Birch Cove Lakes is a fantastic area of Halifax. It's about five kilometres or so from the downtown area. There are more than a dozen wilderness lakes there. It's a place that's visited by all sorts of people from Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford, and Sackville. People use it for recreation. You can go canoeing or.... It's the sort of thing that makes Halifax great.
However, a really important piece of it is owned by a private developer, and that particular piece is crucial for our access to the park. The city has written into its blueprint that it wants to acquire that land for a park.
The challenge is that the city has had a lot of trouble, especially in the last couple of months, in actually reaching a deal to acquire those lands. I think that if the federal government played a more active role, perhaps with some of the green infrastructure funding that may be available, it might help the city to negotiate a deal to acquire this really important property.
Again, I consider it to be green infrastructure. When I think about the future of Halifax, that national park quality site right in the middle of the city is really crucial. Whether or not it's appropriate for a national urban park is I think something that Parks Canada could look at. Certainly the improvements that were made to the legislation around the protection of ecological integrity makes it something that I would consider worthwhile to consider for Halifax.