Environment Committee on Nov. 28th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Good morning, Committee members.

Good morning also to Ms. Goodridge and Mr. Garon, who are joining us today, as well as Mr. Weiler, who was a member of this Committee until recently and was heavily involved in this study.

Good morning, Mr. Pushor. Thank you for joining us today.

Do you have an opening statement, or do you just want to go straight to questions?

[Laurie Pushor, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Energy Regulator]

Good morning.

I have an opening statement, but I'm not receiving any translation for your remarks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

There should be an icon on the screen where you can choose English or French.

[Laurie Pushor]

Is it interpretation?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Can you hear the English interpretation?

[Laurie Pushor]

Yes, I do now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

All right, it’s working.

Before we begin, I’d like to inform you that sound tests were performed and everything is in order…

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

No, Mr. Chair. Point of order. I haven’t done a sound test yet.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

All right. Thank you for letting us know.

We’ll break for a few seconds to check all that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

All right, everything is working and we’ll resume the meeting.

Mr. Pushor, I don’t know if you’d like to introduce the person accompanying you before we begin.

[Laurie Pushor]

It's William McDowell, our legal counsel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thanks very much.

Go ahead, Mr. Pushor. You have five minutes.

[Laurie Pushor]

Good morning.

Today as I begin, I want to acknowledge that I am speaking from Treaty 7 lands.

The Alberta Energy Regulator, its staff and offices are located on the traditional territory of indigenous communities, including the Cree, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibwa, Saulteaux and Anishinabe first nations and the Métis.

My name is Laurie Pushor. I am the CEO at the Alberta Energy Regulator.

When I appeared before you in April, I began my remarks by providing a timeline of the events at Kearl and the significant activities that were taking place under the AER's environmental protection order. Today, I will continue to provide the committee with updates on these activities, all of which are publicly available on our website and shared with indigenous communities in a weekly update from the AER.

Before I begin, I must speak about the investigative position of the AER as it relates to today's committee discussion. Like the Canada Energy Regulator, the AER is an arm's-length regulator that is tasked with quasi-judicial powers to enforce relevant government legislation and policies.

The two incidents at Kearl, today's focus of discussion, are currently under investigation by the AER, and as these incidents continue to be under an act of investigation, it is of the utmost importance and in the public interest that we seek to protect the integrity of the investigation. This includes, through today's conversations, that statements made here may also form part of the record. As such, where it is required to protect the integrity of the investigation and any future potential legal action or regulatory proceedings, I will refrain from commenting on those matters.

As I move into today's updates, it's critical to address one of the key topics discussed in April's committee meeting regarding water quality. Repeating what I shared in April through data collected by the AER, the Government of Alberta, Imperial and Environment and Climate Change Canada, there was and remains no evidence that drinking water was at any time impacted by the events at Kearl, and no one should seek to falsely alarm Canadians by perpetuating narratives contrary to the scientific data and evidence before us.

I would like to acknowledge the rural municipality of Wood Buffalo for their commitment to their communities. They have provided and continue to provide reliable, safe drinking water. They continue to test at the intake and communicate transparently, posting their testing results to ensure their communities have access to safe water that fully meets safe drinking water standards of both the Alberta government and the Government of Canada.

It is the mandate of the AER to ensure the safe, efficient, orderly and environmentally responsible development of Alberta's energy industry, and we do this under some of the highest environmental and regulatory standards in the world. It is under these strict standards that AER's technical experts continue to ensure diligent oversight of Imperial's actions to meet the EPO. This includes over 70 significant field inspections at the Kearl site and additional information requests, resulting in more than 450 submissions of information to the regulator. We've done extensive verification water monitoring by third parties to ensure the sampling results we're getting are accurate and reliable, including as supported by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas.

We've also reviewed numerous technical reports regarding the Kearl site. At times, we've had up to 50 subject matter experts from our team working on information here. We also have transparently reshared these reports and data and information with the public and made them available on our website.

I would also like to provide an update on the third party review into AER's actions, processes and communications surrounding the incidents. The Deloitte-led review has been completed and was made available to the public on September 27.

Deloitte's report confirmed that the AER followed existing policies, standards and procedures and processes in response to the Kearl incidents. It provided recommendations on several improvements to AER's incident and emergency management system to bring it into line with leading practices and heightened expectations.

The AER board has accepted and agreed to the report's findings and opportunities for improvement and has tasked AER management to deliver a detailed action plan to address these items. That work is advancing very quickly.

A key recommendation was for the AER to collaborate with indigenous communities and key stakeholders to develop specific notification and communication protocols, processes and procedures tailored to meet their needs. We will engage with communities and are doing so as early as next week to work together to establish those new formal protocols.

