Evidence of meeting #151 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was project.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
Pat Finnigan Liberal Miramichi—Grand Lake, NB
Thank you.
I'll now turn my questions over to Mr. Morrissey.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Thank you.
Mr. Gibson, you referenced the point that few organizations can afford the cost. Could you elaborate a bit more?
4:50 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
Sure. In cases of nuclear power facilities or hydroelectric facilities, you're talking about a decade of investment leading up to your project, but a lot of projects aren't that size. A lot of the projects simply aren't as large as these large provincially led investments. To ask a housing developer or some other developer to front those costs five, six, or seven years before their development goes in the ground is a difficult proposition, simply because, under the habitat banking today, you make your investment and then you have to establish the credit system following the investment.
Really, what you're doing is monitoring the habitat for a few years in advance to ensure that the credits are viable and the productivity gains are there. Then you're able to make that transaction afterwards. A lot of other project proponents simply don't have that sort of lead time on their projects.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
4:50 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
That's a great segue to third party banking, because when established organizations such as Nature Conservancy Canada are making these, it can be a bit more transactional, so you can make a smaller window for that.
As a proponent, you could come to the table with a project. You could have a partner such as NCC with a project that they've already established, and they're looking to trade those credits. You could create more certainty of offsetting—
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Morrissey.
Unfortunately, Mr. Finnigan said he was sharing his time, not splitting it.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Now we'll go to Mr. Calkins on the Conservative side, for seven minutes or less, please.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
Thank you, Chair. I will not be sharing my time with Mr. Morrissey.
4:50 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
For our witnesses who are here, I want to first of all say thank you very much for your input.
I guess the concern I have is that the scope of this idea is limited right now to the Fisheries Act. I'll give you an example.
We're dealing with reclamation and remediation projects, such as an oil sands project, which may or may not actually involve a river or a lake. I'll use the example of the Kearl project in northern Alberta, which was a naturally tar-bottomed, small, shallow pond that might have had a number of aquatic species in it, but not any fish any greater than perhaps a stickleback.
Instead of actually having habitat banking in place to restore it in an area where there's not a lot of human activity, we could have restored it to its natural state, which is required by all the environmental legislation both federally and provincially, and we could have had an enhanced offset by enhancing a fishery or perhaps purchasing some land for sage grouse somewhere else, not near the project.
I'm wondering about this. Is the Fisheries Act actually the right place for this? Is the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act a better place for it?
Mr. Gibson, go ahead.
4:50 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
I'll probably stay within my wheelhouse on the Fisheries Act, but I don't discount your question. There is an opportunity—I think Mr. Norris alluded to this—for a stackable benefit opportunity. If the Fisheries Act is the enabling legislation, you can look to wetland creation as more than simply a fisheries project. There are opportunities for waterfowl.
I wrote down some statistics here. The Big Island wetland is 16 hectares of ponds and interconnected channels. That's servicing a lot more than just fisheries. There is attenuation of cattail wetlands, and there are 29 species that were not there before, including one listed species at risk that showed up in 2018. There are stackable benefits to habitat creation that go beyond the aquatic environment and into the terrestrial environment, absolutely.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
I'm going to move to you, Mr. Norris. You are the only one so far who has brought up the notion of ecological goods and services or alternative land use services being part of the solution as well. That's a different sense of enhancement. From my experience, that is taking marginal cropland out of cropping and returning it back to a natural state. That might not necessarily be an enhancement, but just returning it back to its natural state.
Do you think that actually plays a role in habitat banking? My understanding is that it's a different thing. How does that relationship of habitat banking and alternative land use services work in your mind?
4:55 p.m.
President, Ontario Waterpower Association
I think what I was speaking about is taking a landscape approach to the notion of habitat banking. In our province, for example, the hydroelectric facilities are managed on a watershed basis. You can envision a habitat banking proposal that looked at a broader scale across the watershed, as opposed to a site-specific scale, and made some investment decisions that provided an overall benefit or more benefit than the site-specific one.
Your question on environmental assessment was a good question as well. The environmental assessment process is a planning process. As I said in my deposition, it is through that process that the proponent goes through the hierarchical consideration of avoidance, mitigation and offset. It's the Fisheries Act in the case of the fisheries or the Endangered Species Act in the case of endangered species that actually puts the outcome of the planning process into an instrument or an authorization. That's why you look to the Fisheries Act through the authorization process, but the thought process begins much more in advance of that, during the environmental assessment process. It's just that this is not the instrument to actually implement the offset measure, whether it's the Fisheries Act or the Endangered Species Act or others.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
Well, we didn't specifically talk about the Species at Risk Act, but it's an interesting idea to use habitat banking as a method of funding or providing resources for actually removing species from the endangered or threatened lists. This is definitely an opportunity that I think is worth exploring.
The other part of it that I wanted to ask either of you to explore with me is the notion of corporate citizenship. Not everything that a company does.... For example, I'll talk about the Buffalo Hills project in Alberta, which is a wetlands project in southern Alberta. Shell Canada put $6 million on the table. They didn't do that because they were required to through habitat banking for an offset. They did it just because they're good corporate citizens.
If we go down the path of requiring this through reclamation, remediation or habitat banking for offsets, I'm wondering whether we're going to diminish the desire of industry to also provide corporate citizenship, just out of their own goodwill, and how or if you see that being a factor.
4:55 p.m.
President, Ontario Waterpower Association
I think it just builds the tent bigger, to be honest. Whether it's on the environment, social equity or gender diversity, I think corporate citizenship is a cultural phenomenon for many corporations across the country.
I think what this does is build the tent bigger. It brings other people into the potential use of partnerships in terms of habitat banking and offsetting measures. I don't think it diminishes the interest in corporate Canada in doing good things for the environment, because that's part of their culture.
4:55 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
I would agree. At OPG we have a biodiversity program that is largely seen as being above compliance or outside of the compliance window. One of the programs we support is the Bring Back the Salmon program, which is done through the anglers and hunters association of Ontario.
4:55 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
Yes, that's OFAH, and we are the larger corporate sponsor. That is driven largely by the fact that these are the communities we live in and a lot of our staff and workers are members of those organizations. We are making those investments outside of the compliance window, so I wouldn't think it would impact that.
4:55 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
Finally, do you see any distinction in offsets from the perspective of projects, be they major or intermediate-sized, of which the impact will be lasting? For example, I don't know if there is a requirement for a hydroelectric dam to be removed at the end of its useful life. However, an oil sands project at the end of its life has to be fully reclaimed to the point that you shouldn't know that a project was there in the first place some years after the reclamation or remediation process has taken place. Do you see a distinction or differentiation in how habitat banking would apply in either of those scenarios?
5 p.m.
Senior Environment Specialist and Chair of Fisheries Working Group, Renewable Generation and Environment, Waterpower Canada, Ontario Power Generation Inc.
Well, I don't think we've seen that yet, simply because our generation lasts so long. We're still on our first generation of....
5 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Red Deer—Lacombe, AB
But are you required to completely remove a hydroelectric dam? What are the current requirements and what are the new requirements going forward? I know that dams that were built 40, 50 or 60 years ago would have had different requirements from those for the dams built today, in your particular case, but what is the plan there? Is there a differentiation, from your perspective, between that and a project such as an oil sands or mining project or any other type of project for which you go in, you do your work, you get what you want and you get out, and hopefully you leave it such that nobody would ever know you were there in the first place? Those are different things, and I'm just wondering, from your perspective, whether that should be reflected in habitat banking policy going forward.
5 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Calkins. We will probably have to wait to get an answer from another questioner on that one. We've gone way over time.
Mr. Johns, go ahead for seven minutes or less, please.