Mr. Speaker, there are no unorganized territories in my riding. The territories I represent are all in existing municipalities, for the most part in the United Counties of Prescott and Russell, an entity which is roughly equivalent to an RCM in Quebec. There are also the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. Finally, the third part of my riding is the city of Ottawa, which I also represent, at least its eastern part. So that is not the case.
Currently, most of that land is owned by the South Nation River Conservation Authority. For the benefit of my colleagues, in Ontario conservation authorities are created under a provincial statute. So, that land is in part owned by the said conservation authority. Another part is directly owned by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell. Another part is owned by the Nature Conservancy. I believe some of that land is owned by Ducks Unlimited. So it is owned either by public or semi-public organizations, and that is good.
Today, on 90% of our territory, we are no longer faced with the risk of seeing mechanical cranes and other pieces of equipment come and cause havoc as we saw in the past. It will not happen again.
However the desire to have a national park in my riding is not tantamount to saying it is an intrusion. It is ridiculous to claim that the desire to create a national park is an intrusion. If I were to stand along highway 17 in Alfred and ask people if they want a national park in their riding, I would say that 90% of them would support the idea. It is not an intrusion when 90% are in favour of it and the other 10% would presumably want to keep on extracting peat from the bog.
However, we do not have a problem with intrusion in our area. As a matter of fact, there is nothing I would like better than to have the kind of resources the Government of Canada could offer us: a small interpretation centre, for instance, and the like. By the way, it is important to note that the Alfred bog was designated by the UN, the United Nations, as a significant ecological area.The group is called COSEWIC and I will try to spell it out later. It was designated by the UN.