We remain committed to working alongside all parties to strengthen our processes, enhance our transparency, and broaden communications.

This concludes my opening remarks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to the first round of questions, which is a six-minute round.

We'll start with Mr. Deltell.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Hello everyone and welcome to this meeting of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

The tragedy we are discussing today must not be ignored. We must get to the bottom of it. What happened at the Kearl mine in Alberta cannot reoccur. Unfortunately, it did occur, so we need to draw the appropriate conclusions and learn from this experience to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. We also need to look at how the crisis was managed. We need to get to the bottom of things. It’s our duty to do so. That’s why we’ve already heard from the primary victims of this situation, i.e., Indigenous communities, but also from the head of Imperial Oil in Canada.

I now yield my time to the MP for the riding in which the incident occurred, Laila Goodridge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Ms. Goodridge, you have the floor.

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the AER for being here. It's been seven months since the last time you came to the committee to present. Unfortunately, I was not able to be there, as my little baby decided to come about a month early, so I missed your first appearance. However, I have reviewed the transcripts.

I'm glad that in your opening remarks you touched on the Deloitte review and the suggestions. I'm just wondering if you can go into further detail, because what we heard very clearly in the testimony was that communications were a huge failure.

I would like to know specifics about what you guys have been doing. How are you moving forward to improve the communications aspects, so that our communities understand what's happening as close to real time as possible?

[Laurie Pushor]

Thank you very much for that.

It was made very clear to me in the first meetings I had with the communities. Shortly after the issuing of the environmental protection order, I had the opportunity to drive up to Fort McMurray and then to Fort Chipewyan to sit with community leaders and councils. They made it very clear that they wanted to be fully informed, and they expected to be informed. The fact that they hadn't heard about it was a significant concern.

From that day forward, we committed to providing weekly updates to the communities. We've done so since that time. I also committed to reaching out to chiefs, Métis presidents, as well as the mayor of the RM to alert them of things they should be aware of that were coming in the weekly reports.

We proceeded with those calls right through and into the summer until, frankly, they asked me to stop calling, that the information was coming to their agencies as well, and they were comfortable that the people in their organizations who needed to know what was happening were getting those updates.

We provided—

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

What processes? Deloitte pointed out that there were some processes that were clearly broken. You followed your processes, but the processes weren't necessarily up to the best standards as per different pieces. Therefore, they've made suggestions.

Are there any other pieces that you guys have that concretely...? Are there any processes you've put in place to ensure that these communications failures never happen again?

[Laurie Pushor]

We have been communicating extensively, not just in the northeast part of the province but across the province, as we came to understand the expectations and build-outs on some informal processes, if you will, or interim processes. What Deloitte is saying now is that it's time to formalize those processes.

We will do that in consultation with the communities to ensure that what we've been doing meets their needs. We also have a contractor in place now to upgrade our website, so that we can make much more information readily available in real time to any interested parties.

Deloitte also suggested that we look at our incident reporting and communications protocols, as well as our emergency management protocols. There are some opportunities to continue to enhance those, and we'll be doing all of that over the next few months.

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

When will we see the emergency response? I would anticipate that this is probably the most important piece. No one wants to see something like this happen. If something like this were to happen again, how would we be assured, as a committee, that AER would be proactively communicating with impacted communities, whether it's in the RMWB, or somewhere else across the province? We're in a unique space where we have one municipal government, but there are many places. If it were to happen in southern Alberta, you might be dealing with 17 municipalities.

How have you guys managed to come up with that process, at least in the interim? Could you provide some detailed specifics, if you possibly can?

[Laurie Pushor]

We have engagement specialists in each of our field centres, and they've been working with us to identify those agencies and organizations we should be communicating with. We've had relationships with them on an ongoing basis. The real question was what type of information we should be communicating proactively to them versus making it available through our incident response website.

Having said that, it's been very informative, as we've communicated at much higher levels than in the past, and communities have been very frank in providing us with feedback. We feel like, foundationally, we have good structures across the province and good contacts in terms of each community and in terms of who is best positioned to receive the information.

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I have a quick question. Do you have a member of Parliament and MLAs on your list of people with whom to communicate? Oftentimes, when something happens, local offices like mine and my colleagues' are some of the front lines of getting some of these questions, along with mayors, chiefs and councils.

If you're not proactively communicating with all layers of government, I would suggest that's probably also a big failure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Give a brief response, please, Mr. Pushor.

[Laurie Pushor]

Thank you for that advice. We'll make sure we incorporate that into our procedures.