Proceedings of the Subcommittee on the
Boreal Forest
Standing
Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 8 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 24, 1997
The Subcommittee on Boreal Forest of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 4:41 p.m. to continue its study on the present state and future of forestry in Canada as it relates to the boreal forest.
Senator Doris Anderson (Chair) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, our first witness is Elizabeth May, Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada.
Please proceed, Ms May.
Ms Elizabeth May, Executive Director, Sierra Club of Canada: I want to thank the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry for taking up the very important topic of boreal forests. It is very hard at the federal or national level to get a focus on forest issues because the management of forests, as you know, is within provincial jurisdiction. Yet there are some very significant national issues which can be dealt with properly only by the Parliament of Canada, through the House of Commons and the Senate. The opportunities to deal with those issues are few and far between.
The Sierra Club has been working for the last two years on a book on Canada's forests. It is called The Cutting Edge and will be published this fall by Key Porter.
I do not have a written presentation today, but if it will be of any use to your research staff, I will give you the manuscript, which will be totally complete next week. You will be able to track the footnotes and see what our sources were.
I will start with a global perspective, and I will leave this document with you. I do not know if you have seen it. This is a recent report of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. It is a very interesting global study of the last of the frontier forests, which they define as forests that have sufficiently large intact areas of primary forest as to be considered important frontier forests. In that category, Canada currently has 25 per cent of all the important frontier forests the World Resources Institute considers at risk. That 25 per cent in Canada is almost all boreal.
You may also be interested to know that other boreal areas, both in Russia and Alaska, are considered important forest areas at risk, and that again points to the important role that Canada has. I am sure you have heard ad nauseam that Canada has fully ten per cent of all the world's forests of all types. However -- and this is rather significant -- of the large, intact areas of forest at risk globally, we have 25 per cent, so I can be said that we are custodians of an even larger proportion of the world's wealth in forests.
Boreal forests form a significant and fascinating ecosystem about which we know surprisingly little. You have probably heard in the course of your hearings that more scientific work has been done on tropical forest regions, such as the Amazon, than has been done on boreal forests. We know very little about the make-up and the functioning of that ecosystem. We know very little about the role of various lichens within the boreal forest and about how they withstand such dramatically different climatic conditions as we have in Canada. The forest extends as far north as our tree line, virtually to the tundra. At the far south of its reach, the boreal forest system withstands substantial swings of dramatic heat and cold through winter and summer. It is a fascinating ecosystem about which we know very little.
I know you have already heard from Dr. Mike Apps on the subject of climate change and the role the boreal forest plays in carbon sequestration, but I wish to emphasize that again, because we in the Sierra Club of Canada are concerned about the impacts of climate change and, of course, about Canada's own policies around fossil fuel use. The role of our forests as carbon sinks is something we tend to ignore, in terms of its economic value and its importance to other industries in Canada and around the world.
The total boreal region of the planet holds about 65 million tonnes of carbon in its trunks and branches and leaves, and another 270 billion tonnes of carbon in its soils and decaying matter. It is a very significant carbon sequestration. Scientists are not entirely sure where all the carbon goes, but the two largest carbon sinks appear to be the oceans and the forests, particularly the northern boreal forests. Every year the boreal forest region absorbs between 0.4 and 0.6 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, so it plays a very significant role.
We are of course tampering with the global balance of carbon through use of fossil fuels. The emissions of carbon dioxide continue to increase, both in Canada and around the world. One of the impacts of this can be seen from the chart prepared by Apps and Rizzo. You probably saw this during his evidence. It shows a predicted impact through climate modelling of an anticipated doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You can see that the results from our boreal forest region are quite startling.
The present day boreal forest extends from Newfoundland farther into British Columbia than this map show. The impact of the doubling in carbon dioxide would not happen overnight, obviously, but the climatic conditions appropriate for boreal forests would shrink quite dramatically and we would be left with some in Labrador and Quebec, some in the northern prairies, but virtually none in southern Canada. There would be substantial shrinkage of our boreal forest regions. In the north, the climate in terms of the temperature and precipitation might be appropriate for a boreal forest, but the soils would not be able to sustain a forest. This should illustrate to you that our boreal forest is at significant risk from climate change.
Similarly, our boreal forest is turning into a source of carbon instead of a sink. That is through the quite dramatic increase in forest fires. Forest fires are one of those impacts that scientists have been predicting as associated with climate change. I do not know how much Mike Apps touched on this when he spoke to you, but since 1970 the natural disturbances in our forests, particularly from insects and fire, have doubled. Much of this is related to climate change.
Since 1980 Canada experienced five of the seven worst forest fire seasons in recorded history. During that time Canada also had eight of the warmest years ever recorded. Also, 1995 was Canada's second-worst forest fire year. In total there were close to 8,500 fires across Canada that burned over 7 million hectares of forest. The situation was particularly bad in the Yukon, where they lost over 3 million hectares of forest.
There are some complicating factors in linking forest fires to climate change, and I want to admit them up front. One of them is, of course, that we have been practising forest fire suppression. Since the boreal forest is a fire-driven ecosystem in which fire results in the succession of different forests, actions by humans to suppress forest fires may lead to more dramatic fires when they finally occur. Nevertheless, climate change creates conditions where fires are more likely. The result of these forest fires in the last decade has been that Canada's forests have shifted from being an overall sequestering force, a sink for carbon, to being a net source of carbon to the atmosphere.
In a sense, the climate change model presents a feedback loop which is bad for Canada's forests because anything that increases carbon to the atmosphere, as we have seen, is a risk to our forest ecosystems from both an ecological and economic point of view.
Senator Taylor: Did you say that the number of forest fires we have had have resulted in the forests becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink?
Ms May: That is correct, and it is a rather startling development.
In any event, how our forests are managed is the subject on which I want to spend the most time this afternoon. Whenever you have questions, please stop me.
Senator Taylor: That leads to my second question. Surely the forest fires we have now are not more numerous and greater than they were 50 years ago, are they?
Ms May: They have been in fact. These have been some of the worst forest fire years in recorded history -- and we have been keeping records for quite a while. The question is: Are the forest fires worse than what we had previously experienced because we suppressed them, or are they worse because the climate is shifting? The warming trends in Canada's north is quite in excess of the global average climate change trends that scientists are seeing.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in making their finding that human beings were having a discernible impact on global climate, relied particularly on the evidence that temperature changes in the Mackenzie Basin were significantly in excess in terms of the global average. The two areas that influenced the IPCC the most were the Antarctic and the Mackenzie Basin. As to the exact cause of the increased forest fires, I would not want to nail it down to being solely climate change because we do have that complicating factor of human forest fire suppression over a number of years. We have had the warmest years and the largest forest fire years on record, suggesting that climate change will result in a climate that is inhospitable to the traditional ecosystem areas that the boreal forest has occupied. At the same time, those forests release more carbon into the atmosphere, thus hastening the change to the inhospitable climate.
We would be quite naive not to assess the economic value to Canada of maintaining our carbon sinks. We have acted as though the carbon sequestration within our boreal forests was an intangible benefit, but when we consider what we must do to reduce global carbon emissions in the face of climate change, we can see that economic benefit of the role our standing forests play is substantial. Yet, over a period of years we have dramatically increased the amount of logging allowed in our boreal forests.
You are probably aware that 90 per cent of all the logging that is done in Canada's forests is clear-cut. The figure is 95 per cent in British Columbia. An even more startling statistic is that 90 per cent of everything that is being logged in Canada every year is in forests that have never been previously cut. In order words, 90 per cent of our logging every year is in areas of primary forest.
When you consider those two statistics in relation to a boreal forest, you will realize we are essentially carrying out a vast experiment with clear-cut logging in an ecosystem about which we know very little. Again, to give you a global perspective, we have 25 per cent of the world's remaining frontier forests in the boreal eco-region.
These statistics, by the way, are from Environment Canada's State of the Environment Report. This is just to show you the level of harvest from our forests. We tend to think of ourselves as a forest nation. We have been in the forestry industry for hundreds of years and we think nothing much has changed. As you can see, this graph runs from 1920 to 1994. We have had quite significant increases in the area being logged. This particular chart shows the annual area of timber harvest, and the scale running up the side is thousands of hectares. The area we are logging every year has dramatically increased, although you can see there is a little dip as a result of the recession in the early 1990s. During the same period, the total volume, in terms of millions of cubic metres, has also been steadily rising. Again, much of this increase has been in Canada's boreal area as we extend further north.
