Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Fisheries and Oceans
Issue 4 - Evidence - Meeting of May 11, 2004
OTTAWA, Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans met this day at 7:05 p.m. to study on matters relating to straddling stocks and fish habitat.
Senator Joan Cook (Deputy Chairman) in the Chair.
The Deputy Chairman: Honourable senators, I call the meeting to order. Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming, by videoconference, Dr. David Schindler from the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. Dr. Schindler is one of Canada's most eminent scientists and a world-renowned authority on ecology and fresh water. He recently became an Officer of the Order of Canada. At the University of Alberta, Dr. Schindler teaches limnology; the philosophy, sociology and politics of science and public policy in Canada; and environmental decision-making.
Welcome to the committee, Dr. Schindler. After your introductory remarks, I am sure we will have many questions for you. I am Senator Joan Cook, Deputy Chairman of the Committee, sitting in for the Chairman, Senator Comeau. I come from the other end of Canada, Newfoundland.
Mr. David Schindler, Faculty of Science, University of Alberta, As an individual: Thank you, Senator Cook. I understand that all senators have seen the notes that I sent to you this morning.
The Deputy Chairman: Yes, thank you.
Mr. Schindler: How would you like me to proceed?
The Deputy Chairman: We would like to hear your presentation and then we will have questions.
Mr. Schindler: I had originally hoped to show some visual aids but I was told that would not be possible. Given the state of this patchwork, that was probably good advice. The material before you contains my comments for today. I have provided some key references to the points I will make.
In respect of the freshwater fishery in Canada, it is difficult to separate the effects of overfishing and habitat on what is happening to the fisheries. That is because we have a very poor database from which to work. For example, the references that I have given you for the top section there are working with rather nebulous data sets, such as creel censuses, limits for catches and guesswork about what has happened with habitats and overfishing.
Overfishing is clearly the worst factor in populous areas. There has been some work by Carl Walters and John Post in British Columbia showing that the state of the rainbow trout fisheries was directly proportional to their distance from major population centres. Accessibility is a big problem. This is well documented in Alberta, where lakes are relatively scarce and industrial development has made them so accessible. There is scarcely a lake in the province that cannot be reached by fishermen, either by road or by using all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles. The provincial fisheries officials have done a good job over the past few years of documenting widespread collapses of key fisheries, such as walleye and lake trout in particular. If those fisheries were to open at all, the bag limit for sport fishing would be one fish for those lakes.
People have not realized a number of things. There has been a big worry about the number of sport fishing licences issued, which have declined in most provinces, likely because people get discouraged about the number of fish they can catch. However, there are compensating factors of which most people are unaware. One of those is the increased fishing technology available. I mentioned the ease of accessibility, in striking contrast to the situation 30 or 40 years ago when I was a keen young fisherman. I skied to lakes in the winter or canoed and portaged in the summer. Anyone ambitious enough to turn a key can now reach almost any lake in Alberta and take along a good load of electronic equipment and a large boat and motor in the summertime, or a power augur in the winter.
I subscribe to a number of fishing magazines just to keep pace with what fishermen are doing these days. Each month, half a dozen periodicals test the latest equipment. Full-time sport fishing professionals are paid to describe the latest improvements in fishing technology in these magazines. As a result, fishermen are much more aware of and no longer have to search for fish habitat.
It is done with GPS and sonar, and most recently, even with underwater cameras, so a lot of the guesswork that was involved in fishing 30 years ago is simply no longer there.
With respect to the habitat destruction, there are usually two things going on at the same lakes. One is simply land use change. If we had the video capabilities, I would show you satellite photos of some of the main lakes in Alberta. Most of the basins have been changed to either pastures or agriculture from what was originally forested terrain or wetlands. There are very few data on these, but as a rule of thumb, those changes have increased the nutrient yield from those watersheds to the lakes by at least twofold, and the erosion of sediment from those watersheds by several-fold. As a result, there has also been a water quality change in those lakes.
Many of the lakes across the boreal fringe of Alberta, particularly the Edmonton and Red Deer areas — and there are very few lakes south of that — have now several hundred to more than 1,000 cottages on them. As I speak, there are several proposals by the developers to add up to several hundred cottages each to many of these same lakes.
We studied the effects on the lakes. In every case where we have examined the lake sediments, we found huge increases in deposition of sediments, indicating increased erosion, and the deposition of phosphorus and nitrogen, indicating a problem with over-fertilization, causing eutrophication and all of the problems with algal blooms and oxygen depletion, et cetera, that are connected with it.
In addition, cottagers do not stop there. Typically, to beautify the view and make it easy to swim and fish, the weedbeds and snags in the lake are pulled out. The natural vegetation along the shoreline is taken out and often replaced with lawns and gardens. Again, there are hundreds of studies that you can locate on Web sites in the U.S. and from Eastern Canada showing that these actions cause increased nutrient loads to the lake.
In many cases, septic tanks are used to service the cottages. There are a number of U.S. studies that indicate that about 80 per cent of septic tanks are inadequately maintained, prove to be poorly installed, or fail somewhere along the way, causing, again, increased nutrient emissions to the lakes.
A number of recent studies have shown the direct effects of removing snags and weedbeds. I mentioned one study by Fisheries and Oceans, where a pristine lake had half of the weedbeds removed. The only predatory species in the lake, northern pike, dropped immediately to 50 per cent of its previous number, and recruitment of the young of the year also decreased by 50 per cent. However, the prey species, yellow perch — and I am told also pumpkin seed, which most people would generically call sunfish — exploded as a result.
They maintained that 50 per cent weed clearance for three years and then tried to let the weedbeds recover. I am told that it was very slow. They were not able to study it to completion because their funding for this research was cut off at the end of the B-based program for Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg, and they no longer have funds to do research on habitat. I am told this year they will be doing research only on fish, and habitat will have to fall by the wayside.
Again, I have given you a number of references. If you do not look closely, you will think that I am Superman and have done a lot of studies. Note that there is a D.W. Schindler, that is myself, and also a D.E. Schindler, who is an associate professor of fisheries at the University of Washington, and my son. His specialty is to study fish and fish habitat, with particular emphasis on salmon.
