Subscribe to our Newsletter

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Committee of Supply

April 30, 2008 - Environment Department

Ms Blakeman: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the minister and his staff who’ve joined us on the floor, and I’m sure that there are staff joining us in the galleries. I can’t see them, but I’m sure they’re there. I just feel their presence.

There are three areas that I would like to talk about tonight, and we’ll do a back and forth, so we’re on the 20 minute clock. The three areas are around monitoring and evaluation, which appears as vote 2.0.2 under Environmental Assurance; compliance and enforcement, appearing as 4.0.3 under Environmental Management; and then we’re into reclamation and emergency preparedness.

I note that the Kearl project – I’m assuming it rhymes with pearl if I’ve got the pronunciation right – in the oil sands lost its federal water licence in early March. Now, this would have been after the budget would have been prepared, and in fact these documents may well have been on their way to the printer when that decision was brought down. Essentially, the federal court found that approval of the Kearl project by the Alberta and the federal governments didn’t fully explain why greenhouse gas emissions were not significant in this project.

What I’m also noting here – in citing the court judgment, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans told Imperial in a March 20 letter that the water permit issued February 8 had been rendered invalid. The letter stated that Imperial is not authorized to proceed with any works or undertakings that will cause the harmful alteration, disruption, or destruction of fish habitat or that destroys fish by any means other than fishing. Now, Imperial Oil has asked for and I think received an expedited court hearing in May to overturn this, but the implications for the existing and the new operations I think are quite clear, and it sets a precedent that improper environmental impact assessments and improper approvals could jeopardize new oil sands projects.

I am noting at the same time that the allocation of budgets for that monitoring and evaluation line have decreased. They’ve gone from the $19 million range into the $13 million range, so about a $6 million decrease in that budget. How does the province do due diligence in terms of requirements of environmental impact assessments, recognizing that the Kearl project is one of the results we could end up with when we have a decrease in that monitoring and evaluation funding?

Mr. Renner: Mr. Chairman, I already answered that question. A similar question was asked by the Member for Calgary Mountain View. There is not a decrease in funding for monitoring and evaluation. There is, however, a reallocation of resources within the ministry. We have gathered together all of the data management people that support each of the various program units within the ministry and put them under one umbrella of data management, so we have removed the funding from a number of areas – monitoring being one, flow forecasting being another, river engineering, and a few other organizations within our ministry that deal with great volumes of data – and we’ve created one data management organization. So the funding in this particular area was simply transferred from monitoring and evaluation into data management. There is no net decrease in funding for this organization.

Ms Blakeman: Well, I take your explanation about moving money around, but essentially you are consolidating in data management, which is not necessarily monitoring. To say that you’ve taken money from a number of other sectors and essentially put it into an information technology format or a collection because you are reviewing large amounts of money is different than actually monitoring compliance with a project. Go ahead and make that one work for me.

Mr. Renner: Just to give an example to the member, it’s not unlike having someone who’s dedicated to providing IT services within the hon. member’s office. If the hon. member had one person who does nothing but IT within her office and her colleague from Calgary- Mountain View had another person who does IT, you would both have IT within your budget. If a decision was made that it made more sense to take those two IT people together so that they would work as a separate IT supporting both of you, the budget stays the same. The number of FTEs, the number of people that are devoted to IT management stays the same. It’s just that from a reporting relationship we have a separate division that is then developing specific expertise in managing information so that the people that are involved in the monitoring and evaluation have more reliable and extensive information to have at their disposal.

Ms Blakeman: I understand what you’re telling me. If I had someone in my office that was responsible for monitoring that certain things were going to happen, that snow got shoveled outside of my office – and you could collect all kinds of information about how much the snowfall was and, you know, how many hours of sunlight you had and things like that – and if I also had an IT person or paid for part of an IT person as did my colleague, the analogy I hear you making is that I’ve now given up my monitoring person, who actually went out and saw if this place got shoveled, and have rolled it into the IT person. So that’s what I hear happening. There are two different functions there. But the minister is disagreeing. I’m going to move on into a different section.

I’m looking at the compliance and enforcement section, which is vote 4.0.3, under Environmental Management. There is a slight increase here of about $2 million over last year’s forecast. See, I think that given a lack of environmental officers to ensure compliance – this has been an issue for years. I’m wondering how a slight increase in funding – I mean, $2 million under environmental protection is not a lot of money – enhances the ability of the ministry to ensure that compliance, to conduct inspections of sites, and to issue environmental protection orders?

Mr. Renner: Well, the underlying premise and assumption is that these functions have not been carried out. I’m of the opinion that our compliance officers have been and will continue to do an excellent job. We are putting our emphasis on the development of appropriate policies. You have to give the compliance officers the tools that allow them to do their job. I would rather have additional resources put into a thorough understanding of what are the rules that we’re asking people to enforce and, more importantly, are they the right rules. Again, to reiterate what I’ve said before, I don’t think you need more compliance officers to do a better job of protecting the environment. What you need is a set of policies and regulations and rules that those compliance officers have at their disposal to ensure that that stewardship and protective regime is in fact upheld.

Ms Blakeman: The minister may not have this off the top of his head, in which case please feel free to provide it in writing, but if I could get the number of environmental officers and investigators that have been employed by the ministry for the past five years. If you’ve got that off the top of your head, that’s great. [interjection] It’s environmental officers and investigators. That’s what you’re calling them in your documents. I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about.

