Environment Committee on April 18th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Mr. Ali, for six minutes.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today to share their experience, expertise and insights.

My first question is for Ms. Stiller from the Prairie Provinces Water Board.

The 1987 federal water policy recommended further use of “mechanisms like the Prairie Provinces Water Board...to address potential...water conflicts” between provinces and territories.

Could you please suggest what best management practices and lessons learned from the Prairie Provinces Water Board could be applied more broadly to interjurisdictional water co-operation in Canada, such as through the Canada water agency?

[Nadine Stiller]

Canada has several mechanisms that are intergovernmental boards. The Mackenzie River Basin Board comes to mind. In that agreement, there are requirements for bilateral agreements between adjacent and neighbouring provinces.

These boards give a more regionally based perspective in terms of water management considerations. They function to prevent conflict, and they also function as information forums where concerns are brought forward by neighbouring provinces with the intention of finding consensus and finding a resolution to any particular concern.

I chair both of the domestic water boards. They represent a significant portion of the drainage that occurs in Canada. The Mackenzie River drains 20% of our land base. I would suggest that the bilateral agreements embedded in that master agreement function to resolve, prevent and manage across provincial and territorial boundaries.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

My second question is for Ms. Sears.

Does the Okanagan Basin Water Board have any enforcement abilities?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

No, we do not. We are an organization of local governments. The local governments have some bylaw authority, but all that enforcement really comes from the provincial government.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

What are the board's current challenges?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

The board's current challenges involve dealing with climate change-related extreme weather events, as I was discussing. There is also the issue of invasive mussels. This is why I brought both of these issues forward to you. These issues are the local governments' greatest concerns. There are always some water quality challenges and challenges in communicating generally with the public, but primarily we are interested in maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure for water and protecting the quality of the lakes and streams in the valley.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Is there a role for the federal government to play in working more closely with the Okanagan Basin Water Board?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

The federal government has been involved in recent years primarily through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It is supporting this massive salmon restoration project that's happening in the Okanagan: 80% of the Columbia River sockeye salmon and a significant number of endangered chinook salmon are reared in the Okanagan, and then they swim south down into the U.S. and out the Columbia River into the Pacific.

We are working with the Okanagan Nation Alliance to support that restoration and to do the water science necessary to improve the habitats. DFO has been involved in that.

Otherwise, the federal government is not super engaged in any of the other Okanagan water issues. We do have some meteorologists around, and we do some work with the Water Survey of Canada, which has a certain number of hydrometric monitoring stations here. We work with them to expand the hydrometric monitoring network.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

My next question is for Mr. Bureau and Ms. Savoy from ALTRA. Given that there are over 4,700 PFAS, the Environmental Law Association recommends the promotion of “management and regulation of PFAS as a class, with the objective of working towards zero discharge and virtual elimination”, rather than addressing PFAS one by one.

First, are you satisfied with the Government of Canada's progress in risk assessment of PFAS under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 1999?

[Martin Bureau]

First of all, we are happy that this risk assessment has been made. After looking at it, we can witness that it's extremely proactive and advanced in terms of regulation compared to other bodies in the world. However, it does not go fast enough. The EPA in the States has already stated their drinking water limits, and they were enforced as of last week.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you. We'll have to stop there, unfortunately. We've gone over time a little bit.

Madam Pauzé.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I was going to ask the same question as Mr. Ali, but before I go any further, I want to thank all the witnesses for being with us today.

Mr. Bureau, I will give you time to finish your answer to Mr. Ali's very interesting question.

[Martin Bureau]

Things are not moving fast enough in Canada. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency already started enforcing its rules last week, and we're still wondering when we're going to implement ours. We feel that we're definitely a few years behind the United States, which is a rarity in this area. However, we can catch up quickly, because the technology has evolved so much.

I started working on PFAS four years ago, and we're now at the marketing stage with our technologies. We can solve the real problems today. Four years ago, I wouldn't have said that. Furthermore, we're not alone. There's healthy competition in the industry, and there are many solutions to complementary problems. So there's a way to catch up very quickly.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

You talk about competition. Call me naive, but when it comes to health, I always think that we should favour co-operation over competition.

[Martin Bureau]

You're quite right.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you.

You've been in the environmental industry for 15 years, in a variety of leadership positions. Prior to that, you held a number of leadership roles at the National Research Council. So you're a very capable individual.

A few weeks ago, the committee heard from Professor Sébastien Sauvé, whom you probably know. He talked about technologies and equipment that could identify the presence of PFAS so that we could destroy as many of them as we can as soon as possible.

I always talk about prevention and reduction at the source. Your company, ALTRA, is being called upon to act in several sectors of the Canadian economy when it comes to water treatment. Could you tell us what role detecting and destroying forever chemicals play in your company?