These disturbances to the watershed and the land use changes that I mentioned take many forms. A lot of it, as I mentioned, is direct conversion of forested areas. I think Alberta is probably an example of a widespread phenomenon. The provincial policy is to enhance agriculture, including the raising of livestock. The official government Web site had a goal of doubling the hogs and cattle in the province by 2010. I believe that has gone by the wayside because of drought and BSE, but there were provincial studies that estimated the food requirements. It was estimated that there would have to be vast increases in the amount of agricultural land; and that because all of the good agricultural land in the province is already subscribed, it would have to come out of the green zone, namely the forested part of Alberta.
Indeed, at about the latitude of Edmonton, that is exactly what is happening. I live in that boreal fringe area myself. In the area where we live, probably 50 per cent of what was forested when we moved here 15 years ago has now gone under the bulldozer and been converted into pasture or agricultural land. In the process, usually the wetlands are either drained or filled, because they are regarded as a nuisance for agriculture. They do not grow anything and it is simply a good place to get your tractor stuck.
In these days of reduced agricultural prices, farmers cleared the land right to the riverbanks. If you look at a photo, for example, of one of the main streams draining from the mountains here in Alberta, you will see almost no trees right to the riverbanks. These natural mechanisms, the so-called riparian areas and the wetlands, which in the past were able to catch things like nutrients and silt and pathogens to prevent them from getting into lakes and rivers, are no longer functioning very well. Needless to say, this has played a big role in the loss of groundwater, which has also been widespread in the central part of the province in the last several years.
I think most people would agree that enforcement of regulations is very poor. I have a number of fishermen friends, and I do sport fishing myself, and none of us has ever seen a conservation officer in the field. The list of regulations in Alberta is about as thick as a small catalogue, probably 70 pages or so, with all sorts of specific limits — minimum and maximum size of fish that cannot be taken. Yet one of my hobbies, when I am in a campground on a lake, is to go around at night and see what has been cleaned at fish-cleaning stations, and there are a lot of illegal fish taken. In one case last year, on one of Alberta's trophy lakes, Beaver Lake, I did not find a single legal fish in the trash cans at the cleaning station. People realize that there is no one to enforce these laws in the field and they take advantage of that.
Even in the case of the Fisheries Act, which is usually used as an example of our strongest environmental law for the protection of water, I have laid out some things there from the analysis done by Professor David Boyd of the University of Victoria on how DFO gets around enforcement of the Fisheries Act.
In defence of DFO, I know that the number of cases processed by a few people is just enormous. There is another incentive for avoiding any environmental reviews. They prefer to handle these with some of the euphemisms that I have mentioned, such as letters of advice and referrals.
The bottom line is that they simply are not doing the job of enforcing the provisions of the habitat section, or for that matter, the toxic chemical provisions of the Fisheries Act. We would like to think that they are.
In the last 10 years, I have seen increasing examples of the federal government bending over backwards to cooperate with the provinces in this activity that is euphemistically known has harmonization. I have experienced some of the dialogue that has gone on there. Usually, if the province wants to press the development, even though fish habitat is affected, the government has gone along with it.
Again, I have given you several cases from Alberta and the Northwest Territories where I think the spirit of the habitat provisions of the Fisheries Act has been violated. It appears that they will be violated big time in the oil sands, with many of these massive developments consuming numerous lakes and many hundreds of stream and river channels, and with very little prospect of replacing those with alternative fish habitats.
Alien species are a problem in some areas. I mentioned the Great Lakes. That case is probably well known to the committee as the result of your past work. I pass over it rather quickly.
Most of the introductions here in the West have been deliberate — for example, the stocking of Eastern or even European species into mountain lakes, both fishless lakes and those where people did not like the native species, such as bull trout. Most of the damage was done early in the 20th century. In most cases, there is probably not much that can be done about it, despite repeated mention by bodies such as the Banff-Bow Valley Task Force and the ecological integrity task force that reviewed Parks Canada's efforts to restore these fisheries. They recommended that these be restored, particularly in the case of red-listed species like bull trout. Parks Canada has ignored these studies and ruled that, at least in the front country lakes, such as Lake Louise and Bow Lake, these alien species will be maintained in the park. This is in total contravention of the park's mandate, of course.
Bait buckets are well known as a way that alien species slip from one watershed to another. People buy the bait in stores and do not ask where it was caught. It is common practice that when you are done fishing, rather than kill the poor little minnows, you dump them in the lake.
It is probable that for most of the lakes in Southern Canada, we do not have reliable knowledge of what fish were there originally. It is believed such species as rainbow smelt were probably introduced to Rainy River, which is a tributary to Lake of the Woods, and then on to Lake Winnipeg and the Nelson River system. It has been well documented that that alien species has swept through that entire system in a period of about a decade. The consequences for the fishery of Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods, for example, are still unknown. It is really too early to tell.
There are some cases where deliberate introductions are being made that are pretty stupid. The one that has been well documented already is the introduction of Atlantic salmon to the Pacific, simply because they grow faster in aquaculture.
There are now several papers that document the fact that those escaped Atlantic salmon will thrive in at least some native streams on Vancouver Island. They compete directly with steelhead trout. Fisheries and Oceans appear to be turning their back on this evidence, and deliberately suppressing it in some cases.
This information is not from environmentalists but from university professors that I talk to all the time. There is the widespread feeling that the main role of DFO is as an apologist for marine agriculture. This is certainly not the image that I would like that department to have.
If DFO has evidence that these activities are safe, it should be made public. So far, I have not seen any. I have seen no effective scientific counters to the negative papers that have been published. Again, I have given you a cross-section here.
One thing that both by federal and provincial fisheries agencies forget is that you cannot manage the fisheries here and the rest of the aquatic environment over there. That is how the mandate is split now.
I spent 22 years at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg with DFO, and I still have many friends there. People who work on parts of the ecosystem and parts of the food web, other than fish, are totally discouraged. Nothing is being done, despite literally thousands of papers showing that some of these factors are essential to know to be able to prescribe help for fish. In turn, fisheries have a huge impact on water quality.
I have given you the example here of the trophic cascade that occurs when predatory fish are removed by overfishing or by deliberating flipping the systems from a clear water, low algal phase to a very murky water, high algal phase without any change in nutrients. This has been studied in several countries. There are literally hundreds of references to show that it happened. Probably the mandates of our federal departments need revisiting. The dichotomy of Environment Canada being able to study the chemistry of lower organisms while Fisheries and Oceans study fish is a recipe for disaster for our freshwater fisheries. It is happening all the time.
