Proceedings of the Subcommittee on the
Boreal Forest
Issue 13 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Monday, November 16, 1998
The Subcommittee on Boreal Forest of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:06 p.m. to continue its study on the present state and future of forestry in Canada as it relates to the boreal forest.
Senator Nicholas W. Taylor (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I wish to welcome Mr. Richard Thomas, who is from Wales. We would be most interested in hearing what you have to say about the Alberta Environmental Protection Program. Please proceed.
Mr. Richard Thomas, Independent Ecological Consultant: I must first say that I do not work for Alberta Environmental Protection Program, but I used to work for them. It might have something to do with my report.
Many Canadians believe that we still have a large amount of wilderness left in this country. Tonight, I will summarize two and a half years of work that shows that, at least in Alberta, we do not.
This myth, if we can call it that, is found everywhere. For example, the American Automobile Association book on Western Canada describes Alberta as a Western province that remains a pristine frontier, and states that the frontier mentality, which remains in much of the country, is most certainly found in Alberta.
My last report for AEPP was done on the boreal forests of Alberta. It is unique in Canada because, for the first time, someone looked at the whole of the boreal forest of a province and looked at all the ecological impacts of human activities there.
This report was featured in the media. You may have seen some coverage. In Alberta, quite a bit of negative publicity was sparked. One comment on the report claimed that it was malicious and an insult to Albertans, who have a worldwide reputation as wise stewards of their natural resources. I will leave the truth of that comment for you to judge.
My brief presentation is about the cumulative impact of our activities, which we do not examine. We compartmentalize our analysis of environmental issues. We must look at the big picture and we must look at it holistically.
This slide shows a map of the natural regions of Alberta. The areas in green are the boreal forest natural region of Alberta. The southern dry mixed wood, northern dry mixed wood, and central mixed wood areas are shown. Most of Alberta's boreal forests are mixed woods.
What you would think of as boreal forest in Alberta consists of three natural regions: The foothills area is shown in grey -- and I will show you some pictures from here -- which is Swan Hills; the boreal forest natural region that I just talked about is shown in green; and the Canadian Shield, which represents just a small portion in the northeast of the province. I studied the foothills and the boreal forest regions, and that comprises two-thirds of the province of Alberta.
The Chairman: I do not understand the term "natural boreal forest." Is that an ancestral forest or an untouched forest? What does that mean?
Mr. Thomas: We are talking here about the natural regions. Other provinces call them eco-regions. This is just a natural history term. It is derived from soils, vegetation, geology, et cetera. Later, I will talk about what a natural forest comprises, so perhaps we can talk about that later. Basically, it is land not influenced by humans, if there is any of that left.
Alberta is divided into two areas: the white area, which is white on the map; and the green area, which is stippled. The green area is predominantly forested land and Crown-owned. The white area is predominantly private land, settled and cultivated. One-quarter of the boreal forest natural region is now white area. It is basically settled land.
The junction between the white area and the green area is where we have most deforestation in Alberta. It is where the fragmentation frontier exists. Farmers are still clearing land here. Many times, spring in northern Alberta looks like Central America. Big piles of aspen forest are mashed down by bulldozers and then set on fire to produce marginal farmlands or pasture. Much of this, in the past, has been funded by the taxpayer.
From space, this is what it looks like. This is the Peace River area in northern Alberta, the northern dry mixed wood I mentioned. There is cultivated land here with the field patterns, and mostly forested land in brown. This is 250 by 225 kilometres in size.
Two studies were done to see how fast these areas are being deforested. Environment Canada did one in the Peace River region in 1991. The orange area is new farmland created between 1961 and 1986.
This slide represents a study that we did. This shows the southern dry mixed wood, the southern part of the boreal forest in 1949-50. The change in forested land is shown in black in 1994-95.
Many people were concerned and the government was rather angry about those results. Environment Canada found a rate of deforestation -- these figures will not mean anything, but I will explain them in a minute -- of 0.81 per cent in the northern dry mixed wood. I found a rate of 0.91 per cent in the southern dry mixed wood. That means that 192 square kilometres of forest are being cleared every year in this area, which compares with a rate in Amazonia from 1975 to 1988 of .87 per cent. Relative deforestation in the southern portion of Alberta's boreal forest is higher than it has been in Amazonia.
How are we using the boreal forest in Alberta? We are using it for timber and pulp. This is a map of forest management agreement areas, as they are called in Alberta. The yellow represents the white area: settled, private, cultivated land. The pink area is the Alberta Pacific forest management agreement area, which is 9.3 per cent of the province of Alberta. Together with the Daishowa area in blue, those two combined equal an area the size of Great Britain.
Only 23 per cent of the land in the green area of Alberta is now not allocated to major forest companies. Much of that land is not commercial timberland. Alberta's forests are very seriously over-allocated to industry.
What do the forest companies do? They cut down old forest first, as per the Alberta government operating ground rules. Timber that is oldest should be given priority for harvest logging. In Alberta, as elsewhere in Canada, we are in serious danger of losing our old growth forests.
This slide shows an old growth aspen forest in northern Alberta. It is a wonderful forest. It has many aesthetic and spiritual values, and so on, but more important, perhaps, it has been shown quite unequivocally, in a five-year study by Dr. Brad Stelfox, that these old aspen-dominated forests are by far the most important for biodiversity. They support any group you care to name, including mosses, bats, and birds. The old forests support the most species, and they support many of the rarest species also.
This slogan may seem trite, but it is important and profound. By cutting down a forest, practising silviculture, and replacing it with a human-planted forest, we cannot recreate old growth forests. Unfortunately, this simple thing seems to be beyond the comprehension of the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Forest Service.
What else are we doing in Alberta? Alberta is a pincushion. The slide I am showing you now is a 1994 map of natural gas fields depicted in yellow and oil fields depicted in green. The boreal forest natural region of Alberta overlies 306 natural gas fields and 80 oil fields. It is a pincushion.
This slide depicts what it looks like in the foothills natural region. Each little red dot on the map is an oil or gas well site. It may not be a producing well site, but it has been drilled. They had to use seismic work to decide where to drill, and they had to punch a road in there to get to that point. In the foothills, there are over 27,000 oil and gas well sites; in the boreal forest natural region, over 88,500 sites.
If you plot things like pipelines, cut-lines, and well-site access roads, you come up with a plan like the one you are looking at. These are called linear features. You can plot their density in terms of how many kilometres of them there are per square kilometre. In the boreal forest natural region, pink and red are the highest densities. You can clearly see that it is up in the north and northeast of the province, where the forest is relatively not cut up by these features.
The white area you are looking at is Wood Buffalo National Park. That is very important.
You can do another analysis and plot the core habitat for wildlife, the secure habitat for large animals, that is left in Alberta, places where there are not cut-lines where people on ATVs can drive through to hunt animals and so on. The red shows you the remaining core habitat in the boreal forest in Alberta. Remember that I did not study the shield. The area you are looking at is the oil sands or tar sands area around Fort McMurray. Much of this core habitat will be destroyed as the oil sands are expanded.
I eliminated each township in Alberta. A township is 6 miles by 6 miles. That is 93 square kilometres. There are over 4,000 of them in the boreal forest natural region. I eliminated all those that contained oil or gas wells, logging on Crown land, and these linear features, for example, pipelines, roads, et cetera. What you are left with are the green squares. You can see that most of them occur in Wood Buffalo National Park, but even in Wood Buffalo National Park there is plenty of human disturbance.There are very few outside the park, all up in northeast Alberta, and I found that less than 9 per cent of the boreal forest, if you define "wilderness" as areas without these human intrusions, is now describable as wilderness.
How fast have we been losing this wilderness? I will show you four slides that are aerial photographs from the Swan Hills. First, this one is 9 kilometres by 9 kilometres. It was taken in 1949. I will not interpret everything on here but, take my word for it, this is wilderness with no roads. In 1949, it was prime grisly bear habitat with very high densities of grisly bears.
By 1964, on a different scale -- you can follow along with the white star, which will appear in each photograph -- the Judy Creek oil field had been found. Each of these squares is a well site. The thick white lines are roads. The thin lines are cut-lines. This view is 13.6 kilometres by 13.6 kilometres. By 1982, we have these areas. These are clear-cuts. You have oil and gas activity followed by forestry activity.
The Chairman: Is there some farming in there? What are the strips of land on the right? It looks like farms.
Mr. Thomas: No, these are all clear-cuts.
By 1991, you can see how the clear-cuts have expanded and the whole landscape has been fragmented -- that is, broken up. It is no longer a natural system but a human-dominated system. As far as grisly bears go, it is pretty much useless. In 42 years, we have gone from absolute wilderness to what we can call an ecologically dysfunctional landscape.
That example from the Swan Hills is by no means unique. Grisly bears are very area-demanding animals. The Government of Alberta has a program called Special Places 2000, which intends to set aside representative areas of the province as protected areas. I calculated that if you wish to preserve a population of 1,000 grisly bears in the foothills, which is what the government has said it wants to do, you must set aside 22.78 per cent of the foothills natural region. That is a large amount, by our standards. The Government of Alberta's target for the foothills is 1.94 per cent. It does not take much to realize that grisly bears do not have a good future in the foothills of Alberta, which is their most important refuge now.
