Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue No. 45 - Evidence - Meeting of March 21, 2018 (afternoon meeting)
CALGARY, Wednesday, March 21, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 1:01 p.m. to study the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agricultural, agri-food and forestry sectors.
Senator Diane F. Griffin (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Senators, our first panel this afternoon consists of one witness. I’d like to introduce Brock Mulligan, Director of Communications for the Alberta Forest Products Association.
We’ll introduce ourselves to you. I am Diane Griffin, a senator from Prince Edward Island. The deputy chair of the committee, Senator Maltais, will introduce himself.
Senator Maltais: Senator Ghislain Maltais, Quebec.
Senator Gagné: Raymonde Gagné, Manitoba.
Senator R. Black: Rob Black, Ontario.
The Chair: We’re from across the country, and we’re very pleased to have you here with us today.
The particular study we’re involved in relates to climate change and its potential impacts on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors. This morning, we heard from a lot of witnesses related to agriculture. In British Columbia, we heard some excellent presentations also related to forestry. In Alberta, you’re our first witness related to forestry.
I will turn the floor over to you.
Brock Mulligan, Director of Communications, Alberta Forest Products Association: Today is a good day for forestry-related testimony as it’s actually International Day of Forests. It’s perfect timing.
By way of introduction to the Alberta Forest Products Association, we represent manufacturing facilities in Alberta. About 45 facilities are members of our association. We’ve been around since 1942. We celebrated our seventy-fifth anniversary last year.
Forestry is a fairly substantive industry in Alberta. We have 20,000 people working directly for forest companies, and then the creation of another 40,000 spinoff jobs. That would be contractors, suppliers, technical services, hospitality, and all that kind of stuff. The industry is a fairly vital part of 70 communities across the province.
As I am sure you know, our economy in Alberta has been hit pretty hard with the downturn in oil and gas, but the forest industry has been relatively strong during that time and has provided a relatively effective counterbalance in a lot of communities.
My testimony today will focus on three primary points. First, I will talk about our commitment to sustainability and how forestry was an early mover at efforts to mitigate climate change.
Second, I will talk about potential forest of biomass and how, to some extent, we feel it has been overlooked a bit as we moved forward and looked for ways to offset climate change.
Third, I will talk about some of the different costs and regulations that may be required as we move forward with policies and how to some extent our industry is fairly sensitive to those being layered on.
Forestry has been around for many generations in Alberta. The oldest members of our association that have been operating the longest have been operating for 100 years now, and that’s a family-run company. A couple of other family-run companies are getting up there as well. The reason they’ve been able to operate so long is because they have a really strong commitment to the land and to sustainability. They’ve made investments in their facilities, as well.
We were a really early mover on climate change mitigation. Between 2004 and 2014, Canada’s forest industry reduced energy use by 35 per cent and greenhouse gas emissions by 49 per cent through our manufacturing operations and fairly substantive investments in facilities.
We’re not done there. Going forward, we at AFPA share many member companies with the Forest Products Association of Canada. We have pledged to remove 30 megatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by the year 2030 as part of their “30 by 30” Climate Change Challenge.
Talking a little about potential, our forests and the boreal forest in Canada is one of the world’s largest carbon stores and probably one of our best defences against climate change. Wood buildings are a really great way to sequester carbon. They have a far smaller carbon footprint than other buildings. We actually put the numbers together on some major infrastructure projects that the City of Edmonton had done. We figured that because they used wood in their four large projects instead of another material, they saved enough greenhouse gases that would be equivalent to 2,100 cars on the road for a year. There’s a real benefit to building with wood and sequestering carbon that way.
There has been a lot of discussion on the move toward sustainable energy sources. We hear a lot about wind and solar. Those are great ways to help offset our carbon footprint. At the same time, the forest biomass has a lot of potential.
Here in Alberta, our members generate enough green electricity for about four cities of 70,000 people. We like to say four Grande Prairies. We still have a lot more biomass that could be used, what we call slash that comes off the tree in a logging operation but doesn’t wind up making it to the mill. As well, some of the biomass that comes out of the manufacturing process probably could be used, if the economics were right, to help offset emissions.
To some extent programs need to reward early movers. We hear about the baseline method of determining costs for emitters. In the case of a lot of our companies, they’ve already made substantive movement and investment. If they’re then going to get held to that baseline and penalized if they don’t move further when companies or industries that haven’t done anything reap rewards for finally moving, it’s a bit unfair and a bit counterproductive.
I’ll move to my final point, which is the sensitivity to layered costs and regulations for the forest industry. We have a great advantage in Canada in that we have the second-biggest forest in the world. We manage it better than anybody else does. We also have substantive costs that other countries and competitors don’t have. We’re a long way from markets. We pay higher wages than probably anybody other than the Scandinavians. We’re also in a trade battle with the United States. They’re putting significant tariffs on our industry.
When we hear some of the different cost levers as ways to bring down carbon emissions, we’re a bit concerned about the tariffs or levies being layered by different jurisdictions, the province and the federal government, on top of regulatory steps that need to be taken, it all adds up to a point where our competitors are able to steal jobs.
It can be a little problematic for forestry because sometimes as an early mover there are minimal chances to get credit for the work already done. Once a policy is in place for our industry, it’s very difficult to mitigate it by potentially exempting part of the industry because the American industry will immediately cry foul and call that a subsidy. We have very limited room to do that kind of stuff.
To conclude, we’d like to be involved in the discussion at an early stage. We’re grateful that you had us here today to talk about this. I welcome any questions that the committee might have. Thank you.
The Chair: Terrific, thank you for your presentation. We’ll move to questions, and we’ll start with the deputy chair, Senator Maltais.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you, Mr. Mulligan, for that fascinating presentation. Do the regulatory costs your members face stem from Alberta government regulations or federal ones?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: I think that it could potentially be both. We’ve already seen rules set in Alberta that are like a carbon tax that is adding significant cost to our industry. There has also been the prospect of additional taxes raised at the federal level. We understand that it may be a necessary process, but we’d like to see it done in a coordinated way so that we don’t wind up paying taxes on taxes essentially.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Very well. Thank you. You said that wood construction was becoming popular again. We saw that in British Columbia, and we’re seeing it in other provinces in Eastern Canada as well. Do you really think wood could regain its foothold as far as the construction of public buildings is concerned?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Oh, I certainly think we can. We’ve seen a real renaissance in wood buildings around the world in Western Europe and here in Canada. British Columbia and Quebec are real leaders. In Alberta, it might be fair to say that we’re lagging behind a bit. At the same time we’ve started to see some really high quality and large projects built with wood.
In Edmonton, where I am from, the city built about four or five projects. There was a very large recreation centre. There was a transit facility on our LRT line. The potential is really there. We’re hoping the progress we’ve seen in other jurisdictions is mirrored here.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: On a mission to China where Canadian Wood Group had a strong presence, we saw a posh neighbourhood where the buildings were made of wood. Is the United States your only market, or do you export to other countries?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Our two largest historical markets have been the United States, which is the biggest export market, and Japan, which is a market that pays a premium price for a very high-quality product. It doesn’t have a lot of growth. It’s an aging population. They’re not building a lot more. China is an area where we’ve put significant resources into developing that market. We’ve started to see some positive things happening. Historically, they have taken the lowest grade product that we make and they use it for non-structural applications. They would be making pallets, concrete forms and those sorts of things with relatively low quality wood.
The Chinese, though, have started to move into using higher quality product for structural applications. One of our pitches to them has been that wood holds up far better in an earthquake situation than anything else. If you shake it, it bends and pops right back. We’ve seen some really positive uptake there.
Probably the biggest challenge going forward in China, as you may know, is that the Russian ruble has completely collapsed. It’s starting to come back a bit, but that collapse has given them a massive currency edge over us. I mean they already have a geographic edge. They’re a lot closer. They also have a labour edge. Adding this currency, to some extent it has displaced Canadian companies from that marketplace. We’re confident that it will come back, but at the same time there is a definite challenge there.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I have a short question about the carbon tax. How will it affect your producers?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Carbon tax is a unique challenge for our producers in that the tax we’ve seen introduced in Alberta gets them on many different levels. They wind up paying it to their contractors because of higher fuel costs. They wind up paying it for whatever energy source they’re using to run the manufacturing facility. When they ship it to consumers, they pay it on that level. Any supplier is typically also tacking on some type of carbon tax.
When those different costs begin to get layered on where it impacts the industry from a number of different angles, it can really be a drag on competitiveness.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you.
Senator Gagné: What climate change effects have you observed in recent years and how have they impacted your industry directly?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Thanks so much for that question. I was hoping a question along those lines would be posed because I didn’t have time to talk about the mountain pine beetle. As our climate has warmed, we’ve seen that the pine beetle has a much higher survival rate and a much further spread. It has already devastated the forests in B.C.
In Alberta, industry and government have taken a lot of action that has really managed to hold the line. The one hole in our game seems to be Jasper National Park. The park is absolutely infested with pine beetle. Every tree in that park is red and dead. It’s beginning to spread further east into the rest of the forests in Alberta. Not to be critical of the policy approach that was taken in the park, but initial efforts essentially focused on allowing nature to run its course. For neighbouring forest companies that is really problematic because nature running its course means that the beetle spreads into their woodlands and ruins the merchantability of the product. It also increases the chances of catastrophic fire spreading farther.
The park in the last probably two years has begun to take small steps to mitigate the beetle. They’ve done some prescribed burns on older pine stands that are susceptible to beetle infestation. They’ve also done some mechanical harvesting around the town site to protect it. We would have preferred to see a much earlier and more aggressive approach taken. We hope other national parks that may be faced with a similar challenge would act more quickly than Jasper did.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: Have you found any opportunities directly tied to climate change that your sector could take advantage of?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Absolutely. We think that the possibility to create even more green and sustainable power from our biomass is a real opportunity for the sector. We’re already pretty aggressive on that front. As I mentioned, we created about 420 megawatts of completely green and renewable electricity. It comes from materials that used to be waste in our manufacturing process, whether we’re talking about bark or sawdust or things that you can’t make merchantable pulp or lumber out of.
Probably the next frontier, in terms of generating green biomasses, is what we call slash. Those are branches or treetops that would come off in our logging process. Right now there’s not a good way to generate power on site. It doesn’t make sense to transport them to a mill because the energy you use to bring them to a mill is more than the energy you get out of them.
There has been some research into more efficient transportation and onsite small plants that can turn those residuals into biodiesel or some other type of product. There’s really strong potential there, but it is going to require more research and investment.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: Where, then, does that research come from? Do your members invest in research and development, or is it supported by other stakeholders?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: It’s primarily a partnership between businesses in the forest sector and government. FPInnovations is a co-funded organization and, I guess it would be fair to say, the major research arm of the forest sector. There’s both government and industry money in that. They’re doing some really important work. We’re optimistic that it will produce some good results and allow us to expand our production of energy in some of the different opportunities.
It’s a bit concerning that we have seen, in the latest round of funding here in Alberta, a pretty strong preference for projects in other fields, whether they be solar or wind. We think that is overlooking a great resource in our backyard which we’ve been managing sustainably for 100 years. We’re already making something out of it, so tapping into the residual stream makes a lot of sense.
Senator R. Black: You talked about generating enough energy to power four Grande Prairies. How are you generating that energy?
Mr. Mulligan: That energy is being primarily produced by our pulp mills with some of the black liquor and other residuals that come out of their process. I am not a chemist, but it comes out of the process and they burn it to make power, basically. Some of that goes onto the grid and some of it is used in the facility itself.
