EVIDENCE
[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, March 11, 1998
• 1537
[English]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson (Elgin—Middlesex—London, Lib.)): My name is Gar Knutson. I'm the vice-chair of the committee. I'm sitting in for the Honourable Charles Caccia, who would normally be chairing the meeting.
Let me begin by welcoming our witnesses today.
Before we start with your formal presentation, I'd like to ask the committee if, after this part of our meeting is finished, we could go in camera, just to have a brief discussion about the report and share some views in an informal way so that the researcher can perhaps get started on formulating some ideas. We'll see how long this goes. That's not on the agenda, but I'd like to put it there for later.
Having said that, however, let me begin by welcoming Brian Craik and Alan Penn of the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec. Gentlemen, begin.
Mr. Brian Craik (Director, Federal Relations, Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec (Eeyou Istchee)): Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we thank you for having accepted our appearance here today.
We're here representing the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec. I'm sorry that Grand Chief Coon Come could not be with us today. He's presently in a hospital in Chibougamau because of an accident he had while out moose hunting on his territory.
We're here representing the Grand Council and the CRA. The Grand Council is the political arm of the Cree organization, and the CRA is the Cree Regional Authority and is the administrative arm. The Crees have traditional lands in the James Bay territory, as well as west, north, and east of this territory.
The primary purpose of this brief is to respond to the recently reintroduced Fisheries Act. We're not going to speak to the Fisheries Act in detail in terms of its articles. We would like more to address issues concerning implementation, and we'd like to draw upon our experience over the last few years.
The argument we want to bring to the attention of the committee most forcefully is that the significance of the Fisheries Act is exceptionally dependent upon the willingness of the government to put into place policies that will allow its implementation and to provide the resources for its implementation, both with respect to the fishery and with respect to the habitat protection.
We also want to go beyond the Fisheries Act in this presentation, to briefly discuss the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and some severe problems we're having in implementing the environmental protection sections of that.
• 1540
The Crees of northern Quebec consider that they're in
a unique position to judge what the Fisheries Act
can mean in practice when there is demonstrably no
political will to use the legislation in question for
the purposes for which it was intended. The past, in
this respect, may possibly serve as a guide to the
future. This is why we believe the standing
committee needs to reflect upon what has happened in
the geographic region of the James Bay Crees.
I'll turn part of the presentation over to my colleague, Alan Penn, who is the scientific adviser with the Grand Council of the Crees.
Mr. Alan Penn (Scientific Adviser, Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec (Eeyou Istchee)): Thank you.
The sections of the Fisheries Act that are of principal concern to us involve the concepts of delegation of responsibility of fisheries management and the concept of partnership on the one hand and the habitat protection contaminant control provisions on the other.
I want to start by commenting that there's a relationship between the two, but not necessarily the relationship that is conventionally assumed. In our experience—and we're going to talk a little bit about the implications of major water resource development in the north—if you go through a succession of stages of development that in effect foreclose opportunities for fisheries development, there is very limited scope subsequently to enter into partnerships for management of resources that themselves either no longer exist or exist in a greatly transformed or reduced state.
I'm going to try to illustrate that with respect to the La Grande project in the next few minutes. You have the written arguments in the brief here. I'll try to expand and clarify some of the points that are set out here in writing.
The Fisheries Act, and specifically the provisions relating to habitat protection, span a period that roughly coincides with the development of the La Grande project in northern Quebec, but I think this could also be said to be true of the Churchill-Nelson development in northern Manitoba and the Churchill Falls complex in Labrador. In other words, there's a rough coincidence between the timeframe of the implementation by the federal government of the Fisheries Act amendments in 1971, 1972, and 1977 and the major river developments for hydroelectric purposes in Canada's boreal forest regions.
I think those developments are worth the attention of the standing committee because they are important retrospective tests of what the Fisheries Act was in fact used for and what it was not used for. I would like to make a few points about this in connection with the La Grande project, which transformed a great deal of aquatic habitat in the last two and a half decades.
It's a project that involved the creation of, essentially, a new river basin out of three previous basins, an area essentially rather larger than the maritimes, with a total reservoir extent, external perimeter, of the order of 20,000 square kilometres. So we're talking about a very substantial amount of land in the Canadian context: a drainage basin of 200,000 square kilometres; 20,000 square kilometres of flooding, an amount of flooding roughly corresponding to the amount of land in agricultural production in Quebec—major changes in land use when viewed from a southern Quebec perspective.
There were three major river diversions and several secondary diversions, involving diversions of the order of 2,000 cubic metres per second. This is the largest set of river diversions in Canada, if you discount the Beauharnois dam, which over a distance of a couple of kilometres reroutes the St. Lawrence Seaway. But I think by most standards this will be considered to be the largest set of river diversions in Canada.
• 1545
One of the major river systems draining into James Bay
found its discharge reduced by more than 90%. That's
the Eastmain River system. The La Grande
River itself, whose basin area was increased by a
factor of two in this development, finds itself with a
flow regime concentrated in the winter months, with a
pattern of flow now, a series of daily pulse
discharges, which corresponds to
something close to the highest historical flow
before the river development itself. So we're
dealing with some very fundamental hydrological
transformations in this region.
As you probably have heard, the large reservoirs of this complex are also associated with mercury contamination. The fish stocks went through a four- to six-fold increase in mercury concentrations, depending on species, over a period of five to ten years following impoundment. This increase is expected to last roughly a human generation, something in the order of twenty to thirty years.
This was a region that experienced a major problem of environmental mercury contamination to start with. The communities affected by the hydroelectric project had also been the subject, prior to flooding, of a series of epidemiological studies on a scale that I think has never been seen before, and certainly not in a northern Canadian aboriginal population, but probably not worldwide. Roughly half of the adult Cree population underwent a series of neurological assessments to determine the implications of mercury from the subsistence economy on their neurological state of health. This was prior to the hydroelectrical developments and prior to the increases in mercury levels documented in the reservoirs themselves.
