Science and Research Committee on Feb. 14th, 2023

[Dr. Arash Shahsavarani]

With respect to the CABIN program, we've estimated it to be about $1,000 per sample or data generated, which basically means that, on an annual basis, we get a return of about $300,000 in terms of data that's generated that would go into the database. That's an estimate, of course.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Am I out of time?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Yes, you are out of time right now.

[Valerie Bradford, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

We're now moving on to our rounds of two and a half minutes.

MP Blanchette-Joncas, please go ahead.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions are for Ms. Loth-Bown, from Parks Canada Agency.

We had the privilege of having Canada's chief science advisor here on February 2, and she talked to us about direction. She said we should consider citizen science as an integral part of our strategies to empower individuals and communities, build trust in our institutions, and sustain our democracy.

I find that interesting. It's still ambitious, but it's really interesting.

On your end, how do you think you can meet such expectations and goals?

[Christine Loth-Bown]

Thank you for your question.

Citizens certainly have a big role to play in collecting data and gathering information for science.

As we explained, right now, we have three national programs. There are also many examples of initiatives that communities are doing with our management units across the country.

So there are many ways for us to expand our partnership with citizens across Canada.

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

Thank you very much.

In your presentation earlier, you mentioned that right now there isn't really a way to integrate citizen science data into your processes.

Can you elaborate on your thoughts on that? In what ways would it be possible now to consider data that comes from citizen science?

[Christine Loth-Bown]

Certainly.

Parks Canada is required to provide parliamentarians with annual reports on the state of conservation of our natural and cultural sites. To do so, this data must be truly accurate.

In the parliamentary reporting, we need to make sure all the data is verified. There's a large opportunity in the future to use citizen data in these reporting requirements. That being said, we need to make sure we go through the rigour and analysis that's necessary. There's an opportunity to use that data more fulsomely, but at the same time, we need to make sure we have standard requirements. That would be the gap at this point in time.

In terms of having pilot projects across the country, we need to make sure that in our national reporting that we have national data points. That's an area where we would need to expand as an organization as we get further take-up of our citizen science programs across the country.

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

Thank you very much.

To understand properly, I would like to ask you two questions in one.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Our time is up, unfortunately. You had 12 extra seconds there.

We're moving on to MP Cannings for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask Environment Canada.... There have been a couple of Conservative questions here about the impact of wind turbines. I know Environment Canada has data on that in terms of bird populations because a few years ago they did a study that looked at all the direct, human-caused mortality of birds.

Could I ask Environment Canada to find that data and provide that to the committee? I know it's there. I've seen the papers. It has other impacts such as direct mortalities caused by oil sands and intensive agriculture, so it puts everything in perspective. I think we would benefit from that. I don't know how much it has to do with citizen science, but that's what they seem interested in, so I would ask Environment Canada to provide that in writing.

With the 30 seconds I have left, I'll turn it over to Dr. Marshall to talk about any citizen science projects that we haven't heard about in too much detail. You mentioned SmartICE and CABIN. Would you like to spend the time telling us about those projects?

[Dr. Shawn Marshall]

Thank you for this great invitation. We'll certainly follow up with the provision of the information on the studies on bird mortality and the different sources of that. Those papers are out there. You're right that they tend to be more professional science research papers, rather than citizen science projects assessing bird mortality, but those studies are there, including our own studies on this.

There's not much time, but I think a couple of really interesting projects are coming out of the meteorological service of Canada, by your invitation.

One of them is called CoCoRaHS. It's a community consortium on rain, hail, snow and precipitation measurements. I should have thought of that when we were asking about the agricultural applications, because there's lots of engagement with farmers in that context, of course. They care a lot about the rainfall patterns. It's really bottom-up, grassroots-driven observations of detailed precipitation patterns. That data flows into the meteorological service to help us understand and interpret the forecasts in extreme weather, after the fact.

There are programs like that coming in and being standardized across the country, which are very interesting for us to tap into.

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

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much to our witnesses.

We will now briefly suspend before resuming in camera.

I'd ask all witnesses and guests to please leave the meeting. I wish them a very happy rest of their day today.

[Proceedings continue in camera]