We were also seeing in the pulp mill side of things some cogeneration projects where they have excess bark, sawdust, or those kinds of things. They’ll burn that to make power. Typically, they’ll use the bulk of that in their facility at a time when they’re not at high production or something like that. They’re also equipped to sell onto the grid.
The final type of power we use is in the kiln to dry lumber where you need a significant amount of power. They’ll do things like burn their bark or sawdust to heat the drying kiln and create power that way.
Senator R. Black: You talked about early adopters being penalized. Can you just expand on that a little more? I think I understand it, but I would like you to share that with us again.
Mr. Mulligan: Sure. We’ve seen the baseline approach in a lot of different economic approaches that are applied to managing our emissions. If you’re putting out 100 tonnes of carbon, there’s an expectation that you move down every year. If you don’t, you will get penalized.
It is fundamentally unfair that a company which has already gone from 150 to 100 is expected to start at 100 and move down from there. However, if a company that remained at 150 even moves to 140, they will get the benefit of a competitive advantage over the company that already moved.
A lot of the early movers in the industry have already brought their energy use emissions down by 35 per cent and greenhouse gas emissions by 49 per cent. If you’re expected to compete with companies that haven’t done anything and have that baseline approach applied to you, there’s a fundamental unfairness about that.
Senator R. Black: If tomorrow government regulators said they would allow the 150 to 1 you’ve already done, is there enough of your sector that has captured that? Do they know where they started before they were an early adopter and came down?
Mr. Mulligan: Yes, the bulk of the sector would know where they started.
Senator R. Black: Where they were.
Mr. Mulligan: They made those fairly substantive investments with an eye specifically toward reducing emissions and energy use typically. They have a pretty good handle on the statistics behind that.
The Chair: I have a couple of questions. As you know, many levels of government play a role in the environmental protection of our country. When it comes to forests and the management of forests, it’s primarily a provincial responsibility, and some municipal too if it’s within a municipal boundary and their zoning.
I am looking at where we’re coming from at the federal level. Generally, in the federal toolkit there are two types of instruments. One is regulatory, but that’s not really the case here unless we’re talking about Jasper National Park or other nationally owned lands. The one that has the greatest impact in regard to land use throughout the country is the economic instruments toolkit and incentives or ways of encouraging certain behaviour and sponsoring research.
To encapsulate, what would you see as the two most important things the Government of Canada could do in regard to forests and climate change?
Mr. Mulligan: That’s a very interesting question. You talked about the incentive side of things. Before any incentives were put out there, companies would have to have pretty detailed conversations with legal counsel and with government. There would need to be a pretty extensive dialogue there. The reason is that we’ve seen in the challenges on softwood lumber, and now on paper, incentives being called subsidies pretty quickly by the American side and used as essentially an excuse to penalize us.
Ultimately the World Trade Organization or the NAFTA panel says that’s not valid. Their case gets thrown out again and again. Typically, in the three to four years that takes, Canadian companies are charged billions of dollars to offset these so-called subsidies. That side of things is really tricky.
If I were to talk to a lot of our smaller companies, and even our larger companies, they would probably say, first, that the best thing government can do is support research, because that is critical going forward, and, second, think carefully and talk to other levels of government before imposing any regulation or tax. It’s absolutely essential that they’re coordinated so that they’re not each imposing a slightly different regulation or tax and we wind up paying twice. That can be a real problem.
The Chair: Compounding of taxes on taxes as you’ve mentioned earlier.
Mr. Mulligan: Yes.
The Chair: You mentioned Jasper Park and the beetle infestation. Basically, it was an incubator of beetles and the population exploded. Has this happened with the other national parks in Alberta? Have they been incubators of other insect pests or the beetle?
Mr. Mulligan: Banff in the 1990s is a real interesting case because it had a pretty significant beetle infestation. They actually took very aggressive actions. They took out trees that were infested as soon as they could. They looked at older pine stands which tend to be far more susceptible to an infestation and managed to get those before that infestation had incurred. There is a good news story and a beacon of hope on the pine beetle fight, and it’s Banff. The action they took worked.
In terms of other national parks, I am not sure they either have the right geography or the right species mix to be as large concerns. We have Wood Buffalo National Park in the far northeast. It’s pretty isolated. I don’t believe it has a large pine population. It’s not necessarily as large a concern. The last national park I can think of is Elk Island just east of Edmonton. It’s again primarily an aspen forest and not really a substantive area. It’s in the middle of a prairie.
The Chair: What about Waterton Lakes National Park? It would have pine.
Mr. Mulligan: Yes, it probably would. Right now it’s probably geographically removed from any infestations. The real areas of concern are farther north because the Prince George area of B.C. has been battered. The areas east of it are real concerns for us because it will move there. Southern B.C. hasn’t necessarily had the same level of infestation, although they certainly could. It would be fair to say there’s a risk but it’s not being necessarily realized right now. Jasper is the epicentre.
Senator Gagné: In the context of climate change, do you think that the forest sector is adapting fast enough to meet the demands of the changing and emerging markets?
It’s a very competitive world. How is Canada and how is Alberta doing in that context?
Mr. Mulligan: Right now we’re doing pretty well. We’ve seen demand for our products skyrocket in the last couple years, largely due to a strong U.S. economy, a couple of very unfortunate disasters down there, and then finally some large fires in B.C. that took a lot of inventory offline. It’s a reasonably strong time for the forest sector right now.
Probably the biggest concern going forward is the lack of diversity in our marketplace. We have Canada here that’s a strong marketplace. We have the United States, which is a tricky marketplace with a lot of protectionism. I mentioned some of the limits on both Japan, which is getting older and not building a lot, and China where we face very stiff competition from other producers, many of whom have some advantages.
It would be fair to say we’re doing quite well right now. We have taken a lot of steps to make sure that we’re competitive, but there are some issues out ahead of us that definitely are cause for some thought.
The Chair: Senator Maltais, did you have additional questions?
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I have one last question. When we were in China, we learned that imported Russian wood was not as good. The Chinese are afraid of finding parasites in the wood bundles, as we call them in Canada. The Chinese are uncompromising when it comes to the quality of the wood because of parasites. They are worried about parasites infecting the few forests they have left.
Do you treat the wood you export to China for parasites?
[English]
Mr. Mulligan: Yes, there’s a very extensive phytosanitary treatment program administered jointly by companies and by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Essentially, the wood is heat treated to ensure there are no pests. China has particularly stringent requirements that we have to meet.
In regard to the other part of your question about the Russian involvement of their products in China, it’s fair to say there are a lot of reasons not to import Russian wood because the quality is low. If it’s cheap enough, and it is right now because the ruble is so low, you can take actions to mitigate the low quality or the pests or whatever else it is.
Historically, they are a competitor that we probably look pretty good against. It’s just they’re so cheap right now that it’s really tough.
The Chair: I’d like to thank our panellist, Brock Mulligan. It has been great to have you here. As I said, we arrived from British Columbia yesterday, so it’s great to hear about the Alberta situation also. I thank you for coming in today.
Mr. Mulligan: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
The Chair: Senators, we passed a motion on Monday that we have to update now. I move:
That, notwithstanding the motion adopted on Monday, March 19, 2018, on Thursday, March 22, 2018, pursuant to rule 12-17, the chair be authorized to hold meetings to receive and authorize the publication of evidence when a quorum is not present, provided that one other member of the committee be present.
Are you in favour of the motion?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: The motion is carried.
For our second panel this afternoon, we have two witnesses: Dr. Danny Blair, Director of Science, Prairie Climate Centre, and Dr. Dave Sauchyn, Research Coordinator, Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative.
We have been on a western fact-finding trip and holding public hearings. We were in British Columbia for two days, and this is our first day here. This morning we heard from the agricultural sector, and we’ve just heard from one panel related to forestry in Alberta.
We’re looking forward to your presentations, after which we’ll ask you some questions and add to the conversation. The floor is yours.
Danny Blair, Director of Science, Prairie Climate Centre: The Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg is very concerned about current and future climate changes in Canada. Our mission is to communicate to the people of Manitoba, the Prairie provinces and all of Canada that climate change is much more significant than many believe.
To that end, we have created an online climate change atlas, climateatlas.ca. It is currently focused on the Prairie provinces but soon, within about a month, a new version of the atlas will be launched that includes all of Canada.
In this atlas, we present detailed localized climate change projections for two of the emission scenarios utilized in the most recent IPPC assessment using the high resolution, statistically downscaled data provided by the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, PCIC, at the University of Victoria. For 12 different climate models, we present climate projections using the RCP 8.5 and the RCP 4.5 scenarios. RCP 8.5, we call the high carbon scenario. It is essentially a business as usual emissions scenario. RCP 4.5, we call this low carbon. It is a scenario with much lower emissions, at least eventually. Of course, RCP 8.5 results in much more climate change in Canada and the world.
We have worked very hard to present these projections in ways that all can understand. We have created high quality maps, graphics and graphs. All of this is curated with easy to understand text.
Importantly, we also include high-quality videos in which Canadians from all across the nation talk about their experiences with climate change and its impacts and describe their responses to these impacts or potential impacts. We’re happy to say that the new atlas will be completely bilingual.
It is our expectation that the atlas will increase awareness of climate change and its potential impacts and assist decision makers of all kinds in making informed decisions about how to adapt to climate change. We hope the atlas will motivate Canadians to be more committed to emissions reductions as well.
From its inception, the atlas has had agriculture as one of its primary themes. For example, we work closely with the Keystone Agricultural Producers, KAP, Dan Mazier and his team in Manitoba, to present climate change and to season the atlas that would be relevant and useful to the farm community. We have also interviewed farmers from all across Canada. Many of these videos will be presented in the atlas. In these videos, farmers talk about the challenges presented by climate change but also its opportunities. Dave Sauchyn is also in a video in the atlas.
For me, the most striking visualizations in our atlas are those depicting how hot summers are projected to get in the future under both scenarios. In general, I believe most people understand that winters will get warmer and shorter, but I do not believe that they appreciate the changes coming to summer.
For example, the atlas shows that my hometown of Regina, in the latter part of the century from 2051 to 2080, will see the average annual number of hot day of 30oC or hotter more than triple from 16 to 50 under the high carbon scenario, compared to the averages of 1976 to 2005.
In the low carbon scenario the numbers only double from 16 into the 30s. This is still a dramatic change. These kinds of changes to the heat of summer are projected all across the southern Prairies. In southern Ontario, southern Quebec and in parts of British Columbia, some areas are projected to see even more dramatic changes in the number of hot days.
In summary, the future is expected to get much warmer in Canada. Of course, there’s a positive aspect to a warmer climate. The growing seasons will be much longer. They are already much longer than they were recently. This will present opportunities for new crops to be grown all across Canada. However, long frost-free seasons and growing degree days are not sufficient to grow crops. Water, of course, is very important.
Unfortunately, another startling aspect of climate projections is that they show summers across much of southern Canada may get drier. In particular the months of July and August are projected to get drier, especially in the long run approaching the end of the century under the high carbon scenario, and especially in the southern Prairies and southern British Columbia. I refer to the August map of change in precipitation.
In addition to getting much warmer summers, these important agricultural areas may experience less precipitation in the summer. This is a great concern to me for it raises the possibility of higher rates of evapotranspiration that could result in serious water shortages for our agricultural producers.
Overall, these conditions suggest a higher frequency of drought, which is of course a concern to farmers and foresters alike. Ironically, perhaps, the climate models also indicate many of the regions that are expecting to have somewhat less precipitation this summer are expected to get wetter winters, springs and falls. For example, in the high carbon scenario the models indicate much wetter springs on average into the southern Prairies including Manitoba. I refer to the other side of the map that shows the increased change in precipitation in the month of April across Canada.
