or the answer to it, is beyond my expertise. A question on contracts would be better put to a lawyer than myself. As to how, I can only point to the need and, in my experience, the apparent openness of landowners to this kind of thing. I don't know what specific barriers there are within the bureaucracy or the legislation to doing it.

Environment committee  Sure. With respect to the Fisheries Act, it's very good at what it does or is a very useful tool for what it was intended to do, which is, in very clear instances, where you can point to the pipe spewing something or point to the person who's done something and say that “this has destroyed habitat”.

Environment committee  The strategy went from the recovery team to DFO in 2005, and then it was posted in 2006 on the SARA registry.

Environment committee  Yes, it certainly did.

Environment committee  I don't know the names of the ministers.

Environment committee  Good afternoon. I'm a self-employed biologist. I specialize in species at risk and habitat restoration in British Columbia. My Ph.D. dissertation was done at UBC and focused on the ecology of two SARA endangered species, the Salish sucker and the Nooksack dace. I am a member of the recovery team for the species and lead author of both recovery strategies, and I've worked on them continuously since 1997, which is to say that I've spent 14 years talking and negotiating with landowners about species at risk and habitat protection.