Science and Research Committee on Feb. 14th, 2023

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Thank you for this question.

I cannot speak to the program you mentioned, so I'm speculating here. My guess is that this is a program run by an NGO, which is probably in the English parts of Canada and does not have that federal bilingual mandate. Anything that flows or is run by Environment and Climate Change Canada—

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Marshall, I'll go back to you.

As a departmental science advisor, do you find it respectable that the federal government promotes English-only initiatives on its website?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

That's again a matter of opinion. That would be my personal opinion and not representative of the department.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Marshall, let me repeat the question.

As a departmental science advisor, do you find this respectable? Do you think this is a good way to do things?

Would you advise the government to do this and publicize a citizen science initiative in only one of the two official languages?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Again, as an adviser, I think it's clear that any of our own programs, anything run by a Government of Canada department, would be in both official languages. However, we don't have the purview or authority to advise external NGOs on their communications.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

As I understand it, Mr. Marshall, the federal government is not even complying with its own legislation, the Official Languages Act, which requires it to communicate in both official languages.

I hope you can pass on my message to the scientific community within the government itself. I hope you can influence public policy through your advice and enable communication in both official languages.

Quebec's chief science advisor, Rémi Quirion, came to talk to us about some of the programs like the engage program, from the Quebec government, which allows for the citizen science initiative. It is possible to get financial support and access to programs to support citizen science efforts.

Is there anything similar in your department?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

I may have to ask for a clarification on the question of public funding to support citizen science. We have funding that we direct towards citizen science programs sometimes as a grant contribution to an NGO, for instance. Sometimes it's a university partner, or sometimes it's our own program and we provide some funding to facilitate training or equipment in support of those programs.

Was that the question?

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you for your answer, Mr. Marshall.

I will just rephrase my question.

Is there any financial support for citizens to propose citizen research programs through your department?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Thank you for that. This is a great question. To my knowledge, we don't have a formal call for citizen science proposals, but when people approach us or when we're working with our partners.... For instance, if a university research project or Birds Canada is proposing a citizen science component, we will definitely listen and—

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

So your answer is no. From what I understand, there is no financial support.

As a departmental science advisor, would you advise the government to enable and develop programs with available and adequate financial support to ensure that a citizen science mobilization is created?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

There are vehicles for this, but I see that Aura Pantieras and the Canadian Wildlife Service has a contribution to support on this question.

[Aura Pantieras]

Thank you for your questions.

Collectively, over 100,000 Canadians contribute data to one or more citizen science surveys on birds.

This includes broad participation by French-speaking citizen scientists in numerous projects on eBird and in the Québec Breeding Bird Atlas.

Our department is working closely with partners to ensure that all these surveys have bilingual interfaces in Canada to support participation in both official languages.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

I'm sorry, but this is my time.

That is not what I was asking you.

I thank you for reading the line you just received in writing. I can clearly see that you are reading from a text that you just received regarding the initial questions I asked Mr. Marshall—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

I apologize, but we are over time right now.

Moving on to the next round, we have MP Cannings for six minutes.

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

Thank you.

Thank you to the witnesses here today. I'd like to start with Environment Canada, and perhaps Mr. Marshall or anyone else can chip in and talk.

Other members of the committee know I talk about birds a lot. The North American breeding bird survey was mentioned. This, I would say, of all the things we've heard about is probably one of the most important citizen science programs in the world, certainly in North America, because it creates very strong and usable data over decades so that we can follow the population trends of birds. In doing so, we can then make inferences about where the problems of our environment are happening. We've heard that we've lost three billion birds over the last 50 years or so. That data comes 99% from the breeding bird survey. This is a program that's administered in Canada by Environment Canada.

I'm just wondering if someone would like to expand on that—perhaps some of the history and where this is used. Again, I could probably expound on it, but I'll let you take the floor and talk about when we are declaring species as threatened or endangered or of special concern. For birds, that data comes largely from the breeding bird survey, and it is a bigger dataset, by far, than we have for any other animal, plant or wildlife species.

Mr. Marshall, I don't know if you want to take the floor on that, but I think the importance of this program is important to get on the record.

