Environment Committee on March 25th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

I'd like to call meeting number 17 of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to order, please.

We welcome today our witnesses: from the Quinte Conservation Authority, Mr. Terry Murphy, general manager and secretary treasurer; from Conservation Ontario, Bonnie Fox, manager of policy and planning; and from the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority, Don Pearson, general manager.

Welcome. We will begin now with your opening comments. Each of you has a 10-minute opening statement. After we've had all three statements, we will go to different rounds of questioning from the members.

We'll begin with Mr. Terry Murphy, general manager and secretary treasurer of the Quinte Conservation Authority.

[Terry Murphy, General Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Quinte Conservation Authority]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.

First of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about something that I've been working on for over 30 years and has become a major part of my life. I hope to see it finished by the time I retire.

I should also mention that my other role is co-chair of the Bay of Quinte restoration council. So for all of the Bay of Quinte RAP programs, I co-chair that restoration work.

Quinte Conservation is one of Ontario's conservation authorities. I'm not going to talk a lot about it because Bonnie will fill you in on what Conservation Ontario, our umbrella group, does for us.

Over the years with conservation authorities, the programs we do all have an impact on improving the environment of the Great Lakes. In our case, the whole watershed of the Quinte watershed drains into the Bay of Quinte. The Bay of Quinte was identified as one of the hot spots in the Great Lakes because of the severe pollution over years of not knowing what people were doing when we were dumping pollution into the rivers draining directly into the bay. The contaminants that were carried down the rivers at the time came mainly from industrial pollution. To the north of Belleville about 50 kilometres, there was an old mining site, the Deloro Mine site, where the by-product was arsenic. Thousands of tonnes of arsenic made it down the river into the Bay of Quinte and also carried other pollutants.

On top of that there were phosphorus problems generated by agriculture and industry adding to the contamination problems in the bay. One of the biggest problems with the Bay of Quinte is that it's fairly shallow. It's not a deep body of water that has changes and has fresh water pumped into it all the time, so it is a problem that requires constant management.

Over the years our focus has been, through partnerships with Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and the health units, to educate the public, educate politicians locally, and also to put programs into place to help restore some of the issues that were prevalent in the Bay of Quinte.

The Bay of Quinte is extremely important to the area. You have to keep in mind that the whole watershed population is about 125,000 people, so we don't have an unlimited amount of financial resources to correct all the problems that exist in the bay. On the other side of things, the Bay of Quinte, from a tourism point of view, is worth millions of dollars a year because of the recreational opportunities that it provides. It's still one of the best fishing places in Canada and attracts a lot of tourists from the States and Europe to come to the Quinte area to fish for several weeks. They pump millions of dollars into the area's economy.

When we talk about delisting an area of concern, it brings up some questions. What happens after we delist? There were 80 points identified 30-some years ago by the public and by experts that had to be addressed. To date we have knocked off 50 of those concerns. They've all been corrected. We have 30 left that have to be completed. They're almost complete.

The problem we have is that the 30 that are left are all connected to phosphorus levels. If we can contain the phosphorus levels, we can control the rest of the problems and take the Bay of Quinte off the list of hot spots. What that means to tourism and promoting the area is that people still say, “The Bay of Quinte is one of those bad spots. We don't want to go there.” We want to promote it as being an area that everybody should come to because you can eat the fish, you can drink the water. The bay is clean.

One of the concerns that we have about delisting is that in our area—I'm talking about the Quinte area only—we deal with 18 municipalities. None of those 18 municipalities has the expertise on staff to manage an area like the Bay of Quinte to monitor and ensure that the Bay of Quinte always is in good shape and doesn't revert back to the way it used to be.

Quinte Conservation does have the expertise, but we don't have the financial capability for doing all the work that's required. We have the staff expertise but not the dollars required to pay for sampling, such as the sampling of algae and the sampling of the water quality and that type of thing.

I don't have the exact figures, but we estimate that we've spent probably about $10 million in cleaning up the Bay of Quinte. It has been money well spent. On top of that $10 million, private industry and the agricultural community have also pumped in several million dollars to match grants that were provided through the federal and provincial governments to protect wetlands, to restore shorelines, to put in alternate watering holes for cattle, and for manure storage and that type of thing, to prevent runoff into the creeks and to try to control the phosphorus problems.

