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THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS

EVIDENCE

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OTTAWA, Wednesday, November 1, 2023

The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met with videoconference this day at 6:45 p.m. [ET] to study the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructures in the transportation and communications sectors and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne (Deputy Chair) in the chair.

The Deputy Chair: Good evening, honourable senators. Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.

I am Julie Miville-Dechêne. I am a senator from Quebec and deputy chair of this committee. I would like to invite my colleagues to introduce themselves, starting on my left.

Senator Simons: Paula Simons, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.

Senator Quinn: Jim Quinn, New Brunswick.

Senator Klyne: Good evening, Marty Klyne, senator from Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 territory.

The Deputy Chair: Honourable senators, this evening we continue our study of the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors by hearing from researchers from across the country who can share their expertise with us.

For our first panel, we are pleased to welcome Alison Perrin, Senior Research Professional, Northern Adaptation and Resilience, Yukon University. We are also pleased to welcome, by video conference, Jeff Birchall, Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta; and Kees Lokman, Associate Professor and Chair, Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia.

[Translation]

Welcome, and thank you for joining us. We’ll begin with opening remarks from Alison Perrin, followed by Professor Birchall and Professor Lokman. We will then proceed to questions from committee members. Ms. Perrin, the floor is yours. You have about five minutes.

[English]

Alison Perrin, Senior Research Professional, Northern Adaptation and Resilience, Yukon University, as an individual: Good evening, honourable senators. My name is Alison Perrin, I’m a researcher at Yukon University focused on adaptation and resilience. I work in Whitehorse, Yukon, and live in the hamlet of Mount Lorne on the traditional territories of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation and Kwanlin Dün First Nation, a very beautiful place, if you can come and visit.

I’m grateful to be given the opportunity to speak with you today on this very important topic. I will be focusing on the impacts of climate change on transportation in the North, which is something that I work on professionally but also something I have direct personal experience with as a northerner.

Transportation networks across the North are sparse and highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Vital transportation networks include highways and ice roads, airports and shipping routes, but northern lifestyles can be quite different than southern urban lives. People travel regularly by snowmobile and ATV, so transportation networks encompass more than just highways; they include trail networks, rivers, lakes, sea ice and overland trails.

These transportation networks are our lifelines. Most, perhaps even all, communities have very limited access points which could be some combination of a highway, airport or harbour.

Climate change affects these transportation networks through a number of mechanisms, but I will focus on three main areas of impacts.

First is permafrost thaw. Permafrost is the foundation of people’s lives in the North upon which everything is built. There are three main things that cause or lead to permafrost thaw, two of which are increasing with climate change: increasing temperature and increasing amounts of water, that is, precipitation, sudden melts, rain-on-snow events and things like this. The other thing is disturbance, which means that we have to build carefully in permafrost environments.

The second aspect is extreme events, which includes landslides, wildfires, floods and washouts. These all can cause catastrophic damage to transportation infrastructure or interrupt access, and increase in these types of events with climate change is already happening.

There are terrifying first-hand experiences being shared by people who had to evacuate in the Northwest Territories this past summer, driving along the only road out of their community and, at times, driving through or near wildfire.

In the Yukon, we have had a series of major access issues in the past three years — I cannot really count them off the top of my head — with landslides, floods and washouts, as well as wildfire closures on two highways used to transport goods to the Yukon and the highway to Dawson City.

The third area of impacts are changes to freeze-up and thaw. Many communities and mines in the North, in particular in the N.W.T., rely on ice roads for critical winter transportation. Many communities rely on frozen sea ice, lakes or rivers as a medium for transportation. In Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homelands in Canada, the sea ice is their highway. They rely on it to travel and hunt. With later freeze-up and earlier thaw, as well as changes to ice quality, the viability of these transportation options becomes shorter.

Thinking about these physical impacts, there are many implications for northerners. These physical changes and impacts on the transportation system have major implications. First, travel safety is a huge concern, and this includes things like falling through the ice, landslides or avalanches hitting a vehicle, driving through a wildfire, as I mentioned, and so on.

Second, cost is a major ongoing issue. It has been well documented. Road networks and other infrastructure costs a lot of money to build and maintain. It costs more to build in the North, more than anywhere else in Canada, because of the high price of materials and labour, logistical considerations and environmental considerations. For instance, despite the massive cost of putting in ice roads annually, it is still considered at times more viable than building an all-weather road in some circumstances because it is so difficult to build.

It is expensive to build in permafrost environments. It requires careful building with site-specific examinations and adapted building techniques. It is also incredibly expensive to maintain infrastructure. It degrades faster and requires replacement sooner. Just outside of Whitehorse, on the main highway that accesses a number of Yukon communities and Alaska, the Government of Yukon is in the process of moving a stretch of highway to avoid a slump that is growing quickly and dramatically as permafrost thaws.

Finally, access is a critical issue impacting daily lives. These highways, runways and shipping routes are our lifelines, and sometimes there are only one or two ways in or out, as I said. When there are interruptions, it can mean that food is scarce, important travel is interrupted, it is harder to access health care, to see family or to travel for hunting, trapping or work.

When a road in or the only highway that connects us to the South is closed, this means that food trucks are not arriving in the Yukon. A visit to the grocery store after the highway has been closed for a few days can mean very slim pickings. When planes cannot land in communities without highway access, there is the same issue and there might be limited fresh food available.

This can affect the whole population, but there are big equity concerns. There are people who do not keep a stock of food in their house because they are accessing the food bank weekly or they do not have storage options or they are feeding extended families. There are people who need to travel regularly for critical medical reasons or to support extended family.

These are big issues. There are lots of solutions being investigated. Technological solutions are important and can improve how we build, monitor change and help to identify issues before they happen. But it’s also important to support community-based approaches to resilience to help northerners weather interruptions to supply chains, for example, local food programs, enhanced community health centres and investments in local emergency planning.

There’s technical expertise in the North and a lot of knowledge around the issues and solutions. Supporting and engaging with local experts and relying on their existing partnerships to identify solutions strengthens the North. Much of this expertise lies within local governments but also within the research and engineering communities, and there are numerous northern organizations working on addressing food security, health, adaptation, et cetera.

As with other northern organizations, at Yukon University we have the benefit of living in the area that we research and we have first-hand knowledge of the impacts of climate change. We can access our research sites at any time of the year and track issues as they happen.

Yet we have to work very hard to keep our research programs alive. In many ways, we work in partnership with southern universities and we rely on their expertise, but at the same time we compete for resources, but often without their competitive advantages.

Investments in northern expertise need to continue to support and grow that northern-based expertise, not only in the Yukon but in other northern regions where there are institutions and organizations trying to thrive.

To sum up, I wanted to emphasize how important this issue is in the North. It is very important. We’d love to partner with people down South, but we also want to see investment in our own expertise in the North to help us address these issues. Thank you very much for letting me speak today.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you for this poignant testimony. We are happy that you are here.

Jeff Birchall, Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, as an individual: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to share with all of you my perspective on climate change planning and resilience in Canada.

My name is Jeff Birchall and I am an associate professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta. I’m also the Associate Director of our school, Director of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Lab, and I lead the UArctic Thematic Network on Local-Scale Planning, Climate Change and Resilience. I’m also a registered professional planner.

My research program, while grounded in community planning, is interdisciplinary in scope and explores the broad theme of climate change resilience and sustainability at the local and regional scale. My work primarily examines decision dynamics around motivational factors and extent of local planning for climate change risk reduction.

Specifically, I’m interested in localized climate impacts and how they affect critical infrastructure and the build form, how this relates to planning and policy decisions and what this means for community well-being and safety.

I approach this research primarily through key actor and local stakeholder engagement, along with physical site assessments and content analysis of strategic planning documents. As a research team, what my students and I are trying to understand are the nuanced barriers to climate adaptation. What is keeping communities from effectively adapting to climate change?

In this context, it is about understanding the barriers to implementing or maintaining hard adaptations like seawalls or dikes and the barriers to developing and implementing soft adaptations like policy or zoning.

There are a range of things that traditionally inhibit action: a lack of community or political will. This is often driven by ideological factors including, in some instances, disbelief in climate change. A lack of local government buy-in for action can also be an issue. Sometimes impacts are viewed as not sufficiently bad enough to warrant action or at least not yet. Impacts are seen as a challenge for the future or someone else’s responsibility — another level of government, for instance.

Other pressing local priorities like economic development and growth or social services can also marginalize action on climate adaptation. And sometimes it comes down to simply a lack of capacity to act, whether with respect to personnel, finances or knowledge and useful data.