This raises the possibility that there will be more instances of having too much precipitation in some parts of the year and not enough in another. To me and many others, this situation demands that we get much more serious about water management in Canada. In particular, the Prairies need to get much more serious about water management. For example, in times of plenty, we need to have a system of local and regional reservoirs to store the water for those times when it may be needed for the demands of the agricultural sector and others sectors too, of course. Only with effective, innovative and timely water management strategies will the agricultural sector be best poised to take advantage of the opportunities presented by climate change and be able to minimize the risks.
Of course, people in the business of agriculture have always been innovative, nimble and opportunistic, for they have always had the response of the enormous amount of variability within our climate system. However, given the severity of the climate changes projected for Canada under both the low and high carbon scenarios, it is important that we prepare for the challenges we are presented by the new climate. It seems clear the benefits of effective and timely adaptation will outweigh the costs, no matter how climate change progresses. Very importantly, we must work hard locally, nationally and internationally to reduce our overall emissions to minimize the overall risk.
Thank you for your interest.
The Chair: Thank you for your presentation.
D.J. (Dave) Sauchyn, Research Coordinator, Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative: I will be addressing this set of slides. I believe you all have a copy of this presentation.
The first slide identifies our Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, which is our climate change research centre at the University of Regina. PARC was created 20 years ago by the Government of Canada. Over the past 20 years, we’ve worked extensively with the agricultural industry providing science to enable them to adapt to climate change.
The next slide is a quote from Canadian Pacific. It’s one of the many quotes or observations you’ll see suggesting that this was a cold winter. In this case, CP is using the harsh conditions. That is the way they describe it. They’re using our harsh winter that just ended as a reason for not being able to move all the prairie grain. Was it really a harsh winter?
The next slide is a graph of minimum winter temperatures at Regina all the way back to 1900. Winter is three months or about 90 days. I took the average low temperature for those 90 days for each year. That triangle is the winter we just had. If your experience has been limited to the past 30 years, then this was a colder than average winter. If you compare that triangle to the 1970s, 1960s and 1950s, it would have been an average winter. If you go back even further to the early part of the twentieth century, it would have been a warm winter.
The warming of our winter is some of the clearest evidence that our climate is changing on the Prairies. Our climate is getting much less cold. Of course, that’s a global phenomenon.
The next slide is from the U.S. government. Unfortunately, it wasn’t printed in colour, unlike the original. In fact, every month since the 1980s has been warmer than average.
You could argue that the climate is always changing. Is this unusual? We can put recent climate changes, the warming of the last 30 years, in the context of the last 2,000 years. The next slide is results from a study that was just published. We called ourselves a consortium because there are 98 authors. Rather than list 98 authors, we call ourselves a consortium.
We collected temperature proxies from all over the world for about 700 locations. There are four kinds of temperature proxies. If you look at any one of these four graphs, going from left to right from the year 0 to the year 2000 you can see the world’s temperatures were slowly declining until about 150 years ago when there was a reversal in global temperatures, and they’ve been rising rapidly ever since. Well, 150 years ago is when humans began to burn coal, oil and gas.
This study is being cited as one of the best indications that our global climate is changing rapidly and as a result of human activities. What does that mean for the future? We don’t have information for the future. Therefore, we have to use models. The next illustration is two types of models, the models that simulate the climate of the whole world and the models that simulate the climate of a smaller region. It’s this kind of information that’s contained in the Prairie Climate Atlas at the Prairie Climate Centre that Mr. Blair was describing.
I’ll show you some of the outputs, first, from the global climate models. Winter is on the left and summer is on the right. The change in temperature is on the left axis. The change in precipitation is on the horizontal axis. This is the recent past to the middle of the century.
It basically shows that winters are getting and will continue to get much warmer and wetter. Summers also are getting warmer but probably drier. Even an increase in precipitation of 10 to 15 per cent is not enough to offset the evaporation we expect in a warmer climate.
This is basically consistent with what Mr. Blair said. This is the most basic scenario. In an average year, we can expect a shorter winter and a longer summer. Therefore, many scholars, commentators and scientists are saying this is good for Canada. Our winter is getting shorter. Our summer is getting longer.
On average it is good, but the next slide shows that the Prairies in Western Canada rarely get an average year. The moisture fluctuates from positive to negative from year to year. Farmers often say, “We either get wet years or dry years; we don’t get something in between.” Here’s the scientific support for that observation.
If you compare the past up to year 2000 and to the left, to the future beginning in 2040 and off to the right, look how the range of moisture is getting larger and larger. One of the most robust or significant scientific findings is that the wet years are getting wetter and the dry years are getting drier. That’s the challenge that agriculture will face.
The next slide is an iconic view of North America, showing that it’s surrounded in water. The reason we on the Prairies get either wet years or dry years is that our water doesn’t come from here. Our water comes from the ocean. Our water comes from thousands of miles away. Sometimes it gets to us and sometimes it doesn’t. As a result of global warming, we are heating up the oceans and they are producing more water vapour. When we do get clouds and rain, we get more than in the past. When we don’t get clouds and rain, it’s drier because our climate is warmer. That’s basically the explanation of how the wet years are getting wetter and the dry years are getting drier.
There’s a picture of south of Calgary here looking at the mountains. That kind of variability from year to year is actually preserved in the landscape because this landscape was exposed by glaciers about 12,000 years ago. We have a lab at the University of Regina where we’ve collected 6,000 pieces of old wood because the growth of the tress is an indication of the water. We’ve been able to determine how much water has been in the Saskatchewan River Basin every year back to the year 1108. That’s that graph.
Pointing down are the dry years. If you look off to the right, you can see the 1930s. They were dry but not nearly as dry as droughts that preceded the settlement of the Prairies.
The worst possible future for agriculture, in fact for Canada, is that one of these droughts that lasted 30, 40 or 50 years will happen in the future, but in a much warmer climate than in the past. We have to prepare for that kind of scenario.
We had a project recently, funded by the federal government, where we looked at agriculture in five different countries: four in South America and one in Western Canada. We shared that information with farmers. There’s a slide here of our meeting with farmers and ranchers in meeting rooms and on the farm, supplying them with the information that we have about the past and the future of prairie climates. Here’s what they told us.
The last slide is some of the comments and recommendations from farmers and ranchers. We got lots of advice from them as you might expect. These are the comments that pertained to governance policy. They told us they recognize that under climate change they have to be prepared but there’s only so much a farmer can do. Therefore, they recognize the necessity of planning, of institutions, and of local and federal governments. What they really need is access to some kind of coordinating network of stakeholders, researchers and all orders of government. There has to be some agency that links science to the concerns of local people.
In fact a federal government agency existed for 70 years that did just that. It was eliminated about five years ago. I spoke recently with a very prominent member of Parliament from the Prairies who likes to say, “The smartest thing the Government of Canada ever did was to create PFRA. The dumbest thing they ever did was to eliminate it.” We no longer have that government agency that links the science to the people on the ground.
I left you with one last slide, a concluding slide showing the opportunities presented to agriculture by a warming climate but also the challenges. Thanks.
The Chair: Terrific, thank you. To lead off with the questions, I’ll ask our deputy chair, Senator Maltais.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: My first question is for Mr. Blair. You mentioned in your statement that none of the three Prairie provinces had water conservation regulations in place. In other words, they don’t have rules around the storage of rainwater for use during dry periods.
Do the governments of those three provinces plan to bring in regulations governing water conservation, which could benefit farmers?
[English]
Mr. Blair: Thank you for the question. I didn’t say that there isn’t any capacity across the Prairie provinces or the Western provinces to store water. I am suggesting that we will need to do more so in the future. There are systems of reservoirs. There are dugouts. There are local systems.
Given the challenges of the future, the drought cycle that Dr. Sauchyn talked about, the wetting many times of the year and extreme variability in precipitation, a lot of people, some of whom you might hear from today, believe we need to beef up or enhance the capacity to even out the hydrological cycle, essentially to be ready for those especially long droughts. Dr. Sauchyn has for a long time been saying we’re going to get it eventually, and certainly we are. We just don’t know when.
The wetting of the climate is happening already. It seems to me it’s sensible that we enhance our capacity to even out the hydrological extremes so that farmers and whoever needs water can manage those extremes if and when they come.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You also talked about extended the growing season, which could even mean an additional annual yield. On the flip side, it would mean longer rainy and dry seasons.
Does that have benefits or only drawbacks?
[English]
Mr. Blair: Oh, no, it’s not a series of disadvantages. There certainly are benefits to a longer growing season. The summers or the frost-free seasons, as we call them, are much, much longer now than they were at the end of the 19th century, for example, when the pioneers came into Western Canada. There are weeks and weeks of extra growing capacity available. More is coming down the pike, no matter which carbon scenario we have. Whether that’s going to translate into more capacity to double harvest depends upon the crop.
Absolutely, all else ignored, a longer growing season means a greater capacity for crops and possibility of yields, as long as there’s water, as long as there’s fertilizer. And as long as there are pests that will, of course, like the warmer growing season, the heat and the clime system. There’s no doubt that agricultural pests will become even more problematic. Perhaps that suggests that we will need to have a different or an enhanced strategy to deal with them.
To answer your question, there are benefits, absolutely, as long as they’re not limited by the periodic extremes Dr. Sauchyn talks about, especially those related to lack of water as groundwater or surface water. There are opportunities for sure. I don’t want to just emphasize the negatives. There are positives, but in the long run it’s the negatives that are the limiting factors. They can really knock down the agricultural system. They can really knock down the economy to a point where it’s not able to be as resilient as we want it to be, unless we plan for that.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you.
Mr. Sauchyn, I took a good look at your map. Could it be expanded to North America?
[English]
Mr. Sauchyn: The maps were provided by Dr. Blair.
Mr. Blair: You would like to see the maps for at least April and for all of —
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Does what it shows for Canada represent a part of North America? Did you extrapolate the data all the way to Brazil?
[English]
Mr. Blair: That’s a very good question. As geographers, we are terribly frustrated by the artificial boundaries that are put on datasets. Of course, the Great Plains climate of North America is one continuum. The data we’re using in our atlas is restricted only to the Canadian landscape.
I will say, however, that we do have another dataset, not produced by Environment Canada and not produced by PCIC that is all of North America. It’s called the AdaptWest dataset. It produces essentially the same data but at a different resolution. It produces monthly data, whereas the PCIC data is daily data. That allows us to calculate things like the frost-free season in number of days between this date and this date. It shows the same thing.
I can get you some of that data. I think we’ve produced some of it. We’ve used that data. This morning Dan Mazier from KAP was very gracious in talking about the atlas. In the document he presented he pointed out how we might have summers like Kansas or northern Texas in the future. That comes from our analysis where we asked, “If it gets this warm in Winnipeg or in Calgary in the future, who has that climate now?” We do climate analogues. We use the AdaptWest data to do that. We’re able to do that because it’s a North American dataset, but not all the way down to Brazil. The datasets tend to be segmented into regions, depending on who paid for them.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: I’m going to draw on what I learned in elementary school geography. That’s going way back for us both.
In Quebec, back when we studied geography and some agriculture, we learned that wheat crops reached maturity after 90 days. Farmers had 90 days to harvest the crop. In Ontario, it was 100 days, so 10 days longer than in Quebec. Out West, it was 120 days. Is that still the case today?
