Environment Committee on May 13th, 2009

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have to catch a flight at five.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You'll have plenty of time.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Is there another session after that?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

One of our witnesses didn't come, so we'll be finished at 3:30.

Are we in agreement to spend an hour with CEMA?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Welcome back. I hope everyone had a good lunch.

We're moving into the last segment of our hearings in Alberta, which have been fantastic. Again we thank the people of Alberta and their representatives for receiving us so well and providing us with so much good information.

We have before us Mr. Glen Semenchuk, executive director of CEMA. We will be spending about half an hour, maybe a bit more.

Is your presentation about ten minutes long, Mr. Semenchuk?

[Glen Semenchuk, Executive Director, Cumulative Environmental Management Association]

Correct.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay, so why don't you start and tell us about your organization?

[Glen Semenchuk]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to thank you and all the committee members for inviting CEMA to appear before this committee.

In the time allotted I'll attempt to convey to the committee all the effort and good results CEMA has contributed to developers, regulators of the oil sands, and the citizens of Alberta and Canada.

CEMA is a non-profit, multi-stakeholder association based in Fort McMurray. It has an annual budget of around $8.5 million that is focused on research and studies looking at the cumulative environmental effects of oil sands development. We accomplish this through five working groups. The working groups look at air, land, and water, and also involve people issues. We have a traditional environmental knowledge advisory committee and an aboriginal round table. These working groups are composed of technical experts from our members, as well as individuals from non-member organizations with expertise, to help us tackle some of these big issues. It is a daunting task, and we rely on these volunteers to help us accomplish it.

As this can be a very intensive commitment of time, it limits the involvement of some of the CEMA members and leads to certain frustrations. CEMA has 46 members, which we call the CEMA board. This includes representatives from industry; different levels of government--municipal, federal, and provincial; first nations and aboriginal groups; and ENGOs. The federal agencies that are represented at the CEMA board are Health Canada, Environment Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Natural Resources Canada, and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

CEMA's work is guided by the regional sustainable development strategy that was developed for the Athabasca oil sands area by Alberta Environment. This was developed to provide a framework for managing cumulative effects and ensure sustainable development in the oil sands area. At that time, 72 environmental issues were identified and prioritized. CEMA was given a number of these issues, and at present CEMA is dealing with 27 of these 72 issues.

Since its inception CEMA has forwarded eight major frameworks to both federal and provincial regulators. We have forwarded a revegetation manual and a wetlands manual. In developing these documents, CEMA has produced over 200 reports and amassed a number of databases related to relevant subject matter. The majority of this information is available on our website, and we encourage people to go there and use it.

Over the last 18 months CEMA has had a number of challenges with the withdrawal of members from first nations and ENGOs. This may be viewed as entirely negative, but in fact it has thrown the ball back to CEMA to respond to the concerns that these groups had on their departure.

Managing a multi-stakeholder organization is very challenging, and how CEMA responds and manages this multi-stakeholder organization could be a major contribution to projects in the future. Establishing this network and making it viable and effective are ongoing challenges that we will respond to.

There have been three third-party reviews of CEMA over the last couple of years. All are available to the public on our website now.

The CEMA board, through its management committee, has held a retreat recently to deal with the issues raised in these reviews. The interesting fact is that the majority of recommendations were not directed at CEMA itself, but towards the regulators and how they interact with CEMA.

The CEMA management committee, with the approval of the board, is looking at how we can reshape CEMA to make it more effective, more efficient, and more attractive for organizations to participate in--and for those that left, to come back. I say this because one of the key messages we received from all of the organizations who left CEMA is that they all left the door open. They made suggestions for change and they put the challenge to CEMA.

CEMA has also recently teamed up with a joint federal-provincial regulator committee—over the next few months, between now and the end of the year—to look at this reshaping of CEMA and to make recommendations to the members of CEMA on how that reshaping may take place, because it's only the members of CEMA who can initiate that change.

CEMA is no different from any other non-profit organization. It relies on outside funding. To date, the majority of that funding has come from industry, and there's a blessing and a curse on that part. The blessing is that it's a fairly secure form of funding and it has come on a regular basis. The curse is that when the majority of your funding comes from one direction, there are perceptions that maybe it has more of an influence than it really does.

