Environment Committee on Feb. 20th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108, we are going to have a briefing by the Department of the Environment. Before us we have Ms. Geller, the assistant deputy minister of the strategic policy branch; Mr. Jones, assistant deputy minister for the pan-Canadian framework; Ms. Milburn-Hopwood, assistant deputy minister for the Canadian Wildlife Service; Ms. Ryan, associate assistant deputy minister of the environmental protection branch; Ms. Campbell, assistant deputy minister of the Meteorological Service of Canada; Ms. Gonçalves, director general, science and risk assessment; and Ms. Pelletier, chief enforcement officer.

How many of you are speaking, all of you?

[Hilary Geller, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy Branch, Department of the Environment]

Madam Chair, those of us at the table will be speaking.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay, and how many minutes will each of you speak?

[Hilary Geller]

We will not exceed the 30 minutes, which is what I understand has been put aside.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Do you mean collectively?

[Hilary Geller]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay, thank you. You may begin.

[Hilary Geller]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My colleagues and I are pleased to be here today.

We are pleased to be here today to have a chance to provide an overview of Environment and Climate Change Canada and then to have the opportunity to respond to your questions.

We have provided you with a deck, which gives a high-level overview of the department. We don't propose to walk through the deck, but as just mentioned, colleagues at the table are hoping to spend a few minutes each to describe to you in some detail their area of responsibility. That way, before we respond more deeply to your particular areas of interest, we'll have a chance to talk briefly about nature, climate change, weather, environmental protection, including plastics, and foundational science performed by the department.

I'll lead off by providing a brief overview of the department, before turning it over to my colleagues here at the table in the area of their responsibilities as they appear in the deck before you.

ECCC's mandate at the highest level is to protect and conserve Canada's natural heritage and ensure a clean, safe and sustainable environment for present and future generations. Some of the services the department provides have been in place for many years. One of the most venerable parts of our department is almost 150 years old; that is the Meteorological Service of Canada, which was formed in 1871. The Wildlife Service, which Sue Milburn-Hopwood is here today to represent, is coming up to 75 years of age, and the department itself is going to be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year.

We are part of a portfolio that includes Parks Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, which I understand you will be hearing from next week. Each has its own deputy head.

The department has approximately 7,200 employees. More than half are located outside the national capital region: 56%, to be precise. There are about 8% in the Pacific and Yukon region, 11% in the Prairies and the north, 18% in Ontario, 13% in Quebec and 7% in the Atlantic region. Forty per cent of our department is made up of scientists. Other specialists include enforcement officers, as represented by Anne-Marie Pelletier; regulatory personnel; international negotiators; wildlife biologists; and of course, economic policy, finance and HR professionals. We're also really pleased that about 15% of our staff are students or recent grads.

The minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada is primarily responsible for 29 acts, some of which are listed in the deck, not all of them, and has secondary responsibility in a further 18. Under those pieces of legislation, there are approximately 80 regulations in place that address issues as diverse as pollution prevention, weather modification and wildlife protection emergency management.

The last thought I'll leave you with is that when we think about our mandate, it's really important to underscore that we work in an area of shared jurisdiction with the provinces and territories. This fact means that we put a premium on partnerships and collaboration in all aspects of our work: with provincial and territorial colleagues, of course, but also with indigenous peoples, local governments, NGOs, other federal departments and industry. You'll hear that theme of collaboration come through in all of my colleagues' remarks.

With that, thank you, and I will turn to Jackie Gonçalves.

[Jacqueline Gonçalves, Director General, Science and Risk Assessment, Department of the Environment]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, everyone.

Environment and Climate Change Canada is one of the largest science-based departments in Canada. The Science and Technology Branch has about 1,400 employees in 24 science and technology centres across the country. Those employees carry out laboratory work, field work, research and environmental monitoring.

Science is the foundation of our department's work. It supports the development of our regulations, the enforcement of environmental laws, as well as our weather and climate services. It provides the evidence we need to make sound decisions to protect our environment, provides public interest services, and promotes economic growth and prosperity. The science developed at our department has an excellent reputation both domestically and internationally. Our work responds directly to needs in service delivery and regulation, and to other department policies and programs.

