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MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. I will now call this meeting to order. The time is 2:01 p.m.
The honourable member for Digby-Annapolis.
MR. HAROLD THERIAULT: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Minister, for being here today. I'm sorry I never got all my questions in the other day, but we kind of ran out of time, I guess. I got lots of time this afternoon - well, no, not lots of time, I guess we only have a half hour or so.
I want to touch on a thing that we've been having quite a problem with down home, not a problem, but there have been problems with it I should say, and that's the mink ranching industry.
AN HON. MEMBER: A great industry.
MR. THERIAULT: It is. It's a great industry and I'm glad we have it that area. It creates a lot of wealth for the Weymouth and Digby area, that's for sure. But constantly, at my office, I'm receiving calls. I'm receiving calls about odour in the air, especially on calm days and warm days, I'm receiving comments about rats infesting people's homes, and I'm receiving calls about runoffs in the rivers. I called the Department of Agriculture, in Weymouth, and they put it over to the Department of Environment and Labour and half of the time, if maybe not more, Environment and Labour will put it back to the Department of Agriculture. So it seems to be frustrating, at times, to be passed back and forth between Agriculture and Environment and Labour. So I call the people back and tell them I'm being passed back and forth, and I'll call you back later, when I try to find an answer.
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Whose responsibility is it for things like I mentioned, like the odour in the air, the runoffs into the rivers and such, and rats infesting people's homes in that area - whose responsibility is that?
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable Minister of Environment and Labour.
HON. MARK PARENT: Well the reason why you go back and forth between those departments is because the responsibility is twofold. In terms of the right-to-farm practices, which fall under the Department of Agriculture, there are certain regulations and legislation in place that give farmers a certain right to farm, as you probably know. Because we have a problem in my own riding, when you're talking about that, where we have heavy development from people who come in because they like the farming and rural lifestyle and yet may locate next to a farmer and all of a sudden they realize that along with farming, comes the use of manure or something like that, so the right-to-farm legislation falls under that Department of Agriculture and, basically in terms of odour problems, it would be the Department of Agriculture that takes the lead. In regard to affected watercourses, my department would be more proactive on that.
So your question is basically dealing, I think, with the odour problem that comes from farming, and I'll certainly talk to my colleague who is the Acting Minister of Agriculture right now. I will be very happy to talk to him so he doesn't shirk his responsibilities in terms of odour problems, and so that you don't get tossed back and forth between departments, because the odour, by and large, would fall under Agriculture. Now if it's becoming a health problem or affecting the environment in a broad way then the department would step in. So the reason you're passed back and forth is not, I don't think, always evasion - sometimes it is because both departments would have some responsibility and the civil service isn't clear on that. But I will commit to talking to the Minister of Agriculture to make sure that he does his job properly and that he takes his responsibilities seriously.
MR. THERIAULT: Thank you. Some of these new ranches, and I've been on one in the Paradise area, down in Annapolis, they have a lagoon in that area and it seemed to be a pretty good system - and I believe one of the new ranches in the Weymouth area has put a lagoon in - would that be something that Environment and Labour is in control of, these lagoons, are they something that will be mandatory? If they are, are the lagoons also going to have to be covered? Those are a couple of questions I've had from people and I couldn't answer them - will these lagoons be mandatory and will they be lagoons similar to a home sewer system, that is covered with the earth or whatever?
MR. PARENT: That responsibility again falls to the Department of Agriculture, and I apologize on behalf of my fellow minister for not being rigorous enough on taking care of those things. So I will speak to him and make sure that his executive assistant does his job properly and gets back to you with answers for that.
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MR. THERIAULT: Thank you very much.
MR. PARENT: You're very welcome.
MR. THERIAULT: I will speak to the Minister of Agriculture myself on that.
MR. PARENT: And I will too, to make sure that you get your answers.
MR. THERIAULT: Thank you very much. I want to touch on another problem I have in my area - in Digby County we have 210 or 211 kilometres of dirt road, and these last two or three years it seems to be getting worse because the Department of Transportation and Public Works seems to be saying that putting chloride on these roads in the summertime, the money to do that seems to be getting scarcer. So through the summer, through July and August, my phone will ring at least 100 times about dust. I get people with asthma, people trying to put out clothes on their line, people trying to dry fish outdoors - anything you can imagine people trying to do outdoors, living on these roads with the dust flying in the air.
I know because I have lived on dirt roads down there myself - well, pretty near half our roads down there are dirt roads, or mostly mud roads I should say. There used to be a lot of mud; we're starting to cover them with gravel now and maybe that's the reason we haven't got enough money to put the chloride on anymore, I'm not sure.
Anyway, it's a problem in those months through the summer and my phone certainly rings a lot about it. Is this something that Environment and Labour - does dust from roads, does Environment and Labour have anything to do with this or is this the problem of the Department of Transportation and Public Works?
MR. PARENT: We do look at some dusting issues - for example, Whitney Pier has been an ongoing complaint on the dusting caused by industrial emissions there, but in terms of dust from roads, that's considered a nuisance and, as such, would fall under the Department of Transportation and Public Works to put chloride down.
I've had very good fortune in my riding when I've been after my department to get chloride on the roads to keep the dusting down. Their dusting program, in at least most of my riding, has been fairly timely, but that would fall under the Department of Transportation and Public Works - we would come in if the dusting was caused by some sort of industrial emission, something that would hurt the health of the people.
Now I realize that dust can, as you say, cause inconvenience for people with asthma, but simply dust from roads would be considered a nuisance and your concern should be directed to the Department of Transportation and Public Works, to make sure they properly care for that road. There are many ways of doing it, chloride is one. There are other ways, as
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well. It's an issue that I get a lot of complaints about, too, in my riding. So I'd encourage you to follow up with the Department of Transportation and Public Works.
I haven't heard, in my riding at least, the response that there isn't any money for the chloride. I know chloride can be somewhat expensive and maybe I have fewer gravel roads and so the budget is able to stretch to cover them. I would encourage you to speak to the Department of Transportation and Public Works.
MR. THERIAULT: You say there are other methods of keeping the dust down, other than chloride - can you elaborate on that a little bit, please?
MR. PARENT: Well, oftentimes with the gravel it gets beaten down and so you have the fine soil on top, so if you can bring the gravel up to the top, you may cause dusting when you're doing that at that time, but if you have a layer of gravel that will keep some of the dust down.
The best method is chloride, but gravel also will keep, if you have a proper level of gravel on top, dusting down to a minimum as well.
MR. THERIAULT: There is one section of road down there, of dirt road, that I want to tell you about that doesn't have any dust on it. I mentioned this the other day, the kilometre of road with the rubber in it. This road has not been touched in seven years - it has been graded just a bit, but it has never had any more new gravel put on it because it stayed in perfect shape.
That gravel that's on that has washed itself, from the weather over the last seven years. I suppose it has taken most of the dirt out of it, and what has kept that road so good is that foot of junked rubber under it that creates great drainage. So that's another thing that putting rubber into the roads could do for those dirt roads - stop this dust from happening, which would save a lot of money on the chloride.
MR. PARENT: You've raised that - this is, as you mentioned, the second time, and I've asked if the RRFB would look at that. I'm sure they're aware of that practice, but you raised it in the context of their alternative uses for used tires. If there are alternative uses that would use the 900,000-plus tires every year that are produced in the province, that would be beneficial to the citizens, I would hope that RRFB would look at it, and certainly I'll be passing on that information to them.
Do you know the name of the - what the road is exactly, the coordinates of the road, so I can . . .
MR. THERIAULT: It's called South Range Cross Road, which is out off our Ridge Road, that we call it - it's out in the South Range area.
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Anyway, I want to touch on another thing here, with a problem with villages, and this could be happening all over Nova Scotia, but it has happened in my area in an area called Deep Brook. There was a person who sold their home and a small store and come to find out the septic system there wasn't up to today's standard, and come to find out that this home, which is probably 40 by 40 feet wide and long, was sitting on an area of approximately 60 by 60 feet of land - no land under that house and no land to put a new septic system in.
So I worked with the Department of Environment and Labour in the Valley and we came to some kind of a conclusion there for the meantime, to put a holding tank in. He had to go next door and get permission from another person to be able to put this holding tank in - there was no room to put in a proper septic system at all. Come to find out this whole village is similar - they've had these homes on these small lots and there's no room to put septic systems in. So it's a Catch-22 situation there.
[2:15 p.m.]
If Environment and Labour gets back to that community and says to all those people that they have to have a septic system in here and no room to do this, what kind of situation is this small village going to be in? The people are afraid of this, that this is going to happen, ever since this one was brought to the attention of Environment and Labour.
MR. PARENT: It's a good question and we've worked with other communities before, one in Kings South that I'm aware of, and another in Port Maitland. What we do is we go to the municipality when there are undersized lots - and one in Sunken Lake, for example, it's a similar situation because of historical patterns - and you have an undersized lot that can't handle a modern septic system, what we do in those cases - and the Port Maitland one is a success story - is we work with the municipality to see if there is some way of getting a central septic system for the community, and everyone would contribute their share and the municipality would facilitate putting that in. Actually, that oftentimes works out to be less expensive for the individual homeowner than putting in their own septic system and able to work better.
So in cases like that, I would encourage you to either phone me or phone Bob Petrie, the Regional Director for Western Nova Scotia, or the district person in your department. We see it as our job to work with the municipality to see if some sort of central system could be put in that would service all the lots, and then the cost of that of course would be divided appropriately.
MR. THERIAULT: This was done in the Smiths Cove area - I believe it just got finished this past year or two. This was the Municipality of Digby, but Deep Brook is under the Municipality of Annapolis. This was brought to the attention of the councillor in that area and he seemed to want to wave his hands in the air and back away from it. I believe it put a
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threat into him of some kind that maybe that municipality can't deal with that financially right now or something.
I just wanted to bring it to your attention, Mr. Minister, because that's happening, you know, and you realize that yourself - and probably there's more of it happening around. I think it has to be realized that people shouldn't be living there in fear, that for every problem there is a solution, and not to believe that they aren't going to be able to sell their homes and maybe have to move out of their homes - and I've had all kinds of calls about this. Anyway, I kind of assured them from myself that, hopefully, this stuff won't happen and . . .
MR. PARENT: As I said, it's really not an extra cost to the municipality, by and large, because the cost is borne by the homeowners who collectively pool together. The municipality has to co-operate in terms of facilitating this, and if there is a case where the municipal councillor maybe isn't being as proactive as you would like, I would encourage you to contact my department and we will contact our district officer to work with the municipality, because we have good relationships throughout the province with the municipal units and the case you raise, like in Port Maitland, it was successfully concluded with the central septic system that served the houses.
I have one in Kings South, that's actually not in my riding, where they are looking at the same thing. The homeowner basically, around this lake, gave away lots to people and they have now proved to be too small for them to put proper septic systems on. The homeowner died and his son is worried that if there are any problems he will be liable. So he wants to give them their land, or sell them their land, but if they buy their land individually they need septic systems. So we are looking at is there a collective community septic system that can be put in, in that regard.
In Sunken Lake it is slightly different than it would be in your community because they are mainly cottagers and so they aren't as eager to have a system like that. They are asking if there are other alternatives because it is cottages, but where there are full-time homeowners and they live there year-round, this is a very good system and it often, as I say, saves them money and gives them a better system than they would otherwise have. So if the municipal councillor is not aware of the program, not aware of the possibilities, I would encourage you to phone either our staff in your area or to phone me directly and I will direct staff to be in touch with you and with the appropriate people to begin to facilitate the problem.
MR. THERIAULT: As you probably know, down in that area, there's a little uprising there right now about contaminated beaches. I know the honourable Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture knows all about it . . .
AN HON. MEMBER: The Minister of Health knows about it.
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MR. THERIAULT: The Minister of Health knows about it too, he said, so that's good. I want to bring the awareness to the Minister of Environment and Labour also, and probably you know about it too. We have probably a dozen or fourteen beaches in that area, in the western area, that are contaminated enough that they have to be closed for the shell fishery. Anyway, there has been a controversy there about one company taking these beaches over with a depuration system and the people are kind of up in arms over this - they say it is not fair competition.
I could go on about that for awhile, but I won't. That's the problem right there right now. Myself, I have said that that problem wouldn't be there if we didn't have the contaminated beaches; the problem is solved if the beaches weren't contaminated. Is the Department of Environment and Labour going to find out what is contaminating these twelve or fourteen beaches in that area?
MR. PARENT: We work co-operatively with the federal government; the federal government is the lead on this. So I would be happy, if you would like to write me a letter, to pass that on to the appropriate federal department. We do provide them information, as a provincial department, to help them decide which beaches may be at risk and which may be under threat of contamination. The actual control over that belongs to the federal government.
MR. THERIAULT: Probably some of the contamination is coming from the older systems that are in use in all rural areas.
MR. PARENT: I have some information that we provide to them if there is a wastewater system there. Certainly, if it is traced back to our system, we are under obligation to do something to fix the problem, and if the federal government has found that it is our system that is contaminating the beach or private homes certainly we would step in at that stage. It's a very good, co-operative relationship we have with the department federally.
MR. THERIAULT: That is something that is going to take a while to correct when the problem is found out, that's for sure.
I want to leave Environment for a second and just go to Workers' Compensation, if I may, in the fishing industry. As you know, I do represent a lot of fishermen down in that area, mostly in the inshore sector. I hear from them daily - and nightly, mostly. They mostly call me in the night, the fishermen - they fish all day and they call all night, but that's all right, I don't mind. One of the big things is the workers' compensation that these small independent fishermen have to pay.
A few years back, before the groundfishery collapsed, most inshore fishermen, they fish with two persons aboard the boat, and that brought them under this Workers' Compensation rule of three persons or more, but as the groundfishery got scarcer, more
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people - and I had done it myself, I took a couple of extra people aboard that boat just to create a job for them, you know, a make-work position for a lot of them, just to have them at work, in the lobster industry especially - these past two years, a lot of the fellows are saying, especially this past year because of the downturn in the market of the lobster, a lot of these fishermen owners are saying to their third and fourth men, you have to go, I cannot afford to keep you anymore.
They are paying $7 on the $100 now for workers' compensation they are telling us, and I was at a meeting where I was told that this could go to $12 by the year 2015 or whatever. It's quite a hefty insurance for one you can go to a private sector and get it for $300 a year per person - even better coverage. That is what a lot of fishermen have, they have workers' compensation and they have the private - even the ones with two people aboard have the private. It costs them $650 a year for coverage, and it doesn't matter if they're home in the kitchen and they fall down, where workers' compensation only seems to cover them aboard the boat for the few hours a day they're there.
They're fishing alongside New Brunswick boats, and this insurance in New Brunswick doesn't kick in until twenty-five people or more are involved in a fishing industry, which seems to me that's getting into the offshore sector when you're talking that big a crew aboard a boat of any kind.
I think at one time the inshore sector was separate from the offshore sector and somehow the Workers' Compensation Board put that together, they combined them, the inshore and the offshore sector, so that made the inshore sector pay more of the bill for the offshore - that's what I'm being told by the inshore sector anyway. There's quite a little controversy, you know, and it's a shame that there's a lot of them going back to the two people aboard a boat and letting that third and fourth person go.
Some of it, not all of it, but some of it has to do with this rising price of workers' compensation and then Workers' Compensation is saying, well you're having a lot of accidents so your fee, your premium, is going up. But you can talk to any inshore fisherman down there and they don't seem to know of anybody around who has been hurt aboard these boats - they seem to be hurt more in the fish plants, run over with a forklift. The odd one that does go over the stern of a boat out there usually doesn't come back, but there are not too many, you know, who are hurt enough - we don't know of anybody who is hurt too much and laid up from the inshore sector, the inshore 45- feet-and-under sector, and I'm not even talking midshore, 45 feet and up, or the 100-footers, I'm talking the inshore sector.
So it's quite a thing and if you go down along there and you mention Workers' Compensation, watch out, because they'll throw a buoy at you or something. So, anyway, has the department checked into this to see all the faults this has for that small inshore fishing sector of this province?
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MR. PARENT: That same issue has been raised by a colleague of yours, the member for Shelburne I believe, feeling that the categorization was not helpful and I've asked that to be looked at. However, I guess there are many different things that one can say about Workmens' Compensation and I'll answer in a rather scattered approach, but hopefully one that touches upon all the issues you've raised.
To begin with, just your comment about fishermen phoning, or fishers phoning at night, with my experience as well I remember when I was just newly elected, in 1999, and Dr. John Hamm at the time had made a comment about the indigenous lobster fishery that maybe wouldn't be allowed to open and somehow that came out that all lobster fisheries wouldn't be allowed to open. My lobster fishery was about to open at that time and so they phoned me repeatedly every 15 minutes - starting at 3:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. - I was the only MLA they had the phone number for, all the others were wise enough to have unlisted numbers at that time or call display. So I do have some experience that fishers like to phone at night and my sympathies are with you because I know you work hard all day and have them phoning at night as well.
[2:30 p.m.]
