Environment Committee on Oct. 18th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I am sure that we could spend many more hours with you. There's a lot more you could share with us that would be important.

As you're driving back, if anything comes to mind that you wish you had said, please feel free to send it in. We are in the final stages, but we still have another week to go before we start thinking about drafting instructions. We are very thankful for your time today in helping us refine those recommendations. Thank you.

We're going to suspend the meeting for just a few minutes and then go to our next group of witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

We'll start the second panel.

I would like to welcome the Canada Parks Agency, with Kevin McNamee, director of the protected areas establishment branch, and Robin Lessard, field unit superintendent for Northern Ontario. I appreciate both of you being here today.

We also have with us Trout Unlimited Canada, with Silvia D'Amelio, the chief executive officer.

Thank you very much for being here.

Go ahead, Robin.

[Robin Lessard, Field Unit Superintendent, Northern Ontario, Parks Canada Agency]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, and members of the committee.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee today.

Parks Canada is recognized as a world leader in conservation. My remarks will provide you with details on Parks Canada's work to protect and present our protected places in northern Ontario where we manage a number of land- and water-based natural and cultural sites along the north shore of Lake Superior. They are situated in this rugged part of Canada along the Trans-Canada Highway.

My presentation will speak to my management experiences in support of ecological integrity including monitoring, restoration and providing meaningful experiences to our visitors. You will see through my examples that relationships with local communities, other government departments and indigenous communities are at the heart of how we operate and how we collectively enrich the experience of our visitors.

Established in 1978, Pukaskwa National Park is located on the north shore of Lake Superior, protecting 1,878 square kilometres of ecosystems, including boreal forest and rugged Canadian Shield.

An ecological integrity monitoring program has been implemented to monitor the long-term trends and health of Lake Superior ecosystems, both terrestrial and aquatic. Data is collected by park staff but also as part of an innovative collaboration with Lakehead University.

Since 2013, Lakehead University has held a field course in the park for its environmental science students. The course contributes to the work we do while providing students the opportunity to engage, experience, and learn about conservation and protection in our national heritage places.

Another example is the citizen scientists who are engaged in annual monitoring of the threatened peregrine falcon along Pukaskwa's coast. Each spring, Parks Canada staff and members of Project Peregrine survey known peregrine falcon territories within the park. In 2016, the highest number of active territories to date, five, were recorded in the park.

In addition to ecological monitoring, Pukaskwa is also actively restoring natural ecosystems through the reintroduction of fire on the landscape. Since 1998, the park has burned over 1,400 hectares of boreal forest, helping to restore key habitat. This program represents an opportunity for the agency to share our knowledge of the role of fire in ecosystems with park visitors who can take a walk through a prescribed burn area that includes interpretive panels explaining the role of fire in a healthy ecosystem.

Collaborations with other departments are ongoing and contribute to our focus on ecological integrity. The Pukaskwa National Park and Fathom Five National Marine Park are collaborating on a multi-year study with Environment and Climate Change Canada to assess impacts of diet on fish-eating birds and its relation to declining populations of herring gull.

Another example is a partnership with Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, to ensure that Lake Superior's ecosystems remain healthy and viable for fish species such as lake sturgeon, lake trout and brook trout.

Parks Canada is also an important partner to the Great Lakes water quality agreement. The Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area makes a significant contribution to the objectives in that agreement, through the protection of one third of the Canadian waters of Lake Superior.

Parks Canada also participated in the Lake Superior partnership working group, which produced the newly released Lake Superior lakewide action and management plan.

Parks Canada works with more than 300 indigenous communities across Canada in conserving, restoring and presenting Canada's natural and cultural heritage. Northern Ontario is no exception. Examples of this include a program where Anishnaabe teachings are brought to life with guided hikes along part of our trail networks.

Recently, the redevelopment of the traditional Anishnaabe camp immediately in the park's main visitor reception area engage the local community to build traditional birchbark structures including a tipi, cook tent and wigwam. Visitors passing by or participating in our guided hikes were able to witness traditional building methods in action and to speak with local knowledge-holders.

