Thank you very much for the question.
I would say that setting up a national park is a breathtaking experience. Parks Canada has done it 46 times, and they are always complicated. Part of this is about the creation of a park from 1922, with the business of the Garden River excision here. That is a park that, while it was created almost 100 years ago, still isn't finished. If you talk to the Mikisew Cree, if you talk to the Garden River First Nation, if you talk to the GNWT, or if you talk to the province of Alberta, they sure aren't finished talking to us either on this.
These things are always complicated. They are complicated when you have different orders of government. They are complicated when you have very passionate interests that are brought to them. They are complicated whether there are 20 million people living within a short drive away from it, or whether in some of our northern parks there is nobody living within a two-hour's drive because you can't drive there. They are always very challenging.
I think what's important that we relearn about this is that if parks are going to be successful in the long term, then there has to be enough common ground built into the starting point to allow people to continue to work together. We have learned that again and again. There are points in time in this country where we barred first nations people from participating in parks and from doing things they had done there for thousands of years. We learned the hard way that was wrong.
There are other places where we went in and we evicted people as a way of creating parks. We discovered that didn't make for the types of relationships you needed to be successful going forward.
There were other points in time where we thought we understood what was important to go on in that park, and we didn't ask a whole lot of other people. We learned that didn't make for a very successful park.
I think it's probably a good idea that we're 130 years in before we tried something as complex as Rouge National Urban Park. We learned a lot of lessons along the way. The core of that is you have to listen to people. The core of that is it's not always our stories as an agency, but it's a broad range of Canadian stories that need to be brought to bear. That's something we've learned. Patience is something you relearn in this business again and again.
To me, those would be some of the key lessons we've learned that we can take forward.