On the Workmens' Compensation Board and the three- person rule, there has been some pressure actually that there shouldn't be any limit, that everyone should be covered, and smaller industries, bed and breakfasts in particular, have been very resistant to that. So I would say that compared to New Brunswick, where they have a larger limit, that we actually have a better situation in Nova Scotia where workers are protected because while there may be frustrations with the Workers' Compensation Board, it's in place to help workers and to make sure that workers who are injured have some form of financial support. It's a devastating experience to be injured on the job and not to have any financial help, to be the main or maybe even the sole breadwinner for the family, it throws a family into tremendous problems. So I would argue that in spite of the frustrations that employers have with the Workmen's Compensation Board that we are very lucky to have such a system.
Not that long ago, the Workmen's Compensation Board, some of the larger industries were claiming it was broke, they were going to pull out of it. We were faced with a strong crisis of legitimacy in the WCB and we have worked back from that in large part by moving to a new governance model that put both employers and employees, representatives from each, on that board because there is a vested interest for employers and also for employees in that they both want the system to work well. The employer wants to pay as little as he or she can and get the most out of it and the employee wants to get the maximum benefits, but both of them want the system to work well because both of them want protection there for their employees if they are employer, and for themselves if they are an employee.
The WCB rate is based upon two things, that's the category they are in and those categories by and large are - in fact more than by and large, those categories are categories
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that are looked at in conjunction with provinces and jurisdictions across Canada, and so the categories are fairly standard across the country, and then the accident rate for that particular category. So if the category has a higher than normal accident rate, that drives the payments up.
To differentiate between inshore and offshore and fish plants, to get it fine-tuned is very difficult. In response to questions from the member of the New Democratic Party, I have promised to look at it. The WCB basically is a self-governing board and so the best I could do at that stage would be to write them and ask them if this categorization is correct. But I continually get comments from employers wanting to be put in a different category. Trenton Works, for example, that is one of the issues that they have raised. Their category, they say, is their own category and therefore they have to pay higher payments than they should, and when I investigate I find oftentimes that really the issue is that they have a high accident rate.
So we have been working with the WCB to try to move toward prevention, to help companies realize that if they prevent accidents that the rates will come down. There is a direct financial benefit to the employer, plus the more important benefit that their employee doesn't get injured, which is, I assume, their main concern, rather than the financial cost.
We have been successful. The WCB in Nova Scotia has the lowest rates for employees and the highest rates for employers. So clearly things were not good there and that's why we instituted this new governance model in response to a lot of concern in the province about the efficacy of the WCB. I am pleased to say that the unfunded liability of WCB has come down substantially - over the last year I think it has come down $30 million or $40 million. As a result of that, the WCB is coming close to a position where it can begin to pass some of those benefits on to both employees and employers alike.
So I foresee, if they stay on the same track, that we will see rates go down, not dramatically, and benefits go up - not dramatically again - but the situation is moving in the right direction. I would again argue, and I know it's difficult for employers, that it actually is a benefit to have your workers protected as opposed to New Brunswick where the limit is twenty-five - that would exclude most of the companies in Nova Scotia, really, and it would become just a system supporting larger corporations, and we want to protect as many workers as we can. So that is the rationale behind our policy.
Certainly I will get back to the member because I know your main question is about should the inshore be categorized with the offshore. Those categorizations, as I said, are done in conjunction with provinces across Canada, so they are not arbitrary in that sense.
MR. THERIAULT: I can see what you are saying, but I will tell you what a fisherman is saying - $120,000 divided up between three livings through the year, of $40,000 each, they'll pay out pretty near $9,000 for that insurance which will cover them for approximately, average, seven, eight, nine hours per day. That, to some of those people, is a whole boat
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payment for the year - $9,000 - and they're each taking $40,000 out of that per year. They can go to the private sector and buy that same insurance - no, better insurance, they're saying, because they're covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for $900, and that's 10 per cent of what WCB is.
But you're going to come back to me, Mr. Minister, and say, well, they can't be sued if they have an accident. Well, 75 per cent of the inshore fleet - the inshore fleet - is family, or neighbours, or friends; they've known each other all their lives. My whole family, I have myself and three boys involved in my fishery; most of them in the community I come from are son and father and cousin or next door neighbour - nobody's going to go out and sue each other in the inshore sector. And that's what you'll hear out of a fisherman, if you tell your story, then he's going to tell you this back. But yet you're taking $9,000 out of that enterprise for that year - which is nearly a whole boat payment for a new boat - that's covering them for a few hours they're aboard that boat.
You can't teach anything about safety out aboard one of those little boats. They've known it for 15 generations down there. They've been beaten and battling it. Every day something different happens. You're dealing with nature itself as far as accidents go. Every accident aboard those boats creates a sea hitting you out of nowhere and flipping you half upside down - I mean, you can't prevent that kind of stuff.
This is what you'll hear from the fishermen, if you want to go talk to a fisherman about this Workers' Compensation insurance. It's a real sore spot. It's a shame they have to let these third and fourth people go out of these little enterprises, but it's happening because they can't afford to pay this $9,000 out of what they're taking in. Anyway, I believe my time is pretty much up anyway . . .
MR. PARENT: I'll be happy to respond to that and I can certainly understand the point that you're making, that our government-run workers' insurance program should try to be as efficient and cost effective as possible and we have been working at that. I'm not sure that I agree that privatizing workers' insurance is the way to . . .
MR. THERIAULT: It's already there . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has elapsed, it's 2:39 p.m.
The honourable member for Halifax Fairview.
MR. GRAHAM STEELE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm just going to take exactly one minute.
Clearly, the minister's department is very important. As a former employee of the Workers' Compensation Board, I could happily talk to the minister for hours about Workers'
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Compensation. We'll have to save that for another day. I just wanted to mention, and I'm sure it has been mentioned before - we're ready to move on to the Department of Energy and so although I'm sure we could find much to talk to the minister about, Energy is also important, and we're ready to move on - I just have one question for the minister, Mr. Minister, will you please, please stop calling it the Workmen's Compensation Board?
MR. PARENT: I think I called it the workers' last time.
MR. STEELE: Yes, the last time you did. It kind of goes back and forth. I know in the House you refer to it as Workmen's. The name changed 30 years ago; in fact, Nova Scotia was one of the first jurisdictions in Canada to make the change. In fact, you can still see it on the front of the building on South Street - you can see where it used to say Workmen's and they took out the "men's" and put "ers' ", which leaves a space where the old letter used to be. But I say that just jokingly, Mr. Minister, but many people, including for example Don Connolly of Information Morning, still refer to it as the Workmen's Compensation Board and we need to rely on the minister especially to make sure that you call it by its proper name.
MR. PARENT: I shall try - it's an important issue, I mean clearly, in language inclusivity, I've dealt with that as a church minister, very strongly. I do have problems with fishers and not so much workers', but workers' board, for some reason it doesn't roll quite as easily. So my apologies that I don't always get the name right, and I shall certainly try, and I think I did the last time get it right, and with practice, as I stay in this ministry for many years to come, as Minister of Environment and Labour, for many elections to come, I will get better in practice and I can assure you of that.
MR. STEELE: Thank you very much.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. The honourable member for Hants West.
MR. CHUCK PORTER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I welcome the opportunity today to ask a few questions of the honourable minister. I know you're busy, it's a big department and lots of responsibilities. I want to go with landfill sites first of all. We're very fortunate in West Hants to have a second-generation landfill site and I wonder what your department or the province is doing with regard to promoting or putting incentives out there - is there such a thing to encourage municipalities to go to all second-generation landfill sites, maybe sooner rather than later?
MR. PARENT: I appreciate your question and I want to thank you for it. There was something I wanted to respond to in regard to the landfill situation - but anyway, we all have second-generation landfills. All the seven landfills across the province are second-generation landfills now. We moved from a situation, in the 1970s and 1980s, where there were hundreds of dumps to 45 in 1994, and then the solid waste management strategy came into
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place in 1995 - I believe it was October, if I remember correctly. Now we have seven state- of-the-art, double-cell, second-generation landfills.
MR. PORTER: Just on that as well, with regard to these landfills, what's the life expectancy of one of these things?
MR. PARENT: The figure that was in my mind was confirmed by staff, that they're designed for 20 years, but that's a design with a certain amount of waste projected. As we've been able to lower our disposal rate - the highest or the lowest, I'm always getting myself confused, but the lowest in Canada - the life expectancy of those landfill sites goes up. So the one in Colchester for example, it was built for 20 years, but now the estimates are, as we've been able to lower our disposal rates, that the landfill might be able to service us and service the residents of Colchester for about 50 years.
MR. PORTER: And that's based on what facts, though - is it because of the amount, or should I say the lesser amount of material going in?
MR. PARENT: That's based on the amount of garbage that goes into that landfill site.
MR. PORTER: The recycling, the reducing, that kind of thing . . .
MR. PARENT: Increasingly as we take out the recyclables, less garbage goes in, less waste goes in and therefore the capacity of that site is not met as quickly and it's able to last longer, which is a saving for Nova Scotians in the long run.
MR. PORTER: With all these seven facilities, are they all the same size or are they different?
MR. PARENT: No, they're all different. They're all second generation, and to be second-generation landfills they have to meet a certain standard, but they're all different sizes and there are different ownership arrangements too, or management arrangements really. Six of them are owned by the municipality; the seventh is a private company. Of the six that are owned by the municipality, some are run directly by the municipality and some contract out, as with HRM - they contract out to another company to run their landfill site.
[2:45 p.m.]
MR. PORTER: So some kind of partnership or shared agreement - is that how those come together?
MR. PARENT: They just hire someone really who runs it for them basically, but they still retain ownership of the site.
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MR. PORTER: I see. Minas Basin, there's something in my area, as you are aware, and fairly close to yours, I guess, as well, a big operation - they move a lot of cardboard down there. Do we have any investment there right now - what is our interest in that particular business, I guess, in keeping that in a place like Nova Scotia?
MR. PARENT: Well, I'm a particular fan of Minas Basin Pulp and Paper - and I'm glad you asked the question - because of its environmental practices. I had the opportunity at Clean Nova Scotia, they presented on Minas Basin Pulp and Paper and I think their story needs to be told to all Nova Scotians. I mean, you know it well, being the member for that riding I'm sure, but I wasn't as aware of what they're doing for the environment, recycling cardboard, and they're a pulp and paper company with a difference in that no standing trees are cut down to feed them. They also have been active in the generation of their own electricity in trying to cut down on their electrical use, doing that through renewables and, therefore, cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The province has invested some money, money that helped them in terms of equipment, I believe, through Economic Development and I have been approached by Minas Basin Pulp and Paper because of the work they do on behalf of the environment, that perhaps there may be some money in the RRFB, in the agreement $9 million that goes back to the municipalities to help them with their solid waste program. I've responded to them that the $9 million is not an appropriate fund for that purpose, but that I think through Economic Development there might be some help for them because they are, in my opinion, leaders in the environmental economy, leaders in caring for the environment. They employ about 170 people and you have a multiplier effect on that and, as I said, it's a story that I like to speak about whenever I'm out of the province about this innovative pulp and paper company that we have in Nova Scotia.
So, as Minister of Environment and Labour, they certainly are a shining light in my department and we try to do everything we can to give assistance to them. That falls right now basically with Economic Development and I'm hoping that there will be some news on that front in the not too distant future.
MR. PORTER: Thank you for that. As the Minister of Environment and Labour, what do you foresee as the minister of this province for future projects? We talked a lot about clean and green, environmentally friendly. I mean I know that there are many, many aspects and there are a lot of variables that fall into that. I'm just wondering what you, as the minister, see this province doing.
MR. PARENT: I'm glad you asked that question because for a long time I've been thinking about the economic future, as all MLAs have in Nova Scotia, and particularly in the global society in which we work where we've seen a shift in employment patterns and a shift in jobs. The member for the New Democratic Party spoke to this but didn't give me a chance
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to respond about what I was doing on the labour side and the projections that we may have had.
One of the areas where I see a great deal of hope for the economy is in the environmental, or the green economy as it's called. A large part of this was accidental. I don't think the government at the time when they instituted the solid waste management program really foresaw - in fact, I know they didn't because I talked to the minister in charge and we've had conversations - that out of that solid management plan and other options we would end up where right now we have over 5,000 people employed in environmental industries with a payroll of over $340 million and growing all the time.
So I see that as a growth area in this province and I go to the book by Tom Friedman called The World is Flat, which is in many ways quite a salutary book when you read it, because many of the jobs - and we see this if you turn to Lou Dobbs, for example, he's always railing away about the outsourcing of jobs in the United States and clearly we have seen the same thing in Canada, that if we can't compete on wages and they can outsource this job, that companies are going to try to find that. So where you can fight that trend and we do try to fight that trend to protect workers here in the province, but you can also look at where the opportunities are in that trend.
One of the opportunities that Friedman talks about in a chapter after he gives all the bad news is where are the opportunities for economies such as ours. He talks about the green economy and we have seen that develop in Nova Scotia and it developed in many senses almost accidentally without being the primary purpose. The primary purpose was to take care of the solid waste, and all of a sudden in 2007 we realize what we've caused. So in October of last year I was down in Trinidad and Tobago, and we have a staff worker down there right now who facilitates trade missions for them and we are in the running, our companies, for being the primary companies considered for two tenders that the Trinidadian Government has put out for $5 billion for treatment of their wastewater and $5 billion - and this is American money - for the treatment of their waste.
So we now have in Nova Scotia, Jacques Whitford, one of the companies that works throughout the world on environmental projects, Neil and Gunter and many smaller projects. I foresee - that's why when the bill was brought forward it wasn't just a bill on environmental sustainability but economic sustainability - the environment and the economy, for too long, have been seen to be antagonistic. You could care for the environment but at the expense of the economy. You could care for the economy at the expense of the environment. We have seen - and we proved it in our own experience, so this is not just rhetoric but we have actually seen - that the reverse is true and that a small province of over 900,000 people can become world leaders in treatment of the environment, in this case in solid waste, and as a result of it create employment.
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In my area of agriculture, the number of people working in farms has decreased for the last 20 years solidly and when I look at that statistic, I can get very depressed. Yet when you look at the growth in the environmental industry from zero workers to 5,000 workers and growing all the time, you start to see that there's a shifting going on and there are opportunities here. Dalhousie has just won a research grant of $35 million from the federal government which will leverage $176 million for offshore ocean tracking, which is putting small little tags on fish to try to understand what's happening to fish stocks in the ocean and the technology to create those is now in Nova Scotia because of that. So you have created a whole industry in Nova Scotia which, because Dal is one of the leaders in analysis of oceans and of fish stock, are creating spinoff companies in Nova Scotia, creating good employment for Nova Scotians.
So I see that will grow. Many districts, of course, are talking about the green economy and want to move in that direction. You hear that from many different people, but I think we are positioned well as those already known in one area of the environmental economy as being leaders. We are positioned well to expand into other areas as well. In oceans, tidal is another one where I have great hopes that we can get in. I think what we did with wind energy, in my opinion, if we could move back in time, with wind energy, we were maybe slow in dealing with it so now we buy the turbines from somewhere else. They ship them from Europe. On tidal, if we get in there quickly enough - and that's why I've been pushing, I think that not only can we get a good source of renewable energy but the accompanying jobs in manufacturing, in consulting expertise will come along.
So it's a long answer to a short question but Minas Basin Pulp and Paper, I think, are sort of leading the way. C-Vision in Amherst is another one. C-Vision, in 2004, knew that the European community would be outlawing lead in electronic products, in circuit boards. So they said, well, if this regulation is coming down in Europe, then let's start manufacturing these boards for them and they were among the first in the world to do so. Just last year they were named Nova Scotia's top exporter in the province at I think the NSBI awards ceremony.
We have recognized that as a government. That's why we have a trade and innovation branch within the Department of Environment and Labour and we co-operate with and get money from NSBI and from Economic Development to further those activities because we see that as an area of growth that's creating good, sustainable jobs in the province. The facts speak for themselves, but really I do think we are well positioned in all sectors to take advantage of this.
In agriculture, for example, one of the areas that we have a competitive advantage on is that the perception of Nova Scotia as having a clean environment spills over to our hog industry, that our hogs are better than other hogs. So we are positioned to take advantage of a market in New England where they are demanding a certain quality of hog for health reasons, which will become increasingly important as people's disposable income rises, they're willing to pay more for food if they think it's healthier food.
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The environmental economy will touch all areas and prove, if I'm right in my predictions, to be a competitive advantage for Nova Scotia that will help us offset some of the job shrinkage in the resource sector. So I think it's important to state that. I'm glad you asked the question because it is easy to get very pessimistic when you look at forestry, fisheries, agriculture, for example, and the number of people employed in those industries.
We need to remember that those job losses in those industries are more than made up for in new endeavours - amongst them the green economy.
MR. PORTER: Thank you for that answer, minister. I want to touch on global warming, something we've heard an awful lot about over the last number of months, even years for that matter. Who are our partners? We spend a lot of time, I'm sure your department does and we hear an awful lot about it. I would think that obviously our federal counterparts are our partners, but are we working with other provinces that are closer to us here on the East Coast, perhaps the United States, along the Eastern Seaboard?
MR. PARENT: Absolutely. We have a very innovative regional approach. It builds, I think, in many cases, on the Gulf of Maine, which is the pin that I'm wearing here which was a very innovative approach that the government took some years ago. I believe John Leefe was the minister, or Robbie Harrison, I'm not sure, historically, of the Gulf of Maine, but what we've looked at in the environment is that we can't handle environmental problems alone, so this organization developed with New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, now includes New Hampshire and we may be looking at Massachusetts joining in to care for the Gulf of Maine, which is such an important part of the well-being, both economically and recreationally of Nova Scotians.
