:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
[Translation]
My colleagues and I are pleased to be here today.
[English]
We are pleased to be here today to have a chance to provide an overview of Environment and Climate Change Canada and then to have the opportunity to respond to your questions.
We have provided you with a deck, which gives a high-level overview of the department. We don't propose to walk through the deck, but as just mentioned, colleagues at the table are hoping to spend a few minutes each to describe to you in some detail their area of responsibility. That way, before we respond more deeply to your particular areas of interest, we'll have a chance to talk briefly about nature, climate change, weather, environmental protection, including plastics, and foundational science performed by the department.
I'll lead off by providing a brief overview of the department, before turning it over to my colleagues here at the table in the area of their responsibilities as they appear in the deck before you.
ECCC's mandate at the highest level is to protect and conserve Canada's natural heritage and ensure a clean, safe and sustainable environment for present and future generations. Some of the services the department provides have been in place for many years. One of the most venerable parts of our department is almost 150 years old; that is the Meteorological Service of Canada, which was formed in 1871. The Wildlife Service, which Sue Milburn-Hopwood is here today to represent, is coming up to 75 years of age, and the department itself is going to be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year.
We are part of a portfolio that includes Parks Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, which I understand you will be hearing from next week. Each has its own deputy head.
The department has approximately 7,200 employees. More than half are located outside the national capital region: 56%, to be precise. There are about 8% in the Pacific and Yukon region, 11% in the Prairies and the north, 18% in Ontario, 13% in Quebec and 7% in the Atlantic region. Forty per cent of our department is made up of scientists. Other specialists include enforcement officers, as represented by Anne-Marie Pelletier; regulatory personnel; international negotiators; wildlife biologists; and of course, economic policy, finance and HR professionals. We're also really pleased that about 15% of our staff are students or recent grads.
The minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada is primarily responsible for 29 acts, some of which are listed in the deck, not all of them, and has secondary responsibility in a further 18. Under those pieces of legislation, there are approximately 80 regulations in place that address issues as diverse as pollution prevention, weather modification and wildlife protection emergency management.
The last thought I'll leave you with is that when we think about our mandate, it's really important to underscore that we work in an area of shared jurisdiction with the provinces and territories. This fact means that we put a premium on partnerships and collaboration in all aspects of our work: with provincial and territorial colleagues, of course, but also with indigenous peoples, local governments, NGOs, other federal departments and industry. You'll hear that theme of collaboration come through in all of my colleagues' remarks.
With that, thank you, and I will turn to Jackie Gonçalves.
Good morning, everyone.
Environment and Climate Change Canada is one of the largest science-based departments in Canada. The Science and Technology Branch has about 1,400 employees in 24 science and technology centres across the country. Those employees carry out laboratory work, field work, research and environmental monitoring.
Science is the foundation of our department's work. It supports the development of our regulations, the enforcement of environmental laws, as well as our weather and climate services. It provides the evidence we need to make sound decisions to protect our environment, provides public interest services, and promotes economic growth and prosperity. The science developed at our department has an excellent reputation both domestically and internationally. Our work responds directly to needs in service delivery and regulation, and to other department policies and programs.
[English]
Our employees are passionate about the work they do serving Canadians. Our department publishes over 700 peer-reviewed journals and articles annually, which puts the department among the world's most productive environmental science organizations. Year after year we make a high-impact contribution to science across Canada and the globe.
To support the department's mandate, our environmental science has taken many forms. One of our priority areas is to model and assess how the climate is changing, and to understand the impacts of climate change. However, under the current burden of warming and under future scenarios, the challenge of understanding, predicting and tracking climate change is a team effort across all of our branches and scientific disciplines. It's also an area of high collaboration with other national and international organizations.
Our department relies heavily on research and monitoring of the presence and impacts of environmental pollutants and stressors to inform decisions. In this area, we are world-recognized innovators in new approaches, for example in the oil sands monitoring program, a productive collaboration among the Government of Alberta, local indigenous peoples, the oil industry and other stakeholders to monitor the environmental effects of oil sands resource development.
