Thank you very much, Madam Senator. That’s an excellent question. The three islands we obtained as part of the park’s expansion were part of the Innu’s request, and they were obtained through an agreement with the former owners of these islands.

[English]

Yes, that is what is being added within the bill. The change of boundaries actually adds places within the Mingan Archipelago. Île du Havre is added, as well as a couple of other small islands within Mingan. That is the inclusion that we are proposing within the bill.

It was totally thanks to the support of the Mingan Innu groups, too.

There are several different stages that we’re in the process of setting up over there. In some islands, we have projects that are called ecological restoration; in some islands, there are projects to return certain places to a natural state — in three or four islands.

With the assets and workforce that are there, it’s necessary to fight climate change with —

[English]

— hardening of the assets there, so they are not blown away by larger storms.

We are taking steps to be able to have, for instance —

[Translation]

The docks there are now better fortified; this is an example.

There are a number of steps to make sure there’s more monitoring there with regard to climate change.

That’s a difficult question to answer. In many of our places, there is obviously no pressure that comes directly to people, other than in certain areas. What we have in those cases are zoning. If we take a large park — one with the largest visitation, which Senator Sorensen is from — for instance, Banff, we have areas where through zoning, we say that it is only a natural area. In those areas, human activity is excluded.

Then we have areas that are right up to areas that border, for instance, the town of Banff where human use is perfectly acceptable within certain parameters. Within those areas, those types of activities would happen.

There is the ability through management planning to have zones of different types of activity. That’s how, through the national parks system, we manage visitation.

No, there are four zones.

Thank you, senator.

It’s very difficult to project into the future and say, “That will never happen again” with Parks Canada. Right now, we have our current management regime — and what is in front of everyone today is an act where we would then be the caretakers if, for instance, there were a provincial road that went through. In all the cases, we would have those transferred to us, and we would become the caretakers of those assets. So we would not only be responsible for the paving and the bridges, we would be responsible for the snow removal and all those sorts of things.

Anything before you today that would have a road pass through, that would be the case. We would continue to maintain that type of access, except in instances where you might be at the end of a road. There are some. With some of the lands you look at on Prince Edward Island, the road ended at the property that we are taking on, we would work toward renaturalizing that area or would use it as some other form of pathway for people to move on.

In this case, in Prince Edward Island, the end of the road would actually be the ocean. There would be no further step that you could take in a vehicle, so it would be adding that piece back into the national park and then creating the connectivity of the shoreline. That would be the only instance I can think of in the bill where that could potentially happen.

I will use a few examples — not Louisbourg — where expropriates, have formed associations. The group of expropriates from Forillon National Park has formed a coalition, and we have been working with them on a number of things. One is entry into the parks — from that perspective, the free and unfettered entry into the park. We’ve had agreements with them around the maintenance of some of their old expropriated lodgings — as for refurbishing them and having access into some of those. Also, there are the stories being told of expropriates.

That’s from the settler expropriates, and then there are lots other agreements that we have with First Nations, Inuit and Métis.

I will take that one as well.

For land claim agreements that are still outstanding and that we are working through, there is the Labrador Innu Land Claims Agreement, which has been signed as with the Nunatsiavut government — so the Inuit of Labrador. There’s a small piece of the northern section of the park reserve that is part of that land claim settlement.

As well, there is an outstanding land claim process under way for the NunatuKavut Community Council who, to date, continue to be beneficiaries of the agreement that we have for the creation of the Akami-Uapishku-KakKasuak-Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve.

Within the groups that we have a co-management agreements are the Innu of Labrador, the Nunatsiavut government for the Inuit and the community council as well. All three of them have different types of agreements. Some are impact and benefit agreements, and others are what are called, shared understanding agreements. The shared understanding agreement is with the NunatuKavut government specifically as they have yet to have full recognition under section 35.

Those are the groups with whom we have shared governance. That shared governance forms three different councils. It is there for the establishment and consultation of the management plan that oversees the direction of the park, as well as the communities are involved in some of the day-to-day running of the park. We also have a community liaison position of individuals from each of those three groups. We then have additional impact and benefit agreements, as I said, with the Inuit and the Innu.

Four where there are land claim agreements or continuing land claims. Through the Nunavut land claim agreement with the Qikiqtani, we have the Inuit association, we have Quttinirpaaq National Park and an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement, or IIBA, around it. Tallurutiup Imanga, again, is in the Qikiqtani region and there is an impact and benefit agreement around that as well. Ms. Cunningham already mentioned Tuktut Nogait with the Sahtu and Mingan with the Innu, as we had previously stated.

Certainly.

