Transport Committee on Nov. 14th, 2022

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to take off from where Mr. Lewis left off, because I think he's in the right state of mind in terms of his questioning. Mr. Lewis, thank you for that.

Also, Mr. Barsalou-Duval, thank you for bringing this study forward, because it is relevant.

This, Mr. Chairman, is quite frankly something that we've been working on for quite some time through the formation of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence task force, a group, I might add, that many of you who have an interest in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence may want to be a part of moving on well into the future, because these are the very issues that we're dealing with.

This is a bipartisan, bicameral and binational group and, to Mr. Lewis's comments, does include partners such as some of the folks we see on the screen here today, as well as the International Joint Commission, the IJC, to deal with these very issues.

Mr. Chair, I have put forward to this group that I'm speaking about and to the government a report of recommendations. That establishes the Great Lakes restoration initiative, an initiative that is comparable to what the U.S. has moved forward with in the last few years. Those recommendations within the report are aligned with the “Action Plan to Protect the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence 2020-2030: Implementing Innovations in Science and in Governance”. I might add that most of the members on this call, including the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, have been a part of authoring and populating that report.

With that, if I can, I'll get a bit more granular. Page 10 of the report, at paragraph 2.1, “Building climate change resiliency in shoreline communities”, identifies a lot of recommendations and/or the next steps that can be taken with all the partners to actually deal with this issue.

Once again, Mr. Chairman, that's exactly what this task force is doing and, once again, I encourage a lot of the members who are here and interested in this topic to become part of that task force, because we're moving forward and bringing the ball down the field to ensure that some of these recommendations are moved forward with.

The government has in fact responded of late by putting in place the Canada water agency, which will establish a freshwater strategy and a blue economy strategy, taking into consideration some of these challenges that we're speaking about.

This will be, members of the committee, a whole-of-government approach to satisfy a Great Lakes restoration initiative.

With that, I'm going to get into my questioning, primarily for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. The first question is, what kind of work has the cities initiative done to study the impacts of erosion on its members?

[Phillipe Murphy-Rhéaume]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the member for Niagara Centre for the question and for his leadership around Great Lakes issues. Most people around the table would probably recognize that he is one of our Great Lakes champions, and I want to thank him for his work.

As the member alluded to, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative contributed to the development of the action plan 2020-30, along with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Stratégies Saint-Laurent in Quebec, the Council of the Great Lakes Region, and Freshwater Future.

The action plan identified a series of recommendations around erosion, including the need to study this issue in a concerted and coordinated manner among the different levels of government, different stakeholders, indigenous communities and partners, as well as focusing on five shoreline priority zones: central west Lake Erie, central Lake Huron, central Lake Ontario, north central Lake Superior and southeastern Georgian Bay. It also identified priority zones in Quebec, including Montreal, Quebec City and the corridor that a lot of our interveners talked about today.

We continue to advocate around those recommendations in the action plan in order to hopefully see it funded, especially as a Canada water agency comes in line and as we hope to see the funding commitment of $1 billion in that freshwater action plan enacted, as well as further details around the national adaptation strategy.

I also just want to mention very quickly the recommendations of the mayors' commission on coastal resilience, which touched largely on the need for greater federal leadership and collaboration with the provinces around this issue to work in tandem with local communities that are impacted by this issue in order to identify the different impacts and causes of this, as well as identify different solutions that could be enacted.

We have a bias as an organization for nature-based and hybrid solutions, but we also recognize that, at the local level and with private landowners, we need to increase our knowledge and awareness around these solutions. We can't always have recourse to traditional hard and grey infrastructure solutions. What we need, again, is a centre of excellence or a series of technical guidance that municipalities can rely on in order to understand best solutions with respect to whether natural infrastructure, traditional infrastructure or a hybrid solution could be implemented in their given circumstances.

We also need to work together to identify and remedy local information and data gaps that exist. A lot of what we were hearing was the fact that there's a lot of information out there, but it's not being coordinated in a centralized manner, and that's something that we certainly see as a role for the Canada water agency, for example.

Finally, we need to work with municipalities to identify the knowledge gaps as we broaden this conversation around coastal resilience to include green infrastructure that takes socio-economic and equity considerations into mind.

I would also like to highlight the fact that we issued a survey last year where we identified, out of the 45 Ontario communities that responded to the survey, that they will be investing at least $275 million over the next five years to address coastal damage to the region. That's on top of the $82 million that has been spent by those 45 communities in the two previous years.

Even though we didn't get as much of a response on the Quebec side, unfortunately, we still identified $56 million that local communities in Quebec are planning to invest over the next five years.

I will stop there so I don't take up all of your time.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

That was well done. He actually answered all of the questions that I was going to ask, so it was perfect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Mr. Murphy-Rhéaume.

Mr. Barsalou-Duval, you now have the floor for six minutes.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for agreeing to appear.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues for their support—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Pardon me for interrupting, Mr. Barsalou-Duval, but two witnesses have just joined the meeting. They have to do a sound check before you can ask them questions.

I'm going to suspend for one minute to allow for that sound test to take place. We'll resume in one minute.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

You have the floor for six minutes, Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

[Jean-Luc Barthe, Mayor, Municipalité de Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to make an introduction, since I'm yielding to Mr. Grégoire, because—

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Chair, I would like to take back my time. I believe the witnesses who've just joined us don't know how to proceed because it was at the start that they had they had an opportunity—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

All right.

Then we will—

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

You can also give them the floor now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

As you wish. It's up to the committee to decide. Do we want to allow them five minutes for their opening statements?

