Environment Committee on May 28th, 2009

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Okay.

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

Subsection 16(2) of the act outlines the qualifications for membership.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Would you consider yourself to be an ichthyologist or ecologist?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

I consider myself to be an evolutionary ecologist.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Very good.

How many people on the COSEWIC committee right now would you describe as herpetologists?

There is one now, or there was one and now there's none?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

There were two herpetologists on the committee, but we're down to one at present.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

There were two. One of them was proposed to be the vice-chair or the second in command, or whatever the case might be, according to your structure, and now there's still one more herpetologist.

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

Correct.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

So you still have the expertise in COSEWIC to make a determination when reptiles and amphibians are considered--

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

In effect, the way the subcommittee works is one co-chair dealt with amphibians and the other was an expert on reptiles. So while they might be herpetologists, their taxonomic areas of expertise are not the same.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Absolutely. Understood. Agreed.

I earned a zoology degree. Fisheries and aquatic sciences is my forte. I spent a number of years working on fisheries experiments for Alberta Fish & Wildlife, I spent a number of years as a conservation officer for the Alberta government, and I spent some time as a national park warden. Through all that time and travel that I have done, I've been surrounded--not only when I went through university--by scientists, ichthyologists, herpetologists, ornithologists, ecologists, the whole gamut. I was also surrounded in my professional career by professional biologists working for the government. I was also surrounded by professional biologists, and so on, working as consultants, working towards helping out those governments, and of course lots of other people with all that scientific expertise.

Could you tell me how many professional herpetologists or biologists would be able to replace the person in question, who could be brought forward as a potential replacement? I know a half a dozen myself, personally.

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

It's difficult to say. I can tell you that in the last competition we received one application, and that was from Dr. David Green.

To a certain degree, the numbers of individuals who apply for membership in COSEWIC is dependent on a number of things. Of course, on the one hand, it's their area of expertise. How many qualified herpetologists are there in this country who have expertise on amphibians? I don't know what the answer is to that question, but to some degree it's going to be reflected by the number of applications.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

How many of them are actually interested in being a member of COSEWIC, is a different--

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

How many are interested in contributing to this committee, for which we don't receive a salary? There's a lot of voluntary work, so you really have to be committed and be willing to put the additional time into it.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Very good. That's very helpful. Thank you very much.

I'm going to change channel here a little bit.

One of the things that frustrates me, and I asked this question of the government officials that were here as well, and I'll pose this question to you.... Mr. Cullen brought up the salmon species. If we take a look, we'll see the peregrine falcon and a number of other species that are in here. If we look at them, some of them are actually classified as sub-species. The act is called the Species at Risk Act, it's not call the Sub-Species at Risk Act. We're dealing with populations that are extirpated when we have perfectly healthy populations of that same species existing elsewhere. We have climate change. The climate is always changing; it always has changed. We have ranges where animals or creatures normally existed, in a constant state of flux as things change. Yet the recommendations by COSEWIC are a snapshot at a particular point in time.

I was hoping to see some constructive recommendations from the members of COSEWIC that would deal more with some of the issues pertaining to whether or not we should be examining the reason why nine-spine stickleback are missing from a particular lake while they're flourishing in just about every watershed. Is that a productive use of COSEWIC's time? Is that a productive use of the assessment process? Or should we be focusing on a much larger-scale picture about the health of populations in general, as long as we have healthy populations and can maintain healthy habitat for those populations?

None of your recommendations is addressing that. Your recommendations actually address the political process, and it's a little bit disappointing to me. Why is it that COSEWIC has no recommendations on changes to the act that would deal with working on some of the issues when it comes to differentiating habitat versus species versus sub-species?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

Well, to assuage your disappointment, we have, in fact, been working on that quite considerably. The act, as you know, defines a wildlife species as a sub-species variety or a geographically or genetically distinct population of animal, plant, or other organism. So the act makes it very plain that the taxonomic or biological species level is not where you stop when you assess the status of a species. It recognizes, basically, what biologists across the world recognize, which is that if one of your objectives is to protect biodiversity, then you need to identify what we might call biologically relevant units of biodiversity to protect.

That is why, given the direction of the act and the definition of wildlife species in the act, COSEWIC has taken a tremendous amount of time to define criteria. They determine the conditions under which it would identify a unit that it would use for assessment purposes in accordance with the definition provided by the act. These are called designatable units. These criteria are exactly in concordance with what the United States uses under their Endangered Species Act to identify distinct population segments for vertebrates and evolutionarily significant units for Pacific salmon.

Specifically, you need to meet two criteria. The first has to do with the distinctiveness. That could be evidence of genetic distinctiveness, distinctiveness in traits that are related to fitness, and other means of evolutionary persistence. But it's not sufficient to simply show that something is genetically different. Under those circumstances, you might list every population of white fish in Canada, which would not be particularly helpful.

Rather, the second criterion pertains to significance, and more precisely, evolutionary significance. There are means by which the United States scientists and we in Canada have agreed that there are proxies for identifying evolutionary significance. The purpose of doing that is to identify biological units that, if they were snuffed out, if they were depleted, they would not be readily replaced. For example, they wouldn't be replaced by dispersion or migration from another area. If a group of populations, or indeed a population, meets those two criteria, then it's eligible for assessment.

We also have an obligation under the act to assess those wildlife species at the greatest risk of extinction. We have a series of criteria. We have about 250 pages in our operations and procedures manual for COSEWIC, which is much longer than the Species at Risk Act. We use it to interpret the act and to guide our operations and procedures in accordance with the act.

All of our operations and procedures have been submitted to the Canadian Endangered Species Conservation Council and to successive ministers of the environment for their information and for their feedback. We have a series of criteria that we use to prioritize the assessment of new species, which include things such as the percentage of the global range that's found in Canada, the extent to which it's found within an endangered ecosystem or not, the degree to which the species in question is considered to be globally endangered.

So I think your question, at a certain level, reflects a concern that many people have. Is this an act that's going to lead to the assessment of every lake population of nine-spined stickleback in this country? The answer is no. One of the reasons why that won't happen is because COSEWIC has a set of criteria it uses to prioritize the new species it will evaluate. The act doesn't have it. We already have an application under the act to re-examine those we've already done, and we have criteria for identifying populations or groups of populations for assessment purposes. It's entirely consistent with what's done in the U.S. They've been doing it since 1996. We looked at it and we thought it seemed like a reasonable basis upon which to identify such units.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful, Professor Hutchings.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I'm sorry to cut you off. It was good information. It was a bit longer than what had been allocated to you, though.

We are moving on now to Mr. Scarpaleggia.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Dr. Hutchings, what are recovery teams?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

What are recovery teams? COSEWIC has no part in recovery teams. But essentially, recovery teams are groups of individuals that are put together to establish a recovery strategy, a plan for recovery, a mitigation of threats for the purposes of increasing the health of a species at risk.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I would assume these teams are made up of scientists?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

I'm not on one, but I think the short answer is yes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Have you heard that many of the independent scientists on these recovery teams are being replaced with government scientists? Have you had any wind of that?

[Prof. Jeffrey Hutchings]

I have not heard that.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Okay.

I'm told that in terms of this list of appointments, you said the reason the government gave for not appointing Dr. Green was that they wanted a mix of the old and the new, that they didn't want to just keep reappointing existing members. Is that correct? Is that what you said?