Environment Committee on April 27th, 2010

[Susan Pinkus]

Perhaps I could respond to that.

This touches on one of our more important recommendations, which is the composition of recovery teams. We have a situation right now where recovery teams exist inconsistently. What that means is that some species have a team of experts who assist the government in planning for them, and some don't.

What we are seeing here is a missed opportunity for those species that do not have enough independent experts on their recovery teams. It can take a long time to hire an expert scientist, but these recovery team members are experts who are leading in the conservation of these species. They work for free. They participate in these recovery team meetings because they want to contribute to the conservation of the species, and yet we're seeing inconsistent use of these invaluable people.

I think one of the problems here is clearly policy on implementation and not a lack of scientists ready to help the government know what these species require to survive or recover.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

The time has expired. That's my job, just to direct traffic around here.

Mr. Armstrong, you're on.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you all for coming today. I've heard many interesting facts.

One thing that we discussed a great deal today is the fact that critical habitat is the cause of about 84% of the listing of species at risk. We've also discussed the fact that just the protection of caribou alone is going to require far greater square mileage than even our larger national parks have.

In order to implement SARA effectively, is it safe to say that the requirement for the protection of critical habitat would be absolutely massive?

If so, will private landowners be compensated at fair market value? Where would the government come up with the money to do this? That seems to be an issue we're going to face. Or is the recommendation that we simply expropriate land without providing fair market compensation, or maybe only limited compensation?

Where are we going with this?

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

The reality is that Canada's land mass is predominantly public. I mean, we have a public land mass. In fact, then, not only do we have a conservation opportunity internationally because of the size of our land mass, but we also have a political opportunity, and an ease of opportunity, with conservation given the amount of public land that is actually in Canada.

So while I agree there are perhaps circumstances where private land purchases and those sorts of things are critical to a specific habitat, the reality is that a lot of this work can be done on public land, and so it doesn't require the same type of investment you might see in private land acquisition.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you.

Mr. Hébert-Daly, in your opening comments, you stated that we have to take urgent action to establish some new expanded national parks, particularly in the Northwest Territories. Could you elaborate on the causes of that and why it is so urgent? You said it should be done immediately. What size are we looking at?

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

There is currently a proposal for a national park reserve in a place called Nááts'ihch'oh, which is just north of the Nahanni National Park, which was expanded last year. It's urgent because in fact it's on the verge of determining its boundaries.

Currently there are three sets of boundaries that are being proposed, and each of those particular sets of boundaries, even the one that has the greatest conservation of the watershed, excludes a rather significant section of caribou habitat. So that's why I say it's an urgent and rather immediate thing that is right before us, and it highlights the importance of collaboration, because while we have the species at risk legislation and we have the parks creation approach, we haven't put the filter of species protection on that particular parks proposal in the same way that we could have.

So one of the things that we've certainly been actively campaigning about and educating the public about is the whole concept of being able to protect the whole watershed of the Nahanni, not only for the protection of the park below it, which is the Nahanni itself, or for the protection of the caribou habitat that in fact we can do in that particular case. So you're right that caribou habitat requires areas that might normally surpass the borders of a national park, but in this particular case, we have the opportunity to do that and we're not. So there's a real urgent opportunity from that perspective, to protect, in this case, an entire herd.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you.

Mr. Ewins, you talked about having some recommendations for priorities for implementation of SARA. One of the concerns you had was that SARA was so broad--and there are limited budgets, of course, to do these things--that we're going to have to pick and choose, in the immediate future, where we place our priorities.

I'm just wondering what suggestions you would have, from your perspective, of what priorities you would put first.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

From my lifetime experience in different countries and 20 years in Canada, I would say the first place to start is with our recommendation four. Follow the money: if there's no money there, you ain't going to achieve much.

So get that creative financing model implemented so that you put a federal dollar to work that levers five or six dollars out there. It has been done elsewhere. It's easy, and, you know, we haven't got surplus cash kicking around, so I can't work out why it hasn't been done already, but go do the homework and put it in place.

I would work backwards. I would go to the conservation agreements--our third recommendation--and I would work out the creative model that does satisfactorily build in monitoring measures, ministerial commitment, and review, and the industry permitting things, so that there is a fair and effective system in place.

As I said, I have no idea why Canada hasn't used these things. They work very well in other areas, even in Canada.

Those, for me, are the two top implementation priorities, beyond the obvious one that we all share, which is the common theme today--getting ahead of the curve and protecting habitat early, while you have the opportunity for conservation.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Armstrong, your time has expired.

Mr. Watson, you have the last five-minute round.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for appearing here today.

I'm enjoying this, not just as a legislator, but a bit as a spectator as well, because some of the discussion is wide-ranging. We've been talking about national parks, and yet in my area--Essex is as far south as you can go in Canada--we measure on a much different scope, I think, a lot of our victories in habitat restoration. We measure in either single, double-digit, or low triple-digit hectares. We have more plant and animal species at risk than anywhere in Canada, and our challenges are pretty acute, so how this act plays out is of some real significance.

Potential new approaches for the government are also interesting. I'm looking at a Canadian response to the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge in southeast Michigan and at whether there's a new approach that can be pioneered to bring new tools to bear in an area where most of the land is already occupied with agricultural, municipal, and other uses like that. Habitat restoration poses some significant challenges given competing land use.

