Natural Resources Committee on May 8th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Do you have a comment?

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

Yes, I have two comments.

First of all, I think we should reinvite them. I think it says “recall” them, but I don't think we really have the power to recall them. We could reinvite them to come, then.

Just for the record, Mr. Chair, the specific reason we were unable to hear from some—or all—of these witnesses was because of goings-on in the committee related to motions that were being brought forward. I just wanted to state that I think it's important we note that. I do think it's important that we hear from them and I just wanted to state it as a matter.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Chair, I find it surprising that the Liberals wouldn't agree wholeheartedly that the issue we debated—which delayed those witnesses—the Trans Mountain expansion, given the deadline and the fact that we only have two weeks left to receive the legislation the Liberals keep saying is coming, although no one over there seems to have a clue when it's coming, under which ministry it will be put forward, or what it will actually be, and given that there are only two weeks left of the sitting days for members to debate that, to be consulted, and to do all the things the Prime Minister promised Canadians and all of us, as elected representatives, that opposition members would be able to have meaningful roles—of course that's baloney—and full consultation and consideration.... I would assume the Liberals would actually be in complete support of the fact that ensuring that the Trans Mountain expansion gets built is an emergency and absolutely urgent, given the deadline. Really, then, we could just vote on my motion to have this study, and we could move forward with it immediately. Then we could get back on track with the data energy study— I'm not done yet—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I wasn't interrupting you, for the record.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

—with no interruptions for witnesses, because we're on a very short timeline now. I think common sense would dictate that this committee taking responsibility for ensuring that the Trans Mountain expansion goes forward should be our highest priority, notwithstanding the importance of this study as well.

I would even agree with the testimony of the witness here, that energy policy is currently a mess in this country and that this would be—I would say—partly because the Liberals had aligned with the anti-energy opponents by attacking Canada's long-time track record as the most environmentally and socially responsible oil and gas producer in the world. This includes constantly attacking the NEB—the independent, objective, evidence- and expert-based regulator, which has been renowned for decades as the best in the world. Now we have arrived—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I am going to interrupt you now because we are off topic.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

Now we have arrived at this place—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

We have a motion on the table, which I sense we have agreement on, and part of the objective is—

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

I think we could have done that very easily.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

—to carry on with the witnesses, two of whom we have sitting before us, so I suggest that rather than continuing this, we use the time left to deal with this motion quickly, and then allow these witnesses to finish answering some questions. That, in my view, would be the best use of our time.

Let's vote on Mr. Schmale's motion, as amended, changing “recall” to “reinvite”.

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

Mr. Falk, I have bad news for you. You don't have any time to ask questions.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

I thought as a gesture of goodwill....

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I would recommend you turn to your right and bring that up.

In the meantime, Mr. Cannings, you have the floor.

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

Thank you both for being here today.

I want to start with you, Mr. Lourie, and just pick up on something Mr. Harvey said, kind of a high-elevation statement. You said if we had good data, we might not be in the policy mess we're in today. Earlier, Mr. Fogwill said that trust is more important than the data. I wonder if you could maybe expand on that, on the importance of having good credible data that we can all agree on and of doing good analysis independently, and on how those fit into a place where we can get good energy policy going in Canada.

[Bruce Lourie]

Credibility and trust around data are fundamental in this, and I think the way those get built is to actually have something that has a degree of independence to it so that it is an agency that wouldn't just be kind of ripped out or altered or influenced at the whim of governments.

I really think too that we do have some very good institutions in this country, which we can rely on to be part of such a structure, and Statistics Canada would certainly be one of them. But I think even if you look at how the Energy Information Administration in the U.S. operates these days, they've gone very much beyond the old statistics-gathering model of “We're going to do surveys. We're going to commission it all ourselves. We're going to figure it out all ourselves. We're going to hold onto it for several years and analyze it all ourselves, and then we're going to decide whether or not anyone else should see it, and there are going to be all kinds of onerous privacy restrictions basically preventing data from being used.” That actually undermines the ability to use the data, and it undermines people's faith in the system.

I think Statistics Canada is moving forward on things, but we also really need to move to a model under which we can figure out who has the best data and how we can get access to that data. Again, on the example of electricity in Ontario, there is so much data that we don't know what to do with it. The issue is how we get it organized in a rigorous way so that anyone can look at it and analyze it and use it, as opposed to the system we have right now, which is very piecemeal.

I think independence and credibility are what build trust.

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

Okay.

