Environment Committee on May 5th, 2016

[The Chair (Mrs. Deborah Schulte (King—Vaughan, Lib.)), Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I'd like to bring the meeting to order, please.

We have two full rounds. If we're going to get all the questioning done that we want, I'd like to start right away. We are also looking to have a little bit of committee time for some motions that have been brought forward; we will deal with those right at the end, if you don't mind.

The first thing I want to do before we get started is turn our attention to the biggest issue we are facing in Canada right now, which is Fort McMurray. I'm thinking of the many hectares of forest that have gone, the homes that are gone, and the communities that have been destroyed. I was very pleased to be in the House this morning during all of the leaders' statements, when the government committed to matching any funds that come in through the Red Cross. I'm hoping that many people will give their support to Fort McMurray and to the rebuilding efforts that will be necessary.

I just want everybody in Fort McMurray to know that here in this committee we are thinking of them as we are working in our deliberations today. Thank you.

I want to welcome everyone.

We have with us, from the Nature Conservancy of Canada, John Lounds and Lisa McLaughlin. Thank you for being here.

We have, from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Alison Woodley and Sabine Jessen.

We have with us, by video conference, Peter Kendall. Thank you, Peter, for joining us via video conference.

I would like to start with Peter, if I could, only because I'm always nervous of video conferencing and wonder whether we might lose him through that medium. If everybody is okay with starting with him, we'll get started.

We have two rounds. There's the 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock panel with this group; then some, I know, will have to leave. We'll get that cushioning done and then move to the second round.

Let's get started, then, with Peter Kendall.

Thank you, and welcome.

[Peter Kendall, Executive Director, Earth Rangers]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

As you know, my name is Peter Kendall. I am the executive director of Earth Rangers and the Schad Foundation. I really appreciate the opportunity to appear before you here today and your hard work on this important topic.

To provide some context for my remarks, I would like to start by saying a few words about our work at the Schad Foundation and Earth Rangers.

The Schad Foundation is a private family foundation. The foundation provides funding to registered charities for work on wildlife and habitat conservation projects. Our current areas of focus are large-scale boreal forest conservation, marine protected areas, and mechanisms to promote recovery of species at risk.

Most of my time is spent on my work at Earth Rangers. Earth Rangers is a kids' conservation organization. Our programs educate children and their families about the importance of protecting biodiversity, engage them in tangible activities to protect wildlife and its habitat, and encourage them to explore their local natural areas. We reach children through live animal presentations in over 800 schools annually across Canada and through almost daily television presence.

Thanks in large part to the support we received from the federal government—thank you again—our program has grown quickly over the past few years to the point where we now have the largest membership base of any conservation group in Canada, with nearly 140,000 members, all of them children, aged roughly six to twelve. They represent every province and territory.

One of the core messages we teach our members is that if we are going to make a difference for wildlife, all sectors of society must work together. This is why we are so excited to see the new spirit of co-operation and transparency from our federal government. What is even more exciting is that this spirit seems to have become infectious and is being adopted by other governments and non-governmental organizations across the country.

It is critical that we capitalize on this momentum. While many gains have been made, the sad reality is that we continue to lose biodiversity and have failed to live up to some of our key international and domestic commitments.

For example, Canada's goals under the convention on biodiversity include protecting at least 17% of terrestrial areas and 10% of marine areas by 2020. While progress has been made terrestrially, less than 1% of our oceans are currently set aside from resource development and fishing.

Even worse, a 2013 assessment of species at risk shows that population trends for most species listed by COSEWIC remain bleak. Of the 369 species that were evaluated more than once, the status of almost 90% either was unchanged or had deteriorated. Even when COSEWIC scientists have recommended that a species be listed, these recommendations often languish. Research out of the University of British Columbia has revealed that the average wait time for a species that has been recommended for listing is almost four years.

