Environment Committee on March 31st, 2015

[Rob Olson]

I think it's visceral because we as hunters and trappers are so passionate. Very much like Saskatchewan farmers who are passionate about their land, we are passionate about our culture, so we can be your greatest friends, and if you attack us, we can be your greatest enemy. We'd prefer to be your friend. Our capacity to love is greater than to fight. We want to do good.

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I felt we were under attack a lot more than we are today and little things were big things because we were sensitive about them. It defines who we are. It's who our families are. It's what we do. Whether we're aboriginal or non-aboriginal, it defines our lives, so when you do something that seems to be small to some, you're hitting us in the heart. You're going to get a visceral reaction from us and maybe sometimes an overreaction.

I think we're in a better place now. I don't feel that anymore. Maybe 15 years ago, I was nervous to tell people at a dinner party I was a hunter and trapper. I don't feel that today. People are lining up at my door to get meat now. It's different. I don't know why it's different. I don't know what's changing. I just love it. It's un-Canadian not to respect cultures. We respect each other. We respect our personal choices. That's the other thing. I think when you start trying to take away someone's choice to live their lifestyle, you're going to get an aggressive reaction from them because it's un-Canadian. We don't like that.

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

I couldn't agree more. As legislators, we tend to hear what's going on in society. People talk to us and our data is telling us that talking about this...and our government is a very strong advocate for hunting, angling, and trapping. We're not afraid to talk about it, so I agree very much with you that things have changed.

Mr. Scarth, I was interested in your comments on the role of regulations versus incentives on privately owned land. We have the Species at Risk Act in place. Can you talk about how it's working on the privately owned agricultural landscape?

[Jonathan Scarth]

I can't think of a more negative signal to a private landowner than the one that makes the presence of endangered species a liability for them on their land as opposed to a source of potential incentive or revenues. I often tell people if they want to be up to their knees in burrowing owls, then they should pay landowners per burrowing owl that fledges from their landscape, and that's the appropriate signal. That's the way the policy should be designed when you're dealing with private property rights.

It's a totally different picture on crown land, obviously, but when you're dealing with the privately owned landscape, to make endangered species that we want more of a liability is, in my view, a perverse and negative reaction.

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

Dr. Boyce, could you respond to the question about SARA as well?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

It's a very complicated issue. The one I know best is for sage grouse in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. Sage grouse went from about 2,000 birds in Alberta, 5,000 total Canadian population in 1968, to now when we have 15 males in Alberta and fewer than that on one lake in Saskatchewan in Grasslands National Park. That decline was attributable very clearly to oil and gas development in the region and development of oil wells directly in critical habitat for the greater sage grouse on private lands as well as on crown lands in both Alberta and Saskatchewan.

There was strong pushback from the emergency protective order that went out in January 2014 to protect the greater sage grouse, the very few that we have left, and to make sure that critical habitats were being protected. The pushback from private landowners had nothing to do with their agricultural operations but rather the fact that they were receiving payments from the oil sector for having wells on their property and on crown land that they had leased. It's certainly a very complicated issue. In fact that's the first time an emergency protective order has been put in place that has had those kinds of ramifications for private landowners.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

We'll move back to Ms. Leslie for five minutes, please.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dr. Boyce, I have a lot of questions for you, so maybe I'll just open it up to you. We are here, as Mr. Sopuck said, as federal legislators. You brought up the issue of land use planning and you were just talking about the Species at Risk Act. A lot of the solutions aren't federal, unfortunately. SARA absolutely is, a lot of the land use planning, provincial or municipal....

As federal legislators, where do we go? What do we do? Is it just the Species at Risk Act? Is that our only avenue here? How do we work with provinces to deal with land use planning and ensure the habitat isn't gobbled up by whichever kind of development? How do we deal with this at a federal level?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

It is certainly the case that finding a way to work between the federal government and the provincial government on issues of land use planning needs to be a priority. In fact, it is an international priority because we have exactly the same land use change issues happening in the western United States.

My suggestion would be that we implement an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada jointly with the NRC, the National Research Council in the United States, to develop a strategy for land use planning in western North America. It is a very complicated problem. In fact, I went to Wikipedia to figure out what you would call it, and it's called a “wicked problem” because no matter what you do, there are going to be consequences for economics, agriculture, forestry, and so on. We have so many different interests on the land base that to balance those in a strategic way, to know how we should be coordinating industrial development in particular, is a very complicated problem.

