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MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. We'll deal with the estimates of the Department of Environment.
Resolution E7 - Resolved, that a sum not exceeding $44,607,000 be granted to the Lieutenant Governor to defray expenses in respect of the Department of Environment, pursuant to the Estimate.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable Minister of Environment.
HON. MARK PARENT: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's my honour to present you, my colleagues, and through you the people of Nova Scotia, the details of this year's budget for the Department of Environment. We've accomplished many great things in 2007-08 and I'm certain that we will build on these accomplishments in the upcoming fiscal year.
Since April 1, 2008, I'm proud to say we have a stand-alone Department of Environment in Nova Scotia with our own deputy minister, who is seated to my right, Nancy Vanstone. The Nova Scotia Department of Environment focuses on climate change, protecting our environment, and advancing our ambitious and cross-departmental environment goals.
Today I will highlight the main new features in the 2007-08 budget and I'm sure there will be questions on the other items that I don't highlight, but I'd like to highlight the new features of our 2007-08 budget. Before I do that, I'm well aware that our past successes and ambitions for the year are the product of every one of our nearly 300 staff throughout the province. Working with the staff across the province has been a real privilege, Mr. Chairman, and I thank them for the opportunity and I do hope to enjoy that opportunity for some time to come. Together with my staff and colleagues we're working on having a cleaner and greener Nova Scotia.
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Some of the new features in the budget, just to highlight them for us, are Nova Scotia EcoTrust for Clean Air and Climate Change of $42.5 million. This fund for Clean Air and Climate Change will help us respond to our challenges in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the air that we all breathe. It was created as a result of an allocation from the federal government in 2007. I had the privilege of helping announce that up in Pictou and we'll utilize that fund until March 2010, to make strategic investments in projects that reduce emissions while at the same time strengthening Nova Scotia's economy.
To date a total of $10.5 million of the $42.5 million has been earmarked for strategic projects, another $17 million of the EcoTrust fund has been utilized to create two programs to assist Nova Scotia organizations and communities, the Municipal Program which the Premier announced at the UNSM meeting about a year ago, and the Environmental Technology Program that I announced not long after that. The remainder of the fund will be utilized for projects still being developed, recognizing that opportunities for investment will present themselves on an ongoing basis.
Another aspect of this year's budget that I want to highlight is the tangible capital asset funds for acquisition of high-priority conservation lands, roughly $800,000. We all know that Nova Scotia is one of the most beautiful provinces in Canada and as a government we must invest in protecting our natural areas. There will be $800,000 budgeted to acquire and protect high-value conservation lands, but I must add that the Minister of Natural Resources, who is here, has always been very generous with his budget, so I do want to thank him. This is just new money that's in, but in years past, Natural Resources has ponied up far more money than that. This new money will contribute to the province's goal of legally protecting 12 per cent of Nova Scotia's land base by 2015, as established in the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act.
Acquisition of critical in-holdings within some of our existing protected areas will protect important conservation lands while protecting the integrity of those wilderness areas and reducing the risk of incompatible private land development. We will spend this money wisely and money will be spent on high-priority properties offered by landowners. In part, the funds will be used for existing agreements with the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, which in return will lever matching funds to increase the amount of land protected.
Another new aspect to our budget this year is the tangible capital asset allocation and that's about $550,000. Inspectors and other staff at the Department of Environment and the Department of Labour and Workforce Development work hard to protect our environment, our homes, our workplaces, so government is investing money to provide additional tools for our staff in our inspectorates to enable them to manage and report on their activities. This is what I was responding to in a question earlier in the House.
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In 2008-09, the funding for the initiative will be $555,000 and as a result of the transition to the new departments, the funding will be apportioned between both the Department of Environment and the Department of Labour and Workforce Development as priorities dictate. The funding will be spent on the development and implementation of an activity tracking system that will help us better attain the better regulation strategic objective of a 20 per cent reduction and administrative burden to business, as well as responding to some of the concerns that were raised by the Auditor General. In addition, the system will allow the government to provide easier access to information that we currently make available to the public through our Environmental Registry.
Another new aspect of our budget this year is funding for Climate Change. Climate change, as we know, is one of the most important issues facing our province today, and I'm pleased to welcome the Climate Change file to my department. Bringing Climate Change to the new department also enables us to increase our focus on Adaptation. The province has currently developed a Climate Change Action Plan that will be released in the Fall of 2008. The province has allocated additional Climate Change funds of $450,000 to begin - and I stress the word "begin" - implementing key actions coming out of a plan. Four new employees will be hired to develop and implement policies, programs and projects that will help the province reduce greenhouse gas emissions and effectively understand, address and adapt to current and future climate change impacts and risks. Nova Scotians will benefit from a cleaner environment and a better understanding and stronger ability to address climate change issues.
We also have new funding this year - $400,000 - to help us begin to implement some of the goals within the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, an Act aimed at making our province one of the cleanest and most environmentally and economically sustainable areas in the world by 2020. Funding from this new money of $400,000 will be used to support existing programs that require some additional supplemental resources in order to reach our goals. Funding will go toward hiring staff who will assist us in achieving our goal of legally protecting 12 per cent of the province by 2015 - our protected areas staff, Mr. Chairman, have been worked off their feet this past year - and also coordinate the goal of establishing a policy to prevent net loss of wetlands by 2009. An additional $200,000 will be used to promote the goals of the Act throughout the province.
This Act - I'll be tabling the first annual report about the middle of May - is one of the most aggressive pieces of legislation ever adopted in Nova Scotia and it will be vital to addressing our environmental and also - we hope - economic challenges.
I have additional new funding in the amount of $300,000 for a Public Drinking Water Supply Program. As you know, Mr. Chairman, Nova Scotians deserve clean and safe drinking water, and our Public Drinking Water Supply Program is a pillar of public health. The purpose of the Public Drinking Water Supply Program is to ensure proper construction, monitoring and reporting of water quality of facilities which serve drinking water to the
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public. In 2008-09, the funding for this program will increase by $300,000, which includes $150,000 that was transferred from Tourism, Culture and Heritage as a result of legislative changes that they made.
This initiative is important because there are presently more than 1,600 registered public water systems operating in the province. In order to ensure the water is safe, the owners are required to monitor water quality in accordance with the department's guidelines for monitoring public water supplies.
At present, Mr. Chairman, only facilities that serve water to 25 people or more for at least 60 days of the year are required to register and monitor their water systems as public water supplies. So this new initiative and this new money will expand the definition of a public water supply to include any facility that serves water to at least 10 people per day for at least 60 days of the year. Now 8,100 more water supplies will register with Nova Scotia Environment and will be required to ensure their drinking water is safe for the public.
The increase in funding to the Public Drinking Water Supply Program will be used to hire four new staff and cover expenses for travel and water-quality sampling. This initiative, Mr. Chairman, will not only ensure safe drinking water to more public facilities, but provide greater confidence from tourists who visit Nova Scotia tourist accommodations.
Another new area of funding that builds on what we did last year is an additional $200,000 for our Drinking Water Strategy. Mr. Chairman, I said before that one of the most important things that we need to protect, conserve and use wisely in this province, and our world, is our water - so building on the Drinking Water Strategy that my colleague, the honourable Minister of Natural Resources, initiated in 2002.
The purpose of this initiative, which I initiated last year, is to develop a comprehensive approach to effectively managing water resources in Nova Scotia. Consultations with Nova Scotians will take place - indeed, they've been taking place even before we met - over the next two years to develop a water strategy that will address security and sustainability of Nova Scotia's water supply, to ensure long-term prosperity of water-dependent industries, health of communities, and health of ecosystems. Strategic initiatives will be focused on drinking water, water quality and quantity, and waste water.
[2:15 p.m.]
In 2008-09 the program will expand by $200,000, as I mentioned at the start of my comments, and will include education and outreach programs for Nova Scotians and communities across the province. This will help protect our health and the health of our ecosystems, and ensure the long-term prosperity of our water-dependent industries.
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Mr. Chairman, I'd also like to take the opportunity to provide you a very fast overview of some of the other accomplishments of the department. An estimated 4,500 tons of electronics is generated annually in Nova Scotia and our new e-waste regulations are helping to divert most of that from our landfills. We are the first province in Atlantic Canada, and one of only four in the country, to develop and implement an effective strategy for dealing with electronic waste. In February 2009 of next year we'll be the only province in Canada that will introduce a Phase II of that program.
In addition, Mr. Chairman, since 2006 when I announced the Nova Scotia Environmental Home Assessment Program, I've been pleased with the positive effects that it has been having for people living in rural Nova Scotia. The Nova Scotia Environmental Home Assessment Program benefits Nova Scotians who rely on private wells and septic systems. The program provides Nova Scotians with all of the information they need to properly maintain their septic systems and oil tanks, and encourages the regular testing of well water. Depending on financial need and the state of the septic system, lower income households may be eligible for a one-time grant of up to $3,000 to help cover necessary repairs. To date - and I mentioned this program last year when we initiated it - 1,400 assessments throughout the province are complete. We're also pleased that 70 grants were issued to low-income Nova Scotians in 2007-08 and 200 are available in 2008-09.
Mr. Chairman, I've touched on some of our goals and successes. I think all Nova Scotians are proud of the environment and want to move forward in protecting our environment, but because of time constraints we'll move to the questions now. I did want to highlight some of the new funding initiatives in this year's budget and I thank you for the opportunity to do that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you for your opening comments.
The honourable member for Halifax Fairview.
MR. GRAHAM STEELE: Thank you, Minister, congratulations on the creation of your new department, and to your deputy minister and to your staff of the new Department of Environment which, of course, is not a new department at all. It's an old department which was amalgamated with other departments and then your government has decided to re-establish what used to exist as a stand-alone department which, of course, for everybody who cares about the environment, this kind of makes us shake our heads and say, really, is that all there is? You're re-establishing something that was already there and saying, look at us, look how good we are. But I'll tell you, as a member of the Legislature, what drives me absolutely crazy - unless it's somewhere in the documents here - I don't see anything that describes in straightforward simple terms what the new department is going to do that is different from what the old department did.
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Now, you mentioned in your opening remarks a couple of things, but as a member of the Legislature - and again, if it's here, please excuse me, I don't see it - I should be able to pick up one document that says in a straightforward way, here is what the Department of Environment and Labour used to do on the environment, here's what the new department is going to do - here is how it compares, here's where the new department is getting more money, here is where the new department is getting less, here's what we're going to do with the money, here's how it relates to our strategic goals. Have I missed it? Does that document exist?
MR. PARENT: Mr. Chairman, the documents before the honourable member are financial documents. If he wants a written document, I did go through some of the programs. I would be happy to give him a copy of my speech with the new things that the department is doing - perhaps I can ask the Page to photocopy that - and that may suffice for the member because it does list some of the new programs that we're doing.
MR. STEELE: Okay, but remember, I don't want just sort of examples. I should be able to have a comprehensive, complete document that lays side by side what the old department was doing with what the new department is doing, so that I can in a very straightforward, at-a-glance way compare the two of them. But I don't have that.
What I do have is the Nova Scotia Environment Business Plan, 2008-09, and I'll tell you that what I'm looking for is not in here. For example, if you turn to Page 14 of the business plan . . .
MR. PARENT: We'll have a new strategic document for you in early Fall, which will give you all the information you need. In very broad outlines . . .
MR. STEELE: No, wait a minute, I don't want a verbal outline. I have such a . . .
MR. PARENT: Okay, in early Fall we'll get you a written document, Mr. Steele.
MR. STEELE: I have such a limited time here today, I don't want verbal outlines. The department already exists, are you telling me that document I have asked for, which I would have thought would have been essential to the creation and operation of the department, just doesn't exist and that you'll have to create it and it won't be ready until the Fall?
MR. PARENT: I'll give you my speech, Mr. Steele, and we'll have the new document, if the business plan you have is inadequate, we have the new one in the Fall - I mean in February.
MR. STEELE: Okay. I'd like to ask you to turn to Page 14 of the department's business plan. Now, this is the closest I could come in the documents that I've seen. It's a
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table, a fairly summary table that lays side by side the dollar amounts being spent on various broad subject headings. I'm going to ask you a few questions about this table, but it does concern me that this table is presented in the business plan without any context or explanation.
The questions I'm going to ask you now are the kinds of things I would expect to see in a business plan and I shouldn't have to go hunting for them and I shouldn't have to ask you because it should already be there.
For example, let's hit on by far the biggest single difference, apparently, between the new department and the old department, which is the amount of money that's being spent on a heading called Environmental and Natural Areas Management. The forecast for the just-finished fiscal year is $6.4 million and the estimate proposed for this year is $27.8 million. So a fourfold increase in funding for Environmental and Natural Areas Management, what's that for and what's that money going to accomplish?
MR. PARENT: There are two answers to your question. I thought this was explained, but maybe it wasn't. They changed the accounting system from a net to a gross - was that not explained by the Finance Minister to the various critics? - because the accounting system this year is on a gross system which is a more transparent system, so what that means is any fees that were collected or attributed back to the department. That accounts for some of the discrepancy.
Then there's about $18 million within that Environmental and Natural Areas Management plan which is a result of the EcoTrust funding which was announced in the budget.
MR. STEELE: Okay. So are you telling me the figures that are there for 2007-08 are net figures and the figure for 2008-09 is a gross figure?
MR. PARENT: Yes.
MR. STEELE: Why are you reporting that way, Minister? One of the essential elements of the change to gross figures is that the figure should be comparable. If one figure is gross, the comparable figure should be gross; if one figure is net, the comparable figure should be net. You shouldn't put figures in a table where one is net and one is gross and then expect us to figure out what it means. Besides, if that is part of the explanation, there should be an offsetting revenue figure, which there clearly isn't. Are you sure you have the right answer there?
MR. PARENT: In the book it's all grossed up but here we've included the net and the growth in a different chart to give you more information. I'm sorry if it's unclear.
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MR. STEELE: Needless to say, it is completely unhelpful for members of the Legislature to get a column of figures, some of which are reported one way, some of which are reported another way, so that you can't compare the two. Now, Minister, if the figure in the right-hand column is a gross figure, then the purpose of the new accounting system is that there should also be reported the figure for revenue, the one that used to be netted out but now isn't, but it's not there. You can see the ordinary revenue has actually dropped; it hasn't gone up, it has dropped.
MR. PARENT: What they did is they treated the Environment Department as a new stand-alone department. Both departments are stand-alone but they treated the budget of the Environment Department - when they separated the two departments, you can see the comparisons with Labour and Workforce Development, but the budget for Environment is a new budget and that was . . .
MR. STEELE: I don't understand that explanation but I'm not going to spend any more time on it. I'm hoping to get an explanation perhaps in writing that makes a little bit more sense. Now, you said the other component that would bump this $6.4 million figure up to $27.8 million in one year was, I think you said $18 million for EcoTrust? So could you explain that? That's brand-new money, but where is the money coming from?
MR. PARENT: The money comes from the federal government. It's $42.5 million and so it's being apportioned to each year. It has to be spent by 2010. So there's $18 million this year; there will be roughly $18 million next year.
MR. STEELE: So what it looks like is that there's a huge increase in the budget for Environmental and Natural Areas Management. Is there or isn't there?
MR. PARENT: Well, it depends whether you count $18 million as an increase or not. It has to be listed somewhere and it was listed under the environment and it is being spent through the Environment Department.
MR. STEELE: And what is it going to be spent on?
MR. PARENT: Well, I will be making an announcement at UNSM. Just recently I mentioned some of the things that we've already committed to. I announced an Environmental Technology Fund of roughly $9.5 million that is to be spent on any projects that help leverage new technologies for greenhouse gases. We have a Municipal Fund of roughly $7.5 million. That's what I will be announcing, the first round of those decisions, at UNSM which partners with municipalities. They first have to be able to catalogue their greenhouse gas use production and then once they do that, they're eligible for projects that would help reduce. So we'll be making those announcements at the UNSM meeting in Antigonish.
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MR. STEELE: When?
MR. PARENT: It's coming up the end of this week, actually - this Friday.
MR. STEELE: Okay, because I mean this budget is before the Legislature now and essentially what your department is doing is asking the Legislature to approve the budget that you proposed and so it concerns me when you say that certain announcements will be made in the future, because I think we here in the Legislature are entitled to know what they are now. So I'm wondering if you or your staff could provide a written list of where the EcoTrust money is going.
MR. PARENT: Sure, yes. There is $2 million that went - do you want a written . . .
MR. STEELE: I want a written list.
MR. PARENT: We'll give you a written one.
[2:30 p.m.]
MR. STEELE: Now, the other item which sees a substantial increase in percentage terms, but nothing like the one that I've just been referring to, is Environmental Monitoring and Compliance which is going up from just about exactly $10 million to $11.9 million. That's a percentage increase of - it's pretty easy to figure out - close to 12 per cent. What are you going to do with that extra money?
MR. PARENT: The additional money there, as I mentioned, when you gross out, what happens is the fees that you would normally collect that are attributed elsewhere are attributed back to the department, are still used in the same way. On Environmental Monitoring and Compliance the increase is basically due to the grossing out.
MR. STEELE: So you're telling me that columns in the 2007-08 year are net figures again and in the 2008-09 is a gross figure?
MR. PARENT: Yes, the only difference being that we did put in two positions worth $150,000 for the tar ponds-coke ovens remediation, which is two FTEs. Then the $300,000 that I mentioned in the water strategy program, that was a result of Tourism, Culture and Heritage's legislative change. We added $150,000 to the $150,000 they had that was transferred over so that now we can test water for businesses that have 10 or more individuals, where before it was 25 or more, as I mentioned in my opening comments.
MR. STEELE: Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to try to figure out what's going on in a department when you give us figures that aren't comparable to each other? Do you?
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MR. PARENT: I don't know, Mr. Steele, it must be frustrating for you.
MR. STEELE: I'm looking at these numbers because my job, as I see it, is to look at the budget that you're proposing, try to figure out what you're going to do with it compared to what you did with it last year, what other provinces are doing with it, so that we can make sure the money is not only going to be spent but it's going to be spent in the best way possible, because for any given dollar there's a thousand different ways it could be spent. Our job is to make sure, to the greatest degree possible, that it gets spent in the best way possible, the best use of that dollar. But instead of discussing policy, what we end up discussing is what are the real numbers and you can't get to the discussion about policy until you get past the discussion of what are the real numbers.
One of the essential elements about talking about the real numbers is having comparable figures. So if both of those numbers were reported in a comparable way, other than the items you just mentioned, is there any increase or decrease in the budget for Environmental Monitoring and Compliance? Based on the figures in front of me I can't tell.
MR. PARENT: I gave you the additions to the budget. If you're asking any increases or decreases . . .
MR. STEELE: If they were both reported on a gross basis or they were both reported on a net basis, what would the difference be?
MR. PARENT: There are no decreases in our budget. The increases are the increases I went through in my opening comments which I provided in written form to you.