The other reality is that Canada has made a major commitment to combatting climate change, and again, we congratulate you on this. This critical effort, though, is going to consume a large amount of financial and human capital over the next several years. As a result, we feel it is important that you are selective and focused on your other conservation priorities.

While there are many conservation needs across the country, two particular areas stand out to us as deserving of a priority focus: marine conservation and species at risk.

While we recognize that completing terrestrial protected areas is also important, we feel that significant progress has been made on this in the last 30 years, with 10% of our land base now protected. It is also an area where we continue to see strong movement and leadership by the provinces. For example, the new government in Newfoundland and Labrador has mandated the environment minister to finalize a natural areas system plan. Minister Phillips recently announced the Alberta government's intention to increase protected areas from 12% to 17%. Ontario and Quebec are working on plans to protect 50% of their far north and, of course, there is the great work you guys are doing with Ontario, moving Rouge Park ahead, so congratulations on that.

With respect to oceans conservation, the government is quickly trying to play catch-up and meet its international oceans conservation commitments, and we really applaud this. This is going to require creative thinking, sustained political will, and focusing on what the science tells us.

Marine protected areas are a great tool, but we need to go beyond that. Almost 25 years ago, the collapse of the east coast cod fishery became the global poster child for oceans mismanagement.

There now is an opportunity for Canada to become a world leader in sustainable ocean stewardship by actively implementing science-backed recovery plans for the hard-hit fisheries. Like marine protected areas, this would be good for the ecosystem and ultimately good for fishery-dependent economies. From what we can see from the outside, you're moving in a very strong direction on this file. Our hope is that you just keep the pressure on here.

With respect to species at risk, it's a little more difficult. The scale of this challenge is immense, making it easy to get overwhelmed. It's going to often result in efforts being spread too thin, resulting in little progress being made.

We do understand that there are fiscal challenges, but we shouldn't use this as an excuse to maintain the status quo. We can and must do a better job with the funds that are currently available. This should start with better alignment across government and agencies, greater collaboration with industry and non-governmental organizations, and the adoption of new approaches.

The vast majority of species at risk in Canada live on private lands. Traditional command and control approaches won't work well in these landscapes. We need new mechanisms and tools to both incent stewardship and discourage further habitat destruction. This could include things like biodiversity offsets, payments for ecosystem services, and safe harbour agreements.

Species and habitats don't exist in silos, and neither do the solutions to their protection, yet this is how we often try to tackle these problems. I'm not just talking about governments here; ENGOs tend to operate in the same way.

Even here at Earth Rangers, we realized this a while ago when one of our eight-year-old members sent in the money that she had worked so hard for by doing chores and by holding a lemonade stand. The donation came with a note saying, “I am an Earth Ranger and I want to save endangered animals. Please make the best choice with this money and make it count!” It was the last part of this note that made us really ask if we were putting this money to the best use and if the investments we were making in species recovery were really making a difference.

After speaking to people in government, academia, industry, and ENGOs, we realized that many others were asking the same questions and wrestling with the same issues. It seemed to us that everybody was unhappy with the status quo. To help inform these collective discussions, we recently launched a study with the University of Ottawa's Institute of the Environment in collaboration with Environment Canada and the Forest Products Association of Canada.

The ultimate goal of this study is to develop recommendations on how we can improve our species at risk efforts in Canada. The study is focusing on both what we can do today with the tools and policies immediately at our disposal, as well as looking abroad for what new approaches and mechanisms may be worth considering here in Canada.

The first phase of this study is scheduled to be completed later this summer, and we would welcome the opportunity to meet with this committee again and to share the results and explore how we can collaborate on improving the species at risk management in Canada.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much for that great overview of what we need to address.

I would like to turn it over to Nature Conservancy and John Lounds, please.

Thank you.

[John Lounds, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nature Conservancy of Canada]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee today. It's great to be here with friends and colleagues, and we're happy to provide our input to your study.