We need to protect our investment. We can't just walk away from it after we take it off the list. We definitely hope that there will be continued funding to make sure that those hot spots don't go backwards. We have to continue to monitor. We have to know what the state of this is. We have to continue to understand where we're at from a scale that we now can compare to from the past.

One of the big concerns I have is the direction that the federal government, through DFO, and MNR and MOE are taking in terms of reductions in staff available to carry out programs on the ground. I'm also very concerned about the new self-help, do-it-yourself permitting. You can now go on a website and get a permit under the Fisheries Act. You can go to a website and get a permit. You will be able to get water-taking permits. MNR, public lands...anybody can abuse those systems. That's going to have a negative impact on what we have done for the last 30 years. I think we're going in the wrong direction in some of those areas.

The last thing that we have a major concern about is climate change. I know that a lot of people think we don't have global warming and that, after this winter, climate change doesn't exist. Well, we know it does. One of our jobs is to manage dams into the Bay of Quinte. We have 39 dams. We used to automatically put the logs in the dams at a certain date and pull them out at another certain date. With the microbursts now and the changes in temperature, last year we were a month behind. You can't go by dates anymore. You have to go by what's happening with the climate. It's affecting everything we do. It has affected the Bay of Quinte. We didn't expect zebra mussels to come in as an invasive species or the impact that's had.

We have to be very aware of all of these things. We can't just walk away. We have to keep monitoring and making sure that we have programs in place to educate the public and educate the local politicians, and to make the public proud of the resource they have and make everybody want to chip in and protect the future.

I could go on for hours, but I'm trying to keep it under 10 minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

We're getting close, but you still have another minute if you need it.

[Terry Murphy]

In conclusion, in the conservation authority program, we will continue to do all the programs that a conservation authority would do. After the bay is delisted, we will continue to do all the programs to improve water quality. We will continue to work with the agricultural community, and we will try to get grants wherever possible to help them. We will continue to work with all of our partners through the federal government and the provincial government. We have had good partnerships over the last 30 years.

We've accomplished a lot of work. It has been very positive. I would just hate to see a lot of the work off the table and to see that, all of a sudden, because the Bay of Quinte is not on the list, it's the end of the care, the end of the financing, and the end of the attention that we're paying to it. We've spent a lot of money. We've invested a lot and we've accomplished a lot, and I would hate to see it all go backwards.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Mr. Murphy.

We'll move now to Bonnie Fox from Conservation Ontario.

[Bonnie Fox, Manager, Policy and Planning, Conservation Ontario]

Good afternoon. I'm Bonnie Fox. I'm the manager of policy and planning at Conservation Ontario. We are the organization that supports Ontario's 36 conservation authorities.

Conservation authorities are community-based watershed management agencies. Of the 36, there are 35 conservation authorities that drain into the Great Lakes Basin and the St. Lawrence River Basin. Of those 35, there are 26 that have a Great Lakes shoreline and St. Lawrence River shoreline.

Of Ontario's population, 90% resides within conservation authority boundaries. This is both a challenge and an opportunity in terms of balancing human needs with environmental and economic needs.

Conservation Ontario coordinates watershed level input into Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River issues through a couple of ways. We will set up review committees of conservation authority technical experts and we will endorse representatives to sit on binational Great Lakes and domestic committees.

As well, the conservation authorities themselves provide an effective coordination and local delivery mechanism for provincial, federal, and municipal priorities. So, for example, it's what Terry was talking about federally with the remedial action plan program. At the provincial level, for example, it's the provincial groundwater monitoring network and local rural water quality programs.

With regard to priority locations in the Great Lakes Basin, I wanted to draw your attention to four broad areas.

The first is the Great Lakes areas of concern.

The second one is Lake Erie. It's suffering from excessive nutrient loads to an ecosystem that is too impaired to deal with them. From the Canadian side, it would likely require a focus on the Grand River watershed as a major contributor to loads, and, as well, for the western basin, the Thames River.

The third area I want to draw your attention to is the nearshore areas of the Great Lakes, in general, and as a major threat to the nearshore areas, the contributing watersheds.