It is not one for which I am prepared to offer a clear path forward because almost every one of these species is being affected in a big way. For example, the management response to caribou is very different from what it would be for grizzly bears on the same land base, as it would be for sage grouse in southeastern Alberta. Finding a strategic way forward to wisely engage land use planning is one of the most complicated problems that we have in ecology today.

Again, my suggestion would be support for the Royal Society of Canada to engage in an expert panel to deal with this very difficult issue of land use planning.

In my testimony, I mentioned suggestions on how we can increase support for wildlife and trapping through the Pittman-Robertson fund, for example, as well as Dingell-Johnson on the fishery side. Those would go a long way toward engaging support at the provincial level.

In the United States, those funds are an excise tax on ammunition, firearms, and fishing tackle, which is then distributed by the Department of Interior to each of the states on a matching basis. The state has to come up with funds to match the federal funding. It ensures a continuing flow of money for doing aerial surveys, for supporting research projects, and for education programs in the United States. Something like that would be a tremendous advance in Canada to provide continuing funding.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you. That's incredibly important.

What are your thoughts on SARA? Do you have any last-minute thoughts about species at risk and any improvements there?

[Prof. Mark Boyce]

I think the conservation community is very nervous about SARA because, of course, in 1930 the management of natural resources was allocated to the provinces, and this emergency protective order has us shaking in our boots about a potential challenge to the constitutionality of the Species at Risk Act.

We think the Species at Risk Act is an extremely important one, and we hope that Parliament will continue to maintain support for SARA under the legal challenges that it is undergoing right now. The City of Medicine Hat, which is a major owner in LGX petroleum that is developing in critical sage grouse habitat, is suing the federal government over SARA.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

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

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to start with the SARA and Mr. Sopuck's and Ms. Leslie's comments and questions on that. There's one thing that always strikes me. I remember a few years back on this committee when we were doing a study, and we had some members from the cattlemen's association—I believe it was the Alberta cattlemen's association who were here. A comment they made really struck me, and it has stuck with me. They said, “if a species at risk is found on a rancher's land it must be assumed that the land manager is doing things right”. I found that to be a very interesting comment. Quite often an endangered species is found on their land, and they're loath to report it because all of a sudden somebody comes in and says they have to change everything they're doing, yet this species is thriving on that property.

That brings me to another point. I was sharing with some of my colleagues a couple of pictures that I took out my back window yesterday morning before I flew in to Ottawa. A couple of deer were feeding at the bird feeder in my backyard. That was within the perimeter, Rob, so there is a lot of wildlife. I have foxes, skunks, coyotes, and deer in abundance, right inside the city of Winnipeg, on my property.

Getting back to the wetlands conservation aspect, on my property I have a wetlands area. I have a five-acre property and I have left about 2.5 acres of that as a natural wetland area. I actually face a lot of pressure from some of my neighbours and especially from the construction industry, which is always looking for spots to get rid of their fill. They always come to me and say, “You have a wetland back there. We should fill that in. That's a problem”.

How do we overcome that kind of attitude within the urban environment and even from these people, who see this wetland right away as a problem rather than as a great solution to a lot of issues?

Mr. Olson.

[Rob Olson]

It's a matter of education. Part of the national conservation plan has to be educating Canadians. Someone asked what a federal group, like you, can do to help the environment and deal with things like wetlands.

You're going to pay, guys. You're paying. What was your tab for the Manitoba flood in 2011? Was it hundreds of millions? You're paying. At the end of the day, the buck is going to stop with you to pay for, what, 90% of disasters? Are you going to be reactive and pay at the end of the game when the damage is done or are you going to be proactive? You can fund this proactively.

The energy sector makes it a bit complex in Alberta with the sage grouse. That's a tougher one in a way, but the same principle is going to apply. If you want to stop flooding, there are ways to do that proactively that, I would argue, could be cheaper than paying to fix the damage at the end would be.

Time will tell. We need to test it and measure it to see if that's possible. We believe it is, but it has not been tried aggressively. If you want to change any of this, you have to connect to the people. If you're going to go and threaten that landowner and tell him he can't have cows out there....

My first job was looking for burrowing owls in Saskatchewan. No one would talk to me until I told them I was a farm kid and I wasn't from the federal government and I was just there to work with them. They love the owls, but they're terrified of losing control of their land. It is all going to take funding.

