Environment Committee on May 15th, 2012

[Chloe O'Loughlin]

I can give you an on-the-ground example, and that's in northeastern British Columbia. Major oil and gas development happens there, and it's an important part of British Columbia's economy. We believe there should be balance between conservation and industrial development, and that area right now is very worrisome.

The most endangered boreal caribou in Canada are there, and Treaty 8 first nations are very worried, not only about contamination but also about the groundwater level and whether there's going to be enough water in the future.

I believe it's a matter of regulation and self-regulation by industry. There are many companies up there, and as my colleague said, they're all building roads, pipelines, and paths. They could be working together much more effectively to build one road, one shared pipeline, and that may be a matter of real leadership from the Government of Canada and the encouragement of the best of industry to take the lead and show how it can be done.

Northeastern British Columbia would be a great place to work on this and then showcase that to the rest of Canada.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Miss Zevit, I would like to finish my question with respect to this area.

There is a change to environmental assessments in the regulation measures of the national conservation plan. Now, instead of triggers, it will be lists. Should shale gas also figure in the lists?

[Pamela Zevit]

I would say that from a broad legislative perspective and looking at policy, any particular extraction or resource development activity needs to be part of a comprehensive plan in which cumulative effects are factored in, so that includes mineral exploration, oil and gas exploration. In British Columbia, of course, we do have significant issues around that. The province has looked at issues of providing some level of accountability around chemicals that are used in shale gas exploration and reporting.

More broadly, we really do not have good harmonization between national and provincial legislation on things like cumulative effects so that we can identify priority areas that need to be set aside for conservation, where we are not going to be touching those areas because of their significance and the role they may play now and in the future as part of conservation, whether it's for species or rare ecological communities.

The short answer is yes. We do need to have shale gas and other types of resource extraction as part of a comprehensive planning process to ensure we are avoiding significant impacts in the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

All right. Time has expired.

Next we will hear from Mr. Lunney, for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being with us today.

We had a fascinating day yesterday, touring sites on Vancouver Island of stream restoration and various projects. British Columbia salmon are iconic here, and on Vancouver Island we had a lot of habitat destruction because of the interaction of humans with their environment. We saw some great examples of restoration yesterday.

Your organizations, both the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Trout Unlimited, have been big time involved in working with local groups, habitat enhancement societies, various agencies such as B.C. Conservation Foundation—with us yesterday—and Streamkeepers, organizations like that. I think Dr. Riddell mentioned some 350 organizations that the Pacific Salmon Foundation has worked with.

Yesterday we saw the Millstone River in an urban area of Nanaimo and the great work that has been done. There are two kilometres of spawning channel through a park that now has a whole community's support behind it, with children helping to see that salmon come up through the stream, connecting the watershed there with very promising returns.

I wanted to just take us back up to where we were yesterday, for the record, and that's Nile Creek, one of the other projects we saw. Nile Creek restoration has been going for a number of years and has been described by many as a model of stream restoration.

I just wonder, Dr. Riddell, if you'd take a moment to describe what makes that particular project what many consider to be a model for stream bed restoration.

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Well, I don't think there's too much that's really unique about Nile Creek. I think you're hearing it as a model in terms of the extent of community organization that has gotten behind them.

You heard them provide examples of huge leveraging. They were saying that for every dollar that could be provided by a foundation like ours, they could leverage twenty times that. I think the number is actually more like eight to ten times, to be honest, but the fact is that they are very well organized. They involve highly professional people. They really build strength by going out and finding people in their community with backgrounds who can contribute to how to operate their society.

They have been dedicated to this for probably twenty years. They have received national awards because of their success in bringing back pink salmon and coho salmon. As you heard, though, a lot of it depended on interacting with the appropriate people and with government departments, both provincial and mostly federal.

Basically, they've been extremely good at taking a professional approach to this. It's a local society, but they've gone out and gotten the appropriate support. They have wonderful community support. They are a model of what the community organization can do. I think the biological recovery is really a reflection of the commitment of the entire community to protect the downstream, to restore the estuary, to protect the flow of the water, and to continue to provide them with the money they need to work on an annual basis.