So you have a series of very dramatic changes in fish habitat on a regional scale combined with a problem of contamination that also, I don't think, has any precedent in Canada. The mercury concentrations we're talking about, which were of the order of 0.5 to 1 part per million in non-predatory fish and in the neighbourhood of 3 to 5 p.p.m. in predatory fish, compare with the levels encountered in the English River-Clay Lake-Wabigoon system in northwestern Ontario in the 1970s, which is the most serious documented case of acute industrial mercury contamination.
So we have a regional picture that illustrates many of the issues we think the Fisheries Act was originally intended to address. What I would like to ask rhetorically is what was the involvement of Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans? At times they were together as one department and sometimes they were two separate departments. What was the involvement of the federal government in the course of this development?
First of all, I think it needs to be said that the hydroelectric development, although it post-dates the introduction of the environmental assessment and review process in Canada, was not subjected to any kind of informal environmental review as part of that policy. The policy was applied only to the construction of a bridge from the island in the mouth of the river where the community of Chisasibi was relocated. It was the decision not to authorize the construction of a bridge from the island to the mainland that eventually forced the relocation of the community there and cleared the path for what became known as the second phase of the La Grande development, which further amplified the changes in the flow regime.
• 1550
So there's a certain irony for the Cree in the
sense that on the one occasion when the federal
assessment process was applied, it was applied to the
Cree as the developer and not to the hydroelectric
developer. It was a decision that eventually
forced a full community relocation.
Environment Canada initially became involved in a bilateral agreement for funding the collection of baseline data by the developer and was involved in some of the surveys of coastal fish stocks. This took place at the time of the negotiation of what became the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which Brian is going to talk about in a few minutes.
Environment Canada, which included the fishery service at the time, was a party to that process as part of the federal government's delegation. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement is a multipartite agreement involving the federal government and its departments and agencies.
Certainly, when the Cree went into that negotiating process they expected the agreement to result in a restructured and long-term working relationship with the federal government, including Environment Canada and what later became the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. What we in fact found was that the existence of the agreement seems to have been used more as a pretext for withdrawal from substantive involvement in environmental management issues in the territory. From 1978 onwards we saw a succession of policy developments, which weren't discussed with the aboriginal communities or aboriginal parties, but which basically led to a progressive strategic withdrawal of the department from involvement in water resource management issues in northwestern Quebec.
The Arctic biological station, with most of the scientific expertise in northern fisheries resource management, was shut down. Those individual research programs in other parts of Fisheries and Oceans that involved northern Quebec were also closed down progressively in the early 1980s. There was no federal involvement in the further assessment of the individual components of the La Grande project, specifically the four projects that comprised the second phase of the development, and this is notwithstanding this decision to change the capacity factor of the powerhouses and very substantially change the flow regime at the mouth of the La Grande river.
The federal government was essentially absent from the impact assessment process for these changes in the developments. They did not become involved in the planning or implementation or subsequent interpretation of monitoring data for the fisheries, which essentially became the unique prerogative of the developer himself.
Perhaps most importantly, the attitude of the federal government towards the mercury contamination that I referred to just now was that the Environmental Contaminants Act could not be used as a framework for dealing with regressing mercury contamination in relation to hydro development because mercury was considered to be, in this case, a natural contaminant, a contaminant released as the result of changes in ecosystem function, if you like, within the reservoirs, and not a result of a specific point discharge, which seemed to us to be a convenient pretext for deciding that this was something the federal government would not therefore examine.
This was raised at the time of the drafting of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, CEPA. There is in fact a provision that was introduced after our intervention with Mr. Caccia to the effect that the legislation could be used as a framework to study contamination arising from the perturbation of ecosystem function, of which mercury is probably the most important Canadian example.
But again, that has not happened in the five or six years or so that CEPA has been on the books. There's been no opening on that front at all.
So essentially, what appears to us—and I think this is subjectively true—to be the most important regional case of mercury contamination in Canada remains beyond the realm of Canada's environmental contaminants legislation, whether that be the earlier Environmental Contaminants Act, CEPA, or the Fisheries Act itself, which has its own provisions relating to the deleterious substances.
• 1555
So we find basically the federal statutory and
regulatory framework inapplicable and we find that the
James Bay agreement is used as an institutional context
for the gradual withdrawal of the kind of institutional
framework that permits the acquisition of basic
ecological data and a maintenance of a capacity to
analyse, interpret, and evaluate data relating to
environmental change in the region.
We're very discouraged by this sequence of events, which spans basically the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
With a very broad brush, that's the habitat protection side of the picture. We also found similar problems in relation to fisheries development and fisheries management.
At the time of the negotiations of the James Bay agreement the Department of Justice insisted that anadromous, sea-run fish were a federal responsibility. They specifically ensured that the concept of exclusive rights for certain species, which was part of the body of subsistence harvesting rights negotiated at the time, would not include these anadromous stocks on the grounds that this was not a principle acceptable to the federal government. But within a few years, within probably about four or five years, by the early 1980s, we were informed—and again this was essentially a bilateral agreement between the federal and provincial governments—that the federal government no longer considered it had any management responsibilities for anadromous fish south of the 55th parallel, in other words the area covered by the James Bay hydroelectric development. But there had been no bilateral agreement with Quebec that would have permitted the Quebec government itself to assume responsibility for those resources.
So there was a vacuum essentially created, and subsequently when the federal government turned towards the Inuit in connection with the ERDA, the economic and regional development agreements of the 1980s, it also took the attitude that the coastal anadromous fisheries were provincial responsibilities in which the federal government was not involved and would not assume any responsibility for development purposes.
So the Cree found themselves, in addition, faced with the problem that the coastal and estuarine fisheries or fish stocks, which in any case had undergone profound transformation as a result of the river diversions I was talking about a little earlier on, were also excluded from the field of application of federal programs for working with communities for fisheries management purposes.
To continue in the same vein, Fisheries and Oceans also argued that inland fisheries were a provincial responsibility, notwithstanding the fact that there was no historical or cultural tradition of inland freshwater commercial fisheries in Quebec. As a result, I suppose, of political sensitivities, they said this is not something the federal government is prepared to engage in. They would look at quality control and marketing and issues like this, but they would not involve themselves directly with the aboriginal communities of the region in fisheries development itself...as being a provincial rather than a federal prerogative.
