Mr. Chair, I want to thank you for allowing me the time to talk about the main estimates. I am actually quite excited about one aspect of the government's plans and priorities for the next year in Environment Canada.
The issue I want to bring to the attention of members in the House is a project that I have been working on, along with a number of other people, which is the establishment of a new national urban park in the Rouge Valley in Toronto. This is a very exciting project.
This project is really an example of citizens coming together to spur the government to action. This is something that was started by the Honourable Pauline Browes, who was a minister in the government of Brian Mulroney in the late 1980s and represented Scarborough in this Parliament. She and people like Glenn De Baeremaeker, a City of Toronto councillor, and other interested stakeholders who served in the City of Toronto, in the town of Markham and in the greater Toronto region have worked for the better part of 20 years to fight to preserve a very important watershed in southern Ontario.
I was asked to sit as the federal government's representative on the Rouge Park Alliance some five years or so ago. Minister Flaherty asked me if I would sit on that group, representing the government. I did so without really knowing a lot about this particular project. When I started to get involved with the alliance, I realized what a gem we had there in the eastern part of the GTA.
What also struck me was that literally thousands of ordinary Canadians had given up their time, effort and money to push the governments, both federally and provincially, to work towards the establishment of this park.
Many people had spent the better part of two decades working on this project. When I joined it, I sought to educate myself about it under the leadership of Alan Wells , who was then and is now the chair of the alliance. He was appointed by the Government of Ontario.
We decided that after 20 years of a very ad hoc governance arrangement, we really needed to come forward with a new governance structure for the park, a new budget, a new vision, so we engaged in a year and a half of consultations with various stakeholders, both governmental and non-governmental, including the federal, provincial and municipal governments and environmental NGOs.
What we ended up with was a report that we came forward with in the early part of 2010. The report called for the creation of a national park in the Rouge Valley. The report was unanimously adopted by all of the various stakeholders—municipal and provincial, environmental and non-environmental—involved with this initiative.
We presented the findings to the federal government in early 2010, and we started to lobby the government and the then Minister of the Environment, Minister Prentice, to seek action, to see if the government would take the report's recommendations and work toward the establishment of this park.
I remember very vividly the day Minister Kent was appointed to the federal cabinet as Minister of the Environment. I was in a hotel room when I managed to get hold of him. We had an hour-long chat over the telephone about this initiative. I think it was in late January or early February of 2011. We had a long and sincere chat about this initiative.
I said to him at the time that this was really the make or break moment for the park. I really felt that if the government did not move forward with this initiative, it was going to fall apart, and all the work that we had done would have been for naught.
I was delighted that Minister Kent took it upon himself to really push this initiative. We had an election about five months later, and it was in the party's election commitment to work towards the establishment of this park. Then, after the election, in the Speech from the Throne in 2011, the government reaffirmed its commitment to establish this park.
Last fall, a mere several months later, Parks Canada, with Alan Latourelle, initiated the consultations that began on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, where we invited a wide range of stakeholders, including, I might add, a member of the New Democratic caucus from Scarborough who joined us for this consultation. She participated for the whole day in those consultations, and that marked the start of the process that we are now in.
I am very excited about this because it is important for two reasons.
The first reason is that it is ecologically important. We have protected large swaths of Canada's north and the boreal forest zone of the High Arctic. I was in Auyuittuq National Park on my own time and my own dime. A couple of years ago I hiked up the Weasel River some 19 kilometres. Never did I think that these moraines would be so difficult to climb. I thought I could do five kilometres an hour, but I think it took me an hour a kilometre to scramble up these moraines. It was a memorable trip.
We have protected the High Arctic. We have protected the rain forest in the Pacific Rim National Park. We have protected marine areas, whether off the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario or off the Pacific or Atlantic coasts. We have protected Gros Morne National Park. We have protected large swaths of Canada's biodiversity, but the most intense biodiversity in Canada that we have not protected on a large scale is the Carolinian forest zone, found only in southern Ontario.
This zone lies to the west of Toronto. If one were to draw a line between Toronto and Stratford, everything south of that is the Carolinian forest zone, and we have not protected a big chunk of it. It is the most dense biosphere in the country. This park would expand the federal protection of that very important biosphere, the eastern deciduous forest zone known as the Carolinian forest zone. That is the first reason this is such an important issue.
The second reason is that many of us will never go to Canada's national parks. The fact of the matter is that most of Canada's national parks are in very remote areas, especially for people who are living in the St. Lawrence lowlands. They are far away and cost thousands and thousands of dollars to get to. To do a canoe trip in Nahanni would cost $,5000 or $6,000 just for a week or two up there. The same goes for many of Canada's national parks, yet in southern Ontario, in the GTA, we have some 8 million Canadians, and in the next 20 years we are going to have a 50% increase in that population, to some 12 million Canadians who would live in what is now called the Golden Horseshoe. Many of these Canadians are new Canadians and have never accessed the great outdoors. Many have never had access to our national park system.
We all know the challenge in these last three years with the decline in the global economy and the challenge of making our national park system accessible. That is why this is such an important initiative. It would give access, a gateway, to our national park system to some eight million Canadians, many of whom are new Canadians living in the greater Toronto area. We will make this national park system accessible right on their back doorstep with a quick hop on the rapid transit system.
I want to thank Parks Canada, the minister, Catherine Grenier and Andy Campbell for their continued work on this initiative. I also want to recognize members of the Rouge Park Alliance for their tireless diligence. People have contributed over 20 years of volunteerism and hard work to this project.
I am very excited about the department and agency's plans and priorities for this initiative. I am going out on a limb here, but I think this could become the most visited national park in our national park system once it is created and up and running. This is a tremendous initiative that will create a new opportunity for Canadians to access the great outdoors.
I will finish on this final note of informing members of this committee why this is an interesting project.
We have never created a park in an urban setting. This park will be 10 to 15 times the size of Central Park. It will far outstrip Stanley Park in Vancouver in terms of size, and it is right in the heart of the city of Toronto, in the town of Markham. Because of that, we are going to create a new type of national park with this initiative called a near-urban national park, or an urban national park.
This will allow Parks Canada to develop expertise in this kind of set-up for parks that are near urban areas. This will be a precedent-setting park that may expand its initiatives in the Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa here, and in other large metropolitan regions, whether they be Montreal or Vancouver.
I want to thank the minister for this initiative. I will just ask a quick question.
A lot of services have been reduced in existing areas at Parks Canada. My question for the minister is: Why is Parks Canada working on creating new national parks and national marine conservation areas, while at the same time it is reducing the budget in other areas of Parks Canada?