Evidence of meeting #30 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was parks.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Dr. Miller, you mentioned Birch Cove Lakes in Halifax. The potential is there for an urban wilderness park. What type of support do you feel you need from the federal government to move forward with urban wilderness planning and protection specifically?
National Conservation Biologist, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
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.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Thank you very much.
I have a question for Mr. McNamee. In her notes, Dr. Metaxas mentioned a number of things under “Management plan” under her suggested recommendations. One was:
To determine effectiveness, MPAs must have [a] clear conservation priorities and [b] measurable targets, as well as [c] criteria for determining whether the targets are being met.
I'm assuming she means that this is not necessarily happening right now.
To what degree, if any, are those happening as we implement and manage MPAs?
Director, Protected Areas Establishment Branch, Parks Canada Agency
Thanks for the question. I cannot speak to Oceans Act marine protected areas, but I can speak to national marine conservation areas established under our legislation.
Bear in mind, as we've mentioned to the committee before, that we only have four operating national marine conservation areas, some quite new, some still in the development phase. Part of what we do for each one of them is develop a management plan, and that management plan, through public consultation—and in some cases, such as that of Gwaii Haanas, developed through the Archipelago Management Board in collaboration with the Haida Nation—sets out a range of natural and cultural goals for the area.
We put in place those kinds of objectives, if you will, for the NMCAs. In some of them we have an active monitoring program for a number of issues. In a number of the other marine conservation areas, we're working to develop a monitoring program.
We've been quite successful on the national park side. In fact, we're the only country that has a very robust, modern ecological integrity monitoring program. We're looking to learn from it to apply it to the marine environment.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
When Parks Canada is identifying how we're going to meet our Aichi targets, whether on the marine conservation side or on the terrestrial side, do we as a federal government actually take a holistic approach to it? Mr. Miller suggested that in Nova Scotia they would identify a large number of areas for protection and then would move forward essentially in concert on most of them. I think he used the term “in batches”. Is that something the federal government could do to hopefully improve the process of moving these conservation measures forward?
Director, Protected Areas Establishment Branch, Parks Canada Agency
I think Parks Canada is in a little bit of a different situation. What Dr. Miller is talking about is creating a protected areas network within one province, where you have a fair amount of crown land that the Nova Scotia government works with. They have the territory on which they can move forward in collaboration with others, while Parks Canada proposes looking at different parts of the country where we can pick up representative natural areas using its systems plan, which we've discussed before.
In some cases, if we're successful in establishing them.... For example, in Labrador we had the national park reserve established to protect 10,700 square kilometres, and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador agreed to protect a really important river ecosystem or watershed such as we were talking about on Tuesday, the Eagle River. You have that collaborative federal-provincial approach to protecting the landscape.
That's the kind of thing we try with some success to leverage during the establishment phase and then more actively during the management phase.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Thank you.
Ms. Jans, I'm intrigued to hear about P.E.I. National Park. Some of us here on this committee visited the western parks—Banff, Jasper, Haida Gwaii, Gulf Islands—and there were protection challenges within each of the parks that were unique.
In your park, the pressures for development to accommodate visitors probably continue unabated, and you have to manage that. In your testimony you suggested that you have reduced the amount of infrastructure within the park—
Field Unit Superintendent Prince Edward Island, Parks Canada Agency
That's correct, yes.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
—and made it more efficient, to ensure that your preservation goals can be met.
Are your visitor numbers going up, or are they static, or decreasing?
Field Unit Superintendent Prince Edward Island, Parks Canada Agency
Visitation has been slowly and somewhat steadily increasing over the last number of years, but what we're finding with what we did with our concentrated investments on the visitor infrastructure is that people are using our trail systems more. Biking and cycling in the Gulf Shore Parkway trail system is moving people through the park and getting them away from maybe just being on beaches, so we've been able to move people around as part of their visitor experience.
In particular, in the campgrounds we've diversified the products. We're offering products that are now more in line with what people use for camping experiences than they were before, and we're concentrating them in one or two areas, rather than many.
