Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 10 - Evidence - November 16, 2010
OTTAWA, Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:45 p.m. to study the current state and future of Canada's forest sector.
Senator Fernand Robichaud (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: I declare the meeting in session. Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. I am Senator Fernand Robichaud from New Brunswick. I would like to ask the honourable senators to kindly introduce themselves, starting to my right.
Senator Eaton: Senator Eaton from Toronto.
[English]
Senator Duffy: Senator Mike Duffy from Prince Edward Island.
Senator Ogilvie: Kelvin Ogilvie, Nova Scotia.
Senator Plett: Don Plett, Manitoba.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: Senator Maria Chaput from Manitoba.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: Frank Mahovlich, Ontario.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: The committee is continuing its study on the current state and future of Canada's forest sector. Today, we are focusing on silviculture, forest management and the health of the forest. Today, we welcome three different organizations.
[English]
From the Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association, we have John Betts, Executive Director.
[Translation]
We welcome Brigitte Bigué, Coordinator of the Quebec Intensive Silviculture Network.
[English]
We also have Chris Walsh, Acting Director, Forests Branch, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
I thank the witnesses for lending us their time to appear before us for our study. I will invite you to make your presentations.
[Translation]
We will first hear from Mr. Betts and continue with the witnesses in order around the table. Simultaneous interpretation is available. Once our witnesses finish their presentation, we will go to the question period.
Mr. Betts, I invite you now to start your presentation.
[English]
John Betts, Executive Director, Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association: Thank you, deputy chair and senators, for inviting me here today. As you have heard, I am the executive director of the Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association. I represent small businesses that work in the reforestation industry in British Columbia. We comprise nurseries; we contract firefighting crews, tree-planting crews and surveyors and do consulting work; and we tend plantations and so forth. We are basically the on-the-ground operational end of the forestry program in British Columbia and Alberta.
Today I thought I would speak to you about one issue to do with reforestation and restoration in British Columbia. I notice that in your terms of reference the economic crisis in forestry is mentioned. I will take a little bit of liberty with the terms of reference and talk about the ecological or environmental crisis, because I think it underpins any economy that we might create in the future. Clearly we have to look at what is occurring on the ground in British Columbia.
I will speak about a particular event and draw from that some conclusions and give you some oversight into the fuel secessions process. That sounds like a disappointingly technical description, but I hope I will make it dramatic enough that you will be thrilled by my narrative. At the end of that brief overview, I will take that and try to turn it into where opportunities lie for the federal government, as well as opportunities for communities in British Columbia. That is a quick synopsis.
I will start with the Binta Lake fire. If you look at the picture, it is kind of a majestic looking thing. That is at some distance; I cannot say whether that is 10 kilometres away or not, but these fire heads look like thunder clouds, and they are rather spectacular, in a way, or magnificent.
However, if you get up close to them, they are not that way at all. They are kind of a combination of what would happen if you married a volcano with a hurricane; these rank 5 fires are capable of creating their own firestorms. They can create thunder and lightning and tremendous wind velocities, and they can suck up materials. We have seen infrared photography that shows whole trees up at 5,000 and 10,000 feet. As you can tell from this photograph, they are capable of sending smoke some great distance.
I want to point out that in British Columbia right now, one of our major forest products is wood smoke, when measured by the tonne. That includes carbon dioxide equivalent, sulphur dioxide, particulate matter and ash that, by the tonne, is one of our major products. It is also one of our major exports in that it is picked up by the jet stream and communicated quite a distance.
This fire was particular in that all of the leading indicators for a big fire season were really not in place for last year's fire season. It was not much of a drought year. In fact, if anything it was quite damp. We had not had a long period of dry weather, and we did not have tremendous thunderstorms beyond anything normal.
This fire did something quite unique. At the time this picture was taken, there were 270 other fires in B.C. I cannot remember if this fire was started by a lightning strike or something else, but it went from 1,500 hectares to 40,000 hectares in a day and a half. In one burst, it travelled 22 kilometres overnight. It was pushed a bit by cold fronts, which are relatively common meteorological events. Regardless, we had a fire that went from 1,500 to 40,000 hectares and travelled 22 kilometres.
This fire occurred at the clay belt on the east-west passage west of Vanderhoof. Fortunately, it is not a really crowded area; there were no communities in the wake of this fire. However, can you imagine the problem we would have trying to do an evacuation with a fire that could move at that speed?
I apologize for the quality, but the next picture is of the fire wall. I will introduce some technical terms here. You are seeing fire intensity, which is the energy released in the flame wall. I will talk about another aspect of this fire, fire severity, which is the actual duration of and damage done by the burning. Keep those terms in mind. I have also mentioned rate of spread. This fire does not move along in a solid wall. Due to the conditions on the landscape ahead, it did what is known as ``spotting.'' There would be a fire head, and probably on its flank there would be something similar. It would be sending ashes ahead.