For the last couple of hundred years, most of our logging activities in southern Ontario and southern Quebec were in the more economically valuable areas -- although I do not like to use that term because it is not an ecological term -- such as the white pine forests, the Great Lakes St. Lawrence forest ecosystem, where the logging was mainly for lumber. Gradually we have change to a pulp and paper economy, which means we can move into the boreal forest where trees have less value as lumber but continue to be valuable as short fibre. Short growth trees continue to be very useful to the pulp and paper industry. We have expanded our logging further north, particularly in the last 20 years.
The rest of my opening remarks will be around the notion of our annual allowable cut, which in some provinces is called the allowable annual cut. The chart appears to show that we have a cushion there and that we know what we are doing. We have an annual allowable cut, which is determined through some scientific process, and the rate at which we are harvesting, while it is increasing, is still below some predetermined level of what is allowable. That is what I would like to talk about for the rest of my time.
The annual allowable cut in every province is set, as you know, by provincial forest departments and it is a terribly important determination. Given that we do not know much about the ecosystem in which we are operating, given that 90 per cent of everything we are logging has never been logged before, and given that 90 per cent of everything we are logging is being logged by the clear-cut method, we must be very careful to make sure that from an economic point of view our supply of forests is sustainable over the long term.
The issue of wood supply is one of the preoccupations of the research that we have been undertaking at Sierra Club. What has been quite surprising is the extent to which the annual allowable cut, the AAC, across the country is based on a house of cards of faulty premises. The first is the question of inventory. There is not a province in Canada that can accurately tell you how much forest volume it has, of what species it is composed or how fast its forest is growing. The impression one gets from government documents is that these things are near certainties, but there is a great deal of guesswork that goes into the initial question of how much forest we have in order to make the decision as to how much can be cut.
In every province the forest inventory is based on aerial photographs, which are then subjected to an analysis. They have to guess from the photograph what species are on the ground. All the provinces have permanent sample plots, some have better coverage than others, and in specific areas they go out check their photographic guesses on the ground. This process is fraught with uncertainty, even when they do the ground sampling in permanent sample plots. There is a substantial body of literature within the forestry community that shows that the forest technicians can come up with wildly different estimates. There is a huge margin for error, in other words, when the forest technicians go on the ground to determine the height of the trees and the diameter at breast height of the trees. Forest technicians come to very different conclusions even within the same sample plot, even when they have gone on the ground and checked. These then are extrapolated over the whole landscape. There is a tremendous level of uncertainty about how many trees there actually are.
Based on this inventory, they then try to determine how fast the forest is growing, where cutting can take place and at what rate. This is where the annual allowable cut is subject to a tremendous amount of manipulation. We have concluded that the annual allowable cut in Canada is essentially a political number. It is not a scientific or objective number. It is manipulated upward in every province in order to increase the fibre flow to the mills. If you have a new mill moving into a province, they will find ways to increase the annual allowable cut and increase the inventory, in order to accommodate that mill.
The annual allowable cut can be manipulated in a couple of ways. From the time of Gifford Pinchot in the late 1800s, and Bernard Fernow, who was the first dean of the University of Toronto School of Forestry, the principle of sustained yield forestry has been fairly well entrenched. It is a principle which says you should not cut more now than you can see is growing.
What has happened is that concept has been manipulated by, for instance, arbitrarily deciding how fast a forest is growing. You need to determine how long it will take that forest to replace itself before you allow another round of logging.
Senator Taylor: Have you any idea what percentage politics and manipulation plays in the determination of the annual allowable cut?
Ms May: It is probably 30 per cent across Canada. That is based on manipulation in the age class. The authorities can say the forest is mature at 70 years, so what had once been a 100 year rotation will shrink in one generation.
The single most important way in which the cut is manipulated, and the most transparently inappropriate, is something called the allowable cut effect. That is an allowance for future silviculture. There is an assumption built into the setting of the cut rates across Canada that there will be an intensive silviculture regime so that following clear-cutting they anticipate planting, preceded and followed by herbiciding, thinning, insecticide application and so on.
There was, as you know, a federal-provincial forestry program that subsidized a lot of this silviculture. Since that program ended, the amount of silviculture has dropped. However, the allowable cut has not been reduced as a response. It should also be said that there is not persuasive evidence that the silviculture, if performed, would provide the increased yield in the forest that many are anticipating. In other words, they are anticipating that the second growth forest will actually have a larger volume than the one they are logging. We must bear in mind they are logging, in primary forests, 90 per cent of the cut every year. These forests have had generations to accumulate the biomass which is now being harvested, and they are anticipating that within 60 or 70 years, depending on the province, they will be able to go back and cut a larger volume than they took at first cut.
The allowable cut effect has been criticized by many people, including resource economist Peter Pearse when he chaired the Royal Commission on Forestry in British Columbia. He noted that the allowable cut effect was so obviously perverse that the degree of acceptance of the system is surprising. Since then, it has been accepted just about everywhere.
Regarding this belief that replanting after clear-cutting solves the problem, even if it takes place, which it does not, an 11-year summary review by Forestry Canada of silvicultural statistics for Canada noted that an awareness is developing in Canada that regeneration success rates based on stocking or density are inadequate to assess regeneration performance. Mounting evidence casts doubt on the premise that yields of second growth stands will at least equal the yields of the natural stands they replace.
Within forestry services, federally and provincially, many foresters are aware that even with intensive silviculture efforts and replanting, we will not see the same yields that we saw in logging the primary forests. Yet every province builds in this allowable cut effect. It is essentially voodoo forestry. It amounts to a program of "cut now, pay later". The provinces say, "We will let you increase your cut in the short term based on the assumption that down the road somebody will do lots of silviculture and that speculative silviculture will yield these wonderful results." As I said initially, it is a house of cards and it is extremely serious, particularly in areas where they are cutting.
The earlier chart showed that on a national basis we are cutting below the AAC. Some provinces, such as New Brunswick and Newfoundland, are cutting at or above their AAC. Taking the New Brunswick annual allowable cut as an example, if you removed the allowable cut effect by itself, you would need to reduce the cut by 30 per cent.
These are some of the things that go into an analysis of whether our forests are being sustainably managed. Given that the boreal forest extends into areas where the climate is more severe, the chances of regeneration success are even more speculative. What we at Sierra Club suggest is that all governments across Canada, through the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, undertake a full and thorough review of the inventory for Canada and of the rates of cut.
The only province that is making a serious effort at reviewing its annual allowable cut rates is British Columbia. They do have some boreal forest. I know that much of the forest that they are cutting is not in the boreal region, but particularly through northern British Columbia, in the Cassiar Region, it is. They just increased the cut 4.6-fold in the Cassiar Region of British Columbia near the Yukon. They have a timber supply review process and their chief forester is required to do a fairly transparent public review of what the logging rates are and how they are determined. So far that has not resulted in more than a 1 per cent reduction in their overall AAC, but at least it suggests that they are working towards an assessment of whether the rates of cut are sustainable.
In British Columbia, because their primary forests are so huge, particularly in the temperate coastal region, they know that once they have gone through that entire primary forest their AAC will need to drop by about 20 per cent. That is the chief forester's determination, not Sierra Club's. We think that is probably also the case across Canada but it is not being addressed.
This is a particular concern economically because we are building mill capacity now at a level that will result in removing our whole primary forest. We are not holding back or building to a sustainable level on the basis that once the primary forest is gone, cut rates will need to be reduced.
There is a propensity in human nature that we saw in the cod fishery. Once all those fish plants are there, you must keep the fish flowing into them. The same dynamic is inevitable in Canada's forests, unless we have a national review early enough in the process so we can control the capacity in our mills. We must look realistically at what our forests can actually provide and make some determinations now about what a sustainable rate of cut is so that we do not repeat in our forests -- particularly our boreal forests -- what happened in our cod fishery.
I just want to touch briefly on what our present rate of cut means to ecosystems in Canada. The old growth forests will inevitably be removed through our current forest policies. That is because as we log through our primary forests, we are placing them on rotations with increasingly narrow gaps between the original clear-cut and the next harvest. As we do that, we are removing forever the structural diversity of old growth forest ecosystems. Without old growth forest ecosystems, many species in this country will become extinct. These are species that are old-growth dependent. We are not putting aside sufficient protected areas or old growth forests to maintain that diversity across the landscape of different species.
