Bill C-40 (Historical)

Rouge National Urban Park Act

An Act respecting the Rouge National Urban Park

This enactment establishes the Rouge National Urban Park, a new type of federal protected area, and provides for the protection and presentation of its natural and cultural resources and the encouragement of sustainable farming practices within the Park. The enactment confers a broad range of regulatory powers for the management and administration of the Park. It also makes consequential amendments to the Canada Lands Surveys Act, the Parks Canada Agency Act, the Species at Risk Act and the Environmental Violations Administrative Monetary Penalties Act.

Rouge National Urban Park Act

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened quite closely to my hon. colleague and his eloquent remarks.

He spoke of research that shows humanity is living unsustainably. He spoke of the importance of intact ecosystems and he spoke of the lack of government resources, cuts to departmental budgets, and changes to environmental protections that have been made over the recent past.

He talked about the importance of an amendment to the bill, to the Rouge national urban park act, to focus on ecological integrity.

I am wondering if he could speak a little bit about why it is so important that we have that amendment to focus specifically on protecting ecological integrity.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his excellent question.

All of the major environmental groups that are concerned about Rouge Park are saying that the focus should be on ecological integrity, or something along those lines, because recent cuts are a major source of concern.

The Conservatives have opened the door to commercializing our parks. We do not want that. We want parks to be open and accessible to everyone. National urban parks should be created so that as many people as possible can access them. This park should not be exclusively for the elite, nor should it be commercialized so that it becomes very expensive.

I hope that the Conservatives on the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development will be open to considering amendments that will improve the Rouge Park legislation.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The hon. member for Drummond will have three minutes to respond to questions and comments when the House resumes debate.

The House resumed from October 2 consideration of the motion that Bill C-40, An Act respecting the Rouge National Urban Park, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to stand in the House today to participate in the debate on Bill C-40, an act respecting the Rouge national urban park.

While I stand in support of this bill at this stage of the legislative process, my remarks today are by no means free of criticism of the bill. In fact, this speech, as with all the speeches from the NDP caucus, is intended to send a clear message that significant amendments need to be made to the bill in order to garner support through to the end of the legislative process.

Of course, the criticism herein is intended to be constructive. It is a plea to the government to raise its sights, its ambitions, and to do three things: realize the great potential of this project; realize the dreams of a whole lot of hard-working citizens who always had before them a clear sense of the great potential of this project; and set a precedent for a new kind of Canadian park, a national urban park.

There is an existing Rouge Park. At 47 square kilometres, it is one of North America's largest and sits amidst about 20% of Canada's total population.

The park is rich in its diversity of nature and culture. It includes a rare Carolinian forest, numerous species at risk, internationally significant geological outcroppings from the interglacial age, and evidence of human history dating back 10,000 years, including some of Canada's oldest known aboriginal historic sites and villages.

For many years, these resources have been under the stewardship of the Rouge Park Alliance, an alliance of many groups, including dedicated citizen groups, but there is now before us the opportunity to move this park and add other resources to it under the stewardship of Parks Canada and its commitment to ecological integrity.

The proposed Rouge national urban park should provide protection and restoration of forests and wetland areas to soften the impacts of urban growth, improve the quality of water entering Lake Ontario, reduce the risks of climate change-related flooding, erosion, and property damage, and improve habitat for rare and endangered species. This is important.

We have built our cities and continue to build our cities with insufficient care and respect for the ecological integrity of the nature that runs through them and borders them, and more than that, with insufficient care and attention to the application of the notion of ecological integrity to how we build and grow cities themselves. There is a certain bitter irony in this.

As pointed out in a report by Ontario Nature and the Suzuki Foundation, entitled “Biodiversity in Ontario's Greenbelt”:

Humans chose to settle in this part of Ontario in large part because of the rich diversity and fertility of the land. Millions now make their home in this region, as do a large number of our most enchanting species at risk....

Evidence of that once beautiful natural landscape remains in Toronto. A recent Toronto Star article put it this way:

The city of Toronto was built on the backs of its rivers. Nine rivers and creeks flow through its rich valleys and pour into Lake Ontario, making rivers as essential a part of Toronto's landscape as the CN Tower or Queen's Park.

Said Robert Fulford in his book Accidental City, “The ravines are to Toronto what canals are to Venice and hills are to San Francisco”.