The role of research in guiding what we do with these fisheries has really gone downhill. When I joined what is now the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, it was the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. All of the directors of that organization were professional fisheries scientists. Most of them were very eminent people. Those people vetted the proposals for research, and they dictated what research was done.
Now, it is very seldom that you see a reputable research scientist above the level of project leader. These people are told to what to do by multiple layers of bureaucrats who are either scientists who jumped to the management stream because they would not advance very high in the research stream, or career bureaucrats who leap from Indian Affairs or wherever to Fisheries and Oceans with the expectation that they can manage these systems.
Often, their stay in the department is only a few years.
I think these people suffer from ``Yogi Berra-ism,'' such that they do not know the direction that the department should take, so they do not know how to get there. In my view, this has been the state of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the last 20 or more years.
Some of the institutional problems that I have seen stem directly from that. I liked working for DFO in the 1970s because there was a sense that we could do anything. If there were not enough resources or sufficient hours in the official day, we worked evenings and weekends to get it done. After 20 years, many of those same people are still with DFO and are repeatedly ``beat about the head'' because this atmosphere of continuous budget cuts, morale problems and lack of resources is always at the forefront. There is never any celebration of what is done well or who is doing it well. That is coupled with an extremely poor salary scale throughout the federal scientific civil service right now. I think it is no surprise that those units are not very effective. In my view, what has happened at DFO is the antithesis of how one manages people and resources to get a job done. My own career will show that I know how to squeeze a great deal out of one dollar.
A fearsome problem is just emerging — the effects of climate warming. Combined with all the other problems, I am not optimistic about the state of the freshwater fishery 20 years from now. Given the effect of climate warming, predicted to be 5 or 6 degrees, on our most lucrative fisheries, which are generally in cold water lakes, and the pathetic attempts we are making to resolve those problems, it is time we started to pay attention to these fisheries.
I have deliberately avoided the marine fisheries today because there are people with much more expertise than I to speak to that. I thought that in the short time available, I should concentrate on things that I know best.
That is my brief run-through of the more detailed material before senators today. I would be happy to take any questions.
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Schindler, for a comprehensive presentation.
Senator Johnson: As a Manitoban, I want to congratulate you on a distinguished career. I have heard about you for most of my life in Manitoba and I have tremendous respect for your work.
Could you please comment on the following: About 7 per cent of the world's renewable fresh water is in Canada. Yet according to Dr. Peter Pearse, with whom I am sure you are familiar and who chaired the national inquiry about 20 years ago, the water policy capacity within the federal government has ``disintegrated,'' victim of a combination of constitutional confusion, budget cuts, interdepartmental rivalry, policy failure, lack of political will and commitment, and terror of treading on provincial toes. I would like your comments on that because it does affect everything we do in respect of our fresh water.
Mr. Schindler: I agree with all that Professor Pearse said in that comment. I will elaborate a little on one example, the Freshwater Institute in Manitoba. When that institution became part of the civil service, the fisheries research force was disbanded. It was originally with Environment Canada, but it was decided that Environment Canada was too big and so DFO was born. The executives at the Freshwater Institute were asked to pick a department and the then director was an old Fisheries hand. Despite the fact that most of the experts in that department were focused on environmental issues, he chose to go with Fisheries. That was the beginning of the problem that we see today.
On the other hand, I do not know whether it is worse to receive a tiny proportion of a huge budget, as the institute receives from Fisheries, or a high proportion of a small budget, which, as everyone knows, Environment Canada has.
Senator Johnson: Manitobans believe that Lake Winnipeg is probably one of the most seriously threatened bodies of water in Canada because it faces many environmental and political perils. Its one-million-square-kilometre watershed is the second largest in North America, encompasses four provinces, four American states, and unlike the Great Lakes, it is neither an international nor national constituency.
Mr. Schindler, what will we do about Lake Winnipeg? We are not the most influential of provinces. Namao, led by Mr. Alan Kristofferson at the Freshwater Institute, has done research over the past few years with which you are probably familiar. It took a community effort to set up our consortium. Was there no will on behalf of the government or anyone else? There have been 400 studies done of Lake Superior and the same number of Lake Winnipeg. We now have the Devil's Lake diversion, Garrison, and the Prime Minister speaking about the issue with President Bush; but the lake is dying. Could you tell the committee anything that would give us encouragement? We are working very hard to raise more money for the research vessel.
Mr. Schindler: I am in frequent contact with several members of that group. Several of them are ex-students or colleagues of mine who asked me to review some of their writings and analyses of the issue. I would agree with you. Currently, Lake Winnipeg is in the state that Lake Erie was in the early 1970s, when the press was declaring it dead.
Senator Johnson: I know.
Mr. Schindler: There was a toxic algal boom of 6,000 square kilometres on the lake last summer. You could see it from satellite photos.
Senator Johnson: You are talking about Lake Winnipeg, of course.
Mr. Schindler: Yes. The dilemma of this huge catchment is part of the problem. As you know, most of that catchment spans Alberta and Saskatchewan. The problem, as I see it, is twofold. No one noticed that in the mid-70s, several of us doing eutrophication work received prizes for developing models. They thought they were all about nutrient loading, but they did not look at the models. There are two factors of equal importance, nutrient input and water flow. The Saskatchewan River, which used to be the biggest river flowing into Lake Winnipeg, is now flowing, in the critical months of May, June, July and August, at only 20 per cent of its flow rates in the mid-20th century. It has gone from being by far the biggest river flowing into the lake, and a tremendous source of dilution for the nutrients coming from agriculture and cities to the south, to being second in size to the Winnipeg River. This is a direct result of drought and the hold-back of water by reservoirs for use in irrigation and other human uses on the Prairies.
The second problem, of course, is the increase in nutrients coming from the south. That is where, as you accurately say, the U.S. comes into play. In the fertile agricultural land of the Red River Valley, probably the biggest sources of some nutrients are the cities of Winnipeg, Fargo and Grand Forks; and the increasing use of fertilizer in agriculture, the increasing efficiency of drainage of the land to rid it of all water into the rivers quickly in the spring, and the explosion in livestock numbers in that basin.
