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

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

moved that Bill C-40, An Act respecting the Rouge National Urban Park be now read a second time and referred to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, it is truly an honour and a privilege for me to speak in support of the bill to establish Rouge national urban park in the Greater Toronto Area. This park celebrates and protects, for current and future generations, a diverse landscape in Canada's largest metropolitan area. It offers engaging and varied experiences. It inspires personal connections to its natural beauty and rich history and promotes a vibrant farming community. In close proximity to 20% of Canada's population, the park includes more than 10,000 years of rich human history.

The national park would increase the size of the regional park by 25%, making it more than 13 times the size of Stanley Park in Vancouver and 16 times the size of Central Park in New York.

As Canada's first ever national urban park, the Rouge offers an unprecedented opportunity to support all three priorities of our government's national conservation plan: to connect Canadians to nature and to restore and conserve the parks' ecosystems and cultural resources.

We can all be proud that this legislation would create a remarkable new entity, one located within Canada's largest and most culturally diverse metropolis. This vast area would be an extraordinary mix of natural, cultural, and agricultural lands. Given its close proximity to one-fifth of Canada's population, the park would be easily accessible for people in the Greater Toronto Area.

This legislation would establish the Rouge national urban park as a new model of protected area in Canada. The park owes its very existence to local visionaries and stewards, citizens, organizations, governments, and countless volunteers. Our government is proud to pay tribute to the nearly 30 years of hard work and determination in building one of the largest urban parks in the world. We also want to acknowledge the over 100 provincial, municipal, aboriginal, and community stakeholders, and thousands of members of the public, who contributed to the vision and plans for Canada's first urban national park.

As hon. members will observe, the bill provides a new framework that would enable Parks Canada to manage the park's natural, cultural, and agricultural resources and to recognize the opportunities and challenges that its urban context brings. Home to nearly 1,700 species of plants and animals, several of which are rare or threatened, Parks Canada would apply its world-leading expertise in conservation and restoration and work with partners to ensure Rouge's ecosystems, plants, and animals are cared for, maintained, and restored for present and future generations.

The Rouge national urban park act would provide broad regulatory powers to address all aspects of park management. A flexible management approach is needed to meet future infrastructure. The minister of the environment, through Parks Canada, would be able to protect and present this unique place that encompasses deep river valleys and glacial features, thousands of species of plants and animals, farmlands, archeological resources, built heritage, and cultural landscapes.

I want to emphasize that the park's tradition of agriculture is a unique feature among Canadian protected heritage areas. The presence of working farms would be integral to the future success of this park. People would continue to live and work on the park's agricultural landscape, as many families have done since the late 1700s. The national urban park status would also bring a new sense of security to the park farming community. Parks Canada would become the landlord of all existing leases on transferred lands and is working closely with the farming community to develop a lease structure that supports long-term farming. There is a real potential for visitors to connect with farming as it exists now, as well as opportunities for new types of farming to serve the growing and increasingly diverse population of the Greater Toronto Area.

The legislation would ensure that all these natural, cultural, and agricultural landscapes are protected and managed in an integrated way to the benefit of Canadians, now and for generations to come. In fact, the bill would give the Rouge the highest level of ecological protection it has ever had. The management plan would permit the minister to present a comprehensive conservation approach. This would be based on the most up-to-date science expertise and experience, drawn from the entire system of national protected areas.

The approach to management planning would strive to maximize the ecosystem health of the park by maintaining and restoring its native Carolinian and Mixedwood Plains forests, and wetland meadow and aquatic ecosystems. The approach to the ecosystem health envisioned in the bill for the Rouge would take into account the park's increasingly urban surroundings and the working farms, roads, rail lines, and hydro corridors. The bill recognizes that this dynamic urban and agricultural context has long driven change, both within and around the park, and it would continue to do so.

The agency would therefore manage the park, but in an adaptive way, maximizing ecosystem health in these ever-changing conditions. Working with people living next to and in the park would be an essential component of the management approach. The park lessee community and the park stewardship volunteers would play an important role in maintaining ecosystem health, visitor experience, and cultural heritage.

Our government's long-standing commitment to first nations involvement in protected heritage places would also play an important role in this park. The new status for the Rouge would facilitate first nations celebrations of their historical roots in this park. The bill contains a provision that would respect traditional renewable resource harvesting activities by aboriginal people. The bill would also respect the rights of aboriginal people in the event of any future agreement for the settlement of land claims.

As the House knows, our government made a commitment in the 2012 budget to invest more than $143 million over 10 years and $7.6 million annually thereafter to make Rouge national urban park a reality. This is a commitment we reasserted in the 2014 budget.

Among other things, this investment would make possible a protected area that is both larger and more strategically situated than the existing park. Increasing the park's size would also help advance the goal of connecting Lake Ontario and the Oak Ridges Moraine.

Moreover, with the creation of the Rouge national urban park we would expand the level of experiences that visitors have in the park. Residents of the greater Toronto area and all Canadians would be able to explore more areas of the larger park. This might inspire them to visit more of Canada's heritage places.

As I mentioned earlier, the creation of the Rouge national urban park supports Canada's national conservation plan. I would like to take a few minutes to explain how this plan will work.

The plan responds to a clear message from Canadians that they care deeply about the natural environment and want to enjoy and conserve it for future generations. The plan aligns and bolsters conservation efforts across this country. It protects the environment while supporting a growing economy and makes concrete and tangible progress to conserve and restore Canada's lands and waters and connect Canadians to nature.

The launch of the plan is an opportunity to continue to work together to conserve Canada's rich natural heritage. Many Canadians are already working to conserve and restore Canada's lands and waters. This includes all levels of government, aboriginal groups, environmental organizations, and the private sector, as well as many Canadians at the local level including landowners, land managers, community groups, and individuals across our great country.

The national conservation plan celebrates collective efforts to conserve the environment. It also invests $252 million toward concrete and targeted actions on conservation. This investment over five years will support and expand successful initiatives, and also broaden work through new activities.

The plan built on the announcement on the 2014 budget including measures to invest in national parks, conserve recreational fisheries, encourage donations of ecologically sensitive land, and expand recreational trails. The national conservation plan's vision is to contribute to a stronger Canada, a country that cares about the conservation of its national heritage and where citizens can enjoy the beauty of Canada's environment from coast to coast to coast.

The plan focuses on action across three priority areas: conserving Canada's lands and waters, restoring Canada's ecosystems, and connecting Canadians to nature.

The first priority, conserving Canada's lands and waters, aims to safeguard and enhance biodiversity and ecosystems through conservation and stewardship actions.

The second priority is about restoring degraded ecosystems. Once restored, these ecosystems provide clean water and habitat for wildlife and are essential for the protection and recovery of species at risk. The plan also includes $50 million in funding to expand support for landowners, aboriginal communities, agricultural producers, conservation and community groups, and other partners to voluntarily implement measures to restore and conserve essential habitat and vulnerable species.

Stakeholders have reiterated that voluntary conservation and stewardship efforts are critical to achieving Canada's conservation objectives. These restoration actions complement existing efforts by the federal government such as the cleanup of contaminated sites.

With this in mind, the national conservation plan's third priority is to connect Canadians to nature. This work will leverage existing successful initiatives to help foster an appreciation for nature and build a community of stewards among Canadians of all ages.

Investments of $9.2 million will be made to improve public access to protected areas and green spaces, focusing on those areas located in and near cities.

To conclude my remarks, the creation of this unique park, the Rouge park, will be another milestone in our government's renowned history of heritage protection. Since we formed government, we have created two national marine conservation areas, three marine protected areas, three national wildlife areas, one national historic site, and two national parks. This does not include the Rouge national urban park.

It also does not include the bill we tabled last week in the House to create the Nááts’ihch’oh national park reserve in the Northwest Territories.

We have done more than any other government. In fact, the total area of lands we have protected in this area is more than twice the size of Vancouver Island.

The Rouge park's urban setting would offer exciting unprecedented opportunities and would connect Canadians to nature, culture, and agriculture. Nowhere is there greater opportunity to showcase and share our natural and cultural heritage than the greater Toronto area, which is home to millions of urban, new, and young Canadians.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker it is an exciting idea to create a national park in an urban space. I have been waiting for this legislation, because it has been promised for a while. I have to say I have been waiting for the speech, because the bill was just tabled on Friday, the departmental briefing was yesterday, and I have not even had time to do a proper analysis of the bill; so I was really looking forward to the speech today to figure out some details about it.

I am very disappointed that the minister is not the first to speak to this. I am also disappointed that more than half the speech was about the conservation plan and not about this park.

I have so many questions, but this is the question that I would love to have answered right now. We have a National Parks Act that says, “Maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity...shall be the first priority of the Minister...”.

The Ontario Parks Act, where this park is located, says that these areas “...shall be managed to maintain their ecological integrity...”.

The Rouge Park management plan says “The vision of the park has, as its primary focus, the continuing health and integrity of natural systems and habitats....in protecting the ecological integrity of the Rouge River watershed”.

The bill before us says, “The Minister must...take into consideration the protection of its natural ecosystems...”. How is taking consideration of a natural ecosystem actually going to fulfill the focus of all these other policies and pieces of legislation?

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very disappointed that the critic for the NDP did not take the time to actually read the bill. As she said, it was tabled on Friday. As she quite rightly stated, there was a briefing yesterday, and unfortunately, she could not make the time to attend that. The answers to her questions would have been in there. If she had listened to my speech, she would have actually heard that the bill would provide the greatest protection that the Rouge has ever had in its history.

One of our priorities is to make sure we protect our environment for our future. As I said in my opening remarks, this has been a 30-year task. It has been 30 years in the making between all levels of government, and I must say, I am very pleased and I am very thankful for all levels of government—federal, provincial, and municipal—and all the stakeholders who have come together to make this a reality.

This is truly a historic moment for Canada. This is a unique park that is the first one in an urban area. It is a model, and it would be treated slightly differently because of the realities that are presented in the park. For example, there are things called highways. That is called development. There are things called hydro corridors. There are things called railways. These are developments that are in place.

Unfortunately, the NDP, instead of being known as the New Democratic Party, is now being known as the no development party, because it seems New Democrats are against everything.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that the Government of Canada has a talent for turning what should be a good news story into a dubious, suspicious story about which Canadians have questions.

Frankly, I join with the member for Halifax in saying that the Conservatives could have done this in a fashion so people could have read it in advance, and they just possibly could have got more support than they presently have, because all they do is raise suspicions.

The first question comes out of clause 4, which is how the park is established. It says that one is supposed to go to the schedule of the lands that are being transferred. So, one goes to the schedule of the lands that are being transferred, but there are actually three little squibs of land in Markham, hardly amounting to an acre or two of land, which are actually being transferred. Yet, according to the presentation the hon. member made, we would be getting 58 square kilometres, which some people argue is even less than it should be.

Nevertheless, what is actually being transferred right now is three little squibs of land. Therefore, when Parliament passes the bill, that is all we would have. There is a heck of a lot of land to be transferred from the Province of Ontario, the municipalities, the TRCA, et cetera before this is actually anywhere close to reality.

Why present the bill now when you actually have no land, when the bill could have been presented when you actually had land to transfer—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order. I do not know how many times I have said this, but hon. members need to address their comments to the Chair rather than directly to their colleagues.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the critic for the Liberal Party. At least he took the time to attend the briefing yesterday. However, I do believe his question was answered at the briefing.

The member may or may not be aware that when transferring lands from different levels of government, the process requires something to transfer them to. As I have said, we have got agreement with different levels of government to move forward in this way. The member is correct in that once the act were passed, there would be a certain amount of land, and once there were an official entity to which to transfer the lands, then the other levels of government and other entities would be able to transfer this way.

As I said, one of the things we should be very proud of is that this would be 25% bigger than the area that is there now, and it would be a parcel of land 16 times greater than the size of Central Park in New York City. This is historic. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time.

I agree with the member's former leader, Mr. Ignatieff, who said when it comes to the environmental files, “We didn't get it done”. This is other proof that the Liberals did not get it done. We are getting it done for Canadians.

[David Wilks, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, recently, the Prime Minister launched the national conservation plan. I wonder if the hon. parliamentary secretary could explain how the creation of the Rouge national urban park would support this particular plan.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Kootenay—Columbia for the question and also for all the good work he does in his community. He lives in one of the most beautiful places in Canada, and he is very committed to conserving Canada's environment.

The Rouge national urban park would support the key pillars of the national conservation plan by taking practical action to connect Canadians to nature, restore Canada's ecosystems, and contribute to the conservation of Canada's lands and waters. Situated close to 20% of Canada's population, the park would provide a great place for Canadians to connect with nature, culture, and agriculture without having to travel far from home.

This park, as I said in my speech, has about 1,700 species of plants and animals, several of which are rare or threatened. Parks Canada would apply its world-leading expertise in conservation and restoration and work with partners to ensure Rouge's precious ecosystem, plants, and animals are cared for, maintained, and restored for present and future generations.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I share our critic's dismay that the minister was not here, because there are some important questions to ask her about letters that local groups have sent and to which they are still waiting for a response.

My question is very specific and it has to do with one of the driving forces in the creation of Rouge Park, which is the Friends of the Rouge Watershed.

Jim Robb, the general manager of Friends of the Rouge Watershed said that his group and others have asked the Government of Ontario not to transfer Ontario's lands, which amount to about two-thirds of the park, until standards of past Rouge Park plans are met, because the current plan that the government is putting forward is not even as good as the last one. He is quoted as saying that, “The park they’re proposing is actually not as good as the park they already have”.

I would like to hear the parliamentary secretary respond to Mr. Robb's questions about why the government's current plan is not even as good as the park we have there now.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Before I go to the parliamentary secretary, just to clarify, for a member to reference that someone did or did not speak to something is acceptable, because that is a matter of public record. However, to make reference to the fact that someone was or was not here is not. I understand that is a subtle distinction, but that is the rule.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, again the premise of the member's question is incorrect. If he had listened to my speech, he would have heard that what we are putting forward would offer the most protection that this area has ever been given.

There appear to be certain single-focus groups out there that may or may not have some misunderstanding of what exactly is going on with the new act. The individual he mentioned did take the time to come down and was there on Monday. I had the opportunity to speak with him, and I will be meeting with him in the near future to help answer many of the questions.

I am very pleased that all of these different groups have done a lot of good work to make this day happen. It is unfortunate that the NDP, the no development party, would even be against the development of the Rouge Park in the way it has been agreed upon. This is a historic agreement. All levels of government and all stakeholders are happy about it. The only people who are not, I guess, are the members of the opposition.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to speak to Bill C-40, and I thank the minister for bringing it forward. The name of my constituency is Scarborough--Rouge River. The Rouge River and the largest piece of the current Rouge Park are in my constituency.

We are excited about this legislation, but we have some concerns. When I say we, I am referring to myself and thousands of activists who have worked for over 35 years in the community to create the current Rouge Park. We have called for national protection of the park and national park status. It started many decades ago with people literally sitting down on these lands and hugging trees. Conservatives do not like tree huggers and environmentalists, but these people feel they have to protect the park's natural habitat.

Rouge Park is the northern most point of the mixed woodlands and the Carolinian forest. Activists on the ground felt they had to protect this land from being handed over to developers who might plan to build condos.

I am privileged to have this park in my community. Many of my constituents have the luxury of living with the Rouge River, or the Duffins Creek or Rouge Creek running along their backyards.

The minister has shown concern about who has read the bill and who has not. I have the bill in my hand and I have read it.

My first concern about the legislation is with respect to the section dealing with management of the park and factors to be considered with the management of the park. Clause 6 says, “The Minister must, in the management of the Park”, and this is the concerning part, “ take into consideration the protection of its natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes”.

This clause looks like it makes sense on the first reading of it. It looks like it is a responsible measure. However, the language is weak compared to the existing legislation, which has stronger language.

Let me read section 8(2) of the existing Canada National Parks Act. It states:

Maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity, through the protection of natural resources and natural processes, shall be the first priority of the Minister when considering all aspects of the management of parks.

I note the words “shall be the first priority”. This is far stronger language than what is in Bill C-40, which is “take into consideration” the protection of natural ecosystems.

Let us look at the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act. section 6, which reads:

Ontario’s provincial parks and conservation reserves are dedicated to the people of Ontario and visitors for their inspiration, education, health, recreational enjoyment and other benefits with the intention that these areas shall be managed to maintain their ecological integrity and to leave them unimpaired for future generations.

The important words here are “shall be managed to maintain their ecological integrity”. Let us compare that with what is proposed in the new bill, which states “take into consideration the protection of natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes”.

The Canada National Parks Act states “shall be the first priority”. In the Provincial Parks Act it is “shall be managed to maintaining ecological integrity”. In the proposed bill it is “take into consideration”.

The Conservative government, under the guise of this bill, “an act respecting the Rouge national urban park”, somewhere refers to making life better for everybody in the country as well. That is what the Conservatives do with omnibus bills. I am joking. I have actually read the whole bill and it does not talk about the economic action plan once, which is pretty awesome because the Conservatives usually like to talk about immigration, economic action and job creation in every bill. That does not happening with this one. I congratulate the government for not making this an omnibus bill about 75 different pieces of legislation.

However, what the government is doing is weakening the protection of my and the people's park in Scarborough. That is what I do not like to see, especially because so many people have worked for so long to create this park and to protect it.

Just this past year, I have taken groups of schoolchildren and community activists to plant more trees and bushes in this park. We did it to ensure the sustainability and ecological viability of it. We have planted spruce, dark cherry and bushes. We have taken students and gone in and removed invasive species that are not naturally occurring in this area, so the trees, bushes and plants can actually thrive.

Activists and people who care about this park are the wardens of it. We are the ones who take care of it. I and my constituents in Scarborough—Rouge River want to ensure that the park has higher protection through the creation of national park status, rather than disintegrating the quality of it.

I can read more from the Rouge Park management plan of 1994, which was cabinet approved, by the way. The cabinet approved the Rouge Park management plan in 1994. I will read excerpts from sections 6.1 and 10.3.

Section 6.1 reads, “The vision of the park has, as its primary focus, the continuing health and integrity of natural systems and habitats”.

Section 10.3 reads, “protecting the ecological integrity of the Rouge River watershed”.

Once again these are stronger words than “take into consideration the protection”.

Section 3.2.1 of the Greenbelt plan says:

The Protected Countryside contains a Natural System that provides a continuous and permanent land base necessary to support human and ecological health in the Greenbelt and beyond...support biodiversity and overall ecological integrity.

All of this is much stronger than clause 6 of the bill, which states “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”.

Let us look at clause 4 of the bill, which is on the establishment of the park. The minister wrote or oversaw the writing of this bill. It is funny because the bill lists the purposes of the creation of the Rouge national urban park and the first thing identified is protection. However, when it goes into the implementation and the factors to be considered in the management of the park, there is weak language.

Let me read part of clause 4. It says:

Rouge National Urban Park...is established for the purposes of protecting and presenting, for current and future generations, the natural and cultural heritage of the Park and its diverse landscapes, promoting a vibrant farming community and encouraging Canadians to discover and connect with their national protected heritage areas.

Once again, the government talks about protection, but in reality it weakens the protection for the park.

