Environment Committee on March 8th, 2011

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm just going to fire my questions out there--I've got about four. For those of you who feel comfortable responding, please do so.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is the Species at Risk Act. This committee is undergoing a study of that right now. We've heard from other department officials that the expenditures to date under the Species at Risk Act have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, yet not one species at risk has been moved off the various schedules in that act. Can you tell me what's being done in the department, as far as budgetary allocations, on any evaluations to determine dollars versus results, to ensure the taxpayer dollars are being used wisely for species at risk?

Mr. Boothe, you brought up rail. In my constituency there is a rail siding used by CN in the hamlet of Mirror, where CN constantly leaves their motors idling in close proximity to residents. This can't be very good for the environment. Are there any programs or any expenditures through Environment Canada that would either change the regulatory approach in dealing with these large diesel engines idling for excessive hours at a time, or programs that might encourage rail companies to reduce their footprints and their fuel consumption?

Mr. Latourelle, I'm going to come at you with park fees. Right now, if citizens of Calgary or Edmonton who drive west into British Columbia, or vice versa, say at the park gates that they're not going to be staying in the park, they get free passage through. Yet the 7,500 residents of Rocky Mountain House and 1,500 residents of Bentley who head west on Highway 11 are hit with a $20 fee for driving for 20 kilometres on the parkway. They end up driving south to Cochrane or north to Hinton to avoid that park fee. Wouldn't it make more sense for the environment to allow a shorter distance of travel from central Alberta to British Columbia by removing that fee? Frankly, I don't think it's fair, and it is quite punitive to people, depending on where they live.

When it comes to litigation, this committee just examined Bill C-469 a little while ago. Various environmental organizations, like Ecojustice, and so on, assured this committee that the cost of litigation for this bill, which actually.... The clauses in the bill actually create a litigious environment and make it easier for litigation to happen. Has anybody in the department prepared any expenditures to examine, should that bill come to pass, what the cost would be? They assured us that litigation would not happen if the bill were passed, yet we've seen increased budgets for litigation. I'm hearing conflicting stories from groups like Ecojustice that the taxpayers of Canada are going to be on the hook for these lawsuits against the Government of Canada.

[Paul Boothe]

On SARA, the department is working hard to catch up, because when the legislation came in it created a big backlog. We're making progress.

Am I aware of any evaluations of SARA yet? I'm not. It doesn't mean there aren't any, but I'm not aware of them. There are many groups that are very generous with their advice on how we're doing our job, and I expect I will hear about that soon. I get lots of informal advice all the time.

As far as rail goes, I don't know the answer to that. It may well be a Transport Canada issue that's being considered as part of their regulatory approach to reducing GHGs for rail. I'll try to find out if there is any information that I can forward to committee members about that.

I will turn to my colleague on park fees.

[Alan Latourelle]

Thank you.

On the Species at Risk Act, we are taking concrete action. If you look at Grasslands National Park, we have reintroduced the black-footed ferret and the bison, so clear, concrete actions are being taken that will see significant improvements in those species in the near future.

On the park fees, the overall concept is that as people use our national parks, there's a public-good component that is paid through appropriations and the private-benefit component is paid through user fees.

In the case of roads through our national parks, we have two types. We have the Trans-Canada Trail, with free access on the Trans-Canada Highway through several parks. But where in-road parks include parkways, such as the Icefields Parkway, Parks Canada charges a fee.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Sopuck, you have the last of the five-minute round in the second round.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

I'll just make a quick comment about the Species at Risk Act. The reason why it has been such a failure goes back to the architecture of the act itself. It's an act that really inhibits citizens. I come from a farming and resource constituency and my constituents do a lot of voluntary conservation work, but the coercive nature of the Species at Risk Act is a grave weakness. I would urge the department to move from an enforcement approach to the conservation of species at risk to an incentive approach.

My question relates to how you develop policy within the department. I'm specifically referring to the policies related to greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, energy conservation, and all of that.

The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy a couple of years ago put out a report called “Achieving 2050”. I was on the round table at the time when that report came out. The report, as I recall, looked at the economic impact of a cap and trade system, which seems to be off the table in North America. Nevertheless, it was an analysis of what a cap and trade program would do to the economy of the country.

One thing in particular stuck out for me, and even more so now that I am a member of Parliament for a remote rural constituency. The economic impact of a lot of these programs is disproportionately felt by people who live in rural areas or have low income.

I don't think there has been nearly enough discussion about the effect of a lot of the stuff on low-income Canadians and rural Canadians, because low-income people in this country, as well as rural people, spend a disproportionate amount of their income on energy. Even though the majority of Canadians live in cities, what I really worry about is that too much policy is designed for urban Canada, which is fine, but often the needs of rural Canadians and low-income Canadians—and the two are often synonymous—are not considered.

