Natural Resources Committee on Sept. 27th, 2016

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

To run electric versus diesel, is it a cost benefit to run electric, or is that just truly to meet some GHG targets that you're doing that?

[John Mullally]

I was excited that you asked that, so I forgot.

You actually have a net-net decrease in electricity when you run electric equipment. It's always better to deploy electric equipment for the consumption of electricity because of this reduction in ventilation. I spoke about it earlier. Ventilation in our underground mines is half of our electricity consumption. If you have fewer pollutants in the air, then you have to ventilate much less. You can imagine pushing air down from the surface almost a kilometre underground in various different locations takes a tremendous amount of fan power.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

How about on the surface, supplied electricity versus diesel power electricity?

As I was mentioning, in our area they have a 10-megawatt power bank...the 10 diesel-powered...the largest engines I've seen running their power generation. They say that's more efficient than just buying it off the grid.

[John Mullally]

Thankfully, we do have an incentive to get off that. We also have about 12 megs of backup generation there. There is incentive to get off because the power on the grid is cheaper.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

You mentioned UNDRIP a little bit. I normally sit on the indigenous and northern affairs committee. We got a letter from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce saying that the current UNDRIP promises have led to some significant reduction in just any projects going forward because nobody knows how it's going to go, and they've laid out a nice template on which way to go on UNDRIP.

Do you have any suggestions for us on that?

[John Mullally]

I sound like a broken record a little bit on this, but we really rely.... We think that the social licence to operate—that's not my favourite term—which really is granted, denied, given, or withheld, I'm not going to use the C-word, occurs on the ground with the community. We work directly with the communities, and the more we understand, again, issues, impacts, and how we can include our communities in the development of the project....

In terms of UNDRIP or Supreme Court decisions, or even the section 35, it doesn't provide, in practice—this is from experience—clarity for the proponent on the ground. We think there's an opportunity to look at a principled framework that aligns interests for industry, first nations, and government, and that potentially gets people to a better understanding, a consensus, over what projects work and don't work. This is not to say that projects always work, but if they don't, then you understand right away and you move on.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. McLeod.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

Thank you for the very interesting presentations. I'm quite impressed with the involvement aboriginal people have with the mining industry and with your companies.

I come from the Northwest Territories. Mining is playing a very big role in the areas of employment, training, and working with our aboriginal communities. It's certainly a way for our younger people to find employment and training, and become a very viable part of the community.

We have quite a few mines. We just had a diamond mine announce their opening in Gahcho Kué. They will be bringing over six and a half billion dollars to the NWT economy.

I see so many good things from the mining industry. My son works with the mine. He's been there almost 15 years. He went right from high school into the industry, and he stayed there. He's making a very good living.

I've also been watching, with interest, how the mines deal with communities. I know for a fact that for Gahcho Kué there are five impact benefit agreements and training. They've signed agreements on with the communities. There's been a real sense of relief from the communities that the mine is there.

We have other mines. I heard you mention Rio Tinto, a gold mine in the Tlicho area that we'd like to see move forward. They have challenges. We, in the north, have very little in terms of roads and adequate airports. Only 12 out of 33 of our communities have roads. Even though this mine isn't there yet, there are a number of communities where there are no roads. To make it viable, we'll need roads.

Our government has promised to review the environmental assessment process to make it more modern, more accountable, and more credible. I wanted to ask if you could tell me what you see as the role for indigenous Canadians in evaluating the mineral resource development projects. We have had some of the regulatory boards from the Northwest Territories come up and talk about how they've included aboriginal people. Some 50% of their boards are aboriginal and it seems to work well. I just want to ask if you've looked at that whole area.

[Pamela Schwann]

I think I mentioned that one of the reasons we feel we have significant public support is because indigenous people are not just involved at the EA stage. By then, if you're already at the environmental assessment stage, you're well into knowing you have a good thing in terms of development, so it starts before that.

We've had a number of review panels in Saskatchewan, starting with the Bayda Commission back in the 1970s, that really laid down the foundation for stating that local communities that are most impacted by mine development should have preferential treatment in terms of employment and business opportunities. I think that really is what laid the foundation for the great participation we have in northern Saskatchewan of first nations and Métis people.

Then we had subsequent commissions that established mechanisms, like the environmental quality committees, where people from impacted communities meet regularly with the provincial regulators and also with the federal regulators—CNSC is involved in that—to learn about what's happening at the companies, the mine sites, and elsewhere.

I think it starts long before an environmental assessment review. It starts early on in the process.

There's intervenor funding that's available to first nations and Métis communities to ensure that there's understanding of very technical documents.

We've also seen business developments. The Lac La Ronge Indian Band has a company called CanNorth Environmental Services, which is really one of the leading environmental service providers in northern Saskatchewan. They've recently expanded, I believe, to have an office in Ontario.

