Bonus.
Since 2006 we've seen a tremendous expansion in parklands available. I remember an announcement about the Nahanni National Park being expanded, and the Great Bear Rainforest on the west coast, which is kind of iconic out in our side of the world. There's, on the eastern side of the Great Slave Lake, Ramparts River, and there's the Gwaii Haanas National Park, which is huge, on the west coast. There's the Rouge National Urban Park, the first urban park here. And in your remarks you mentioned, collectively,150,000 square kilometres added to the parks system. And again there's what was just mentioned with the Nature Conservancy, about 338,000 hectares of working landscape being recovered.
These project, we're pretty excited about. I think committee members are very interested in this. Recently our committee's been looking at urban parks, and we're hearing a lot about nature deficit disorder, about the disconnect between urban dwellers.... Increasingly about 80% of our population lives in cities. The experiences with nature are diminishing as kids are more into electronic gadgets and so on. One of the projects that we heard about is Parks Canada experimented with providing passes for kids in grade 8, I think.
But I'm wondering, if we're looking ahead to the national conservation plan, are we looking at strategies of how we can encourage young people in particular, who particularly may be coming from our immigrant communities, to have positive experiences with nature? Because we certainly understand that there are tremendous benefits to all of us, as Canadians, personally and in terms health benefits, when we appreciate nature by interacting with it positively.