I am quite sure those are all culprits in what we see.
Very little has changed on that lake in 30 years. In 1969, I took part in a survey of Lake Winnipeg. We negotiated to keep the Bradbury out of mothballs. It is now in a marine museum in Gimley. We were the last people to use that boat for a summer, and there were some fairly wild stories about it. That boat could have been on the bottom of the lake rather than in the marine museum.
This new story sounds like nothing has changed. It is an ad hoc program, cobbled together. You can bet that if the U.S. border were halfway through that lake, we would have a research program there just for the purposes of waving the Canadian flag. However, the fact that it is entirely within our borders seems to be good excuse not to do anything about the problem.
Senator Johnson: This is such an important issue. What do we do? Will it have to go the way of Lake Erie before we get any action on it?
As you probably know, the hog industry in the province has also increased enormously since you did your study. That waste is also going into the lake. This is not an example of how we want freshwater lakes to end up in this country. I do not think people realize how huge this lake is and how many tributaries it has. Nor do the Americans have any respect for Devil's Lake and the fact that we do not know what species there are in there that could empty into our waters as well.
Mr. Schindler: That is correct. With respect to the relevance for your committee, this is also one of the most important freshwater fisheries in Canada.
Senator Johnson: That is a very good point.
Our committee was so concerned, Dr. Schindler, that we went out there about three years ago. We studied the issue and were influential in the restoration of Namao.
Senator Phalen: I have a supplementary to Senator Johnson's question.
I want to know who holds the responsibility for waters in the lakes and rivers in the country.
Mr. Schindler: That is a good question. It is one of those areas, as David Boyd describes accurately in the book that I am giving you, that is not husbanded. When I started with Fisheries, the federal government claimed responsibility, but that was then largely handed off to the provinces, which considered fresh water to be part of the land.
The dilemma that developed is that while at that time the provinces had fairly healthy enforcement staffs, none of them were doing any research on fisheries-related problems. For some time, we were able to keep doing research on things like acid rain and neutralization as federal fisheries scientists, even though the provinces were responsible for enforcement.
In the 1990s, it was if there were a contest in budget cutting between the provinces and the federal government. Almost every province cut its environmental staff. If they had any research staff, as Ontario, B.C. and Alberta did, they were cut almost entirely. The enforcement staffs were absolutely cut to the bone.
Meanwhile, we have the federal government behaving, as I mentioned, as if they increasingly feel that they need to put almost all of their resources into the marine environment. What little effort they put into fresh water is largely in reviewing these potential problems and proposals.
I would say that no one is minding the freshwater fisheries store in this country, to add to your portrayal.
Senator Phalen: I do not know much about the provinces out West. In Nova Scotia, there is a high number of lakes and rivers that are either dead or in serious decline due to acid rain. With respect to acid rain, what is used in an attempt to bring the lake back, if it can be brought back? Is there a subsequent maintenance program? What type of maintenance would be required on these lakes and rivers if you did bring them back?
Mr. Schindler: It looks now like most lakes could not be brought back quickly, particularly in the area around the smelters in Southern Ontario, despite the plants cutting their emissions by 60 per cent — one of the big success stories. The lakes responded very quickly in many cases, but the acids had leeched so many of the base CAD ions from the soil, calcium, in particular, that some lakes were unable to respond fully.
There have been repeated droughts and climate warming that have been shown to release sulphuric acid from wetlands and wet soil in the catchments and further delay recovery of the basins. It is now predicted that an absolute, full recovery would probably take centuries, even if we cut off all the acidified emissions. We can expect a partial recovery of the fisheries.
There is a new move afoot to cut emissions even further. This goes back to a bad period in my career. Scientific evidence indicated that we should have cut much more in the way of acidifying emissions than we did, but the government chose the target of 20 kilometres per hectare. The number was basically picked out of a hat. I got several reprimands for giving talks in foreign countries about how the evidence indicated that we needed higher reductions than we set.
Here we are 20 years later considering another round of reductions. In my view, we have wasted 20 years. The evidence was there.
Senator Phalen: Is there anything that they can put into the lake to neutralize the acid?
Mr. Schindler: There are things. Sweden, for example, has a big program for liming of lakes. There are a number of problems associated with that. Sometimes, making just one or two additions of lime to the lake causes a reverse shock in the fisheries and other organisms. They suffer from the quick rise in PH. Even with acid rain, the decline has taken years and years. To turn that back within a matter of a few hours is too much of a shock for them.
The Swedes have tried to solve that problem by liming the catchments in such a way that the lime would trickle in slowly. They ended up killing much of the terrestrial vegetation.
Another problem is that it is tremendously expensive. The estimates that I saw 10 years ago — and I have not reviewed the costs since — were around $100 a hectare of lake surface, and it only lasts a few years.
It was a strategy for protecting key fisheries in places near cities, where they are an enormous recreation resource or vital to the maintenance of fresh fish stock and other things. It is probably not a widespread solution.
Senator Phalen: I ask that for a reason. In most of Nova Scotia, all these rivers and lakes are dying, but in Cape Breton, which is a part of Nova Scotia, they are not. There is much lime in Cape Breton.
Mr. Schindler: Right. I think it is only the most acidic parts of the Precambrian Shield that are under this joint Canada-U.S. cloud of sulphuric/nitric acid. That is the problem. If there is either enough buffering, as in the case that you describe, or little acid precipitation, the lakes are safe.
Senator Cochrane: I will turn to another angle and deal with administration.
I would like to hear your thoughts on what needs to be done to strengthen the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the state of our fisheries. You mentioned that DFO has played a very unsatisfactory part in the development of aquaculture. Hypothetically speaking, if you were an adviser to the minister and free from any political concerns, what would be your recommendation for overall improvement of the fisheries and what role would you envision for DFO?
Mr. Schindler: I am running a filter because what I could say would take two hours.
The first thing I would do is get rid of the many layers of bureaucrats, replace them with a few layers and make sure that those people were respected fisheries scientists who understood the problems with which they were dealing.
The second thing would be to sort out this mandate problem with the provinces. I think provinces that want to do the actual enforcement and management should be allowed to do so, but they should not be able to hang back. If you are going to have the responsibility for enforcement, you need enforcement officers; and if you are to manage the fisheries, they cannot be subjected to lower status than the other economic developments that you want to promote 100 per cent of the time.