Another example is the elaboration of a draft scientific assessment on the pollution of plastic that was recently published. We hope to be getting comments and feedback on that report between now and April 1.
Another of our priorities is to support informed responses to threats and emerging priorities. We have many activities in a variety of different media that we collect information on, share information on, and collaborate with many other organizations to deliver.
To close, environmental issues are interconnected globally, and no single country or organization has the expertise or capacity to address them alone. Canadian collaboration in the international science community is key to delivering on our mandate's responsibilities.
I'll pass it now to my colleagues.
Thank you.
:
My name is Matt Jones. I am the assistant deputy minister of the pan-Canadian framework implementation office, formerly known as the climate policy office.
Our group was involved in developing our national climate change plan, the pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change. We've since pivoted to supporting its implementation. It is quite a cross-cutting collection of policies and measures that are being implemented and led by colleagues across a number of federal departments.
I think you'll hear from many of our colleagues that part of their responsibilities are associated with the issue of climate change. It is a vast and cross-cutting issue with many subcomponents, and we're all involved in various ways. Our regulatory colleagues are obviously very involved in developing GHG-based regulations. We have an international negotiation team. We have a dedicated modelling team. There's a team that is exclusively focused on the issues of adaptation—how we adapt to the impacts of climate change. We have a technical team that does our GHG inventory. We have a dedicated modelling team that does our emissions projections and our accountabilities and reporting. Lots of my colleagues here at the table and others are very much involved in climate change.
My team has been put in place to try to pull together the pieces, to have a holistic view of the issue and to be able to provide advice on the issue of climate change. I have three primary groups.
I have a policy and coordination group that pulls together climate policies and works across all of the implicated federal departments. It also works with provinces and territories, and it chairs a climate change committee with environment ministry colleagues from the provinces and territories. It also supports three existing tables with first nations, Inuit and Métis on the issue of climate change. That is the central policy and coordination group.
I also have a programs team. They implement the low-carbon economy fund, among others, one piece of the pan-Canadian framework.
And I have the Canadian centre for climate services, which is a technical organization that really pulls together climate data and makes it available to Canadians in a usable format. I'd encourage you to check out its website. You can see both historical data and projected future impacts of climate change on a map. It's climatedata.ca, which is a very useful tool for understanding the local impacts, changes that we have seen in precipitation and temperature, both in the past and also projected into the future.
Those are the three main components of my organization. I'm happy to follow up on climate topics.
The Meteorological Service of Canada provides Canadians with authoritative information on weather, water quantity, ice conditions, air quality and other environmental conditions. We do this 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As Hilary said, we're poised to celebrate our 150th anniversary.
We also actively support the mission-critical operations of other entities. For example, we provide the weather services for our Department of National Defence, for the Canadian Coast Guard—particularly ice-related services—and for Canada's air navigation system. We also provide essential data to the provinces and territories to support their emergency management operations, including their government operations centres, as well as their provincial flood forecasting entities.
Canadians are avid consumers of weather data. About 90% of Canadians actively seek out weather data every day. For example, we issue thousands of products, and our weather website is visited about 50 million times per month. We launched a new service platform about a year ago: WeatherCAN is our weather app. We've had about a million downloads of that weather app since it was first introduced.
In addition to the products and services, we also make our data very widely available on some of our digital platforms.
I'll give you an example. On average, about 30 terabytes of data are downloaded every month. These are taken up by third parties, who either further distribute the data or create their own value-added products for their business purposes.
Partnerships are critical to our business. Weather doesn't stop and start in Canada, so the whole business model is based on international collection and sharing of data on a real-time basis. Every day, multiple times per day, there's a coordinated effort across the planet to launch weather balloons and to share the data in real time in a global telecommunications and information management system. Then we in Canada draw from that data in order to initialize our weather models.
In addition, back in Canada we work collaboratively at the local and regional levels with our provinces and territories. For example, for our water quantity program we manage more than 2,000 water quantity stations, where we measure the flow, the level of the water. That data is provided in almost real time to our provincial and territorial colleagues, who will then use the data to help predict floods and other hazardous conditions.
