Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 19th, 2011

[John Percival]

We do very little drilling. Most of the work is based on small rock samples that are cut in the lab, so we don't do any drilling in the field.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

In your view, what's the accuracy of the actual finished product that you produce?

[John Percival]

It's difficult to assess. We publish maps at different scales. There's an implication when you have a map at a very regional scale that the accuracy is somewhat limited. The more detailed the map, the more accurate it is, but the less ground you can cover. For this program we're trying to cover large areas and get as much information as we can from them. Most of the maps we publish will be at regional scales, with somewhat limited accuracy.

For the purposes of this program, to attract industry, using those maps we can identify the geological environments where industries should dedicate their attention. We find the haystacks, the prospective zones, through that process. Then industry will pick up those prospective zones to do their detailed exploration in looking for their commodities of interest.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

I think Mr. Scott mentioned that in comparison with other countries we are somewhere in the middle. You mentioned Mexico. It's kind of a surprise to me that they're way ahead of us. Can you elaborate on why they're ahead of us? What do they have better than us in geological exploration?

[David J. Scott]

In the case of Mexico, as an example, it's physically a much smaller country and it's much more logistically accessible. The Mexican government has recently—I do not have exact dates off the top of my head, but they have completed a major regional mapping program of their entire country, analogous to what we currently have under way in the GEM program.

By comparison, it's our vast territory, the relative inaccessibility, and frankly, the absolute expense of going to the unmapped or inadequately mapped parts of Canada that are preventing us from having a national scale data set that's comparable to that of other countries. We're the second largest country in the world. All of our inadequately mapped areas are in the territories effectively where it's remote, difficult, and there are short field seasons. It's a financial and logistical challenge to undertake the techniques that Dr. Percival pointed out, to do the homework, to get on the ground, to do the ground truthing to come up with those maps, which are not the best available but are adequate to support the investment decisions with sufficient precision. And the precision varies within an individual map area. Some areas are more covered by drift and we don't know with certainty where the different bedrock units are; we can infer it from the geophysical measurements. In other places, where the bedrock is well exposed, we can put our fingers on the difference between this rock type and that rock type, and we know with absolute certainty where that boundary occurs between those things.

So it really is a combination of the size and the remoteness of Canada where the remaining inadequately mapped areas are. Other countries have had perhaps a more logistically straightforward way of doing it. Australia and Mexico have both recently invested in programs similar to GEM to bring their national knowledge bases up to modern standards. We're doing the best we can now with the current five-year program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Lizon.

Mr. Allen, up to five minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here.

There are just a few areas I'd like to explore. It's on your early slides where you talk about the intersection with the provinces and the federal government and the responsibilities that each have in these areas. You talked about the provinces where you have a presence. Is there any geomapping done in the other provinces, i.e. New Brunswick or Nova Scotia? Is any of the GEM work or anything like that being done in any of those provinces?

[Dr. Brian Gray]

No. The provinces that I covered earlier—I'll pull that out again—for the GEM program, and remember, it was mostly 75% targeted north of 60 and then 25% in the northern part of the rest of Canada.... So south of 60 it's British Columbia, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

When you look at your slide and you talk about the shared responsibilities and collaborating with provinces, territories, and stakeholders and geoscience within provincial boundaries to manage natural resource development, how is this overlap done? How is that coordinated? It seems to me that resource companies would want to be able to look at an overall map for the whole country, for example. We'd want to make sure we have all those areas closed where we might have gaps. How do you coordinate that? Then, who publishes those maps so that the companies can have a big idea of what's going on in all the areas of the country?

[Dr. Brian Gray]

I can start on the first part of that response. As far as the actual technical collaboration is concerned, my colleagues can continue on that.

Under the intergovernmental geoscience accord that I mentioned started in 1996 and is renewed every five years, this is an accord between all of the provinces that have an interest or capacity in geological sciences. I don't know the number of other provinces that have an analog to our geological survey; my colleagues might have that information. But to address specifically what you're saying, it doesn't make sense if we all have limited resources to do our own thing; we should be pooling our activity addressing, okay, what are the priorities?

