Natural Resources Committee on May 8th, 2018

[Dr. Nichole Dusyk]

To pick up on what Mr. Fogwill said, that funding is really critical. You might need to mandate an extended funding period, up to 10 years, at the beginning of the organization, to ensure that stability and ensure it gets created.

There are a number of models that would work. Ones that are partially housed within government are workable and potentially less resource-intensive, but again it really comes down to the functions you want it to perform and this issue of public trust and independence, which are really linked.

I don't have a definite answer, but I think that rather than the actual structure itself, what you want that structure to achieve and whether you can achieve it with the model needs to be put at the forefront.

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

I'd just like to switch gears now and talk about timeliness of data.

Mr. Israël mentioned that things are changing rapidly, and that to keep abreast of things we need timely data. I am wondering if perhaps both groups here could comment on what kinds of data tend to take the longest to get. Why is that, and how could we fix it? Is that, again, a problem with the system, or is it just a problem with how the data is gathered right now?

[Allan Fogwill]

It's a bit of both, and I'll speak from the perspective of information coming from Statistics Canada.

At the Canadian Energy Research Institute, we use a lot of Statistics Canada data. We use it for our economic models for input and output analysis. There's a lot of information behind those tables, and it's very vital that the information be gathered, vetted, and then put into the tables themselves. At the national level, you can get a table for last year's information probably 18 months after the end of the year, maybe a year. The real meat of the matter is understanding the product and material flows between the provinces and the details behind that, and that takes three to four years for that same year. Right now we're doing analyses on interprovincial and international flows at the provincial level that are from 2013, and we just got those. We were using 2011 data until very recently.

When we're talking about some significant changes in the electricity system, the oil system, or the natural gas system, it will take a long time for those models to be put together. Once they're run by analysts, they're often broken, because it's not always right the first time. It might take another six months for them to be useful, so you could be looking at five years before you've got good analytical tools to tell you what happened five years ago in a different situation.

[Dr. Nichole Dusyk]

I'll let Mr. Israël comment on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

If you can do it very quickly.

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

Do you want to comment quickly on that?

[Benjamin Israël]

Sorry, yes. I have a hard time hearing you.

I can definitely build on what Mr. Fogwill was saying.

At the Pembina Institute, we typically work with data from two years back. Even with that, whenever we have data from two years ago, like on greenhouse gas emissions, for example, we have data from 2016, but we still spend a lot of time going through some inconsistencies. Sometimes you have some kind of recalculations with the datasets compared to the previous years, so you always have a bit of reconciliation to do. It's not only that the data is coming late, like two years after the year it is for, it's also that you need to spend a bit of time to try to understand it and make sure you fully understand it.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you and stop you there.

Mr. Serré.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am going to share my speaking time. Mr. Harvey said he had an important question to ask.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you, Marc.

I just want to highlight something very quickly. It's not even so much as a question as it is a statement.

The NEB's modernization panel studied this issue and added something. You know, I've sat on public accounts, and every department is struggling with data. It just seems to be this overarching problem that's across the broad strokes of government. We can never seem to have relevant data in a relevant time frame that allows us to make accurate decisions.

Their recommendation was that an independent organization that would be federally funded and at arm's length from government could take all the relevant data from the sources that were willing to participate with it and use that data to make better and more informed decisions about how we create energy policy in this country.

Just in this last five minutes, we've been talking about how we're utilizing data from five or six years ago, and some of it is from eight years ago. That's crazy. If I told that to somebody in the private sector, and I was working for them, they'd just say, “Get out”, but because it's government, you can get away with that. It makes no sense at all.

The reason I made the earlier comment that it should not be within the purview of the NEB in my opinion is that I believe it needs to be an arm's-length institution that's not looking for funding but is simply there to give Canadian people relevant data so that they can form an opinion about energy policy in this country.

That's all I want to say.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Mr. Fogwill, you mentioned the importance of establishing an independent agency. That was one of your recommendations. We also have to get the trust of the provinces that have natural resources and jurisdictions that have data. There's a complexity there. Even if we had millions of dollars to set up this independent agency, we still have the challenges of ensuring we get the buy-in and agreement of all the provinces and all the stakeholders for national energy programs.

