The natural historic sites process is a process of commemoration. It is a process to recognize special places, people, and events in Canada, so it is not an asset management system. It is not looking at an inventory of buildings within a complete system to decide how to manage this category and that category.
For example, right now, as I said earlier, the national historic sites program is not eager to fund a lot more battlefields, because they've been there; they've done that; they have overextended themselves in that direction. The Parks Canada program of national historic sites, actual parks that are managed by Parks Canada--and in fact they're not really expanding those--is a program to make special places available to the public. They will be managed, particularly interpreted, for the visitor. So it's like a museum program. They have stories they want to tell and places they want to interpret to the Canadian public. Again, a very limited number of places are going to be candidates for a Parks Canada system.
The federal heritage building policy is a blanket program. It is an asset management program, and in fact it covers all of our buildings, and FHBRO, as was mentioned, has the responsibility to identify and rate and classify these buildings in terms of how they'll be treated. You might very well say that that third level is sufficient; we have a program in place. The evidence is that it doesn't work that well, and the reason it doesn't work that well is that it's not backed up by legislation. In fact, if you asked me what was wrong with the lighthouse act, I would say the problem with the lighthouse act is that I'd like to see this kind of legislation for all our heritage buildings in Canada. It isn't there.
When you look at the building I mentioned earlier, the Work Point Barracks, a military building that came down, I'm not saying that it had to stay, but I'm saying that the process that was involved was not adequate and the policies in place to protect that building as an historic place really were not strong enough. They were not backed up by real legislation.
So what we're dealing with here is a special class of buildings within that program. But given that this is a very special class and that it is a unique set of buildings, I would say that it probably is valid to have this particular piece of legislation, much like the Heritage Railway Stations Protection Act of the 1980s was identified as something that was needed then because of the change in the railways. We couldn't wait 30 years to figure this out; we had to act then.
So in that sense, I think this piece of legislation takes our blanket heritage policy, federal heritage policy, another step further for this special class of buildings, and it's something we need to do. I would also say that if we don't do it now, if this bill fails, it's not going to come back again and we will only have the dubious privilege of looking back in 20 or 30 years, those of us who are still around, and saying we should have done something and we didn't.
I hope that answers the question.