There appears to be no objection to that.

Mr. Barthe and Mr. Grégoire, you have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Jean-Luc Barthe]

Thank you very much.

The federal government came here in the 1990s to install riprap over a large stretch of the river to protect Île de Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola from waves generated by ships and boats, in particular. The problem is that it terminated the program in 1997 when roughly one kilometer of riprap remained to be installed to the west of the island and two kilometers to the east. At the time, local citizens couldn't afford to complete the riprap works the federal government had started. They therefore tried to protect their shorelines as best they could, but if you come and look at their properties today, you'll see that some of them have been shortened by 25 or 30 feet since the 1990s, or even much earlier than that. The water has come closer and closer to the houses over time.

Furthermore, when ice forms on the west side, it strikes the riprap section that the federal government completed and, at the same time, the shorelines and all the properties of the local citizens. Let me tell you that, when those big pieces of ice hit the properties, they really scour out the soil. So that's what I wanted to tell you a little about.

We ask that the federal government reinstitute the shoreline protection program because we know that shoreline erosion doesn't just affect Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola. Thanks to information from the Ouranos Consortium, I know there's a lot of erosion from Montreal to Varennes, Contrecœur, Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel and in our region as far as Lake Saint Pierre.

In addition, these days, approximately 4,500 ships navigate the river, and I don't think they always obey the speed limit, especially at night, probably because no one can see them.

Thank you for listening. I'm going to yield the floor to Mr. Grégoire.

[Roy Grégoire, Resident of Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola, As an Individual]

Good afternoon.

My name is Roy Grégoire, and I'm a resident of Île de Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola and live on the bank of the river. When the ice breaks up back home in the spring, the segment of riprap that the federal government completed retains it, creating a kind of dam. As a result, the ice flowing down river stops there and the water level rises nearly 20 feet. I know that because my land is normally about 20 feet above the water level.

We know there are many erosion factors, but I think the biggest cause is the federal government's incomplete riprap works. Shipping has something to do with it, of course, because as Mr. Barthe said, 4,500 ships navigate the river every year.

Climate change is also involved. Studies show beyond a shadow of doubt that the waves generated by ships are more powerful than those caused by wind. According to one report, shipping alone is responsible for 70% of water level fluctuations in the St. Lawrence River. Those changes have a significant impact on shoreline erosion near the channel. The waves associated with shipping on the river are responsible for 60% of shoreline erosion.

The situation is starting to be disturbing. Personally, I've started seeing signs of major impending erosion. I had an engineer come to my house and I'm waiting for his report.

That's all I have to say for the moment. I'll try to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Grégoire.

Mr. Barsalou-Duval, you finally have the floor for six minutes.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

As I said earlier, I want to thank the witnesses for being here and the members of the committee for agreeing to conduct a study on this very important topic for the people in my riding and, I'm sure, for those in other ridings.

Some properties in Saint-Ignace-de-Loyola, on the other side of the river, are affected by erosion. I'm convinced that's also true of other lands on the St. Lawrence and in the Great Lakes.

Many witnesses so far have said that shoreline protection works were built after the seaway was built. In the 1950s and subsequent years, the seaway was dredged to allow larger ships to pass through. Walls were erected and riprap was installed to offset the damage.

Ms. Lagarde, in what condition are the works in your area?

[Micheline Lagarde]

Personally, I own a property that has no protection, and the waves are just eating away at the land.

The walls on the very large property of a 100‑year‑old woman in my neighbourhood are leaning over, which is very dangerous. Her property is actually starting to collapse.

What we're asking is that specific measures be taken soon.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Lagarde.

As I understand it, the protective works erected at the time are gradually disappearing throughout the area. Is that correct?

[Micheline Lagarde]

Many properties no longer have any protection at all.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

No protective works were ever built on the properties in other areas. I think that's the case of Ms. Durocher's property.

What's the situation in your area, Ms. Durocher?

[Carine Durocher, Vice-Chair, Comité pour la protection des berges du Saint-Laurent]

We lose two metres of land to erosion every year on our property on Île Sainte-Thérèse, which is opposite Varennes. There are no works protecting the shorelines near the seaway. We lose about a metre of land in the years when the water level is low and two or three in the years when it's high. It's quite a catastrophic situation; it's especially unbelievable to see that nothing has been done to help us.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

My next question is for Ms. Lagarde or Ms. Durocher.

If citizens decided to invest money to stabilize the shoreline along the front of their property, how much would it cost for an average property?

[Micheline Lagarde]

It costs about $5,000 or $6,000 per metre. In other words, it can cost approximately $200,000. People can't afford to do it.

The work has to be done by experts, if you want it to be innovative and sustainable and not disrupt biodiversity. You also have to consider water quality and heating.

You shouldn't just use riprap, since it accomplishes absolutely nothing and is inhospitable for wildlife, plant life and people.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

As I understand it, you're concerned about the environmental aspect. You don't think using riprap everywhere is an optimal solution since it destroys biodiversity.

You mentioned that the federal government installed riprap and subsequently denied responsibility for it.

How did the federal government respond when you asked it to maintain or restore those walls?

[Micheline Lagarde]

Government officials actually told us there was no program for that and that it wasn't their department's responsibility.

I personally wrote to a number of federal and provincial departments, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Transport Canada. I think we need a joint solution. Pilot projects, for example, need to be quickly introduced. All involved stakeholders can be part of the solution. However, citizens can't be responsible for the solution since they have neither the skills nor the necessary financial resources to protect the shorelines.