In order to deliver on this mandate, we run an integrated system, from the collection of the data all the way to the product and service delivery. It's based on a very large asset base of diverse monitoring equipment that includes weather radars, weather balloon launch stations, surface stations, water quantity stations, lightning detection systems, etc.
As a highlight, we're currently midway in a major project of replacement of our weather radars. We got an injection of funds in 2013. We have replaced 12 of our 30 radars and are on track to replace the rest.
The next part of the value chain is based on high-performance computing. We have one of the most powerful computers in Canada, one of the top 100 computers globally. It processes vast amounts of data every day. We run a top-tier global forecasting model—we're among the top five performers on the globe. Two years ago, we completed a replacement project of the current high-performance computing system. We've replaced it and we've done our first upgrade.
The performance of high-performance computing systems is pretty integral to how well weather models perform globally. The top-tier weather centres are always in the mode of planning the next supercomputer replacements. It's a small-knit community. We track each other's performance but also track the ability of the vendors to respond to our needs.
Finally, part of the chain is our experts, our meteorologists. Once we have the guidance from our computer models, our meteorologists take that guidance and issue the products every day, and that includes specialized products and services.
Overall in the meteorological service, we have about 1,400 employees, who are distributed in 50 centres across Canada. If we focus just on the weather business, though, there are about 300 meteorologists, focused in seven regionally based storm prediction centres. Then we have some additional specialized services for aviation, defence, etc.
We're very pleased to be here. The reason we exist is basically that extreme weather presents extremely high impacts to the global economy, and that's the same in Canada. The World Economic Forum recently identified that the highest risk, the most likely risk, is extreme weather. In Canada, the costs of disasters such as floods and fires are extremely high, so our focus is on improving the services, delivering more early warning information and having longer lead times to help Canadians and their institutions prepare for extreme weather.
Thank you.
:
Good morning. I'm pleased to be here today.
I'm the assistant deputy minister of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The Canadian Wildlife Service is responsible for the department's nature agenda more broadly across the government. I'll go through our responsibilities and some of our priorities.
First of all, we have a significant mandate related to species at risk, and the Species at Risk Act provides a number of authorities and mechanisms for species protection and recovery. We have obligations for federal species like migratory birds, and then the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has that responsibility for aquatic species. Then we have provisions for a safety net for non-federal lands and non-federal species.
There are currently over 600 species at risk, and the list continues to grow. Tackling the species at risk issue is a bit of a daunting agenda. In 2018, Environment and Climate Change Canada, in collaboration with the provinces and territories, developed something called the pan-Canadian approach to transform our approach to species at risk conservation across the country, focusing on some select priority places, some select species and some sectors and threats to try to build in more multi-species, ecosystem-based planning and delivery.
Unlike some of the other species—the terrestrial species that are largely managed by the provinces—we do have exclusive responsibility for migratory birds under the Migratory Birds Convention Act. Birds are in decline, particularly shore birds, grassland birds and aerial insectivores, which are birds that eat insects in flight. In North America, we've lost three billion birds since 1970, largely due to habitat loss and degradation. Habitat loss is the greatest risk, but we also have responsibilities for managing the hunting of migratory birds, and we are pleased to indicate that we are modernizing our approach to those regulations.
The next big area that I want to talk about is our work on conserving and restoring important wildlife habitats and ecosystems. We do that through a mix of conservation tools, providing funding and incentives for others to act. Sometimes we act on our own and sometimes we use regulatory action, all supported by science.
Environment and Climate Change Canada leads on the national efforts to expand Canada's network of protected and conserved areas. Our current target is to conserve 17% of lands and inland waters by 2020. As of January of this year, 12.1% has been achieved. That's an area twice the size of Alberta. That's a really significant accomplishment.
