OTTAWA – Charles Caccia, veteran Liberal MP and former environment minister, figures farmers will simply have to learn to accommodate a growing public demand for endangered species protection.
It may mean new rules about what they can do with their property if it houses plants or animals considered endangered.
Last month, he succeeded in the rare parliamentary feat of winning House of Commons approval-in-principle for a private member’s bill to protect endangered species.
Caccia sees his bill not as the final word on the subject but as a catalyst to push the government toward taking tough action of its own.
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And inevitably, there will be conflict with farmers who could be affected.
“Agriculture is pretty intrusive,” said Caccia in an interview.
“The question is where to find a balance. We have had no rules and a lot of species have disappeared so farmers must understand that there is a growing public policy demand for some protection.”
In the Commons during debate on his bill, he said the threat to endangered species must be put “on the political agenda and on the agenda of Parliament.”
Talk like that makes Reformer Lee Morrison see red.
The rookie MP from southwestern Saskatchewan looks across the floor of the Commons at the veteran Toronto environmentalist and 27-year MP and he sees the face of Big Government.
The Liberal drive to create endangered species legislation “illustrates the typical attitude of Canadian urbanites that rural Canada is their playground, unfortunately cluttered up by all those quaint rustics who do nasty things like cultivating land and producing cheap, wholesome food for Canada and for the world,” Morrison said in the Commons.
He said Caccia and the Liberals would make farmers “the real endangered species” by imposing unreasonable restrictions on their use of the land: “So much for property rights.”
That remark brought a sharp rejoinder from Caccia.
“It is a question of ideology,” he said. “We disagree. I do not believe in private property rights that supersede the public good.”
Their split provides a glimpse of the emotional political debate Canada is now entering.
Environment minister Sheila Copps is proposing to have government legislation before Parliament by next spring and into law before the end of the government’s term
in 1997.
Negotiations among governments, environmentalists, landowners, farmers and others with a stake in the question will be held this winter as the government looks for a compromise.
Prairie livestock producers are watching this nervously, spooked by American tales of disruptions caused by U.S. endangered species legislation.
The search for the middle ground between Caccia and Morrison will be a test of Canadians’ fabled ability to compromise.