Some of those rivers were lost but have since been found. Groups such as the Toronto Green Community and the Toronto Field Naturalists actually provide Lost River Walks in the city. Some rivers, such as the Humber, the Don, and the Rouge, their various branches and tributaries, remain essential to what Toronto is and more important, remain essential to visions of what Toronto could actually be if we took care to restore and preserve their ecological integrity.

There are innumerable groups on the ground in our urban communities animated by a vision of preserving and restoring the natural and cultural heritage of these rivers, preserving and restoring that which brought people to settle there and live off that part of the land in the first place.

In my riding, for example, the Taylor Massey project was developed by a group of volunteers a decade ago for the purpose of increasing community awareness of this 16 kilometre watercourse and for the purpose of restoring the natural heritage of the creek's valley lands and to improve the water quality and aquatic habitats of this urban creek.

The Taylor Massey creek flows into the Don River. By 1969, the Don River was reportedly not much more than a city sewer. That prompted some to call it dead. Therefore, on November 16 of that year, 200 mourners paraded from the University of Toronto campus down to the banks of the Don River in a mock funeral procession complete with hearse.

If it was indeed dead, then it has risen from the dead, thanks to the efforts of countless citizens, but not yet fully recovered because much more effort is required. I am thankful for those people who commit their free time and energy to its revitalization and to realize, for their own projects, for their own communities, for the benefit of all of us, what we have now the opportunity to do for the Rouge River.

What we have in this legislation is a great opportunity. With respect to the Rouge, so many people have brought us to this point where this land can be brought under the stewardship of Parks Canada. As stated on its website:

Parks Canada's objective is to allow people to enjoy national parks as special places without damaging their integrity. In other words, ecological integrity is our endpoint for park management...

However, rather than bringing to the urban park the same commitment, indeed legislatively set out priority, to ecological integrity that is applied to its other parks, the legislation would shed that commitment and shake loose that priority. Bill C-40, in fact, would require only that the minister “take into consideration the protection of its natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes and the maintenance of its native wildlife and of the health of those ecosystems”. This flies in the face of Parks Canada's own governing legislation and policies that specify the maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity through the protection of natural resources and natural processes and the fact that this should be the first priority of the minister when considering all aspects of the management of its parks.

What is more, this language affords, according to a recent legal review by Ecojustice, significantly less protection than Ontario's Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act. In failing to do so, it would appear to be an obvious breach of the memorandum of agreement between Parks Canada and the Ontario government, which requires that the policies that govern the Rouge national urban park meet or exceed provincial policies.

This is how we end up in this position, with the Ontario government withholding the transfer of lands to Parks Canada until the federal government commits in effect, and really quite perversely, to live up to its own legislative priorities and commitments.

The bill needs to change so it is consistent with the Canada National Parks Act and lives up to commitments made to the Government of Ontario so we can get on with the great opportunity of creating a first and great national urban park along the Rouge River watershed.

Let me conclude by saying, with respect to the many people who are putting their minds and energy to this issue, that we have not really arrived at a clear understanding of what the ecological integrity of the urban actually looks like. However, I approach that issue with the same optimism and the same ambition as I do this legislation. The urban and the concept of ecological integrity ought not to stand in contradistinction. Indeed, in light of the incredible rate of urbanization globally, we have to make meaningful the notion of “urban ecological integrity”. A first national urban park is the first good step along that path.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened carefully to the member's critique of the bill.

I believe the bill, as it is currently drafted, would allow Parks Canada to implement a management plan for the park that would ensure a higher standard of ecological integrity for this new national urban park than is currently the case for parks in the Ontario provincial park system, parks like Algonquin and Killarney.

In the provincial statute, I note that the province is mandated to protect ecological integrity. Equally, the province is required to protect Ontario's natural and cultural heritage. Both are given equal weight in the provincial statutes.

The approach taken in the federal legislation is no different. The big difference is in the actual implementation of these laws. I believe Parks Canada will interpret these laws to a much higher standard than is the case in the Province of Ontario. That will please residents of this area, because the Rouge will exceed Algonquin and other types of provincial parks.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the member's assurances, I take cold comfort in that.

One of the issues is that the management of the provincial parks is happening at a lower standard than the principles and priorities set out in this federal legislation. This bill explicitly stands in contradiction of the priorities as set out in the prevailing legislation for national parks.

What we are seeking and asking is that the bill be amended in order to retain the priority of ecological integrity for the management of the Rouge national urban park.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of ironies in the government's approach to environmental issues. One of them is that this river used to be protected by the Navigable Waters Protection Act, and that was removed by the government.

