Thank you very much. It is good to see you, Mr. Butler and Ms. Powley, and thank you for your attendance with us. I am hoping to get back to that issue of accessibility in a moment so that you won't feel cut off, I hope. Thanks also to the witnesses who are with us here in person.
I have one or two specific questions, but I want to preface them with some personal reflection to tell you how I get to them. I will begin by especially thanking Mr. Bienenstock because I appreciated, if I can put it this way, your treetop analysis.
I really think you have done a good job of pointing out some of the social implications of what we're here to talk about. Having said that, you took me back, as you did some of my colleagues, to a time that got me interested in such matters. I have to tell you I am a wilderness canoer. I have loved it; the most fulfilling, happiest days of my life have been spent out in the wilderness. When I was listening to you, I was thinking about how the heck that happened, because I grew up in a city.
There were a couple of things that were different when I was growing up, one of them being that our city had only 80,000 or 90,000 people. It is now more like 230,000 people. In those days, with a quick bike ride or even an hour or two of walking, you could get to the fields and forests that we learned to enjoy.
The second thing was that I think we had, in my parents' generation, a generation of educators in a way that I don't think my generation has been. There were always people in our community willing to run Girl Guide or Boy Scout troops and take us out into natural areas in a way that I don't think my generation has done for our children.
Third, the population of Canada, I hate to say, was then only 18 million to 20 million people; now it's 34 million people.
The only thing I would disagree with in your analysis, Mr. Bienenstock, is that some of the parks I visited are getting pretty crowded. Algonquin Provincial Park has almost become domesticated; it's no longer really what I like to think of as a wilderness park. I moved on to Quetico Provincial Park, which used to be more wilderness, but the number of American fisherman in there is outrageous, in my opinion, so I have to go further afield. Having said all of that, what I realize from these presentations is that having accessible green areas when I was young was an extremely important thing.
I am interested in the greenbelting idea that Ms. Powley and Mr. Butler have come up with, but from a federal perspective I am concerned about how I can contribute to that. The only thing I can think of is in terms of the incentives in federal infrastructure money that we might provide. Could we make that money conditional on ensuring that there is adequate green space, or could we make it conditional on only being employed to renew our city centres? Then I come up against the question of whether it is really our job to make those decisions and to set those kinds of local priorities, and I am not sure it is.
I'd like to hear from a planning perspective how I can resolve that conflict for myself. Where are the decisions best made—in Ottawa, or in Halifax or Kitchener or wherever it may be? May I ask Ms. Gabor and Mr. Wise to comment on that first?
