Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I have given Mr. Lafleur several copies of my presentation. It has some figures, and as a result I will not read it. I've always had a thing about somebody giving me something to read and then reading it to me, which is usually one-tenth as fast. So instead, I'll just hit some high points.
Figure 1 is my first point. It shows the rate of increase in the oil sands area, a doubling every 10 years. I can tell you first-hand that a lot of the environmental problems that are developing are because of that rate of development. That rate of development is only matched by China, and it's only been matched in the past during times of war. I wonder what's the hurry. I think we need to take the time to change Bill C-38 to get it right, at least the environmental part of it.
I'll show you several examples of provisions of the bill that don't make environmental or economic sense. The first is the proposed change to species of economic, aboriginal, or recreational value. I'll give you an example from the Experimental Lakes Area, which I directed when I was a scientist with DFO for 22 years. Those were the days when acid rain was considered a problem, or it was debated as to whether it was a problem.
Most of the data, when we began our experiments there, were from short-term lab toxicity studies, mostly done on the fish of interest for economic or cultural reasons. It was decided that acid rain wasn't a problem until these systems reached pH 5.
We began acidifying a small lake to see what happened along the way. We found that some of the key species of food for lake trout were ten times more sensitive. They disappeared when the lake hit pH 6. They were species that would not have been protected by this proposed wording change. Fathead minnows and opossum shrimp, a large crustacean that have co-evolved with the lake trout, are its main items of diet in many lakes. So it's an example of how these key species would not have been protected.
We nearly lost the lake trout in that lake, not because of the toxicity to them but because these other two species that were non-target species disappeared. The lake trout began to starve and they stopped reproducing and the population went into decline.
That's the kind of loophole that we can expect from the proposed change in wording. Some of the figures are of those very organisms. In that same pH range between the normal pH of 6.5 and 5, where it was believed that damage began with our whole ecosystem experiments, we lost 50% of the normal species in the lake. Most of them would not be targeted by the proposed changes.
What it meant was that we lost several key processes in that lake: key biogeochemical processes like nitrification, so we had an ammonium buildup; changes in algae, so that instead of clear water with algae that would be grazed by plankton and zooplankton and then eaten by fish, we had big balls of rolling algae on the bottom of the lake.
So expect big declines in biodiversity without this protection for fish habitat. The work done at ELA was never done solely because of the fish. It was all regarded as work on fish habitat.
I think it's a weakness of our current DFO that we have Environment over here studying the environment and Fisheries over here managing fisheries in isolation from the very ecosystems that support it. We're almost unique in the western world for that approach. It is outdated by 70 years. We have to realize that fish are a part of an ecosystem and need to be regulated as part of it. We shouldn't have these disparate things.
If you look at the various mandates of Fisheries, they all have cod or salmon in the top 20 priorities. There is nothing on inland fisheries at all. Yet a lot of our people—mostly aboriginal people and a lot of our recreational fisheries—depend on freshwater fisheries. I can tell you that provinces don't do any research on them, and I have lived in three provinces. It has been up to the federal government, and that mandate should continue.
In the press, soothsayers for DFO have told us about all of the nasty things that happen—how concerts have to be cancelled, and irrigation water back-flow can't be discharged because there are a few fish in it. To me that seems analogous to saying we should be throwing out murder as a charge because there were boo-boos in the Robert Pickton case, or we should get rid of police because of a botched policing action around G20. They're exceptions to the rule.
I can tell you that with 22 years as a DFO scientist, and a daughter with 10 more as a habitat officer, there are some very practical things with respect to habitat that are done. One common example that's very inexpensive to do right, but very expensive to fix afterwards, is called hanging culverts. Typically, someone with no knowledge of fisheries will put a culvert across and water flows through it. There's no regard to whether the flow might be too fast for fish to come upstream and use what is often key spawning habitat. I have seen cases in Alberta where one culvert cut off red-listed bull trout from 60% of their spawning habitat in a stream. The rate of flow through the culvert can be too high. There are simple design features to make them level enough so fish can go through them, or broad enough so the flow can be tolerated by fish—or with some resting baffles. They are very simple things to do.
My daughter was a habitat officer for DFO in the Bella Coola region. She reports that she has never had a hostile incident. The contractors there were always happy to have the design input, and proud of the fact they could put in road crossings and maintain the salmon and other species that were using those streams.
Another example given in the press was lakeshore development. I chaired a committee for the Minister of Environment in Alberta on lakeshore development in Lake Wabamun. All of the cottagers pointed at the big power plant, but we found that the main damage was due to people putting in docks and beaches where there should have been fish habitat. I give you some examples of how cottage development destroys fish habitat, based on studies done by my son in the U.S.
Much of what I have said also applies to terrestrial species. I give you two Alberta examples: sage grouse and woodland caribou. We have known for 20 years that caribou were on the skids. Now we have Environment Canada reporting that it's questionable whether we can recover them at all. The sage grouse probably is not recoverable; it's near zero. Both of them are near zero because their habitat was not protected. We don't need any further weakening of habitat revisions.
To finish, I support the idea of streamlining the review process, but not necessarily to hurry development. The way to go about it isn't to weaken our environmental laws; it's to streamline this stupid process by which the science is collected by a few students who work for consulting firms, 10 pages are hidden on a long shelf, and a committee is expected to find them and make sense of them in a year or less.
It's time we had an organization that did professional environmental impact assessments, based them on good long-term monitoring—we usually know in advance when those systems are going to be targeted for development—gave us an unbiased view of what the changes to those systems would be, and then went back afterward to see if their changes were correct. That's something that is not done in our current environmental impact process. It's not a science, because that self-correcting action simply does not occur.
Thank you for your time.