Environment Committee on April 18th, 2013

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

Yes. As I say, hopefully everybody is so motivated, it would just need to be tooled up to achieve what we're after.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Chief Louis, I have a question for you with regard to the identification of critical habitat. Obviously, aboriginal groups and organizations do an assessment and they identify critical habitat. I'm just wondering if you could share with us how you go through that process and how you determine what the threatened species are and the process of protection—how you would set up the protection. Obviously, there's great input from your community on that. I'm just wondering if you could share with us a little bit how you would see that.

[Chief Byron Louis]

If you're looking at identification, I think it goes overall, it's a combination. You can't get away from the fact that western science in conjunction with aboriginal traditional knowledge provides a very powerful mechanism for recovery and protection. I think there are some of those things in there—of having just baseline information on what species are on a particular land base and looking at what type of activity is being proposed, either present or future on that particular land base, then more or less arriving at a decision from there.

Since in our particular area there are presently no threats to the species, we're collecting that information for future use, because eventually what we would like to do is develop our lands for economic purposes. But with that information, I think, the goal is to use it sustainably. So that's it in a nutshell, and we're quite limited on it. However, through our traditional knowledge, we're well aware of the species that are on our land base.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Go ahead, Mr. McNeely.

[Joshua McNeely]

The identification of critical habitat under the Species at Risk Act is a very cumbersome and hard process for government to get their minds around. It's easy to identify it in a park, a wildlife habitat, on DND land, or on something that's owned by the federal government. But I'll share a simple story with you. Inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon recovery team members undertook this process to identify critical habitat in the marine environment. We had 30 to 40 scientific experts on salmon together in a room saying that the entire Bay of Fundy was critical habitat for the salmon, and they had volumes of information to prove it.

In the end, DFO was saying, no, we can't identify the entire Bay of Fundy as critical habitat. We're going to have to call it something else. We're going to have to call it important habitat or some other type of habitat. We do not want to identify the Bay of Fundy as critical habitat. We only want to identify a small portion.

But in a biological sense and an ecological sense for the salmon, it needs the entire bay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. McNeely, and thank you, Mr. Toet.

Ms. Leslie, you have five minutes.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all for your testimony. You all gave great opening statements, and you've been answering our questions—questions driven by us, with an agenda by us. Now that you've heard each other's testimony and answers to questions, I want to turn it over to you for closing statements on anything you've missed or anything you've drawn from each other's testimony.

Before I do that, Mr. McNeely, I have one very specific question for you. I'd ask if you could respond in writing to us. It's not obligatory—you don't have to—but if you could, that would be wonderful.

You appeared before this committee almost exactly two years ago on species at risk. That's correct?

[Joshua McNeely]

Yes.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

In those two years, I wonder if you could tell us how or if the relationship between your organization and the government has changed, and if in that time it has affected the ability of Ikanawtiket to carry out its mandate with regard to the preservation of natural habitats and biodiversity.

Again, it's not obligatory for you to do that, but if you could, it would be appreciated.

[Joshua McNeely]

Yes, I can definitely make a submission.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

I'll now turn it over to you, to whoever would like to start first, for any closing thoughts or things that we missed.

[Chief Byron Louis]

One question came in from the South Okanagan Similkameen environment committee—namely, how does Canada ensure that its international commitments under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity are upheld in the course of its work to carry out the national conservation plan and complementary legislation, regulations, or policy processes? That's a question that's put forward, and I think that's one of the closing statements on that.

Just based on my particular experience over the years, and working on this particular file, it goes right down to this comment that came out of the national conservation plan, that we should “use the right tools in the right situations so that environmental and economic benefits and burdens are distributed fairly to ensure positive environmental and economic outcomes”.

There are a lot of examples out there where this has not been done and the outcome has been detrimental to first nations and to the environment. I think there needs to be a lot more concentration on that. We need to start looking at how we can actually use those right tools in the right situations. They could be regulatory. They could be cooperative. There are all types of tools, but we need to work collectively to identify those tools.

As a closing statement, then, that's one I'd like to underline.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

We have two minutes left in this round if any of you would like to respond.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

I'd like to suggest that time is the key thing that unites what we're talking about. None of this was scripted, but I agree with absolutely everything my fellow presenters say.

It's not about four months, or four years. It might be about four decades. Habitat conservation, healthy ecosystems, functioning habitats with species in them, livelihoods that will be sustained across generations of humans—that will only happen when we actually think and act and plan in those kinds of timeframes.