In your department, when you're looking at these kinds of programs and policies, do you do an economic impact analysis and do you specifically look at the effect of what you're proposing on rural Canada and low-income Canadians?

[Paul Boothe]

Thank you for the question.

Actually, Mike Keenan leads the group that does that work, so I'll ask him to respond.

[Michael Keenan, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy Branch, Department of the Environment]

Thank you for the question.

The issues you raise are indeed,key issues in the course of the policy analysis on various options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We use various sets of analytical tools that pull together different types of information.

One of the things we do is we match up what a regulatory instrument, whether it's a price instrument or a performance tender, would do in terms of industrial activity, what that does to prices, and then we work that through in terms of the impact on households. You can see the different impacts by location in the country, you can see it by income class of households. So it is a factor we regularly look at in the context of our economic analysis.

The second point I would make is that the impacts of these measures depend greatly on the details of the measures. For example, generally there's an assumption that any action to address greenhouse gas emissions increases the price of energy, and households thereby have to pay more. That's not always the case.

I think one key exception would be the performance standards the Government of Canada has put in place for light-duty vehicles, in collaboration with the U.S. government. Those are now working their way through the first period up until the model year 2017. It will generate a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

It will also reduce the total cost of operating motor vehicles. What happens is the vehicles cost a bit more because we require manufacturers to put technology in, but the fuel savings when people operate their vehicles means, for example, that for somebody driving a car a lot because they live in a rural community and they have a big commute distance, their overall cost of operating that car will be less as a result of these regulations. Yet greenhouse emissions will be reduced significantly in the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Before we kick off the third round, I just have a couple of comments I want to make before we turn it back to the membership.

I'm just going through vote 1 on the main estimates, and I'm just looking at all the different program activity we have here. It seems that this is very technical and science-based, all the programs we run: wildlife and habitat biodiversity, water resources, sustainable ecosystems, wildlife compliance promotion and enforcement, climate change and clean air, substance and waste management, weather and environmental services.

Since this is highly technical, how many scientists do we actually have working in the department?

[Paul Boothe]

One of the first things scientists will argue about is how you get defined as a scientist. The way I think of this is if you think of the Environment Canada budget as a box, about half of the box is devoted to science. It's not just people with graduate degrees but also the people who support them as well. So about half of the department's budget is science.

I guess I would say that, just in terms of telling members a little bit about results, we are the seventh-largest producer of peer-reviewed environmental science in the world. We are the largest outside of the U.S.

One of the things Environment Canada can do, and I'm very proud of the department because of this, is that with a lot of scientific credibility it can provide very good advice, not just to ministers and deputy ministers but in environmental assessments, international science work like climate change work, etc.

About half of what we do is basically science.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

So in person-years, what would be allocated to that half?

[Paul Boothe]

We think about, just in very round numbers, 7,000 persons in the environment, give or take, and about half of those. So in the neighbourhood of about 3,500 would be supporting or directly involved in the science.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

That's good to know. Thank you very much. That's a great service being provided, not only to the government but to Canadians in general.

We're going to go with our final round. We'll probably have to go to about four minutes so we can fit into the time that's allocated.

Mr. Kennedy, you could kick us off.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I assume somewhere in that fairly large number of scientists there are mathematicians.

Canada, notwithstanding some of the numbers we heard before, may be 2% of the GHGs, but we're about 0.5% of the world's population, about 1% of the world's economy. Does that sound about right to you? In other words, our GHG contribution per capita is still significant.

[Paul Boothe]

I think that is fair to say.

I should also say, first of all, that I did teach mathematics to economists at the University of Alberta, so I should know these numbers better.

Those don't sound far off. Of course with the growth of China and India, our share of the world economy is shrinking even as our economy is growing. But there's no question that everybody has to do their part about greenhouse gases.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

But we're a top-ten emitter of GHGs in the world--top ten.

[Paul Boothe]

In absolute terms?

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Right.

[Paul Boothe]

No, I don't think that's right.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

That's correct.

[Paul Boothe]

I'll have to check that.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I'm happy to have that from the ministry.

There is another thing I would like to have from the ministry. When we were in Mexico there was an evaluation released in Germany that suggested that out of 57 nations that have made pledges in terms of GHG reductions, Canada was ranked 54th.

I wonder if the ministry has had time to evaluate that document. Do they want to share with us where they would locate us, if that's inaccurate? What would they say about our relative performance compared to some of those international evaluations?

[Paul Boothe]

I'm not familiar with that document. I'll certainly look into it.

Are you saying compared to our Kyoto commitments?

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

They were measuring us on relative progress in terms of commitments we've made. I guess our Kyoto commitments count. You report every year on those Kyoto commitments—

[Paul Boothe]

We do.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

—and so forth. Would you like to qualify that?