Environment committee  Yes, I think it's something we should all be doing. Different levels of government have different specific mandates. But habitat conservation is really something that transcends from municipal all the way up to federal politics.

Environment committee  Yes, I think the target audience really has to be the “unconverted”, for lack of a better term. What I would like to see is really pushing home this connection that we have to the land. Typically what you hear out there is that it has to be either the economy or the environment,

Environment committee  Climate change is particularly scary for those of us doing conservation in very fragmented landscapes, because you're essentially depending on having sufficient north-south connectivity so that species can migrate north as they need to. When you're dealing with a fragmented lands

Environment committee  I think I would just like to highlight that the federal government is really in the best possible position to do these types of landscape-scale studies over a long timeframe. In the academic world you're dealing with grad students who may do two to four years of research and then

Environment committee  I guess it could be done within the government, and also with longer-term allocations to others. With most of the funding programs out there, you can apply to them on a multi-year basis. But it's not usually a 40-year timeframe—three to five years is considered a long-term study.

Environment committee  Perhaps a better approach would be to reach agreements with partners who would do this research, rather than having them go through an annual grant application process. Perhaps they could collaborate on this kind of thing and sign agreements to do the research over the long term,

Environment committee  It would probably assist with the uptake. I would draw a parallel between SARA and the provincial Species at Risk Act, because the original provincial Species at Risk Act legislation was passed in 1971 or 1973 and was essentially a one-and-a-half-page document that said, Thou sha

Environment committee  The original publication came out in 1998. It was initially targeted to the Great Lakes areas of concern. It laid out specific targets for things such as forest cover, the percentage of stream length that's naturally vegetated, the percentage of wetland cover—those types of targe

Environment committee  It's essentially a literature review of best practices that outlines different case studies: where those percentages have been achieved, what kind of biodiversity you can expect. There are a few caveats. The guidelines are focused on populations that are of interest to the fede

Environment committee  I think they're called different things, depending upon which organization you're dealing with.

Environment committee  It might, if they were to have the flexibility to do things differently. Flexibility can be somewhat a double-edged sword, because on the one hand you don't want to be locked into being required to manage your property in a prescribed way. I gave the example of grassland species.

Environment committee  I would answer that question by talking about the way we do land use planning in southern Ontario. Typically, municipalities will require the preparation of a subwatershed study. That's a broad-based idea that looks at multiple aspects of the landscape—terrestrial ecology, aqua

Environment committee  Yes, I do believe that wetland conservation should be a priority. There are a number of species that depend on wetlands for all or a portion of their life cycles—amphibians, ducks, insects, you name it, the list goes on and on. In southern Ontario, the rate of wetland loss has be

Environment committee  Certainly I would support any program that funds purchases of ecologically significant lands, particularly in southern Ontario where land prices are just so astronomical. We can use any help we can get on the financial side of things for securing these properties.

Environment committee  I think there's really room for both and it depends on the type of landowner that you're talking about. Typically with the farming community, incentives are a much better way to go. Farmers already know what's happening on their properties. Many of them have been stewards of the