Environment Committee on March 27th, 2012

[Andrea Barnett]

I won't address anything specifically about marine protected areas, but on the topic of the Fisheries Act, everything right now is speculative from our standpoint, so I'm not going to make any comment about what may or may not change. But I will say that fundamentally when you're trying to look after any species, be they terrestrial or marine, it's really important that habitat is a consideration. It's certainly not my position today to speculate as to what might need to happen at a legislative level to enable that, but Ducks Unlimited is a strong.... We're a habitat conservation organization, and we do feel that a focus on habitat for the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is important, however that happens. It's important to mitigate and compensate for impacts to fisheries' habitats, in some sense.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

Thank you very much, Mr. Choquette.

We have Ms. Ambler, five minutes, please.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our guests for being here, and for your presentations today.

I'd like to talk to you about urban settings and conservation. We talked earlier about engaging urban audiences and ways to do this.

In particular, there is a project called the Lakeview Corridor project in my riding, which is on Lake Ontario in an area where access to the lake has been cut off for 120 years. There is a group in the community who is working to fix this problem and to bring nature back to those living in the surrounding area.

I listened with interest about the Ducks Unlimited program called wetlands for tomorrow, and about the $600 million in wetland conservation. I want to hear a bit more about that, even though it's over. I am wondering if that will continue in any other fashion, or take another direction perhaps, and if there was any support in that program for urban projects.

I'd like your thoughts on the importance of habitat conservation within urban areas. The project I'm speaking about, the Lakeview Corridor project, is approximately a 20-year project. It replaces a coal-fired generating station in the area, with four very ugly smokestacks sticking out like sore thumbs on the shores of Lake Ontario. I think this is a project that could be a showcase for brownfield development in the Greater Toronto Area. It will include waterfront trails, eco-friendly homes, green businesses, and recreational canals. The idea is to restore wetlands and marine habitat to the area.

My part b question is that while I like the idea of educating young people in urban areas and field trips to parks, I also believe that conservation has to be part of how and where we live every day, and most Canadians live in urban areas.

Do you believe that smart growth can be combined with conservation? Should this government, this committee, this report on the national conservation plan, support urban projects that attempt to do this? What advice would you have for us as we study this issue as it relates to urban issues?

That was a long preamble. I'm sorry.

[Dr. Karla Guyn]

I tried to take some notes to include all of your questions.

Thank you. To address your first point about wetlands for tomorrow and whether any of the funding we raised was spent in urban areas, the answer is absolutely, yes. We did a number of large projects in the Vancouver area—in Surrey. We also did a number of habitat projects right in the city of Montreal, and a number of interpretative centres, which were more like boardwalks in urban wetlands, in Edmonton, Calgary, and Saskatoon. Fredericton has an interpretive centre as well.

When you're talking about having conservation within urban areas, one of the things you may not be familiar with is something that Ducks Unlimited is involved with, particularly in Winnipeg, through a segment of our organization called native plant solutions. It works with developers to naturalize stormwater ponds. They provide the functionality of a stormwater pond, but they look like a natural wetland. That gives the ability to educate urban audiences about the functions of wetlands.

When you're trying to implement any kind of urban conservation program, I encourage you to have very clear objectives about what you want that conservation program to achieve. Is it to engage Canadians? Is it to educate them? Is it for actual habitat? Be very clear about what you're trying to achieve with those programs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

Thank you so much. Time has expired.

Monsieur Morin, you have five minutes.

[Marc-André Morin, NDP, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you.

I have seen a lot of Canada. I know the Canadian west almost as well as Quebec. I wonder about something. How can a single strategy work in the Prairies, Quebec and the Maritimes, when the contexts are so different?

With regard to Saskatchewan and Alberta, we are almost always talking about cultivated land. The issues are pretty straightforward. They are always about wetlands located in the migration paths of ducks, and so forth.

In Quebec, as soon as we leave a city or a village, we are nearly always on crown land. The owners or users cannot be readily identified, the way farmers are on the Prairies.

How can we develop one plan that factors in the particularities of the Prairies and the St. Lawrence Valley? As soon as there is something to conserve in the St. Lawrence Valley, we are talking about special resource land and we know it is going to be expensive. We cannot protect such land.

How do we determine different strategies, when we have different conditions?

[Andrea Barnett]

It's a great question, absolutely, and I think it's really both the challenge and also the potential great achievement of this plan.

I'd like to—and maybe my colleague Karla can help me a little bit—draw the example of the North American waterfowl management plan, which involves Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and has been one of the most successful conservation plans or strategies potentially ever. It has been about—taking into consideration your question—how you bring together all of these different geographic areas and stakeholders that are present, the barriers, and the opportunities.

At the end of the day, it's really about establishing a goal and looking at what your different priorities are, whether there are priority issues, priority sectors, or priority regions for conservation, and then figuring out what is happening on that landscape and what the potential tools are.