Already in Canada, of old-growth dependent boreal species, the pine marten is particularly at risk. The Newfoundland pine marten population is down to fewer than 300 individuals, and it is old-growth dependent. The same is true for woodland caribou. Across Northern Ontario and Manitoba, the woodland caribou is dependent on old growth forest. It relies on lichen that only accumulates on the bark of particularly old trees for its sustenance in winter. As the old growth forest disappears, the habitat and food for pine marten and woodland caribou disappears. Old growth forest is also particularly important for many different cavity-nesting birds, and even for bears. A number of bear species rely on the old growth forest ecosystems.
I do not want my analysis of logging rates to sound as if we are only concerned about maintaining the forest industry in Canada, but obviously if we cannot be sure that we are managing our forests to sustain an industry, we are certainly not managing our forests in a way that will sustain the biological diversity that relies on the boreal forest ecosystem.
I will stop there and see if there are any further questions or if I have been unclear.
The Chair: You said that every province builds in an allowable cut effect.
Ms May: Right.
The Chair: That is based on this anticipated intensive silviculture, and on different species of trees, right?
Ms May: Yes.
The Chair: Would you comment a little further on that?
Ms May: It is a very stunning discovery for me. I knew that in my home province of Nova Scotia -- and I thought it might have been just unique to Nova Scotia -- our Department of Natural Resources was allowing the pulp companies in our province to cut more now based on the promises and the plans to use herbicides. It turns out to be a very widespread phenomenon. In fact, with the passage in British Columbia just this year of an amendment to the Forest Act, called Bill 7, they have now put this into their forest planning as well. It is built into the determination of the AAC in every province except, I believe, Prince Edward Island.
It has allowed Nova Scotia to say, at a point when it was facing wood shortages, that the province would aim towards doubling the rate of cut by moving to an intensive silviculture management mode. Every province has now accepted the concept, which allows more logging now than would have been allowed without this factor. You do not need to have a contract that says the silviculture will be performed; you just assume that down the road there will be an intensive silviculture effort, and based on that assumption you allow more logging in the short term. It comes to about 30 per cent across Canada.
I do not think it is sustainable but I think that speaks for itself. The Chairman of the Royal Commission, Peter Pearse, said the same thing quite some time ago. It is similar to the problem with the cod fishery in Newfoundland, where they had the total allowable catch off Newfoundland, which had that ring of scientific objectivity about it because it was based on all these wonderful models, but which was subject to manipulation.
We do not have a much better idea of how many trees we have in Canada than we had of how many fish are off Newfoundland, nor do we have a much more reliable way of estimating what should be logged now. What is missing in the management of our renewable resources is the precautionary principle, which Canada accepted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Since we do not necessarily know everything about what we are doing, and since there is potential for some serious errors when we are exploiting a renewable natural resource, we ought to be a bit careful and build in a caution against our own mistakes and our fallibility. However, just as in the cod fishery, I maintain that we are merely guessing at what is there, then pumping up our estimates with optimistic projections and setting our logging limits on that basis, which is why, on the graph I held up earlier, the AAC is above the harvest levels. Those lines are getting closer together.
The other thing that allows the AAC to be higher than our harvest level is that in every province substantial areas of forests that are included in the calculation are currently inaccessible and largely non-commercial. Again, that gives the deceptive picture that we know how much we have, that there is an adequate and abundant supply, and that therefore our logging rates are sustainable because we are below the AAC line.
That notion be fundamentally re-examined. I would love to find out that our analysis on this is wrong, but we have used government statistics and we do not see any evidence that there is any caution whatsoever in developing the rates of cut across Canada.
The Chair: Your organization is recommending that all the provinces undertake a review of logging rates?
Ms May: Yes. There is a real need for federal leadership here. It would be nice if your committee made recommendations to the federal government. One of the best things the federal government has ever done in the forest area is the scientific work of the Canadian Forest Service. Facilities across Canada, such as the one at Petawawa, have done some really good work that has aided the provinces in understanding what they are doing. Unfortunately, we are losing the scientific capacity of the Canadian Forest Service through budget cutbacks. Given our economic reliance on forests, that is very short-sighted.
The Canadian Forest Service and the federal government should provide some leadership in an assessment of rates of cut. Even a tally would be helpful, something no one has done. No one has taken the holistic picture: What is the total number of mills? What is the total cubic metres of hardwood or softwood that we need to keep all the existing mills running? What happens if all those new mills that are being proposed come on line? Each province has wonderful industrial development plans. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland admit that they are already significantly in a deficit position in terms of their mills as opposed to their forests, but the prairies and B.C. are still looking at increasing logging rates. We need a national perspective. We need to know how much we have and how much we can sustainably maintain. We also need to know at what point we will push the ecosystem, through over-exploiting the resource, past its limits to recover, ultimately costing forest-dependent communities their jobs and their sustainability. That kind of an assessment would be extremely useful, given my preamble about climate change. Given what we know about the risks to these ecosystems, the fact that we are stressing them to the maximum through clear-cutting and through extending our logging further north at a time when the sustainability of that entire ecosystem is at risk through climate change is extremely short-sighted. Unfortunately, no one is taking that kind of holistic view of forest policy.
The Chair: You also said that it is your recommendation that we must control the capacity of our present mills. We heard out west that some Alberta mills already must bring logs in from Saskatchewan, and that one mill in northern Alberta is not getting enough logs at this time.
Ms May: That is right. Mills in British Columbia are relying on wood from as far away as Saskatchewan and the Yukon. Mills on the main island of Newfoundland are essentially without wood supply and hoping to clear-cut throughout Labrador. These are ecosystems and forests that no one would have considered commercially worthwhile even ten years ago. We are already seeing supply difficulties. The sawmilling industry throughout Southern Canada is having a hard time finding sawmill-quality wood; at the same time the pulp industry is having trouble finding pulp-quality forest material. This is a sign that the whole ecosystem is being exploited at levels that are unsustainable, but there is not that level of assessment across Canada.
Even within provinces that are experiencing supply shortages, they tend to minimize them by seeing them as a localized problem. If you look across Canada and see a series of local shortages, maybe you should assess whether or not there is a role here for the national perspective. Perhaps the federal government could assist the provinces in assessing whether what they are doing is sustainable, not only economically, but also in terms of the other values such as carbon sequestration and protection of biological diversity.
Senator Taylor: Back to the forest fires again, I am having a little trouble. You like the idea that a forest should be a carbon sink. I gather that is good?
Ms May: Yes.
Senator Taylor: However, you argue that as a result of the large numbers of forest fires, the forest is losing that role, and instead it is giving off carbon. You also argue that we should leave the forests alone. Are you recommending that in order to achieve this carbon sink goal, we should do much more work to prevent forest fires?
Ms May: The carbon sink value of our forests is never economically assessed when provinces look at their Crown forest land. What I am arguing is that we should do whatever we can to maintain the carbon sequestration value of our boreal forests, which at a minimum means that vast clear-cutting in boreal forest old growth should be assessed in terms of whether or not that forest has a larger value to Canada, and to other countries as well, in its role as a carbon sink. This does not mean that forest fires are inevitable in a boreal forest eco-region. As I said, it is a forest-fire driven ecosystem. With massive clear-cutting in the boreal region at the same time that forest fires are increasing, either through the actions of climate change or through the combined actions of climate change and previous forest fire suppression, there is probably not a simple answer to your question. I certainly do not wish to suggest that these answers are simple. Fires are part of the boreal forest ecosystem, but what is happening is that the number of fires and the amount of area that is being lost to fire are increasing. This is probably related to climate change. Therefore, as a response to climate change, in terms of protecting our forests down the line, we should be ensuring that substantial areas of old growth boreal forest are not logged so that they can be maintained as a carbon sink.
Senator Taylor: Because of the climate change, which we will not be able to address overnight, old growth forests will be prime targets for fires. Therefore, we must heighten our fire safety links to try to preserve old growth forests. That follows logically because while sometimes the cause of fire is natural, in this case we are actually supporting the unnatural.
My next question is related to clear-cutting the carbon sink. My impression from somewhere is that clear-cuts use up as much carbon as, or more than, old growth.
Ms May: You mean the new forest that grows up afterwards?
Senator Taylor: There are millions of little critters up there fighting with each other to get up in the air, and there are no real scraps to burn down underneath, so they are really creating a bigger carbon sink in that former area of old growth.
Ms May: I know the forest industry has tried to claim that the young trees in a plantation of second growth forest absorb carbon faster than the old trees, and that therefore they are providing a better carbon sink. There is a very good article in Science, and I will leave the reference with your research staff, that concluded that clear-cutting and replanting an area does not approach the old growth storage capacity for at least 200 years. Even when sequestration of carbon in wooden buildings is included in the models, timber harvest results in a net flux of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.
