Finance committee  Okay. No, we haven't been looking at that. That's not something our group has particular expertise in. We focus on the biodiversity conservation question. Many more regional land trusts have been established that are looking at agricultural land conservation.

Finance committee  No, not to this point in time.

Finance committee  You're speaking about the carry forward in terms of how long you can utilize an ecogift for your individual tax? We haven't found it to be necessarily a major problem. It would be helpful if you were able to do that, obviously, because a lot of the folks we run into often—land r

Finance committee  Both the dollars and the credits available are very important to why people participate in a program like this. If you think about land and land conservation, really there are private benefits that are being received from the land. There are also public benefits that are being re

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. On behalf of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, l'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present to you today as you consider recommendations for Budget 2013. I would also like to thank the government for the bold

Environment committee  Certainly. The Nature Conservancy of Canada has done quite a bit of work along the eastern slopes of the Rockies in and around Calgary. We understand you're visiting a couple of places in the Calgary area in mid-May. One of them that we would suggest is to visit the Providence

Environment committee  I would echo the market-based incentives or tax policy. There are some things that can be done, although I know it's a very difficult area to move into. A lot of the legislation that applies to conservation, certainly by private landowners and even on public land, is provincial.

Environment committee  Nature Conservancy Canada has many properties across Canada, so we run something called the conservation volunteer program. It's not just a program to get people out to look at the sites and learn about them; we actually ask them to assist us with the stewardship and conservation

Environment committee  The Convention on Biological Diversity target is 17% for terrestrial by 2020. It also has a target of 10% for marine by 2020, and Canada has also signed on to that.

Environment committee  As I mentioned in our presentation, I think there are some things that Canada and Environment Canada can do well, and certainly defining what we're counting and determining how we're going to go about that is something you need to bring people together, and facilitating that is c

Environment committee  I'd have to beg your forgiveness because my name will be in that report as an adviser, so I can't say I didn't know about it. I think it was good work at the time. I think much has changed since then. Canadians are becoming more involved and interested in conservation, people who

Environment committee  I think we have actually been supportive of that. We don't do that ourselves.

Environment committee  Maybe Michael knows more about this than I do.

Environment committee  I think my colleagues here have alluded to what hasn't worked in the past, or what has worked up to a point, and that is having each side of the equation—whether it be the economic side versus the conservation or environmental side—drawing hard and fast lines around “thou shalt n

Environment committee  I am going to answer in English. We could talk about that. We didn't actually put that in the presentation because we know other groups have talked about the protect, connect, restore notions when you're looking at a landscape. In fact, that is how the Nature Conservancy goes a