As we work toward getting higher amounts protected, indigenous protected and conserved areas are increasingly important. We've had significant investments, particularly in the last two years, to make progress in this area, but there's much more that needs to be done to meet the target. The government has indicated that we'll bring a plan to conserve 25% of Canada's land and 25% of Canada's oceans by 2025, working toward a 30% goal by 2030. In doing that, we'll be looking at science, indigenous knowledge and local perspectives.
As I indicated, we also have some direct responsibilities in this area. In Environment and Climate Change Canada, we manage a huge network of protected areas, more than 14 million hectares. Protected areas are essentially parks for wildlife, and Environment and Climate Change Canada is the second-largest land manager because of this responsibility. We manage 55 national wildlife areas and 92 migratory bird sanctuaries. They include not only terrestrial but also some of the marine areas outside of these areas, so they are both terrestrial and marine.
Those are really the three big areas. On top of that, we have an overall responsibility for biodiversity, and we lead collaborative efforts with other federal departments, provinces, territories, indigenous people, and stakeholders to develop Canada's national biodiversity strategy, both domestically and internationally.
The work that's under way right now is to prepare for the October meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity and to develop goals for the post-2020 period.
As Hilary mentioned, we share this responsibility with provinces and territories. The responsibility for addressing biodiversity loss is shared. Land use planning, natural resource development and wildlife management are primarily a responsibility of the provinces and territories. Forty per cent of the landscape is covered by indigenous land claims, so it's really important—
:
Good morning. I am pleased to be joining you.
I am in charge of the Environmental Protection Branch at the Department of the Environment. Our purpose is to monitor, prevent and manage pollution from various sources, to prevent air and water pollution, and to manage risks associated with chemical substances.
We work with our counterparts from Health Canada and, as my colleague Ms. Gonçalves said, we provide scientific and technical support 24/7 to help better manage emergencies. We work closely with our federal, provincial and, in some cases, municipal counterparts. We also work on managing hazardous waste to ensure that it is properly managed and eliminated safely.
In addition, we also ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as my colleague Mr. Jones mentioned.
[English]
This area is definitely one of shared jurisdiction. We work very closely with our provincial and territorial colleagues to help deliver on this important mandate. We also have a responsibility for managing environmental programs, such as the federal contaminated sites program, to help reduce the legacy and liability from past practices that have resulted in environmental contamination on federal land. We put in place regulations and other risk management measures. We work collaboratively with industry in helping to reduce and manage the pollution and pollution sources that we spoke about. We take regulatory and other actions under a couple of key pieces of legislation: the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, and the Fisheries Act, in terms of both the general prohibition and administration of some key effluent regulations, including pulp and paper, metal and diamond mining, and wastewater system effluence regulations.
We also support some of the work that my colleague Sue mentioned under the Migratory Birds Convention Act and the pollution prohibition provisions there. We are responsible for helping to support the department's work on the modernization of our legislation—the CEPA modernization, for instance—and we are working to help bridge the environmental gap that we find on reserves.
With respect to air quality, we work collaboratively with our provinces and territories to improve air quality. We are also working collaboratively with our colleagues at Health Canada in the development of an air quality management system that would help set standards and emissions requirements for industries and equipments. We also put in place regulations—
:
Good morning, members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here today.
The mandate of the enforcement branch is to enforce the department's environmental and wildlife acts and their regulations in a fair, predictable and consistent manner. As my colleague mentioned, our work covers many pollution regulations, wildlife regulations, general prohibitions, national wildlife areas and migratory bird sanctuaries, among others. The enforcement branch, in collaboration with several Environment Canada programs, provinces, territories and national and international partners, works to ensure that companies and individuals comply with the environmental and wildlife acts and regulations. Our main objective is to bring regulatees into compliance. It's not about going out there and saying, “We got you”; it's more about bringing them back into compliance.
We are a young branch. We were formed only in 2005, following recommendations made in 1998 by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. It had tabled a report called “Enforcing Canada's Pollution Laws: The Public Interest Must Come First!”. The report made a number of recommendations, including that the department should establish an independent or centralized enforcement agency and that enforcement decisions should not be made by officials with managerial functions and responsibilities in areas other than enforcement. This is why the branch was created under the minister, reporting directly to the deputy minister.