It is fairly obvious that the sheer biomass, the weight of that carbon storage in an older forest, will be more in total than a clear-cut forest. It is true though an old tree is not growing much, so it is not absorbing as much carbon as a small tree relative to size and relative to rates of absorption, but if you wish to find out which has a larger carbon sink, it will be the old growth forest every time. The industry has tried to play that particular argument to their advantage but it does not stand up to scrutiny.
Senator Taylor: You mention annual allowable cut but I have not heard much about biodiversity in your presentation. You did touch on the fact that the old growth boreal forest may be as helpful as tropical forest in bacteriological and pharmaceutical areas, although we as a country have not done much research in that field. We must also remember that 400 of our 500 native bands in Canada live in the boreal forest and require it in a great many cases to sustain themselves, not only in forestry but, more importantly, in hunting and trapping and so on. Should we not have a big section of the boreal forest set aside for game and native peoples, and then we can work on the AAC? Have you studied this issue at all?
Ms May: That is an excellent point. I have been criticizing the way provincial governments set the AAC, and you are quite right to point out that they never consider whether first nations rely on that same forest for subsistence, unless that forest is literally in their reserve. The question of the 400 first nations communities that rely on the boreal forest is an excellent one, particularly when one considers that clear-cut logging is anticipated for virtually all of the boreal forest within reach of mills. The roads keep moving north to make all of those forests accessible. There is, as far as I know, no provincial government that is setting aside substantial forest areas in order to maintain first nations' traditional activities, or their ability to survive, period. Of course there are often conflicts. For instance, the pine marten is an old-growth dependent species but it is also a fur-bearing mammal. Some first nations, particularly in the Yukon, are dependent on trapping, and the pine marten is part of their economic base. As the pine marten disappears because the old growth disappears, first nations people face an immediate problem. When the rates of logging are set, I do not know of any province that takes into account the reliance of their first nations communities on that forest base.
Senator Spivak: In fact, quite the opposite is happening. There is a complete neglect of anything to do with the aboriginal peoples anywhere. Provincial governments do not even take them into account. Is that not what the Cree, for example, are complaining about? They have the right to hunt and fish, but with no forest and no streams, how will they exercise those rights? That is totally ignored by all levels of government.
Senator Taylor: In old growth forests, what is your estimate of the percentage we should leave untouched?
Ms May: That is a very difficult question. In their publications, the federal government is currently promoting an absolute lie. I do not usually say that about a government but it is so transparent that I must say it is a lie.
What they are saying is in their publications is that they are protecting, by policy or legislation, 12 per cent of Canada's forests. Of course the actual amount of Canada's forest currently within any level of actual protection, such as within a national or provincial park, is somewhere under 4 per cent. The 12 per cent figure is used, of course, in an effort to meet the World Wildlife Fund endangered basis target, and is arrived at by adding together all of the buffer zones that are supposed to be left along streams and beauty strips along highways, although we know from audits that very often these buffer strips are not left. The figure includes steep slopes, inaccessible areas, buffer strips along streams, beauty strips along highways, and somehow, if you add these all together, magically it is supposed to come to 12 per cent. It is really quite disturbing to see this figure being promoted all around the world as if it is what Canada has actually done, because a lot of little tiny strips here and there, even if they did exist, do not add up to 12 per cent as a protected area.
In terms of how much old growth should be left, what is needed is a representative patchwork across the landscape that is close to natural conditions. You want to allow old growth to follow its normal course, as much as possible, and current younger growth eventually to become old growth. It is very hard to put a percentage on it. What I would like to see is a re-examination of logging methods so that we are not clear-cutting 90 per cent of everything. You actually can have a sustainable and economically profitable logging operation in an old growth forest which will maintain that forest for quite a long time while logging in it through selection cuts. The reliance on clear-cutting is what puts us into this awkward position where we must determine that some amount must be left as an protected area. Creating small ecological islands of old growth forests will not work. It will not be sufficient for wildlife corridors. Woodland caribou, for example, need vast areas of forest through which they can migrate, and those forests must contain enough old growth to sustain them. I am afraid there is not an easy percentage answer.
Senator Spivak: You are not speaking of the temperate forests, though?
Ms May: No, I am talking about old growth, boreal. The Government of Canada statistic is based on all forests, but when I talk about the rate of clear-cutting and how much old growth you should maintain in a boreal area, you should mimic natural landscape conditions as far as possible, and that varies from place to place.
Senator Taylor: As we conducted our study, I was amazed at how much timber and pulp Sweden, for instance, puts out, which was nearly all from plantations. They decided some years ago that the boreal forest is the home of the Sami, and yet they still put out an amazing amount of lumber and pulp. In fact, they are technological leaders around the world.
I think many of us suspect that we have already over-developed our forests. Has your group considered whether the government should be looking at a very active program of plantation forestry, perhaps on lands that are fairly marginal anyway as far as crop and grass is concerned?
Ms May: It is a very hard question because a plantation forest is not, in an ecologist's view, a forest. There are some significant differences in terms of biodiversity that can be supported in a plantation forest versus a natural forest. Another country that has followed a similar path is New Zealand. They have made a decision to do aggressive eucalyptus harvesting in plantations and to set aside a substantial amount of their primary forests as lands that will never be logged. It is controversial within the environmental movement in New Zealand. In some ways, that may be the ideal solution. There are a number of ways by which Canada can attempt to perpetuate the natural biodiversity of its forest, protect the carbon sequestration of our northern boreal and have a forest industry.
Clearly some provinces have already decided to convert their forests into a fibre farm. New Brunswick is the leader in this. As the head of the New Brunswick Forest Products Association says, every single tree in New Brunswick has a date at which it will be logged and the name of the mill on it where it will go. There is not a piece of forest in New Brunswick that is farther than 100 kilometres from the closest mill, and there is a network of roads that reaches all of them. It is an intensively managed piece of land and it has lost a lot of species. If that were the model that was followed across Canada, we would all be the poorer for it.
A certain amount of mixed plantation, while maintaining natural forests and looking for alternative fibre sources, particularly for paper, is an attractive option. Many people are advocating that the current tobacco-growing areas of Southern Ontario should be used for growing non-THC hemp for use in making paper. Also, greater recycling of paper should theoretically reduce the pressure on Canada's primary forests.
The World Resources Institute study came up with an interesting projection for the future increase in world consumption of wood products. At this point they are projecting that by the year 2010 wood consumption will increase globally by 56 per cent over what it is today.
Since Canada is the world's largest exporter of forest products and paper products, we will be producing much of that increased demand, so it is important that we make decisions now about what we can sustain, how many mills can we deal with, how much logging should we allow. I am very happy with the tenor of your questions because it means you are actually thinking about what is sustainable and where we should draw the line. The current thrust in provincial forest policy is to sell the very last roll of raw pulp and ship the last log out regardless of whether such actions destroy our forests.
Senator Spivak: What have you found in terms of enforcement? It is fine to talk about an allowable cut and all the rules, but certainly in Manitoba they are just ignoring them. I am sure the intent is there, and I do not accuse the province of not wishing to enforce their own laws, but are they?
Ms May: No.
Senator Spivak: How many people are there in the provinces doing any kind of enforcement?
Ms May: I am sure you all know, we are going through a period of what is euphemistically called "downsizing." The cuts of staff in the provincial departments of natural resources have been significant. I already mentioned the cuts at the federal level to what was once good forestry science.
Recently on CBC, in relation to another issue, Andrew Nikiforuk said that losing our scientific capacity to understand the environment around us is like taking away the seeing eye dog from the blind man. That is exactly the boat we will be in with regard to our forests. We will not be able to understand what we are doing because we are removing the basic science. At the same time, we are removing our enforcement capability in the provincial departments of natural resources to enforce the laws regarding things such as leaving a buffer zone around streams or maintaining proper road building techniques or logging at a sustainable level.
Ontario and Alberta are moving in the direction of industry self-regulation. The idea is that the industry will file its own reports and let the government know how it is doing. Even when we did have staff in provincial departments of forestry or natural resources, there was not much compliance with regulations and forestry guidelines. In many provinces there are only guidelines, not regulations, about how large a clear-cut can be, whether you are allowed to log to the banks of a stream, at what point you must build a certain size road and what culverts you must put in.
