Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 2nd, 2019

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Have you seen the visitor welcome centre at the other end of Centre Block? You would have had to walk through it today.

[Paul Johanis]

Yes.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Above it, you find a space that could be used as green space. I don't know how much space there is, but there's some space that could be grassified above that. Is it your hope regardless that the space between Centre Block and East Block become green space that we can then use? Could that be built above a visitor welcome centre?

[Paul Johanis]

It certainly can. The only problem is that to get there in 10, 12 or 13 years, everything there, including the elm, has to be cut down. We are hoping that the government would be open to considering alternatives and that instead of building the next part of their visitor centre under that green space area, it could shift it somewhere. It could shift it in a way that wouldn't require that green space to be removed.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Do you have any suggestions on where that could be?

[Paul Johanis]

We're very much at a disadvantage, because there's no public information on what the plans are. We just don't know. We're just shooting in the dark here.

We can infer from the fact that we're told all those trees are in the middle of an excavation area that the plan is to extend the visitor centre towards the north. Mind you, this is an underground visitor centre, so there would be no reason, I don't think, once it's been extended along the front of Centre Block, that rather than building it out towards the north, it could sort of be a mirror image instead and be built towards the south, to the west side of East Block. But I mean, this is just.... Who knows? Again, we don't have public information.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

You mentioned in your opening comments the need to inspect and further test the tree. What would that involve? Is that core samples? What work would that require? Would that in itself endanger the tree?

[Paul Johanis]

No. I think there are non-invasive ways in which the tree could be further tested. Even in this memo that the chair read out.... Further testing could be done in a way that would determine whether there's any disease in this elm, and in a non-invasive way.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I don't have a lot of time left. We've heard there's a nine-metre or 30-foot radius of roots on a tree like this. How deep does that go? Do you know?

[Paul Johanis]

It really depends on the subsoil conditions, I think, but one of the tests or one of the procedures that can be done, for example, is to actually map it out. There's equipment now that you can use that would map out the actual root extent of the tree.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Is it possible to build under the tree while supporting it, or does that become extraordinarily complicated?

[Paul Johanis]

I think that's an engineering question. It's possible to tunnel under the whole city of Ottawa to put in an LRT, so maybe you can tunnel under here to do a visitor centre, but....

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

We'll call it Elm Station.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I think my time is up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

“Parliament Sinkhole”, maybe.

Just before we go to our next speaker, this is for Public Works and Services and Procurement Canada officials in the audience. Could you cover some of these points that have been made when you do your presentation in the next hour? Hopefully, you'll cover the specific design of the new visitor centre and where exactly it would be. Second, if there's any irrigation like water sprinkling in that area related to the September drought, that would be helpful for us to know, and also if there's any comment on the one-day analysis of the tree that I read out, the cursory analysis.

Now we'll go to Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We heard from that report that was read by our chair that the tree, according to the arborist, might be sufficiently unhealthy that it wouldn't survive the winter. Is it your view that we will be better able to figure out whether it survived the winter if we wait for the winter to end before cutting it down?

[Paul Johanis]

That is one of our requests: Can we just wait until it leafs out and see whether it has, in fact, survived the winter, and if it has, in what condition?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Right. The proposal to cut it down was based in part upon the assumption that the wood would be more usable for furniture if it was cut down prior to the sap starting to run. I am not an expert on the preparation of wood for furniture making and what having sap in the wood means, but I think I would be right—you can correct me if I'm wrong—that in the event that the tree is not healthy enough to survive the summer and it were cut down this autumn, if it was surviving but in a very poor state, the sap would be out of the wood again and we'd be back to a state where the wood was similar to the way it is now. Would that seem correct?

[Paul Johanis]

I would think so, although, again, I don't have that expertise myself. However, I think that probably at this point the sap has already started to rise in that tree, and I would think that whatever opportunity there was to cut it down for that purpose is probably lost at this point.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Right. That's a good point.

Obviously, the reason I raised those two questions was to say that if we are treating the health of the tree as being the driver here, as opposed to considerations about what kind of work has to go on in and under the space occupied by the tree, then there is no cause for hurrying. One can deal with this just as well in the autumn of 2019 as in the spring of 2019. The point was to put out to colleagues in this committee that we ought not to hurry for that reason.

There was talk about soil remediation and the importance of doing soil remediation in this area, which I just simply don't understand. What is the reason for doing soil remediation?

[Paul Johanis]

The critical root zone of the elm right now is partly a parking lot. There's pavement and cars parked there. The rest of it, up until very recently, was very publicly accessible. There's a lot of foot traffic and a lot of vehicular traffic right around it, so that will cause compaction of the soil. The remediation is basically to loosen up the soil to allow for more oxygen penetration and to make it more available to the tree that way.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Oh, I see. So, soil remediation could be done in order to help enhance the health of the tree.

[Paul Johanis]

Absolutely. That's what it's required for, yes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

So, if we were to cut down the tree, there would be no need for soil remediation.