When you look at the picture, you can see an ill-defined opening, which is a logging clear cut. There has been a lot of logging here because the industry was trying to follow the leading edge of the beetle and log as much as it could to salvage that wood before it was destroyed. In their hurry to do that, they left a lot of debris behind in the woods. Also, there was public resistance to prescribed burning, which would have cleaned up that fuel. Ahead of this fire were patches of logged sites with what we call ``fine fuels,'' which dry out quickly. They were highly capable of carrying ignitions forward. As the wind blew the sparks ahead, they would land and ignite the fine fuels. In many cases, they are actual plantations now, as we have put seedlings there. They move the fire to another stand of timber.
I apologize for the poor resolution of the photo, but you can also see some grey wood, which is dead beetle kill. This fire is very typical of the kinds of fires we will see in the future because of the beetle-killed wood and logging sites that we have dealt with without prescribed burn, driven by a relatively normal fire event. Our principle concern from a restoration point of view is that these kinds of conditions, which I will explain in more detail later, will produce fires of 200,000 to 300,000 hectares in size. They will move with a rapid rate of expansion and do tremendous damage, not only to the ecosystems they sit on but also to many of the infrastructures embedded in it.
I have talked in the context of the beetle kill. Of course, that is one of the first things that come to your attention when we talk about damage and the forest health crisis in B.C. Actually, there is something in the woods before that.
We have been suppressing fire for good reason in British Columbia for the last 70 years. In many of their fire regimes, fire commonly returns in some of the drier sites in a short interval of 7 years. The Okanagan Mountain fire that destroyed 250 homes was in an area where the fire regime was about every 7 years. It had not had a fire in 70 years, so 10 intervals did not happen. When the fire finally took off, it behaved like the Binta Lake fire and, in this case, took out 250 homes.
This happened because of overstock before the pine beetle arrived. When you stop fire, other seedlings are able to take root in what might normally have been grassland, and they begin to infill. These pictures give you an example of that. In this case, you can see the fuel loading starting to happen already. It might be that in this particular shot, not only is the site overstocked, but also on this kind of dry forest type you might have only one tree every 50 feet. In the Pemberton Valley, near Whistler, you can see large vets, or very large trees, and they have lateral branching right down to the ground, which suggests that when they were growing, there were no other trees competing with them. However, they are now stacked with very large trees. That is in-growth. That stresses the environment. In other words, that site cannot accommodate all those trees.
The same thing is occurring in the pine forests: Through suppression, we have created pine trees that are older than normal and more contiguous. The mountain pine beetle and other agents of disturbance would normally break up the stand structure. If a fire got going, it might run out of fuel because it hit an area that the pine beetle had killed off 10 years before. That is how the ecosystem would retain its resilience. That is no longer on the landscape. The landscape cannot adapt except through these dramatic fires. We call that ``fire regime changes.''
As the slides show, there is a stress stand where fuel builds up so that when a fire goes through, it is capable of producing an immense amount of damage. This is in the Okanagan Valley. This next one is the pine beetle, which I will come back to.
I live in the south corner of the Okanagan Valley in Nelson. The drainage I live in is called the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. It is a mixed-forest type, not only a pine forest. It has almost all the species of conifers. It is quite a unique area. The West Arm has not had a fire in 100 years. Depending on some of the slopes and aspects, some of those sites have seen fires in as short as 15-year rotations and 30-year rotations. The whole valley is full of trees. It sits on an east-west corridor. If you go back and look at the Binta Lake fire, you will begin to see why I am concerned because the pine beetle is coming through. We already have an overstocked forest that is stressed and has ladder fuels; and now the mountain pine beetle is coming through. In my valley on an east-west corridor, if a fire gets going, you can connect the dots as to what the threat would be. We have an area the size of England hit by the beetle. We have millions of hectares outside of that area suffering from overstocking. That whole area is building up energy. When the trees die from the damage done by mountain pine beetle, they fall over. They form a lattice work of fuel. When that fuel catches on fire, it burns for a long time. That is the fire severity aspect.
Normally when the trees are standing, the crowns burn; but when felled trees burn, the fuel throws heat back onto the ground, which has the effect of destroying nutrients, bacteria and seed beds. It can do severe damage. These are not renewing fires; they are stand elimination fires. They might very well set the ecosystem back so far that there will be problems with how well it will regenerate.
This is gaining momentum across the whole landscape of British Columbia. It will have to be addressed. We cannot keep throwing suppression costs at it. Through the Disaster Financial Assistance agreement, the federal government has contributed over $300 million in the last three or four fire years to put these fires out. I am not saying the money is wasted, but you can see how it is going up in smoke, and it will only get worse and worse.
Dale Bosworth, the former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, admitted that the United States is in the same boat. They can put out 98 per cent of the fires, even more, but it is the 1 per cent and 2 per cent that do 90 per cent of the damage. Those are the fires you cannot fight, like the Binta Lake fire. The only effective fire strategy for such fires is November when the snow comes and puts them out.
What can we do about this? There are 18 million hectares of land affected by the mountain pine beetle. I suggest that there are even larger areas of land that have gone into this overstocked condition. I do not suggest by any means that we try to harvest and knock all of that down, but there are strategies we can employ.
This is just to repeat that fuel secession process, which I have described to you already. I will not stay there. Do you remember my comment about exporting? If you can get your bearings with that photo, you will see the North American continent seen from a satellite. You can see that the smoke plumes are travelling to neighbouring Wyoming. This next one is the Okanagan Mountain fire. There is nothing more unsettling than looking at that fire. I had some fires close to me. You can imagine the sort of effort to think about what to pack up and take away; it is truly awful.