This slide is a map that shows existing so-called protected areas in the boreal forest natural region of Alberta. The whole story here is Wood Buffalo National Park. The circles you see are to the correct relative scale. The green areas indicate federal protected areas; and the grey or purple indicate provincial protected areas that are greater than 10 squares kilometres in size, the minimum size that international agencies accept. Provincial protected areas in the boreal forest occupy .35 per cent of the boreal forest. It is a tiny area. Without Wood Buffalo National Park we would be in even more trouble than we are in the boreal forest.
The Chairman: That is not under provincial jurisdiction though, it is federal, is it not?
Mr. Thomas: No. That is the point of this slide. The green shows areas under federal jurisdiction and then the purple is the provincial park system in the boreal forest. Wood Buffalo and Elk Island equal 95 per cent of all the protected areas in Alberta's boreal forest.
The real story, then, bringing this to a close, is the fact that land in Alberta has been allocated to a whole suite of industries rather than for protection. The black areas show lands that are allocated to forest companies, to the tar sands industry, to private land, even to protected areas. It shows that the bulk -- over three-quarters of Alberta's boreal forests -- are allocated to one industry or another, or are in private hands. This is just the land surface.
This is a map showing oil and gas subsurface leases in Alberta. There are many of them in the boreal forest. My map does not show commercial timber leases up here, or metallic mineral exploration leases. There are many things left off. The picture is worse than this.
What is the real problem in Alberta and elsewhere in Canada? This quote, by Adam Zimmerman, former chairman of Noranda Forest Inc., sums it up.
Anybody can say what they want about the value of the forest, but it's worthless unless you can convert it into profits.
The problem here, particularly in Alberta, is that the value of standing forests, other than their value for timber and pulp, is simply not recognized. Neither their ecological services nor their aesthetic and spiritual values are recognized. In Alberta, forests must produce a profit in order to be worth anything.
There are many solutions here -- and you have this in written form so I will not go through them -- but they are immediate solutions. The long-term solution is that we must realign our value system when we look at forests, how we deal with forests and the way we treat forests. We must do this to reflect ecological realities. We cannot survive without these forests and the things they do for us, like producing oxygen, clean water, soils, and storing carbon. It is a battle between value systems. Will it be the very last tree or the very last chair? This is the conflict that is being played out all across Canada now.
I have approximately four or five requests from the federal government. First, I should like to see strong federal involvement in the management of our boreal forests. At this time we need leadership and we need vision. We need tough laws that are enforced with regard to the boreal forest. We need real endangered species legislation for the grisly, the caribou, and all kinds of other creatures. We also need an endangered habitat legislation, something that will take care of old growth forests. We need to ensure that there is no net loss of these old growth forests.
If we are to play the game of saying, "We will have sustainable forestry; we will look after biodiversity," there is no way around it. We must protect old growth forests. We need wilderness legislation similar to what they have in the United States. Theirs came into force in 1964.
We must convince the provinces that we need maximum allowable road density standards. The major problem is these industries are opening up pristine boreal forest. Many other activities follow the industries into that forest, and that is the end of the natural forest as we know it.
Finally, we need a significant amount of education and research on the non-timber values of these boreal forests. We need a campaign to educate the public that there are more values with regard to the forests than just their timber and value for pulp.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening.
Mr. Don Sullivan, North America Coordinator, Taiga Rescue Network: I am with the Taiga Rescue Network. I should like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak. I had an opportunity to meet with you on a previous occasion when you came out to Winnipeg.
The Taiga Rescue Network is an organization comprised of approximately 150 organizations from the scientific and academic communities. These organizations focus their attention on the boreal forests in northern Europe, Russia, Canada and, to a large extent, Alaska. These areas make up most of the world's boreal forest ecosystem.
The Taiga Rescue Network has three separate nodes: Russia, Europe, and North America. The North American location is in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I am its North American coordinator. We do have a steering committee made up of people from across Canada and the United States. We also strive for a balance of aboriginal and non-aboriginal interests.
On a macro overview, we have been involved in looking at boreal forest issues for some time. Generally, from a world perspective, Canada is very much a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.
When you look at the contribution of forestry to Canada's economy, it is the single largest net contributor to Canada's economy. Forestry, hydro electricity, oil, gas, mining, agriculture, and fisheries make up the vast majority of Canada's economic activity. Our economy is still very much based on natural resources.
That is a large motivator as to why many of us in the environmental community are here today and are frustrated at the slow process in protecting our environment.
I have provided to the committee several documents, which will serve as a good overview of what is occurring in Canada's forests. I would highly recommend it as good reading material. I also would include the most recent report of the World Resource Institute, out of Washington, D.C.; and a compendium of writers from across the provinces.
I will be speaking on an issue more relevant to the province of Manitoba. I was asked by a group of elders to make this presentation. Given that our organization works fairly closely with indigenous peoples, I said that I would do that on their behalf.
I should like you to open up to the page that contains two coloured maps. The first one is a map of Manitoba. In it are a series of boxed areas highlighted in red. Those are boundaries delineating forest management units within Manitoba, which are units that are harvestable and marketable timber. The green area represents the forest management licence area that was held until recently by Pine Falls Paper Company and has since been acquired by Tembec of Montreal.
The preceding map of Manitoba has various roads indicated. You will note that on the east side of Lake Winnipeg there is a little black dotted line. North of it, you will see a red dotted line. Previously there were no roads in that area of Manitoba. This was one of the last remaining roadless wilderness areas in Manitoba. I will take a leap of faith and say that it was the last roadless wilderness area in Canada that far south.
This area is made up of boreal forest. It is part of the Canadian Shield. It has some of the most magnificent canoeing rivers in Canada, including the Bloodvein River system, which has been designated a Canadian heritage river. There are also the Pigeon and Poplar Rivers, which are visited by many tourists from Europe who canoe them every spring and summer.
The company has expressed an interest to expand and construct an all-weather road some 337 kilometres to Island Lake. At the heart of most environmental problems is the increased access that is occurring in wilderness areas defined as frontier forests, those large intact areas of forest that have ecosystems that are relatively undisturbed -- that is, there is not all-weather access to them. Forestry companies in Canada tend to use a cut-and-run method. They do not allow the sufficient rotation period of 80 to 100 years. They generally operate on a 40-year rotation. We are running out of woods in southern Manitoba, and the forestry companies simply continue to migrate further north.
Of particular importance is the east side of Lake Winnipeg, where there are 14 First Nations communities that would be directly impacted. They still practice their traditional ways. They still hunt and fish for their livelihood, and they still gather home food and pick traditional medicines.
The company wants to increase its cutting of softwood from 360,000 cubic meters annually to 750,000 cubic meters. In order to do that, they must build 337 kilometers of all-weather roadways. Tembec has not once consulted with any of the First Nations communities about its plan to expand in the northern regions of Manitoba on the east side of Lake Winnipeg.
The map I am now showing to you was produced by Pine Falls Paper Company. We saw it for the first time about three months ago. You can probably imagine the uproar this has created within First Nations community, given the recent Delgamuukw decision, which affirmed the right to title to resources of First Nations, despite having signed secession treaties.
The application by the federal government of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act is one of the underlying causes of deforestation. To proceed, the company would have required a permit under the Navigable Waters Protection Act because the plan called for at least three major bridges crossing navigable waters; "navigable waters" being defined as anything that you can navigate in a canoe. Enforcement of the Navigable Waters Protection Act is the responsibility of the Coast Guard, but it is now being subsumed under the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
I need not explain some of the problems DFO has been experiencing in other areas. Suffice it to say that they have manifest themselves in the freshwater area as well. DFO has decided that, for the purposes of applying the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the principal project in this case is the bridge. The trigger is the federal permit, and DFO has defined the principal project as the construction and decommissioning of the bridge.
I have yet to see a bridge that exists unto itself. Bridges do not exist in a vacuum. There are always roads on either end of a bridge. A bridge is actually an extension of a road, which is the principal project. However, that is not the view of either the Coast Guard or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In a recent court case in Alberta, Justice Gibson of the Federal Court decided that if there is a bridge you must assess the road, and if you assess the road, you must assess the harvesting activities. I can imagine the alarm bells that rang in each province when this ruling was made. I am sure that pressure was exerted upon the federal government to do something about it. They have chosen to appeal this ruling.
The federal government basically ignored its responsibilities under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. We managed, however, to slow the project down, and we have been able to extract a commitment from the company to undertake a 10-year plan rather than a series of two-year plans. The problem that will arise will be how the federal government will properly apply and enforce the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act with regard to this project.
The crux of the problem is access to areas that are, for all intents and purposes, wilderness areas, and that opens the door to all sorts of other problems. The problems for First Nations communities are social as well as environment.
You have the documentation on that issue before you.
On the second page of our written presentation you will see a small insert map of the other two forest management licensed areas in Manitoba. These three forest management licensed areas in total cover approximately 14 million hectares, in which three companies have the right to all trees. That is a very large portion of Manitoba.
There is another concern that arises and seems to fall through the crack, that being the transboundary impacts, which have never been assessed and for which no baseline data has been collected. That is also a problem on the east side of Manitoba, with the encroachment of forest management activities from Ontario, as Manitoba and northwestern Ontario share a watershed system. Both provincial governments refuse to take the responsibility to do cumulative transboundary impact assessments, or even to do research on the topic. As the federal minister has the discretionary power under the Environmental Assessment Act to hold panel reviews on this matter, one would have thought that something might have been done about this.