In the same way, on global warming or on climate change, on the change climatique, we've realized that we can't operate in isolation. There has been good partnership between Quebec, the Atlantic Provinces and the eastern states. We've worked together, I was at a conference where we put together several recommendations going forward to the Council of Premiers and Governors that will be held in P.E.I. in June. Amongst the recommendations was to adopt California-style tailpipe emissions, standards for greenhouse gas reduction. We see that very much on a regional basis, that we need to work at this regionally.
We also are involved with the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, working at it from a Pan-Canadian perspective. We're involved on two prongs: one is with the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment where I am active and where our staff are active on various working groups within the CCME, and then working regionally with our partners in the United States as well. Much of the greenhouse gases and much of the air pollution that we get is coming transborder, across from the United States. New England is getting it from the Ohio Valley as well.
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We know that because we've been able to expand our air pollution monitoring system to, I think there are 26 monitors now, it may be higher than that, spread out across Nova Scotia. Recently I was just able to get Cabinet support to raise the budget for that $400,000 and that enabled a couple of new monitoring stations. One's near Aylesford, down in the Valley and we put it there direct because it's monitoring transborder air pollution from across the Bay of Fundy, coming up from the New England States.
It's vitally important that we work, not only in Canadian context which we're doing and which we're committed to, but work regionally as well. We have been a model - with the New England States and the Atlantic Provinces with Quebec - we have been a model really in working regionally on co-operation in dealing with greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. We are modelling our greenhouse gas efforts based upon successes we've had in the past in reducing sulphur, nitrogen oxides, et cetera.
[3:00 p.m.]
As you will remember, Mr. Chairman, and honourable member, the depletion of the ozone layer, the acid rain, were huge problems and we've managed, by working regionally, to bring down some of those levels. We committed as a province but regionally we looked at the problem. There has been progress in that regard. The ozone layer is once again thickening and acid rain, although still a problem, is lessening. Some of our rivers are starting to come back. I was talking over the weekend to a person with the salmon fishery and they're trying to bring back one of the great salmon rivers in Nova Scotia. They now have the pH level up to 5.2 per cent which is, well, it's about 5.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent. Salmon can survive at any level of 5.2 per cent and above. So, regional co-operation is imperative.
MR. PORTER: Regional co-operation, I agree, is imperative and I'm just curious, I guess no matter what department, or what ministry, dollars are involved. How much money have we invested in these partnerships with regard to what you were just talking about, you know, regionalized?
MR. PARENT: I wouldn't have all the figures on that because Intergovernmental Affairs participates and Energy participates in these conferences. On the air pollution monitoring that I mentioned before, we're at $1.2 million now in our monitoring. I can get you those global figures on the cost to these. With the Gulf of Maine, I should have that figure right there because our provincial contribution is funded totally, I believe, through our department. So we'll get you the Gulf of Maine figure if we could. It's a grant we give to the Gulf of Maine. I just signed off a cheque for $30,000 so I know it's at least $30,000 to the Gulf of Maine, but on the climate change, the climate change action plan with the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers, that cost is spread out through different departments so it will be a little work to get that for you but I would be happy to do that.
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MR. PORTER: It's not all just coming out of the Environment Department?
MR. PARENT: No. On the Gulf of Maine, I'm almost 99 per cent sure that's Environment but on the climate change it's a combination of various - climate change per se lies under the Department of Energy. The figure that I have right now out of our department is $10,000 as our contribution, but there are contributions from other departments as well and I'll get you the figure on the Gulf of Maine, but I think that raises an important point.
If I could impose upon your time a few minutes to talk about this issue because there are many people who are confused, in light of the bill I brought in, and think that somehow climate change now is under the Department of Environment and Labour. This is the challenge that we have as a government, that the environmental issues - and the honourable member for Queens has raised this several times and her Party colleague, the Minister of Environment in the Government of Saskatchewan and I have had talks about it as well - that these horizontal challenges mean that we need to work across departments and if we didn't do that, you would have, as he once predicted, three departments in government provincially - Education, Health and Environment. So we work co-operatively with Energy, with Agriculture. We formed the Deputy Ministers Forum, the Green Forum that has nine different deputy ministers, co-chaired by my deputy minister and the Deputy Minister of Economic Development, to try to work in a co-operative manner to deal with the environmental problems that we have and to come up with solutions and opportunities together.
So climate change is still vested under Energy right now but is included in the environment sustainability bill that I brought forward because we need to work across departments to achieve solutions to these broad problems and increasingly what we're finding in government is that the sector or the silo approach of departments, which is the way governments are set up, is not conducive to dealing with some of the main challenges that we have. So that's pushing governments to be creative in how they solve and address these global problems.
Environmental health is another issue. We now have, in the latest budget, about a million dollar figure for environmental health - the secretariat for that, I think, is about $600,000. That will be vested; it could have been located in my department just as easily as anywhere but it is located in Health Promotion and Protection, but there's a piece in Agriculture, there's a piece in Environment and Labour, but the secretariat is in Health Promotion and Protection.
So basically the environmental health issue is another issue that touches so many different departments, so we need to learn to co-operate as ministers, we need to learn to co-operate as departments. That's difficult at times for ministers and for deputy ministers, whose careers and advancements depend upon their particular department doing well, to put aside
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their departmental perspectives to a certain degree in order to co-operate across various sectors.
That's what's happening with the environmental bill, so I just want to clear up the confusion that there is sometimes that climate change has shifted over to Environment and Labour, and it hasn't - it is still vested in Energy, but because of the same issue that the honourable member for Queens raised in the House we have to come up with new models that are able to deal with this, and basically there are two models out there: create a super department of environment that takes in every other department, which is what the minister from Saskatchewan felt would happen, or I've put forth an alternative model of co-operation.
It takes more work, egos have to be put aside, and communication is vital in terms of doing that. So far we're pleased that there's success and that we are moving forward in regard to this.
I was interested in, and want to follow up because the honourable member for Queens again raised the situation in New Zealand. New Zealand was the first country in the world to have a Green political Party. The State of Tasmania, in Australia, and the Country of New Zealand in the 1970s - although the first elected member, avowedly Green member of any national Parliament, was in Switzerland in 1979. I was interested in following up on New Zealand, and I don't know if I committed back then, honourable member, but I certainly will, to see how they structure their departments to deal with this issue, because the environment touches so many different - health, the economy, agriculture, and the climate change affects us all.
We're trying to create models that will get beyond the sector/department approach, maximize the benefit of that approach, which there are benefits, and yet deal with these problems that push us beyond our comfort zones. In the same way that it pushes us beyond our comfort zones in terms of departments working together, it also pushes us beyond our comfort zones in terms of political jurisdictions when you deal with these great issues, and that gets back to your question of regional co-operation. You cannot deal with these issues in isolation; what happens in other jurisdictions affects us in Nova Scotia.
The acid rain, most of our salmon fishery is lost because of acid rain - some of it our own doing, much of it transborder acid rain. So in order to fix the problem, we have to engage with other jurisdictions and we have to do that not only as a country that we're doing it, but also have to do that as a province, and what more natural sort of partnership than working with the New England States, where we have a long history with the Maritimes of co-operation with the New England States - many of the people in the New England States, if you trace back their roots far enough, come from the Atlantic Provinces.
When my wife died in 1999, the shop teacher at the Northeast Kings, a man named Gordon Porter, brought over a box. It was a box about this big - and I forget the name that he gave it, but anyway it was a box in which I could put things that were special, that
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reminded me of my wife that I wanted to keep. It was a box that he said historically was connected with Maritimers who went down to the New England States and they would build these boxes out of different types of wood here in Nova Scotia, all the different types of wood we had, and they would create this box, and when they went down to the States they would take their possessions in it, and the box would serve as a memory of the province that they loved so dearly and that is still part of their life, but also a physical reminder.
It was a very touching gesture on his part. He made one for my two daughters as well. I can tell the honourable member that it brought - and it still brings - tears to my eyes to think of the gesture. It was based very much on that old history that many Maritimers went down to the New England States to find employment, to work, and yet they took their love of Nova Scotia, of New Brunswick, of P.E.I., of Newfoundland and Labrador, with them. So to build on those relationships from many, many years ago to deal with the modern problems is something that we're trying to do.
MR. PORTER: Thank you, Mr. Minister. Just one other question - maybe two. You recently introduced a program with regard to reducing emissions. I'm interested to hear more about that - I didn't catch all of the announcement at the time. I have read a little bit about it, but I know you'd probably like an opportunity to speak to that as well.
MR. PARENT: Yes, it's the car manufacturers from Upper Canada who have been concerned about this and I've met with them. They've stated, I think, in The Globe and Mail that Nova Scotia is too small a jurisdiction to have anything to do with car emission standards. As I said in a previous answer, I think sometimes our smallness is an asset in today's globalized economy and allows us to be more nimble - certainly solid waste was an example of that.
The other answer, too, that I made to them was that we're not alone in this - at the conference that Jean Charest called in Quebec City on the change climatique, climate change, we made a commitment, as representatives, ministers, and commissioners from the United States, that we would encourage the premiers and the governors at their meeting in June to adopt such a standard.
The standard is, in our legislation, the California style, we didn't say the California emissions because we wanted some flexibility. So the California-style emissions really call for cars to be built that will emit lower emissions in terms of sulphur, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and in terms of CO2. B.C. employs the California LEP standard now and we fully expect that in June this standard will become the standard for the New England States, the Atlantic Provinces, and Quebec, which gives you a market of about 24 million people. California has a population of 36 million people - and that's not including B.C. or New York State, who are looking at it. In fact I understand that maybe the country of Canada, as a whole, the federal government many be moving in this direction, but even if they don't, you
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already have a 60- million person population, half of whom are in the car- buying age, a 30- million person market that is going to be calling for these style emissions.
[3:15 p.m.]
I made that point with the representatives from the car manufacturers, and I listened to their concerns. One of their concerns expressed to me, which was an important concern, was that one of the most efficient ways to deal with car emissions, which are about 26 per cent - not just car emissions, but transportation emissions are about 26 per cent of the problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but one of the most effective ways to deal with that was to get older cars off the road. I certainly told them that I would work with the federal government which announced a financial incentive to help people get older cars off the road, but we have some challenges in our province as well. I certainly don't want, as Minister of the Environment and Labour, for the fight against climate change to fall predominantly on the backs of those with lower incomes. So that is why, in this province, we looked at new cars and making them more efficient, and over time that will filter down as well.
But we will access the program. I made the commitment to them that we'll access the program to the best of our ability as a province, the federal incentive program to help people who might not be able to buy a new car - they have an old truck that's not that efficient - to get into a more modern car that is more efficient and is better for the environment.
This figure of 26 per cent of greenhouse gases in Nova Scotia is similar to the Canadian average. In Nova Scotia, about 46 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions come because of electrical generation and 26 per cent because of emissions from vehicles. The Canadian average is 25 per cent, so we're on average there. We're high in terms of electrical emission; the rest of the emissions come from buildings and some from agriculture.
MR. PORTER: What I did read was some of the feedback on this release that you put out and, keeping in mind you mentioned the word "challenges", do you see the goals and opportunities that you've announced, are they realistic, these guidelines?
MR. PARENT: Yes, they were developed by the team deputies - nine in total, as I said, from various departments. What we asked for was that the goals be doable, but challenging, and that of course is a fine dance.
I have had environmental groups, and they'll probably be presenting at Law Amendments saying the goals are not challenging enough; I have met with representatives from the electrical industry, from the automotive industry saying the goals are too challenging. I joke with our department that when everyone dislikes us equally, we've reached success. Because in caring for the environment, it is a balance. We have some saying
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the goals are too challenging and some saying they're not challenging enough and that gives me some measure of comfort that perhaps we've struck the right balance.
We have checked very carefully with all our goals to make sure that they're challenging and yet doable, because it's no use setting a goal if there's no opportunity of making it - but you don't want to set the goal so easy that it doesn't cause you to grow and move forward as well.
Some of those goals we will achieve and overachieve. Others, in my annual report, we will have to admit that we haven't achieved, but we're working at. As a whole, we are committed to moving Nova Scotia forward to have one of the cleanest and greenest and most economically prosperous jurisdictions in the world by 2020. I know honourable member that you'll be here as an MLA - I may be in retirement at that stage - and I know the honourable member for Queens may be here as well because of her age. But I will be in my retirement very much cheering you on when we reach this goal, and in 2020 I hope that you'll invite me back. (Interruption)
I still may be here, yes, with the bill I brought in - the Chairman is reminding me of a bill that I brought in in conjunction with the Minister of Justice and the Minister responsible for Seniors that would allow me to continue to work well past the age of retirement. I colloquially want to call it the Ron Russell bill, but you may be actually, some days, happy that Ron Russell did retire; other days you may wish that he hadn't, but (Interruptions) yes, Ron Junior.
Anyway, I do take that correction from the Chair that it may well be that I'll be here in 2020 too, and if I am I'll certainly be happy to celebrate, because I think we can do it. It is a challenge, there are times I've been afraid this bill wouldn't pass - and it still hasn't passed so I'd better be quiet - but there are times I've been afraid it would pass for that same reason, because it is a challenge, but it is a challenge that we can do.
MR. PORTER: Thank you, Mr. Minister, I think, for that answer. Very detailed and some comedy in there with it. Just one piece, you talked about the 26 per cent being somewhat in line on the average, but the electrical side is somewhat high - where are we going with the electrical to bring that down?
MR. PARENT: The electrical side is a real challenge for this province, and I met this morning with representatives from Nova Scotia Power. I tried to make the argument with John Baird on the eco-trust - which I think we have to use another word now because I understand there's a company that has title to that name, but we'll be making our announcement soon. I was supposed to be making it today but Mr. Baird's schedule changed, so we will be making it in the not too distant future for Nova Scotia. It's on a population basis so we're looking at a fair chunk of change there.
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What we're directing that to are areas that would help - on the energy sector - bring down the greenhouse gas emissions, either through more use of natural gas which has a lower carbon footprint than coal does, or through renewables such as tidal. We haven't really brought tidal on the way I'd like to see because it is a new technology and not many jurisdictions are doing very much with it. But there's a lot of potential - there's more water that flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy in a given 24-hour period than all the rivers in the world. It runs at enough speed that when you look at tidal energy on a worldwide basis one of the hot spots is the Bay of Fundy. At the conference in Quebec City, when Quebec was boasting about their hydroelectric power - their green power from dams - I said really the Bay of Fundy is a dam, that instead of flowing vertically flows horizontally. So I have great hopes for that and will be encouraging that. That is one of the areas that we hope to be able to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from Nova Scotia.
Talking about a big dream, if I may in terms of this, because there are big challenges. When I spoke to Mr. Baird, I said is there some way in which the funding, this eco-trust funding, can be pro-rated for the four or five provinces that have more challenges than other provinces. I received a no, but I'll continue to pressure him. It's the same sort of challenge that we have with health funding, where we have a higher burden of illness and the argument is, we should have proportionately higher health fund. We haven't been successful in that argument either but we keep trying.
In the long run I have a dream and the dream is that we co-operate with Newfoundland and Labrador, bring down their energy from Churchill Falls undersea to Cape Breton, then bring it down the spine of the province, pick up tidal renewable energy and then undersea, going in to the main markets in Massachusetts and Connecticut. It's doable, it's a big dream - I'll agree to that - but that would provide a guaranteed energy source for Nova Scotians. One of the problems with tidal energy is that it is variable as opposed to wind which is intermittent. It's better in the sense that it's variable but there is a downtime when the times change, so we would augment that with the Churchill Falls energy and then we'd be able to export down to the United States which are willing to pay extra money for energy than what we're willing to pay here in Nova Scotia and very willing to pay extra money for renewable energy. This is a $30 billion pipe dream - let me take away the word "pipe" because it is possible if the United States, in particular, and the world moves to valuation on green energy the way that we expect. It's something that I want to start talking about and encouraging people to dream about.
Currently right now, I have some worries that Quebec and New Brunswick are working together with the New England States and that Nova Scotia will be left out in terms of any sort of activity in regard to being able to find markets for renewable energy. So we need to find an alternative plan that will include Nova Scotia. I think the partnering with Newfoundland and Labrador is the ideal plan. When I talked at this conference to the New England States, there was enormous interest in tidal because they see it as a clean energy. They have some concern about hydroelectric energy in Quebec because of some of the work
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that the indigenous communities have done down in the New England States talking about the problems that creating these large dams have caused on the environmental footprint. In fact, right now the hydroelectric energy from Quebec in the New England States is not considered green energy, because of its effect on the environment creating the dams. So if tidal can come on the way I hope it can and the way that many experts tell me it's possible and it can be commercialized quickly enough, then tidal becomes a green energy which they are very happy to receive and to use.
I know it's a long answer to a short question but I want to be very full in my responses to give you as much information as I can provide.
MR. PORTER: Thank you for those detailed responses. I do have a couple of other questions. We have a great program in this province, the recycling program - the reduce, the reusing. We see that working very well. My question is with regard to what a lot of people refer to as the green bin or green monster program, in a lot of the rural areas. Do we, as a province - your department or one of the departments - have some investment in that? I know the Municipality of West Hants, just as an example, don't have the same program as the Town of Windsor does. I'm kind of curious about how that works or why it's different.