[English]
Mr. Blair: I am not a farmer. I don’t know the maturation dates for the different kind of crops, but I do know that heat is a limiting factor. If there’s heat not restricted by availability of water or affected by other things, it should mature faster.
The farm community is very opportunistic. They select varieties of crops that will mature in the time available to them on average. The farmers that KAP represents, for example, are really nimble and making sure the varieties they’re using are suited for the climate at hand. I have no doubt that they will change their varieties. The research that has been talked about is looking for new crops or importing new varieties of crops from different regions, so that there’s a good match between climate and crop. That kind of research needs to continue for sure.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: If we take a look back at temperatures over the past 150 or 200 years, will we see that the changes are cyclical? We have 10 or 15 years of normal conditions, followed by a drought. Conditions return to normal and, then, a period of excessive precipitation hits. Do climate conditions follow a constant and cyclical pattern, or have they changed in recent years? The entire world emits carbon dioxide. We do here, of course. Mr. Sauchyn talked about the emergence of the coal, and oil and gas industries. Are these conditions cyclical, or are they due solely to the emergence of coal and crude oil?
[English]
Mr. Blair: Well, I have to say the kinds of changes in the clime system that we’re talking about today and the climate changes that are depicted in the projections are driven by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. The primary cause of those changes is unequivocally related to carbon dioxide emissions, which have ramped up enormously from about 150 years ago. Generally, 1750 is said to be the year of the beginning of Industrial Revolution. It took a while for those carbon emissions from coal, gas and oil eventually to build up. They’re accumulating at enormous rates. We’re emitting 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. If we continue to do that, we’ll be at RCP 8.5.
It’s us, but I acknowledge there’s some amount of variability in the climate system that’s natural. The anthropogenic signal is swamping that globally and locally. Maybe Mr. Sauchyn has a perspective on that, as well.
Mr. Sauchyn: If you consult the slide I shared with you from a recent publication, you can see that there are some cycles. For example, you’ve probably heard of El Niño and La Niña. During an El Niño, when there are warm ocean waters along the equator, we tend to have a warmer winter. During a La Niña like this year, we tend to have a colder winter. There are differences from year to year as a result of the circulation and the heat that is given off or taken in by the Pacific Ocean.
The dominant trend in all of these graphs is a reversal in temperature about 150 years ago. The only factor we can attribute that to is the change in the chemistry of the atmosphere that has been caused by human beings.
Senator Gagné: I believe the Government of Canada intends to create the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. Have you heard anything about this new Canadian centre?
Mr. Blair: There is a centre in Victoria, the CCCMA. There is a centre, a very internationally renowned, well-respected centre at the University of Victoria. They are producing the kinds of model outputs that are incorporated into these analyses for sure. You might be referring to something else.
Senator Gagné: It might be. I am looking at the library analyst and trying to see if they are the same. It’s a new centre that they will be setting up.
Mr. Blair: I believe you’re referring to the Canadian Centre for Climate Services. They’re trying to mobilize the data they have so that people have access to it. We are working with them, actually.
Senator Gagné: You are working with them. I was going through your website, Aïcha, our analyst, is saying that in the new budget the Government of Canada intends to create a Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in order to compile data relative to climate change and to facilitate the decision-making process pertaining to resiliency activities for the potential impacts of climate change. I am just wondering if you will be participating in this.
Mr. Blair: We are. The Prairie Climate Centre is very fortunate to have recently received substantial funding from ECCC, from Minister McKenna’s office.
Senator Gagné: Yes.
Mr. Blair: It hasn’t been announced yet, but over the last several months we’ve been working closely with them and are delighted to be doing so.
Senator Gagné: These are public hearings, so it hasn’t been announced yet.
Mr. Blair: In a month.
Senator Gagné: I wanted to congratulate you on your very user-friendly website. It will be a very good tool for teachers. I really enjoyed going through it. Congratulations.
Mr. Blair: Thank you very much. You haven’t seen anything yet. If we have time, I’ll show you the hidden site of the new one. It’s 10 times better. The team is just remarkable. We have five full-time staff members at Prairie Climate Centre, thanks to funding from the Province of Manitoba and ECCC.
It is a remarkable site for all of Canada. It’s targeted at kids, teachers, citizens, business leaders, government officials and farmers. We’re so proud of it. We are going to have a big splash, hopefully by the end of April.
Senator Gagné: It is very useful.
Mr. Blair: I appreciate those comments.
Senator Gagné: There’s an interesting question on the website: How can you predict the climate if you can’t even predict the weather? I am going to ask you the question.
Mr. Blair: They’re two different things. The weather is essentially focused on the next few days. Generally, the longest weather forecast in Canada would be for about 14 days, unless it’s experimental. Those forecasts are expected to be accurate to the hour almost. The goal is to provide citizens with information about the atmospheric conditions they can expect in coming days.
Climate models are not attempting to predict what it will be like on July 5, 2051. They are being used to describe the average conditions in the future. You can aggregate those to a year, or you can aggregate those over 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. In no way should you look at that data as a weather forecast. It’s a climate forecast. We don’t even like to use the word forecast because it suggests precision that we don’t even attempt to have. I am not a modeller myself. I am a user of model data.
The climate models and the climate model data that we present are meant to be aggregated to show what the average conditions are in terms of temperature, precipitation, heat waves, extremes and so forth.
Then the nuances of that are interpreted by the climatologist to explain what that probably means, based upon research and not just guessing, in terms of frequency of extreme events and all the kinds of things that will be a challenge in the future. It is absolutely one of the things that a lot of citizens do not understand or appreciate. It puts them in a position of being skeptical, perhaps: If you can’t forecast the weather very well, how can you forecast the climate? They’re two different entities from geographical and temporal points of view. It is a wonderful question, though.
Senator Gagné: I’d like to come back to one of your slides. The PFRA, is that the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration?
Mr. Blair: Right.
Senator Gagné: That was obviously eliminated five years ago and was not replaced by any other coordinating body, nothing.
Mr. Sauchyn: That’s right.
Senator Gagné: What is being done right now to link science to the interests and concerns of farmers?
Mr. Sauchyn: According to the farmers we interviewed, not much. As a result of the elimination of PFRA, there’s more of an ad hoc approach to providing the farm community with information about science. The PFRA had people in the regions. They had offices in small towns and cities across the Prairies. Farmers were able to speak to their local PFRA office and get advice about the management of crops, soils and waters. PFRA is typically given as the best example, in the world perhaps, of an institutional adaptation to a climate event.
As the result of the drought and devastation of the 1930s, the government created PFRA to rehabilitate the prairie farm landscape. Like any good government agency, once that job was done they found a different mandate, which was to work with farmers to make farming sustainable on the Prairies. They were incredibly successful, perhaps too successful.
Senator Gagné: Thank you for bringing that recommendation here.
Senator R. Black: My question has pretty much been answered. You’ve told us who’s using the website now. I haven’t seen it. I look forward to looking at it.
What has been the uptake? Is it just Manitoba now or is it just the Prairies?
Mr. Blair: Right now it’s just the Prairie provinces. It’s all of the three Prairie provinces from top to bottom, east to west.
Senator R. Black: What has been the uptake, the hits?
Mr. Blair: We use Google Analytics to follow who’s using it. It’s being used all across the world. It’s used a lot by school children and teachers. Just as importantly, it’s being used by people at the municipal level.
One of the features of the current prairie atlas is that you can click on any RM or county across any part of the Prairie provinces, and it’ll give you the average projections for your hometown or for your home locale. That was one of the mandates we insisted that we have. When we talk about climate change, we talk about the global temperature raising. It is all very important. We also talk about the average temperature in Canada. If we want people, whoever they might be, to take it seriously and to act upon it, it needs to be relevant to them.
We try to bring the climate data home, as we say. In the current atlas, you can go to any county in Alberta or any RM across Saskatchewan and Manitoba. If you give us any shape file of an area you’re interested in, a watershed boundary or a First Nations landscape, we can tell you what the 12 climate models tell is likely to happen in the next 30 years and the 30 years thereafter under the two scenarios.
We’ve been very fortunate that even though we haven’t released a new atlas, we get calls from the Town of Selkirk. We get calls from Saskatchewan. We get calls from Alberta. We get calls from First Nations people for advice and support for their adaptation strategies. There’s ongoing adaptation out there in Canada, but to a large extent we think it’s limited by data and expertise at the local level.
One of our missions at the Prairie Climate Centre is to localize and even personalize the data so that the people who are living there can see what that means to them and their kids. Then they have data in their hands that can be used to think about the following: What does this mean about the infrastructure in my town? What does this mean about water levels or fisheries or wildlife in my community? We’re confident that the new atlas will do even more so.
Senator R. Black: When will I be able to check my hometown of Fergus, Ontario, in the new atlas?
Mr. Blair: At this point in the new atlas, it’s organized by a 250,000-scale map sheet. It’s 100 kilometres by 100 kilometres.
Senator R. Black: When is it coming?
Mr. Blair: This is the big question. It’s a moving target. Today is March 21. We hope by this time next month.
Senator R. Black: I am looking forward to it. How can we get the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration back into existence, Dr. Sauchyn?
Mr. Sauchyn: I am almost certain it is not to be reinstated because governments tend not to do that. It won’t be replicated. Plus, that capacity has been lost. There were hundreds and hundreds of scientists, engineers and policy analysts working for PFRA over many decades. They lost their jobs, so they moved on. In some cases they left the country and were hired by the U.S.
I can’t imagine it will be replicated, but there will have to be something that fills the void because governments have a mandate to facilitate adaptation to a changing climate. We’re already seeing agencies that are stepping into the void, but not in the national and coordinated effort that existed with PFRA.
The Chair: Quickly going over the 41 bullet points you gave us, Dr. Blair, at number 40 you say that, very importantly, we must work hard locally, nationally and internationally to reduce our overall emissions to minimize the overall risk.
I am primarily looking at this from the point of view of the Government of Canada because that’s whom we advise. I realize other levels of government are involved, but the Government of Canada basically has a toolkit with two big tools at its disposal. One is regulatory instruments, but as most land use falls under the provincial governments it is more of a provincial or municipal responsibility. The second one the Government of Canada has is economic instruments in which it can encourage or discourage certain behaviours.
With that in mind, what would you say would be the two most important things that the Government of Canada could do in regard to climate change?
Mr. Blair: Wow. I have been, for a long time, in total support of carbon tax. First, we’re in the dilemma we’re in because we haven’t been paying for the thing that has caused all the damage. The polluters haven’t paid. It’s a bit uncomfortable to say, but a tax is important. I applaud the Trudeau government for bringing in its tax, and I applaud the Pallister government in my home province for bringing it in. It was an important step for us.
Are the numbers where they need to be? As a climatologist, not even close. The carbon taxes don’t even come close to where they need to be in terms of the associated costs of adaptation and impacts from extreme events and so forth, nationally and internationally. The impacts of carbon emissions will continue for a long time.
It’s really important, of course, that the money being collected from taxpayers be used for the most part in reducing emissions. The goal is to reduce emissions. Mitigation is important. The economic instrument that is carbon taxes need to be invested in reducing emissions. Some of that is certainly ongoing, but there needs to be more of that, that’s for sure, in terms of research and the greening of the economy which in itself will reduce emissions.
Second, I would say leadership is important. I am happier than I was certainly several years ago about leadership in Canada. I applaud the federal government and most provincial governments for moving forward on this, but it needs to happen at the local level as well. The mayors of Canada and decision makers of all sorts need to step up and make sometimes the bold decision of investing in changes that will reduce emissions. You heard from the ag community this morning. I heard from many of them that they’re willing and able to participate in changing their ways such that they sequester carbon and reduce their emissions.