We are currently in court on this issue. We are also taking the federal government to court on the issue of the bridge crossings. Our concern is that in the three forest management licence areas -- one in Saskatchewan and two in Manitoba -- there will be enormous impacts along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border in the last remaining north-south wildlife corridor in the provinces. It is a very important and unique escarpment area in Manitoba. It is home to many large mammals and is the only migratory path in and out of Riding Mountain National Park. It is home to the largest black bears in North America, as well as to the eastern cougar, which is an endangered species, although the Province of Manitoba has refused to recognize its existence in Manitoba.
Some of the underlying causes include the lack of proper enforcement and application at the federal level of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act; as well as the lack of baseline data. All of these causes can be attributed to severe cuts to these type of programs in the last three budgets. These programs might have afforded us some baseline research in these areas. They might have afforded various departments in the federal government to have the personnel and the kind of policies and research documents available or even undertaken.
While we are concerned with the debt and deficit phobia, we have an increasing gap of data being provided, not only to yourselves but to the rest of Canada, as to the impacts of large-scale resource extraction activities in Canada.
Another underlying cause is the subsidization to the forest industry. There is no such thing as a level playing field in forestry. The provinces determine the stumpage rates, which is not based on any remote concept of a market system at all. In fact, in Manitoba, stumpage rates are probably one of the lowest in Canada. For example, it costs anywhere from $2.60 per cubic metre to $3.60 per cubic metre to cut softwoods. In Ontario, it could cost anywhere from $15 to $16 per cubic metre to cut the same products. For hardwoods, in Manitoba, the stumpage rate is 50 cents per cubic metre for oriented strand board. In Ontario, the last time I looked it was $6 per cubic metre.
Provincially, we do not have a standard stumpage rate system. Companies tend to migrate to areas where stumpage fees, or their input costs, are substantially lower than in other jurisdictions. That is something that could have been fostered, because Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and some of the Eastern provinces were left out of the softwood lumber dispute. I would argue that the Americans do have a point when they say we do subsidize our forest industry.
Those are some of the overlying and broader underlying causes. I am willing to answer your questions, Mr. Chairman. I have left you with a lot of paperwork. I will leave it at that.
The Chairman: We will now hear from our last presenter, Mr. Gray, after which we will ask questions.
Mr. Tim Gray, Executive Director, Wildlands League: Mr. Chairman, thank you for the invitation to appear before you this evening. You may have been a bit ahead of your time, in holding hearings and discussions on the fate of boreal forest in Canada. The fate of boreal forest globally is rising in importance and awareness among governments around the world.
As the fate of global forests is discussed more among governments, the special importance of the boreal forest has long been neglected. It is time for someone to pay attention to it.
The Wildlands League is a chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. We are a charitable organization with chapters across the country. I also work in Ontario as the representative of the World Wildlife Fund for their endangered spaces campaign.
Today, I should like to introduce three sets of issues as they pertain to the boreal forest. They include ecological, economic, and social issues. By no means is this an exhaustive list; however, it will give you a flavour of some of the issues that need to be addressed. We can then spend a bit of time discussing the nature of solutions to some of the challenges that Canada faces in managing its boreal forest as we move into the 21st century.
I will begin with ecological issues. In Canada, the forest industry as well as the provincial, federal, and territorial governments have formally committed to produce a network of protected forested areas by the year 2000. Many of the issues you have heard described today are related to the fact that we have done little to ensure that we have a representative network of wild forest areas for the future. Fortunately, at a governmental level, we have a strong commitment to have that done. The devil has been in the details.
In Ontario, only 3 of our 26 boreal ecological regions are currently adequately represented by a network of protected areas. Clearly, we will have to do a lot between now and December 31, 1999.
Generally, across the boreal forest, the rates of industrial harvest have increased as our demand for consumer goods, such as paper and wood products, has increased with it. In Ontario, cutting rates have increased fourfold since the 1940s, from 2,000 square kilometres per decade to 8,000 square kilometres. At the same time, the mechanization of the harvest has proceeded apace. Currently, in Ontario, 95 per cent of the industrial harvesting in the boreal forest is by large area clear-cutting.
What is happening on the ground is that we see, through independent audits by the provincial government in Ontario and through peer reviewed scientific research, that what comes back after forests have been logged is not the forest that was there originally. It is dissimilar, in terms of its ability to provide habitat and its structural and species composition, to the forest that was there naturally or would be expected to regenerate under natural conditions.
What that means is that boreal forest flagship species, such as wolverine or woodland caribou, are increasingly threatened. In Ontario, the woodland caribou are retreating northward to the northern limit of the logging areas. This species was much more common as far south as Algonquin Park and North Bay.
Road networks are fragmenting habitats and providing human access to formerly remote areas. This access, as was discussed earlier, leads to negative impact on fish and wildlife populations. In Ontario, only 40 areas larger than 20,000 hectares that are without roads remain. In terms of the overall size of that boreal forest, that is about .2 per cent of the entire public land forest area in the boreal forest in Ontario. That statistic is very surprising to many Canadians. We have a sense, especially people in Toronto, that once you are north of Steeles Avenue the trees go on forever. The level of industrial pressure that we have placed on our forests for our economic needs is quite surprising to most.
On the economic front, in Ontario, all the boreal forest areas outside our parks system, which comprises about 6 per cent of the area, are currently licensed and allocated to one or more timber companies. Currently, discussions are ongoing between the provincial government and the forest industry to extend harvest licences into those areas north of 51 degrees north.
The rate of harvest in the past has meant that the supply of high-quality timber in Ontario is declining rapidly.
The average diameter of sawed timber entering Ontario sawmills -- the stuff we make our two-by-fours and dimensional lumber out of -- has declined from 20 to 15 centimetres in just the last five years. The Ministry of Natural Resources concludes that overall fibre supplies in Ontario -- that is, not just soft timber but pulp and paper, material for oriented strand board mills, and other types of fibre to be used in engineered wood products -- will decline over the next 60 years.
At the same time that we must face the realities of finite resource, we also know that technological change and corporate consolidation have resulted in large reductions in employment and community benefit within the forest industry, both field and mill operations. This trend is expected to continue.
Recently, in Ontario, there has been a huge spate of mergers and acquisitions. Bowater of South Carolina bought up Avenor from Montreal, Abitibi-Price and Stone-Consolidated from Chicago merged. Tembec bought out Spruce Falls. These mergers are expected to continue. Forest industry analysts from Bay Street point out that, within other fields of endeavour on the planet, globalization is proceeding even much more rapidly than it has in the forestry sector and that we can expect that, in places such as Ontario, we may have two companies controlling all of the forest licence and harvesting over the next five years.
At the same time that we face these challenges in wood supply and in community and governmental benefit from forest operations, the companies themselves face new global competition and new technology, which has created a strongly competitive environment for a lot of the forest products we produce.
In the past, Ontario paper mills, for example, could count on the fact that we were harvesting old growth black spruce fibre, which made great newspaper. We could sell it to the New York Times because they could not get better paper cheaper anywhere else. That has changed. Technology has made it so that we can produce high-quality papers out of just about any fibre. I am sure you have heard people talk about the growth of pine plantations in New Zealand or the southern United States, or the use of trees that formerly were considered weeds, like poplar and birch, to produce high-quality papers as well.
On the social side, we know that, globally and domestically, there is growing consumer and citizen concern about how forests are being managed, not just in Canada but around the world. This growing concern is being manifested in market pressure for products that can be demonstrated as being produced in a fashion that is ecologically and socially sound, that people and the forests themselves are not being damaged by the level and the methods of extraction.
The shrinking wild forestland in Ontario and across Canada has the potential to create competition for resources among communities and among different business interests that operate within the forests. For example, in Ontario we have an escalating conflict between the needs of the tourism industry, especially the remote tourism industry, and the forest industry, in that the land uses that are required to carry out industrial forestry are incompatible with many forms of tourism.
Canada's environmental image in the international arena will be at least partially determined by the manner in which we conserve and manage a globally important asset. Canada spends a lot of effort on the international stage telling other people what a good job we do at home on a variety of issues. Environmental issues are ones on which we like to show leadership. In Rio and in other forums, we have been among the first to make commitments. We also need to be among the first to take action.
Moving on to solutions, I will mention some that I think are general and then try to make some specific recommendations about the role of the federal government.
First and foremost, we should live up to the existing commitments and then figure out how to solve some of our other problems. First, we should complete an ecologically representative protected area system. This will have social, ecological, economic and market benefits -- markets being the economic portion.
The commitment is there -- from the industrial sector, from the public and from the government. Some of the mechanisms to make it possible are there as well.
We should legally require long-term sustained yield of all forest values, including timber and ecological benefits. We have seen the results of poor management of resources in other sectors -- fisheries being probably the most frightening example. We have also seen some of the social and ecological costs of mismanagement. We need to ensure that we avoid that in our forests.
We should institute investment incentives to encourage business to undertake value-added wood manufacturing, to produce more jobs from harvesting less wood, and to carry out enhanced silviculture. That will help us to return cut-over sites to their original composition and to increase the volume and quality of wood in the future.
We need to return a sense of control of communities -- both First Nation and non-First Nation communities -- over lands and wood in their surrounding communities. We need to develop mechanisms to provide the technical and planning expertise to local community forest boards to allow them to make decisions about some of the wood being harvested just outside their back door.
As to the federal government's role, many of the areas that we speak about in terms of the future of the boreal forest lie within provincial jurisdiction. Short of dramatic constitutional change to address what is happening in the boreal forest, I do not think we are likely to change that. However, there are things within the purview of the federal government that could be done.
