Thanks for the question, Mr. Amos.
We have three national parks in Quebec. We acquired one by outright purchase from an oil company. The second one is on a 99-year lease, and the third one was the result of land exchange.
Saguenay-St. Lawrence exists because there is both federal and provincial jurisdiction. Parks Canada protects the federal jurisdiction in the waters and Quebec has terrestrial parks adjacent. The Government of Quebec has had a policy, which I believe it enshrined in legislation, that it will not transfer land to the Government of Canada for a range of purposes, and that includes national parks.
Under the Canada National Parks Act, in order to establish a national park in a provincial jurisdiction, we require the transfer of the surface and the subsurface. In terms of making any meaningful progress—and there have been a number of attempts to move forward but they did not come to fruition—we focused elsewhere, where we have had some good federal-provincial co-operation in terms of establishing new national parks, for example in Newfoundland and Labrador, where there was tremendous co-operation, and more recently with the Government of the Northwest Territories.
To go to collaboration, what is interesting is to look at the national parks of Quebec that have been created by the Government of Quebec. What they have done is that they've used our studies, focused on the areas that we identified as of national significance, and established them as national parks, in some places co-operatively managed with indigenous organizations.
You can look at it and say that, well, from a really tight federal perspective, we didn't make any gains, or you could take a more sort of national perspective and say they focused on the areas that we identified as of national importance and protected them. That's why we have continued for now to focus on the other areas where we have collaboration and to make progress there, and maybe through the indigenous model there might be something we can do in Quebec, but I think that's to be determined.