Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting all our guests, and thank you to the guests who have come to give us the information.
I want to focus my time on Ms. Pearse from Parks Canada Agency. Unlike John, I haven't worked for them, but I've enjoyed them and loved them for 60-some years. My riding of Yellowhead encompasses all of Jasper National Park and half of Banff National Park, so I have a lot of contacts there, and a lot of concerns.
Of major concern to me is that under the minister's environment letter, we want us to develop Parks Canada and encourage visitors to come to the parks. In 2017 we want to make it free for everybody, and then we want to keep it free for children under 18. I would just like to make a suggestion that you throw seniors into that.
Then we also say we need to protect our national parks and limit development, etc. I'm not going much further than that, but there is a clash within national parks of a group of people, probably more on the management side, who are pressured by the development of the national parks to assist the people we are asking to come into the parks. As a prime example, there are two major cities less than three hours away from both Banff and Jasper that have over one million people. The demands when people come into the park are different from what they were in the 1950s or 1960s. The population is three or four times what it was. We need more services in the parks, but the services that are demanded by the public and that are needed in our parks are impacting on the footprint of the natural heritage of the parks.
I wonder how your department is going to try to balance the two. There is a demand by the public for these extra services. There is a demand, probably, from the scientific side and from people who have lived in our parks. A lot of people have to realize that in some of our national parks, we are into second- and third-generation people who have loved that environment, who have grown up in that environment, and who don't want to see it changed. They want to remember it as it was when they were kids.
I'd like to get a little feedback from you, Madam.
Thank you. It's a pretty complex question.