On the economic side, certification will be an important mechanism for interaction of the public and business in the area of managed forests. Trade, especially international trade, is the responsibility of the federal government. The federal government could play a key role in ensuring that the certification systems that are developed are sound and defensible on the world stage to enable the forest companies in Canada that can meet their standards to be able to stand up proudly in international markets and say they are doing a good job.
Long-term ecological research in the public and business interests has been a role in the past that the federal government played. We must make no mistake in thinking that long-term ecological research will be paid for out of the profits from forest companies. If we want to know what is happening with our publicly owned forests, if we want to know what the long-term implications of our current management regime will be, we will have to pay for that. We have made huge mistakes in Canada, both at the provincial and federal levels, over the last five to ten years, in thinking that we do not need this information. We do, and we must pay for it.
The federal government's role in resolving First Nation issues, specifically land claims and treaty entitlements, must be linked to issues around boreal forest management.
Lastly, the federal government needs to revisit its current move towards devolution of environmental, regulatory and legislative responsibilities to the provinces. We have seen, as both presenters before me have discussed, the important role that the federal government can play in the Canadian environmental assessment process, or in other legislation such as the federal Fisheries Act, to set a level playing field for the public and for business across Canada.
In summary, I should like to point out that what I see happening across the boreal forest is competition between two realities. One is the ecological reality so aptly described by both previous presenters, and the other is the economic reality of increasing demand.
As a country, we need to find some way of not having those two freight trains collide -- some way of planning to be in a spot in 50 or 100 years from now whereby we still have healthy forests that produce economic and ecological returns and deliver on the promises we made to the rest of the world that we will manage a resource, of which we have a huge proportion.
Senator Cohen: I wish to thank all the presenters. I am not on this committee regularly; I am sitting in for someone else. The boreal forest and the whole ecosystem is not my area, but I wish to thank you because you have whetted my appetite and you have helped me to realize that the boreal forest is vitally important.
Is Canada the only country left that now has a boreal forest?
Mr. Sullivan: I might be able to answer this in terms of the organization that I represent, which represents all those countries that have boreal forests in them.
In terms of intact frontier forests, outside of Russia, Canada is the second-largest country that has remaining intact frontier forests. Most of Northern Europe, where the rest of the boreal forest is located, has been cut over and there is not what we define as frontier forests left there. They do have boreal forests there, but it has already been exploited. It is already second, third and, to a large extent, fourth growth.
Senator Cohen: Does Russia respect its boreal forest?
Mr. Sullivan: I would assume that it is having similar problems to us, based on the financial pressures brought to bear on similar situations, probably enhanced to some degree because of a lack of leadership. Actually, who knows who is running Russia these days and what is happening with their legislation. I would assume that there is little enforcement and monitoring of whatever laws they may have that govern forestry.
Senator Cohen: In Canada, we have an international responsibility.
I wish to ask Mr. Thomas a question about raising awareness and education. Have you been effective in any provinces? Has there been a silver lining anywhere that gives you hope that there will be changes and that people are taking this seriously?
Mr. Thomas: I always say that a pessimist is an optimist in possession of the facts. There is increased awareness but it is not translating into change. It is not at the level holding the levers of power.
In Alberta, which I know best, I am afraid I do not see any cause for optimism whatsoever right now. We need a major restructuring of the way we deal with forests, the way we appreciate them and the way we value them.
I must say though that there is increased awareness about these issues in Alberta and where I have travelled elsewhere in Canada, but I do not see it at the moment translating into positive action.
Senator Cohen: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, I remember going to meetings, both public and private, and there would be an environmentalist outside the entrance to the door handing out sheets of paper. We would all look and say, "Oh, there they go again," and we would throw the literature away. Today, however, people are listening to environmentalists in many areas. We must talk, push, and concentrate on smaller areas to raise the awareness about the boreal forest.
This information that I have before me is revealing. I will now be far more interested than I was before I walked into this room.
Mr. Thomas: If I could address your earlier question, the figures I have show that Canada contains roughly 25 to 30 per cent of the world's total Taiga and 22 per cent of boreal closed Crown forests. Canada contains a significant portion of the world's boreal forest.
The Chairman: One of the areas that has not been paid enough attention is the aboriginal aspect of Canada's forests, relating to the fact that the treaties and the courts seem to be showing that the treaty rights given to our aboriginal people were much more than just a reserve in some corner. The hunting and fishing rights encompass large areas. Unlike oil and gas resources, for example, when the lands were handed over, there was a provincial caveat stating that if they ever needed the lands for aboriginal use, they would take them back, but they did not do that in the forestry. When we talk to the government foresters, most of them have a blank look on their face and claim that the natives are not a provincial responsibility but the responsibility of the federal government. This completely ignores the fact that the right to hunt, fish, trap, and make a living in the forest is worthless if someone can come in from The Hague or Montreal or Toronto or Calgary or New Orleans and cut it all down. There is not much room left for animal life then.
You made recommendations on certification and other things, but have you thought about what can be done on the native question, bearing in mind the conflict between federal responsibility and provincial rights?
Mr. Gray: There was a fairly extensive discussion of access to resources in Ontario around First Nation communities. We had a public hearing, which resulted in approximately 109 terms and conditions of approval for allowing timber management to go ahead on provincially controlled Crown lands.
One of those terms and conditions of approval was with reference to First Nations communities and the requirement of the Ministry of Natural Resources to negotiate community benefit, including access to resources for First Nations. My understanding is that to date the First Nations community does not feel that that has occurred. We have had a precedent in Ontario just recently where the divisional court and the court of appeal found that other terms and conditions of that decision had been violated by the provincial government.
I cannot say whether the concern of the First Nations community that those terms and conditions have not been met is true, but on other aspects of the same decision the provincial government has been found in violation of the legislation.
Clearly, in First Nations' issues, such as land claim settlements, there is a huge role for the federal government to play. However, resource control is largely a provincial responsibility. Increasingly, the provinces will be required by the courts to recognize aboriginal treaty rights and entitlement to access resources. A role for the federal government could be to help facilitate negotiated settlements to some of those claims; otherwise, they will end up being resolved in the courts, probably not to everyone's benefit.
The Chairman: One of the presenters mentioned buying back rights. Have any of you read anything in that regard? If the provinces share control of the forestry with aboriginals, the provinces will lose some of the financial benefit they get from having control of all of the forestry. However, I understand that it has been proposed that the federal government, through tax points or some other method, could replace that financial benefit for the provinces.
Mr. Gray: I am not familiar with that concept.
The Chairman: Have you not seen anything like that?
Mr. Gray: No.
Mr. Sullivan: Having worked on the west side of Lake Winnipeg over the past few years, I should like to comment on some of those issues pertaining to First Nations. Also, I have a legal document that is quite readable regarding what the implications will be for the First Nations' partnership with the federal government as a result of the Delgamuukw decision.
Constitutional rights to hunt, fish and track are impeded once forest companies have ownership of vast tracks of land. The only recompense for the rights of First Nations seems to be in the form of monetary compensation. Most of the trappers with whom I have spoken who still exercise their trap lines and are still active are not interested in compensation. They are interested in exercising the right to trap and they are unable to do that.
There is a role for the federal government beyond what they would see as their traditional role when dealing with federal lands, because trap lines are within traditional land use areas. Traditional land use areas are often outside of reserves that the federal government thinks are strictly their area of concern when it comes to environmental issues relating to First Nations.
Certainly, forestry has an impact on the ability to commercial fish and to harvest other crops such as wild rice and berries. Home food gathering and production of traditional medicines are also directly affected. First Nations utilize many values within the forest rather than just forest extraction of trees, but those other activities are not recognized in the equation when we do management planning at the provincial level. That is often where problems lie.
First Nations are not involved up front in land use management planning. They have no say in land use management planning even though they should have the largest say in how land will be used within the territories in which they still exercise their rights. There is a lack of commitment both by the provincial governments, who have equal fiduciary responsibilities to First Nations, and the federal government, which has been determined to play a role through various court cases. However, there are still some vestiges of colonialism being exercised all over the place.
At one level, First Nations communities must be given the right to exercise self-determination and self-government. Any concept of self-government must have a land base and must have access to the resources within that land base. That is the essence of a nation-state. They must be given the right to manage those areas. That brings us to community control access. That is an important value overlooked by many.
The Chairman: The management system that seems to be devolving does not seem to be that bad, bearing in mind the slavish way we follow the market economy. The management system seems to let the so-called market entrepreneurs manage the forests. Ontario is moving in that direction by setting up five-year audits that are independent of both forests and the government.
An independent auditor is put in place to determine whether the water filtration and the aboriginal and environmental aspects are satisfied before a tree can be cut down. New Brunswick took some lead in that respect by ordering their people in forestry areas to give 5 per cent of their allowable annual cut to aboriginal organizations.
In Ontario, around Timmins, tourism plays a role. Areas of forest were set aside for tourism, snow-mobiling, hiking, et cetera.
What do you think of that method of management? I will ask Mr. Thomas first. How do you envisage managing the boreal forest in order that competing realities are honoured?
Mr. Thomas: Everyone wants a piece of the boreal forest. Very few people speak for the forest and for biodiversity and address the question of leaving sizeable chunks of the boreal forest alone.
The major problem, in terms of the timber industry, is one of scale. Pulp mills such as Alberta Pacific have been built and require a huge volume of timber per month, per day. Their goals are, by and large, incompatible with other goals, such as protecting biodiversity and setting aside areas of old growth, because the government virtually compels them to cut down the old growth first. I have major concerns about leaving the fox in charge of the hen house.