Our paradigms right now are short-term ones, driven by the way we've structured our economy and our political landscape. We seem to have lots of rhetoric around the long-term things, but really the only things that count are actually thinking and acting for the long term. We have to get out of the philosophical and into the real 40-year-plus timelines with everything that we do.

[Joshua McNeely]

The question was raised about incentives for people to be involved in conservation and sustainable use. I think the biggest incentive for Canadians and aboriginal peoples right now is political leadership, strong political leadership, to constantly be saying, “Yes, we want to develop this resource but we need to do it this way. These are the checks and balances we put in. These are the people we're inviting to the table to determine how to sustainably develop that resource and how to conserve that resource. This is how we're going to respect aboriginal and treaty rights.”

It is also important to understand that when we're talking about biodiversity, we're talking about life and all aspects of it. You follow the international arena. Mr. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the previous secretary to the Convention on Biological Diversity, was very eloquent in stating that biodiversity is all about life and we are part of life. At least, I am part of life, and I hope everybody in this room is part of life.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. McNeely.

We have at least three rounds left.

Mr. Sopuck, go ahead.

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

Mr. Ewins, I would like to follow up on the whole stewardship issue on managed landscapes. We see for example in southwestern Saskatchewan that cattle ranching has replaced the bison, but would you agree that extensive cattle ranching can be very beneficial to the conservation of biodiversity?

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

Yes, the right level of grazing, informed by the right information.

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

My own farm is in a managed landscape right outside Riding Mountain National Park, and of course, that's a living laboratory comparing a completely unmanaged area, the national park, with a pastoral landscape outside the park. My own personal observations, from having lived there for some 30 years, are that the biodiversity in the numbers of species and productivity of the land is actually higher outside the park than inside the park.

What in active management inside national parks can we do to improve biodiversity conservation? In many of our parks there's fire suppression, no agriculture, no forestry, and a tendency towards senescent, old-growth forests.

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

In general, this is where the network comes in because we don't know everything. We can't engineer everything, so what you want to do is leave a network of natural areas alone so that nature, Mother Earth, is really the one that works out which species are going to thrive and which ones are really not suited to these new conditions, and whatever. So even if humans are not managing anything, we have to have enough space and connectivity in place to let nature do her thing.

Where we're managing it, of course, then, the values get laden in and we can decide, for example, whether we want to trade off three species of little arable weeds, plants, for some enhanced crop productivity through certain pesticide use. We do that all the time. It's about values. That's why the landscape effect or plan is really important, so that we leave enough space for Mother Nature to do her thing.

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

Perhaps we'll have a discussion offline but I would argue very strongly that there's no place on earth that's unmanaged by humans right now. When we make a decision, for example, in Riding Mountain National Park or Banff to actively suppress fires, which we do, that is a managed environment. It's how we do it, and I think that's a very sterile debate, natural versus unnatural, managed versus preserved.

It's the ecosystem function that's critical.

Mr. Ewins, under the Species at Risk Act, the lawyers tell us that even if an organization enters into a conservation agreement with the authorities, they are actually at risk of prosecution if something happens to that species while they're undergoing active conservation work. A specific example—it happens to be a fish but it's irrelevant what the species is—the white sturgeon in the Columbia. The hydroelectric people have hatcheries there. They're stocking the fish. They're rehabilitating the species and so on, but if one of their stock fish becomes entrained on the water intakes, the lawyers say that they're actually under legal jeopardy.

Don't you think that's a fairly ridiculous section of the Species at Risk Act, or interpretation of the Species at Risk Act, which needs to be looked at?

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

I agree it's a ridiculous interpretation. Yes, I know that example very well and that's exactly why I and the Columbia hydro association and others are working on this permitting component tied to watershed-level, in this case, ecosystem-level planning, so that those silly lawsuits—just because two fish got caught up in the old turbines—are not the focus for everyone's activities. In fact, the net benefits, including possibly biodiversity offsets, which at that scale are used.... I totally agree that the hydro company, which is putting, I think, five to ten million dollars a year into conservation measures, isn't penalized through the courts for having done that. Of course that's a disincentive. You have to remove that by using the other provisions in the act.

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

Really quickly, because I know my time is tight, then you would agree that they should be indemnified from legal action if they are in good faith and are undertaking sound, scientifically based conservation to bring back that species?

[Dr. Peter Ewins]

In implementing the plan at that scale, yes.

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

Right, and they should be indemnified?