This group is governed by a national geological surveys committee. We are represented on that by our director general of the geological survey. This group reports directly to—I believe, David, there's a ministerial committee—energy and mines ministers. This group reports in. They develop work plans, they develop strategic directions, and they report in to this collective federal-provincial ministers committee.

That's at the higher level, but then on programs like GEM, we're like a targeted geoscience initiative, which we didn't present today but it's another aspect of our forward-thinking science.

David, do you want to pick up on that?

[David J. Scott]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'll answer the most straightforward question first.

All jurisdictions in Canada, with the exception of Prince Edward Island, have geological survey organizations of one form or another.

As we introduced previously, it's the intergovernmental geoscience accord that guides those bilateral or in some cases trilateral discussions between ourselves and the jurisdictional surveys as to who does what. One distinguishing factor is, effectively, scale or resolution of mapping. We do the broadly regional scale work. That work is done completely south of 60, largely. The provinces work on the next generation of detail. We can always go back and look in more detail. We can map things at the scale of this room as opposed to the scale of the city of Ottawa, for example. The provinces do the more detailed work.

The discussions take place bilaterally, between ourselves. They also occur in group when the national geological surveys committee meets twice per year.

I will build upon a point Dr. Gray has introduced. GEM is our flagship program under the northern strategy to address those areas of Canada where the basic framework mapping is not adequate to support private sector investment. We do have a suite of other geoscience programs, including a climate change geoscience program that is functioning largely in the north. We have a groundwater geoscience program that's mapping groundwater aquifers across Canada, so we're working south of 60 exclusively in that case. We have a program called the targeted geoscience initiative, which is operating dominantly south of 60, across all of the other jurisdictions on areas where there's sufficient existing knowledge that there has been significant production in various parts of those jurisdictions. That production is in decline. By working with the provincial jurisdictions, largely, and the private sector we're trying to develop new models and new exploration techniques to allow them to vector towards more deeply buried, more hidden ore deposits. So we are working from coast to coast to coast with our suite of programs. The GEM program itself is dominantly targeted north of 60.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Allen. Your time is up.

We go now to Mr. Stewart for up to five minutes.

Go ahead please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank you for your presentation.

I think this is an excellent undertaking. I support this project. I think it's essential for Canada to know what's going on underground and just above ground. I also think that more data is always better than less data, so I think it's good to know regardless of how it's used.

My questions regard the end use of this information and really how this information trickles down to not just the industry but communities that are involved.

My experience in British Columbia is that co-managed projects, especially in non-treaty areas, are often much more successful in terms of the length of time it takes them to get going, and also whether they're eventually approved or actually if they start. Something former Premier Gordon Campbell figured out and put into practice in British Columbia would be the co-managed projects.

I'm just wondering how this information gets down to first nations and Inuit communities. It's great that they have these maps that are downloaded, but then what about the end-use expertise? Is there anything in this program that helps them develop that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Dr. Scott, would you mind answering?

[David J. Scott]

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

I think we're on the same page with respect to working as locally as possible with the local stakeholders, individual communities, and jurisdictional governments. Those more local are always more informed on what the issues are, what the desires are, what some of the best practices are. We've always worked hand in hand with the jurisdictions, and we work even more closely than we have previously worked at the community level.

With the guidance of our advisory group of northerners, we've really upped our game in terms of spending time in the communities well ahead of going in on the ground, first of all to explain our intentions and what we are trying to achieve, and to hear from them how best we might plan to achieve that as well as to better understand their concerns. We can then explain some of the technical tools in our tool box. By working with communities we can plan a much better approach. We can start to generate interest from the community and perhaps even get participation with us out on the land.

Many northern communities, both first nations and Inuit, have a lot of the land skills we need, and we can bring some of their promising students with us. We bring elders from the communities out to our camps to demonstrate how we're taking care of the land while we're temporarily out there for six or eight or ten weeks in the field season.

