Environment Committee on March 31st, 2015

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Can anybody actually measure success on these matters? Because it would be nice to get the farmers who probably are.... There is a certain percentage of farmers who are quite willing to take land out of production—certainly marginal land—but then there are others who simply won't. The problem if they simply won't means that you folks in Manitoba get flooded. I'm being simplistic, and I get that. However, if you look at it over the generation of time, we can't keep on doing what we're doing.

Where does the softer voluntary approach end and you then do a mix of some sort of incentives, or carrots and stick? You're telling me that the U.S. and the European Union have that. Is that a recommendation to this committee?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

I have a comment directly in response to that.

Certainly, permanent grassland cover is a very important mechanism to reduce flooding. There are programs, and in fact Ducks Unlimited has a struggling program on carbon investments. Grasslands are extremely effective at storing carbon for almost permanent storage.

I own a farm in Iowa, and there are places on my farm where the black topsoil is almost as deep as I am tall. That's all been accumulated over the last 9,000 years. Tons and tons of carbon is in the soil in native grasslands.

By converting marginal cropland into permanent grassland cover, we achieve the flooding protection but we also squirrel away as much as 30 metric tons of carbon per hectare per year into these soils. Permanent grassland cover is an extremely important change in management for some of those watersheds that are flooded so heavily, and by focusing on a carbon tax, and taxing industry that is producing excess emissions, we can achieve both ends.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you.

Your time is up, Mr. McKay.

Mr. Choquette, you have five minutes.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here today.

I am pleased to see all sorts of people speak about hunting, fishing and conservation. I think conservation is a priority for us. The national conservation plan is being studied. Of course, we talk all the time about the importance of investment and research in helping us make the right decisions when we take action, whether financially or in support of science, for instance.

Mr. Boyce, in terms of conservation and maintaining hunting and trapping activities, are the investments and research in science sufficient? Of course, there is always room for improvement, but what could we improve at the federal level?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

As a research biologist, I'm always going to suggest that there is greater need for research. But I think that, on the more practical side, we often don't know how to make the right management decisions. We don't know what is the most strategic way to achieve, for example, reduced flooding in the Winnipeg area. But by conducting research and exploring alternative land use practices in strategic ways, we can adjust how lands are managed in a way that has the maximum benefit for flood protection, as well as the maximum benefit for wildlife conservation.

There are always new tools being developed so that we can do a better job of land use planning, for example, which is a very important research need right now. It's a matter of trying to figure out how to best unroll industrial development on the landscape. In western Canada for example, we have 761,000 oil and gas wells. It's not just the well pad itself that affects the landscape but all of the infrastructure that goes with it. Roads, power lines, pipelines, fragmented habitats, it's all happening willy-nilly across the landscape without any careful planning and without using best management practices to ensure that we still have wildlife on the landscape as well as industrial development.

There's an enormous opportunity and a need to improve land use planning. If there's one area that I think probably has the greatest research need today, that's where I would focus.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much for your comments on land use planning for habitat conservation.

Another issue you have raised in your research is the impact of climate change on caribou populations and other populations. You have done a lot of research on that.

How does climate change really affect caribou hunting and trapping practices in the north, for instance? Could you elaborate on that?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

We've done a survey of caribou herds, and reindeer herds in the old world as well. Almost all of them are in decline, not only the boreal forest herds, the woodland caribou, but also the migratory herds. There are only a couple of herds in North America that are not declining, and one or two in Siberia. Almost all herds around the world are in decline. There are a number of reasons for that.

In the context of the boreal caribou, we understand how disturbance of habitat creates better habitat for moose and for deer. The result is an increase in wolf populations, and an increased wolf population results in greater depredation of caribou. This is called apparent competition, and has been demonstrated in Siberia as well as straight across Canada. So for woodland caribou, the industrial development associated with timber harvest and oil and gas development is having secondary consequences, not direct, but secondary.