Our employees are passionate about the work they do serving Canadians. Our department publishes over 700 peer-reviewed journals and articles annually, which puts the department among the world's most productive environmental science organizations. Year after year we make a high-impact contribution to science across Canada and the globe.

To support the department's mandate, our environmental science has taken many forms. One of our priority areas is to model and assess how the climate is changing, and to understand the impacts of climate change. However, under the current burden of warming and under future scenarios, the challenge of understanding, predicting and tracking climate change is a team effort across all of our branches and scientific disciplines. It's also an area of high collaboration with other national and international organizations.

Our department relies heavily on research and monitoring of the presence and impacts of environmental pollutants and stressors to inform decisions. In this area, we are world-recognized innovators in new approaches, for example in the oil sands monitoring program, a productive collaboration among the Government of Alberta, local indigenous peoples, the oil industry and other stakeholders to monitor the environmental effects of oil sands resource development.

Another example is the elaboration of a draft scientific assessment on the pollution of plastic that was recently published. We hope to be getting comments and feedback on that report between now and April 1.

Another of our priorities is to support informed responses to threats and emerging priorities. We have many activities in a variety of different media that we collect information on, share information on, and collaborate with many other organizations to deliver.

To close, environmental issues are interconnected globally, and no single country or organization has the expertise or capacity to address them alone. Canadian collaboration in the international science community is key to delivering on our mandate's responsibilities.

I'll pass it now to my colleagues.

Thank you.

[Matt Jones, Assistant Deputy Minister, Pan-Canadian Framework Implementation Office, Department of the Environment]

My name is Matt Jones. I am the assistant deputy minister of the pan-Canadian framework implementation office, formerly known as the climate policy office.

Our group was involved in developing our national climate change plan, the pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change. We've since pivoted to supporting its implementation. It is quite a cross-cutting collection of policies and measures that are being implemented and led by colleagues across a number of federal departments.

I think you'll hear from many of our colleagues that part of their responsibilities are associated with the issue of climate change. It is a vast and cross-cutting issue with many subcomponents, and we're all involved in various ways. Our regulatory colleagues are obviously very involved in developing GHG-based regulations. We have an international negotiation team. We have a dedicated modelling team. There's a team that is exclusively focused on the issues of adaptation—how we adapt to the impacts of climate change. We have a technical team that does our GHG inventory. We have a dedicated modelling team that does our emissions projections and our accountabilities and reporting. Lots of my colleagues here at the table and others are very much involved in climate change.

My team has been put in place to try to pull together the pieces, to have a holistic view of the issue and to be able to provide advice on the issue of climate change. I have three primary groups.

I have a policy and coordination group that pulls together climate policies and works across all of the implicated federal departments. It also works with provinces and territories, and it chairs a climate change committee with environment ministry colleagues from the provinces and territories. It also supports three existing tables with first nations, Inuit and Métis on the issue of climate change. That is the central policy and coordination group.

I also have a programs team. They implement the low-carbon economy fund, among others, one piece of the pan-Canadian framework.

And I have the Canadian centre for climate services, which is a technical organization that really pulls together climate data and makes it available to Canadians in a usable format. I'd encourage you to check out its website. You can see both historical data and projected future impacts of climate change on a map. It's climatedata.ca, which is a very useful tool for understanding the local impacts, changes that we have seen in precipitation and temperature, both in the past and also projected into the future.

Those are the three main components of my organization. I'm happy to follow up on climate topics.

[Diane Campbell, Assistant Deputy Minister, Meteorological Service of Canada, Department of the Environment]

Thank you very much.

The Meteorological Service of Canada provides Canadians with authoritative information on weather, water quantity, ice conditions, air quality and other environmental conditions. We do this 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As Hilary said, we're poised to celebrate our 150th anniversary.

