Environment Committee on Dec. 8th, 2010

[Sue Milburn-Hopwood]

I can't tell you. There have been several stages of it, so I can't. But I could certainly provide you with the chronology of that. There have been a number of different starts of different phases, and I don't think I could do it with any accuracy at this point.

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

But the most progress has been made over the last several years. Is that true?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Armstrong's time has run out.

Before we turn to the third round, I want to ask a couple of questions myself.

Commissioner Vaughan, I appreciate that in your look at water quality you cited Lake Winnipeg and the Lake Winnipeg basin initiative, something that's very near and dear to my heart, my riding, and the province of Manitoba.

I think you said there is a concern about the number of federal sites. There have been some added. I was wondering whether you looked at the collaboration that's happening between Environment Canada and the Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Ontario, since all those provinces are a part of the basin, and the entire basin drains from those areas into Lake Winnipeg and ultimately up into the Churchill and up to Churchill and Hudson Bay. As well, there are four states involved in that project.

Did you look at the role they're playing in the overall work on this initiative?

[Scott Vaughan]

Mr. Chair, let me respond, and I'll ask my colleague, Andrew Ferguson, to provide some more.

We said that every province has an agreement or an MOU on the water quantity monitoring side with the federal government and with the provinces. On the water quality side, there are four agreements: with Manitoba, as you've said, as well as with Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I., and British Columbia.

Then, as you have alluded to, the federal government has important responsibilities because of other interprovincial or transboundary.... Those are particularly on the water quantity side. We said those were functioning quite well.

Mr. Ferguson.

[Andrew Ferguson]

From a water quality perspective, what we've found in the audit is that the department has water quality monitoring agreements federally with British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, and no such provincial-level agreements with any of the other provinces for water quality monitoring.

What we also looked at in the audit was whether the department, which purports to have a program for monitoring the status of Canada's rivers and lakes and trends in aquatic ecosystem health, had the data and the information necessary to do it at a national level. We recognize that there are lots of provincial and proprietary data bases available, but we found that this data is not integrated at a national level to provide the federal government with the capacity to understand the status of Canada's freshwater resources or trends in aquatic ecosystem health.

So it's at this higher level that we were looking at the department's activities.

There is a lot of monitoring going on. It's disaggregated, the quality of the data is questionable, and there is no capacity at the federal level to understand the idea of the status of these lakes or trends in aquatic ecosystem health.

In this case in Winnipeg, it was in 2006 that the province requested the federal government to get involved. The federal government has gotten involved and has provided some budgeting, as has been mentioned today, for cleanup activities.

The purpose of these programs is to get ahead of the curve, to understand emerging trends before they become problems, so that they can be dealt with proactively. We don't see, in this case, that this has happened.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I have been requesting since 2004 to have the study done on Lake Winnipeg, so I'm glad it did start happening in 2007.

The one criticism I have is that in the commentary you provided on the case study on Lake Winnipeg, they said there were suspicions about nutrient loading from agricultural activity. It's not just agriculture. Municipalities' dumping of effluent is a big concern throughout the entire watershed, especially coming up the Red River, from the United States as well. So that was a concern.

But I want to ask Mr. Wicklum a question, because I believe he's been working on this as well, overseeing.

I just finished having a really good public meeting in Gimli about the Lake Winnipeg basin initiative. Environment Canada scientists were there explaining all the great work they're doing along with all the different partners they have in the project.

This summer I had the opportunity to go out on the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium platform in the ship Namao. Environment Canada was on board, and they were dropping rosettes and doing water quality monitoring all through the basin; they were out there for a few months. It's not just that they have a station. They have people on board a ship going up and down the lake, finding out where we have algae problems, looking at aquatic species, and also looking at the nutrient loads and doing that analysis.

I wonder if you have anything to add.

Manitoba Water Stewardship was on board, as well as the Lake Winnipeg Foundation. So you have various community groups and people who are concerned, working alongside both the province and the federal government.

[Dan Wicklum]

Yes, Mr. Chair, I'd be happy to comment.

Environment Canada has been monitoring the major tributaries of Lake Winnipeg for 30 years, so we've been watching the Red River and the Saskatchewan River. That's one of the main reasons why the Province of Manitoba approached the Government of Canada and said, we think we have an issue here in Lake Winnipeg, but we should help clean it up--it was because of Environment Canada data.

That's exactly what monitoring is supposed to do; it's supposed to identify issues. So frankly, what happened is that we used our data—we have a well-designed system to flag a problem—and we launched the Lake Winnipeg basin initiative. It is a $17.7 million initiative over four years.

