Environment committee  No, we are not involved directly. There may be overlaps from time to time with some of our sites, such as Wood Buffalo, but we're not directly involved in the designation.

Environment committee  Parks Canada has a National Marine Conservation Areas Act. Although the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is the lead federal department for reporting on the percentage of protected areas, Parks Canada has its own legislation and establishes national marine conservation areas.

Environment committee  Thank you for your question. I'll do my best to answer in the language in which it was asked. Under our administration, ecological integrity is our number one priority. What that means is, when we create things like visitor programs, our first consideration is their impact on ec

Environment committee  We have legislative protection. In particular, in that place we have that piece of legislation that helps define our role, and then as a federal department we work with the impact assessment agencies, so any projects that move forward would be going through environmental assessme

Environment committee  It would depend on the legislation, on what that particular impact might be and our ability to demonstrate actual impacts. It's going to depend.

Environment committee  For both the terrestrial and the marine environment, Parks Canada has a systems plan whereby we've divided the country. For marine conservation, we have 29 natural regions. The mandate of the agency is to have a representative placed in each of those regions. The first thing we

Environment committee  The southern Strait of Georgia has been a bit of a long-standing project, and some of these are like that. We're currently in conversations with many of the first nations communities. One of the challenges and opportunities on the southern Strait Of Georgia is there is 19 indigen

Environment committee  It depends. As with terrestrial parks—and Andrew mentioned the management plan—part of the management planning process is to identify zones. We operate with different zones. We have the ability to protect really sensitive areas with special preservation zones and so focus use in

Environment committee  Parks Canada contributes to both the marine and the terrestrial targets. DFO is the lead federal agency to report those numbers. Environment and Climate Change Canada is the lead federal department to report the terrestrial. Parks Canada is feeding both of those with our system

Environment committee  Right now, the establishment processes can be long. The government's invested quite a bit of money into protected areas. I think we're doing really well right now to explore a number of options.

Environment committee  I'm not going to comment on that, thanks.

Environment committee  I think you're referring to the pilot project. That's being led by Environment and Climate Change Canada. To Michael's point, Parks Canada has had a number of guardian programs operating for upwards of 20 years in certain parks. It's a model that we know works really well to rec

Environment committee  That's the call to action we're specifically responsible for, but a number of the initiatives and the way in which the agency works with indigenous communities are supporting a number of the principles in the calls to action.

Environment committee  Every park known to have a fire risk will have a fire-risk management plan and everything for that. We currently invest about $7 million a year to prevent, mitigate and respond to fire management, and another $1.5 million a year in the use of fire on the land for ecological integ

Environment committee  Again, it's going to depend by species, but certainly some of the invasive species or just hyperabundant native species are causing problems. We do manage for ecological integrity, and certainly with native species it's not necessarily our goal to eradicate them. Within our polic