I think there is a clear mandate that should be federal — freshwater fisheries research. The main reason I say that is that in some instances — a particular case would be organic contaminants — there really are not enough people, and probably not enough taxpayers' money to hire qualified people, and the masses of equipment necessary to do that sort of research.
I think that the best model is that we had in the early 1970s, which was the envy of people in every country with which I am familiar — it was actually mentioned, for example, by the President of the International Society of Limnologists and a number of prominent European scientists — was the old Fisheries Research Board.
The problem is that these middle manager bureaucrats, who do not understand what a critical fishery issue is, act first to promote development and to protect the minister from criticism. This makes me furious, frankly. I think of how hard my parents worked to pay their taxes. It is clear that the taxpayers pay the salaries of fisheries scientists and they should have the right to know what these people are finding out, and not through a political filter. I would like to see this department — and Environment and Parks and other departments — more at arm's-length from the political process.
I think that any minister who does not know his portfolio well enough to explain why he might not want to do things the way the scientists recommend, and who hides behind making the science invisible, should not be a minister.
Senator Cochrane: That is wonderful. I hope we have that down.
Senator Robichaud: You made a good presentation, but you paint a very negative picture of the situation. You were saying that agriculture is a major contributor to the state of the fish habitat, but we also know that agriculture is there to stay. I do not think anyone will go out there and say, ``You people have to move off the farms because we want to save our rivers.'' How would you go about it? Is there a way that we can save both, or do we have to make a choice that agriculture stays and the state of the rivers, the habitat, will have to suffer whatever comes?
Mr. Schindler: The solutions to the problem are actually quite simple. The reason that things have gone so far is that we really did not develop the database in time to prevent it happening.
A few simple measures like protection of wetlands and riparian areas and, if necessary, even paying the farmers to keep those areas out of production and protect the watercourses, would have been good moves before the damage was done. Even now, in Alberta, we have an absolutely dismal state; one of the last complete provincial studies showed that over 90 per cent of the waters in agricultural parts of Alberta were out of compliance with either E. coli/coliform or nutrient standards. The farmers have sort of banded together with a few volunteer organizations like Cows and Fish and they are clawing this land back. They are not letting cattle just wade into creeks and rivers and lakes to drink any more. There are simple pumps that they can us to pump the water up onto dry land. It sounds costly, but some farmers are actually finding that the weight gained by their cattle has more than paid for the installation.
There is another factor that we should be considering in full-cost accounting, and that is that all of that damage means that cities downstream — and Edmonton is a good example — have to pay more for water treatment. For example, we have 250,000 head of cattle in the North Saskatchewan River above Edmonton; it is where Edmonton draws its drinking water. It has been shown that those cattle are the main reason there are cryptosporidium — a protozoic parasite that is resistant to chlorination — in the intake water for Edmonton. As a result, Edmonton has just installed a $10-million ultraviolet treatment plant. This will not do the entire job; they still have to chlorinate the water to ensure that it is protected during distribution. I do not even know the running costs of this operation, but certainly they are considerable.
It has been shown time and time again that a few dollars invested in the protection of watersheds, in this case perhaps by paying farmers to protect critical areas, would be money well spent and, as a society, save us money.
Senator Robichaud: I agree with you that if you have a few dollars — and in this case, let us say a few hundred million dollars — and you use it wisely, you could make a difference.
Thank you for giving us some positive examples of things that can be done in remediation. One example you gave was farmers not letting the cattle go into the river, but having another place for them to drink. Are there any other examples that simple?
You say that the City of Edmonton is paying millions of dollars for filtration, and if measures were taken upriver, it would save them much. However, the people in Edmonton will not pay for things to be done upriver, will they?
Mr. Schindler: You are right in that. Your voice is breaking up a bit. I think it is an electronic problem, but I think I got your question correctly. If this answer seems off, then I did not and please ask it again.
The best example I know of is New York City, which was faced with installing a new filtration plant. I believe the costs were in the order of $8 billion. They had some studies done that indicated that they would be better off to buy the land in some of the catchments, or pay the managers of the land to protect it — this is largely in the Catskill Mountains. They chose the latter course because the estimated cost was only about 20 per cent of that of the engineering solution, of adding bigger filters.
Some small-scale examples are surfacing. Curiously, one of the best countries at protecting its water supply has been Australia. They simply shoo people out the catchments that supply drinking water to the major cities and they protect it fiercely. Despite being a very dry country, their treatment costs are relatively low. The other case I have been involved with is in Portland, Oregon, which draws its water from the Bull Run Watershed on Mount Hood. They have run that system for more than 100 years and people are not even allowed to walk in the watershed area without a permit. They have never had a case of waterborne disease and they add only a tiny amount of chlorine to the water supply. These are examples of how instituting protection right from the start has truly prevented many problems.
A book will come out shortly by one of my colleagues, Steve Hrudey, and his wife, Elizabeth Hrudey, that documents cases of small outbreaks of waterborne disease in Canada and other developed countries. We generally never hear about many of these instances because they are small. It seems that it has to be a Walkerton or a North Battleford crisis, with a body count, before we hear about them. What impresses you in this book is the realization that waterborne disease is a much bigger problem. It is typical, when children come home with diarrhoea, to think that they ate something bad or caught the flu. Rarely do we think that they drank some bad water. A recent study by microbiologists indicates that the U.S. probably has about 100,000 cases of waterborne illness, resulting in 100 deaths, per year. It is a much bigger problem than is immediately visible because the associated medical care and loss of life constitute a high price tag.
Senator Robichaud: Thank you, Dr. Schindler.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Dr. Schindler, this has been a wonderful presentation. While I am as concerned as the people around this table about fisheries, it seems to me that the overriding concern tonight is water quality. Have we ever had a summit on water? At such a meeting, we could examine the issue of water from many angles. What is the status of looking at water globally in Canada and in North America?