When you establish your priorities and you establish a very large, comprehensive toolbox—we have discussed using the right tool in the right circumstance—it really allows you to make an assessment of what to do on a particular landscape.

For example, in urban areas, the challenge to habitat loss might be development. You need to look at how you engage the development community and how you engage local governments on these sorts of strategies. In other cases, it's going to be about engaging industry in the north—the mining industry, the forestry sector, the oil and gas sector. There are a whole bunch of different opportunities that you can work on there. Then, in settled Canada and on private landscapes, there are a whole bunch of other things.

It's about creating this comprehensive plan that has different targets.

Karla, do you have anything to add to that?

[Dr. Karla Guyn]

I'll reiterate what Andrea is saying.

The North American waterfowl management plan is a great example. As for Quebec, it is part of the eastern habitat joint venture. It brings together the partners within the province of Quebec to develop a conservation plan just for Quebec. What is planned for in Quebec is very different from what is being done in Alberta.

It needs to be very situational, depending on what the key issues are in the location, and it needs to bring the partners from that location together to develop the plan.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

Unfortunately, time has expired.

Mr. Lunney, you have the last five minutes.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to pick up on a comment from my colleague, Monsieur Choquette, who raised the spectre of Conservatives destroying fish habitat.

What you're talking about at this stage is, of course, speculative. You have situations recently.... In Quebec, there was the flooding.

It was the Richelieu River.

In 2003, I had a farmer fined for draining his field after the flooding, because some fish had come from the river into his field. The same farmer this time had to get a fishing permit in order to drain his own field after the recent flooding in the Richelieu River.

We're concerned that regulation needs to be smart regulation. We can meet our conservation objectives without being punitive and unreasonable in other manners. So what the discussion is actually about is making sure our regulations are smart.

For our friends from Ducks Unlimited, I want to say that I see from your remarks that you have 500 fundraising events hosting 68,000 people. I know, having attended a number of those, that they're very popular in my region, where we have a lot of outdoors people. Both the Pacific Salmon Foundation, for habitat restoration, and Ducks Unlimited raise a lot of money in our area, because people are very enthusiastic about maintaining our wetlands and marshlands on the coast. Estuaries and habitat restoration attract a lot of volunteer activity on the coast, where I'm from on Vancouver Island.

I notice, though, that in your remarks you talk about taking a landscape- and habitat-based approach to conservation.

Would you first just define a “landscape approach”?

[Dr. Karla Guyn]

Well, it's always very tricky to discuss what a landscape is, because I don't think there is any one definitive answer. In my mind, a landscape is an expansive area that tends to provide habitat for a number of species. It could be a township. It could be many townships together.

I don't think there is one definitive area that you would say is a landscape. It's simply the approach of thinking about conservation from a broader perspective than thinking about it on an individual project-by-project basis. You need to look at the cumulative impacts of conservation actions, instead of thinking site by site by site.

Look at the landscape in general and at what the needs of that landscape are, as opposed to those of individual specific locations.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

So you're basically talking about an ecosystem approach.

[Andrea Barnett]

It can be even smaller than an ecosystem. It really depends on the conservation scale you're working at.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Rather than looking at one item in isolation, try to determine what other factors are at work?

[Andrea Barnett]

Let me add that what is also intended, behind that, is a focusing comment, in terms of what DU sees as an important focus for this plan, because there are other outcomes—for example, healthy wildlife populations in general, or a carbon strategy.

We feel that a focus on habitat is a really good way to achieve all of those other benefits. In addition to the scoping conversation, we feel that a focus on habitat—conservation, restoration, all of the things that you've identified—is really helpful. It will create all the other benefits that we want.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

I think my time is really short. I want to throw this question out quickly.

You talked about effective funding models to sustain long-term activities and programs, designing new funding models—particularly ones that could use private sector capacity, saying that approaches should target innovative cost-sharing models—and new incentives to encourage conservation of private lands.

Can you help us out with new incentives? Do you have any ideas?

[Andrea Barnett]

It's really not a short answer. I would recommend that we convene a national discussion on this with relevant industry sectors and the conservation community, and that we really think about what might be a helpful approach.

DU has done a lot of research in the last little while into the realm of ecological goods and services, and this is basically providing the basis, or the background, for a whole variety of different incentives that could be developed. Likely, most of them would be market-based systems that would provide specific currency for a system that would provide a conservation incentive to landowners.

This will take up way too much time, if we start going into all of it, but we do need to convene a discussion. There are some good examples of incentive programs that already exist in Canada, and expanding on the ones that currently exist and building new ones is going to be really important.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

Unfortunately, our time has expired.

I want to thank each of the witnesses for spending time with us today and providing testimony from the organizations they represent—Ducks Unlimited, CPAWS, and the David Suzuki Foundation.

The meeting is adjourned.