Thank you very much.

Some of the points I'll make will actually duplicate a little of what Mr. Brown has said. I apologize for not having complete notes. I'm just back from England and still adjusting to time.

As a little bit of perspective of where I'm speaking from, back in the seventies and eighties I was an employee of Parks Canada. I was a biologist and managed the visitor services staff at Point Pelee and the St. Lawrence Islands National Park at the time.

I left the parks system to go into private business in Brockville for two decades, in retail business and sporting goods. During that time, I wrote the nomination papers for the third land trust in Canada, which is in that particular region and was named the Canadian Thousand Islands Heritage Conservancy. Also, just after that time, I was one of the authors of the nomination papers for the UNESCO Frontenac Arch world biosphere reserve.

So I come to you from a variety of points of interest.

Back in 1673, Champlain showed up on the shores of the eastern end of Lake Ontario and immediately asked, because he hadn't been there before, what all that shimmering was in the east. The first nations people told him that it was a lake of a thousand islands, and we've been following that nomenclature pretty much ever since.

The creation story has that as being an international border, even back in the creation story days of good versus evil...scooping up great handfuls of land masses and hurling them across the border at the evil side, creating a thousand lakes on the Canadian side and two thousand islands in the St. Lawrence River. Obviously, right from the get-go this has been very much the symbology of the region—it's “the thousand islands”—so it's only natural that the name would carry on.

Back when I was working for Parks Canada and came to the Thousand Islands.... I was brought to the Thousand Islands in the 1970s because there was quite a controversy going on at the time about the expansion of the national park, which probably could have been handled a little differently than it was. But I think it was actually a crystallizing moment for people in the region, because they began to realize, out of a potential expropriation of private properties, just how valuable this asset in their backyard was.

There was an advisory committee formed to discuss how all of this should take place. One of the recommendations that came out—and was signed by Judd Buchanan back in 1983—was that the name of the park should be changed to Thousand Islands National Park. Originally when the park was established, it was done so at the will of the residents. They actually petitioned to have a national park in that area.

Although it's the first national park east of the Rockies, it was proposed as a national park 10 years in advance of the creation of the Banff National Park. It's actually the first proposed national park in Canada. At the time, it was supported by a fellow by the name of John A. Macdonald, and it was heavily advocated for in local newspapers. Landowners actually donated property to establish what was then called the Thousand Islands National Park.

When the park was actually created, it was a little bigger than it is now. There was an event called the St. Lawrence Seaway, which came to be in 1959, and a couple of other national park islands, further down river in the St. Lawrence River than they are today, are currently under water with the seaway. So it has actually consolidated the holdings a little bit in the upper part of the St. Lawrence River and truly in the Thousand Islands. Over and over again, we see the Thousand Islands name popping up.

A couple of years ago, a previous Conservative member of Parliament by the name of Jim Prentice, who was Minister of the Environment at the time, suggested in a news article that this was probably the best national park location in Canada to discuss amongst Canadians the value of national parks and the national park system. This national park sits within a five-hour drive of 53% of the population of Canada. If you extend that drive outwards to a full day, there are 85 million people within that day's drive of this national park.

It's probably the most accessible national park in the entire national parks system, and yet until just a few years ago it was the smallest of Canada's national parks.

To show further how the community values this national park, one of the efforts that the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve undertook, along with the Thousand Islands Watershed Land Trust, was a consultation with the province, where Gord at the time was chair of the St. Lawrence Parks Commission. With Gord and the commission, we negotiated transfers of property, nearly ten square kilometres that were provincial holdings along the St. Lawrence River, to the national park. This was done for less than the average price of a house in Canada, if you can imagine that, in that particular region, because people wanted it to happen.

It cascaded another community event in bolstering the size of the national park. Several landowners came forward via the land trust and donated considerable other properties to this national park. Very rarely do you see occasions where people are willing to give up private land in such a valuable real estate region as this one to augment what they see as an incredibly valuable not just local but national asset. So it's very important that this happens.

In terms of its ecology and its value, Gord had mentioned as well that this is the most biodiverse area of Canada. That's the foundation for the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve coming into place. It only took five months to go from nomination to designation. Of all of the 583 UNESCO world biosphere reserves, this set a speed record in the UN for this thing to happen because of the recognition of its globally significant natural assets and also because of the total of 25 signatories, with all of the municipalities and organizations, to the nomination papers to make this happen.

It is an incredibly significant area, and the national park has played a very strong role in stewardship in the region. It also has been a guiding light with regard to science and education within the region. I do hope that significant budgets can be replaced into this particular national park, and supporting the biosphere reserves associated with any national park, because they bring this kind of awesome value to the community where it's taking place.

Canada's national parks, national historic sites, world heritage sites, and world biosphere reserves are all incredibly involved in the complex brand that is Canada. These are landscapes that people recognize internationally, our culture and history that people recognize internationally, and they play an important part in the hearts and minds of not only Canadians but the people who visit the region.

To all of us who live in the region, the name change is long overdue. It is someplace around about 300 years overdue. It's really a no-brainer in the region. We have the St. Lawrence Parks Commission. We have St. Lawrence Park in Brockville. We have St. Lawrence streets all over the place, in every town. We don't have anything really to distinguish St. Lawrence Islands National Park from the rest of the community except for this small name change.

This one-sentence bill can do that.

Thank you.

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