I recently went to Ottawa to meet with our five federal agencies that are members of CEMA to deliver the message to them that CEMA needs their help in two areas. One, they need to take a very active participation in the reshaping of CEMA to make it more effective, which would include a higher level of involvement in our management committees, our membership, and also in our working groups. We understand the challenges when the expertise is in Ottawa and meetings are held in Fort McMurray, Edmonton, and Calgary. There are financial challenges to this, but we feel it's very important, and we conveyed that message.

The other part of that message was to convey the uncertainty in these uncertain economic times in the petroleum industry about whether the level of support from industry will be maintained, or whether CEMA will have to rely on other sources of funding to continue its mandate, specifically from federal and provincial government agencies.

In the last two years, the provincial government has stepped up and contributed a significant amount to our annual budgets. The federal contributions to date have been rather minimal. We were very happy, though, to have announced very recently that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has assisted us greatly by taking over the funding of a couple of our projects, and also by providing in-kind support to one of our major fisheries studies, amounting to support at a level of $350,000.

Also, in responding in part to some of the criticisms of CEMA and the cumbersome decision-making and transparency of CEMA, the CEMA board has adopted two new policies in a very short period of time in the last few months. We now have a new decision-making policy wherein the consensus-based model is used, mainly on recommendations going out the door of CEMA to the regulators. And on a number of internal process questions, we now operate more on a majority vote.

The latter isn't an effort try to minimize anybody around the table or to try to target groups, but to try to be more effective. One of the criticisms that CEMA took from the phase one instream flow needs study was that we didn't meet the deadlines, that we didn't do our job. I could look at it a different way: we finally realized there were limitations to what multi-stakeholder groups could do. And instead of continuing to beat each other over the head with baseball bats when we've completed 95% of the job, the decision was made that it's actually the regulator who makes the final decision, so let's turn the final product over to the regulators and let them make that decision. But that decision was based on 95% of the work being completed by CEMA. CEMA completed the research; it completed the studies that contributed to that.

One of the things that was missed this morning is that the phase two study is being coordinated by CEMA. We're the ones who had to go out and raise the funds to complete that study. We had to change some of our internal policies to allow groups like the World Wildlife Fund to participate, because we had a policy that if you weren't a member, you didn't participate.

So we are changing. We are trying to respond to make this multi-stakeholder group more responsive.

We have also just completed a release of information policy that will result in the release of the majority of information CEMA has, including reports, databases, and so on. There are some restrictions, as there are pieces of data we are not free to release. One example is that we have collected a fair bit of information on traditional environmental knowledge from various first nation groups, with whom we have legally binding agreements that we cannot release that information without their approval.

In our release of information policy, led by industry members, we are not trying to recover costs on these studies. If the information is being used for research, whether by an NGO, a research institution, or a government agency, we should be prepared to release that data. The only restriction would be that if it were going to be used for a commercial venture, there might then be opportunities for CEMA to recover some of its costs.

On the issue of water, the majority of the water issues in CEMA are conducted through our surface water working group, and their main effort is focused on dealing with the RSDS issues related to water. The surface water quantity issues include a focus on ensuring the health of the aquatic ecosystem and the maintenance of socio-economic uses of the lower Athabasca River. The main surface water task, at this point in time, is supporting the creation of that phase two water management framework for the lower Athabasca River.

It is anticipated that the final draft report will be completed by the end of this year. It will be formulated into a recommendation to the government, and we would hope that recommendation will be going forward in 2010.

The opportunity of creating a multi-stakeholder group to deal with tough issues is unique, and I think the fact that there are still 46 agencies sitting around that table trying to deal with these issues is a bit of a milestone. Yes, organizations—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Semenchuk, will you be concluding shortly, so that we can ask questions?

[Glen Semenchuk]

Very shortly.

It is a challenge, and as I say, all of these groups did leave the door open to come back, and we're taking up that challenge.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

We'll start with Mr. Trudeau, for seven minutes.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you.

You mentioned the barriers to the release of information, with the excellent example of aboriginal traditional knowledge. They want to keep control over it, and that's understandable. However, any time that information is not being released, particularly in an organization like CEMA, which has so many different partners with different motivations and reasons for it, there's always a suspicion that you don't want the information released because somehow it would be damning to a particular member of industry, or a particular partner, or a particular something, such that if these facts were known, it would cause negative impacts on a particular group.