We have a wonderful opportunity, with the numbers of people we get there, to share stories about the importance of national parks and protection and conservation. We do that with our programming and our outreach.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Has there been any disagreement among the stakeholder groups within the park on any development projects that have been undertaken?
Liberal
Field Unit Superintendent Prince Edward Island, Parks Canada Agency
No, there has been absolutely no disagreement. They are very happy that we're upgrading.
Liberal
October 20th, 2016 / 4:50 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Thank you.
As always, we have excellent witnesses and excellent testimony today.
Mr. Hunka, I very much appreciated your brief, although you had to skip through it trying to pick through some of the real gems of information there. You really nailed the dilemma, the homocentric world view versus the ecocentric, as you put it. This really leads us to the conflict of the 10% versus 90% or the 17% versus 83%. It's like asking how we deal with conservation in a western society and try to bring in the aboriginal values and perspectives. I think what we're trying to do is find solutions to marry those up. It's going to be a bit forced, but I think that's what we're trying to do.
Hopefully I got that right as I read your materials.
I'm curious specifically about two quick things in your presentation. One is the cancellation of the ESSIM, which I had never heard of before, being a westerner. What I understand, from the material you have, is that it looks as though on St. Anns Bank there was a marine protected area that was ready to go.
What would it take to get it back on track? Is that a DFO issue? Is it a somebody else issue? Who owns that problem? Is there a possible win there, if we can get people back to the table?
Director, Intergovernmental Affairs, Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council
Thank you.
The ESSIM is the eastern Scotian Shelf integrated management plan. Nova Scotia has a large shelf. That was a plan to look at the overall area and at an integrated plan whereby you could then have various components, MPAs, included within that area. That was shelved because basically of provincial and federal misunderstandings of where we would want to go.
St. Anns Bank is again a large area. It's 4,000-odd square miles. I'll defer that to Joshua, because he's been very much involved in it.
Josh, maybe you could take that question.
Joshua McNeely Ikanawtiket Executive Director, Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council
We started on St. Anns Bank in 2007, as we said in our brief, with a number of different meetings with a number of different stakeholders and rights holders, and developed a plan for it. It was submitted to Ottawa. For four years now we have not known where it sits. We know it sits somewhere, hopefully on the minister's desk.
Ikanawtiket Executive Director, Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council
Yes, I mean the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
In that time frame, many people.... We're on the fisheries round tables and marine protected area tables with fisheries users and oil and gas users and everybody else. We've seen a stepping back from wanting to be involved in marine protected areas, when it takes seven years and we still don't know the answer from one. Now the marching orders seem to be that we have to go from 1% or 1.5% to 10%.
The mentality that I see, especially among the fishing community, is that we agree with the intent of marine protected areas, but we need to be involved in the process. The result right now, at this stage in the game, is that if you're going to force it upon us, pick somewhere that I'm not fishing. That's our—
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
That led into another train of thought that I'm not going to necessarily go to now, but as we talk about seven years to create these marine protected areas, I would assume—we've seen this with Parks Canada—that for a lot of new protected areas, it takes time to develop the relationships, to build the trust, and to have the right conversations. If all of a sudden we're going on an accelerated plan, what's going to go out the door? Is it the relationships? That is a concern as we're looking at moving forward.
The other point of clarification I simply want to get is this. In your brief you mentioned that “the targets set by the Liberal Government are impractical without a brutal top-down approach”. Are we talking about the 10% and the 17%? Is this related to the Aichi targets, or is it something else? I'm just wondering which—
Director, Intergovernmental Affairs, Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council
When Dr. Peter Lawless reviewed the situation happening in Canada through looking at and discussing things with a range of persons, including us and DFO, he realized that here it seems to be that we're looking for the government itself to put forward a view saying it wants a particular area to be a marine protected area or a terrestrial area, which is really not the experience worldwide. Worldwide it's usually communities and persons who say that there's a unique feature here, there are unique characteristics, there's a unique biodiversity, and we should protect that area, and that idea moves upwards. That is what he's referring to. It would almost put the government in a position of saying, “We have to meet the 10%; here, do it.” That is going to, as the doctor indicated, create horrendous management and monitoring issues.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Perfect. Thank you.
I'm going to move quickly to Parks Canada.
