Ottawa has long had the power to throw people in jail for not paying their taxes. Now the feds want to lock you up if you refuse to hand over your land.

That's right, the government is no longer satisfied with simply stealing your income to finance graft and corruption (i.e. the $1 billion HRDC job grants scandal). Now it wants your property as well.

And it's going to get it through something called the Species at Risk Act (SARA). The legislation is ostensibly designed to prevent the extinction of various animal species and pave the way for the recovery of plants, fish and wildlife deemed at risk throughout Canada.

Well that sounds reasonable enough. After all, who wouldn't want to protect Bambi and Thumper from annihilation

Everyone can agree that, in principle, Canada needs to protect its wildlife. But it's how Ottawa is going about it that raises some alarming questions about state control over private property. The SARA, for example, sets out massive fines and heavy jail terms for anyone found guilty of killing, harming or capturing species at risk. Corporations could be fined up to $1 million and their officials could go to jail for five years. Individuals also face five-year sentences and fines up to $250,000.

Taking care of that marauding fox that keeps getting into your hen house might just put you first into bankruptcy and then into the slammer. "Ah, but wait," says the government, "if you just hand over your land we'll provide 'compensation' and we can forget about having to have the RCMP take you away in handcuffs."

So those are your options - face jail and/or fines or give the feds control over your land and how you do business. The latter choice might not be such a bad alternative if Ottawa was serious about compensation. But it's not.

The legislation lacks an adequate formula for recompense for the expropriation of private property. The SARA says nothing about paying "fair market value" to those individuals or corporations that have to give up their land or alter their land use practices. Instead, the question of reimbursement will be left up to Ottawa's bureaucrats to decide through future "regulations".

And just how much do the feds think this little program might cost Well, the SARA itself will funnel $90 million over the next three years into a "national strategy". Just how much of that figure is to go toward compensation is unclear. In 1997, when the legislation was first introduced as Bill C-65, then Environment Minister Sergio Marchi admitted that his department had not considered the potential costs involved when he responded, "I haven't thought of that threshold - maybe you have- I haven't figured that out". Apparently nothing has changed. As usual, the government has no idea as to what its program might cost.

We do know, however, that since 1973, when the U.S. implemented similar legislation, over $13 billion has been spent on endangered species recovery. Within this time not one species has been recovered, five have gone extinct, and six were listed mistakenly because of incorrect counts.

The failure of the U.S. program has everything to do with government imposed penalties. Rather than risk substantial financial loss landowners have taken measures to ensure their property is unencumbered by endangered animals - a sort of "species cleansing". Fines and jail terms have created just the opposite effect sought by the legislation.

We should learn from the American experience. Protecting Canada's endangered species should be a top priority for all of us - but it's not going to happen via threats, intimidation, and legalized theft. Save our wildlife - exterminate the SARA.