Speech

 

Check against Delivery

Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us here today.

I recently marked my one-year anniversary as Canada’s Environment Minister. It’s been a challenging, but very rewarding 12 months.

Without question, one of the single most challenging—and rewarding—files of 2011 was the oil sands.

Challenging because of the complexity and urgency of it… rewarding because of the progress we’ve made towards ensuring future growth is done in a responsible and sustainable manner.

In our view, what gets measured gets done. We need the best way of collecting the scientific information needed to do our job and ensure that accountable and transparent monitoring is in place in the oil sands area.

Improvements are necessary if we want to have world leading environmental monitoring in the oil sands. We need to match our commitment to environmentally responsible development with a world class, comprehensive, and transparent monitoring program.

To do this, we’ve worked with excellent partners, foremost amongst them the Government of Alberta. It’s great to be here in the province today… and to share the stage with Minister McQueen.

As many of you know, our Government released an Integrated Environment Monitoring Plan for the Oil Sands last July. That plan was developed in partnership with the leading environmental scientists from across Canada. It outlined all the elements needed to have a world-class monitoring program with a comprehensive approach that covers water, air and biodiversity.

Since then, we have continued working constructively with our Alberta counterparts to build further on that foundation. We are all aware that the scope and scale of our shared challenge requires a shared effort.

The result is one comprehensive monitoring program for the oil sands—the new Joint Canada-Alberta Implementation Plan for Oil Sands Monitoring that Minister McQueen and I are announcing today.

This world-class, science-based program will make Canada’s oil sands monitoring among the best in the world.

This comprehensive, shared program optimizes already-existing provincial and federal environmental monitoring for water, air and biodiversity, and is being carried out in an efficient manner as we utilize current infrastructure that is in place. But it also goes well beyond that—we will be monitoring in more places, more frequently, for more substances.

It will be jointly managed by the governments of Canada and Alberta. It will deliver on the plan we produced last summer for a world class environmentally credible monitoring system. Monitoring will be comprehensive and integrated. We will seek advice from all stakeholders as we deliver on this plan. Implementation will be tracked through annual progress reports. 

The new program will be subject to external scientific peer review at the end of the three‑year implementation, and periodically thereafter. This will ensure that we build and maintain one of the best environmental monitoring systems anywhere in the world.

And because collaboration and informed discussion are the cornerstones to success for an undertaking as complex and important as monitoring oil sands development, we will make the system highly transparent. We will ensure that the scientific data that’s collected from our monitoring and analysis is publicly available with common quality assurance practices in place. And as we move forward with the implementation of this program, we will continue to engage stakeholders so that they are informed each step of the way.

Obviously, a commitment of this magnitude requires additional resources.

While both governments and industry already commit significant resources to environmental monitoring, we expect industry will provide the increased funding required to implement this new program.

We will begin to work immediately with industry, scientists and other stakeholders to rationalize the existing collection of monitoring programs to create one single, efficient, comprehensive and credible monitoring system.

It is critical that we get the development of Canada’s oil sands right. It will require our discipline, focus, ingenuity and co-operation to get it right and protect the environment, while realizing the full, positive potential for all Canadians.

This plan will provide us with the scientifically rigorous data that we need in order to ensure that this important resource is developed in an environmentally sustainable way.

I’m pleased—and grateful—to have such capable, credible partners on this journey. And I look forward to another year as Environment Minister… and to meeting our many challenges with success.

Thank you.