May 2000 Fraser Forum: Ottawa's New Bill Threatens Wildlife
Ottawa has just tabled a new Species at Risk Act. The bill is adversarial and punitive, promising fines of up to $250,000 and five years in jail for individuals who kill an endangered species or harm their habitat. It is difficult to imagine a worse way to protect endangered species.
The United States has taken this kind of heavy-handed approach to species protection since 1973. Today their Endangered Species Act is highly controversial and targeted for major revision. Its critics include environmentalists, politicians, and property owners, who charge that in addition to its high costs and authoritarian approach, the legislation fails to accomplish its mission of protecting endangered species.
The basic problem with the American legislation is that it creates the perverse incentive for landowners to view endangered species as a liability. If evidence of an endangered species is found on your property in the United States, you can be told that you cannot build, cut down trees, plough fields, dig or fill ditches, or in any other way alter your land. These controls have often led to substantial uncompensated reductions in property values. As a result, in order to protect themselves from the uncompensated taking of private property in the name of protecting wildlife, some in the United States have resorted to a policy that has been called "shoot, shovel, and shut-up." In the extreme, landowners will kill endangered species and dispose of them in order to prevent their property from coming under the control of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Canada's legislation promises more of the same.
Does Environment Minister David Anderson really believe that Canadians care so little about their wildlife that they are not already doing a good job of protecting it? There are hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals working hard to protect endangered species in Canada. Groups like Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy have, in the last four years alone, doubled the amount of land that they protect in Canada. In fact, there are more conservation groups than there are endangered species in Canada. The members of these groups, who directly protect wildlife by buying or leasing land and working with private landowners, are in a much better position than the federal government to protect endangered species effectively. Indeed, the plethora of private initiatives that exist have to be taken as a reflection of the will of Canadians to protect their wildlife without a centralized government having to do it for them.
Thanks in large part to the work of these groups, there is no endangered species crisis in Canada. The last mammal extinction in Canada, the Queen Charlotte Islands population of Woodland caribou, occurred 80 years ago. The last bird extinction, the Passenger pigeon, occurred 86 years ago. It is perhaps the height of irony that the six latest extinctions have been fish—fish that the federal government is supposed to protect through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
When you consider the work of private conservation organizations, it is impossible to imagine that the government's efforts of introducing legislation, inventing new regulations to support the legislation, and monitoring and enforcing those new regulations is the bestway to use Canadians' resources to protect endangered species. Here again, the American example can be instructive. Consider the comments of a US Fish and Wildlife Service official who complained that of the $1.9 million budget his Columbia Basin office receives each year, only $2,000 is designated for actual recovery work. The rest goes primarily to regulating private industry and land.
If the government insists on spending resources to protect wildlife on the public's behalf, it would be better to direct those resources to the groups actively engaged in species protection. Ducks Unlimited, for example, spends over 87 percent of its budget to support its conservation program. The best solution, however, would include reducing tax burdens so that individual Canadians will have more after-tax dollars to support the excellent work of such non-profit organizations.
It is disappointing that the federal government and many environmentalists don't care enough about endangered species to ask difficult questions about how best to protect them. It seems that the belief that more regulation is the solution to environmental problems is so strongly held that people will often vehemently defend such regulation even when it flies in the face of common sense and years of evidence. It's too bad that this stubborn conviction now threatens our wildlife.
[Note: Laura Jones, Laura Griggs and Liv Fredricksen recently released their Critical Issues Bulletin, Environmental Indicators, 4th edition. It is available from The Fraser Institute for $12.95 plus shipping, handling, and GST (Total: $16.00). Call 1-800-665-3558, ext. 580, to order a copy.]
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