Environment Committee on Oct. 25th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have two and a half minutes.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay.

Is Mr. Smith still on the line?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Yes. I was hoping someone was going to ask. He's still on the line and patiently waiting for a question, I think.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay.

Mr. Smith, I was curious when in your discussions you outlined a number of accomplishments related to protected areas, national parks, national marine conservation areas or other marine conservation areas. You mentioned one that seemed to be under negotiation. I just want you to give a sense of what's happening there. Are there other opportunities within the Inuvialuit settlement area for protected areas, and what are the obstacles to moving that forward?

[Duane Smith]

In reference to that MPA that's under development, that's exactly where it's at. We're trying to finalize it. The terms are there. The concern we have is the lack of adequate resources being applied from the federal end of things to document our traditional Inuvialuit knowledge on the area, as well as to develop a consistent monitoring process to ensure the viability and the sustainability of this marine protected area over the long term. There won't be any other MPAs that we would agree to within our region unless there are adequate resources and justification for these things in the future. Our use and our knowledge are key and crucial parts of any of these moving forward, as well as of the review. With the changing ecosystem that we're experiencing within this region, we need to ensure that these MPAs continue to live up to their objective and their mandate. If they aren't, then what is the purpose of maintaining these things when the ecosystem that they were intended to protect has moved away?

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

I'm going to get the red flag here soon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have 10 seconds.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

What department or who do you deal with primarily on this MPA initiative?

[Duane Smith]

We're dealing with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on this case right now. Actually, as I speak, I'm the co-chair of the Beaufort Sea Partnership, which has been in place for close to two decades. We're just starting our meetings, which I'm absent from at this time. About 40 different government departments, agencies, academia, and our organization are part of this Beaufort Sea Partnership.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you for being here with us.

Go ahead, Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you.

Professor Bull, I think you got cut off as you were expounding upon some of the management strategies that you would employ.

Before I give you that opportunity, are you able to quantify in very real terms, either by percentage or otherwise, how much of the carbon that Canada produces is actually sequestered in our natural environment?

[Gary Bull]

I don't have that number in my head, but I can tell you that there's certainly far more carbon stored in the existing forests than we expend every year, and the potential is there for us to essentially, within biological systems, offset all of the emissions that we produce in Canada.

That's in theory, now. So then it's an economic problem, in terms of making choices around how we best allocate resources to deal with our climate change challenges. That's why I've argued that we need to develop these things called marginal abatement cost curves.

On the management strategies, what I'm suggesting is essentially that we behave more like Europeans in a sense. If I took you to a similar forest in Sweden as I do in Canada and showed you how they manage it, you'd see that what they do is put a lot more emphasis on the reduction of insects, fire, and disease; increases in growth; and use of thinnings and so on to produce bioenergy. This is something I personally work on quite a bit, how they are making the switch and managing forests to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels.

There's a whole suite of things a manager can do. The issue always becomes the cost and making sure it's an efficient solution.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I'll give the rest of my time to Mr. Eglinski.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

Professor Bull, I want to follow through on something you mentioned earlier during your presentation, about our forests being attacked by such things as pine beetles and stuff like that. I don't know if you referred to pine beetles, but you did say beetles.

Living in B.C. for many years and now living in Alberta, I've seen the pine beetle effects in British Columbia and am now seeing them through Jasper National Park and coming into the western slopes of Alberta.

Now, from some reading I was doing through Canadian forest service publications, I've learned that we're basically taking the forests that were a small net carbon sink and turning them into a large net carbon source. I understand that some of the impacts in one year alone from B.C. are equivalent to the amount of forest fire situations we had over a 20- or 30-year period in carbon and stuff like that.

I wonder if you could just elaborate on that a little, and tell me what we could do as a government or what we could do to try to improve that.

[Gary Bull]

I think we should probably revisit some efforts the federal government made 20 or 30 years ago when it came to realizing that forest resources are important to us and we need to invest in them. As I mentioned, and this goes back to my early days as a graduate student, there were large programs and up $1 billion allocated to helping out in provinces such as New Brunswick after the spruce budworm outbreak, and those dollars were invested back into forests.

