Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Scherkus.

[Eberhard Scherkus]

I will start and be very quick. I think we are all in agreement that we need further education. It's not just formal education; it's simple education. You think of a culture in which you have elders who came off the land and then you have children, their grandchildren, who are on the Internet and have never held a job before. It's simple things like what does a job mean? What does a bank do? It's everyday things that we have to do. So it's education, but even start back at that rate.

Also really consider infrastructure. We're not talking about power lines all across the north; we're talking about a coat of asphalt on a runway, maybe adding 200 metres so a larger aircraft can come in. These are not big-ticket items.

We're talking about communications. I mean it's remote enough as it is. What can we do to improve communications in the north?

Goods and services for everyone. Mining is capital intensive, so it needs deep sea ports. But then the whole community, the whole region, benefits from the port as well and not only the mining companies. These, in our view, are simple things, and probably some of them can still be attained in my lifetime. They're not big, gargantuan projects.

[Tara Christie]

I guess I'd echo that about the infrastructure, particularly things like redundancy in communications. That satellite outage, which many of you may have known about earlier this fall, had a very significant impact, not only on our operations but on communities and businesses all across the north, where parts of Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut were completely out of communication with the world.

For those businesses that have set up in Nunavut that are trying to operate global businesses so they can compete, basically they were out of commission, some of them, for three or four days. You can't survive in a business environment when you don't have reliable telecommunications and reliable Internet, not in this day and age.

I wanted to provide a clarification with respect to timelines. It's not just the board assessment processes that are the problem. Often much of the problem is the federal permitting afterwards, or the other permitting agencies afterwards, which don't have those timelines.

That's particularly one role that the northern projects office could assist with, as project champion or.... Really, their role could be to help communication between those federal departments, and hold them accountable to the timelines, which would also help the boards to do their job because they could push some of those federal departments to provide the information to the boards in a more timely manner, and maybe get under the timeline, so that the boards could be under their timelines.

It's very difficult for the boards to try to push federal departments to provide information in a timely manner. The federal departments are also understaffed and busy, and many of the ministerial sign-offs that are required take ages—the projects sit on the desks of bureaucrats and we just don't get sign-off on permits. On that one Fisheries authorization that Chris referenced earlier, the EA had been done and then it took four years to get it signed off. Nothing changed in that four years, but it just took that long to get it signed off.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Connell.

[Larry Connell]

With the ASEP program coming to a halt, we need the federal government to stay as a partner and help us in skills training, so that's a definite recommendation and ask.

The north needs help with its basic education system. ITK has laid out a great road map on how to move forward to improve education in the north. To me, that needs endorsement; it needs the federal government to decide. We all need to be partners to improve educational outcomes.

It's critical that the federal government help to make sure that these opportunities will benefit the north and benefit Canada as a whole.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Lizon.

Unfortunately, we're out of time for this question period.

Madame Day, for up to five minutes, and after Madame Day, Mr. Calkins for five, and that'll be it.

Go ahead.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will speak in French. I have a lot of questions, but I'll try to be brief.

You have all spoken about infrastructures, problems and issuing permits. You all spoke about agreements with Inuit—sometimes known by another name—land agreements. Mr. Tom Hoefer, you spoke about research and development, mapping, and community environment.

Mr. Cheechoo, your summary was really different from those made by the other guests. You talked about partnerships, respecting federal legislation, responding to the report, investing in education and tempering economic enthusiasm.

I think Mr. Scherkus said that there isn't enough commitment in the system. Mr. Cheechoo, you spoke about tempering the enthusiasm for the economy. I would like to hear your comments on both because they really are two opposite aspects.

[Eberhard Scherkus]

Thank you for your question.

As for the Nunavut government, we can give them the straight facts because Nunavut is a young territory that has 12 years of experience. So there is a lack of experience and a lack of experience as far as economic development is concerned. We hope that this will change with time.

We worked with the various Inuit communities and associations. They had the example of a company, of fair-minded people who came and changed their quality of life very quickly over four years or so. A lot of these people are now asking questions. We see that it is possible, that it is more than possible. Things are happening. These people are asking where their government representatives are in all this and why it is taking so long to manage some files. More studies are being requested while we are seeing more direct jobs being created.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Cheechoo, what do you think?

[John Cheechoo]

Thank you, Anne-Marie.

I think it's important that educational attainment doesn't focus just on the industry. It should focus on different sectors—health, public sector jobs, private sector jobs, having your own enterprise, and so forth. Also, we need the ability to move from one region to the next to apply our skills. It's not just going to be your local people in one place. It should provide for people to move different places for different opportunities.

In fact, at one of the meetings we had with the ITK board of directors back in September, the presidents of the land claim organizations suggested that Inuit from one region should be able to go to another Inuit region to get work experience in that region and to share their knowledge.