Again, we've found this very difficult to justify on the basis of our own reading of the framework legislation under which Fisheries and Oceans operated. So in that sense we have the combined or parallel problem that not only do we have an absence of federal involvement in habitat management or habitat protection issues, but we also have an absence of involvement in management and conservation issues—covering both areas.
• 1600
I would like to close these comments by simply
adding that we also see the federal government
absent in the larger issue of contamination in the
northern Canadian shield region. There's a growing
interest, as you know, I'm sure, in long distance
transport of mercury as a contaminant. Many of the skills
developed for the study of the long-range transport of
sulphur and nitrogen oxides have also been applied
now to the study of mercury.
A major report was recently released in the United States on this subject by the Environmental Protection Agency. There has been a series of initiatives by individual research groups and individuals to initiate work on the collection of atmospheric transport phenomena relevant to the mercury cycle.
The underlying problem is documenting what is happening in Canada's northern regions, in its aboriginal subsistance-based communities, and what is the linkage between the transport of mercury in the atmosphere and the bio-geochemical pathways that lead to the uptake of mercury in fish. Again, we see a complete absence of involvement. The department is simply not present. It is quite simply not present in the region. It also seems to be very marginally involved anywhere in Canada's mid-north.
We were told there was the Green Plan in the early 1990s, and a certain amount of money and resources and expertise went into the documentation of contaminants and contaminant pathways in the Arctic regions of Canada. But again, in eastern Canada this was territory defined as excluding the James Bay territory. So the Cree also did not benefit from access to the Green Plan program, where it was directed to the investigation of contaminants in Canada's northern regions.
As a final aside on this, I think it has also been true that the James Bay territory somehow escaped attention as well in the flurry of activity around the issue of acid precipitation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, notwithstanding that the highlands in the southern part of the region are probably as vulnerable as any other region on the Canadian shield within Quebec.
What I'm essentially trying to say is that we have in Canada an interesting and promising statutory and regulatory framework to deal with both habitat protection and resource conservation and management issues. In practice what this means depends or hinges entirely on whether the department or departments in question are prepared to use this framework as an expression of policy and to commit the kind of technical and human resources needed to flesh out this service statutory framework. What we have seen is essentially a pattern of absence of the federal government.
Whether there is any prospect for change in the future, we really don't know. But we think it is very important to take a critical look at what has happened in the past before deciding what this legislation might mean in the future, because on the face of it, to the Cree, it doesn't mean very much.
Mr. Brian Craik: To focus a little bit on the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, it's becoming a mantra of aboriginal peoples in Canada to continually turn back to the treaties and read them in whatever federal forums they can get. Perhaps you know that the trail of broken treaties is one that has been added to recently by the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. If you look at the environmental protections under section 22 of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement you'll find that there are some principles outlined in it.
I'll just briefly present the principles. The first principle establishes a regime:
• 1605
The second principle is:
On the one hand, you have this legislative promise, and on the other hand you have a promise in terms of particular projects.
The third principle is:
The last principle I'll mention is:
What was set up in the agreement was a sort of bipartite, bifurcated system, federal and provincial, with the Cree involved on both sides. In some cases, there were joint committees where all three parties would be involved.
The main joint committee charged with the responsibility of implementing the regime and overseeing its implementation is the James Bay advisory committee on the environment. It has a legislative function in that the committee is actually supposed to be able to, with justification, recommend to responsible governments legislation, regulations, and other appropriate measures related to the environment and social protection regime for enactment or action by the appropriate authority. In other words, the committee is set up to make sure the laws that apply in protecting the environment and the Cree, in the context of development, are appropriate to the territory. The Cree would be involved in that committee, and this is set out here.
The second committee of importance to development is the James Bay evaluating committee, which is a scoping committee that develops the guidelines for development when a development project is proposed. The Cree, Quebec, and Canada sit on that committee.
The third committee set up on the federal side is the federal review panel, and it's a Cree-federal committee. The idea is that when a project impacts areas of federal jurisdiction, that committee will do its work.
When Alan cited the issue of anadromous fish being a reason for the federal government to want a strong federal involvement in the environmental protection regime, that was one of the issues at the time that would have been overseen by that federal review panel.
On the other side of it is the review committee. For projects that impact areas of provincial jurisdiction, there's a Cree-provincial committee that looks at those aspects of the impacts of particular projects when provincial jurisdiction is impacted.
When you ask what types of measures could be taken with respect to social impacts, there are a lot of measures, but one of the measures set out in the James Bay Agreement is under 28.10.4. You will recall that the environmental protection section is supposed to allow the parties to give effect to the rights in this agreement. Under subsection 28.10.4, is a clause that says:
If you go back and look at what's happened, it's fairly simple. First of all, the James Bay advisory committee has never been properly implemented. To this day it meets from time to time. The federal government limits its participation to certain consultants, who are paid for the days they spend on the committee and given very little back-up time beyond that.
The committee itself has almost no resources. It shares a secretary. It has no legal capacity, so there's no independent legal advice possible to the members. It has no independent environmental capacity. There's nobody there. There's just a secretary and that's it.
• 1610
The members from Quebec are not paid to sit on the
committee. They do so on a voluntary basis. So they
spend very little time on doing the work of the committee.
If you look at the mandate of the committee, if this were a committee Canada had with the Government of the United States, for example, it would have part of this building, with several people working in it. But because it's with the Cree in northern Quebec it has nothing. It has been consistently strangled by budgetary restraint in the departments here in the federal government and in Quebec.
If you look at the laws and regulations, no social laws and regulations have ever been adopted pursuant to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement; not one. And no environmental regulations, laws, or policies have ever been implemented by either government, Quebec or Canada, pursuant to this agreement. They don't exist.
The Vice-Chairman (Gar Knutson): I don't mean to cut you off there. We all find the comments fascinating and they are important. But I'm not sure this is the forum. In any event, if you have more to say, please say it quickly, because I think people are anxious to get into the questions.
Mr. Brian Craik: I think that's good enough. We can respond to questions.
The Vice-Chairman (Gar Knutson): Mr. Gilmour.