I would like to talk a bit about the responses since the bill has been tabled. We know that the idea of the creation of Rouge national urban park was mentioned in a couple of throne speeches. It got us all excited in the community, but then we saw there was no real financial commitment. We pushed and pushed and we saw some financial commitment, which is great. We then saw that somebody from Parks Canada had been assigned.

We thought the community would have a say in the creation of what we wanted to call “the people's park”. I remember that at the first public consultation, as it was called, which happened at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, the member of Parliament who had the largest piece of the current Rouge Park in their riding was not invited. That was me.

My constituency is home to the largest piece of the Rouge Park. However, when the government was holding public consultations, I was not even invited. I forced myself in to ensure I was there. This is the people's park. The Conservatives say that it is about consideration for future generations? I was the youngest person in the room, and I was not even invited. I make sure that my opinions, the opinions of my constituents and the opinions of those who have been activists on the ground were brought forward at that meeting.

The whole idea of “the people's park” came from that first consultation. I know we will probably hear Conservative members say that there was plenty of consultation, but if we speak to residents who live in the vicinity of the park, they will not even know that these consultations took place because not much notice was given to them. There needs to be a thorough inclusion of the constituents who will be affected in the area surrounding this park.

Recently, since the tabling or announcement of this bill in the House on June 13, CPAWS, which is the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, has issued a quick reaction to the tabling of this. I want to read a excerpt from the group's reaction. It says:

CPAWS recognizes and supports the importance of Rouge National Urban Park in connecting urban Canadians to nature and encouraging them to become nature stewards. It is imperative, however, that conservation is prioritized in the park’s legislation and management plan to ensure this remarkable natural area and its wildlife are not “loved to death” over time. Putting nature conservation first is also consistent with the international definition and guidance for protected areas.

On first glance, it’s not clear if the Bill accomplishes this as it only requires the Minister to take the health of park ecosystems and wildlife “into consideration” in park management. We also note there is very little information provided about how agriculture will be managed in the park.

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society is concerned about the weak protection of the conservation of the park. It is the same point I mentioned about clause 6 of the bill, which states, “take into consideration the protection”.

The second issue the group identified was the agriculture in the area. We know that within the park boundaries, much of the land is leased to people for private interests. A lot of the agriculture and farming that happens in the parklands is cash-cropping. We know there is usage of pesticides, a concern for many environmentalists, activists and neighbours.

Residents whose water is drawn out of the watershed and who take their children to walk in the park are concerned about pesticides being used in a soon to be nationally protected park. That is a problem. We need to ensure that the agricultural development and investments in this community are done in a way that is sustainable. Also, we should be supporting organic farming or local community farming in Rouge Park. We want it to be known as “the people's park”.

I want to mention one other item. The parliamentary secretary mentioned that a lot of consultation was done and that this was the largest the park could be. We know that is not true because this park can be 100 square kilometres. What is being proposed is that it would be North America's largest urban park. Central Park is the largest as of now. We are going to make it bigger than that.

It is an historic moment for this country's national parks. I agree. However, why do we not make it the best park it can be? Why does it have to be a mediocre one?

I want to read from a motion from the city of Toronto. The city council actually passed a motion. It was passed unanimously by the city councillors who were present. I will quote from the recommendations with respect to what Toronto city council wanted to make sure was respected and conserved in Rouge national park. City council wanted to encourage the federal government to:

Ensure that the concept, legislation and management plan for Rouge National Urban Park respects, strengthens and implements the vision, goals and objectives of the City approved Rouge Park Plans (1994 and 2001) and current Toronto Official Plan, the Provincial Greenbelt Plan (2005) and the Rouge Natural Heritage Action Plan (2008); including incorporating the existing park vision

This is the current park vision:

the Rouge National Urban Park will be a special place of outstanding natural features and diverse cultural heritage in an urban-rural setting, protected and flourishing as an ecosystem in perpetuity. Human activities will exist in harmony with the natural values of the Park. The Park will be a sanctuary for nature and the human spirit

That sounds fabulous. I have so much more to say. The recommendations go on to say:

Respect conservation science, good planning principles and long term park ecological health and visitor potential, by including the 100+ km² public land assembly within the Rouge and Duffins Creek watersheds as part of the Rouge National Urban Park study area;

iii. Ensure restoration of a large mixed-wood and Carolinian forest habitat system linking Lake Ontario to the Oak Ridges Moraine with public parkland and trails; and

iv. Include First Nations and other respected conservation NGOs on the Rouge National Urban Park Advisory Board.

The motion was passed unanimously by city council.

How does it make sense to create legislation to create Canada's first national urban park but to also push forward and support a pipeline that goes through this park, and then, to make this even worse, to not protect the main waterway that goes through this park and has the pipeline cutting across it? How does that make sense?

I put forward one of my private member's bills, Bill C-532, an act to amend the Navigable Waters Protection Act (Rouge River), to ensure that the Rouge River, from end to end, is a protected waterway so that the pipeline that cuts across it does not actually pollute the waterway, which is the main waterway for this entire Rouge park. It goes into the tributaries, the Little Rouge Creek, and the underground water tables.

How is it that the government seems to think it makes sense when creating a national urban park, and saying that it is protecting it with the most protection it has ever had in its history, to not protect the largest waterway that cuts through this park? The government supports having an oil pipeline that cuts through the park.

For about two years, there was exposed pipeline in the park. It took Enbridge, or the company that went to fix it, two weeks to set up to access the pipeline to fix it. Imagine if there were a disaster.

There are pieces in the bill about spills—

[Kevin Sorenson]

Have you ever been to the park?

[Cathy McLeod]

Jasper. What about Jasper?

[Kevin Sorenson]

Jasper.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Oh, Mr. Speaker, a Conservative member is heckling me and asking if I have been to the park. Of course I have. I go there and plant trees and bushes, and I take care of that park. I personally take care of Rouge Park.

[Robert Sopuck]

I want to see deer.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am one of the stewards of this park, and that is why I am saying that this bill is a good start, but we need to make sure we are protecting this park and making it the best park it can be.

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

Mr. Speaker, I was listening attentively to the presentation by my colleague. I have heard a lot of misinformation presented to the House regarding the park. She said she participates in many activities in the park. Unfortunately, I have not seen her very much. I go there. I live in the park.

I would like to ask my colleague if there is a difference between a national park and an urban national park. Does she think Highway 401 should not be in Rouge Park, that the 401 should be destroyed, and that they should block the entrance to the park to everyone but the NDP? I would ask her to tell me, please.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is really funny that the member would say that he does not see me in the park, because the one or two times he has been to the park, I was there. I do not understand what he means. However, it does not matter. Let us not talk about what he does or does not do. I want to talk about the park.

The park is very important to me. He says that I was giving misinformation here. I was reading from existing legislation. I was reading from the Canada National Parks Act, the Provincial Parks Act, the Rouge Park Management Plan, and the Greenbelt Plan. I was reading from the motion from city council, from a release that CPAWS put out, and from the legislation itself. The member said he was listening very hard. Maybe he missed the parts I quoted from the existing legislation and the legislation that is before us.

After he attacked and said I do not spend time in Rouge Park, which is a joke, he asked about the difference between a national park and an urban national park and if I feel the park does not need highways. My vision for this park is that it will be one that conserves and protects the natural habitat and ecosystems of this park while allowing the residents of the area to enjoy the park. It also means making sure that there is not a large oil spill and that the water system is protected.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Before I go to questions and comments, I would remind all hon. members that they should wait until their colleagues are finished their questions before standing. Standing up before their colleagues are finished does not increase your chances of being recognized; in fact, it decreases your chances of being recognized.

The hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the hon. member about her participation in Rouge Park activities. Those who have been active in the last 25 years, groups like Save the Rouge Valley System, Friends of the Rouge Watershed, Lois James, Derek Lee, a former colleague, Pauline Browes, a former colleague of members opposite, and a whole variety of others appear not to be involved in, or have been specifically excluded from, the management plan of the park. I wonder whether she could comment on their apparent treatment.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Lois James is known as the grandmother of the park, and the Friends of the Rouge Watershed are the ones who take care of a lot of the tree planting in the area. The activists and community members who care seem to be left out. Who was invited to the announcement about the Rouge Park legislation? All of the Conservatives' friends were invited to it, it seemed, but Friends of the Rouge Watershed was not. My office did not get notice that they were going to be making an announcement about it.

Of course, the announcement was made in Markham, but we know that Rouge Park affects multiple ridings in the area, and we need to make sure that we work together for the creation of Canada's first urban national park. People like the grandmother of the park, Lois James, need to be included in at least the visioning of it.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. While the Chair appreciates the assistance of hon. members in this place, it is in fact the responsibility of the Chair to try to manage the clock. I know it is getting near the end of the session, but interruptions and interventions from the floor are more likely to delay the business of this House rather than expedite it.

Questions and comments. The hon. member for Scarborough Southwest.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by commenting on the heckling from the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette when he was talking about wanting to see the deer in the park.

Deer are one of 27 mammal species in the park. There are 55 fish species, 19 reptile and amphibian species, and 762 plant species. Over a quarter of Ontario's flora can be found in the park, as well as 225 bird species, including 123 breeding species. Therefore, there is a lot to see in the park beyond deer.

I want to ask my hon. colleague about the absolute negligence of the changes that were made to the Navigable Waters Protection Act by making sure—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. The hon. member for Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette is rising on a point of order.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The hon. member across the way referred to me as making a comment, and I have yet to speak today, so I would ask him to retract it.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

On the same point of order, the hon. member for Scarborough Southwest.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was commenting on heckling by the member when he was not recognized by the Chair, not on a comment he made when he was. Maybe he might want to wait until he is recognized before he speaks up.

My question to my hon. colleague was about the negligence in the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act that mean that there will not be stop valves placed on both sides of the line 9 pipeline when the reversal is made and why that could lead to potential spills down the road.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from Scarborough Southwest is correct.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, would you like me to continue over these hecklers?

[Leon Benoit, Conservative, Vegreville—Wainwright, AB]

You have your own members heckling.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. Could all hon. members speak when they have the floor and refrain from doing so when they do not? If there is a discussion that needs to take place, members are obviously free to leave the chamber and do it outside the chamber.

The hon. member for Scarborough—Rouge River.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, thank you. I very much appreciate your getting the House to order.

My colleague from Scarborough Southwest is correct in stating that Rouge Park is home to many endangered species. I can list a lot too. It is home to 70 species of trees, 27 species of reptiles, and 20 species of amphibians. More rare species of plants and animals are within Rouge Park than in any other region in Canada. That is not me saying that. That is from research done by the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

To answer the question my hon. colleague asked, which was about the protection of the waterway and the changes to the Navigable Waters Protection Act and the Migratory Birds Convention Act that were brought forward by the Conservative government in one of its many omnibus bills, they actually makes it not safe. It was probably in a budget bill. I really do not remember. The changes ensure that the Rouge River, which is the main waterway in Rouge Park, is not a protected waterway. There is a pipeline going through it, and we need to make sure that there are protective measures and that there are valves on each side of the river to stop the flow into the waterway.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour and for Western Economic Diversification]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest. I know that the New Democratic Party is anti- pipelines going anywhere. I do not know if the member is aware, but the Kinder Morgan pipeline goes through our beautiful Jasper National Park, and has for many years. I do not think there is anyone in the House who would say that Jasper National Park is not a phenomenal treasure. The Kinder Morgan pipeline supplies 90% of the gas to the Lower Mainland. It has gone through my riding for many years.

I would ask the member this. Is she saying that Jasper National Park is less of a park because it has a pipeline that has gone through it safely for over 60 years and that pipelines and protected and treasured areas cannot coexist?

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have not had a chance to visit Jasper National Park, so I look forward to visiting it one day.

Every single one of our national parks in this country is a treasure. Every single one needs to be protected. We need to ensure that every single one is ecologically sustainable and that its habitat is protected. I'm saying this should happen for every single park; I am not saying that one park is more important than the other.

However, for me, Rouge Park is going to be the most important because it is in my backyard. It is the park I go to most frequently, because it is my park. It is the park where I go to hang out. It is the park where I run and go for a walk. Hopefully, some day I will take my children or grandchildren to that park.

However, if it is not protected and if there is a spill in it, as happened in Kalamazoo, then my park, the river, the watershed, and the groundwater tables will be ruined. That is what I want to prevent.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to enter into this debate. In the interests of full disclosure, Rouge Park is very close to my riding as well, and I have taken my children and my grandchildren through the park from time to time, both in winter and summer. So I am quite familiar with this piece of real estate and am very pleased to see that we have moved to the point of presenting legislation. But in typical fashion, the government seems to have a talent for taking good news and turning it into bad news.

I suppose it is only coincidental that after the northern gateway decision, we are now debating two park bills, the first with respect to Rouge Park and the second with respect to a park up in the Northwest Territories. It is only coincidental that the announcement about northern gateway and the discussion about parks happens almost sequentially. It has nothing to do with trying to burnish the environmental creds of the government.

Before I go too much further, I want to acknowledge the 25-year effort by my colleague, Derek Lee, in conjunction with Pauline Browes, in advocating on the floor of the House for the park and the reservation of these lands, along with a number of citizens groups, Friends of the Rouge, Save the Rouge, WWF, COSCA, and of course the patron saint of the park, Lois James. I am certain that I have left out a number of NGOs and individuals who have been very important to why we are here today. Regrettably, they do not seem to be as involved in the potential management plan as they possibly should be, and I hope that once the dust settles here, the officials will think it over and see their way clear to incorporate them into the park management plan.

The interesting part of this proposal is that according to the bill itself, what is actually being incorporated into the park are three little pieces of property in Markham. When asked about this at the briefing yesterday, the Conservatives say they are actually in negotiation with three or four levels of government, a variety of conservation authorities, et cetera. But the way it is being presented by the parliamentary secretary and others is that this is 58 square kilometres. Actually it is not 58 square kilometres; it is about two or three acres. By the time the bill actually receives royal assent, it will still be two or three acres and the negotiations will have yet to be completed.

Why is this a concern? First of all, the Government of Canada can unilaterally transfer from the Department of Transport the lands under its control, but for whatever reason, it has not included those lands in this bill or in the schedule that would be attached to the bill. In addition, there are other airport lands that apparently might possibly be under negotiations and that are not included in the bill. Instead of 58 square kilometres, some people would like to see 100 square kilometres, going all the way up to the Oak Ridges Moraine, in order to protect a corridor for wildlife, et cetera.

It is in some respects, as far as a presentation of a piece of land is concerned, much less than what it appears. Take note of the contrast between the bill for the park in the Northwest Territories, whose name I dare not pronounce for fear of offending someone, and this bill. Half the bill, six or seven pages, actually goes to a metes and bounds description of the park itself. That is normally the way a park bill is presented. Bill S-5 is a proper presentation.

In terms of the schedule of the land being presented, the actual amounts are far less, and there is no guarantee that the lands in the presentation by the parliamentary secretary are in fact the lands that will be transferred.

There are two reasons for this. First, negotiations are negotiations and they may go somewhere differently than the government hopes they will. Second, there is no presentation of a plan for ecological protection. That is worth drawing attention to, because in normal park bills we have a specific clause in each and every bill. The specific clause says:

...a set of ecological integrity objectives and indicators and provisions for resource protection and restoration, zoning, visitor use, public awareness and performance evaluation, which shall be tabled in each House of Parliament.

There is no such inclusion in the clause. When I asked the officials yesterday why it was not in there, their reason was that this was a unique park. The reasoning actually does have some sense to it. As others have pointed out, Highway 401 goes over the park, as does Highway 2, and so do Steeles Avenue and Taunton Road, and there is also a huge hydro corridor through the park. Therefore, we cannot set up ecological metrics to evaluate the ecological performance of the park. What we are left with is a very vague clause in paragraph 6 of the bill. It states:

The Minister must, in the management of the Park, 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.

“Take into consideration” is not a plan. Let me just sketch a scenario. The minister goes to the Province of Ontario and says, “We would like your thousand acres, or two thousand acres”—or whatever the number is—“and we want to know how you're going to manage this plan and this park”. The minister says, “Trust me.“ Well, “trust me” does not cut it.

As far as I and anyone else in the House know, including the parliamentary secretary or the minister, we do not actually know how this park is going to be managed. If I am the Province of Ontario, or the Town of Markham, or the City of Toronto, I am going to be asking that rather fundamental question. I would say: “No plan, no transfer”. I rather hope that it does not get held up on that. I hope there is a plan. I hope the ecological and cultural integrity of the park would be protected. However, “trust me” is not exactly a great answer when one is asking for thousands and thousands of acres to be transferred, which according to the government's numbers are supposed to amount to 58 square kilometres.

If in fact the government had some ecological or environmental integrity, one might actually say, “Okay, trust us. We will have a plan and we will fulfill this”. However, as we know, the government's environmental credibility is as about as rock bottom as rock bottom can be, so “trust me” is not exactly an answer when we are asking other levels of government to transfer thousands of acres to the park for what would otherwise be a very supportable proposition.

Again, why is this of greater concern? As others have alluded to, in the park there is what is called mono-cultural or industrial farming, and some of those farming practices are in clear contradistinction to proper park management functions. One might say “Well, let's not worry about that, because we'll make sure, as we renew each lease and try to move it up to market value, that in fact we will assure the best farming practices”. When I raised that question yesterday, one of the members of the Conservative Party dismissed the concerns about neonicatoids. Frankly, that stuff is of concern. Here we have Environment Canada and Parks Canada managing farms in the park, which should be held to the highest possible standards, to the best science we have available for farming practices.

The member just dismissed it: “I do not give a hoot about the bees. I do not give a hoot about the watershed. I do not give a hoot about the hiring practices. Just get my constituents the cheapest possible land for the longest period of time.” It does not inspire—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

I must interrupt the hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood at this point. The time for government orders has expired. The hon. member will have 10 minutes remaining when this matter returns before the House.

The House resumed from June 19 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.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

When this matter was last before the House, the hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood had spoken for 10 minutes. Therefore, he has 10 minutes remaining, plus questions and comments.

The hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I suppose there is some possibility that since June 19 members do not remember what profound wisdom I shared with the chamber. On the realistic possibility that they have not retained that profound wisdom over the course of the summer, let me do a quick review and then comment on the changes that have happened since that debate, which have a dramatic impact on the integrity of the bill.

When I was initially expressing my thoughts, I was concerned about three things: the actual size of the park, the ecological integrity of the park, and the consistency of a park with agricultural leases. At that time, I was concerned about the ecological integrity of the park. Members may or may not know that most parks make reference to a clause when a park is created, which states:

The Minister shall, within five years after a park is established, prepare a management plan for the park containing a long-term ecological vision for the park [and set out] ecological integrity objectives and indicators....

That clause is noticeably missing from this park bill. Rather, there is a downgraded standard of ecological integrity, which states:

The Minister must, in the management of the Park, 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.

It is quite a significantly reduced commitment.

As I said on June 19, taking into consideration that was not a plan, I then went on to sketch a scenario, which in a strange sort of way actually unfolded. The scenario was that the minister would go to the Province of Ontario and say that the federal government would like the 1,000 acres or 2,000 acres or whatever the number might be and the minister from the Province of Ontario would say that the province wanted to know how it would produce the plan and manage the park. The response from the minister of the environment, who is the responsible minister, would then say, “trust me”, which does not cut it.

As far as anyone else in the House knows, including the parliamentary secretary to the minister, we do not know how this park would be managed.