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

I should acknowledge DFO habitat expert Mel Sheng, who's been involved in these projects for many years and is right on the ground, working with volunteers. He was able to accompany us yesterday.

I also want to draw attention to the fact that I believe they started with sowing the stream with pinks that were virtually extinct from the Nile when they started. The success of the pink returns actually helped to bring the coho, because I don't think they actually sowed coho. Some of the coho actually followed the pink and re-established themselves in these spawning channels. Is that correct?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Not quite. They did start with pinks, that's correct. They were very successful in restoring a good run of pink salmon. Pink salmon can become very abundant very quickly, because they have a fixed two-year life cycle.

Essentially what they did is restore the ecosystem first, so it's certainly a model in that sense. They protected the habitat, they provided the water, and they restored the ecosystem function by providing heavy nutrients to the river system. Some coho did come back naturally, and other coho—you saw the small hatchery—were supplemented. You made reference to the restoration biologist and the building of the kilometre-long side channel.

The productivity of coho in that river is abnormally high. The success is maintaining a habitat, restoring the ecosystem, providing the habitat expansion, protecting the water flow—all things that, if you think back on it, are kind of a natural progression. Their success was that they overcame the pressures around that stream. They protected the water, they worked with the community and the agricultural groups, and they put the whole picture together.

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

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, how much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

You have two minutes.

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

Great. Thank you.

I want to turn to Ms. O'Loughlin.

[Technical Difficulty—Editor]

Okay, thanks for that.

We're talking about parks and the parks system. We've done a lot of work in the last few years to expand parks territorially. Kluane Park was expanded, as were Great Bear Rainforest, the Gwaii Haanas of course, which you mentioned, East Arm of Great Slave Lake, and the Ramparts River.

We've expanded the footprint of our national parks considerably. About 10% of the second-largest country in the world is actually already preserved or conserved in one form or another.

You mentioned the Similkameen and the challenges when you're talking about establishing a new national park. You made some comments about the businesses and Osoyoos and the school and so on, but when I drove through there recently, I saw the signs that said, “No national park”.

Can you speak to the dynamic, since you've spent some time there, of helping people work through the process of understanding the benefits of a national park, and can you tell us where the resistance is coming from locally?

[Chloe O'Loughlin]

That's a good question.

I think people who are opposed to the park, who put those “no national park” signs up.... There's no indication whatsoever of public support. Those signs could have been put up by one person or 10 people or a thousand people. There have been three public opinion polls in the area that show significant support—more than two to one. The polls showed that between 63% and 80% of the population in that area wants the national park. The regional district made a formal request to see the results of the eight-year, multi-million dollar study that was funded through the federal government. The regional district, the chambers of commerce, the tourism associations, the big wineries, and the organic food organizations do want to see the results of this study so that they can make decisions on the park, and I understand that report has just been released today.

The area impacts on 11 ranchers, and three of them want to sell their ranch specifically to Parks Canada for a national park, and the other ranchers would be allowed to continue to own that land and their cattle tenures for as long as they want to, and Parks Canada would be helping them and working with them.

So the opposition, now that people are educated, comes from a very small group of people, but business, tourism, and local citizens are very interested in the national park.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mark Warawa]

Time has expired.

Ms. Fry, you have seven minutes.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, everyone.

I just wanted to ask a couple of questions.

Internationally Canada has signed on to an agreement stipulating that 17% of land and 10% of ocean be conserved. How far are we from that? How much have we done so far, and where do we need to go from there?

That's my first question.

We used to have an oceans strategy that sunsetted a while ago. Do you believe that the oceans strategy should be brought back? What are the elements of the oceans strategy that we should bring in to ensure we fulfill the 10% conservation requirement for our oceans?

James said that, as a British Columbian, he knows the salmon is iconic in this province. It's more than a fish. The salmon in fact is an indicator of how habitat is doing. So the big question I want Brian to answer is whether he believes that the ebb and flow of salmon is a natural thing or that it reflects the habitat. That's my second question.

My third question is what do you think would be the impact of the proposed Enbridge pipeline coming through British Columbia? How will it impact on our ecosystem, and in what ways will it actually be contradictory to a national conservation plan for British Columbia? What will the tanker traffic do to the fish and ocean habitat?

