Madam Chair, to try to frame my thoughts on this, I also went to the minister's mandate letter. Like many of you, I share a lot of things coming out as well, the whole climate change agenda and being part of that is very important. There are items in the mandate letter on freshwater protection. There are pieces on climate change related to infrastructure. There's the endangered species act. As a federal government worker in my previous life, I've had to deal with a lot of legislative pieces; some work as they're intended and some have issues and unintended consequences. So I'd like to be able to look at some of that legislative framework and what it means when it's actually enacted.
The piece I'm particularly interested in—and I think, Martin, you'll appreciate this—is simply the Parks Canada piece, in particular national parks. I've mentioned before that I worked for Parks Canada for 32 years and have been in many parks and national historic sites across the country.
My fear when I got elected and saw that we had changed the Minister of Environment to Minister of Environment and Climate Change was that given the importance of climate change in society right now, it may overshadow a lot of these other things. So I want to be, along with others, the voice of parks to make sure that we don't forget that piece of an important environmental agenda for our country.
I pulled out a number of items. There are at least eight or ten from the minister's mandate letter that relate specifically to national parks. What's silent in here are national historic sites. I'd like to talk a little bit about that, because it does fall under the Parks Canada program. I have a real interest in things like the development of the national parks system plan. There were objectives set in the 1970s with the systems plan, and I'm interested in hearing from Parks Canada as to where we are in the completion of those.
I was working for Parks in 1985, and I remember the Brundtland Commission, which fell under the United Nations, where a call was made to protect 15% of Canada's land base. I think at last calculation we're under 3%, and I believe the current target is somewhere in the range of 3.5%. I think we need to have some discussions on what our objectives are in society for the government in protection of resources.
I believe that in some cases our legislation has worked to protect, but we've also alienated our population in many protected areas. There's always that balance between use and conservation. In Parks we always talked about the pendulum swinging from heavy on conservation and therefore exclusion of the public to including the public but then sacrificing conservation. I'd really like to see us hit that middle point of the pendulum's swing and have sustainable use of parks. I'm really excited about the opportunities that things like free access for 2017 hold.
I was the manager of Lake Louise and Yoho and Kootenay national parks for six years. Anybody who's visited Lake Louise in the summer months knows it is completely overrun. We piloted a transit system for two years and had some success in trying to shift some vehicular traffic out of a grizzly bear habitat. It's a fairly important corridor for movement of grizzly bears during the summer months, yet you have this wall of steel, as it's referred to. So along with use, I'd like to see what kinds of things we could perhaps pilot and implement in park systems to make visitor use sustainable so that we don't have negative impacts on the resources that, in fact, we are protecting. Without the protection of the resources, we don't have parks, so I think there is a great agenda there.
I've experienced first hand the loss of some of our younger people. I've had school groups who refused to sit on the ground on tours because they didn't want to wreck their designer jeans, couldn't get grass stains on them. How do we reconnect youth to our natural spaces?
I am passionate about historic sites. There's some literature I've recently come across that talks about the amount of energy that's embodied in historic spaces, and we're losing a lot of buildings that are being landfilled. In Parks Canada we ran a national cost-share program that was to invest in heritage buildings across the country. Instead of owners and operators saying landfill is the only option, we can increase the environmental efficiency of these buildings while maintaining the integrity of these historic structures. I think there's a lot of attention to be paid there, particularly for infrastructure investment.
I believe that historic sites should be the heart of communities. A lot of regulation and legislation works against that, similarly with national parks. Parks should be the heart of the communities they are involved with and yet we haven't found that balance. With my more than three decades of experience, I can bring some of that voice and discussion to this table, things like the federal heritage buildings review office.
Another one which I think the federal government has opportunities to demonstrate real leadership in is environmental sustainability in the management of heritage buildings. There are things on the expansion of the marine conservation areas which I think are really exciting. That's really my interest, although I want to be part of the other discussions on climate change and other things. But it really is my parks experience that I remain passionate about and hope that I can further that agenda but from a different seat now on the government side than where I was previously.
On a bit of a different topic, the last thing is that one of the municipalities in my riding has won awards on brownfill development reclamation. In talking to municipalities, I've heard there are a lot of these contaminated sites. I have another municipality that has had development hindered because of contamination from a former dry cleaning operation. I wonder what sort of leadership role the federal government might be able to play in the redevelopment or rehabilitation of sites in municipalities across the country.