When local adaptation initiatives do occur, they are often reactive and low in priority and, as a result, tend to be high-level with lots of rhetoric. They manifest as a peripheral agenda and are typically ineffectively incorporated into anticipatory strategic planning and actions.

In practice, this can mean low community risk perception, which can disincentivize political action. It can mean limited coordination between and within levels of government, and exacerbate boundary and jurisdiction complications, which can delay action. And it can ultimately result in infrastructure deficit.

For instance, infrastructure standards often do not adequately account for the unpredictability and severity of current and predicted climate effects. Infrastructure maintenance in many cases is downloaded onto local governments without adequate financial support, and/or local governments are not effectively accounting and preparing for long-term costs. There’s also a lack of infrastructure redundancy, which can have large-scale repercussions during and after a climate disaster, both in terms of emergency management and supply chain disruptions, which can have impacts across the economy, and certainly this is regional and national.

Communities across Canada are underprepared for climate change. Urban planning is focused on development and growth, while the critical infrastructure needed to support this growth is often poorly maintained, underdeveloped and below current code, let alone what is necessary moving forward.

To help communities become more resilient, we need research that explores and forecasts localized climate impacts. This will give decision makers a better understanding of risk. We need studies that explore how “build back better” can be actualized and in practice, how learning during and following a disaster can become part of the governance process. Research is necessary on how to pay for infrastructure resilience equitably across levels of government and for the long term.

In the end, we need to better understand how infrastructure is vulnerable from both a design and a siting perspective, but also how it interacts or how it “disinteracts” with decision making. In other words, when it comes to community vulnerability, is the issue that a dike is not high enough or that the floodgates won’t close due to disrepair and a lack of maintenance? Is the problem that coastal storm activity undermines the primary conduit to a hospital or that the transportation network lacks redundancy?

Thank you, I look forward to your questions.

[Translation]

The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Birchall. I’ll now give the floor to Professor Lokman. Go ahead, Professor Lokman.

[English]

Kees Lokman, Associate Professor and Chair, Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia, as an individual: Dear committee members, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts on the topic of climate change and critical infrastructure. My name is Kees Lokman, Associate Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at UBC, and Director of the Coastal Adaptation Lab at UBC. I would like to acknowledge I am calling in from so-called Vancouver, which is located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Before providing some examples of critical infrastructure that is most vulnerable to climate change in my region, I would like to speak to the definition of critical infrastructure itself, which will be important in terms of how this committee might select case studies.

During my research, it has become clear that the term “critical infrastructure” and how it is understood by different individuals, groups and communities varies substantially. For some, critical infrastructure can be defined as physical networks and facilities such as roads, railways, health facilities, utility systems, et cetera. For others, including many Indigenous communities, however, wetlands and forests, just to name a few, should also be understood as critical infrastructure, as they support livelihoods, ways of life and biodiversity. As such, in order to develop decision support tools as well as to facilitate the implementation of climate change adaptation solutions, it will be important to develop common understandings and a working definition of critical infrastructure that is shared and inclusive.

Within this context, my research has primarily focused on the Lower Fraser River region in B.C., and my recommendations focus primarily on this region.

As Canada’s largest and most diversified port in North America, the Port of Vancouver is important to the region and to Canada as a whole. However, its location at the water’s edge makes it susceptible to sea-level rise and storm surges, and due to its reliance on global supply chains, maladaptations in other parts of the world may impact access to goods and products in Canada.

At the same time, port developments and protection of associated rail and road networks have resulted in the infill of wetlands and salt marshes, the hardening of shorelines, shoreline erosion and water pollution. This has caused the erasure and degradation of critical coastal ecosystems and biodiversity. Since this is impacting one of the largest salmon spawning regions in the world, and also home to other ecologically and culturally important fish and bird species, we need to develop ways to restore and regenerate these critical ecosystems — or what some call critical infrastructures — in the context of climate change and ongoing development pressures.

The November 2021 atmospheric river event in B.C. revealed the critical importance of certain roads for regional and international connectivity. These transportation corridors include B.C. Highway 1, Highway 5, Highway 7 and Highway 99, which connects to Interstate 5 in the United States.

However, questions remain as to how these roads should be protected from climate hazards, including floods and fires, in the future. Should they be adapted in place or realigned to provide more room for flood plains and other ecosystems? How can these decisions be made regionally when there is currently a lack of regional coordination on these issues?

On a more local level, research needs to be done to understand how flooding, wildfires and other climate-related hazards will impact the functioning and accessibility of local essential services, including fire halls, community services, hospitals, health clinics, schools and others. We need to understand how people get to these facilities and how electricity networks and others on which these facilities rely might be impacted due to flood events and others.

Lastly, I will mention Vancouver’s YVR airport, as it is located in the flood plain. This means that sea-level rise, storm surges, changing weather patterns and potential earthquakes may significantly impact the functioning and operating capacity of the airport. It poses questions as to what might happen if the airport is not operational for days or weeks on end. We need better understanding of running these scenarios and the impacts on residents, local communities and regional economies as well.

In conclusion, I believe it will be important for the committee to include multiple perspectives and knowledge systems into defining what critical infrastructure means and how this will guide the selection of its case studies. I applaud the committee for doing this urgent and relevant work and I look forward to learning more about your findings and recommendations. Thank you.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Lokman.

Thank you to our witnesses for your opening remarks. We will now proceed to questions from members, and we are starting with Senator Simons.

Senator Simons: Thank you for such interesting presentations, all three of them. I don’t know where to start. I will start with Ms. Perrin, in chronological order.

We heard a lot in the previous testimony yesterday about the fragility of permafrost. One expert told us that it may all be melted by the end of this century, in which case I think that we have an even greater problem than road maintenance, which is the release of all the sequestered carbon in the permafrost. We heard a great deal not just about ice roads but about the importance of frozen waterways as transportation corridors.

How much should we be worrying about accidents, not just a snowmobiler but a truck convoy, a piece of heavy equipment, going through the ice? Is anyone tracking incidents of that nature? How thick does the ice have to be before it is safe to transport larger vehicles?

Ms. Perrin: Are you speaking specifically about ice roads?

Senator Simons: Or passage over frozen lakes, frozen rivers.

Ms. Perrin: As far as large transport vehicles are concerned, those incidents are rare. There are pretty good safety protocols for when roads are open and ready to go. As for individuals driving on frozen waterways — for example, we have a crossing between two parts of Dawson City that is a regular roadway that residents use in the winter — there are people monitoring when it should be open or not.

I think the safety concerns are there. The numbers would not be high, but there is definitely an increase in individual incidents with snowmobiles and things like that in lake ice or sea ice where people’s understanding of the conditions is not necessarily — the conditions are not what they used to be. Their understanding or knowledge of when or what’s happening is not always as relevant or on point as it used to be. That is an issue.

Senator Simons: I guess the other question that came up with our witnesses yesterday is at what point you just have to say these traditional ice roads, these things that are built on permafrost cannot be saved or sustained.

We had one witness yesterday who was extraordinarily enthusiastic about the idea of airships replacing ground transportation. At first it sounded fanciful, but as I thought back on all the testimony about how the season for ice roads is getting shorter and shorter, and their capacity to carry heavy loads is getting more and more tested, is there a certain point at which you can see that they’re not going to be workable anymore?

Ms. Perrin: Yes, and I think it depends on what you’re using the ice road for. For mining, in particular, they need the season to get their goods in the most affordable way possible, so if they have the time, they need to get that in. Whereas with an ice road to a community, they’re trying to extend it for as long as they can because it’s access in and out, and then there might be a period of interruption until there can be barge transport. Those are two different approaches to how viable an ice road is. I know nothing about airships, so I can’t really speak to that as an option.

Senator Simons: We all know more than we did yesterday.

Ms. Perrin: But I think there has been a lot of work, particularly in the N.W.T., evaluating whether it’s worth to continue with ice roads or to put in all-weather roads and deal with the issues of those roads. There are a lot of people looking at that question.

Senator Simons: Dr. Birchall, I enjoyed your testimony because everybody else has told us what the physical problems are, and you’ve talked about the political and social problems.

In your analysis, what has to happen? Is it going to take a tremendous calamity of some sort before people wake up to the realization that we have to — this isn’t something that you can leave to your great-grandchildren. This is something we have to fix in the next 10 to 15 years if we’re serious about maintaining the standard of living that we have come to expect.

