Environment Committee on Feb. 1st, 2022

[Terry Duguid, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the commissioner for his report, particularly his excellent work on river basins.

I was talking about water not too long ago. We have members gathered here who have faced the water challenges up close and personal, with droughts and floods. We know what our country is facing. We have a water crisis.

You point out the need for coordination between departments—the agriculture ministry along with Environment and Climate Change Canada—but the last time I checked, 26 departments and agencies touch water in one form or another. You may have read in Minister Guilbeault's mandate letter the need for the creation of a Canada water agency, not just to coordinate what Agriculture Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada are doing, but also to have that whole-of-government, cross-ministry approach to deal with some of our water challenges.

I wonder if you would have some comments on the need for new institutional relationships. Most water challenges are what I would call governance challenges.

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

The water issue illustrates the complexity of the environmental and sustainable development challenges we face. Many times these issues that are intractable and long-standing are ones where there is dispersed decision-making authority. This is not only across departments and institutions within one level of government, but also across levels of government—provincial, municipal, indigenous—and across boundaries, international boundaries, which is the case for these three water basins.

As our environmental and sustainable development problems have become more complex and difficult to address through single departments, a one-window approach isn't so.... There is a need for more coordination and more coordination bodies, so long as they focus not just on coordination, but also on real results—on water in this case, on land, on the atmosphere or on wildlife. I would suggest that with many of these issues of a horizontal nature, like water, we need to increase the level of coordination and increase the focus on tangible progress in the form of outcomes.

[Terry Duguid, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

You've just described what we hope the Canada water agency will do. I hope you will be auditing the Canada water agency in the next year or two.

My next question comes from your report, in which you highlight that we're falling behind on investing in a climate-resilient future that points to climate change adaptation. Again, the minister's mandate letter calls for him to have a climate change adaptation strategy plan by the end of 2022. What kind of metrics and what kind of design of a program would you be looking for, so that it results in tangible outcomes?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

Well, I can speak to that issue in part. I say in part because we're actually in the throes of an audit related to climate-resilient infrastructure. We'll have more to say on that later this year.

This is another issue that requires coordination. Even though the types of impacts vary across the country, there does need to be a coordinated approach for prioritization. The scale of problems is immense and growing each year, as many of your constituents well know. The features that we would like to see are that ample resources are put to the problem, that we work simultaneously on adaptation, resilience and mitigation, and that we do not give up on mitigation and focus just on adaptation or vice-versa. We need to work on both to produce the scale of effects as well as to move forward with adaptation.

We will have much more to say on that in our next report on that very issue.

[Terry Duguid, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Thank you, Commissioner.

Mr. Chair, I think I have about a minute left, so let me just address one more issue.

The commissioner rightly points out that governments have been long on rhetoric and short on the delivery of results over the last 30 years.

Would the commissioner agree that with the most recent climate plan, which I believe is granular and detailed and has begun implementing measures like carbon pricing, we have started down the road of delivering concrete results? I wonder if he's confident about the 36% reduction in emissions that are projected by the plan.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Unfortunately, we're all out of time. Maybe you could weave your answer into a response to another question. I'm sorry about that.

Ms. Pauzé, the floor is yours for six minutes.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, Commissioner. Thank you for joining us and for the interesting reports you have submitted.

In the last Parliament, we talked about the funding for your organization, the Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, and about the means that you have at your disposal. You were given new responsibilities under Bill C‑12, which was passed in June 2021.

Have the financial resources at your disposal increased as a result?

Also, for how many years has the budget increased? Is it a long‑term increase?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

Thank you for your question.

The Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act does give us an important new mandate. I can say that we have not received a new budget for that mandate specifically. We are currently studying our options for this new mandate. To this point, we do not know how much each option could cost, whether we will be asking for additional resources, or whether we will find the resources we need in our current budget.

This is a new mandate. Our first report has to be published in 2024 at the latest. We are currently studying our options, including how to finance the resources for those options.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Okay.

In one of your reports in November, on the federal sustainable development strategy, you paint a troubling picture. My question is much like the one my colleague Mr. Albas asked.

How are you going to fulfill those responsibilities in terms of a federal strategy, if your recommendations are not fully implemented, with timelines and monitoring?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

Yes, your question is much like the one Mr. Albas asked.

