Natural Resources Committee on Dec. 7th, 2011

[Claire Derome]

It's an historical rail link, but it's a rail link that exists today. So if you take a trip to Skagway on a cruise ship, you can take the train from Skagway up to Carcross in the Yukon today.

That rail was used for ore transportation by mines up until 1985, so we're not talking about something that was not used in the past. But since it was built in 1898—it's a narrow-gauge rail—it has been upgraded, the bed has been upgraded, but it would need, first of all, to have the track put back in shape between Carcross and Whitehorse, which is about 30 kilometres of track, and it should probably be moved from narrow gauge to standard gauge to make it a more appropriate way to deliver ore to Skagway.

Whether this will happen or not will really...[Technical difficulty—Editor]...find its way from Whitehorse to Skagway over time. That's more a business decision that will need to take place. But it's truly possible. It's not that this has not happened in the past and could not be put back in place.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Who owns the line right now?

[Claire Derome]

White Pass owns the rights to hold the line and the rights to it. It's a lease they have. The facilities in Skagway are owned by the borough of Skagway, the City of Skagway, and the ore dock is a lease owned by AIDEA, the Alaska economic development agency.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

One minute, Mr. Calkins.

[Claire Derome]

So it's a complicated ownership structure.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

It's very interesting.

I just want to go back to the chart, then, on page 3. You did mention in your start that the growth in the population of the Yukon has been quite rapid. Can you give us some numbers? Is that migration or is that birth rate? Can you just give us a little bit more on the demographics of the workforce and what they look like? Is it an aging population in the Yukon? Is it a young population? Is it a migrant population?

I just want a little bit of clarification there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

All that in 30 seconds, please.

[Claire Derome]

It's a mix. The original population is aging, but the migration explains the growth in the population, and it's happening between the 25 to 35 age group mostly.

That's your 30 seconds.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Calkins.

Mr. Stewart, four minutes. That's what I gave Mr. Calkins.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you both very much for your presentations.

I'll just jump right to questions, to Ms. Lloyd. You talked a lot about sustainable development right at the beginning of your presentation. There are a couple of things I'm interested in.

First is the development of renewables, renewable energy. We're talking a lot about mining here, but I'm wondering about other kinds of exploration in the north. Have you come across projects of a different sort perhaps in regard to developing different sources of renewable energy in the north?

[Brennain Lloyd]

Do you mean development of renewable energy projects?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Sure.

[Brennain Lloyd]

There are a lot, at least on the design board, in northern Ontario, and some in southern Ontario.

If you look at the Ontario Power Authority planning maps—and there is a plan on the minister's desk that has not been moved to the Ontario Energy Board—there are a considerable number of renewable energy projects: some stored power; wind and hydro, particularly on the James Bay coast; the Superior coast; the north shore of Lake Huron; and some on Manitoulin Island. Those are the primary areas for wind. Hydro is more in James Bay.

Some of them are feasible; some of them less so. As the OPA gets further out in its planning horizons, it's less easy to judge how viable the projects really are.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Do we have much of that development up there at all? What could we do as a federal government to help kick-start some of those projects? Perhaps better balancing the extraction of non-renewables with something like this up in the north, that kind of development?

[Brennain Lloyd]

I think what the federal government could do to kick-start renewable energy is to go to the biggest source, which is the negawatt. The emphasis right now needs to be on conservation and efficiency.

In the mining sector, there's tremendous potential for co-generation, the capture of waste heat. I don't see much attention or investment in that area at all.

We really favour regional demand and supply planning, balance of demand and supply at a regional level. There needs to be much greater emphasis on conservation, particularly in southern Ontario, and co-generation in all regions but particularly in northern Ontario.

When you're looking at the forest product sector, support for co-generation might make some of our not very viable operations right now more viable, and that would be very important at a community level and a regional level for a bunch of reasons.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I have one minute left? Okay.

Is there anything you'd like to add on that aspect—maybe not to do things the way we're doing them now, but rather thinking about how, as a federal government, we might help to facilitate that kind of dream scenario in the future?

[Brennain Lloyd]

We really need integrated planning and integrated strategies. In northern Ontario we'll get an electricity supply plan crafted in Toronto with all the arrows moving south, to pull every electron south. What we don't have is an industrial strategy for northern Ontario, and I think the same might be the case in other regions. So we need integrated planning that looks at what of our resources we can keep in the region longer—forest, metals, people—and how we then power the projects to take us to the greatest value-added possible. There's a role for the province, the communities, and the federal government in that because there's a range of jurisdictions and overlapping interests. That would be the place to start.

I think this should happen before we make very constrained decisions, isolated decisions, on projects that are going to have significant impact and could foreclose other options; for example, around McFaulds Lake, the Ring of Fire development.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Stewart.

Thank you to both of today's witnesses, Ms. Lloyd and Ms. Derome, for very helpful presentations and for allowing us to get a lot of information in a short time. Thank you again for coming back.

The meeting is adjourned.