Let us end on a positive note because I do not want to overstate my case. However, I am afraid it is as bad as I am making it sound. We could begin to get out onto the landscape, not just in the woodland urban interface, which is the two-kilometre zone we have defined as where we need to treat. To be honest with you, these fires gain all of that momentum well out on the landscape as they move through. We could go out and break up the fuel. That wood is no longer viable as saw logs, so we could take it and build a bio-energy industry. In Idaho and Montana, they heat their schools with waste woodchips. We need to look at those strategies for communities. The B.C. government has a build- with-wood strategy. Let us heat with wood. We can produce thermal energy. All the wasted wood from the land just from our harvest would heat every home in British Columbia every year. That is where we need to end up.
There is a strong potential that we can break up the fuel. We can apply what we remove to a bio-energy market that needs to be developed. However, conditions on the ground need to be created for that. That is where I suggest we need to be going.
There is a role there for the federal government. Between 1985 and 1995, we had the two FRDAs, the Forest Resource Development Agreements. We need to be looking at something like that. I do not mean to come here with cap in hand and say that we need more federal dollars. We can cover the costs of reducing this threat and reduce the money we are spending on putting out fires that I am saying we cannot fight well and invest those dollars back into modifying the landscape and doing restoration.
That is my probably-longer-than-10-minute galloping survey. I made a number of sweeping assertions at the expense of quite a lot of detail. Generally speaking, that is how our sector sees it. That comes from being on the ground. We see way too many hectares of dead wood, and it is soul deadening to look at. When you think of it as a threat, it is quite scary. I do not mean to be so pessimistic, but that is how the situation stands.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you. We will move on to our next witness, Mr. Walsh. We received the presentation but did not have time to put it into the two official languages. Do I have permission to distribute it in just one official language?
Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.
[Translation]
All right, we can distribute it.
[English]
Chris Walsh, Acting Director, Forests Branch, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources: First, I want to apologize for having the presentation in one official language. I finished it last night and did not have any time to have it translated.
I want to thank you again for the opportunity to come here to speak to you today. The forest industry and the forest sector are important to Canada, and I want to help in any way I can in providing advice through my experience in this. I have a short presentation, as directed by the clerk. I will stick to my guidelines there. I look forward to the discussion afterwards.
I want to correct one thing for the record: I am the director of the Forests Branch, which is a policy branch within the Ontario government, and not the research branch. However, I was in consultation with them before I came here.
My premise is that sustainable forest management is the key to a healthy forest sector. Most forests in Canada are owned by the Crown. If we are not doing sustainable forest management, we will not have the social licence to be able to harvest the stands to supply the mills. It is important that we focus on sustainable forest management.
Every forest management plan that is produced — and I am talking from an Ontario perspective — attempts to find a balance between the economic, social and environmental factors. If that balance is not achieved, then it puts stress into the system. Currently, the economic pillar of that balance is out of whack, and it is causing stress on the system.
Without the dollars being generated from the industry to support the sustainable forest management framework, everything starts to go haywire. I think government can play a role in this by looking at those areas of sustainable forest management that are under stress because of the economic situation and putting our minds to see what we can do in the short term to mitigate those things and provide support to the sector.
When the economics are out of balance, it affects sustainable forest management, silviculture and forest health. First, there is a loss of skilled workers, professionals and supporting businesses for the industry. Youth decide not to go into forestry when they are in school because they do not see a future in it. There are no jobs for them when they get out. When the sector rebounds, there will not be enough professionals to be able to manage the forest if this trend continues. I think this trend is exacerbated by the demographics of the sector when we have an aging population in the workforce and a lot of people are retiring. We are getting a double whammy on this one. Supporting businesses like tree nurseries start to fail because of reduced harvesting, and there is less need for tree planting. These will be needed in the future when the sector rebounds, but they may not be there or may not be healthy.
Forest companies look for ways to reduce their costs immediately. One of the ways they do that is by looking for cheaper forms of forest renewal. That puts pressure on future forest productivity that is important to support the industry. There are also fewer resources available to engage stakeholders in the planning process. This leads to more conflict in the forest. You all read in the papers about the conflicts happening in the forests. This leads to greater business uncertainty if there is more conflict in the forests, roadblocks, and so on. If there is an industry rebound, they may not be able to get access to their resources.
Industry also has fewer resources to be able to monitor its own operations for compliance with the regulations and the laws. There is more environmental risk to the operations because they are not there as they should be to look at things. As well, research dollars become scarce. There are important questions to support sustainable forest management that go unanswered, in relation to things like climate change, invasive species control, et cetera. Furthermore, there is less ability to monitor and to protect forests from insects and diseases.
We talked about the impact that forest insects and diseases can have. In Ontario, the dollars to support protection from insects are linked to the harvested volume. For every cubic metre of wood that is harvested, an amount of money goes into a fund to support protection. If you are harvesting less, then less money goes into that type of support.