I think there's more capacity that's being built up, but I think there also still needs to be more understanding of environmental western science in some of the first nations and Métis communities as well as an understanding of traditional knowledge by panel members. Your suggestion of having an indigenous person as part of the panel has merit as well. We did see that on one of our panels. Chief John Dantouze participated for part of the federal-provincial panel on uranium panel hearings in the mid-1990s.

[John Mullally]

I have one comment on your question, Mr. McLeod.

I can say right from the outset that you get on the land at the planning and permitting stage, when you're literally having no impact but walking the land, and already consultation and discussion with the communities start. With any of the early exploration permits—the air, water, noise, industrial sewage, and anything that's going on with water, streams and rivers—all the way along there's a tremendous amount of consultation. It's not really consultation as much as it is inclusion...where those things don't advance. There's a tremendous amount of discussion there.

At Éléonore in Quebec with the Cree, the environmental impact statement was basically co-written, so we worked with our Cree partners at that time. We already had the relationship fully in place, and the agreement was far enough down the road that there wasn't something we were trying to get somebody to agree to. We were working together, collaborating, and moving that forward.

I think the level of integration, just from what I've witnessed, is very high.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Cannings, you have three minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Schwann, I just want to talk about COSEWIC. I have to take exception to your comments about COSEWIC being non-scientific. I was co-chair of COSEWIC for eight years, and I can assure you that I was very impressed during those eight years with how careful and scientific that organization is. If anybody wants to see COSEWIC in action—this is a committee on the status of endangered wildlife in Canada—they meet every year in the last week of November in Ottawa. They welcome observers, so please come.

Getting to caribou in particular, I don't know the science or data on caribou in Saskatchewan. I know that woodland caribou are collapsing in various parts of the country, that's why they were listed as threatened. I know that in Saskatchewan they've banned sport hunting because they are so concerned about populations.

If your organization were telling the government how to regulate the cumulative impacts on threatened species such as caribou, how would you do that? This is not just an iconic species—it's on our quarter—but it's a key species of the boreal forest. How would you assure all Canadians that those populations would be viable in the long term through regulation of cumulative impacts?

[Pamela Schwann]

I think it's understanding what your population is. I'd be happy to send you all of our responses back to COSEWIC that question the data that's being pulled before these listings because there's certainly been more than just a handful of cases. I'll be happy to forward that to you.

Any time an environmental assessment is done, just as an example, there's the population, demographics, and a profile of a number of different species, which are provided as baseline data. None of that data is ever compiled. We've had a dozen environmental assessments from various projects that have gone in. There is no compilation of the data. It sits in isolated pockets. It should be compiled by a government, so everything is available for everybody to see and use. That has not been done. We undertook the effort actually to pay to have that done, particularly for the caribou, and submitted it to Environment Canada. These were all environmental assessments that were done. Environment Canada refused to accept that data.

These are some fundamental things that shouldn't happen. They are all science-based. They're done by consultants who are professional in their work. We need good data and we need good databases in order to make good decisions. We see things in silos right now rather than integrated, and I'm sure Saskatchewan is not alone in that. I'm sure if you tried to find a comprehensive database for other species in other areas, you would have the same issue. I think there certainly could be some collaboration amongst the jurisdictions in developing and sharing databases.

The caribou recovery strategy plan was based on a model for caribou populations in Quebec. It had nothing to do with Saskatchewan. It had to do with linear developments that came from Alberta, where you had intensive oil and gas disturbance, and you needed a 500-metre buffer in terms of linear disturbance.

The fellow who is in charge of that study, Dr. Phil McLoughlin, said it was inappropriate to use that buffering in northern Saskatchewan because it was not the same type of disturbance. We have 3% man-made disturbance in northern Saskatchewan. We have a fire regime that causes over 45% natural disturbance, which is natural. According to Environment Canada's recovery strategy, they don't want to let any development happen with anything more than a 35% disturbance.

When you have a fire regime that's 45%, which happens on a more regular basis than 40 years, how are you going to have any sort of development? We know our caribou populations are there. Under Environment Canada's model, theoretically there would be zero caribou in northern Saskatchewan. We know that there is a healthy population. Their model is wrong. They need to realize that.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you. I'm going to have to stop you there.

Unfortunately, we are out of time. I just wanted to say thank you to both of you again for taking the time to come in. This is a wide-ranging topic, and as you can see, we could go on for much longer than the time we're allotted. I appreciate both of you coming, not only attending, but also the focus of your presentations.

[John Mullally]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Okay, we're going to suspend for two minutes, and then we're going to go in camera and talk about committee business.

[Proceedings continue in camera]