We have put forward private members' bills, and I believe the member has as well, to re-protect these waters.

Would the member like to comment on the apparent contradiction by the government?

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, have presented petitions with respect to the Don River, which borders against my riding in Toronto, Beaches—East York.

As I commented in my speech, many people over many long years have put in a lot of effort to ensure that the Don River has been revitalized and that it comes closer to the principle of ecological integrity, as it flows through the city.

This is the great opportunity we have with the Rouge park, that under the protection of an appropriately worded bill, that river, too, can be protected and live up to the principles and priority that exists under the National Parks Act of ecological integrity.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his obvious commitment to the rivers and natural places across the GTA.

With regard to the question of ecological integrity, the general definition is that in our great and wild national parks ecological integrity is very often taken to allow nature to take its course, whether that is wildfires, floods or erosion, the natural changes that take place across these spaces.

In the parks plan for our oldest parks, Banff and Jasper, for example, there are provisions for interventions around townsites, around the townsite of Banff or Jasper, for example, with regard to fighting fires, floods, controlling river flows, town dumps and the use of infrastructure of these towns.

Parks Canada has made a commitment. Certainly the stewards of the Rouge Park Alliance over the years have been looking for one body like Parks Canada, pre-eminent in the world in terms of its stewardship—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please. The hon. member for Beaches—East York.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Quite simply, Mr. Speaker, the language of the bill does not require it to happen.

I appreciate the member's point that this is a qualitatively different park than the remote parks under the stewardship of Parks Canada. However, my point is, given, as per the UN's department of economic and social affairs, that all population growth on this planet will be urban for the next four decades, we need to find a way to make sense of applying the principle and priority of ecological integrity to our cities, how we build them and grow them. Having Canada's first national urban park is a great way to start down that road.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Davenport.

The notion of ecological integrity is one that may be foreign to some of the members opposite. Certainly it is foreign to the way the government has approached many of the issues that have arisen over the course of its term in office in terms of protecting and enhancing the environment.

The member for Thornhill, who most recently asked a question, was at one point the minister of the environment when one of the worst pieces of legislation, as far as the environment is concerned, was introduced. That was the budget implementation bill of 2012, which in fact eliminated environmental protection through the environmental assessment act and replaced it with an act that basically does very little to protect the environment.

This same government then, in another budget implementation bill, removed the protection for Canada's water systems, the watercourses, for the rivers, the lakes, the streams that run all over our country. Some 250,000 of them used to be protected and now we are down to something like less than a hundred. Therefore, ecological integrity is not top of mind for the members opposite.

That said, we support and we will fight for the notion of creating an ecological preserve in the heart of an urban area, in particular in Toronto, where I live. It will hopefully set a precedent for the creation of other urban area ecological integrity preserves in many urban areas in Canada. As the member for Beaches—East York said, all of the population growth is going to happen in the cities in the next 40 years.

We need to get it right. We need to design our park systems to protect the integrity of the ecology. We need to design them to provide access to the burgeoning populations of these great metropolises, while not allowing that access to degrade the park. We need to be able to use these systems for the creation of parks to provide us with the necessary climate change adaptation that we are now going to be facing.

There are members opposite who used to talk about climate change adaptation. In fact, it was the member for Thornhill's favourite words over the course of his term in office. He said we were not going to protect against climate change; we were going to adapt to it. That seems to have fallen off because someone discovered it costs money to protect us against climate change, but we still need to do it.

One of the ways to do it is to design and protect the integrity of watercourses that flow through our urban areas. One of these watercourses is the Rouge River. The Rouge River gets its start in the headlands north of Toronto in the Oak Ridges Moraine and carries fresh water from a huge area of drainage to Lake Ontario, thus protecting that watercourse.

Protecting what flows into that water and protecting the lands around that water will also protect the integrity of Lake Ontario. Lake Ontario is the drinking water source for several million Canadians. Ultimately it flows down the St. Lawrence toward Montreal and becomes the drinking water source for many more Canadians. Therefore, protecting the integrity of that water system is something that we should be paying careful and close attention to. We cannot do it by removing protections, which is what the government has done in the past.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act now basically does not protect the environment at all. That was back in 2012, more than two years ago. Schedule 2 has yet to be published. We still do not know what an environmental assessment will do in terms of human health. A number of pieces of what is to be protected by the environmental assessment is still not defined because the government has still not published the regulations.