[Martin Bureau]

I know Professor Sauvé very well. He's an eminent chemist. When we talk about characterization, identification or detection, that's his area of expertise, and he may be the best in the world.

We're involved in PFAS remediation, problem solving, treatment, concentration and destruction. These technologies are effective, especially since the concentrations are high. Our place in the chain is more at the source of PFAS than where they get out. The idea is to address PFAS at the source through efficient and cost-effective means of concentration, and in doing so, reduce the problem downstream.

Because of the dilution factor, remediation costs are through the roof, to put it mildly. In response to a recent call for tenders from the City of Saguenay, the specifications estimated that remediation of three drinking water wells would cost $11 million over five years. We're talking about $2 million per well per year. If you do the math, you'll see that's not a cost-effective solution. You can't invest $2 million per well every five years in all water wells across Canada.

Instead, we have to find the source of the contamination upstream, which is very easy to identify, and then remediate the site. In the case I just cited, the federal government recognized that the source, at least in part, is the Bagotville military base.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

With respect to what happened in Saguenay, you're quite right, yes. I think we're on the same page. Basically, you're still referring to addressing the problem at the source, and therefore focusing on prevention.

That almost answers my second question. From a financial perspective, I wanted to ask you how much it would cost to have facilities able to detect safe thresholds for PFAS. Given that it takes $11 million to remediate three wells, we're talking about astronomical figures, I guess.

[Martin Bureau]

If I may say so, detection is not that costly; remediation is.

I'll give you an example. If we know the source of a water system, it generally costs $1 million to $2 million a year, depending on market rates, to remediate that place and solve the problem at the source.

If we're talking about continuous water generated by a landfill, it's per year. If it's a remediation, you take the soil, clean it up or burn it, and then you solve the water problem, and there's no more PFAS. In general, that would cost $1 million to $2 million. However, if we act downstream, for an extended water system it can cost at least $1 million a day, in general. So that's $1 million a year on a one-time basis versus $1 million a day downstream.

These figures could be applied to the water treatment plant in Montreal, for example. Not a lot of industries use PFAS on the Island of Montreal, but some landfills have used them in the past. We're treating at the source, as opposed to at the Jean-R.-Marcotte treatment plant for $1 million a day. I did the math.

Don't take me at my word, because that's an image, but we are probably in that ballpark.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's perfect. Thank you, Mr. Bureau and Ms. Pauzé.

I now give the floor to Ms. Collins.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I think there is a theme here around how, if we fund and invest in the mitigation efforts up front, we can prevent some of the more extreme costs.

I want to start with Ms. Warwick Sears, but I also have some questions for Monsieur Bureau.

I heard you talk about the gap in disaster mitigation funding. At committee this past fall, we pushed for and passed a motion calling on the federal government to establish a $1-billion freshwater security fund for British Columbia, in partnership with the B.C. government and private partners. Unfortunately, the security fund was missing in this week's budget.

Can you talk a little bit about what a freshwater security fund for B.C. would mean for your organization and your region?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Yes.

Let's use the fire risk on the Duteau plateau as an example. This is going to take maybe $5 million a year for a number of years to do the wildfire mitigation work. It involves cutting down non-market timber, so the forestry companies who do it have to be compensated.

The current size of the B.C. provincial watershed security fund is $100 million, which would provide $5 million a year for the entire province. On one project in the Okanagan, we could use up the entire amount of current provincial funding. The funding for this type of work back in the 1990s, in the days of the B.C. forest renewal program, adjusted for inflation, was about $60 million every year.

We're just not able to do the work. It's very expensive. The impacts are coming from the extreme weather, which is coming collectively from the rest of Canada and globally, and the costs are just astronomical to keep up with this after years of just ignoring the problem.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

You also mentioned the discrepancy from east to west. We have seen some significant funds for the eastern provinces. The number you mentioned, especially when it comes to invasive mussels, was zero dollars for British Columbia. That's pretty striking.

When it comes to disaster mitigation funding, B.C. has been the hardest hit. We have had extreme flooding and evacuations from wildfires. We've had heat domes that have killed hundreds of people. I feel like B.C. in particular is in desperate need of this kind of funding.

Can you talk a little bit about that discrepancy?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

I don't want to say anything bad about the Canada water agency, but most of the funding for their freshwater fund is going to the Great Lakes and eastern Canada. I think there is some funding earmarked for the Fraser River basin. One of our arguments for the federal government to get more involved in prevention of invasive mussels is that there seems to be no recognition of the fact that the Fraser River basin, which is one of their priority watersheds, is also at super-high risk of invasive mussels.

The balance of the population in Canada is in eastern Canada, but most of the resources are coming from western Canada. I think, yes, it could be a lot more equitable. By having more resources up front, as Mr. Bureau was talking about, we can save the federal government billions of dollars in having to send us disaster response funds to repair all the damage that happens with the massive impacts to local infrastructure from these extreme weather events.