Environment Committee on Feb. 18th, 2016

[Louise Métivier]

One of the things that was done during these negotiations was a synthesis report from the secretariat of the convention that looked at all the countries' first commitments last year. It did an assessment and said that this would put us at around a 2.7° temperature rise. That was a key aspect in the agreement to put in an ambition in a cycle so that this ambition will increase over time to bring us down to 2 degrees. Right now we're at about 2.7 degrees.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you.

Mr. Eglinski.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting all our guests, and thank you to the guests who have come to give us the information.

I want to focus my time on Ms. Pearse from Parks Canada Agency. Unlike John, I haven't worked for them, but I've enjoyed them and loved them for 60-some years. My riding of Yellowhead encompasses all of Jasper National Park and half of Banff National Park, so I have a lot of contacts there, and a lot of concerns.

Of major concern to me is that under the minister's environment letter, we want us to develop Parks Canada and encourage visitors to come to the parks. In 2017 we want to make it free for everybody, and then we want to keep it free for children under 18. I would just like to make a suggestion that you throw seniors into that.

Then we also say we need to protect our national parks and limit development, etc. I'm not going much further than that, but there is a clash within national parks of a group of people, probably more on the management side, who are pressured by the development of the national parks to assist the people we are asking to come into the parks. As a prime example, there are two major cities less than three hours away from both Banff and Jasper that have over one million people. The demands when people come into the park are different from what they were in the 1950s or 1960s. The population is three or four times what it was. We need more services in the parks, but the services that are demanded by the public and that are needed in our parks are impacting on the footprint of the natural heritage of the parks.

I wonder how your department is going to try to balance the two. There is a demand by the public for these extra services. There is a demand, probably, from the scientific side and from people who have lived in our parks. A lot of people have to realize that in some of our national parks, we are into second- and third-generation people who have loved that environment, who have grown up in that environment, and who don't want to see it changed. They want to remember it as it was when they were kids.

I'd like to get a little feedback from you, Madam.

Thank you. It's a pretty complex question.

[Jane Pearse]

Thank you very much for that.

This is a very core issue for Parks Canada. We've provided just a very short overview on page 40 of the document that we shared with you, which was also used to brief the minister. We call it “development pressure”. As you said, there are pressures from visitors using the parks, the sites, and the historic sites in a way that could potentially impede their ecological integrity or their cultural and historic integrity.

The good news is that Parks Canada has actually had this balancing act in its mandate right from the beginning. You may know that when Banff National Park, the first national park, was created, it was originally created to protect the cave and the basin, the hot spring that was at the core of Banff National Park. Part of the reason for this was that the railways wanted to encourage people to visit Banff to experience those hot springs, but they needed a way to protect those hot springs for the enjoyment of all visitors.

That balancing act between presenting and protecting is very much the core of Parks Canada's mandate. One of the ways that we manage to express that balance and to get Canadian feedback on how best to manage it is through the management planning process. Many of the parks and national historic sites have a legislated obligation to have a management plan established for those parks. Those plans are reviewed every 10 years, and public consultation is a major feature of how those plans are produced and developed. As we look at a particular historic site or a national park, those plans are available for discussion with all the communities.

There is an interesting evolution on how parks are created. Some of the original parks, especially the ones with townsites, were created at a time—

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have one minute.

[Jane Pearse]

Thank you.

They were created at a time when people wanted golf courses and other development opportunities in the park. The new parks now are created often in collaboration with first nations, and the visitors' services and the businesses are located outside the park. There has been an evolution in how those services you referred to are being provided to visitors.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I probably have only 10 seconds, so I'll pass them on to the next one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You're okay? You do have one more go there, so you might want to ask your colleagues to follow up.

Mr. Gerretsen is next.

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

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you, everybody, for coming here today.

I'll start by following up on something that I think that Mr. McDougall and Ms. Dodds commented on. That was with respect to the our country warming at approximately twice the global average. I'm curious if you can comment first of all on whether it's a linear relationship throughout the world. Is it normal for our particular region of the world to be warming at twice the speed of other parts? I'm curious about the relationship there. Is it normal, or is it something specific that is being done differently in Canada that's contributing to this?

[Dr. Karen Dodds]

Thank you for the question.

I would say that there isn't anything specific to Canada that's causing the difference, except for the fact of where our country is located and the kind of geography that we have. Also, this is a fairly new finding. Again, the further north in Canada you go, the higher the rate of increase is above the global norm, so it's already higher in the Far North than it is just north of the border.

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

You're saying it's dependent on our particular location in the world. Can you very briefly provide some comments as to what that means? What are the implications of this?

[Dr. Karen Dodds]

This gets back to the need to adapt to climate change, which I think my colleague made some comments about. As you go further north, you see a lot of permafrost, but we're already seeing some of that permafrost melt. A lot of our infrastructure, especially in the north, is sensitive to those kinds of changing conditions. The zones where you can grow agricultural crops may change. The kinds of species that you once saw in the south may start moving further north. Again, we know that climate change has a very significant impact.

