Environment Committee on March 5th, 2013

[Bob Hamilton]

I'm afraid I can't help you with that one. The experimental lakes is an issue that our colleagues at the Department of Fisheries are managing. I don't know whether any of my colleagues at the table feel that they have anything constructive to say. I can undertake to get you some information, but as to the question you're asking, I don't know the status of those discussions.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Even that information is helpful. Those discussions are taking place primarily at DFO.

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thanks.

I brought up the fact that there are 510 species listed on SARA and 257 don't have a recovery document posted on the public registry. Recovery documents for 210 of those are overdue. I'm wondering about the government's plans to address the backlog.

[Bob Hamilton]

It may be small comfort, but I can report some updating on those numbers, which are largely in the same range. We have 264 strategies proposed. We need 246. That's a little bit better than the numbers you quoted. We understand that we have a backlog with SARA, and we're doing the best we can within our resources to address it on a priority basis. The minister mentioned the caribou recovery strategy. We're quite glad to have got that out, but there are many others that we need to do.

What we're doing is a two-track approach. One is trying to eliminate the backlog as quickly as we can. We've made some good progress during the last number of years in the number of recovery strategies that we have. If you compared this with the five previous years, we're doing better, but we need to do better still.

The second thing that we're looking at is things we could do in the way of implementation or legislative or regulatory change. As the minister said, there's a full range of options that we as officials are looking at to work within the existing legislative framework and do it better. There are people out there who say that the law is pretty much fine; we just need to find a better way to do it.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

I'm not quite understanding. Are you saying that legislative or regulatory change would address the fact that we need to develop recovery strategies for these species?

[Bob Hamilton]

It would help. I'll come back to what it would do for the existing backlog. But going forward, whether it's through implementation or legislative change, we'd like to find a way to better line up what we want to accomplish. We want to identify a priority species and have timelines and responsibilities we can deliver on. I don't know what that would be at this moment. We're still thinking about some possible options. We wouldn't want to contribute to the backlog as we have been in the past. In that context, one would have to think about what we can best do with the backlog. Maybe it's more implementation. Maybe we could do a better job of prioritizing and making sure that we're taking off the highest priority species. Maybe there's something we could do with other parts of the backlog that doesn't require a full recovery strategy but that might be more efficient. There are the two tracks for dealing with the backlog, but there's also trying to think ahead and see if there's a way to prevent a bigger backlog.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, and thank you, Ms. Leslie.

We are going to move to Mr. Sopuck and then Ms. Duncan, if she has another question, and then we need to move on to dealing with the actual votes to approve the supplementary estimates and the main estimates.

Mr. Sopuck.

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

The last tranche of fast-start financing is due to be released in 2013-14. On what activities has this funding gone toward, and what are some of the results we have seen?

[Bob Hamilton]

As the minister mentioned, fast-start financing is part of our agreement. Internationally we've agreed to provide $1.2 billion in funding. It tries to look at a mixture of activities whereby we can help developing countries deal with their efforts to try either to mitigate climate change or to adapt to climate change. Parks Canada has been part of that. We talked earlier about CIDA and some of the projects it has participated in to try to help some of the poorest countries adapt to climate change.

I won't go through all the projects in gory detail, but I would certainly be happy to provide them because there are quite a few. Suffice it to say, that's been an important part of the international climate change discussions, to find ways for Canada and others to provide that funding. We are finishing the last tranche of that and then there's a bigger question at play internationally about how we might go further as a group of countries going toward 2020.

That funding ends March 31 of this year. As I say, we are in the last phase of that.

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

Thanks.

Ms. Feldman, my next question is in regard to the relationship between environmental assessment and environmental outcomes: what happens in a project. The stuff I have read and been involved with in my professional career...the projects initiated by industry build in the best environmental practices from day one in terms of, let's say, water quality, remediation, air quality, and biodiversity protection.

When an environmental assessment from a project proponent comes to your office, by and large the best environmental practices of the day are already built in. Is that a fair assessment?

[Elaine Feldman]

I think it's fair to say that each project is different. When we provide the environmental impact statement guidelines to proponents, we work with them over the course of the time it will take for them to come back with their environmental impact statement so that issues that come up along the way can be resolved. Best practices, as you say, can be put forward by proponents. It's very much a give and take throughout the process.

In terms of the environmental outcome, the new act now provides for the minister to issue a decision statement with conditions, which will enable the agency to monitor whether proponents have lived up to the conditions of the decision statement and whether they're having the outcomes that they were predicted to have. I think this is a truly important component of the new legislation and one that was not there in the previous year.

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

To me the focus has to be on what's happening out there in the environment itself. All these arguments about consultation processes are often divorced from the environmental outcomes.

In terms of environmental outcomes, I'd like to talk about environmental indicators in Canada. Over the last decade or so most of Canada's environmental indicators have improved. I'm thinking of NOx, S0₂, and so on. There's been a steady improvement in Canada's environment overall.

Is that a fair assessment?

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes, I believe that is a fair assessment, in terms of some of the improvements that have been made.

We publish our environmental indicators so it's there for all to see. Having said that, I think we have the prospect of even more improvements. On NOx and SOx air quality, in October we reached agreement with the provinces on an air quality management system for Canada, which I think was a major accomplishment in trying to bring all the players together to get an agreement on how we can improve air quality in Canada.

We are now working together to try to implement that. I'm fully expecting that's going to generate even further increases. It's an example of the work we do at Environment Canada day-to-day.

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

I couldn't agree with you more that there's always room for improvement.

Interestingly, wealthy western industrial societies generate continuous environmental improvement. As far as I'm concerned, the sky is the limit. However, we still need to work on some environmental indicators. A number of us are very concerned about the issue of wetland loss. That should be a priority, as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

I will move to Ms. Duncan and just ask you to keep your questions to four minutes. We gave you a little more last time, so please keep your comments to four minutes this time.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to use real jargon here. Inside your program alignment architecture, where does oil sands monitoring fit?

[Carol Najm, Assistant Deputy Minister, Finance Branch, Department of the Environment]

Oil sands monitoring is received through vote net revenues that are not present in the main estimates numbers before you. So those are incremental costs that will be covered by industry through our authorities for vote net revenues.

Right now the main estimates do not include the costs for oil sands.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Can you table, or give us now, what the actual expenditure has been in the past and what the projected expenditures will be going into the future?

[Carol Najm]

The nature of these expenses is incremental based on the agreement we'll sign with the province and what we will bill industry. They're incremental activities that the department is engaging on for oil sands monitoring; they're not present in the numbers at all.

[Bob Hamilton]

To add to that, I think what Carol is referring to is that we were doing monitoring already, and so what this agreement does is step it up, and so it's incremental to that.

Let us go back and try to find the figures for you in terms of what we're spending now. In terms of the future, it may be more difficult to provide a precise estimate, at least until the MOU is finally signed, but let me look at what we can do. We can certainly tell you what the incremental is that we've seen thus far over the past year.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you. That's what I would like to know: what we have spent and what are we going to spend going forward.

The last thing I'd like to ask is this. Can you give us a detailed breakdown on where the cuts are happening in the $31.5 million relating to savings measures for Environment Canada?

[Bob Hamilton]

Whenever you start with detailed breakdown....

I don't know, Carol, if you want to start and then I'll come in.

[Carol Najm]

Yes. The $31 million consists of initiatives that will find administrative efficiencies throughout the organization.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

What are they, please?