The most impressive set of forest guidelines is the Forest Practices Code of British Columbia, but the fact that it is not being implemented or honoured on the ground is a real problem because that is the highest-profile, most serious effort. I will give the British Columbia government credit: I think it was at least initially a serious effort to control logging practices. It is not being enforced.
Another serious problem is the fact that in many cases logging on private lands is not controlled at all. Depending on the province, there can be quite significant ecological damage through totally unregulated logging on private lands. In the Maritimes, a very significant problem is the growth in what they are calling liquidation cuts. It is an interesting phenomenon and I will take a minute to describe it. It affects some boreal forests in New Brunswick, and the Acadian forests in Nova Scotia.
Many contractors bought large feller bunchers, or feller forwarders, very expensive equipment, so they have loan payments on this equipment. Then they lost work on Crown lands to the larger companies and so contractors in the Maritimes are literally going door to door and phoning owners of private wood lots. In New Brunswick, one-third of the land is owned by small private wood lot owners. In Nova Scotia, it is closer to 70 per cent. The contractors are calling the owners and offering to liquidate their whole wood lot. Owners who are in economic straits are being offered maybe $30,000, which goes straight into their bank account. They will still own their land; all they are doing is getting rid of all their trees. As Senator Anderson will know, being from the Maritimes, this is not normal practice. People's family wood lots have been maintained over generations.
The problem has become so serious that Premier McKenna has introduced tax measures to penalize private wood lot owners who cut more than 10 per cent of their wood lot in any given year. The government is considering whether to introduce licensing requirements for contractors. They currently are not required to meet any standards.
That is a significant problem and, of course, the large companies are worried because they know they are running out of wood and they will need the private wood lots for their own future supply to run their pulp mills. In the meantime, there is a lot of wood leaving New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for Maine and Quebec. They have no idea how much. No one is keeping track. There is no regulation at all.
A similar situation has developed on some of the private lands and even first nations lands in Alberta which were being logged for mills in B.C. When you are in a cycle where there is some wood shortages happening, such levels of cut and the type of logging being used are not sustainable.
Senator Spivak: The Pulp and Paper Institute were here and they seemed to think that the answer to everything is through the Canadian Standards Association and the ISO and so forth. They think that they will provide what is not being provided now in the provinces, that is enforcement and better standards for logging. Do you have a comment on that?
Ms May: I did not know that Canadian Standards Association's Sustainable Forest Management System had come before you, and I appreciate the chance to say that it will not provide any guarantee of sustainable logging at all. There are several certification systems out there. We have been working with one called Forest Stewardship Council, which is an international certification program. There are now two active Forest Stewardship Council efforts in Canada. I am sorry to say neither of them is working on standards for the boreal forest. One is working on the Acadian forest in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and the other is working on a temperate coastal for British Columbia. There is a Forest Stewardship Council operating in Canada.
The approach of the Forest Stewardship Council can be contrasted with that of the Canadian Standards Association. The Forest Stewardship Council will certify forest products with a label, an eco-label, that goes on the product itself. It ensures a chain of custody from the wood lot to the marketplace. It is what is required by many buyers in the U.K. and in the United States. Home Depot and companies like that are looking for sustainably harvested forest products with a chain of custody that goes right back to an ecologically based logging operation.
Forest Stewardship Council operates by certifying the certifier, so once a certifier has been approved as understanding the ecological concepts of the Forest Stewardship Council, he or she is allowed to provide an eco-label to a council-approved operation.
In contrast to FSC, which has a performance-based approach, CSA has a systems-based approach, quite similar to the ISO 9000 quality-assurance program. ISO 9000, as people like to say, would allow you to certify something as meeting ISO 9000 standards. Let us take the example of a concrete life preserver. The fact that it was a concrete would be no impediment to certifying it as having a quality system. The approach of a system-based certification is that the company itself, rather than the particular product, has accepted a set of management systems which meet either ISO or, in this case, CSA standards.
The Canadian Standards Association process, with which I am quite familiar, is difficult to explain, but essentially involves a number of groups in public consultations. A forest company would undertake to develop some goals for their operations. It would then go back to the people who have always made the decisions, the forest manager for that company, as to the ways in which they will meet those goals. If a community consultation said their goal was biodiversity, it would be perfectly okay for the forest manager to say the company will meet the biodiversity goal through clear-cutting, because there are people who argue that clear-cutting will somehow improve biodiversity.
Once they have gone through the system and determined how they will manage, which does not need to be performance-based at all, they can pick any product within their company; that is their right.
Senator Spivak: When I asked the pulp and paper industry representatives what the difference was, they stated absolutely -- you can see that in the transcript -- that both approaches were performance-based.
Ms May: This is the trick. Even though the one approach is system-based, the companies say it is performance-based because the companies and their systems are audited. However, they are audited by independent auditors against the plan they have chosen for themselves. They are not audited to see if the outcome was enhanced biodiversity, they are audited to see if they did what they said they would do. If they say they will clear-cut, so long as they clear-cut they can be certified as a sustainable forest management company. However, if they decided that clear-cutting was not meeting their biodiversity goals and they wanted to be more ecologically based and shift everything to horse logging, they could lose their certification as sustainable forest managers because they were no longer clear-cutting.
It is a combination of a performance-based and systems-based approach, but it is not premised on improving ecological outcomes. It is a debate that may in fact find its middle ground. Forest Stewardship Council certification people are talking to CSA sustainable forest management people to see if there is a meeting place. It may be that the Forest Stewardship Council system will reward the best and the CSA system will improve the rest, but in the meantime CSA, in and of itself, will not in any way move us towards any guarantee of sustainability.
The Chair: Thank you.
Our next witnesses are from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Welcome and please proceed.
Mr. Gerry Swanson, Director General, Habitat Management and Environmental Science, Fisheries and Oceans Canada:Thank you. My opening remarks should take about 15 minutes and then I will be available to answer any questions you might have or to undertake to bring back any answers that I am unable to provide today.
I understand that there was a question as to whether or not Dr. Parsons, my boss, could be with us today. Dr. Parsons is the first vice-chair of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas and he is on his way to Europe this evening in conjunction with his responsibilities with that organization, so I will attempt to pinch hit for him this evening.
Unfortunately, I will be unable to discuss the opening and the closure of the Eastern cod fishery since that happens to be beyond my particular area of expertise.
What I propose to focus on today are the department's fish habitat management responsibilities under the Fisheries Act. I will also make some remarks on some other sections of the act dealing with pollution prevention and the links of the Fisheries Act to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which was proclaimed in 1995. I understand that there is some interest in a proposal we are working on at the moment to delegate some of our fish habitat responsibilities to provincial governments. That will be covered in my opening.
The federal government has constitutional responsibility for sea-coast and inland fisheries. The federal Parliament has exercised the federal responsibility in this regard with the Fisheries Act. The Fisheries Act contains specific provisions designed to protect fish habitat from disturbance. This is principally through section 35, which prohibits the destruction or the harmful alteration of fish habitat unless authorized by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. There are other provisions in the act ensuring the safe passage of fish around dams and other obstructions and provisions requiring sufficient flows of water to enable fish to live.
Our primary function with regard to fish habitat is reviewing development projects that can have an negative impact on fish habitat, and recommending or developing ways to minimize or avoid the impacts. Our business is the protection of the fishery and the habitat upon which fish depend.
As I am sure you are aware, provincial governments are generally responsible for the management of natural resources, including forestry. You also may be aware that the federal government has delegated some of its fresh water fisheries management responsibilities to many provincial governments.
Senator Spivak: Could you tell us which ones?
Mr. Swanson: We have arrangements by which the Province of Quebec manages its fresh water resources. We have similar arrangements in Ontario and the prairie provinces, and in British Columbia for those streams that do not contain salmon, generally in the eastern part of the province.
While we have delegated fisheries management responsibilities to provincial governments, there are some sections in the Fisheries Act which, as currently constructed, cannot be delegated. These are sections that require the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to exercise a discretionary authority in some way. One of these is under section 35 of the Fisheries Act, which provides that only the minister can authorize the destruction of fish habitat.
Senator Spivak: You say "currently". Is there some thought that this may not last forever?
Mr. Swanson: Yes, and I will be getting into that later, senator. There is currently a bill in the House of Commons to amend the Fisheries Act, which could change that particular provision.