We also actively support the mission-critical operations of other entities. For example, we provide the weather services for our Department of National Defence, for the Canadian Coast Guard—particularly ice-related services—and for Canada's air navigation system. We also provide essential data to the provinces and territories to support their emergency management operations, including their government operations centres, as well as their provincial flood forecasting entities.

Canadians are avid consumers of weather data. About 90% of Canadians actively seek out weather data every day. For example, we issue thousands of products, and our weather website is visited about 50 million times per month. We launched a new service platform about a year ago: WeatherCAN is our weather app. We've had about a million downloads of that weather app since it was first introduced.

In addition to the products and services, we also make our data very widely available on some of our digital platforms.

I'll give you an example. On average, about 30 terabytes of data are downloaded every month. These are taken up by third parties, who either further distribute the data or create their own value-added products for their business purposes.

Partnerships are critical to our business. Weather doesn't stop and start in Canada, so the whole business model is based on international collection and sharing of data on a real-time basis. Every day, multiple times per day, there's a coordinated effort across the planet to launch weather balloons and to share the data in real time in a global telecommunications and information management system. Then we in Canada draw from that data in order to initialize our weather models.

In addition, back in Canada we work collaboratively at the local and regional levels with our provinces and territories. For example, for our water quantity program we manage more than 2,000 water quantity stations, where we measure the flow, the level of the water. That data is provided in almost real time to our provincial and territorial colleagues, who will then use the data to help predict floods and other hazardous conditions.

In order to deliver on this mandate, we run an integrated system, from the collection of the data all the way to the product and service delivery. It's based on a very large asset base of diverse monitoring equipment that includes weather radars, weather balloon launch stations, surface stations, water quantity stations, lightning detection systems, etc.

As a highlight, we're currently midway in a major project of replacement of our weather radars. We got an injection of funds in 2013. We have replaced 12 of our 30 radars and are on track to replace the rest.

The next part of the value chain is based on high-performance computing. We have one of the most powerful computers in Canada, one of the top 100 computers globally. It processes vast amounts of data every day. We run a top-tier global forecasting model—we're among the top five performers on the globe. Two years ago, we completed a replacement project of the current high-performance computing system. We've replaced it and we've done our first upgrade.

The performance of high-performance computing systems is pretty integral to how well weather models perform globally. The top-tier weather centres are always in the mode of planning the next supercomputer replacements. It's a small-knit community. We track each other's performance but also track the ability of the vendors to respond to our needs.

Finally, part of the chain is our experts, our meteorologists. Once we have the guidance from our computer models, our meteorologists take that guidance and issue the products every day, and that includes specialized products and services.

Overall in the meteorological service, we have about 1,400 employees, who are distributed in 50 centres across Canada. If we focus just on the weather business, though, there are about 300 meteorologists, focused in seven regionally based storm prediction centres. Then we have some additional specialized services for aviation, defence, etc.

We're very pleased to be here. The reason we exist is basically that extreme weather presents extremely high impacts to the global economy, and that's the same in Canada. The World Economic Forum recently identified that the highest risk, the most likely risk, is extreme weather. In Canada, the costs of disasters such as floods and fires are extremely high, so our focus is on improving the services, delivering more early warning information and having longer lead times to help Canadians and their institutions prepare for extreme weather.

Thank you.

[Sue Milburn-Hopwood, Assistant Deputy Minister, Canadian Wildlife Service, Department of the Environment]

Good morning. I'm pleased to be here today.

I'm the assistant deputy minister of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The Canadian Wildlife Service is responsible for the department's nature agenda more broadly across the government. I'll go through our responsibilities and some of our priorities.

First of all, we have a significant mandate related to species at risk, and the Species at Risk Act provides a number of authorities and mechanisms for species protection and recovery. We have obligations for federal species like migratory birds, and then the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has that responsibility for aquatic species. Then we have provisions for a safety net for non-federal lands and non-federal species.

There are currently over 600 species at risk, and the list continues to grow. Tackling the species at risk issue is a bit of a daunting agenda. In 2018, Environment and Climate Change Canada, in collaboration with the provinces and territories, developed something called the pan-Canadian approach to transform our approach to species at risk conservation across the country, focusing on some select priority places, some select species and some sectors and threats to try to build in more multi-species, ecosystem-based planning and delivery.