Mr. Bill Gilmour (Nanaimo—Alberni, Ref.): Thank you.
Thank you for coming before us.
Perhaps you can clear something up for my edification. In your brief you say as a result of contestation of the hydroelectric project the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was signed in 1975 and came into force “in the teeth of opposition by the Federal government”. Did the federal government oppose the signing? Please clarify who the signatories were and what the flavour was at the time.
Mr. Alan Penn: What I meant by that in that section of the brief was that the agreement was a multipartite agreement involving all the parties to the litigation originally initiated by the Cree and Inuit against the La Grande developments. That involved the federal government, the Quebec government, Hydro-Québec, the James Bay Development Corporation, the James Bay Energy Corporation. These were all signatories to the agreement.
The agreement was supposed to come into force on the basis of enabling legislation adopted by Quebec and by the federal government. An outer time limit of two years was provided for that. Back in 1977 it looked very much as though the federal government would not in fact pass legislation prior to the deadline of 24 months and it looked very much as though the agreement would fail simply because of non-implementation by the federal government. Quebec passed enabling legislation, or umbrella legislation, and then a series of individual statutes in 1978—
Mr. Bill Gilmour: The federal government was opposed to it but signed?
Mr. Alan Penn: The federal government was very reluctant. At the time the federal government appeared to be very reluctant to legislate it into force.
Mr. Bill Gilmour: But they did.
Mr. Alan Penn: There was intense lobbying at the time and in fact the enabling legislation was passed. But at the time it was not at all obvious it was going to go ahead.
Mr. Bill Gilmour: We are now are in the position of looking at the lower Churchill and the rules have substantially changed. Will there be an environmental review? If so, will it be Quebec or Labrador or the feds or a combination, and of which? What do you see as the process in what is being talked about today between Premiers Tobin and Bouchard?
Mr. Alan Penn: To the best of my knowledge, I assume the developments in question would automatically trigger an assessment under the provisions of CEAA—the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act—for Gull Island and Muskrat, the two sites downriver from the existing Churchill Falls project. Essentially, they would automatically go through assessment.
These are projects that have been on the books for quite a long time. I've already seen a draft impact assessment for the Gull Island project. A number of environmental studies have already been done.
• 1615
Mr. Bill Gilmour: In your opinion, if the old sites had been under an environmental review, would they have passed, particularly with the mercury situation?
Mr. Alan Penn: The extent of the problem of mercury contamination only became apparent in 1983 and onwards, or thereabouts. The Smallwood reservoir of the Churchill Falls complex was flooded in 1973-74, if my memory serves me correctly, so mercury would not have been anticipated as an issue at the time of its creation. Of course, the major loss of land and habitat took place at the time of creation of the Smallwood reservoir, which is the largest reservoir in North America. It's in the order of 6,000 square kilometres when full, which it is not right now. It's really very large.
The lower Churchill developments are relatively...I wouldn't say they are innocuous, but they're dam sites in canyons, basically, downstream from the existing Churchill Falls reservoir. It is the Churchill Falls reservoir that makes those lower developments physically possible and interesting, because the headwater regulation is already in place.
I think the answer to your question is that there will be an assessment, but the major restructuring of the aquatic environment, which makes it physically possible to extract power from these sites, took place twenty years ago.
Mr. Bill Gilmour: Talking of restructuring, my understanding is that the flow of two rivers will be reversed as a result of the new projects, which will clearly impact fisheries. My question is, with an environmental assessment, does it have a hope of passing? How is that going to fit, and what are your views on the impacts of such a scale?
Mr. Brian Craik: One of the comments Alan's been making is to the effect that a lot of the damage has already been done in the Churchill system, so that what's there now downstream from the original Churchill dam is already an unregulated and unnatural flow.
The new dam will add some regulation to the system, but not very much, because it won't add much in terms of storage capacity. If you look at the other rivers that are being diverted into the system, they are there just to provide more energy and to get more energy out of what's being proposed.
In my view, there's already been enough damage in the north. They shouldn't be diverting more rivers. Canada is working on a diminishing process over time. It's sacrificing rivers for marginally acceptable development projects.
Also, in my view, if you look at this project from an economic point of view, the reason that Newfoundland is asking for the $2 billion is that without it this project wouldn't fly. It's not an economically viable option. There are a lot better options in the south right now. Natural gas is producing energy in New England at a very cheap price. Also, from an environmental point of view, bringing in some fuel cells and bringing in some energy conservation measures and energy efficiency measures is much better.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Do you have a final question?
Mr. Bill Gilmour: As a final question, and just for my own information, my understanding is that mercury contamination comes from the vegetation, that when the vegetation is flooded the plants take up the mercury and then it's dissolved by the water. If in fact this is correct, could this effect be removed by removing the vegetation before it's flooded? This is just for my own information, but perhaps you could clarify it.
Mr. Alan Penn: I'll answer the last part first. For projects on a modest scale, this certainly is a possibility. When Ontario Hydro was considering the Jackfish River hydro project in the late 1980s, it was essentially intending to deal with the issue of mercury by stripping the topsoil and vegetation, basically in order to remove the organic matter that was driving the accelerated processing of organic carbon.
• 1620
To clarify one point here, what happens after a
reservoir is created in the north is that you have a
very large store of both vegetation and organic soil.
The trees themselves, the bowls of the trees
themselves, are refractory and will last quite
possibly hundreds of years, but the foliage, the
ground cover, and the topsoil provide food for
microbes. What you have in a young reservoir is a greatly
accelerated microbial cycle producing organic carbon,
which is why reservoirs in fact are sources of
greenhouse gases once they're created—methane,
possibly dinitrogen oxide, and certainly
goodly quantities of carbon dioxide. But the
production of methyl mercury, or organic mercury, if you
like, is a by-product of that microbial activity.
So the extent of the problem is proportional to the amount of flooding: the larger the amount of flooding, the larger the reservoirs, the more likely you are to run into the argument that the economics of clearing mean these projects are impossible to build if you insist on measures to control mercury at the source. At least that's what's happened in the northern Quebec case.