The Lake Superior national marine conservation area, once formally established under the Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act, will protect almost 13% of the lake, including 10,880 square kilometres of lakebed, over 600 islands, the water column and all living things in it.

The completion of the interim management plan released earlier this year reconfirmed the vision established in 2002 and is an example of Parks Canada's collaboration with partner indigenous organizations, the Province of Ontario, other federal agencies, and coastal communities. As the national marine conservation area becomes operational, local indigenous communities are helping to define all aspects of its operation.

Canada's national parks and marine conservation areas are gateways to nature, adventure, and discovery, and Parks Canada will continue to connect Canadians with their heritage.

As we near the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017, we are inviting Canadians to experience and learn more about our environment and our heritage. For example, the Pukaskwa National Park currently welcomes approximately 9,500 visitors per year and looks forward to welcoming more visitors for this special year.

Next year, a new trail will open at Pukaskwa, which, while linked to the iconic coastal hiking trail, will offer a more accessible hiking experience for visitors. The trail has been designed in collaboration with indigenous partners to include a focus on indigenous culture through the presence of interpretive panels and learning opportunities.

Canada's two national marine conservation areas in the Great Lakes region provide incredible living laboratories for freshwater research. As protected areas, they provide a baseline for understanding lake ecosystem health.

As part of our operations, we ensure that ecological integrity is the first consideration in the management of our national parks. Ecological integrity and visitor experience are not mutually exclusive; both are essential to ensuring that visitors will create lasting connections to our places. Within our marine conservation areas, ecological sustainable use is the management goal.

Parks Canada is strongly committed to working in partnership and collaboration with indigenous peoples, communities, municipalities and other stakeholders to ensure that Canada's heritage areas are protected for future generations.

Through planning initiatives, partnering opportunities, public outreach and education, Parks Canada is informing Canadians about the importance of protecting these special places and encouraging stewardship of our natural and cultural resources for present and future generations.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lessard. We appreciate that.

We'll listen to all the witnesses and then start the questioning.

Ms. D'Amelio.

[Silvia D'Amelio, Chief Executive Officer, Trout Unlimited Canada]

I'd like to thank everyone here for the opportunity to speak before the standing committee. The organization really does appreciate your time and your interest in what we have to say.

Trout Unlimited Canada, or TUC, is a national not-for-profit conservation organization founded in 1971. We're an on-the-ground conservation organization that's focused on conserving, protecting, and restoring Canada's freshwater ecosystems and their cold water resources for current and future generations. We're a science-based but volunteer-driven organization with volunteer chapters across Canada that adopt and work to conserve their local waterways, not only for the fish that inhabit them and the fisheries they support, but also to ensure clean water for the communities that depend on them.

TUC's science, policies, and program direction come from our national conservation agenda created by input from our chapters, our members, and our supporters, and from a national resource advisory council made up of academics, professionals, and policy-makers from across the country. Canada's landscape of lands interconnected by rivers and lakes constitutes the natural infrastructure of Canada, providing enormous ecological and economic benefits to all Canadians. Our organization recognizes that proper management of Canada's natural areas and biodiversity includes the continuum from protection, to conservation, to restoring damaged environments as part of ensuring the sustainability of the natural system that ensures our own health and prosperity.

Ensuring the protection of critical areas and their ecological functions, natural biodiversity, and habitats for wildlife, migratory birds, and species at risk is one component of an integrated environmental management strategy. Restoration of endangered aquatic species also requires the protection and restoration of their endangered habitats. TUC believes that the maintenance and acquisition of protected areas is one critical major step in better protecting Canada's natural biodiversity and the health of its natural systems.

The ongoing maintenance and establishment of new protected areas, whether as part of the national parks strategy, national wildlife areas, migratory bird sanctuaries, national marine conservation areas, or national marine protection areas, will require significant resources to maintain existing areas and also to strategically acquire new areas. Funds need to be ensured for the medium and the long term to manage and to acquire these protected areas into the future.