Some very interesting research has been done in Alberta lately, an example being the Daishowa Forest Management Agreement. They studied whether they could sustainably manage the forests there. Their conclusion was that they could, providing they were the sole users of the forests. They were losing considerable amounts of forested area to oil and gas and to agriculture, as I have explained. That does not factor in recreation, First Nations rights, et cetera. Of course, the list is a long one.
I am sort of weaselling away from your question. However, as I said before, we must rethink our approach to forest management. It is total conceit to think that we know how to manage forest ecosystems. As many First Nations people have said, we need to learn to manage ourselves.
That does not solve the problem in the short term because those major forest management agreements in Alberta are up for renewal in 10 years. I hope that many groups in Alberta will get together to make sure that those agreements are restructured in order to ensure that the forests are managed in a much more sustainable manner.
The Chairman: That is a key point. I believe it was Harry Truman who said that war is too important to be left to generals. I am not certain that forests are not too important to be left to departments of forestry. The department responsible for forestry considers itself an exploitative branch with a mandate to make money for the government. As an ex-elected politician, and now an appointed one, I know the pressure that is exerted by people trying to make money in forestry.
What system would you recommend to manage the forests and protect them for generations to come?
Mr. Gray: In Ontario, we are currently facing some of those challenges. The provincial government has reduced the staffing of the Ministry of Natural Resources by 45 per cent since 1995. The Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Natural Resources have taken the largest percentage cuts of the entire bureaucracy. Clearly, the current direction is to remove that public management ability.
The challenge is to ensure protection of the public interest and long-term sustainability of the forest with devolution of management responsibility to the private sector. I think it is possible. I agree with your comment that provincial resource agencies were set up with a mandate to deliver wood to the mills, rock to the mines, or whatever; not to be concerned about long-term sustainability but, rather, about short-term delivery of royalties.
There is an opportunity in Ontario to turn whatever remains of those provincial bureaucracies into watchdog agencies that oversee audit systems that are truly comprehensive. As this privatization of management occurs across the country, the challenge is to move away from a regulatory and legislative structure that is very enabling and was designed by bureaucrats to give themselves maximum flexibility.
The Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario, for example, wanted to provide the wood to the mill as well as to regulate the wood flow and to maintain other values in the forest. They wrote legislation with huge loopholes because they wanted that flexibility. That same legislative framework is being transferred to the private sector. It is very much open to abuse because it has no bottom lines, no clear objectives, and no audit or inspection procedures.
I do not think many people are averse to having the five-year management plan for timber harvest written and paid for by the people who want to harvest the trees, but it is very much in the public interest to know whether the rules are being complied with and we need systems in place to ensure that they are. I have not seen that done in any jurisdiction. In fact, in Ontario, the opposite is true. The challenge for all jurisdictions across the country is to create a system wherein that will in fact occur.
There is an argument that the forest industry would do a better job of looking after forests if they owned them. The argument is that if Crown land were privatized, there would be an incentive for investment in silviculture. You must consider that very carefully when you hear it from the forest industry. Think about it in terms of an investment that you or I would make. If we had $5 to invest and knew that in one investment it would be worth only $6 in 80 years to 100 years, we would prefer to take our money to the Royal Bank where we could double our money in five years.
It does not make a lot of sense to invest in trees for monetary profit in northern climates such as Canada. It makes sense from a social point of view. We want to have forests in the future and we want to have trees to cut in the future, but the argument that if a company owned the land they would invest more money in it does not make sense.
As an example, Bowater, a big new investor in Ontario, have owned outright thousands of acres of freehold land in Nova Scotia and Maine. They have recently sold vast tracts of it. They still own their mills, but it makes more economic sense for them to ditch the land and buy the wood on the open market.
Long-term land management is a not a profit centre for the forest industry. It must be recognized that way in a regulatory structure as a cost of doing business. You pay for electricity, gas, labour, and silviculture to a standard set by the province or whatever regulatory agency is in place, in exchange for the right to extract the resource which is publicly owned.
I am very concerned about the suggestion of privatizing public lands and I think that many Canadians will be. However, there is a growing clamour for that from the forest industry in B.C. because of the particular market conditions faced there right now.
Mr. Sullivan: In Manitoba, and to some degree in the rest of Canada, there was an impression that a mechanism was in place that would bring in all the stakeholders, with a transparent process that would accommodate the environmental, social and economic components of what is happening in forestry, provide recommendations to governments on how to proceed, and result in discussions of land management and forest management planning, as well as providing for First Nations concerns.
We thought that was the purpose of the environmental assessment process. Environmental assessments are not only about the environment. They are about the social, economic and environmental impacts, cost and benefits, as well as about land management and forest planning. That mechanism is not working. It is too discretionary. In Manitoba, there is no independence in the review process. There is no independent expert analysis associated with the assessment process. In fact, none of the recommendations are binding on the minister. It is not even recognized within the court system as a quasi-judicial institution.This mechanism, which has been touted to Manitobans as the sort of mechanism to deal with the very issues that we are talking about, is not working at all.
The real problem is that these things come after the legal document, a forest management licence agreement, is signed between the Crown and the company. Forest management licence agreements are legally binding usually for 20 years. At least, that is what they are called in Manitoba. They set out stumpage rates and the ability of the Crown to withdraw within the company's licence areas for the public good. It also determines how much the company will spend on silviculture and who will pay for access. It is only after the legal areas have been addressed and the agreement is signed that the environmental assessment process begins. That is putting the cart before the horse. No licence agreement should be signed until after the assessment process has occurred so that no one is bound by that agreement until the public receives transparent access to the decisions that are being made. Certainly, an assessment process is one mechanism that exists in most provinces.
The Chairman: Certification is another method of control -- that is, if we are able to educate the public. Certification that is used in the market sounds like a great idea if you are an informed consumer. We export about 23 per cent of our timber and pulp to the U.S., which has shown no real interest in certification. If it is foreign timber, it is good. They do not care how many trees were cut down to get it.
Can certification be done on the producing side? In other words, can we set up the certification process here before the timber is exported, or must we rely on the consumers' idea of certification and hope that, down the road, certification will force the cutting and marketing companies of both paper and fibre to run more environmentally sound businesses?
Mr. Sullivan: Existing certification schemes are being explored by both Canada and the United States. Those programs are gaining credibility. Frankly, I am not a big fan of certification. It is something that industry can misuse.
I do not see why we need to certify the pulp and paper industry. Alternative fibre sources exist today. We do not need to be making paper out of wood. That is a known fact. We are still subsidizing the wood component of paper, yet we do not provide the same incentives to alternative fibre producers. There is an inequality in the market system that continues to favour the wood extracting industry as opposed to alternative fibre sources that are less harmful to the environment but produce the same kind of results at the end.
I have my opinion on certification; I am sure other people will comment on it, too. With respect to the pulp and paper industry, I do not know why we are even thinking about certifying large resource extracting industries such as the ones that exist in Manitoba. If you want to certify anything, make it practicable for the small independent owners. Pulp and paper companies that use wood should not even be certified.
Mr. Gray: In Canada, there are two competing certification schemes. One is the Canadian Standards Association, which was developed by the forest industry in Canada in response to a perceived threat of consumer boycott pressure, mainly from Europe. They wanted to develop a certification system to help ensure access to those European markets. The other system is the Forest Stewardship Council, which was developed mainly through the activities of non-governmental organizations -- that is, environmental groups -- across the country.
The CSA system is complete. The standards have been developed for it. The FSC system has now become more international and is based in Mexico. The balance of favour is moving towards the FSC system. Western Forest Products, MacMillan Bloedel and J.D. Irving are moving in that direction, partly because there was a perceived uselessness of the CSA approach and partly because it was widely and almost universally boycotted by the environmental community. If you are to develop a scheme of environmental products and you cannot bring a single environmental group on side, you will have a hard time in the marketplace. On balance, you will see the FSC system emerge.
The mechanism by which certification will either fail or succeed deals very much with public acceptance about whether or not the standard actually measures good management of forests. Interestingly, the mechanism by which certification is being used in the marketplace is not at the individual consumer level. That is important to recognize.
Certification in Canada does not matter too much. It is our foreign markets that are important. The mechanism that is being used is to set up large buying groups, such as Home Depot, that will agree to buy only certified wood as it becomes available. Those large chains sell lots of things besides lumber. They are interested in being able to use, in their marketing, another reason for consumers to come into their store to buy power tools or garden furniture. When consumers are there to buy a few two-by-fours to build a new deck, they can feel good because they are doing something that is not harming the environment. Certification will have the greatest impact not by convincing every single person to pay 10 cents more for a two-by-four but by convincing large companies that it is in their best interests, as large retailers, to embrace this as something that they can offer as a benefit to their customers and to avoid the negative side of consumer concern -- that is, boycotts, market pressure, cancellation of contracts, and so on.
I am more optimistic that there is at least potential to use certification to encourage the good performers and weed out some of the worst ones. However, it will never replace clear environmental regulation and policy. It is a blunt instrument. People who do not meet the standard do not sell. In certain markets, the ones that do can sell everything. It is not a good way to determine whether company X built a road illegally in this management unit and needs to be punished for it or have something done about it. It is a much broader, blunter instrument, but it has some value.
Canada has some opportunities to be a real leader in this area. I am hopeful that we will be able to accomplish something over the next few years.
Mr. Thomas: I would agree with the comments that have been made, particularly by Mr. Sullivan. I am leery of certification. Right now, industrial forestry as it is practised across Canada is not ecologically sustainable. We need government regulation of the industry. I do not think we can leave it in the hands of the mythical marketplace or consumers.
