Evidence of meeting #19 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was wetlands.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
I was a little concerned when you mentioned that 72% of southern Ontario's large inland wetlands have been lost or converted to other land uses over the last 200 years and that the loss continues.
You also mentioned the ability to reclaim. Do you have any rates at which reclamation is occurring? How is it going now?
Director, Regional Operations, Eastern Region, Ducks Unlimited Canada
Our assessment is that we're continuing to lose the battle and that the wetlands are disappearing off the landscape faster than we can put them back on the landscape.
We're restoring several thousands of acres of wetlands every year in Ducks Unlimited activities. There are a number of other people who work on the landscape doing conservation work. Conservation authorities are doing some reclamation activities, but again, probably on a smaller scale overall than Ducks Unlimited. Some of our other conservation partners are doing a little bit, but I think you could probably say that if there were 3,500 acres of restoration happening across southern Ontario, that would be pretty close.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
Earlier we heard from different witnesses who talked about different government policies that we might be able to implement. There are some at the municipal level, the provincial level, and the federal level. I was wondering if you have some ideas about things that can be done.
Director, Government Affairs, Ducks Unlimited Canada
Can you clarify for me just exactly what you mean? Are you speaking of specific policies?
Director, Government Affairs, Ducks Unlimited Canada
Well, certainly Ducks Unlimited has been active in suggesting to all levels of government that fairly broad sweeping wetland protection measures be put in place across the country. There are some policies that are in effect, and there are particularly effective policies in Atlantic Canada, where certainly the bulk of the wetlands are protected and there are mitigation sequences in place that strive to find solutions to replicating or restoring wetlands that have been unavoidably lost.
Certainly, Ontario does not have a similar type of policy in place. There are measures in place through the provincial Planning Act, which is where the wetland policy for Ontario resides, but certainly we would like to see the types of policies that exist in the Maritimes replicated across Canada.
Director, Regional Operations, Eastern Region, Ducks Unlimited Canada
Could I add a little thing to that?
Director, Regional Operations, Eastern Region, Ducks Unlimited Canada
I think the key element is creating some certainty around it. We talked about wetland protection policies, and the key element, as Jim mentioned, is the mitigation sequence, where you're trying to avoid, minimize, and then compensate for any loss. I think if we can embed those kinds of elements into any policy, it enables government to meet their mandates, but it also provides certainty to development.
So it's a benefit for development and industry, because they now have some certainty as they move forward. What we hear when we work with industry is that what kills them most is the uncertainty around environmental regulation.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Harold Albrecht
Mr. Carrie, you have 10 seconds left. We'll maybe add that on to someone else's time later on.
Mr. Bevington, you have seven minutes, please.
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses. I think you've painted a pretty difficult picture of the conditions in the Great Lakes and certain areas that are quite under stress.
Mr. Ciborowski, I'm interested in the chemicals in the water system. You talked about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, environmental estrogens. What are the main causes of those things coming into the—
Professor, University of Windsor, As an Individual
I didn't refer to them specifically. The environmental estrogens can be byproducts of things like PCBs, but they also come in through personal care products. They've been documented to have influences at the site where sewage treatment plants may release their materials, but there's so much dilution by the water itself that those effects have not been seen at larger scales.
Things like polyaromatic hydrocarbons and other hydrophobic chemicals that don't mix with the water and tend to stay in the sediments are legacy industrial byproducts that have been around for many years. They're still there in the sediments, and when the sediments are dredged to clean them, or perhaps washed away by water levels and so on, that's when they can become reintroduced into the water system and can have their effects there.
Professor, University of Windsor, As an Individual
I'm not that familiar with it.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
So it hasn't been tested for in the water system in the Great Lakes?
Professor, University of Windsor, As an Individual
I'm not familiar with that.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Okay. Well, that's interesting, but I'll leave that.
Mr. Sweetnam, we've had a great debate here over the days about the relationship between water quality and water quantity. It's something that I want to clarify, and I think perhaps you, speaking about Georgian Bay, can really lay this out—why water quality and water quantity are synonymous subjects.
Executive Director, Georgian Bay Forever
I think it also does depend on geographic location. The eastern coastline of Georgian Bay is an archipelago, with lots of coastal embayments. Some of the embayments are more connected to the bay and others are less connected to the bay. When water levels drop, you can have significant percentages of that connection. The pipe between the water that could dilute any of the coastal nutrients that come into it is reduced markedly.
For example, in Sturgeon Bay, with water levels being much lower, in the slide deck you can see that the internal loading of phosphorous in that bay doesn't have the ability to be diluted enough to kind of wash through the system. At that point, the concentrations increase and the right conditions consist for a blue-green algae blooms, which then degrade the use of the water.
There are two other bays that are listed here, north bay and south bay, that are very close to one another but quite different in their actual bathymetry, the structure of the basins. What we found was that the conditions that exist in Sturgeon Bay for blue-green algae blooms actually exist in those bays. Historically, given our ability to go back in time and look at different types of plant communities and predict the impacts of higher or lower water levels that existed there, we've actually seen blue-green algae blooms in those bays, again related to water level impacts. We can't pinpoint exactly how many years of duration they've had, but we've seen blue-green algae blooms there too.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
There's another question I've asked some of the witnesses here. The elephant in the room is the agricultural industry. Do you think in the future it will be necessary to regulate what people are doing on farmlands in order to control this nutrient release into the Great Lakes if we really want to make a difference with it?
That's for anyone.
Professor, University of Windsor, As an Individual
I'll be happy to respond to that.
That's receiving an incredible amount of attention, especially in Ohio where the Maumee's been charged with a lot of the hazardous algal blooms. There's intense interest by the farm community to undertake voluntary best management practices to avoid being regulated. The key issues seem to be the timing and the intensity of nutrient discharge. Certainly, there are best management practices that can be implemented to try to reduce the runoff of those nutrients from the farmland. It deals with the types of fertilizers that are used, the way they're applied, whether they're on the surface or whether they're injected into the materials. I think that's an area of active exploration, and it's certainly something that will have to be dealt with by the farm community, either voluntarily or through regulation.
Vice Chair, Restore Our Water International, Sierra Club of Canada
Yes, I would add to that. There are better farming practices that need to be encouraged by working with the farming community. I was at a binational meeting where the operator of a very large farm on the south side of Lake Erie described how he was leaving what was left of his crop after he took the corn off the field. He then mulched all that material and left it on the field, and over a period of years developed a mulch that retained water and the nutrients in the soil, and prevented runoff.
The other thing that's happening is rules to prevent discharge of manure or raw sewage onto farmlands during the winter when the ground is frozen, because that simply allows those nutrients to run right off into adjacent waterways. Regulation and preventing that from being allowed is absolutely necessary.
Executive Director, Georgian Bay Forever
I think one other thing to keep an eye on also is open-cage aquaculture and the amount of phosphorus that can be released as those operations become more popular or intensified versus closed systems where the effluent of those operations would have to be treated like other industrial operations. That's something to keep an eye on.
The 46-tonne figure that was used for the amount of phosphorus getting dumped in is the current estimate that one of the groups up at Georgian Bay is looking at for the load of the existing aquaculture operations too, so it's pretty significant.
Conservative