MR. PARENT: We set the standard, but it's up to the municipality to decide how to achieve that. Municipalities adopt different practices. I may have mis-spoken slightly when we had the discussion about clear garbage bags which the media, of course, are quite interested in and given the impression that we would mandate the use of that. That is not what we would do. What we would mandate is the disposal rate and then the municipalities would decide how they intend to achieve that. So in my particular municipality, we have a limit on garbage bags. Some municipalities may decide in order to enforce that limit properly or enforce that proper recycling is going on, they may adopt clear bags, which seems to be for some people, quite a controversial subject. I'm not terribly sure why but really that is the municipality that would figure out how to do that. Different municipalities have taken different models, but all under the standard and all recycling the products that fall under the recycling stream.
MR. PORTER: With regard to these recycling depots - your buy-back centres, your bottle recovery places - are those mandated by your department or controlled or do those also go through the municipality? So if I want to set up a shop in West Hants somewhere as a recycler, do I go through the municipality then or through the province?
MR. PARENT: You would go through the Resource Recovery Fund Board for that. The Resource Recovery Fund Board - I'm the sole shareholder of that, but it was set up as an arm's length organization from government in order to make sure there wasn't political interference in the running of it, in the negative sense of political interference. In terms of policy direction, certainly they look to the province and there is co-operation on that level. I'm not saying there is no co-operation, but they very much run their own shop.
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The Enviro-Depots are their responsibility and I have toured the RRFB in Truro and seen the map of where all the Enviro-Depots are. There was a concern to make sure that we have enough Enviro-Depots around the province to service the citizens because the honourable member for Preston has raised the issue time and time again - and I think he is absolutely correct - that we need to make recycling as easy as possible or people won't use it. They will just bypass the system and then we won't have accomplished what we want.
[3:30 p.m.]
RRFB supplies funding for the program through diversion money and through special assistance program funding for carts and with composting for composting plants, et cetera. So, very much, the number of Enviro-Depots and the geographical placement of those is the responsibility of the RRFB. I think there are about 60 now (Interruption) 85 Enviro-Depots. Most of those are now positioned geographically in an area where they can sustain themselves. We have, I think, a few that may be a little too close to each other and of course the problem is you want - this is a private business, the Enviro-Depots. They are private business people so you want them situated strategically in the mix of the population but also with enough population around them that they can have a thriving business. We've achieved 99 per cent. There are three or four that they showed to me on the map where they were maybe close to each other and struggling a little bit in order to make an appropriate business model work. We try and help them on that.
Some of the smaller Enviro-Depots are small operations and can only afford a couple of individuals and they're not robust businesses, but they're able to afford a living for the people. Some of the larger ones are able to employ larger workforces.
MR. PORTER: Obviously this is a good program. Over the years, we've seen a reduction in the number of waste going to landfills. We've seen education in schools with separate containers and the whole variety of ways to - advertisements, whatever that might be - educating the public. What's next in the step toward our youth?
MR. CHAIRMAN: You have 10 minutes.
MR. PARENT: The next challenge is to divert more things from the waste stream and I announced in Kentville just recently - we are the only jurisdiction in Atlantic Canada to do this now although I informed my fellow Ministers of Environment that we'd be moving ahead because we'd had discussions on this at a previous conference and I didn't want them to read about it in the paper before they heard about it from me - but we are moving on electronic recycling.
We're doing that in two phases, giving time for industry to move into this. The first phase will cover large items such as computer monitors, et cetera and the second phase will cover smaller items such as cellphones. We are the only province in Canada that has a time
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frame for not only Phase I, which is the larger items, but Phase II. There are four other provinces in Canada - or maybe five, I'm not particularly sure - I think there are four other provinces that have electronic waste diversion schemes, but we're the only one that has actually mandated a time limit for the smaller items as well. We are now in the lead - not only in the Atlantic Provinces, but in Canada on electronic recycling.
We estimate that about 80 per cent of these units can be recycled, reused and that diverts 80 per cent from our landfill systems. There are some parts that can't be reused and we hope to do some of this in co-operation with the other provinces in the Atlantic Region. For example, in Belledune, New Brunswick, they would probably take the lead because we don't have the capabilities of doing that here in Nova Scotia.
We also estimate that this may create anywhere from 60 to 75 new jobs. It's an industry-led program so the industry will be making the final decisions about exactly the pick-ups and who does the recycling, but we're certainly encouraging them to look at the Enviro-Depots as the place where the units can be dropped off. I've had conversations with the coalition of sheltered workshops across the province, called New Directions. They're a coalition of sheltered workshops spread across Nova Scotia and that's the model they use in Saskatchewan and they are very much interested in perhaps replicating that model here in Nova Scotia. They are talking to the industry right now and we'll be hearing the results of it.
I say that it's industry-led and it is. This is not our program - this is an industry program, but I want to also make very clear that they have to submit stewardship programs to me, as Minister of Environment, that I sign off on. So, while the industry is leading the program, charging the fee which is an industry fee and will be making the decisions, the stewardship program has to be signed off by the Minister of Environment. That partnership was one that was modelled in Saskatchewan and Alberta, to a certain extent, the same model we're using here, but I repeat that we've jumped ahead of other provinces because we're able to put a time limit on Phase II which no other province has been able to do yet. So we will be helping through the diversion of electronic products from landfills and that's a big, big news story. I can't express how big it is.
We are also looking at other things. The paint recycling is something that we got in place and I was quite excited when I went up to the paint recycling facility in Springhill. I'm chagrined to say, as an MLA, that there are so many good things going on in the province that really I wasn't aware of - this paint recycling is one of them. We have a paint recycling facility in Springhill. It employs up to 15 people. We take paint from all over and it is then recycled. It is sold under the name Boomerang Paints at half the price of regular paint. It's sold across Canada right now. There are only four colours because when you mix paint together, it is hard to then get appropriate colour separation but people tell me that this paint is as good, if not better, than the original paint.
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So instead of the paint going into the waste stream, being poured down drains or in the woods or wherever and polluting the environment, we now have it being recycled and we have created 15 sustainable jobs in Springhill. I have toured the plant, and the people there - there is a sense of pride that they have in their work because they know they are doing something to help the environment and created a product that we can sell. So as with paint, we anticipate with electronics that will also happen. We are looking at oil filters is another product. Right now the oil is recycled but the metal filter is just thrown in the waste. We are looking at how that can be recycled appropriately and reused and therefore diverted from the waste stream.
So we are working hard with the municipalities. In fact, I got a little bit of a smile, and I won't name the person who phoned me, but there was a municipal politician who phoned me who was concerned that we might be diverting too much from the landfill sites and therefore cutting into his profitability, or her profitability, I will keep it both sexes to keep this person, and I smiled a little bit because that, for us, was a measure of success. That goes back to the previous answer about how we are able to keep these landfill sites in operation beyond the 20 years because we are diverting more products. We intend to continue. Sharps are another thing. We are already doing sharps and batteries. So we intend to move as - it's a win-win, basically. Our main focus right now that we spend a lot of work on and we are pleased to see is the electronic recycling program that was just announced and is being rolled out even as we speak.
MR. PORTER: I know my time is coming to a close so I will just ask one final question. Do you know what the tonnage may be, and I will just talk in general terms, whether it's electronics, which is new, but we talked about paint, oils, everyday recyclables. What is being diverted? What kind of tonnage, annually, is being diverted in this province from the landfills?
MR. PARENT: I have that figure just at my fingertips and I forgot it. We think it's 4 million kilograms that will diverted from electronic waste. That doesn't include paint. We expect it to grow annually as electronics become a ubiquitous part of our life where it seems like we, you know, it used to be people just had one television. Now they have three or four televisions, two or three computers, electronic play games, cellphones galore, PDAs, blackberries, electronic units of all sorts and I don't see that lessening. I see people's dependence on electronic units growing. So 4.5 million kilograms of electronic product waste is generated currently and we will be diverting 80 per cent of that and that figure will grow.
MR. PORTER: What do we put in the landfill?
MR. PARENT: Oh, there is still lots that goes into the landfill.
MR. PORTER: How many tons going in? Do we know?
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MR. PARENT: The tonnage right now into the landfills?
MR. PORTER: Yes. We talked about what is not going in, I'm just curious if you know the tonnage going in.
MR. PARENT: We can get you that figure. We would have to talk to the various landfills about the tonnage that is going in. We are more concerned, as a department, on bringing down the disposal rate but we have that figure in the department. We will get it for you.
MR. PORTER: Thank you, Mr. Minister, for the opportunity.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The time is now 3:41 p.m. I'll call on the member for Preston again.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: I've got a bunch of different questions today. I've had time to prepare and you better get your Budget Book ready because I'm going to ask you some questions there too. I'm just going to make one statement and I don't want an answer - I sure hope that electronic recycling works as well as you say because you're going to be in big trouble if it doesn't.
The recycling of paint - we talked about this the other day, and I think it's a great thing. I know when I was on regional council, I pushed and pushed and pushed the municipality to push the government which they did do when they finally decided they were going to recycle paint. I think that was a really good positive move. I want to go back to tires again. You must be tired of hearing about tires, but there has got to be a better way of doing this. I know tires can be used as aggregate in lots of different places - we talked about this some before. I really think the Resource Recovery Fund Board has got to get a little bit more proactive with this and that really we've got to look at a way to make it economical to reuse this, even if we use it just straight as aggregate.
I know my colleague who was here before from our caucus was talking about tires in asphalt and I think that's probably an idea too, but I'm talking about straight aggregate where the tires might be potentially stored at all different places in the province that are close, to do them near a facility where they would normally have a gravel pit, or whatever the case may be, and then a machine go around, like they do with a crusher, chunk these tires all up in pieces that they can use as aggregate, and then move on to the next location, even if the Resource Recovery Fund Board owned the machine and did that. Has anyone really looked at that? I mean that from the standpoint of the Resource Recovery Fund Board actually owning a machine and hiring someone to do it, because then you don't have your transportation costs you used to have and one thing is for sure, we need lots of aggregate in the province.
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MR. PARENT: Yes. No, I've talked just as recently as Sunday with the chair, Rick Ramsay, about alternate uses for tires. I know that certainly the Resource Recovery Fund Board looked extensively at trying to find some way to deal with the used tires in the province. The honourable member for Digby-Annapolis has raised the issue of using tires in roadbeds. He has a kilometre stretch, and we're checking into that - a road, the South River Road I think it's called - where shredded tires were used and it has basically stopped the gravel from working its way down. There's one patch in the road he claims doesn't need to be topped up or the gravel turned over to bring it back to the surface because of the elasticity, I would guess, of the shredded tires that form the basis for this road. Certainly that's one thing I promised to the honourable member to talk to the RRFB about.
If that use of tires was economically feasible, that would be a win-win for not only disposal of the tires but also for the condition of our roads because we all have roads that begin to break down with traffic. I know I have roads in my riding where in the Spring, they're almost impassable and certainly it's something we need to look at. We promised the honourable member the figures from the innovation fund, do we have them yet? (Interruption) We have this information for you because that ties in with the innovation fund, doing proper innovation.
[3:45 p.m.]
I understand the honourable member's concern about tire-derived fuel. My only response I can give right now is that they would have to go through an industrial approval and on behalf of the honourable member, there is a concern that RRFB would even entertain this idea. RRFB, in my conversations with them, have commissioned several studies and they feel - and I'm not saying I feel - but they feel that scientifically the science bears out that these can be used with the appropriate kiln at a high enough temperature without causing environmental damage, but that's their feeling. I am not yet convinced and that's why I commissioned my own study. I know Quebec uses tire-derived fuel, in fact that's where the tires are going right now. I want to be rigorous in protecting the safety of Nova Scotians and their health, but I also don't want to be a luddite if there are technological advancements that have come along that allow things to happen that maybe couldn't happen before, in a safe way, I do want to, I think, be open to them.
This ties into another issue and that's the use of methane from landfills, and there are people telling me now - and I haven't done any study on it or commissioned any study - that the technology has moved forward so that methane can be recaptured from landfills and used for energy production and I understand your concern about tires. I certainly understand the position that your caucus has taken that this should not even be considered, that the decision should have been made that this should not be allowed and that the scientific studies are really superfluous to it. I guess the only response I can make is that I want to be open to the fact, while at the same time protecting Nova Scotians strenuously, but open to the fact that there may be some technological advancements that allow us to do things in different ways.
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So having said that, the funding program that you talked about - we will give this to you - includes plastic recycling enhancement, restaurant refurbishment, mats and swings from tires, which I know that you'd be pleased to hear. There was some money that went into that: pilot organic programs; wharf waste bins, to help with wharfs; many different things that the money has gone into and the figures are here, so in 2003 - I'm trying to look at the global figures - we'll have to add them all up. It covers many different groups: recycling of videos, how to recycle that properly; education programs; refrigerator coral, whatever that is, $5,000; a fluorescent tube recycler, for $8,000 - I believe that project is in some place in the Valley, where the mercury is extracted from the fluorescent tube.
So there's a wide variety of projects that are funded through that fund and, as you mentioned and I agree wholeheartedly with you, the more innovation we can do and the more money we can put into innovation, the better we will be. So with that, these are the programs and I'll pass them to the member, on that technology and innovation fund. But I will talk to them about making sure that we at least target, perhaps tires, for more innovation money, to see what can be done, because used tires are an enormous problem. In the harbour of Trinidad, they have about four huge containers full of tires they don't know what to do with. And they're just sitting there, a blight on the harbour really. And we saw it when we were down there. It's a world-wide problem. How do you properly deal with tires?
One other possibility with tires is to raise the environmental fee from $3 to $5, in the future and that would allow companies to perhaps be able to make a business plan that would be profitable in doing something different with the tires. I've hesitated doing that because taxpayers find that sort of onerous and yet tires are a problem because they're not an economic benefit as opposed to cardboard, for example, that we've talked about before, where you can sell cardboard and make money on the open market. You can't do anything with tires besides the odd swing and planter people put in their house and maybe on mobile homes using it to help keep the roof on, but basically they're an economic liability. All I can commit to the member is to speak to the RRFB to encourage them to use their innovation fund money, and looking at it just briefly before handing it to the member, that there have been projects in use of tires.
I'm quite intrigued with what the honourable member said from a different jurisdiction but from the same Party, Digby-Annapolis, your colleague there, about this one particular road. We're going to look that up and do some research on that because he swears what makes that road unique and has kept it in good shape is the shredded tires. I'll tell you, this honourable member here would be very happy if the tires could be shredded and proved to be beneficial in keeping our roadways in place, for two reasons: the first you can guess and the second is because our roads need all the help they can get. So certainly we will be looking into that, but there are three or four projects in that list you have seen that target tires. I'll encourage the RRFB - not that I think they need any encouragement in this regard, but I'd certainly encourage them - to try to direct money towards companies that come forward with good projects on how to deal with recycled tires.
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MR. COLWELL: Thank you very much, I appreciate getting that list. With the list, is there another list with that? I know when you're doing innovation that you try a lot of things before you get one particular thing that succeeds. I'm not looking here for witch hunt, the money they spent and didn't succeed in, but are there some success stories from those projects that are done that you can talk about, that the RRFB or the department might have put into innovation?
MR. PARENT: Yes, there are many success stories. The best thing for me to do would be to get the CEO of RRFB, Mr. Bill Ring, to share with you. As I said previously, the chairman of the board shared at the conferences at Acadia many of the success stories and I wish that my brain was better off because I want to remember those, but unfortunately I deal with the limitations God has given me and I can't remember all the success stories that he told, but they were quite interesting.
What I'll do is I'll commit to having staff speak to Mr. Ring to get him to talk to you about the various success stories because I think the list we gave you are all the money that is given out. Some of them were successful and they found out it couldn't be done properly because that's a success too. But you're interested in the ones that were able to be done properly, so we'll get Mr. Ring to give you a call and to give you some of these. Maybe I'll get him to give me a call too and see if my impoverished memory at my advanced age can retain some of it.
MR. COLWELL: Maybe you can get him to write them down for both of us so we can both remember. You talk about recycling oil filters, that seems to me to be a pretty easy thing to do, again because there's metal in them, there's steel in them, and the remaining oil can be taken out easily, and the separation of the oil filter to do that from my technical background would be a pretty simple thing to do. How far along is that project?
MR. PARENT: Sorry I missed the last question. We were discussing the oil filter?
MR. COLWELL: Yes, how far along is the oil filter project, because it would be one pretty simple to do quite frankly?
MR. PARENT: It's almost there. We're working in conjunction with the other Atlantic Provinces on it to get enough bulk really to make it profitable for a company. The filter needs to be washed and there is the rubber gasket that needs to be disposed of. In many of the recycling projects it's a question of numbers. As you pointed out, sometimes maybe we're looking at too big a number and we should be breaking into smaller. We want to do this on an Atlantic-wide basis.
The electronic recycling we wanted to do on an Atlantic-wide basis as well but we felt, as a province, we couldn't wait and so we moved forward on electronic waste, alerting my colleagues as I did, that we'd be doing this. I'm not sure if I created pressure on them, I
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suspect I did, as pressure has been created on them because of the stance we've taken on reviewing the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, because of the stance we've taken with our environmental sustainability bill, that I may not be very popular with my colleagues because it's putting pressure on them to move forward.