MR. STEELE: Now, the deficiencies identified by the Auditor General in his most recent report had to do with Environmental Monitoring and Compliance, so when I saw that the budget for that unit had gone up by 12 per cent, I was hopeful that represented a real increase that was actually going to go to addressing the issues raised by the Auditor General, but now if I understand you correctly that's not the case, that the numbers simply aren't comparable and if you put them on a comparable basis there's hardly any change at all.
In your opening remarks and in the business plan there's a reference to dealing with the issues raised by the Auditor General. How precisely is the new department going to deal with what I can only characterize as the substantial deficiencies in Environmental Monitoring and Compliance?
MR. PARENT: As you told you before, the Auditor General's comments dealt basically with tracking of activities. One of the things that we needed to do - and we'd actually asked for a year before but there hadn't been a budget allotted to it - was to have an activity tracking system. The total cost of that is $550,000 and I'm pleased to say that we have that now. Now, part of that will be shared, I believe, with Labour and Workforce
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Development, because they too need to track activities. So we'll be able to address the Auditor General's concerns, which were basically dealing with proper tracking of decisions, not so much with the decisions themselves.
MR. STEELE: That's actually not the case at all and I'm really disappointed to hear you say that's how you understand the Auditor General's Report. Activity tracking was only one of several deficiencies that he found. There are four areas within Environmental Monitoring and Compliance that the Auditor General looked at and he found deficiencies in all of them.
I think the first step the department needs to take in terms of dealing with those deficiencies is to acknowledge that they exist. In the department's response which is in the Auditor General's Report, and in your comments in the House and here today, I'm just wondering if the department is somewhat in a state of denial about what exactly it is the Auditor General is saying. I still haven't seen or heard an acknowledgement of the seriousness of what the Auditor General is saying. It is not simply a matter of activity tracking - give me some reassurance.
MR. PARENT: I gave you reassurances in the House, Mr. Steele. I told you we would . . .
MR. STEELE: Let me leave it then, let me just repeat my comment then that it doesn't sound to me that you understand what it is the Auditor General is saying, and I think there is a tendency on the part of yourself and the department to minimize what the Auditor General is saying. It is one of the more critical reports that I've read in the seven years I've been reading Auditor General's Reports. There have been few that have been worse and many that have been better. I'm disappointed that the department's response seems to be to minimize it and to suggest that just a tweak here or there is going to be sufficient.
Let me move on then. A new budget item is under the heading Climate Change, $1.055 million. Can you remind me what that money is being spent on?
MR. PARENT: There are two aspects to that. There's the transfer from the Department of Energy which was a result, basically, of six FTEs being transferred over from Climate Change, and then there's additionally about $450,000 which will allow us to get more FTEs in Adaptation and also in formulating a greenhouse gas program. So it's a combination of the FTEs coming over from Energy to the new department and also additional money to help us in part really to address the issue of adaptation which is so important to Nova Scotians.
MR. STEELE: Would all of this or most of it represent simply a transfer from the Department of Energy, or how much of this is new money?
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MR. PARENT: Yes, $605,000 was a transfer from Energy and then the rest, about $450,000, is new money which is what I stated at the start.
MR. STEELE: And now the last line, the funded staff says that the new department will have 272.8 full-time equivalent staff, compared to 447.9 for the last fiscal year with the combined Department of Environment and Labour. Can you tell me off the top whether the two new departments together add up to the same number of FTEs - are FTEs being added, are they being lost, what's going on here?
MR. PARENT: On Environment there's about 10 - the tar ponds, the water, two, four, six - there's about 10 in Environment that are additional and there's about 90 in Labour and Workforce Development. So the total between them is 272.8 for Environment and 318 for Labour and Workforce Development.
MR. STEELE: So the two departments together in this budget are growing by one-third the number of staff from 448 up to 590?
MR. PARENT: Yes.
MR. STEELE: And that's new money?
MR. PARENT: For both departments. It's not new money, it's new staff for our department. Wasn't that the question you asked?
MR. STEELE: I just want to make sure I understand it. The Department of Environment and Labour, which also had a few other things that were really neither environment nor labour, is being split up into two departments - the Department of Labour and the Department of Environment. By splitting . . .
MR. PARENT: The Department of Labour and Workforce Development.
MR. STEELE: Yes, I know the full name. And so by splitting up the department the two together are going to have, what, 140 more staff than the two had when they were together?
MR. PARENT: Yes.
MR. STEELE: And some of that is being taken from other departments?
MR. PARENT: Yes.
MR. STEELE: How much of it is brand-new positions that never existed anywhere in government before?
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MR. PARENT: Brand-new positions, about 24.
MR. STEELE: Okay, 24 brand-new positions.
MR. PARENT: And next year there'll be another roughly 80 to 100, we're not sure at this stage, of new employees in Labour and Workforce Development as well.
MR. STEELE: On the subject of climate change, the department's business plan has the following statement which it states as a fact: "Nova Scotia has become a leader in tackling this issue head on by setting measurable targets for cleaner air." Who, besides you, says that Nova Scotia has become a leader?
MR. PARENT: How long do you want me to go - I'll give you one example just recently. At the Nova Scotia Automobile Dealers Association there was a person who is a well-known sustainability expert from British Columbia as their guest speaker, who they had flown in from British Columbia. He got up and said: I come from what is traditionally known as the "green province" and the "green city" - he was from Victoria actually. He said: But I want to tell you, we don't hold a candle to Nova Scotia. Then he pointed out in several areas, for example, he said that Victoria still has no waste treatment, they pour their waste directly into the water, while Halifax has begun and we've begun in Sydney . . .
MR. STEELE: Hang on now, I'm not talking about waste water treatment, I'm talking about climate change.
MR. PARENT: Oh, I thought you were talking about all environmental issues.
MR. STEELE: The context of the sentence that I'm reading is climate change, I'm on the subject of climate change where you say that Nova Scotia has become a leader. When people talk about leaders they talk about British Columbia, they talk about Quebec, some talk about Manitoba, but the government's documents consistently say that Nova Scotia is a leader - a world leader in some of the documents. I haven't heard anybody outside of the government say that, so I'm just looking for the references.
MR. PARENT: Well, I was giving you the reference. We've always . . .
MR. STEELE: But you started talking about waste water.
MR. PARENT: We've always said consistently that we are a leader in caring for the environment. We tried very hard in Nova Scotia not to treat the environment in a compartmentalized fashion, that's always been one of the problems that has happened in the treatment of the environment. So the statements have always been, we're leaders in the environment and I was giving you the statement from this leader in B.C. and I could continue with many, many others.
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If you're asking where we are on climate change, we've adopted the position of the New England Governors/Eastern Canadian Premiers, which is one of the most aggressive climate change goals in Canada. We adopted it long before B.C. adopted theirs. They have adopted one more recently that is slightly more ambitious, with a carbon tax; however, we haven't yet come out with our climate change plan, which comes out this Fall. We have always stated that Nova Scotia is a leader in all aspects of the environment. If you wanted me to go on and tell you about the various people throughout Canada and the country who have stated this, I'd be happy to.
MR. STEELE: Okay, I'm looking for the backup for the assertion which is repeated a couple of times through the business plan that Nova Scotia is a leader and somewhere else it says "a world leader." If you have references to back that up, I'd be happy to see them.
MR. PARENT: I'd be happy to give them - do you want me to give them to you, Mr. Steele?
MR. STEELE: I do, but not now.
MR. PARENT: Not now. You've asked for them but you don't want them now?
MR. STEELE: So let's move on then to Page 8 of the business plan. Again, this is talking about climate change and about the goal that the Nova Scotia Government has set for itself, which is that greenhouse gas emissions would be10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
In the House last week my colleague, the member for Halifax Chebucto, who is here today, pointed out that there are many people who think that's not enough - some would even say not nearly enough - and I was intrigued by the fact that in the business plan on Page 8, it says, "While these reductions put us on the right path, the latest science tells us that further reductions are required." This intrigued me because I hadn't heard you or anybody else in the government say that the science is saying we've got to go beyond the 10 per cent reduction. I was wondering if the government has a new target and, if so, if and when is the Act going to be changed to reflect it?
[2:45 p.m.]
MR. PARENT: When the Act was brought out - I was very clear about this - we viewed these targets as minimum targets, they were not the upper targets. So on waste reduction, for example, this would be a minimum target of 300 kilograms. In greenhouse gas targets, we view that as a minimum target and we would try to exceed the targets if and where we could. We'll be unveiling our climate change plan in the Fall and we'll be listing more targets past the 2020 year at that date and at that time.
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MR. STEELE: And presumably if the government adopts a different target, it would be at the same time proposing an amendment to the Act because we wouldn't want to have in our Act a target that everybody, including the government, acknowledges it wasn't ambitious enough?
MR. PARENT: The Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act states that these are minimum targets that we intend, and when we unveiled it we stated that. So we won't be making any amendments.
MR. STEELE: So even if everybody agrees that 10 per cent is not enough - I mean your own document, your own business plan says or implies it's not enough - why wouldn't you amend the Act to set a new floor?
MR. PARENT: Because we stated at the time of the Act that they were minimum targets. What we wanted to put in the Act were targets that were very ambitious but targets that we could achieve. If you know about greenhouse gases, there's no jurisdiction in the world that has managed any reduction of greenhouse gases and so we don't want to be in the position as a province where we are making commitments that we can't live up to. However, we were very clear at the time - you can check the records - that they were minimum targets; in every area we stated we would like to overachieve if we could.
There are two targets in Nova Scotia that are going to be difficult in that Act and challenging: one is the greenhouse gas target, the other is the protected areas target for various reasons. But we still intend to overachieve, if we can, on all the targets and we stated that very clearly, so therefore there's no need to raise the target at this particular time. We also stated that the Act would be reviewed in five years, so that would be the appropriate time to change targets, at that stage, and hopefully we'll have exceeded and superceded some of them.
MR. STEELE: The government had originally announced that the Climate Change Action Plan would be released this Spring and it would have been very helpful, you know, when we were considering the overall direction of the government, the budget that they're proposing for themselves - bearing in mind that it is a minority government and if the Opposition doesn't like the budget, they can defeat it, and so there's more than the usual importance attached to the quality of the budget. But here we have a situation where you've said - I don't think that you said it in the House but I could be mistaken about this - but just last week you said around the introduction of the budget that the Climate Change Action Plan wouldn't actually be introduced now until the Fall. Can you just say for the record, what is the reason for the slippage there from the Spring of 2008 to the Fall of 2008?
MR. PARENT: There are basically two reasons. One is, because of some of the winter weather, the consultations which were set to take place were delayed and so the consultation took far longer than was anticipated by the Department of Energy, and that was
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simply because of weather-related events that made the consultation have to be postponed and put on at a later date. Then the other reason was that I felt more work needed to be done on the adaptation piece. As you know, the IPCC and leading climate change experts are stating very strongly that not only do we need to look at mitigation, but we need to look at mitigation and adaptation together in one package.
The climate change plan, in my view, hadn't looked as strongly at adaptation as it could, so I wanted to see both of them put together. So it was really two factors: the consultations that Energy was holding, led by Dr. Fournier, some of them were postponed due to weather and then slated later, which put a time pressure on a very small section of the department, the Climate Change section; and then the need to do more work on adaptation and do it right.
MR. STEELE: I just want to make sure that I understand the timeline exactly. The Climate Change Action Plan was being undertaken by the Department of Energy but at some point, presumably on or around April 1st, you became formally responsible for the Climate Change Action Plan. At what time did you make the decision, after looking at the draft document, that it needed more work?
MR. PARENT: The draft document wasn't really available in terms of a draft plan. There was sort of a draft outline leading to a plan and that was all that was presented at that stage, in part because of the fact that the consultations had to be extended.
That sort of draft PowerPoint that was given to me that would lead to a plan needed to have a bit more work before it was firmed up on adaptation, but there needed to be other elements, as well, that hadn't yet been addressed and discussed and those need to be done.
In addition, it's important that we work collaboratively in terms of the transfer files, so the Energy Department in part, I assume, because some of their consultations were snowed out - you remember we had quite an interesting winter and early Spring - suggested that they themselves were not in place and even if it had come out with the Energy Department they would have been asking for a Fall date. It was the two factors basically that led to that decision. So Energy themselves stated that they wouldn't have been ready to have a full climate change plan until the Fall, that would be a more appropriate date in order to do it properly, and that gave me the opportunity to suggest some additions and a little more work on the adaptation piece.
MR. STEELE: When did you see that draft PowerPoint?
MR. PARENT: Early to mid April, the deputy and I saw it both together for the first time.
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MR. STEELE: So it sounds to me like the plan was far from being finished. Not only was it not written down, not only was it not a draft, it was a PowerPoint but it wasn't even a finished PowerPoint, it was a draft PowerPoint as you've described it. So it doesn't sound like it was going to be ready for a Spring release anyway.
MR. PARENT: In my opinion, to have a Spring release based on what I was given would have been to have a plan that wouldn't be as well-thought-out as it could be. And when I spoke to Energy, it was in large part because of the fact that the consultations were postponed and had to be rescheduled.
MR. STEELE: Okay, let me move on from there, I want to move on to a few other things. I am, as you can see, focusing largely on the department's business plan because I find business plans far more useful than the ledgers for trying to figure out what a department is doing now. What I'm about to say it not a criticism of the Department of Environment, it's pretty much a criticism across government, and that is that as business plans go, these are not very helpful, they're not very informative.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could manage the department based on a business plan like this. I've always had this feeling - I've said this before to the deputy of the Department of Finance, since Finance is one of my other critic areas, that they have a business plan for public consumption which they give to us, the poor legislators, and then they have the real business plan which is what they actually manage from. These documents are vague, they're written in sometimes baffling language, the targets that are selected, there's no relation to the amount of money that's being asked for, or if these targets were achieved, how that would relate to the strategic objectives of the department.
There are better ways of doing this kind of thing. I mean it's well-known how to do these kinds of business plans, performance reports, other jurisdictions really are leading the way but Nova Scotia is trailing badly. As a legislator reviewing the plans and the budget of the department, I have to tell you that this document is not useful, it could be so much better than it is.
For example, just today you've said it's going to be hard to meet the province's protected areas target. I didn't know that before, I certainly didn't know that from reading the business plan but I would expect it to be in the business plan. I would expect to be able to read, here's the target, here's how much closer to the target we're going to get this year, here's why we're going to get there, here are the risks and challenges we're facing and here's why, in the long run, we're going to have trouble meeting our target anyway, so that I can see the path into the future, see how this year relates to the past and the future years, see how it relates to the budget that you're asking for, so that we can debate in a meaningful way whether your department needs more money, less money, or needs to go in a completely different direction.
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Instead, we have to read between the lines here, listen to offhand comments that you might make, try to guess, try to dig for the information. So again I say, rather than having a thoughtful policy discussion about protection of protected areas, we end up having to dig for information that we just shouldn't have to dig for. So that applies generally to the whole business plan.
Now, let me turn to this issue of water resources. One of the targets in the water resources plan is that all municipal public drinking water supplies will meet the province's treatment standards by 2008. What it doesn't say anywhere in the document is why they don't currently comply, what the challenges are, specifically which units are the ones that have to be brought into compliance, and why there's any reason to think that if they weren't compliant last year they will be compliant this year.
It doesn't tell me how it relates to the budget for water resource management that you're asking for, whether you should have more money, less money, or just have a completely different approach to the problem. So I say this earnestly hoping that somebody is listening, to say that when you present a document to the Legislature - actually to the public because it's available on the department's Web site - it needs to be done better than this so-called business plan.
Okay, so let me now ask you this specific question. If the target for this year is that all municipal public drinking water supplies will meet the province's treatment standards by 2008, which municipalities currently do not meet the standards?
MR. PARENT: In general terms, 50 per cent will have met the target, 82 per cent will have met it by the end of the year, so there's 18 per cent we're still working towards, working with. I have a list of all of the municipalities, which I published at one stage. I'm not sure I have it right now but I'll get it to you, Mr. Steele. We have a list of every municipality that has not met the standards and the 18 per cent that will still have some difficulty meeting it.
MR. STEELE: The business plan on Pages 18 and 19 has different figures. I won't read them off. The last figure reported is for 2005, where the compliance is set at 98 per cent, already at 98 per cent. So either I'm misreading that figure or you've mis-remembered.
I was under the impression that there were a handful of municipal water supplies that are not currently compliant and that there are some pretty serious challenges they're facing to become compliant. What I wanted to get at is, what is it going to take for us to help those municipalities overcome the hurdles? You've just given me a figure that's completely different than what I read in the business plan.
MR. PARENT: Well, basically what it will take . . .
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MR. STEELE: Now, wait a second, let's get the percentages. Your business plan says as of 2005, 98 per cent are compliant. You've just told me today that 50 per cent are compliant.
MR. PARENT: But those figures that you're looking at, compared to the figures I gave you, that's percentage of population served versus percentage of municipal water facilities.
MR. STEELE: Well, how am I supposed to know that? It doesn't say that in the document.
MR. PARENT: It says at the top . . .
MR. STEELE: So it's percentage of the population served . . .
MR. PARENT: Right, so it does say that, doesn't it?
MR. STEELE: But now you're saying that 50 per cent of municipal water supplies are non-compliant?
MR. PARENT: No, I'm not saying that, I'm saying . . .
MR. STEELE: What's the 50 per cent figure then?
MR. PARENT: There's about 18 per cent.
MR. STEELE: What - 18 per cent of what?
MR. PARENT: They're small ones - 18 per cent are non-compliant, 18 per cent of 100.
MR. STEELE: There are 100 municipal water supplies?
MR. PARENT: No, 18 per cent of 100 per cent. You want the actual numbers and which ones they are, I'll get you that.
MR. STEELE: No, I just want you to explain to me what the 18 is - 18 per cent of what?
MR. PARENT: Of 100 per cent, of all the municipal drinking water systems in the province.
MR. STEELE: How many of those are there?
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MR. PARENT: I promise I'll get you the list of those that aren't in compliance, but of the 100 per cent, of all of the municipal drinking water systems, roughly 18 per cent will not be in compliance by the end of this year. Those 18 per cent are by and large very small municipal water systems and the reason why they're not in compliance in part is financial - it's a financial cost for small water systems.
[3:00 p.m.]
MR. STEELE: But here's my point, for the purposes of the budget discussion, your department says that by the end of this year the target is that 100 per cent will be compliant. Why should anyone believe that in this fiscal year that will happen? There's no explanation in the document about which municipalities they are, what barriers they're facing, and why the budget that your department has asked for will help to achieve 100 per cent compliance.
MR. PARENT: We'll get you the list of those municipalities.
MR. STEELE: Okay, but I'm asking for more than that. Your department says that if we vote this budget, we have reason to believe that 100 per cent of those municipalities will be compliant by the end of the year and I'm looking for the proof to back that up. Why is the budget that you've asked for going to help achieve 100 per cent compliance?