In Alberta, for instance -- and I keep returning to this -- we need to pursue alternative fibre sources. For example, with hemp, you get four times the finer yield per hectare. The author of Logging the Globe has said that in the Boreal Forest we are only putting off the day when the eucalyptus plantations of the southern hemisphere flood the market with cheap pulp fibre. She is right. We are liquidating old growth and subsidizing the industry here. Basically, that is how they are surviving.
I believe we have to be honest about plantations. In Alberta, the taxpayer has paid for a great deal of forest clearance to create marginal farmland. I should like to see that farmland returned to growing trees and leave what is left of the natural forest alone. There would be problems with the change-over period, but we could accommodate that. One of the more promising avenues we could pursue is to change the way we are doing things now. The way we are doing it right now cannot last ecologically or economically.
The Chairman: Thank you for your presentation.
We will now hear from Dr. Schlinder.
Mr. David Schlinder, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta: Mr. Chairman, I have been sitting here for about half an hour and I did not hear anything with which I did not agree totally in regard to what is going on in the three provinces.
I lived for 22 years in northwestern Ontario. My head office was in Manitoba. Thus, I know a lot about what was going on there in the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1989, I have lived in Alberta. I was a member of the panel that did not approve the Alberta Pacific mill that went ahead anyhow. I know the problems there very well.
I have six neighbours who used to be loggers. They ran small sawmills and are no longer in business because all of their holdings were given to Weyerhauser. They were told to deal with Weyerhauser. Therefore, I know the small person's end of things, too.
I thought that by this time you probably would have heard a lot of the standard things about the rate of cutting in the boreal forest, and I do not want to repeat that. Since I was on the Alberta Pacific panel, I have regularly followed the price of paper pulp. It seems to me that the bottom line for sustainability should be that, at least, you ought to be able to sell your product for a profit, which has not happened very often in the last nine or ten years. It seems to me that we could afford to hang on to a lot of what we are cutting until we can at least make some money on it.
Having both lived and worked in the boreal forest for a long time, I am aware of many things going on that interact with the rate of cutting that you have been hearing about and compound the situation. I was fortunate enough to live in the boreal forest during a 22-year period of almost relentless climate warming. That is one experience about which I should like to talk to you and show you some data. It is pretty typical of what has happened in the boreal forest.
The years 1970 to 1990 were unusually warm and dry in western and central boreal regions. On average, the temperature increased from about 1.5 degrees centigrade to about 2 degrees centigrade during that period. There was a near doubling of forest fires during that period. There was also a relentless increase in cutting during that same period.
I know several provincial foresters and have watched many management plans being constructed. One of my concerns is that we are not doing a very good job of accounting for the possibility of increased forest fires in the future, whether caused by increased greenhouse warming or even simple, natural events.
The two pulp mills at Kenora and Dryden, Ontario, with which I am familiar, are having tough times today because of the extensive fires in that area. The one in Kenora is trucking wood from northern Manitoba to keep its mill going. Yet, in 1966, when I negotiated some catchments for a small lake project, the two companies just laughed and said, "That little bit of land, well, we will never miss that." Today, they call my replacement as the project leader there every year and ask, "Are you not finished with any of those small watersheds yet? We really need the lumber."
We have not been well foresighted in the past. If we look back 30 years, we can figure that we will not be much better at looking forward at the next 20 or 30 years.
People have looked at climate warming. One version of the global models that have been used to project climate warming shows a bull's eye over the central boreal forest. Most of the estimates indicate fairly large warming for the boreal forest. Many people think that is a good thing. They think that trees and fish will grow faster. However, they forget that it also means more evaporation, and a lot of the western and central part of Canada is pretty borderline for moisture already. This map indicates a 50 per cent decline in moisture for the central boreal forest and 30 per cent or 40 per cent for much of the rest.
That sort of climate warming is something for which we do not have adapted ecosystems. The best estimates of paleoecologists who have pawed through various remains of animals and plants in lake muds indicate that the warmest climate most of the boreal forest has seen in the past 10,000 years is about a degree warmer than at present.
Of course, the models are predicting temperatures three and four and more degrees warmer than the present weather conditions.
We know that a number of the largest lakes in Canada, Lake Manitoba, for example, went dry and that there were no peat lands in the southern boreal forest whatsoever. They were retarded by the warm temperatures 6,000 years ago to such an extent that most of them did not reappear until 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. As you can see, there were a lot of major changes in the boreal forest at that time.
The project that I ran for 22 years, from 1968 until 1989, is called the Experimental Lakes Area, in northwestern Ontario. It is on the Precambrian Shield and in the southern part of the boreal. We did work on about 30 lakes in the area, some for management-type experiments, but some for reference and background information, so that we could interpret the experiments by knowing what sort of natural changes were occurring to lakes as well.
I will show you data taken from a particular reference system in an area of old growth Jack pine and black spruce. It is a system of several lakes flowing out to the south via Lake 240. We monitor water quantity and quality and we monitor the outflow in forested and wetland catchments. Bedrock is quite close to the surface so it is easy to get watertight installations. Chemistry has been taken once a week and flow has been measured continuously on these since 1969, so it is quite a long data set.
From 1970 to 1990, we got warmer and warmer air temperatures. There was some fluctuation in the mean annual air temperatures and there was declining precipitation. Everyone seems to forget the fact that as temperature increases, so does evaporation. With declining precipitation and increasing evaporation, those forest and lake systems experienced a double whammy. Also, as there is less precipitation, you tend to get less cloud cover.
When an area gets on average only about 550 millimetres of precipitation per year, there can be quite extreme results. Most notably, three of the streams that we monitored were small streams that drained terrestrial catchments. They were headwaters. In the early 1970s, there were no days without flow, meaning that they were permanent streams. By the late 1980s, those streams were without flow for about 160 days on average in the ice-free season. They went from permanent to very ephemeral streams. Those streams, of course, normally carry the nutrients and other chemical substances from the forests into the lakes.
During the start of that warming trend, in early July, 1974, on a day following a dry lightning storm, fire rolled right through to the lake shore in the east sub-basin where the largest stream enters the lake. In true textbook-fashion boreal recovery, a year later you could see all sorts of small Jack pine, a few black spruce, aspen and other trees coming back. Six years later, they were over head height. However, many of them turned brown because the drought continued and, if anything, intensified during the period.
In 1980, a second fire swept through the area. Needless to say, that was a major setback. There are still today, nearly 20 years after this fire, big patches of bedrock in the area that have not recolonized.
It is easy to see why. There is not much soil there. The trees simply grow out of an organic mat on top of the rock. If that mat is burned or, as is often the case these days, if the trees are cut and the mat is allowed to dry out in clear-cutting and then be ground up, it is pretty inhospitable for new things to grow on.
By the end of that period, the streams that drained those areas had not had water in them for up to 160 days. When the streams are not flowing, they do not carry many chemicals. From the standpoint of productivity in lakes, phosphorus and nitrogen are the chemicals of most concern.
The three streams originating in the terrestrial catchment drain into Lake 239. Lakes in that area are all phosphorus-limited, as shown in the experimental work that we have done in the area, so the decline in phosphorus translates into a decline in production. The climate problems not only compete with clear-cutters for the forests, you might say, but also have adverse effects on the lakes.
There was an increase in the ice-free season.
The mean annual wind speed in the area increased by almost 50 per cent. We are pretty sure that that is the combined result of a number of big fires in the area and big clear-cuts.
The thermocline in the lake, that is, the transition from upper, warm water to deep, cold water, became much deeper during that period.
One of the key chemicals in those lakes is what we call DOC or dissolved organic carbon. It is exemplified by this bottle of stream water from the east inflow. This yellow colour is the remains of organic matter from wet soils and wetlands after every terrestrial microbe has had a shot at degrading it. They are highly coloured and, peculiarly, that colour is a very efficient mechanism for blocking ultraviolet radiation and also visible wavelengths of light in lakes. In fact, for these very unproductive lakes that typify the boreal region, that is the main factor that controls light intensity and depth. There are a number of reasons for concern about that. After a rainstorm, a flood of that compound may come out of one of the streams and replenish the sunscreen, you could say, for the lake.
I mentioned that the flow was reduced. If you simply plot inflow of dissolved organic carbon versus inflow volume, you see the relationship. If you know the flow, you know how much DOC is coming in for a given area. Since during that period less DOC was getting into the lake, there was an increase in light penetration in the lake, which would be expected to have all sorts of consequences.
I mentioned the thermocline deepening. That was a direct result of increased solar energy destabilizing the thermocline, making it move to almost twice as deep during that period. As the warm mass at the top became deeper, the water temperature went up and the ice-free season got longer, so the combination of the three caused a vast increase in temperature of those bodies of water.
Also, it is easier to see in that water, so predators that rely on sight to prey on small fish or other organisms have a better time of it. Therefore, there is some hint that the ecological balance would be affected as well.
As I mentioned, we have seen a decline in productivity in our lakes. Chlorophyll declined at a rate parallel to that of phosphorous. That is an indication of algal production in the lake. The lakes showed a decline in productivity during that 20-year period as a result of warming climate.
There are some pretty severe implications for things like lake trout. I am sure that you have already heard how they are threatened by the increased access left by forestry roads, seismic lines, et cetera, to say nothing of higher populations of people in the boreal forest and better means for lazy people to get around. I can actually remember when you could go into the boreal forest in winter, and all you saw, if you saw any sign of another human, were snowshoe prints or ski prints, not skidoo tracks around every lake 20 miles from the nearest road. The fish have been taking a real kicking by exploitation.