Unlike some of the other species—the terrestrial species that are largely managed by the provinces—we do have exclusive responsibility for migratory birds under the Migratory Birds Convention Act. Birds are in decline, particularly shore birds, grassland birds and aerial insectivores, which are birds that eat insects in flight. In North America, we've lost three billion birds since 1970, largely due to habitat loss and degradation. Habitat loss is the greatest risk, but we also have responsibilities for managing the hunting of migratory birds, and we are pleased to indicate that we are modernizing our approach to those regulations.

The next big area that I want to talk about is our work on conserving and restoring important wildlife habitats and ecosystems. We do that through a mix of conservation tools, providing funding and incentives for others to act. Sometimes we act on our own and sometimes we use regulatory action, all supported by science.

Environment and Climate Change Canada leads on the national efforts to expand Canada's network of protected and conserved areas. Our current target is to conserve 17% of lands and inland waters by 2020. As of January of this year, 12.1% has been achieved. That's an area twice the size of Alberta. That's a really significant accomplishment.

As we work toward getting higher amounts protected, indigenous protected and conserved areas are increasingly important. We've had significant investments, particularly in the last two years, to make progress in this area, but there's much more that needs to be done to meet the target. The government has indicated that we'll bring a plan to conserve 25% of Canada's land and 25% of Canada's oceans by 2025, working toward a 30% goal by 2030. In doing that, we'll be looking at science, indigenous knowledge and local perspectives.

As I indicated, we also have some direct responsibilities in this area. In Environment and Climate Change Canada, we manage a huge network of protected areas, more than 14 million hectares. Protected areas are essentially parks for wildlife, and Environment and Climate Change Canada is the second-largest land manager because of this responsibility. We manage 55 national wildlife areas and 92 migratory bird sanctuaries. They include not only terrestrial but also some of the marine areas outside of these areas, so they are both terrestrial and marine.

Those are really the three big areas. On top of that, we have an overall responsibility for biodiversity, and we lead collaborative efforts with other federal departments, provinces, territories, indigenous people, and stakeholders to develop Canada's national biodiversity strategy, both domestically and internationally.

The work that's under way right now is to prepare for the October meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity and to develop goals for the post-2020 period.

As Hilary mentioned, we share this responsibility with provinces and territories. The responsibility for addressing biodiversity loss is shared. Land use planning, natural resource development and wildlife management are primarily a responsibility of the provinces and territories. Forty per cent of the landscape is covered by indigenous land claims, so it's really important—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I need you to wrap up. Otherwise, the other two will not get time to speak.

[Sue Milburn-Hopwood]

I'm finished.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay. Thanks.

[Helen Ryan, Associate Assistant Deputy Minister, Environmental Protection Branch, Department of the Environment]

Good morning. I am pleased to be joining you.

I am in charge of the Environmental Protection Branch at the Department of the Environment. Our purpose is to monitor, prevent and manage pollution from various sources, to prevent air and water pollution, and to manage risks associated with chemical substances.

We work with our counterparts from Health Canada and, as my colleague Ms. Gonçalves said, we provide scientific and technical support 24/7 to help better manage emergencies. We work closely with our federal, provincial and, in some cases, municipal counterparts. We also work on managing hazardous waste to ensure that it is properly managed and eliminated safely.

In addition, we also ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as my colleague Mr. Jones mentioned.

This area is definitely one of shared jurisdiction. We work very closely with our provincial and territorial colleagues to help deliver on this important mandate. We also have a responsibility for managing environmental programs, such as the federal contaminated sites program, to help reduce the legacy and liability from past practices that have resulted in environmental contamination on federal land. We put in place regulations and other risk management measures. We work collaboratively with industry in helping to reduce and manage the pollution and pollution sources that we spoke about. We take regulatory and other actions under a couple of key pieces of legislation: the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, and the Fisheries Act, in terms of both the general prohibition and administration of some key effluent regulations, including pulp and paper, metal and diamond mining, and wastewater system effluence regulations.