Forest certification also provides access to markets. With the sector the way it is presently, in some cases forest companies do not have enough money to maintain forest certification or the annual surveillance costs associated with it. In some cases companies have to let their certifications lapse, which makes it difficult for them to sell into some markets.
I have a graph to illustrate the situation in Ontario. I will direct your attention to the blue lines on that graph. From 2004-05 to 2008-09, that represents the harvest over that five-year period. Over that period, the harvest has gone down by close to 50 per cent. If you look at the green bars, that represents the tree planting following the reduction in harvesting. As a result of that reduction in harvesting and tree planting, forest nurseries have seen dramatic decreases in sales. Most of them have not invested in new equipment to ensure their equipment is up to date; some are on the verge of failing. Silviculture contractors, and Mr. Betts will tell you this, have been stressed. In Ontario, many of the silviculture opportunities are provided to First Nation people. They are feeling the effects of that as well because that is an activity in which they are participating in Northern Ontario. In general, the silviculture industry is stressed. We need them there when the industry rebounds. If they are not there, we will have another issue in maintaining a healthy and sustainable forest.
I am an optimist. I think conditions will improve over time. Some of the programs already put in place by both federal and provincial governments have started to help and are good programs. I recognize that there is not a lot we can do about the markets because a lot of the factors affecting the industry are global in nature, for example, the value of the Canadian dollar. Your interim report talked about the decrease in demand for newsprint and things like that. They are hard for us to deal with, but we can ease the pain and position ourselves to come out ahead once the sector starts to rebound by a couple of mitigating factors. In your report, you also recognize that we must ensure that whatever compliance programs we do are in compliance with the Softwood Lumber Agreement and other trade negotiations that we have.
To shore ourselves up so that we come out of this on the strong end, we must promote the forestry profession to our youth and focus on the fact that there is a lot of high tech involved in this industry, as well as the environmental aspects of it. That appeals to our youth. Also, the Aboriginal population in Northern Ontario, where most of the forestry occurs, is increasing, and the rest of the population is decreasing. I think the promotion of youth to go into forestry should have an Aboriginal focus because I believe they will be the workforce of the future.
We should also provide support for enhanced renewal programs to renew some of the areas that you have seen on this other slide. Stand improvement activities could take place close to the mills. They could provide a source of biofuel immediately for energy and enhance the quality of the remaining stand so it grows faster and is more productive for when the forest industry rebounds.
There are other benefits in stand improvement. If you can get the stand growing more quickly, it sequesters more carbon out of the atmosphere and mitigates climate change impacts.
The renewal of areas that have been naturally disturbed through windthrow or fire is another activity we could do in the interim, and this would keep our silviculture contractors operating and the business going so they are there when we come out. It has many other benefits as well.
There is an opportunity to mitigate by supporting the research, which provides us with the tools we need and the answers we need to some of the questions we have to support sustainable forest management in the near term. I will not dwell on the part about the incentives for a more diverse forest products industry, but if there is an opportunity to diversify our industry, that would be good. In a mixed forest where there are trees of varying quality, there are good- quality trees that the industry wants for the traditional industry, but they are mixed up with some lower-quality trees. It does not pay to go into that stand unless there is have a market for the poor quality trees. In many cases right now, that market does not exist. We need to figure out a way to provide a market, and it may be through bio-energy.
We talked earlier about this industry you visited in Northern Quebec where they take small pieces of wood and make laminated timbers. If we can find businesses like that on the landscape and provide incentives for them to come, we would benefit big time.
You also talked about the emerald ash borer and the European longhorn beetle and things like that. These types of pests have the potential to have the same dramatic effect that the mountain pine beetle has in Western Canada. We need to collaborate and focus our efforts on trying to control these and try to prevent them from happening as well.
There a few more mitigation actions. We should continue to promote Canada's responsible, sustainable forest management approach to foreign markets. Canada has world-leading forest practices, and it has the most areas certified through independent, third-party certification in the world. Frankly, forestry has a bad name because of the successful campaigns against forestry. We should be doing something to give forestry a better name and to show the benefits of forestry.
Helping to promote the use of wood will assist with the diversification of the markets. Building with wood has a much lighter environmental footprint than building with concrete and steel. That should be promoted.
Other jurisdictions have advantages to Canada in that they have faster-growing forests, lower wages and, in some case, lower environmental standards. We should take the opportunity to promote higher environmental standards in other jurisdictions so that we start to play on a level playing field.
The other thing we could be doing is to invest more in our forest inventory. If we learn more about the volumes in our forests and the distance they are from potential processing facilities, as well as the species composition and the quality, we provide businesses with more certainty about the raw material that will go into the facility and help them make better business decisions and give them more confidence to actually invest.
The end result is a healthy, sustainable, managed forest, which is paramount for the forest sector to come out of where it is now. When it does come out, it will need a sustainable approach with a strong labour force so that it is ready to jump in when things turn around. We will require the knowledge through research to answer the questions that we need answers for with regard to things like climate change and invasive species to allow us to manage the forest sustainably.
That is my short-term mitigation strategy, and a little bit on sustainable forest management and how that relates. I will stop there.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: We will now go to Ms. Brigitte Bigué. Please start your presentation, Madam.
