Mr. Speaker, he is the member for Davenport. I thank the member who has just helped me with the riding name of the chair of the environment committee.
The member put forward an amendment to the Canada Parks Act that would have given some satisfaction to the concept of ecological integrity but his own party voted it down because the language was too strong. I guess the Liberal Party was frightened by the language. He did not even get the support of his own caucus.
The language of the amendment he put forward in partnership with the leader of the NDP was that “the ecological integrity and the protection of natural resources shall be the first priority when considering the uses and activities of and in our national parks”. Had that language succeeded in 1988, the national parks of Canada would be in a far different state than they are today. It would have been binding in the truest sense of the word. This would have regulated and would have been the enabling language where the enforcement officers could have acted in the first interests of the national parks and not in the first interests of commercialization, expansion, development, real estate, and all the other competing interests for our treasured national parks. Had the Liberal party supported its own member on the environment committee with that amendment, it could have carried the day and we would have been facing a different situation today.
I am here to say on behalf of our caucus and on behalf of our national parks critic that the New Democratic Party believes Bill C-27 is a good start. We in the NDP are happy to say that we believe the basic tools for saving Canada's national parks are found in Bill C-27. However, like most Liberal legislation, we believe that Bill C-27 stops short of doing all that is really necessary to protect the ecological integrity of Canada's national parks system.
We will be fighting for amendments to the act. There is a long list of them here, but the first and only one I have time to express is that we want a definition of ecological integrity built into the act so that people fully understand the impact those words really have and what they mean to the environmental community.