Mr. Birchall: You’re absolutely correct. I don’t want to take a cynical approach to answering your question, but it really does come down to awareness and political will to make something happen. If we want to design a road that’s going to withstand the variability associated with permafrost, we could probably sort that out, but we need the political will to make that happen.

If we want to change building codes in a community so they can better adapt to permafrost thaw and just allow for that ambient heating to get away before it gets into the ground itself, we need political will to make that happen. That political will comes from the public understanding that risk is increasing and it’s going to impact a lot of people. From that understanding, you can start to get some action.

I think it’s really tricky. I focused my opening remarks more on the social side of things as opposed to the physical infrastructure, but the research that I do across Canada is looking at the different impacts on infrastructure and what this means from an urban planning perspective. It always comes back to willingness to do something, willingness to understand or an appreciation, anyway, that we needed to be doing something yesterday, not into the future. It can be really tricky to get everyone on board right now.

As you mentioned, sometimes it takes a precipitating event to get everyone on board. Usually there is a sweet spot right after that event when people are excited to do something about it, but then things change. The political cycle comes back and kicks in, things change again, and people lose interest. We’re quite complacent as a society and we want to do things short term as opposed to trying to invest long term. I think that can be really challenging.

Senator Klyne: My first question is for Mr. Birchall.

In your most recent published paper, you discuss a very important point that it is critical for municipalities to assess their threat from natural hazards, including those exacerbated by climate change, and to put in place strategies to minimize their risk and increase their resilience. In this paper, you also concluded that based on your study, many municipalities in Alberta did not have sufficient wildfire mitigation provisions within their land use bylaws.

Would this be an example of short-term political priorities taking precedence over public well-being?

Mr. Birchall: I think it certainly can be interpreted that way. To come up with a definitive response on that would take a lot of study in and of itself, but I think we can make that assumption.

When it comes to wildfires, to talk more about open space and how to zone, it would be best to talk to the primary author on the paper. He was one of my grad students, and this was something he spent a lot of time really thinking about and trying to understand. I think it’s an important article and an important subject matter, particularly given how wildfires are ravaging our country, and it isn’t going to get better; it’s going to continue to get worse. What can we do as a society? We can better plan our communities. We can better prepare our homes. We can create open space and make it so that we’re more resilient, because we can’t necessarily effectively predict where these wildfires are going to go. We have places that are already built up, so we need to try to mitigate that risk, and that comes down to land use and zoning.

Senator Klyne: Speaking of land usage and lessons learned, shifting from fires to floods, you mentioned something about dikes not being built high enough. Is there also a case that some dikes weren’t built back far enough to allow for an overflow, to let the rivers overflow, but if you pushed the dikes back further, they could catch more and not spill over?

Mr. Birchall: That can be an issue too. What you’re speaking about is this idea of a safe failure. That can be something that’s incorporated into a dike system.

When I talked about the dike not necessarily being built high enough, that can indeed be the case, but in my experience, when it comes to the communities that have dikes that I’ve done research in, it’s not necessarily the height. The communities just don’t have the resources to maintain the dikes, which means there’s penetration all over the dikes, which means they can’t close the gates to completely make it a hard wall, for instance.

But in some instances, the dike shouldn’t be there in the first place because the community behind the dike shouldn’t be there in the first place. We shouldn’t be emptying lakes to create farmland and then putting communities there. If we do that — and perhaps we need to, and there’s going to be a justification for it — then we really need to put money into maintaining those dikes so that we don’t get into the situation that we saw in the Lower Mainland in B.C. two years ago.

Senator Klyne: In that regard, where a community shouldn’t be, I totally agree with you. Why would you build there in the first place? But once they’ve experienced that unfortunate and tragic situation of a flood, and then they want to rebuild the dikes and rebuild there again, is that not the definition of insanity?

Mr. Birchall: I don’t know that I can say that, but I agree with you. I don’t think they should be able to rebuild in that place.

This gets back to the point I was making about “build back better.” “Build back better” doesn’t mean build back in the same place. It means thinking through the problems so that you don’t run into the same scenario in the future. If you’re built in a flood plain and you have the opportunity to build back somewhere else, do it, because if you build back in the flood plain, you’re going to get flooded again. There is going to be a lot of complexity associated with that.

These are decisions we make as a society. It’s not that all these environmental conditions will change. Well, they will; they’ll get worse. They’re always going to be there. The role we can play is to mitigate climate change, but we’re not doing very well at that as a society. We need to become better at adapting to what’s happening to us.

Senator Quinn: Thank you, witnesses, for being here this evening. It’s fascinating information that you’re sharing with us, and it really does build on previous witnesses.

I would like to ask you, Professor Lokman, about the B.C. situation that you have described in Vancouver, YVR and the port. Back when we had the Olympics in Vancouver, I had the opportunity to go through the response and the operations centre that was set up and built to really stringent earthquake standards and the whole awareness of earthquake preparedness that was going on at that time and, I think, continues to go on. Is there such planning with respect to climate change?

I think Mr. Birchall said that an event occurs, and memories are short. I actually lived through a flood in 2018 in New Brunswick, and it touched a little bit on 2019. Memories are short because people are doing major renovations and building in those areas today.

Is there that kind of intense consideration being given in the province of British Columbia, specifically in the Lower Mainland, when it comes to climate change and the situations that have been experienced there and which you spoke about, particularly with YVR and the port?

Mr. Lokman: That’s a great question. It’s ironic in a way that the Olympic Village was built in 2010, and it wasn’t built up to the projections of sea-level rises. It wasn’t considered at that time. I think they’re doing that now. The dike standards are now incorporating seismic stability but also looking at sea-level rise and increased climate precipitation in the future.

I would say that in terms of the port and the airport and some of the rail systems, they’re quite mysterious about how they’re incorporating and looking into climate change when it comes to future projections, as well as their ways of addressing it in upgrades that are currently happening. There are several instances where there are upgrades to roads and rail systems that have happened in the past years that do not look much more ahead than 10 or 20 years. So they don’t incorporate this.

There is a huge desire and need for that to be incorporated into regulations, policies and any kind of funding that is accommodated to make these upgrades available or make them happen; there is a certain expectation that they’ll be looking at 2100 and beyond, but that is currently not happening.

Senator Quinn: You’ve expressed it so well in terms of how things are done and what attention it gets. How do we raise the situation or the issue to the public in the Lower Mainland so that they understand the seriousness? When the public becomes aware or more informed, it translates into having the right attention by levels of government. How do we get the levels of government to work together to address situations that need to be addressed because the public has raised them?

Mr. Lokman: If I knew that answer, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here.

Senator Quinn: I probably wouldn’t be sitting here.

Mr. Lokman: It’s a great question. If you just look at flood management, that’s downloaded to local municipalities and First Nations. They don’t often have the capacity even internally. If you have a small municipality or First Nation here, they don’t have people who are trained or have the capacity to deal with these issues.

If there is no mandate for communities to work together, then they’ll start making decisions by themselves that can cause maladaptation. Even if residents were aware of this, I think it needs to start, in my opinion, at a provincial level at the minimum and also at the federal level to require collaboration and regional watershed-based governance around these issues. Otherwise, we’re not going to get there.

That is also for funding. For example, the previous question was around building back better. The problem right now is if you look at disaster financial assistance, it actually specifies that you can only build back to the conditions that were prior to the event happening. You can’t actually do proactive adaptation because you don’t get funding for it.

There are also issues related to funding baskets being siloed. You get funding for restoration, transportation, private property and flood mitigation, but what we’re looking for is holistic solutions to these issues. We need funding that addresses how to improve food security and, at the same time, flood management and, at the same time, improve wildlife and habitat. Currently, we don’t have these funds because they’re all separate.

Residents can get upset about this and vote, but there needs to be a critical reorientation and reconfiguration of governance frameworks and funding. The communities want certain things. They know what they want, but they have problems accessing funds to actually do the work that they want to do.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much. I will remind everyone that we would like to talk about transport infrastructure. Obviously, this is a wide topic, but we’re trying to focus on transport.

I’m well aware of what you said, Mr. Lokman, about the definition of critical infrastructure. Thank you for reminding us, but we’re trying to focus on climate change and transport infrastructure. But you’re free.

Senator Simons: I want to pick up from where I left off talking to Dr. Birchall. He said to me that in the immediate aftermath of a crisis is often when people’s minds are focused.