MR. PARENT: I'm not totally clear on your question. The department doesn't fund the municipalities to be in compliance, we set standards for drinking water. They were set in 2002 with the target date of this year, as you mentioned.
MR. STEELE: But remember, Minister, this is your business plan, not mine, and I'm just going to read you the sentence that I'm referring to. It says on Page 8, "Target: All municipal public drinking water supplies will meet the province's treatment standards by 2008." Now, that's the target in your department's business plan and what I'm asking you is if the Legislature votes you the budget that you've asked for, what is it about that budget that is going to lead to 100 per cent compliance?
MR. PARENT: I mean I'm trying to get at - I think you're asking me two different questions. The compliance, the enforcement, the working with the municipalities to bring compliance about is through my department. So the budget that you will be approving will be helping to fund inspectors who will work with the municipal water systems, who will be able - who are already telling them they're not in compliance and telling them what they have to do to get into compliance. Funding to bring them into compliance would come through Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, if there was outside funding to them. We don't have funding in the department.
So, for example, if Town A wasn't in compliance, we would be able to tell them that and we would be able to tell them what they had to do to get into compliance and the money
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that you would approve for our budget would fund that. But if you're saying do we have resources to then fund them to get into compliance, we don't. That is done through Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations and through partnerships with the municipalities.
So, for example, in Canning and in Port Williams, they were not in compliance. My officials, and my department funded by the budget, were able to determine that, able to determine what they need to get into compliance, and able to work with them in order to help them understand the challenge. They then had to partner with both the Municipality of Kings and with the Province of Nova Scotia, through Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, and they received grants - in one case $400,000, the other $200,000 - which they put together in partnership form to come into compliance. Then the inspectors that you fund, the province helps fund through this department, would sign off on that and ensure that they were in compliance.
MR. STEELE: I'm not sure if you understand the point I'm trying - I mean everything you've said makes perfect sense but it's your business plan that says your department's target is 100 per cent compliance. But if you know from the get-go that's not achievable, then it's a meaningless target. That's what it says on one page. Then the table at the back, Appendix C, Performance Measures, says that the target for this year is to ". . . maximize the percentage of population served by municipal water supplies that meet the health-based criteria for bacteriological quality". That, in itself, is a meaningless sentence. What does it mean to maximize something? Does that mean the most that is achievable, in which case it's just a tautology? It doesn't mean anything. Does it mean 100 per cent, which is what the document says earlier on Page 8?
MR. PARENT: Which page are you on again?
MR. STEELE: I'm on Page 18. If you look under Annual Target, "Clean and safe drinking water" that means the target in this fiscal year, if we vote this budget that you've asked for, it says, "maximize the percentage of population served" but that's a meaningless target, because if you maximize whatever is achievable then all you're saying is your target is whatever is achievable, which tells me precisely nothing.
MR. PARENT: The regulation is in place that they all be in compliance. Oftentimes we don't have people in compliance with various aspects of the Environment Act, so then we have a couple of options. One of the options is to have ministerial orders and move in that regard. What we try to do is we try to work with them to bring them into compliance and say, okay, what sort of resources do you need, what time do you need in order to come into compliance? Because what we really want is we want them to comply, we don't want to just slap orders on them. So when we use the word "maximize" what we're talking about is that 18 per cent, those very small ones who either need more resources or more information, or whatever, we will work with them to bring them into compliance. If we come to the point
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where we determine within the department that they are deliberately not moving to meet the target that we set, then we have to come out with a stick.
So the word that you see "maximize" basically, we'll work them to bring them into compliance. There are about 18 per cent that won't be in compliance, from what we can determine, and we will work with them. At any stage if we feel they are being deliberately obtuse and they have no intention of coming into compliance, that's when we . . .
MR. STEELE: Why can't you say all of those things in your business plan, because what appears to be a hard target - 100 per cent compliance - turns out to be a soft target that really can't be achieved this year. One other way of thinking of the budget that's helpful is to say to somebody who comes to you asking, let's say for the sake of round figures, you come here looking for $1 million for this particular aspect of your department's work and then I would say to you, okay, what if we voted you $1.5 million, what could you achieve then? What if we voted you $500,000, what could you achieve then? What if we voted you nothing, what would we lose then? What if we doubled your budget, what would you be able to achieve?
When I look at the documents that have been provided to us, I have no idea what the answers to those questions are and I should. For example, if you have $1 million to do this, I don't know at the end of the year how many of those municipal units that are currently non-compliant would be compliant, whether it's going to be any different than it is today. Or if I gave you another $1 million and said fix it, because that's a lot of people who aren't drinking safe water, whether your department has any idea how they would use that extra money or if it's even achievable or whether it's some other department's job. There is no context for the goals, in other words, or for the amount of money that's being asked for.
I guess my point - I know my time is winding down, I still have another 10 minutes left - but here's the thing. On every single aspect of the business plan, I could go through the same exercise with you that I have just gone through on water resource management where I look at the goal that your department says, probe it to see what it actually means, look at the business plan to see how your department plans to go about achieving it, and I have very little information to go on. Most of the goals turn out to be very vague and soft. Just as we've explored this one topic, we've discovered that the target of 100 per cent compliance turns out not to be a target at all. The target is to maximize compliance, whatever that means, in any given fiscal year, but we could go down topic, by topic, by topic, and reach the same conclusion.
For example, on Page 9 of the business plan, it says, "Target: Achieve a solid-waste disposal rate of three hundred kilograms per person per year by 2015." But there's no context for that. There's no discussion of why 300 is picked, how that compares to other jurisdictions that have already achieved it, how other jurisdictions achieved it, what that means. Because according to the figures in the business plan, that would mean that each one of us, including
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my children, would have to cut our waste disposal by more than half in order to get to that target.
But I'm given no context about how your budget will help us achieve that or move us one year further down the road. It's just sort of there as a stand-alone target, with no explanation or background about why that number seems to have been plucked out of the air.
Let me then move on to another one that you've referred to already. Another target, "Legally protect twelve percent of the total land mass of the Province by 2015." In your budget for this year, I'm looking for information about how at the end of this fiscal year, if we vote the budget you're looking for, how we're going to be advanced towards that goal. You've mentioned it's going to be hard to achieve that target - why?
MR. PARENT: Perhaps some of your questions will be answered when we table the first report that's based upon the round table and it's coming out later in May . . .
MR. STEELE: But you're looking for your budget to be approved today, so let's talk about it today.
MR. PARENT: . . . when you look at the targets, I just want to give you some of that reassurance. The reason why the 12 per cent is hard to achieve is twofold. One, we've started from a level of below 8 per cent protected when we started; and two, there's an enormous amount of private land that's held in Nova Scotia. We have the smallest amount of public land within the province, in large part because of the age of the province - we were settled very early on and land claims were given and land was deeded.
In some provinces where you have extensive public landholdings, it's fairly easy to move your targets quickly. You just transfer over that land to protected area status. In our province, where we have very little public land, it's harder to do because we don't just put land in protected land status unless it meets certain qualifications ecologically. Otherwise, I mean, we do have enough Crown land, we could just sort of wave a magic wand, but that would be somewhat devious.
What we need to do is get representative and ecologically sensitive land, because there's so little in Crown hands, we have to depend upon private landowners to put conservation constraints upon their property. That's why we're working with the Nature Conservancy and the Nova Scotia Nature Trust.
That having been said, we've made great leaps this past year: $25 million with the Bowater lands, 91 per cent of which qualified as protected lands; the Birch Cove and Ship Harbour announcement, there's been a fair amount of activity with the Nature Trust; and the Blandford Nature Reserve. So we've made great strides this past year. But the challenge is
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basically due to the fact that there is so little public land that we either have to buy it outright as a province - which is expensive - or we have to work with private landowners.
MR. STEELE: Could I just get you to flip to Page 22, please, of the business plan. There must be something wrong either with your figures or the figures in the business plan because they just don't match what you're saying. If I could get you to flip to Page 22, look down the column headed Data and then over to the Ultimate Target. It says that 12 per cent of Nova Scotia's total land mass would be 663,125 hectares. If you look over at the data for 2007-08, it says 301,474, which clearly is less than half the target.
You've often used the figure 8 per cent - we've all used it - but that's clearly less than 6 per cent. Why do the numbers not seem to add up, can you explain that? You also mentioned we made great strides in the last year, but according to the figures in the Data column, we added exactly 320 hectares in 2007-08 over the previous year, which would be 0.1 per cent.
MR. PARENT: The data you see in the business plan is the land that's protected specifically under the Environment Department. However, there is private land added to it and then there are two very large national parks that are considered protected land, according to protected land data. So the total of protected land in Nova Scotia, some of which is protected directly by my department, some of it's protected in co-operation with the federal department, but according to agreements across Canada is considered as protected land, attributed to the 12 per cent, 450,696 hectares.
[3:15 p.m.]
MR. STEELE: But do you see how the figures in the third column, then, aren't comparable to the figure in the fifth column and how any reader looking at this would think that the two were talking about the same thing, but you've just explained why they're really counting two different things.
So let me ask you this - Mr. Chairman, I think I have, what, two minutes left, maybe three?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, about three minutes.
MR. STEELE: About three minutes. Let me ask you this then. If I sound frustrated, it's because I am. As I look at figures like this, I know that one of these numbers is wrong but I shouldn't have to sit here trying to figure out which number is wrong. The numbers should be right and they should be directly comparable to each other. My question is - the target for 2015 was set last year. So the projection of the government, enshrined in law, is that in eight years we would get up to 12 per cent. Now, one year into that plan, you say it's probably too ambitious.
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MR. PARENT: No.
MR. STEELE: I'm sorry, you said it is probably going to be difficult to meet.
MR. PARENT: What I stated is that the two most difficult targets - we fully intend to meet them and we're working hard toward them - are the protected areas and the greenhouse gases, for very obvious reasons on the greenhouse gas side. That doesn't mean - and I hope you don't take from my comments that we're not going to meet them in any way. What it means is that those are challenges - and when you see the report of the round table, which I'll be presenting on behalf of some of the advice of the roundtable, I think it will indicate that.
I also want to make sure that when we talk about the drinking water strategy, the drinking water is safe for Nova Scotians but because of what happened in Ontario, as you know, different policies were put into place to make sure that things like that could not happen. So I wouldn't want to leave the impression that drinking water is not safe in Nova Scotia and anything I said that would be interpreted in that way, I want to disown.
MR. STEELE: But you see in your business plan, I don't see anything stating that the target of 12 per cent might be difficult to reach. It gives me no context for what's going to happen during this fiscal year and how it relates to the target and how we're going to get there, what the challenges are. I think that's what I and other people in Nova Scotia want to see because on the one hand you say it's going to be difficult to meet, but on the other hand you say, oh, I don't want anybody to think we're not going to meet it. It's difficult to hold those two thoughts simultaneously. One of them is true and one of them isn't.
My complaint today is when I look at the documents provided by the new-old Department of Environment, tell me why they want all this money and what they're going to do with it, I just have very little information to go on about how the money you've asked for is going to help achieve these targets. So is 12 per cent too ambitious?
MR. PARENT: No, I didn't say that. I said it's going to be a challenging goal. You asked me about all of the different targets, and two of the ones that are going to be the most challenging are the 12 per cent and the greenhouse gases. I didn't say they were too challenging, I said they would be challenging and they will be.
MR. STEELE: After looking at your department's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, I have no idea how it relates to the eventual target of 2015 and how what happens this year is connected to what happens the year after that or the year after that. That is the essence of my complaint about the documents that your department has provided to the Legislature.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll probably wrap up before I start a new line.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has expired for the NDP caucus. We'll now move to the Liberal caucus.
The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Mr. Chairman, so many questions, it's hard to know where to start with this. I'm going to start with the new department, the change in the Department of Environment back to where it used to be, pretty well. What responsibilities does the department have now with the tar ponds?
MR. PARENT: We've added on inspectors for the tar ponds, we have two new inspectors for the tar ponds. Our job is really inspection and oversight of the environmental side of that. The Sydney Tar Ponds Agency is doing the work but we make sure that the environmental standards are kept and because we needed some more expertise on that, there are, as I mentioned, two additional FTEs who are going to be designated specifically for that to make sure the environmental regulations that were imposed upon them are met.
MR. COLWELL: So I just want to make sure I understand it properly. If the department's only concern with the tar ponds is just to make sure that everything is - that the results of testing of anything that comes out of there, anything that's disposed of, ensuring it's disposed of properly, and all of that sort of activity, is that what I'm hearing?
MR. PARENT: Yes, our job is the regulatory oversight to make sure that the agreements and the EA, the environmental assessment, are adhered to. We don't actually do the work, the work is being done by the Tar Ponds Agency and by the related partners, but we make sure that the regulations are adhered to. So we've added on two FTEs, two full-time staff, to deal with that issue and we've recently received an application from the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency for the construction and operation of a material processing facility. We determined, our inspectors, that the proponent hadn't met all of the requirements in the environmental assessment approval and they hadn't completed one specific section, Section 5.1, so we asked them to go back and refine their application. So that's what our inspectors do, but the actual work is done by the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency and the related partners.
MR. COLWELL: Do they do any actual monitoring of the effluence or anything like that, or do they just do sort of a paper overview?
MR. PARENT: Yes, basically as is typical with most of the EAs that we do, the company has to hire individuals to do the testing and then submit reports to us. We examine those reports and if we find any questions for concern, if there are any discrepancies, et cetera, then we'll investigate further. We also do physical inspections from time to time - not on a regular basis, I don't believe, but on an ad hoc basis - in order to sort of keep everything above-board. So those are not scheduled inspections, those are inspections that could happen at any time. The paperwork needs to have been done, and that provides us with the
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examination of the paperwork, and these ad hoc inspections happen on different schedules so that they can't sort of, you know, just get ready for the inspectors coming. We hope the combination of those keeps them in full compliance.
MR. COLWELL: Do the staff in the department review the testing processes to see if, indeed, the processes they're using are appropriate for what they're looking for?
MR. PARENT: We do that. We also have two outside consultants that we have contracted with to do peer review of the testing processes. We knew that when the Sydney tar ponds project was going forward that this was an ambitious one for the government, that our department needed some expertise, so we added on these two FTEs. But we also consult with outside consultants who do peer reviews of the literature to make sure that the processes and the testing methods they use, and analyses, are as scientifically up to date as possible.
MR. COLWELL: So basically your department doesn't fund the cleanup, as a representative of the department, you're just the monitoring agency, is that correct?
MR. PARENT: Yes, we're the regulator. I think the Sydney tar ponds is under Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, which does the funding. We do the regulation and we also agreed that because in the report that was done by the Community Liaison Committee and then the panel of experts, there was some sort of concern that this was such a big project, one of the biggest remediation projects in Canada, that the department didn't have the necessary expertise. That's why we got additional FTEs, we got money to hire outside consultants, but we also agreed that there would be a review of whether we held them to the environmental regulations. That is reviewed by the - I forget the name of the monitoring panel - the Remediation Oversight Monitoring Board.
So in order to give full assurance to people that the monitoring was being done properly, we got additional resources both within the department, consulted outside the department, and also agreed that the Oversight Monitoring Board could monitor - not so much the project per se, because we're monitoring the project - but monitor whether we were adhering to our regulatory requirements and fulfilling them properly.
MR. COLWELL: The Oversight Monitoring Board, how is that made up? Is it made up from the community, experts, or what?
MR. PARENT: It's three experts - I forget the (Interruption) Yes, all of them are environmental experts - I can get you the names. Colin Hines is one, one is from CBU, I believe one is here in the city, and one is from Windsor. But all of them are experts outside of government in environmental cleanup issues.
MR. COLWELL: What's their mandate? If they find something they figure is not appropriate, that the government's not doing, what recourse do they have?
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MR. PARENT: They would provide a report to me. They had their inaugural meeting in February, went through the terms of reference, and they're now up and running. So what they'll do is provide reports to me if they feel that the environmental monitoring regulations that we have in place are not being adhered to. They would report where they felt we had not performed properly and then, of course, we'd fix that.
I need to be clear on this because there was hesitation by the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency as to what this recommendation meant and what it means is that they monitor the monitors, basically, to make sure our monitoring adheres to what we've stated. This was to provide assurance to the citizens of Sydney and the citizens of Nova Scotia that the regulations which they felt were good, from what I could tell from the feedback I got, but those regulations were enforced.
Not only do they have the assurance from my department and from myself, but there's a monitoring board of three environmental experts who will look and make sure we're adhering to our regulatory policies. But they're not monitoring the actual work, they're monitoring our regulations and whether we're adhering to them.
Is that clear? I just need to make that distinction. It's subtle but it's important.
MR. COLWELL: What's the annual budget for all of the work the Department of Environment does with the tar ponds - including everything?
MR. PARENT: As a result of an agreement with the federal government, all of the money is recoverable, but it's about $550,000.
MR. COLWELL: So there's no cost actually to the . . .
MR. PARENT: No, because there was an agreement worked out with the federal government where really, we receive the money, but there's no cost to the taxpayers recoverable from the federal government - well, from the actual, the $400 million that was put in place.
MR. COLWELL: What kind of progress does it look like they're making with this cleanup, from an environmental standpoint and a monitoring standpoint?
MR. PARENT: The word I get is that things are on schedule. This is about a 20-year project, it's a long, long project, and stabilization right to the end, where they're hoping - and I've heard various hopes. Some have talked about a business park there, others have talked about a golf club - that may well be one of your colleagues who has been pushing that suggestion. But it will be about a 20-year project and they are on schedule to date, but it's just at the beginning, the start of it.
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It's an exciting project in that because it's one of the largest remediation projects in Canada - and I guess by definition it's one of the larger ones worldwide - that it gives us an opportunity to develop capacity and expertise in my department of overseeing and monitoring contaminated site cleanups of this size. Also, I know that CBU is interested in working and have dealt directly with the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency and some possibility of some sort of partnership where they develop expertise in cleanups of contaminated sites, which they could then help in terms of building up the university. So there are a lot of opportunities.
[3:30 p.m.]
CBU has been looking at two areas in the environment in particular. One is perhaps developing an institute of contaminated sites - I don't know how far they've gone on that - but developing that where they could then attract students who would come from other places to study there on that specific topic, and then they could also export that knowledge. Also, they're quite interested in clean coal technology, in large part because of the history of Cape Breton and because, I understand, CBU has MOUs with some universities in China where almost every week a new coal-fired plant is going up - at least one. This falls into that category of opportunities that CBU wants to see.
In addition, I think they've partnered with the Membertou Band there and part of the requirements that were placed upon the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency is to try in the cleanup to make sure the local community received as much work as possible from the project. But that would be outside of what my department does. We would monitor that, because that was part of the EA conditions that would be going on, but we wouldn't actually be doing it.
MR. COLWELL: On to another topic. What's the status on the proper handling and disposal of tires in Nova Scotia now?