I want to move onto timeliness. This seems to be a real theme today, from other witnesses as well. Mr. Mustard also brought it up. I remember the first time the NEB appeared before this committee, they presented a report that was clearly completely out of date, and I don't know whether that was their fault or the fault of the data that they were given. I'm just wondering if both of you could comment on timeliness of data and how we can move to a system that is more based.... Data is coming in all the time in real time. How can we make that data available to people and get away from this two-, three-, four-, or five-year backlog of data?

[Donald Mustard]

I guess we have to get over the fear to tap into the actual data stream. We—our regulatory frameworks and our government frameworks—still operate and work in a model that says, “Give us what you want, once you've had time to go through it and sort it out, and we'll have a look at it.”

There are opportunities now. Industry has moved way ahead of us in terms of processes. In many of our activities, the information is there and readily available. It's simply about establishing a framework where, instead of having a human interaction in the data process, we simply go and get the data directly.

One of the biggest sources of error in data is the human input. If you have a process whereby somebody puts together a report, types it onto a piece of paper, and sends it over to you as an email, and then you get it on your end and you get somebody to type it into your data system, you've just caused not only a massive delay but a disaster on the data, which is unnecessary. You could have had the same information they're collecting to make the report just fed into your machine. We now have the automated processes to handle that. They do these kinds of things much better than we do. We're just not quick enough and never will be.

[Bruce Lourie]

Yes, I would agree with that. I think the hard part, really, is to stay ahead of the systems that will help us do this, to not get bogged down in the bureaucracy of data collection, and to really try to be as open and transparent as possible in regard to the new technologies that are available.

[Donald Mustard]

One of the real keys—I didn't get a lot of time to talk about it—is the Internet of things technology, the industrial Internet of things.

I'll give you a quick example. I did an investigation a couple of years ago. A runaway crude oil car collided with a standing train and derailed a bunch of cars. We went to look at the car. There was this device on top of one of the tank cars. I thought to myself, “I wonder what that is.” Somebody used to call me “Inspector Clouseau” and I'd say, “I'm not Clouseau, I'm Columbo: I have one more question.” I went to the source and found out what the tool did. I found out that it took GPS. It took G-forces in three dimensions. It gave the peak impact duration as well, and the time. We got data that we couldn't have gotten otherwise.

When we put that data into the system, what we found out was that the tank car had experienced a force four times the design capacity of the car. Then the obvious question becomes, how come this thing didn't make the six o'clock news? Well, again, because we got this data, we found the telemetry data: the impact duration was only five one-hundredths of a second. You had this massive impact on the car, and then it released before it had fully crumpled. It had actually buckled. There was a small buckle in the car, because essentially the train had hit with a crumple zone and the forces were transmitted through once they got the locomotives moving.

The point is, why aren't we accessing that data? Ask yourselves. Do we say that obviously this is way too expensive to get? These sensors on a car cost $150 a year. It's chicken feed. Why that's not a requirement on every tank car, I don't know. On the comparison between pipeline and rail, for instance, I don't think there's anything inherently that says—I investigate both—one is safer than the other, except that the pipeline has sensors in every foot of it and is being constantly monitored. But for that tanker train, it leaves the station and gets to the other end, and there are few steps along the way where they have a look at it. The reality is that you could be watching it in the same way, and one tank car derailing is a lot different from having 30, 40, or 50 derail.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Serré, you have about three minutes left—maybe four.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Some witnesses mentioned the need for a data base. My question is for both witnesses.

We sometimes hear the opposition say that there has been a problem for the past two and a half years and that we don't have data.

You said that we had missed opportunities over the past years. With regard to this lack of data, what era are we talking about? Are we talking about 20, 30, 40 or 50 years where we did not have the data to make decisions regarding very important projects? This reality does not only concern the past two years, but decades.

Is that the case or not?

[Bruce Lourie]

Right now, we're not able to make those long-range decisions, because we don't have the data infrastructure in place, so ultimately, this will help us. It's more than just creating the data. We have to create other systems within the government that will allow us to make that long-range kind of thinking, and use it for long-range, multi-decade planning, so I would support that.

[Donald Mustard]

The data typically now is attached to the process. You have something you want to do, you want to count widgets, and you collect the data for counting those widgets. You process it, and you have a very effective system for collecting and using that data to count widgets. That data may be perfectly valid for counting glasses, but because it's over here, we go and collect another set of data, that repeats the other set of data, and does it again.

We need to get away from this idea that data is in this repository. It's in a warehouse, and we can't get at it. That's the change in mindset. Yes, there are structural issues, but Amazon doesn't care about the location of the data. In fact, with all these big entities, the data is in a cloud. They go and get it. People who are given permission to the data can get the data, and people who aren't can't get the data. They build in security systems that are probably better than what our banks are using, and they're very effective at doing that.