In the immediate aftermath of the flooding crisis in British Columbia, the Agriculture Committee did a study of why that flooding had happened. One of the things we learned was that the Province of British Columbia and the federal government had downloaded to the municipalities of the Lower Mainland the responsibility for maintenance of the dikes. When the dikes failed, then that led to the problems, in part, but we also learned that the dikes didn’t fail that much and they could fail much worse down the road.

So we wrote a report. We released the report a year ago. We called on the government to do things. It was a very nice expression of our concerns. Nothing has happened.

I’ll start with Professor Lokman because he hasn’t had a chance to answer me yet, but I want to ask this question of all three of you: Municipalities are often the first governments on the ground to deal with the immediate impact of emergencies. They also tend to be more nimble than provincial and federal governments. What do we have to do to empower local governments and local municipalities to take action, and what do we have to do to resource and prepare them to take action?

I’ll start with Mr. Lokman and then Ms. Perrin and then Mr. Birchall.

Mr. Lokman: I’ll keep it short, but I think I answered it a bit in the previous answer.

We’ve set up a group called the Lower Fraser Floodplains Coalition. It is trying to work with First Nations and local communities to set up watershed-based guidance and planning around these issues.

If you leave it up to the local municipalities, as we have seen, there is a lack of capacity to deal with it. Local municipalities often don’t have the connections with the First Nations, so there needs to be really that. It is another level of government that is often being involved after decisions are made, and they should be involved at the same level as other governments.

I would say it is really at the regional watershed scale. If there are round tables, funding and mandates that are being prescribed at that level, then we can make more headway on these issues.

Senator Simons: Ms. Perrin, what can we do to ensure those in the Yukon are making these decisions?

Ms. Perrin: We are likely in a different situation, because we have one major municipality, Whitehorse, and then very small municipal governments in the communities. We also have 11 self-governing First Nations and 3 that are still under the Indian Act but have councils which make a lot of decisions.

Municipalities and First Nations often work together on these issues and take advantage of where each other’s strengths are in funding they can access or in the ability to be nimble in different ways, as you mentioned.

Ultimately, the territorial government plays a massive role in all of this. They own and maintain transportation networks. They own the purse strings for most things. I would echo Mr. Lokman: ensuring all parties are together early in the decision-making processes, so enabling First Nations governance and municipalities to take a greater role in making those decisions, resourcing them to take part, including them in communication chains when there are emergencies that interrupt transportation networks and thinking about those communities and how they are affected.

It is a hard question.

Mr. Birchall: Thank you very much.

I would like to echo what my colleagues have mentioned and emphasize that for local governments to be able to do what they need to do during, following and in the aftermath of a disaster, they need the authority and the capacity — they need these things to act — but they also need to be able to communicate with each other, with other local governments. They need to be involved together when it comes to scenario planning in advance of an event so that when the event actually occurs, regardless of what type of event it is, they have already played this out. They have gamed it. They can actually see, before it all happens, how they need to work with each other.

Right now, local, regional, provincial and territorial governments, all these different levels don’t always “play nice” together, unfortunately. There are a lot of different reasons for that. That is at the heart of the research we do in my lab — to better understand these barriers. Some of it is human nature, but some of it comes down to jurisdiction and people not wanting to step on other people’s jurisdictions. We really need to get past this. These disasters are not focused on one location. They cross boundaries. We need to figure out how to better work together and better communicate with each other.

From a more regional government level, local governments need money, money that they are not having to compete for, for instance, and right now that is often the case. Thank you.

Senator Simons: To Professor Lokman, we have been looking at Vancouver’s airport as a possible subject for a study to be an example. Do you think that it would be a good one to look at the weather resiliency of the airport, its relationship to the Coast Guard, its relationship to how it is dealing with weather change and rising sea levels?

Mr. Lokman: I think so, yes.

Senator Simons: Okay.

Mr. Lokman: We have had students even exploring — I think we’re talking about relocation. That would be interesting to think about. Part of my opening statement touched on value systems and what value systems we have.

The value systems we currently have when it comes to climate change and protection of it really focus on colonial property and the capital I infrastructure and economy.

The Vancouver airport is at the mouth of the Fraser River, and is that where we need to put airports, especially in the future, if we’re going to put a lot more diking and investment in that? So either way it would be a great case study.

The Deputy Chair: Maybe, Mr. Lokman, you could send us those students’ papers that are relevant. If there is anything that you think would help us do the research on this particular issue, we would really like that.

Mr. Lokman: Yes, I will do that.

Senator Klyne: My first question is for Mr. Lokman.

I found one of your projects that I saw on your website, and I have dubbed it in my mind as “the nexus between Indigenous knowledge and Western science.” That is not how you refer to it on the website. In fact, you refer to it as “Living with Water,” which I might say destroys highways and other things, and that is why we should look at it and other critical infrastructure. That is a transdisciplinary research project funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

It states that the project is rooted in “. . . the rights and knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples as critical to researching and developing equitable climate adaptation plans.” The project pledged to:

. . . pay special attention to the relations of power and histories that have excluded Indigenous knowledges, perspectives, and priority-setting in regional and municipal contexts.

Can you expand on how bringing together researchers and staff from the Squamish First Nation as well as managers from municipal and provincial governments helps to develop fair and integrated solutions to coastal flooding? Why isn’t this something that is used in other jurisdictions in terms of where Indigenous knowledge, traditional knowledge, meets Western science and solutions? They have been working with adaptation to the environment since time immemorial.

Mr. Lokman: Thank you for the question. Historically, there have been challenges in terms of research institutions doing work with First Nations and Indigenous communities, and sometimes this has been very extractive. It has only been over the last decade or so where there is more trust being rebuilt in some of these initiatives.

The set-up of the project is really to learn what is happening on the ground, what First Nations and local municipalities are struggling with, and how we, as researchers, can identify whether it has to do with regulatory barriers and constraints or if it is design and planning schemes that could be adjusted. It’s also to learn how we can create bridges between local municipalities and First Nations and understand what their needs and desires are and how we can create shared language and shared ways of doing work.

What we’re trying to do is create knowledge-sharing networks and cross-cultural learning and develop ways that we can work together and that academia can support some of the research questions that come up during things that coastal managers are dealing with. Often they do not have time to do research, and when they hire a consultant, the consultant doesn’t want to publish their research because they want to gain an advantage in the market. If they have certain knowledge systems and datasets, they don’t want to share that with others. Working with universities provides an opportunity to make knowledge public but also to help in cross-cultural learning.

Senator Klyne: That was a good plug for universities. Way to go.

The Deputy Chair: Yes, thank you.

Senator Quinn: Ms. Perrin, you gave a really good overview of the criticality of transportation routes, whether it is the ice roads or the frozen lakes or the trail system itself. Other witnesses have talked about the importance of ice roads.

What work is done now with the Yukon government and others — First Nations — using traditional knowledge, frankly? What work goes on in that regard?

Given everything we have heard about ice highways, ice roads and things of that nature, would that be another candidate for us to look at in terms of a micro-study on the importance of that transportation routing in the North? Because it is so vital to the communities, as we understand.

Ms. Perrin: In the Yukon, it is not super common to use ice roads. We have one fly-in community, Old Crow. Every couple of years or so, they will build an ice road in the winter to move goods into the community for building. They will plan ahead what they want to build and what they need to bring in. Then we have some ice crossings.

There would probably be a good case for someplace in the N.W.T. where there are communities that are accessed by ice roads. They also have the diamond mine that is accessed by an ice road. That would be a good location if you were considering a case study.

If you were considering a case study of a road on permafrost, I would give a plug for either the Alaska Highway or the Dempster Highway. Both are critical highway infrastructure and both are dealing with quite a few spots where there are permafrost issues. The Dempster is also dealing with landslides, water issues, et cetera.

The Deputy Chair: Ms. Perrin, you haven’t spoken about your airports. Is that a problem in terms of tarmac?

Ms. Perrin: There are the usual issues with weather and access and runway replacement. There are other locations in the North with more challenging issues with runways and weather than the Yukon. Also, because we do have highway access, it is not like the communities in Nunavut where their access in the winter is their airport.

Senator Cardozo: Do any of you have thoughts about how we pay for these infrastructure upgrades at the end of the day? They are all essential but also awfully expensive. Besides the federal government, which is what we might be focusing on, are there others who you think have a role to put money into this?

Ms. Perrin: I think it depends. In the North, we generally rely on the federal government for our infrastructure. I would say that in the case of access to mines, there is a place for industry to play a role.

We have had a long-standing partnership with the Government of Alaska for the highway that goes to Alaska. I’m sorry, I am not exactly sure where that is right now, but the Shakwak Agreement used to be in place.