The minister has a responsibility for management and direction of the department. Accountability for the branch rests with me, the chief enforcement officer. I report directly to the deputy minister. While the minister provides strategic direction to the entire department, the minister's role is independent from my role in enforcement operational decision-making. This distance was put in place to protect the integrity of the law enforcement process and protect all parties from claims of conflict of interest, influence or misuse of public office. This distance, when it comes to enforcement, is very important.
The branch itself is made up of about 430 employees, of whom 270 are enforcement officers, and they are across Canada. They have enforcement powers under the legislation, which they are designated for. We are dispersed into five regions, and we have about 27 district offices across Canada. Enforcement officers are designated with the powers of peace officers for the purpose of enforcing the legislation under which they are designated. Among other things, this gives us the power to seize evidence, with search warrants, and to issue summonses compelling people to appear in court.
The enforcement branch is organized into five sections. Of course, we have the enforcement on the environment side and the enforcement on the wildlife side. We have risk assessment, and we also have the training and the support officer safety section as well.
I'm going to leave it here. It's quite evident what we do as our role within the department, and we work very closely in collaboration with our regulatory people and also people from the wildlife section.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for a tremendous panel. It's always too short, but very informative.
Considering some of the topics we might be studying in future meetings, I might want to test a few with you to see what you have to say. One of them is around recent rulings on Volkswagen. As a co-chair of the automotive caucus, I'm always interested in how government and industry work together to protect the environment. That being said, on January 22, Volkswagen pleaded guilty to illegally importing vehicles equipped with defeat devices in contravention of our environmental protection laws. Similar jurisdictions like the U.S. and the EU moved more quickly on this issue than Canada did.
Could you talk about the process we follow in situations like this, where we need to investigate the charges on industry?
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Okay. If we could hold on that, that would be great. That gives me a flavour for how we go back and forth on that. Thank you.
I have two other questions I want to get to, and we only have a few more minutes.
Last week, I held a climate change town hall in Guelph. I had our member of provincial Parliament there on a panel with me, as well as our mayor. All levels of government are working together on climate change initiatives.
One of the topics that came out over and over again was transportation. Guelph has recently been awarded funding for electric buses—we have 65 buses coming to Guelph over a period of time. We're looking at how to mitigate the pollution from vehicles on greenhouse gas emissions and how to coordinate across your department in terms of vehicle emissions—things like buses, transit fleets and city fleets, as well as business fleets.
:
First, thanks so much for your time and for your insightful presentations. I want to follow up on a couple of questions that have already been asked.
It was mentioned, on the pollution side, that the enforcement is predominantly targeted at industry, whereas I think it was more aimed at individuals on the wildlife protection or conservation side.
In the fall of 2018, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development audited the government's performance of controlling toxic substances under CEPA and identified several weaknesses in the enforcement.
One example was that 70% of the prosecutions were of dry cleaners, which are often small businesses and are less able to defend themselves in court. In addition to that, there was really no documented evidence that the substance presented a higher risk to human health and the environment than other substances—especially in the context of Volkswagen, a very large corporation having potentially huge impacts on human health.
I'm curious about that kind of gap or other gaps that you see in the enforcement of CEPA and what's happening on that front.
:
Thank you for your question.
We took these gaps very seriously. The enforcement branch is shifting how we're assessing risk. We are in the midst, in our first year, of developing a methodology where we're going to be identifying, with all the regulations that we have, which sectors are at higher risk for the environment. With that, it's going to be shifting our enforcement activities from knowing where to target to knowing where the highest risk is, so we look at areas that may not be the dry cleaner. It may be other areas where we know the risk is higher. We may not have all the information today. We may be going collecting. We may be going in areas that we are not predominantly going to. It's human nature to go where we know there is non-compliance, so we're shifting that.
I cannot give you any examples right now, because we are really in the middle of doing this. We are meeting with provinces and territories next week to share our methodology so we can work collaboratively, and we're looking at doing some joint planning as well.