It is that kind of laissez-faire attitude that we on this side of the House wish to correct. One of the things we hope to do by giving Bill C-40 support is to bring these flaws to the attention of its drafters in the environmental committee over the course of the next few weeks and months, so that we can make the corrections that are necessary to make the bill much more robust and a better example of a precedent for other cities in the country.

With this bill we need to provide for a way to adopt the long-standing vision that has been around for many years for the Rouge Park. We need to strengthen and implement the existing environmental protection policy framework and that includes protecting the watercourse. The removal of the watercourse from the Navigable Waters Protection Act, some may wonder what difference that really makes in this day and age. Surprisingly, a meeting between the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and Enbridge about Line 9, which flows across this park and across the Rouge River, advised the conservation authority that the removal of the watercourse from the Navigable Waters Protection Act meant that they no longer had to put shut-offs on an oil pipeline as it crossed the river. This is one of the consequences of removing the protection.

Was that a deliberate act on the part of the government? I hope not, but it is a consequence of that act and it is a consequence that we cannot sit idly by and let go on. Imagine if we create this wonderful park and Line 9 bursts over the river? What utter degradation. What utter devastation to the Rouge River would happen then.

In addition, the whole notion of will give consideration, which is part of what the bill is about, is one of the things that we have serious reservations about and the Province of Ontario has serious reservations about. That phrasing is in keeping with the government's general approach to the environment, which is “we will give it some thought but we are not going to be held to anything, we are not going to actually guarantee that we are going to do anything”. That is one of the reasons the Province of Ontario has withdrawn its support at the moment for transferring its lands into this set of lands. It is afraid that the word “consideration” will mean that the park's ecology can be degraded in a manner that it would not have allowed.

I believe that the Province of Ontario may have it right. We do not always agree with the way the Province of Ontario behaves, but in this case it may have it right. We need to correct the bill in order to make sure that the integrity of the park and the integrity of the entire system is protected and maintained.

In addition, there is an opportunity with something called Pickering lands, which are lands that are north of this park, that presents itself to the drafters of the bill and to the government to include a much bigger area in the protections that this park legislation is meant to provide. We should not bypass that opportunity to try to find a way to protect more of the Oak Ridges Moraine, to connect this park to the Oak Ridges Moraine, because right now the town of Stouffville has way too much development in it to connect it otherwise. Therefore, connecting it through the Pickering lands would be a good additional step.

Finally, I want to say something about what was referred to in part by the member for Beaches—East York and that is the notion of the potential for flooding, the potential for climate-change-wrought, weather-related devastation to parts of the city of Toronto. One of the things we discovered in my riding is that despite the actions of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, some devastating flooding took place in the July 8 storm in which more water fell than in Hurricane Hazel and it fell in shorter time. That flooding is a direct result of the massive changes to the weather systems that we are seeing and we are not prepared for it. The cities are not prepared for it.

The creation of this park could give the federal government, the provincial government and the city of Toronto the opportunity to study ways to prevent the kind of disaster that happened on July 8, 2013, and to find ways to make sure that water flow is managed in such a way that it does not affect human habitation around it. The alternative is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in redirecting water through giant sewers and creating a whole new set of infrastructure that the city cannot afford to do. It would be turning to the federal government to afford to do that and the federal government has already said there are limits in how far it can go.

In closing, we do appreciate the effects of the bill, but we wish to see it go to committee so that it can be seriously amended in such a way as to give the land the protection it deserves.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the Rouge national urban park would be unlike other national parks. It would include major highways, rail lines, homes, businesses and hydro corridors as well as farmland.

Ecosystems have integrity when their native components are intact, because ecosystems are constantly changing. Conservation strategies, which have ecological integrity as their primary goal, should maintain or resolve key ecological processes that reflect their natural condition, such as fire, flooding, death and disease outbreaks, among others. These aspects make the concept of ecological integrity inappropriate for the national urban park.

Ecological health is an approach that recognizes the park's increasingly urban surroundings. Parks Canada would manage the park in an adaptive way so that it stays healthy and strong while respecting that the park is located in an urban centre. This approach allows us to balance the pressure of an urban environment.

Does the member recognize that there is a need for legislation defining an urban national park, which is different from the legislation of a national park?

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not disagree with the member opposite that this is a different kind of park, but I do disagree that we cannot strive to do more than just consider the ecological integrity of the park. I believe that we need to preserve the ecological integrity of the park, and that ecological integrity includes a lot of human activity.

I am concerned that human activity could increase exponentially to the detriment of the park and the legislation could not stop it.