It's an excellent question.
You're absolutely right that our visitation in the first year of the pandemic, 2020-21, was 17 million. We reached 21.6 million in the last fiscal year. What's important, actually, about that number for Parks Canada is that we had very low international visitation, of course. That meant our domestic visitation among Canadians actually increased by roughly 20%. That meant that a number of Canadians who had never before visited a setting like this were coming. We absolutely had to adapt and strengthen our outreach, our communication and our social media work just to educate Canadians about how to safely and constructively enjoy these settings.
We also worked very collaboratively with the news media, and you might even have seen some of the proactive news media coverage on how to be safe and how to ensure not to impact the environment or the cultural integrity of our places.
We manage the potential impact of visitation on protected places through a number of means, everything from zoning to fairly elaborate visitor use management strategies, and we are able at very high levels of visitation, including the visitation levels that we experienced in 2017 with free admission, to effectively mitigate the impacts of visitation on ecology.
In the first year of the pandemic, it is true that we did not see high levels of visitation, and absolutely we saw some changes in the patterns of wildlife use of our places, but I don't know that I would say that we saw a significant ecological change or benefit from the decline in visitation.