Mr. Speaker, I was particularly taken by the member's comments about climate change in the context of this northern park. I had the pleasure of hiking and backpacking across Auyuittuq National Park this summer. I saw climate change in Nunavut up close and personal as we could watch the glaciers recede and the waters were much higher. This is not theory; this is practice. When we talk to national park staff they confirm what my friend has said, which is that the budgets for national parks are not being kept up.
In the context of my friend's remarks about this park, does the number of kilometres that have been saved matter if we have no credible plan to manage that park? When the former premier of the Northwest Territories is saying that they have “taken the heart right out of it. The middle of it is carved out so that mining can happen dead centre in the middle of the proposed national park.”
Without a management plan, does it really matter how large the created entity would be?