Evidence of meeting #122 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was parks.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
What do you have to say about this memo? Why is your staff talking about cancelling prescribed burns for the sake of media optics? Has this ever been brought to your attention, Minister?
Senior Vice-President, Operations, Parks Canada Agency
As both of those employees work directly for me, I'd love to take this question.
In fact, what they were doing was looking at the difference between prescribed burns and mechanical removal.
We're in communities. We'd just had the mayor of Fort Smith and the council talk to us and say they weren't comfortable with prescribed burns. We'd just had Banff talk to us, and they weren't happy with prescribed burns. We had articles coming out all across the country.
I think a good thing for people to do is to look at the different options they have. Two of my managers were saying, “Do we do prescribed burns, or do we do mechanical removal?” It was not that there would be nothing done. It was a choice between mechanical removal and prescribed burns.
You can take these things out of context, which they have been, but that was what the conversation was about.
Liberal
Leah Taylor Roy Liberal Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here, and to the minister and to Parks Canada, and especially to Mr. Shepherd, for being on the ground and helping to fight this.
I'd like to direct my questions to you, because there have been a lot of accusations thrown around and a lot of negativity concerning what happened. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the co-operation on the ground. How did you and the individuals actually there fighting these fires feel about what had happened and what you were able to do, and how did you feel about the level of preparedness when you came in?
Wildfire Incident Commander, Jasper National Park , Parks Canada Agency
Thank you for the question.
I'm very happy to talk about some of the things that did go very well with respect to the Jasper fire.
It started with the safe evacuation of about 20,000 people in a very short period of time. That was conducted by a community that is only 5,000 residents itself. We were able to safely get that many people out of harm's way. It helped us to prepare for being able to manage the fire and to protect critical infrastructure and 70% of the town. My team and I are incredibly proud of being able to pull that off with a fire that was, as I said, unprecedented.
The problem with that term is that all of the fires that I've been going to in the last five years—in British Columbia, in the Northwest Territories, in Alberta—are all unprecedented for those areas, and our jobs are getting harder.
I do want to take the opportunity to shout out that I certainly do enjoy working with a lot of different specialists because I don't approach fire or these levels of events or landscape management with a sense of ego, like “I have everything figured out”. It really is important to rely on other specialists and other experts.
I know that some professional foresters were referred to earlier. We actually do go to a lot of professional foresters for assistance with wildfire risk reduction work. We do collaborate with them. We didn't collaborate with those two individuals who obviously were very interested in offering their services, but we do work with a lot of specialists all the time.
Liberal
Leah Taylor Roy Liberal Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Shepherd. I appreciate that.
It's good to hear the level of collaboration on the ground, because a lot of this has become very political, trying to score points.
It's interesting to hear Mr. Calkins talk about the fact that everybody knew this was coming. Clearly, we see the increased investment that was made by the federal government. The minister referred to $86 million versus, I think, a few million dollars that had been made previously by the previous government.
Why do you think that the provincial government decided to reduce spending on firefighting when it seems that everyone knew that this was coming?
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
Thank you for the question.
I don't think we want to put Mr. Shepherd in a position to answer this question.
Liberal
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
Frankly, I can't speak on behalf of the Alberta government, but the fact is that all levels of government, whether they're municipal, provincial, territorial or federal, will need to invest more in adaptation to help us prepare for climate change.
Federally, about $10 billion has been invested since 2015. It sounds like a lot, and it's obviously a lot of money, but the reality is that we will need to invest even more to help Canadians and our communities be better prepared to face the impacts of climate change.
Liberal
Leah Taylor Roy Liberal Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you.
While the need for spending dollars on adaptation is clear, we clearly also need to continue with investments in mitigating the increase in these extreme events. It seems that there's more opposition to the programs we put in place to try to mitigate some of the increase in the buildup of greenhouse gases and therefore the climate change we're seeing—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
I'm going to have to stop you there, Ms. Taylor Roy. We're almost at the end. We have only a few minutes left. The notice says we end at 6:30.
Mr. Morrice has asked if he can get unanimous consent to have five minutes. Are we okay on this side?
Liberal
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
We are going to 6:30, right, so I'll have another round?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
No, we don't have another round. We have five minutes left. We can't have another round.
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
Can we have two minutes each, please?
The longer we talk—
Liberal
Leah Taylor Roy Liberal Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Perhaps I could finish what I was saying.
September 25th, 2024 / 6:25 p.m.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
I don't see a round with six people when there are five minutes left. That's my sense as chair. I don't see it.
Conservative
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
No. Why would we give up our turn? As opposition, I am sure we have lots of questions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
Practically speaking, there's no time for another six-member round of questioning
The option is we stop now or we give Mr. Morrice five minutes to ask a couple of questions. We don't have unanimous consent for that, so I'm going to stop the meeting now.
The meeting is adjourned.