Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Inquiry No. 16, instigated by Senator Rob Black, calling the attention of the Senate to the ongoing concerns respecting Canadian agricultural wetland and forest land reallotments, as well as potential food, economic and social insecurities as a result of reduced capacity for farming, pasture, forestry and food production domestically and internationally.

In Canada today, we begin most public events with a land acknowledgment, a pointed, sometimes powerful reminder that our country is built on the traditional territory of the Indigenous nations who first called this place home.

I want to begin this speech with a different but related kind of land acknowledgment. I want to acknowledge the actual land on which we sit, the soil that gives life to our boreal forests, our prairie grasslands, our crops, our gardens. I want us to acknowledge the fragile essential layer of topsoil, which is perhaps Canada’s most important, least valued natural resource.

Once, we understood the debt we owed to the land that gave us life, to what many cultures call our mother earth. The name of Adam, the Bible’s first man, comes from the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “earth” or “soil.” And Jewish tradition teaches that God shaped man from the soil, made him of earth.

The word “human,” which we use to describe ourselves, comes from the Latin word humus or “earth.” The ancient Romans, too, recognized the numinous sense of our relationship with the soil.

I myself come from Treaty 6 territory, one of the traditional homes of the Cree people. The Cree have a legend of their own about a great flood that swept away all the land. Various animals attempted to dive to the bottom of the water to bring up some soil from which to form the land anew. The various animals tried and failed and tried and failed, until finally a brave little muskrat dove down deep, deep into the waters and made his way back to the surface with a fistful of soil, almost drowning in the attempt. It was the courage of that little muskrat, we are told, which allowed the terrestrial world to begin anew.

But over generations and centuries of urbanization and industrialization, many of us have forgotten our roots and the soil that gave us life. Not to put too fine a point on it, we treat it like dirt.

Here is the irony: Our cities and towns tend to be built where the land is most fertile. That makes sense. It has been that way ever since mankind built the cities along the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, the Yellow River. It makes perfect sense. As we changed from hunter-gathers to farmers to urbanites, we settled on the land that was best able to feed us. But as we built our cities, we paved over some of the richest soil on earth.

When colonizers and settlers came to Canada, they did the same thing, building towns and cities right beside and then on top of the most fertile ground in this new world. We’re still doing it, building subdivisions, shopping malls, factories, airports, university campuses and highways upon some of the most valuable farmland of all and atop other important land resources, from wetlands to forests. But we do so at a cost.

Canada is huge. Look at a map — all that pink. But only about 5% to 7% of our land mass is ranked as prime agricultural land suitable for cultivation. Put another way, only about 6.8% of this entire country is currently under cultivation. That number may surprise you. Canada seems so vast, but once you subtract the Canadian Shield, the northern boreal muskeg, the Rocky Mountains, the Arctic tundra, the permafrost and all the lakes, well, there just isn’t that much soil where we can grow food or raise cattle and sheep.

A full one third of all of Canada’s arable land is found in my own province of Alberta, yet between 2011 and 2020, some 52,000 hectares of prime Alberta agricultural land was taken out of agricultural production, primarily to make way for urban infrastructure and housing developments. And while urban sprawl around Calgary and Edmonton is taking out a lot of good farmland, the pace of development in Alberta pales beside what we see in the Greater Toronto Area, where farmland as far away as Guelph is being gobbled up for residential development.

When we on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee were working on our recent soil report, I learned a new term: “soil sealing.” Now, that’s not the kind of sealing they do in Newfoundland — sorry, my friends from the Fisheries and Oceans Committee.

“Soil sealing” is a euphemism for paving over soil with something impermeable, such as concrete or asphalt. The challenge isn’t just that soil sealing takes land out of cultivation; it also disrupts the ability of the soil to do its ecological work. Healthy soil helps to filter, purify and store water. Healthy soils are more resistant to drought and erosion, better able to absorb water in times of flood. Healthy soil is a natural carbon sink, essential to our efforts to slow the impact of climate change. Soil is home to more than 25% of the planet’s biodiversity with more than 40,000 different organisms in a gram of healthy living soil, organisms essential to the biogeochemical processes that make all life on earth possible.

Soil sealing puts paid to almost all of that. When we seal our topsoil with asphalt or concrete, we fragment soil habitats and cause a loss of biodiversity. Sealed soil can’t absorb water, which leads to more runoff and flooding. Sealing can have a more profound impact on water movement, which also compromises soil’s natural ability to purify water. Sealed soil can’t do its work to regulate climate or sequester carbon, and the more soil we seal, the more we speed up the pace of climate change and global warming.

This isn’t just a question of paving over farmland. Indeed, some of the most dire environmental consequences of soil sealing come when we pave over wetlands and bogs or chop down trees to put up apartment buildings or industrial plants.

Frankly, I think that we might have liked to have written at greater length about urban sprawl and soil sealing in our new soil health report Critical Ground, but we faced a constitutional conundrum, the same one I face today as I look at the terms of this inquiry.

Land use planning? It is not in federal jurisdiction. It is properly the role of provinces and even more the role of municipalities, the cities and towns and counties that derive their authority from the provinces. It is simply not the federal government’s place, nor the Senate’s place, to tell municipalities where to put their subdivisions, malls and roads.

At a time when Canada has a desperate shortage of housing and when many middle-class Canadians can no longer afford homes in city neighbourhoods and are fleeing to the suburbs in an effort to find a house they can actually afford, the pressure on municipalities to allow more suburban sprawl is acute.

There are new challenges in rural Canada too. As we work hard to transition away from fossil fuels, there is new demand for solar and wind power and even industrial-scale biodigesters. And we need that clean green power, especially on the prairies, where hydroelectric power is simply not an option, but we also need to find a balance so that we’re not building this essential new power infrastructure atop our very best farmland or our most important riparian zones.

Yet, at the same time, we must be wary of politicians who seek to stop the construction of new solar and wind farms in the name of protecting the environment while at the same time encouraging and valorizing oil and gas production, which are far more polluting and toxic to soil in their own ways. The hypocrisy might be amusing if the stakes weren’t quite so high.

These are, again, issues that have to be left to provinces, counties and municipalities to resolve, although perhaps with a few helpful hints from us. We have three interrelated challenges, if not crises, facing us as Canadians. We must preserve our prime farmland in the name of food security and food affordability. At the same time, we need to create more housing — affordable housing — so that young Canadians and new Canadians and all the other Canadians can have a place to call home. We also have to transition to green energy, even if that means building green energy infrastructure on rural land.

This means we need to be creative, whether that means building on existing brownfield sites, encouraging affordable urban infill or just engaging in smart land use planning that balances the competing needs of our municipalities. Maybe this inquiry — alongside my own earlier inquiry into the role of municipalities in Confederation — can help spark some important, long overdue conversations.

I want to thank our colleague Rob Black for launching this inquiry and for turning me into something of a “soils evangelist.” His passion for this subject is infectious and has been an inspiration for many of us in this chamber.

What we as Canadians need now is to find the courage and determination of that indefatigable muskrat to hang on tight to the soil that gives us all life and to acknowledge the land to which we all owe so much. Hiy hiy.