It takes people to make decisions to move forward, so we need to see continued and courageous leadership, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally to get on with it because we’re way behind.
We are unfortunately tracing pretty close to the RCP 8.5 high carbon scenario that I talked about. The kinds of changes that those would impose upon Canadians, let alone people around the world who are much more vulnerable than we are, are catastrophic and totally undesirable.
Let’s make some decisions soon and fight for the right to make those decisions. I hope that helps. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, panellists, for being here today. It has been great to have you.
Senators, I am now pleased to welcome our next panel. Thank you for being here with us today. It’s great to have you. We’re very pleased with the presentations we’ve had to date on this fact-finding trip, so we look forward to more of the same high quality from you. I am just putting you on the spot.
To introduce the panel, we have Dr. Howard Wheater, Professor, Institute of Water Security, University of Saskatchewan; Dr. Maurice Moloney, Executive Director and CEO, Global Institute for Food Security, University of Saskatchewan; and Dr. Stephane McLachlan, Professor, Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba.
We’ll start in the order in which you were introduced, so you have the floor first, Dr. Wheater.
Howard Wheater, Professor, Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: You might tell from my accent that I am a newcomer, relatively, to Canada. I came in 2010 as a Canada Excellence Research Chair.
I founded the Global Institute for Water Security in 2011. That’s relevant because the aim was to bring together the multiple disciplines and interact when we think about water and agricultural problems across the University of Saskatchewan campus. Our big focus at that time was the Saskatchewan River Basin. The Saskatchewan River is the lifeblood of the Prairie provinces.
In 2013, I chaired a Council of Canadian Academies panel, which reported on agriculture and water. I think you’ve seen that document, so that might be relevant to your hearings.
Also in 2013, I put together a team funded by the federal government’s climate change research program to look at the changes that were taking place in the interior of Western Canada. We moved our focus from the Saskatchewan River Basin to also include the Mackenzie, and hence all the way up from the U.S. border in the south to the Arctic.
That project terminates this month, so I have some results for you which are hot off the press. Essentially, we’ve been looking at the changes taking place in the region, trying to understand them and improve our capability to project into the future. We have some of those projections available.
The Changing Cold Regions Network has brought together eight universities and four federal agencies. That might be of interest to you. Environment and Climate Change Canada has been a key partner, as have Agriculture, Agri-Food Canada, Parks Canada, and Natural Resources Canada. We’ve had about 40 or so principal investigators working on the issues of changes in the region.
I thought I’d talk to you a bit about some of the challenges around water and agriculture in the Saskatchewan River Basin, just to highlight some of the current issues which are likely to be exacerbated in the future as we move to a warmer climate.
The first point to note is that irrigation is a very big issue in the Saskatchewan River Basin. In South Saskatchewan, 82 per cent of the water that is consumed is consumed by irrigators. Water resources in southern Alberta are fully allocated, so there is no unallocated water resource. We’re in an era of competition for water between different sectors.
On the second point I want to make there’s a slide that illustrates things have been changing quite fast on the Prairies. You heard from Dave Sauchyn and colleagues about this. I presented a time series of stream flows from a prairie watershed that interestingly drains from Saskatchewan into Manitoba. What you can see is a huge change with time in the stream flow from that basin.
There are two parts to that story. One is that the climate has been changing. In recent years we’ve been seeing summer flooding in the Prairies where we never saw that before and then rainfall-driven flooding as opposed to the typical annual spring snow melt. Also, of course, agricultural drainage has played a very large role in that. Something like 80 per cent of the natural wetlands in the Prairies is probably drained now.
Drainage is a big issue. It’s obviously advantageous for farmers to improve their cultivable area. It gives them better access to the land for machinery, but it takes out some natural storage from the landscape. Hence, it flows downstream but also passes on water quality issues around nutrients too.
The next slide turns to the nutrient issue. I think everybody in Canada east and west is aware of the challenges of the fact that we as a society are putting too many nutrients in our water systems. It’s the biggest pervasive global water quality problem every developed country is facing. Lake Winnipeg had an algal bloom that was 15,000 square kilometres in extent. We know that Erie, having recovered from nutrient pollution, is now back into a phase where there are significant problems with algal blooms.
I’ve shown a little diagram of the South Saskatchewan River Basin. Just to illustrate, we are in Calgary on the Bow River. If we move north, there is the Red Deer. If we move south, there is the Oldman. Those are the three major tributaries of the South Saskatchewan. If we look at the next slide, we can see the buildup of phosphorous in the river as we move down through that system.
There’s a little red line there which was a guideline that Alberta had for water quality for total phosphorous. Because they routinely have phosphorous concentrations in order of magnitude higher, they’ve withdrawn that guideline.
Phosphorous and nitrogen are both important issues linking water and agriculture. There are some major challenges in agriculture trying to improve its sufficiency and minimize its impact on aquatic systems.
It’s worth noting that in the South Saskatchewan a lot of that phosphorous sits in the sediments in Lake Diefenbaker. Also, Regina lost part of its water supply a year or so ago because of an algal bloom in one of the tributary lakes, Buffalo Pound.
There were challenges around water quantity and agricultural drainage. The climate is changing, and you heard very eloquently from previous speakers about that. It’s a dramatic change. We’ve lost one to two months of snow cover. Winter is getting shorter. We’re seeing more rain, less snow, earlier snow melt and earlier flows in the river systems.
In the North, there are some very dramatic changes with permafrost thaw, which is not only giving rise to challenges for infrastructure but also landscape. Landscapes are collapsing. Forests are turning into wetlands. The connectivity of the landscape is changing. There was a very spectacular occurrence in the Slims River in Yukon where a glacier retreat led to the river changing direction.
We heard about the extremes, the floods and droughts. Drought is also impacting wildfire occurrence. We’ve had major wildfires in the west in each of the last four years, with Fort McMurray being the obvious headline example. A warmer climate is giving concern for extremes and the hotter extremes have multiple consequences of dust, fire and a lack of water.
I don’t want to talk too much about climate futures because I think you’ve heard a lot about it already; but I would point you to the next slide to say that this is a new level of detail in looking at the future of precipitation. Most climate models are pretty good at getting temperature. They all show consistent warming over Canada. They’re not really very good at all at precipitation. One of the things we’ve been doing in conjunction with the US National Center for Research is running very high resolution models of future climate. This allows us to do a much better job of looking at the detail of the mountains and the detail of precipitation, including convective precipitation. We have some quite exciting new products which gives better insight into the structure of future precipitation over Western Canada. In a new project, we’ll be rolling that out in the whole of Canada in the next year.
We’ve been developing models that allow us to predict impacts of climate change on the major river systems. These results are very hot off the press. They’re about a week old. They’re very undigested, but they show that we expect a warmer and a wetter future on average, which will lead to earlier stream flows. At the moment we think that, on average, precipitation will exceed the increased evaporation and we’ll see some higher flows in our rivers.
These simulations for the Saskatchewan include changing climate. They don’t include yet changing land use or changing water management. They will in the next month. If we look at future soil moisture, then we’re looking at on average more moisture in the prairie soils.
The next slide takes us to the Mackenzie, a huge river basin of 1.8 million square kilometres. It is a very complex river basin flowing north into the Arctic. It is one of the major Arctic inflows. What we’ve shown there are the effects of climate change and then the effects of projected land use change.
The blue line is the present climate. The orange line is a warmer climate. The purple line is a warmer climate with expected changes to land use. I’ve included a few slides to show our projections of what is likely to happen to land use.
These have been based on, first, an analysis of climate and crop suitability, vegetation suitability to changing climate, an understanding of the soils and of the rates at which ecosystem change might take place.
Essentially, we’re looking at cropland moving north replacing deciduous mixed wood forests. We’re looking at impacts of fire, which give rise to some grassland displacing evergreen forest. We’re again seeing some evergreen forest replaced by cropland after fire. We’re seeing some shrub land displaced by mixed wood forest after fire. Then, in the North, the shrub tundra is likely to expand.
Those are just a few highlights of some of the work we’ve been doing that might be of interest. I just wanted to close on the slide about global water futures. We moved from a focus on the Saskatchewan River Basin to the Changing Cold Regions Network, which brought in eight universities and four federal agencies and looked at Western Canada. The next step is to look at the whole of Canada. We have a very large program running called Global Water Futures. It involves 380 researchers across Canada from 18 universities and eight federal agencies. Several of those projects will hopefully deliver scientific results of value to your interests.
There’s a pan-Canadian agricultural program. There’s detailed work on the future of the boreal forests, the future of the prairie landscapes, the future of the mountains and the future of Canada’s major river basins. Thank you very much.
Maurice Moloney, Executive Director and CEO, Global Institute for Food Security, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: Thank you very much, honourable senators, for the opportunity to present some evidence to the committee today.
[Translation]
I can speak French and answer any questions in French afterwards. I prefer, though, to cover the key points of my presentation in English so that I can move through it more quickly.
[English]
I want to approach this discussion from a slightly different viewpoint. I am a plant biologist and an agricultural researcher. One of the things that I’ve worked on, basically for the last 40 years, is the idea that a plant and a tree are very sophisticated machines that are able to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into biomass. If you follow the discussion that I want to present today, you’ll see that this becomes extremely important to take into account in terms of our net emissions into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
I do get worried about vocabulary because we talk about carbon dioxide as a pollutant these days. It isn’t a pollutant in the same sense as sulphur dioxide would be or carbon monoxide out of a tailpipe of a car would be. It is an absolutely necessary part of our life. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we’d have much bigger problems than we’re facing right now because there would be no life on the planet.
I might spend a couple of minutes rehabilitating carbon dioxide, not for the purposes of limiting the worry we have on climate change, but to get us to focus on what we’re really trying to achieve, which is we need to reduce the net emissions we are responsible for and can affect by interventions.
In the world of climate science it’s pretty clear that although climatologists look at a very holistic picture, by the time it gets down to policy, we tend to focus on about 8.4 gigatonnes of carbon that are released into the atmosphere by the use of fossil fuels. That’s a very important target to reduce. If we think about the fluxes associated with land to air and sea to air, the fluxes of carbon dioxide are much, much larger than that. I mean they’re 100-150 gigatonnes of carbon, both from the oceans and from the land. Perturbations in those can also have a massive effect on our net emissions.
Really what I am trying to do is to bring you along the journey that I’ve had to go through, which is to say we need to think about agriculture not as a problem to be resolved but rather as a part of the solution to the problems we currently face with atmospheric carbon dioxide causing climate change.
It has been mentioned that over the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution we have seen increases in CO2 in the atmosphere. As we’ve seen that, we’ve also begun to see the net warming effect of climate change. What’s less frequently talked about is the fact that in exactly the same period we’ve also seen a carbon fertilization effect. Our trees, our forests and in fact our crop plants have actually all benefitted from the fact that the carbon dioxide levels have increased. There has actually been a net benefit to food production, fibre production and lumber production as a result of these changes.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I fully understand that there could be a tipping point, but really where I am going with this is that we need to focus on what agriculture and forestry do and can do for the world’s overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I won’t go into the two papers that are actually in my slide. If anybody did want to read them, you’ll realize there has actually been, even over the last 50 years, a net increase in greening in the development of carbon sequestered biomass of as much as 14 per cent between forests and agricultural production. That is actually a very significant change, in some part because of interventions and in other parts simply because in the case of our boreal forest we have a natural resource which is continuing to sequester carbon.