Mr. Schindler: There have been a number of summits at various levels. I was involved in a summit in 2000 right in the Parliament Building. Karen Kraft-Sloan, Paul Muldoon and I organized an eco-summit on water, to which we invited many parliamentarians. I remember well that Senator Johnson was there. There was an opportunity to bring the issue forward. I wrote a preliminary paper for that summit, which was published in 2001 by the Canadian Journal of Fisheries, predicting we would have waterborne disease, among other things. That conference was held about two weeks before the crisis in Walkerton. About one month later, a reporter who was handed a copy of the paper at a press conference read it and telephoned me to say that I had predicted Walkerton. I said yes, but if I had guessed, I would have guessed that it would have happened in Alberta, where there are all the signs for anyone who follows quality of water. This is not far off the issues of fisheries. Fish are a component of healthy water, without which they cannot survive. The artificial dissection we have in Canada between the management of fisheries and the rest of the water issues is part of the problem.
However, there have been international conferences as well. I will attend one in Puerto Rico in two weeks' time — there will be representatives from all countries of the Western Hemisphere — with respect to the problems associated with nitrogen in water, which causes enormous eutrophication problems in estuaries and marine systems; it is also a critical pollutant in groundwater. Unfortunately, I will be the only person in attendance who will be able to report that we do not have many problems. However, I know that if we do not act, we will be in remediation mode, just as the U.S. and other highly developed countries are. If we were to act now, we could prevent problems, which would be much less costly.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: If I might, Madam Chair, I would ask about the summit in 2000 that Dr. Schindler mentioned.
From your answer, I conclude that we have not had a summit that included ministers of fisheries, ministers of natural resources and learned experts such as you in attendance to truly tackle this issue and prepare an action plan. Is that correct?
Mr. Schindler: That is correct. This was the motive behind Ms. Karen Kraft Sloan's and my plot. She called it ``David's adopt-a-scientist program for parliamentarians.'' However, it did not work well. Many people turned up for the photo op with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and did not appear for the meetings of the conference. Perhaps it would have been different had the conference taken place after the events in Walkerton.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: It would seem that we have revealed one problem.
Mr. Schindler: That concern is well-founded. It always struck me as peculiar that Canada is at the bottom of the heap in respect of a summit to bring together people who can affect policy and legislation and the scientists who know about water. When I was a member of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in 22 years I never had a single meeting with the minister and I met only twice with a deputy minister. During that time, I had one-on-one meetings with then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the King and Queen of Sweden. I spent one full day with the Swedish Minister of the Environment and her staff. I had a one-on-one briefing with the head of the U.S. Department of the Interior. If something was scheduled in this country, even deputy ministers did not attend. There was always something more important that came up at the last minute. They used to send one of their aides to take notes. That has always struck me as very strange.
Senator Hubley: Good evening, Dr. Schindler. I listened to much of the conversation this evening and you have presented a great deal of information to us on the health and condition of our waterways. We relate that to the fisheries, but this information does not seem to be working its way down the chains of command.
The communities that perhaps could best take action on this information are not getting it until their waterway, pond or lake is severely affected.
On Prince Edward Island we had very aggressive community programs such as environmental watches that identified many of the problems between the agriculture industry and the fisheries industry that Senator Robichaud mentioned. They came to agreements and did many things with hedgerows and riparian strips around the waterways to fence in the streams where the livestock would go.
Are the successes that you have seen community driven or government driven?
Mr. Schindler: In almost every case that I have seen recently, it is community driven. Currently, for every talk that I give to a scientific audience, I probably give three times as many to community groups. I literally cannot satisfy the demand. I have hired a younger scientist to pick up the slack. Now we are both snowed under.
There is a huge demand in Alberta, particularly after the release of that devastating report that I mentioned about the state of waterways in agricultural areas. I speak to communities to help them figure out what to do to solve their problems.
Also, the government has pulled out of research. The Department of Environment here has actually phoned me up and offered me their equipment because they no longer have any use for it.
Currently, we have two lake groups sponsored by communities with which we are working. They are putting up part of the money to fund our research. We in turn are trying to train their people so they can continue the necessary long- term monitoring.
I really think this is not the way it ought to be done. I like community involvement, but each community will have a tiny database. It will be impossible to get an overview. It would be great if we had government agencies that could help with the community interaction part. They could have service centres to collect data and analyze regional patterns.
You are absolutely right. These are not government-driven programs.
Senator Hubley: It was certainly the experience on Prince Edward Island. They did have monitoring by the Department of Environment. They did have scientists available to them. There was certainly give and take.
Listening to you, we can see the threat that our water will encounter. What about a water policy?
Mr. Schindler: It is badly needed. As Senator Johnson outlined, one was planned in the 1980s.
Environment Canada is another patchwork plan. I believe that department originally began as part of what was then Mines and Natural Resources, the predecessor to NRCAN.
The inland water division of Environment Canada was to administer the federal water policy. Then there seemed to be a bureaucratic change, and there was no longer any focus on water. Water was still featured to some degree, but it was regarded as part of the general environment.
This silly ``sustainable development'' banner was put up and water was forgotten. For the most part, we sustained the economy but not the ecosystem. I do not think that was the original intent of sustainable development. We have done a very poor job of protecting water as a result of that.
Water in the populous parts of Canada should be re-featured as one issue that may stand out from other parts of the ecosystem. We are very limited in what we can do with healthy growth of human populations and societies without it.
There are very few environmental features about which we can say that, but it is certainly one of them. Probably the only thing that is of equivalent or greater importance is air.
Senator Hubley: I ask my colleagues to help me with the percentage. Canada has boasted of having what percentage of the drinking water?
Senator Johnson: Canada has 70 per cent of the renewable fresh water in the world.
Senator Hubley: What percentage of that is not polluted now?
Mr. Schindler: Probably most of it. However, the dilemma is that most of that is in places like Great Bear Lake and the other huge lakes of the North.
There is a problem of scale. The media always tell us that Canada is one of the most water-rich countries in the world. The appropriate scale would be a comparison to Europe, since we are about the same size. Countries such as the U.K, Germany or Sweden can be compared to one of the Canadian provinces. Even Alberta, a middle-sized province, is bigger than the U.K, Germany or Sweden. We forget this enormous scale.
If we wanted to tap that huge water resource, we would be into mega-dollar diversions and reservoir construction to get the water to our populous and industrial areas. The cost and the ecological consequences would be disastrous.
Senator Hubley: Thank you, Dr. Schindler.
Senator Johnson: Would it be relevant to give a little information about the Canada Water Act now, or should I wait until the end?