Brigitte Bigué, Coordinator, Quebec Intensive Silviculture Network: Mr. Chair, first of all, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to contribute our expertise to your deliberations regarding forest management and silviculture in Canada.
My name is Brigitte Bigué and I am the senior coordinator of the Quebec Intensive Silviculture Network. I am here today representing the 20 or so partner members of our network.
The Quebec Intensive Silviculture Network was established in 2001. It is an innovative group dedicated to research, development and the transfer of knowledge and brings together the various players in ligniculture and intensive plantation silviculture in Quebec.
The partners actively involved in the network hale from six Quebec universities, the federal and provincial governments, seven forest industries and other major private sector organizations. We are working in over 10 regions of Quebec. Our mission is to coordinate research efforts in a high-tech sector and develop Quebec's expertise in ligniculture and intensive plantation silviculture, as well as in knowledge transfer, a key aspect that is often neglected.
We have initiated over 60 research projects in the past ten years throughout the province in fields as varied as genetic improvement, plantation growth and yield, and wood processing.
We were very interested to read the interim report that you produced on Canada's forest sector and the interest that you showed in research and development as well as development of the best tools to aid in better forestry management practices.
For the past 10 years, we have focused on innovation to develop better forest management practices through plantation forestry and the use of fast-growing, high-yield trees. In the global forestry context, with the current focus on sustainable development, forests are now a collective heritage that has various uses and must incorporate social, environmental and economic considerations. As I am sure you are aware, social pressure is growing for us to increase our network of protected areas so that we preserve biodiversity and to adopt greener forest management practices.
On the other hand, our forest sector must have access to quality forest resources at an affordable price that allows it to be competitive. How do we reconcile this duality: on the one hand, we want to produce as much wood as we can and keep increasing production to maintain and grow a flourishing forest industry and, on the other, we want to dedicate a portion of our land for preservation of nature and its many uses? Our answer to this duality: plant fast-growing trees that produce exceptional yields in a brief period of time, using small areas of land located near supply sources (wood processing facilities) and thus near rural communities.
Planting of fast-growing trees could also be used in the reclamation of abandoned agricultural land. Therefore, when judiciously planned, these plantations can have a beneficial effect: they fill the shortfall in wood material, they reduce the need for cutting down vast areas of woodland by providing a more ecological (ecosystemic) means of development, and they increase the network of protected spaces.
In your interim report, you pointed out that manufacturers are at a distinct competitive disadvantage due to the small stature of the trees and their relatively remote location, that these trees were at one time larger and closer to the processing location and that the change in circumstances may be a testament to poor forest management in the past. In our view, we must introduce new, imaginative and viable methods in order to reconcile these contradictory ideas of producing the same amount of or more wood and making a genuine effort to preserve our forests.
The introduction of intensive plantation silviculture, or ligniculture, using small areas of land may be one of the solutions for maintaining and even increasing our supply of fibre, while meeting these emerging needs. It would make it possible to address the shortfall in wood material, diversify sources of supply, guarantee quality of wood for processing plants, bring the fibre closer to the plant and thus reduce supply costs, all directly in line with your own findings.
In Quebec and in Canada, development of fast-growing trees has been under way for over 40 years. Genetic improvement is a well-established process that involves selectively reproducing trees with desirable characteristics. It produces significant, tangible and predictable results when combined with appropriate silvicultural practices. Genetic improvement of a number of species, such as poplar, larch and white spruce, has made it possible to develop trees with exceptional yields, as compared with the yields obtained in forests managed in the traditional manner.
These plantations produce yields of 8 to 20 m3 of wood per hectare per year, whereas a forest managed traditionally gives a yield of about 2 m3 / ha / year. Using these species in plantations, we can produce a volume of wood 10 times that of traditional forest management. I would like to digress for a moment to tell you that vast amounts of money are invested annually to develop high-performance trees in Canada. Aside from the genetic improvement programs that have been under way for decades, we have also been developing genomic tools over the last decade. The result of all this investment is exceptional trees that produce a large quantity of quality wood, but at this time, our use of these high-potential trees that we have invested so much to develop is rather half-hearted.
In your report, you emphasized your committee's interest in identifying the best tools at the federal government's disposal for encouraging better forest management practices. We are working on just such cutting-edge tools and we believe that it is time to shift from experimental mode to operations mode. It may be extremely advantageous for the future economic development of the forest sector if the Government of Canada were to encourage and support a global strategy that included this type of forest management model in Canada. For this model to be productive, it is crucial to focus every effort on making it a success and this includes investing money to continue research and knowledge transfer to practitioners and promote implementation in the field. A contribution from the federal government could be of considerable assistance in developing this cutting-edge practice.
Is it farfetched to consider introducing plantation forestry using high-performance trees in Canada? If we look at the global situation, the FAO projects that, by 2050, 75 per cent of the wood cut for commercial purposes will come from plantations of fast-growing trees and that they will account for five to 10 per cent of forested areas worldwide.
What is stopping us from developing plantation forestry in Canada? We need to be determined to do it, with policies that foster such practices and with money earmarked for research and transferring the knowledge and on concrete on- the-ground implementation, while respecting the timing of intensive silviculture work. Those are the conditions for success of this model.