I then went on to say that if I were the Province of Ontario, the town of Markham or the city of Toronto, I would be asking this rather fundamental question. I would say that unless they had a plan, no plan, no transfer. I want to emphasize that I hope it does not get held up on that. I hope there is a plan. I hope the ecological and cultural integrity of the park will be protected, however, “trust me” is not exactly a great answer.

I know the Speaker appreciates the profundity of my wisdom on these matters, but even I did not know that I would be prescient.

Members will note that since then, the Province of Ontario has withdrawn its 22 square kilometres because it wants a commitment to an ecological plan that is similar to or exceeds the commitment that currently exists for the park. The consequence of that is the government, for whatever reason, has not offered that commitment and is not presenting legislation which offers that commitment. Therefore, the Province of Ontario is in a bit of a dilemma because it wants to see this park succeed. The town of Markham, the city of Toronto and I dare say that pretty well everyone in this chamber want this park to succeed, as do all of the people who they represent.

The Province of Ontario has reluctantly withdrawn its commitment to transfer the 22-odd square kilometres that are within its jurisdiction. At this point, we do not actually know what other transferors will do to fulfill the government's commitment to a 58-square-kilometre park.

As we are speaking here on October 2, 2014, debating the bill, which we all support in one manner or another, we do not actually know what the park will be. In fact, we know much less than we knew back on June 19 when we were debating it.

At this point, this is a bit of a Swiss-cheese park, and I do not know what the Province of Ontario controls. I do know that it is significant. I would say it is pretty well one-third of the intended park. I do not know whether this turns it into a whole bunch of little pieces of land, which may or may not be joined together, through the entire 58 square kilometres. We may have a big chunk out of the middle of the park, or we may have a bunch of little chunks out of the park.

Regardless, this does not seem to be an appropriate way to go about it. I would have thought, and far be it from me to give advice to the government, that before tabling the plan, before tabling the bill, the government would have had the Province of Ontario, the City of Markham, and the City of Toronto, whichever would be transferring land, sign on to the commitment to ecological integrity, which was actually created in January 2013, when the federal government signed a memorandum of agreement with the Province of Ontario requiring that the Rouge Park policy meet or exceed existing provincial policy.

I would have thought that would have been locked down prior to the presentation of the bill, but it was not, and the Province of Ontario is not satisfied. The Province of Ontario will not transfer its land until it is satisfied, so we have a bit of a Swiss-cheese park proposal presently before the House. None of us actually knows what is in the proposal and the Government of Canada does not seem to be prepared to meet or exceed provincial policy.

The consequence is that we are debating in the dark, because we do not know where we are going to have this plan. We do not know what will be in it. We do not know what will not be in it. We do not know the basis of the government's refusal to meet or exceed the provincial standards, and the consequence of that is yet to be determined.

I frankly thought, when I read of the Government of Ontario's intention to withdraw from its commitment, that the government would actually pull the bill until such time as all levels of government were satisfied with the commitment to ecological integrity in the bill.

It is not as if this does not actually have some serious implications. This is an exciting possibility. This is a one-in-a-lifetime possibility, and it is very important to get it right. Therefore, it is very important to have all levels of government on side and to deal with what are unique problems in the proposal.

This park is crossed by Highway 401. It is crossed by Taunton Road. It is crossed by hydro lines. It is an urban park. Members might also know that the Rouge River is one of the more degraded watersheds in the general GTA. Because it is one of the more degraded watersheds, it is extremely important that an ecological management plan be put in place before the Conservatives invite other levels of government to simply turn over their commitment and in the end lose all control over their pieces of land.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for your time and attention. I cannot say that I would be overly insulted if you did not actually remember what I said in June this year. I hope that my remarks summarize what I see as the state of affairs and why this bill is quite problematic for many of us.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Minister of State (Western Economic Diversification)]

Mr. Speaker, first, I agree with my colleague that ecological integrity is one of the key pillars of Parks Canada. I believe in that quite strongly. We see that with many of the parks our government has created across this country. We have actually expanded park space quite significantly under the government.

What I am curious about is the November 15, 2015 date that has been set. There would be no talk, and my colleague can correct me if I am wrong, under any circumstance, for the transfer of that land. One could suggest that it has been coincidentally set. I would hope that is the case.

Would my colleague support an accelerated timeline for discussions around that should we be able to come to a consensus? Does he support that particular date for any specific reason? Could the member also comment on the fact that the whole principle of developing a parks management plan is to consult with the community, different stakeholders, and different levels of government to agree to the principles by which ecological integrity will be maintained in this park, which is typically the process by which parks are maintained in this country?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know about a date. I believe that the member said November 2015. I do not know about that. I would have thought that a lot of the heavy lifting with respect to the plan and the park would have been done prior to the presentation of the bill. I guess that is where the rubber is hitting the road.

There are ongoing consultations with community stakeholders. I have been to one of them in my community. The consultation was literally across the creek from my own backyard. It was an interesting exercise. At the end of the two hours of consultation with my community, there may have been a lot more questions than there were answers. If this is the state of consultation, it does, in fact, make me a little nervous.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciated my colleague's speech, in particular when he was talking about ecological integrity.

I am not an MP from Ontario, so I am interested in what he is hearing on the ground. He talked about the fact that the federal government is supposed to meet or exceed existing environmental legislation. That is part of the land transfer agreement. Now the Ontario government is saying, as we heard, that it may not transfer the land.

It is a complicated thing to be debating in the House when we do not actually know what this park will look like. We are debating a bill about a park, and we do not know what the final result of the park will be.

I am wondering if the member can expand a little on this point and what he is hearing in his community and if he has any particular insight as to how we can even do this if we do not know if the lands will be transferred.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has hit the nail on the head. The presentation of this bill was entirely premature, given the recent factual circumstances, the facts on the ground, as folks like to describe it.

I know there are a number of people who have been Rouge Park warriors for 20 to 25 years. They are deeply committed to and involved in the management of the park and have been over the last few years. There is a sense, rightly, wrongly, fairly, et cetera, that they are marginalized. It is not an optimum way to treat citizens who have dealt with it.

Frankly, the Province of Ontario has picked up on the disquiet in the community, because this is a complicated park, no matter how one slices the baloney. It is going to be a very complicated park, even with the best of intentions, and even with a lot of the stakeholders on the side of the angels.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, for his presentation on the Rouge Park, as proposed to us.

I had a lot of involvement with the Rouge when I worked in the office of the Hon. Tom McMillan, when he was minister of the environment, and with the wonderful Pauline Browes, who continues to play an important role in this. She was minister of parks in the Mulroney administration.

I want to see the Rouge created as a national park, but I want it to be done right. I have also, therefore, worked with a group known as Friends of the Rouge Watershed for a very long time and share their concern that the current management plan and current plans for the park do not protect it adequately.

I want to ask my hon. colleague, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood a question. Yes, it is a park in an urban area, which makes it unique, but how much do we have to compromise on the fundamental principles of ecological integrity within the national park scheme in order to create an urban park? Should we not push for the very best ecologically protected zone we possibly can? This will be an achievement for the world.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to acknowledge the work of the Hon. Pauline Browes. Members might be interested to know that at one point, she ran against me, so I have some familiarity with Ms. Browes. Anyway, I am here, and she is not. The member for Whitchurch-Stouffville had the same experience, I believe, as well, but he is here.

I also want to acknowledge the work of Derek Lee, who was the member for Scarborough--Rouge River for many years. I think those are the two legislative heroes.

The hon. member asked a really interesting question: how much is the compromise going to be?

There is going to be compromise. We are not talking about pristine wilderness. We are not talking about Nahanni, which is what we will be talking about in the next park bill. We are talking about a significantly degraded watershed. We are talking about an area in the eastern GTA that is heavily populated, and we are talking about a lot of complications, particularly, for instance, with the leaseholders and how to integrate the leaseholders into the management of the farm yet meet the highest possible ecological standards, under the circumstances.

This is going to be difficult at the best of times, and it has been made even more difficult by these current circumstances.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be brief, given that I am short on time.

What concerns me is the dangerous precedent that the Conservatives could set by creating this park. Since it will be the first urban national park, it is essential that ecological integrity be the priority. My Conservative colleague just said that ecological integrity is important to her. Therefore, she should push her Conservative colleagues to make sure that this priority is in the bill, because it is not.

Does my colleague not believe that a dangerous precedent could be set by creating this park without making ecological integrity a priority?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I agree and I disagree, simultaneously, with my colleague. I think it is a dangerous precedent.

The creation of urban parks is difficult, and each one is unique to its own circumstances. However, I think this is the one where we make the mould, and if the mould is not one that has ecological integrity, or, in the words of some, has a net gain in ecosystem and watershed health as our standard, then we will achieve nothing. At this point, there is not one. That will result in some rather regrettable consequences.

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

Mr. Speaker, I will make a quick comment. I think the legislation in front of us should be supported by the members of the House, because it would, in fact, exceed provincial standards when it comes to ecological protection in our parks.

Provincial parks, such as Algonquin and Killarney, allow logging, mining, fishing, and hunting. The current legislation in front of us does not allow that. It will not allow for resource extraction, logging, the removal of native flora and fauna, hunting or fishing, or the removal of fossils.

I just make that comment because I think it is important to acknowledge that the legislation would exceed Ontario provincial legislation with respect to parks like Algonquin and Killarney, which are considered crown jewels in the Ontario parks system.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his work on this park. I imagine that if the hon. member were running this file, we could actually do some business.

However, “trust me” does not cut it. The responses from the federal government and the Government of Ontario have been unhelpful. This is a complicated park and, of course, there are other forms of commercial activity in other parks. That is the reality.

Unfortunately, the way that the legislation is phrased makes it open season. That is regrettable.

Frankly, “trust me” does not cut it.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by noting that today is the first day of the Markham Fair, which runs from October 2 to October 5. This is one of Ontario's largest agricultural fairs. It has been going on since 1844 in my community. It highlights the important role that farming and agriculture have played in the development of my community and the entire York region.

What is very special about the Markham Fair every year is the importance that the entire community places on it. Every November, I have the opportunity to attend the president's banquet at the Markham Fair, and we recognize the individuals who have volunteered their time at the fair. It always amazes me how many people have been there for 5, 10, 20, 25, 40, 45 and 50 years, volunteering at the Markham Fair. Generation upon generation of families volunteer to make this annual fair a special event for our entire community.

As I said, it is an agricultural fair. We see all the things that we could expect to see at an agricultural fair. There are ploughing matches There are competitions for things like hogs, chickens, the best homemade apple pie. There is soap carving. Obviously, there is a midway and there are all kinds of other things that highlight the importance of agriculture to our community.

Today, as they kick off another year of the Markham Fair, I just wanted to congratulate them and wish them well.

There has been a lot of difference of opinion on the creation of the park. Actually, let me take that back. I do not think that there is a difference of opinion with respect to creating the Rouge national urban park. I think that the difference is in the form that the park would take.

As the members for Scarborough—Guildwood and Wellington—Halton Hills highlighted, a lot of people for many years have been focused on trying to create a national park in the Rouge. That is something that has been talked about for many years.

It is important to look back a little bit at where this all started and how we got to this place. A lot of the land in this area became available to the government through the expropriations in 1972 by the Trudeau government of, I think, over 18,000 acres of land for the creation of potential new airports and a second airport for Toronto. At that time, farmers in the area were evicted from their lands. Some were given leases to lease back their lands on a yearly basis, but many were evicted. That has been the reality for many of the farmers in the area since 1972.

Fast forward to 1994, when the Rouge park concept started being put into play. As it has already been noted, it really followed Pauline Browes, who was the minister of state for the environment in the Campbell government and a parliamentary secretary in the Mulroney government. A decision was made that $10 million would be set aside to help create, manage and preserve some of the natural heritage of the Rouge park. That brought in a heightened significance of how special the natural heritage of the Rouge is.

Consequently, there have been provincial governments that have also recognized its significance. Through the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Mike Harris government transferred thousands of acres of land into the management of the park. Also through that time, plans were made to manage the Rouge in a more effective way so that we could preserve and protect the national heritage of the area.

As we have got a little bit further into the discussion, there were thoughts about what could be done to protect the Rouge park. As it has been mentioned, the Rouge park falls into two different categories. There is a Toronto category, and then there is a York region part of it.

For those who do not know the area, in the Toronto category there is a large street called Steeles Avenue. South of Steeles Avenue, some of the most extraordinary natural heritage in Ontario or Canada can be evidenced through the Rouge park there. It is absolutely spectacular. I do not think anybody can question that.

North of Steeles Avenue, we start coming into more agricultural areas. A vast majority of the land to the north of Highway 7, which would be put into Rouge park, is agricultural land that has been farmed for hundreds of years. This is not just a new concept. This land has been farmed for hundreds of years. In fact, I would invite all of my colleagues in the House to look at a program called The Curse of the Axe. This program highlights the Wendat people who were settled in this area some 500 years ago. It was discovered that the Wendat people had been farming those very same lands. The extent to which they were farming completely changed how we viewed our first nations and the role that they played in agriculture and trading in the area. I would invite all my colleagues to look at the program. It will highlight again how long this land has been farmed.

North of Highway 7, it is farming. To the south, as the member for Scarborough—Guildwood rightly pointed out, we have the 401, a hydro corridor, the Toronto Zoo and, on one edge of it, there is a landfill. However, there are extraordinary pockets of incredible beauty that the Ontario government, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and what was previously the Rouge Park Alliance had been working on preserving for a number of years. We have done that with partners in the private sector. By and large, we have done a very good job.

However, when the concept started evolving with respect to a national urban park, and we knew we had some excess airport lands, that is when the debate started to change a bit. We knew, as has been mentioned by other speakers, that we could do something very special here. We could protect the natural heritage of the Rouge Valley, but at the same time we could extract those lands that had become surplus to any potential airport needs, and put them back into a Rouge park so these lands could be protected for a long time to come.

The Ontario Farmland Trust, a non-profit organization that promotes farmland preservation, said, “The new Rouge National Urban Park offers one of the most innovative opportunities for the protection of farmland resources, agricultural heritage and local food production in our generation.”

If I am not mistaken, it is only 1%. This is class 1 farmland. We have lost so much farmland in this area to development. In the park south of Steeles Avenue, pretty much all of the farming that was there is now gone. I believe that we have to do our absolute best to ensure that the class 1 farmland on the northern part of the future park is preserved and saved, and that we allow our farmers to continue to farm, using best farm practices, for a very long time.

Our farmers are sometimes condemned as not being proper stewards of the land. I disagree. These lands have been farmed for hundreds of years, and our farmers are some of the best stewards of the land. The proposal that has been brought forward by the minister would see these farmers finally get long-term leases. Bear in mind that these farmers have been working on yearly leases. It is very hard, if not impossible, for them to make investments in the land that they have been farming. They cannot make the investments that most farmers would want to make. They are forced into a certain type of farming because they are on a yearly lease. This has disadvantaged the farmers in this area for a very long time.

We have the opportunity through this legislation to do both things that are very important, to protect the natural heritage of the park, while at the same time reversing decades of poor treatment of farmers in the area.

That is why I am very excited about this. Obviously throughout this process there has been a lot of debate. The member for Wellington—Halton Hills and I have not always seen eye to eye on this. We have had a tremendous amount of debate. When the proposal first came to me as the member of Parliament for Oak Ridges—Markham to create a Rouge national urban park, I was dead set against it if it meant that farmers in my riding would be disadvantaged the way they had been and if they were to be treated the way they had been under the existing Rouge Park management.

There is a 2001 Rouge Park management plan. Part of that management plan calls for a 600-metre corridor. The net result of that corridor would mean the elimination, at a minimum, of 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland and that is completely unacceptable to me, to farmers and to my constituents. We can make sure that we work with the farmers, who are not opposed to making sure that the entire ecosystem is protected. They want to work together with government to make sure that they can do that. I want to read a letter from the York Region Federation of Agriculture, which represents farmers in the area, to the hon. Brad Duguid, the Ontario minister who has highlighted that the Ontario government does not want to transfer the land. It says:

The York Region Federation of Agriculture members are the 700 farm businesses in York Region and Toronto including the farmers in the Rouge National Urban Park. ...you arrived at your decision to not recommend the Provincial land transfers after discussions with stakeholders and local citizen groups. You did not consult with the York Region Federation of Agriculture, the farmers in the Park, or the community living in the Park. We urge you not to hold up the transfer of Provincial lands to Parks Canada.

The farming community in the Rouge National Urban Park are the same farm families that have been farming and caring for the land...for the past 200 years. The future of the farms in the Rouge National Urban Park have been in limbo since the farms were expropriated in the 1970's. The farmland in the Rouge National Urban Park is Class 1 Agricultural Land, meaning it is the best land for agriculture production. Less than 1% of Canada's farmland is Class 1. The farmers in the park have already given up 1000 acres of productive farmland in the Rouge National Urban Park to reforestation projects.

It continues:

We support Parks Canada's consultation process that engaged over 100 stakeholder groups and thousands of individuals to create the Rouge National Urban Park Draft Management Plan.

It went on to say:

We believe that Parks Canada will improve the ecological integrity of the Rouge National Urban Park while maintaining the farmland in food production.

I want to reference another letter, from the Cedar Grove community group to Minister Duguid. Cedar Grove is an extraordinary community within my riding, a very historical community. This is what it has to say:

On behalf of the Cedar Community Club, we write with regard to your letter of September 2...which presents your decision to withdraw your recommendation to support transfer of land to Rouge National Urban Park.... It was shocking to learn of your decision and we strongly disagree.... With the promise of the coming Rouge National Urban Park, there was an anticipated hope for stability for the farmers and residents of Cedar Grove and surrounding communities.

It went on to support what the minister has done to bring about the Rouge national urban park.

I want to talk about what has recently transpired with the Province of Ontario.

We obviously have been working with the Province of Ontario for a number of years. Since this announcement was made in the previous election of 2011 and rehighlighted in the throne speech, we have been working closely with the Province of Ontario to bring about the Rouge national urban park in a way that respects the ecological integrity and promotes the national heritage, but also protects the farmers and gives them the stability that they have been looking for since 1972.

I do not think it is a big secret that we were close to an agreement. We had a signed agreement with the Province of Ontario that we probably would have announced had an election not been called for the Province of Ontario. Then, after the election that changed, unbeknownst to any of us. I know I picked up the Toronto Star one day and saw a letter from Liberal Minister Duguid outlining the Liberals' concerns. They were no longer going to be transferring the land because they had some concerns with ecological integrity.

Never had they mentioned this before. The province had signed an agreement with us. The transfer was to happen. We were to move forward with a management plan that was working with the province and the stakeholders in the area. Then this came. Coincidentally, everything is held up until November 2015, after the next federal election. It is truly shameful.

It is worth remembering that these are the same provincial Liberals that had before requested, not ecological integrity, but money for the lands it was going to transfer. They wanted to be bought out. Therefore, when they asked for I think it was $120 million, they had no concerns with what they were seeing then. Their concern was that they wanted to be bought out of their position in the lands; “Give us a hundred million dollars and we'll transfer it to you, no problem”.

It was highlighted by people like Alan Wells, who was the final chair of the Rouge Park Alliance, that this had never been the case. Governments had transferred lands to the Rouge Park for a very limited amount, I believe for $1. The provincial government had done that before. The provincial government of Mike Harris transferred lands to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority so that it could be managed. That was pointed out to the minister, but they needed to get their $100 million.

