Environment Committee on May 12th, 2015

[Darren Goetze]

I'd have to look to see if Dr. O'Connor is involved. Again, I'm not personally aware.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Okay.

Can you tell me how Fort Chipewyan and Fort McKay are involved? Are there representatives from those communities involved? Or how are you working specifically with those two downstream communities?

[Darren Goetze]

We have, I guess, a multi-faceted relationship with both of those communities. We have an air monitoring station located in Fort McKay. We have water monitoring operations that launch from Fort McKay. We ask the band regularly if we can use, for example, their boat launch. That's a small operational thing, but folks go through the community quite often. They have allowed us to use their facilities. We also include them in the engagement activities that we're undertaking. We have regular dialogues with their representatives.

I answered Mr. Choquette's question badly, for which I apologize, but we do actually have an enhanced effort to engage first nations and Métis communities across the oil sands effort. It was one of the things that came out of the audit, and we expanded our efforts as a result of that recommendation.

In fact, we went to communities to talk to them directly, communities as diverse as Grande Prairie and Peace River. We tried to hear from communities more directly. We've also altered the governance of the program so that representatives of first nations and Métis communities have a direct input to the co-chairs and can influence the decisions that are being made under the joint oil sands monitoring program.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thanks for that.

Continuing along that line of questioning, I'm thinking about fish health. You talked about air monitoring and using the boat launch and those kinds of examples. How are you using traditional knowledge and understanding of the health of fish in the Athabasca River?

[Darren Goetze]

We are engaging first nations—and I want to say this in the right way—to understand their traditional knowledge about changes they've observed on the landscape, in a number of different ways. It's not only Environment Canada, but it's also Alberta and organizations like the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association that are engaging with first nations to understand how it is that they see changes on the landscape or in the waterways.

We're trying to translate the concerns that they observe into scientific monitoring objectives so that we can go back to them and say, “You told us you saw these changes that you were concerned about. As a result, we initiated this particular monitoring and here's the result of that monitoring.”

You asked about Fort Chipewyan. One of the ways we feed back is through a process called the Peace-Athabasca Delta Environmental Monitoring Program, or PADEMP. They have an annual meeting where they bring the first nations from that region together, to Fort Chipewyan. We have extensively participated in that process to present our results from various types of monitoring and to hear their further concerns about what they're seeing in their local environment.

It's very much a dialogue.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thinking about the changes that people are seeing brings me to a question about the baseline. I know when this project was first announced there were concerns about what the heck are we using for a baseline?

How have baselines been developed?

[Darren Goetze]

Baselines are developed in a number of ways.

We do actually have monitoring data from the region that goes back a number of decades in some cases, particularly from Wood Buffalo National Park. It is a national park in a federal jurisdiction, so we do have some information from decades past that we've published on the oil sands portal.

We also have a range of data from other sources and monitoring programs that were done in years past. What we've tried to do is to collect this data and try to analyze it for equivalency so that we can establish what the baselines looked like, at least in the early days of the development of the oil sands resource.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

In addition to criticism about where the baselines are coming from, when this project was first announced there was quite a bit of criticism about RAMP, the regional aquatics monitoring program, including that it was funded by industry.

How have you addressed those concerns?

[Darren Goetze]

What we have now, as opposed to what the RAMP program was criticized for, is a comprehensive water quality monitoring program that looks at both the tributaries to the Athabasca River and the main stem of the Athabasca River. It extends from south of Fort McMurray, where there's no development activity, to way beyond what we call the “extended geographical area”, meaning way beyond the Peace-Athabasca Delta. We also look at the Peace River. We are looking more frequently for more substances at more monitoring sites than the RAMP ever did.

[The Chair, Conservative, Harold Albrecht]

All right.

I want to thank you, Ms. Leslie.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. Thank you for your time and your input.

Thank you to our committee members.

With that, we're going to suspend the meeting for two minutes.

[Proceedings continue in camera]