Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 24th, 2011

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Based on what you are observing at present, should action be taken more robustly over the next decade?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

Pardon?

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Should government action be undertaken more firmly over the next decade, based on what you are observing at present? You note that we actually operate on an observation-reaction dynamic. How would your observations prompt us to act vigorously over the next decade?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

You cannot make a statement like that in a vacuum. It is true if we stop changing the atmosphere, things will settle down. If we stop adding things into the atmosphere, things will settle down, but you can't make it in a vacuum. You have to understand what's happening with the economy. You have to understand what's happening politically between countries. Just the diversity with respect to the third world starting and the western world being mid-stream in terms of industrial development, just that causes a huge political issue in meeting the targets for, say, something you want at Copenhagen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Lapointe.

The time is up.

Mr. Allen, you have 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 today.

I'd like to start with Mr. MacLean. I just have a couple of clarification questions on some of the items that were stated in the questioning. You were commenting about being able to see some of the challenges on the atmosphere. The pollution you saw in China is now coming into the north and into northern Canada.

Did I understand that correctly? Is it the same theory? Is seeing the same global warming somewhat of a Chinese phenomenon? Can you indicate how much is man-made and how much is natural, assuming the same thing?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

It is true that local sources of pollution travel around the world. That's a given. We see it every day with our satellite data. If you start with the Montreal Protocol, where they took baselines from the 1990 level, you can establish who is adding more anthropogenic substances into the air compared to who is not. It is clear that China and India are hitting way above the numbers that they should be.

Canada's numbers? Canada only has 2% of the total substance that is being injected into the atmosphere. If Canada were to clean up its 2%, it wouldn't change anything in the world at all. I think we should still meet our targets, but it wouldn't change anything. The space data tells you who is emitting and who has cleaner numbers.

That's about the best I can do.

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

I want to talk to you a bit about partnerships. We've talked about them in the presentations. I'm going to ask Mr. Ferguson to chime in on this as well as Mr. Moore.

The thing that struck me about this was some of the ozone monitoring.

Mr. MacLean, in your answer, you also said that a lot of our equipment is still travelling on other country's satellites. So in fact they are using our equipment to monitor these types of things. It seems to me we're still playing a leadership role in that.

I take the next point from your comments, where it says:

If Canada wants to take fuller advantage of some of the more than 250 satellites that will be launched by space nations in the next decade, many of them capturing images over Canada....

So truly this whole mapping and information is going to be an international thing that we're all participating in, and it's a great opportunity for us to all share the cost as well.

How would that model work in terms of these partnerships? And I'll take it down to the next level in Canada, to Mr. Ferguson's...the spatial data warehouse in Alberta. They seem to be able to bring all these disparate pieces together. So how can we build a partnership model with other countries that makes sense economically? And how do we then extend that into something like an Alberta model for Canada so that we have the best use of our information?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

There are 70 earth observation satellites up there right now. Canada has four of them. In ten years there will be somewhere around 280--more than 250--and those are the ones that are on the books right now.

Canada is a country of choice for downlinking, and that's because we are the country that is the furthest north, much further north than Russia. If we put three or four ground stations--and what I mean by ground stations is for telemetry control and downlinking of these satellites--those countries would love to downlink with us. One of the ways it works is that the data they obtain over Canada will be given to Canada free of charge--if we provide that service. Now, it costs us to provide that service, but I think this is a smart thing to do.

You take that, and then you couple it with the fact that there's an international data policy where the level zero data is going to be free; then the Government of Canada would take the data from those 250 satellites, plus the ones we have--and there's a plan with what each country does--and give that to the mining industry, and then the value-added sector of the mining industry would turn it into application products that suit and serve their needs. That's how I see that happening.

There are issues along the way on a data policy. You have to have everything on the same georeference. It is not right now. So it has to be redone, and that's something we need to clean up, which I believe Alberta, the data centre, is involved in. But this is something that will change how we get space data to the mining and exploration companies.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

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

We go now to Madam Day, for up to five minutes. Go ahead, please.

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

Good afternoon. My first question is for Steve MacLean and the next two are for James Ferguson. Since the interpretation is very good, you may answer in English.

Mr. MacLean, are you able to extrapolate the effect that development in the north will have in terms of pollution?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

I'll try to say this again, to answer the other question as well.

There are clearly changes that are taking place. Water temperature is going up. Air temperature is going up. Pollution indexes are changing and variable. Coastlines are changing with this, and that's a combination of the swelling because of the permafrost and also of what's happening in the water. Ocean currents are changing. From space, we don't measure that under the ice cap, but DFO is involved in measuring that. Atmospheric circulation is changing. We have parts of that but not all of it.

