Environment Committee on Dec. 5th, 2023

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for being here today again.

My question is for Ms. Beisner.

I understand that the Canada-Quebec Agreement on the St. Lawrence expires in March 2026, and that a new agreement will be renegotiated. Do you have any thoughts on some of the key concentrations that should be included in the update?

Can you tell us more about provincial government initiatives in Quebec to protect and restore fresh water and any particular areas where you see there being a need for more collaboration?

[Beatrix Beisner]

I think I partly answered that question last time. Again, I have to say that my expertise is less on the political side and more on the ecosystem and ecology side. Mr. Hudon can probably answer more easily than I can with regard to the involvement of citizen groups. Personally, I believe that this is essential in the management of the St. Lawrence. I can talk more about inland waters. In Quebec, for example, there are watershed organizations. That is one of the ways of managing waterways in Quebec. I find that very useful because it engages all stakeholders in the field, as Mr. Hudon mentioned earlier. It is essential to have the involvement of the people who live there.

One of the problems with watershed organizations is that they have not always had the funding to implement the plans they had developed with the water stakeholders in the regions. They have to be supported through funding. It's good to have all the good discussions and to make all kinds of plans, but if there is no funding to implement them, there isn't much point to that.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

My next question is for Ms. Orihel.

Can you tell us about barriers to addressing some of the water issues you are finding in your research?

What ways do you think the federal government could help address those challenges? Are there any innovative solutions you have seen in other jurisdictions to address some of these challenges?

[Dr. Diane Orihel, Associate Professor in Aquatic Ecotoxicology, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thanks very much for your questions.

You asked what the barriers are to my research or to the tailing ponds issue. Could you clarify whether it's a question about my research or a question about the tailing ponds?

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

I'll repeat the question again.

Can you tell us about barriers to addressing some of the water issues you're finding in your research?

That is the first question.

[Dr. Diane Orihel]

Thanks for the clarification.

In my research group we study the effects of naphthenic acids on fish and frogs. Naphthenic acids are the chemicals in tailings ponds. They are the major source of toxicity. They're not the only source of toxicity but the major source of toxicity.

We know that naphthenic acids break down very slowly. They're very persistent. We know that the concentrations of naphthenic acids in tailings ponds today are lethal. Organisms die within minutes to hours and sometimes days.

At lower concentrations, when we expose developing fish and frogs to these naphthenic acids, they have sublethal effects on reproduction, growth and behaviour. We see abnormalities in fish such as cardiac malformations. We see brain malformations. When we expose tadpoles, we see amphibians with deformed limbs.

What are the barriers to dealing with this issue? There doesn't seem to be the will, the framework or the push to actually do anything about this toxic waste that's been accumulating on the landscape for 50 years, and continues to accumulate.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Is there anything in the way of a solution that you've seen in other jurisdictions to address some of these challenges?

[Dr. Diane Orihel]

Yes, it's an excellent question.

We've been mining oil sands in Canada since the late 1960s. For 50 years now, engineers, scientists and academics have been working at developing treatment technologies and figuring out ways of improving the efficiency of extracting bitumen from ore. They've been figuring out better ways of increasing water reuse in the industry and ways to flocculate and dewater tailings.

There's also been a lot of work to figure out how to detoxify the industrial waste water that we refer to as oil sands process-affected water, or OSPW. These technologies can be chemical or biological in nature. Chemically, there are advanced oxidation technologies that have been developed to basically break down all of the organic compounds in tailings ponds. On the biological side, there are microbes and wetland techniques to be able to do similar things to degrade the compounds.

Personally, the technology that I've been most excited about and have worked on in my lab is a titanium dioxide microparticle. I was excited by this new technology for cleaning up tailings ponds because it can basically blast apart the naphthenic acids that I work on, which I know are toxic to aquatic organisms. It uses a passive photocatalyst. Basically, these beads sit on top of tailings ponds and use energy from the sun to catalyze this process.

In my lab, we have exposed fish to other tailings pond water, or tailings pond water that's been treated using this titanium dioxide photocatalyst. I should credit Dr. Frank Gu here. His lab developed this technology. I'm just the ecotoxicologist who's testing it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We just have to wrap up, but I really want to know what the conclusion is. It's like a thriller movie here.

[Dr. Diane Orihel]

I'm sure someone else will ask me about it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

No, please finish. I want to—

[Dr. Diane Orihel]

Okay, if you'll allow me to.

What we find is that, once we treat oil sands process-affected water using this titanium dioxide photocatalyst, we can remove the acute lethality of the water. However, if you only partly break down those compounds you can actually create more toxic breakdown products, so you really have to break all of those compounds down to be able to basically have the same end points as we see in our control fish that are not exposed to oil sands process-affected water.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Are the documents forwarded? I don't know how to ask for that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I'm sorry. We're done here with the questions.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

I just.... She was referring to that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Can we get it for you? What do you want?

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

I just want to ask if she can send a written response on her recommendation for what the federal government should do to address....

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes, if you could send a written response, please, on your recommendation for how the government should deal with tailings ponds' processed water....

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Yes.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

On that research, too, you were talking about conclusions and what to watch out for. Then you were referring to the toxins in tailings ponds. Where did you get that data?

If you could forward that....

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

If you could send us some written comments, it would be very valuable for our work.

We'll go now to Madame Pauzé.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for being with us again, either in person or by videoconference.

Ms. Beisner, I read that there are categories of watersheds: the sub-watershed, the watershed, the river basin and the ocean basin.

Should one of them be prioritized?

[Beatrix Beisner]

That's a good question. I'm not sure we can establish with certainty, from a scientific point of view, what type of watershed is most important. However, I can tell you a bit about our research.

As I mentioned last time, we have launched a project, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a federal agency, to collect samples from 650 lakes across Canada. That data helped us start answering that question.

As part of that sampling project, we studied all aspects of the water that we could study. One of the things we examined was the effect of the environment and the quality of the habitat on the zooplankton, these small planktic animals, first on the scale of bioregions—that is, regions defined by the type of forest and climate. We were able to explain a certain proportion of the makeup of these organism communities. We were pretty sure of what we were going to find in each type of lake.

Then we expanded our study to the continental watershed scale, taking into consideration the ocean into which the waters of a watershed flow in a given region. There are five or six continental watersheds in Canada, one of which is very small flowing into the Gulf of Mexico—

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Could you wrap up quickly, please?