In the north, alteration of climate is affecting the timing of the caribou's arrival on their calving grounds. The vegetation has already matured and gone past its most nutritious stage when the caribou arrive, so the nutritional status of many of the northern migratory herds has been affected as a consequence of climate change. The climate is changing more in the north than anywhere else on the planet.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

That concludes Mr. Choquette's time.

We'll move now to Mr. Carrie for five minutes.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'd just like to correct the record for my colleague from Drummond. He mentioned that we should have a national conservation plan. Well actually, last May, the Prime Minister announced one. It provides a $252-million investment to conserve and restore Canada's natural environment for present and future generations. As part of the plan, the government provided $50 million over five years to restore wetlands. I believe the NDP actually voted against it.

Anyway, I was wondering if the organizations in front of us could provide the committee with some examples of the projects funded through this program within your province or within your organization?

[Jonathan Scarth]

Thank you.

I think it was mentioned earlier that the national conservation plan is supporting the growth and expansion of the alternative land use services program, ALUS program, which is a program that seeks to engage private landowners and local governments in the delivery of conservation for the first time.

Just to be clear about the way in which ALUS is delivered, the counties are the local entities that actually manage the funds and they enter into the agreements with the landowners to conserve these areas, as Rob mentioned, that are less productive soils integrated with wetlands. The goal overall is to engage both the landowners who own the land and the local governments and make conservation a mainstream activity.

That activity is certainly taking place with the support of the national conservation plan, and we are hoping it will expand across the country over time.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Excellent.

Professor Boyce, you mentioned you have expertise in managing large mammals. I've read about a moose hunter app you helped initiate in 2012. Could you please provide the committee with how this app works, and what kind of data you've been able to collect from the app?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

I guess I can't really show you on the screen very well, but it's a little app. When you click on it, a table comes up asking you to input how many bulls, cows, calves, and unidentified animals you saw during a day hunting in the field, and the number of hours you were hunting on that day.

When a moose licence is issued to a hunter, they receive the request from Environment and Sustainable Resource Development asking them to participate in this voluntary program to contribute information on the number of moose they see each day in the field. The idea for this app came from a visit I made to Norway several years ago when I learned about their program, where every day at the end of the day hunters have to report in at a check station and tell how many moose they saw that day. That number of moose seen per day is very highly correlated with the number of moose in the population.

In Alberta we spend $600,000 a year monitoring moose populations. That's only enough to fly 10 wildlife management units. It costs $60,000 to do one because it takes helicopter time, it's extremely expensive, and at that rate we're only covering 10% of the moose wildlife management units in Alberta. So every 10 years we get an index of how many moose there are in the population. This way we could do it by engaging the hunters and do it for almost free.

As the moose hunter enters how many moose they have seen into their app, even if they are out in the bush somewhere and they don't have cellphone coverage, as they are driving home the iPhone or Android-based machine will beam the data up to a cellphone tower and it comes right into my computer.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

That's one of the magical things about these committees. We all learn. Mr. Olson mentioned that there's a moose crisis in his area, and I was thinking maybe the two of you could connect on that and see if there's something you might be able to utilize and implement.

One last question. Mr. Olson, you did mention that your goal is to have wild places here forever. I think that's exactly what you said. You said, hunters as conservationists, you're looking for recruitment. How does your organization engage with new Canadians—women, kids—and try to get them involved in hunting and trapping? You did mention it. Can you elaborate a little bit more because it would be wonderful if all of our communities could engage in that way?

Do I have time for that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Fairly quickly, Mr. Carrie.

Please give a 30-second response, Mr. Olson.

[Rob Olson]

We're starting in the inner-city schools. We're trying to connect with new Canadians there. We're trying to reconnect aboriginal children there with their outdoor heritage. We're also advertising our recruitment programming. We have several levels where they can tap in, based on their experience, throughout Winnipeg, in mainstream media sources. So we're trying to connect to them in a variety of ways.