I will let the other witnesses speak to this question.

Mr. Lokman: I can maybe offer a slightly different take. I do think we need a different way of doing cost-benefit analysis. The cost-benefit analysis that we do for infrastructure upgrades has a short time frame for payback and doesn’t take into consideration things that can be quantified in monetary value systems.

We get a skewed thing whereby we tend to view it as just business as usual. Whereas if we start looking at a 100-year time frame or seven generations ahead and start thinking about cultural and ecosystem values that could be gained by, for example, relocating or realigning the transportation network, that might initially be quite expensive. However, in the long term, because you are reducing risk, you might save a lot of money and you are actually creating multiple benefits with increased habitat or ecosystems values, et cetera.

There are things to do in that space. That is maybe not directly about how we fund it but more about that we need different ways of calculating costs and benefits.

Senator Klyne: Ms. Perrin, your research looks at the human and policy dimensions of environmental change in the North, focusing on adaptation and resilience. As well, you work with communities on land claims and such to learn about adaptation to climate change and to share those lessons across the North.

One of your current projects is the Climate Resilience Knowledge to Action program. For the sake of time, I will just jump to a question and I hope you can make the leap without the preamble.

Could you elaborate on why understanding capacity strengths and weak points in communities is at the centre of your research and education program to develop stronger climate resilience?

Ms. Perrin: There are a few things there. For years, we have been focusing on working with the government to ensure that people in government understand climate change impacts. It is on the side of many people’s desks. We’re trying to make it easier for them to access the information that they need. Also, as Mr. Birchall spoke about, we are thinking about the barriers to taking action and what barriers we can assist in removing, and then supporting research that answers questions that communities have.

One of the projects we have recently undertaken within that program is thinking about what adaptation work has already been done. One thing that happens in the North is that money gets thrown at problems, and a lot of work gets done, and then it gets a little lost. We bring up the same questions again, and people do similar work again, and then that gets a little lost. We are not always tracking what adaptation is happening, what adaptation projects are happening and what we already learned 10 years ago. We are trying to look at trends in adaptation projects, funding, climate change research and what is already out there that we can access and bring together, and what the gaps are in terms of things we don’t already know and that we have not done research on. We want to highlight those so that people can work on addressing them.

Senator Klyne: Could I paraphrase? Building on strengths and cultivating competitive advantages in communities but, on the weak points, knowing where the next problem is going to be and addressing it in a proactive way.

Ms. Perrin: Yes, and getting a sense of the knowledge culture that is happening already.

Senator Klyne: Thank you.

[Translation]

The Deputy Chair: That brings an end to our first panel. I wish to thank you all for taking the time to be with us to answer our questions and share your expertise this evening.

[English]

For our second panel this evening, we are pleased to welcome by video conference Dr. Tristan Pearce, Associate Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Cumulative Impacts of Environmental Change at the University of Northern British Columbia; Dr. Eric Rapaport, Associate Professor at the Dalhousie University School of Planning; and Dr. Clarence Woudsma, Associate Professor with the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo.

Welcome to our witnesses. Thank you for joining us.

[Translation]

We’ll begin with opening remarks from Professor Pearce, followed by Professor Rapaport and Professor Woudsma. We will then proceed to questions from committee members.

[English]

Professor Pearce, the floor is yours when you’re ready, and you have about five minutes for your opening remarks.

Tristan Pearce, Associate Professor, Geography and Canada Research Chair in Cumulative Impacts of Environmental Change, University of Northern British Columbia, as an individual: Good evening, honourable senators, deputy chair and other members of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.

I’m here today to discuss climate change choke points and risks to transportation infrastructure, particularly in Northern Canada. The information I will share today is part of two studies that I conducted for the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary on climate change impacts in the proposed Canadian northern corridor.

The context for this research is that Northern Canada is an inherently challenging environment to construct, operate and maintain transportation infrastructure. Additionally, Northern Canada is experiencing rapid warming. There’s virtually certainty that this trend will continue into the future.

As temperature and precipitation patterns have changed, the cryosphere has been impacted. The ice extent and thickness have decreased; snow cover and accumulation have decreased. Permafrost has thawed, and glaciers and ice caps are losing mass at an accelerating rate. These changes have consequences for transportation infrastructure in Northern Canada, and, to date, most research has focused on estimating the direct impacts of future climate change on a particular piece of infrastructure: a given road, building, pipeline. Less attention has been given to how multiple secondary climate impacts might affect a transportation infrastructure corridor.

That is what I want to speak to you about today: looking at this issue a little differently — rather than a direct cause-and-effect relationship, looking at the secondary and even tertiary impacts of a climate event.

I will use the term “choke points” and I’ll use it consistently with the maritime sector: as key junctures in transportation infrastructure systems that are vulnerable to obstruction. Given the remoteness of Northern Canada and the absence of alternative modes of transportation, potential choke points could effectively shut down a transportation corridor. I will give two examples to illustrate climate change choke points and risks to transportation infrastructure in Northern Canada.

Located on Hudson Bay, the Port of Churchill, Manitoba, is the only deepwater seaport on Canada’s northern coast, making it a key strategic export location connecting the North Atlantic through Hudson Strait. The port is expected to grow as the open-water season increases with sea ice loss.

However, coastal climate impacts like extreme weather and wave events and sea ice uncertainty could delay or limit shipping capacity at certain times of the year, damage coastal infrastructure or limit route accessibility. Because ports represent key links and choke points in supply chains, they are an excellent example of how increasing climate-related impacts could create backlogs throughout the rest of the corridor system.

In addition to this, all goods shipped overland to and from the port must travel by rail. The use and maintenance problems on the railbed that supplies the port due to permafrost thaw and flooding could create a choke point for goods to be transported to and from the port. A warmer climate means not only more annual precipitation but also more variable precipitation. Instances of extreme rain and snowfall, such as the massive late winter storms that have led to spring flooding and previously washed out the railway, could become more common.

A second example is the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories, which is a major transportation route serving many remote northern communities and mine sites. The river is only navigable during the summer and early fall, when clear of ice. However, this past summer hot and dry conditions caused historically low water levels, forcing a 4,000-kilometre detour for goods and transit. Instead of barging cargo down the Mackenzie River, the Northwest Territories Marine Transportation Services had to ship it by truck up the Dempster Highway.

In addition, some coastal Inuit communities that are dependent on barge service have experienced low water levels, which has made it difficult — if not completely impossible — for those barges to actually land in the communities. Now, at the same time that low water levels inhibited shipping, wildfires forced evacuation of residents in Hay River, a key shipping terminal, leaving loaded barges standing still, creating yet another choke point in the transportation infrastructure system.

My study shows that the potential for large wildfires is present across all of Northern Canada, especially in forested sites. And with more extreme heat waves and increased drought conditions, it is expected that water levels will also continue to lower, and wildfire risks will grow larger and more extreme.

Here, a new model for how goods are transported in Northern Canada will likely need to evolve to effectively adapt to the changing conditions.

In conclusion, my research findings suggest that the study of climate change impacts on critical transportation infrastructure in Canada should consider the cumulative effects of multiple climate risks, and the concept of choke points could be useful for describing how these risks can disrupt a transportation network. Thank you.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you. This was very interesting.

Professor Eric Rapaport, the floor is yours.

Eric Rapaport, Associate Professor, School of Planning, Dalhousie University, as an individual: Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I speak to you from Dalhousie University, where I’m an associate professor in the School of Planning in Nova Scotia as well as a licensed professional planner.

I would like to mention that Dalhousie is located on the Mi’kma’ki, ancestral unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, and we are all treaty people.

I have innovated climate change impact assessment by considering not just current population demographics and future climate change, but modelling future population demographics such as what the percentage of seniors living in communities in 2050 will be and what the exposure to future coastal flooding will be, as well as to heat and other climate change risks. Seniors are just one recognized vulnerable group. This population’s vulnerability only increases when transportation and communication systems are interrupted directly or cause increased travel times to access services, sometimes critical care services.

One of the many threats to the transportation and communication systems across Canada is sea-level rise, as has been discussed by many experts prior to me.

Sea-level rise will permanently change the mean water level and it will also impact the tidal range for the ordinary new water-level mark. This will result in a shift in jurisdictional location of tenure mainly through the permanent inundation of land at the coast, leading to a loss of land to the sea. Sea-level rise itself will exacerbate natural processes such as coastal erosion and accretion. It will then also affect land tenure, so exacerbating the loss of land to the ocean.

