I have the honour of being the president of CPAWS. I think you have a copy of the prepared remarks. I'm not going to follow them exactly; I'm not that well-behaved. There's some more detail there that may be helpful to you in your considerations.
CPAWS will turn 50 next year. It's just a little bit older than your marriage. It's not a bad age for a conservation organization. I wish I was still 50.
We have 13 chapters from coast to coast to coast in Canada that are involved in campaigns to create national and provincial parks and marine protected areas in all regions of Canada. We also work to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources in the rest of Canada, because just having those parks as islands is not in the end good for our conservation, and to ensure that existing protected areas are managed to protect their ecology.
Historically we focused largely on wilderness conservations on those big landscapes, but like this committee, we've taken an increasing interest in the creation and management of urban and near-urban conservation areas and in connecting people to nature through those areas. I think you probably have a good sense as to why that's important to this country.
One small part of this is that our national board of trustees meets somewhere across the country every May. We've now taken up the practice of getting there a half a day early and going on a bit of a field trip to see some kind of current or potential protected area near where we're meeting.
A couple of years ago when we were meeting in Victoria, we had the opportunity to go out to Gulf Islands National Park. I was just mentioning to Michelle Rempelhow pleased we were to see the announcement that more land is being added to Gulf Islands National Park.
One year ago we met in Sackville and went to the Chignecto wilderness area of Nova Scotia, and I had the opportunity to see that just around the time when the provincial government in Nova Scotia was announcing the creation of two large new protected areas in the Chignecto, which is very important for that province.
Last spring we had the opportunity to meet in the eastern part of Toronto and to go to the proposed Rouge national urban park. We got to hike through some of the areas of the park and had a briefing from Parks Canada staff on the planning and conservation work they are doing around that very important initiative.
In effect, these three experiences we had connect very directly, I think, to your interest in conservation in urban and near-urban areas. It has given us a chance to see first-hand what's being done, as well as some of the challenges, frankly, that arise in some of those locations.
Obviously we don't believe urban conservation should take place at the expense of a continuing interest in the larger wilderness areas of Canada. Those large wilderness areas are going to help us to meet our commitments internationally, under the Convention on Biological Diversity, to protect at least 17% of our lands and 10% of our waters by 2020, but I think we all know in this room that wilderness conservation is not just about putting some numbers up on a board. That's not really what turns anybody on about this.
Wilderness conservation is about healthy ecosystems and the clean air and clean water that come from them. It's about opportunities for outdoor activity that contribute to human health and well-being, and it's about sustainable tourism that helps to support the economies of local communities close to many of these parks.
Urban and near-urban conservation is never going to put up the big numbers in terms of numbers of square kilometres that we conserve as a country, but their value, as I'm sure you recognize, is that these are places that people can reach, places that ordinary people can experience first-hand in terms of the healthy outdoor activity that can take place there or their opportunity to learn about the ecosystems and the conservation challenges they bring. Perhaps that's a beginning of a broader engagement with these areas that goes beyond their immediate neighbourhood.
Urban protected areas and the larger wilderness ones are both important, but we need to recognize they are different. They need to be managed to different standards—high standards in both cases, but it's not appropriate that they be the same.
Canada's national parks benefit from a law that requires they be managed to maintain or restore their ecological integrity as a first priority.
I don't know how many people really have a gut feel for what ecological integrity means, but one way of looking at it is that parks should be managed so that all of their native species are present in healthy populations and so that ecosystem processes like predator-prey relationships or natural fire regimes are working well.
The law sets a high bar for ecosystem-based park management, and it's considered a gold standard around the world. Sometimes achieving that standard just requires protecting what's there now, but often parks are in locations that have been degraded in one way or the other over time, and there's a need to restore them in some sense.
We think about Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, for example, where both bison and black-footed ferrets have been reintroduced in recent years. Doing that helps to restore the landscape as well, because landscape is adapted to being inhabited by bison. Parks Canada has also been using prescribed burns to restore the natural ecosystem in places where fire is normally a part of it.
That gold standard for ecological integrity in national parks is one that we are very committed to preserving. We believe that urban parks should be managed to a high standard as well, but we don't think that the same standard is either feasible or desirable, and frankly we wouldn't want to see the standard for those more traditional national parks eroded in order to have the same one. We think they need to be set deliberately at different levels.
We support the concept that national urban parks or conservation areas should be managed to maximize their ecosystem health rather than to maintain or restore their ecological integrity. We're not expecting that people are going to bring back caribou or wolves to the Rouge national urban park—it might be a little too interesting if they did that—but we think there's a lot that can be done to restore the biological and natural values of an ecosystem like that. We can restore the rivers and streams. We can replant native trees and plants. We can control invasive species. We can engage a broad range of partners, including young people, seniors, and first nations, to help with this work, and one of the things that struck me from visiting the Rouge last year was the volunteer involvement that there has been historically in that area, in both educational programs and in the restoration activities themselves.
To ensure that urban parks like the Rouge are able to protect and restore ecosystem health in the long term, the legislation for these new national urban parks needs to put conservation clearly as the first priority, but it has to be looked at differently from the way it would be in the traditional national parks. Given the enormous pressures that these places will face from urban development and the millions of people who will visit these small, fragile places, it's critically important that the laws governing them include a clear statement that human use will happen within the limits of maintaining and restoring ecosystem health.
Urban conservation areas can't be all things to all people. Too many people are going to want access to them. If they're going to retain their natural values, there has to be a focus on stewardship activities in order for these areas to be resilient.
When creating protected areas, whether in cities or in wilder parts of Canada, there are some other basic principles that need to be thought about. For example, is the area big enough to sustain populations of wildlife or the ecosystems in general? If you have tiny pockets, they're really just not viable from a biological standpoint. Is it connected to other areas so that populations can move back and forth? As with any species, it's important that there be outbreeding and that the populations not be genetically isolated. If the landscape is fragmented—if things like expressways run through the middle—what can we do to deal with that fragmentation?
Urban conservation areas can play a very important part as well in connecting new generations of Canadians to nature. I think that's something we're all aware of as an increasingly important priority, and one that locations like the Rouge can serve ideally with appropriate volunteer involvement as part of that effort. There's a bit more detail on that subject in the written submission, but I'll respect the limit on time and stop now.