I’m still somewhat on the same theme because I notice you have some additional work to do now with the cumulative effects framework for the Industrial Heartland. We think that’s a good move, but there are questions there about how those targets are going to be enforced. So now you have a new thing that needs to monitored and reported back on and some kind of compliance met. Can the minister tell us whether the targets for air emissions will be voluntary, or will there be strict regulations with penalties? How is the government supposed to know if the industry is reporting accurately if no one actually ensures compliance?

Mr. Renner: Well, I will get the information as best I can with respect to the numbers of investigators and inspectors. I think I did mention in question period today in response to a question that as of today, if memory serves me correctly, it’s about 57 inspectors and 23 investigators that we have on staff. I don’t know what it was last year or the previous four years. We’ll attempt to get that information.

I do want to emphasize, though, that the whole issue with respect to compliance is really three pronged. Enforcement is only one leg of that triangle. Education is as important as anything. It doesn’t do any good for us to have all of these great compliance rules in place if no one knows about them, if no one understands why we have them. The other thing is prevention.

Within the department there is a need for us to maintain a balance. It’s not unlike the balance that needs to be maintained when we get into discussion around the budget for the Solicitor General and Justice. If the Solicitor General provides funding for more police, which is in this budget, then it stands to reason that Justice is going to have to provide funding for more court costs: judges, prosecutors. We have the same kind of scenario in our program. We have the compliance officers, but if we don’t at the same time balance the compliance officers with the educational component within our ministry, it’s not going to do us any good. We need people out there educating not only industrial players but also individual Albertans because then that leads to this preventive side. That’s where Albertans become vigilant. Albertans know what the rules are, and Albertans are able to assist our compliance side when they see something happening that they know shouldn’t be happening. We don’t have enough eyes and ears to be everywhere all the time. We do know that Albertans have a great deal of pride in this province. They have a great deal of respect for our environment. As long as they can have that information, as long as they can be informed, then they become a very important part in our enforcement and compliance mechanism.

Ms Blakeman: Okay. I’m just going to go back and put two of those questions back on the record because they didn’t get answered. One of them was: could the minister tell us whether the targets for air emissions will be voluntary, or are there strict regulations with penalties attached? Secondly, how is the government supposed to know if the industry is reporting accurately if there’s no compliance? The minister is saying: well, there’s education and prevention. Fair enough. I mean, this now becomes quite current because I’m hearing back from the minister that, well, we rely on working with the Alberta public. Okay. Good. Glad that the public is engaged. That’s exactly how we found out about the birds being killed in the tailings ponds. Somebody phoned in and said: “This is happening. Does anybody know that?” In fact, the company had not reported it as they were supposed to. We rely on those citizens, tipsters, phoning in a tip. Who knows? Maybe they’re whistle blowers. I don’t know.

So I’m back to the question: are those air emissions voluntary, or is there some kind of regulation with a penalty? How is the government supposed to know if the industry is actually reporting accurately? What’s the process that you’re using there?

Mr. Renner: Well, there are two sets of air emissions that we need to take into account. One is under our existing regulatory regime, that puts very hard limits on emissions. When we give an operating authority to an industry to produce something – doesn’t matter what they’re producing – there’s a limit on SOx, NOx based upon best available technology, and we monitor that very, very closely. The question is: how do we know that it’s accurate? We know it’s accurate for the same reason we know that you’re not cheating on your income tax. We do audits, and if we find that someone is not being completely honest with us, we actually treat that as a more severe offence than, in fact, them telling us that they’ve had an issue, that they’ve had an occurrence of an exceedance. We require them to report to us any time that they exceed what is under their permit, and if we find that they haven’t, then that’s a very serious offence. We do audits. We do audits on a fairly frequent basis, but like any audit program we don’t do a complete and total audit on every licensee every year. It’s on a rotating basis, just as I haven’t been audited – well, until I mentioned it tonight, I guess – by income tax auditors in many years. Maybe my number will now come up.

On the issue with respect to caps that the member referred to, that is with respect to our cumulative effects program that we talked about. Those are overall caps. Those are caps that are cumulative from all of the licence holders in a particular region, and those are hard caps. We’re a long ways from reaching those hard caps. I’m not concerned about us exceeding those hard caps this year, next year, or probably in the next three or four years. What I am concerned about is that the approvals that we are making today are made in accordance with our ability to continue to make intelligent approvals into the future. There is no need for us to track whether those caps are being exceeded today, but there will be an opportunity and a need for us to monitor whether those caps are being exceeded as we begin to approach them many years into the future.

The Deputy Chair: The hon. member.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you. Two final questions. If the minister could let me know – and this may have to be in writing as well – how many fines have been levied in the last 24 months around industry accurate reporting, for example, that you’ve discovered through your audits.

The second issue is around reclamation. Now, I notice that the reclamation and emergency preparedness is about a million dollars less than last year. I believe that this takes in the area of unreclaimed abandoned wells. I note that the December ’ 04 licence liability report states that there are 31,772 unreclaimed abandoned wells. How can those be properly remediated when there’s such a small amount of money in that reclamation fund?

Thank you.