In conclusion, our organization works collaboratively to develop unique, integrated expertise in Quebec, including provincial and federal, public and private stakeholders. We have developed enviable expertise in genetic improvement, intensive silviculture on plantations and ligniculture. We propose innovative avenues, in line with the objectives pursued in your deliberations, for resolving the challenges that we face today, while respecting the values of society and the social, economic and environmental considerations of sustainable development.
Intensive plantation silviculture and ligniculture are the scenarios that have the greatest impact on forest yield. We have to think intelligently about where to put them and that is why we propose a model for plantations placed in proximity to plants and near rural communities (think of the quality jobs it could create). By concentrating our wood production efforts on small areas of land, the forest can be used for other purposes such as preservation of biodiversity, creation of protected areas and more ecological forest management.
Despite the forest industry crises of the past few years, it would be disastrous to neglect forest management. In the long term, it would negatively affect timber supply. To help the forest management sector, the Government of Canada could support promotion efforts and encourage innovative practices such as the model we propose.
We therefore propose to implement cutting-edge solutions and stress the need to update our methods of working in the forest by using knowledge acquisition and transfer supported by investment. We need to have a long-term vision and, for that, we must consider different options based on innovation.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Ms. Bigué. We are moving now to the question period. Senator Plett will go first. Senators Mahovlich and Eaton will follow.
[English]
Senator Plett: Thank you to all three of you for coming out and giving us excellent presentations.
My first question is for Mr. Betts. Excuse my ignorance, but how many hectares is 310 square kilometres?
Mr. Betts: I think that is 310 hectares, because it is a kilometre squared. You are throwing a trick question at me. No, a hectare is —
Mr. Walsh: It is a lot.
Mr. Betts: What is a hectare? A hectare is a thousand by thousand. You have embarrassed me on that point. I went all the way to the Hill in Ottawa and could not translate a square kilometre to a hectare.
Senator Plett: I apologize for that. That was not my intent.
Mr. Betts: It is a lot of area. A hectare is a Canadian football field, and a square kilometre is much larger than that. The real question is how many football fields fit in a square kilometre. I will have to default, but you can use your imagination.
Senator Plett: It is a large area. No worries. I am trying to visualize how many hectares the Binta fire was. I think you said it was 310 square kilometres.
Mr. Betts: It went to 40,000 hectares, so 40,000 football fields. That may help make it more recognizable. A hectare is not all that well understood.
Senator Plett: Did I understand you correctly when you said the Binta fire was actually not put out by human efforts, but we waited for snow or rain?
Mr. Betts: I took some liberty, hyperbolizing somewhat to make my point. In that case, there were certainly suppression attempts, but while it was making its run, we basically stood back. When the weather cooled off, we tried to get at it. Ultimately, what puts these fires out is the snow in the winter, because the fire will get down into the undergrowth and stay there. Sometimes they can survive that. The fire was eventually suppressed, but the weather had to change and turn to cooler weather, and the cold front that came through probably brought some rain as well. Those are contributing factors.
Senator Plett: My brother lives in Kelowna, so I was involved long distance when that fire went through. They were concerned about their own place.
You said there had not been a fire there for many years and, close to where you live, I think you said for 100 years. I gathered that this is not necessarily a good thing. It is good to have fires every seven to ten years. Did I understand that correctly?
Mr. Betts: It makes sense when you look at the forest from a harvest perspective. Nature's behaviour on the landscape may seem profligate — why is it burning every seven years? With good reason, we thought, also to protect ourselves, to suppress fire was a good idea, and it is good in that sense in that we have created a tremendous inventory of wood on the land. However, it had some unintended consequences in that it began to deprive the landscape of its normal disturbance patterns.
The consequence now, we are finding, is that we end up with more trees on the landscape than the landscape can normally support. Those trees become stressed due to the pathogens and pests, and they lend themselves to fire as the outcome. Nature tries to come back, and it eventually does come back; nature always bats last in these situations.
Therefore, I would not want to say either one is good or bad but rather that we are living with the consequences of taking disturbance out. We thought what we were doing was making sense. However, now we have to adapt to the new circumstance we have created.
I will also add that climate change will exacerbate whatever conditions we have created on the land. As the climate tends to get drier and hotter, we will have longer fire seasons, and we will have a greater period of exposure to the forest types of which we have interrupted the normal disturbance patterns. I do not mean to give you an evasive answer, but it is both good and bad.
The Deputy Chair: I will interrupt. Using modern technology, our researcher found that one square kilometre is 100 hectares.
Senator Plett: I know that is what you were intending to say on the record, if you had just been given another minute. Thank you.
During your presentation, you spoke about research and development. You mentioned something at the start that has concerned us while doing this study for a little over the past year. I remember vividly that we had architects in here a year and a bit ago who were telling us that they could not get young people to get into and stay in the programs for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was because they could not get jobs.
Mr. Walsh: These are architects you are talking about?
Senator Plett: Yes. However, you were saying the same thing, that one reason people are not studying the forests is because they will not have jobs when they get out of school. I think you further alluded to a shortage of research dollars, and you also talked about forestry having a bad name, though I am not sure you used that phrase. Why does forestry have a bad name?