You asked around our use of different technologies. We use a large number of different technologies now, everything from the electronic monitoring of species and their movement to environmental DNA. You may have seen recently in the news, the issue of whirling disease in the mountain parks and in the lakes. Environmental DNA is used in order to be able to look at that, the same as we are doing for zebra mussel testing. For invasive species, we tend to use a lot of environmental DNA techniques. For the movement of large terrestrial fauna, we use a lot of environmental DNA as well. As animals are moving through overpasses and underpasses, there are rakes, for lack of a better term for that, that actually take the samples from the animals that are crossing through and then we do environmental DNA testing to see the species complexity plus the movement of genetic material to ensure that there is a broader ecological resilience there to the DNA.

Parks Canada is responsible for a percentage of the percentage of 30 by 30, so it would be wrong for us to comment on the full 30 by 30 on track. However, Parks Canada continues to play its role in moving forward, and we’re having very successful discussions with groups all across the country. I will say that in many cases, it is the local Indigenous organizations who are now coming to us, looking for that level of protection and looking to see if we can do that jointly as an Indigenous-protected area at the same time as we are doing it under federal legislation.

[Translation]

There are two answers to this question. For the smaller islands that are attached to already established parks, there’s not really a big cost. So it’s difficult to determine. We’re under more pressure from each of the parks to get more land to manage.

As for the other major parks, it would probably be best if we sent you a written response, to make sure we have the exact figures.

As Ms. Cunningham mentioned, a series of studies led to this decision. At Parks Canada, we have a plan for establishing different parks and acquiring land and different ecosystems across the country. So we have ways of creating representative parks in the different ecological regions of Canada. That’s how we determine our priority for establishing the different parks and marine areas.

In terms of the size of the different places, we want to make sure that we have a certain level of ecological integrity. The purpose of creating national parks is to ensure the ecological sustainability of marine areas. That’s the goal of Parks Canada’s protected areas, and it’s also about having a large enough area to make sure we have real ecological processes in the park.

As far as the forest industry is concerned, since most of the discussion is about Northern Canada, it’s not an issue. We consult extensively with the fishing industry, for example, and the transportation industry, in some cases as well.

As I said in my answers to Senator MacDonald’s questions, we always conduct this type of consultation with various groups of people, industries and other stakeholders who are next to the parks.

As we see, there are two other pieces that I want to touch on. One is cultural continuity, of both traditional users and of local Indigenous groups being able to continue to have access, in perpetuity, in a lot of these areas. Tuktut Nogait National Park was a great example, in that the traditional harvest and the protection of caribou herds through that area are very important for the cultural continuity of the individuals that are there. It’s hard to put that in straight economic terms, that cultural continuity, but certainly that’s a large one.

The other one is ecosystem services. I don’t have to tell you what the Colombia Icefield and the water it produces for the rest of the country out of your area. But some of the others, the large peat areas absorbing large amounts of carbon in two of the parks being created here, again would be massive as far as carbon sinks. Our ability, as Canada, to continue to have natural carbon stores and their value to our economy and health, is difficult to exactly quantify. Certainly, there are many models out there that try to do that. I don’t have that exact answer today from the quantification of those ecological services for these particular areas.

The term traditional land users is used extensively now when we are making agreements with provinces and territories. I’ll use the Labrador example with the Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve. In that area, the NunatuKavut, which still does not have section 35 rights, are still considered traditional users of the land. There are parameters published around that. I will have to look them up in my notes to remember. There are, essentially, 50 families that come within 10 kilometres. There are a number of factors going into that to establish that part of the community. They would not be considered within the Indigenous group but are traditional users of the land.

There are some other examples where provinces or territories or through, for instance, the Nunavut claims agreement that other traditional users of that land — traditional fishers who may not be part of the Inuit community — would also have use and some harvesting rights. That’s all through negotiation. That’s really how it happens, through section 35 of the Constitution, those are established rights for Indigenous peoples. We do benefit agreements. In this case, we sort of walked through those between Ms. Cunningham and myself in response. Those would be how those traditional rights are managed.

Parks that were established before 1982, there are sometimes rights and recognition agreements that we are negotiating with Indigenous peoples across the country. Those would re-establish rights. Or we can do it through a superintendent’s order. I’m sure some of you, yourself, senator, are following this through the Alberta news that has come out recently around a hunt that took place. It was to be ceremonial, around an Indigenous treaty between the Stoney and the Simpcw. They wanted a traditional hunt within Jasper. It was done under a superintendent’s order.

There are lots of mechanisms. If it were pre-1982, the parks of Prince Edward Island would have a different set of rules than the newly established parks.

I won’t argue the science, today. One of the pieces, if you look at permafrost and muskeg and large wetland areas, in fact, they don’t have the same impact. Fire obviously doesn’t have the same impact on them. Warming has an impact on them, so the release through warming will have an impact on how much carbon they can continue to capture.

That being said, the larger the undisturbed area you have the greater the chance that carbon continues to be captured and not released. From that perspective, from an ecological processes perspective, that’s more what I am discussing.

[Translation]