As a starting point, the areas that could be focused upon are where there are already federal, provincial, and municipal collaborations to deal with nearshore issues. For Lake Huron, the southern Georgian Bay collaborative comes to mind, as well as the Lake Huron Southeast Shores Initiative. For Lake Ontario, the Greater Golden Horseshoe comes to mind.

The final priority locations are natural areas that provide significant support to our Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River ecosystem. That may include the headwaters, large natural areas, wetlands, and shoreline areas. Preliminary priority locations have been identified in lake biodiversity conservation strategies that were developed by binational committees. These natural features in areas improve water quality coming from the contributing watersheds, and they are the nurseries of our commercial fisheries and endangered species, and resting areas for migratory birds. One of those priority areas is the Bay of Quinte.

With regard to efforts that are currently under way or planned for remediation, I can tell you conservation authorities have a lot of experience in developing and implementing a range of local conservation programs. Best management practices within watersheds and along the shorelines of the Great Lakes improve water quality, and they create green jobs to boost the economy.

We consistently hear from the conservation authorities that they need more incentive funding to promote voluntary actions. This funding cannot be short term, but needs to be multi-year and long term. This allows momentum to build and community action to occur.

There are some best-bet actions I want to highlight that are occurring, but they require greater investment to have real impact.

Number one are rural and urban stormwater management practices to reduce non-point source pollution. I'm talking about agricultural best management practices, urban stormwater management, green infrastructure, and low-impact development techniques.

The other area is habitat enhancement projects for improved biodiversity and resiliency in the nearshore. Examples of those projects would be dam removal or naturalization of Great Lakes shoreline protection works.

As indicated earlier, the nearshore of the Great Lakes is a vital resource. There's no question that the nearshore ecosystem and dynamics affecting water quality need to be understood. As well, the contributing watersheds, as one of the major threats to the nearshore, must be recognized in nearshore science and assessment activities. There must be measurable targets set for the nearshore areas to achieve improvement of Great Lakes water quality. An integrated watershed management approach would enable the assessment and subsequent adjustment of watershed actions, like the BMPs I've mentioned, as necessary to meet the targets. Monitoring and reporting will ensure accountability.

In the Greater Golden Horseshoe especially, it will be important to examine population growth projections and land-use scenarios that are watershed-based and modelled for climate change predictions that demonstrate what we need to manage and adapt to. Watershed and shoreline managers need to be able to access climate change data and information specific to the Great Lakes region, and that is not something we can do locally.

Turning to your final question around best practices that will facilitate further remediation of areas of environmental concern within the Great Lakes Basin, a critical best practice that's currently being enhanced under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is collaboration. Collaboration between all levels of government, first nations and Métis, watershed management agencies, and others is necessary for improvements to Great Lakes water quality. In particular there needs to be greater collaboration on governance, science, and action.

For governance, Conservation Ontario has taken the position that, given our role in local watershed management, we should have representatives at decision-making tables wherever priorities are being set and work planning is undertaken. We have a seat on the Great Lakes executive committee for the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and on a number of the annex committees and task groups. That's a great start and we appreciate that. It would be good to see similar engagement under the new Canada-Ontario agreement.

Collaboration is also necessary for the action agenda with regard to increased implementation of stewardship and capital assistance programs, as well as education and outreach programs. These actions must be supported with an adequate and collaborative science agenda with regard to research, monitoring and reporting, and ensuring accessible information.

Another important best practice in remediation that I would like to share is prevention. We need to transfer the tools and the lessons learned across the basin, lessons we know will benefit Great Lakes water quality. We need to incent implementation of these best management practices so that we are not creating new areas of environmental concern and playing catch-up. Through application of lessons learned and financial incentives to enable significant action, we can protect the entire basin while we continue to remediate in environmental areas of concern.

In conclusion, we rely on Great Lakes water quality for all kinds of things in our daily lives. We should ensure that we will have enough clean water for all our needs, whether they are ecological or economic or they are for our own health.

The attention of this standing committee is welcome. The conservation authorities are committed to improving Great Lakes water quality. We look forward to working with you and meeting the commitments of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and, most significantly, participating in implementation actions.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to submit these comments and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Ms. Fox.

