Evidence of meeting #18 for Natural Resources in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was sibbeston.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK
They find ways to work around the rules. Is that right?
5:10 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
People are innovative. They do things to work within the regulations they have to follow.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Mr. Calkins has a couple of questions, so I'll let him take part of my time. Then I would be glad to finish up, if he has any left.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
Thank you, Chair.
I want to relate something. I worked in the Arctic when I was younger—it's been a long time since I was up there. I was a fishing guide on Great Bear Lake when I was a university student. For everything we did, the utmost in planning had to be done. Everything you needed to have there that summer had to come in on an ice road during the preceding winter. So everything was a year out in planning cycles, when it came to transportation. The last thing you wanted in the operation of your organization was to have to pay for somebody to fly something in, because it was so expensive.
We flew people; that was the main thing. We used float planes, of course, because we could get by with float planes. We used gravel road airstrips at the mine in Port Radium. I don't know whether you people have been up to Port Radium at all. We would shuttle people back and forth: we'd rent a Twin Otter to ferry people back and forth, and we'd have an old de Havilland Beaver on standby to take people around to various outposts, and so on.
I remember very specifically back then that just for gravel road runway maintenance, we would go over there by boat and would pick rocks off the runway at all hours. Of course, you could do that in early July, because the sun doesn't really go down. You could do all those kinds of things.
Just from that perspective alone, it was a ton of work. There was always the scuttle back then that they were going to build a road, that some day people were going to be able to drive up to visit Great Bear Lake. The only way you can get there is either by river—navigating across that way—or by flying.
Mr. Sibbeston, you were very eloquent in your presentation about having ways to provide incentives for the private sector to engage in the building of these kinds of.... How do you foresee building a...? The amount of effort, if you look at the terrain there—the amount of engineering, the number of obstacles in your way.... I mean, 60% of the land mass up there is actually not land mass; it's water.
How are we going to do that? Do you have something specific? Are there ideas that have been talked about? What can we do to get the private sector to be more involved and more engaged in this? Building a road up that valley would cost billions of dollars.
5:15 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
We're really just getting started with the north, exploring it and developing it.
As technologies like the Discovery Air airship come on.... Technologies are being developed in the northern Alberta oil field for roads that rely on a certain amount of buoyancy, with geo-textiles and things like that. There are technologies that are helping. Now, keep in mind this is not my area of expertise.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
You're up there, you're on the ground, you're talking to people on an ongoing basis, right? You must hear what's going on.
5:15 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
It just takes more money, and it's such an enormous area of land with such fantastic resources that the little explorers have to be given the freedom and latitude to go and have a look to find out what's there. Then it has to be reasonably expensive to investigate the promising finds in order to find out if there's a big enough resource to interest a big company that has the financial backing to go in there and put a road in because what they've found is so valuable that the road is a good investment.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
In my home province of Alberta, if you were actually to go up.... You drive down highway 11, driving down the west country, and you see bush—it all looks like bush. You'd think you were driving through 300 kilometres of solid trees on your way to the Rocky Mountains from a place like Red Deer, for example. That is until you get up in the air, and you realize that just 100 yards over there are all these lease roads. There's a whole maze of lease roads that the oil, gas, and forestry companies have all built. Those roads are privately owned roads, and they're not for public use or public access. How would that work in the territories?
I can't access these because of all the liability issues and so on that would affect a user's ability to use those roads. As a matter of fact, a good friend of mine had to bail off the road with his forestry truck; it rolled over. He was quite badly hurt, simply because somebody who shouldn't have been on that road was on that road on a quad and coming around a corner.
How are we going to deal with those kinds of issues in the territories? If you're going to build everything with private roads, then you're going to have to negotiate public use of those private roads. That's a real conundrum.
Furthermore, if the resources that are going to be extracted don't need to be extracted for some time in the future, does it make sense to build a road now?
5:15 p.m.
President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.
In my opinion, the reason there aren't more roads is because most companies model in the cost of the fastest, quickest way, with the idea that it wouldn't matter what they wanted to do, they aren't going to get a permit to do it.
I think the Cumberland project, and ultimately Agnico-Eagle, is an example of that, where the actual.... When it got right down to it, that was the only way you could pencil in that project—if there was a road from Baker Lake to the site. Ultimately, that's what happened. If there was any other way, they wouldn't have gone through the effort of dealing with every circumstance—a stream, a muskeg, or whatever—that happened to be in their way. It cost them $100 million, too, and it was $100 million per kilometre, or a mile, I don't know which.
I would say that more roads would probably be built if there was a defined process where a guy could walk in and say, “I want to build a road from the extension of the winter road for 200 miles, can I do it or not?” Do you know what I mean? The process to get to that point is too hard.
5:20 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
If that's a five-year process and a fifteen-year life of a resource, for instance—that's fairly common—then the investment's not looking so good anymore, is it? You're going to have a third of your transportation paid for already before your infrastructure comes on.
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Thank you, Mr. Calkins. Your time is up.
We go now to, first, Mr. Lapointe, and if there's time left, Madame Day.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
François Lapointe NDP Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let us talk a bit about regulations. There were very concrete examples in Mr. Sibbeston's presentation. Do you have the expertise and the experience to tell me where the present regulations came from? Why, for example, is there a limit of 400 person-days in a camp? Historically, someone somewhere decided that it was not going to be 300 or 500, but 400. What is the basis for it?
I am quite open to changing regulations, but I would like to know the history of who made the decision, why it is a good one, why it is a bad one, or why we would open it up to 1,500, for example. I would like to know why, where it came from and, knowing that, where we could go with it.
5:20 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
I have no idea of the background on that. But it came out of the regulations that go with the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
5:20 p.m.
Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
I observe these things. I don't really wonder where they come from. I do have opinions, though. I mean, 400 man-days is a four-person tent over a 100-day summer season. So if you want something bigger than that, you need to get a class B land-use permit. You're not talking about a very big enterprise before you need to invest a lot of money.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
François Lapointe NDP Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC
I see Mr. Gemmer nodding his head.
5:20 p.m.
President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.
Yes, that's for sure. These little camps have grown in size because of legislative things that people have to do. They can't function with a small operation, with the limited time or anything else.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
François Lapointe NDP Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC
Are there people in the community or from the department who still support that decision? Does everyone feel that it should be revisited?
With that specific example, if everyone agrees that it is too restrictive, what else could be done? Once a change is decided upon, what would have to be done?