These combined effects will all have impacts on existing infrastructure such as coastal public roads or rail line infrastructure. If you think about Halifax Harbour, our rail lines lay directly to the coastline, which eventually will have to be either raised or moved given sea-level rise.

Sea level and tides should not be considered alone. Extreme water levels caused by storm-surge-driven hurricanes have and will continue to damage infrastructure along our coast, as well as infrastructure protecting roads and railways such as, as you have heard previously, the Chignecto Isthmus and the dike lands there.

In the Atlantic provinces, the ability to do this sort of analysis and understand things has been enhanced by federal-provincial funding that has allowed for the acquisition of high-resolution LiDAR data for elevation mapping. This sort of investment needs to continue into the future.

Besides sea-level rise and coastal flooding, I would like to bring to your attention some other impacts that Nova Scotia faced in the summer of 2023, which may increase due to climate change, mainly inland flooding and forest fires.

In certain locations across Atlantic Canada, there is a lack of inland flood mapping, which is a threat to transportation infrastructure, especially roads and rails. In late July of this year, Nova Scotia witnessed the loss of four lives, ranging from the ages of 6 to 52 due to flash flooding across a road caused by an intense rainstorm. Twenty-nine bridges needed major repair, and 19 needed minor repairs, as well as 50 roads. Falmouth Dyke Road, which is a raised road, was nearly impassable, and the CN Rail connecting Halifax and the Port of Halifax to the rest of Canada was cut off.

Due to climate change precipitation, which is expected to increase, our ability to protect from flash flooding is very limited, according to the few meteorologists I have spoken to, in part because it is difficult to predict. In Nova Scotia, the information needed for inland water flooding, such as culvert size as well as readily available information on physical characteristics of lakes and streams such as depths and flows is lacking, making inland flood mapping a costly and inaccurate task. We need to make investments there.

Other impacts that occurred in Nova Scotia that were unprecedented were the late spring Nova Scotia wildfires. There were two of them. One of these closed Highway 103 for just over one week. Another fire at almost exactly the same time in the Halifax municipality tested the municipality’s ability to deal with emergency evacuations and to fix known road egress issues where there was only one way in and one way out for a long time, with no solutions put in place before the fire took place. These disruptions will not impact the roads themselves, but will disrupt the movement of goods and services as well as people and property through displacement during evacuations.

Finally, I would like to say that climate studies, like the 2016 study where I was a lead author of one chapter, combined all the Atlantic provinces into a single study. I would like to see in the future the Atlantic provinces not being lumped together in these types of analyses. Each province has a unique set of geographies, but it also has a unique set of provincial governments with varying priorities, which brings a requirement of unique perspective on transportation and communication system impacts. Lumping the Atlantic provinces together provides no insight or depth of understanding.

Finally, we need to increase our understanding and information related to inland flooding mapping to provide credible and accurate information so we can better predict how communication and transportation will be impacted in the future. Thank you.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you, professor. Your point is well noted that there are provinces in the Maritimes and they are all different. Thank you.

Clarence Woudsma, Associate Professor, School of Planning, University of Waterloo, as an individual: Honourable chair, deputy chair and members of the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications, thank you for the invitation. My name is Clarence Woudsma, and I am an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning.

In our climate crisis, noted scholars argue few human activities are as vulnerable to climate change as transportation and logistics: the movement and storage of the goods or freight on which modern society depends. From global to national to local scales, transportation and logistics activity is geographically extensive, tightly interconnected and time-sensitive.

My favourite example of critical transportation infrastructure and vulnerability is the Nipigon River Bridge failure of 2016 in northern Ontario. While this failure was not climate-related, loss of a single bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway essentially disconnected Eastern and Western Canada for a key freight mode. For the estimated 1,300 commercial trucks that crossed it a day, carrying goods costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the closure created a lengthy and costly rerouting through the United States for weeks.

Transportation network redundancy, or route alternatives, is a key criterion for assessing vulnerability. This is an example of “acute impact” in the language of climate adaptation — a significant event like the extreme rainfall in November 2021 which caused widespread devastation in British Columbia and essentially cut off Vancouver and the Lower Mainland from the rest of Canada. In this case, the closure of road and rail traffic created nationally significant supply chain disruptions. At the local level, people and communities suffered greatly.

The interplay between national significance and local considerations is important to understanding climate vulnerability. We have a good handle on what critical transportation infrastructure is nationally today and in the near term — the road and rail routes, the major ports, airports and pipelines.

The recently released National Supply Chain Task Force report identifies climate-caused disruptions and uncertainties as contributing to growing vulnerabilities across the country, not only in terms of the acute shocks of storm events but in terms of the chronic physical risks associated with longer-term changes in climate patterns, like increasing warming in the North, including Ontario’s north. There, small and remote communities face vulnerabilities due to loss of their roads and permafrost degradation negatively impacting airport facilities that are essential to community health and vitality.

Transportation is directly tied to land uses and patterns of human activity that support communities. We accept that these patterns evolve over time — where crops grow, where firms locate, and which areas become more or less accessible. We should keep in mind that what critical infrastructure is today may not be critical into the medium- and long-term time frames explored in climate adaptation research.

Furthermore, reducing vulnerabilities is not just about the resilience of road, rail bridge or airport infrastructure. We can also influence the risk exposure through directing long-term local economic development in concert with infrastructure investments. The relocation adaptation or planned retreat of settlements may be an alternative in cases where repeated flood events would require expensive infrastructure-based protections.

Referencing our climate adaptation and transportation work in Ontario, the diversity of vulnerabilities provides interesting case study options. For example, in a changed climate, ice formation on the Great Lakes may decline, leading to more evaporation. Great Lakes shipping could face reduced capacity due to resulting low water levels, despite a potential increasing length of shipping season.

The increase of extreme weather, like blizzards, storm cells, heavy rains and tornadoes, means that any location can be vulnerable. Zones of significant interconnectivity, like Peel Region would be high on the critical list of climate vulnerabilities. Peel Region is a leading national hub; it is home to Pearson Airport, major intermodal rail terminals for both CN and CPKC, the busiest highways in Canada and huge volumes of logistics spaces and employment. Examples of climate vulnerabilities for roads and rails relate to projected increases in extreme heating, whereas airport vulnerability also highlights the role of major rainfall events, related stormwater management and potential flooding.

Not surprisingly, in reviewing local community plans and policies, there is more emphasis on greenhouse-gas mitigation than adaptation. I recommend case studies of adaptation that offer a rich diversity of modes, jurisdictions and stakeholders. Ownership, responsibility and regulatory complexity are inherently messy in Canadian transportation, especially on the freight movement side. If we are going to make real gains in adapting to the climate crisis, we need to take this governance challenge on. Thank You.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you. Now we will turn to questions.

Senator Quinn: Thank you, witnesses, for being here this evening and for the excellent overview of various parts of the country and their challenges.

I would like to focus on Professor Pearce for my first question. You gave an overview of the Port of Churchill and Mackenzie River corridor and the challenges they face due to climate change. My question is this: With the vulnerabilities that they face, should Canada be considering alternatives to the further development of the Port of Churchill?

Secondly, is there a point where we need to consider resupplying the Arctic from a southern location rather than from Hay River?

Mr. Pearce: Those are both really relevant questions. Without being able to answer those directly, the Port of Churchill is a great case study. Here we have the only deepwater seaport in Canada. We know shipping is going to increase — it already has increased. We know there is a proposal on the table for other ports. What it really comes down to is that the railbed was developed at a time when we believed we had certainty in the environment. I think this is the critical message. There never was certainty in the environment. The northern environment is inherently dynamic. Permafrost is always changing and freeze-thaw events were always there. It’s just that we’re adding another layer of uncertainty.

To answer your question, I would say that it’s not all about a new risk or danger. We sometimes characterize climate change as this impeding threat, but the reality is that infrastructure in the North has always been challenged. When it comes to now asking if we can maintain the viability of a port, I think it comes down to asking ourselves whether we can develop infrastructure or redevelop infrastructure in a way that’s going to be able to be dynamic, and that includes the railbed.

Senator Quinn: I would like to talk a little bit about the Mackenzie River system and its viability. That has been a key resupply point for the western Arctic. For the eastern Arctic, for years supplies have come out of Montreal. With the challenges that the Mackenzie River is facing, as you’ve described — and they seem to be increasing every year — is it time to think about alternatives?