Ms. O'Loughlin, I think the first one is for you, regarding 17% of land and 10% of ocean.

[Chloe O'Loughlin]

Great. [Technical Difficulty—Editor]

We have a big opportunity to protect a lot of our country. Many countries around the world have no land left to protect—for example, the United States.

Canada has a big responsibility in the world to exceed those targets. I think in the marine environment it's less than one per cent that is protected, and terrestrially there's less than 10% protected. [Technical Difficulty—Editor]

So if we had marine planning, which brings together industry, local communities, and environmental groups to plan where the traffic should be, where the protection of the fish should be, where things should happen.... A marine-protected area is zoned. It's not entirely protected. We need a portion that's protected.

There are four areas on the coast that need marine protection, which means marine planning. The government could certainly provide the leadership to make that happen and to figure out where things can go and where things need to be protected, and it's a very collaborative partnership process.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

How much of the land is currently protected?

[Chloe O'Loughlin]

I believe it's less than 10%.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Okay.

And the oceans strategy?

[Chloe O'Loughlin]

The oceans strategy is really important on all three coasts—to have leadership that would say it is really important to our country, which has the biggest coastline in the world, to protect our ocean resources.

With climate change, our oceans are changing drastically. If we don't have healthy blue, we say, then there's no green. If our oceans are not healthy, it has major impacts on the land. Oceans produce half of the oxygen we breathe.

So an oceans strategy is just critical, and would be a major part of a national conservation plan.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Thank you.

And Brian, the salmon-habitat relationship?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Yes—three loaded questions in seven minutes.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

You can deal with loaded questions, Brian. Go on.

[A voice]

And I get the pipeline question?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

You get the pipeline, yes.

Is the variation in Pacific salmon populations natural? Absolutely. Does it explain all of the fluctuations? Absolutely not. There are local environmental effects. There can be long-standing effects due to overfishing that we're still correcting. There can be the combination of several factors that lead to the cumulative effects that Jeff spoke about in his presentation.

I tell people that Pacific salmon are very difficult to summarize quickly because there are 4,000 locations of streams and Pacific salmon in British Columbia, and there is a wide diversity of different types of pressures. But there isn't any question that what we're seeing determining salmon returns in British Columbia now is in the ocean. What's particularly interesting is that as we apply new scientific methods, we're really determining that a lot of the variation in survival is determined in the first few months at sea—so in Canadian coastal waters. And close to us, the particular area of concern is the Strait of Georgia.

So yes, natural is a big player, definitely, in the long-term trends, but it doesn't exclude that there are localized pressures we have to deal with that can be related to development, urbanization, water extraction, and so on.

You asked about the pipeline. I'll make a quick comment on this, because of course with Pacific salmon we're definitely concerned about this development.

This, to me, is the epitome of a risk assessment in that if you built this system and it worked fine, ultimately the environment would heal and people say, “You know what? We can have both.” The problem is that the risk is a function of the.... What's the risk of something occurring? What's the probability of it occurring? What's the effect of it when it occurs? And the effect could be enormous.

So this is the epitome of risk assessment, and that's what really has people concerned. It will cross 778 streams and rivers from Alberta through B.C. It will cross three major drainages with very important salmon populations. You're really talking about a very heartfelt concern in the local communities here.

I challenged one fellow recently who was tackling us with “Why can't we have pipelines if you have forestry?” Well, it's not the same. And it's not to imply that we don't regulate forest-cutting, for heaven's sakes, right?

So yes, it could actually work, but they have to acknowledge that pipelines do leak. They will certainly not tell you that they don't leak. All we have to hope for, if it comes through, is that we do it in the very best way possible and minimize the risk to freshwater ecosystems. We need to have very rapid response, because they will leak; it is only a matter of time.

The tankers are another big story. I personally think that tanker traffic.... If you look at the history of tanker traffic around the world, the incidents are very rare. But I'm sorry; we have examples on the west coast of some very bad experiences. We lost a ferry because somebody simply fell asleep and ran into a rock. These things will happen when you have very large volumes of traffic, and how do you minimize that risk?