I'm John Lounds, president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Joining me today is Lisa McLaughlin, our chief conservation officer.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada—the other NCC, not the National Capital Commission and not the National Citizens Coalition—is a made-in-Canada, non-profit charitable organization that is this country's largest land trust. We work with Canadians to conserve and care for some of our most threatened natural areas and the species they sustain.

The lands we conserve come to us most often through purchase, donation, or conservation agreements. Our partners include individuals, communities, corporations, governments, and indigenous peoples. Ours is a collaborative conservation model that facilitates lasting results.

I'm sure many committee members are already aware of our work. More than half of your ridings feature Nature Conservancy of Canada projects. In fact, more than 80% of Canadians live within 100 kilometres of NCC conservation lands. There are a couple of other aspects of our work especially relevant to today's discussion that you may not be familiar with, such as mineral rights relinquishment and conservation planning.

NCC has helped lay the groundwork for some large publicly protected areas. We are uniquely positioned to bring together industry and government to address private mineral rights, which is an important step in the creation of large federally protected areas, terrestrial or marine. We negotiated with six companies to relinquish the mineral rights to more than 4,000 square kilometres in the Yukon, paving the way for the creation of Vuntut National Park. We have done similar work to help create Gwaii Haanas, Canada's first designated national marine conservation reserve, and in the Flathead River Valley in British Columbia.

We've also assisted marine protected areas by acquiring fee simple ownership along adjacent coastlines. NCC projects are located along the Musquash Estuary in New Brunswick, the Lake Superior national marine conservation area, and the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. We look forward to continuing to play this role as Canada considers new protected areas.

NCC is also a Canadian pioneer in conservation planning. We have spent a lot of time thinking about the integration of protected areas and developing tools to ensure that we are targeting the highest-priority places. We have completed highly detailed assessments of all of Canada's southern ecoregions, and we are now beginning similar work for northern geographies.

Far from academic exercises, our ecoregional assessments and nature atlases are available for public use. I am happy to have copies of our Labrador nature atlas here. The author, Lindsay Notzl, is here in the back row. The atlases are available for public use and help determine where to invest limited funds for the greatest conservation impact. These assessments support more than 80 finer-scale natural area plans, which means we can roll up our data and report on the local and national significance of our work. They allow us to develop science-based conservation plans, and they guide our investments and our decision-making. They help us to integrate our work within the greater protected area ecosystem.

That brings us to the key message we want to leave with you today. In our view, the range of federally protected areas is not currently integrated in any formal way to achieve Canada's targets and objectives, and nor are they coordinated with provincial, indigenous, or privately protected areas. We should not let this current lack of integration stand in the way of immediate progress toward our commitments. The work on integration can and should occur concurrent to reaching our international commitments by 2020.

Canada has agreed to the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets, including target 11, committing signatories to protect 17% of their lands and inland waters, and 10% of their marine areas, by 2020. Target 11 is clear that the areas must be of a certain quality: equitably managed, ecologically representative, and connected. The good news is that we believe Canada can reach terrestrial target 11 by the end of the decade. Marine conservation will be more challenging.

Perhaps more than any other nation on the planet, Canada has sufficient natural and wild spaces left to allow us to become a world leader in conservation, but we need a road map to guide us. To address this we recommend two immediate steps. First, the federal government should consider urgently convening a panel of thoughtful Canadians tasked with devising this road map for achieving our Aichi targets by 2020. At present a lot of players are working diligently and independently on Aichi-inspired projects, but we are working in silos. We need a mechanism to bring us together to make sure we're making meaningful contributions toward common goals.

We imagine a panel that can gather stakeholders, government, indigenous peoples, and NGOs. Its work needs to begin immediately and, frankly, needs to be completed by the end of 2016. Panel members could bring a level of science-based expertise to the table and a keen understanding of government structure and decision-making. The recommendations must be designed to obtain the political buy-in needed for success.