There was a commitment to move forward on the oil filters and we've got a study group on that, so we should be able to be in a place by the Spring/summer, after we've had talks with our colleagues, to move forward on the oil filter and the paint recycling program.
MR. COLWELL: Okay, I think the oil filter one would be pretty simple to do and if there was some small operation that could probably separate those because the metal is worth so much money in them now, as long as you get the oil off them, you can sell them pretty easily.
Another thing that I've talked to your department about sort of unofficially, over time, and it's an issue that I think needs to be addressed and it's not a complicated issue and it won't cost much, is the problem a lot of the construction companies, mainly the smaller ones - the large ones probably have engineers on staff who can look at this problem - and excavating companies and just the small contractors, when they're working near watercourses, I think it would be a great idea if the department would come up with a training program and some kind of certification program for people who have been trained in this. I don't think it would take very long.
When I say training - what not to do, what to do, how to fill out the application forms, what application forms are necessary, and it could even be done with someone like Wastewater Nova Scotia or some organization like that or directly from the department. I think it would save people a lot of aggravation because I know I've talked to many contractors and when someone calls them up and says, look, I want to put a wharf or something in on a lake, they just sort of jump back in horror and say, oh no, I can't do that job, and indeed they might be able to, but if they don't know how to do it, how to approach it, then they won't tackle it and maybe some projects don't go ahead that could be done, for whatever reason, and without difficulty. So the department doesn't have any difficulty either, so that's an issue because you don't want people doing things illegally because they simply don't know.
MR. PARENT: We're working in co-operation with New Brunswick on a certification program that should be able to meet the challenge that you suggested, and to do so in a way that reduces the paperwork burden as well. So that certification program should be going forward. It was started last year and it's a multi-year program to get the certification forward. So we are dealing with New Brunswick on that and we started last year and it's a three-year project, I believe, before we figure that the certification will be in place and that will meet the concern that you had but will also do so in a way that doesn't create unnecessary paper burden.
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[4:00 p.m.]
One of the parts of my department - it's a very diverse department that I have and an interesting department - in the budget line we're $34 million, yet we spend almost $50 million because the recoveries from other departments, plus RRFB's budget is somewhere around $40 million a year and the Workers' Compensation Board is about $40 million a year. So in some senses, when you look at just the budget item for our department, it's a bit deceiving - everything that is done, plus the variety of things that our department works at. We have pensions, we have fire services, we have Alcohol and Gaming, we have Environment, we have Labour, workers' compensation, Occupational Health and Safety, public safety. There are so many different things the department touches in its mandate and in the work that it does, and now I've gone on so long that I've forgotten what I was answering in your question. What was the question again, honourable member?
MR. COLWELL: I think we're wearing you down a little bit here. Really the question is, there's got to be a way to train contractors and excavating companies.
MR. PARENT: Oh yes, thank you very much, and that was what I wanted to get at because another really important part of the department that I don't boast about enough and really I should, it's really a cross-government initiative and this is tying into your question, honourable member, is the competitive compliance initiative which is the lead part of a cross-government better regulation initiative and that ties in with my response, because what we want to do is get this certification in place but to do so in a way that doesn't create unnecessary paper burden.
That's always a bit of a challenge but it is a challenge that I think Nova Scotia is leading across the province. We had a conference on better regulation here in Nova Scotia and I can tell you the other provinces are looking to what we're doing. We're the lead department on it, but it is a cross-government initiative. So in terms of the certification, we will establish that but do so in a way that doesn't increase paper burden. That's what I was trying to get at in my long discourse about the many things the department does to get to that important part of the department, which is the competitive compliance initiative, about $1 million, I think, a project that we're working on.
So we will have the certification piece, we've been working on it since last summer and it will be about three years, but we'll be doing it in a way that ensures that your concerns are met and yet unnecessary paper burdens aren't placed upon individuals.
MR. COLWELL: That sounds good. I think that would be something that's long overdue because I think sometimes a lot of these companies get themselves in trouble and don't realize they're doing it, and if there was some way to just educate them, I really think that would make it easy for them to understand what's being done. That sounds good, I'll
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wait and see if it's good when you come out with this certification. Hopefully it's not too complicated.
Of course that training would be done in the wintertime when people aren't working, right? Give them a chance to have time to go and take these programs, whatever.
MR. PARENT: We're concentrating on the forestry sector right now because it's off-season for them so we try to work with the various groups, using the time that is most available to them.
MR. COLWELL: Okay. There's another thing here that I've run across on more than one occasion, and the minister may or may not be aware of this but this is a workers' compensation issue. If - and I've had this happen to some people I've been working with regarding workers' compensation - if an individual goes in the hospital and has an operation, in the one case I can think of there was a knee operation and they operated on the wrong knee in the hospital, so the gentleman was not too anxious to go after the hospital until he got the proper knee operated on and got that straightened out because he was afraid of whatever in the hospital. But anyway, he got the second knee operated on and then he decided, well, they made this mistake operating on a knee that didn't need to be operated on, I'm going to go after these guys for poor practices.
Come to find out that he could not go after the doctor, the hospital or anyone for malpractice, or whatever you want to call it, in this case, because the only one who can do that is the Workers' Compensation Board - even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the injury, absolutely nothing to do with the treatment because it was a mistake, just strictly a mistake by the hospital. In order to do that you have to go through a long and lengthy process with the Workers' Compensation Board to get permission to sue.
This, to me, doesn't seem correct. I mean when it's completely clear of what the original injury was and the whole nine yards, and then almost for sure the Workers' Compensation Board, if something happened to that operation, wasn't going to pay compensation because the medical procedures failed, in an area they weren't even supposed to operate on. There are probably other examples of the same thing. That's something, I think, that really has to be looked at.
MR. PARENT: I'd be happy to talk with the member afterwards about the particular case. We can't name names here publicly, but I'd be happy to talk with him because it does sound like a legitimate concern. Maybe there needs to be some sort of fine tuning of the Workers' Compensation Board policy in that regard.
I would hope that would be an exception to the rule, that most doctors would operate on the proper knee, but accidents do happen and I know that in the district health authorities there's a push on now for quality control that would help to see those accidents lessened.
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Doctors and nurses are very busy people and sometimes in the business of what they do, don't always go back and examine cases that went wrong in order to make sure they don't go wrong in the future.
I would hope these would be isolated cases, but I'm certainly willing, if the honourable member wants to talk to me afterwards in private about the particular case, to check into it and have that checked into. I do know that the Workers' Compensation Board has somewhat of a problem in getting timely medical care for its clients. We've been working with the Health Department to try to make sure they do get timely health care, which is different from the issue that you raised of inappropriate care and the person not being able to sue because the Workers' Compensation Board protects workers but takes away the right to sue.
We'd have to check into that. I would hope it would be isolated, but I'd be happy to get the details and check into that for the member.
MR. COLWELL: I have documentation on it, so I can share that with you sometime in the future.
MR. PARENT: I would be happy to look into it.
MR. COLWELL: I believe I've at least talked to two people with the same problem. Not the exact same operation, but the same problem. I think that has to be addressed but, anyway, I'll get you the details afterwards and you can see from there what the issue is.
The Workers' Compensation Board is also looking at an assessment rate for companies, increasing their assessments on the fees they pay if they have a poor safety record or a poor return to work record. That was supposed to be implemented by now, I think, and I want to know if there are many companies in that situation that, indeed, have been penalized because they don't have the good safety records they should have or decent ones.
MR. PARENT: We can probably get you the statistics in global figures on that. There has been, across the board with the various industries and the categories they fall into, an improvement. There are some that have been problematic and the Workers' Compensation Board targets those industries that have had high accident rates and tries to work with them in order to bring their accident rate down. It's not simply a question of the Workers' Compensation Board sitting back and saying, you have a high accident rate so we'll raise your rates. The ones that have high accident repeats, trigger a process whereby the Workers' Compensation Board sends in people to help them analyze why this is happening and to bring their rate down. It's in no one's interest for workers to be injured at work.
I can get you the figures, but I do know that the overall success rate has been good. I was mentioning yesterday that the unfunded liability - and these are rough figures so don't
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stand in the House and hold me to them, I can get you the exact figures - when I became minister, the unfunded liability was about $390,000, it's now down to $340,000, which is not a tribute to me being minister, but it's a tribute to the work being done on the WCB.
That has been done basically through prevention and through prevention training. The Workers' Compensation Board has increasingly shifted the resources and energies into the preventative side. Everyone realizes if we can stop the accident from happening in the first place, then we stop the pain and anguish that the worker experiences, but we also financially benefit both employee and employer.
Those industries that have had high accident rates, the Workers' Compensation Board does not simply rub its hands and say, great, we can get more money out of them. It targets those industries in order to help them bring down their accident rate and the success has been good. I can get you probably global figures on the areas which have the highest. You can usually see that yourself though. There's a rate book that's published and some of them are high simply because of the fact that they're more dangerous occupations, but usually you can make a correlation between their rate and the occupation. But I can get you some of those figures.
MR. COLWELL: Yes, that would be useful and you already just mentioned in your reply about safety in the workplace. You've answered my next question actually which is good. Another thing I want to talk about and ask about is the minimum wage. I know we've been moving the minimum wage up in Nova Scotia pretty consistently over the last several years. I know it's a balancing act, unfortunately, between a business's profitability and ensuring the business survives and also ensuring the people survive. I don't know what the solution is because I see a lot of people, and I know it's all over Nova Scotia, this dilemma, you know, two members of the family working maybe at minimum wage and just can't make it. I give the people a lot of credit because they are working, they are not on the system and it's a real dilemma.
Is the government looking at anything to potentially make it easier on those people, maybe eliminating income tax, or making other services available that someone that's struggling like that doesn't have to face other tax burdens, or anything that would help those families?
MR. PARENT: There are many different things that we're doing in regard to poverty reduction. The minimum wage is one part of it, as you correctly identified, and we are the leading jurisdiction in Atlantic Canada in terms of the minimum wage being the highest. I would love to see the minimum wage move up to the LICO figure, which would I think probably be about $8 for Nova Scotia. On a federal level it's $10, but that's because other jurisdictions are wealthier than we are. So it would be about $8 I'm told, maybe a little higher than $8, and then to tie the minimum wage to CPI.
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The Minimum Wage Committee did an excellent report, put a lot of thought and effort into the minimum wage and the role that the minimum wage plays in poverty reduction, and what I've asked them to do in their next report - because every year they report back, this is a policy or a directive that started a few years ago - is to take a look at multi-year projections, if that's possible at all, and also in some way, some formula for setting the minimum wage that would be fair and would help both employers be able to plan ahead and employees to be able to not see their earnings diminished by rising inflation.
[4:15 p.m.]
In terms of the larger issue of working families and poverty reduction, we're working as a province on a poverty reduction scheme. Many people talk about Ireland as being the great example of poverty reduction and certainly the minimum wage is part of what they did there. They instituted a minimum wage which I understand they didn't have before. We've had it for many years here in Nova Scotia and in Canada, but it clearly saw, and I think the importance of the Irish model is that poverty reduction needs to be a wide orbit of economic development, skills education, literacy training, support for families of minimum wage, et cetera, and so we need to bring these together. Many of the elements of poverty reduction we're already working at. We have, for example, changed the system to help people who enter the workforce to keep their Pharmacare for one year. We have a transition allowance because what we're finding is that people were poorer off going off Community Services and going into the workforce than staying on Community Services, it was a disincentive. People who wanted to work and found employment were being penalized for that.
We have the low-income Pharmacare Program that's coming into play because, as I said, all we were doing was covering the first year after they went back into the workforce, but after that, if they had prescription plans that were expensive, most of them were, even after one year, not in jobs that covered prescription medication. Some of the costs of medication, as you know as an MLA, can be exorbitant - $200, $300, $400.
The minimum wage is important, but it's not the only method for poverty reduction. I think that sometimes I feel, as Minister of Environment and Labour, that people expect the poverty reduction to just rest on the minimum wage. It can't, by itself. The Irish model shows us that, the models in other provinces in Canada show us that. For poverty reduction to work, it needs to be multi-faceted and minimum wage is a part of it, but only one part of it.
The other thing is when you talk about minimum wage, there are some interesting challenges that I looked at in terms of the minimum wage. About 65 per cent of people on minimum wage are on minimum wage for only a year, but about 30, 35 per cent are on for a long period. It's those people I wanted to target, to see if that minimum wage - could we have a two-tier minimum wage? Most of those 65 per cent were younger workers, by and large, students, et cetera. Not that they don't need the money, but I have in my riding people who are 30, 40, 50 years old who have been on minimum wage their whole life. How can you
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support a family, buy a home, pay for a car, do all the sorts of things we take for granted, on that?
So I was wondering if there's some way of differentiating between these groups of people to increase minimum wage. The Human Rights Act, we tried before on age and that was proved to be discriminatory by the Human Rights Act. We do have a bit of a differentiation based on experience, but we worry that too would be considered to be discriminatory so we haven't really built on that.
That was one challenge and I still would like to know if there's some way that we could meet that challenge that perhaps for those who live on minimum wage their whole life have a higher minimum wage and for when it's just a starting wage and after a year they're on to something higher, something else, it wouldn't be quite as necessary. I haven't met that challenge yet, but it's something I'd like to work on.
The restaurant association has pushed the committee to look at tip differentials. I think in Great Britain they may use tip differentials, but we looked at it and the advice I was getting was that was fairly cumbersome. I still think there may be some merit in that. What I'm looking for are ways that would allow us to raise the minium wage for the people who live on it their whole life. A tip differential would mean those who work in establishments where alcohol is served might not get as high, the minimum wage would still go up, but it might not go up as much as it would for others, which would allow us to boost it for others a bit more.
The problem with the minimum wage too is that not only are you concerned about poverty reduction and about those who are working on minimum wage, but also employers. If you push the minimum wage too high, sometimes employers will say instead of having three employees, I'll have two. Effectively, you've created more poverty rather than less. It's always a balancing act in terms of the minimum wage of how far we can push.
An interesting phenomenon that we're facing now in Nova Scotia in terms of minimum wage, particularly in the HRM area, is that we have an economy where the unemployment rate is down so low - I think that the figure is around 6 per cent or below 6 per cent, and 5 per cent is considered full employment - that people are finding it hard to find people willing to work for them. That's driven, as the honourable member would know, by the economy out in Alberta which is drawing workers from across Canada who are leaving, and therefore leaving our companies here and our industries and businesses here at times finding it hard to get workers.
So the minimum wage in HRM, really we could have raised the minimum wage higher and it probably wouldn't have affected hardly any businesses in HRM because they are already paying that because they are in such a competitive marketplace. The trouble is, in rural areas of Nova Scotia, that's not the case. So, again, we looked at is there a way of
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differentiation based on geography for that factor and also the factor that it costs more to live in HRM. Housing is substantially higher, so can we have a higher minimum wage in Halifax Regional Municipality to compensate for that. But that's a very, very difficult task because while it's clear that between HRM and Yarmouth you have differentiation, once you start to get where is the border that you will pay the higher wage to, and if someone is living here and working there - it just becomes very difficult.
So there are many things on the minimum wage that I studied and considered. I did a lot of reading and my staff did a lot of work, and the minimum wage committee did an enormous amount of work on it and I'm still not satisfied that the minimum wage is being used as fully as it can be to help alleviate the poverty or to help Nova Scotians. Certainly my mandate to the committee - and I didn't tell them, I asked them - and they agreed to look at multi-years rather than just one year and to look at a formula I think will help to push us in the direction of using the minimum wage as effectively as possible for poverty reduction.
It needs to be part of a full orbit. It's a government initiative, but the lead agency on that is Community Services. I have said that I will do my part on minimum wage to help in that poverty reduction, and I know that the Minister of Community Services is working at the various pieces across government that need to be pulled together.
Ireland was a phenomenal example basically in terms of reduction of absolute poverty - I wish I could remember the figures right now, I studied them not too long ago. I think it was 16 per cent to 4 per cent. It was something phenomenal, and certainly we would like to replicate that in Nova Scotia.
MR. COLWELL: That's sort of a long answer - I can tell what you did in your previous life.
It is a complex question, and the trouble is if you put wages up it does affect things, like groceries, people in grocery stores working there, and puts the price of groceries up, so someone gets a raise, it doesn't necessarily mean they have any more disposable income for anything else. So it's a difficult thing.
I'm going to ask you a couple of questions here from your estimates and some of these are going to be pretty straightforward and some of them aren't. Looking at Page 9.5 in the one I got - so I hope the numbers are the same - it's Program and Service, and under Net Program Expenses, under Policy, I see you have a budget there of just around $1 million, pretty close to $1 million, $900,000. I may be looking at it, but I don't see it here - how many staff are in that section?
MR. PARENT: We should have the staffing. It's coordinated in another part - we will get to you on that very quickly. In the Policy division, one of the things, we have had staff seconded from other departments and particularly I think of one staff person from
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Agriculture who spoke very highly of the fact that we are able to do that policy analysis in my department that's so necessary, and he found that quite fulfilling. The policy is, with all the regulatory power - about 80 per cent of the regulatory power of government is vested in the Department of Environment and Labour, and so policy analysis is very, very important for us, not only for our department but to support others. So that budget of $1 million is the salary component of it. I don't know - we can find that, but there are 12 people employed in that division.