We'll move now to Mr. Don Pearson of the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority.

[Don Pearson, General Manager, Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, members. Again, I appreciate the opportunity.

My name is Don Pearson and I'm general manager of the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority. I have spent nearly 40 years working either with conservation authorities or with our municipal partners directly, including eight years with Conservation Ontario, the umbrella organization. So I am obviously very passionate about the job that we're all interested in accomplishing, and again I appreciate that the committee is taking a look at this most important question.

The committee is aware from previous presentations from conservation authority colleagues about the geographic expanse of the conservation authorities so I won't repeat that. I would like to just add, though, the fact that 90% of Ontario's population currently lives within the conservation authorities' jurisdiction and therefore impacts the Great Lakes. That population is expected to increase by 25% to 30% over the next 25 years. So in addition to some of the catch-up work that's been referenced, we really have to get ahead of the curve in terms of planning to make sure that we're not solving problems at the expense of ignoring the potential for future problems developing.

I think it's important to again understand that the 36 conservation authorities are investing more than $300 million annually into programs that benefit, among other things, water quality, including the Great Lakes habitats, and providing recreation and contributing to human health. And they're doing so by leveraging municipal sources. It's about 40% municipally funded. An additional 40% comes from revenues that are largely self-generated. These can be user fees, to permit fees, to resource management fees, and the remaining 20% is made up by a variety of senior government grants, including the federal government. It often comes in at around 2% to 4% of that figure annually. So it's a shared contribution to that program expenditure, and I think one of value.

Within the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority, where I am the manager, we encompass more than about 100,000 people, but it is also Ontario's most productive farmland. I think it's important to realize that this same part of Ontario that accommodates the population is also our prime farmland, and it's also the area where people expect natural heritage and other things to be protected, so it's a challenging job.

In addition to the Thames River, we also have a significant area that drains directly into the north shore of Lake Erie, and we have over 100 kilometres of Great Lakes shoreline, which I think makes us one of the largest jurisdictions directly impacting the Great Lakes.

The Thames River has been recognized, sadly, as the area of greatest contribution to the water quality impairment in the Western Lake Erie Basin. Of course, the Maumee River in Ohio is the largest, responsible for about 80%, but obviously Canada and Ontario have to do their share in terms of reducing the nutrient loads into the western basin. The economic costs are enormous.

I will now turn to the three areas of focus of your study.

The first is the priority locations within the Great Lakes Basin. Obviously, the western basin—declared dead in the 1960s—recovered, but since 2011 annually we've seen expansive algal blooms, and these of course are affecting ecosystems, human health, and the economy for most of the ice-free season, and obviously drinking water, commercial and recreational fisheries, as well as direct contact recreation are impacted by this. Other watersheds, including the Grand River watershed, have been mentioned as having significant input into Lake Erie, and what would apply in the Lower Thames would be applicable in the Grand as well.

We are doing some things under the category of efforts under way to remediate identifiable areas. Many government agencies, municipalities, and the conservation authorities, as well as organizations like the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association, have been promoting best-management practices with the goal of reducing non-point sources of contamination. They've often used funding cobbled together from a variety of sources, including the federal government, but a number of authorities have been able to sustain programs over time, which has allowed the development and retention of the staff expertise and capacity that is necessary to maintain credibility and continuity within the community.

Our authority hasn't been as active in this regard as some other authorities, partly due to the limited financial capacity, but also because it has emphasized flood hazard reduction as a priority program instead.

We are cooperating with neighbouring jurisdictions at the moment, delivering clean water programs and implementing a greening strategy with the Municipality of Chatham-Kent. As an example, municipal funding of $150,000 annually is being leveraged through additional investment into $500,000 in program delivery on the ground. The authority's mechanism has been very effective.

We recently entered into a new partnership arrangement with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food to address nutrients and sediment loadings to Lake Erie through enhancing our understanding of how phosphorus moves over land, not just the mechanisms but the time of year and the factors that influence its transport, and how those are influenced in turn by various tillage and nutrient application practices. This will support the development and implementation of new approaches for reducing phosphorus from agricultural sources while raising awareness and increasing adoption of environmental farm planning and beneficial management practices among producers. We'll also involve ongoing monitoring and demonstration and evaluation of new technology and practices so that we can ensure effectiveness and value for the investments that are made.