In considering the 17% terrestrial component, the panel might begin by considering the list of protected area proposals contained in the report “Protecting Canada: Is it in our nature?”, by our good friend sitting next to us here, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. We'd be happy to assist with this panel.

Our second recommendation would be to implement a road map to 2020. It must be an inclusive process. That means counting the achievements of provinces, indigenous conservation initiatives, NGOs, and the private sector. The federal role is to ensure that core areas are protected, but it will be up to all partners to fill the gaps so protected areas are ecologically representative and connected. These are also conditions of the Aichi targets.

Let's establish a process for counting our conserved lands that is clear, credible, and consistent with other countries, such as the United States and Australia, and let's ensure the process is auditable and resolves jurisdictional differences. Shared recognition results in shared responsibility and shared action to achieve our collective objectives.

Achieving the Aichi targets will be an ambitious step forward, but if it's all we do, it still won't be enough to protect the areas that sustain us. Ecologists are now telling us that as much 50% of our landscapes need to be conserved to protect Canada's essential biodiversity and the delivery of ecological services. How much is enough to ensure fully functioning landscapes for nature and for people? How much is enough to ensure our species have space to move and adapt in the face of climate change?

To answer those questions, we recommend the government work with key partners to undertake a science-based conservation assessment for Canada as a whole, not just Labrador or other places, much like the NCC has done for individual ecoregions. This major assessment will take some time, perhaps a few years. It should speak to the integration of greater protected area ecosystems. It should identify priority areas and connections and outline the roles that each level of government, indigenous communities, and non-governmental organizations can play. It should also consider building on winning strategies that produce significant conservation results and are integrated into the landscape in a cost-effective way—such as, we would argue, the current Government of Canada-NCC partnership in the natural areas conservation program.

The program is designed to protect habitat for species at risk and for migratory birds and to create and enhance connections or corridors between protected areas, including national wildlife areas, national parks, and migratory bird sanctuaries. It's an integrated model. With an investment to date of approximately $275 million from the Government of Canada, the program has resulted in more than 400,000 hectares conserved in southern Canada. Additionally, NCC has raised $500 million to match these funds. Cash and land donations have come from individuals, foundations, corporations, and other levels of government.

The program has also supported 38 local land trusts and served to engage more Canadians in nature and conservation through the various volunteer programs, with more than 10,000 people over the past several years. The lands conserved so far provide habitat for 201 terrestrial and freshwater species at risk. The program directly complements federally protected areas with conservation lands that contain samples of the full range of existing ecosystems and ecological processes. In fact, half the program's conservation projects are within 25 kilometres of a federally protected area. Quality conservation is about integrating biodiversity strategies across all landscapes.

To conclude, Canada has an opportunity to build a natural legacy beyond 2020, with conservation in the right places done the right way. Let's reach our Aichi targets by establishing an expert panel to draft the road map to get us there, include all stakeholders, and create a clear process to define and count all contributions.

At the same time, let's begin the work to go beyond Aichi by launching a science-based conservation assessment for Canada that speaks to the integration of protected areas and the roles for all stakeholders, and building on matching fund models, such as the natural area conservation program, to encourage Canadians from all walks of life to participate in a conservation future worthy of this great country. Again, we'd be pleased to assist in these initiatives.

Canada's 150th birthday is just around the corner. Let's celebrate 2017 by demonstrating significant progress in advancing a plan to ensure our natural heritage is still here, and better, when Canada turns 300.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much.

Now we get to hear from CPAWS.

I want to remind you that you have 10 minutes. That was just slightly over. I'll let you know when you have one minute left.

Alison, you're up.

[Alison Woodley, National Director, Parks Program, National Office, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society]

Thank you very much.

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about federal protected areas.

I'm Alison Woodley, the national director of the CPAWS parks program. I'm here with Sabine, the national director of our oceans program. I'll spend a few minutes introducing CPAWS and speaking about terrestrial protected areas in my very short five minutes, and then Sabine will address marine protected area issues.

