Mr. Speaker, I thank all those watching out there in Canada. I am glad to have them watching us tonight.
Really, Motion M-15 is about the Liberal commitment to the 30 by 30 agenda, the ever-growing commitment, as it grows to 50 by 50, which is half of our land mass and waters in Canada. There is also the commitment to funding the groups that promote this agenda. This agenda threatens public access to large tracts of land and waterways that have previously been utilized for hunting, fishing and resource development. This motion would ensure more loss of public access.
Despite the Liberals trying to give us the impression that this is about conservation, it is really about protection. For the audience out there, I asked a group just last week at UVIC what the difference is between protection and conservation. Conservation is the principle that we will conserve things so we can use them. An example would be some people I know very well, our salmon fishermen and fisherwomen, who go on weekends to clean up garbage along the river and the streams, all to promote those salmon spawning again. That is, again, conservation so it can be used.
Protection is completely different. This group is proposing to support more protection, and it is really building fences around areas in the country and really preventing accessing from what used to be public land. I am going to quote the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, who spoke on this earlier. He said that this debate is not simply about conservation policy. It is about who makes decisions over Canada's land, resources and economic future, whether those decisions are made here in Canada by elected representatives accountable to Canadians or whether they are increasingly shaped by international frameworks and targets negotiated outside this country's democratic institutions.
I will speak first-hand because I have a couple of personal examples. It all really started around PNCIMA, which is the Pacific north coast integrated management area, where I was first exposed to MPAs, as they are called. Where it really hit home for me was the caribou closures that happened in my riding. It started with a meeting with the mayor and council in Chetwynd. They said that they were worried that, if these caribou closures really took hold, we would lose mills and we would possibly lose coal mines in the area. They were very concerned about what this closure would do to access to resources.
Well, the closures came to fruition, despite community outcry and many community meetings saying this would be devastating for coal development, snowmobiling, hiking in the backwoods, skiing, etc. The government, despite all our recommendations, proceeded to go forward with this closure policy. We have since lost two mills in Chetwynd. We have lost access to snowmobiling in the Rocky Mountains, where people from Chetwynd go to recreate and people in the Peace region go to recreate. We saw this land closure do exactly as we had predicted with the loss of public access to previously accessible lands and waters.
Another example is the bluffs of Pender, which are off Victoria. We met people who fish in Victoria and they have little boat businesses. This contributes about $1.3 billion to the provincial GDP. In this one really key area just outside of Victoria where people fish, the closure was proposed for the protection of the southern resident killer whales. Well, the southern resident killer whales are only in that particular area for five to seven days per year, yet they are going to close down the entire area for the entire year. These closures have not gotten smaller, even though the southern resident killer whale population and the other killer whale populations have done very well and are very healthy. The MPAs, or the marine protected areas, keep expanding all because of this 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 agenda.
I will speak to another example that just happened recently, and this is under the current Prime Minister's watch. It is a closure that is happening and has been implemented in Northwest Territories. I will just read the article, and this is an American article. Again, another highlight for us in this particular issue is that it is not just Canadians talking about these protections. It has actually had a lot of foreign influence, which has really shut down access to those public lands. The headline reads, “Pew and Partners Celebrate Unprecedented Indigenous-Led...”.
It is not really indigenous-led. It was an initiative led by these other groups, and they got eventual buy-in from indigenous groups. I will read from the article again. It states:
Pew and Partners Celebrate Unprecedented Indigenous-Led Initiative to Protect Northwest Territories
WASHINGTON—.... The agreement, initially funded through an investment of CAD$375 million (approximately USD$270 million) in public and private financing....
The initiative will protect [not conserve] a vast area of intact forests, rugged mountain chains, and wetlands, lakes, and rivers, resulting in a significant contribution to Canada’s pledge to protect 30% of its lands and waters by 2030.
Again, protection is putting a big fence around a large area of potentially resource-rich territory in the Northwest Territories. The article continues:
Private donors will match the government on a 1-to-4 basis, contributing CAD$75 million over a 10-year period.
Guess where that money is coming from? The article says it is coming from the Pew foundation, so the international donors, of which there are not many, include the Pew Charitable Trust.
Here we have this foreign influence that really threatens access to the public not only to fish and hunt but also to mine. We know we are already struggling to have mining in Northwest Territories. The last mine is about to close at the end of 2026, and here we have another impediment to future development.
I will just read this in terms of scale. When we say the scale of 30% and 50% and those kinds of things, what does that actually mean? This is a quote from an article in The Canadian Press about the size of 25 by 25 and then what 30 by 30 will mean in a tangible way. It states:
To hit “25 by 25,” Canada must further protect more than 1.2 million square kilometres of land, or approximately the size of Manitoba and Saskatchewan added together [a massive amount of territory]. To get to 30 per cent is to add, on top of that, land almost equivalent in size to Alberta.
It is massive. It continues:
The federal government would need to protect another 638,000 square kilometres of marine territory and coastlines by 2025, or an area almost three times the size of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By 2030, another area the size of the gulf would need to be added.
Therefore, here we are, influenced by foreign non-governmental environmental organizations about closing key areas that we could formerly access publicly to fish, hunt and develop our resources, all shut down by these groups.
I met Crawford Patkotak. He is an Alaskan Inuit leader and he spoke to us about this very issue. Listen to his approach to these radical environmental groups:
Environmental groups, animal rights groups, these are the same organizations that come into our communities and try to split us all apart, split all the corporations, the tribes, the governments because they have an agenda [it is called the “30 by 30” agenda] and if they had their agenda we wouldn’t be able to hunt today. If they had their agenda, we wouldn’t be able to develop the oil we have in the ground. That would cripple us economically.
He said that they told these groups to get lost. I would say that is an example of an indigenous leader who knows exactly the benefit of having access to be able to fish, hunt and develop their resources.
Therefore, Motion No. 15, while well-intentioned perhaps, would really set the stage to have a lot more closures and protections in Canada, and 30 by 30 is already causing Canadians to lose access to our beloved fishing, hunting, areas of recreation and other examples I have laid out tonight. That, I simply cannot support.