Generally, the inland provinces I have referred to manage the fish habitat within the province as an adjunct to their fisheries management responsibilities. Provincial departments manage the recreational fishery, even the commercial fishery in some cases, within their borders, and as part of that general management framework they also have general enforcement powers under the Fisheries Act, including the habitat provisions. DFO, however, continues to manage the fishery, both the fresh water and the marine, in the coastal provinces, and to a large degree in the two territories as well.
My next topic is the inter-relationship of forestry and fish habitat management. Provincial governments will usually refer development projects which contain unavoidable impacts to fish habitat to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It is through these referrals that DFO becomes involved in the review of development proposals.
When we review those proposals, we consider whether or not there could be changes in hydrologic regimes due to the loss of forest cover along the stream. We consider whether there could be actual physical disturbance to stream bottoms, or the destruction of fish habitat, caused by heavy equipment associated with harvesting operations crossing streams. In some proposals we have to consider whether increased water temperature could occur because of the loss of forest cover on the edges of the stream, or whether the loss of forest cover might lead to increased sediment loads within streams.
We are also involved with provincial governments in the development of guidelines to minimize the impacts of forestry on the fishery and fish habitat. The previous witness mentioned one of them, the British Columbia Forests Practices Code. We worked very closely with the provincial government in the development of that code, and there are others as well.
My next topic relates to sections of the Fisheries Act that are administered by the Department of the Environment. One is section 36, which prohibits the deposit of deleterious substances except under regulations. These are generally things that come out of the end of a pipe -- pipes which might come out of paper mills, for example. There are regulations passed pursuant to the Fisheries Act, such as the pulp and paper effluent regulations, and they are administered by the Department of Environment.
We work with the Department of Environment, however, in providing them with scientific support in terms of what the impacts of various discharges can be on fish and fish habitat. We are also working very closely with the Department of the Environment in an environmental effects monitoring program which has been established under the pulp and paper effluent regulations.
I would also like to refer to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. CEAA, as it is known within the bureaucracy, is triggered, or comes into play, when there are development projects that are federally funded; that are located on federal land; where the federal government is the proponent; or, finally, where there is some sort of federal regulatory approval required, such as under section 35 of the Fisheries Act, where the minister's authority is required for destruction of fish habitat.
Page 8 of the presentation lists a number of so-called "law list" triggers. "Law list" is the name of the regulations that are passed under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. I have listed the various regulatory authorities within the federal government which would cause CEAA to come into play. The remaining regulatory triggers with respect to the Fisheries Act are listed there.
I should like now to outline for you very quickly the process that we go through when a project is referred to us. First, we examine the project to see whether or not there are any impacts on fish habitat. We then will have some discussions with the proponent about measures that might mitigate, or avoid entirely, any impacts on fish habitat. If mitigation or avoidance is possible, we would confirm the discussions that we have had by sending the proponent a letter saying, "If you do it this way, you will not be damaging fish habitat so you will not be in contravention of the Fisheries Act."
If mitigation is not possible, then section 35 of the act comes into play, and if the proponent wants to go ahead with legal certainty that he would not be running afoul of the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans or the people who are responsible for enforcing the act, then he may have to obtain an authorization. We operate under a policy principle known as the "no net loss" principle. Any time an authorization is issued by the minister or his officials, we require the proponent to compensate for the habitat that would be lost as a result of the project. If you are destroying X number of acres or square metres of fish habitat in one spot, you replace it with the same number or more square metres some place else within the same ecosystem.
When we get to the stage where an authorization is required for a project, CEAA is triggered, and we are then required to examine not only the impacts that that project would have on the particular fishery, an examination that we would do under our own legislation in any event, but also broader environmental and social impacts.
There have been some difficulties for proponents, for provincial governments and others, with how the process has unfolded insofar as the Fisheries Act is concerned. The main problem is referred to as a back-ended trigger. CEAA is not triggered formally until after there has been considerable dialogue among ourselves, the proponent and the provincial government. This can create some uncertainty for other stakeholders. We may be well into a review process when we have to tell the proponent that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act has come into play, and we are now no longer interested only in the fisheries issues, but issues such as migratory birds and other problems. In the meantime, there may have been provincial environmental processes triggered up front, at the beginning of the project proposal. It becomes very difficult then to harmonize the federal and provincial processes.
I should like now to focus on forestry issues. Forest harvest plans in themselves do not trigger a review under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. However, there may be some aspects within a particular cutting plan or proposed activity that would require an authorization. Then, of course, that particular portion of the proposal could require an authorization under the Fisheries Act or even a permit under the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which would trigger a CEAA assessment.
There has been a proposal put forward which could alter this method of operation. That is a proposal to delegate some of the discretionary ministerial authorities that now rest solely with the federal government to provincial governments. As I mentioned earlier, provincial governments already review many of the same kinds of proposals and that is often the window of entry to regulatory review. They have their own legislation regarding water usage and other usage that requires a review of many of the projects we are also reviewing.
The minister has proposed, in Bill C-62, which is now before the House, that some of the provisions regarding fish habitat be changed. We would put into the legislation a new section that would require a federal permit for certain projects that would have the inherent capacity to have significant impacts on fish habitat. Projects that would require a federal permit would be listed in a regulation which we would develop on the basis of input from stakeholders.
We would include in the permits, when they were issued, mitigation conditions, monitoring conditions and those kinds of things. The application for our consideration of these permits would trigger a CEAA review, but that trigger would be up front, at the time the application was made for the project.
There is another benefit in having the projects requiring this kind of permit listed in regulation. We would then eliminate that uncertainty that I have spoken of earlier where we must negotiate with a proponent, and then only after considerable "to-ing" and "fro-ing" between us and the proponent we finally get to a stage where it is determined that a CEAA review is required.
We would at the same time be proposing to delegate projects that we not listed in the regulations to provincial governments, and we would negotiate agreements with provincial governments. The agreements would contain requirements that the provincial government exercise delegated federal responsibility in accordance with standards that have been developed or agreed to by the federal minister.
I should now like to talk about the principal amendments that are proposed in Bill C-62, the new Fisheries Act. Bill C-62, by the way, is a cover-to-cover rewrite of the Fisheries Act. Many of the provisions that are currently in the Fisheries Act have been there since 1868. This is the first time there has been such a cover-to-cover review of the act, and the bill is currently at second reading stage.
If you have any questions, I will try to answer them.
The Chair: When you were discussing forestry and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, you said that forest harvest plans do not in themselves trigger review under this CEAA. My question is why not?
Mr. Swanson: You must look at the framework of the CEAA legislation. The CEAA trigger comes into play only if certain conditions are present. There must be a regulatory decision for the federal government to make. In the majority of cases, these plans are not on federal land, and the federal government is not doing the harvesting, so regulatory decision is not required, and without that there is no CEAA assessment triggered.
The Chair: I see. I was wondering about this new Fisheries Act. I do not think I have heard of this one.
Senator Spivak: It is still in the House.
The Chair: It is still in the House?
Mr. Swanson: Yes.
Senator Spivak: Thank you for your presentation; it was very enlightening. How many staff do you have in the fisheries department involved with the section 35 review process?
Mr. Swanson: I will try to answer that off the top of my head.
Senator Spivak: You do not need to answer it now. You can send us the information. My questions are very precise: How many staff members do you have working on this area now; and how many did you have in 1993?
Mr. Swanson: I will provide you with the number of staff we had in 1993-94 and the staff we have at the moment as well.
Senator Spivak: At step number 3 in the section 35 review process, you issue letters of advice. From the figures I have here, it seems there have been many letters of advice issued. In 1991, there were 12,000 authorizations that had the potential to trigger assessments. How are these letters of advice handled? Who in the department makes the decision? Is it yourself? Is it Scott Parsons? Is it the minister? Canada is a big country. Who is doing it? How is it done?
Mr. Swanson: These letters of advice are issued at the regional level.
Senator Spivak: By the regional people?
Mr. Swanson: Yes. We have fish habitat management biologists in our regional offices and the letters of advice would be issued at that level. These are the people who deal with proponents on a day-to-day basis.
Senator Spivak: I know there are guidelines for triggering the CEAA, but within the department are there guidelines as to when you issue these letters of advice and when you issue an authorization, and so on, and must they be followed?
Mr. Swanson: Yes, there are.
Senator Spivak: Could we get a copy of those?
Mr. Swanson: Certainly.
Senator Spivak: How is the decision to issue a letter of advice arrived at? Does the impetus for that come from the provincial people? Are your people out in the field examining everything? Let us take an example. Louisiana-Pacific has 20 per cent of Manitoba, right?