For instance, if someone is working in Labrador and is from Labrador, he could move to the Northwest Territories and the Inuvialuit region and get hired there and then transfer that whole Inuit-to-Inuit experience. That includes a number of different areas, including the highly skilled areas of development. In one region, there might be a highly developed area for Inuit who are skilled in mapping, whereas in another Inuit region that's not so much the case. But you could transfer and move. There are different creative ways to use the leadership to do that within the Inuit world.

The Mackenzie pipeline has been going on for a whole generation, but they haven't started it yet. A lot of these projects take a long time. I agree with Mr. Scherkus that this is a beginning point. Even for the land claim agreements for Inuit, this is a beginning point—the first 30 years of starting out. These are big questions.

Industry and employment have to be approached in a holistic way. You can't let opportunity outstrip people's education, and you can't let opportunity escape the region itself.

I think people are enthusiastic because they want those things in place to make it work. If fundamental areas are falling behind, it's not going to work. I think we all have to agree that a larger strategy around these issues has to be looked at in the Arctic. We have a high cost of living and a high cost of doing business. We have important regulatory frameworks. Perhaps they are time-consuming, but those are the realities. How do you improve that? How do you look at it with acceptance in mind? I think that's an important part of this, because Inuit aren't going to leave the Arctic. They're going to be there. Whether there are jobs or not, the Inuit are going to remain in the Arctic as their homeland.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Merci, Madame Day.

Finally, Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I really appreciate the testimony. I appreciate the patience you've shown as we go through our parliamentary process. We had to leave for a vote, and I thank you for staying later than otherwise scheduled to hear our questions and concerns.

I'm hoping to get some further input on the Northern Project Management Office. I'm of two minds on this personally. I see that we have the Northern Project Management Office doing good work. They've just been stood up, and they're ramping up their abilities. But it seems odd to me that we would create another government agency to help businesses navigate through all the other government agencies, rather than just fixing the ones that need it. I want you to help me sort this out, whether it's necessary or redundant.

I'm wondering if anybody has any recommendations for the Northern Project Management Office, on how they see the office being improved or becoming more helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Hanks.

[Chris Hanks]

I asked a question of a number of deputies in this government as to why the major projects office south of 60 works and it seems to be making a difference in the process. The answer I got from all of them at the deputies committee was that they're all embarrassed to come in and admit that their department has fallen behind. And they've pushed each other to make that major projects office work. It really has been a consortium of your deputy ministers that have been successful.

The northern projects office doesn't have that same deputy committee, so there have been various ideas about whether or not the northern major projects office should just be simply rolled into the projects office and then you have one organization that's trying to help the federal family work together more effectively. One idea would be to bring them together and bring them underneath that deputies committee, which seems to be working south of 60.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

That's very interesting.

The deputies committee that works south of 60 has brought the game forward for the other departments, obviously, but because there is less jurisdictional involvement in the north there are fewer deputy ministers involved. Am I understanding this correctly? Is that the main issue?

[Chris Hanks]

It doesn't become the concern of the deputy of the environment or the deputy in AANDC as directly in the north as it appears to be in the south. I don't know all of the mechanisms as to why that hasn't happened and the governance differences that have led it to be successful in the major projects office. But I can tell you it works.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Okay. Thank you. I think that's going to be very helpful.

I want to talk a little bit about the regulatory environment.

I'm an Albertan. We have a lot of exploration, we have a lot of surface mining, we have a lot of subsurface extraction of natural resources, we have surface extraction with forestry, and so on. It's very much a resource-intensive economy.

The north, obviously, is the new potential that is so highly touted. I'm excited about it. I've spent some time in the north. I was a fishing guide on Great Bear Lake during university. I just love the Northwest Territories. I've loved the places I've gone in Canada's north. It is a beautiful environment. It's a harsh environment; it's a tough environment, I understand that, and I was only there during the summer months. I survived the black flies and mosquitoes and the other perils that were out there, not to mention grizzly bears.

I fly over this country every week. I fly back and forth to Alberta. I fly over vast tracts of the Canadian Shield. I don't see anything. I don't see lights. I don't see roads. I see a bunch of nothing, and that's on a clear night. You see the odd community. Yet we have all of this environmental protection legislation restricting everything we can do. I know I've walked in places that no human being has ever set foot on before in Canada's north.

I have a zoology degree. I've spent a lot of time protecting, defending, and conserving Canada's natural resources. That's where my head space is at. But at the same time, I realize that as a former public servant of the Government of Canada, the Province of Alberta, and so on, I relied on the fact that our economy would grow and prosper in order to pay my salary and keep things moving forward.

From a regulatory environment perspective—and I'm happy to hear the recommendations you had—how do we compare to other countries that you may have operations in, insofar as the timelines and going from discovery to an extraction process?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Calkins is out of time.

I think we have only 15-minute bells for this, which leaves us about 10 minutes or less. I'm going to have to cut it off. We're going to have to leave that as a statement.

Sorry, Mr. Calkins.

Thank you all very much for coming. You've been extremely helpful, and I do thank you for your patience.

We hope you'll have a look at the report when it does come out.

The meeting is adjourned.