Yes, hello. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to share with the committee recommendations by the David Suzuki Foundation for Bill C-40, An Act respecting the Rouge National Urban Park.
My name is Faisal Moola. I'm the director general for Ontario and Northern Canada with the David Suzuki Foundation and a professor of forestry at the University of Toronto. I'm terribly sorry that I'm unable to provide my comments to the committee in person, and I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to participate by phone.
Mr. Chair and honourable members, three years ago almost to the day, in 2011, I had the honour of joining the then-environment minister Peter Kent at the historic Miller Lash House near Old Kingston Road in the Rouge at the first stakeholders' meeting held following the government's announcement of its intention to create a national park in the Rouge. In addition to Minister Kent, we were joined by members of the Conservative caucus, such as MPs Michael Chong, Paul Calandra, Corneliu Chisu; elected members of the opposition; local municipal leaders; senior executives of Parks Canada; representatives from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and the York Region Federation of Agriculture; and, of course, local advocates who have fought for over 30 years to protect the forests, fields, and farmland that are at the heart of the Rouge national urban park.
We rolled up our proverbial sleeves and sharpened our pencils and by the end of the day we had banged out 10 consensus principles to guide the establishment and management of the Rouge Urban National Park. These principles address a diverse set of issues, ensuring inclusive, progressive governance led by Parks Canada to foster a culture of community engagement and respect and partnership. However, one principle has stood out consistently for the many years of subsequent public consultation and planning that have followed the inaugural meeting of government leaders and stakeholders originally tasked with drafting a vision for the park. To quote from the guiding principles for Rouge national urban park, drafted by the stakeholders at Parks Canada's visioning workshop, held on November 9, 2011, principle 6 is to “Maintain and improve ecological health and scientific integrity” of the park.
For several years now, Parks Canada has expressed a preference for managing the Rouge national urban park under an ecosystem health framework rather than an ecological integrity framework to distinguish national urban parks from other national parks. Indeed, maximizing ecological health features prominently in both Parks Canada's original discussion paper and the Rouge national urban park concept. To quote:
Past and current stewards of Rouge Park have made great strides in protecting and improving its ecological health. In order to continue to protect the variety of habitats within the park for generations to come, Parks Canada will adopt a conservation approach that fosters the interaction of people and nature while also maintaining and restoring species and habitat diversity.
Past and current stewards of Rouge Park have made great strides in protecting and improving its ecological health. In order to continue to protect the ecological health of the Rouge Park for generations to come, Parks Canada will need to adopt a conservation approach based on international best practice that is focused on maintaining, conserving, and restoring species and habitat, within a landscape context that emphasizes the interaction of humans and nature and that gives Rouge Park its distinct ecological, cultural, scenic, and community values.
Maximizing ecological health was even referenced by the government when it introduced Bill C-40 to the House this past June.
My point in going to these earlier references to ecological health is to argue that since the initiation of the planning process to establish a national park in the Rouge, the government has made considerable progress in advancing ecological health as an overarching management objective for the park. However, in the drafting of Bill C-40, this earlier explicit reference to maximizing ecological health has been dropped. There is no reference to ecological health in the bill, nor to ecological integrity for that matter. Instead, clause 6 of the bill offers a highly discretionary approach for the protection and restoration of nature or the benefits that are provided to humans, such as the provision of clean air, clean water, and healthy food, attributes that we believe are at the heart of sustaining ecological health in the park.
To quote from clause 6 of the bill:
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.
The David Suzuki Foundation believes that the government should adopt the earlier approach that Parks Canada had advanced and make maximizing ecological health an overarching priority for managing the park. While there are a number of elements of Bill C-40 that we support, such as the strong prohibitions against resource development in the park, we believe that the bill must be improved with surgical amendments to properly define and prioritize ecological health in the management of the park. By doing so, the government will create a strong legislative and policy framework for the park that protects core ecological values, such as the habitat of endangered species, while allowing for human land use, such as agriculture, to continue within a broader sustainability context.
Indeed, we do not believe that maximizing ecological health and support for agriculture are mutually exclusive objectives in the park. The David Suzuki Foundation supports sustainable farming in the park. Several years ago we published a major study documenting the contribution that farming, if well managed, can make to producing not just market wealth, but non-market economic benefits as well, something commonly referred to as “ecosystem services”. A summary of this study was provided to committee members earlier. We found, for example, that croplands, conservatively, produce an additional $380 per hectare in non-market benefits, such as agricultural pollination and the sequestration and storage of greenhouse gas emissions by agricultural soils, the point being that these non-market benefits are over and above the market benefits that farming generates.
There are numerous examples from other jurisdictions where sustainable farming and the protection and restoration of nature are happening in a coordinated and complementary fashion, often guided by a strong legislative and policy regime that prioritizes ecological health and its constituent attributes, such as the protection and restoration of ecosystems. For example, in Cuyahoga Valley National Park a number of private farms are in operation under long-term leases despite the fact that the legislative and policy regime governing Cuyahoga Park is subject to the National Park Service Organic Act, which clearly prioritizes the conservation of nature. Eleven working farms were operating in Cuyahoga in 2009. The number of farms in the park is set to expand to 14 by 2015.
Closer to home, Parks Canada is already working closely with local ranchers who are grazing their cattle herds within Grasslands National Park. The fact that this program even exists is a reflection of the willingness on the part of Parks Canada to work with the agricultural community to support farming within a management regime that continues to prioritize nature. The David Suzuki Foundation would like to see the same in the Rouge, as well.
We believe that Bill C-40 captures many of the core values that motivated stakeholders and local communities to come together to advocate for a national park in the Rouge in the first place. We're nearly there. But the David Suzuki Foundation believes that Bill C-40 requires surgical amendments to explicitly define and prioritize ecological health if those values are to be effectively protected and stewarded well into the future.
Thank you very much.