I want to bring some of the discussion back to what the committee is actually charged with. And this is a legislative review; it's not a policy review and it's not a number of other things. We're looking at a specific piece of legislation and recommendations on what, if any, changes need to be made to that.

I was concerned about some of the preamble of a couple of our Liberal colleagues, who almost suggested that SARA should be tossed out the window and a new approach should start again.

I just want to start by getting on the record from each of our witnesses whether they accept that the fundamental architecture of SARA is good as a principled starting position, and then we'll work toward subsequent questions.

I'm not sure who wants to start on that answer.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

I'll start.

I think the fundamental architecture is sound.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay.

Same here?

[Rachel Plotkin]

Yes. I would say the primary problems to date have been a lack of implementation and a lack of supporting policies.

[Dr. Keith Ferguson]

We agree here in Vancouver.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you.

So in dealing with habitat fragmentation, we're dealing a little bit with “process” fragmentation, I think it might be fair to suggest. One of the key things that I find we're finding some conflict with is how do we get more action and perhaps less process? We had some of our aboriginal leaders here who were suggesting that we need more consultation and more steps along the way with respect to aboriginal participation. I'm hearing in some respects that the ENGOs are looking a little bit more at perhaps condensing some of the process.

Can you walk me through how we square the two away? We have obligations, of course, to consult with our first peoples. They're asking for more steps along the way. How do we reconcile that with the need for less process to get more action, for example? Can you help the committee walk through that a little bit?

[Rachel Plotkin]

I think I'll just take a first stab, and then Keith and Susan can join.

There are a couple of times when we've talked about timelines and also consultation as it pertains to timelines. I think there are a number of recommendations that you've heard to close some of the loopholes in SARA under the listing process. But we recognize that setting a finite timeline for consultations with aboriginal communities is outside of our purview.

I think what we would like to see from the act, or from policy supporting the act, is that government sets clear and transparent timelines for consultations. We have some species for which consultations have dragged on. A species such as the Peary caribou, which is recognized as endangered by COSEWIC, is just in a limbo of consultations for which we see no transparent end timeline.

I don't know, Keith or Susan, if you want to add to that.

[Susan Pinkus]

Speaking as a biologist, I would just add that from a biological perspective, the tension here is that the longer you wait for consultation—of course consultation is important, in particular with first nations—the more you lose your opportunities, the more you endanger your species, and the more costly and difficult it is to end up recovering it. I think that whatever decisions are made about how to take on consultation with first nations or any other stakeholder, it really needs to come back to that continually. We have numerous species that are likely to wink out or go beyond the point where we can effectively recover them while in extended consultation limbo for listing, while waiting for critical habitat, and while waiting for protection of critical habitat.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay.

I don't know if you've had a chance to weigh in on the particulars.

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

I think Rachel, frankly, has probably made the clearest point there. So no, I don't think there's anything to add.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Chair, how am I doing?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

You have time for one very short question.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

You know what? I'm not sure I have a short question. I'd need to set it up, so I'll let it go for now.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

I have a couple of questions myself.

First of all, I appreciate your passion of wanting to protect endangered species and making sure that we identify critical habitat, and I appreciate the expertise that all of you have brought to the table and the comprehensive recommendations that you're all bringing forward.

I want to follow up on what Mr. McGuinty was saying about streamlining the process, that we have this multi-layered advisory role system. I'm just looking for some direction, I guess, on how we might be able to streamline it. When we start looking at making these recommendations on how we tackle the whole process and making sure we address each and every need, but we have to go through all these different advisory boards and subcommittees, I just want to know if there's any way that we can strengthen some of the organizations, like COSEWIC, or if there is a different model that we should be looking at. And maybe, with your knowledge of what's happening internationally, there's a different way out there that we should be looking at.

So I'm open to some ideas here.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

I'll jump in.

When you look at the front end of COSEWIC, I think you're totally right; it's well resourced, it has a great bunch of people involved, and it does its job. The faltering starts progressively as you get further down--i.e, let's implement this thing on the land when we haven't even got the prescriptions in place.

I think the process tune-up that's needed starts once the species...“big time”, when species actually make it onto the list, and its implementation.

I think you've heard today, certainly from a number of us, what our priority recommendations are for doing that. They're not incisive--“Right today, here's the prescription”--but it does logically involve the federal government initiating exercises to take the best of world experience and put it into play in form of a plan to implement. It is tied to finances. That's just the way it works.

In the U.K. when I was there, to reflect social values, which were quite high for biodiversity, the government put a significant amount of money on the table in the form of management agreements and compensation with tenure holders. The fact that we have nothing on the record yet shows me that Canada hasn't really started trying to implement this thing.

[Éric Hébert-Daly]

I would just add that part of the role that government can play is to help facilitate the ability of all those players to come together as often as possible.

I mean, to some degree your anxiety about the delay and the lengthening of the process can be somewhat mitigated by a deadline, but, more importantly, if the players are all at the table and talking to each other, then it doesn't become solely the responsibility of the government to try to figure out what to do: we all come together at a table and try to figure that out together.

I think those are often the ways that we've been most successful at doing conservation. One shouldn't limit that to outside the government realm.