Evidence of meeting #38 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
You are completely right. The portal is being built by Public Safety and StatsCan. The dataset was procured by a private sector....
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Could you table all the contracts, statements of work, licensing terms and invoices for that company with this committee, please?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
I can, for sure.
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Okay.
The commissioner also said, in the report, that the proprietary model “restricted...transparency”.
Do you accept that finding?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
Can you repeat that, please?
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
The commissioner's report says that the proprietary nature of this restricts transparency. Do you accept that?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
I think the information is there. We are not hiding from transparency. We are making the best information available for Canadians to make their—
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Why would you not provide the back-end information that allows for those assumptions? If I'm going to look at a one, two, three or four risk factor, I'd like to know how you came to those conclusions.
Why hide that information?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
We're not hiding information. We are guiding Canadians through that information. What that means is the level of the rating.
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Did you, at any point, consider an open-source model?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
That is in the future. We are working on that being available in 2029.
Conservative
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
I will take this question and send a written response about it. I would not say it's a stopgap.
Conservative
Branden Leslie Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Are you happy with the way this has turned out so far?
Director General, Policy and Outreach, Emergency Management Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
I am. Once we have an opt-in and once we have jurisdictions in, we're going to see the utility of the portal.
As the commissioner indicated, the portal is available, but there is a grey zone, which we are saying is coming soon. Once we have that information available, we're going to be very happy with the outcome. The tool is really going to help Canadians make the right decisions.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
Thank you, Chair.
I'll be sharing my time this morning with Mr. Fanjoy.
My first question is for Mr. DeMarco.
I noted that ECCC's Canadian wildlife service is responsible for wild bird and wildlife surveillance. In my riding of the Bay of Quinte, we've had several reports of die-off H5N1 outbreaks among wild birds. In most cases, it's swans in Prince Edward County that have been reported. Also in Prince Edward County, we have several poultry producers that have, as a result, reached out to my office to express some concerns.
I noted that the audit found that the ECCC, in its study, significantly expanded its surveillance capacity from approximately 3,300 samples annually to an average of 9,550 samples per year, following the 2021 outbreak, and added blood antibody and egg testing methods.
To reassure the commercial producers in my riding of the Bay of Quinte after these wild outbreaks, did you find that sufficient? Was the overtesting of migratory birds a good thing, in your estimation?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General
The additional sampling, which was essentially a tripling of the sampling capacity, as outlined in paragraph 16, was a good thing, to use your term.
The the main gaps are twofold. There isn't targeted surveillance of species at risk, which are the ones that are already in trouble because of habitat loss and so on. We have the exhibit about the whooping crane as an example of a highly endangered species that is now susceptible to avian flu. That's one gap.
The second gap is, looking forward, will this reallocation of money from other programs be sustainable without dedicated funding? That's a question Environment and Climate Change Canada will have to answer. With the current constraints regarding budgets, will it be able to find money for this program to sustain it? It's not the type of program for which you do the sampling once and then you can rest. You have to continue to do this to find whether the incidents of bird flu are increasing or not and whether it's being found in different species, such as swans, geese or ducks.
Those would be the two problems. There's the uncertainty of sustainable funding and the lack of targeted surveillance for species at risk.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
I have a further question, but owing to time, I'll pass the floor to my colleague Mr. Fanjoy.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
Thank you very much.
Congratulations to our chair. I think this is a nice example of how federalism works.
This question is for Mr. Jeanty from NRCan. My riding of Carleton exists within the beautiful Ottawa River watershed. Every spring, we face flooding risks and sometimes very serious floods. Our waterways often form boundaries between jurisdictions. That is the case here in the Ottawa River watershed.
How is the experience of co-operation among the federal government, provincial governments, indigenous communities and municipalities? Can you elaborate on that dynamic? Are there recommendations for how that can be improved upon?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Department of Natural Resources
To date, the collaboration has been fantastic with the provinces and territories, including indigenous communities, where flood mapping actually matters.
I think it would be important for me to share some statistics of targets that were set when this program was put in place. We are on track to develop over 1,000-plus maps, which will be produced by 2028. To date, we have 450-plus maps and related projects that have been created.
We talked about high-risk areas. We work collaboratively with the provinces to make sure that they are prioritizing which areas need to be mapped. Every dollar that's been spent to date has prioritized what the provinces have brought forward, specifically for high-risk areas.
Liberal
Bruce Fanjoy Liberal Carleton, ON
What are the biggest opportunities for Canada to shift from reactive disaster recovery from flooding towards more proactive, climate resilience planning?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Department of Natural Resources
One of the opportunities that exist, which the commissioner has touched on quite a bit, is that we have to accelerate. I think we have an opportunity to act collaboratively to do that. That means sharing data, sharing technical information and making sure that at the federal level, when we have technical working groups, guidelines and documentation, we are doing the best we can to make sure that they're standardized across the board when they're shared by one province with another province.
Bloc
The Vice-Chair Bloc Patrick Bonin
You're welcome.
Now it's my turn for two and a half minutes.
Mr. Jeanty, you're an assistant deputy minister at Natural Resources. We talked to the commissioner about how it doesn't make sense to build and finance new pipelines when adaptation needs are increasing rapidly.
Do you think it makes sense to build more oil and gas pipelines given that you're not meeting the objectives set out in the adaptation strategy and that doing so will increase needs even more?