You folks collect taxes, and at the end of the day, you have to pay for damages from floods. Do you want to recover an endangered species? Do you know how expensive doing that is? It's nearly impossible to do. Proactive is what we have to be. You guys are going to be paying the tab at the end of the day. Why don't you pay it at the beginning of the day? It's going to be a smaller tab and there's a way to do it.

I love the panel idea from Dr. Boyce. We need you to invest. If you want this, you can have it. You have to make an investment, and it should be smart. Panels are a great way to channel investment to smart outcomes, but we know more about how to do this all now. If you're going to pay at the end of the day, you might as well pay at the beginning and pay less.

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

Mr. Scarth, with regard to that, in your introduction you talked a little bit about alternative land use services and national conservation plan cost-shared efforts, which also involved money from the hunting community. I'm very intrigued about the ALUS concept. You've had some experience with that, I believe, in Manitoba. Can you talk about some of your successes with ALUS and how they have worked out and the cooperation required to make that work?

[Jonathan Scarth]

Yes, thank you very much.

Our vision for ALUS is as a private-public partnership to do conservation. I draw the analogy with infrastructure, where the federal government has a long history of working with the provinces, with municipalities, and more recently with the private business community to deliver roads, bridges, and needed infrastructure. I don't look at this issue as anything different from that.

We have to make conservation mainstream. We can't have it as something that is marginalized or sort of an afterthought. Dr. Boyce mentioned earlier in his testimony the concept of offsets, that if you build and affect habitat in one area, you should be investing back more than that to replace that habitat, or manage it in a way to replace that ecological footprint. I think with those concepts we can develop a national program that involves federal, provincial, municipal, and private investment for this purpose.

The other element of ALUS, which is critically important, is that it engages the local governments. We do have a project in Manitoba, we have two in Saskatchewan, and we have three and growing in Alberta. In Prince Edward Island, it is a province-wide program that enrolls more than 85% of the island's agricultural producers. It is done in a way that encourages what I call super-buffers around potato fields to prevent runoff into tributaries, which are often salmon and trout streams. It is off-the-charts popular with landowners, as compared to the other approaches we've talked about today, in which as you have heard, we are in battles out there.

We are now in a fight with the City of Medicine Hat. Is that a smart result? I mean, patently, the answer to that is no. Do you really want to be sued by the City of Medicine Hat, which lives closest to the sage grouse? In my view, that is a policy disaster.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you, Mr. Scarth. Mr. Toet is true to form, there again. But that's a great response.

Go ahead, Mr. Carrie.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I wanted to get back to Mr. Olson. He's been giving me some great quotes. One was that it's un-Canadian not to respect different cultures. Here in Canada, hunting and trapping are so important to who we are, and are part of our culture.

You also said that when you hit somebody with a stick, now it's contentious. I think one of the reasons, you know, years ago, that maybe you were feeling a little self-conscious about being a hunter.... I know the government learned its lesson with the wasteful and ineffective long-gun registry and how that affected law abiding hunters and farmers.

I was wondering if you could, please, elaborate a little bit more and describe the cultural significance of licensed hunting and trapping in Canada. You mentioned the importance with aboriginal and first nations people, and you know, it's just a way of life. Could you elaborate just a little bit more about that for us?

[Rob Olson]

One of the great things about Canada, I think, is all the different cultures we have. There's no cultural group or cluster of humans in this country that doesn't think of themselves as something: Newfoundlanders, sealers; lobster fisherman from Nova Scotia; and British Columbia first nations, hunters of moose. For any group you look at, if its a cultural thing, then it's in your heart, it's in your soul, and it defines your family. It's the fabric of your life and your community and therefore it's passionate. It's extremely passionate.

The power and, I think, one of the great strengths of our country is all the cultures we have and that we're culturally diverse. All of them are important to each other, you know, to themselves and to their own community.

In Manitoba, I don't have a right to hunt moose; I have a privilege. I don't have constitutional protection of my hunting culture here. My Métis hunting friends do. My first nations friends have constitutional protection for their hunting. When we talk about it, though, what we share is a bond. As hunters we have this cultural deep connection to it. So when we talk about our grandads, dads, mums, or sisters who do it together—and we do that. We live in the bush together for a week. We go and do that—that's where we reconnect. It's where we heal as family sometimes. It's all that stuff. It's deep and it's important. It's in your gut. It makes you emotional. It makes grown men cry, kind of thing. We wear it on our sleeves.