The thermocline deepening also reduced their habitat during that period. Those trout have a maximum thermal tolerance of approximately 15 degrees centigrade; in midsummer, in small lakes, they must go below that level. They spend the summers in the thermocline.
Lake 239 was transformed from largely a lake trout fishery to largely a northern pike fishery during that 22-year period. That was not the result of exploitation, because we do not allow fishing on those lakes. The only thing that happened to that lake was the change in climate. While that is not absolute proof, we can think of no other reason.
In the case of Lake 240, what little trout habitat there was appears to have disappeared completely. Approximately 75 per cent of the lake trout lakes in the boreal forest are small lakes under 100 hectares, so some of these factors could be quite significant.
I want to go back to the deepening of the thermocline. Two things are responsible. One is the increased wind velocity due to the stripping of trees from the basins, which is the result of fire and clear-cut logging. The second is the loss of dissolved organic carbon input, which is a sign of declining stream flow and of dryer catchments. Typically, after logging, there will be a little surge in run-off for two or three years, and then the soils get much dryer as a result of no canopy shading them from full sunlight.
As well as the direct and indirect effects of logging, we have been studying the effect of ultraviolet exposure. As most people know, increasing ultraviolet is falling on the earth as a result of stratospheric ozone depletion. As the dissolved organic carbon in lakes declines, as we have found, there is an exponential increase in ultraviolet penetration. This is true particularly where there are fewer than 3 milligrams of dissolved organic carbon per litre, which is the case for roughly 30 per cent of the lakes in the boreal region.
Looking at the long-term values for dissolved organic carbon brings in yet another perturbation common to the boreal. A dozen or more studies show that acidifying lakes removes the dissolved organic carbon which offers a protective screening from ultraviolet and visible light as well. Typically, 90 per cent to 95 per cent of the DOC is removed due to precipitation with aluminium and decreased photodegradation. To make a long story short, if you are worried about the effects of ultraviolet exposure on aquatic organisms, the first thing to worry about is acid precipitation. In terms of UV exposure, the effect in those lakes is roughly 100-fold greater than that caused by stratospheric ozone depletion.
In the case of climate, the effect due to the decline in DOC is still about 10-fold greater than that caused by stratospheric ozone depletion. The environment is probably more stressful for aquatic organisms than it is for terrestrial biota or humans, because of the combined effects of acid rain, climate change and UV. Of course, all three of those act in concert, with the dissolved organic carbon as intermediary, and it should be remembered that this is not a small impact in the eastern boreal region.
Ken Mills and I did some work in the early 1990s that we refined as part of a Royal Society committee. We found that there are probably 100,000 lakes that have been affected to some degree by acid precipitation from the Ontario border on eastward and south of the 52nd parallel. Those lakes are suffering not only due to acidification, but also increased UV penetration. In fact, we now believe that a few of the effects that were attributed to acidification are the result of the increased exposure to ultraviolet. There are combined effects that lakes in the area suffer in addition to the effects on water chemistry caused by clear-cut logging.
It gets even more complicated than that. We know from experimental evidence that, as the climate is warming, we are getting increased mercury methylation in those lakes. Methyl mercury is very rapidly taken up by biota. Despite our efforts to control mercury from plants around pulp mills and so forth, there are other factors which tend to accelerate the mercury cycle.
Not only is more methyl mercury produced, but, as the result of increased light penetration, more of that methyl mercury is released to the atmosphere. Before we understood that the methyl mercury to elemental mercury pathway existed, we were missing the major component of methyl mercury that is released from lakes to the atmosphere.
That also fits together with the landscape story, because the original source of that mercury is from the terrestrial catchments. It is falling all across the landscape but, for some reason, it tends to trickle down from dry upland areas into wet soils, and particularly wetland areas, so that the amount of methyl mercury leaving those areas and flowing into lakes and streams is approximately 80-fold greater than the amount on the upland area.
With all of those mechanisms at work, we are not seeing a decline in mercury. Rather, based on lake sediments, we are seeing an increase despite the fact that we have controlled 70 per cent or 75 per cent of the sources.
There is yet another more direct effect of ultraviolet. Two of my students have been studying the effects of clear-cut logging on streams in British Columbia. In that case, DOC is not much of a factor because those are shallow streams from a few centimetres to a few tens of centimetres deep. There is not much attenuation of light in the water, but removal of the forest canopy means that stream biota which have been shielded for millennia from ultraviolet solar radiation are suddenly exposed. By a very clever set of experiments, one of the students was able to dissect that away from the effects of temperature. Of course, temperature increases in streams exposed by clear-cutting, but when the student compared results obtained right at the top of a clear-cut where a stream came out of a shaded area with those obtained at the foot, and did UV experiments in both, he found that most of the effects on almost all of the aquatic insects that are eaten by fish were caused by ultraviolet radiation.
There are a few other peculiar things. We did one of those experiments in a postal zone, and the results were so dramatic that we did another on the inland plateau north of Fort St. James, which is a boreal system that looks much like the northern parts of the other provinces. There was supposed to be a 10-metre buffer strip along the streams in that location, but it is simply a no-machine zone. There is a size limit on the trees, but with the large mechanical pickers, if there is a nice big tree that you can reach without driving into the riparian buffer zone, you are allowed to pick it and, in pulling it out, you break off all of the four inch and five inch trees as well. Those that do not get broken off by the machines get blown down because it is a little narrow ribbon along the stream courses. In the stream with the so-called buffer strip alongside, the exposure to UV was only 25 per cent lower than in fully clear-cut streams. Some of these regulations sound good on paper but, in fact, they do not make a whole lot of difference.
We conducted an experiment on acid rain to test the assumption of the American National Atmospheric Precipitation Assessment Program that there should not be any concern about lakes until they had decreased below a pH of 5 and that therefore there was not an acid rain problem, because only 4 per cent of the lakes in the American northeast had pH levels below 5. We inventoried all of the groups that we had expertise in, in a small lake in this experimental lakes area, and then decreased the pH to 5. The biodiversity of those systems declined by approximately 30 per cent over that pH range. Even that does not fully reflect the species losses in those systems.
Some new organisms that were acid tolerant came in and replaced organisms that had disappeared entirely. The actual loss of natural organisms is more like 50 per cent. It is a little difficult to say exactly because some species that are rare tend to come and go without real cause, but that is probably very close to the actual figure. Ken Mills and I estimated that in the 100,000 lakes within these taxa, we probably lost something like a population of 1 million various organisms from those systems in the eastern boreal.
I sent you a copy of the overall review of the boreal that I did this spring for BioScience. The bottom line that I see happening here is that we tend to focus on logging, or acid rain, or these various little problems one at a time. When I look at the boreal and all of the things happening there, I see it like a big slice of bread that all sorts of ants are nibbling on. There is clear-cutting everywhere, acid rain in the east, climate change in the west and north, increased access all through the southern part of the boreal. When you put them all together, it is an extremely dire picture indeed.
Senator Cohen: Could I have your views on government regulation and certification? We have heard some different opinions and I should like to hear yours.
Mr. Schlinder: I would certainly hate to see government regulation if it is of the sort we have been getting recently.
One of our problems in Alberta is that as the province has been taking more responsibility, they have had a real hearing problem. They do not seem to care about assessment. They are cutting their assessment staff. The only thing they seem to be concerned about is cutting the timber. That is not a satisfactory solution.
If there were a model that might work, it would be one that was used not for the timber, but should have been. It was used for the northern river basin study where the panel was a collection of stakeholders, aboriginal leaders, mayors of cities -- including those with pulp mills -- some industry people, and scientists. They did not get along all the time, but people watching the process felt that it was fair, and they could see the steps along the way by which things came through. They also had a science advisory panel of which I was a member. While every member did not support the final decisions, every member thought that they were fair.
To this day, and from beginning to end, I saw a good respect developing between aboriginal leaders and mayors of pulp mill towns. In one particular case, the mayor of Grande Prairie was the recipient of a four black-star rating by the northern river basins committee. He was not very happy about that but, to this day, he says he thought it was a good process and one that should be continued. However, the government, for whatever reason, does not want such a process and our environment minister says this study had its day.
Senator Cohen: Did the province alone conduct this study?
Mr. Schlinder: The study was 50 per cent financed by the federal government. Most of the science was done by federal government agencies. Another thing I find disturbing is that there is not the expertise in the provinces, at least not Alberta. Ontario is probably the best of the provinces, and even they are dropping rapidly in expertise in these areas.
I have three friends who are being laid off by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. They are all moving to universities. Projects that they have run for 25 years are being closed down.
Senator Cohen: That is a depressing message for the whole picture.
Mr. Schlinder: I see two funny things happening. The province wants all of the control and the federal government seems anxious to go give it away. Yet, when the provinces get it, they do nothing with it, except to hand over the resources.
For 22 years I was a part of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and saw the decline in what they did. Many of the projects I work on now are with Environment Canada scientists and provincial, largely aquatic scientists in Alberta and Ontario. All of those agencies are declining in research expertise.
Senator Cohen: There is no sympathetic ear from the federal government at all. I read in some of our information that by the year 2000 the government has promised a deadline date to improve the situation of the boreal forest.
Mr. Schlinder: I do not see how they can do it. If they do it, it will be via the mechanisms that got us into the mess in the first place. They went ahead with commitments without studying what we had to commit and when we ought to commit it. It is like have a cookie jar full of cookies and eating them all at once. We are now suffering from a stomach ache.