I really want to reiterate what the provincial Liberals' proposal would do. In his letter to the Minister of the Environment, he highlighted what the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands talked about. It is worth noting that the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, the member for Scarborough—Rouge River, the member for Markham—Unionville, and I am not sure if anyone else, submitted petitions to the House supporting a 1994 framework, saying that this park could not go ahead unless the 1994 framework was supported. However, as I said earlier, the 1994 framework would cause 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland to be taken out of production. It would mean the eviction of farmers and would probably mean the closure of one of our most successful farms in the area, Whittamore's Farm.

To say that the farmers do not trust the provincial Liberal government on this is an understatement because they have seen this before. There was a park called Bob Hunter Memorial Park, where 600 acres of class 1 farmland was taken away from farmers. People who had lived there for 33 years were evicted. Trees were planted across this class 1 farmland. Millions of dollars were put into it. There was no consultation. It was done and forced upon these farmers. Therefore, the farmers do not trust the provincial government. Quite frankly, governments at the federal level have never undertaken a consultation process like we have on this, and that is all governments. The Conservative and Liberal governments in the past have never done what we have done now.

While I agree that the southern part of this extraordinary ecosystem needs to be protected, and that is what our legislation does, I do not agree that means sacrificing thousands of acres of class 1 farmland in order to create a Rouge national urban park.

I hope that members of the House will work with us to create a park that we can all be proud of and give the millions of people who live in this area access to a treasure that we will be able to brag about because we helped create it.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary kept bringing up farmers over and over again. He made numerous references to the 1972 expropriation of land by the federal government and then the one-year leases that have since followed. Many of the farms that the member was speaking about are actually outside of the land that was expropriated.

There are still some farms today, but there is actually only one family farm that is left from that original era when the land was expropriated. It is owned by the Tapscotts, who folks in Scarborough will know quite well. They immigrated from Scarborough to Pickering to farm that land and they have been sitting on those one-year leases ever since.

The member made reference to how horrible it was that all that land was stripped away, but then successive governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have continued to ignore that problem. He is worried about the loss of a bit of farmland upstream from the area that he thinks needs to be protected. If the land upstream is not protected, then the land downstream will not be protected either.

We have class 1 farmland in that expropriated land that could be turned to farming today. It is laying fallow. Why does the government not want to address that issue, which would also help the park, instead of continuing with this plan? It hurt farmers again when the government reannounced plans for the airport that we are not sure we need.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member is wrong. The vast majority of the land in that area is actually farmed as part of an agricultural preserve. In fact, I hazard to say all of it is farmed on one-year leases, unfortunately.

This is the problem that we have. By supporting the 1994 framework, farmers have to be evicted and 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland have to be taken out of production, at a minimum. I do not agree with that. I am sorry but I do not agree with that. I think we could do both. We could protect the ecological integrity of the park, we could also protect farmers, and we could create something that would be of benefit to all Canadians and certainly of extraordinary benefit to the people in the GTA.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have been in and around this issue for quite a number of years. I have gone to quite a number of public meetings and met with a number of farmers, though not a huge number. I know the area intimately because my family had a farm a little west of there. We would drive through the Reesor Road and the Reesor farm. We know the Whittamores and Tapscotts, et cetera.

I realize I am advancing in my years, but my memory still occasionally serves me. I do not recollect any conversation in which it was stated that the farmers are going to be evicted or are somehow or other going to be circumscribed. In fact, were the plan to have been presented by the government, we might have actually gotten 5, 10 or 15-year leases that would give the stabilization that the hon. member wishes the farmers to have.

I think the conversation with the farmers has consisted of the management of watersheds, the kinds of pesticides or not that are put on the land, the kind of phosphorous or not that is put on the land, public access, things of that nature. I see the conversation with the farmers as relatively mature. I think, frankly, the hon. member mischaracterizes the fear of the farmers. A lot of the people who are keenly interested in this park south of Steeles are, in fact, big farmer fans north of Steeles.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we cannot fulfill the promise that the member has just talked about.

The member is talking about the 1994 framework for the Rouge. We cannot fulfill that promise. We cannot take 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland out of production without evicting farmers. It is impossible to do. With 1,700 acres of land, farmers would have to be evicted. We saw this through the creation of the Bob Hunter Memorial Park.

Whether we like the Bob Hunter Memorial Park or not is not the issue. The reality is that it was 1,600 acres of class 1 farmland taken away from farmers with no notice. People who had lived there for 33 years were evicted from their homes. Therefore, we cannot do what the member is suggesting without evicting farmers.

I read for members, and I am happy to table it, the letter from the York Region Federation of Agriculture supporting the process that we are putting in place and highlighting the fears its members have. The fears they have come from decades of being treated poorly, decades of being removed from their lands, and decades of not being listened to.

We have an opportunity to listen to farmers and protect the ecological integrity, natural beauty and heritage of the park. We can do that through this Parliament. We can stop playing political games, as I would suggest Minister Duguid and the provincial Liberals are doing, and we can create a good park.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister for his excellent speech and also for his passion in defending farmers.

The member gave us a bit of a history lesson that is important to reiterate. It was under the Trudeau Liberals in the 1970s that farmers were evicted from their lands and given these short-term one-year leases for this important class 1 farmland.

Now we see that the provincial Liberals, and it appears the federal Liberals, are endorsing a plan for the Rouge Valley that would completely evict farmers from class 1 farmland. As the member said, this is land that has been farmed for hundreds of years. Our first nations farmed this land. Now, under threat from the Liberals, they want to evict these farmers, these hard-working Canadians who have been there for years.

I wonder if the parliamentary secretary could take some time to explain a little more to our colleagues who obviously do not understand the bill and have not read it. How does the bill support our hard-working farmers?

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, again, Parks Canada has been talking to our farmers.

The bill seeks to give our farmers long-term leases so that they could make investments on the land and use best farming practices to continue to do what they have been doing for years, as did the Wendat people, as the member said.

I would again encourage members to take a look at the movie, Curse of the Axe. They can Google it and see what the Wendat people were doing in this area. It is absolutely extraordinary. Members should also take the time to go to the Canadian Museum of History and see some of the artifacts from this area. It is stunning what they accomplished. It completely changes our attitudes on how our first nations farmed and interacted with other people.

This is a $140 million commitment to create a Rouge national urban park. It is a commitment to protect the ecological integrity of the park. It is a commitment to restore the dignity of our farmers, give them the long-term leases that they deserve and allow us to create something very special in an area that is home to some five million people.

I think we can get it done and I am looking forward to members supporting the bill and creating the Rouge national urban park.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, we looked at Rouge Park at committee during an urban conservation study. We heard from Parks Canada about the extensive consultation it has done and the way it has worked to try to bring everyone on board. However, as members heard earlier, this is going to be a difficult park to figure out. There are a lot of different interests, one might say competing interests. Parks Canada has done a good job of making sure that everyone is at the table and of trying to find out where the overlap is and how we can move forward with this.

I am in the same position as my colleague for Scarborough—Guildwood when he said earlier that he was surprised to even see that the bill has been tabled. I am surprised that we are still talking about the bill, because we do not know what the park will be. Without the transfer of lands from Ontario, we barely know what we are discussing here.

This is not a partisan question, but I wonder if government is open to taking a step back and pressing pause on this, because I do not know that we are ready to debate a bill when we do not even know what the park will look like.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member is right. Parks Canada has done a very good job. It is world-renowned in the work it does to protect and manage our parks.

We are going ahead with the bill because it is important to do so. The door will remain open to the Province of Ontario to transfer its lands. The door will remain open, as it always has, but we have to move forward with protecting the farmers in the area and protecting those lands that are owned by Markham. The current federal airport lands can be taken out of the airport reserve and put into a farming preserve. I do not think that anybody in the House would disagree that removing thousands of acres from a future potential airport and putting it into farming is a bad idea. It is a good idea, and we would protect our farmers.

Moving forward, we will leave the door open to the Province of Ontario, if it becomes satisfied with what it sees, if it decides to stop playing politics. I would be more interested in what the province had to say if it had not picked an arbitrary date of November 2015 and had not at one point said, “Give us $100 million and it's yours”. I do not trust that the provincial government wants to create a park with the highest ecological standards. However, I think if we can remove it and continue with the bill, we would protect the farm lands by taking that out of any future potential airport. Even at that, it is a win for my area and the environment.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak on a bill that deals with my hometown of Scarborough.

The possibilities and, as the parliamentary secretary said, the promise of this national urban park is certainly something for all of us to get excited about. It is a new type of park for a new era. With 80% of Canadians now living in urban environments, we need to have some national urban parks. This is really the test bed, the thing that any future endeavour is going to be measured against. It is incredibly important for us to get it right from the beginning.

The member was talking about political games being played by the provincial government, having delayed the decision until November 2015. This was an election promise that the Conservatives made in 2011. It was in the throne speech, and yet it has taken three years to get here.

Just like many other items, including trade deals, the Conservatives are announcing that the mission is accomplished before they have all the ducks in a row, before they have got the land from the province.

When my colleague from Halifax asked the question about hitting the pause button until we actually know what park we are dealing with, she asked a very relevant question. Given all the uncertainties, I am not sure how, once we get past second reading, into committee, and then come back for third reading, any member in this House could turn around and vote in favour of a park when we do not even know what the boundaries would be, without resolving this issue with the provincial government first.

If all the concerns can be addressed and a deal reached, then that would be the appropriate time to continue to move forward with the bill.

I find it interesting that we are hearing all these accusations of political games, when the Conservatives are playing the same games.

Over and over again, we heard about the Trudeau government in the 1970s expropriating land from the farmers and how much it hurt farmers. After Trudeau there was Joe Clark, and after Joe Clark there was Turner, and after Turner there was Mulroney, and after Mulroney there was Chrétien, and then Paul Martin. Now we have had eight years of the current Conservative government, and none of them have taken the steps to address that harm to the farmers that happened 40 years ago. None of them have taken the time to address those issues and to actually get that land farmed.

The member incorrectly stated that most of the land in the Pickering airport lands is being farmed right now. I would recommend that he take a drive around the area again, because most of the land is lying fallow. Many of the homes are falling down because the government has not maintained its responsibility to keep them in good repair. It is ignoring it.

The member should speak to Land Over Landings and take a drive around with its members. They are not scary people.

I know the government likes to play the game of friends and enemies game, and the game of “you are with us or you are against us”.

When the member for Oshawa was introducing the bill, and when I asked questions about the Friends of the Rouge Watershed's concerns that the protections would not match what is there now, he completely ignored it and dismissed the Friends of the Rouge Watershed as a fringe group.

Nothing will ever be accomplished in Rouge Park without buy-in from the Friends of the Rouge Watershed. They are the ones who have been there on the ground. They are the volunteers who have cared for and loved that park for 40 years. They are not going to let it be torn apart. They are not the fringe. They are the stakeholders. They are the people who are invested in that park already and have been for generations. Getting them onside is also critically important.

They went to the provincial government because they found there was nobody at the federal level who was willing to listen to them. I wish the provincial government had made this point before the last provincial election. That would have been a good time to make a stand on this and would have pushed all the leaders of the parties on that issue, and would have brought a really important Scarborough issue to the forefront.

I think that would have been really good for the debate and for making sure that this park that is going to be created is actually going to be the park we want and the park we need.

I have some personal experience with the park over the years, from visiting there as a child with my grandmother. Probably not many members of this House know, but for the first five years that I worked, from age 15 to 20, I worked in a daycare. I worked for Not Your Average Daycare in Scarborough. It has several locations across Scarborough.

They really had an innovative program. During the summertime, they used to take all the school-age programs from the different daycares and put them into one central location to basically create a summer camp. For the vast majority of the kids who were attending daycare, it was far beyond their families' financial means to send them away to camp, to have that experience in nature. By bringing all these school-age programs together, we would be able to give them a summer camp. It was still in the city and it was in a school, but we were able to take them to different places, so they could have some of those experiences.

One of the most important trips was the one out to Rouge Park. It is just magnificent when one comes into the park, because one sees that blend of urban and rural, of park and city. At the entrance to the park, it is abutted against the CN tracks, and then there is a beach. There is the fabulous Rouge beach. There is the lake, the beach, and then the train tracks, and of course all the myriad sounds that go with it.

On the other side are magnificent wetlands and a pond that are just spectacular. Individuals could be in a canoe and close their eyes and feel they are in Algonquin Park or hundreds of kilometres away outside the city. They could decide to paddle up or down the Rouge River. People who have spent time in a canoe know the sounds of rapids and waterfalls, and they have to be alert because they do not want to encounter any of those when they are in a canoe. On the Rouge, they do not have that, but as they approach highway overpasses and roads, they get a very similar sound from the cars going across the roadway. It sounds very much like rushing water. They can actually merge the two forums here.

It presents unique challenges, because there are not too many national parks that have to deal with city-sized infrastructure, whether we are talking about sewers, roadways, or electrification. Rouge Park, I would think, would certainly be the park with the best cellphone access that we can imagine, and that presents challenges to enjoying nature, but it also presents opportunities and new mediums to educate the population. I am thrilled that Parks Canada is working on an interpretive program based on a cellphone app that would actually give people self-guided tours in Rouge Park, one of those ways to actually harness technology to enhance the experience within the park.

I spent a lot of time there myself, growing up, and I also like taking the train whenever possible in my travels between Toronto and Ottawa, but certainly I used GO Transit back and forth, visiting friends and family all across the east end of Toronto.

One of the most spectacular sights I have ever seen in Toronto—my colleague, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, skated on it—is that pond in the wintertime when it is frozen, and all of a sudden Canada's national obsession takes over and a couple of nets get placed down and we get shinny and a skating rink on the pond, inside the boundaries of Toronto. It is a unique experience to have pond hockey happening in Toronto in the wintertime. It is not something anybody would think of, but it is just one of those unique facets of the park that make it a multi-use facility all year round.

There are also snowshoeing excursions in the wintertime, and my one experience of trying to do that did not result in much success, not because of the snowshoes and my falling down, although that would have happened many times, but actually because of one of the barriers to the park. Back then, I did not have a vehicle. My partner and I intended to take public transit on a Sunday to get there. The subway does not open until 9:00 a.m. on Sundays and the bus takes a long time, even from east-end Toronto, not even downtown or the west end. To get all the way out to Rouge Park via public transit can take two hours from the east end of town.

That is another problem that would have to be addressed, the public transit access to the park, because one of the main features is supposed to be public transit access. The public transit file is an absolute mess in Toronto these days, and certainly in the municipal election, one would have hoped that many new and great ideas would come forward.

Unfortunately two of the candidates, John Tory and Doug Ford, both have transit plans that end at the Scarborough Town Centre, that do not address anything in the eastern half of Scarborough. They do not even come close to addressing better transit access to the Rouge Park.

The only candidate who does have a plan that addresses improved transit in eastern Scarborough is Olivia Chow, the one person who uses public transit, and always has. She has never owned a car and every time she visits east Toronto, she takes transit out there, and I know how long it takes from all my years of using public transit.

Transit presents some unique challenges as well as some unique opportunities for the use of the park.

Other issues have come up.

I am sure that part of the reason why the province has decided to potentially hold up transferring this land, beyond the political games, is the environmental changes the Conservative government has made that have degraded environmental protections, in particular, the Navigable Waters Act.

Rouge River used to be a protected waterway, but it no longer has that protected status. Municipal infrastructure criss-crosses the park in different places. Line 9B pipeline crosses through the park. A few years ago there was an erosion where parts of the pipe were exposed. It took three days to get access to the pipeline. This means that if we ever have a spill at some point and it takes days before people get there to start to address the problem, then we need much more stringent environmental protections, even something as having stop valves on each side of the river.

If the Rouge River still had navigable waters protection, stop valves would be a required change with the reversing of the flow. We are dealing with a 40-year old pipeline and we have no additional protections. Approval has been given to run oil the other way and at a higher psi. This is problematic on old pipe.

Looking ahead at any other projects that might come forward, whether it is Energy East or anything else, we have to ensure that the strongest protections and measures are in place so that when pipelines cross crucial environmentally sensitive areas like the Rouge River, they will minimize and mitigate as much of the risk as is humanely possible.

It is just a fact of life that it is impossible to eliminate all risks in all situations, but we can do a lot to prevent problems from happening rather than simply picking up the pieces after a problem occurs. Unfortunately, with the changes to the Navigable Waters Act, this is the situation in which the federal government has left us. More effort is going to be put into cleaning up a problem than into preventing one from happening in the first place.

There are fish species in the river and there are migratory birds and endangered species. The endangered Carolinian forest is a very unique bit of forest in southern Ontario. The Rouge River is one of the only places in Canada that has that type of forest.

It is incredibly important that we do what we can to get things right. It is important that we have the right framework, the right protections in place to ensure that the park serves for generations to come. It is important that it set a really high standard that can be met for future national urban parks or even provincial and municipal urban parks that would follow.

Lots of folks on the other side forget that the federal government has a role to play with respect to leadership.The federal government should be ahead of the provinces and the municipalities when it comes to its thinking on environmental protection, so that thinking can filter down to other levels of government. We do not have that and we see that across the board with the Conservatives.

The Conservatives opposed a $15 minimum wage that would have sent a strong message toward fighting inequality in our country. They opposed it because they did not think it would impact a lot of people. It would not impact their people is more of the reason why they would oppose that.

I again bring attention to the fact that when introducing the bill, the member for Oshawa dismissed the Friends of the Rouge Watershed as an outright nuisance group and as radicals, as members on the other side so often do. Now that is coming back to bite them, because they now have a supporter in the provincial government.

The Conservatives want to lay blame at Trudeau's feet. Let us lay the blame at the feet of every Liberal and Conservative government that has followed for not addressing the issues of farmers for the last 40 years in that area.

My colleague from Beaches—East York, our agriculture critic and I toured the Pickering airport lands last year as part of a fact finding mission to see what we should do with this land. It is a tremendous track of green space. It is class A farmland that should be used for farming. It was taken away and has, in many cases, laid fallow for a really long time.

As I said, there is only one family farm left there, belonging to the Tapscotts, who emigrated from Scarborough many years ago. They have not updated any of their equipment or introduced any new practices in the last 40 years because the land could be taken away from them at any moment. As a result, they do not run as efficiently or as ecologically as they could, because successive Liberal and Conservative governments have failed to address the issue or at least give them the opportunity for a 10 or 15-year lease where they can invest back into the land that has provided for their family for generations. We would like to see that addressed at some point as well.

All of this consternation has really left us wondering if this park will ever be created. Under existing legislation, the province states that the protections are higher than those the federal government would put in place with the introduction of this park. Maybe the federal government could go back and talk to the provincial government to see about addressing these concerns. We will raise them here, and we will raise them in committee, but it is up to the Conservative government to act. It is the government.

The government is forging ahead without an agreement with the largest stakeholder in the province, which controls a huge amount of the land for this park. It is just incredible that it would steam ahead without having that agreement in place with the province. The parliamentary secretary said that we had an agreement, and that there was a memorandum of understanding. The province now thinks that the federal government is not upholding that standard and that the protections that would be put in place would not as good as what is there now.