The factors that can actually affect carbon balancing will include things like reforestation and intervention like no-till agriculture on the Prairies, and I’ll come back to that in a minute, the ability to produce crops that are more nutrient efficient or water efficient, and the ability to increase photosynthetic rates. A lot of new research over the last five or six years suggests that we can increase photosynthetic rates in the field in croplands.
I would also argue that Canada is a very special country because we have a relatively small population for our land mass. Our land mass spends an awful lot of time fixing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If you take some real numbers, the boreal forest, for example, currently sequesters over 200 gigatonnes of carbon. That’s an awful lot more than we emit in a year. Therefore, just by having a boreal forest that goes right across the country we are absorbing a vast amount of CO2. Arguably we are helping many of the other countries which have much higher net emissions than we do by the absorption of that carbon dioxide.
In agriculture, there have been very clear examples of interventions which have enabled us to reduce its carbon footprint, and I use no-till as an example. No-till agriculture was made possible by a biotechnological intervention, the development of herbicide-resistant crops, particularly herbicide resistant canola. That’s practised right across the canola growing regions in Canada and has resulted in the sequestration of about 22 megatonnes of carbon annually. That is a massive contribution. What does it mean in urban terms? It probably means 1 to 2 million cars off the road. That will be the equivalent in emission terms. An intervention that a farmer can implement can have a very significant effect on our net emissions.
I joke with many of our farmers on the Prairies about if there’s a carbon tax and they’re sequestering 22 million tonnes of carbon, when is the cheque coming in the mail? Let’s think about it in terms of a business. If factory owners pay a certain price for carbon because they burn fossil fuels, for any mitigation steps they take, for example, trapping carbon dioxide in flues and liquefying it, they get a carbon credit back.
In fact, with our agriculture and forestry it’s more looked upon as an ecosystem service. It’s just there, and we take it for granted. It’s a bit like bees pollinate. We don’t pay the bees to pollinate. They’re just there. The farmers are just there and the foresters are just there absorbing vast amounts of CO2.
If we take a bit more of a holistic viewpoint, then we can do what we really want to do, which is to encourage good behaviour. A carbon tax in an urban setting will certainly encourage good behaviour. Buy a car that either is a hybrid or maybe an electric car or buy a smaller car, whatever it is, but reduce the use of fossil fuels in that way. That’s fine and is something absolutely to be encouraged in our urban environment.
In our rural environments, what we’re looking for are other interventions that farmers or foresters could implement that also make significant contributions like that. My point is with the landmass and the vast agriculture and forestry that we have compared to many other countries, the leverage of that is much, much higher in this country than in most other trading nations with which we interact on a regular basis.
I have just a couple of words, then, about new technologies, some that are very close and some that are a bit further out. It has been demonstrated through breeding programs that it is possible to grow plants with much higher biomass roots, so high proliferation of roots and deep rooting crops. It’s very good for water utilization and nutrient utilization, but mostly because we don’t harvest the roots it now becomes sequestered carbon in the soil.
In the U.K., a forage grass was bred by one of the grassland research institutes. If that were grown on about 160 million hectares in the world, which is just about feasible, it would account for all of the fossil fuel emissions, 8.4 gigatonnes of carbon. Just having something that’s high biomass in the soil and isn’t being removed from the soil on harvest can also have a great effect.
Perhaps a bit further out is research that has been now proven in the field. There are two or three different biotechnological interventions that increase photosynthesis efficiently by as much as 20 per cent. If we do that on a large scale in crop plants and in grasses or trees, we would not be worried about net emissions at all because this would far outweigh any of the emissions we currently have with the burning of fossil fuels.
What I am really saying here is that absolutely we will continue to do all the mitigation steps we can to reduce direct emissions through the burning of fossil fuels; but if we’re thinking about a global solution, the global solution will come from photosynthesis.
The good news is that Canada has a lot of great research in this area. Canada can be a leader in this regard. Because of the landmass available to do the experimentation, Canada can demonstrate that this can be done right across the world. There is a global point to my evidence here, as well as a local point.
In conclusion, we have to look at carbon dioxide sensibly. It isn’t entirely a pollutant. It’s just that we have too much of a good thing in the atmosphere right now. Let’s look at the ways in which we can use the strengths of Canada. The strengths of Canada would be the natural resources of the land, the forest and the agriculture, combined with the ingenuity of Canadians, not only to solve our own problem of net emissions but actually to help the world fix their problems where they have much higher net emissions on a landmass basis and on a per capita basis. Thank you.
Stephane McLachlan, Professor, Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba, as an individual: My presentation will perhaps be a bit different from the ones you’ve heard thus far because I will be basing it on 20 years of close collaborative research with Indigenous communities and rural communities in the Prairies and the Near North. I will focus on four dimensions of agro and Indigenous food systems which I think can be argued will facilitate adaptation and resilience in the face of climate change or other kinds of uncertainty that might press us in the North.
These are in order: First, the diversification of research around agriculture and agri-food systems in Canadian universities; second, increasing the voice of farmers and Indigenous communities in shaping that research; third, finding ways of supporting new farmers and cultural revitalization in Indigenous communities , which some people call cultural resurgence; and, fourth, finding ways of increasing stakeholder support for farmers for diverse and socially just agroecosystems and Indigenous food systems. I am marrying the science and the social science here when I am talking.
I thought it would be most honest to admit that despite working in very close collaboration with these communities, farmers and Indigenous communities alike rarely talk about climate change. I am certainly not a denier. There are reasons for that which I think we can talk about if you’re interested. Mostly I am working in areas of Canada which in a sense are being degraded by industry. It might be the oil sands in Northern Alberta, hydro-impacted communities in Western Canada, et cetera. There are other reasons, as well. Having said that, I fully recognize climate change will likely impact those same communities in the future. If it’s not climate change, it’s other kinds of uncertainty.
Today I’ll be focusing on ways of facilitating adaptation, mitigation, the kinds of things Dr. Moloney has been talking about, food security and resilience. By resilience, I mean ecological and social resilience.
I want to briefly talk about what I see is the status quo in agricultural research. Most of the responses I am seeing are technocentric, so they focus on technology. Their input is energy intensive and they’re export oriented. Ultimately, they’re trying to find ways that they can maintain or even increase food production while minimizing waste and inefficiencies.
Some of the things we’ve already heard about this afternoon are herbicide-tolerant crops. There’s also precision farming, conservation or zero till, climate smart crops in agriculture, climate modelling and potentially nanotechnology. Again, I don’t mean to disparage those. They can play an important role when designed in appropriate ways. Basically, this is a one-way transmission of knowledge from universities, from governments and from industry to farmers as end users. That raises red flags for me. For the most part, Indigenous people and Indigenous food systems receive very little if any attention.
When Dr. Olivier De Schutter, a special reporter on rights to food, came to the UN back in 2012, he asked me to look at this other idea of agroecology and what degree it was reflected in research programs in Canada. It was a big order. I focused on the three prairie universities that have ag programs. I don’t think you’ll be surprised by what I found when I looked at 118 research programs. Admittedly, in fairly course ways, about half were molecular in approach. In microbiological, GE and physiological production focus was about 20 per cent. Environment was substantially less important at 14 per cent. Conventional breeding in this case was about 8 per cent. In a sense these are the idea generating machines that are resulting in the kinds of adaptations I am sure you’ve been hearing about. Interestingly, all five of the richly endowed Canada research chairs in agricultural programs were all molecular in approach.
This helps shape the conventional go big or go home responses. What we’ve seen along with that is a decline in farm numbers; an increase in farm size that I am sure you know about; and an average age of farmer of about 55 years of age, which is about what I am at, and admittedly increasing all the time. Farmland is at unprecedented prices in terms of cost. In Manitoba, it’s about $2,500 an acre. This livelihood is effectively inaccessible for lots of people who want to start farming.
I am interested in finding ways of growing alternatives to that one particular model which, again, can be effective. Whether we’re looking at organic farming or this resurgent or surging interest in local and regional food systems, I think these can play an important role.
I worked with a PhD student who did a national survey looking at new farmers in collaboration with the National New Farmer Coalition. She found something that was quite dramatically different from the census stats around agriculture. She surveyed over 1,300 new farmers and found that most were ex-urban, most were university educated, young and interestingly women, and most were kind of engaged in smaller farms on an average and sometimes substantially so. About 50 per cent direct marketed their goods and 90 per cent used agro-ecological approaches to production.
Yet there’s a disconnect between the kinds of farming these folks are producing, which again support and reinforce organics, and local food systems. Back to the De Schutter report, I found that very few people, or about 3 per cent of the people that I examined, were engaged in organics. There was no mention on these websites of local food systems, urban food systems or the many types of alternative or agroecological approaches to agriculture.
Back to this disconnect between what’s being done in universities and what other agroecological farmers are using, there was a high level of dissatisfaction, especially with governments but also with universities in terms of providing support.
Back again to the De Schutter report, rural extension in these three prairie universities has been decimated. There was rarely, if any, mention of working with rural communities or especially Indigenous communities. The people surveyed were going elsewhere for their support. They were creating networks of support, sometimes online and sometimes in reality, on-farm mentoring and workshops. They’re finding answers in other kinds of ways, but I think that’s still a problem.
Finally, I want to talk about meaningful collaboration. Whether they’re Indigenous communities or rural communities, the reality is that people are always adapting. They’re always experimenting on their farms or on their traplines. I’ve been arguing in a number of recent publications that this local knowledge or traditional knowledge is not only inherently important but can play a valuable role in helping inform and shaping our science around agri-food systems and Indigenous food communities.
In that regard, I’ve talked about a so-called three-track model where you have western science on one side. You have Indigenous or local knowledge on the other side. Then you have a third track in between which integrates the two and uses them in complementary ways that are accountable to those communities whose voices are being used.
Indigenous communities are increasingly engaged in decision making. That’s important and essential, but that still has to extend to farmers who, for the most part, are left out of these ideas across the country.
I’ve a number of suggestions that I’d like to run by you which I think can facilitate future adaptation around climate change or other stressors: First, a shift from a sole focus on technocentric and input-intensive agriculture to more diverse approaches that can complement one another; second, a shift in scale from a sole focus on export-oriented agriculture to ones that also include regional and local food systems in not just large scale operations but in small and medium size ones as well; third, addressing the age crisis in rural communities that we see in farms across the country by finding entry points to farming for younger farmers and often ex-urbanites often more diverse around gender and ethnicity; enabling farmers and Indigenous communities in their knowledge system to play a meaningful role in shaping science as we move forward; finding ways of reducing financial barriers that everyone talks about when they’re getting into farming no matter at what scale they operate; removing regulatory barriers, which I can talk about; supporting social networks and learning communities in that regard; and, importantly, developing a national food policy that works with local and regional partners to support this much more diverse vision of agriculture and Indigenous food systems.
In conclusion, this lack of diversity will ultimately undermine our ability to respond to climate change in the future or other kinds of unanticipated stressors. I distributed to you this afternoon some of the things we work with in terms of the Was Ni Ska Tan Research Alliance, which I can talk about if you’re interested, with 22 Indigenous communities across Northern Manitoba. I am happy, if you’re interested, in setting up tours to help facilitate the exchange of information with a number of those 22 communities and, for that matter, farmers in southern Manitoba who are engaged in agroecological practices. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you to all the presenters. We’ll start our questions with the deputy chair, Senator Maltais.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you. My first question is for Mr. Wheater.
You talked about sediments in rivers and waterways. How far north did you go to track where those sediments were coming from? You talked about the Mackenzie River, farther north, but other rivers originate in Canada’s North as well. How far north did you go?
