Science and Research Committee on May 28th, 2024

[David Hik]

That's a very important question, because at the heart of being able to develop adaptation and mitigation responses is knowing what's changing and how quickly it is changing. Is it a cycle, or is it just a perturbation? Is it really a long-term directional change?

For that, we need longer-term records. We have many of those records in Canada. Maintaining them in the long term is a challenge. Many people are committed to maintaining those records, but we're realizing that historically we have observations in certain places that may not be where the largest changes are taking place or where the impacts of current changes are being observed. Those places are in remote places like PEARL or the Northwest Passage, where accessing and maintaining marine buoy observations can be done only during a very short window during the open water season.

We're realizing all of these things are complemented by the local and community and indigenous knowledge that lets us extend our understanding of changes much further back in time. Our scientific observations span perhaps only 20 years, but once we start understanding how people who lived in those places observed that environment over generations, it puts things into a better context for us and allows us to better forecast what might happen in the near future.

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

Dr. Strong, at PEARL you have a 20-year dataset. It breaks my heart to hear that PEARL is facing closure. I just think about another long-term dataset under fire.

Could you comment on the importance of this kind of work?

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

I certainly agree with what David said. Long-term measurements are the lifeblood of understanding what's happening in the Arctic. We've recorded some long-term datasets. I started doing measurements in the spring of 1999. This is the 25th anniversary of measurements of ozone and some gases and of ozone depletion. As a result of those records, we were able to see from year to year a lot of variability in the stratospheric ozone, which protects us from harmful UV. The years when we had very low ozone levels, in 2011 and 2020, were really there and visible in the record, because we had the long-term baseline.

Similarly, we're also measuring wildfire smoke. We see plumes coming up over Eureka. The fires in the Pacific northwest and B.C. in August 2017 injected record amounts of a number of different pollutants into the atmosphere. They came right over PEARL, and we had these big spikes. Again, they were very obvious compared to the baseline we'd collected over the years.

It's the same thing with aerosols, clouds and other things we're measuring. Because of COVID, which limited our access to PEARL, and funding problems, we now have gaps in some of our data records. Some of the instruments need maintenance, but we no longer have an operator on site year-round. You can't go back, right? We're never going to go back and get the measurements that we didn't get after March 2020 with some of our instruments.

We have some instruments that are still running. Some are automated, and for some we have remote control. We have some campaigns to go up and do things. We used to have an on-site operator year-round who would deal with minor issues, but right now we're not able to do that. We sadly have gaps, and we'd like to ramp back up to where we were.

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

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

You have 44 seconds.

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

I'll go back to Dr. Hik.

Could you spend a little bit of time on the connections between community wellness and environmental wellness in the Arctic?

[David Hik]

I'm going to pass it to Andrew to talk about a caribou project that I think is relevant to that.

[Andrew Applejohn, Executive Director, Programs, Polar Knowledge Canada]

There's a close connection between how people live, particularly in smaller and more isolated northern communities, and environmental health. POLAR made a strategic investment with the Government of the Northwest Territories, starting about two years ago. It came into effect this year. They began to look at a variety of perspectives on what's driving the extreme variability in Barren-ground caribou populations. Those programs, funded through that collaboration, were done in a way that really provided communities with the opportunity to play a leadership role.

I believe seven programs were funded. The majority of those programs focused on community perspectives on what was changing on the landscape and what was changing with animal behaviour. They looked at some of the influences potentially driving the health of some herds versus other herds. It was a program that was conceived in response to pressure coming from communities that were asking questions about what was happening and what was driving changes in the caribou population.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. That's the time.

We'll now go to our second round. We will start with MP Soroka for five minutes.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

I want to start off with the fact that our chief science adviser, Dr. Mona Nemer, after three months still hasn't responded to our questions. Can we get the clerk to once again reach out to her?

Dr. Hik, you mentioned food. With the emphasis on food and energy security in your recent initiatives, what innovative approaches are being explored to ensure sustainable solutions for Arctic communities? How can federal policies better support these efforts?

[David Hik]

Thank you. I'll provide perhaps two answers.

One, there's an important need to be able to share food in communities. When hunters, harvesters and fishers are out, they bring food back not just for themselves but also for elders and for the community. Traditionally, being able to have community freezers as a focal point for food sharing and food storage over seasons has been relatively easy. With warming, we've needed to look at innovative options and new solutions. We're working very closely with hunter and trapper organizations, wildlife management boards and communities to look at how community freezers could be adapted to warming conditions, with everything from sea cans that are powered by clean energy to ways of preserving or packing and sharing things more efficiently.

Second, we're also working on greenhouse technologies. There's a very high cost and challenge in transporting fresh produce in the north. In the Kitikmeot region alone, three separate greenhouse projects over the last few years are looking at different ways that community-supported growing of foods of interest could be commercially viable in those communities.

Those are both very close to being adapted or adopted by different communities to serve their needs, recognizing that different communities might have different requirements.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Okay.

How effective has the collaboration between scientists and policy-makers been in addressing Arctic challenges? What improvements do you suggest to ensure that scientific research more directly informs policy decisions?