What we recognize today that's different from 20 or 30 years ago is that these forests not only produce jobs and a livelihood, trees to make houses, and so on, but now they add this additional dimension, which is helping us mitigate and deal with the climate change problem. In our calculations and our international commitments, this adds a whole other reason for us to revisit how we invest in the forest landscape. These outbreaks of pine beetles, spruce beetles, and spruce budworms—and by the way, New Brunswick is going to get attacked again—are ongoing concerns and we just need to be a lot more active in our management strategies than we have been in the last 20 years.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I believe I have about 30 seconds left.

Do you believe this is a provincial matter or is it a national matter at this time, taking into consideration the way the pine beetle is moving east?

[Gary Bull]

I think it's a national matter and the provinces need a partnership role in that. Importantly, aboriginal communities need a partnership role in this, because a lot of the management strategies that I see moving forward are consistent with the aboriginal approach to managing the landscape.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Fisher.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Madam Chair; and thank you very much to all you folks for being here today. You're providing an awful lot of detail, an awful lot of knowledge, and I apologize if I don't absorb all of it. It's not an easy thing to do.

I want to go to Duane, if I could, and touch again on the MPAs that Mr. Aldag spoke about a bit.

I'm interested, Duane, in your experience in dealing with the government on the first MPA that you now successfully have and the newest one. Are they years apart, are they decades apart, or are they working parallel with each other?

[Duane Smith]

They're at least a decade apart. Actually, the Inuvialuit set up the first one ourselves. When I say that I mean we established an MOU with industry not to do any activity within that area because it was a sensitive beluga habitat for their calving and their moulting. So they agreed to that, and the federal government eventually came around to see that it was working between ourselves and industry and began to work with us to develop the criteria for the official recognition and establishment of this MPA for that habitat. It works as well as it can. Our local hunters and trappers committees work with the researchers so that both sciences are documenting and providing data and information to ensure the sustainability of that MPA.

I should point out that, in listening to some of the discussion, there needs to be a recognition of the shoreline erosion that's taking place in my region at the very least and the amount of carbon dioxide, as well as methane gas, that's being emitted into the atmosphere as a result. Across Canada, people don't seem to realize that this massive shoreline erosion is taking place.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Okay, thanks Duane.

I'll go to Professor Bull for a quick second here.

Again, going back to my earlier comment about not necessarily understanding all the little things that you threw out when you were speaking, you talked about biological solutions versus engineered solutions. Could you just expand a little on what you meant when you were comparing the two and which one was better for certain things? I wrote that down when you said it and I didn't really understand the context.

[Gary Bull]

Quite often, and you can see this in our education system, engineers will come up with a different solution than a biologist. I'm an applied biologist. It means if I want to deal with, say, emissions coming out of a smokestack, I can put in a scrubber and clean up all the emissions, or I could plant more trees. I can plant trees probably for about $5 a tonne CO2e. Our carbon capture and storage project is north of $120 a tonne CO2e. As a society we have to make that difficult decision about how we best allocate our scarce dollars to get to a solution.

I'm arguing that too often we've been striving with this climate change issue to just find engineering solutions and not looking at how the natural environment—forest, agriculture, and wetlands—play a pivotal role, especially in a vast country like Canada. We can't ignore it because if we find all the engineering solutions and reduce emissions to zero, our natural ecosystems are going to emit as much as we do as humans in our economic activity.

That's what I mean. We have to address biological solutions in concert with engineering solutions.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you. If I have any time left, Madam Chair, I'll give it to Mr. Amos.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have a minute and a half.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Smith and Ms. Towtongie, as Mr. Smith may recall, I worked for many years as legal counsel to a wildlife fund on the issue of Arctic offshore drilling. I'm interested in getting NTI's and the Inuvialuits' perspective on whether we should continue to have a system whereby INAC accords exploration rights prior to the establishment of protected areas. I wonder if these two Inuit organizations would provide us their position on this issue.

Do they think that areas should be conserved collaboratively between Inuit rights-holding bodies and the federal government prior to determination of the issuance of exploratory rights? Obviously in the case of Nunavut this has brought us to the point of litigation that is going to the Supreme Court. But in the case of the Beaufort Sea it brought us to the point of a rather large-scale, deepwater offshore drilling project, which was subsequently abandoned by Imperial.