Before I go to you, I want to ask Ms. Dusyk: If we don't have the millions of dollars to set up an independent agency, what are the gaps right now with NRCan and Statistics Canada? What could we do to get this data more real-time and more relevant today? If we have the millions of dollars, we'll set up the independent agency. If we don't, what can we do specifically, today, to get better data?

[Dr. Nichole Dusyk]

Part of the rationale behind the model we proposed was that it is doable. Statistics Canada has the mandate to collect the information. It has relationships with the provinces.

I will let Mr. Israël comment on what we can do to get more timely data, immediately.

[Benjamin Israël]

That's a great question because I'm not totally familiar with how the bodies work, internally. I'm sure something is feasible. I think there should be better coordination across agencies so they at least produce consistent data, so you don't have one body saying energy demand is that, and another one saying it's actually 20% higher, or this kind of thing. This often happens.

It's about coordination. Maybe one way of doing it would be to release some preliminary reports like StatsCan is doing for a couple of datasets. We always need to take it with a grain of salt because it's preliminary, but at least we have the feeling that it's coming earlier, and we can have a better sense of what's currently happening.

More concretely, maybe they should also start releasing quarterly data, as opposed to yearly data like the way it is now. They can do some reconciliation of this data. Annual aggregation at the end of the year, more granular data, quarterly data, or even monthly data could be really helpful here.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Fogwill, do you have any recommendations on this independent agency? How do we get the agreement and trust to move forward with the private sector and provinces to look at an independent agency?

[Allan Fogwill]

I think the first challenge—that there's a general recognition we need something—is already overcome.

The second challenge is going and talking to the provinces and the various industrial sectors, and saying you're serious. Then they will start listening.

It's not going to be easy. There are some provinces that won't sign on, as there have been with other national collaborative approaches we've seen. That's not necessarily a disaster. You're out there, you're wearing all your issues on your sleeve, and saying you want to do this because you want to develop something for the country and in the public interest.

That means when you're talking about what the organization is going to be and do, you have to be open to compromise. If you go in there and say the organization is going to be this and do that, and one of the provinces says that doesn't fit with what they would like to see happen, you're not going to get their buy-in. Buy-in is vital.

It doesn't matter if we all call this a glass, or a flagpole, or a panel. As long as we all agree, we can move forward. The trust is more important than the data. The trust exercise has to come first.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Ms. Dusyk, could you provide a specific recommendation to the committee on what we could do for Stats Canada and NRCan to enhance, to fill in the gaps of specific data afterwards? That would be useful.

[Dr. Nichole Dusyk]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

We're going to suspend for a moment and bring in our next set of witnesses.

Thank you very much for joining us this morning. As you can see, we don't always have enough time to keep everybody happy, but that's the job I was given. I've got to keep people equally unhappy. We are united in our gratitude for your coming in today.

[Allan Fogwill]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

We have two witnesses joining us for the second hour. We have Mr. Bruce Lourie from the Ivey Foundation, and Donald Mustard as an individual.

Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us today. The process is that each of you will be given up to 10 minutes to make a presentation, and then following that we'll open the table to questions.

Mr. Lourie, why don't we start with you, sir.

[Bruce Lourie, President, Ivey Foundation (Toronto)]

Merci beaucoup.

My name is Bruce Lourie, and I'm president of the Ivey Foundation.

The Ivey Foundation is a 70-year-old philanthropic granting and policy research organization. We have today a programmatic mission to help Canada transition to a low-carbon future using evidence-based policy and communications. Our goal is to better integrate the economy and the environment. We're basically an independent organization that provides grants and undertakes research in the low-carbon economy, and we support many of the groups that are working in Canada , such as the Ecofiscal Commission and Clean Energy Canada. I've done a lot of work with a previous speaker, Allan Fogwill, at CERI. We basically work with groups across the country.

Our work has included—and I think Allan mentioned this—convening experts across the country. We've done workshops in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver, bringing together energy regulators, energy companies, provincial governments, Statistics Canada, the National Energy Board, NGOs, expert private modellers, experts from the U.K., and experts from the U.S. basically to help understand how we can create a more rigorous energy-data and energy-modelling capacity in this country.