Senator Cohen: Governments make all sorts of commitments and provide target dates, no matter who is in power, and we are all waiting.
Mr. Schlinder: Going back to the Alberta Pacific panel, we were given terms of reference that were cumulative impact terms, something the Alberta government will probably never do again. They asked us to assess the load that the Alberta Pacific mill would add to the river systems, and we refused to approve the mill because we had no data to base it on.
Eight years earlier they had constructed promotional videos to attract foreign investors. Why did they not think of doing assessments of the river so there could be some proper cumulative effect assessment at the same time? Some of the information we got as a panel indicated that there were overtures at that time to do studies of the rivers and that they were turned down as being too expensive because the price tags ranged from $10,000 to $60,000.
Senator Cohen: Our report will be written in February. What shall we do with our report? Where do we go from here?
Mr. Schlinder: It is time to put on the brakes awfully fast and have a second look at where we are going. In the area where I have lived for 32 years -- I moved there in 1966 <#0107> at one time I could go out and walk for a week without seeing a sign of another human being. If you go there now, you do not go half an hour without crossing a road or meeting some hunter on an ATV or a skidoo or something equivalent to that.
In the 1960s, about half the logging in that area was still done with horses. We went through an era where there were many people with chainsaws and skidders. We are now beyond that to fewer people again, but with big machines.
In one case, we did a study on a catchment, before and after logging. It was a 70-hectare catchment. One man, with one of these big bunchers and two trucks, logged that in about five days.
We are not employing many people to clear a lot of land. I do not think it is solving our job problem in the boreal forest. We are not making any money off it. The pulp and paper sector seems to be awash in red ink most of the time, to the extent where Alberta Pacific did not make its last loan payment. At couple of years earlier, the mill at Whitecourt was in the same situation.
During an era when we are losing money on the product and cutting at twice the sustainable rate, it seems to me that we are so far from so-called sustainable development that the message is pretty clear.
The provinces seem to be the bullies in the areas that I deal with, ranging from endangered species to water pollution to boreal forest issues. When they say "boo", the federal people involved jump up and run.
Senator Cohen: Maybe it is time for a major inquiry.
The Chairman: One of the witnesses this evening spoke about the bonsai forest on the north side of the boreal forest. Can anything be done here, before this area is turned into tundra? Will global warming turn those bonsais into towering trees? As the south end dries out will the north keep rolling forward, or do we have the soil to support it in the north?
Mr. Schlinder: It is a question of not enough soil and, even more so, a question of not enough water. For example, the whole eastern half of Alberta gets about 450 millimetres a year of precipitation. Yet, if you go into the Medicine Hat area, it is semi-arid; and in the Fort MacMurray area, it is wetland. The only difference is the annual transpiration driven by temperature.
I am worried that we might zing through that critical phase, that is, about the middle of the province, where it supports boreal forest, and go from something that is too wet in the north to something that is too dry south of that line. South of that line, the accelerated fire cycle obliterates everything. It is like the Prairie transition, where it increasingly becomes dominated by trees that can withstand fire and, when they cannot with stand it, then it becomes grasslands.
I doubt whether we will see any forestry bonanza in the north as a result of warming -- that is, not unless it is sustained for thousands of years. For tens to hundreds of years, I cannot see it happening.
The Chairman: One thing that bothers the committee as we travel across the country is this: What kind of administrative system do we put in place to supervise the boreal forest when the provinces themselves are very much like Colonel Sanders? That is to say, they are selling them off at a great clip. Now that the forestry companies are internationalized or globallized, they are quite willing to cut down what they can and move off somewhere else in the world. The environmental groups will say, "We can look after it", but the experience there has been that the only thing two environmentalists can agree on is what the third should give to charity. This often leads to arguing and fighting.
What is the system that you would contemplate, ideally? There is no place else in the world that has tried to address this problem. If you were pioneering in this field and you were able to make the final decision -- and if you had a budget to do so -- what kind of system would you put in place to preserve our boreal forest for all the uses that we want to have from it? How would you set up such a system?
Mr. Schlinder: First, I would try to re-Canadianize it. That is a long-term prospect because we have been so rapidly giving it away. I cannot see anyone who does not have a stake in the boreal forest caring much about it. It is not their children or grandchildren who must live there. Finland has a rule that 80 per cent of their forestry must be Finish-owned. I believe Sweden has a figure somewhat close to that. It is a bit crazy that we did not follow their lead -- not that they have done everything right, either.
The Chairman: Are you talking about the value-added system?
Mr. Schlinder: Yes. The other issue was put forward by Mr. Thomas, who suggested that we could use a lot of the substandard farmland that has been cleared as tree plantations. That idea has a lot going for it, in that you can leave the road systems intact in those areas. The southern pine plantations in the U.S.A. are one of the big competitors with virgin pulp from boreal regions right now. Of course, their overhead is a lot lower because they do not have to construct roads all over the place.
I live in such an area between Edmonton and Edison, along the Yellowhead Highway. In the nine years that I have lived there, 25 per cent of the remaining forest has been cleared, yet there does not seem to be any real pattern. The main fascination is to clear it and make pastures out of it. People do not seem to notice that pasturing adjacent to that area was tried and that it did not prove profitable, so it has been abandoned. There is a mosaic of abandoned cleared areas that are now growing back in Aspen.
A lot of that land has no business being turned into pasture or farmland. In the community where I live, as a rule of thumb -- and this is only 100 kilometres west of Edmonton -- they only get a grain crop one year in three. The other two years, they cut it and sell it as hay. There can be as few as 70 frost-free days, yet there are still people trying to clear this land. If it were turned into some sort of forestry rotation, they could do as well as they are now and spare a lot of the pristine boreal forest.
I do not think we know how to reconstruct the pristine boreal forest. That is what bores me. It is difficult to maintain some of the really rare animals and plants that live there. A forest company in Finland took me on a tour. That is the company that Don Getty hired to review our report, which he thought was full of biases. I happen to have the only copy of the report that had references in it, because the other committee members thought this would scare off lay readers. I was happy to hand that to them and they were happy to report to Don Getty that they did not think our report was biased, and they took their $400,000 and ran. As a result, I was able to see what was happening in Finland.
In Finland, their forestry plantations, some of which were in their second and third rotations, were like cornfields. There was little growing in them but trees, and they were very boring. As a special event, they drove us about 100 kilometres north to a little town where there was a small, handkerchief-size boreal park. The park was about five hectares and had planks covering it so that you could walk over it without crushing the mosses and flowers and the fora and small fauna. The big fauna was long gone. It was very much like we used to be able to work through for days in Northwestern Ontario. All that was left was one small plot of what is often touted as the best forestry country in the world. If the Swedes and Finns cannot do it, I doubt that we can do it. They have had three rotations to practice. Most places, we have not had any in Canada. The most we have had is one or, perhaps in the far-eastern Maritimes, two. Our so-called management of these forests is not doing well from the standpoint of producing a complete boreal forest. Maybe it is fine in terms of producing one product such as pulp or the little boards that Ikea calls wood, which they turn into chairs, but that is about all.
The Chairman: We have heard in different places that the percentage of the forest that should be pristine is anywhere from 10 per cent up to 18 per cent. Do you have any figure for the percentage of the forest that should be maintained by law as a pristine forest?
Mr. Schlinder: I do not know if I would want to come up with a figure. I would probably prefer less if it were connected better, rather than a bunch of measle-like dots that represented 13 per cent. I would probably sooner have 10 per cent and have some interconnectedness that would help some big migratory animals such as the grizzly bears and woodland caribou in the boreal. They are declining rapidly. Anyone who has studied them in any ecosystem knows that simple noise and being disconnected from their habitats are the main features. Some of these have home ranges of several thousands square kilometres per animal. I would opt for a few big patches rather than try to come up with a magic percentage.
That being said, I think the percentage we have is far too small, as evidenced by the declines in some of the mammals that I do not think anyone would dispute are key to protect.
The Chairman: Thank you for your interest, sir.
Mr. Sullivan has indicated that he would like to clarify a point that he made earlier. I will ask him to proceed.
Mr. Sullivan: Mr. Chairman, at the beginning of my comments, I was talking about the court case that we have against the federal government. I mentioned that the principal project defined by the federal government under the CEAA is the bridge. Our definition was that it was not only the bridge but also the road, something that was affirmed through another court decision.
We wanted to go upstream even further and say that the other part of the principal project would have been the mill because they are all related and interconnected. Therefore, the mill, the harvesting activities, the road, and the bridge road are the project. For all intents and purposes, when the company presents itself before the public or the government in terms of putting its best foot forward in an economic sense when they do cost benefits, they always include the mill, the road construction and the harvesting activities in terms of the benefits that will be incurred for creating employment. Yet, when it comes to the assessment of those things, all of a sudden the company defines it as just the bridge.
I just wanted to make that clarification.
Other distinct federal interests come into play, even though it may be seen as exclusively of provincial jurisdiction when it comes to forestry management. There is the Migratory Birds Act and the biodiversity convention. The federal government issues export permits for all logs that are exported outside the country. Of course, there is transportation, which is governed by federal legislation in terms of rail. Thus, there are various federal interests. While it may appear constitutionally to be strictly a provincial interest, federalism does have that grey area in terms of constitutional responsibility.
The Chairman: Thank you for the clarification. We will make a note of it.
The committee adjourned.