MR. PARENT: We have a committee and thanks to the hard work on your part, in part, we made a decision, as you know, that for the foreseeable future we would not allow tires to be used for tire-derived fuel at the Lafarge plant. We commissioned a study with a professor heading it up from the Université de Moncton, in that he graded about 20 different ways of dealing with used tires and he assigned to each of those 20 different ways a grade of one to four. He said they were all possible ways that were used worldwide, and we certainly know tire-derived fuel has been used in other jurisdictions. He graded it a four and the scale was one to four, so he graded it at the bottom. What he did in that regard was to list for us in this report what he thought would be the best option for us to proceed on. The best option, in his opinion, was to look at using tires for aggregate, which I believe you also may have suggested in our last session together.
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So we formed a committee, it's headed up by a person in my department, Bill Turpin, under the deputy minister, who has been working across government to try to see whether this proposal is economically feasible and how to put it into action.
The committee has met and hopefully we'll be able to get something in place by summer, if not by the Fall. I was hoping it might be able to be in place by the summer for the construction season, if indeed they hope to use tires as aggregate. The report indicated there was opportunity for that and that would be the best opportunity for Nova Scotians in part because TRACC, which is a New Brunswick company, is doing a lot of recycling, animal mats, the various things that they're doing, and they felt there was no market for that, but they felt there was a good market for aggregate because no one was doing aggregate out of tires.
So the committee is moving forward and making substantial progress, to use a term we use in the House, but let me get you a more specific update. So I will have more to say about this in the first of the summer and we hope that we'll able to announce good news at that stage, as to what to do with the tires in a way that would be environmentally friendly.
MR. COLWELL: What's happening to the tires now in the meantime?
MR. PARENT: Part of the tires are still being sent to Quebec where they're used for tire-derived fuel there - in fact, I think most of the tires are being sent there. Tires are not being stockpiled, so that must mean that all of the tires are being sent. There is some recycling of tires that goes on - but it's very, very minimal - for certain products. So the tires are being sent to Quebec where they're being used for tire-derived fuel right now by Lafarge.
MR. COLWELL: Of course, that's causing pollution problems for us because of prevailing winds, I believe, coming to Nova Scotia through Quebec.
MR. PARENT: Yes, it's not the top solution that we want, that's why we have this committee formed and are working very hard specifically on that option that I mentioned to you that the report indicated it being the number one option for tires in Nova Scotia. That's what we'd like to see happen as soon as is feasible, so I've been hounding our staff to try to get something in place. I'd like to see it in place before the construction season because if aggregate is a possibility and we can use it for aggregate, if it works well and there's a company willing to buy the equipment to shred it up and we can transport it to the proper sites in an economic way, then let's get that in place before the construction season rather than afterwards.
As you know, stockpiles of tires are very, very dangerous. Moncton had that fire which burned for - how many days? It was quite a long time. We don't want to export our problem to Quebec but we can't stockpile them, so it's a temporary solution until we get the aggregate in place and we're moving as quickly to that goal as we can.
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There were about 20 different ways of dealing with tires. They talked about bridge stabilization as another one but according to the scientist, he thought there were opportunities for aggregate. We needed to do the economic work to make sure that was true because he stressed to me that he was making an environmental assessment based upon consulting, but that more work needed to be done in terms of the economic viability of that.
MR. COLWELL: What does it cost us to move the tires to Quebec right now, per tire?
MR. PARENT: I'll have to get you that information, I don't know offhand whether it's costing us - most of the $4 environmental fee, about $3. I better get my figures back to you, but well over $3 is just in the transportation of it throughout the province to a main depot and then it's sent out from there. RRFB have assured me on several occasions that we are not subsidizing tires for Lafarge in Quebec, that the money is going to transport them to a central depot and to pay for the administration and the holding of that depot. But I will get you that information.
We're going to be having a knowledge day to stimulate private-sector interest in tire-derived aggregate and that was to try, once we got everything in place and decided it was economically feasible, we knew it was an environmentally friendly way because the report stated that and we knew that much to try to stimulate private-sector interest in tire-derived aggregate. The word has been going out because when the report was published on the Net, it stated very much that here was an economic opportunity that the report saw that was environmentally the best option, but we need to stimulate private-sector interest in it so that we have companies coming forward that might be willing to take that on.
We've had some calls already. In fact, interestingly enough, Lafarge has actually bought a company in the Valley area that provides aggregate and could very much be in a place where it might buy a shredder, and instead of providing rock aggregate, provide tire-derived aggregate.
I think you brought to the House - and maybe your colleague, Junior, brought to the House - that there were two roads. My staff have examined them, but I haven't had the opportunity and I'd like to, at one stage, see both of those roads. One is up near Port Hawkesbury, I believe, and the other is down near Digby - they used tire-derived aggregate some years ago and both of them have stayed in almost pristine condition, from the reports that I was getting. So we have high hopes but we need to have the private sector step up. So we're going to have a day - it's going to be tomorrow actually, I'm finding out - where we'll be unveiling the statistics, inviting various companies in that might be interested in taking this up as a business opportunity.
MR. COLWELL: I think it's a step in the right direction, but I hope when you go through that process, it's not going to be the RRFB again deciding that one big company is
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going to cure everything and fix everything, and then truck tires from Yarmouth to Sydney to process them, and then truck them back to Yarmouth again to put them in roads. That seems to be what the RRFB is all about. They don't seem to have any imagination whatsoever when it comes to solving these environmental issues that they're tasked to do. I personally think it would be a lot better if the RRFB purchased a couple of shredders and made them available at a cost to the different gravel pits in the province and worked it like the car crusher does: go around and stockpile a few tires - not a big pile of them - at each site and then shred them all year-round.
It would make a lot more sense because if you get one large outfit like Lafarge - and I have no problem with Lafarge buying equipment and doing this work, none at all, because they're a great company - then we would make the aggregate available to everybody so we get more roads and more use of it, and also it would cut down the extremely ridiculous cost for trucking them all over the place. That, again, I think the RRFB has miserably failed with the trucking cost on these tires. It's just, I don't know, they must have found - I believe, from what I've heard, Lafarge is trucking the tires for just about $3 apiece, the environmental fee we're paying, the province gains on that because we pay HST to the province for paying the $3.
So I really have no more faith whatsoever in the RRFB. Initially I did have, they did some good work, but it seems like they all fell apart. It seems like they're big-business oriented. They're not at all there to help stimulate the local economy and, indeed, help resolve some of these environmental issues we have while at the same time creating some employment. Has there been any consideration of doing that instead of just again, they'll probably come up with some big outfit that's going to shred these tires and truck them from all over the province and then they'll have to truck them back all over the province again, adding to the greenhouse gases and all of the other problems that go with it. It's insane, it's absolutely insane what they even proposed before, to burn the tires. If you leave it to them to look after, I'm very concerned.
MR. PARENT: The committee headed up by the staff person does include the RRFB but it's bigger than the RRFB. So this decision will be taken at a different level and I agree with you on your point because when I spoke to this issue about aggregate long before the proposal for the tire-derived fuels came forward, I had mentioned aggregate at that stage and the answer I always got was that you needed the aggregate near where you're doing the road construction and you would only have one sort of central depot. So your suggestion of having a chipper that could be moved makes a lot of sense. Certainly we'll be passing it on to the committee that's looking at it to see if that sort of technology is out there and could be used.
That was one of the reasons, I was told by RRFB staff that aggregate wasn't a feasible possibility because it would all be in one central location and the trucking back and forth would be too expensive, but if we could take the chipper - and it's not really a high-tech chipper, as you know - if the chipper could be moved to the place where the road-building
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was going on and you could have maybe a couple of these mobile units, that would sound to me like a good system.
[3:45 p.m.]
Again, I'm speaking without really knowing whether the chipper technology - I did speak to the chair who wrote the report - I forget who the chair was now - Louis LaPierre, and he indicated that from the consulting he'd done, these chippers were not really very high-tech and then I think he gave me a figure of $1 million for a chipper, but that the technology was not something that was unique, it was fairly standard technology, that the different blades could chip it to different sizes.
Certainly your suggestion would be passed on, I just don't know whether they could be moved, but it would be helpful if they could be, because that would then help overcome the trucking and the greenhouse gases you mentioned.
The other thing, I know that New Brunswick was doing some of this and they had quite a major road construction project going on that would take all of their aggregate, so they just stationed the chipper near where they were doing that work and were able to just concentrate on that one road. I'm not sure of the amount of aggregate that would be produced from 900,000 tires and how much could be used by, say, a kilometre of highway. That's the sort of information that's being looked at by this committee and that will all be grist for the mill.
So your suggestion is a good one and certainly we'll pass it on.
MR. COLWELL: Well, if you look at the pulp and paper industry, Scott Paper used to bring all of their logs in round, with the bark on them, and chip them in the mill, feed them into the mill, because that was the only way it would work. From what I understand, Scott Paper doesn't even own a chipper anymore, but all of the people who contract to them, who harvest the wood in the woods, own them and they bring the chipped product to the mill and they dump it directly in the mill. It has saved the mill millions of dollars, it has reduced the trucking costs because, instead of the round logs, you have the chips coming in huge trailer trucks which are probably lighter than the round logs.
It's just inconceivable that the Resource Recovery Fund Board couldn't come up with a solution similar to this - I'm not saying this is the only solution, but similar to this. Again, the response you got from them is, well, we'll have to truck the tires all to one place. That's typical; it's big or nothing with them.
There is a company in the States that builds shredders and from what I understand, they'll build a shredder to shred anything. I think the last thing they shredded was a school bus. They can build shredders to do anything and they've actually built shredders to shred
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tires. I used to design mechanical equipment and the only issue with it is getting enough power to a machine to make it work - that's the only issue - and making it light enough so you can truck it on the roads without breaking the - those are the two issues, everything else is pretty straightforward. This is not rocket science, it's just a matter of building the right equipment that will stand up to the stress over time.
Perhaps we should have two, or three, or four of these machines that travel the province to each pit. The tires could go from where they're picked up, or someone could even drop them off at the pit - that would cut out the trucking costs, almost all of the trucking costs. Put it in a location that will be the end user, and then the end user sell these products and make a profit on them and cut our costs. Maybe we could reduce our $3 fee down to the public and help reduce some of the costs in place. I just get so irritated when I talk about this, when the solutions are so simple.
MR. PARENT: It's interesting when you talk about the fee because I believe, I forget which MLA it was - it wasn't me - who talked about how we might have to raise the fee and I was really pleased when Louis LaPierre said that he thought it could be done at a profit for a company within the fee we have right now. He didn't suggest we would be able to reduce the fee, I don't want to lead you astray in that regard, but he felt that - this is a cursory - he kept stating he was doing an environmental assessment, not an economic one, but because of the nature of the task we gave him he had to do some of that. He felt fairly confident that this could be done within the current fee and still result in a profit to whatever company undertook it.
I understand, and this is more anecdotal than anything, that the original company that was dealing with recycled tires in Nova Scotia took a very, very expensive initial approach - freezing the tire with nitrogen, a very high, intensive energy, not very friendly to greenhouse gases - and this was just unsustainable. What happened to them is in the end they morphed into TRACC, which is in New Brunswick, which is doing recycling of various products, a whole line of products, but not doing aggregate. So the aggregate is an opportunity for us.
MR. COLWELL: Yes, and just for the record, it wasn't me who suggested that the tire fee go up.
MR. PARENT: No, I never meant to assume that, that it was you, and I don't think it was our Party either.
MR. COLWELL: It was Mr. Steele of the NDP in a newspaper report, in case you've forgotten, and it means an increase in taxes of 25 per cent. So that's a substantial increase.
I'm an entrepreneur by nature and that's the way I used to make my living. Indeed, I think tires can be reused and indeed a profit made off of them by a company and still sell them at a very reasonable cost, at a lower cost to the consumers who have to buy new tires,
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and I think it's very easy to do that. I'm sure Lafarge is very, very happy getting paid the trucking fee to get them partway to Quebec and then getting free fuel when they get it there, so it's a good deal for them. But hopefully we'll be able to end that good deal and if it so happens that they're the people that do the aggregate, or one of the companies that do the aggregate, that's fantastic.
The other issues around the RRFB, there was recently a contract cancelled with a company that did the recycling of the bottles and repackaging when they came into a central site. That was a decision the company made to cease the contract at that time and I won't go into the details, but what has it cost the RRFB after that contract was terminated to redo these bottles? I've got some information, and I can't verify it at this point, that it's costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to do this over and above what the original cost was, is that correct?
MR. PARENT: I don't have the specific figures on that. I was just talking to the Minister of Economic Development today since you brought it to my attention on behalf of your constituents about seeing if there was some way through Economic Development that there could be help for this company. I understand from the information you gave me that the RRFB was incurring higher costs in order to deal with the fact that perhaps the full information hadn't been given to the company about the challenge and the storage capacity and then the equipment that they would need in order to do the job properly. We are working with Economic Development and Mr. MacNeil in my department has been tasked, within the limits that we have to work with, to try to bring some sort of solution to this problem. But in terms of the actual money that the RRFB is putting out, I'll have to get you that information specifically and I'll have that before the end of the House session.
MR. COLWELL: That would be great. The diversion rate on reusable and non-reusable containers that are dropped off at the enviro-depots, the little ones, has that gone down?
MR. PARENT: Not to my knowledge. On the returnable bottle containers?
MR. COLWELL: Well, the cans, the bottles, the reusables and non-reusables, juice containers - it's my understanding that might have dropped.
MR. PARENT: I spoke at the annual meeting of the recyclers' association, they include about 80 per cent of the enviro-depots in their membership, and I just spoke there two weeks ago and it certainly wasn't brought to my attention that it was a problem in any way.
There has been some discussion, if what you're getting at is whether the fee may be too low and it needs to be revisited, because that fee has been in place for about 10 years, but P.E.I. has just come on-line with their 10 cents and what we'd like to do, if we do anything,
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it would be on a harmonized Atlantic basis. But that hasn't been brought to my attention so if you have any information on that, I'd be happy to hear it. But the information I have is that it hasn't been a problem, in part because people get back their 5 cents, so even if the individual doesn't think it's worth the effort to take it back, there are other individuals who will - or in my case, fortuitously, since my garage was getting full of pop cans, et cetera, the Cub Scouts in the area come through and use it as a fundraiser.
MR. COLWELL: Yes, that does work very well.
Again, I'm really disappointed with the Resource Recovery Fund Board. Has any effort been made by the RRFB to have the small enviro-depots take expired propane tanks?
MR. PARENT: We talked about this last year and there's been nothing to my knowledge - I could stand to be corrected on that. The major effort that we had and, as I mentioned in my opening remarks and you give me a chance to elaborate on it if that's okay, is electronic recycling.
MR. COLWELL: I'm going to get into that later - not the electronic, I want to talk about propane tanks.
MR. PARENT: Propane tanks, no, not that we're in discussion - there's been no decision made, but it's still in the discussion stage. So that's where it's at and I think that was the same answer I gave you last year, so it should be duly noted that discussion should move along a little faster.
MR. COLWELL: And maybe we should have some real serious discussion and get them done in the next month or so because it is so easy to do. I mean this is not something that has to be very complicated.
MR. PARENT: We have a new deputy minister who's very gung-ho, she's listening intently.
MR. COLWELL: I'm well aware of that and I think that's good news - not that the old deputy minister didn't do a great job.
MR. PARENT: No, but he really had two departments to handle at once. This new one is chomping at the bit to put 110 per cent into the one department.
MR. COLWELL: I'm going to get on to a little bit bigger picture with recycling. I'm a big supporter of recycling, I don't think we should have a landfill in this province in another 20 years, quite frankly, there should not be a landfill of any type in this province.
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Has there been a real conscious effort by government - I'm going to talk about government now - to really recycle more items? It seems like we've come to a standstill and use the enviro-depots more for more things, even if it means we take some of the money that the RRFB makes - and they make a substantial profit every year - and help put some infrastructure in place for these small enviro-depots so that they can actually handle some of the goods.
Some of the things that are happening, for instance, in the Halifax Regional Municipality, there's one place in the whole municipality that takes hazardous chemicals. Now, when I say hazardous chemicals, I mean the stuff you use at home every day. So you're not dealing with dynamite and you're not dealing with things that are super-dangerous. It would be really easy to set up a process where you could have the enviro-depots look after these things but they have to have the capital investment to do it - they have to have the proper equipment, they have to have the training and everything in place.
I can tell you, if you live in Ecum Secum and on Saturday you've got to go to Lakeside Industrial Park to dump off your half-litre of gasoline you have left over that has gone sour, or some cleaning solution, guess what? It never makes it there. So where does it go? It disappears and it's probably going to be a bigger environmental hazard down the road someday than the possibility of these things being handled properly.
Is there a master plan by the government to look after this stuff and start really getting serious about it? I think it can be done in a way that, indeed, it'll be easier for people, number one, because I think that's important to success, this has to be easy for people to do, and at the same time the enviro-depots, or some other structure - but they're in place so it makes sense that they would do most of this work - can make not a lot of money off of it, but a little bit more money handling these things and ultimately cost the taxpayer and the government less money.
MR. PARENT: I mean you put the challenge out, you frame the challenge very well. We're looking at propane and chemicals for this coming winter. The other challenge that I've talked about a lot that we really haven't done a lot on is batteries. I mean individual companies - Home Depot, I think, has a battery and Dalhousie University, universities do that.
[4:00 p.m.]
Our major efforts this year would be on the electronic recycling. That took far more work than we thought it would. It's an industry-led program but we suggested that they might want to work with the RRFB.
MR. COLWELL: That's a mistake.
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MR. PARENT: They decided they would. Then we also suggested that the enviro-depots would be the appropriate drop-offs.
I was somewhat disappointed that there were only about 32 of them. I would have thought that - because I agree with you, the more convenient we make it, the easier it will be. Now, when I quizzed - and again I have to stress this is an industry-led plan - all I signed off on was the stewardship program so I sort of had veto rights, in a sense, but it's really industry-led.
We did that for a very specific reason. The only one that's not industry-led is the one in Alberta where it's actually run by the province. All of the other ones are industry-led. But they came up with the 32 sites based on the fact of traffic patterns. In my area it does make sense because the one in my area is in New Minas and while Scots Bay is about 25 kilometres away, everyone really goes through New Minas at some stage. However, my sister was phoning me up about the one for Lunenburg County being in Lunenburg rather than in Bridgewater, and that's not the sort of traffic flow.
So the commit was made after six months that we would look at the spread of depots to see if we needed to add on and if we could convince the industry to add on.
To be fair to them, they were starting the program without having any money in the bank. The money would come in the bank once the initial goods were recycled and it may well have been that in six months' time, when there is money in the bank, there will be opportunities to expand that.
Also, in regard to that, we're the only province that has Phase II of electronic recycling and I still can't quite understand why the other provinces haven't moved in that regard. The electronic association didn't include the makers of cellphones, et cetera, so they, in a sense, really didn't want to be part of the recycling efforts but we said for the Nova Scotia citizen, all of these electronic goods should be recycled, not just part of them. So we're the only province in Canada to mandate Phase II, which will come in a year's time.