[English]
Mr. Wheater: Thank you for the question. In all work, we’ve been mostly focusing on terrestrial ecosystems and the flows in rivers within the Changing Cold Regions Network. We study those rivers for their entirety up to the Arctic Ocean. We haven’t done very much work on sediments, but sediments are clearly an important and challenging issue.
We’ve heard quite a lot about reservoirs and their important role in sustaining hydropower, agriculture and water security in general. The reservoirs in Saskatchewan, for example, trap sediments that can be contaminated with mercury naturally. That can affect fish populations, and then that can affect Indigenous foods.
There is another consequence of one of the dams upstream of the Saskatchewan delta. Because the dam has held back sediment, the river has cut down a little. That river feeds a natural wetland area. As the river cuts down, it becomes less able to replenish the wetlands.
Sedimentation is a complex issue. When we construct rivers we tend to reduce the sediment transport, and then that has various environmental consequences.
That probably hasn’t quite answered your question.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Mr. Moloney, you spoke at length about photosynthesis. You’re absolutely right that it plays a leading role in tackling greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s an aspect you didn’t talk about. For the past decade or so, people in big cities have really taken to growing plants on their balconies. It’s a growing trend in big cities, from Calgary and Vancouver to Toronto and Montreal. In Quebec, transmission line corridors are being leveraged, with large community gardens popping up. Does that contribute to GHG recovery?
Mr. Moloney: That’s a great question. I would say it’s a practice that should be encouraged. It’s very important for a family, or even a community, to learn how to grow plants and food. It creates a direct relationship between people in urban communities and the production of food. In some cases, people are able to grow items that are unique and different from what is available in a grocery store. Therefore, it’s certainly a practice that should be encouraged. From a photosynthetic standpoint, however, it presents few advantages. Even as far as nutrients, soil and plants go, it makes little difference to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The point I was trying to make has more to do with the size of Canada’s land mass. The only country in the world that compares is Russia, and the land mass isn’t being well-managed right now, agriculturally speaking. I think Canada is a unique case. Even if everyone living in Toronto were to start growing vegetables on their balcony, it would have little impact on atmospheric gases. It is, however, a great thing to do because it helps people better understand how food is grown.
Senator Maltais: Mr. Moloney, you also talked about phosphorous concentrations. Where in Canada are those concentrations the highest?
Mr. Moloney: In terms of fertilizer, the prairies, in particular, use a significant amount of phosphorous. As Mr. Wheater mentioned, these fertilizers make their way directly into tributaries and rivers.
The problem is due to two things. The first has to do with the solubility of the form of phosphorous. What winds up in the river is much more soluble than, say, phosphorus in rock form. Normally, fertilizer is applied in a fairly soluble form.
Growing high-efficiency plants with the capacity to absorb the fertilizer may help reduce the fertilizer rate without harming crops. That is entirely possible but would require plants that are much more efficient.
Take roots for example. Many plants have roots that will not grow deeper than the first 20 centimetres of soil. A lot more fertilizer is needed to apply enough phosphorous. If the root systems were deeper, the phosphorous might be much better absorbed. Now, when plants are selected, the objective is to increase nutrient efficiency to prevent the problem Mr. Wheater talked about. An excessive amount of fertilizer is used, and that excess winds up in the rivers.
Senator Maltais: Mr. McLachlan, your experience working with Indigenous and rural communities is to be commended. I support the resurgence of small farms. We are seeing it happen in Quebec, and the results are positive. We took home the top prize in the World Championship Cheese Contest. We beat the French at their own game. The winning cheese did not come from large farming operations; instead, it came from small farms with 40 or so goats.
Young people are returning to farming as well. In my province, especially, the vast majority of small farm owners are university-educated women. They aren’t taking over large farms because they are too expensive. They are opting to run small farms that can compete with the big guys by focusing on high-quality products that are no longer available from the big farms. They aren’t choosing farms that grow wheat, canola or other such crops. That’s not the type of production they are getting into. They are investing in vegetable and dairy farms, producing things like butter and cheese. They are competing with the big guys. They make products that are often organic, high-quality and more expensive, but they don’t need as much land to support their farms.
This week, we have met with many young farmers. Quebec’s farmers’ union offers services to support young farmers. It’s very challenging to take on a farm with a family and children, and to grow that operation to the point where both members of the couple are able to earn a decent living. They can’t afford to buy the land surrounding their farm. The banks don’t have confidence in them, even though there was a time when bankers would say that land made the best investment. Land value doesn’t rise with the stock market. It’s a matter of confidence, not to mention mindset. What you experienced in your communities is not rare. It happens all over Canada, from Newfoundland and Labrador to Victoria. It’s one of the biggest challenges facing Canadians. It’s time to go back to small farms, which don’t require people to invest millions of dollars just to give their small family a decent life. Would you agree with that principle?
[English]
Mr. McLachlan: Absolutely, yes, I do. I would say that. Some 1,300 new farmers were surveyed. They might have actually been some of the people you spoke to. I think it was about 10 per cent. It was made available both in English and in French in Quebec. It was interesting to me that Quebec really separated itself from the other provinces dramatically in the level of support the government and universities provided new farmers. Basically, the rest of country was failing them. In some ways, what is working so well in Quebec could be a model for the rest of Canada in terms of how to support these, as you say, “women.”
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: What you’re saying is important. In Quebec, it’s still taken quite a few years. The province’s act respecting the preservation of agricultural land and agricultural activities is what made the difference. The legislation sets out very stringent parameters to preserve agricultural land.
Research has been done on the urban development of farmland. If that land continued to be farmed properly, cities would expand onto rockland. That isn’t the problem of farmers. Support for young farmers comes from the cooperatives that the government has set up and supported in partnership with colleges and universities. That is the future, I believe. Big farming operations are great. They contribute a lot to Canada’s economy, but people have the right to live on their land and do a job they love: farming. As for Indigenous people, I’m delighted to see that they have an interest in agriculture.
I come from a region in northern Quebec, and the Indigenous communities there don’t have farms. It’s not possible there. They do other things. They’ve been successful in other sectors.
The future of farming is a problem in Canada. You mentioned the average age of a farmer. That isn’t a serious problem yet, but, in 10 years, it will be.
Who is going to provide financing to a 25-year-old man or woman whose father passed on to them a piece of land worth $5 million or $10 million? Find me a bank that will give them financing. None. Young people are giving up, so fathers are selling the land to big companies. As a result, Canadian farmland is increasingly owned by trusts, with farmers becoming the employees of these large trusts. It’s sad, whether we are talking about farmland for vegetable or other production. That is the challenge facing Canada. This is where we are. If we don’t find a solution in the next 10 or 15 years, what will Canadian agriculture look like? I just wanted to make that point.
[English]
Mr. McLachlan: I would just add that I support fully everything you’re saying. There are novel examples of land being entrusted, people putting it in trust and feeling ownership of it and maybe passing it on to their children or to their neighbours in the future. These entry points allow often young women, ex-urban university-educated people, to farm. They might not help as much with carbon sequestration, but it’s absolutely essential for adapting in the future. Thank you for your comments.
Senator Gagné: Could you give us an idea of what will be the biggest change in the Canadian agricultural or forestry industry you foresee for the next five to ten years?
Mr. Moloney: It’s very interesting to talk about the extensive agriculture and the more intensive agriculture in the same session because I think we’re going to see a bit of both.
First of all, it’s very interesting to see the results that Dr. Wheater has just talked about which do suggest that we will have somewhat longer growing seasons. There may be sufficient soil moisture to support increased yields. We’ll probably be able to move production a bit farther north, as well, particularly on the Prairies. That will have a dramatic effect just on its own as to how much agricultural production we can deliver.
With our population, it will turn into export items primarily, I am sure. I think it also gives us the opportunity to diversify the crops that we will grow. We’ve been seeing this for the last 15 to 20 years. When I first came to Canada, field peas were about it for pulses on the Prairies. Now we are the largest producer worldwide of lentils. The idea that we increase, for example, the diversity of crops, especially nitrogen fixing crops, also feeds into the whole question of how much fertilizers we will need to use because naturally fertilizers can be significantly reduced if we’re rotating appropriately with pulses. I think we’ll see that.
At the same time, I spend a lot of time with farmers that are farming 3,000-plus hectares on the Prairies. Automation is a fact of life. I mean we are seeing a higher degree of automation on farms. Oddly enough, I don’t really see farm employment increasing that much, but I believe farm technology employment will increase because we are in a position to be generators of a lot of the next-generation technologies.
It will impact the carbon footprint of agriculture because some of the things we’re already doing in precision agriculture significantly reduce that footprint. We will be able to substantially reduce the use of things like pesticides because we’ll be able to deliver those in a much more targeted manner. Because of imaging we’ll be able to distinguish between a weed and a crop plant and only spray the weed as opposed to what we currently do, which is broadcast. We will see very significant changes in the use of agricultural chemicals, which overall will be very good for us to look forward to.
Mr. Wheater: While I agree with what Mr. Moloney was saying about the movement of the agriculture north, the corollary is that there’ll be some heat stress potentially affecting crops in the south. There’ll be more days of more than 30oC.
I think there will be increasing tensions in terms of access to water resources between the agricultural community and other communities. It’s still the case that the dominant majority of production is natural precipitation, but irrigation is an important sector in terms of productivity and outputs. There are already some interesting developments through water trading between irrigation districts in Alberta that are improving efficiencies.
There are a lot of tensions around nutrients in the landscape. Some of the nutrient challenges and some of the problems of agricultural drainage and transmission of floods can be resolved by restoring wetlands in the natural landscape. Then there’s a very interesting policy question about how to incentivize the agricultural community for that. It’s important to recognize the ecosystem services that farmers provide and to provide a way for them to have resources to support those activities.
Maybe I’ll stop there. It’s a time of great opportunity for agriculture, but there are challenges that policy guidance is needed to help with.
Mr. McLachlan: Was your question was around forestry as well?
Senator Gagné: Agriculture and forestry.
Mr. McLachlan: Yes, together. I would say forestry is an important and interesting example because they’re obviously situated in the North. Many of them are on traditional lands of Indigenous people, so I think partnership-based approaches are essential in moving forward. Using the ecological approaches I was talking about around agriculture can also work in terms of having a fuller diversity of forest uses and in terms of what some people call non-traditional use of forests. It can be medicines. It can be mushrooms. It can be the forest products themselves. Again, I am not just thinking solely in terms of export but also of the cultures and the needs of the communities up there. It’s an opportunity for small and medium scale forestry as well.
We’ve been talking about small and medium scale agricultural in terms of high quality. Some of the literature, admittedly in the global south, talks about higher percentages of carbon in the soil in terms of the full diversity of root systems from many different kinds of crops being planted together or sometimes in sequence one after the other. The mitigative potential of those more diverse agroecosystems needs to be explored in Canada. It should not just be seen as boutique agriculture that caters to middle class and upper middle class consumers, but as something that actually can be conducted on a scale that benefits all Canadians.
The research just isn’t being done. That frustrates me as someone who works in agriculture at the University of Manitoba. I have a grad student who’s looking at universities across the country, in a sense trying to do what I did in greater detail and more thoroughly. We’re finding the same thing. We need to diversify this very technocentric, expert-driven approach to agriculture. We need to start exploring other possibilities, not because they’re better or they’re more needed, but because there’s a role for those as well.
Senator Gagné: I have another question about trying to be more inclusive. What I am hearing is that the climate movement is failing to engage a diverse set of stakeholders to address climate change.