Other companies we have talked about, such as concrete and steel companies, do a lot of self-promoting. Why does your organization not do more self-promotion?
Mr. Walsh: We do not do self-promotion very well because I work for the government, and no one believes the government. It reminds me of the same situation with the seal hunt: No one likes to see little seals getting banged over the head. In the same degree, no one likes to see a tree cut down. If you walk down the streets of Toronto and ask whether trees should be cut down, you will get ``no'' for an answer, because, people will say, ``they are good for the environment.''
We have an urban population and a rural and Northern population. The urban population does not really understand the forest industry. I am sure when you did your tours some of you folks had your eyes opened with some of the things that go on with forestry.
That is where the voting public is and where the policies are made. There is not a great understanding of sustainable forest management and the benefits it can provide.
I think I have answered your question regarding why we are not promoting. The forest industry has the same challenge we do. People do not believe that this is good because they are in it to get the wood out and process it for their own profit.
Third-party forest certification goes a long way to start to get people to understand that sustainable forest management is a healthy thing. There were some federal government programs where we brought people over from some of the markets, the U.S. or Europe, and gave them tours of the forest. When they left, every one of those folks said, ``I did not know this. Why are you not telling your story?'' It is a hard story to tell, and people are not that interested because they are living in urban areas. In my mind, that is the answer.
Senator Plett: Is third-party certification equivalent to seeing a certification tag somewhere on a box of corn flakes? Is that what you are talking about? I think we had witnesses in here a week ago talking about that.
Mr. Walsh: Right. They do not believe governments or industry, so there are third parties that set a forestry standard. They will go around and certify your forest independently, saying, ``Yes, that is a well-managed forest.'' Presumably, they are easier to believe because they are independent.
The real reason companies get certified is so they can sell their products into markets that have demanded that sort of an unbiased viewpoint.
Senator Plett: Ms. Bigué, I am hoping I did not lose anything in the translation. You were talking about developing larger trees, and you alluded to the fact that you needed government support in doing so. Was I off somewhere, or am I correct in that?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: The idea is not necessarily to develop larger trees. The goal is for each tree to produce a larger volume of wood. By planting trees and by doing all the silvicultural work required, we produce a lot more wood on plantations than in the great natural forest.
As I said in my presentation, the forest managed traditionally gives a yield of about 2 m3 of wood per hectare, whereas on genetically enhanced tree plantations, we noticed that the result was high-performance trees that produce very large quantities of wood in a small area.
Have I answered your question?
[English]
Senator Plett: Yes, I think you have.
I think Mr. Betts said in his presentation that we had enough forests that we can harvest in British Columbia to heat all of British Columbia for forever and a day. I am wondering why it is necessary to do what you are suggesting. If we have all the forest that we need and more, why would we need to do what you are suggesting?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: I think we have to look at the situation in the long term. We currently cut fewer trees and hope that it is temporary. I think we are going to need a lot of wood in the future.
In Quebec and in Canada, there is social pressure to increase our network of protected areas so that we preserve biodiversity and adopt greener forest management practices respecting the natural disturbance processes. So overall, we cut less wood in our great natural forest.
If we want the forestry industry to continue to flourish and be economically viable, we have to have wood. There are a lot of developing products coming out—biofuel, bioenergy and biorefinery, not to mention the traditional wood industry.
If we want to accommodate society's new values, which are to preserve the forest and have a flourishing forestry industry, we have to have wood. How will we be able to produce wood if we can harvest less of it in the future?
We think that we have been developing trees that perform well for over 40 years. For 40 years, we have been selecting trees that, from generation to generation, provide more cubic metres per hectare than those growing in a natural forest. They could be planted in smaller areas, in other words, near rural communities or close to lumber mills. That way, we would produce enough wood, and we could even produce more than we currently do to meet a growing need if the forestry industry bounces back. We could also accommodate other uses while increasing biodiversity and preserving protected areas.
This is why we need to use this as a basis to adopt a new way of looking at forest management in Canada.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: I want to discuss the Binta Lake fire. Was that forest properly managed? Who are the managers? Are the provincial and federal governments involved in managing that forest?
Mr. Betts: Yes. This Crown land is the responsibility of the province. It was working with licensees on the landscapes who were working within their normal references. I did not mean to imply any form of negligence on behalf of the provincial owner, the Crown or the behaviour of the licensees. They were harvesting as the market dictates and the regulations allow. Of course, in the other areas affected by the pine beetle, a force of nature moved through the landscape with regard to whatever designations we might have in terms of regulation and responsibility.
Senator Mahovlich: What would have happened to those pine beetles? Would the fire have destroyed them?
Mr. Betts: By the time that fire went through, the pine beetles were long gone. They are on a two-year cycle. They fly in and infect trees, lay their eggs, do their galleries, cut off the circulation in the tree and are gone within a year or two. In fact, some of them blew across the continental divide and landed in Alberta a few years ago. Apparently, they came in thick clouds. They normally fly only a little bit but their numbers are so beyond the pale and off the scale that we have not seen the likes of it before.
Senator Mahovlich: Prior to November, if they had gone in and burned 4,000 hectares to make a strip, would that have helped?