Since 1963 CPAWS, which is a nationwide charitable conservation organization, has been working hard to create parks and protected areas and make sure they're managed to conserve nature. This has been the core of our work. Over that time we've led in the creation of over two thirds of Canada's protected areas.

The vision of CPAWS is to protect at least half of Canada's public land, fresh water, and ocean. We adopted this vision a decade ago in light of the growing scientific consensus that we need to protect at least half of ecosystems in an interconnected way to effectively conserve them, both to sustain people and to sustain nature.

This is well articulated in the Nature Needs Half vision, an event that a number of you were able to attend on Monday night at the National Library, and we appreciated that.

It's also articulated in a recent E.O. Wilson book. E.O. Wilson is an eminent American scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who actually coined the term “biodiversity”. He's in his 80s, and at the end of his long career he has concluded that at least half of the earth needs to be managed to conserve nature. He has just released a book called Half -Earth, and I'd recommend that you read it.

As the environment commissioner pointed out earlier this week, we have a unique opportunity in Canada to create large connected protected areas, but at this point we haven't grasped that opportunity. Canada has only protected 10% of our land and inland waters at this point. We're lagging way behind the rest of the world. We were a shocking 32nd out of 34 OECD countries in the percentage of land protected in 2014.

We've made little progress since 2010 when we signed onto the biodiversity targets, and we have no plan in place yet to deliver on the 2020 targets, or to deliver on the end goal of conserving nature. I think it's always important to focus on what we're actually trying to achieve—that my colleagues have also shared—which is that we're trying to conserve nature. We know we need to do much more, and those targets are a step toward that goal of what we need to do to conserve nature.

I'm going to highlight three points that I think are opportunities to move forward and that the federal government can help with.

We need federal leadership. As we know, jurisdiction over land management in Canada is shared among federal, provincial, territorial, and indigenous governments. Similar to what we're now seeing on climate change, where there is strong federal leadership, we need that federal leadership to bring together governments and to bring together other interested parties to collaborate and create a plan to achieve the goal of conserving nature, with targets as a step along the way. This leadership would make a big difference.

Another key opportunity in Canada is to work in partnership with indigenous communities. CPAWS works with indigenous communities across the country who are working hard to protect large areas of land to safeguard natural and cultural values. Thaidene Nëné in the Northwest Territories is one example you'll hear more about later today. Supporting and embracing these efforts in a way that respects indigenous rights and interests offers a huge opportunity to advance both conservation and reconciliation efforts in Canada.

A third area of opportunity is to better link protected areas and climate change strategies. We have a climate change crisis. We also have a biodiversity crisis, and these are closely interrelated. The Paris climate agreement recognizes the important role ecosystems play in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Protected areas store and sequester biological carbon and help nature and people adapt to climate change. We need to make sure that the pan-Canadian climate strategy that is being developed right now includes protected areas and reflects the important role of other ecosystem-based approaches as part of the climate change solution. This could help to drive and advance protected areas creation and better management.

Across Canada there are large-scale protection initiatives to build on. We're not starting from scratch here. Some of them have already been mentioned—for example, Ontario and Quebec's commitments to protect half their northern regions, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which is an NGO large landscape scale initiative in western Canada and the U.S., and the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which you'll hear more about next week.

Bringing together and supporting these initiatives would offer some really exciting opportunities for collaboration and help identify potential synergies that can help us move forward. I might note that there are examples from around the world of countries that are already doing this.

There's also important work to be done to get the federal protected areas house in order. We do have detailed recommendations about this in our reports. You will all have received a copy of this report, en français ou en anglais, and we do have detailed recommendations in there. I don't have time to go through them, but I do have one point I'd like to make.

I spend a lot of time working on national park management. Our special report on commercial development threats, which you will also have received—

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Just be mindful that you are over five minutes, which means you're taking away from another. I just wanted to make sure you know. Thank you.