Mr. Chair, if I may, I will expand a little bit on Mr. Ferguson's comment that the Government of Canada is not in a position to report on national water quality trends. We feel that through our Canadian environmental sustainability indicators we actually do report on trends. We have 153 CESI sites—Canadian environmental sustainability indicator sites—and what we do is take all the data we collect at those sites and synthesize it into a single number, a single parameter, which makes it easy to communicate.

One of the real challenges with monitoring data is that you have all sorts of numbers, but how do you communicate to people in a very simple way, but so that you don't lose the information? Using the CESI, which we report annually—and starting this year we will report as part of our federal sustainable development strategy—we feel that we have quite a good level of knowledge of water quality at the national level. This is exactly what our program was designed to do through CESI.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Keenan.

[Michael Keenan]

Mr. Chair, may I add to that with one small point?

Just to pick up on Mr. Wicklum's point with respect to the CESI program, CESI started in 2004 on a time-limited basis; in the 2010 budget the government made CESI a permanent program and funded it on an ongoing basis.

This has enabled us to expand the CESI program and make it a more effective tool for getting the information that Dan is describing out to the public. We have gone from a traditional annual report that is printed and filed to a website that we update on a regular basis throughout the year. It's interactive; it has geo-mapping capacities built into it. So any Canadian, through the www.ec.gc.ca site, can go in and can look at the sum of this water quality science for hundreds of locations across the country and can zero in on the ones that are important and can look at trends over time.

We have also taken that program and have built it, as Dan said. We're using it as an indicator set on the federal sustainable development strategy so that we can, in a fairly structured way, report to Canadians on the resources that are spent on water quality, the results that are being achieved, and how they compare to the targets established by the government.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Because we started late, I'm going to allow one quick question per party.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Chair, I have commitments that I have to go to, so I'd like to move that we leave early.

[An hon. member]

It's past 5:30.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

On a point of order, I'll hear Monsieur Ouellet.

[An hon. member]

It's non-debatable.

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

Mr. Chair, Mr. Vaughan said just now that he could answer the question I asked about the Irving Whale. I would ask him, if possible—and I don't want to bother him, if he would answer us in writing about the consequences of the Irving Whale accident, between 2007 and 2009.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Even though we have a set time to adjourn, I need unanimous consent to adjourn a meeting, actually. I don't have unanimous consent to adjourn, so we're going to continue. But with respect to time, I want it to be just one quick question per party, and we'll do a quick round.

I am going to start with Ms. Murray, and then we'll go to Monsieur Ouellet.

It's just one quick—

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Woodworth made a comment that the focus of the commissioner was on record-keeping and not on actual results. But there is a very important piece between record-keeping and analysis of results, and that is that there is the plan, the capacity, the trained people, the understanding to respond. What I think the commissioner was concerned about is that there isn't that.

Ms. Thomas, as the lead agency for responding to a spill, we found that there was no up-to-date emergency management in place in your agency. But your agency would be working in partnership probably with B.C. Parks, Parks Canada, the emergency plan provincially, the emergency plan federally. Have you therefore ensured that the plans of your partners are in place and that the partners you would be counting on to work with you at the provincial and federal levels have plans, that they are up to date, and that they are adequate so that you know the response can take place?

And I meant Public Safety Canada and the Ministry of Public Safety, B.C.

[Jody Thomas]

Right. No, we haven't done that verification. I can't say we've audited or questioned our partners. There is a federal emergency response plan that is coordinated by Public Safety. It is exercised. We are part of that. For a major spill of any significance, the FERP would probably be activated and coordinated so that there is a total response by federal and provincial--

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

As the lead agency, you're going to want to know that everybody else's plans are good. We saw that with H1N1. The lead agency was not responsible for all of the partners actually having plans and being able to do what they needed to do for the total package, meaning that there were problems. So do you have plans to ensure that your partners actually can contribute and that they do have emergency plans, are trained, and have the equipment?

[Jody Thomas]

Well, that validation would certainly be a very useful part of the risk assessment we're doing, and of our assessment of our own capacity and our emergency management plans.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Clearly your plan, if it's only in the scoping stage, hasn't had the consultation and will not even be in time for this year's budget, never mind completed by March 2011, as my colleague Mr. Andrews was getting at.

[Jody Thomas]

The risk assessment will not be completed, but we had an internal audit done by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans earlier this year, so we've started some of this work in terms of the scoping of the risk assessment and our own internal management program as a result of that audit.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Ms. Murray.

Monsieur Ouellet.

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

I would like to ask Mr. Vaughan again whether it is possible to answer us in writing about the effects of the sinking of the Irving Whale, between 2007 and 2009.

I also have a short question for you. I would like to come back to the subject of climate change. Between 2007 and 2009, there was no plan. Did you identify what negative effects the absence of a plan or strategy may have had on Canada?