Also, it's at points of sale in the outdoor retail stores here. Often new Canadians gravitate to fishing first, sometimes, and then when they go into the store we can connect them to hunting as well. We're hitting it on lots of levels, from the youth in schools all the way up to adults in a variety of places in Winnipeg.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you.

We now move to Madam Morin for five minutes.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also thank the witnesses for joining us today. Your testimony was very interesting.

My question, which is quite broad, is for each of you.

Could you tell me whether you have enough information from all the sources and whether informed decisions are being made in terms of wildlife management, with the exception of scientific research, of course?

Perhaps we could start with Mr. Boyce, followed by Mr. Olson and Mr. Scarth.

Go ahead.

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

I believe that we oftentimes do not have sufficient information. We don't necessarily have the research base to make the right management decisions. It goes right across almost all wildlife management. We usually need more information about how to do things well.

An example that comes to mind recently is that I visited an area that has sage grouse in southern Alberta. The Alberta Conservation Association was trying to work with local farmers to redirect the grazing pressure in places where they thought it would take them out of the lowland areas that had lots of sagebrush and perhaps protect those areas from grazing pressure. However, unfortunately they were moving the livestock directly into the nesting habitat of sage grouse, and the heavy livestock use was reducing the nesting success of sage grouse in these upland areas.

Without the habitat monitoring and modelling research, they were making decisions about wildlife management that were unjustified and counterproductive. There's always a continuing need to improve our understanding of the complexity of nature.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Boyce.

We can now move to Mr. Olson or Mr. Scarth.

[Rob Olson]

Okay. I guess I'll go next.

I agree with Dr. Boyce. I think we rarely have enough information, or of enough quality, to make management decisions. We're always dealing with a lack of information, and I suspect that's not going to change.

If you look in Manitoba, we have a moose crisis here as an example, but as Dr. Boyce said, there's not enough funding to do aerial surveys to be able to count the moose. We don't know how many moose we have. We have no idea how many are being shot. We're constantly playing a guessing game. We need to fly Dr. Boyce to Manitoba to bring his app because I think the hope is citizen science; it's the people.

In Manitoba, with health care costs, crime prevention, education, an aging population, all those issues are so expensive and important that moose are never going to rank in the top hundred list for most people here, no matter how hard we work in the city to connect people to the resource. We have to get creative and innovative, but there's never going to be enough money. We're going to have to make decisions, so we're going to have to engage the people in the communities.

The goods news is that they know a lot. We've not engaged them, but we should engage them in this committee. The hunters and trappers on the land, aboriginal people, know a lot. The research apparently says that in Norway those observations from hunters actually correlated with aerial survey data. That's fantastic. We can save that money, then, from flying in helicopters and counting moose.

As conservationists and environmentalists, we're going to have to be creative and innovative because there is not going to be the money that we need. There never has been and there's never going to be. That's the key, to engage people in the communities. There's lots of knowledge there that we've not tapped into yet.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you very much.

Do I still have time, Mr. Chair?

Do I have 30 seconds? Okay, thank you.

[Jonathan Scarth]

I'm going to answer the first part of your question that related to whether we are bringing all of the elements together. I would urge all of the committee, as policy-makers, to consider the other elements that go into recruiting and retaining hunting and angling and trapping on the landscape.

There are many unintended consequences of policies, whether they be the whole gun registration file, the animal cruelty file, that make it more difficult to hunt and fish and trap on the landscape. As you consider environmental investments, I would urge that you consider the negative effect that those could have on this community.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Morin.

Mr. Sopuck.

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

Thank you.

Earlier last year the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—they said they were under pressure from animal groups—wanted to do away with the iconic muskrat hat. The hunting and angling caucus, which I chair for the Conservative caucus, jumped on that immediately. This was admittedly a small issue, but it was highly symbolic and after our government reversed that decision by the RCMP, the emails that flooded into my office from every rural, aboriginal community thanking us for reversing that were truly remarkable.

Mr. Olson, can you perhaps provide us with an explanation as to why this very small issue was so visceral for some communities?