Mr. Swanson: Yes.
Senator Spivak: There are many streams there, many roads being built, a lot of fish, and so on. How do all these things come to the notice of your regional people?
Mr. Swanson: We will be providing you with more precise figures later. Manitoba is in our central and Arctic region. Our central and Arctic region is comprised of the entire Northwest Territories, the north slope of the Yukon, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.
Senator Spivak: And you have five people there?
Mr. Swanson: We have seven people in Ontario, located in Burlington. We have approximately 15 to 20 people located in Winnipeg at our regional office. We have nobody in Saskatchewan or Alberta. We have one habitat biologist in Yellowknife and one in Inuvik.
Senator Spivak: How do you know where you might or might not need to issue a letter of advice? How does that information come to you?
Mr. Swanson: Those letters of advice would be generated from some sort of a provincial referral process. The window I talked of -- which is another bureaucratic term -- is through the provincial government.
Senator Spivak: You would not even know whether you had to issue a letter unless the province refers the project to you, right?
Mr. Swanson: In the vast majority of cases, yes.
Senator Spivak: How does the province know? Who tells the province that there might be a stream which will require mitigation? Is it the forestry company?
Mr. Swanson: The proponent would come to the province because there is some sort of licensing requirement under provincial legislation. In these cases there would be fisheries biologists with a provincial ministry of natural resources who would examine the application and determine that the project could have some impact on the fishery.
Senator Spivak: But you understand my question. Let us talk about Louisiana-Pacific. They have 20 per cent of the province and they have a plan. They are very precise, they know what they will cut and where, and they wish to do a good job. Who looks at the plan and determines that there might be a problem, that the referral process should be started? That is the question. In the beginning, what happens?
Mr. Swanson: Our people are not field people out doing enforcement work.
Senator Spivak: I know that.
Mr. Swanson: That kind of decision would come from provincial officials, but the impetus for bringing it to the attention of government, whether it is federal or provincial, would rest with the proponent.
Senator Spivak: Louisiana-Pacific. I do not want this to be misconstrued. You are telling me that the real impetus for the decision to refer a project for a determination of whether or not it might have an impact lies with the forestry company? Who knows about this?
Mr. Swanson: There is no requirement for a permit under the Fisheries Act. We have something called an authorization. Essentially, anyone can destroy fish habitat. They do it at their own peril, however, because the destruction of fish habitat is an offence against the Fisheries Act, but there is no offence of not having the permit. It is up to the proponent to decide whether or not he or she wants to have the legal certainty of operating in compliance with the Fisheries Act.
Senator Spivak: In other words, it is the proponent who makes the initial decision as to whether or not this might be in violation of some act?
Mr. Swanson: Yes, I would say that is correct.
Senator Spivak: It must be correct, because there appears to be no-one else out there.
Mr. Swanson: There may be provincial enforcement people who are out there.
Senator Spivak: Oh, no; they have all been cut. This process is obviously very heavy on the top end and has absolutely nothing at the bottom end. There is no supervision if what you are telling me is correct.
I want to be sure that I am understanding this correctly, because this is an important point and the people of Canada are under the impression that there is a whole structure in place. All of the recent polls show that people care very much about the protection of water and fish. This is important.
On page 6 of your presentation, you say that section 36 of the Fisheries Act prohibits the deposits of deleterious substances, except pursuant to regulations, such as pulp and paper effluent regulations. In Alberta, they were very proud of the progress they have made in reducing pulp mill effluent. Where are the pulp and paper effluent regulations?
Mr. Swanson: The pulp and paper regulations are under the Fisheries Act at the federal level.
Senator Spivak: The Department of the Environment is responsible for administering them?
Mr. Swanson: Yes, that is correct.
Senator Spivak: In these regulations, is there a definition of a deleterious substance which would cover hormone-mimicking chemicals, or are there no problems with hormonal-mimicking chemicals?
Mr. Swanson: The regulations that are in effect are really exceptions to the act. They permit the deposit of things that could be deleterious to fish up to a certain level. If you only put so much in, you are okay.
Senator Spivak: Whose decision is that? Is that a decision of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans?
Mr. Swanson: That decision is made by the regulation itself.
Senator Spivak: Right, and that has been done through the Fisheries Department?
Mr. Swanson: It is done through the normal process for establishing regulations. We work very closely with the Department of the Environment in that we do research. You talked about the mimicking issue. We are doing studies on that particular issue and while you never have all the answers on any scientific question, we know that there are impacts.
The pulp and paper effluent regulations do not cover a full range of substances. They talk about putting limits on BOD, which may be a term that you have come across in your studies. There are only two or three matters that are regulated under those regulations. Anything else that is deleterious to fish is prohibited under the law.
Senator Spivak: That takes me back to my initial question. It seems to be up to the companies. Who will check? Is it the Department of Environment?
Mr. Swanson: There are arrangements that have been made between the federal and provincial environmental departments for inspections of plants that are making these kinds of deposits.
Senator Spivak: Would you be able to tell us by province the number of staff checking this? I would like to know who is involved, how this is done, and what is the process.
Mr. Swanson: I do not think we would be in a position to do that.
Senator Spivak: Do we get that from the Department of Environment?
Mr. Swanson: That would be a logical place to start.
Senator Spivak: Again, what you are saying is that all deleterious substances, which must be defined somewhere in the regulations, are prohibited, but the question of whether this particular regulation is being violated is something we do not know?
Mr. Swanson: The question of whether or not a substance is deleterious would have to be established in court through the tendering of evidence. If a charge were laid against somebody for depositing a deleterious substance, the Crown would bring in experts who would say, "If you put that in the water, here is what it does to fish."
Senator Spivak: It is not defined?
Mr. Swanson: No, that is correct.
Senator Spivak: I understand that, but while these substances are prohibited, we do not know if they are there or not. Who is checking? Who is minding the store here? You are saying people from the Department of the Environment and provincial people are checking that. It is not a responsibility of the forestry companies themselves?
Mr. Swanson: I am sure there are programs in place where forestry companies are required to sample their effluents from time to time and to keep records, under provincial and perhaps federal legislation as well.
Senator Spivak: That information would be within the knowledge of the Department of the Environment as well?
Mr. Swanson: That is correct.
Senator Spivak: You say that the forest harvest plans do not in themselves trigger review under CEAA. Can you lead me through the legislation? I do not know of any projects which have the ability to affect the environment in a deleterious manner more than forestry operations. Roads are being built, streams are being crossed. I cannot remember how that review process works under CEAA. I know what the restrictions are -- it must be on federal lands; it must be supported by federal money -- but I am talking about triggers such as navigable streams and migratory birds and so on. Everyone knows all of these things are going on because it is impossible for them not to go on. There are all kinds of crossings over streams and culverts, and there are places for nesting of birds, and everyone knows they will have an impact. Why does these forestry harvest plans not automatically trigger an environmental review? After all, the most important question is: What are the environmental consequences? It is not only fish habitat that is affect. All kinds of other things are affected as well.
Mr. Swanson: Perhaps we may have caused some confusion here by using the term "forest management plan".
Senator Spivak: You are saying "forest harvest plans".
Mr. Swanson: Forest harvest plans. Often these plans are of a very general level. The company might be merely saying they will be cutting in one particular area this year and another area in another year. However, when they actually start harvesting, the kinds of things that you are talking about often do come into play. For example, their plan might require the construction of a bridge. Indeed, I suppose the harvest plans would indicate that as well. The requirement to cross a stream, however, could trigger the CEAA process. It would not be the harvest plan in itself but the proposal to cross a particular stream which could trigger an environmental assessment under the Fisheries Act or under the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Once the decision has been made that there is a CEAA trigger in a certain situation, then we get into very complex questions about the scope of the project.
Senator Spivak: I know that part of it. I am only talking about how these things begin. I know, for example, that with regard to the oriented strand board plants that were located near the Saskatchewan border, the federal minister said he could not intervene and look at the cumulative impact of the plants, and the provincial ministers would not ask that he intervene, so in effect they were not reviewed.
In my province as well, they did things backwards. They did not look at the forestry plan, they just looked at the plant. Once they had approved the plant and said it was environmentally acceptable, then they went on to look at the forest plan. I think that was done through the Clean Environment Commission.
Anyway, what you are saying is that the law does not permit the minister to intervene.
Mr. Swanson: That is correct.
Senator Spivak: Do you have a legal opinion on that?
Mr. Swanson: Yes. We have looked at this issue from stem to stern.