I would like also, in response to your earlier question, simply to make the point that all of the hydro schemes, not just in Quebec, but all of the hydro schemes advocated and implemented in the Canadian Shield region in the last 25 to 30 years in Canada have involved river diversions. The economics of those projects have always been dictated by river diversions. It's true of the Churchill Falls complex.
It's always very tempting for a company such as Hydro-Québec to look for additional sections of river that can be diverted into an existing system to augment the energy production. But the fundamental restructuring of the river system for the Churchill Falls complex took place in the early 1970s, a long time ago.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Asselin.
[Translation]
Mr. Gérard Asselin (Charlevoix, BQ): Welcome to the committee. I'll ask you a few questions to clarify some points you make in your report.
If I understand correctly, you represent the Grand Council of the Crees in Quebec. You know very well that hydro development or the hydro infrastructures in the far North, mainly the ones at La Grande and at James Bay, create environmental problems, and not only in Quebec.
I am somewhat surprised that you wouldn't mention Newfoundland or Labrador. You know as well as I do that the Crees are now making claims related to the very next project, not only with regard to Quebec , but also to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Is your mandate strictly limited to Quebec? In a second stage, will another agency come here to talk to us about the hydro project, but doing so then from the perspective of Newfoundland and Labrador?
You also referred to the Fisheries Act and the resulting problems. I remember very well the La Grande hydro project which dates back to the period 1970-76, when the Bourassa government was in power. The project continued in 1976 under Quebec Premier René Lévesque.
I remember the big negotiating process that took place at that time between the Quebec government and the Cree community. A choice had to be made regarding a decrease in the quality of life and the potential impact of the project on the environment. The Cree community accepted several million dollars, but did so to the detriment of their quality of life and of the environment.
The Crees, Hydro-Québec and the Quebec government got involved in those negotiations. They dealt with the Quebec territory, although the James Bay area extends into Labrador and Newfoundland.
• 1625
I'd like to understand what is your mandate. I think that,
with this presentation, you aim mostly at making the committee
aware of the lack of any federal involvement on environmental
issues. I think it is the main objective of your coming here.
I'd also like to state that, as we say in French, you must break some eggs if you want to make an omelette. Likewise, it is impossible to build an infrastructure such as the James Bay if you don't know whether there will be a dam and a reservoir upstream or downstream.
You're also telling us that you have found mercury. I'd like to ask you whether you are confident that it is due exclusively to the Hydro-Québec infrastructures. Surely, mercury could be found earlier in the water in the territory claimed by the Crees, or did it start only after Hydro-Québec got there?
Do you have only a mandate to make the federal government aware of the situation, to show a red light? With a yellow light or a red light, you're telling the government that the time has come for them to address the issue. In other words, they should work together with the Quebec government on the environment problem in order to protect habitats, salmon as a natural resource or something else. Is that the goal of your brief and of your presentation?
Mr. Brian Craik: I could answer you, but I'll ask my colleague, Mr. Penn, to give you part of the answer.
Since we do not represent the Innu from Labrador and the North Coast, who are the ones involved with the proposed Churchill River project, we only intended to speak as environmentalists, as people who looked at the impact of dams earlier. We are more or less familiar with the situation on the Churchill River.
I'd also like to tell you that the Crees went to court against the La Grande project in 1972 and that, after six months of proceedings, they managed to get the project stopped, they got an injunction against the project. Work was halted for about a week; the Quebec Appeal Court then reversed the decision, the Crees eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court refused to hear the Crees on the injunction but invited them to present their case to the court based upon their rights.
Therefore, they should have started with the Quebec Superior Court, basing their argument on their right to the territory. It might have taken them five years or more to get to the Supreme Court, and during all that time, work on the project would have gone on. Therefore, they foresaw that the project would be completed before they got anything from the court. At the time, Native rights were not defined as well as they are now in Canada.
So the Crees were forced to negotiate with Hydro-Québec, the province of Quebec and Canada, as well as with both developers, the James Bay Development Corporation and the James Bay Energy Corporation. After two years, the result of their negotiations was the James Bay Agreement, which stated that they would be paid damages. However, the damages that have been paid to the Crees for years would have been depleted within about a year if they had not received anything from the governments to maintain various agencies on their territory such as the school board, the health council, the Cree regional government or the maintenance funds for the bands.
• 1630
People are complaining now that, under the James Bay
Agreement, the Crees were granted the right to develop a territory
that was specifically set aside for them. But what do we see? We
see that the environmental regulations which are enforced in the
North are issued in Quebec City and that there are no regulations
on how the Cree community should be affected by the development of
the territory. Because of that, it is said that the agreement has
not been implemented correctly.
It is one of the reasons why we are here. We'd like to change this. We'd like to to follow another route and have some other development projects accepted on the territory. It's a big issue for the Crees. For the people at Great whale, it's out of the question and they're against the project. The Cree community accepts their position.
If one or two small dams were proposed to be built here and there on the lands of one of the appropriate sites, we certainly could discuss it with the Crees. But if we are dealing with a big project such as what was mentioned earlier, the Crees will never accept it.
I'll let Alan take the floor because he'll be able to explain the mercury situation better than I would.
[English]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Excuse me. Could you make the comments brief? Each member is supposed to get 10 minutes, and that includes the answer. Right now we're over time, so please just make your answer brief.
[Translation]
Mr. Alan Penn: Very briefly, I'd like to say that the appeal court rendered its decision in late 1973 on the fact that the Crees had to wait for the La Grande project to be completed before consequential damages could be assessed. The project was being built during the whole time the negotiating process went on. When the James Bay Agreement entered into force, the reservoir of the LG2 plant was almost ready to be flooded.
Regarding mercury, I'd simply like to say that a five-fold increase in the mercury content in various fish stocks has been documented. The reality of the increase cannot be questioned.
If you ask Quebec representatives, you'll get the same answer: there has never been such a clear signal of a development project having such a consequence. Unquestionably, the five-fold increase in mercury content is due to the flooding of the region. I think I answered your question.
Mr. Gérard Asselin: I'd just like to ask a short question. Could mercury be eliminated over a certain time period?
[English]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): We're at 13 minutes.
