Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his question.
I think that the breadth of the member's original question, before focusing on the protection of flora and fauna, particularly wildlife and all its forms in the new Nááts’ihch’oh national park reserve, makes it a complicated and very large question.
There is the creation and stewardship of both our traditional national parks and our new national park reserves and marine protected areas on all three coasts in very different parts of the country. There is the new Sable Island National Park Reserve, the proposed Rouge national urban park reserve within the outskirts of the Greater Toronto Area, and of course, Nááts’ihch’oh, which is a remote, still largely unsullied part of our great natural spaces in the north. They face a number of challenges in terms of designing the national park plan for each individual park, such as ensuring that there is reasonable accessibility for visitors and considering highways as well as a variety of civilization infrastructure realities, such as power lines and so forth.
Parks Canada is world renowned. In my travels around the world, in almost every situation when visiting a protected national space abroad, I have heard from the administrators of these parks of their great admiration for the work of Parks Canada.
In regard to the protected species within Nááts’ihch’oh national park, great care has been taken, because Nááts’ihch’oh has a very important part to play in the life and continued existence of the woodland caribou. On the calving grounds, both the Sahtu and Dene people, the Northwest Territories, and wildlife authorities have advised protecting these birthing grounds, and I can assure my colleague that they would be protected under this legislation.