We also support some of the work that my colleague Sue mentioned under the Migratory Birds Convention Act and the pollution prohibition provisions there. We are responsible for helping to support the department's work on the modernization of our legislation—the CEPA modernization, for instance—and we are working to help bridge the environmental gap that we find on reserves.

With respect to air quality, we work collaboratively with our provinces and territories to improve air quality. We are also working collaboratively with our colleagues at Health Canada in the development of an air quality management system that would help set standards and emissions requirements for industries and equipments. We also put in place regulations—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Madam Ryan, I am sorry to cut you off, but I will not be able to give four minutes to Madam Pelletier unless we leave it for questions. You'll be able to expound on it then.

[Helen Ryan]

Perfect. Absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Sorry. Thank you.

[Anne-Marie Pelletier, Chief Enforcement Officer, Enforcement Branch, Department of the Environment]

Good morning, members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here today.

The mandate of the enforcement branch is to enforce the department's environmental and wildlife acts and their regulations in a fair, predictable and consistent manner. As my colleague mentioned, our work covers many pollution regulations, wildlife regulations, general prohibitions, national wildlife areas and migratory bird sanctuaries, among others. The enforcement branch, in collaboration with several Environment Canada programs, provinces, territories and national and international partners, works to ensure that companies and individuals comply with the environmental and wildlife acts and regulations. Our main objective is to bring regulatees into compliance. It's not about going out there and saying, “We got you”; it's more about bringing them back into compliance.

We are a young branch. We were formed only in 2005, following recommendations made in 1998 by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. It had tabled a report called “Enforcing Canada's Pollution Laws: The Public Interest Must Come First!”. The report made a number of recommendations, including that the department should establish an independent or centralized enforcement agency and that enforcement decisions should not be made by officials with managerial functions and responsibilities in areas other than enforcement. This is why the branch was created under the minister, reporting directly to the deputy minister.

The minister has a responsibility for management and direction of the department. Accountability for the branch rests with me, the chief enforcement officer. I report directly to the deputy minister. While the minister provides strategic direction to the entire department, the minister's role is independent from my role in enforcement operational decision-making. This distance was put in place to protect the integrity of the law enforcement process and protect all parties from claims of conflict of interest, influence or misuse of public office. This distance, when it comes to enforcement, is very important.

The branch itself is made up of about 430 employees, of whom 270 are enforcement officers, and they are across Canada. They have enforcement powers under the legislation, which they are designated for. We are dispersed into five regions, and we have about 27 district offices across Canada. Enforcement officers are designated with the powers of peace officers for the purpose of enforcing the legislation under which they are designated. Among other things, this gives us the power to seize evidence, with search warrants, and to issue summonses compelling people to appear in court.

The enforcement branch is organized into five sections. Of course, we have the enforcement on the environment side and the enforcement on the wildlife side. We have risk assessment, and we also have the training and the support officer safety section as well.

I'm going to leave it here. It's quite evident what we do as our role within the department, and we work very closely in collaboration with our regulatory people and also people from the wildlife section.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much. We maintained the 30 minutes.

Committee members, I'll allocate about five minutes at the end for committee business because something has come up.

We will go to first-round questions, and we'll have questions until five minutes before the end of the meeting.

Madame Findlay.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, all, for being here today. It's very informative, but very quick. I have many things I'd like to ask and won't have enough time to do that.

Because Madame Pelletier was the last speaker, maybe I'll just ask a couple of quick questions there. You mentioned there are five regions and 27 offices across the country. How many enforcement officers do you have across the country?

[Anne-Marie Pelletier]

I have 270 enforcement officers across Canada.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Where are they trained?

[Anne-Marie Pelletier]

We have a training system, a training program, so we work in collaboration with Algonquin College, with National Defence and with CBSA. As we are a young organization, we are building that component right now, but we have a very thorough training program for our enforcement officers.