Environment Committee on March 25th, 2014

[Terry Murphy]

Yes, with respect to the incentive idea and the paying for phosphorus, there's been a lot of talk about agriculture. In my area, the agricultural community has been totally cooperative. They've spent millions of dollars on their own to create buffers.

We discussed earlier one of the problems we have. We had one case in our watershed involving a stream that was close to a kilometre long. We're trying to convince the farmer to create a buffer zone that's 15 to 30 metres wide. He's taking several hectares out of production, and that land is worth a lot of money. There is no incentive to encourage this person to protect that land.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Ms. Fox and Mr. Pearson, what's the general consensus in the region on polluter pay?

[Don Pearson]

When it comes to agriculture, the tradition has been to try to educate, to incent, to work with landowners. The reluctance to regulate or to really quantify this polluter pay idea is that you would have to know precisely who is contributing what. The nature of phosphorus from agriculture is that it's insidious; it's a small amount from the entire landscape. It is extremely difficult to establish, for purposes of determining who is financially responsible, who has actually contributed that phosphorus.

Now, we do have techniques for tagging the phosphorus and following its migration through the system, but that approach has generally not been favoured. There's certainly a legitimate argument that excess phosphorus moving out of the farm system should be the responsibility of the producer. That is an approach that would be up to governments to determine.

There would obviously be significant pushback from the farm community. It seems, then, that if that's an added cost to production, which many industries have been forced.... The trick is that in agriculture, as price takers they're competing in an international market in which other jurisdictions are in effect financially supporting theirs.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

It's the very argument we have for all pollution.

[Don Pearson]

It's a legitimate question.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

It's a lame argument everywhere.

Ms. Fox?

[Bonnie Fox]

The only thing that comes to my mind in terms of polluter pay is in the context of point sources.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

So you haven't heard of that—

[Bonnie Fox]

I haven't personally been involved in any conversations concerning polluter pay for non-point source or for agriculture, at any policy table, so I don't have anything to contribute.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

So we have a problem and haven't been able to solve it in your area. We have Lake Erie now up to levels of phosphorus that are turning it into a dead lake. There's a huge fisheries loss involved, I'm sure, with a huge cost to the economy in some ways, and yet the volunteer incentive method is not producing the results you need.

Is that correct?

[Don Pearson]

To date, you're absolutely correct.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

If it doesn't work, then you have to try something else. Is that not the case?

[Don Pearson]

It certainly would be my view that once targets are established from a scientific standpoint to say that for this landscape we need to reduce contributions by x thousand tonnes per year, then there is the possibility of being able to move toward regulating that amount and requiring producers to meet the target.

The trick always becomes how far the regulation goes. Again, every producer has a different circumstance, a different landscape. So I think the idea of marrying a regulated target to a financial incentive has some merit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Bevington.

We move now to Mr. Sopuck for five minutes.

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

Thank you.

I think the last discussion certainly illustrates the difference between our Conservative point of view and the way the NDP operates. Polluter pay is the first option on the other side, whereas we believe in working with producers by the provision of incentives.

Mr. Murphy, I was very intrigued by your example of the kilometre-long stream and the farmer being willing to provide a buffer zone at his own cost. I think that is a measure of the attitude of the farm community. Working with them is far better than working against them.

I'm going to give Mr. Pearson an opportunity to answer the question I asked earlier regarding habitat banking. Is that a kind of program that you could see working in the Great Lakes watershed?

[Don Pearson]

I think there would be opportunities to do a program such as that. Obviously, the downside of such a program is that it can be perceived as your simply licensing somebody to destroy something, with a payment that will then contribute to recreating it elsewhere. The notion that you can actually recreate what is lost has some difficulty; in many cases a high-quality habitat cannot be recreated.

There is merit, however, to the idea that we could do a better job by doing a restoration or remediation project on a larger scale—by pooling, if you will, resources that come from the consequence. I would be cautious about saying that this is a solution, but I think there are cases in which it could be applicable.

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

That's okay, except that all of you discussed urban growth and urban sprawl in the area, so there's going to be landscape change going on no matter what. In Alberta right now, in some of the fast-growing cities...Alberta has a major wetland mitigation program whereby real estate developers are required to create a fund that is now going into farmers' pockets to recreate wetlands.

I agree with you that Carolinian forests are extremely difficult to recreate. Wetlands are easy to bring back; they really are. Of course, I'm familiar with the prairie wetlands situation. Don't you think there's more hope for the idea of habitat banking, given that this urban development is going to happen regardless?

[Don Pearson]

Well, certainly, if one looked at the inevitability of urban development and decided that in addition to the other things that urban growth is required to pay it should also contribute to further environmental enhancements.... I think Bonnie indicated that we're approaching that through more of a low-impact development kind of scenario, whereby the developer would look at maintaining the hydrological characteristics of the land, after development occurs, and maintaining habitat characteristics and other such things within the area they're involved with.

I think our experience with having the developers, in effect, be taxed—and effectively that's what would happen, because the money would then be pooled and then moved to do remediation in another area.... Obviously, this would provoke a political discussion, and I would anticipate significant pushback on it.

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

This is the kind of tax that even a Conservative would like.

Mr. Pearson, in terms of Lake Erie, I'd like to zero in on the fisheries for a minute. When Lake Erie was dead those 20 or 30 years ago, were all the fisheries essentially gone?

[Don Pearson]

No, they weren't.

Lake Erie is really considered to be physically three different lakes. The western basin is quite shallow, the central basin, deeper, and then the eastern basin, quite deep. They all behave differently in terms of the circulation patterns and so on.

The western basin is extremely vulnerable to the impact of phosphorus. Algae blooms, in addition to being toxic, eliminate oxygen within the water column and the fish move elsewhere.

It is the most productive lake. From the standpoint of commercial fisheries, more pounds of fish are harvested out of Lake Erie than out of all the other lakes put together, but the reality is, for parts of the year, there are very unfavourable conditions for fish survival, let alone fish production, in western Lake Erie.

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

The parallels with Lake Winnipeg are almost exact, because it's in a similar stressed state, but for the walleye fishery they're seeing fishing there now like they've never ever seen.

In terms of Lake Erie, has there ever been fish winterkill?

[Don Pearson]

That's outside of my area of specific knowledge, so I can't tell you that.

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

Okay.

That's it. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. Sopuck.

We move now to Mr. Toet, please, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I basically have one question and then I'll pass it on to Mr. Woodworth.