Mr. Pearce: I think that’s what you’re hearing from some of the communities. I can’t speak directly on their behalf. You can look to Inuvialuit, who have already said that they need more certainty in transportation. The Mackenzie might be viable some years and not other years. From my experience and from speaking and working with several communities that depend on it, there is conversation that they need more certainty. This would involve — like you’re describing — an open sea route from a southern location, which has already been in place. It’s just that the infrastructure there isn’t fully developed — nor the costs.

Senator Quinn: I have a quick question for Professor Rapaport. You had some interesting comments on the transportation systems — if I can say that — in Atlantic Canada. The one thing I wanted to clarify and have you clarify for me are the interdependencies of transportation systems in Atlantic Canada. Where I’m going with that is that Newfoundland has dependency on Marine Atlantic, Marine Atlantic has dependency on road and rail up into Sydney, and P.E.I. has dependencies getting out of the Port of Halifax, et cetera. I understand what you’re saying about each province being a stand-alone province, but there has to be recognition of interdependencies, does there not?

Mr. Rapaport: Oh, absolutely, and that is well recognized and studied by people like Clarence and others who do logistics analysis. It’s more that when we try to do these studies, we lump together the region and we lose the jurisdictional nuances that the provinces bring to what they consider to be critical impacts to their infrastructure. Asking one professor to cover multiple jurisdictions sometimes isn’t feasible. That’s where we’re coming from with that report, because I think we missed the mark of getting into the interdependencies in that report. Even more so, what are the priorities of these different provinces in terms of what they see as critical infrastructure and where the choke points — using that wording tonight — are?

Senator Quinn: Great, thank you.

Senator Simons: Dr. Pearce, I want to pick up where you and Senator Quinn left off. I’m from Edmonton, so even though I’ve never been to Hay River, I feel like it’s part of the spinal cord that connects my city to the North.

Hay River is an interesting city to me because, obviously, there is the highway, which is built in part on permafrost, and then there is the rail line. I think not many people know that CN has a rail line that goes right to Hay River. During the fires this summer, CN lost some of that rail line to fire. Then, of course, there is the whole river shipping system with barges. So as we’re looking for case studies to examine — we just finished doing one about the Chignecto Isthmus — would you suggest that Hay River might make a good choke point case study? I suggest it because it feeds the whole North and would be a way to look at rail, road and barging vulnerabilities all at the same time.

There’s a leading question for you, wouldn’t you agree?

Mr. Pearce: I like your question, and I like your proposed solution. I couldn’t agree more with you. This has been on the table for a long time. Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, which is a governing body of the Inuvialuit Settlement Region — the six communities in the western Arctic — has been calling for this for a long time. The narrative started in the early 2000s about a more secure, dependable, robust sealift. I think taking what you’ve described and adding a little bit more to it is characterizing this infrastructure, as others have suggested, as only about the physical aspects of it, but there is also a human element to it. I think this is how we sell it to other Canadians.

This is critical infrastructure. If you don’t get a sealift, you don’t get fuel. If you don’t get a sealift, you don’t get food. Rather than looking specifically at Hay River, I would look at the whole Mackenzie River route as the current transportation infrastructure for the sealift, but I would step back and ask the question, “What is the future of a sealift in the western Arctic?” The reason I choose the western Arctic is that unlike the eastern Arctic, the western Arctic is warming the fastest. We’re seeing the impacts soonest, meaning that lessons learned can be transferable.

Senator Simons: I see the deputy chair asking a question, and I don’t know the answer to it either. What, actually, is a sealift? From context, it is obviously stuff coming in from the sea. How does a sealift work?

Mr. Pearce: In the west, we have rail cars. They are essentially rail cars you would see on any railway. In some cases, they are moving from Edmonton to Hay River on the railbed. There, they are loaded onto barges, and those barges are pushed down the Mackenzie. They come out at the Beaufort Sea, and they service those communities. The barges loaded with sea cans are transporting these goods as well as fuel, and they’re referred to as a sealift in the North.

Senator Simons: The sea is not the ocean? Is it the sea can? Oh, it’s going to the Beaufort Sea.

Mr. Pearce: You could think of it that way, but it’s because it’s in the Beaufort Sea.

Senator Simons: I have a question for Dr. Woudsma. No one has talked to us yet about the Great Lakes and their vulnerability. You’re the first person who has raised that issue. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the threats to Great Lakes shipping are? I’m from the West, so I don’t know how important those shipping routes through the Great Lakes are.

Mr. Woudsma: There are two points to your question. In terms of the vulnerabilities, for sure — as I alluded to in my comments — there is the danger of having low water levels, which means the ships carry less goods because they can’t have as much draft. You have to respond to that with dredging programs — for example, the Welland Canal and the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. Others have studied these to some extent already to look at what the implications might be.

In terms of the importance of Great Lakes shipping, certainly, as a bulk commodity mover — for example grains, various ores and materials — obviously, this is an important part of the supply chain in the central Canadian context, a gateway out to Europe and beyond. The St. Lawrence Seaway would argue they’re a pretty important part of Canada’s transportation network.

Senator Simons: Do the water level issues affect the St. Lawrence Seaway as well?

Mr. Woudsma: I’m not as clear on that. I’m thinking specifically about things like the Welland Canal and then obviously the canals once you get into the St. Lawrence Seaway. I’m not an expert on the hydrology dimensions of it, but I know for sure that lower water levels mean less goods in ships.

Senator Simons: Thank you.

The Deputy Chair: Professor Pearce, you said at the beginning, I think, that your testimony was based on two studies, one on the Port of Churchill and one on Mackenzie River. Could you send those studies?

Mr. Pearce: Yes. Just to clarify, the studies were completed for the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. They focus on climate change implications for the proposed Canadian northern corridor — that multimodal right-of-way that has been proposed and studies endorsed by the Senate.

The Deputy Chair: Perfect, thank you.

Senator Dasko: Thank you to our witnesses. I have a couple of questions.

Professor Woudsma, I very much appreciated your Ontario examples of climate change. Regarding the Nipigon River Bridge failure, I’ve certainly travelled on that bridge on a few road trips I’ve made between Winnipeg and Toronto, so I can understand how it could be a very serious issue with that bridge failing.

But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your example of the Peel Region and the climate impacts there. I know that region very well; there is, as you said, a massive amount of car and truck traffic, and then there is an airport and everything else. Could you just describe in a little more detail the impacts of climate and what the risk factors are? All I see is a lot of traffic, and I’m trying to understand what the risks are in that region. Thank you.

Mr. Woudsma: Thanks for the question.

The reason I included that as an example is because, again, it’s one of those — we’ve talked a lot about the Nipigon bridge being an example of a single link that’s broken or the many communities in the North that only have a single highway in.

The Peel Region is a place where you have a vast web of interconnected activity. It’s not so much an acute climate impact in the form of heating increasing so there’s pavement degradation. That’s something, in terms of asset management and maintenance, that we could address with different pavements, et cetera. It’s more a case that if there’s an acute event, such as a major storm or an intense flooding event or an ice storm, you suddenly have a few hundred square kilometres where the repercussions would be felt not only locally but in terms of national significance, given the amount of activity that is centred in Peel Region itself.

It’s meant to highlight the other end of the spectrum. Rather than small communities and single access, you have a large community and population with a lot of interconnectivity in terms of all the different modes being within a very small area.

Senator Dasko: So events, then, can obviously cause damage across all of those modes, and that’s why the region is vulnerable, in your perspective. Thank you.

This is a question for Professor Rapaport. At the beginning of your comments, you said that the work you do is in the area of population demographics, but I don’t think I heard you refer to that part of your work in your other comments. Do you actually study the impacts of climate change on population demographics, or is it the reverse? Which is the dependent variable in your analysis, if that’s the kind of analysis you’re doing? I hope you understand what I’m trying to ask. Thank you.

Mr. Rapaport: If you think about a lot of the climate change studies that have been done, we’re looking at 2050, 2075 or 2100 for these impacts, but we often freeze our communities. So I began to look at things we could forecast in the future, such as population, as we do as city planners. So I try and combine those two things, bringing vulnerable populations together with infrastructure impacts and seeing where there might be communities that are isolated. It’s actually trying to get a sense of what the future might look like in its totality versus holding something in a steady state that we know is dynamic. Population is an example. It then drives a bunch of questions about demands for housing, infrastructure, hospitals and all the other things you can think of. It was one of the first times that we tried to link two types of forecasting together: climate change and population forecasting.

