History of the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation
As an excerpt from Hansard on Tuesday, March 1, 2005 explained:
The Wildlife Act is amended to improve governance of the Habitat Conservation Trust Fund. These amendments will ensure that the trust fund remains independent from government. Therefore, the Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection will no longer be the trustee for this fund. Instead, a board composed of stakeholders with a variety of expertise will make the decisions as to where and when trust fund money should be spent. The new trustee will be bound to follow the directions of this board. This new governance structure will allow the Habitat Conservation Trust Fund to continue to provide funds to assist in maintaining healthy ecosystems and diverse populations of species that rely on those ecosystems.
The legislative changes went on to spell out that the new board would be comprised of:
- two people appointed from the Ministry of Environment,
- two people appointed from the BC Wildlife Federation,
- one person from the Guide Outfitters Association of BC,
- one person from the Trappers Association, and
- four additional people appointed by the Board, each having demonstrated expertise in one or more areas including conservation science; fish, wildlife or habitat conservation or management; business; law; education and communications.
With the new board structure, yet another important milestone was passed, one made possible by those distant events in the East Kootenay region in 1979, when an idea became firmly embedded in the minds of conservationists outside and inside government. The idea being that dedicated funds, generated by resource users, should be used to do vitally important fish and wildlife enhancement work and habitat conservation through the acquisition of key parcels of land. In the intervening 25 years no less than three different political parties have ruled in the province and throughout that time the fund has remained in place.
In 2007, the new Board worked with government to further refine the governance model for HCTF. This took place in two phases – the first phase saw the Board establish a new society, the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, as a mechanism to unite the business operations of the board into a non-profit model.
The second phase saw government amend the Wildlife Act to appoint the newly established Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation as the trustee for the Habitat Conservation Trust. One of the first objectives of the new Foundation was to seek charitable foundation status from Revenue Canada, and this status was achieved in the summer of 2008.
To date, more than $120 million has been invested through the HCTF with incalculable benefits to wildlife populations. New stream channels have been created to expand fish habitat. Rare desert and grasslands have been purchased to help preserve some of the most threatened ecosystems in the province. Winter rangeland has been protected to help conserve wild sheep populations. Inventories have been conducted to help ensure that biologically distinct populations of lake trout are managed properly so that they can be fished in a sustainable way to the benefit of local communities. And new generations of threatened and endangered species such as burrowing owls have been raised in captivity and reintroduced to their environment.
Thanks to the vision of a few key people, an idea germinated and began to spread in the late 1970s. As more and more people were infected by the idea, its spread became too great for anyone to stop it. In a remarkably short two years, the scales tipped allowing what became the HCTF to be born. And with vigilance, the scales will remain tipped in its favour for years more to come.
