As an active farmer I am…

As an active farmer I am very displeased with the failure to protect feeding habitat, and the proposed discretionary (arbitrary?) powers for the province to remove protection of any species at will. I am also worried that there is over-reliance on federal protection that has proven woefully inadequate in other places such as with protecting the orcas in the Straits around Vancouver Island. The federal machine is simply not set up well enough to absorb the fallout from stepping back at the province level. If anything we need more protection of species, and more support for farmers like me who have made the space and habitat to attract a diversity of rare wildlife. My farm is an oasis of permanent crops among a cash crop desert, and I am proud of that. I have to jump hoops other farmers long ago washed their hands off, when they went into cash cropping with constant tillage of soil and two to three crops a year from the same soils, extirpating their own wildlife and pushing it to me! There is precious little support for the adaptations made, the delays and observations we make year round. If the fees from your proposal could go to “conservation farms” like mine that would be something positive. I aim to leave my lands better than I found them, not in highest and best use for development but balanced in conservation and species recovery. Please help me, and people like me, who carry this conservation burden others cast aside. Don’t reduce protections, but use these to justify sharing the community cost of keeping our amazing biodiversity. We are so fortunate to have a rich Carolinian ecosystem that supplies so many environmental goods and services. If I could be compensated for my efforts to harbour the rare species I enjoy sharing my lands with, that would indeed be a win:win.