The government is going say that it is better. Why does it not take the time to explain to Canadians why it thinks it is better than what is there now? Have those conversations with the provincial government.

I do not know why the government always seems to have so many problems discussing things with the provinces. It does not matter whether we are talking to health care, the environment or parks. It just seems to like to roughshod over everybody else. Frankly, the leader knows best, they will put it in place and everyone just has to trust them.

As one of my colleagues said, “just trust us” is not enough. That is not the barometer for any transparent or accountable government in our country. I would even argue that a future NDP government has to have opposition, effective critics and people on all sides of the argument, ensuring that they are coming together, because that is what makes bills and legislation.

In this case, it will make for a better park. Hearing from all sides and addressing as many of the concerns as humanly possible will ensure that we have a park that meets the best environmental standards. It will ensure that the farming continues to be allowed but that it is done in the most ecological manner possible, with the least amounts of phosphates and pesticides, and the most organic products available.

Let us use that area as a best example that we can share with other jurisdictions about how to coexist between farm and urban settings.We will need to have more of this in the future as more of Canada becomes urbanized and as we require more food to be developed locally. It is important for the future of our planet to ensure that more food is developed and produced locally so as to have fewer environmentally negative impacts.

We have a lot of problems with the bill as it is. I will be happy to see my colleagues in the environment committee eventually see this and study it further. I hope for once that we can actually see some compromise from the government so we can achieve what we all want to achieve, which is a national urban park in the Rouge Valley.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, the member talked about Land Over Landings. Looking at a number of its tweets, it talks about how it is able, through the agricultural preserve in this area, to feed the people of Toronto.

The member talks about the land not being farmed. I live there, and as I drive to Ottawa every Sunday night and come back from Ottawa every Friday night, I drive through this area that is all farmed. Every acre of it is farmed. The acres that are not farmed are the ones that were taken away from farmers and reforested.

I ask a very simple question for the member. The 1994 protocol calls for a 600-metre corridor. Jim Robb, Friends of the Rouge Watershed, suggested that at a minimum 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland would be taken out of production to create this corridor. That means farmers will be evicted. Is that what the member supports?

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I brought up the land that is not being farmed, which is the much larger tract of land. The member speaks of 1,700 acres. Thousands of acres are not being farmed right now as part of the reserved lands for the Pickering Airport.

We can find a way to have our cake and eat it too. Yes, those farmers have been there for many years and in some cases for hundreds of years. If we cannot find a way for them to continue to farm there ecologically in a way that is sustainable and that will not be a nuisance to the future park, the federal government has ample land that it could let them farm right next door. They can have a corridor—

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

It's already farmed.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, not the land inside the park. He just said the land inside the reserved area is not.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

No I didn't. I said it's all farmed, every acre.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please. The hon. member for Scarborough Southwest has the floor. It is sure difficult for members to understand when the conversation goes back and forth. I encourage members to direct their commentary to the Chair, and that sometimes avoids that sort of thing.

The hon. member for Scarborough Southwest will finish his comment.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I really do wish at times that the microphones would pick up more of that other side of the conversation because they would really hear how nonsensical some of the things they say in response to us are.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister is trying to say that all the land within the reserve of the Pickering Airport land is being farmed right now. It is not. There is one family farm left, and that is the Tapscotts. There are other farms, but there are entire ghost towns in that area that the current government and other governments have continued to ignore. We could be used as farmland.

If we cannot find a way to work out the differences between Friends of the Rouge Watershed and the farmers, there are alternatives there. However, I think solutions can be found.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think it was Bismarck who said that there are two things in life we should not actually see. One is the making of sausages and the second is the making of legislation. This does seem to be the situation here today. I do not know what is out in the lounge to eat this afternoon, but I hope it is not sausages.

Let us concede that the parliamentary secretary has a concern about his farmers, and some of those farmers are on provincial lands and some of them are on federal lands. If in fact he is concerned about security of tenure, which is a legitimate concern, presumably the federal government could unilaterally set in place longer-term leases, set ecological standards for the management of the land and make it consistent with Parks Canada standards.

That would leave the farmers, over which he has some direct control, some ability to farm in an ecologically and commercially sustainable fashion. I would be interested in the hon. member's comments.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for making sense, unlike our colleagues on the other side. That is exactly what must happen. The member is hung up on 1994. It has been 20 years and there are changes required and things that need to be updated. Until Friends of the Rouge Watershed hears a better plan from the government, which it has not yet, it will hold on to the plan that was there. It would be happy to negotiate an updated framework for 2014 if it was engaged on the issue. That is what is missing. The government has cast it off as an enemy and will not listen to anything it has to say.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I find this a fascinating discussion. There was a period of time when my family left northern Ontario and moved to Scarborough in the mid-seventies. When we moved to Warden—Finch, the backyard of our home was farmers' fields. People told me how 10 years before at Ellesmere it had been farmers' fields. Anyone wanting to date a Markham girl had to drive through miles and miles of cornfields before getting to the centre of Markham. That is all gone now. It has been heavily transformed into heavy urbanization.

As we see the increasing urbanization in southern Ontario, there is a need to have some levels of planning. I remember being told in school that some of the best class 1 farmlands in the entire country could be seen from the CN Tower. Much of that has been paved over and turned into condo development. Therefore, I would like to ask my hon. colleague this. What lessons can we learn from the issue of the Rouge and the importance of the Rouge River in terms of parkland, in terms of maintaining viable agriculture and viable wildlife space within the increasing urbanization of southern Ontario?

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my family goes back so far in Scarborough that St. Clair was farmland back when we settled in Scarborough. I am happy he asked the question about some of the lessons learned because it brings up something that I did not get to in my speech. Although I had an entire 20-minute speech prepared, I barely even looked at it.

The heat island effect was debated very recently in the House. Green spaces like the Rouge Park help to offset that incredible urban heat island effect that happens in our cities and artificially inflates the temperature. It causes more ecological problems, especially in the summertime, because if it is 2°, 3° or 4° hotter in the city people will have to make more use of air conditioning, electricity and other mitigating factors to offset what they have used. That is an important lesson.

However, we also have to move beyond thinking that we cannot have farm and city coexisting, just like business and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive but should be working hand in hand. The more food we can produce locally, the better off all of our cities will be in the future.

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

Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the member opposite talk about the issues related to Rouge Park. The Province of Ontario is showing a complete disregard for the creation of the park based on cheap political calculations and has expressed its so-called ecological concern at this late date.

I live 100 metres from the park and the lower Rouge Park is in my riding. I can tell members that the state of the park and its bare administration during the years has translated into continued neglect. This neglect was also briefly alluded to by the member for Scarborough—Guildwood.

I am asking the hon. member this. Does he or does he not support the creation of the first national urban park or is he endorsing the Ontario provincial Liberal government's steps to decide to deny and to delay the creation of the park?

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised if anyone in this chamber does not strongly support the creation of a national urban park. But the devil is in the details and the devil is always in the details. The province might be playing political games, but the government has its narrative set up already, that the province is withholding and playing cheap political games to prevent the park from happening. The follow-up line is that they have been neglecting the park.

If we really want to play that game, let us go right back to the reason I became involved in politics, which was Mike Harris and the devastating damage he did to environmental protections in Ontario. If we really want to go back into why there is trouble in our parks, we just have to look back at the Mike Harris era. It devastated environmental protections and started the move to self-regulation that the current government has been more than happy to continue with: self-regulation of rail, of food inspections and of airline safety. That was all started during the Mike Harris government, that era of neglect of our safety and our parks.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to rise today to participate in the debate on the legislation in front of us, which would create a first in Canada, a new national urban park in the greater Toronto area.

The first thing I want to do is acknowledge all the people who have worked tirelessly on this issue for over two decades. Literally tens of thousands of Canadians in the greater Toronto area and the Golden Horseshoe have been involved with this initiative.

This started some 25 years ago, as members opposite and on this side of the House have mentioned, when agricultural lands and open spaces began to be paved over by the ever-growing sprawl in the greater Toronto area. At that time many concerned citizens decided to get involved, become activists, petition and call upon municipal, provincial and federal governments to preserve this important part of Canada's biodiversity.

It started with the involvement of those citizens in the 1980s that then led to an adoption in the House in the 1990s of a motion that minister Pauline Browes introduced and was continued with by people like Glenn De Baeremaeker on Toronto's City Council.

More recently, in the 1990s, work was done by the Rouge Park Alliance, which was chaired by Mr. Alan Wells, past chief administrative officer of the Region of York, appointed by premier McGuinty to chair that alliance. I had the privilege of sitting on that alliance with a number of municipal and provincial stakeholders in recent years and doing very important work with Mr. Wells. Minister Flaherty appointed me to that alliance in June of 2008 and I worked with that group for about five years.

When I was first appointed to the Rouge Park Alliance, I had no idea about this gem in York region, now the city of Markham, and the city of Toronto. As an MP from the west part of the GTA, I had no idea that this ecological gem existed and what is even more surprising is that I lived in the city of Toronto for 15 years and I had no idea, as a Torontonian then, that this existed on the eastern part of the reaches of the city. After I was appointed to the Rouge Park Alliance, I quickly became aware. The scales were dropped from my eyes and I became aware of this precious area in the eastern part of the GTA.

The Rouge Park Alliance and its members worked together for a period of about a year and a half to take a look at the future of the park. There were many challenges that the park and the area faced. One was a very complex system of governance that had no legal standing to affect outcomes, a multiplicity of players and interests that all had competing agendas. It was decided that we needed to come forward with a new governance model.

Therefore, the Rouge Park Alliance spent a year and a half consulting dozens and dozens of stakeholders about the future of the park. That culminated in a report that was adopted in early 2010 by the Rouge Park Alliance, adopted unanimously I might add, that recommended the creation of a national urban park in the Rouge watershed. That is the genesis of how we got to where we are today.

The legislation in front of us is the result of broad consultations. There are two sets of consultations in particular I would like to focus on to illustrate the number of people and the depth of the consultations.

The first set of consultations were held between 2008 and 2010 by the Rouge Park Alliance itself. The Rouge Park Alliance was made up of representatives from the Government of Canada, the province of Ontario and all constituent municipalities, the city of Toronto, the region of York, the town of Markham, as it was then called, Durham region, Pickering and Ajax, stakeholders like the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, environmental groups like Save the Rouge. They were all represented at the table by the Rouge Park Alliance. When we conducted that year-and-a-half analysis that produced the report, we consulted widely, not only with stakeholders but with many other people in the region.

We consulted with organizations such as the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, environmental groups like the David Suzuki Foundation and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, dozens of meetings with dozens of stakeholders. Those consultations produced the report of the Rouge Park Alliance, in early 2010, recommending the creation of a national urban park.

Now, after that report was approved unanimously by the Rouge Park Alliance, a number of us convinced Minister Flaherty and the then minister of the environment, the current member for Thornhill, that this was an important initiative, that the Government of Canada should get behind this initiative, that we should concur in that report, and that we should act on this.

As a result, in 2011, the cabinet deliberated on this proposal from the Rouge Park Alliance in a memorandum to cabinet and came to a record of decision that decided the Government of Canada would support the creation of a national urban park. In the fall of 2011, after cabinet approval, Parks Canada was instructed by the minister and the Office of the Privy Council to begin public consultations, the second round of consultations, concerning the creation of this new park. Those consultations were even more broad and deeper than the consultations that had been held previously by the Rouge Park Alliance.

Parks Canada heard from 11,000 Canadians about the future of this park, consulted with 150 stakeholder groups, and included MPs such as the MP for Scarborough—Rouge River, who I had the pleasure of personally inviting to a consultation that was held by Parks Canada at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus in the fall of 2011. Out of those consultations came a draft management plan, which Parks Canada has been working on, and the legislation in front of us today.

The legislation has been the result of not just broad and deep consultations, but the work of thousands of ordinary citizens, ordinary Canadians who care deeply about the environment in which they live. Therefore, the legislation is the on-paper dream of many tens of thousands of people who live in the greater Golden Horseshoe.

It is important to note that the legislation is not simply paper. Minister Flaherty, when he was alive, put $144 million in the fiscal framework for this park for the first 10 years it comes into existence. The money has been budgeted. There is real money and real resources, $144 million, that will go to the creation and support of this park, and $7.6 million a year after the first 10 years. This is real money that would lead to the tangible result of the creation of this national urban park.

I urge members to support this park because of those resources that will be brought to bear, but I also urge them to support it for two very important reasons.

The first one is accessibility.

This park will sit in the greater Toronto area, and as such it will be accessible to millions of Canadians. It is unlike most other parks in our national parks system. Most parks in our national parks system are not accessible by millions of Canadians, especially Canadians living in the St. Lawrence Lowlands. They are not accessible geographically because they lie in far-flung places of the country, like Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island, or Jasper National Park, which I have never been to, out in the Alberta Rockies, or Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island, or Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador. These parks are often far away and very expensive to get to.

This park is in the backyard of some 8.5 million Canadians who live in the greater Golden Horseshoe.

This park is not only accessible geographically to those millions of Canadians, many of whom are new Canadians who have never had the privilege of experiencing the great Canadian outdoors, it is also, unlike many of these national parks, accessible economically.

To get to Nahanni National Park to do a one- or two-week canoe trip, it can cost upwards of $6,000 or $7,000 per canoeist. That is well beyond the means of many Canadians. To hike up the Weasel River in Auyuittuq National Park, it can cost upwards of $7,000 or $8,000 just to get there, do the trip and get out. That is also well beyond the economic means of many Canadians.

This park, though, this national urban park in the Rouge Valley will be accessible by a simple subway stop, a $3 TTC token or a simple car ride to that part of the country. This park is accessible in a way that millions of new Canadians will be able to enjoy. It will introduce them to our great treasure, our great national inheritance, our great outdoors.

It will also create a park that is 10 to 15 times the size of Central Park in Manhattan, a park that far outsizes Stanley Park in Vancouver. This is truly an opportunity for us to introduce millions of Canadians to the national park system, especially new Canadians, many of whom live in the greater Golden Horseshoe.

There is a second reason why this park should be supported by members on both sides, and that is ecology. There is an ecological reason to support this park. Parks Canada, through federal legislation, has a mandate to protect each ecologically significant part of Canada's biosphere. That is the mandate of Parks Canada.

We have done so to a large extent, as governments, present and past. We have protected the rainforest in the Pacific Rim National Park on the western reaches of Vancouver Island. We have protected the Atlantic coast and the great mountains of Atlantic Canada in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland.

We have protected much of the prairies and the boreal forest zones. We have protected pieces of the Rockies, such as Jasper and Banff National Parks. We have protected marine areas, like Fathom Five National Marine Park in Georgian Bay. We have protected much of Canada's unique biodiversity.

However, the one area in the country where we have not protected a significant piece of our biodiversity is in the Carolinian forest zone, an eastern deciduous forest zone. It is the forest zone that lies south of a line drawn between Stratford, Ontario, and the city of Toronto. I would argue it is one of the most precious ecological spaces in this country for one simple reason. It is the most dense biosphere in this country.

It contains the greatest number of species of flora and fauna. There are more species of flora and fauna per square kilometre in the eastern deciduous forest zone than in any other square kilometre of Canada's other pieces of biodiversity. However, as governments, we have yet to protect a significant chunk of that.

That is why the act is so very important. For the first time, we will protect thousands of acres of that precious biodiversity in this part of Canada.

When we came forward with this Rouge Park Alliance report, when the cabinet was deliberating on what to do to protect these thousands of acres of biodiversity, we had a conundrum.

The conundrum was this. The area of the Rouge watershed is replete with modern civilization. It has the 401 going through it. It has sewer lines from York Region that go through the York-Durham line onto Pickering and Ajax and to the water treatment plants on the shores of Lake Ontario. It has hydro lines. It has hundreds of kilometres of dirt and paved roads. It has civilization running through it. It has farmland. It has many other things that do not normally exist in our national park system.

Clearly, the government cannot remove the 401 from this part of the Rouge. It cannot remove the toll road, the 407, from this part of the Rouge. It cannot remove hydro lines or sewer pipes. It cannot do all that, and it has to acknowledge that this area is different than places such as Banff or Jasper or Gros Morne or Pacific Rim National Parks.

The government had two options to pursue. One was to water down the national park standard, which has an ecological standard of wilderness. The other option was to create a new second type of national park. Wisely, the government decided to go down the second path. To water down the wilderness ecological standard of our national parks would put the future ecological integrity of those national parks at risk.

By introducing a second standard, we can create this firewall, so to speak, around the national urban park to ensure we do not weaken the national park standard of wilderness ecology.

We introduced the legislation to create a first, a national urban park that would still meet a very strict standard. In fact, it would exceed the provincial park standard in Ontario. It is similar to the provincial park standard in that it acknowledges existing uses such as agriculture, the 401 and the 407. It would acknowledge existing needs to stop forest fires and flooding, which we do not stop in national parks. It would acknowledge the need for hydro lines and sewer pipes to traverse the region. It would acknowledge the existence of agriculture. However, it is different than the provincial park standard because it is a stronger standard.

I love the Ontario provincial park system. Every summer I canoe through our beautiful provincial parks: in Algonquin Park from Canoe Lake up to Brent and back; through the beautiful lakes like OSA in Killarney Park, from Georgian Bay and through Baie Fine. I have canoed up the Missinaibi River, a provincially protected area, up to Moosonee.

I love our provincial park system, but in the crown jewel of the provincial park system, in Algonquin Park, the province of Ontario today allows logging. The Algonquin Provincial Park has a provincial logging authority. There is logging in the provincial park. The province also allows for hunting and fishing. I know because I have fished in Algonquin Park and caught a smallmouth bass. The province of Ontario's standards for provincial parks allow for resource extraction such as mining, logging, hunting and fishing.

This legislation and the government's draft management plan would not allow those activities to take place. It would not allow any resource extraction such as mining or logging to take place in the Rouge national urban park. It would not allow the removal of native species of flora and fauna. It would not allow for hunting, or for the removal of fossils or other national heritage features.

Also, this proposed legislation and its associated budget would, for the first time, ensure that full-time Parks Canada staff are on site 365 days of the year to enforce the national urban park standard. The dedicated year-round enforcement officers exclusive to the Rouge Park would prevent illegal dumping, hunting and other long-standing problems in the park area.

In closing, I strongly urge members to support the legislation. It may not be perfect, but it is very good legislation that would provide a lasting legacy for the millions of Canadians who live in this area.

When I have traversed Algonquin Park, I have often thought about the people and the leaders who had the wisdom and foresight in the late 19th century to stand up to the Ottawa lumber barons, to stand up to the vested interests, and say that we needed to preserve this part of the transition forest between the boreal and the southern forests in Algonquin. I often think of those leaders who, over 100 years ago, had the foresight to establish this park so that today generations of Canadians have come to enjoy parks such as Algonquin.

The proposed legislation is in that spirit. The bill would benefit our children and grandchildren, and for that reason, I urge all members of the House to support it at second reading.

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

Mr. Speaker, I find the spirit the member presents today for the proposed legislation quite depressing. What I get from him is that we are going to create a second tier, a diluted watered-down tier, of national park that is an urban national park, because we cannot remove the 401, because we cannot remove hydro towers.

What the bill offers is the opportunity to make sense of the notion of urban ecological integrity. If the current Conservative government would hang on to that concept and apply it to an urban space, I think there is great hope for building ecological integrity into our urban spaces and our urban lives, which we need.