Under the topic of best practices that will facilitate the further remediation of these areas within the Great Lakes Basin, we've certainly learned much about the effectiveness of various best management practices for reducing non-point source pollution. We also understand that voluntary, incentive-based programs aimed mainly at the agricultural community have enjoyed strong landowner participation and afforded the opportunity for cost-sharing with various levels of government.

Within the Thames watershed, but more particularly in the upper basin, programs have been implemented for more than several decades. They have produced local benefits but they have fallen short of the overall goal of improving water quality throughout the system and in the Great Lakes. Partly this is attributable to the changing climate, which has produced more frequent and intensive rainfall events, and to longer exposure of soils to the elements during the shorter duration of snow cover in the period when crop cover is absent. Obviously, again, climate change and the changing weather patterns impact our water quality protection efforts.

We have to our adjust our agricultural practices on a very wide scale to compensate for impacts resulting from changing weather patterns. If voluntary, incentive-based practices are to become more widely adopted, then realistic levels of effort must be applied to ensure that the targets are met.

It can't be overlooked that one of the more critical success factors for influencing change, particularly on the agricultural landscape, is the ability of an organization to develop and maintain relationships, reputations for excellence, and capacity to deliver on-the-ground support and advice. This is often challenging, because many government programs are transient in nature, or they have specific targets and timelines, often without regard for the realities of the funding cycles of other potential partners. This reality of multi-stakeholder efforts has presented a challenge for implementation, and yet it has been made to work by the conservation authorities' ability to coordinate the programs from multiple funding sources while maintaining continuity and stability in program delivery to landowners.

Again, some authorities have been more successful in this regard than others due to a variety of factors, but we can't ignore that on the landscape, population is coincident with municipal ability to pay. A given watershed may be sparsely populated, but it may have the same impact in terms of agricultural sources. Somehow governments have to create mechanisms for equalization of the financial costs of implementing programs in those areas. In other words, it's hard expect 100,000 people to put the same effort forward as 500,000 people on a watershed of comparable size. I think this is something that has to be taken into account in program design; there is a role for governments in terms of creating a level playing field or some kind of equalization payment.

A second critical factor for ensuring that public investment achieves greatest possible value is captured in the idea of co-benefits. Conservation authorities have successfully applied the principle of integrated watershed management in designing and implementing programs in partnership with landowners. We have to recognize that most of the contributing area within the Great Lakes Basin is privately owned, and it happens to be agricultural land. It's imperative that we achieve multiple objectives within this limited area.

Traditional approaches to problems have really been narrowly focused on a specific program or objective. If you have a flooding problem, you build a dam or a channel or a dike.

One minute, Mr. Chair...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Yes.

[Don Pearson]

Thank you.

Similarly, if you want forest cover you encourage tree planting. If you want to reduce soil erosion you promote conservation tillage.

In reality, there are multiple benefits produced from each of these examples. Forests and wetlands provide habitat, fuel, and food; moderate temperature; improve infiltration; reduce runoff and therefore flooding; and maintain stream flow and aquatic ecosystems to protect the fishery. If we consider the landscape as a functioning ecosystem, we can undertake projects that realize multiple benefits while maintaining the productive capacity of the land for agriculture.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I too look forward to questions from the members of the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much, Mr. Pearson.

We're going to move now to our opening round of questions of seven minutes each.

I just want to point out to committee members that on your agenda there was a note that we have a short in camera meeting from 5:25 to 5:30. There are a couple other issues we would like to discuss so we are going to end the open session at 5:20.

We will begin now with our first round of questions, starting with Mr. Sopuck from the Conservatives.

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

Thank you.

Thank you for the presentations. They were extremely interesting. Coming from an agricultural constituency, I am especially interested in the agricultural situation because the issues are the same across the country and I think that the principles and solutions are fairly similar as well.

My first question, Mr. Murphy, is directed at you. You talked about how in the Bay of Quinte, arsenic was a real issue there, and the implication was that the problem has been remediated. If that is true, how was the arsenic situation dealt with?

