Environment committee  If I have your questioning correctly, what you're pointing out is that we have a number of programs in Environment Canada—climate change and clean air being examples—for which we get time-limited funding, so we get it for five years or some other period of time. What you see in the projections going forward are the cases in which that funding is due to expire.

Environment committee  Minister, are you aware that the federal government paid out $2.6 billion in disaster relief assistance last year, almost entirely from climate change-driven catastrophic weather events?

Environment committee  —is quite broad, and it's not environment-specific. There's mental health, suicide, climate change, traditional knowledge of indigenous people, safe shipping. So it's quite broad—

Environment committee  In the initiatives under the clean air regulatory agenda that we've taken, we have taken actions to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants that have threatened the health of Canadians, degraded the environment, or contributed to climate change and smog. I'll just highlight some of the funding that we have renewed from the clean air regulatory agenda—

Environment committee  That wet-weather-flow master plan does consider the sizing required to handle some of the new flows they expect to have due to climate change.

Environment committee  My question is for Ms. Goucher. Based on your expertise, could you talk about whether you see climate change as something that the government should be addressing as an issue of concern for the Great Lakes region?

Environment committee  Could you explain to us the importance of the International Joint Commission and of the scientific data regarding the fight against climate change? I read that, among other things, the commission studies water levels and rate of flow, which are related to water quality in the Great Lakes.

Environment committee  These sectors are currently seeing significant growth and opportunity, serving expanding market needs that could grow, particularly with stress in other areas, such as the Imperial Valley, but they're also facing risks when it comes to dealing with waste water or the threats of climate change. As your committee has been discussing with numerous witnesses, there's a whole array of organizations, 13 Canadian federal and 11 provincial agencies on the Canadian side, and similar on the United States' side.

Environment committee  Climate change is here. It's here. We have clear evidence of it now. The report that's just been released makes it even more scary than we previously thought it was. In terms of its impact on the Great Lakes, obviously it's warming water temperatures.

Environment committee  I think our concern right now is that the magnitude of the impacts of the climate change is going to overwhelm the anticipated effects. I think we may be thinking on a 20-year time scale, so we're a little concerned that the language around water levels isn't quite as explicit in the agreement as, perhaps, we would have liked it to be.

Environment committee  Yes, a 30% cut at Environment Canada is a very exciting thing. I don't know how reducing your budget by 30%, and your staffing by 15%, and your climate change by 77% can get much more exciting than that. For those of you looking for help from the Government of Canada on monitoring data, good luck. Now, I thought I'd give Dr. Taylor the opportunity to tell us what biomagnification means.

Environment committee  What's happening now, which is really unusual for Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, is that it has stayed low for the last 15 years. We do have a sense that some of that is definitely because of climate change, but some of that is also because of the dredging of the St. Clair River, which has also exacerbated that.

Environment committee  There have been game-changers that we've talked about already in terms of the zebra mussels and other invasive species, human interventions, development pressures, clearing for crops, and the obscuring effect of climate change. We've had to go back to the drawing board a number of times and reassess the initial delisting targets to see whether they still make sense. Also, really, you have slow environmental recovery.

Environment committee  They range between 175 and 177 metres, but with a long-term mean of about 176 metres, above sea level. One of the many consequences of global climate change is there are lower than normal water levels in the Great Lakes, and we are seeing this now. For lakes Huron and Michigan, which are essentially two lobes of the same lake, water levels have been at or below the long-term average since 1999.

Environment committee  A lot of those things all contribute to nutrient loading—algae blooms, and throw in the climate change and throw in the zebra mussels to make it a lot more complicated. But we have received funding and we have done a lot of research. Prior to the Bay of Quinte being identified as a remedial action plan area, there was a project called Project Quinte.