This risk assessment-based approach is really going to be addressing the report and the gaps that were in the recommendations.
:
The issue of fossil fuel subsidies and the examination of them—both from a tax side and a non-tax side—comes from a G20 commitment that was made a number of years ago to identify and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. A framework was developed by our colleagues in the ministry of finance to do that analysis, and the application of that framework has led to eight tax initiatives being phased out over the last decade or so.
On the non-tax side, Environment Canada has been leading that work, in co-operation with a number of other departments. We applied the same framework and, as the member says, identified four non-tax fossil fuel subsidies that were determined not to be inefficient—if that's not a double negative.
As a result of two reviews by the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, there is still work under way on this. The previous minister retained Michael Horgan, a former deputy minister of environment and finance, to have a look at the framework, consult with Canadians and provide some recommendations, taking into account the context as it has evolved since the time of the G20 commitment.
The short answer to the question is that we are still considering it, with the advice of Mr. Horgan, in light of the CESD recommendation, and of course the government's commitment to net zero by 2050.
I think it's fair to say that the surrounding context has evolved, and we're still considering how we may need to evolve with it.
:
Thank you very much for the question.
With respect to the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act specifically, consideration was given under of part 1 of the fuel charge. I should note that it was Finance Canada that led the development and the implementation of part 1, along with the Canada Revenue Agency.
There are exemptions for farmers, in terms of coverage. In jurisdictions where it applies, the federal fuel charge does not apply to biological emissions from livestock, or to gasoline or diesel used on farms in trucks and farm machinery. Similarly, for the related policy, in terms of the return of direct proceeds from the fuel charge, in jurisdictions where it is returned directly—primarily to households—there is an increasing 10% supplement for rural areas. There is a front-end and a back-end consideration of rural communities.
:
Thank you very much for that question.
In the context of the earlier issue, when the waste was brought to the Philippines, we subsequently made an amendment to our regulations to put in place a requirement that where a jurisdiction defines a waste as hazardous, even if it's not captured under our regulations as being hazardous, we will consider it hazardous and then subject to the same requirements and provisions that hazardous wastes are.
That means they are required to obtain a permit from us. In order for us to issue a permit, we reach out to the country they're exporting to and where the final disposal will occur. We look to obtain prior informed consent, which is also part of the provisions of the Basel Convention. Once we have the prior informed consent, then the permit will be issued and the waste will be tracked.
The other thing I should note is that for countries that are not members of the Basel Convention—for us, our big exporter is the United States—we have a memorandum of understanding so that we put in place the like provisions with them as well.
:
What is it in French? That's okay, not a problem. I have to learn it anyway. Duolingo gave up on me a long time ago.
Thank you. Those were great presentations.
I'm from Manitoba, right in the middle, by Brandon, Manitoba. My riding is Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa.
Modelling is a very interesting topic, when we have all of this data and we look at it, looking at different studies and the results of them over the years. When the modelling becomes something, how do you look at it, and what become the criteria for looking at modelling?
Across many departments—there was one statement Mr. Jones made—do you use the same model? Do you use the same criteria when you're analyzing? When you go across government departments and you say, these are the criteria we're going to use for all departments, from Parks to space and technology, how do you determine what model to use and what is going to be in those models?
:
It would be helpful to have the experts here.
I can tell you that the data sources for the model, which are the foundation of the analysis, come from a number of sources—everywhere from Statistics Canada to other federal agencies—so that we have credible and consistent data sources. They're run through the model. It is a general equilibrium model that produces both economic and emissions outcomes. When they run scenarios, particularly when we do regulatory impact assessment, they can look at the impacts on the economy and the GDP.
The key is to have a credible model, consistent data and credible assumptions. We try to be very transparent with that. We do release publicly our big analyses, in terms of both our emission projections and the regulatory impact assessments for each of our regulatory measures.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
First of all, congratulations on this extraordinarily clear and detailed presentation. It's very succinct and rich in information.
My question will interest my colleague, Mr. Schiefke, because his riding is contiguous to mine—upstream from mine. My question is for Ms. Campbell.