[Alison Woodley]

There is an urgent need to refocus Parks Canada on its first priority by law of maintaining and restoring ecological integrity, and there are recommendations in that report.

To conclude, there are significant challenges but also huge opportunities, particularly with the new commitments by the current government in mandate letters and the commitment from the Prime Minister to go beyond our targets. We're committed to helping in any way we can to scale up efforts so we can conserve ecosystems for Canadians and wildlife into the future.

Thank you.

Sabine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you.

Please proceed.

[Sabine Jessen, National Director, Oceans Program, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society]

Thank you, committee members, for having us here today. I wanted to focus on CPAWS's concerns with the quantity and quality of marine protected areas in Canada, and also make recommendations to you for how we could improve on the current situation.

You did hear earlier this week from government officials that there are a number of legal tools available to establish marine protected areas in Canada. You may have also come away with a feeling that to date it's been a rather ad hoc approach to MPA establishment.

One observation I do want to make from my decades of work on marine conservation in Canada, and it actually applies more broadly, is that there is generally a double standard when it comes to how we treat protection on land versus the ocean. On land, it's generally accepted that industrial uses like logging, mining, oil and gas, and hydroelectric development should be prohibited. However, in the ocean the tendency is to allow a variety of industrial uses to continue in our protected areas.

The downside to this approach is that not only is it very difficult to distinguish between MPAs and the ocean areas outside them, but in the long term we're not going to achieve either the benefits for both biodiversity conservation and for the ecosystem services that we rely on if we don't provide adequate and effective protection for our marine protected areas.

Many scientific studies, including a recent one, have looked globally and they have concluded that 30% of the marine environment should be fully protected if we're going to conserve biodiversity over the long term. What does it mean to fully protect marine areas? It means that fishing and industrial uses like offshore oil and gas, mining, dredging, and dumping shouldn't be allowed. But they are allowed right now in many of our protected areas.

The scientific evidence is definitive on the point that aside from climate change, fishing causes some of the largest changes to marine ecosystems, whether it's destruction of benthic habitat, changes in the trophic structure, or changes in marine food webs. Fully protected marine areas that prohibit industrial-scale fishing and other industrial uses have been shown to significantly increase the diversity of species and the overall numbers and size of individuals as well as increase the resilience of marine ecosystems to the impacts of climate change.

Over the past few years, CPAWS has conducted a number of studies focusing on marine protected areas in Canada, which I believe members have received. These are two of them. Our overall conclusion is that Canada lags behind many countries in the world in MPA coverage. Most of our marine protected areas are small, and current protection standards for existing MPAs are weak with less than 1% with any form of protection and only 0.1% that is fully protected. The current pace and approach to MPA establishment must change significantly if the rate of decline in marine biodiversity is to be halted.

We've made many recommendations in these reports. I'm just going to highlight a few key ones.

First, we absolutely need minimum protection standards for all marine protected areas. We need to prohibit industrial uses and we need to have large parts—at least 50%—of each marine protected area fully protected from fishing and all other uses. We need to provide—

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Sabine, I'm going to have to cut you off, unfortunately, because we won't have the full round of questioning that we'd like to have. We will make sure that we get your written statements. I'm hoping we can get some of the points that you wanted to get to in the questioning. You can submit anything after, and we'll make sure that gets in front of everybody.

Our first round of questioning is with Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you to all of you for providing us with a wealth of information on the work you do and some of the challenges we face in Canada.

I'd like to direct my questions to CPAWS. We received from you the special CPAWS report on our national parks and your concerns about development taking place within those national parks. To what degree do you feel that development within those parks should be prohibited?

[Alison Woodley]

Thanks for that question.