I'll turn it over to Mr. Laliberte.
Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, NDP):
[Member speaks in Cree]
I wish to, on behalf of all the members, extend a well greeting to Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come in his accident and wish him a speedy recovery.
My colleague has raised two issues. You do raise a concern that the federal government is neglecting its responsibility as a tripartite member of this agreement and neglecting its environmental responsibilities in a huge region with a major impact to certain people in this country.
• 1635
There are two disparities that I thought you were
comparing, but you didn't extend any further discussion
on it. One is the south of the 55th parallel issue
and the other is in reference to the Inuvialuit
agreement. Can you shed more light on those two? In
terms of that 55th parallel, why is north of it federal
jurisdiction and south of it provincial jurisdiction?
Mr. Brian Craik: I'll let Alan answer the question on the 55th parallel.
Mr. Alan Penn: The 55th parallel is the northern boundary of the Eeyou James Bay municipality. It was basically the functional limit of the administrative structure set up by the Bourassa government in the 1970s for the administrative framework for the development of the La Grande project. Anything south of the 55th parallel basically was subject to the jurisdiction of these different crown corporations set up by the Quebec government for the La Grande development. It's a major, critical constraint. It's a major component of the political picture from 1971 onwards.
Does that respond to your question?
Mr. Rick Laliberte: Is the 55th parallel a designation by the federal government in the provincial agreement, or is it just the end of the surveyor—
Mr. Alan Penn: In relationship to jurisdiction, again I come back to what I said just now. It's been treated by both the Quebec and federal governments as being an approximate dividing line between Inuit and Cree interests, although it is in fact a very unsatisfactory dividing line from a Cree perspective.
Most importantly, by cutting off northern Quebec at the 55th parallel, at its southern limit you basically avoid the appearance of interfering with Quebec's jurisdiction in connection with the La Grande development. That's the practical significance of the 55th parallel and this question of federal jurisdiction.
What I was trying to say with respect to the Inuvialuit agreement in the Northwest Territories is that there was no such hesitation about the significance of the involvement of Fisheries and Oceans. There's a group in the central and Arctic region of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg that is devoted full time to issues relating to the implementation of the Inuvialuit agreement. There is a joint fisheries management structure that apparently works very well. And there was implementation funding negotiated at the time of the conclusion of the agreement to provide a framework for that.
I'm trying to say very simply that the political context of the development in the Beaufort Sea area and the involvement of the federal government were fundamentally different from that in the northern Quebec region, where there was much greater sensitivity about the federal presence.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Is there anything else?
Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Joe Jordan (Leeds—Grenville, Lib.): I want to thank the witnesses for coming out. I just want to ask a couple of maybe semantic questions, but they may be much deeper than that.
On page 9 of your report, you refer to third parties. Are the Cree feeling so alienated that they're referring to themselves as a third party in this matter? Who are you talking about there?
Mr. Alan Penn: Where is this?
Mr. Joe Jordan: It's on page 9: “These initiatives will mean little, and may mean nothing at all, if they are not accompanied by funding for third parties”. It's the second-last paragraph on the page. I can read the whole paragraph if you want. It's in your conclusion.
Mr. Alan Penn: Read the paragraph to me.
Mr. Joe Jordan: Actually, I'll make my whole point, then maybe we can clarify things.
You struck a chord when you talked about not only the existing legislation. I think what you were also getting at there is the political will to then enforce and act on that legislation. Sometimes there are examples of those things being directly at cross-purposes.
• 1640
Rather than spend a great deal of time and effort
trying to force actions through legislation, I'm a
strong believer in enabling third parties to have the
capacity to intervene. What we saw with the Great
Whale project demonstrates the very positive role
it can play.
When you're talking about funding for third parties, are you referring to the Cree as a third party? Is that how bad it has become? Or are you saying as with the Sierra Club, to make sure we have the resources?
Mr. Alan Penn: I'm still looking for the reference in the text here, I'm afraid.
Mr. Joe Jordan: Do you want to see mine?
Mr. Alan Penn: Yes. Basically, in many situations, what has happened now with the implementation of the environmental sections is that proponents come in and present a project. The Crees, usually out of their compensation funds, sometimes shoulder a large part of the cost of reviewing that. So our capacity to conduct those reviews is limited.
If we turn to the governments and ask them to provide us with some advice, we sometimes get a little bit out of Quebec; we get nothing out of Canada. Zero. The one time we tried to implicate the Freshwater Institute in some comments on the Great Whale project, it was vetoed by the deputy minister. They could not say anything to us.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): When was that?
Mr. Alan Penn: It was 1993, I think.
Mr. Joe Jordan: What I see in that conclusion then is sort of an affirmation that it makes sense to engage people who are interested in this issue, but it needs to be accompanied by the capacity to intervene in some kind of constructive or intellectual way.
Back to the question then: are you then referring to the Cree as a third party?
Mr. Alan Penn: In that case, yes.
Mr. Joe Jordan: I guess that speaks volumes about how the situation has deteriorated.
Mr. Alan Penn: Yes.
Mr. Joe Jordan: Thank you.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mrs. Kraft Sloan.
Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan (York North, Lib.): I just wanted to apologize for being late. There was an event on the Hill that involved my riding.
I also wanted to express my condolences to Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come. He's come before the committee on a number of occasions and has been a very able witness.
I just want to thank you for your brief. It has been very good. That's all I really wanted to say.
Mr. Brian Craik: Thank you.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Asselin, I cut you off. Would you like to lead off the second round?
Mr. Casson.
Mr. Rick Casson (Lethbridge, Ref.): I'd like to ask a question about the Quévillon pulp and paper mill, which lost 70 tonnes of mercury. How do you lose 70 tonnes of mercury?
Mr. Alan Penn: At the time, the pulp industry produced chlorine on site for the bleaching of pulp using these very large baths of inorganic mercury, metallic mercury. Many mills lost an appreciable quantity to the subsoil and the neighbouring river system, and they had to replace it. So the figure of 70 tonnes, basically, comes from the company's records of what they had to replace.
Mr. Rick Casson: You say it's the only chloralkali cell in Canada that hasn't had a clean-up and restoration.