However, the notion that we need to rope off this area and have a lower concept of ecological integrity because it is urban is quite a dismal view of urban life in Canada and urban possibilities for Canadians, which, frankly, leaves me depressed.

I would like to hear the member's response to that.

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

Mr. Speaker, quite simply, this area could not possibly ever meet the national park ecological wilderness standard, for a number of reasons. First, in national parks, we allow uncontrolled forest fires to take place. We allow natural flooding to take place. We do not allow agriculture. We do not allow the construction of new underground sewer pipes in our national park system.

We have to acknowledge that this park sits in the GTA. It sits in southern Ontario in an area that has been subject to civilization for centuries. We need to ensure the co-uses of the area, such as agriculture, such as controlled flooding, such as the management of forest fires. That is why we need a second standard.

This is wonderful legislation, because it would also allow us, at some future date, to deal with the issue of Gatineau Park, across the river.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his thoughtful speech. As I said earlier, I think we could actually do business. I agree with him that we cannot set up a national parks standard similar to parks like the Nahanni, et cetera. I agree that this is off the table. However, he goes on with what I consider to be a straw man argument, which is that in the provincial parks, we can mine and log. Well, there is actually no discussion about mining or logging or resource extraction of any kind in this particular park. I am sure the five million people in the GTA who would enjoy this particular park more than possibly others would be absolutely outraged if that were allowed. I respectfully suggest that it is a straw man argument.

He goes to the standard set out in the bill, which he thinks is a wonderful standard. Were it to be accompanied by more forthcoming and understandable concepts, we would not be hearing concerns from the David Suzuki Foundation, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Wildlands League, Sierra Club, Save the Oak Ridges Moraine, Environmental Defence,and Friends of the Rouge Watershed, which have called on the government to uphold its commitment to the memorandum of agreement.

As it stands now, the draft federal legislation threatens to undermine 25 years of consultation, scientific study, and provincial policy. I am in a bit of a dilemma. I would like to believe the hon. member, but those who have actually studied this and participated in it do not.

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

Mr. Speaker, I made reference to the provincial parks standard in Ontario simply because the Province of Ontario has raised this as an issue. I believe the province's position on this park is wrong. I believe that this legislation puts in place a stricter ecological standard than exists for Ontario's provincial parks system. It would create a stricter standard than exists today for Algonquin Provincial Park, Killarney Provincial Park, and the other parks in the Ontario parks system. That is why I referenced the provincial standard in Ontario in my speech.

The second point I would make is that if we were to talk to all the environmental NGOs on this issue, they would argue that they want to see improvements to the bill. That is fine, but as I have said many times in the House before, perfection is the enemy of the good. What we have here is very good legislation for a very good initiative that would create a first in Canada: a national urban park that would benefit millions of Canadians living in the Golden Horseshoe.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for the level of eloquence and knowledge he has brought to this debate.

I just want to ask him a question. What is the plan for urban reforestation under the bill?

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

Mr. Speaker, the important thing to know about reforestation in the bill and in the draft management plan for the Rouge is that we would continue to allow agricultural use in the park. In fact, we would strengthen agricultural use in the park. We would go from one-year leases to multi-year leases that would allow the farmers to plan longer term, with a greater degree of certainty.

Also, the draft management plan, which supports continued agricultural use in the park, is strongly supported by almost every single environmental group. These are groups like the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the David Suzuki Foundation, and many others. They strongly support the continuation of agricultural uses in the park. The draft management plan in this legislation would allow those uses to continue. The voice of the member for Oak Ridges—Markham, who has been so vocal and strong in this regard, will continue to be heard, and we will continue to allow agricultural uses.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Beaches—East York and I were talking about the fact that there is an actual debate happening here. I do not know if anyone noticed that, but it is exciting to talk about real ideas in the House.

In that spirit, I, too, want to believe my colleague across the way when he talks about this park having good legislation around it to keep its ecological integrity and about it being strong, robust legislation.

This is a comment more than a question. It is really hard to trust the government on this file, and it is hard when there is a national parks act that talks about maintaining ecological integrity and then we have one bill about one park that says we will “consider” ecological integrity. I can accept that there might need to be a new standard for urban parks. However, I would feel more comfortable if that new standard were a stand-alone discussion. Maybe there could be an amendment to the parks act that would say that if we have urban parks, we have to consider different things, because it is complicated. I do not know how that would be done, but we would feel more reassured knowing that this was not opening a door for every other forthcoming piece of park legislation and that this was actually about urban parks.

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

Mr. Speaker, I can assure the member opposite that this legislation does not in any way, shape, or form impact the ecological wilderness standard of national parks like Jasper, Banff, and every other park in our national parks system. It establishes a new, second type of park, a national urban park. One of the things that might be helpful for the member opposite in allaying her concerns is to get a copy of the draft management plan for the park, if she does not have one already. She could perhaps put a question on the order paper, and I am sure Parks Canada would be obliged to provide that information to her.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Wellington—Halton Hills will know that there is no other member in the House for which I have greater respect, except for the hon. member for Cape Breton—Canso, who raises his hand at this moment, so it pains me to disagree. I do hate to differ, and I literally regret differing with my hon. colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills.

While the present Bill C-40 does not do as much damage to the standards of national parks as did the Sable Island National Park Reserve act, which was regrettably passed by unanimous consent in June 2013, we have before us a bill that needs improvement. My friend from Wellington—Halton Hills referenced the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, but when I look at its website, it says “Rouge Valley: Getting it right for Canada's first National Urban Park”. It urges its supporters to ensure that the bill will put conservation values first, and they are not satisfied with the current state of Bill C-40.

I note also that it is a red herring to claim that we do not put out fires in national parks. The Gulf Islands National Park Reserve in my riding aggressively puts out forest fires. We only allow uncontrolled forest fires in national parks when they are fire-driven ecosystems, such as in the northern boreal, but not in the Gulf Islands and not in the Rouge.

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

Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge the member's point about forest fires, but I would point out that we are at debate on second reading. This is about whether to send the bill to committee for further study and potential amendments. That is why I urge all members to support the bill at its first vote at second reading.

I would also add that the member opposite and I have long talked about this issue. She was in the government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as a staffer in the 1980s, working with the hon. Tom McMillan on this very file with the hon. Pauline Browes, so I welcome her interest in this file, and I encourage her to support it at second reading so that her concerns can be examined.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The hon. member's time has expired.

Before I give the floor to the hon. member for Drummond to resume debate, I must inform him that I will have to interrupt him at 2 p.m., when statements by members will begin.

The hon. member for Drummond has the floor.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, from the outset I would like to mention that I will be sharing my time with someone yet to be determined.

Before I begin my speech, I would like to say something about this debate. I listened to all the speeches today, and some members have done an excellent job. I would like to say that I met with a number of environmental groups who spoke to me about the problem of ecological integrity in Rouge Park. They told me that it is very important to keep the concept of ecological integrity and to make exceptions that will make it possible to adapt the national park to urban realities. This would help maintain very high standards.

I would like to come back to the importance of parks and nature in Canada. The marvellous WWF Living Planet Report 2014 contains a truly important proverb that really puts everything in context: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”. That is really important. That concept must be part of our actions and our sustainable development. The future of my children and my grandchildren is one of the reasons why I entered politics. The report continues:

Yet...we are not proving good stewards of our only planet....The way we meet our needs today is compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs...

We must understand that if everyone on earth consumed resources like Canadians do at present, it would take more than three planets to meet our needs. We are mortgaging our children's future, which is really not a good thing. The report makes that clear.

I have met often with representatives from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. They said some key things about the importance of parks in Canada.

According to a federal government study from 2011, Canada's national parks support 33,000 jobs across the country, providing a stable, long-term economic base for rural and remote communities. The study also found that, for every federal dollar invested in national parks, more than $6 goes back into the national GDP. Parks are therefore very important for our economy.

That brings us to the much talked about Rouge Park. A number of my colleagues expressed their concerns about the federal government's ability to ensure the ecological integrity and health of the park and the natural environment. Nature in this part of our country is actually very important.

I would like to come back to a report by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development and a report by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, which said that the federal government made major cuts in 2012, thereby reducing our scientific capacity to only one-third of what it was. If we have only one-third of our scientific capacity, we will have a hard time meeting the needs. In fact, according to the report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, “ecological integrity is a characteristic of healthy ecosystems”.

That is very important and indeed it is set out in the National Parks Act. If we want Rouge Park to become a national park, it must have ecological integrity. It says so in the legislation.

The commissioner's 2013 fall report says:

...the Agency's governing legislation and policies specify that the “maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity, through the protection of natural resources and natural processes, shall be the first priority of the Minister when considering all aspects of the management of parks.”

That is the law. The priority in the management of national parks is the maintenance and restoration of ecological integrity.

That has to be the priority for the Rouge national urban park. There can be adaptations in the future with exceptions for an urban park as needed. However, the basic principle of ecological integrity must be maintained.

I am a member of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, and several of my Conservative colleagues have said that they would never touch the ecological integrity of national parks. If that is so, then they should not start doing it here. This should be the priority, and new terms can be added to adapt later. I am very concerned about the federal government's approach to ecological integrity because the commissioner's report states:

We found that overall spending on Heritage Resources Conservation decreased by 15 percent in the 2012-13 fiscal year, compared with the average of the preceding six years, with further reductions planned [after that...]. The planned staffing numbers in Heritage Resources Conservation were reduced by 23 percent.... More specifically, staffing in the science work stream [those involved in ecological integrity] was reduced by 33 percent during this period, as 60 of 179 positions were eliminated.

The federal government has everything it needs to protect the ecological integrity of the Rouge national urban park. That is why we completely disagree. We are very concerned about that possibility.

According to the Rouge national urban park bill, the minister is not required to consider ecosystem and wildlife health. He is not required to rehabilitate ecosystem health, just to consider it. What a joke. They cannot simply consider it; they have to implement strict rules.

In conclusion, we will support this bill because it is important to move forward with the Rouge national urban park. People have been working on it for a long time, and it is really important. As a member of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, I will ensure that this bill is amended to make ecological integrity the priority.

I think it is a real shame that the Conservatives have started blaming the Ontario Liberal government for future inappropriate use of the park. On the contrary, they should be reaching out to the Government of Ontario and provincial governments. The Conservatives tend to be high and mighty with the provincial governments, telling them things will be done their way, period. What they should do is sit down and negotiate with them.

I find it unfortunate that a provincial government has come under attack in the House. Instead, the Conservative government should be working in partnership with the provincial governments and Rouge River advocacy groups. That is a real shame. That is why it will be much harder to work with the Government of Ontario, given the way it has been attacked here.

An NDP government will provide all of the necessary support to ensure that this park is protected so that we can preserve its biodiversity and help surrounding communities tap into the full economic and tourism potential that our national parks have to offer.

There is absolutely no doubt that creating parks will be one of our priorities when we form the government in 2015. At that time, we will ensure that ecological integrity is a priority, just as most environmental groups are calling for. Of course, there may be exceptions when it comes to urban parks such as the Rouge national urban park, for example.

[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.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for York South—Weston talked in his excellent speech about the importance of connectivity between the Oak Ridges Moraine and through the Rouge national park. Some of the stakeholders, including, for example, the Friends of the Rouge, have suggested that we should have wider corridors, perhaps in the order of about 600-metre corridors.

Does the member have any particular comment with respect to the suggestion that is coming from the Friends of the Rouge Park?

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

Mr. Speaker, I will not get into specifics about the actual width of any particular corridor.

My comments were that if the park can be expanded to include lands to the north that connect the park to the moraine, which is the source of the water that flows down the Rouge River, then it would provide us with a better opportunity to protect what eventually flows down into the park. It would provide us with a better opportunity to study, to enhance and to hopefully preserve what is a wonderful ecological piece of the city of Toronto that requires a protection that is currently not provided.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to ask a question on this very important issue among many colleagues from Scarborough, which I think is an exciting thing because that is where I am from originally.

Given the government's environmental track record, given the government's laggard behaviour vis-a-vis climate change—in fact it was only a few years ago it was denying the existence of climate change—is the member for York South—Weston confident and comfortable that the protections in the bill would see the Rouge national urban park fulfill all of its possibilities and potential?

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

Mr. Speaker, I am not confident that the current wording of the bill would provide the protections necessary so that this park could achieve its fullest potential. Although we are agreeing to support the bill at second reading, that is one of the reasons we will be presenting significant amendments to the bill, in order to reinforce the notion that the ecological integrity of the park is something that requires protection, not merely consideration.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Resuming debate. I have noted the other members who were not able to get up on this last round of questions and comments. We will do our best to work them into the next round or two.

The hon. member for Davenport.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place on behalf of the good people of Davenport in the great city of Toronto to debate this bill on an urban park in Toronto. In fact, it is in Scarborough, which is a little dear to my heart, given that I grew up in Scarborough.

It is important to note that there are many people who grow up in Toronto and in greater Toronto area, and there are many people who live in Toronto, who are cut off from the natural endowments the city offers. There are many reasons that happens. I am dwelling on this because of the importance of having green space in an urban context. That is important, as long as people have access to it.

I have spoken to seniors, for example, in my community who came to Canada as immigrants and worked very hard their whole lives and never actually had the opportunity to experience the lake. In fact, they did not even realize that Toronto was right beside a lake. They have not had the opportunity to explore the green spaces.

Scarborough has acquired a reputation, which I have always felt was incredibly unfair, even though I grew up at Markham and Lawrence, as being a concrete jungle. In fact, it has some of the most beautiful southern Ontario landscapes one could imagine. I invite you down any time, Mr. Speaker.

The issue I am raising is the issue of access. We have so much to offer in the city of Toronto, but we have a growing gap between those who can access these wonders and those who cannot. That gap largely hinges on economics and the income gap between the rich and the poor.

We have communities in the north part of our city with young people who have never gone downtown or visited City Hall, although these days, I do not know if people would want to visit City Hall. These young people have never visited the museums in downtown Toronto. They have never swum in the lake that is right there, at the side of the Gardiner Expressway.

A project that is going to create an urban national park in the eastern part of the city is incredibly important, if we do it right. The NDP has a number of questions about whether we are doing it right.

The NDP is strongly in favour of protecting the ecological integrity of Canada through the creation of national parks. However, these parks must be protected by strong environmental legislation backed up by sound, scientifically based management plans. The Rouge Park is no exception.

There is conditional support. We support moving the bill to committee to strengthen it. Part of the reason is that we do not trust the Conservative government on the issue of environmental protection. It has a long record of doing everything in its power, which is considerable right now, unfortunately, to diminish, denigrate, and demolish environmental protection right across this country. We are very concerned about this.

The way the government has first made a promise then delivered a bill that is weaker than the promise gives New Democrats some real concerns.

From coast to coast to coast, Canadians recognize the importance of oversight and well-funded institutions that protect our environment and well-funded parks.

New Democrats have many concerns about this bill, which we want to address in committee.

We believe the national park legislation and management plan should adopt the longstanding Rouge Park vision, goal and objectives; strengthen and implement the existing environmental protection policy framework; protect a healthy and sustainable 100 km² Rouge national park area; restore a sustainable and integrated natural heritage system; dedicate more of the park to nature and public enjoyment instead of private leases; transition towards smaller-scale farms that support healthy local food production; clearly prioritize ecological health and conservation of the Carolinian and mixed woodland plain forest; ensure that all activities that may affect the Rouge national urban park undergo staunch environmental assessments; and, finally, include a science-based management plan.

In other words, we have a long list of items we need to raise. We have a park, and the partner with the largest parcel of land is not in support of the direction the government is going right now. That also underlines a serious concern, and the concern is about leadership. The concern is about the seriousness with which we take our actions in this regard.

It is incumbent upon the government to work with all the stakeholders in a manner that moves this park forward in the way it was described initially. It is also important that we look at the natural value and work together to find a way to bring this forward in the manner in which it was initially planned.

On this side of the House, we look forward to working with our fellow parliamentarians to see this park finally realized with the strongest environmental and ecological protections it should have.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to compare and contrast the legislation in front of us with provincial legislation that governs provincial parks.

Yes, it is true that provincial legislation includes the words “ecological integrity”, but those words mean little if we look at the overall provincial legislation. Let us compare the two pieces of legislation, provincial and federal, with respect to two issues, logging and hunting.

The Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, 2006, says, in respect of hunting, in subsection 15(2), “hunting is permitted on the public lands...added to Algonquin Park”. What does the federal statute say in section 18? It says, “it is prohibited to (b) hunt a wild animal in the park”.

I will do a second quick comparison. The Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, 2006, says, in subsection 17(1), “timber may be harvested for commercial purposes in Algonquin Provincial Park”. The federal statute says, in subsection 18(2), “It is prohibited to (f) harvest timber in the park”.

The federal legislation in front of us clearly is stronger in respect of the actual outcomes of protecting the park. The Rouge Park would be a better protected park than Algonquin Provincial Park, and that is why I am happy that the member opposite is supporting this legislation.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was listening for a question, but it was a comment.

I would simply like to say that words matter in legislation. Of course, we stand here day in and day out and in committee battling over words, because they actually mean a lot. That is why we are raising these concerns about the weakening of the protections that are in the bill right now.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, putting aside the very strange comment we just heard from the opposite side, my question is not about whether the Conservatives do or do not support hunting and do or do not support logging. Apparently they do not anymore. That is news, I guess, to many of their party followers.

The issue that I think concerns us all is the environmental standards that have to do with the quality of water, the quality of soil, and the quality of the natural infrastructure.

Does the member share the concern of our party that the federal standards do not speak to water quality and the quality of the biosphere and to whether some of the runoff from local farms may in fact damage the quality of the natural environment we seek to protect with the park designation?

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the short answer is yes, we share those concerns. It is why we are calling for the legislation to include some of these issues, such as a transition toward smaller-scale farms that support healthy, local food production, which of course would mitigate some of the potential runoff.

We have concerns. The Conservatives have been weak on environmental protection in general. The issues with the bill before us underline the concerns that we and many Canadians have.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from London has brought in a private member's motion on urban forests. Clearly one of the things that is important is having a national strategy, and that is part of her bill.

Could my colleague share with me the importance of protecting parks and urban forests and the importance of the national strategy the NDP has put forward?

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as my colleague for Beaches—East York never wastes an opportunity to underline in this place, Canada is increasingly an urban country, and we are facing a climate change crisis. We are facing increasing difficulty in our urban areas with extreme heat and various other issues related to climate change.

What is important is the precedent it sets and the signal it sends to other levels of government that we take these issues seriously in our urban areas.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Before resuming debate, it is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Acadie—Bathurst, Rail Transportation; and the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra, National Defence.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to join the debate on Bill C-40, an act respecting the Rouge national urban park.

This legislation would create the first national urban park in Canada, which is a positive step forward for our national park system. Having an area of pristine wildlife so close to 20% of Canada's population will offer a great value to the entire nation.

While the proposed Rouge national urban park is not within my riding of Scarborough--Agincourt, I grew up only a few short kilometres away, and I can tell the House that the Rouge lands are truly a national treasure. I remember attending my first day camp near the metropolitan zoo in Toronto when I was about 8 or 9 years old, and in many ways this was my first exposure to the splendours of the Rouge Valley system. Because I came from an immigrant family without significant means, this was in many ways my first exposure to the outdoors.