There is a strong need for a national strategy—not just an agency one—for the management and identification of future protected areas. This requires collaborative strategic planning and the linking of various protected area initiatives by Environment Canada, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada into a cohesive integrated planning initiative that would direct a longer-term protection program. The program would include critical terrestrial and aquatic habitats for both species at risk and threatened species, as well as examples of sensitive ecosystems and environments essential for the survival of all Canadian biodiversity.

This form of collaborative planning would increase the justification for the acquisition of specific protected areas, reduce duplication of effort, and demonstrate a more cohesive rationale for why specific areas are protected. Expansion of collaborative management to other organizations, nations, and private landowners will help ensure a broader strategic planning approach to better protect critical ecosystems beyond the capability of the federal government alone.

An ecological network needs connectivity. To increase the capacity for resiliency, especially with more climate variability and adjacent human activity, we need to actively create a set of connections to link protected areas to create a true ecologically active network of land- and waterscapes. We suggest that protected areas, whether freshwater, marine, terrestrial, or wetland, should be linked to corridors of connectivity where possible to ensure that they act as ecological networks, not just administrative or physical ones. In addition, there is a need for a stewardship strategy which ensures that the remaining landscape, whether working or not, is as functional as possible, especially in those areas near, connected to, or adjacent to protected areas. Some of these discussions date back to wildlife policy in the 1990s.

Stream and river corridors are one type of network system. One of the major elements lacking in Canada's legislation currently is legislation such as the wild and scenic rivers legislation in the U.S., which not only protects critical aquatic habitats in riverine systems, but also ensures connectivity through their linear corridors to protect landscapes. This is a major component in resiliency on the landscape, and it is currently lacking in Canadian legislation. While not the direct focus of this standing committee, this form of legislation would help to better link federal mandates and responsibilities for protecting both terrestrial and aquatic environments and could be considered another tool in achieving an effective protected area strategy.

Protected areas will not remain viable in the long term without ensuring that surrounding lands and waters have better management to ensure critical physical, chemical, and biological functions are maintained and that, where degraded, they are restored to some sense of ecological function. Trout Unlimited Canada focuses on working with others to ensure that Canadian landscapes that are not directly protected and are mostly private are managed to ensure critical functions where possible and restored to some level of ecological function. The roles of provinces, first nations, and private landowners are critical to ensuring these functions are maintained while these lands and waters are used for other purposes.

All lands and waters need some level of management and support to ensure various levels of stability, especially those lands in private ownership. Where acquisition is not possible or appropriate, incentives and support for complementary land use practices on private lands would extend the protection in and around protected areas. This is not a regulatory approach, but more of a co-operative approach.

There should be a federal strategic planning exercise for protected areas in Canada that is a collaboration among the three federal agencies and jointly implemented. The plan, reflecting the success of Parks Canada's approach, should focus on simplicity and clarity of message for why we create and manage protected areas. It should have clear objectives that are measurable and realistic timelines to ensure ongoing implementation. The exercise should be linked to strategic collaborative planning with provincial, territorial, and indigenous organizations that also wish to act proactively to better manage and protect critical environments.

People and monetary resources need to be made available to manage protected areas and maintain them so that the ecological and biophysical functions are maintained. Nation-to-nation collaborations and co-management opportunities should be explored and established to extend the range of these protected areas.

With that, I'd like to thank the standing committee again for the opportunity to speak.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much. I know that we didn't give you much time to get ready to come here and present, so we really appreciate the detail you've put forward.

We'll move right into questions.

Mr. Amos.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you to our witnesses. I appreciate the preparation on the short timeline.

Mr. Lessard, as I read your brief on Pukaskwa, I was reminded of the two weeks I spent on the White River. I then hiked the trail. It is amazing and I recommend it to everyone.

Pukaskwa is

a “must hit”, as far as I'm concerned, but I will leave Pukaskwa for now and direct my questions towards our trout friend.

I'm particularly excited to hear about the priority that you place on connectivity, because we've been hearing a lot about that. When your organization is advocating for conservation, are you focusing on specific rivers and tributaries or are you focused on the broader landscape-scale and sort of holistic tributary and watershed protection?