[Terry Murphy]

The Ontario Minister of the Environment has been working on that issue for probably 20 years. The problem was created by a private company. The company dissolved, disappeared, and the government thankfully stepped in and had to go through all of the environmental assessment processes over the years, provincially and federally. They are now at the point where all of the arsenic will be contained. The filtration of arsenic into the water courses will be stopped. It will not be removed from the site. They are basically containing all of the arsenic on the site.

The problem we have is that some of the arsenic and other contaminants will always be buried within the sediments of the Bay of Quinte. As long as they aren't disturbed and dredged, they are not a problem. We do, through the conservation authority, have all the proper rules and regulations in place to ensure that there is no dredging along the Bay of Quinte shorelines.

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

Great, thanks.

In terms of your comments about the Fisheries Act, I would like to set your mind at ease. I am also on the fisheries committee and was heavily involved in the rewriting of the new Fisheries Act. A fellow I'm sure you all know, Ron Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, made the point of how absurd the old situation was, where a farmer dug a drainage ditch that automatically became fish habitat even though it wasn't there originally and when that drainage ditch grew in and he wanted to clean the ditch out, like in normal practices, he was subject to enforcement actions under the Fisheries Act, which was clearly ridiculous. Our new act has gotten rid of that. Our strong view is that instead of engaging in ineffective regulatory programing, we are making very direct investments as a government into remediating real issues.

We had people from Hamilton, from the Hamilton harbour area, at one of our meetings. They were asked directly if there was any inadequacy in federal funding—were there any cutbacks and so on?—for the Randle Reef project, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. The gentlemen were quite forthright and said no, we have lots of money from the federal government to do this.

Would you agree, Mr. Murphy, that directing funds to remediating real and pressing environmental issues is a wise use of government resources?

[Terry Murphy]

Yes, I do.

My reference to the Fisheries Act, I agree with you, I totally believe that the act was.... I don't think it was a problem with the act, it was a problem with the way the act was being enforced. I think we could have accomplished the same thing by better educating the staff who were using the act, but either way the Fisheries Act is a good tool to help us protect the watersheds.

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

Again, my comment on that is that it's an even better tool now because we have the ability to set standards we didn't have before, and the enforcement actions that the government can now take will be much more serious.

Ms. Fox, you talked about non-point source pollution. I know this is a very difficult question and it could require a long answer, but what in a nutshell are the principles when it comes to dealing with non-point source pollution? What do we need to do?

I'm referring to on the ground actions. What do you want to see happen?

[Bonnie Fox]

I think I can simplify it to two things. One is knowing the sources for the non-point source pollution in the assessment within the watershed and in doing the modelling so you can see the relative contributions from those different sources. For example, we found in the low water response plan that none of the producers of the nutrients is going to want to do reductions if they don't know what their neighbour is doing. By doing some modelling and assessment and putting some numbers on it, the rural areas will say it's all coming from the municipal point sources. The idea with the watershed-based assessment of the sources, the relative contributions lend themselves to having the discussion at the local level: who's responsible for what, and then what can we do to fix that.

I didn't touch on this in my presentation but by having that kind of an assessment framework within an area, some of our conservation authorities are looking at water quality trading programs. So instead of doing a major investment in municipal infrastructure they can look at getting the reductions and phosphorus through their rural water quality programs.

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

That said, the New York City water supply example, which I think has been a very successful program...I heartily endorse that approach.

In terms of direct projects it's funny. I'd like to point out that our government has something called the recreational fisheries conservation partnerships program. Right by Mississauga the Rattray Marsh was remediated using funds from that program. Again I think the angling community is very numerous in the watershed, and many groups there are partnering with them, accessing the $25-million fund from the recreational fisheries conservation partnerships program, which did not exist a year ago. That's brand new money. In the spirit of directing money at real projects that do real things, that might be worth doing.

Mr. Pearson, I was very interested in your presentation, especially the $300 million that is spent annually on water quality in the Great Lakes. All three of you talked about the importance of the nearshore and habitat and wetlands and so on. What is your view on the concept of habitat banking, which has the potential to unleash significant funds from industry to perhaps do some of the habitat work that you would like to see done?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. Sopuck. We'll have to let Mr. Pearson think about that answer for a possible future round when we get back to him. Your time has expired so we'll come back to that if there's time.