More recently, over the past number of years I have had the pleasure of going back to the Rouge Valley as a cub pack leader and as a scout troop leader, participating in programs such as the 10,000 trees for the Rouge program and planting trees in the Rouge park to add to the wonderful biodiversity found there.

My family has taken significant advantage of the Glen Rouge campground that is run by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

It is a fabulous opportunity. We have heard from colleagues on all sides of the House about the tremendous accessibility that this potential national urban park would afford to many residents within the greater Golden Horseshoe. It represents one of the last great unspoiled wildernesses and also happens to be coupled with some of the most outstanding farmland in the country. For example, my family has also had the privilege of going on a number of occasions to Whittamore's Farm. Those were opportunities to expose my family to farming culture, particularly as we enter into the fall harvest season.

Let me simply join my colleagues on all sides of the House in expressing my excitement at the potential opportunity that the creation of this new national urban park would afford to our community and to all residents within Toronto.

I am also particularly pleased to see that the government is building upon the tremendous work that has been done by the provincial government with the establishment of the Greenbelt in 2005. The Greenbelt is one of the largest and most successful areas of preserved green space in the world and serves as a showcase for what an urban green space can offer on a large and significant scale. I had the privilege of being in the legislature as a staffer at the time, and I watched this wonderful legacy unfold.

Unfortunately, at that time the Ontario Conservatives wanted to allow continued development on this precious piece of land, as we may hear from certain members in this House, so it is heartening to see support from the government in the House today and to recognize that it is indeed time to establish a national urban park. I do want to recognize the tremendous work that has been done on all sides of the House and by many stakeholders over the last 20 years, work that has led to where things sit today.

The Rouge national park would provide important connectivity with, for example, the sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine leading to the shoreline of Lake Ontario. Earlier the member for York South—Weston highlighted the importance of creating linkages and connectivities between these various important spaces.

We support this particular bill, and it appears that essentially all parties across this House will likely be supporting the bill as it moves forward at second reading. However, like most things that the government does, its efforts to create this new national urban park, at least from our perspective, fall short in some key aspects.

This park is to be created using lands currently held by the Government of Ontario. In fact, lands being held by the Government of Ontario would represent approximately two-thirds of the total park lands if and when they were transferred to federal control. However, despite the fact that intergovernmental talks have been going on for a number of years and should be a shining example of intergovernmental co-operation, sadly, we have sometimes seen strife taking place between the two orders of government.

For example, when the government was supposed to have engaged in a positive announcement last summer when it was signing the memorandum of agreement to create this national park, it unfortunately turned out to be a bit of a public relations nightmare.

I do not necessarily want to diminish the long-standing efforts of the many people who have been the driving force behind this park or on the long consultative process that has occurred, but if the government was truly committed to building a first-class national urban park, we have to ask why so many environmental groups are applauding the recent actions of the Ontario government.

In this debate I have heard the accusation that the Government of Ontario is playing politics with the formation of the Rouge national park, but the question is who is playing politics with whom. For example, it was this government that blindsided the provincial government when the announcement was made last year about the ongoing development of the Pickering airport at the same press conference, and the Government of Ontario was not given a heads-up that it would be happening.

Let us be frank: it is not as though the government has a reputation for sound environmental bona fides. Members could just read, for example, the Commissioner of the Environment's report that was issued yesterday, which was damning in its conclusion that we would not meet the Copenhagen greenhouse gas emission targets by 2020.

This is the same government that has also seen substantial reductions in Parks Canada staff, despite the fact, as I will acknowledge, that the government has set aside a significant amount of funds, in the order of over $140 million, for the creation of this new national urban park.

It is no wonder that the Government of Ontario and leading environmental groups just do not trust the government when it comes to acting in the best interests of the environment.

After a decade of environmental management of the Greenbelt, which the Rouge park will become an integral part of, the Government of Ontario requested some assurances from the federal government that it would continue to protect this land, as was befitting a national park.

Sadly, this is where the bill fails the people of Scarborough, the people of Toronto, and, frankly, all the people of Canada. In our view, this bill is missing some key details. For example, it is missing details about how endangered species will be protected, plans showing how heritage areas will be treated, details about how the park will be zoned for different uses, such as farming, hiking, and protection of natural habitats.

I stand with the provincial government in asking the government to honour the memorandum of agreement that it signed with the Province of Ontario. I do so because it is important that in establishing a first national urban park, we ultimately get it right.

Despite the fact that the Liberal Party will be supporting this piece of legislation on second reading, we strongly urge the members on the government side, particularly when it goes to committee, to support efforts on this side of the House. These efforts will be undertaken by the member for Halifax and the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, our party's environmental critic, who will attempt to work with members on the other side to fix this particular bill and strengthen the legislation that is required when it returns to this House on third reading.

While the Liberal Party supports the creation of this park and especially the significant expansion of a park system that the residents in this particular area already enjoy, it is critical that we get this right the first time. I ask the government to continue to work with the Province of Ontario and with key stakeholders to build the best possible legislation before this House. I ask the Conservatives to honour the agreement that they signed and to work with the requests that have been advanced by key environmental groups. I also ask them to simply be open to changes in order to build a bill that will have a lasting legacy for all of our children.

A national urban park in a major urban centre like Toronto can ignite the imagination of Canadians and bring joy and knowledge about the importance of the outdoors, just as it did for me when I was a young lad. However, it can only be done if we get it right, and it can only be done if we make the necessary changes to this bill.

Let me conclude by asking the members opposite to work with all sides of the House so that we can fix this bill.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member might have his timelines a bit mixed up. In fact, this government was prepared to announce the signed memorandum of agreement that we had with the Liberal Ontario government back in May, but a provincial election was called. The election terminated the announcement, because we cannot make those types of announcements during provincial elections.

The member is asking us to live up to the signed agreement; we are quite prepared to do that. We will do that tomorrow. We are prepared to live up to the signed agreement that we have with the Province of Ontario. If the member would like to call the provincial minister here, or we could go there, we will actually sign that agreement that we have in place. We have had it in place since May.

The member talked about the provincial government and its desire for ecological integrity. In 2012, it was not ecological integrity it wanted; it was a $120 million cheque that it wanted for the land. Forget ecological integrity; give them $120 million, and we could have the land, no problem. That was what was said then by the Province of Ontario.

What this comes down to now and what the Liberals have to account for is this.The Friends of the Rouge Watershed, as he mentioned, want a 600-metre ecological corridor. The result would be that 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland through the northern part of this riding would have to be taken out of production. Is it the Liberal Party's position that it supports the removal of 1,700 acres of class 1 farmland from production and the eviction of farmers from that area?

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, to answer my hon. friend's question, let us keep in mind that we are dealing here with a number of significant environmental groups that have challenged the Conservatives to make this bill a better bill.

At the end of the day, these critical voices in this particular debate feel that the current government simply has not moved far enough. We are not simply talking about the removal of some farmland that the member for Oak Ridges—Markham is concerned about; we are trying to ensure that we create a national urban park that ultimately meets its fundamental objectives. Those fundamental objectives are to preserve the health of the ecological system, to ensure that we have sufficient forest cover, and to ensure that an incredibly degraded watershed system has the capacity to renew itself.

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech.

I would like to remind the House that during the 1993 election campaign, the Liberals made wonderful promises about Canada's national park system in their red book.

Unfortunately, from 1993 until they were thrown out of office in 2006, they accomplished very little. They found all sorts of reasons for failing to expand the national park system.

How can my colleague expect to have any credibility in defending this particular issue?

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is the same Liberal government that signed the Kyoto protocol. I take exception to the suggestion that anyone on this side of the House has a bona fide environmental challenge.

The national parks system was grown under a series of successive governments, and we continue to move forward on moving the park system through this legislation today.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, rather than dwell on past struggles and rather than focus on what is not in the legislation, let us talk about what we can do. My question to the hon. member is this.

I was a member of a city council that voted on about $17 million to put that land into the park. It is great to see it coming to fruition. However, there is this perpetual notion that somehow farmers are about to be evicted. I am unaware of any level of government that wants to evict the farmers or do anything other than protect the park from being sold off at a future date.

Could the member explain to me if he knows of any plan by anybody to evict any farmer on the land in question?

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is typical of the other side to set up this sort of false dichotomy to put up this kind of ghost or bogeyman that somehow we are opposed to things that are intended to impact those particular individuals who currently occupy the lands. I simply have not heard any plans to take class A farmland out of production.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the member opposite for supporting the bill at second reading. That is a good thing. I am happy to hear the Liberal Party will support it.

I want to make a third comparison between the legislation in front of us and the provincial parks legislation. I have already made two earlier comparisons between the two pieces of legislation in respect of hunting and logging, so I want to make a third comparison.

The Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, 2006, states this about mining, “new aggregate pits may be established in areas of Algonquin Park”. The federal legislation in front of us today states, in paragraph 18(2)(g), “it is prohibited to...explore for minerals, oil or gas, or conduct an extractive activity, including mining, in the Park”.

The legislation in front of us today is stronger than the legislation that protects provincial parks. Rouge national urban park would be better protected under this legislation than provincial parks that are protected under provincial legislation, such as Algonquin Park and Killarney Park.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know my friend has been listing a series of comparisons with respect to this bill against provincial parks legislation. Each particular park has its own unique features. In many cases, a lot of these issues were grandfathered in as part of the parks system when they were established.

The key point here is this. What will we do when we are establishing a new national park? What standard do we want to achieve? Are we going to compare that against an existing provincial standard or do we want to get this right the first time when establishing this new national urban park?

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, over the past few years, I have enjoyed some wonderful visits to Toronto. This great city has many lakes, islands and scenic views. It is a place that everyone should visit.

When they were in power, the Liberals had plenty of opportunities to invest in Canada's national park system, but instead, they helped to create a $2.8 billion backlog. That is why I am surprised by what they are saying.

They could have done this work and even more. The leader of the NDP, who was once the Quebec environment minister, knows what should be done with the national parks.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, ultimately we are attempting to strengthen a particular bill and we are counting on the honourable intentions of all the members to work collectively together to get the best legislation we can moved forward. Let us not dwell on the past.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I have tried to follow this debate, to keep an open mind and get a best feel for it. My colleague talked about bona fides and past Liberal governments. I am very fortunate to represent an area that benefited from a Liberal government that was very committed to environmental stewardship. It put $280 million toward the cleanup of the worst toxic site in our country, the Sydney tar ponds. This is the first year people have come and enjoyed the place.

I will give my colleague an opportunity to expand further on how he feels confident in our party's approach to all environmental issues.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I simply want to stress that the best of intentions exist on all sides of the House to get the best kind of legislation forward with respect to Bill C-40. We have faced a number of environmental challenges over many years. Regardless of which government we have dealt with, we have tried to bring forth solutions that ultimately are in the national interest.

That is the nature of our critique today with respect to the bill. We are simply trying to get a better bill forward, just like we tried to deal with the tar ponds issue in the past.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that as the member for Parkdale—High Park, I may well be the only member in the House who has the word “park” twice in the name of my riding, so I am very happy to stand to speak about parks.

Specifically today we are debating Bill C-40, An Act respecting the Rouge National Urban Park. Coming from an urban riding in downtown Toronto where the city is growing in its urban density, we are seeing increasing numbers of condos, high rises and growing stratification of people of different economic means. Some are doing extremely well by the economy, some are staying fairly stable, but then some are falling further and further behind. A University of Toronto professor from my riding, David Hulchanski, has talked about this idea of three cities, where we have three distinct populations living as one. I see that even within the area I represent.

Some people in our community are very well off, professionals, people who buy homes that are not just worth one million dollars, but multi-million dollars. They have a lot of choices about where they go and how they participate in recreational activities. They can choose to belong to a private club in the city. There is a waterfront club right in my riding. They can take a vacation in northern Ontario or anywhere else in the world. Then a growing number of people, and I see in my community, do not get to go anywhere. They stay in the city. They have never been to Muskoka or out on a boat. Their options are rather limited.

In our riding of Parkdale—High Park, we have High Park, which until now has been the largest park in the city. Through the visionary action of John and Jemima Howard many years ago, this park was bequeathed to the city with the understanding that it would always remain free and open for access to all. On a summer day, families, not just from the surrounding communities but from all over, come to the park. They have picnics, play sports and conduct a variety of activities in the park. It is a really wonderful thing to see. In fact, people from around the world come to see the cherry blossoms when they are in bloom, a gift from the Japanese government. It is a source of great enjoyment.

My kids played soccer there. There is skating and many activities, but it is also an area where there has been a great deal of work to protect the natural environment. There are old oak forests that are unique to the area and a great deal of work goes into protecting and preserving the natural ecology of that area. It is a great treasure of which we are all very proud.

The notion of creating the first national urban park is quite exciting. I see the same potential for communities to participate, to have a variety of activities or access to nature in a way that, frankly, a lot of people growing up in downtown Toronto in towers, whether condos or rentals, would otherwise not have the ability to do.

It is in fact a real treasure. It is something that one generation can pass on to the next for the enjoyment of people in the future. It is something that has to be done well. It has to be done right. The fact that this park would be created is something that we are very pleased about. As New Democrats, we will be supporting it. I do, however, want to raise some legitimate concerns about the creation of the park.

One thing I have come to really understand, with the creation of High Park and the legacy of John and Jemima Howard, is that they got it right when they bequeathed this park to the city. They got it absolutely right. In downtown Toronto, if this land were made available for development today, I cannot imagine how much money these acres of waterfront property in the centre of the city would be worth. However, this parkland has been protected for the present and future generations.

How this new Rouge Park is structured will be very important. The Rouge Valley is home to over 1,000 species of plants and animals, including a number of species at risk. It is made up of Carolinian and mixed wood forests. They are very rare forest areas. It is certainly an area worth preserving and protecting.

The fact that the federal government would create this national park was laid out in the first throne speech of the Conservative government. We applaud that. This would be the first urban national park in the country and one of the largest in the entire North American continent. The funding was laid out for this in the economic action plan of 2012. The 2012 budget said that there would be $143 million over 10 years for the development and interim operations of the park, and $7.6 million a year for continuing operations.

The main issue is the framework for the creation of this park and the protection of the environment within it. The park is currently protected under a whole range of existing action plans that were developed for this area. There has been incredible community engagement in the creation of this park. There have been management plans, greenbelt plans, watershed plans, heritage action plans, a variety of plans into which the community has poured a great deal of consultation, expertise and hope to get this right for the future.

Unfortunately, Bill C-40 does not embrace the strong foundation of conservation policy that is provided in the plans that I just mentioned, in addition to the laws that have been passed already. The concern is that the bill, if it passes unchanged, will undermine the ecological integrity and the health of the Rouge Valley.

Again, I would like to say that if we do not get it right from the beginning and if we do not set out the proper framework, the after-effects will be felt by generations.

We want to see a Rouge national urban park that incorporates the same legal protections as other national parks. That would really make sense. This is an idea that has broad support from environmental organizations, local community groups and residents. While we believe that the bill is a step in the right direction, we have concerns that, with the way it is drafted, it will undermine the ecological conservation of this land for the future.

New Democrats think that the legislation and management plan should adopt the long-standing Rouge Park vision, with its goals and objectives. We think the bill should strengthen and implement the existing environmental protection policy framework. We believe that more of the park should be dedicated to nature and public enjoyment and that we should be setting as a priority the ecological health and conservation of the Carolinian and mixed woodland plain forest.

There are a number of other points that others have raised. Again, I want to give the government credit for moving on this. I talked about High Park in my riding and another feature of my riding is the western boundary, which is Humber River. The Humber River is the only national urban heritage river in the country. It is the only heritage river that can be reached by subway. It is a very wonderful, historic place in the city.

There was great concern when, in one of the Conservative omnibus budget bills, the protection for this river was removed, except for the mouth of the river. Therefore, I thank my colleague from York South—Weston, who introduced a bill to once again resume the protection of the Humber River, because it is of tremendous heritage and environmental importance to our community, and we believe, as it is designated, to the country as well.

In closing, I want to urge my colleagues to really think through the content of the bill. Again, we salute its existence, but the detail of it, the specific measures of it, can and should be improved upon and we hope that all parties can work together in the House to make that happen.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member opposite for supporting the bill at second reading. I thought she gave some very thoughtful comments on it. Maybe I can give her some further assurances about the legislation in front of us in respect of the protection of the ecology of the park.

While clause 6 says, “The Minister must...take into consideration the protection of its natural ecosystems”, section 4 of the bill says, “Rouge National Urban Park...is established for the purposes of protecting and presenting...the natural and cultural heritage of the Park”. That is quite categorical.

Further on, subclause 9(2) says:

The management plan must set out a management approach, by area, that includes the following: (a) the protection and presentation of natural and cultural heritage....

The bill is so protective of the park that it will be illegal to pick a flower in the park. It will be illegal to pick a flower because subclause 18(2) says:

...it is prohibited to... (c) remove a wild animal, a plant, a part of a plant or any other naturally occurring object or product of natural phenomena from the Park....

It will be prohibited in this law to pick a flower in the park. That is how strong the protection will be of the park in the legislation.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly would not want to encourage people to try to capture deer or racoons or any other wildlife in the park, although, I dare say, I am sure that in spite of that, the odd flower may get picked in some cases.

I appreciate the member's comments on this and thank him for his work on it, but there are people who have been engaged in the development of the plans—and he may be as well, yes—but let me quote the general manager of Friends of the Rouge Watershed, Mr. Jim Robb, who said:

I have participated in almost all of these processes. The current Rouge Park concept deviates significantly from the existing plans. For example, in the new vision of the Rouge national park concept, there's no mention of the words “ecology” or “ecosystem”. That's the primary vision of the existing Rouge Park, which has been approved multiple times over two decades. Another thing is the 600-metre wooded corridor. That's enshrined in provincial legislation through the green belt. It's in Rouge Park plans consistently. There's no mention of that 600-metre wooded ecological corridor within the Rouge Park concept. I could give you more examples.

These are people who have been involved in this for some time and I express their concerns.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the member would care to comment on the proposal that is often put in front of the Toronto City Council vis-à-vis the Toronto Zoo, which is one of the major pieces of property contained within this park.

The proposal comes from people who are not seeking to conserve, and I would use the word “conserve” as in conservative. There are members of council who are not in support of conserving this piece of public property in the hands of city government but rather want to privatize it and send it out the door. In other words, they want to sell the Toronto Zoo, sell a piece of this park, because they do not believe it should be under public ownership or public operation.

Perhaps this is one of the concerns the province also has about the agricultural lands. If we do not protect the agricultural lands from being sold out from the park and do not protect them as part of the park, these too so-called conservatives will not conserve the park and in fact will simply transact it to private sector partners for development.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as a Torontonian who has frequently visited the Toronto Zoo, and over the years my kids have come to love it along with generations of kids, it is something we want to protect in the public sphere.

In my comments, I spoke about kids and families who do not have cottages and do not get to travel or get out of the city. The zoo may be their only chance to see even domestic animals up close.

There was a tremendous campaign that our local community in Parkdale—High Park led to protect the zoo in High Park. The goal was to keep it public, accessible and open, and we were successful in that. I believe the City of Toronto will also be successful in keeping the Toronto Zoo open for all to have access to and not turn it over to private hands.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her remarks. I have to say that they fit in quite significantly and appropriately with some work that I have been doing regarding the urban forest.