Mr. Alan Penn: That's what we understand.
Mr. Rick Casson: So is this thing still there and polluting? Is it an active mill?
Mr. Alan Penn: The mill is active. The chloralkali cell was shut down in 1977. The site itself continues. The site itself was monitored by Domtar for a number of years. For a while, the runoff from the plant site was treated in order to strip mercury from it, but was only continued for a while. There's also a major brine disposal site a few kilometres away. We were advised in fact by regional officials from Fisheries and Oceans that this was a site that simply hadn't been cleaned up, and one of the obstacles was, again, a federal-provincial agreement on the characterization of the site. In the absence of a federal-provincial agreement, no action was being taken. Domtar was the beneficiary of that process.
• 1645
Mr. Rick Casson: Is the department aware that this is there and it's still polluting?
Mr. Alan Penn: They were in 1989 and 1990, when this was brought to our attention. But my information is that the problem has still not been corrected.
Mr. Rick Casson: We were told that every case reported is acted on in some way, I suppose. I don't know what that means.
Mr. Alan Penn: Again, the problem here is a question of federal-provincial and industry relations and who actually takes the initiative to authorize a clean-up process. The federal government is a party to the process, but as far as I can make out, a passive party, who in practice depends on the initiative of the provincial government to act, although the authority to act is still there under the Fisheries Act.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): We could ask the department for an update.
Mr. Rick Casson: That would be nice.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Who is it...? Is it for the clerk to do?
The Clerk of the Committee: It's recorded in the transcripts.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Maybe they don't read the transcripts.
The Clerk: Mr. Chairman, they read them backwards and forwards.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Well, to the department, if you're reading this transcript, we would like an update when the officials finally come for their last visit on enforcement.
Mr. Rick Casson: I would like to get a feeling for where the majority of your frustration must come from. It seems it's high, because you keep saying these different levels of government and different agencies and different committees go around and around and nothing happens.
We've talked about different ways of getting different levels of government to work together to be responsible; somebody to take the bull by the horns, for lack of a better way of putting it. Who do you think should take the lead here in order to get some of these problems resolved and for some attention to be brought to these? Does it have to be the federal government?
Mr. Brian Craik: I think it could be either. But I don't see why either should wait for the other. They both have jurisdiction.
One of the frustrating things is that the federal review procedure in here is now suspended by the federal Department of Environment. They won't implement it. They won't review any projects; none.
We look at a bridge that's proposed by a forestry company north of Waswanipi. It's going over the Broadback River. So we ask the federal people to do a review. They say, well, we are doing a review. Well, who is doing the review? CEAA is doing the review; we're doing it under CEAA, not the James Bay agreement. Where is the review being done? Well, we contracted some people in New Brunswick to do it; people we never see.
What is that about? This regime is supposed to be for the Crees to be involved in the environmental review process. The present Department of Environment refuses to implement it and contracts to somebody in New Brunswick to carry out a review of a bridge in northern Quebec. What is happening is ridiculous.
Mr. Alan Penn: May I add something to that? This is an impression I have, but I think the Quebec region of Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been hypersensitive with Quebec. We deal routinely with both the federal and the provincial levels of government, and at times it has appeared that the provincial interlocutors we deal with also ask questions about why the federal government has been so reluctant to get involved. Certainly, this is true in the case of freshwater fisheries development, where Canada still is the national repository of expertise in the area. We don't understand frankly—ourselves and some of our provincial counterparts—the extreme sensitivity of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans about getting involved in anything relating to fisheries management. It seems to me there is a far greater initiative that could be taken.
• 1650
In the case of the Le Grand complex, which occupied
part of this brief here, there are plenty of data around
that were collected by the James Bay Energy Corporation
and by Hydro-Québec under its own initiative. There
was plenty of scope, as there is for us, for the
federal government to become involved in debating what
these data mean and how they relate to the subsequent
changes being made to the Le Grand project and the
planning of other developments.
As far as we can see, there's no tangible evidence of any interest on the part of the federal government. Obviously, we'd like to see them do more than simply comment on somebody else's data. They could at least show some interest in what has already been done. We don't know what it takes to trigger that, but we really do believe that the degree of avoidance or the degree of sensitivity that we have seen over the last few years is unjustified by the circumstances.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Gilmour.
Mr. Bill Gilmour: Very briefly, perhaps this is an impression I've gained, but in British Columbia, because of a lack of manpower, provincial fisheries and federal fisheries work very well together. They both won't show up; they work hand in glove, and work well.
Do Quebec provincial fisheries and federal fisheries work well together, or is there a level of animosity because of politics? What's the relationship between the two levels in terms of fisheries?
Mr. Alan Penn: I think the best place to go to address that question is to the people involved in the maritime fisheries in the Gaspé. Again, that's not an area in which I've worked, but it is my impression that in those settings, in the lower north shore and in the Gaspé region, there probably is a fairly close functional relationship between the federal and provincial officials.
In the case I was talking about in the James Bay area, there is simply no history of involvement either on the federal side or on the Quebec side in management issues related to the fish stocks along the James Bay coast associated with the major river systems. There's a subsistence fishery in the area, and that's basically been allowed to stand on its own. There's never been any kind of overriding interest either on the federal or provincial side.
In the inland freshwater fisheries case, the issue is that there simply is no tradition of provincial involvement in such fisheries, whereas I think in British Columbia there's a history of provincial and federal involvement in fisheries going back many years. I think that predicates, if you like, how the two governments have decided to work together or not work together in the context of the political developments of the last 15 years or so in Quebec.
Mr. Bill Gilmour: Thanks.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Joe Jordan: Just one quick question. In light of the recent harmonization initiative, which has been called many different things by many different people, are we just talking about an administrative clarification of who's going to do nothing? Do you see that as a deteriorating situation, or is it so bad it can't get any worse?
Mr. Bill Craik: In part, I think you've hit it on the head. The other part of it is that the federal government has been gradually abandoning and taking expertise out. So even while there was a great reluctance in the past for the federal government to do anything in terms of active regulation and review, there's also a disappearance of expertise. At least at one point, on a very functional level, we could deal with some of the federal people and get some advice. It doesn't exist any more.
