Thank you very much for that.
This is a very core issue for Parks Canada. We've provided just a very short overview on page 40 of the document that we shared with you, which was also used to brief the minister. We call it “development pressure”. As you said, there are pressures from visitors using the parks, the sites, and the historic sites in a way that could potentially impede their ecological integrity or their cultural and historic integrity.
The good news is that Parks Canada has actually had this balancing act in its mandate right from the beginning. You may know that when Banff National Park, the first national park, was created, it was originally created to protect the cave and the basin, the hot spring that was at the core of Banff National Park. Part of the reason for this was that the railways wanted to encourage people to visit Banff to experience those hot springs, but they needed a way to protect those hot springs for the enjoyment of all visitors.
That balancing act between presenting and protecting is very much the core of Parks Canada's mandate. One of the ways that we manage to express that balance and to get Canadian feedback on how best to manage it is through the management planning process. Many of the parks and national historic sites have a legislated obligation to have a management plan established for those parks. Those plans are reviewed every 10 years, and public consultation is a major feature of how those plans are produced and developed. As we look at a particular historic site or a national park, those plans are available for discussion with all the communities.
There is an interesting evolution on how parks are created. Some of the original parks, especially the ones with townsites, were created at a time—