As members will know, my leader was an environment minister who worked with great integrity in order to protect the Mont-Orford provincial park. He has encouraged me with my urban forest program because, first of all, I come from the Forest City, and second, the urban forest is an incredibly important asset, as will be the proposed asset that we are hearing of in terms of the Rouge Valley trees, which protect the environment, create a canopy, cool us down, prevent flooding, provide storm protection and have great health benefits.

My question is in regard to the concerns around the 600-metre wooded corridor. In light of the importance of an urban forest, could my colleague please comment on the significance and importance of that corridor?

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for London—Fanshawe for that important question.

A question that is very pressing in urban centres is this. How do we protect not just green space but the green canopy?

There are many Toronto city councillors, including ours in Parkdale—High Park, who have been very vocal and adamant about the need to increase the tree canopy in our area and in the city of Toronto generally. The last thing we want to have is a concrete or asphalt wasteland. We want to have all of the health, environmental and ecological benefits that the tree canopy brings.

I thank my colleague for London—Fanshawe for her work on this issue. It really speaks to the importance of this corridor and to preserving access to this wooded area and the tree canopy, not just for now but for generations to come.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, I will have to ask the question again. I have asked it so many times it is actually frustrating.

The member cites the Rouge Park plan. First, the bill we brought forward actually goes further than the former Rouge Park Alliance's plans for the park. The protection the bill offers goes further than the 2001 protocol that was put in place by the Rouge Park Alliance.

The plan members opposite are citing is the 1994 Rouge Park plan that calls for a 600-metre corridor, a 1994 plan, a plan that is 20 years old. That is not the basis by which the Rouge Park was moving forward.

The 1994 plan would see 1,700-acres of class one farmland removed from production. The Liberals have said they support that. Some New Democrats have said they support that as well. The Liberals have said they want to see farming in the area progress to small-scale farming.

Again I ask, how do we create a 1,700 acre ecological corridor, remove 1,700 acres of class one farmland from this area, and not evict the farmer? It is impossible to do. How do we do that without evicting farmers? Why is the member citing a report that not even the Rouge Park Alliance accepts as the plan with which they would move forward?

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, in my remarks I listed a number of reports and plans. The member is right that there are plans going back to 1994. However, the quote I just gave from the general manager of the Friends of the Rouge Watershed, Jim Robb, was from 2012.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Citing a 1994 report.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

There was a comment he made in 2012.

Mr. Speaker, through you, I think this is my time to speak and not a debate, so I would ask the member to hold his comments while I have the floor.

The importance of creating parkland is that there can be multiple uses. There could be an area for an ecological preserve, where we can preserve a purely natural environment. There could be walking paths. There could be other activities in the park. There could be a zoo. There could be many uses.

To say that by preserving the ecology of the park or insisting on woodlands in the park, somehow that would have to cover every square foot is simply not correct.

However, I do trust the people who have been active on this issue for 20 years or more who are saying they have concerns about the bill and that their work is not being listened to.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to lay out a bit of the timeline around the bill and some of the key issues.

Before I get into that, I do want to take a moment in this House to thank my colleagues, the member for Scarborough—Rouge River and the member for Scarborough Southwest. They have been really helpful. It has been great to work closely with them as MPs in the NDP who are right there where this park is. It has been great to get their advice from the ground to hear what is going on.

I also want to take a minute to thank some of the environmental organizations and local organizations that have been very helpful with our analysis of the bill. They include the Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and the Friends of the Rouge Watershed. When we are here on the Hill, we try to do an analysis of legislation as it is presented, but it is hard to know exactly how it will play out in local communities. They have been very helpful to us.

There was a study at the environment committee on urban conservation. The NDP was successful in getting two days set aside to specifically look at Rouge Park. I think this was last year. That was incredibly helpful. We got an update from Parks Canada officials and we did hear witnesses. We heard about the incredible consultation that has been happening, over 25 years of consultation, and the work around this park. We heard about the great work that Parks Canada staff have been doing to try to ensure everybody is at the table and to deal with creating a piece of legislation that would create a park. That is very difficult.

This is an urban national park. Even the concept of it is challenging, because there is a highway in this park. There are farms in this park. It is an incredible gift to think that we could have a park that we could access by subway. However, with those gifts come great challenges.

Often when bills are presented in the House, we will hear from government; usually the minister will speak to the bill. Then we will usually hear first from the opposition critics to lay out a party's position and see where we are going.

I am actually speaking at the end of this debate. I have been listening to it since the beginning, with a small break for committee duty. It has been really interesting. I am not saying that the way a politician says, “This has been interesting”. It has been really interesting. There has been actual debate in this House.

My colleague, the member for Beaches—East York, sits behind me and I turned to him in the last of debate and asked, “Are you listening to this? People are talking about ideas. There's a little give, a little take.” I learned from each and every speech, regardless of whether it was a government member giving the speech, a Liberal member, or an NDP member. Why is that? I think the people who are speaking in the House to the bill have a vested interest in it. They are MPs from the area predominantly. They are MPs with expertise. They are MPs who have been engaged in this issue and engaged in the creation of the park for years.

In that debate, that honest debate that has been happening here in the House, I would say that most members have put aside their talking points and have talked about some of the real issues. I find that to be incredibly refreshing.

I think everybody who has spoken to this bill really does want to ensure that we get this legislation right, but they also want to ensure that we create this park. That is priority number one.

I will say that I will be supporting the bill, and I know that my caucus is behind that recommendation. As members know, critics make recommendations to their caucuses on different pieces of legislation. We are united and we do believe this is a good project, the creation of this park. We strongly support protecting land through creation of national parks writ large, as long as those national parks are backed with strong environmental legislation.

We also support this legislation, the creation of Rouge Park, Canada's first urban national park. That is the first thing.

The second thing is that I will come to this debate with an open mind, an open heart, and put down my talking points as well, to try to present some ideas, try to present some proposals, because I do see problems with the bill, and I am not alone on that. However, I think there are solutions, and I do believe that we as parliamentarians could work on those solutions together, alongside the community, and actually come up with a stronger bill.

A lot has happened with this bill. It was introduced in June, and frankly, I think some politics were involved in that. I think it was hastily introduced in this House, but we had some byelections happening in the Scarborough area so it is good for the government to say, “Look. We are going to hold up this bill.” That is just my assumption, but I do think it was tabled pretty hastily. There continue to be politics when we see what the Ontario government has been doing and saying via the media.

This park will be 58 square kilometres. The Province of Ontario owns two-thirds of that. The federal government owns about one-third, with some small parcels owned by Markham and Toronto. In order to create this park, we need a transfer of lands. Some 5,400 acres of parkland would be transferred from the Ontario government to the federal government. At least that was the theory we were working with in June. It is not so much the theory now.

In early September, we heard that the Ontario government was thinking about not transferring the land because of the issue of ecological integrity. I will get to the ecological integrity piece in a minute. About a week later, we saw that the Minister of the Environment said that the federal government would move ahead with this park anyway. I have a concern that we would be creating a park that we do not actually know what it will look like. We do not actually have the full parcel of land. I will admit I would rather create a very small park than no park at all, but we are in a situation where we are not 100% sure what land is going to be involved.

What is the issue with ecological integrity? This is important. The National Parks Act specifically states, “Maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity, through the protection of natural resources and natural processes, shall be the first priority of the Minister when considering all aspects of the management of parks”. The first priority is maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity.

This bill says that the minister must take into consideration ecological integrity. That is a big sticking point for a lot of people.

Community groups have come out and said that this is not acceptable, that it is a lower standard of environmental protection. I understand what they are saying and I believe what they are saying.

There was actually a pretty good release put out by a number of groups, including Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature, for example. They said:

We call on the federal government to uphold its commitment to the Memorandum of Agreement. As it stands now, the draft federal legislation threatens to undermine 25 years of consultation, scientific study and provincial policy development that made ecological integrity the main purpose of the park and the top priority for park management.

That is their concern. I share their concern, but I think we can figure this out.

Listening to the debate here in the House, I have heard my colleagues, in particular the members for Wellington—Halton Hills and Oak Ridges—Markham, talk about the fact that this is an urban park and it is complicated because there are farms and there is a highway. How do we have this standard of protecting ecological integrity when Highway 401 is going through it? That says to me that maybe we legitimately need a different standard, not a lower standard but a different standard, for urban parks. I buy that. That is something worth exploring.

The problem I have right now, though, is that I have trust issues with this government.

[An hon. member]

How come?

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Well, I am the environment critic.

I do not trust that this is just a different standard. It says to me that this bill is opening the door a crack, and other parks legislation will also have a different and perhaps lower environmental standard, so it is hard to trust that this is what the issue is.

However, if we are looking at a new consideration of ecological integrity or a new consideration of urban parks, then I think we need to have that conversation. I think it needs consultation. I think we need to hear from witnesses at committee.

I think we need to, as I said, put the talking points down and have an open and honest conversation about what we do with urban parks. I think there is a solution. I am not sure what it is yet, but I think we can get there together.

I often think about the fact that there is a concept that the environment is a precious, pristine thing that is unsullied and is separate from us. It is not. The environment is us. It is the people. It is our buildings, roads, and farms. We are part of the environment.

There has been a lot of work and thinking on that concept of the environment, so I know that the work is there that can help us get to a solution here. I do not know if it is an amendment to the Parks Act. I understand if the government does not want to reopen the Parks Act, but maybe we need to. Maybe it needs to be a definition for urban parks.

We need to come together. I think we can do it, both opposition MPs and government MPs and communities.

One might think I am naive in thinking we could actually work together to get this done, but I live in eternal hope. I actually have some good experience. There is precedence here in this House, even in this current majority government.

I am really proud of the work we, all of us, were able to do on the Sable Island National Park to bring that bill forward, to raise concerns about some problems with the bill, and to actually get assurances and commitments from government, whether it was via the park management plan or reporting, that dealt with some of the problem areas and with our concerns.

As a result, there was near unanimous support, with the exception of one. Everyone wins in that case. Everyone feels good and confident, and we know we have a good piece of legislation before us. I hope we can do the same with this bill.

I challenge all of us to maybe come up with a definition for ecological integrity, or maybe to come up with a different standard for urban parks, something we can all agree on. I do not believe that anyone in this House, or any party, wants weaker environmental protection. I take the government at its word on this.

I think we can figure this out, and then maybe if we can figure this out, we could actually apply that solution to something like Gatineau Park, for example. Members may remember that the NDP has brought forward legislation several times, I think it is three times, to clearly establish boundaries and to clearly establish roles when it comes to Gatineau Park. This is a park that exists without a plan or real boundaries or definition. I will say that most recently, legislation was brought forward, in the form of Bill C-565, by my colleague, the member for Hull—Aylmer. We think this is another opportunity for an urban park with strong environmental legislation.

Unfortunately, the government voted against that bill—

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

That is a shame.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

It is a shame, Mr. Speaker. It was a good piece of legislation. Maybe we can stake out a bit of ground on what we do with urban parks. I am not anticipating thousands of them or a flood of urban parks, but it is a real issue, and we need to wrap our heads around it.

If we can establish what urban park protection would look like, then maybe we can apply it to Gatineau Park and have another win in this House.

I will go back to ecological integrity just for a minute, because members may think I am giving up too much here, that just because this is an urban park, we would not have strong environmental protections and we would not strive for ecological integrity. I want to be very clear and let the House know that this is not what I am saying.

I believe that a park next to or in Canada's biggest city should continue to strive for ecological integrity.

Ecological integrity is the goal of environmental protection within Rouge Park, Greenbelt, and Rouge watershed plans as well as in provincial and national park legislation and policies. I know that the government agreed to meet or exceed existing provincial policies. I have heard debate in the House saying that this legislation exceeds them, but I hear from the community that it does not meet them, so we need to figure this out.

Ecological integrity must continue to be the priority for the scientifically planned and zoned national habit systems of Rouge national urban park. We could look at different standards, such as net gain and ecosystem and watershed health, perhaps. It could be utilized for areas zoned for agriculture, infrastructure, hamlets, campgrounds, et cetera. I am not sure, but it is something we can talk about. If we think about it, lots of our provincial and national parks have highways, towns, railways, and other infrastructure within them, yet they still manage to prioritize that goal of ecological integrity.

We really want to see the creation of this park. We really want to work together to try to come up with a solution that addresses these concerns about ecological integrity. I look forward to hearing the witnesses at committee. I look forward to hearing speeches in the House afterward to see where we are, and I look forward to some questions.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for supporting Bill C-40 at second reading. I appreciate her feedback and comments on the bill.

I just want to emphasize that while provincial legislation does include the words “ecological integrity”, that same provincial piece of legislation allows for natural resource extraction, logging, and hunting in Algonquin Provincial Park. While the legislation in front of us today does not contain the words “ecological integrity”, when we look at the totality of the bill, in its prohibitions to protect the environment and the flora and fauna of the park, it is far stronger than the provincial legislation currently in force in the province of Ontario. Therefore, if we look at the bill in its totality, it will effect a better outcome for Rouge national urban park than what we have in the provincial parks in the provincial park system.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I understand what my colleague for Wellington—Halton Hills is saying, but it is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. We can say “no” to hunting yet still not protect ecological integrity. They are different beasts.

We all have to acknowledge that there are people who have serious concerns about this specific issue of ecological integrity. What do we have to do as legislators? We have to address that head on. Instead of saying that we are going to ban hunting and picking flowers, we need to confront the issue of ecological integrity and figure out a solution. Organizations like Environmental Defence have a problem with this, and I trust the work they do. They do incredible work. They do incredible analyses. Therefore, let us deal with the issue of ecological integrity, not whether or not a flower is going to be picked. It is a different issue.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's speech very carefully and heard her several times suggest skepticism in trusting the government to protect the natural state of this park.

As I mentioned in my earlier question, I was a member of city council. It spent $17 million to add a substantial amount of land to this park. Is she aware that some of the most prominent Conservatives on that city council, people with the last names of Ford, Holyday, who went on to represent the Conservatives in the provincial legislature, Denzil Minnan-Wong, and David Shiner, another Conservative candidate, all voted not only to refuse to protect the land from being converted from a naturalized state into something else but also actually refused to acquire this piece of property to add to the park?

Is that perhaps one of the reasons she is skeptical of the Conservatives, whose members, when they have a chance to add land, to protect the naturalized state, actually vote against the interests of the park, the interests of Scarborough, and the interests of the city of Toronto on this? Is that one of the reasons the member might have some skepticism about the authenticity of the Conservative position?

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague from Trinity—Spadina to the House. This is my first opportunity to interact with him here in the House since his election.

He asked if I knew about this, and I have to admit that I did not, because I do not follow Toronto politics closely. I am here, and I follow politics back in my home province of Nova Scotia. It is interesting that he can bring it to the floor and talk about that here.

I am not going to comment on Toronto municipal politics, but I will talk about skepticism. I did say that I was going to put down my talking points and I have, but this is the truth. We have seen cuts to Parks Canada. Twelve hundred jobs have been cut in parks across Canada. If parks are so important, how are we going to protect them, especially when we are seeing job cuts, park hours diminished, and parks being closed for different seasons? This is where my skepticism comes from. People cannot go to Kejimkujik National Park in my home province in the winter anymore. A lot of the communities around these parks rely on them being open year-round. It is unfortunate.

[Romeo Saganash, NDP, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Halifax for her speech. This member has an excellent understanding of her file, and I thank her for that.

This bill proposes to create the first urban park. If there is something we should be the best in the world at, it is creating parks. I would even say that this is in our DNA as Canadians. This bill presents an incredible opportunity.

Aside from the challenges that my colleague mentioned in her speech, what other challenges could we expect to encounter with this bill?

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou for his kind words.

Indeed, it is an incredible opportunity for us to be part of a government—I think that the opposition and all the other parties are part of the government—that will create Canada's first national urban park. What are the other challenges? As I already mentioned, I am a bit concerned about funding for the parks. Is it possible to create a new national park with the cuts to Parks Canada? Will there be enough scientists and employees in the park to support its objectives? I have a lot of concerns.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

I know that the debate is coming to a close, Mr. Speaker.

The member for Trinity—Spadina and the Liberal Party have been talking about ecological integrity. Their position is that if the Toronto Zoo were added to the park, it would increase the ecological integrity of the park. By allowing people to come to the park and look at the giraffes and polar bears within the park, we would be increasing the ecological integrity of the park.

I want to thank the hon. member across the way for supporting the bill to get it to committee. I appreciate that, but I have a comment.

The farmers in this area have been treated terribly. Their lands were originally expropriated by the Liberal government in the 1970s. Many of them were evicted from their lands. Some were given one-year leases that they have been operating on for over 40 years. This park would give them the opportunity to have some stability for the first time in over 40 years. In the past, they were evicted from their lands for the creation of the Bob Hunter Memorial Park. They were evicted from their homes. Those class one farmlands were reforested.

When the bill gets to committee, I would ask the member to really listen to the farmers and look at the reports. The creation of a 600-metre ecological corridor, which will take 1,700 acres of class one farmland out of production, based on a 20-year-old report, cannot be done without evicting farmers.

While I thank the member for her support, I hope that when the bill does get to committee, she will really take a look at how the farmers have been treated in this area, listen to what they are saying, and look at what would happen to them if we created this zone in that area.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that comment. I have heard the member raise this issue several times in the House.

First, when I think about ecological integrity, I do not see it as necessitating the re-naturalization of farms. For me, that is not on the table. The member talked about other examples of farms in the past that were re-naturalized, but I do not see that as part of the equation here.

The member is very right when he talks about the fact that these farmers have had one-year leases. I do not know about other members, but if I had a one-year lease and I did not know what was coming down next year or what was going to happen, I do not know if I would make a lot of investments in my farm for the long term. I do not know if I would make those environmental and ecological investments. I do not know if I would engage in the best practices when it comes to farming and the environment because I might not be there next year.

There is some opportunity to listen to farmers, but also to talk to them and engage with them.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not aware of a member of any party or any organization suggesting that we close down farms or even shrink the size of them. However, if I recall my history correctly, Bill Davis, who was a Conservative premier of the province, was one of the people who led the fight to expropriate the farms and close them down in favour of the Pickering airport.

Is that yet another reason why the member is skeptical of the Conservative Party's real commitment on this file to preserve these farms?

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I am a bit at a loss. Once again, I am not up on my Ontario politics and ancient history. I am here before the House, looking at this bill.

I appreciate the member's intervention. Again, this is why we have members of Parliament from all across Canada. It is so they can bring their first-hand experience to the floor here. I take what he is saying as an interesting addition to this debate.

I do have skepticism on a lot of other fronts when it comes to the Conservative government and the environment. Another good example, in addition to the cuts to Parks Canada, is that on climate change and reducing emissions. We were promised oil and gas regulations. That was eight years ago. Earlier today in question period I asked where those regulations were. There is neither hide nor hair of them.

My skepticism is well warranted. We have these questions on the environment, we have these issues that we want to have heard, we have ideas that we want to see turned into regulation or legislation and we have not seen them.

I am very willing to take a risk and work with everybody in the House. I believe we all want the best for this park, I believe we all want strong environmental protections for this park and we all want to see it created.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Accordingly the bill stands referred to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and referred to a committee)