We return to the communities. Once we have our preliminary results, we take time on the way out of the field season to close the loop with teachers in the schools to let them know a little bit about what we found out. We talk to the hamlet councils and the HTAs, the hunters and trappers associations. We can't divulge specific details. We want to wait for public, simultaneous release of that, but we absolutely let them know about the general things we found out there on the land.

We're increasingly returning to the communities during the school year to visit the schools, to bring rocks that we found in their backyard back into the community so we can show the kids who didn't come to the field with us. We're working diligently to instill in the communities the idea that beyond their traditional knowledge of the land there's accessible scientific knowledge that they can also benefit from in their land use decision-making, beyond economic decision-making.

My personal belief is that there's very little we do as scientists that can't be explained appropriately in simple terms. We can do this with school kids. We can do this with hamlet councils. We can do this with regional associations. By building that comprehension of the value of basic geoscience knowledge--and whether it's for environmental management or parks planning or investment decisions, it's that same fundamental knowledge--we can help the local people understand the knowledge we generate so they can make better decisions at their own community scale, or at the scale of their region, and the knowledge can also be used externally by the private sector. It's all the same knowledge base. It serves many decision-making masters.

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

Thank you.

Maybe if I have time we can talk about the ability to expand the local capacity and how, if funding was reallocated again, that might be expanded.

I'm also interested in culturally sensitive sites. I'm just wondering how those factor into your mapping. Is there any combination...or when you find these sites or they are explained to you by local knowledge, do you add these into your mapping as well? Is this something you provide to industry?

Thank you.

[David J. Scott]

When we're on the land, we often go to places that the local folks would not go to, because they're not necessarily where they traditionally go to hunt, for example, or to gather berries at a specific time of the year. We go to places that make them think we're sometimes kind of crazy. They might wonder why we would bother going there, and that sort of thing.

As we do this, we often come across tent rings or obviously features that had been arranged by those who had been there prior to us. They're overgrown by lichen, so we know they're ancient. Our practice is to never disturb these things. We often record them photographically. We do report back to the communities that at such and such a location we found these features that no doubt are from those who have gone before us. We do not include those features in the scientific information that we put out to the public domain. We limit that to features about the geological aspects themselves, but where we can we do return that information to the local communities. In many cases they say, “Oh yes, we knew about that one.” We often get that sort of feedback.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Stewart. Your time is up.

We go now to Mr. Harris for up to five minutes.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, panel, for your input today. It's very interesting.

I just want to talk about the process of geomapping. I'm looking at page 9, and I see the helicopter with the hoop of string. Is that kind of like a LIDAR type of technology? I know they use that in the forest industry a lot. Do they use that or something similar for geomapping?

[John Percival]

Yes, it's a similar technique. This loop makes measurements not on the surface of the land, which LIDAR does, but it images the topography of the surface. This instrument makes measurements of, for example, magnetic properties of the rocks below the soil. The bedrock image is captured with this instrument. It flies back and forth on a regular grid, so we have a very complete picture of the bedrock. Even when we can't see the rocks, we know what's down there--at least an image of what's down there.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

On page 13 there's quite a colourful picture. I imagine this is a result of the technological picture that was taken on the fly-overs. Are these colours representative of different topography of the land, or do they identify the different types of rocks and materials that are above and in the ground?

[John Percival]

What you're seeing is a colour-coded image of the magnetic intensity of these rocks. The bright colours—the reds and purples—are relatively magnetic rocks and the blue colours are non-magnetic rocks. This particular map is from the previous generation of geophysical surveys that were flown in the 1970s in analog mode, so they came out as paper maps with contours on them. About 25 years ago we went through the process of digitizing all that and making it colour coded like this. So there were digital images available. However, the resolution of these was still very coarse.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

So page 15 would be a more up-to-date use of the technology.

[John Percival]

That's right. Both 14 and 15 show up-to-date images that were flown in 2009-10.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

I see there's a note identifying what could be a new belt of nickel potential. You can tell that by the colour that's produced from the fly-over. I guess it's a default that's built in and gives you that information.