MR. COLWELL: What would be an example of the type of thing they would look at in particular, because there are quite a few people and it's quite a lot of money - so exactly what are they looking at?
MR. PARENT: A variety of different policies. We live in a regulatory environment worldwide, where we in Nova Scotia pride ourselves on having the most advanced regulations that deal with the safety of the environment and the safety of people. Those are our two main mandates: a healthy environment and healthy individuals - so policy in terms of elevators, in terms of workplaces, in terms of environmental issues.
One of the big things that we need to do on the regulatory side, and my secretary who came over from Community Services, having worked in Community Services before - an excellent secretary who happens to have a very poor brother-in-law, but a very good secretary otherwise; her brother-in-law may be less than perfect, but the secretary is a great secretary, my executive secretary, anyway, her brother-in-law is coming along, he's okay, he's not quite at the level that she's at, but anyway she is top-notch, I have to say that, so I don't want to hold her extended family against her in any way - but to get back to the subject of my executive secretary, she was surprised coming over from Community Services at the amount of travelling my staff does.
I have to sign off on all this, of course. Sometimes that travel is paid for because our staff now are recognized in many other jurisdictions - I think Manitoba just approached us and are paying for experts whom we have in the fire services. They're paying for it, but I still sign off even though Manitoba is paying, but our staff travel because they want to stay up-to-date educationally on the regulatory framework and have the very best regulatory framework for Nova Scotians. In part I think this came out of the Westray case where it showed that maybe our regulatory side, at least on the regulation of coal mines on the Labour side, may have been a little weak - but out of something bad comes something good.
So the 12 people do a variety of regulations and there are 12 divisions within the department, so basically it's one policy person per division, but we put them all in the Policy department for the purposes of reporting. So really each division, and I mean you've got fire, you've got power engineers, you've got alcohol and gaming, you've got financial institutions on the pensions, so really one policy person per division is not high. We're not a large department compared to other departments but, as I said, 80 per cent of the regulatory power
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of government is vested in Environment and Labour. So really when you look at government, and a large part of what government does is regulation, we've put it all in one department. We have 450 staff overall across the department, and many of those are out in the field.
When I was first introduced to the department and given a tour, there was hardly anyone to see. They had these little cubicles but they weren't there, and when I go out and visit their field offices for either OSH or for Occupational Health and Safety, or for Environment, a lot of them aren't there either. So I haven't met a lot of our 450 staff, but the reason they're not there is because they're out in the field doing their work.
So these policy people are support to them, each division basically needing one policy person, although we get the efficiency of having the policy people working together - so cross trade.
Now, the honourable member mentioned that he can tell my previous background because of my willingness to - but I want to give full answers so that the honourable member has a full picture of the department.
[4:30 p.m.]
MR. COLWELL: I appreciate that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: You have 10 more minutes.
MR. COLWELL: Thank you. I'm going to ask you sort of a different question this time. When it was brought up, and I'm Chairman of the Human Resources Committee and we do the appointments of course for the province - we rubber-stamp them, I should say, we don't do them - the boards and commissions, one issue that has been brought up by several members on the committee is how do you choose what you pay the different people on the different boards, how is that done? I know you have quite a few of them here that are under your responsibility - how is the compensation for these boards established? Some boards get some reimbursement for travel, some get none, and some get funds for actually serving on the board, plus expenses - it's all over the map.
We've been having a great deal of trouble - not us, but the government - attracting people. There are very few people applying for these positions on the boards, so it makes it very difficult for the government and it's not good for our committee either because we like to see a broader selection of the population being involved in helping make policy for the people of Nova Scotia.
MR. PARENT: It's a good question. I'll just answer generally and then bring it down to my department. When I was Chairman of Human Resources for two years under a previous government - Dr. John Hamm was Premier at the time - I too asked myself the
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question. For example, particularly our health boards - we pay no honorarium for people who serve on health boards and yet the workload and the responsibility they have is very big.
I'm not sure across government there has been that analysis and that standardization - a lot of it just arose historically in a piecemeal fashion.
In our particular department, I think there is more a systematized approach than across government, in part because we're the regulatory arm of government, or the main regulatory arm of government and we have 25 boards and 260 people serving on them, so a large part of the agencies, boards and commissions falls under the control of the department. But many of those are what are known as "Kaiser appointments" and many of those are appointments where they represent certain pipefitters, gas fitters, certain trades - we don't have a lot of flexibility, and we're mandated by legislation to have a representative from this trade and from that trade, an employee representative, an employer representative.
I've looked at the honorariums and expenses in some of the boards that are under us - as I say, we have 25 with 260 people, so I can't claim to have looked at all of them, but some of them are a result of the workload. For example, labour relations is a very, very onerous workload and so the compensation for the labour relations is higher and the skill set that's needed is higher.
We still have the complaints, and we're looking for a new chairman and vice-chairman of the Workers' Compensation Board. In the first round of interviews, the committee - which is two employee representatives and two employer representatives, two from the Workers' Compensation Board currently and two outside individuals - the first go-round, they concluded they could not get a new chairman because the honorarium for the chairman is $50,000 and for the vice-chairman is about $25,000, with the expense money. They felt that was far too low and the feedback they were getting from individuals they approached was that was just too low.
I responded that while it may be too low, that was all we could afford as government at this stage, and gave them some help in terms of providing and paying for an executive search professional. They have gone back out and instead of just taking applications, they've actually, I guess, targeted individuals they think would be helpful. To my delight, the last report I had from them, they feel they have a quality of individual, that they'll be able to put certain names before me. They have to do at least two names, which there are two positions, but I said I'd prefer to have a little bit of choice, if possible, although I respect the work they had done.
We have been successful in attracting people in spite of the fact that the workload we give to board members and the honorarium we give is considered by the search committee to be too low. So the variation is oftentimes in terms of the skill set or the amount of time, and I think my department, the rationalization of that is probably more objective . . .
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MR. CHAIRMAN: You have 5 minutes.
MR. PARENT: . . . than other departments. It may be something that we need to look at within our department; it's certainly something we need to look at within government.
MR. COLWELL: I'm scared now - I've got five minutes left and you will give me a five-minute answer.
I'm going to ask another question about environmental and natural areas management. I notice there's a write-up here on what it does, but you have a lot of money in that budget - about $7 million, almost $8 million. What do the staff there really do and how many staff do you have there, number one - it must be quite a few for that kind of budget - and I know I'm going to get a long answer on this one.
MR. PARENT: We have 72 staff in that department. We have also, this past year, $1 million of that budget was actually used to procure land to help add to our protected areas. We have set a goal. It was set a while ago, but we have been more vigorous in speaking about it and, with the support of the various Parties, that goal will actually go into legislation of 12 per cent, a minimum being protected by the year 2015. So part of the money this year, $1 million of that budget was used actually to help procure land, but we have 71.9 - how do we get a 0.9 of a staff person? - anyway, we have roughly 72 staff people in that division.
MR. COLWELL: I think this land acquisition for protected areas is behind schedule - that was really set some years ago by the government I served in. I think it has become more and more important as we see more and more issues with our environment, and any time we can protect an area, as taxpayers, I think it gives us green areas that we know won't be built on and won't be abused. It might be abused otherwise - not saying that people in Nova Scotia abuse land.
One important question I have to ask - and I want this on the record, and I know what the answer is, but I just want it on the record - will there be any harvesting of trees in these protected areas?
MR. PARENT: No, in fact that's one of the reasons why people come to us. We have, with two game sanctuaries, right now people are coming to us saying we would like you to change them over to protected areas, because if they are protected the trees can't be harvested on them. The Blandford Game Sanctuary, there are individuals who are concerned about that, who have approached the department, and the Chignecto Game Sanctuary.
MR. COLWELL: I have seen that first-hand with the Liscomb Game Sanctuary, where the place basically looks like a war zone - almost every tree has been flattened, and the ones they missed the first time they came back and got the second time, and the ones they missed the second time they came back and just wiped them all out. That's supposed to be
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a wildlife preserve and I don't know whatever possessed anyone to let them cut the trees there, or at least if it would have been even a managed harvest - taking certain-sized trees in certain areas over a long period of time so you didn't see the forest disappear - that might have been acceptable, but the way it is, and I have spent quite a bit of time in that area, I finally gave up. I sport fish and I just stopped going there because it was so terrible.
You don't see wildlife. At one time you would see deer and other wildlife there. You don't see them anymore because there's no place for them to hide and it's supposed to be a game preserve. Is that one of the areas you're looking at?
MR. PARENT: We hope to be able, on the Blandford - my department has analyzed the land, there are some sensitive - we found lichen there that's very unique. It is ecologically sensitive land and we have made that recommendation to DNR, which are the ones who do the land acquisition, by and large, so we're waiting to hear from DNR.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time has expired. Do you want to finish your answer?
MR. PARENT: Well, I'd like to, if that's possible.
MR. COLWELL: I would like the answer too, please.
MR. PARENT: So we're waiting to hear from DNR but we expect Blandford to become a protected area.
On the Chignecto, that's much more of a preliminary discussion at this stage. We would need to examine the Chignecto; simply because a group wants an area to become protected doesn't mean it will be protected. It is protected if it's ecologically unique in some way or has vegetation or something that makes it unique, and Blandford qualifies. In Chignecto we haven't really begun that analysis yet. There may have been some preliminary work, but I've just met with the group that came and right now they're not asking that group for protection, what they're asking for is a moratorium on clear-cutting in Chignecto, so that really falls under DNR.
On Blandford they are asking for protection. We have done our analysis on the land, we do a recommendation. Our analysis is that there is ecologically sensitive land that's worthy of protection, and DNR is now back with that recommendation and working on it.
MR. COLWELL: If I just may say something. In Liscomb you might find endangered tree harvesters because there are no trees left.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, and I'll call on the minister now for his closing comments.
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MR. PARENT: Yes, well, I could go on very fulsomely about the department, as I have stated in answers to various questions. It's a fascinating department, the staff is top-rate, first-rate. I'm very honoured to be the minister of the department. We have so many different divisions, the Alcohol and Gaming Division and as the member now knows, a big challenge in that and a big project that the Alcohol and Gaming Division will undertake.
We have the fire services, the power engineers, Environment, Labour - the Workers' Compensation Board is an agency that reports to us and the RRFB and pensions, a growing field of interest in pensions. We've covered many of those topics and I have been grateful for the variety of questions that have been asked to me and I think the variety of questions illustrates the complexity of the department that we have because we've talked about everything from pensions and the solvency issue with pensions, to labour issues - we haven't really touched on alcohol and gaming issues, but there are many things under there that we could have discussed.
The member from the New Democratic Party spoke a lot about labour and felt that we hadn't moved as aggressively on labour as we have on the environment. I would like, on the record, to disagree, time didn't allow that opportunity before but four bills have been brought forward in the last session and this past year four bills, one protection of reservists, the other is for rest breaks which should have been done long ago, I admit, but hasn't. Then we also had a change in pensions so that people can access their pensions if they prove certain hardship. I forget the fourth bill that was brought in.
[4:45 p.m.]
Then we also have put in, in the expedited arbitration, fair representation in this budget, $400,000 and $100,000 in the pension side to protect and to help with people's pensions, which falls under the Labour part of my department.
I would agree with the honourable member when she said we need to look at the Labour Code as a whole, but all provinces have been waiting until the Arthurs report came through where he looked at the federal Labour Code and he has just finished his work, reported at our annual meeting of territorial ministers and First Ministers and the federal minister. We're studying that Arthurs report and, based on that, looking at our own labour standards as well. It may well be that the time has come, or is coming soon, to take a comprehensive look at that in light of the Arthurs report.
We have moved aggressively on bills that protect workers, we've moved on the minimum wage - oh, the fourth bill that we brought in was the protection of retail workers in retail industry that normally were exempt from working on Sunday, so that was a new bill that we brought in. We're very aggressive with bills, about $500,000 extra in this budget, so on the labour side of the department we are as aggressive as we are on the environmental side. Clearly because of public opinion the environmental side of the department gets a lot
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of attention by Opposition members and by the press but I do want to, on the record, disagree with those comments that the honourable member said - and there wasn't enough time, time ran out on her comments - on the lack of work being done on the labour side of the department.
I'm very, very pleased and proud of those who work in Labour, our Occupational Health and Safety Division. Jim LeBlanc, the director, is renowned throughout the province. Whenever I go to speak at safety conferences, his experience is mentioned as one of the great assets of the province.
I think the proof of that is in a bill that I brought in respecting undersea coal mines that would help see the regulatory framework so there wasn't any confusion in who would be the regulator in order to provide utmost safety to people who worked in the underground coal mines - in particular we're looking at the Donkin mine here. It was very clear from both staff and from the company, Xstrata, which is a world company, that the regulations in Nova Scotia were far more advanced than the federal regulations on coal mining. So I think that while I'll always accept the challenge that we need to move further in labour standards and protection of workers, that we need to work very hard at it, that it's an important task of the department, I would very much disagree with comments that we've not been successful. There's more we can do, but I'm very proud of what we've done over the past year in terms of protection of workers and in labour standards, labour relations.
I also want to mention in regard to labour relations, that it wasn't that long ago in this province that one read in the paper of strike after strike after strike. You don't read about strikes very much any longer and in large part that's because of the conciliators that we have in the department who do a phenomenal job getting different people together to come to a common consensus that will benefit both employer and employee, and that's no easy task. Many of them work, at various times, 24 hours around the clock but have been very successful. When you look at the lost time due to strikes in the Province of Nova Scotia, I don't have the actual statistics, but the deputy assures me that we are now one of the leading jurisdictions in Canada in terms of lost time due to strikes, which was not the case, I can assure the honourable members here, that long ago. It may be worthwhile for me to get that statistic.
I do want to get on the record that on the labour side of the department and in spite of what the member for the NDP said, I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in the past year. I will admit that we may need to look at the Labour Code and modernizing of it. We've modernized it in a piecemeal fashion and I want to make sure that the code as a whole is good and maybe in the next few years the opportunity will come to take a look at that.
One of the issues that people have in Labour Standards that's common to all jurisdictions is the fact that oftentimes the people do not lodge a complaint with Labour
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Standards until after they've lost their job and then it's very difficult to determine the fairness of their complaint and the situation concerning it. That is common to all jurisdictions and we're trying to deal with that across Canada in a way that enables workers to lodge their complaint or their concern while they're working so that it can be fixed up at that time rather than after they've quit that job or have been let go and then it's far more difficult to find out the facts surrounding that.
In the field of pensions it's a challenge as well. I mentioned the multifaceted nature of our department, the honourable member mentioned that perhaps we should, as a government - the New Democratic Party member - and I didn't get a chance to respond to her question so I beg her indulgence in using this opportunity to get on record the response I wasn't given the opportunity to give before. I hope that's okay with the chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Go ahead.
MR. PARENT: In terms of pensions I have looked at a pension review. The finances weren't there to do that so we've decided to bring together experts in the field of solvency, since solvency seemed to be the number one issue in terms of various employers on the affordability of their pension plans to take a look at if we can find some sort of template that would help so that it's not being addressed in a piecemeal fashion. The bottom line as minister who has charge over pensions is that we also always have to remember that the pension plans have to be there to pay out for employees. We know in jurisdictions in the United States that there are pension plans where they're paying out 25 cents on the dollar. As long as I'm minister in charge of pensions I will do my utmost to make sure that's not a situation that happens here in the Province of Nova Scotia.
Also our staffing of that division, as I said, because of a bill that was passed to allow individuals on an individual case-by-case basis if they can prove financial hardship to be able to access their pension earnings. We have some concerns about that as a department, because we certainly don't want people to use pensions that perhaps they shouldn't be using, so we didn't want to move forward on that until we had appropriate staff in place. We now have $100,000 extra in our budget to help get appropriate staff and support for that and should be moving to proclaiming that bill basically in August.
I also want to speak a little while on the violence in the workplace regulations that we have. We had quite a long discussion on that and the honourable member referenced that in her comments to me. Again, I didn't get a chance to respond so I appreciate the opportunity that the chairman is giving me to get on the record my response to those questions. We will be announcing this week our plan to deal with violence in the workplace. We've had extensive discussions with employers and employees, although the Occupational Health and Safety Regulation really has a duty to protect in it now we're going to be moving forward more aggressively to help lessen violence in the workplace.
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We are one of three jurisdictions across Canada that at the Labour Ministers conference in Fredericton we're providing leadership. B.C., Ontario, and Nova Scotia are leading the way for other provinces, and all provinces are trying to do something about this. So I will be speaking more about that later this week, but that's something that the honourable member referenced in her comments. I'd like to get that on the record that we have worked aggressively on that, have a discussion paper out there, and are about to unveil what we think will be an innovative and effective way and strategy of lessening violence in the workplace.
On the environmental side of the department, again we have discussed that quite fully so I won't go into that with too much depth. I think it's fair to say that Nova Scotians in many ways are already leaders in the environment, but with the bill that was brought in that we will become known even more as leaders across Canada and throughout the world. With the Alcohol and Gaming Division various challenges have arisen in terms of regulation. We know that there have been violent incidents in HRM and we've been part of discussions on hours of operation, whether it's necessary to change those hours. Certainly we have out there a discussion paper on liquor regulations that we will be unveiling. We have had quite a bit of discussion. It seems any time you deal in the issue of liquor regulations, it's a very protracted and drawn-out discussion.