So it's up and running. We do need to add on more sites to make it easy. We had some growing and teething pains. Some were brought out in the House or the media. Part of it was really that there weren't enough pickup sites or drop-off sites, basically, or that they were located in the wrong area, but we do have a chance to revisit that. I think it was six months that we stated. We have some that are working very well and others that we need to do more work.
Part of it was some of the enviro-depots just felt either because of their facility or staffing, or for whatever reasons, they wouldn't bid on the tender to get that business. Maybe once they see the success of some of them - there's one when we launched it we were down
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in Kingston-Greenwood and that was going great guns already from the start, that they'll be encouraged and we'll get a wider distribution.
I've had quite a few MLAs from various Parties and a few municipal units saying we want more drop-off sites to make it easier. So as you've mentioned several times, we need to make it as easy as possible, but we also have to make it on a business plan where there's a profit in it and that's the balance. But we will be reviewing it in six months and hope to improve it as we go along.
MR. COLWELL: I'm surprised - again, RRFB looked after this so I'm not surprised - why someone would have to put a tender in to collect these things, as a small enviro-depot, because some of these are one-person operations, two-person operations, they're not going to take the time to put a tender together, quite frankly, and they shouldn't have to. There should be a fee that they pay per pound, or per item, however they work it out, that makes sense for them and makes sense for the recycling process, to keep the costs as low as we possibly can.
It just doesn't make sense that all of the enviro-depots, unless they for some reason can't handle them, they don't have the physical size, or something serious like that, that they should have the option of just opting into it, this is what you get paid for it and away you go, it should be that simple. It never seems to be that simple with the RRFB, but I think it's time they - they need an entrepreneur to run that place, the RRFB that is.
MR. PARENT: In this regard I'm not sure if we can lay - RRFB had a difficult job working with the environmental association at the start. I don't know what all of the difficulties were, clearly there was some lack of communication there. I think the fact that we were dealing with someone who is up in Ottawa at one stage, their association rep, I'm not going to sit here and say there weren't some teething problems in how it was unrolled, but by and large it was unrolled fairly successfully. I, as minister, haven't received any personal complaints from people in my riding. The number-one issue I received was there need to be more drop-off sites.
MR. COLWELL: Yes, and I spoke to the deputy minister about this when we were in Public Accounts and she said she never had a complaint. I gave her the first complaint about TVs in the woods.
MR. PARENT: I read that, yes.
MR. COLWELL: Unfortunately, I lost the telephone number of the lady who called me to follow up on that, so if you could give me that again, I'd be only too pleased to actually show you the sites - not one site, but several sites - where this is happening. It's only about a kilometre from an enviro-depot and guess what? An enviro-depot doesn't take electronic
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waste - strange coincidence. I'm sure that this particular enviro-depot would love to have some more volume through their facility to make them profitable.
So within a six-month period - when's the six-month review, when is the actual date that's going to happen?
MR. PARENT: July or August of this year will be the six months and that will be the review and we should have more information then. Hopefully, as I say, I would like to see as minister that they move to either reorganize the 32 or I'd prefer that they added on. Part of the onus does fall upon Nova Scotians as a whole, we have to make it easier for them, but they do have to take some responsibility. In my area you'd have to plan where before you might just put it on the curbside. You'd have to plan: Oh, I'm going into New Minas, I better pop off my old TV in the trunk and take it in. As I said, that traffic flow pattern, everybody in our area shops in New Minas, one way or another, so that works.
But there are some areas where I've looked at - Minister Murray Scott's complaint about his area, for example, where just not everyone is going to go to that one location in the catchment area, so they'd have to go specifically to drop off their electronic goods. If that's the case then only the very committed are going to do it, so we have to examine that and that will be examined in July/August.
MR. COLWELL: And if you find there are deficiencies, can you make an order to them to change this and fix it or will you just suggest it, or how is it corrected?
MR. PARENT: I think it's moral suasion at this stage. There's a stewardship agreement we signed off, which lasts for how long? I approved their plan. But it's moral suasion in the six months we asked them to put that in as a review. It has been successful to date, they've worked collaboratively with us. But it's in their best interests, in the electronic association's best interests, to make sure that it works as well as possible too. So moral suasion has been effective. I did approve the plan, the six-month review will basically depend upon moral suasion with them and making the argument that more sites need to be there.
There was an organization in the Pictou area that was quite eager and then didn't put in a tender at the end because they were worried they couldn't make a profit on it, that I think now we'll be able to, having seen it in operation in other places, have a better assessment of whether there's a profit that they can make from it and I think they'll find they can. So we have high hopes that many of the concerns will be ameliorated in July-August after the six-month review.
Nonetheless, I do want to stress that this is a good-news story and I know you're not suggesting otherwise. We need to make it as seamless and as effective as possible, but it is good. I've been approached by Newfoundland and Labrador who feel that they may not have
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sufficient bulk of materials to do a proper recycling of the materials there and I've told them that we'd be very happy to work with them.
When I first became minister, at the Environment Minister's retreat, this was the top item that we were looking at and we were going to do it collaboratively. The other provinces, for one reason or another, didn't feel they were in a place to do it. In part, New Brunswick doesn't have the enviro-depot network, which is invaluable in helping us to roll out something like this. So it would be far better if it could be done on a regional basis and we're trying very hard on environmental issues.
We're having a meeting of the Environment Ministers with the federal minister, in Wolfville, in June of this year. I think this is one of the items that I've asked to be put on - I know solid waste is, because some of these things need to be done on a regional basis and it really is helpful if it is done on that basis. But we feel good that in Nova Scotia, it was supposed to be in place in all of the provinces by now, for some reason or another they haven't done it and we've got it in place. There were some teething problems, but it's working its way out and we'll fix those teething problems as we go along.
MR. COLWELL: I'm not opposed at all with what's going on with the electronic recycling, I think it's a great step forward, but again, if it could have been handled a little bit better at the beginning, I think the rollout would have been better and it could have been even more successful than it is today. Convenience is absolutely essential, you cannot have it convenient enough for people, it has to be easy, it has to be on the route they travel, it has to be at the place they drop their bottles off, or whatever else they do. It has to be easy to do and especially now with the fuel prices even higher, people are going to be more reluctant to drive further to drop a TV off, when they can dump it off in their neighbour's woods and then we have a huge cleanup problem and costs, and possibly an environmental hazard as time goes on. I think the program is good, I think you need to finetune it, and I don't think these things can wait. We can't wait years to get it right, we have to get it right, right away.
The next thing I'm going to talk about is something I haven't brought up before, which is the C&D sites, construction and demolition sites, in this province. How closely are those monitored?
MR. PARENT: This year we visited every site to try to get a full assessment of what the compliance issues were. We were pleased, by and large, with what we found. There were some tickets that we levied. We hope with the activity tracking system that it will help us in that regard, as well, because as I mentioned to your colleague, that was one of the main concerns the Auditor General had - the fact that proper tracking wasn't going on. So we think with the money we're now able to receive, and quite grateful that we're able to get at that, we can do a better job on that. But this year we visited every site and there was good compliance for the most part, a few issues and we levied some SOTs - what does the SOT
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acronym mean? It's a ticket to get them to comply, it's a ministerial order. Summary offence ticket - SOTs.
MR. COLWELL: The reason I bring that up is I was, more than a couple of times, to a C&D site and they have it separated for shingles and other items in sort of little concrete bunkers, and they keep it nice and clean and tidy. I'll give them a lot of credit for doing that because that is a big job. The shingles are really easy. You just dump them off and they can be ground up and used for all kinds of things, and that's what I understand they do - although they charge an awful huge fee to do it. I'm sure they're making money on both ends of it, and that's fine too.
[4:15 p.m.]
But the other thing is I saw one spot with wood and glass, old aluminum doors, windows - plastic windows and metal windows - and the big loader comes in, scoops it all up and it disappears. Now, the glass can be recycled, the metal out of the windows can be recycled. Some of the wood may possibly be recycled, ground up and used, as long as it's not painted with something that's not good. Is that just straight going to the landfill?
MR. PARENT: That would be considered an offence, which hopefully would be reported and we'd investigate. Afterwards, if you'd quietly like to give us the name of that site, we'd be happy to investigate them.
MR. COLWELL: It just seemed odd. I didn't see them dumping it in a truck to take it away - now, they could have been moving it somewhere else, but everything was sort of dumped in and they brought this huge machine in and scooped it up. There was no obvious effort to separate anything. With the value of metals now, it's worth taking the metals out and the glass, within reason, is easy to take out. Of course, if they're broken up and they're in small pieces, that's a different thing and if they buried them, they probably don't do much harm anyway. Some of the wood and plastics, and I saw sinks go in there that would have been cast-iron sinks, again, that could be recycled, all kinds of things. So it would be interesting to see just how much of this stuff is being buried and actually how much is being recycled. Do you have any statistics on actually how much is being recycled out of the C&D sites? Is that information available?
MR. PARENT: We don't have the statistics right here for you, but we'll get them. It has been a challenge on the C&D, as you know, and that's why we did the inspections on all of the sites. By and large we're pleased. It's always the minority that are a problem, the minority prove the rule for the majority. So we'll get those statistics to you, and also if you'd like to see the conditions we put on C&D sites.
It's too bad I have to answer all of the questions because I may ask you a question later, but I'll throw it out for you to think about. In The Economist, they were talking about
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San Francisco moving to single stream so that they didn't sort their waste. Well, here in Nova Scotia we've been sorting our waste, and in San Francisco they weren't giving it good compliance with the recycling so they went to single stream and then separate with a technological machine, with a machine that pulls it out. They claim that improved their waste diversion rates quite substantially. So maybe afterwards we can chat about it because the downside of that, of course, would be that I think people feel some sense of involvement and caring for the environment when they separate and I'd hate to lose that, but we go back to ease of . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. The time allotted to the honourable member has expired. I will call on the NDP.
The honourable member for Halifax Fairview.
MR. GRAHAM STEELE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's my intention, Minister, to take another half-hour of your time and then hand it over to our Department of Labour and Workforce Development Critic. Do you have the staff with you that you need?
MR. PARENT: Would we be finished with Environment on the Liberal side as well? They are two separate departments and so we're treating them as two separate departments. They are under one minister but because they are two separate departments, once Environment is totally finished we'll bring Labour and Workforce Development in. Would that be possible?
MR. STEELE: But you don't have with you right now the people you need for the Department of Labour?
MR. PARENT: No, because the word I was given from, I believe it was your House Leader, was that he expected about four hours on Environment. Now, we can bring in Labour, we can bring them in if you want to move to Labour, but if we move to Labour, we're not coming back to Environment.
MR. STEELE: I understand, but we have an hour and what we would like to do is, I'll take the first half-hour on Environment and then we will move on to Labour permanently. What the Liberals do is up to them but that's what we want to do.
MR. PARENT: Okay, well, you'll have to speak to the Liberals about that.
MR. STEELE: We have one minister with several votes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please.
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MR. KEITH COLWELL: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order. My understanding from our House Leader was that we would do Environment, completely finish Environment, and go to Labour because they are two separate items. I thought we were going to have at least four hours on Environment and we have at least another hour we would like to put into it, maybe more. Other members of my caucus would like to ask some questions, so I'm not in favour of splitting it this way. I don't see any limit on the time for Environment, or Labour and Workforce Development. We've got a lot of questions on Labour too, but we want to separate them totally.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The member raises a point that has been brought forward and I'm not sure if there is concurrence on that point but I'll perhaps defer to the minister as to what his understanding is.
MR. PARENT: That was my understanding. I checked with our House Leader and the House Leader checks with the other House Leaders, but the understanding is that they're both separate departments; in fact, at one stage I thought Labour would come after Fisheries, but I was told by the House Leader that the tradition is that even though they're two separate departments, they're in the same time slot but you don't go from one to the other. You do all Environment and then you do all Labour, but I mean I'm willing to get Labour staff here. Certainly that was my understanding from my House Leader. If that wasn't communicated properly to the Official Opposition, my apologies, and certainly we stand ready to do what would be agreed upon by yourself, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, certainly in the interest of time, I would like to keep the estimates debates flowing and, of course, going. I wonder, is the NDP prepared to go back to Environment where the staff isn't here with Labour?
MR. STEELE: I guess what I'm looking for from you, Mr. Chairman, is a ruling on whether we can, in the course of our hour, move from Environment to Labour which is what we want to do and we're prepared to do.
MR. CHAIRMAN: It's my understanding, based on the conversations in here, that there has been an agreement.
MR. PARENT: Could I make a suggestion that perhaps we could have a five-minute recess and just talk to the House Leaders because this is really a decision they make. I don't know. I, as minister, will respond to . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Just before we do that, the member who raised the point has another point and I'd like the member for Preston to perhaps bring forward another point of view here.
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MR. COLWELL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are two separate departments and we don't do two departments at one time - ever. I've been here for 11 years and never once have we done two departments at one time.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think in the interest of the disagreement between members, what we'll do, we will recess for five minutes and get this clarified quickly. Thank you.
[4:23 p.m. The subcommittee recessed.]
[4:35 p.m. The subcommittee reconvened.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. We are ready to reconvene.
After a brief discussion, the understanding was that the Department of Environment estimates were to be discussed as a whole today, and the estimates of Labour and Workforce Development would be discussed separately on another day. So we'll reconvene with the NDP caucus on the Department of Environment estimates.
The honourable member for Halifax Fairview.
MR. GRAHAM STEELE: I do have to say for the record, I spoke to our House Leader who said he agreed on no such thing with anybody. We certainly didn't agree to it. Our Labour Critic has been sitting here patiently waiting for her turn because that was our intention all along. I'm not sure who you spoke to during the break, Mr. Chairman, it wasn't me, it wasn't the member for Halifax Needham, it wasn't our House Leader. But in any event, it appears that the people from Labour and Workforce Development aren't here and we're wasting more time talking about who we're going to talk to than it deserves, so we'll continue on. But it's our intention, as we intended all along, to go for approximately another half-hour and turn the floor over to the Liberals to do whatever they want to do.
I'm going to read a sentence to you right now, Minister, and I just want you to tell me, as simply as you can, what this means: "Sustainable workplaces and environmentally sustainable economic growth recognize the economic value of the province's natural capital and its' [sic] intrinsic link to social prosperity and economic competitiveness which are essential to Nova Scotia's long-term sustainability." What does that mean?
MR. PARENT: The whole issue of sustainable growth . . .
MR. STEELE: I want to know what that sentence means. I don't want you to explain sustainable growth to me. What does that sentence mean?
MR. PARENT: Would you let me answer the question, please?
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Excuse me.
MR. PARENT: If you don't want to hear the answer, don't ask me the question.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Excuse me, I will ask the honourable member not to interrupt the minister when he is trying to answer, and vice versa.
MR. STEELE: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman. I don't mind the minister answering the question, it is when the minister, very obviously, is not answering the question that I interject and just remind him what the question was that I actually asked.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, once again, I am saying for the last time, I don't want any interruption from anyone trying to answer a question or reply. Continue.
MR. PARENT: Thank you very much. As I was saying, the issue of sustainable development is an issue that has been in discussion on a worldwide level. How it affects the environment is the recognition that we have limited resources, that the limits of some of those resources have, in some places, been met or superceded so there is a growing recognition that has really been under discussion for some time now, starting from the Brundtland Commission that talked about sustainability. The Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainability was basically a very simple one, that you didn't want to do anything to the environment that would result in a lower quality of life for your children than you experienced.
Now, I'm paraphrasing it, but that is really what it was saying. So out of a lot of that work came the recognition with economists, as well, that much of what they hadn't measured was natural capital, that they had taken that for granted as something that would always be there and that they were measuring one-half of the pie and not the full pie. So the Province of Nova Scotia very clearly made the decision that you couldn't have a sustainable economy unless you cared for your environment. We, in our opportunities for sustainable prosperity, looked at the various sources of capital that were there: labour capital, financial capital, and natural capital. Natural capital is basically the environment in which we live, although I feel the environment encompasses all five sources of capital that are opportunities for sustainable prosperity.
What it is, is a statement that the economy will be directed with the view to sustaining our natural capital in such a way that we don't deplete the resources, that they're there for the future for our children, as they are there for us now. That is the challenge that not only have we inherited here in Nova Scotia, but that the world is really struggling with as well. So that's really what that statement means.
If you want to break down into shorter pieces that you want me to respond to, I'd be happy to, but that's basically the overall philosophy behind that statement.
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MR. STEELE: Thank you, Minister. Of course, the reason I picked that sentence out of the business plan is it's utter gobbledegook. But it's emblematic of the kind of thing that is written into the Department of Environment's business plan. It's a sentence that doesn't make any sense. You can talk for ages about sustainable development and what you mean by it, but that sentence, in and of itself, is meaningless.
The problem with the Department of Environment is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, the gap between what the department - specifically you - claims it's doing and what is actually happening. Sentences like the one I read to you, which are utter nonsense, are a good example of how words fill the air and fill documents but don't actually say anything.
I could take virtually every single major environmental initiative that the government has announced over the last year and say, okay, this is what the government claims to be doing and then I could lay out for you what is actually happening and it's really the difference that forms the basis for debate about environmental policy. It's not just me saying it, it's organizations like the Ecology Action Centre - I'm sure you've seen their response to the budget - where the essence of what they say is the gap between what the government says it's doing and what it is actually doing. It refers to the budget and what it says about the environment as being rhetoric because the actual underlying choices that are being made don't come anywhere close to matching what the government claims to be doing. I could go through this business plan, as I was doing during the first hour, and show the difference between the rhetoric and the reality.
Let me refer you now to Page 15 of the business plan. This is a business plan to support the budget proposal that's in front of the Legislature this year. It identifies this activity tracking system that you referred to earlier, which I emphasize again, is only one piece of the puzzle, one piece of the responses needed to what the Auditor General says. But what the business plan says is that the development of the system ". . . will take place over the next 2 years as funding permits."
Does that mean it's going to happen, it's not going to happen? What does that mean? In a budget document when you say that something's going to happen as funding permits, do you have the money you need to do it this year, or don't you?
MR. PARENT: Just with regard to the business plan and to the statements, I would categorically refute the statement that they're gobbledegook, but I will ask the department to use shorter words and shorter sentences in the future in their business plans.
Back to this. Clearly we started the funding with the $555,000 that I mentioned, but it is a big task and we will need ongoing funding in subsequent years in order to accomplish the goal. We'll also need the funding this year and that is dependent upon the budget being passed.
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MR. STEELE: Okay, but it says it will take place over the next two years as funding permits. So do you have enough money this year or do you not? Why would you add the qualifier that it will happen "as funding permits"?
[4:45 p.m.]