Are universities able to attract a diverse set of students in environmental sciences or other sciences so that we have scientists and other people from different communities involved in advancing the knowledge?
Mr. Wheater: I could say that water is a huge part of the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous communities. We do a lot of work within Indigenous communities and schools in Indigenous communities. We also train them in various aspects of monitoring water quality and fish health. They are very receptive and welcoming, but these relationships take a lot of time, effort and energy, and mature over quite a long time scale.
It’s not always consistent with the academic needs to get publications out and be recognized for tenure.
Mr. McLachlan: In my almost 20 years at the University of Manitoba teaching environmental sciences and studies, I think that student bases become much more diverse. In part that’s second-generation students but also newcomers taking advantage of education opportunities in Canada. It is not only that. If you look at the demographics in a city like Winnipeg, which you obviously know, it’s much more diverse now. It has become a really welcome receptor site for immigrants and especially refugees from around the world.
The problem is that there aren’t right now any receptor sites. It’s still this homogenous approach to agriculture and to environmental sciences. I would include my own area of study in that.
We have newcomers, for example, who often have this wealth of information and these knowledge systems that come from multiple generations, but they have no place to farm. I mean there are the balconies and there are the community gardens, but in terms of upscaling they’re often disadvantaged. They have this knowledge and this expertise but they end up ultimately doing jobs that don’t reflect that. As universities, we need a take a lead in providing that support and in a sense affirming the ethnic diversity that you rightly pointed out is there. I think it is being neglected and overlooked right now.
We have this vision of rural communities. They still are largely white. They still are multi-generational farmers, but the ones I work with welcome diversity as well. We have to find a way of supporting that, perhaps by having more nuance and more nimble approaches to farming that are smaller in scale and where people can actually grow a lot of the crops like the vegetables and fruit they grew up with. Right now that diversity isn’t reflected in the research or in the teaching that we do in universities.
Senator R. Black: We’ve heard three days of people talking about climate change, Mr. McLachlan. You commented that you rarely, if ever, hear elders, harvesters, farmers, or rural leaders talk about climate change. Why is this? I don’t disagree, but why is this?
Mr. McLachlan: It’s complex. Maybe part of it relates to what Dr. Moloney was saying. A lot of those communities are situated in the earth’s lungs in terms of sequestering. In a sense maybe that ends up mitigating some of those impacts. I would include rural communities in this. They’re dealing often with other more pressing stressors. I mean BSE or mad cow disease in the mid-2000s devastated communities.
People are willing to talk about climate change if they’re pressed. If a researcher comes out and asks them about it, they’re helpful and they want to do that. Ultimately, when you create space to let people talk about what’s important to them, in rural communities it’ll be things like: “Who’s going to inherit my farm” and “What’s going to happen to it?” Succession plans are really important in terms of economic crisis, how they pay the bills and how pay the bank.
Indigenous communities are especially confronted by that. I mean we have residential schools which we all know about in terms of the devastating impacts. We also have devastating impacts of industry, whether it’s the oil sands and downstream communities that I’ve worked with or hydropower or those point sources of contaminants or point sources of changes in water flows that Dr. Wheater was talking about, for example. The people are just trying to earn their livelihood. They’re trying to figure out a way of preserving their cultures, their languages and their traditions. I don’t think there’s really room in that for them to even talk about climate change until it becomes so pressing that it ends up displacing some of the other more pressing difficulties they encounter and engage with.
That said, a lot of funding has been available for researchers to look at climate change. Obviously we need to better understand that. We need to find ways of mitigating that and adapting to that. Sometimes I get a sense that maybe it’s a bit of the tail wagging the dog. What we need to do as researchers is to make more room for those rural voices and those Indigenous voices to communicate what’s important to them. Then we need to develop research, whether it’s science or social sciences or even humanities and the arts, to better reflect those priorities. We’re still not very good at that yet.
Mr. Moloney: As a postscript to that as well, it is interesting, as Mr. McLachlan says, it’s not a subject of discussion. It’s not articulated in that way. On the other hand, farmers are very practical people. It’s interesting how they adapt to what they observe as changing conditions.
When I first came to Canada, I don’t think there were any soybeans grown in southern Manitoba or in southern Saskatchewan. Now we have over a million hectares of soybeans being grown there. That is a choice by farmers. What they basically realized is they’re now becoming the Midwest, what we traditionally call the U.S. Midwest. That’s climate change effect almost certainly, but they’re adapting to it in a very practical way.
If Mr. Wheater’s predictions are anywhere close to being right, we’ll probably see an awful lot more of high productivity soybeans being grown in places that we would have never guessed. The only place we used to do it was southern Ontario. It is interesting. Although there might not be articulated discussion about it, very often choices are made by very practical growers and farmers.
Mr. McLachlan: Just to add in Arctic systems, we’re seeing in the current day dramatic changes that are taking place. People have always adapted because those environments are changing all the time. Studies have looked at both the sciences and the human dimensions around climate change in the Arctic. For the most part, they ignore the really damaging impacts of residential schools in the Arctic: colonization, removing people off their land from their camps, centring them in communities, and the kinds of damages and social challenges that many of these communities face.
We can’t just look at climate change in isolation from all these other things. The models are essential. It is important to predict that some of these changes might take place, but when we talk about adaptation and mitigation we need more complex scenarios that allow for some of the background factors to emerge.
The Chair: I have a couple of quick questions. Will the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, which was announced about three weeks ago by the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, be beneficial to each of you in your work?
Mr. Moloney: Yes. We were very pleased to see this initiative announced. We kind of knew it was incubating but we didn’t know when it would be announced. Almost immediately, there are consortia coming together to try and figure out what would be some of the grand challenges we now want to be coming together to discuss and plan for. Without a doubt, agricultural climate change is on the agenda.
In both senses, what do we have to do to adapt our agriculture to what we see as the predictions of changing climate in Canada? We want to continue to be not only as productive but even more productive in the world food security sense. At the same time, there is now a much bigger consciousness that yes, we have an opportunity to do something very big in terms of carbon fluxes because of the size of this country and the leverage we have in agriculture and forestry.
I am hoping there will be a coalition of researchers across the country who will look into the various types of interventions that might be possible to put us into a position of not only of solving our own problem, as I said earlier, but of actually showing the rest of the world how we can get to grips with the runaway increases in CO2.
The Chair: Does anyone else want to comment on that? Is it useful to you or potentially useful to you as a source of funding for research?
Mr. Wheater: We’ve been fortunate at the University of Saskatchewan in that we’ve had the world’s biggest grant for water funded through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. Several major projects there involve agriculture. We’re very keen to develop stronger linkages at the federal level. We have already good relationships at the provincial level.
Mr. McLachlan: I am just speed reading through some of this. Obviously, whenever the Canadian government funds agriculture it’s a good thing and an exciting thing. For me, I would hope there are mechanisms. I don’t know it in enough detail to see if it can really benefit the full diversity of those who are involved in the agri-food systems and Indigenous food systems. Hopefully they are there. It is even better if there’s room and farmers and Indigenous people have been involved in helping design those programs. Generally speaking, of course, it has lots of potential.
The Chair: I have a final question or a comment, but I’ll throw it on the floor anyway. Another committee I am on has been looking at automated and connected vehicles. I always express a concern in regard to that when we have witnesses appearing before us. In Canada, it’s very unfortunate that we have a very high rate of functional illiteracy. I mean it’s particularly high in Atlantic Canada. It’s particularly high in rural Canada, unfortunately. It sounds like to be in the farming business is already increasingly more sophisticated with the use of GPS and other technology. You’ve mentioned that some of the new farmers coming in are very well educated, but there’s a huge number that are not. We still have this aging group of farmers.
My uncle says he wouldn’t be able to drive today’s tractors probably. He is 84 now but he was a lifelong farmer. At the end of the day I think there will be winners and losers with the change in technology and our level of literacy. I know we’ve put a lot of money into education in Canada, but a lot of people are missing out.
I guess it’s a comment rather than a question, unless you want to comment on the comment. The concern that I have is that we’re really missing the boat in terms of the amount of illiteracy in Canada with the changing technology that will demand that people be even better educated.
Mr. Wheater: Maybe this is a tangential response, but we’re in a very exciting era of communication through social media. Increasingly we’ll see a lot of exciting products of information made easily available to people through their smart devices in a way that they can assimilate. This will apply for anybody who wants to canoe in a river or irrigate their farm. It’s an era of big data targeting information to people in a way that they can access it.
I am pretty optimistic about the future in terms of information flows. It’s not difficult to operate a smartphone. It’s not difficult to download an app. Then you have information on the soil moisture underneath your feet coming to you, and that can be really useful information.
The Chair: Works great, as long as you can read it. That’s the trick.
Mr. McLachlan: I have the pleasure of teaching experiential-based courses in southern rural Manitoba. I take out multiple students every year, some 40 or 50, and many of whom are international students. We visit different farming practices, a whole diversity from the larger scale which in our area is Hutterite colonies.
They farm upward of 15,000 and 20,000 hectares. They’re definitely the largest operations in our part of Canada, anyway. In many cases they don’t have a lot of formal schooling, but they have this incredible mechanical know-how and ability through software to operate technology, which certainly overwhelms me in every way.
I also think of people in their 80s around precision farming using GPS and really complicated combinations of different kinds of plant varieties and herbicides. In that case they found a way of adapting. We’re really getting at the souls of a lot of farmers in this case. They just adapt and they figure out a way of making it work for them. I am more hopeful in that regard.
I struggle with how we end up supporting small and the medium-scale farmers. In a sense they’re the ones left out in the cold. It’s not the ones who have access and can afford incredible technology. It’s in the ones who in a sense are sometimes turning their backs on their formal education and wanting to farm in traditional labour-centred ways on a small scale, using agroecological principles like cover crops, mulches, green manures and agroforestry, et cetera. How do we end up supporting them?
That’s a different kind of illiteracy. I am sorry if I am sounding like a broken record here and saying the same thing over and over again, but we’re not doing well by those folks. Those are the ones that in many ways will be the future of agriculture. They’re the ones who are coming from ex-urban backgrounds. They’re farming in unconventional kinds of ways. They’re absolutely committed to this livelihood, but they’re working largely in a vacuum that has being left by a government and by universities. Again, it is a different kind of illiteracy. How do we support those? If you have ideas around that, I’d love to hear them, but right now, there’s not much there for them.
The Chair: Right. I am asking the question because I don’t know the answer either and I am concerned.
Mr. Moloney: Following on a bit from Mr. Wheater’s comments, I am actually quite optimistic. We work with farmers across the Prairies. I just came back from Ethiopia where we have a project. It’s amazing to see some rural farmers in southern Ethiopia using a smartphone to take a photograph of a diseased plant so that they can now send it off to a pathologist to figure out what the problem is.
Their literacy rate can’t be as good as Canada’s. Also, they’re not working in English, and most of the operation of the phones and so on are. Yet, they’re still capable of doing those things.
I am fairly hopeful that social media, the use of technology and the user friendliness of a lot of the technologies we’ve developed will help people to be able to implement those things. That’s not to get away from what Mr. McLachlan is indicating in agroecological terms. There are a lot of traditional approaches to agriculture. In biological terms they’re just as complicated as everything else we do. If you want to get down to that level of analysis, they are traditional and they are passed on. Therefore they’re easily accessible to people. We will definitely see the parallel paths of those happening.
The Chair: It has been great having the three of you here as our final panel of the day. Thank you for your presentations.
(The committee adjourned.)