We hope to move forward on allowing people to record their wine at restaurants so that they can take the half-empty bottle home. We see this as actually a way of lessening the abuse of alcohol because when they buy an expensive bottle of $20 or $30 wine, rather than feeling they have to drink it all because if they don't drink it all, it stays behind, they will be able to re-cork it and take it home with them. That will lessen the temptation to drink the whole bottle when really all they wanted was a glass or two.
The big challenge that Alcohol and Gaming will be dealing with - and I will be making an announcement about this in a couple of weeks - has to deal with our review of the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation and the discussions that have been held.
So all divisions and fire services, I could speak awhile about that. One of the big things in fire services that we actually didn't touch upon but should is the need to buttress our Firefighters School in Waverley. I will be hoping for support from the members. We have put in, and a previous member put in significant money to help with the various parts but the Firefighters School needs a longer and more comprehensive upgrade and support. I've asked them to go back and rather than just coming forward with requests for $100,000 or so, to try to bundle them together with the request that would see the Firefighters School meet all its needs and move into a new aspect and phase of service.
So, Mr. Chairman, I can see that the interest is beginning to wane a little bit in the various divisions that we have and aspects of our department but it is multi-faceted. With that, I want to move my resolution.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Shall Resolution E7 stand?
Resolution E7 stands.
Thank you for your time.
We will recess to set up for the Minister of Energy.
[4:58 p.m. The subcommittee recessed.]
[5:01 p.m. The subcommittee reconvened.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: I'd like to call this session to order. We will begin the Estimates of the Department of Energy. We welcome the Minister of Energy to our session. We have one hour and three minutes left.
Resolution E6 - Resolved, that a sum not exceeding $20,261,000 be granted to the Lieutenant Governor to defray expenses in respect of the Department of Energy, pursuant to the Estimate.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable Minister of Energy.
HON. WILLIAM DOOKS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to be here this evening. I would like to introduce the gentlemen on either side of me. To my left, I have Bruce Cameron. Bruce works with the Department of Energy to make sure that everything is on tap and on-line. And to my right, I have Allan Crandlemire, Executive Director of Conserve Nova Scotia. Both gentlemen work very hard for the department and they're here to assist me as we go through this process.
Once again, it is a pleasure to be here tonight to talk about the Department of Energy and what we have been doing for Nova Scotians. First of all, as we know, Nova Scotia is blessed with a variety of energy resources. We have 400,000 square kilometres of offshore potential. Oil and gas production has already generated billions of dollars in growth. Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of natural gas springs up from the Sable project, each day, Mr. Chairman, and onshore frontier is also opening up. High-speed winds sweep across the province and 100 billion tons of seawater flows through the Bay of Fundy every day.
These resources inspire my deep confidence that Nova Scotians will continue to benefit from the energy sector and that our greatest days still lie ahead. We want to seize the opportunities that nature has given us, but ensure we do it in the right way. Our future demands it.
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With that in mind, the Department of Energy moved ahead on a number of fronts this year and I am pleased to report we pushed the Deep Panuke natural gas project further and further than any other time in the project's history. We have a signed agreement, a streamlined regulatory process and we expect a decision on Deep Panuke this summer, Mr. Chairman.
By signing this offshore energy agreement with EnCana, Nova Scotians are ensured direct employment for 830,000 hours. In addition, Nova Scotian companies are given first consideration for contracts in support of the project, and the benefits don't stop there. Just ask Laurentian Steel, which signed a $4 million deal this year to work on brand new technology for rig components, a deal brokered by the EnCana agreement. This agreement protects the future of our workforce by placing them at the cutting edge of the industry. To keep them at that edge, we need to provide the best education money can provide.
That is why, first of all, we encourage high school graduates to pursue careers in energy, with a scholarship program. Industry and government work together to develop homegrown expertise, offering a $10,000 scholarship to students pursuing energy-related studies at a university and a $2,500 award to students studying energy-related trades and technology programs through the Nova Scotia Community College.
Second, we encourage companies to provide students with energy industry work experience, with a wage subsidy program. In this energy training program, Nova Scotia companies involved in the energy sector offer work placements to students. In return, the government pays up to 50 per cent of the student's salary. Students get excellent work experience at a reduced cost to the companies that hire them.
Finally, our scholarship program includes research grants up to $15,000 each for students at a master's level. This grant supports research in the energy sector, for students in the earth sciences, business or engineering. Together, they create a number of things: one, a pool of highly skilled, knowledgeable employees trained in the energy industry; two, an opportunity for businesses to become involved in the educational process; and three, another reason for the best and the brightest to stay at home in Nova Scotia.
The offshore is not the only place these well-trained graduates may find work, other prospects in the energy sector are opening up. In fact, as you may know, Stealth Ventures, which has already spent more than $10 million in our region in the exploration stage, has submitted a development plan for the production of coal bed methane gas in onshore Nova Scotia. The potential scope for this project is large, very large. Stealth puts the figure at over one trillion cubic feet. We will have to wait and see if further testing will show whether the development of this gas is commercially viable.
While it is only a first step, it is a significant step in the journey to develop Nova Scotia's onshore frontier. Stealth plans to add to the growing evidence of Nova Scotia's
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tremendous energy potential. Now, when I say evidence and energy potential in the same sentence, in our department that means research. The Department of Energy is committed to research, we are committed to funding the science that shows off Nova Scotia's energy potential. This past year we've invested nearly $6 million to establish two new research associations to do just that. Their work will build our understanding of both our offshore renewable and non-renewable energy sectors. Research is a perfume to investors and to explorers.
Not only do we need to invest in research, we need to advertise it. Last year we provided a $1 million grant to the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board to strengthen their Data Management Centre. Science, innovation, and technology are coming together on the Internet to broadcast our oil and gas potential to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In that process we're taking our world-class R & D capacity here in Nova Scotia and making it even better. This coming year we will strengthen our efforts to market our offshore energy potential with more people and more funding.
While I have focused on our non-renewable energy sector, which has enjoyed an exciting year, even more exciting has been the growth of our renewable energy market. We all want to put Nova Scotia at the forefront of green energy innovation. It is a fantastic opportunity so let's take it. That's why two months ago I announced Nova Scotia's new renewable energy standard. This standard increases our green electricity generation in just six years to almost 20 per cent. It means more homes powered by green energy, large amounts of carbon dioxide removed from our atmosphere, and hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment in Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia Power has already tendered 130 megawatts of new renewable energy since the standard was announced. This is great news but we need to do more. We need to continue searching for new and cost-effective green energy sources. It turns out we have an excellent potential source in our backyard. We know that we have massive energy potential in the tides of the Bay of Fundy, we know that these tides - the world's highest - can generate 300 megawatts of renewable energy from just eight small sites, but what we don't know is if we can use in-stream tidal technology in the Bay in an environmentally safe manner. That's why the province is providing $250,000 for an environmental assessment. This work will help identify the potential impact of this technology on marine life and fisheries and many other factors, and also help find a good site to test this technology.
We are moving ahead on tidal energy to seize this opportunity but also to ensure we do it right. Seizing an opportunity but doing it right, that is our mission, Mr. Chairman. Not only does our economy depend on it, but our environment as well.
Climate change is becoming the challenge of our generation. We know climate change is real and it is happening right now. We cannot afford to ignore this threat. But if we meet this challenge honestly and directly, if we seize this opportunity, if we do it right, our
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best days are yet to come. Meeting this challenge and new renewable energy standards, renewing our energy standards, this standard, as I mentioned, will see 20 per cent of Nova Scotia's electricity generated by wind, tidal, biomass, solar and hydro, by 2013.
The department will be working with stakeholders this coming year around these targets. Meeting the climate change challenge continues to motivate Conserve Nova Scotia, the agency we recently created. Conserve Nova Scotia offers rebates and incentives on a number of initiatives and has already helped nearly - listen to this, Mr. Chairman - 9,000 Nova Scotians to save energy and money. Conserve Nova Scotia reinforced their mandate just last week by providing $600,000 to help purchase two hybrid electric-diesel buses for the HRM and Metro Transit. These hybrid buses reduce emissions, reduce operating costs, and are ideally suited to urban centres where buses often sit and idle in traffic. In fact, they use 25 to 30 per cent less fuel and reduce greenhouse gases by about 30 per cent.
I know that Conserve Nova Scotia will have many more initiatives in the coming year, including an enhanced focus on energy-efficient lighting. Over the next few years it is inevitable, Nova Scotia will move away from incandescent lightbulbs. The savings from energy-efficient lighting are staggering. CFLs, alone, save up to 75 per cent in energy costs. Saving money and lowering greenhouse gases, that is what I call seizing an opportunity. I urge you all to join in this effort. Everyone has a role to play to meet the challenge of climate change.
That's why I continue to urge all Nova Scotians to create practices in our homes, our workplaces and in our daily lives that contribute to the solution. Together, we can take Nova Scotia and make it greener and to do it in a way that sees our province continue to grow. A thriving province will always be our common goal. Folks, thank you very much.
[5:15 p.m.]
Now, Mr. Chairman, they were just a few opening comments scripted by the department officials and myself as we prepared for our estimates. But in saying that, I'd like to take an opportunity over the next few minutes and just talk in a general sense about some of the things that we're doing in the department, maybe a little bit more in-depth before I take some questions.
It was a year ago when I was appointed Minister of Energy by our Premier and to be quite honest, I met the challenge with an upbeat attitude. I knew, from that point on, that things were going to change. I knew that we were sort of on the edge in the province and said, hey, we have to start understanding some things are taking place, that climate change is a reality.
We talked about climate change over the past 20 or 25 years. I can remember being a young man in our community and listening to the older chaps explaining that our climate,
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or our weather, was changing from the old days - the amount of snow, the cold weather, the frost - but as we moved along in life, as we were educated, we understood that indeed it was a fact and the reason why, I guess the quick comment I could make is because of the amount of carbon that's building up, so to speak, inside of our atmosphere.
Mr. Chairman, in saying that, I know Nova Scotia has to play its part in reducing greenhouse gases. I'm not going to get too deep into this, but when people talk about climate change, they identify climate change with the buildup of emissions of different types of carbon going into the atmosphere.
We can quickly make reference to different companies that use coal to produce different types of energy and we can make reference to a number of other industries in the province. We also can talk about the gases that are produced by our cars idling or our commute back and forth to work. We can talk about a number of things that contribute to carbon buildup in our atmosphere. The point is, we can continue to talk about it, nothing really changes, the condition only gets worse. Each province, each community, each person can make a difference.
I'm not going to talk today about our federal partners in Ottawa, the position they're taking, I'm more or less going to zero in on the position the province is taking, being the minister responsible for the Department of Energy, of course, along with the Department of Energy's new agency, Conserve Nova Scotia. The main focus on Conserve Nova Scotia is to encourage Nova Scotians to be more energy efficient. In doing that, we cut down on greenhouse gases and we also save money, so I think people are aware and supportive of cutting down on greenhouse gases and especially supportive of saving money.
Conserve Nova scotia, as I said, their main purpose is to change the behavioural habits of people. Sometimes that can be very difficult. Sometimes people don't want to easily change their habits, but I can be an example of what I'm speaking of today. In my involvement as minister, I have made changes in my life with regard to energy efficiency. First of all, I know it must start in our own personal lives. In saying that, I have not completed, but I'm preparing to do some energy-efficient improvements in our home in the country. I make sure, of course, our vehicles are out to the shop and tuned up and the tires are properly inflated and all these good things.
We start to make some wise decisions simply by not only changing our light bulbs in our homes to energy-efficient light bulbs, but, hey, let's shut the light bulb off when we don't need it. Let's shut the car off when it's not necessary for it to idle. Let's not take that trip when we don't have to, or let's be very smart and make one trip instead of two. These are ordinary things that ordinary people can change in their lives at no cost, or very little cost.
There's information floating around that I mentioned in the House a number of times - if each person who owned a residence in Canada were to use one energy- efficient light
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bulb in their home, across Canada that would be the same as taking 66,000 automobiles off the road. Mr. Chairman, that's exciting news.
I said in the House the other night, what would happen if we were to change two bulbs and three bulbs? Well, Conserve Nova Scotia is promoting that type of change in people's lives. We have purchased over 200,000, maybe 300,000, light bulbs and have given them out at different home shows, at events and you probably see me passing them out to people to encourage them to take one home, try it, and encourage them to go out to the retailer to purchase more, and that is catching on. So we are doing promotions on small things like simple light-bulb retrofits. That's encouragement.
We are asking people to be more aware of the idling time of their vehicle and we have promoted a program in regard to that. So there, once again, little, small things make a difference.
Also, Mr. Chairman, Conserve Nova Scotia has put forth a number of programs to help Nova Scotians to be more energy conscious or more energy efficient. We have provided a program so that people are able to upgrade the insulation in their home so that in return they will save heat and in return that saves carbon emissions and this sort of thing. So that program is very much available.
We also have a wood stove rebate. A person can buy a wood stove that is certified and in return they get a rebate on that energy-efficient wood stove, and also, Mr. Chairman, we have this solar panel rebate and we encourage people to take part in that. Now just released yesterday, our federal partners in Ottawa have also now contributed some money toward new programs for houses, to upgrade their insulation, so that information has been released and you can get more information from my department. It's changed from our EnerGuide program that we had in which I may say, in absence of the federal program, the province stepped up to the plate and made sure that void was filled.
I can remember about a year ago when we had our program partnering under Smart Energy Choices - we were in partnership with a program with the feds to provide insulation and improvements in people's homes. They cancelled out, but the province picked up the slack, filled the void until just recently - they have now announced a program in which we are partnering with them again.
This program is superior to the program that we had last year because it clearly identifies now how much a homeowner will be able to save through the process. Last year we had the A audit, the B audit, and a homeowner didn't really know how much they were going to save or get refunded or granted by the government until the whole process was finished. Now the A audit comes in and will certainly give clarity on how much that homeowner will receive when they finish the process. So it's a little tighter program and we welcome that.
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I'm talking a lot today about Conserve Nova Scotia and I say to you that information is available. Its mandate is to encourage people to be more energy efficient, to change the behavioral habits of people and I must say, Mr. Chairman, they are doing a fine job of that. I have been very much involved with Conserve Nova Scotia. I have actually been a part of an advertisement scheme to encourage people to be more efficient and that has been very successful, and we got a lot of good comments about - and I actually go to the home shows with people and staff to give out the light bulbs.
I have been to Cape Breton a number of times, Mr. Chairman - I know that's dear to your heart. I have been there to promote different programs and always enjoy myself there in Sydney and other parts of Cape Breton Island.
So I think, generally, people are open and understand the need when it comes to climate change. They know that we can do small things that make a big difference. They need some direction, they need some funding, and they need some education - and we're providing that under the direction of our Premier in reference to Conserve Nova Scotia.
I have great hopes that we'll continue to do this. We have a very knowledgeable and very friendly staff over there. I refer different issues constantly to them and I must say, when I do that, Nova Scotians are having their questions answered.
In Conserve Nova Scotia we have a budget of over $10 million. This is an amount we feel comfortable with. As we create programs and as we're accountable to this forum here tonight to discuss where we spend the money, we feel that a lot of wise decisions have been made.
So $10 million to change the behavioural habits of people; $10 million to be spent on advertisement;$10 million to create programs like the old furnace rebate where we assist in helping people have energy efficiency tests on their furnaces and to provide funding for them to upgrade that - there are a number of programs, and I haven't stated them all. I do have them listed here but, as I said, I'm just going over a few things before we get into questions.
I want people to understand that Conserve Nova Scotia is there for that very reason. It's an educational experience, promotion. For instance, as I made reference to myself, I can be an example. I always have sort of been somewhat energy efficient. I'm very proud that I represent a once very rural area - I don't know how rural it is anymore, things are changing, it may be a little bit suburban now, but I can remember years ago when we had a bit of an energy crisis, I can't recall the year, but it was in the 1970s when the price of oil was very expensive and people in the rural areas went back to the traditional woodburning stoves. I'm not pleased to say that they would be energy-efficient stoves at that time, but nevertheless it was another way to cut the cost of energy.
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Energy is a high cost - not just to Nova Scotians, but to people across the nation and people throughout the whole world. Not only the issue with greenhouse gas emissions are attached to that, but the financial stress on people. It's very clear that we have a dependency on carbon fuels and we will have that dependency for some time because we must rely on that while we're exploring and developing renewable sources of energy.
In the country we used to burn our wood - and people still do. I have a woodburning apparatus in my home that, from time to time, I use wood to heat our home to help save some energy costs. As I said earlier, when I'm finished my renovations, I hope the cost of heating or running the energy in my home will be reduced. That would be my main focus.
[5:30 p.m.]
I feel that with the knowledge that's made available now by the government that people can move along and feel as though they're participating and feel they're making a difference. As I said earlier, people understand they have a responsibility and a duty now to take ownership with regard to climate change.