You talked about predicting environmental conditions, including with respect to water. Can you take us step by step through how you would approach a flooding situation like the ones we've experienced in the last two out of three years along the Ottawa River, Rivière des Prairies, the St. Lawrence River and so on? How do you work with the provincial authorities to help predict what the water levels will be? That's my first question.
:
Sure. Thank you for that question.
It's a multistep process. It starts with actually monitoring the environment. The data that we start with is what's happening with water levels and flows. We run the stations. It's a bit of a collaborative program, so there are stations that are of interest to the provinces, like Ontario and Quebec, and ones where the water is moving interprovincially or internationally where we have the most interest. We collect all the data, though, and it's supported through a cost recovery program. We maintain the data quality control. We maintain the data flow to make sure that the information—the data itself—gets to the provincial governments very quickly.
Quebec is a little different from the rest of the provinces because they collect their own data and we acquire it and make it available. That's a small difference, but it doesn't materially change the speed at which the data is shared.
It starts with data, and then, in those two jurisdictions, the provinces have their own flood forecasting centres. We feed the forecasting centres in two ways. The weather part of the enterprise is continually doing the forecasting of what the conditions are, such as how much rainfall there is. We look, on a season by season basis, to see whether we're going to have a wetter season ahead of us. There's a fair amount of uncertainty with a seasonal scale prediction versus a daily weather forecast, but nevertheless that's part of what we will give them. We will update that on a monthly and then weekly basis as it starts to get to the spring freshet season.
The other thing we do is track the amount of precipitation that has happened in the winter. The snow pack, the rate of melt and the intensity and duration of rainfall are all the major conditions that determine whether we're going to have a flooding kind of event like the ones we had in the region for those two years you've described.
That's the principal engine. You spoke about modelling generally. I described the weather modelling enterprise. It's a very complex atmosphere, ocean and ice model. The last component that we're working on now through our science is to bring in the hydrological modelling component. Our vision is that, within a few years, we hope to provide the same kind of predictive outputs to the provinces and territories as we do with weather forecasting. The science isn't quite there.
:
Thanks very much, Chair.
Thank you all very much for being here.
It's interesting. Briefings such as this, conversations such as this, allow us to go a mile wide and an inch deep, and you can see some of us trying to scratch the surface and go a little deeper.
I have questions on two topics. Hopefully we have enough time in the five minutes to cover both of them at least at a high level.
I represent a riding called Etobicoke Centre. This is a suburban riding in the 416 area, in the city of Toronto. Back in 2013, there was flooding throughout the GTA. That was well covered; you would be aware of that. Etobicoke was hit particularly hard. There was flooding inside people's homes, transit was shut down, and so on.
I understand that the city is responsible for mitigating the risk associated with flooding such as that. There's the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. There are a number of entities involved in that.
To what degree, if at all, is the federal government involved in mitigating that? What are some of the steps the federal government takes to do so?
The second topic goes back to climate change. Mr. Jones, I think this is a question for you, but please feel free to delegate it to others if appropriate.
I wonder if you could share briefly where we're making the most progress in terms of policy development, but especially in terms of execution, the execution that's required to make sure that we tackle climate change.
If I think about what I hear from constituents in my riding, to them climate change is the existential issue of our time, so I'd be curious if you could share briefly where we're making the most progress.
:
I'd be happy to. I'll try to be brief. That's certainly a big question.
In terms of emission reductions, we do have some good public data on this that we could provide. I think the electricity sector is one where we have seen the most significant reductions, mostly from a switch from coal to alternative sources, everything from natural gas to renewables. Frankly, most of our emission reductions have come from the electricity sector, although there have been reductions across most sectors of the economy.
The transportation sector is one where we've been able to stop the growth and achieve some reductions. That's not an easy thing, given the current that we're swimming against there, where the number of vehicles on the road and the amount of freight shipped have increased over time.
On the flip side, one of the areas where we do need to make more progress is really around the question of adaptation: how we're adapting to the impacts of climate change. The science is clear that there are impacts in all scenarios. There's a certain amount of warming baked in, no matter how global emissions go in the future, and that's an important area.