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Thank you for this question. Perhaps I could take a moment to thank you for your long-term work and investment in this. It's been valuable.

I believe this is a good question to turn to my colleague, Aura, to comment on.

[Aura Pantieras]

Thank you.

I echo your words, Shawn. I want to thank Mr. Cannings for his own long-term contribution to citizen science.

In general, the monitoring performed by citizen scientists—specifically, the breeding bird survey we coordinated with the U.S. and Mexican governments for several decades—helps, once it is validated and curated, and it contributes to decision-making for conservation. Some of those examples include evaluating conservation and management actions, and prioritizing the conservation activities we do. As we discussed, for example, it targets declines identified in aerial insectivore, grassland bird and shorebird migration. It helps with sustainable hunting. It also contributes to prioritizing conservation in land-use planning.

I think another key element worth noting is that it empowers Canadians to contribute to conservation actions, including, for example, turning that information into conservation activities to protect species at risk. As was noted, this information is used by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, which provides advice to the environment minister on risks to wildlife species. It can even be used in the context of regulatory decisions by the department.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to return to a comment made earlier, I think, by Mr. Marshall—or perhaps somebody else—about remote and northern indigenous communities and how they can play a role.

We obviously have vast areas in our country where it's very difficult to get professionals out on the land, water or ice to collect this data. Community members have been doing more of that for the scientists of Canada. I would like to name three programs I've come across, and I'm wondering whether Environment Canada uses data from these—perhaps just comment in general.

One is the Nunavik sentinels project, promoted by Espace pour la vie in Montreal. It gets community members in Nunavik in northern Quebec, especially young people, out on the land to collect information on insects. The Arctic Eider Society in Sanikiluaq, by Hudson Bay, does similar things, and there's a new phone app called SIKU through the Indigenous Knowledge Social Network, which promotes the gathering of this sort of data.

Is Environment Canada using any of these programs in northern Canada?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the question.

You're absolutely right. Northern Canada is the place where we very much need indigenous guardians and citizen science to expand our observational capabilities.

I might turn to my colleague Jennifer Provencher, who can speak more specifically to those three programs.

[Dr. Jennifer Provencher]

Thank you. I can speak a bit more to those programs.

The sentinels program is an academic program that is certainly supported through several different academic networks. The idea is to go out on the land, make many different types of observations and bring them into a central place.

Environment and Climate Change Canada has been more involved with the Arctic Eider Society, as well as SIKU. The Arctic Eider Society is focused around southern Hudson Bay and was the parent of SIKU.

I can spend a little more time on SIKU. This is an indigenous and Inuit Facebook that is specifically codesigned with partners. Academia and Environment and Climate Change Canada have been involved, along with community members in Sanikiluaq and other areas. The idea was to design and put online an application, so Inuit can be out on the land and report their observations as they travel. We have partnered and developed functionality within the app so hunters can report dead or sick birds. There is work with our scientists working on polar bears and their health, and when hunters and harvesters are hunting or working with animals they've harvested, they can report any abnormalities in the physical condition of the animals. That information is owned and controlled by SIKU and the indigenous co-collaborators on—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

I'm sorry, but we are out of time for that round of questioning. Maybe in future questions you can expand further on that.

Moving on to the five minute round, we have MP Soroka.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for coming today.

Because we're doing so much on the bird study, I was curious about the controls we have in place for accurate information from citizen scientists when dealing with bird deaths, either from buildings, windows, stray cats or wind turbines.

How do we determine that they're reporting all of the deaths as opposed to maybe half of the deaths or something? What kind of information do we have with safeguarding that?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

I know we're working on analyses of bird mortality with colleagues in universities.

I might turn it back to you again, Jennifer, to fill in a little bit on some of those partnerships.

[Dr. Jennifer Provencher]

Sure.

One of the things that Environment and Climate Change Canada has supported is the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative. This is the network of vet colleges and veterinarian groups across Canada from coast to coast to coast in both of our official languages.

There is a hotline where the CWHC can receive calls. You may have seen this recently in relation to the bird flu, or avian influenza. What the CWHC does with the ECCC support is understand, using those types of reports both through digital [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I have a point of order.