MR. PARENT: Because the business plan was written when we didn't know whether we would get the full funding for the activity tracking system. We had asked for this, as I said, at least a year before because we recognized that many of the concerns the Auditor General had were concerns that we needed to address and that we wanted the information on. In fact, nothing that the Auditor General said was any surprise to us and one of the big factors was this activity tracking system. So the business plan, I understand, was written before we had any knowledge we would get the full funding. So my understanding is now with the full funding we'll be able to put this in place this year.
MR. STEELE: The business plan is dated April 22nd - it's like two weeks ago.
MR. PARENT: I'm giving you the answer. If you don't believe it, you don't have to.
MR. STEELE: But what are you saying to me, that on April 22nd, a week before the budget is delivered, you didn't know whether you're getting the money or not? How could . . .
MR. PARENT: And I'd go back to . . .
MR. STEELE: The business plan - it's my turn, it's not your turn - the business plan does not match the budget that you are presenting to us and this is another example. You say it's out of date, it was written before you knew whether you were getting the money or not. Now, Minister, despite what you were saying earlier, that you'll ask the department to write in shorter sentences and shorter words, which I know you intended as an insult, but listen, it's not what I'm saying and if you think you're being clever, you're not. This stuff is too important for you to think that you're being clever. I read you a sentence that makes absolutely no sense - you know it makes no sense, I know it makes no sense - but it's in your department's business plan.
It's not a matter of writing shorter sentences or shorter words, it's meeting the standards by which business plans are written in this day and age and that is where there are clear goals, clear identifications of the risks and opportunities for each one of the strategic objectives, a clear link between the budget and the achievement of those goals and some discussion of the environment that would indicate on what factors the achievement of the goals depends, and what will be done with the money that's being asked for.
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Also, with respect to performance reporting, there are national standards in place by the Public Sector Accounting Board, supported by the work of the CCAF organization on which I serve on an advisory committee - I do happen to know a thing or two about where the national standards are in performance reporting, Minister, notwithstanding your insulting remarks about short words and short sentences - and I would tell you that this business plan does not come anywhere close to meeting existing national standards for performance reporting.
Now, with respect to the target in the business plan for the emission of mercury, on Page 20 it says, according to the date of the last year for which data is recorded, 2005, it's 105 kilograms from electrical power generation; the target for this year is 168 kilograms, which is something that was achieved six years ago. Why is it that your department is setting a target for this fiscal year for a target that has long since been met and exceeded? Why are you not setting a more ambitious target?
MR. PARENT: On the mercury emissions, one of the issues was that just last year, finally all of the provinces across Canada agreed to mercury emission targets and that was our apportioned share of it, 168. So that was the federal annual target that was apportioned to Nova Scotia. It was about 10 years getting that agreement and the problem was that Ontario wouldn't agree to targets on mercury because of the problem that they had with their coal-fired plants. So we finally got the federal target just last year and that's what that 168 is and our ultimate target is, as you can see in the column next to it, a deeper target than that.
MR. STEELE: It's what?
MR. PARENT: Our ultimate target is a deeper target than the federal target that was given to us.
MR. STEELE: In the column Ultimate Target, it says 65 kilograms by 2010, which would be roughly a 40 per cent cut, or actually exactly 40 kilograms, but what Strategic Actions says is that you will work with NSPI. So the strategic target is two years from now and they have to cut their mercury emissions by 40 per cent in two years. The piece that's missing is any discussion of what exactly it is that your department will be doing with the budget that you're asking us for in order to achieve that target. So what is the answer to that question?
MR. PARENT: My department sets the regulations and we measure the air quality. So we set the regulations and then we measure the air quality to ensure that they're meeting it and if they don't meet it, then we follow up with environmental ministerial orders, et cetera. It is a challenge, as you know, in the fact that most of our electrical generation is from coal-fired plants similar to the Province of Ontario. We've made strides with it but we need to work with NSPI collaboratively. We set the standards but we always try to work in such a way that we only use the stick if we have to, because what we want is compliance.
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MR. STEELE: I guess the difficulty I have with this, as with so much else in the business plan, is that (Interruption) The difficulty I have with this target, as I do with so many of the targets here, is that in order to meet this year's target, Nova Scotia Power doesn't actually have to do anything and neither does your department. So let's move on then to the nitrogen oxide air emissions target. I note based on the information in front of me here that the target for this year was already met four years ago. So, again, why are we setting a target that we've already met and exceeded? Why aren't we setting a more ambitious target?
MR. PARENT: The good news on this is that we overachieved the target that we set and we'll be developing further targets for NOx. Although you do achieve a target, when you have economic growth in a province, oftentimes that economic growth comes with increased emissions, so we have good news for this year. We need to keep up that good news, but how far you can ratchet down the NOx I'm not sure. We will be setting new targets, we over-exceeded, according to staff this particular time, but it's always a balance because ultimately you'd like to get your NOx emissions down to zero, but you're not going to be able to do that except through some sort of sustained way. As the economy grows the NOx emissions can sometimes increase. We intend to keep them below the 72 tons, but we did over-exceed in this one and so we're going to be looking at those targets.
MR. STEELE: Okay, because none of what you just said is in this business plan, it really ought to be because what I have here is an annual target which is the same as the ultimate target, a target that we exceeded, it appears from here, four years ago. Then you're saying, well, economic growth might lead to higher emissions. But what needs to be in the business plan is some sense of where those new emissions are coming from, what the challenges are and what we're doing to meet the challenges. Instead, I just see a target that we've already exceeded four years ago.
Okay, let's turn then to solid-waste disposal. I alluded to this earlier, but I want to get into it more now. According to the information, the most recent date we have here is 2004 - I'm not sure why it would be so old - and the ultimate target is listed as being, "achieve a disposal rate of 300 kg/person or lower by 2015," but there's no context for that anywhere in the document, in the sense of what that means for Nova Scotians. What is your department aiming to cut out next? What are the things that we're going to take out of the solid waste disposal stream? How are we going to do it and specifically, how is the budget that you're asking for this year going to help us move along that path?
There's a target that's really stated without anything to explain why that number has been picked. Why not 200? Why not 400? Why not 350, 250, 150? There's just no explanation at all for that number. So let me ask you that question, why is that number the target and what are the steps that your budget is going to allow your department to take this year that will help to achieve that target?
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MR. PARENT: As you know, Nova Scotia is a leader in waste diversion, widely recognized as such on a global basis by the way. We've received companies from Ireland and Japan looking at our disposal rates, and that was a result of meeting the 50 per cent disposal challenge that was put out nationally. However, other provinces have also made gains. When we looked at what other provinces were doing and what we had been able to do, the staff felt we could reach a disposal target of 300 kilograms - right now we're at 416, I believe - and that would be an appropriate goal that could be met in such a way as to be effective. We didn't want to set goals that we couldn't meet, but we didn't want to set goals that weren't goals that would cause us to grow either. The way that we intended to do that is through the implementation of a solid waste management program.
Also, I talked with an honourable colleague from the Liberal Party about one of the new initiatives that we needed to put in place in order to meet that, and that was the electronic waste diversion plan. Electronic waste became a growing part of the waste stream, as anybody who has children around Christmas can attest to. One of the big things to help meet that lower target was to tackle electronic waste and to tackle not just Phase I, which would be computer monitors and printers, but Phase II, which would be cellphones and items like that - the only province in Canada to actually legislate that. So that's what we've been working on this year in terms of helping Nova Scotians meet that target, so keeping the target, lowering it.
[5:00 p.m.]
I sense your frustration that you want more information and would be happy at any time, honourable member, to invite you to the department to come ask those questions of staff. Please avail yourself of this invitation, you have an open invitation to come to the Department of Environment at any time.
Really, it's more artistry in a sense. We reached the disposal target, but there are challenges on C&D, construction and demolition. There are challenges in that as your economy grows that tends to produce more waste, but we still felt that because we reached the target and were world leaders in waste management, and widely recognized as such, that we could adopt a more ambitious target. We looked at where we are right now - 416 - and staff did an analysis that we could come up with a target of 300, but we had to do various things to get there. The one that we worked on this year was the electronic waste management.
We're going to be having meetings in summer/Fall to reach out to stakeholders - ENGOs, the RRFB, and municipalities - to work at further activities. We have plans - for example, propane is one that has been on the books for awhile that we haven't moved on, propane tanks, chemical disposals, but we need to do those always in co-operation with the environmental non-government organizations and with the municipalities. So it was a result of staff analysis, and is the target ambitious enough or not ambitious enough is always sort
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of what staff have to weigh. If you don't make it ambitious enough, then clearly you're not moving forward on the environment. If you move it too ambitious, then you're not going meet the target and you don't want to do that because then that just leads people to feel that they weren't able to do something.
The staff analysis, looking across Canada at other jurisdictions, the improvements they were able to make, came up with this target. You do get the law of diminishing returns in that because we're world leaders in waste diversion, that some of the low hanging fruit has already been picked.
Paint is another example; I don't know of another jurisdiction in Canada - there may be - that recycles paint. In Springhill we have a wonderful paint recycling facility that recycles paint not only from Nova Scotia, but New Brunswick as well. It produces a paint called Boomerang paint in four different colour streams, so that all of the paint it produces is recycled. Now, that's sort of an easy target, electronics is more complicated and batteries, for example, is something we've been looking at. It gets harder and harder to ratchet it down, but that's our intent, to increase the goals in order to protect the environment.
When you ask exactly why 300, why not 325, basically it's based upon analysis of the Solid Waste Management Division who are in touch with their counterparts across Canada and who are ambitious and tend, since we are world leaders in solid waste diversion and recycling, who want to keep that record up and have analyzed what can be done, so we will continue.
One of the things we're moving forward on - and the electronic waste recycling is an example of it - is the stewardship agreements with various industries. In the past industries saw their mandate as bringing a product to market and then once the consumer bought it then there was no responsibility on their part for that product any longer. Increasingly there's a realization that the disposal of the product is a cost, as well, and that the industry needs to work with government and with the citizenry at large to deal with that, that there is a cost involved in that.
The electronic stewardship agreement was an example of that and that really took a fair amount of work and that was really the big effort we had this year. But we're looking at propane, we're going to be having consultations in summer and Fall of this year as to what further items can be diverted from the waste stream - propane tanks are certainly one of them. So there are many different items that we're looking at.
The problem and maybe part of the frustration you have is that we need to work with all Nova Scotians to reach these goals, so we have to set the goals to get the Nova Scotians working towards it. We can't sort of set the goal - we have to set a realistic goal but an ambitious goal, and it's sort of like a chicken and egg sort of thing that we're faced with all the time.
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So we're able to be world leaders in waste diversion - 416 - and you can see that's almost half of the Canadian average, so it was on the basis of that. Perhaps the goal is too ambitious and if that's the case, then I can only put it down to the enthusiasm of the solid waste staff. But that was how it was achieved.
MR. STEELE: Thanks. That was a fairly rambling answer, Minister, but I think - I want to point out to you that you were misreading the figures. The 416 was the old data; the newer data is down at the bottom, which shows that our average was going up, not down. Really the discussion here, and what I'm trying to get at, is the difference between meaningful targets and meaningless targets - targets that are there just for the sake of being down on the paper.
Now, 300 kilograms per person sounds like a noble target but what I'm looking for in your department's business plan is some sense of how that was derived and whether it is a meaningful target that will guide the activities of your department, or whether it is essentially a meaningless target which nobody has any idea how to achieve, and therefore cannot meaningfully guide your department over the next year. I noticed the data is four years out of date, which is not terribly helpful. It would be interesting to know where the data has gone in the four years since 2004.
I just want to point out again that the target, when you get right down to it, lacks context and therefore appears to be fairly meaningless so that when we're asked to approve a budget to help achieve this target, which appears without context, it's difficult for us to know whether you've got enough money, not enough money, too much money, it's just impossible to say. I don't think that we, as legislators, should be in a position where we're sitting here really having no idea how the budget you're asking for relates to these targets.
I could flip over the pages, as I will, to Page 24 of the business plan and say, "total number of categories of materials banned from disposal in Nova Scotia," Data says 13 materials in 2006-07 - which, of course, is two fiscal years ago - and the target for this year is 17. What are the four that are different between the 13 and the 17?
MR. PARENT: Just if I could respond to your prior question, the reason why the data is 2004 . . .
MR. STEELE: I only asked one question, I had a comment before that. I only asked one question . . .
MR. PARENT: If I could make a comment before I respond to your question, it would certainly be allowed, Mr. Chairman?
The data of 2004 is 2004 data because we depend upon Statistics Canada, because we want outside verification so that everyone can have confidence that we're not fudging the
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figures, we're meeting outside verification. Their data for 2006 is due out soon. That's why the data, Mr. Chairman, is 2004 data, because it's data based on Statistics Canada, so their data for 2006 will be very out very soon. Statistics Canada has a big job, I guess, and their data always seems to lag a little bit, but I think it's important to state that just for the record because it's not us measuring ourselves, it's Statistics Canada measuring us, so that's important to state.
Now, the other question, if you could just rephrase it for a moment, please, if you'd be so kind - the question you have?
MR. STEELE: You want me to rephrase my question?
MR. PARENT: If possible, yes, if you would be kind enough.
MR. STEELE: On Page 24, the column under Data says 13 materials; the column under Annual Target says 17. I asked you to explain the difference between those two. What are the four materials that are banned in that two-year time period?
MR. PARENT: The four materials are - electronic waste, as I've gone on, but specifically TVs, monitors, printers and laptops in year one and then in year two it will be cellphones, fax machines, there's about five or six - audio and video equipment, VCRs, et cetera, in year two.
MR. STEELE: So you've already met your target, because it says 13 for the year before last, 17 for this year, the ultimate target is 21. You just rhymed off 8 items, so bingo, the target is met - am I right?
MR. PARENT: By 2010 we'll have met it on electronics but that won't have met our disposal rate target. That will have met the material rate target because . . .
MR. STEELE: I'm just asking about the number of materials so when you draw a distinction between TVs and cellphones and different types of electronics, actually that, for your purposes here, counts as eight different types of materials.
MR. PARENT: Yes, they count as - TVs are one category of material and then cellphones are another - yes, you're quite right.
MR. STEELE: Do you see how meaningless the targets are? You've already met them.
MR. PARENT: No, I don't. I mean in the previous target you said it was too high. This target you're saying we've already met it, it needs to be made higher. So the targets will be worked on and as I stated in the EGSPA goals, we stated very clearly these were minimum
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targets. If you can find me another jurisdiction in Canada that has actually set out targets and put them together to be measured, I'd love to see the data because clearly I take your point but targets are not hard science in the sense that I can tell you exactly steps one to two, how we're going to meet those targets.
Targets are visionary and we're visionaries in our department and I think that's good. The language in the report is visionary language. It may not be legalistic language in the sense and that's fine. I mean there are different ways of stating different things and if I was a little testy with you before, it was because you felt that the business plan was gobbledygook, which I thought was a rather poor choice of words as well.
But getting back, I think we may be talking about different forms of language and with your background, you'd like to see a certain language but in the environment what we're looking at in many ways is a combination of science and art, as I said. On this target you said, well, it's too low; on the other target it was too high. Clearly we need to then work at them and if we've met this one on the materials, we'll continue to work.
The material target basically is really a subset of the larger disposal target. So we may have met the material target but the larger disposal target is the target that we really need to aim for. So we'll supercede this material target, you're right, but the disposal target will still be a challenging one since we're at - well, 426, and thank you for the correction. We did slip in 2004 and part of that was because of the heavy construction that was going on in the province, due to the economy is what I've been told and the strengthened economy in the Province of Nova Scotia.
So the material target will supercede but it's really a smaller subset of the larger target, which is the disposal target, which is the more challenging one and which is the one that really is the one that across Canada, they use that category to make their own targets. So how you reach that target, how many materials you ban, is not nearly as important as the disposal rate target itself.
MR. STEELE: You just tried to paraphrase what I've been saying and if you really believe what you've said, you've completely missed my point and that concerns me - maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. You said I complained this target is too high, that target is too low, I've done nothing of the kind. I just hope you don't go outside of here in the House or otherwise and say that's what I said today.
[5:15 p.m.]
What I did say, and have been trying to get across to you, is the business plan is not a useful document to help guide members of the Legislature to decide whether or not to approve your budget, because most of the targets are rhetoric dressed up in bafflegab.
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MR. PARENT: I'm trying to be polite to you and extend an olive branch and you slap me again.
MR. STEELE: I haven't asked you a question yet. What I'm complaining about is a lack of context, reliable data, comparable data, information that would help us know what it is that your department is going to do this year with the budget that you've asked us for.
Let me ask another one. Page 10 of your business plan, "Reduce the paperwork burden for business by 20% by 2010." I want you to listen to the question I'm going to ask, because it's probably going to be different than what you expect. My question is, how are you going to measure that 20 per cent reduction in the paperwork burden by 2010, measured how?
MR. PARENT: The measurement was really a measurement of how much time it took businesses to do the paperwork within the department, so that was the measurement. If business took so many hours and then the next year we were able to take fewer hours, that was the measurement in the CCI. The CCI, Competitiveness and Compliance Initiative, is a subset of the Better Regulation and the Better Regulation is vested in Treasury and Policy Board, so they might be a better department to ask in terms of the overall regulation and how they set it.
My understanding is it was based upon the amount of administrative burden. The baseline was set - we did a baseline analysis and a baseline of 69,875 hours was set - so then we worked from that baseline. That was what the analysis showed that businesses had to do in terms of total paperwork, and that was the total paperwork regulatory burden in terms of paperwork that we put on businesses in 2005-06. So 69,875 hours. So then the 20 per cent reduction would be 20 per cent off of the 69,875 hours.
MR. STEELE: Who is measuring that - who specifically?
MR. PARENT: The Better Regulation, which is under Treasury and Policy Board, which would be under Minister Jamie Muir.
MR. STEELE: It's one of your department's targets, but you're saying you don't actually measure it, somebody else does?
MR. PARENT: The 69,875 for our department. We will measure a 20 per cent reduction in our department, or whatever reduction there is, and then give it to Better Regulation who will put all of the different departments together globally.
MR. STEELE: Regulation like most things is a balance between what you're trying to achieve by the regulation and the effort that is required in order to ensure compliance with the regulation. The way to get rid of all paperwork is to eliminate all regulation, but we all
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agree that's not feasible or practical, it's not a good idea. What's missing from here is any consideration of what's being lost.
We all have this image of red tape or paperwork burden where it's useless, it doesn't actually achieve anything. I assure you, we're all in favour of elimination of 100 per cent of useless regulation, but I assume that has already been done, you've gotten rid from your department of all the useless regulation, so all that's left is useful regulation and then it becomes a balance about what your department achieves with that regulation versus how much time and effort businesses have to put in to fulfilling that. When you're going to cut paperwork by 20 per cent, measured somehow by somebody else, what is it that your department is giving up in that balance?
MR. PARENT: It's kind of you to say that all the useless regulations are gone, I'm not sure if any of the regulations put in place were useless, but they may be regulations that have outlived their time in that sense. I'm not sure that has been totally achieved, but if it has been, there are still many savings that can be made. For example, using the Internet, we've done it with septic systems where they can do on-line forms that are built in, where they don't have to fill out the whole form, mail it in, type it up, where they can just plug into the Internet and tap in a preset form, so there's one of the initiatives that we're working on.