The Deputy Chairman: Go ahead.
Senator Johnson: The first water policy occurred in 1970, with passage of the Water Act. That included federal- provincial consultations, cost-sharing and joint planning for water resources. Then Dr. Pearse's water policy inquiry was launched in 1984. The report, submitted a year later, made 55 recommendations, resulting in the tabling of a federal water policy in 1987. You were asking about studies and other things.
A major proposal was made to update the act, resolve interprovincial conflicts and initiate federal-provincial protection of ecosystems. Two years later, Environment Canada bailed out, embarking instead on an ambitious omnibus approach to environmental protection that lumped water resources in with parks and wildlife. This omnibus strategy collapsed under its own weight in 1990.
The fallout was severe. The inland waters directorate, the body enforcing federal water policy, was disbanded. The interdepartmental committee on water fell dormant. The federal water policy was quietly shelved and Fisheries and Oceans cut its internationally respected fresh water science program by 55 per cent after it failed to be transferred to Environment.
I thought I would throw that into the mix now so that you could see that we have had some water acts and policies.
Mr. Schindler: Peter Pearse is an excellent historian. His attention to detail is near perfect.
Senator Johnson: That is where it is at now. We have had nothing since then?
Mr. Schindler: That is right.
Senator Johnson: Perhaps this committee can pursue it.
Senator Mahovlich: Thank you, Dr. Schindler. That is quite a list you have.
We have the zebra mussel, which is an alien species, in Lake Ontario. I think they introduced another alien species to counteract it. Is that plan working?
Mr. Schindler: I do not believe that it is. I do not know, but the person who would be able to answer that question for you would be Hugh McIsaac at the University of Windsor, who is the reigning expert on Great Lakes fisheries. The zebra mussel has been a tremendous problem. The last time I looked, there were 160 alien species in the Great Lakes, which is probably the world's biggest fish zoo. I do not think anyone really understands how that ecosystem is changing; I do not think it is for the better.
Senator Mahovlich: In your opinion, will water be the issue of the century? Would more reservoirs or dams help alleviate Alberta's water shortages? How do you respond to people who say that global warming is not a certainty?
Mr. Schindler: Well, to take the questions in order, I think that dams and reservoirs are a solution for people who live around the dams. For organisms downstream, be they other human users who would like to have some water or fish that live in that river, obviously they are not good solutions. Part of the problem is that when you impound water and increase the exposed surface area, evaporation also increases. In areas like Alberta and Saskatchewan, which are already very arid under normal conditions, without any climate warming or increased human industry, water is a borderline problem.
They are also very costly. You might know of the proposal to put another dam on the Saskatchewan River — the so-called Meridian dam on the Saskatchewan border. The estimated benefit/cost on that was that the return would only be 30 cents on the dollar. Even the Alberta government, not known for being environmentalists, scrapped that one. I mentioned earlier that the lack of this water flowing to Lake Winnipeg is part of Lake Winnipeg's problem.
My answer to those who do not believe in climate change is very simple. If you look at climate records, the climate is warming. It has warmed enough since the 1960s to have already increased evaporation in the Edmonton area by about 12 per cent, for example. Whether the trend that we are seeing is caused by human emissions or by some natural phenomenon is sort of secondary to the point that as a result of the warming, water will get much scarcer.
That being said, I think the media have done a very unfair job in portraying the state of science. My initial training was in physics, and nobody thinks twice about stepping on an airplane and flying off somewhere. If people knew how close the science behind global warming was to that which makes airplanes fly or puts men on the moon, they would be greater believers.
I would estimate that probably 7,000 or 8,000 people were involved in the IPCC document that Alberta politicians hate so much, but the media keep dredging up the half-dozen dissenters and making it look like they carry equal weight. Of course, any dissenter who is proven to be right, like Galileo, should be celebrated, but if you look at the history of science, those people are few and far between.
Senator Robichaud: Dr. Schindler, you say the water resource that we can use is diminishing. How much of the water that is available now is being pumped into the ground by the oil industry? Is that considerable?
Mr. Schindler: It is considerable if you look at it in terms of numbers of litres. If you look at it in terms of permitted water use, it is not so large. It is about 1 per cent of permitted water use in Alberta, and about 25 per cent of permitted groundwater use.
There are two things about it that are bad. First of all, that water is pumped several thousand feet underground and is out of the water cycle permanently. Even if it is 1 per cent, that happens every year; so over 25 years, that is a lot of water disappearing from the global water cycle.
Even worse is the fact that other people who need to be brought onside and cooperate to preserve what water we have do not feel like doing their part if the industry is let totally off the hook. I participated in a number of hearings, most recently in Red Deer, where mayors of 10 communities stood up to oppose one of these deep-well injection proposals, and it was approved anyway. Scientists are sort of getting shelved, probably rightly so, and this is becoming a fight between farmers and industrialists, and even business communities, over this water.
It does not need to be done. I have visited several sites where carbon dioxide is used instead; and it is well known that saline water can be used, which is probably not as damaging. However, the symbolic fact that industry is allowed to do this, while the provincial water policy has asked everyone else to cut back on their use by 30 per cent, is not sitting well either with communities anxious to develop, or with farmers who are already short of water.
The Deputy Chairman: The next question is from Senator Adams from Nunavut, that northern part of our country where we believe the water is pure.
Senator Adams: Dr. Schindler, you mentioned the Northwest Territories. I used to represent the Northwest Territories five or six years ago — now it is Nunavut. I do not know if you have been to Rankin Inlet. That is where I come from.
Mr. Schindler: I would go to Rankin Inlet any time.
Senator Adams: Can you tell us something about the troubles that are expected in the North in the future?
Mr. Schindler: I believe there are troublesome sites right now in the North. I know of more in the Northwest Territories now than in Nunavut, and I hope you can keep it that way. Some were identified in the Auditor General's report a year ago — the abandoned mines of the North, and the fact that companies had gone bankrupt and walked away from the problem, extracting enough equipment from the mines that could have paid for the cleanup and knowing that if they did not do it, the taxpayer would be stuck with the bill.