[Silvia D'Amelio]

The goal is watershed protection. That's not always in the cards, so we like to at least have the end goal that the projects we're putting in place, the advocacy we're doing, and the protections we're trying to put in place protect ecological function at the watershed level. That's done through on-the-ground projects, through advocacy, protection, and all of those sorts of things.

We take a watershed-wide view, and I'll be honest: sometimes it's a hard sell. It's a hard sell to explain to someone that to fix the problem in their backyard, we have to go 100 kilometres upstream and work on someone else's property, but that's the reality.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

I'm not sure if your organization has done any projects in rural western Quebec. I think it's broadly acknowledged, at least in this committee room, that Pontiac is the greatest riding for trout fishing—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Okay, maybe we haven't had the discussion. I'll acknowledge that we haven't had that discussion.

If a given region has a conservation project that could involve elements of trout conservation, how would they engage with your organization? What is the criteria that you apply as you're evaluating opportunities for your organization to engage?

[Silvia D'Amelio]

Our criterion is simple: people who care. That's how it starts. It starts with a phone call. It doesn't get simpler than that, and it doesn't get more complicated than that.

We have a team of professionals who go out and assess and who support tens of thousands of volunteers across the country. We work in areas where there's interest, because the gains that will be realized will be realized in areas where people care, where people can steward these projects through, and where they can take care of them and make sure they're maintained in the longer term.

We are misnamed. We don't just work on trout. We work on all fresh water. It's not just cold water and it's not just trout. Many of our projects have nothing to do with fish at all. It's about clean water. We'll work on that part.

As for Quebec, we just got our first chapter in Quebec about a year and a half ago. They're probably our most active chapter, and we have interest for three more chapters, so I expect to be seeing you soon.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

If the good people of CPAWS, who were testifying just previously and speaking about the Pontiac region, could be in touch with you, I think that would be fabulous.

I think my six minutes are close to done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

No, you're only at four, but if you want to give them up—

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Out of respect for my colleagues, I'll give up space.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Okay.

Do you want to take the other two, Mark? Off you go.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes. Otherwise Ed will take them.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Don't waste them, though. Go.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay.

Robin, the question is for you. In your notes and your presentation, you talked about ecological integrity, including monitoring, restoration, and the provision of meaningful experiences to visitors. Later, you went on to address that point again by saying that they're not mutually exclusive.

My question is, what's the balance? You obviously can't have too much visitation; otherwise, it jeopardizes the ecological integrity of it. I'm curious. I'm wondering if you could comment a little on what the balance is, other than what you have said, which is that they're not mutually exclusive. That doesn't really say much about where you see that balance.

[Robin Lessard]

First, I would like to thank you for coming to visit Pukaskwa Park.

I like to paddle and enjoy the outdoors, so thank you for visiting. I'll make sure I talk to the team over there about it.

If I may, I will talk about the two areas in which I have worked.

First, in Quebec, I worked on the north shore, specifically on the Mingan Archipelago. Then I went to Pukaskwa Park in Ontario. When the ecological integrity monitoring program is applied, those two parks—actually, the first is a park reserve and the second is a park—are in good health according to what we have been able to observe. At Pukaskwa, our program has three indicators, for which we use five measures as a minimum. Observing those measures allows us to say that the park is in good health.

With that as a starting point, we have to look at the infrastructures and experiences that we can offer to our visitors. At Mingan, as we were developing the visitor experience, for example, we installed oTENTik tents. We made sure to conduct sound environmental assessments so that those oTENTik tents were set up in places where rare plants would not be threatened. So we make sure to conduct good environmental assessments and examine the park's state of health.

It is important to try to provide an experience for the visitors because, at the end of the day, it is they who will be helping us to better protect our parks by talking about the experiences they had there.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Is that environmental assessment still ongoing?

[Robin Lessard]

That depends. It's based on the environments. We do it constantly based on our projects. We have internal processes that enable us to do assessments based on the nature of the projects under way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Okay, I hate to do it, but I have to cut it off. Thank you very much.

Mr. Shields.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate what you say about Trout Unlimited. The organization I'm familiar with in Alberta, Cows and Fish, has the same problem with identification and gets asked, “What are you?”

I could look it up, but what is your membership base?