Environment committee  Your question is around which monitoring programs...?

Environment committee  There are some simple things that could be reinforced in the conservation plan. One would be a commitment to the emergency response network to marine mammal strandings and entanglements. That is run through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans with partners across the country,

Environment committee  That the government commit to enhancing and maintaining sufficient funding for the marine mammal emergency response programs across the country to respond to threats to marine mammals that are at risk. That would be one. The other aspect would be to make recommendations—although

Environment committee  This is where the federal government could, with the departments, lay out a framework—essentially a protected areas policy framework—specifying how these tools should work together. I don't believe how the tools should work together is clearly laid out, or which tools apply to wh

Environment committee  From our perspective, both those goals recognize the intrinsic value of wildlife and our natural areas, so they're aspirational. As somebody mentioned earlier, we need to set strong aspirational goals regardless of science; ethically, we want to be protecting wildlife and habitat

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I think there are different options for meeting those targets. Some have had a lot of collaboration and a lot of talking and are ready for some action. For others, as you say, I don't know if the time frame to meet the target is sufficient to even get through the beginning of the

Environment committee  The objective was set many years ago, so it certainly gave us the time frame, hopefully, to achieve it. Right now we're looking to 2020 and being able to report. I think we want to get as far along as we can by 2020. I'm not in a position to have done an analysis of what's on th

Environment committee  That's what one of the witnesses was proposing: clarity on who makes the judgment.

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. The Canadian Wildlife Federation is a national charity. It has about 250,000 supporters. We work through education, science-based policy, and outreach to conserve and inspire the conservation of Canada's wildlife and habitat

Fisheries committee  Yes, we would like to see improvements to it. Neither of us is a lawyer, so we didn't comment specifically on exactly what that improvement would be in terms of language in the act. The one shortcoming primarily is the lack of clarity around it being temporary, preventing tempo

Fisheries committee  That's a complicated question. I don't think that you write laws based solely on scientific evidence but I do feel, and I pointed out, that there were a couple of shortcomings in the language that was used. I think Dr. Favaro did a good job of pointing out some of the inconsisten

Fisheries committee  I think it's both before and after. Some amendments were made in 2012 that might facilitate some new ways of looking at offsetting. There is still some legal language, as I understand it, that is a barrier to working on things such as creating a habitat banking program in Canada.

Fisheries committee  The restriction wasn't so much around the fact that there was a prohibition on a temporary harm. The restriction was really around liability and what was allowed from a regulatory point of view. The way this law gets applied both pre- and post-2012 is that there's a prohibition

Fisheries committee  I was around. There was no consultation during the drafting of the change. We were unaware, a lot of people I talked to were unaware. There had been, though, about five years of consultation on the Fisheries Act, and my understanding is that a bunch of that consultation was input