This proposal should be…

This proposal should be rejected. The removal of legal protections for species at risk is abhorrent. These protections should be strengthened, not removed. I’m a wildlife conservation biologist and am gravely concerned about the negative impacts this bill would have on my livelihood and the conditions my fellow citizens will be subjected to without the protections of the Endangered Species Act. We need rare species, and the habitats those rare species use to forage, find cover, and travel, not only because the species deserve to survive in their own right, but because they contribute to the air we breathe and water we drink. Government cabinet ministers do not understand the status of species at risk better than scientists, so should not be able to reject that statuses the scientists have identified – status assessments should remain science-based. If an area is truly so significant that the benefit to the economy is demonstrably more important than the species at risk that live there, then there is already a process to obtain permits to develop that also ensures that there is an overall benefit to the species by doing things like removing individual animals before work commences, doing work outside of critical periods of the year for important wildlife activities (e.g nesting), and creating/restoring suitable habitat elsewhere. Improvements that could be made to the Endangered Species Act to make it more efficient could be returning the power to grant permits to government experts rather than requiring each permit to go to the Minister and reducing the amount of time it takes to approve permits for folks working to recover a species at risk, but folks working to harm a species at risk should still have stringent permitting requirements requiring review by a large variety of people. Endangered Species Act protections should return to what they were in 2007, not be further dismantled.