The way I'm going to try to answer this question is what I hinted at in the beginning. Development of the north is going to be accelerated by the space business, but we're also able to monitor what those companies are doing. For example, if a capped well head starts to leak in the Beaufort Sea, we'll see it from space, even though it's two or three kilometres under the surface of the water. We could actually see that if someone asked us to look in that area. If a ship that's going back and forth up the west coast starts to dump its bilges or is leaking oil, we will see that.

So we can help to prevent the pollution from taking place by measuring and monitoring it. If we do that across the whole Arctic...I think this is what the definition of “sovereignty” is. It is not that you have sovereign right to that area; it's that you have the capability to respond to the pollution that may be happening so that you're protecting the area.

I think what happened...you know, the northern waters pollution act, which was a way to show our sovereignty, which was what the government did in...I want to say 1974. That's a very difficult question, what is sovereign and what is not. But Canada has the right to control the pollution off its waters, so this was very smart to do that. And communities like ours can now measure that and protect the northern perimeter in such a fashion.

So we have assets that will promote the acceleration of the development of the north, and we have assets that will protect the countryside with respect to the development of the north. It's that balance that I feel we're trying to achieve.

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

Mr. Ferguson, you noted that geomatics also serves our communities and our businesses. You mentioned Google and Microsoft, for example.

Is geomatics completely funded by our governments, or do these companies share the expenses incurred?

[James Ferguson]

In the case of Google and Microsoft, they are buying data to put up on their websites. They acquire data through partnerships. Microsoft, for example, owns a company that builds digital sensors that collect data, so they actually have a commercial arrangement with them. They buy data from different satellites around the world. They buy data from other sources, if and where it's available.

Their model is to try to get as much data for as low a cost as possible, and if it is freely available they will use that as well.

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

Is it the same thing for companies that are going to develop natural resources, or do they use the data free of charge?

[James Ferguson]

When I hear discussions today of free data, as a practitioner and as a business person, I never think there's such a thing as free data. Someone has to pay for it, otherwise it doesn't get collected.

Open data, in our opinion, does not necessarily mean free data. I don't think any of our practitioners and the user community that we speak to will have any issues paying for data at a certain level, and licensing it, because many people can license the same data set and use the same data set over and over again, so the cost per user comes down significantly.

If you want to fly the city of Ottawa with photographs...if you're the only client, it will cost you lots of money; if you're one client of many, it will cost you a lot less. That's our opinion. That's our position on the cost of data.

[Le président, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mrs. Day.

We'll now go to Mr. Trost for up to five minutes.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Before I start my questions, Mr. Moore, in my last round you were talking a bit about the regulatory processes in Greenland and Newfoundland. We've got a few more minutes here. Would you care to give us a bit more detail about that, so we can have some idea if it's something we should include in our recommendations?

[Richard Moore]

My personal experience in the Greenland example is that they had an office where you would put forward your exploration plan, and then they would take that plan to each different department and ministry that had regulations controlling exploration and development within their jurisdiction.

This office was responsible for coordinating all the different responses from the different ministries, and then it would come back to you and you would respond by making changes to your plans or would note that there is an acceptance of the plan.

I understand in Newfoundland.... I was speaking with a colleague the other day. I don't have first-hand experience, but he has been operating in Newfoundland. They are about to have a web-based program where you put forward your exploration plan through the Internet to the government, and then this plan goes to the various ministries—environment, fisheries and oceans, and so on—and they take it all the way through, and then it comes back with requested changes or acceptance.

There's only one place to go, rather than three or four different ministries.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I remember I was working on a project, and the senior geologist had 20 years of experience. He was telling me that most of his time was spent in permitting rather than exploration work. I can see where the value would be there.

I'm putting together a few things from what Mr. MacLean and Mr. Ferguson were saying.

Mr. MacLean, you were saying that we gather all of this data from satellites, and we are able to compile it.

Mr. Ferguson also noted a little bit about national standards being somewhat necessary.

Have I put that together, that both of you are calling for national standards that would coordinate the various levels of data? Who should be responsible for that? What would be the cost, and in what sorts of timelines could that be done? I can see how it would be useful for data collection to be applied in the north.

I guess I'll let Mr. Ferguson start, and then Mr. MacLean, if he has any comments.

[James Ferguson]

I would say that's an accurate assumption, for sure, an accurate inference.

We know that all levels of government—regional, municipal, federal, provincial—do want to work together as users of this data in both collecting and using it. There have been some initiatives that have been started at the federal government level. There's one called the CGDI, which is the Canadian geospacial data infrastructure. It's been partially funded through a program in the federal government called Geoconnections, but we're not sure all the stakeholders that need to be there at this time have been there. But I would definitely—

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

So it could be expanded and accelerated.

[James Ferguson]

Absolutely.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Mr. MacLean, do you have some comments on that?

[Dr. Steve MacLean]

Basically I concur. Data has to be on the same georeference. All levels need to march to that georeference and proceed accordingly.