There must be accountability. It is all very well to publish reports and to receive responses, but, in my opinion, actions speak louder than words. I want to know whether our actions will produce results. We have to focus on results, not just on responses.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Agreed.

You state in your report and in your presentation that, when oil and gas production increases, emissions increase as well. We know that, during the election campaign, the government made promises about putting a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. But there was no mention of production.

Does the example of the Offshore Deployment Program not in fact show us that promising reductions is useless if the state is helping to increase production?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

The temperature of the planet is affected by the emissions and concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The amount of greenhouse gases that goes back into the oceans must also be considered. We need a target that measures all emissions, meaning net emissions. There are a number of possible ways of establishing such a target.

Because of lesson 2 in our report entitled “lessons learned from Canada's record on climate change”, I believe that Canada has begun to realize that a ceiling for emissions must be established because we have set net‑zero as our target. So net emissions must be brought to zero in 2050 and reduced to 45% as of 2030. We must put a cap on our net emissions if we are to achieve our targets for 2030 and 2050.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Okay.

So, in order to put a cap on emissions, we must also look at reducing production.

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

Those two factors go hand in hand. We have many options. Today's plan has 64 different programs, so I cannot give you the full picture.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

A number of things can be done. As you were saying, there must be no more talk and much more action.

Some comments I have read say that your reports are the harshest that an environment commissioner has submitted since 1995. We know that the Liberal government has announced targets with no accompanying plans or new measures to reduce emissions. The plans are there but the measures don't seem to be following. After seven years of Liberal governance and the nationalization of a pipeline, is it reasonable for us to attribute the failure of Canada's climate policy solely to the government that has been in power since 2015?

Actually, the government's reaction to your reports was to say that everything stems from decisions made prior to 2015. But since then—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. DeMarco, you have 10 seconds in which to answer those questions.

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

They are difficult to answer in 10 seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

So let us continue with Ms. Collins.

Ms. Collins, you have six minutes.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Commissioner, for appearing before us. I also want to thank you and your team for these critical reports on these critically important and pressing issues.

Following your report, the Minister of Natural Resources said that the emissions reduction fund was not the kind of fossil fuel subsidy that the government had promised to eliminate. That's despite the fact that, as you reported, 27 of the first 40 projects funded by the program claimed they would be increasing production.

Isn't handing out taxpayer money to oil and gas companies without linking funding to actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions a fossil fuel subsidy?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

This is a fossil fuel subsidy. Only the minister can answer your question as to whether it's the type of fossil fuel subsidy that he wishes to eliminate, but it is a fossil fuel subsidy, no doubt.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

You said you were disappointed in the department's response to your audit and that it doesn't bode well.

Does the response from the minister that this isn't a subsidy also raise concerns for you, given the government's promises to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

We just received the information from the department on the changes that they propose to the emissions reduction fund. Whether we do a follow-up audit on it or not, it's too early to tell whether they have addressed the key problems in the fund.

I would say it's too early for us to really indicate one way or the other whether the changes recently announced for round three of the emissions reduction funding will properly address our recommendations.

I note that you have departmental officials slated to appear before the committee, so you could ask questions of them as to how well their changes to the program will match up with the recommended changes we made in our report in November.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

I watched the hearings that you had yesterday at the natural resources committee. You did express some concern about the response you received from the department.

Could you elaborate on that?

[Jerry V. DeMarco]

Yes. I expressed that same sentiment on the day of tabling, because they didn't agree completely with all of our six recommendations. They agreed completely with only four of them. Two of them they agreed with partially. Even on the ones they agreed with, there was a lot of grey in their response. Even though it says “agreed”, that was followed by a lot of words afterwards, and we weren't quite sure whether they fully agreed or not.

Based on those responses, I was of the view that it didn't bode well. This is another reason, now that a few months have passed since their responses, for requiring departments to put forth actual detailed action plans to this committee. That will allow you and your colleagues on the committee to have that accountability and ask, “What exactly are you going to do in response to these recommendations?”

Here we have seen immediate action in the changes to round three. Whether they are meaningful or not would require further research and analysis.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Your report on Canada's climate record is very critical of the lack of action Canada has taken to reach its climate targets, saying, in your words, that they can't keep going from failure to failure.

Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, Canada has continued to see emissions rise. We have become the worst performer on climate action in the G-7.

Can you elaborate on some of the failures you see that have led Canada to fall so far behind our peers when it comes to action on the climate crisis?