Environment Committee on March 4th, 2014

[Dr. Maurice Bitran]

I'm not really aware of the details of the research, but I suppose that a few aspects might be related to the water quality in the Great Lakes.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

I think all the committee members are interested in knowing whether there are studies that might help improve the water quality in the Great Lakes.

Could you ask your colleague to send the committee that information?

[Dr. Maurice Bitran]

I will get the information and send it to the committee.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much.

I don't have much time left, but I would have liked to speak with Mr. Richardson about the famous joint committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

I'm sorry, Mr. Choquette, but you only have about five seconds, so I think we'll move on.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Right. Perhaps I will come back to it later.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

We'll come back to you in a few minutes.

We'll move now to Mr. Toet, for five minutes.

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

Mr. Chair, unlike my colleague Mr. Storseth who tries to be generous, I actually am generous, and I'm going to give my full five minutes to Mr. Woodworth.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Toet and Mr. Chair.

I'll return to the witnesses. I want to assure them that the only axe I have to grind in this study is to investigate the question of how we can get the Great Lakes water basin to a position where it is swimmable, drinkable, and sustainable. Whatever other political axes may be out there, I'm not here to deal with them.

Along that line, I'd like to go to Mr. Wilcox for a moment.

The Government of Canada introduced a new program a year or two ago, the recreational fisheries conservation partnerships program. I wonder if you're aware of it, Mr. Wilcox, and whether or not there have been any applications received. It's designed to encourage local participation in the improvement of waterways and the improvement of fisheries in the province. I wonder if there has been anything in your watershed in that regard.

[Ian Wilcox]

Mr. Chair, I am not familiar with the program. I apologize. Certainly we do work through the Ministry of Natural Resources for fisheries enhancement work, but that program specifically I am not familiar with.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

I'm going to put you on my list to send you some information, because I think you'll be interested in it once you see it.

[Ian Wilcox]

That would be great.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

The next question I will ask will be for Mr. Richardson.

As I said before, I was writing pretty quickly, but I missed a few of the details regarding the farm cost-share programs that you mentioned in your remarks, Mr. Richardson. I had noted that there were 23,500 projects and that there was a total of about $352.9 million, which involved provincial and federal money leveraged with private money.

I wondered if you could give me some further details, the name of that program, the timeline, when it was established, and how long it has been going such that we've accumulated 23,500 projects. Did I get that figure right? Are there any other details that you can give me about that, please?

[Jim Richardson]

Yes, certainly.

Mr. Chair, the formal name of the principal program I was referring to is the Canada-Ontario farm stewardship program. Colloquially, it's usually called the environmental farm plan. It's a joint federal-provincial program between Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food under the Growing Forward 2 framework. It started off with the agricultural policy framework that ran for five years, Growing Forward 1, which was completed in 2013. We are in the first year of the Growing Forward 2 framework.

The statistic I can provide for you with respect to just this program is that we funded, in Growing Forward 1, so that's in that five-year timeframe from 2009 to 2013, 6,797 completed projects, with a gross cost of $117 million, of which the joint federal-provincial cost share was $29 million.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Were those equal contributions or not?

[Jim Richardson]

The program generally runs on a sixty-forty basis, with the 60% being provided by the federal government.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Sixty per cent by the federal government?

[Jim Richardson]

Yes.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

When I heard 23,500, did I just hear wrong or was that something else?

[Jim Richardson]

There are slightly different ways of calculating. Those were 23,500 best practices.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Best practices spread over 6,000 or 7,000 projects, actually. Thank you very much.

To go back to you, Mr. Wilcox, you gave us some excellent recommendations regarding the issue of western Lake Erie, the algae blooms, and targeted non-point control. Along the way, I think a phrase you used was a comprehensive Lake Erie plan. I am interested in hearing from all the witnesses about what effort, if any, has gone on up to this point to come up with a comprehensive Lake Erie plan.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

We'd love to hear from all the witnesses but Mr. Woodworth, your time is up. Maybe the witnesses can hold that question. I don't know if Mr. Carrie wants to incorporate that into his or not.

We'll move back to Mr. Choquette for five minutes.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll come back to my question on the famous report of the International Joint Commission entitled “A Balanced Diet for Lake Erie”. The commission seems to think that agricultural practices and phosphorous are largely responsible for the pollution of Lake Erie. We talked about it a little off mic.

I would like to know what you think about this report. What measures does the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture intend to take as a result of the report?

[Jim Richardson]

The report prepared by the International Joint Commission and in which the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food participated is founded on work by the Science Advisory Board and the Water Quality Board. It states that if you look across the Great Lakes with respect to nutrients, Lake Erie, in particular its western basin, is in trouble.

A lot of the environmental conditions are dictated by the morphology, the shape of the lake. You can think of Lake Erie as actually three small lakes joined together: the western basin, which is very shallow, the central basin, and the eastern basin. In the western basin, the water mixes constantly. The two main tributaries to the basin are, as Mr. Wilcox suggested, the Maumee and Sandusky rivers coming from the United States, and the Detroit River coming through the international border.

The Maumee and Sandusky watersheds are developed extensively in agriculture, particularly row crops, corn, bean, wheat. They have identified that as the single largest contributor of phosphorus to that area. In aquatic systems, phosphorus is a very important nutrient. If you add phosphorus, things grow. It is considered to be the limiting nutrient and the most significant. That's why the discussion is focused on it.

If you recall back in the 1960s and 1970s, Lake Erie was referred to as the dead lake and through a lot of binational work, it was recovered. By the time I started practising in the 1980s, it was a lake in recovery and there were actually discussions that the phosphorus levels were getting too low. Since the 1990s, a number of things have changed. It seems to be related to the presence of invasive species, zebra mussels and quagga mussels, and changes in the food web. While we are still meeting those original objectives in the open water for phosphorus, now it looks like—and this is a theory, not a fact—what was an acceptable level of phosphorus 15 years ago is no longer acceptable.

The other thing the report points out is that traditionally phosphorus exists in two states in water: dissolved and particulate phosphorus. The particulate phosphorus is usually associated with soil particles and in agriculture situations, runoffs, and erosion. Through much of the last century, the focus was on controlling total phosphorus. What the International Joint Commission report is suggesting is that we need to turn our attention to dissolved phosphorus now as being the most biologically significant, in that if you add dissolved phosphorus, algae grows really well.

In Ontario, I think we could say that they have many of the issues correct although they've extrapolated the data from American practices and American studies, which don't necessarily track the same in Ontario. We use different agriculture practices. We have somewhat different soils and the definition of large in the United States is much different from the definition of large in Ontario, order of magnitude quite oftentimes.

The best practices, the things that you can do to balance the proper use of phosphorus and other nutrients in the lake, those translate well across the borders. Under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement which came into effect a year ago, there is an annex that deals specifically with nutrients and it asks for a number of steps to be taken. We are participating with Ohio and a number of the binational jurisdictions on that task force.

Simply speaking, they're setting new objectives for the lake that will address these ecological endpoints, like harmful algal blooms, dissolved oxygen depletion, and cladophora growth as a first step that's to be done by 2016.

We're looking at a review of best practices across the jurisdictions, what works best where, and we're coming up with domestic action plans. That's already part and parcel of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.