Climate change is somewhat different than our weather patterns. I'm not going to go down that road too much, but if you were to walk outside just now you wouldn't believe anyone's theory on global warming because it's not very warm out, but that's our weather today, not our climate. Climate and weather are two different issues and all one would have to do is some research to look at the difference between the reference made to our weather and to our climate. So I encourage you to do a little bit of research on that - and over the past number of years it's recorded that certainly climate change is reflective of the changes taking place on our globe.
There are a number of people, Mr. Chairman, trying to convince people about climate change. The thing one has to do is to look at the evidence presented to yourself, Mr. Chairman. A good starting point would be for you to purchase or to view An Inconvenient Truth. Strangely, as a good Progressive Conservative, I've been promoting that documentary throughout Nova Scotia through Conserve Nova Scotia and through the Department of Energy, where we've actually spent thousands of dollars and working with an agency here in Nova Scotia to go out to educate our children in regard to climate change. I also have sent a number of copies to each caucus, or at least one copy to each caucus, so that each caucus member will have an opportunity to view An Inconvenient Truth - and out to departmental people to encourage them to watch it and to understand that a number of our glaciers are melting.
Mr. Chairman, I've had the opportunity to be up North and actually had an opportunity to fly over some of the melting glaciers and witness that a change is taking place. If one is to deny that, one is only fooling oneself. We look at our climate changing, we look at our glaciers melting, we look at the effect that's having on our forests, on the migration
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of certain animal species, about our movement in life and the needs - anyway, I think I've touched enough on Conserve Nova Scotia, you know, and to say that if any caucus member, or anyone in Nova Scotia for that matter, would want some direction on how they can make a difference in our province, I would be very happy to give them the appropriate direction to make a difference.
So I've talked a lot about energy efficiency, but let's switch to the other side of the department that I'm responsible for - let's talk a little bit about energy. I touched a little bit on carbon fuels. You know, when we talk about carbon fuels, we think about coal, but the mining of coal, other than coal bed methane, is under the watch of the Minister of Natural Resources and the assessments would be under the Minister of Environment and Labour who was speaking just before me, but I would like to talk about offshore gas for a little bit.
Offshore gas has been a great benefit, it has been a great benefit to Nova Scotians, and offshore gas is not new to Nova Scotia. I'm not going to give a history of where we talk way back in the 1940s,1950s and the 1960s, but will talk a little bit about the government spending a tremendous amount of money back in the late 1970s and 1980s when money was given to the oil companies to go out and do exploration of the offshore, and through a long process - and I'm not going to get political here - of dark days, of happy days, of uncertainty of victory, a number of wells were actually located. A number of wells were capped and we found out rather than having a lot of oil, we had a lot of gas and those gas wells were, I guess in anyone's opinion, if they were viable commercial wells or whatever, but anyway it didn't pass that. There was a time when all of a sudden the gas resource, I'll say, in the offshore certainly was beneficial to the coffers of the Province of Nova Scotia.
The ExxonMobil group, or SOEP group as we call it, have been producing gas for a number of years just off Sable Island. When I was a young man I had an opportunity to work on the oil rigs out there. I can recall the name was Zapata Scotian, and that would be 1983 or 1984 that I did some maintenance work on that. Little did I think back then, as a young man, that in a number of years, a long time, that I would indeed be responsible for the production of gas in the offshore, off Sable and the coastlines of Nova Scotia.
Anyway, getting past that, last year we had reached a peak in regard to the Sable Offshore Energy Project and we believe that we will have major revenues this year, but geologists and the experts will tell us that this peak will only last for a few years and that finally, we will run out of gas in that project. Mr. Chairman, the good news is there's another project being developed. The development plan has been put in place. We have a streamlined regulatory process called an OSEA and it's in regard to Deep Panuke, owned by EnCana.
So what I'm saying to you, Mr. Chairman, is we reach a certain peak of productivity in one offshore field, we have another one being developed and hopefully it will be on-line. I have great faith in all of the departmental people who have worked on this project and I hope I'm here when they open the tap on that wellhead and that gas starts to produce.
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Now, as I said earlier, making the comment of looking for renewables and the dependency that we have on gas and oil. Actually, gas is an efficient fuel. It certainly burns cleaner than bunker oil. It certainly is better for an environment than other carbon fuels. I have been working very hard with departmental people and industry to bring natural gas here to the peninsula. I have been to Ottawa with Mayor Kelly lobbying the federal government to cost share in a program to bring the pipeline across from Dartmouth-Woodside to the peninsula here.
The peninsula, of course, as we all know, is a very active place. We have our hospitals, we have our universities, we have DND. One could say, Mr. Chairman, it's the heart of the province. The sad thing is for me to sit here and say that we heat the facilities that I spoke of with a very low grade of oil, not quite bunker oil but something that would compare to bunker oil and when this is burned in the furnaces of Saint Mary's, Dalhousie, the VG, the hospitals, the federal buildings, we know what is taking place.
When I encourage people to change a light bulb and then on the other hand we're burning, on the peninsula, all this heavy oil which we know is producing greenhouse gases, it's of great concern to me. I believe when a person is a minister of a department, there are certain objectives that person wants to meet and one of the objectives I want to meet and be successful in would be using our own offshore gas, bringing it to different points in Nova Scotia and also bringing it to the peninsula where there's a major call for heavy oil here.
I haven't been able to achieve that, Mr. Chairman, at this point but my commitment to this forum here tonight is that I will keep working until we make an announcement that we will be in concert with or helping Heritage to bring that pipeline across and providing the necessary tools for them to do that. I don't want to get too deep into that conversation today, but I just want to let my colleagues know that I anticipate an announcement sometime. I can't really put a time on this but I have had an opportunity to speak to my colleagues and the government is very supportive of actually accomplishing this task.
So natural gas is being distributed through some parts of Nova Scotia by Heritage Gas. They do a pretty good job. There's a fund, Mr. Chairman, which we're able to tap into under the administration of the gas company, Heritage Gas, for commercial businesses and residential units to be able to retrofit from the traditional oil furnace to gas-burning apparatus. Just recently, as far as commercial capacity is concerned, we were working with stakeholders to make sure that this program is the proper fit for commercial properties and we're in line to make more improvements in that.
It's exciting that the government, Mr. Chairman, has given us the money necessary to promote efficiency and also has, on the other side of the coin, given us enough money to be able to do research in developing the energy part of my portfolio. Now, every good business person knows that without research and development, your company or your position will not grow.
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Mr. Chairman, we've given millions and millions of dollars to our universities and community colleges throughout Nova Scotia for the advancement of research in regard to energy opportunities in Nova Scotia. The business is changing, the technology is changing, and the way people decide or the way people make their mind up on where they should explore on the offshore is changing.
The Department of Energy has a vision and very seldom are we ever caught sleeping. We know that if we're going to be leaders in offshore natural gas, we have to provide tools for industry to get there and this is why we have provided information on the Web site, provided seismic information, preparing to do even more, and have spent $1 million or more on the core lab where people can fly from any part of the world to go into our core lab, geologists, and they can make a decision from what they're looking at, if there's a possibility, or any increased interest would be shown.
So we talked a little bit about the offshore. As I said, and I'll make this clear, we have a dependency on our offshore to feed our coffers so that we can have better schools, better health care systems, better opportunities for our people, and we also use that resource, our gas, here in Nova Scotia. What's becoming very exciting now, Mr. Chairman, is the development of coal bed methane or the drilling or exploration of oil onshore. Now, offshore, as I said, I didn't want to give a history lesson but they have experienced a tremendous amount of difficulty in exploring the offshore from way back simply because of the deep waters, because of our cold and rough winters, and the men and women who have contributed to this industry have been successful to bring us where we are today and we salute them for that, but new opportunity lies onshore.
[5:45 p.m.]
Mr. Chairman, one thing I should have said and I neglected to say is when we signed our OSEA for the offshore with EnCana, certain benefits were provided for our workers. As I had said in my script earlier, 830,000 hours of work plus the engineering, and so on and so forth, guaranteed for Nova Scotians, but also an amount of money was provided for land rigs. Now, EnCana is a big, big company, probably even larger than we can think, and they do onshore and offshore work in regard to gas. Part of our OSEA was for us to provide money for the fabrication or the development for onshore rigs so that rigs would be available if people wanted to explore for coal bed methane or other drillings in the province.
Stealth Ventures up in the Attorney General's riding, in the Springhill area, have been successful in actually establishing a drilling site. They have drilled a number of holes and they feel comfortable enough, Mr. Chairman, that they provided us with a development plan about a month ago, which is under review. We certainly wish them the very best of luck that their findings will be enough that they will start an operation to actually start producing coal bed methane onshore Nova Scotia. If that should take place, once again we would be able to employ people. We will have an alternative source of gas which is cleaner than the traditional
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Bunker C and this type, or for that matter furnace oil. Also, once again, I have to make reference to the revenue that this resource brings to our province, hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a great benefit to us.
So as I sit here and talk about energy, it is a tremendous responsibility, Mr. Chairman, to watch over this department but I must say again, the people who work in the Department of Energy/Conserve Nova Scotia are very capable people. They are people who care about all the things that I have talked about. There are people in the department who have made a career working with the province and advancing the province to where we are today. A lot of smart minds, a lot of focus. I think it's a very important department, one which I hope will be around for a long time.
Energy efficiency, on the other side of the coin, we are advancing our energy resources, petroleum resources, and in between that we have to create a balance. I don't think anybody here would argue that a balance has to be reached. We know that for so long we've had a dependency on carbon fuels. Now also one of the great benefits of being the minister of this department, I have had an opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to travel around Nova Scotia and to watch how different industry produces different types of power. I have been up in the Springhill area and looked at the geothermal operations up there - quite impressive.
I haven't even touched upon - Mr. Chairman, I could speak for hours on this file, I haven't touched upon, only in script - the Bay of Fundy and where we're going with tidal power. I haven't really talked about wind power as a renewable source yet. We will be able to get in discussion on that. I haven't talked about the other types of biofuels that present themselves as an alternative to carbon fuels. We are certainly not a leader in the country on biofuels but there are a couple of operations that are doing well. Once again, we have to do more research in the different fields but the good thing is the money is here in the departments for research and we look at applications that come in or we visit with people and if they have a good idea, if we feel that we can substantiate spending money on research in a certain way, we certainly do that.
So it is a very exciting department. It's one that also holds the climate change file and this is where we can get confused, Mr. Chairman. The climate change file is actually under the Department of Energy and energy efficiency is under Conserve Nova Scotia. So the bottom line to Nova Scotians, it doesn't really matter which heading climate change is under or whatever, the point is that I feel Nova Scotians feel confident that under the leadership of our Premier, we are moving in a cleaner, greener way. I don't think anybody can dispute that.
Mr. Chairman, will people demand us to do more? Yes, certainly they will. I receive letters from constituents and from leaders of renewables from across the world that say, you can do more, quicker. In my opinion there's no quick fix to the challenge that we have.
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The minister who encouraged - that's a nice, friendly word - Nova Scotia Power to put the 20 per cent of renewables in the mix by 2013, and you may say, well, why didn't you go 30 per cent or 40 per cent or 50 per cent? Mr. Chairman, the worst thing I could do would be make mandatory targets that are not achievable. As I said, all of the province and most of the world know now about climate change and they understand renewables but we have to be very careful because this is a very complex file, the electricity file.
As we talk about moving ahead with renewables, we also have to make sure that certain times when renewables are unable to meet our needs, that we have a backup for an energy source. I mean I can talk on that issue all day. The thing about the Department of Energy, I believe, is attitude, is to measure if we are progressing in the right direction, being cautious that we do not move too quickly and make errors, because we have to be very careful, as I said, in which manner we move. We're dealing with big stuff here, we deal with major oil companies, we deal with the possibility of exploration off our coast, we talk about renewables. As clean and as green as renewables may seem, the environment is important to us as well and some renewables can possibly have effects on the environment.
As we talk about the Bay of Fundy, everyone has encouraged me, well, you just go up there right now, Mr. Minister, and throw a few turbines in the old Bay of Fundy there and start generation of electricity. That's a lot. We certainly hope that after this environmental assessment is completed, the old minister will be able to sign papers and will allow projects to start in the Bay of Fundy. We have to worry about our marine life, we have to worry about our tidal shifts and changes and we have to worry about certain rights of certain groups in the community, interests. We have to be very careful to do these things right.
With our wind towers, I think the province has moved in the right direction. For instance, we started encouraging people putting up towers here and there and, all of a sudden, it became a municipal tax issue, one that was addressed later on and that issue was very stressful at a time but the municipalities and the province and also the independent power producers got together and after some discussion and dialogue, were at a place where they feel comfortable now, right from the very issue of who owns what, the taxation, who is responsible, our environment, research development, what about resource, the availability of materials to build.
You know another great advantage of being a minister of this department is I have an opportunity to travel across Canada to meet with other ministers and other leaders, and guess what, Mr. Chairman? We're not the only people moving towards renewables. You know different people are moving in a different direction, different provinces - or I may add states as well because we meet with our neighbours to the south - people are moving in different directions, but nevertheless they are moving towards renewables.
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Our folks in P.E.I. have a different slant on renewables and our folks in Newfoundland and Labrador think differently about renewables than we do, but nevertheless they're talking about renewable sources of energy. So I believe that having an opportunity to travel is a great avenue for education. We can go and share what we're doing and also, at the same time, learn from other states and provinces about what they're doing.
Now you know when we talk about that coin that I say we have to balance, there are two sides of it - well, when we talk about renewables and then we talk about carbons, there's a benefit to both. The money that's being made available for investment, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into our province because of the development of renewable sources of energy.
You can image the design work and you can only imagine, unless you have a history in construction, the hours and the works and the ability and the design of putting a base down to support one of the wind turbines. So our cement trucks, our gravel trucks, our excavators, our carpenters, our engineers, our foremen, our electricians and our plumbers are all being employed, Mr. Chairman, because of the development of renewables.
Then, on that other side of the coin, when we talk about our advancement of the offshore, as we talk about the advantages of - in Canada, we talk about 830,000 man hours, person hours of work, and what does that mean? That means a lot of money to our province, that means a lot of taxation benefits, Mr. Chairman, that means more money for health and schools and roads, as we talk about that. Also, it's a light to encourage people to develop their education skills.
Today our community colleges are filled to capacity in regard to people wanting to be welders and fabricators and fitters and all of these things that have to do with the gas and the offshore. Mr. Chairman, that's very exciting news to have our own people employed in our own industry.
We also have educational opportunities for people abroad to come into our province, especially once again I speak about Cape Breton Island and Cape Breton University. Mr. Chairman, I've been to that university a number of times and had an opportunity to see the educational part of it, where we've had people from different foreign countries come to Cape Breton University to be educated in the petroleum business, gas and the offshore. I believe the last time I was there, there were graduates from Russia and I believe they were entertaining the thought that some people from Italy were to be there later on in the Fall.
I know now, through the Department of Energy, that we have people looking for new opportunities to bring people in. So it's a revenue generator when we bring in people from other countries to buy seats in our community college and our university. They take away the knowledge that our people have and also the experience of our culture and our people and our country, and hope that someday they return. So, in a very broad sense, I believe that
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energy plays a very important part in the very lifeline of our province. So we have an untapped resource and we're developing that by pumping the necessary monies into research and development so that we will have the tools to move forward.
[6:00 p.m.]
Education is very important to our department and our province, so we're providing monies to our universities and community colleges to educate the people. There are a number of bursaries that are being developed - Pengrowth. I wouldn't be able to, Mr. Chairman, not speak of the Pengrowth bursary that continues to grow, and we're so very pleased to be a part of that and to partner with them, giving people tremendous opportunity. So we use all the benefits financially - well, as a province we have a lot of responsibilities upon us and one is to provide good government and to provide opportunities for our people. Someone working in the energy sector is usually paid a good amount for their hour or for their yearly wage. That's important for them to have those monies available to make a better way for their family.
So, Mr. Chairman, I believe my time is running out with my opening comments for today, but I think this is a very exciting time for us, both the government and members of the Official Opposition and members of the Third Party. I believe that basically you folks agree that we're moving in the right direction. I know, and I have been though this process before, that you'll have certain questions, but my attitude is that I'm here to answer those questions to the best of my ability, and I have two very experienced staff people here with me to help me and support me in answering those questions.
Tonight is Tuesday, Mr. Chairman, we'll not return until Thursday - I'm looking forward to that, to talk about both sides of that coin, Conserve Nova Scotia on behavioural changes to our people in regard to energy efficiency, but yet we must still talk a little bit about our offshore, or our petroleum resource and our renewables, which we have to balance and which we benefit from.
Mr. Chairman, what is my time now?
MR. CHAIRMAN: There is one minute left.
MR. DOOKS: Well, Mr. Chairman, as I said, there are a lot of things to talk about - one could just touch briefly on everything that has taken place in the Department of Energy and we'd use up all the time in the estimates of the 80 hours allowed for all ministers to explain, so thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable member for Cape Breton Centre, and you have one minute.
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MR. FRANK CORBETT: Well, okay, we'll try to conserve as much time as we can.
As usual, Mr. Minister, I want to thank you and your staff for being here. In this very short time I have tonight, you spent a lot of time on Conserve Nova Scotia and I have a great deal of respect . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has elapsed. (Interruption) It would be better to have a fresh question anyway.
We are adjourned until Thursday.
[The subcommittee adjourned at 6:04 p.m.]