Mr. Joe Jordan: I think eventually we're not in the game. Eventually, we can't counter their data because we don't have the capacity to generate our own. Figures can lie and liars can figure. I mean, what are we going to do?
Mr. Bill Craik: The other problem is that in most cases the province isn't picking it up.
Mr. Joe Jordan: That's right.
• 1655
Mr. Brian Craik: The provincial department of the environment has lost a lot of employees and a lot of expertise. So there are the proponents. Is it in their interest to really collect data that are going to show up the impacts of their projects?
Mr. Alan Penn: In addition to that, I would say the problem I see is that the federal institutional framework for technical and scientific support for both freshwater marine systems in the eastern Arctic region of Canada, including the sub-Arctic...it was dismantled in the time period that was covered by this brief. If you dismantle something, you've lost it, unless you rebuild it. I think what may be necessary here is not an explicit recommendation to this brief, but I think what we would like to see is the relevant federal agencies take a fresh look at what kind of institutional support they should be providing, not necessarily in the sense of invading someone else's jurisdiction but what basic knowledge base is required for resource management and for habitat conservation and protection, for large-scale sound environmental policy in this part of the country. I think there needs to be a fresh reflection about what is needed.
Mr. Joe Jordan: Thanks.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): To finish it off, I have a few questions. For the example of the bridge, could you give us a little more detail. Where is it? How big a project is it? When did it start?
Mr. Alan Penn: What used to be known as the community of Fort George is now called—
Mr. Brian Craik: No, not that bridge. We're talking about the forestry road bridge.
Mr. Alan Penn: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Mr. Brian Craik: There's a forestry road being built just to the northwest of Ashuanipi, south of Nemaska. What they do is they build in a main access route and then they build in a number of smaller routes. The road spans the Broadback River. I suppose at that point the Broadback River is 200 yards plus across. It's a fairly big river. It's not enormous, but it's one of the three biggest ones in that area. The Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydroelectric project, which was on the books for a while and was scrapped.... The Broadback is that river.
The federal government got involved largely because of the Fisheries Act and decided, through CEAA, that it should take a look at the review. We haven't seen the result of the CEAA review. The preliminary examination of the project is all being done somewhere in New Brunswick. Somebody has been contracted to take a look at it for them. They refused to implement the James Bay agreement and the process in there.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): What form did that refusal take? Did they send you a letter?
Mr. Brian Craik: It's just that we're doing it under CEAA. Yes, they did it in a letter to us. Actually, they did write us a letter on that one. They said they were going to do a review under CEAA.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Do they think that puts them in compliance with the agreement?
Mr. Brian Craik: They think they don't have to implement the agreement, because they say the Eastmain decision in the court—
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Which means what?
Mr. Brian Craik: It was a decision on a proposed Eastmain project in about 1994, I think, where the Crees contested the project. The judge said that basically this project was described in the original 1975 agreement and therefore should go ahead. Then the judge went on to say that when you have a project in an area of provincial jurisdiction, such as hydroelectricity, the review should be done through the provincial process, not the federal process.
There's a real contradiction here. The agreement had been interpreted before that when it's a project that impacts on an area of federal jurisdiction, the agreement will do the review. The federal government would do the review under federal areas of jurisdiction; Quebec would do the review under provincial areas of jurisdiction. But the problem is that since that judgment, the federal government won't apply this process, because what project in northern Quebec isn't essentially under provincial jurisdiction?
• 1700
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): When you say “this process”, do you mean the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement process?
Mr. Brian Craik: Yes. This has become defunct since then. Instead of approaching the Cree or Quebec and saying “How are we going to implement the federal environmental protection sections of this agreement?”, they say “We don't have to implement it”. So it's not usable.
The irony in it is that the federal legislation under CEAA requires them to do a review under the Fisheries Act. So it's a matter under federal jurisdiction that has invoked the CEAA legislation. They've used the reverse logic. They've used the same logic we used to use to implement the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement to say they now only have to implement CEAA. Maybe they should say to us “Let's go to court and get a declaratory judgment as to how this thing works”. We'd be in favour of doing that if you paid our court costs.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Ms. Kraft Sloan.
Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: I know of many examples where there is federal-provincial jurisdiction involved and they do a joint review or there's a joint panel—whatever is stuck up. They've worked together on these things.
Mr. Alan Penn: When the agreement was negotiated in 1975, the environmental section Brian is referring to designated a person responsible for decision-making with respect to matters under federal jurisdiction and a person responsible for matters under provincial jurisdiction.
The problem with the court case, the Eastmain judgment, is that the federal court of appeal threw out the item where there was such scope for deciding on matters of provincial jurisdiction and simply said a project was either federal or provincial by definition. If you think about it, any project that involves natural resources development is easily classified from that point onwards essentially as purely provincial. That basically eliminates federal involvement in issues related to hydro development and forestry or mining under that kind of decision-making rule. We don't think that was what we went into in 1975 in the negotiation of the agreement, but that is the implication of the court of appeal ruling.
Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: There's a law list under CEAA that acts as a trigger, and the Fisheries Act acts as a trigger for CEAA as well.
Mr. Brian Craik: It does in the case of CEAA, but it doesn't in the case of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.
If you remember the Great Whale review, if that were proposed again the federal position would be that it would not be involved in it in terms of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. It was involved in the review before 1994 because the Great Whale was going to impact on matters under federal jurisdiction. It wouldn't do it now. That knocks the Cree out of the review process, which is one of the treaty promises here.
Mr. Alan Penn: If I understand it correctly, the federal government can argue the Cree process applies even if the Cree process will never trigger the federal review. So we're caught both ways.
Mr. Brian Craik: For example, a sawmill was proposed by one of the Cree communities to be built in its community on category I lands, which are under federal jurisdiction, largely to cut forests that are on category I lands, and the federal government refused to do a review of it because sawmills are provincial in nature.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you very much for your presentation. I just want to remind committee members that we'll go in camera for a few minutes to see if anybody has any comments they would like to make to the researcher.
[Editor's Note—Proceedings continue in camera]