We'll move now to Mr. Choquette.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is a very fast-paced meeting. Mr. Sopuck had some questions and comments I was very interested in. I find that the time has gone very quickly.

I want to mention that March 22—it was practically yesterday—was World Water Day. This international day declared by the UN aims to raise people's awareness of how important fresh water is. The protection of the Great Lakes is very important in our current study.

Before delving deeper into the study on the Great Lakes, I would like to point out that Canada doesn't have a national framework on water or a national water strategy. This is a shortcoming. If we had such a framework—and the NDP is favourable to Canada having one—we could see not only what is happening with the Great Lakes, but also what the situation is in terms of water protection in general.

This was a digression, and I will now come back to our topic of discussion. My first comment—and I am pleased that Mr. Murphy explained it well—is that it's a shame the legislation on fish habitat protection was amended. The legislation itself was not bad, but its application was problematic. It's too bad the Conservatives feel the need to scrap the whole thing, even though there was just one little problem to resolve. Now, unfortunately, all fish are no longer protected. Only certain types of fish are protected, but biodiversity cannot work in isolation. Everything is interrelated.

I am getting to my questions. I was interested in what all three of you had to say, especially when it comes to climate change, which I think is very important to take into consideration in a study of the Great Lakes. All of you talked about how important it was to adapt to climate change. Unless I am mistaken, Ms. Fox, you said that more data on climate change was needed. I think you also said that this data would not come from local authorities, but perhaps more from national authorities. Could you elaborate a bit further on what your needs are and what the federal government could provide you with to help fight climate change and adapt to it? What are your needs in that area?

[Bonnie Fox]

That's a good question.

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement has a climate change annex, and Conservation Ontario has a representative on that annex. That subcommittee is currently working on pulling together the current information. They're planning on having a webinar and providing a report.

When we talk about accessible data, the challenge has been that the scientists do the studies, but then those of us at the local level don't necessarily have access to the data so that we can run the various models. I believe that the steps are in place for us to have better accessibility and we're working collaboratively together on that.

In terms of specific pieces of information, I don't know how relevant that would be, but certainly we want to know about water levels, changes in ice cover, etc.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much.

I will continue in the same vein.

I think you worked on the Green Economy Roadmap for Conservation Authorities in Ontario or a group closely related to you did. This document suggests creating sound partnerships to manage climate change, adapt to it and promote green economy.

Can you tell me more about that? Unless I'm mistaken, your group is involved in the roadmap.

[Bonnie Fox]

I apologize, you refer to a world map. I'm not sure to what project you might be referring.

What was the second half of the question around green economy? I was still thinking about the map.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

I wanted to know something about green economy, and the question is for all three of you.

It's important to invest in green infrastructure. What would you suggest to the federal government in that regard? Earlier, we talked about climate change and its repercussions on the work you do to improve water quality, be it in the Thames River, the Bay of Quinte or the Great Lakes.

What suggestions do you have for the federal government in terms of green infrastructure?

[Bonnie Fox]

Around green infrastructure, our interests are on the watershed level, the watershed basis, where we look at the watershed and have more natural areas, so that when we have these sudden, intense storms, there's more natural infiltration.

The important piece with the highly urbanizing areas is that as the surfaces become more concrete, more impervious, we're having trouble with infiltration of the water when we have these sudden, intense storms. Within the urban context, the green infrastructure, we are looking at urban stormwater low-impact development techniques and different ways of using more green technologies in terms of absorbing that additional water. I think you had someone from the City of Toronto who came and spoke to the committee, and had some examples of that.

A number of our member conservation authorities are experts in this area: the Credit Valley Conservation, Toronto Region Conservation Authority, and Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority. They've established a sustainable technologies evaluation program,. They are testing actual low-impact development techniques and green infrastructure techniques in an urban environment for urban environments. That's on the websites. They developed that program through the Great Lakes sustainability fund, so the support of the federal and provincial governments for these activities has been really important to move the technologies forward.