Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-38 Committee on May 30th, 2012

[Gregory Thomas]

I think what you experienced is fisheries officers refusing to embark on some of these overzealous adventures. Activists groups used the legislation to force the government into undertaking things like the Salish sucker initiative. So, yes, we believe that changes to the legislation are absolutely essential.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Do you think that a drainage ditch, for example, in my part of the country, which is dry virtually the entire year, should be put on the same level as the salmon fishery in British Columbia, or that a culvert that's being replaced in a municipal road is similar to a pipeline being put under a river? Should they be treated exactly the same?

[Gregory Thomas]

No. I think the environment movement and thoughtful parties on all sides should actually quantify them by asking how vital the culvert is, how critical it is, how many fish are being impacted, and whether there is a cheaper way to do it that has less effect.

As I mentioned, in the European Union, if you essentially expropriate a farmer's ditch.... These farmers actually came over from Europe in 1910, and they were invited by Canada to drain the land in the Fraser Valley. So if they're affected, and there's going to be massive costs to them, then there should be compensation in Canada as there would be in other parts of the world.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

You had a farmers' gathering about a month ago, I understand. I'm just wondering, can you tell us specifically what interests and demands the farmers were making there? What did they see as the major problems?

[Gregory Thomas]

What they saw was that they're actually closer to the ground—pardon the pun—and they know how their ditches operate. They know when the fish run in them, and they know effective ways to manage their own ditches better than the fisheries officers and better than the environmental activists who tromp out there occasionally every few years to tell them what to do. Their point is that their lands are being flooded, that the quality of their acreage is being affected, and that their ability to grow food and to support the work that they came to Canada 100 years ago to do—and were invited by us to do—is all being undermined by people who don't do a very good job, don't quantify the costs and benefits of the programs that are being undertaken, and do not prove the value of the program they're proposing to foist on everyone versus what it's costing us all.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Fisher, you talked a bit about loss of productivity. Do you have some examples that you can share with us of farmers having run into the bureaucracy in ways that you think are inappropriate, given the legislation and what it should be doing?

[Lorne Fisher]

As I pointed out in my opening remarks, we have to keep water tables down in order to maintain productivity. Now, there are areas, primarily for forage crops, that we haven't been draining properly. I predict that they're going to go down at least 50% in their potential productivity with regard to yield of forage from those lands previously compared to what they are now, because we haven't been getting regular maintenance of the drains. It's a relatively small amount of land, and I think that's why it's so important.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Can I ask what happens, then, if you're not allowed to drain and you're just forced to leave the drainage ditches the way they are, and they become overgrown? What's required of them?

[Lorne Fisher]

The drainage ditches will definitely become overgrown. Again, because we have such a lovely climate, plants grow pretty fast. Weeds grow pretty fast. Reed canarygrass grows faster than anything, and they require cleaning on an annual basis, particularly if we just hand clean. DFO staff, and certainly the Ministry of Environment for the provincial government, demand that we hand clean areas that should be machine cleaned in order to make them effective.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

So you have a man-made environment that you can't touch, and then it's constantly changing.

[Lorne Fisher]

Yes. These are engineered ditches, for the most part.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

The FCM can't be with us tonight, but they have a statement out that says that reducing the time municipal employees are forced to spend filling out forms and waiting for federal approval, through changes to the Fisheries Act, will make it faster and less expensive for local governments to perform routine public services.

Is that something that resonates with your municipality? Do you see a reduction in bureaucracy so that your time can be better spent? We've had some witnesses who have said clearly that the environmental assessment program here is not going to change the outcomes, but it's certainly going to change the process and make it much smoother, and in that case it will make it much easier for people to deal with.

[Lorne Fisher]

I would hope that this would be part of the results of these changes, that they would speed things up.

We've recently gone through an improvement of the breakwater on Harrison Lake, with the combination of the two municipalities involved. We had a very difficult job getting approval of it through DFO. It took about three years to finally jump through all the hoops, because it was fish habitat.

We did some very special things with respect to making sure that we had washed gravel going into the dike and for the breakwater, but we really didn't get progress until we said, “This breakwater is dangerous; it has dropped below the water levels when the lake is high. We have a sign, but sooner or later somebody's going to run a boat up on top of it and have some serious....”

It took that type of threat before we could finally move them forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Thank you, Mr. Anderson.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I think I still have some time, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

No, my clock says seven and a half minutes, Mr. Anderson.