It's incredibly important. To me it's not about the money. Yes, it's economically important. Outfitting's important. We raise lots of money in hunting. If it were a business, it would be a big deal in the economy. But it's not about that. It's not about the economy. It's not about money. It's about culture. It's about how it defines us as people. It's about what it means to us.

At the end of the day, that's all you really have as a person so it's really deeply important. You see that in every community you go into. You feel it. They tell stories about their lives and their community. It's just awesome. It's rich and it's deep and it's valuable.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

That's excellent. Thank you very much.

You mentioned some of the things that the federal government can do. It is extremely important that we work together with our partners. We recently had a federal-provincial-territorial meeting on biodiversity, and the thing is that we all realize that animals don't know borders and that we need to work overall for the well-being of our biodiversity.

I was wondering if you could elaborate a little more on what else the federal government could do to improve habitat conservation efforts in Canada.

[Rob Olson]

I think that having a panel like the one Dr. Boyce was talking about is important. Get great people to help direct that plan. That's important. Getting the input of locals, hunters, and farmers is really important. You need great research people like Dr. Boyce, but you need great local people as well. Also, at the end of the day, it needs investment. It needs a plan and it needs investment. It has to have both.

I want to re-emphasize the investment side. Again, when there are flood disasters, you guys are paying. You're going to pay that bill, so invest your money proactively. Let's get into flood prevention. Let's get into doing it through the local communities, and let's be smart. I think that's the way.

Let's invest in engaging Canadians in the outdoors. That's the other thing I would say. That doesn't mean just hunting. It means getting them outdoors, and there are a lot of ways to do that. For little groups like ours, with a lot of volunteers, we just need a little bit of gas in the tank. Habitat is expensive. Flood remediation is expensive.

It's about supporting guys like us and gals like those back in the office where I work to connect new Canadians and youth to the outdoors and to the environment and making them environmentalists. That's cheap. That's really cheap, and you get leverage from that. We always invest in habitat. We don't invest much in engaging Canadians in it. The latter is at least as important as the former, and I would say more so.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

Thank you very much.

We'll move to Mr. McKay for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank each one of you for your contribution.

I agree entirely with your observation, Professor Olson. You pay now or you or you pay later.

It doesn't seem to have sunk into the consciousness of Canadians, and maybe not even into the consciousness of the government, that if you look at the Calgary flood, at the regular Manitoba floods, or at the Don Valley flood, these are massive government payouts, but they're also massive insurance payouts as well. The massive insurance payouts are almost inevitably passed on to your own premiums. Everyone around this table who has an insurance policy is paying for this. In the current political climate, it's very difficult to land that point.

Here's what my curiosity is about. As you've all rightly described, this is tricky public policy. You do one thing and then it has an offset on that, and then on another thing. I do like the idea of Professor Boyce's panel, but it is an incredibly complicated way to go about having what is in effect a green infrastructure plan. In other words, no infrastructure should be built unless the green implications are sorted out.

The three of you, I presume, have done some thinking about this. Let me start with Professor Olson. If you were to have the ability or the pen, if you will, to design a green infrastructure plan for what you've talked about today, what would it look like? Are there other countries that you think do it right or that at least do it better than we do?

[Rob Olson]

I'll keep my comments very short, because I think Mr. Scarth and Dr. Boyce should take that more than I should. I'm just going to speak to the local side. There are mechanisms out there.

There's this program called ALUS. The magic of it is that it engages the local people at the local level. That's the key. Most approaches in the past have been more from the top down, coming from the federal government as a regulation or from a big NGO buying land. Neither approach engaged people. It didn't engage the farmers.

You can. They have amazing local capacity. They can raise their own money locally for some of these things. They have amazing capabilities at the county level. They're smart people, way smarter than we often think. We think about scientists and think that this needs to be driven by Ph.D.s. It doesn't always, no. The local people have an amazing capacity to do this.

As a federal government, the way it has to go is that it has to be decentralized a bit. Now, there are governance issues there, but there's a business model being.... There are models out there that we could look at, but you have to somehow get the money to the local level and have them engage in delivering at the local level. Have them buying in, putting in their own time and energy, and putting their own money in there too.

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

Dr. Boyce and Mr. Scarth.