At one point, Nova Scotia was sort of a steady-state population and wasn’t growing very much. Now we’re booming, so we really have to ask ourselves about some of these rural communities that were small but are now growing. How are we going to make investments into the future?

My type of work helps us make better planning decisions by looking at how the population is changing. That’s one of the drivers for where investments go, not just the transportation system.

Senator Dasko: Right. I was looking at the new census data a while ago, and I saw the growth in Nova Scotia. It has been huge and quite phenomenal. People are moving there in large numbers.

To clarify, are you saying that you’re looking at multiple indicators and how they impact each other as opposed to the impact of climate change on population?

Mr. Rapaport: Yes.

Senator Dasko: Right, okay. Thank you.

Senator Cardozo: My question is for Professor Woudsma.

You talked about Peel, and I’m somewhat familiar with that area. It’s large, flat land with a lot of housing and commercial activity, as well as the airport. There are maybe a couple of ravines around there — the Humber River to the east of that. My question is about airports. If you look at our airports, you have Toronto and Montreal in the middle of fairly flat land. You have Halifax in the middle of a forest, and Vancouver is on the edge of an ocean. What are the things that we need to be thinking about in terms of what is going to go wrong there, either in a terrible winter or any other time of year with big rain?

Mr. Woudsma: The vulnerabilities of airports — you’ve described them as being in different geographic locations, so they could obviously be exposed to different climate impacts depending on that. Regarding Vancouver, we’ve talked in the previous session about its vulnerability to sea-level rise. For other airports, there are operational impacts. Storm events are always something that would impact all of them uniformly. Each of the airports probably has their own adaptation strategy or plans — things that they’re aware of. I know Pearson did some work on theirs that identified flood risks for Pearson as one of their key considerations.

Senator Cardozo: How about Halifax? The methodology is that they picked that land so it would be far away from the city. Then, when they built it there, it began to fog there; is that not so?

Mr. Woudsma: I’m not that familiar with the situation in Halifax. Maybe Eric Rapaport could comment on that, because he probably knows the situation better than I do.

Mr. Rapaport: That is correct. Cutting down the forest changed the local weather dynamic, so it became foggier.

Senator Cardozo: People didn’t think of that before?

Senator Simons: That raises an interesting point. Over the last few days, we’ve heard lots of evidence about ways in which people have attempted to mitigate climate change that actually made things worse — things like filling in salt marshes and wetlands and building bigger dikes that actually made things more vulnerable.

This is a question for all three of you. At what point does our hubris blind us to some hard realities about things that we just can’t fix? What are the dangers of assuming that our tech fix might be better than letting natural forms of amelioration do their job?

Maybe that’s too big a question for this late at night, especially if you’re in Nova Scotia, where it’s an hour later.

Mr. Woudsma: I would offer a quick comment.

An interesting thing about transportation and its relationship to the natural environment, rivers and waterways, is that we built all of our roads and railways along river valleys, so we have not been doing a very good job for the last couple of hundred years.

In some cases you are saying, in the previous session the suggestion was made to look at what is happening in B.C. They should not put the roads right back where they were in those river valleys because the floods will happen again; it is just a question of when, right?

I don’t know how we internalize that lesson and, as decision makers at all levels of government, try and be more rational about it. That is just a comment.

Senator Simons: Some of these environmental problems seem to be not just due to climate change but because we have done things to the environment: chopped down trees that should have stayed up; cleared trees, which then lead to more avalanches; paved over or drained lakes and then were surprised that they flood again.

I worry a little that some of those who have come before us with high-tech fixes for these problems — that we’re not learning the lesson of listening to — and this will make me sound much more touchy-feely than I actually am — what the land is trying to tell us.

Mr. Pearce: I will phrase it differently. You have asked a timely question.

You are absolutely right. If you look to the literature, most published literature looks at engineering responses. Sometimes we call it hard adaptation, built infrastructure.

Two things I would bring up: One is I believe we have to look at climate in the context of multiple stresses. There is a difference between weather and climate. We’ve always had weather. Weather events have always been just a fact of life for transportation in Canada. It is nothing new. What is new is that there is an increased occurrence of extreme weather events. There is less predictability. There are more shocks in the system. First, we have to consider — whenever we are talking about infrastructure — climate events in the context of multiple other stresses.

The other thing, we could call it rediscovering different approaches to resource management which are relevant to infrastructure. That means engaging communities: First Nations, local communities. These are people who live in particular places. They have a relationship with the environment that may be different than somebody who comes into that region.

For me, whenever you talk about what we do, how we adapt, I think our starting point is that we have to go and listen, and that includes multiple voices: First Nations, local communities, people who have lived there for a considerable amount of time and have a vested interest in the space.

Senator Simons: Professor Rapaport?

Mr. Rapaport: We can do better to work with natural systems. Instead of using dikes, we can use nature-based solutions as one way of protecting our coastline.

The other thing is that we do need to find new investment strategies. One senator kept saying, “How are we going to pay for this?” I come from Nova Scotia. We led with climate change adaptation plans as being a requirement for all municipalities. We even saw Halifax Regional Municipality this year implement a climate change tax on all property owners. It is money that is dedicated to climate change resilience in our municipality.

Municipalities also have to step up and figure out how they are going to face these facts and pay for things going into the future. Nova Scotia was a lead before, and now Halifax Regional Municipality has been a lead in terms of finding new funding mechanisms.

The hubris is still going to be there. We’re still going to need engineering solutions in certain cases. Undoing all of the things that we did is going to take another generation. It took a generation to build all of this infrastructure. We do have to consider retreat as part of the solution. I’m not exactly sure where that funding is going to come from in the future.

Senator Simons: I do not know about the political will. Unfortunately, we have a long and ugly history in this country, especially of making Indigenous people move places to meet our political aspirations.

I don’t want to think about the implications of telling Indigenous people in northern communities that their communities are no longer viable and we’re going to make them move someplace. That has a very ugly odour to it.

The Deputy Chair: Mr. Pearce, your hand is raised.

Mr. Pearce: Thank you. I would change the narrative. I think that we can no longer tell people what to do. It’s rather if you start from the grassroots, if we start there, people who live there, who have a vested interest in the space — across all sectors — they will make those decisions.

We can look to examples globally. We can look to Australia for coastal retreat. We can look to the Netherlands, where coastal retreat is also mainstreamed into their planning. That is not coming from a top-down mechanism but, rather, voices of people living in those places realizing that there is a need for change.

I think of flipping the narrative from saying, “You have to move,” to saying, “This is the issue; let’s learn as much about it as we can together and what our possible pathways forward are” and allowing people who live in those places, those communities, to determine the terms of reference for what happens next.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you.

Senator Quinn: Professor Woudsma, you mentioned during your opening statements about evaporation rates in the Great Lakes probably associated with less ice coverage in the winter months and whatnot, a direct link to climate change.

I want to ask how your work ties into, in any way, the International Joint Commission, water flow controls out of the Great Lakes Basin, the Ottawa River Basin into the St. Lawrence Seaway, specifically into the Port of Montreal. It is a significant issue, the water levels in the St. Lawrence.

The water levels now in the Great Lakes, where are they over the last five years? Are they higher, lower? We’ve gone through various cycles. The overall trend at one point was definitely down. Does that remain the case? The heavy snow events, are they replenishing water levels to the point where they are more in a steady state?

Mr. Woudsma: I wish I had done more homework in advance of this meeting so I could give you a better answer to that question.

Last year, if I recall correctly, there were issues with ships having to go lighter on the Great Lakes because of lower water levels. You are absolutely right about the International Joint Commission. The Great Lakes is essentially a managed watershed to some extent in terms of the water flow.

The modelling work we were doing, again, when you start projecting out to 2050, 2075, those are the scenarios where you look at the extremes: worst-case scenario, best-case scenario.

Again, given the significance of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes to Canada’s population and Canada as a nation, that is why I chose to use that as an example.

Senator Quinn: The 50-year projection that you have talked about, are you in a position to say whether it is continuing to go down over that 50-year window?

Mr. Woudsma: You mean the water levels in the Great Lakes?

Senator Quinn: Yes.

Mr. Woudsma: Yes. That was not part of it because, again, you are forecasting climate variables, for example, precipitation, temperature, et cetera. Again, it is purely speculative as to what the water levels are actually going to be.

Senator Quinn: Thank you.

The Deputy Chair: Thank you all for answering our difficult questions. You have been a great help.

That brings our second panel to an end. Colleagues, please join me in thanking our witnesses for taking the time to share their expertise and answer our questions today.

Thank you, senators.

(The committee adjourned.)