My colleague Helen is reminding me that methane emissions are another area where we have made some good progress and are continuing to do so. In many countries, that's generally considered a low-hanging fruit in terms of low-cost emission reduction opportunities. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. If you're able to capture it and keep it from being vented to the atmosphere, it is a saleable commodity, of course, so that is an important area.
I'll maybe turn to colleagues if there are other topics.
:
I'll take that question, Madam Chair.
Tree planting is part of a bigger bucket, which we call nature-based climate solutions. It's about how trees, grasslands, wetlands, agricultural soil, etc. can contribute to the sink that takes carbon.
Our colleagues at Natural Resources are leading the work on trees—the Canadian Forest Service, which is part of Natural Resources Canada—and we're working closely with them in terms of some of the co-benefits that the trees could provide to caribou and nature in general.
We are doing a lot of analysis right now on the other part of that equation, which is wetlands, grasslands, building on some existing programs and looking at more. In addition, Agriculture Canada, of course, is involved in the soil.
I would say that it's a relatively new area. The world is paying a lot more attention to that side of the equation, and I think there will be a lot more detail that colleagues at NRCan will be able to provide, probably in the next month or so.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Scarpaleggia.
I have a question on the international dialogue that we're having. As we know, at COP21 there was a debate on article 6: article 6.2, and beyond that, article 6.4.
With these two articles, I think we lost—I'm not saying Canada, but collectively as a world—a huge opportunity, because these internationally transferred mitigation outcomes could have been used as leverage, not only for helping developing countries, but also for helping the companies we have here in Canada.
There has been a failure to reach an agreement—COP22, COP23, COP24 and COP25—and I'm wondering what the issue is, per se, and whether there is an opportunity for Canada to show leadership. Four years have gone by. With article 6.2, and especially article 6.4, when you're inviting the private sector to participate in these outcomes—
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Many very interesting things have been said. I would like to come back to a question by one of my Liberal colleagues.
Regarding climate change, it has been said that one of the areas where the most progress was being made was electricity. In Quebec, we have never had coal. I know that Ontario has closed coal-fired power plants, and that has clearly improved things, but it was several years ago already. Have there been any more recent changes?
Of course, we are thinking about the electrification of transportation, but we are still far from putting words into action. There may be more real and faster measures in that area. The issue of electricity also affects transportation, one of the sectors that emit the most greenhouse gases. It is said that progress has been made. I like that, and I would like to be positive. Right now, I am not, but perhaps your answer will help me become more positive.
:
Maybe I could start, and I will turn to my colleague Helen as well.
We see electrification as one of the key pathways to deeper emission reductions. You are correct that the regulations phasing out coal-fired electricity were introduced and then amended and strengthened in the past, most recently as part of the pan-Canadian framework.
There are a number of other initiatives that target the electricity sectors. Colleagues at NRCan have programs on smart grid, battery storage and other things that can help improve the utilization and optimization of the electricity system for vehicles, for movements, everything from meters and pumps to other things that consume energy. That can be either fossil-fuelled or electric.
If it's electric and comes from sustainable sources like hydro, it's an opportunity to achieve quite significant emission reductions in the future. We are very focused, through infrastructure investments on the grid and through programming, on making greater use of renewable energy, non-emitting energy in this country.
Helen, did you have something to add?
:
Thank you very much to the witnesses. I know I cut some of you off when you were doing your presentations. The committee has asked if you could share your notes where applicable, and the clerk will also send you an email for follow-ups.
As the committee knows, we have a meeting on Tuesday, and we will allocate 20 minutes for committee business, when we will look at all the follow-ups of NRCan, etc., and we'll discuss moving forward our agenda.
I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here. Share your notes with us if you can, and sorry to have cut you off, but we have to maintain time.
With that, I'll excuse the witnesses, and we will have five minutes for committee business.
Committee members, Madame Pauzé has a proposition to make, and we will all listen to it.
Madame Pauzé.