Is that one of the concerns or reasons that you're not releasing all of the information, or all of the data?

[Glen Semenchuk]

No, that's the main one. The only other way we wouldn't release information would be timing, if it was still in draft form. The way we work through our working groups, they would have to approve the database and move it up the CEMA ladder.

Once it has been approved by the working groups as a final report, it's basically public information.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

I'm also interested in the relationship between CEMA and regulators. You spoke about this a little bit, but I'd like you to go into more detail.

Specifically, the Government of Alberta is much more the regulator than the federal government in this case. I'd like you to talk about the difference between the two levels of government and their levels of participation and activity.

[Glen Semenchuk]

It is a unique role. Some people consider the regulators being at the table not a good thing. I think it's a very good thing. It's a very good idea that the regulators are there, seeing what the work is, and also helping to direct that work.

One thing I've learned in many years in the environmental movement is that we don't have a lot of resources, so we'd better use them effectively and efficiently. We also don't want to see duplication of information. Having the regulators at the table and having it in a non-confrontational way, these regulators can provide a lot of assistance not only to the ENGOs and the aboriginals around the table, but to industry as well. If industry takes a path and the regulators think it's the wrong path, it's a good idea to find that out as early as possible.

To date, as regards the activities at our various working groups, there has been a lot more involvement at the provincial level than there has been at the federal level. That was one of the points I made going to Ottawa.

I was apprehensive going to Ottawa and not sure what kind of response I'd get from our federal members, but it was very positive. They all saw the value of more involvement at CEMA and in fact have asked me to come back in September with more details as to how they can get involved.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

In regard to the process whereby CEMA makes recommendations that are then implemented by government, has that been smooth? Has that been responsive? Is there resistance to that? How is the Alberta government, mostly, and to a lesser extent the federal government, responding to the recommendations and responses of CEMA?

[Glen Semenchuk]

All of the frameworks that CEMA has put forward, with the exception of one, have been accepted almost immediately by government and have influenced policy a fair bit. I don't have it here, but I can provide a document to the committee that I had prepared showing exactly how each of the frameworks was implemented by both federal and provincial agencies.

The one framework that is still under review is the terrestrial ecosystem management framework, which is basically contributing to a land use plan. At the time that CEMA made its recommendation, the provincial government was just initiating its land use framework.

I can say, being involved in that process, that the work of CEMA is going to have a fairly big influence on the creation of the lower Athabasca regional plan.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Okay.

As to the groups that have left CEMA and left the door open, you just said you shifted some of your decision-making processes recently. Have those processes and the recent changes made the groups that have left more favourable to coming back? What is it going to take to get those groups that have left to come back around the table?

[Glen Semenchuk]

I think it was a big step forward. I think they're still going to be looking at how the governance model of CEMA is going to be re-established.

One of their concerns, from the aboriginal groups especially, was that they feel outnumbered. So we have to come up with a way to balance the voting so they feel that their contribution is equal to other people's contribution. That's not going to be an easy task, but there are some good models right here in Alberta to help us. It's not like we have to start with a blank page. I think that's going to be the key one.

We have open lines of communications with the ENGOs and the aboriginal groups that have left, and the feedback I have received personally from them is that we're on the right track. We may not be there yet, but we're on the right track.

We are going to encourage them to participate in our restructuring, to give us any suggestions they may have, but again, as I say, ultimately the responsibility for that restructuring is with the CEMA member board.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll move on to Mr. Ouellet, but first I want to clarify something.

You said you were coordinating the phase two framework for employees. Is that correct?

[Glen Semenchuk]

That's correct.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Ouellet.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Semenchuk, I'm very surprised that you talked about CEMA's structure and the problems it's facing. I thought we had invited you to come and tell us about what CEMA thinks about the oil sands operation relative to water resources, which is the subject on the agenda.

Our committee is concerned about environmental issues and sustainable development, not organizational structure. I'm surprised that you didn't talk about CEMA's views on sustainable development and the environment. Could you tell us about the oil sands?