Senator Spivak: Can we look at those?
Mr. Swanson: Our legal opinions?
Senator Spivak: Your documents regarding CEAA.
Mr. Swanson: Yes, I will send over the documents to which we were referring.
The Chair: In general, do you think that forestry and forest product manufacturing activities pose a threat to fish habitat?
Mr. Swanson: In general yes, I think they do, and our job is to attempt to mitigate the possible impacts.
The Chair: How do you do that?
Mr. Swanson: We have already referred to some of the things we do. We work very closely with provincial governments, as we did with the development of, for example, the Forest Practices Code in British Columbia. That particular code has been hailed as a milestone document. There is still a lot of debate with respect to the code, not so much regarding the document itself but regarding its application. We do research into the impacts these various activities can have on fish, and we are developing our own guidelines in term of how certain activities should be conducted. We have developed various guidelines across the country, for example, on how culverts should be installed. Heavy equipment crossing streams can do tremendous damage to fish habitat, but there are ways that culverts can be installed in these forest harvest operations so that the impacts on fish habitat are eliminated or are negligible. Those are the kinds of things we do.
In certain parts of the country -- I mentioned the coastal areas -- we have personnel who are involved directly on the ground in an enforcement capacity. There is more to protection of fish habitat than enforcement but that is certainly another tool available to us in those areas.
The Chair: In my province in the last two years we had two very tragic episodes of salmon being killed in streams and in small lakes after a farmer apparently was spraying potatoes in a field right next to the stream.
Mr. Swanson: There is another piece of legislation that would apply in that situation, the Pest Control Products Act, which is used not only in agriculture but in forestry as well. There are real problems if pesticides are not applied in a safe manner. The pesticide can enter the water directly through a spraying application or be leached into the water through the ground.
We work very closely with the new agency that has been established federally to manage that particular legislation, to try to ensure that any of the directives that go out explaining how particular products are to be used include the potential impacts on fish and fish habitat.
The Chair: How many cases involving fish habitat destruction have been brought against forestry companies under the Fisheries Act over the past 10 years?
Mr. Swanson: I will have to do some research into that and get back to you with an answer.
The Chair: Would you think it was a large number?
Mr. Swanson: I would have to know what you think is "large".
The Chair: Senator Spivak was talking about the effluents that were coming out of the mills that we visited, especially in northern Alberta. We were told that there are thousands of chemical compounds found in these effluents and that hundreds perhaps remain unknown. How do you regulate for fish habitat preservation under such conditions?
Mr. Swanson: Again, the primary responsibility for that rests with the Department of the Environment. There is no doubt that the effluent that comes out of mill has the potential to contain many chemicals. The pulp and paper effluent regulations, which were amended at the beginning of the 1990s, do require the companies to undertake effluent monitoring programs, and these monitoring programs involve extensive sampling of various kinds of fish populations at various distances from the outfall. On the basis of the results of those monitoring programs, we will get an indication as to how effective the regulations are.
Senator Spivak: The point is you do not know what you are monitoring for. How can you monitor when you do not know what you are monitoring for?
Mr. Swanson: You can look for the impacts on fish. You can also be doing various kinds of sampling of fish tissue to determine whether anything unusual is occurring.
Senator Spivak: How many closed-loop systems are there in Canada?
Mr. Swanson: I do not know.
Senator Spivak: We need to get that information, although perhaps not from you.
Mr. Swanson: Again, you should probably ask the Department of the Environment. That would be their area of expertise.
Senator Spivak: I have a question about the new bill. Could you tell us exactly what the devolution will be insofar as the effect of forestry operations on fish habitat management? Will you no longer need to issue a permit for anything? Will the provinces issue all the permits?
Mr. Swanson: I cannot tell you that exactly, and the reason is that the new bill provides for the delegation of fish habitat. It provides for two things essentially.
Senator Spivak: Fish habitat management, not fish habitat?
Mr. Swanson: It provides for the delegation of regulatory decision making with regard to fish habitat. There are two essential changes in that bill from what we have today. First, it provides for a new compulsory federal permit that does not exist today. In some of the situations that we have discussed where presently they do not need to involve the federal government, there will be a requirement that they get a permit. It is like the situation of a 16 year-old who wants to drive a car. He or she needs a driver's licence.
Senator Spivak: In other words, the forestry companies will have to get a permit?
Mr. Swanson: I have not said that yet. The situations where someone must get a permit will be listed in a regulation. Those regulations have not yet been developed.
Senator Spivak: This is the same old story. That is what happened with CEAA.
Mr. Swanson: That is one major change. The other major change is that for things that do not require that kind of permit, the minister can delegate. It is not automatic. The authority that the minister has under the act can be delegated to a provincial minister.
Senator Spivak: I have trouble with that because everyone is so anxious to devolve themselves of any federal power. That is not very comforting because the provinces have no resources. Who will be doing the monitoring? The forestry companies?
Mr. Swanson: I will be providing you with our level of resources across the country, and you will be able to see what we have.
Senator Spivak: I am sure there is still a critical mass of expertise within the Department of Fisheries that has not been destroyed by the recent cuts, expertise that does not exist in the provinces. Why are we even thinking about delegating? I can understand that the department might want to delegate for tiny projects, to avoid all the red tape, but how can they be thinking of delegating for these huge operations, when the provinces do not have the expertise?
Mr. Swanson: There are two issues here. First of all, the research capacity you speak of does exist within the federal government, particularly within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, although some of that capacity has been affected by the program review. We are not talking about turning that particular portion of our program over to provincial governments. What we are talking about is coming to arrangements with them with respect to our regulatory role, and in the cases that we are talking about, although provincial governments have been subject to the same financial pressures as we have, the required expertise is by and large there.
Senator Spivak: In the provincial governments?
Mr. Swanson: Yes. The provincial governments have people who review these kinds of projects to determine their possible impacts on water and fish and so on. It is only in those areas where the provincial government has already been managing its fishery and has biologists and enforcement that we are considering entering into these arrangements.
Senator Spivak: When will the comprehensive list of activity types and sizes that will form the framework for dividing federal and provincial regulation of fish habitat management be made? Will it be after the bill is passed? This is what happened under CEAA: The bill was passed and then the regulatory decisions were made.
Mr. Swanson: You will certainly not be seeing the actual regulations until after the bill has been passed, but I think it is quite conceivable that the work on developing the list of regulations will begin very shortly after the bill has passed.
Senator Spivak: I must say that I find this process increasingly prevalent, sometimes with good results sometimes not. For example, the regulations under the new tobacco bill are not released to parliamentarians before they are made, and afterwards it is too late to do anything about them. They are entirely within ministerial discretion. We also did not get many of the things we thought we would be getting in the CEAA bill.
Can you at least tell us whether there will be any types of forestry projects that will be included in that list?
Mr. Swanson: I cannot recall any specific forestry activities that will be covered, but the projects we are talking about are generally what one would regard as large projects, such as the development of a mine where the mine uses considerable water. If mines are on the list, I would think the construction of a paper mill, where there might be great impacts on water and fish habitat, would also be on the list.
Senator Spivak: That would be automatic, so in that sense the capacity of the federal government to trigger an environmental review would be strengthened?
Mr. Swanson: Yes, but, again, no final lists have been drawn up yet.
Senator Spivak: Madam Chair, I would suggest that the questions which have been provided to us by the researchers be sent to the witness. Then, if he would be so kind as to answer them for us, there could perhaps be an opportunity for the researcher to request further details if there are things that are not understandable.
I am not at all familiar with the bill, except by rumour, so I just have one more question. Would the federal-provincial agreements be flexible enough to allow the provinces in some cases to say to the federal government, "You have the expertise, you review it," or will it be all one direction, down? Is that in the bill anywhere?
Mr. Swanson: It is certainly not covered in the bill, no. I am not saying it is totally out of the question, but one of the things that we are attempting to accomplish with this is to provide some level of certainty to people.
Senator Spivak: I think that is very important.
Mr. Swanson: If they are proposing a project, they should know which level of government they are dealing with.
Senator Spivak: I understand that concern, but there is a fine line between uncertainty and total laissez-faire, neither of which is acceptable.
Mr. Swanson: When dealing with the kind of framework that we are considering, there is usually some flexibility in the regulatory process so that things can be added or deleted from the list of regulations as you go along. That might provide the kind of flexibility that you are envisaging or thinking about.
The Chair: Thank you for appearing. The clerk will provide the additional questions to you. We would appreciate any answers.
The committee adjourned.