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

Okay, that's great. Thank you.

I think Mr. Cullen was asking some questions about this particular graph, and I just want to follow up a little bit on that.

Is there a plan to start to make these lines start moving in the direction that we're trying to get at, and if so, when would we have an opportunity to see that plan?

[Dan McDougall]

Thanks for the question.

One point I should highlight before answering that directly is that this graph, as I mentioned originally, is of measures in place as of September of last year.

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

Okay.

[Dan McDougall]

Even right now, a number of significant developments have taken place that are not reflected in those lines. For example, the Alberta climate change plan that came out is something new.

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

Mr. Cullen was basically asking if you are accounting for such potential developments as Energy East. You would equally have to account for, on the other side, the downward trends.

[Dan McDougall]

Absolutely.

Ontario is another example. Ontario wrote their cap and trade program, which they're just finalizing the details on. We expect that it will have a significant effect on decreasing emissions.

This is not a crystal ball. It is actually just an economic modelling projection of what happens with existing measures in place as of a point in time.

What we're working on now with the minister, and she with the Prime Minister, and he with his first minister colleagues, is the pan-Canadian framework, the objective of which will indeed be to change the slope of those curves and put them on a downward trajectory toward our targets.

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

Okay, that's great. Thank you.

I'll turn to Parks Canada for a second. This question was asked of the Department of the Environment by Mr. Amos. I want to pose the same question about cutbacks that have occurred and what the implications of those may have been in terms of employment and in terms of your ability to continue with programs. It's not about trying to accuse a previous government or anything; I'm just trying to get a sense as to where we are right now. I'm curious to see if you could comment on that.

Have any cuts been of particular pressure on Parks Canada? What areas have been affected?

[Jane Pearse]

Well, I am relatively new at Parks. I've been with Parks for a couple of years, so it's not from personal experience that I'm speaking.

Parks Canada did go through a series of cutbacks, as all departments did following 2012. One of the areas where we tried to absorb the pressure, as my colleagues were saying, was in the services offered. What we did in the agency was target opening seasons to visitation, and that meant to some degree that the shoulder seasons and the winter season were cut back. It did have an impact on some of our staff in terms of their seasonal employment being reduced and being targeted to the period that had the highest visitation. For example, on the canal, some of the canal seasons were reduced. That was actually reversed for the last year or two.

Therefore yes, there were some implications for staff from cutbacks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I'm going to have to cut that off. Thank you very much.

Mr. Shields is next.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to those who are appearing here today. We really appreciate your information and the materials you've given us.

Mr. McDougall, you referred to a graph in your presentation that has the types of energy segments, and the one that I'd ask about is buildings.

In the private sector and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, there is a lot of work out there with municipalities and energy audits. The municipalities are probably taking the leadership on this, and the private sector is working with them. They're both asking for national standards, because they're doing it independently, and that creates real challenges for the private sector from municipality to municipality. They are asking if there is a place where we can get national standards to help the private sector as they build and to help the municipalities to harmonize their requirements

Is this something that you have addressed or are interested in?

[Dan McDougall]

To start with the building sector, yes, in general it's a sector that's of great interest, and it's an area where potentially there are additional emissions reductions that will help to bend that curve.

In terms of standards, a lot of the standards on the building side are done with colleagues at Natural Resources Canada. They have developed model building codes that they then work with the provinces to implement.

As with many things in Canada, the jurisdiction on this is somewhat mixed. Sometimes it's at the provincial level and sometimes it devolves right down to the municipal level. The federal departments and agencies—Canada Mortgage and Housing, for example, and some of the research institutes—work with departments to develop model standards that they then work with our colleagues in other governments to get implemented. It is an area of ongoing and continuing work, and potentially one of the areas that we'll be looking at with other levels of government as we deepen our work on this pan-Canadian framework.

[Julie Gelfand]

I was just going to add that in one of my upcoming reports—and I believe it'll be tabled in May, although I'm doing so many I can't track if it's May or October—we're looking at the issue of adverse weather and whether Canada is ready for it, and the issue of the national building codes will be addressed at least partially in that chapter.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Okay. Yes, I think of the energy audit, because municipalities are carrying that load and it's causing a problem, in a sense, for the private sector. Hopefully we can see more of that, and understand the different levels of government and how challenging that is.

I have one last piece: national parks. In 2012 there were round tables on involving youth in the parks, but there's nothing on your list of issues that says how we are addressing the challenge of youth participation in national parks. If it's not an issue on the list, yet it was in 2012, did you resolve it? I don't think so, because young families still aren't going, and I don't see anything that indicates the age of people who are going to the national parks has dropped. It's just us old white people. Do you want to address that one?