One of the things that we discovered in that—and I'll share just a couple of anecdotes—is that if you're a Canadian energy-resources researcher or an energy-systems modeller or a climate-policy consultant, I'm not sure if you know where you are likely to get your data and information from. It's not Natural Resources Canada. It's not the Department of Environment and Climate Change. It's not Statistics Canada. It's the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Most of us in Canada doing research on these things actually have to go to a U.S. department to get the data that's compiled for us by this American government agency. Of course it's worth considering that, given the geopolitical context right now in North America, and given that we're doing things like negotiating NAFTA, I can almost guarantee that some of the information that we're using in those negotiations was generated by the U.S. government. I think that's a situation that clearly needs to change.

Canada's energy information systems were once very well regarded, but I'm going back many decades now. The support for science and energy data began to unravel in the mid- to late 1990s with precipitous declines through the early 2000s and up until very recently. I heard a story recently of two federal government climate change policy experts, one in Canada and one in the U.S. The Canadian was saying, “We wonder how in the U.S., with all of your data infrastructure, your energy experts, your think tanks, and your sophisticated models, you cannot come up with any national climate policies.” The American replied, saying, “That's funny. We always wonder how, given that you have none of those, you still manage to in Canada.”

We have a challenge in this country. The reality is we're—

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

We'll be getting into that a little later.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Yes, we will.

[Bruce Lourie]

The reality is that we're kind of bumbling along blindly, and by blindly I mean we have limited information. We have a lack of access to that information, and a lack of transparency around the information we have and how it's used.

I really wonder how we can have an intelligent debate in this country on the emissions potential of carbon pricing if we don't have the data to understand that. How can we have an intelligent debate on the environmental effects of pipelines if we don't have the data and we don't agree to a common set of data across this country?

One of the reasons why people always wonder how industry can say this, environmental groups can say this, and governments can say this—and they all have different answers and different numbers—is because we don't have a shared set of common, adequate, high-quality data in this country. Given that we often talk of Canada being an energy superpower, the reality is that when it comes to energy data, we are anything but an energy superpower.

I would go so far as to say that if some of this information and institutional infrastructure had been available 10 years ago, or perhaps even two years ago, we probably wouldn't be in the energy policy mess we're in today.

There are some great international examples, and I'm going to touch on one. Imagine a world where energy and climate data are made available to researchers, industry, and NGOs alike. Then, imagine well-funded modelling experts producing multiple sophisticated energy and economic models to inform policy. Add to that what I can only describe as the pinnacle of evidence-based policy-making, a group of independent experts with the mandate to set long-range climate policy goals based on expert models and scenarios, and that this evidence produces carbon budgets extending 10 years into the future, and that this is used by governments and evaluated, with the results fed back into those models to inform the next five-year planning window.

This isn't fantasy; this is exactly what the U.K. does. It's called the Committee on Climate Change. We know it can be done, and this frankly isn't a complicated matter.

Everything is politically complicated in Canada, but technically this isn't that challenging. The U.S. does it. The Energy Information Administration in the U.S. does it. The International Energy Administration in Europe does it. The U.K. does it; they do a very good job of it. I think we have a clear consensus in this country, based on the research we've done, the convening we've done, the experts we've talked to, that it isn't that hard for Canada to move forward on it.

Under the pan-Canadian framework, we've committed to an expert engagement mechanism to support climate policy with independent advice. It's been excruciatingly slow for that to develop. I think that needs to move forward. We don't just create energy data because it's fun having energy data; we create energy data so we can use it to inform policy. That's another mechanism that's needed.

I'll end with three main points.

One, we need to build the energy information capacity in this country, and we strongly believe that creating a Canadian energy information organization is something that's well needed. This needs to be an independent entity, and conceived as a partnership between groups like Statistics Canada, NRCan, Department of Environment, and other relevant energy data groups, experts, provinces, and the private sector across Canada.

Two, we need to support independent modelling and analysis. Our capacity in this country has declined to a state where we basically don't have the fundamental modelling and analysis we need to make these complex decisions. I know you heard from David Layzell at University of Calgary a couple of weeks ago, talking about a transition pathways initiative. We are strong supporters of that, and believe that kind of cutting-edge work is needed in this country.

Finally, we need an independent climate expert institute in Canada that will use the modelling and analysis to help provide the policy advice we need to the country. Again, it needs to be independent, transparent, evidence based, and expert. This was referenced in the pan-Canadian framework, but it has been very slow to emerge.

I've provided a couple of little graphics in my speaking notes that you can look at to see how these things might fit together.

With that, I'll thank you very much for considering this important issue and for having me present today. Merci.