Environment Committee on Dec. 8th, 2010

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

We're going to go to our five-minute rounds.

Ms. Murray, you have the floor first.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

Commissioner, you commented on concerns about the lack of information and the lack of leadership by this government on these programs overall. It is especially concerning that you are on record saying you're “troubled that the government is not ready to respond to a major oil spill”.

The Liberal Party of Canada has been concerned about that as well. As the commissioner probably knows, the Liberal leader made a commitment to formalizing the ban on increased tanker traffic around Haida Gwaii; implementing the integrated oceans management and ocean zoning in an expedited way; creating a world-class oil spill contingency plan; reviewing Canada's oil spill prevention and response capabilities and liability limits for companies; and halting all new leasing and current oil exploration in Canada's Arctic pending a good review and assurances that we're not at risk.

I appreciated the commissioner's frankness about the woeful state of things. Having worked with civil servants myself, I know it's not because there aren't good people and I know it's not because the people in the department don't care. It likely has to do with inadequate resources. As the commissioner pointed out, it's lack of leadership from this government.

I want to explore a bit more on chapter 1. When we're thinking about a major oil spill, a tanker that would potentially be in the central coast if a pipeline were to go to Kitimat...if we look at the dispersion of oil spills, on page 18 of the report, which of those means of dealing with the oil would be chosen if there were, say, a 35-knot southeaster blowing on the coast after that oil spill?

[Jody Thomas]

That's a very technical question. We would rely on the shipowner, our experts on the ground, and the response organization to make those kinds of risk assessments. I wouldn't want to speculate from here about what action would be taken on the water. I don't think that would be responsible.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

I know there's been an assessment of the extent of pollution from a major oil spill. And I think modelling may have been done by Environment Canada that showed that at a certain time of the year, with certain weather conditions, a single oil spill could foul the coastline from the tip of Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Alaska. That's the worst-case scenario.

As the agency responsible for responding, I notice that the standard here is 72 hours to have equipment in place to respond to a pollution event of over 10,000 tonnes of oil, which is one-quarter of the Exxon Valdez and just a fraction of what could happen with a panamax or a major supertanker. In 72 hours, how much could that oil already be fouling the beaches, the inlets, and the environment? How far would that oil travel in 72 hours, with a major wind?

[Gerard McDonald]

That would be speculation. We can't respond to that question, not knowing the details of the particular incident.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

The standard is 72 hours to get there. We know that on the west coast, with its wild weather, the oil is going to be all over the place. It's industry's responsibility to respond, but the companies certainly don't have facilities in the 71 million square kilometres of Canada's oceans in which a spill could occur. Are there response agencies a company would use in that case?

[Gerard McDonald]

That's correct. There are four response corporations across the country with which shipowners are required to have response agreements.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

How many bases do those response organizations maintain so that they would be nearby to deal with it?

[Gerard McDonald]

I don't have that information at hand, but I'd be happy to get back to you with respect to the various caches these organizations have.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Time has expired.

Mr. Calkins, you have the floor.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Time sure flies when you're having fun, doesn't it?

I would like to thank everyone for coming here today and for bringing your testimony. It certainly has been enlightening. I'm going to go fairly fast. I'll be looking for some relatively quick responses.

I'm going to start with you, Mr. Keenan.

In your presentation you talked about some of the issues the Government of Canada is pursuing, particularly with waste water system effluent regulations to phase out the dumping of untreated and undertreated sewage in Canadian waterways. This is in response, obviously, to some of the concerns the government has about water quality.

Could you tell us, for example, what the city of Montreal does? What's the volume of treated or undertreated sewage that's pumped into the St. Lawrence Seaway every year?

[Michael Keenan]

Thank you for the question.

The member is absolutely right in terms of moving forward on waste water effluent regs.

I don't actually have the stats for the city of Montreal here with me, but I do know that the city actually discharges a large amount of sewage that would not meet the standard of the proposed regs. In fact, for situations like the city of Montreal, the proposed regulations would have a phase-in period to provide municipalities with the chance to plan their infrastructure so that they can upgrade.

The second point I'd make is that the discharge of municipal waste water effluent is one of the key challenges in water quality around the St. Lawrence.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

My understanding is that it's about 1.3 billion cubic metres of effluent or discharge a year. To put that into a context that I think most Canadians would understand, that's enough to go over Niagara Falls for three hours. My question is whether we have any downstream monitoring sites on the St. Lawrence to monitor that, given the fact that the St. Lawrence would be a source of water for many communities along that waterway.

[Michael Keenan]

I will defer to my colleagues on that.

[Dan Wicklum]

We have extensive water quality monitoring on the Great Lakes and in the St. Lawrence River. We use two different types of monitoring. One is the type of monitoring the commissioner looked at, which is a long-term monitoring site. The other is a type of monitoring that the commissioner found was outside the scope of his audit, so he didn't include that. That's something we call CABIN, the Canadian aquatic biodiversity information network. Frankly, it's quite a paradigm shift for water quality monitoring. What we're actually doing is taking a look at the invertebrates--frankly, the bugs--that live at the bottom of rivers, and we're monitoring them over time to see if the species composition, the community, changes.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

You're doing benthic dredges, and so on, and going through all of these kinds of things, right?

[Dan Wicklum]

That's exactly what we're doing.

So we're quite excited about this. It's outside the scope of the audit. It would really change the findings of the commissioner, if it were inside the scope of the audit, because it's very much scientifically valid—and it's extremely cost-effective.

You can certainly miss things if you're going to measure water. Even if you measure water once a month for a year, you can miss a slug of a pollutant or something that goes through the system. But the philosophy is that the benthic invertebrates live there, and if they're being affected, we will measure that in the community changes.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

It would bioaccumulate, and we could see these kinds of changes?

[Dan Wicklum]

Right, it could bioaccumulate and could change the communities.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

It's basic limnology, and it's great to see these things are actually happening.

I really did appreciate your response about the oil sands, that there are quite a few programs offered by the province when it comes to these kinds of things. I don't know if you can respond to these things directly, but the Province of Alberta has a long-term river network monitoring program. They have the river water quality index. They have a lakes monitoring program, which I'm sure the Government of Canada partners with them on.

I used to be a conservation officer. We talk about these water quality testing sites, and I can tell you that I used to test water all the time on various lakes and rivers. I would simply get out of my truck, walk down with a bottle, take the sample of water, and walk back up.

Unless the Commissioner of the Environment were there to watch me do that, I guess he wouldn't even know the watering site existed. So could you tell us how many of these kinds of water sampling and water sites exist? Does Environment Canada participate in these kinds of water quality monitoring practices?

[Dan Wicklum]

We do participate. We're highly leveraged in the provinces. We actually have formal agreements for water quality monitoring across the country with, for example, British Columbia, P.E.I., and Newfoundland. We also have an MOU on water that we signed with the whole suite of Atlantic provinces, and we have a number of other formal agreements we partner through. For example, with Ontario, there is something called the Canada-Ontario agreement.

In terms of specific pieces of information on how detailed our cooperation is with those groups, frankly, I'd have to go back and check with my colleagues who do that on a more operational level. But we do have an additional 505 sites—at least, cabin sites—that I mentioned, in addition to the ones the commissioner audited.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

It's hard to sneak by a good line-backer.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!