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.

So it’s nothing or permission?

No, there are four zones.

You don’t have to go through them, but there are different zones. Thank you.

Thank you to the witnesses. It is good to see you again. Mr. Campbell, we have known each other for a while, so I will direct my first question to you. I know you will be familiar with this.

I want to talk about how the bill addresses the issue of access roads for neighbouring communities near the protected areas. Again, I want to reflect on my own experience in Louisbourg, where the fortress site is 60 acres, yet the government eventually took 16,000 acres, including all the access to Louisbourg to Gabarus — a stretch of eight miles, effectively turning the town, which was a seaport, into an outport. I have always been concerned about Parks Canada’s overreach when it comes to taking land and how it affects neighbouring communities. Can you assure us that this will no longer be the case?

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.

That same approach was evident in Louisbourg in the 1960s. We weren’t at the end of the road. They put us at the end of the road. They took over the provincial road that went through, and they let it run down to the point where they claimed they had to shut it down, and they shut it down. That was 50 years ago, and I don’t see a lot of difference in your approach if that’s the methodology.

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 have one more question. I would like to find out what the government intends to do and what measures it intends to take to preserve the heritage and memory of communities affected by the modifications to national parks and the conservation areas. Again, I look at my own hometown, West Louisbourg, as well as Kenyon Cove and Deep Cove. Kenyon Cove and Deep Cove were communities about 120 years old. West Louisbourg was over 200 years. My mother’s family had been there for 200 years, and my grandmother was expropriated. There is no mention of them around the fortress — no acknowledgement of them.

How is Parks Canada going to deal with this, going forward?

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.

Hopefully, it will get better going forward.

Thank you. Welcome to the Senate. First of all, I would like to request a list of all the First Nations, Métis and Inuit who have been consulted and those who haven’t either. It would be good to bring them in as witnesses.

So Bill S-14 would establish that Akami-Uapishku-KakKasuak-Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve in Newfoundland and Labrador. A national park reserve is a region that is intended to become a national park but where there are outstanding land claims by Indigenous groups that have yet to be settled.

What outstanding land claims are there with respect to this national park reserve, and which Indigenous groups have claims? What co-management agreements are in place for the park, and how do Indigenous communities share management and planning responsibilities for the park with Parks Canada?

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.

What about the other parks that are there? Are there outstanding land claims with those as well?

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.

Could we have a list of those?

Certainly.

I was keeping these questions for the Minister of the Environment, but we don’t know yet if he’s coming, so I’ll ask you.

Recently, we were in Montréal hosting COP 15 conference on biodiversity. This crisis of biodiversity loss became extremely important.

Yesterday, in the National Finance Committee, we were talking about how the shrimp is disappearing from the Gulf of St. Lawrence because of climate change.

My question concerns biodiversity and how you assess biodiversity.

Every time you decide this is a national park, my first question is this: Does this belong to the Montréal agreement with the goal of conserving 30% of Canada’s land and water by 2030?

Second, when you take possession of the territory, I hope you measure and assess biodiversity. What indicators tell you that biodiversity is increasing in these protected areas? Are you looking at endangered species? Are you following biodiversity?

I’m asking that because today there are incredible genomic tools that can tell you in detail how good or how bad you are in terms of biodiversity.

Thank you very much for the questions. That was a lot of information there.

With regard to the lands included in Bill S-14, they are counted toward Canada’s protected areas in terms of achieving 25% of protected lands by 2025 and contributing toward 30 by 30 as well.

In addition to that, Parks Canada is also engaged in the establishment of 10 new national parks and 10 new national marine conservation areas, along with 10 national urban parks. That’s part of the expansion program to continue to contribute toward 30 by 30.

With regard to your question about biodiversity, the ecological values and the selection of lands, when we are identifying sites across it’s the country, we’re using a variety of things. One is, in fact, the biodiversity, the existence of ecosystems, the protection, the amount of undisturbed territory and those sorts of things. There is a site identification stage to new park establishment, as well as a feasibility stage where we work and consult with partners, identify potential boundaries and at that point are doing a thorough assessment of the feasibility. At that point, it includes an inventory of biodiversity, species, natural habitat, cultural connections and Indigenous knowledge. All of those aspects are studied during the feasibility stage for the establishment of a new place or the addition of lands.

With regard to indicators, each of our national parks have a monitoring indicator suite where we do resource conservation, research, study and monitoring own an ongoing basis. Some of our older parks that were established decades ago have a long history of data gathering and analysis to be able to track the ecosystem health of each of these national places over a period of time. We are seeing external climate change impacts in all of our places. Some of those we can address and mitigate through active management of, for instance, restoration and species movement and a variety of resource conservation projects that take place in our parks with our scientific staff. In other cases, we are able to contribute to the body of knowledge within the country and internationally with regard to the impacts of various types of climate change in our places.

In terms of which indicators, they each have different indicators depending on the situation which the park derives. But that is part of the early stages, as we have scientific and feasibility studies that inform the appropriate suite of indicators to use as an ongoing monitoring program for that park.

I think I’ve touched on a few things.

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.