Thank you.
I want to thank our witness for being here and for sharing your insights and your experiences with us today. It's very important for us to hear a variety of perspectives, including yours.
From the questions we have heard already from members around the table, I think you can see how complex the ridings are that we represent. We have seen Lori, who has a territory with a specific agreement in place. We have large areas like those Mr. Melillo represents, with many indigenous communities. Then we have areas like the area I come from, which is metropolitan suburban Vancouver and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. I think it's probably closer to the situation of our witness. There there's a lot of occupied land, a lot of settled land and not many opportunities for the three land-based nations that live in the area I'm in to seek economic reconciliation and to pursue land back opportunities.
I would like to get some thoughts from our witness: In these metropolitan areas, what are the opportunities for land back? How does that work?
In particular, in your opening statement, you referenced national parks and, again, by way of context prior to my career in politics, I spent over 30 years with Parks Canada in a number of national park settings. I would say that there were some good examples and some not good examples about things like comanagement. I also served on the environment committee, where we did a study on protected spaces and made recommendations to the government on other forms of protected areas—other than national parks—things like indigenous protected conservation areas.
Right now, Parks Canada has been tasked with things like pursuing urban national parks. This is something that I'm very interested in for the area that I represent and in speaking with the three land-based nations—the Semiahmoo, the Kwantlen and the Katzie nations—about what the economic opportunities are and what the land opportunities are.
I would like to go to our witness and see what she thinks. In situations like we live in, these settled areas, sometimes the go-to is monetary compensation, but are there other means of getting land back that may not necessarily be part of an expansion of existing reserve lands or new reserve lands? Is there room for other models?
The last contextual piece I'll give is that, in the study that we did in the 42nd Parliament, there was some information that came from Australia. It talked about how the return on social investment related to protected areas far exceeded the investment that was going into social programs. It actually helped with a lot of healing that needed to happen within the aboriginal community in Australia. They saw that there was a huge return on investment for those who were managing indigenous protected areas.
I'll stop talking now. I would love to get your thoughts on how we pursue land back in these settled areas such as you and I live in. Is there any hope for things like urban indigenous protected areas, perhaps, that could be done in concert with initiatives by the federal government?