[David Hik]

That's an important question for all of us to think about. How do we ensure that the science policy nexus is something that is readily apparent on what those knowledge mobilization and knowledge-sharing pathways are to make sure that information is shared in a timely way, and also to make sure it's appropriate? There are a number of forums for doing that.

One way we do that is to meet once or twice a year with the hamlets, hunter and trapper organizations, wildlife management boards, Inuit development corporations or organizations in Nunavut and with the other equivalent indigenous organizations in Northwest Territories and Nunavut so that we can share information that we're learning, or that others in the research community are learning, with community members. I think it's important that this be normalized and done on a regular basis. We're invited to those meetings. We make sure we always have someone attending. That provides a mechanism for feedback.

Does that get up to the federal level? We need to find other mechanisms for that, but we need to be able to share things locally, regionally, at the territorial level, at the provincial level in some cases, and also with federal colleagues and with policy-makers.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Then there's still lots of work to be done.

Dr. Strong, what technological advancements have been most impactful in your atmospheric research, particularly in remote sensing techniques? Are there emerging technologies that you believe will significantly enhance our ability to monitor and understand the Arctic atmosphere?

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

That's a good question. PEARL is quite useful as a site for testing instruments, particularly under fairly harsh conditions. For example, we have been testing solar panels for a Canadian solar panel company. They're very interested in seeing how well they perform, and will then perhaps deploy them elsewhere in northern Canada.

One thing we helped do was evaluate the performance of an infrared instrument that will be deployed on Canada's HAWC mission, which I mentioned earlier. This is Canada's contribution to the atmosphere observing system that NASA will be launching later this decade. LR Tech and ABB developed this technology. We had it at Eureka. We had it side by side with an instrument that's been there for a longer term. We did side-by-side measurements to evaluate the performance of that instrument and prove that it would be able to do the kind of cloud measurements that we want to do from space. That's been very useful. That instrument is now being actively developed for deployment on a satellite later this decade.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you, Dr. Strong. That is a bit over our time.

Now we'll go to MP Chen for five minutes.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

My question is for Dr. Strong.

You mentioned today in your testimony that PEARL is running out of money. It's a bit heartbreaking to hear, because PEARL plays such an important role in bringing researchers together in an important facility that is widely regarded as important and crucial to producing knowledge around climate change, the atmosphere, pollutants and how they interact with the environment.

In terms of funding, I know you've had moments in the past and in your history, since being formed in 2005, when you have been financially challenged.

My question for you is twofold. Can you shed some light in terms of helping us understand how you have been funded? Second, what does sustainable long-term funding look like?

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

It comes back to my earlier answer.

The initial equipment was bought with CFI funding. Then we had the six-year project grant from the Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which is an organization that no longer exists. Then we had a six-year grant from the climate change and atmospheric research program at NSERC, which was kind of a follow-on from CFCAS, and that program no longer exists. Those were our two primary science funding programs.

Then, as I mentioned, we had some funding from International Polar Year and from the Arctic research infrastructure fund. We've had regular small amounts of money from the Canadian Space Agency that have helped, and some support from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

We've also had funding from NSERC. An NSERC CREATE training program in Arctic atmospheric science funded us for six years, from 2010 to 2016, and that really funded students. We ran six Arctic summer schools as a part of that. That wasn't supporting the lab per se, but it was supporting the students who were doing some of the research at the lab. At the summer schools, we brought in Inuit and other northern representatives to come and talk to the students, and that was very enlightening for them.

Looking forward, we need programs that will cover the operational expenses of working in the Arctic, which is different from working at a university lab down south; that recognize the costs of transport, travel and on-site accommodations; and that can fund the staff that we need. It's that kind of operational funding.

We don't.... We are always looking for programs to apply to, but many of them have different requirements, and it can be hard to meet the criteria. None of them are quite like the CFCAS and the CCAR funding that we had in the past.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Looking into the future, if there was a way that government could help support your work in a more stable way, how do you envision that to flow through?

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

It's funding for research facilities. I know there's work going on in the government right now to look at major research facilities, very large ones like TRIUMF, SNOLAB and Ocean Networks Canada. I just finished a five-year term on the SNOLAB board a few weeks ago, so I'm well aware of how that works.

It's also to be able to fund smaller research facilities. I mean, PEARL is just one facility. It's a fairly large one compared to some others. There's an organization called the Canadian Network of Northern Research Operators, which includes several dozen stations across the north, and it's really been struggling over the years. They did try to get some funding some years ago, but because it's a disparate group and not all under one university, it's kind of hard to fund that broadly.

It's some kind of funding that maybe isn't major but is medium-sized—even for some smaller research stations, too—to provide that continuity so that you can get staff, build up the expertise and keep things going. That's what we're looking for. It's not just PEARL; there are other stations as well that are struggling.

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

Are there any examples that you can give from other countries that are involved in research in the Arctic? Are there any examples of how other nations support research labs such as yours or other activities related to better understanding the climate in the north?

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

Right. I mean....

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Give a short answer, please. We're down to 10 seconds.

[Dr. Kimberly Strong]

I can't comment on details of how they're funded, but I certainly know that we partner with labs at Ny-Ålesund in Norway and Sodankylä in Finland. They have funding through Europe-wide and national programs that they can tap into. Obviously, we don't have access to those.

That's the short answer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

We will now turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes.