Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Kootenay—Columbia who himself has had a long career track record, particularly with our parks system.
Targets are important, but targets can be misleading. One of the things out of the Brundtland Commission, the World Commission on Environment and Development, was a mistake. Certainly the author of the Brundtland Commission report, Jim MacNeill, lamented that somehow, people took out of that report 12%. It was sort of a magic number. If we could protect that, then everything else would take care of itself.
Ideally, we have graduated systems of protection. The national parks, as I mentioned, are the crown jewels, so no industrial activity at all should take place within national parks, and we should avoid the notion that they are a cash cow to pay for Parks Canada.
As my colleague from Kootenay—Columbia mentioned earlier, Parks Canada should be adequately funded so that the agency does not have to rely for so much of its revenue stream on people paying for services. That tends to drive us in the direction of national park Disneylands. We need to avoid that.
If we go out across the landscape, farmers, we know, are great conservationists. Ranchers can be great conservationists. Knowing how to protect things, they lamented deeply that the Harper administration killed the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, losing hedgerows, losing tall grass prairie. All parts of our ecosystem can be protected through sustainable development and sensitive use, even when we are exploiting them for economic purposes.