The Better Regulation Initiative is an interesting one. I agree with you that there has been a push across Canada to get rid of red tape, and in certain jurisdictions that's what they set out to do. They simply counted the number of regulations they had and started chopping.
We felt in Nova Scotia that regulations are not bad, that appropriate regulations are needed for any effective society to work, certainly in the Departments of Environment and now Labour and Workforce Development. So the approach taken in Nova Scotia was, where regulations were appropriate, make them easy to understand and easy to fulfill. So a lot of the effort that has gone in is to try to make them easy to understand and easy to respond to, and the Internet has been an invaluable tool in that.
We've been able to add new regulations where we feel they're necessary, so the philosophy has been very, very different. I'm speaking about the wider Better Regulation Initiative, and the reason why my department reports on it more than other departments is because we have so many regulations within the department. I should clarify that the 69,875 hours was from the Department of Environment and Labour last year, because that's when the measurement was, 2005-06, so we'll have to do work on dividing that up and apportioning the share to each department as they move forward.
I do want to make sure that the philosophy is very clear because I think it is an important philosophy and just to cut regulations is simplistic and not the answer. So what we did was measure the amount of time it took to fulfill those regulations, so it may not be that
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we're cutting regulations to cut the amount of time, but we're depending upon tools such as the Net, depending upon tools such as simplifying the regulatory forms, et cetera.
We've turned around the wait time through in-house efficiencies on provincial licences and permits. We've moved towards our goal of 10 business days there and a lot of that was done internally within our department. The other thing is we've moved to risk-based management in terms of some of the policies, so rather than prescriptive regulations you have risk-based ones, and that certainly helps reduce the regulatory burden in terms of the amount of times spent fulfilling regulations.
MR. STEELE: How much time do I have left, Mr. Chairman?
MR. CHAIRMAN: You have until 5:33 p.m.
MR. STEELE: Thank you. Okay, I'm glad we agree that it's simplistic just to cut the number of regulations for the sake of cutting regulation - I've never quite understood the British Columbia approach where they just literally counted the number of regulations and said, okay, we're going to chop a certain number, because the fundamental issue, of course, is that regulations achieve something. We all agree that if a regulation is not achieving its purpose it should be chopped, immediately. But if it is achieving a purpose but nevertheless is imposing too much of a burden on business, then there's a better case to be made that there might be other ways of achieving it.
If a regulation is achieving its purpose, for example, Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, talking about cutting them makes little sense because what you're giving up is a safeguard against industrial injury, even though fulfilling Occupational Health and Safety Regulations tends to be the number-one complaint of businesses when it comes to red tape.
My point, again, is not to support or defend this regulation or that regulation, it is that your department's business plan says there will be 20 per cent less of a burden on business this year, but there's no context or explanation about what's going to be given up or which regulations you're tackling, or what the criteria are, because it's a balance. So I want to know - let me rephrase that. I think the people of Nova Scotia want to know from the department, in your business plan or otherwise, how are you going to achieve that? If it's simply a matter of doing things like Internet permits so that exactly the same regulations are in place but the time needed in order to get such a permit is reduced, well, that's one thing, but that's nowhere in your business plan.
You've come to the Legislature asking for money and you say this is your target and I sit here, and based on the documents that your department has presented, I have no idea how your department intends to meet that target.
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Another one on Page 11, "Measure: 90% of regulatory programs have performance measures by 2010." When I read that I'm sure you know what my reaction was. First of all, why is it taking so long? How did we manage to have all of these regulatory programs with no performance measures? I think the figure I read somewhere - I might be mistaking this for another one - is that 50 per cent of programs have a performance measure which means 50 per cent don't, so how do we know they're working?
Another measure: you want 100 per cent of your existing inspectors and investigators to have complete standardized foundation training by 2012, to which my reaction is, you mean some of our inspectors and investigators don't have standardized training? Why not? What took so long?
Another one on Page 10, "Measure: 95% of regulatory proposals comply with a standardized, systematic development process by 2010." Well, what took so long? It's amazing to me that we've had all these regulatory processes for so long, many without any performance measures, many without any standardized training.
We know from the Auditor General's Report, for example, that complaint tracking was not standardized across the province, there were four different regional divisions, each of which kept track of complaints a different way. One kept track of it on a spreadsheet that was on somebody's desktop computer, but there was really no way of generating reports from that spreadsheet. So it's amazing to me that these are things that are listed as targets some time for the distant future, like several years from now.
Let's go back to the standardized foundation training by 2012, so four years from now 100 per cent of investigators and inspectors will have standardized foundation training. What would the percentage be today?
MR. PARENT: I understand we have the capacity to train about 40 inspectors a year, so with the ability to train 40 inspectors a year we should reach the target by 2012.
MR. STEELE: Why are they only receiving it now? How could we have gotten by so long without standardized training?
MR. PARENT: Our training used to be done through the RCMP college out in Regina and then we moved to training our own people. We had a large number of inspectors who had training, so they all have training, but the question is standardization of that training. So we also have new inspectors who come on. So it has just been a question of time of getting all that training standardized.
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[5:30 p.m.]
They're all trained but they used to be trained with the RCMP college in Regina, or through other training programs, and we've moved to standardize that within the province. So we're catching up with all of the inspectors who are out in the field already, who are trained, but to standardize it. Then we have about a 5 per cent turnover of staff every year in that particular field, I believe, so they need to be trained, as well, on the standardized program. So looking at the capacity, the fact that we could train 40 inspectors a year, we're able to reach the target by 2012.
The member has asked whether there's enough money in the department and certainly I was going to quip that we can always take more money. The challenge of the environment is growing and growing and growing. The budget we receive, we can do the tasks that we set out to do but we do have capacity issues, as all departments do, and so to get everyone at the standardized training level when we've changed the system from training being done in other centres outside of Nova Scotia and new staff, we can do 40 a year and we can reach it by 2012.
MR. STEELE: Well, my time is just about up but I just want to summarize by saying that I think the credibility problem in the Department of Environment has to do with the difference between what it says and what it does, between what the Auditor General's Report finds and what the department says it is doing.
It seems to me the Department of Environment, particularly Monitoring and Compliance, has been underfunded for a number of years and underfunding explains almost perfectly the deficiencies found by the Auditor General. As legislators, we simply need more information than we are getting about the department, the state of the department, what it's going to do with the money that it is asking for, what it would do with more money, what it would do with less money, how the targets got decided upon, and what reason we have to think that the targets are good targets.
You mentioned that I could come over to the department any time I wanted, but that's not the point. The point is not whether I personally can go to your department and get to know the people and get tours and things, it's about the people. We're sent here to represent the people. Every single Nova Scotian should be able to look at your department's business plan and it should be a credible, solid, understandable, well-written business plan that meets today's existing standards for business plans and performance reporting so that every single Nova Scotian can know what the Department of Environment is up to. With the documents that we have today, I will say that in my opinion the department hasn't met that standard.
It's not unique to the Department of Environment. Two years ago I remember saying exactly the same thing to the Department of Finance. The government as a whole needs to pull up its socks on business planning . . .
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Excuse me, the time has elapsed for the NDP caucus. I would turn the questioning over to the Liberal caucus.
The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Mr. Chairman, how much time do we have left today?
MR. CHAIRMAN: We have until 6:20 p.m.
MR. COLWELL: Thank you. I want to continue on where I left off with the C&D sites. I want to ask some more very specific questions. We were talking a little bit about the diversion rate. Is there any monitoring going on to find out exactly the total percentage of everything they take in? Is there monitoring going on to find out how much of that is reused, recycled or diverted, instead of being buried, and specific numbers for each item - like, I spoke about roofing shingles, which is very straightforward, glass and metals, any woods, insulations, or anything else they may get?
MR. PARENT: We can get you the figures on how much they divert. I think I indicated before that I'll get them to you. If you're asking if we break that down into specifically how much wood is diverted, how much glass is diverted, et cetera, I don't think I have those figures, but the total figure I can get to you.
Certainly with our activity tracking system - and the department agreed that we needed a better tracking system, we needed the computer capabilities to do that. We'll hopefully be able to expand that out further and next year if we get funding, as well, we'll be able to expand that further. Hopefully we'll have better data.
On oil contamination sites, for example - you and I have chatted about this and they're all held in individual offices and really by individual property numbers and an individual property may have more than one environmental problem, so it's listed under the property rather than listed under the oil contamination. But with the activity tracking system, it would be a very simple matter to put in the key word, that the property may have three or four environmental problems, but one of them is oil contamination so that could be tagged, then you just push a button and all of your oil contaminated sites could be pulled out.
So we will get you the global figure, and hopefully with the activity tracking system we'll be able to break that down further next year.
MR. COLWELL: Is there any auditing or requirement for auditing of the C&D sites - I want to specifically talk about C&D sites, not anything else right now - that requires them to report on these items themselves to the Department of Environment? I think it's very important that information be made available by the sites. Because everything that goes into the facility is weighed and there's invoicing done to the people who drop them off -
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hopefully everything that goes out is weighed so you'd have a net balance of what's happening. It's a pretty straight accounting process and I would be sure that even the company that's doing this would want to know what they're taking in, what they're shipping out and how much they're burying, because it costs them a lot of money to bury this stuff. If they can get the burial rates down, I think it's a very important number to know.
If we can reduce that amount of material that's being buried every year, we know we're going in the right direction. A C&D site that buries things is another dump, literally a dump, it's nothing else. You can call it anything you want, but it's a dump - instead of the municipality operating a dump, the C&D operator operates a dump.
The number should almost be zero that goes into the landfill and, indeed, it may be cheaper for the operator to bury it rather than to recycle it. If it's cheaper, that's what they'll do, as long as they can get away with it. So I'm really looking for some answers from the department to make sure that doesn't happen and we move away from dumps that go from the C&D sites and if it has to go to the dump, it should go to the regional dump operated by the municipality, or whoever it's operated by, and they should have to pay the fees and that would be a deterrent for them doing that.
MR. PARENT: No, I mean, I think the point you're making is that the conditions are put on them, but are we monitoring them as strictly as, perhaps, we could? Then it comes to a question of capacity - they have to keep those statistics on-site that you're wanting, so we can get them from any C&D site and our inspectors ask for them.
But if they are deliberately fudging the data and burying stuff and not reporting it, then it will be through examining their paperwork and then through inspections that we'll catch that. Sooner or later, our inspectors would catch it, but they may be able to do it for awhile.
As I said, we inspected all the C&D sites this year and from what the inspectors saw, the vast, vast majority were in compliance. There were a few where we issued SOTs. It's a combination. They keep the data, it's part of the conditions that they have to monitor it, and then we inspect not only the paperwork. We'll do physical inspections from time to time. But it is really a question of capacity.
We do depend upon members of the public to alert us, for example, on illegal dumping. One of our problems with illegal dumping is that by the time we find out about it, the perpetrator is long gone and so we need to get citizens involved in reporting it and then being willing to go to court if we do issue some sort of summary offence ticket.
So the sites monitor according to the conditions and we can get you a copy of the conditions placed on the sites. They have to have the paperwork available when our inspectors come by and then our inspectors do some physical monitoring. The large number
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of C&D sites and the number of inspectors means that if there was someone who wanted to abuse the system, they could probably get away with it for awhile, but I suspect in the long run they'd be caught. It's a challenge.
I certainly won't ask you publicly, but if there are certain sites that you're aware of that you'd like us to send inspectors to, especially, we'd be happy to hear off the record. We depend upon those kinds of concerns simply because of the number of inspectors we have.
MR. COLWELL: I'm not proposing that I'm aware of anyone fudging the numbers or anything like that, I'm not proposing that. From the sites I've seen, the particular sites you go to, everything is clean, it's tidy, it's the way it should be. My point of this whole thing is, they do take this and they bury it, the stuff they can't deal with, it's buried. I think a goal of the department should be to eliminate that burial.
MR. PARENT: Oh, okay.
MR. COLWELL: Totally eliminate it. So that forces the C&D site operators to come up with innovative ways to recycle, reuse and reduce the material and to make a profit out of doing that. I'm sure that can be done, especially if it's metals - it's pretty simple today, with the cost of scrap metal. I'm not sure they're doing that - I'm not sure the regulations really encourage that. I don't know but it doesn't seem like they do and if we're going to do this, number one, I think we should outlaw any C&D operator having a dump, and they do exist. There's one in HRM now and it's there because the regional municipality wouldn't take the material, and I think that's the wrong approach. I think they should take the material to the regular dump site and pay the fee, as everybody else does.
The municipality here, which I totally do not agree with, went to court to make sure that you can't ship anything out of the municipality because they want to fill their dump up faster than someone else does - that's the bottom line - and make some more money off of it. So why they wouldn't take this material and then they can monitor the material that's coming in there so it gives another checkpoint that the department can check, because once it's buried it's pretty hard to find out what's under there, unless you order them to dig it up and then find out that maybe things aren't there.
That's the point I'm making, and I think that would help your diversion rates long-term. But if you don't know what the C&D site is taking in, if you don't know how much they're burying, then you can't determine that. You don't have the solid numbers on it and that's really what you need to know. The burial, they may not weigh the stuff that goes to burial. I don't know if they do or they don't, but if they don't do that and they don't have records of that - and it's easy to keep track of that. It's straight accounting information and I'm sure your staff is well-trained in that. If not, Revenue Canada is pretty slick on all of this stuff and making sure sequential numbers are on all of the weigh slips, and all of the other things that they do and make sure that things are done.
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So I would just encourage the department, at this point, to really look at this. I don't know if there's anybody out there doing anything wrong, I wasn't aware of any of these SOTs being issued to those people. I think they're business people and they do what they have to do to make a profit. I think the long-term goal in this has to be to reduce these dump sites and we should, over time, eliminate those and make them take their scrap to the regular dump that the municipalities, or whoever operates it, the proper facility, and then they have a record of how much is going there, number one, and also what materials are going there. So if they're not cleaning their materials up and taking the metals and glass and all of those things out, that will be identified and then the department can really do something about it without incurring more costs for the inspectors. So that's the point with the C&D sites. Is there any move to do that in the department, any thought about doing that?
MR. PARENT: Your suggestions are very well taken and we're making copious notes. The C&D diversion is something that is a real challenge. If we're going to reach the 300 kilograms per person, we have to do better on the C&D. We're going to be having the consultations in July and August, as I mentioned, and those will be one of the key things that will be discussed at that consultation in terms of improving our C&D.
[5:45 p.m.]
Your suggestions are very, very good suggestions in terms of progressively ratcheting down the amount of material that they could get rid of so that ultimately, in the end, everything is recyclable. So those will be noted. As part of the discussions in July and August at that strategy session, I know that C&D is one of the focuses that they're looking at, because we won't reach the 300-kilogram diversion target unless we do a better job on C&D. So thank you for your suggestions, they've been very helpful.
MR. COLWELL: The other thing with C&D is, to me, if you're going to reach your goals - and I'm glad you've set goals and there was some discussion about whether they're right or wrong or how you got to them, but at least you've got a goal; however you arrived at them, you've got a goal, and hopefully you'll achieve them. But if you set a goal for diversion or reduction in waste, if you can take a product that is going to the dump now and recycle it, to me, that is diverted and that's part of the process where I would think you'd be able to add that to the reduced amount of garbage per person because it's reused, it's not garbage anymore. Is that the way you calculate it, or do you just take . . .
MR. PARENT: Yes, that's how we do it. So we will take, if it is recycled and not put in the landfill, then it counts for the diversion - so reduce, reuse, recycle. So it's only that which is going to the actual landfill that is counted towards that goal. So your point is well made on the C&D that the more we can get them to recycle, the better off we'll be in terms of our goal. You've put your finger on a bit of a challenge because C&D is one of the challenges which caused our diversion rate to slip up, as the honourable member pointed out, from 416 or 417 to 427. A large part of that, I was told, was because of C&D, because there
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was a lot of business activity in terms of construction. So one way to deal with that - it's an interesting suggestion - is to ratchet down what they can put in the landfill, keep ratcheting that down.
If we get back to the RRFB, which is a bit of a touchy subject with you, we need to leverage their research and development dollars better than what we do in order to help businesses do that, because they need some help in being able to find ways in which this could be reused in a way that made some sort of profit. So last year I did give you - you asked for a list of all of the R&D grants that were done by the RRFB but we intend to look at that, the deputy and I have already talked about that, in terms of leveraging that as best we can so that we're now not just sort of saying you can't put this in the landfill, but here's some help so that either you or some company can find a way of recycling and making a profit off of that. So we need to do a better job of that and we've talked about looking at that whole thing so that the two go together.
MR. COLWELL: I'm encouraged to hear that. That really has to go together, because I firmly believe that the C&D sites should be privately owned. They shouldn't be operated by government because then there's no accountability for how much it costs and it all slips away. If it can be done profitably by independent businesses and ultimately cost taxpayers and the individuals less money, in the meantime you'll generate real revenue from real jobs, not government jobs - and nothing against anyone in the government - but it generates real dollars and it generates the economy and makes the economy go. People like myself and yourself, and all of the civil servants who sit in this room, we don't generate the economy, it's private business that does.
As people who get paid by the people of Nova Scotia, it's important we encourage that so that we have the resources to do the things we need to do and look after health care, education and all of the other things, and inspections by your department.
So I think that's one area that you can really improve upon and you can set some real tangible goals with that, but if you don't have the information to know what's going where, you can't set a goal, so I think that's really, really important to track that down, to know how much glass you've got, how much metal, how much painted wood that you can't deal with, there are ways to get the paint off and then chip the wood up for other things. There are all kinds of really innovative solutions, I'm sure, that if somebody wants to make some money, an entrepreneur will come up with pretty quickly if they're given the opportunity and some seed money to get it rolling.
Back on electronic waste, when is the processing facility going to be set up here, in real time?
MR. PARENT: This summer - specifically? Work is being done with a particular company right now and it should be by the end of July, first of August.
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MR. COLWELL: Of 2008, right?
MR. PARENT: Yes, of this year.
MR. COLWELL: Just making sure.
MR. PARENT: The interesting thing you mentioned - I hope I'm not taking any of the member's time by talking about it - I was fascinated when you talked about - it's kind of a mind shift for entrepreneurs to see this not just as waste, but as the ability to make profit. That mind shift has to take place because I think that is almost more important than the technology. I think the technology will be there if the mind shift is there - rather than seeing this as waste, seeing this as economic opportunity, and this is happening.
What fascinated me - and I just wanted to share this with the honourable member - was that OTANS, the Offshore Technology Association of Nova Scotia, which is a rather swanky affair and when you go as Environment Minister, you always sort of feel that your dinners and the dos you have are quite simple compared to the OTANS annual banquet. What fascinated me this year is the sponsor for the banquet was a waste recovery company out of Calgary that had, in recovering oil that was wasted before and fuel that was wasted before, made a profit, I think it was around $400 million last year. So I mean there are big bucks to be made, it's just getting the shift in mindset and then getting help on the technology.