Thank you very much.

Ms. Quach, you have seven minutes.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for joining us. I will speak in French.

I have several questions for you, Mr. Hazell, but I would like to begin by putting certain information into context. I think there has been a lot of misinformation in the discussions we have heard today and over the last few days.

Much has been said about efficiency, about saving money. People have said that it is impossible to associate saving money with sustainable development. However, the environment commissioner says the opposite, as do several experts, including yourself.

Wouldn't it be preferable to invest in environmental protection and prevention, instead of investing in healing and decontaminating sites?

You pointed out a paradox. It is constantly being mentioned that environmental assessments are too long and costly, and that there are many delays. However, you said that politicizing environmental assessments and giving the provinces responsibility will lead to more delays. Therefore, I assume this will lead to risks and higher costs.

[Stephen Hazell]

Thank you for the question.

The first thing I would say is that environmental assessments cost money, but a lot of times the amount of money they save is tremendous. My colleague made reference to the Mackenzie gas project. He says there's lots of support for it. It's unfortunate that it's not actually supported by the proponents.

Imperial Oil and Shell have saved billions of dollars in lost profits by not proceeding with that project. If they had proceeded with that project—and everyone understands that this process took too long—they would be trying to sell natural gas at $6 into a market where they could only get it for $2. They'd be losing money hand over fist. What the environmental assessment process gave them, gave us all, was a better understanding of the costs of building the project. Part of the pipeline link was through country with no roads, with permafrost, with difficult building conditions. I don't expect Exxon Mobil to thank me for saving $1 billion, but I live in hope.

My colleague talked about the need to cost out the regulatory expenses. That's fine. I think by and large we do that. There are two things to consider, though. The first thing is that we have to look at the economic benefits of the ecological services provided by the boreal forest, in the case of the Mackenzie Valley. Having that boreal forest there and those boreal wetlands provides enormous benefits to Canada—absorption of carbon from the air, fresh water, etc. Those sorts of metrics need to be incorporated as well.

All of that's a good idea, but the effect of this bill is exactly what Mr. Thomas is saying shouldn't happen. We won't be able to do any of that work, because the effect of this bill is to more or less shut down the federal environmental assessment effort. It's not about streamlining or timelines. It's about a massive reduction in the capacity of the federal government to understand what development projects do to the environment and the communities.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Thank you for your passionate answer.

I would also like to know whether you think Bill C-38 takes into account cumulative effects. If not, why is it important to take into consideration the cumulative effects of large projects?

[Stephen Hazell]

One of the great advances of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in 1992 was that it required the assessment of cumulative environmental effects. That was extremely important: it tried to get at what are admittedly tough problems. Take the tar sands region. How do you say to the first company trying to do work on the tar sands that they have to look at everything that's going to come on downstream? The effects might not have been that great for the first project, and the second project might not have been that great either. But when you add them all up, what you're left with in the tar sands region in northern Alberta is significant air quality problems, a significant risk of failure of tar sands dams, which could wipe out the Athabasca River.... So looking at cumulative effects is important, but it's really difficult.

Under this legislation, that's basically out the window. The capacity of the federal government to do environmental assessment is going to be so dramatically reduced that there will be no serious effort to do cumulative effects assessments. We have no evidence to support the notion that the provincial governments are going to pick up that effort, that the provincial governments are going to somehow replace this lost capacity. Certainly, the provincial premiers, when they have spoken about this bill, have made no indication that they would be ramping up their environmental assessment efforts.

Normally, when the federal government is downloading responsibilities, the first thing provincial governments do is ask for more money. I haven't yet heard Premier Clark or the other premiers ask for more money for environmental assessment.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

My next question is for Mr. Kneen.

You talked about the drop in public participation. What do you think about simply limiting debates to stakeholders?

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Quickly, Mr. Kneen. We only have about 30 seconds left.

[Jamie Kneen]

The specific limitation applies to National Energy Board processes, as far as I can tell, in the legislation. Within the range of proposed assessment processes, one of them limits the definition of public participant to someone with a direct interest, which is something that has been in place and is highly controversial in Alberta. It's been proposed at the federal level at different times and rejected because it's simply unworkable as a standard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ms. Quach.

We now move on to Ms. Duncan for seven minutes, please.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses.

I'd like to begin with Mr. Hazell. It can be a short answer. What do we know about the project list?