Mr. Pat Morrison:

I will address the first question on the riparian buffer zone on designated lands. As a background to it, to get the CAP strategic plan approved, part of the process was carrying out a strategic environmental assessment. As part of the assessment, we had to give a commitment that any of the actions and interventions in the CAP strategic plan would not have any detrimental or potentially negative effects on designated sites or important habitats. Riparian buffer zones on grassland involve permanent fencing. In many of the designated sites, fencing is an action that would require prior consent. The way the scheme is designed, we have a short window for applications. Some 46,000 applications came in, so we would not be able to deal with those individual requests to get prior consent on fencing in these designated sites. As a precautionary action, we had to block those actions. Unfortunately, it was an operation-----