We have highlighted that over the last number of years there has been an emerging and renewed trend of threats to our mountain national parks, specifically Banff and Jasper. This is something that is not new. This has happened in the past. The most recent time was in the 1990s, when there were huge commercial development threats in Banff specifically. There was a really comprehensive process and study put in place, the Banff Bow Valley study, which then resulted at the end of the day in a suite of measures that were designed to limit and cap development in the mountain parks, recognizing that they cannot sustain endless development. Those narrow valleys, where all the people are, are also the areas that wildlife need, so we can't have endless development.

What we're actually saying—

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I'm just going to interrupt for one second, simply because my time is short. I only have six minutes, probably four and half left now.

I was very direct in my question: do you believe that additional development in those specific parks that you've identified in your report should be prohibited, or is there a different position you're taking?

[Alison Woodley]

There needs to be a cap. Well, there is a cap on development, and it needs to be adhered to, basically.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Here's my concern. This is no criticism of your position, but I had a chance to review some of the testimony we've already heard. For example, Kevin McNamee, who is the VP for one of the directorates for Parks Canada, said the following:

In short, we do not just establish new parks and NMCAs and then throw away the key. As Parliament has directed through the Canada National Parks Act since 1930, and the Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act since 2002, our mandate is both to protect and ensure that visitors use, benefit, and enjoy these special places....

And then the Prime Minister's mandate letter to our environment minister highlights four things that she's expected to do. One is to develop Canada’s national parks system. The word “develop” isn't actually implying expanding, because it's dealt with separately in that mandate letter. Another is to develop Parks Canada programs and services so that more Canadians can experience our national parks. A third one is to make admission for all visitors to national parks free in 2017. Another one in the mandate letter is to protect our national parks by limiting development within them.

What I'm painting is a picture of a natural tension between a desire to have increasing numbers of Canadians enjoy our national parks, yet on the other hand to protect those national parks. I would love to hear from you on how that tension will be resolved. It's pretty clear this government does want to increase visitor use in our national parks. To do that, you're going to have to allow some development to accommodate for that use. How would you reconcile those two?

[Alison Woodley]

The development pressures are most intense in Banff and Jasper, and they always have been. Again, in the 1990s there were limits put in place, including in the act, which now makes it clear that ecological integrity will be the first priority for management. There were caps on development put in place specific to the mountain parks.

CPAWS absolutely embraces the idea that people need to enjoy and appreciate our parks. This is absolutely critical for people to have the opportunity to experience nature and to become conservationists. It's how I became a conservationist. That's not the challenge. The challenge is when that use supersedes the ability to protect and the mandate to actually pass along these areas unimpaired. That's what the act and the limits to development in Banff were designed to do, to make sure that the park isn't impaired for future generations.

We're actually just saying that we need to adhere to those limits, put in place a decade or more ago, to make sure that this happens. There are now infrastructure developments that are encroaching on those limits, and that's what we're calling on—

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

So how do you propose we accommodate the very significant number of additional visitors to those two parks without further development?

[Alison Woodley]

Well, it's going to be challenging, but if we are going to pass those along unimpaired, we need to figure out a way to do that, and it doesn't mean endless development. We need to keep that cap on, otherwise there won't be grizzly bears and wolves in those parks, and all the other critters that rely on those parks.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

My request to you is to be part of the solution here, because there will be additional visitors to those two iconic parks in our country, and we'll have to accommodate them somehow.

[Alison Woodley]

We would love to be part of the solution.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I just want to ask a question to Mr. Lounds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have 30 seconds.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Lounds, you mentioned bringing together all of the partners inclusively and establishing a method to determine our collective progress in reaching our Aichi targets. This is something that I had already had concerns about, and you've highlighted the fact that we actually haven't catalogued across Canada exactly how much all of the different contributors—the NGOs, your organization, Ducks Unlimited, the governments across the country, the private sector—actually contribute to reaching our Aichi targets.

Can you be a bit more specific or identify what is not being achieved here?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

We are at six minutes and 15 seconds. Can you answer in 15 seconds? Otherwise, I'll have to say that we'll let this question go till later. Go ahead.