I'm not saying that technology is not important, but with a lot of these things it's not a big technological - as you mentioned on tires, it's really just the mind shift. The technology for tire-derived fuel was probably far more complex than the technology for chipping. So it's not always the technology but it is that mind shift - instead of seeing this as waste, seeing this as a business opportunity. I just wanted to confirm what you said and we need to move further in that regard.
Progress is being made, but it is fascinating to me because I didn't realize there's so much money to be made in waste. I don't know if the average Nova Scotian would know that as well. As you know, the city had a lawsuit on flow control and garbage out of the city because it was going up to a site in Hants County that was constructed by a huge corporation out of Texas that is a very, very well-to-do company, built solely on waste management.
The culture shift has to happen and I just wanted to confirm what you're saying and appreciate your comments that maybe because of your small-business background you offer very helpful comments on how we can improve in this regard. I know that you expressed frustration last year that we need to do a better job of this and certainly those are noted. One of the things we need to study is how to integrate our waste-disposal targets better with the financial opportunities that are there through RRFB and to integrate them better than they've been integrated in the past.
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MR. COLWELL: I've got some beliefs on how that can happen real quick, but anyway. The trouble is I think your government has failed dismally on the ability to encourage small business in this province, and C&D recycling is part of that. I think it's working a lot better than it ever did, don't get me wrong, we're making progress. But as part of that, and as you've suggested already, how we can take some of these products and turn them into other products and/or raw materials that can be sold or reprocessed, or whatever the case may be.
There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are small business - one, two, three, four, five, even up to 10 or 15 people - that can't take advantage of this because they don't have the financial resources and they have an idea. Sometimes the best ideas can make a lot of economic benefit in the province.
Again, you go back to the RRFB and every time I think of the RRFB I shudder because the more I hear about them, the more I see about them, the more disgusted I get, because if they can find a way to dump every television set in some big company's lap, they will give it to them. That's basically what I see. The same with the tires, just get rid of all of the tires, they're gone, now we're going to go to coffee break. That's what I view the RRFB as being right today; there are good members on the board, there are good employees working there, but there's a direction missing, there's that whole thing missing.
Some of the lists that you gave me last year of some of the work they did on this research and development side, some of them might have been good but I don't know, some pretty weird list of some of the other things. This really has to be addressed because this has to work. When we talk about greenhouse gases and all of those things, they are so important; 10 years ago, five years ago, people didn't understand, they didn't care. But people care today and they should be caring. People will separate their garbage, they will do all of these things and they'll do the things they have to do, but we also have to do the other side of it.
They have to see a light at the end of the tunnel, they have to see some small business on their cable channel that's taking the glass from the garbage and turning it into some product that they're shipping to the U.S. and to all over the world and employing five people. That's what we have to see. Once we see that happening, this is not even an issue, the issue is gone, and we don't have to go to the C&D sites. The problem with C&D sites will be having enough material to supply these people, that's when we start to win. Until that happens - and the government has not done that, they haven't set the environment to do that. You have to just set the environment, that's all you have to do, and these people will come forward, but you have to set the environment to do it.
I can tell you, running a small business and I did a lot of R&D and did develop products, this province is a heck of a hard place to work. It's really, really difficult - it's not set up for that. Civil Servants don't understand a small business and the needs of a small business, and rightfully so because most of them haven't had the opportunity to be in that
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spot. They're difficult people to deal with a lot of small-business people because they're frustrated. They want to move forward fast, they can't wait for the bureaucracy to catch up with them, and because of that they sometimes miss opportunities. It's not because the bureaucracy is stopping them or restricting them but there are rules they have to follow and as they follow those rules, the rules are restrictive. So you really need a political will that really moves this forward. If we don't have that, it won't happen.
I personally believe, and I've said this for 15 years, we do not need a single dump in this province, not one - not one landfill, not one dump - but we've got to learn to change things. We're doing a tiny little bit, we're scratching the surface. We've got a pencil trying to get a hole through the metal plate that we're working on and we need a grinder to get through that metal plate.
MR. PARENT: I mean certainly I wouldn't say we're perfect in any way. There are some success stories, one that when you mentioned how if we're really successful they're going to be wanting to import the material, and that's one of the problems we actually have with Minas Basin Pulp and Power, who divert our cardboard, and instead of cutting down trees - they don't cut down a single tree to produce their fine paper products or their Chinet products - they do it all through reprocessed cardboard. They've been so successful that now that they're having to import cardboard from the New England States and from New Brunswick, it's starting to get too expensive. So there are economies of scale where they've gotten almost too big on that side because of the amount of material they're doing.
MR. COLWELL: Could I just interrupt you, if you don't mind.
MR. PARENT: Yes.
MR. COLWELL: I agree, that's a total success story. RRFB doesn't take cardboard anymore at the enviro-depots, they gave up. So here's a company, like you say, a total success, companies that we need in this province; here's RRFB, we're not going to handle cardboard anymore, so it makes it difficult for me, as a citizen, to get rid of my cardboard. So I cut it up in little chunks like this and I tie it all together and I put it in plastic bags and I put it out for the garbageman. Some days I don't bother doing that and if it gets wet, guess what? It goes in the green bin. That material then hasn't gone to that company to process. If I can pack all of my cardboard boxes up in the trunk of my car, take them to the enviro-depot with my paint, and bottles, and all of the other stuff I have, I'll take it. My newspapers, my magazines, I can take those all in there, get rid of them, it's a big headache gone and it's easy.
[6:00 p.m.]
But the RRFB in their great wisdom, with this company that's doing exactly what we hoped to happen in Nova Scotia, they scrapped it. This is what I'm talking about. It just
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seems as though there's somebody that's totally incompetent looking after this process. It has to stop. We have to encourage companies like this and we have to make it easy for these companies to get the products they need.
We shouldn't have to buy product from New England, we should be getting everything we can here and shipping it and making money shipping it to New England. It's not a success story - it's a success story for the company - but it's like having a dairy farm and you want milk out of the cows, but you don't stop feeding them. That's what's happened.
Not only that, it's also reduced the small, tiny little bit of money that the enviro-depots made off of this, might have paid, in the whole year, might pay one month's power bill, but that's one month's power bill that they've got paid, if they're lucky, to pay that much, but they're willing to handle it and look after it because it was convenient for the customers, they made a few dollars and went back to Minas Basin Pulp and Power, they turned it into a product - everybody wins.
The RRFB intervenes, scraps the whole thing. Tell me that makes any sense, explain to me how it makes sense.
MR. PARENT: I've talked to Minas Basin about the cardboard issue, they have contracts with big companies like Wal-Mart, but what's missing is the point you made, individual use, and I really don't know how to answer that because it doesn't make sense. I'll certainly ask the question of RRFB again - why? I understand from staff that it may not be so much RRFB that made the decision as the municipal units, but when Minas Basin is complaining to me they can't get enough cardboard and they're importing it, certainly we should be using all of the cardboard here in Nova Scotia to help them in that regard, rather than them having to import at a cost which makes their bottom line unproductive and which also adds transportation, which adds greenhouse gases.
I'll get staff to look into that for you.
MR. COLWELL: I'd appreciate it. It's an issue that flies in the face of everything we're trying to do in this province, it absolutely does. I've heard different stories why the RRFB quit doing this, but I can tell you personally this year, just regular things, not doing anything special, the amount of cardboard I had this year at home - it wouldn't make a big dent in what Minas Basin does, but if you take everybody in Nova Scotia had about half as much cardboard as I had this year, it'd be a tremendous amount of cardboard. If you think about the cardboard that comes into your house, almost every little thing you purchase.
Some of the stores give you a cardboard box to put your purchases in and you collect them. All these cardboard boxes are a tremendous amount. Then the magazines and the junk mail you get is another pile of stuff. I know what my wife was taking out today and I had one small plastic bag that probably weighed about 20 pounds with magazines and junk mail in
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it, and this is every couple of weeks. When you add all that up in every household, if you made it easy for the enviro-depots to do this and keep this going, I think you would find a tremendous amount of material back in Minas Basin where it should be.
MR. PARENT: Your point's well made and well taken. One of the interesting things Minas Basin's working at that I think is exciting, is the ability to reuse the paper coffee cups and turn them into paper again. I understand they are the first ones in Canada to be able to do that. It was unveiled in Yarmouth and there will be an unveiling because they work not only at this, but at how to separate them and proper bins in the Tim Hortons stores, et cetera.
So that will help augment some of the need they have for cardboard but a lot of the cardboard, as you say - and I was thinking of myself as you were talking - with some of it going into the green bin, that if that could be collected, that would help put a dent in the amount of cardboard they need to import. So certainly we'll investigate to see if anything can be done.
The point that you made is that we need to make it as easy as possible for individuals and certainly it's an important point for me to hear and for staff to hear and for us to work at making it as easy as possible so that people aren't tempted to circumvent the rules or to dump illegally. I know in your area, up in Cape Breton, and down near Yarmouth, there has been some illegal dumping going on and certainly I'm not justifying that in any way, shape or form, but one of the ways to minimize that is to make it as easy as possible for people to get rid of their waste. I know you've mentioned that and we need to always work to improve that.
Certainly on the cardboard, I will ask more questions as to why we couldn't do that because it would seem to me that the enviro-depots could collect and then Minas Basin could go around and pick it up, because they are importing a lot of cardboard. I'm not sure if the importation of cardboard is fairly new, that at one stage they couldn't handle all of the cardboard and now that they've grown, it may be that it's lagging a little bit, that at one stage they had more than enough. But I do know right now that they are importing and that's a major problem for them.
MR. COLWELL: I'm just going to make a quick comment, I have just three or four more items I want to talk about here. I wish them well with their coffee cups but if the RRFB is going to collect the coffee cups, they'll never get any. It's important technology that they're developing, so I hope they get them.
MR. PARENT: Well, one of the things that makes the bottles successful, as you know, because you were part of the government that helped set this all up, is that there is the deposit back. So I may be too lazy to get my 5 cents back, charity groups like the Scouts or individuals - there's an individual who I see going up and down Spring Garden Road and every time I see him I give him $1 or $2 because he's got a big grocery cart full of bottles and
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he always looks surprised and I say, you're sort of like an unofficial waste collector for the province. Although he's getting money back from it, which is why he's doing it, I do want to commend him and he always has sort of a wry smile when I do it.
The problem with the coffee cups is that system won't be there because although Minas Basin can reuse the cups, it's a cost to them. They're doing it as a service - not at this stage yet - not as something that would make money. That's the problem I've wrestled with. So right now they're working with just the one company, Tim Hortons, who is going to put in all sorts of education programs, proper bins, et cetera, in order to get them that supply of coffee cups. If there was some way of putting a deposit where there would be a returnable part, then you would have suddenly everyone having a vested interest in picking up a coffee cup on the sidewalk and bringing it back, but we're not anywhere near that stage.
So right now they're working just with the one company and they're using basically the carrot approach to try to get in Yarmouth, through proper waste receptacles, proper signage, through education, through advertising, et cetera, to get people to bring their coffee cups back to Tim Hortons, and then Minas Basin will take those coffee cups and put them through their process. It won't be nearly as successful as if there was some deposit that came back to the person, although many people are willing to go the extra mile. There are a lot of people who have busy lives and, you know, may not bring their coffee cup back - but if there was a deposit on it.
So I agree with you, I think their chances of success, it will be very interesting. It will depend upon an aggressive campaign by Tim Hortons. We've talked with them and they unveiled it in Yarmouth. I haven't had a chance to go see how it works in Yarmouth, whether it has significantly reduced the amount of discarded Tim Hortons coffee cups on the streets of Yarmouth.
It's supposed to be unveiled in Kentville soon. I'll have a chance to see out the backdoor of my office because I look out onto what's called Centre Square and I can tell you there's a lot of coffee cups blowing around in the breeze there because the Tim Hortons is just on the other side of the square. So I'm going to be interested to see whether the program that they put in place is able to do it without a deposit back because the genius of the deposit back is, as I said, even if I'm too lazy to pick up that coffee cup, someone sees 5 cents in it that they're going to get and will pick it up. So it will be interesting to see. It's the first in Canada and Tim Hortons is very, very proud of this initiative.
At one stage I was talking to the fellow at Minas Basin, I think they were feeling that Minas Basin could handle coffee cups from across Canada, and Minas Basin said, whoa, whoa, we're nowhere near there. This is just sort of a pilot thing because I guess it took some work to break down the coffee cup properly. The cardboard was far easier to break down because there's a plasticized coating on these cups and so it wasn't as simple a process to break the fibres down and be able to reuse them. So I'm monitoring it very closely.
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I do have concerns about the amount of waste in the province. I drive up and down and see waste discarded and particularly by fast-food retail outlets. For example, if you go to Windsor - and I almost always stop for a cup of coffee at Tim Hortons - there's a Tim Hortons, there's a couple of convenience stores, there's a Wendy's, an A&W, McDonald's, and then you come back onto the highway, that whole bank is littered with debris from careless passengers, or thoughtless passengers, just throwing it out the window, and it really saddens me.
One of the things our department needs to do - and again it comes back to resources - is a more aggressive program, an anti-littering program, and again it comes back to financial resources to do that because that involves ads on TV and various media to encourage people. I saw the same thing up near Pictou. Now, near Pictou it was near a waste disposal site and someone said maybe it was debris falling off the back of the trucks. But my understanding is that trucks had to have netting over them, so I'm not sure if that was an excuse.
But as Nova Scotians, I think we need to do a far more aggressive job on anti-littering and take pride in our province because our waste disposal rates are very, very good but when you look at the countryside, particularly after the snow has melted, you'd be somewhat embarrassed. I believe we're still negotiating, but the senator in charge of waste in Trinidad has been invited up to come sign a memorandum, the wife of the Prime Minister of Trinidad, and I certainly hope a lot of that waste is picked up before she gets here or she won't believe the statistics that we give to her. The waste is just a very small, minute stream but it is a visual annoyance and I think if we take visual pride in the beauty of the province, that also helps us take pride in what we're doing.
So the coffee cup effort by Tim Hortons will be an interesting one. I know my aide was quite excited on partnering with Tim Hortons. No decision has been made on that with the department because they're a private company but he was all excited because they have rights to use the hockey player Sidney Crosby, and so he got these little stars in his eyes thinking that Sidney Crosby might be going out there talking about Nova Scotia environment and the Tim Hortons representative said, well, you know, it's possible, I mean he's under contract with us. He cares about anti-littering and cares about the minor hockey program, in particular, that they run, but my aide was off dreaming of great things long before we were able to put them into place.
[6:15 p.m.]
So it will be interesting. The first one is in Yarmouth and the second one will be unveiled in Kentville. I know Tim Hortons has high hopes, they're hoping to do it without any deposit because I talked with them about setting a deposit on coffee cups. Now, there wouldn't be a return deposit, it would just be a levy that you would pay a 10-cent levy on your coffee cup and then that would be plowed back into municipalities to help them pick up the waste of those who aren't good with their waste disposal. It wouldn't be the deposit
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system but it would help - the municipalities are bearing the brunt of picking up that garbage anyway and without any financial help.
Tim Hortons would rather use an educational approach, encouraging people, and they believe they can be successful that way. I believe for 80 per cent of the people of Nova Scotia that's true, that they will respond to positive messages of caring for the environment, don't litter, et cetera, but I believe there's a harder core of 20 per cent who I'm not sure will respond to positive messages, who might need some fines.
One of the things that I find particular bothersome, and there are some members in this House who I have spoken to about it, is cigarette litter on our streets, who will dump their cigarette and just throw it on the street. I don't know if they actually think about where that goes, but it gets into the sewage system for HRM, or down into the harbour and contaminates. If you look along Barrington Street, you'll find mounds of cigarettes because with the smoking program we put in - which was very good in terms of you can't smoke in a public place - but the unintended consequence of that was then they go outside and smoke and just drop their cigarette on the ground.
The HRM did put in some cigarette receptacles up and down Spring Garden Road and Mayor Kelly told me they handed out thousands of these individual ones that people could carry with them for their cigarettes. I will walk to my department and I will find at least two people just tossing their cigarette on the ground and I used to sort of accost them, but I'd get a rather negative reaction. I need to learn that a soft answer turns away wrath and I need to learn that with the honourable colleague who questioned me before you, as well, and I'll do better at that in the future.
Now I just say, would you mind if I pick that up, with a very pleasant tone, and they sort of look at me in surprise and say, oh, no problem. I don't know whether they don't think about where that's going to end up and I've sort of concluded that they're not doing it deliberately, so maybe positive messages like what Tim Hortons is planning to do as they unroll this across the province will cut down on the discarded Tim Hortons coffee cups.
I certainly don't want to, by my comments, single out Tim Hortons, I commend them for unveiling this plan. Much of the fast-food industry has programs, but either they're not adequate or individuals need the stick as well as the carrot. So I'm hoping that we can do more in cleaning up the countryside.
Sorry, I was rambling on but you gave me a chance because it has bothered me for some time, the cigarette debris and the fast-food debris littering our . . .
MR. COWELL: I had about 10 more questions I would have liked to ask. How much time do we have left? Two minutes?
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I think the recycling of the coffee cups is a great thing. One other thing, I've been to some of these local takeout restaurants and some of them don't even bother recycling, they don't separate anything at all, you just dump everything in one container and away you go. I think that has to stop immediately. A lot of the stuff they have is composting material that could be composted and with the way they do it, there's absolutely no way you can compost the stuff because there's a lot there. I think some of the papers could be put into compost, some of the leftover food. Some places have a half approach to it, they have a couple of containers there that are really not clearly marked. A lot of people put the wrong thing in them, but maybe if they were better marked - a little bit more education would help.
What I find from people is they want to do this now, it's not like one time when they didn't think about it, but even the people with the cigarette butts on the sidewalk, they will clean them up once they're aware that it is a problem. Most people, I think, are honestly just throwing them and saying, that's what we always did with our cigarette butts. I don't smoke but I think that's what they always did, nobody said any different and they don't believe it causes a problem. Maybe if you had just even a small ad on radio or someplace: Do you realize what happens to your cigarette butt when you throw it out your car window? Well, number one, you can cause a forest fire out our way or it causes other environmental damage.
People probably just don't understand that and I think, like you say, even a low-key advertising campaign that doesn't cost too much may start the ball rolling. Probably the Cancer Society and other people would help you with that because it's all part of the non-smoking . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. The time allotted for today's estimates debates has expired. At this time I need some direction from the members with regard to continuing tomorrow or closing the estimates today. The honourable member for Preston has 13 minutes remaining in his hour.
The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Thank you, I'd like to finish my 13 minutes tomorrow.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. We will adjourn for today and reconvene tomorrow.
[The subcommittee adjourned at 6:21 p.m.]