One is the Colomac Mine, north of Yellowknife, on the river that feeds water to Rae-Edzo, among other things, and then into the northern part of Great Slave Lake. The others are the diamond mines in Yellowknife. Again, I was part of a study in the late 1960s of the Giant Mine that showed there were unacceptable levels of arsenic going into the watercourses from that mine. As a solution, they were told to blow the arsenic into the underground shaft; the permafrost will seal it and it will never be a problem. They forgot about climate warming. That permafrost seal is now broken. For the owners of Giant Mine and the other one there — I forget the name of it now, it just closed recently — again there is a big problem. The solution will make a lot of the jobs and profits of the past look like they were not really a good deal after all.
I hope there is enough wisdom in Nunavut to prevent those problems.
Senator Adams: I know that the universities could help in Nunavut and in Northern Quebec. A few years ago, they offered some help regarding Arctic char to some communities in Northern Quebec. Each community is increasing in population, especially with all the char in the rivers each spring and the cod fishermen. A number of years ago I was working in the freshwater fish market in Winnipeg, before I was appointed to the Senate.
How do you feel about that? Have you studied the future of fishing in the territories? You said that some fish have disappeared in Alberta. Has such a study been done in Nunavut?
Mr. Schindler: I hate to say, at this point, that I did a quite a bit of research when I was with the department. That included areas north of Rankin Inlet and some of the char runs in small lakes on Chesterfield Inlet, with good involvement of the local communities. However, that research was closed down after five or six years, early in the budget-cutting process. It is a good example of what has happened to Fisheries and Oceans. When I started in 1968 with the predecessor of that department, there were 14 field stations throughout the North to help us understand some of the problems. The Fisheries Research Board was not a policing unit; rather, their mandate was to help resolve fisheries problems. Each of those stations is now closed and there is no research presence in the North. This needs remediation.
There is one critical thing that makes this of imminent importance — the existing knowledge of the people who grew up and lived on the land. The power for the younger generation would be to interface that understanding with what Western science has to offer. A person who could interface and understand both of those would go much further with this issue than one or the other alone.
We are coming to a time when people who have lived on the land are becoming few in number. Most of them are older than you or I.
Senator Adams: We live on Hudson's Bay, where five or six rivers run into it. What is the future of Hudson's Bay? Perhaps the University of British Columbia would be prepared to do a study of the bay's future in respect of changes in water temperature of the rivers, the effects of pollution, et cetera. Could you comment on that?
Mr. Schindler: I do not have any recent understanding of that. I did a bit of work in the late 1960s on some of the rivers flowing into James Bay, just before I started with the Fisheries Research Board. One big issue is how hydroelectric development has changed those rivers, their fisheries and the communities that depend on them. With some warming there would probably be some drying of the tributaries in the Western part. Big changes in ice cover and snow pack would lead us to predict that polar bear populations would decline. Dr. Ian Sterling has studied the problem for 30 years, and there are a number of issues. I have not made any predictions about any part of what will happen. That is not a pessimistic prediction, however.
Senator Adams: Thank you, Dr. Schindler.
Senator Johnson: What do you think of the conservation reserve program in the U.S. and how it is working?
Mr. Schindler: I do not know much about it but I am disturbed by one thing. The U.S. is always touted as not caring about the environment under the Bush regime and yet I see a great deal of research happening on issues related to environment and energy.
I suspect that if we continue in the same way, we will find ourselves buying American equipment when Canada finally signs the Kyoto Protocol. Currently, the best-managed salmon fisheries in the Western Hemisphere are in Alaska. I mentioned D.E. Schindler; he happens to be my son and I receive firsthand accounts three or four times each year of the latest happenings with the Alaska fisheries. That is very special.
Senator Johnson: It is encouraging to hear that we could learn from what the Americans are doing in that respect.
The Deputy Chairman: I have two questions, Dr. Schindler. In its hearings, the committee heard that while fish habitat provisions of the Fisheries Act constitute a powerful environmental tool, those provisions are not being enforced to their fullest extent. Would you comment on that?
I slip my next question in at every opportunity, because I come from Newfoundland, where we have oil and gas exploration off the coast. I never receive any insight on the phenomenon of seismic testing. I understand that your field is fresh water, but could you comment on that or show me where to find an answer to that question? It truly bothers me.
Mr. Schindler: There are a couple of reasons why your statement is correct. I would encourage anyone who wants a horror story to read this book of David Boyd's that I mentioned, on natural law. It is a spot-on analysis of the problem with our environmental laws. In what will probably seem like a defence of DFO, it simply does not have enough people to handle this problem. At the Freshwater Institute that Senator Johnson and I talked about, three floors that used to be devoted to research are now devoted to people who simply read these various development plans and decide which ones are the high priority that have to go to full review. The assessment is extremely rapid, and as a result, it is very poor.
As well, at several hearings on the diamond mines and the oil sands that I participated in, I have seen DFO put up what seemed to be a strong defence of the Fisheries Act in the case of the two oil sands developments. I participated in those hearings last fall, and departmental officials said flatly that the plans of the companies for implementing no net loss of habitat were unacceptable; yet the plans were approved.
I do not know what machinations occurred there, but in that one case they said definitively that these end pit lakes, which constitute the leftover, are an advantage to the company, in that they do not have to fill in the last gaping hole.
They let them fill with water and, magically, they become a fish habitat. They said they were unacceptable because of the high levels of contaminants and other things from the oil sands.
I did not see anything in the decision about changes to those proposals, yet the developments were approved. I think that the federal government has just not taken a strong stance. They have let the provincial and territorial entrepreneurs simply roll over them. Something needs to be done to put some backbone into whoever it is that orchestrates the enforcement of the act.
The Deputy Chairman: Would you address my question on seismic testing?
Mr. Schindler: I got distracted because I know nothing about it. I was trying to think of someone for you. I recommend that you start with Jeff Hutchings, a professor at Dalhousie University. There is Ransom A. Myers, who is also at Dalhousie. They are two people who are very familiar with marine fishery issues. If they cannot help you directly, I am sure they will know who might be able to do so.
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you for that piece of information. Thank you for a very informative and stimulating presentation. I am sure what we have heard this evening will enhance the outcome of our habitat study.
While I apologize for the quality of the sound in trying to communicate with you, I think we did share views. For that, to you and to all the senators, interpreters and reporters who have been here after a long day, I say thank you.
Mr. Schindler: Thank you for listening to me.
The committee adjourned.