Mr. Betts: That kind of idea is what we will have to look at. We also have a mosaic of harvests on land already. In fact, one of the problems we have right now is that the landscape is so able to burn. I have described how the plantations have the finer fuel and the stands have that fuel matrix. We are having trouble about where to anchor a fire line.
Senator Mahovlich: Maybe you could build a canal.
Mr. Betts: What we will do goes to Ms. Bigué's point about some of these special fast-growing trees. We might want to put in corridors of fast growing deciduous trees to interrupt the conifers. It is kind of simplistic forestry, and there will be lots of controversy about cutting swaths, but we would not do that. There is a lake and an old burn. We would try to take the heat out of the landscape and break the fuel up. It would not be a swath. We would break up the fuel so the fires cannot get up a head of steam. We have seen in the U.S. and a bit in Canada that when fire hits a treated stand where the fuel has been removed, the fire drops out of the crown; its intensity goes away; there is no 400-metre flame wall; and the fire severity is reduced. The fire moves through politely, and we can get in there with our crews and settle it down. That is what we have to start doing across the province, so your idea of a canal is not far off.
Senator Mahovlich: With respect to plantation forests, years ago mahogany was a popular tree for furniture. Do they have mahogany plantations in the United States?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: I could not tell you.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: Are there any in South America?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: Yes, probably.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: Could this committee see a plantation? Does Europe have plantations?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: You can come to Quebec. We have plantations of fast-growing tree species in Quebec. But not very many.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: Do you have a maple plantation?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: A number of companies in Quebec have gotten into planting fast-growing tree species, including two major companies — Domtar and Norampac.
Domtar is located in the Eastern Townships. It has private land, and it plants 500 hectares of fast-growing tree species. It has done this every year since the early 2000s. It plants hybrid poplars. Domtar produces coated paper, a type of fine paper. It also managed to certify its private land by planting fast-growing tree species.
Norampac is located in Quebec in the Lower St. Lawrence region. This company also has private land. It is also developing plantations of hybrid poplars around the mill. It's a subsidiary of Cascades and makes cardboard.
If you would like to see the plantations of fast-growing trees, we would be pleased to arrange a guided tour. We have wonderful things to show you. The plantations have been in operation for over 10 years. The trees can grow up to three metres a year. You can practically sit and watch them grow.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: I am from Northern Ontario, and I do not remember ever seeing a plantation up there. Do we have them in Ontario?
Mr. Walsh: Yes. We have similar situations in Northern Ontario to those in Quebec. Our Crown Forest Sustainability Act requires that we emulate natural disturbances and try to maintain as natural a forest as possible. Intensive plantations where they do a lot of spacing, thinning, pruning and fertilizing are not practised much. There are plantations in Ontario. We have between 63 million and 80 million trees planted per year. They are not the sort of plantations that are highly intensively managed. We have an environmental assessment in Ontario that allows us to do forestry, and we have to do it in a certain way. It does not allow us on Crown land to do irrigation, fertilization and things like that. There would have to be changes if we wanted to look at trying to farm the forest. We are talking about the difference between a plantation and a forest farm. Environmentalists are against moving towards the forest farm because it reduces the biodiversity and habitat to support wildlife in the natural environment. We are not at that stage.
As was said earlier, taking fewer hectares and getting more out of them would allow more naturally managed areas to provide landscapes. That concept has been bantered about quite a bit.
You can take the committee to Costa Rica if you want to see some good mahogany plantations.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: I do not think we'll be going to Costa Rica tomorrow.
[English]
Senator Eaton: Thank you for your presentations. Mr. Betts, I will follow up on Senator Plett's questions. There have been many discussions around Yosemite Park and whether to let the fire burn or try to stop it. Are we going to continue to rush in and stop our forest fires, or is there valid debate about trying to let nature take its course?
Mr. Betts: That is a very good question. In this case I cannot tell you what that course would be. We have thrown nature off so much that if we were to let nature take its course, the consequences might be severe.
Nevertheless, we will have to start looking at that. If we let a fire burn because we cannot afford to fight it, that is a different situation than letting a fire burn because it will accomplish a definite environmental objective.
Senator Eaton: Like cleaning up the forest.
Mr. Betts: Yes. I am concerned that we do not have the science in place to make those calls on the landscape. That is one of the areas where I think the federal and provincial governments need to work together quickly to try to map out what a fire would do if it were to take off from point A. Would it do the scenario that I described with the lattice work of fuel? Would it end up with many football fields of moon dust in its wake?
Senator Eaton: Ontario does not have the pine beetle. Every summer, I sit in Georgian Bay and I watch the water bombers go over. What kind of policy does Ontario have? Has it thought about that?
Mr. Walsh: In terms of fire management policies?
Senator Eaton: Yes.
Mr. Walsh: We have different regions within the province. In the area where the forest harvesting and the forest industry take place, we have a certain level of fire response. If there is a natural fire and if it will damage wood that some mill is relying on, then we will endeavour to go and control that fire. Beyond a certain level north of that, in the Far North, we allow the fires to burn naturally unless they are encroaching on a community, usually on a First Nation community in that part of the province.
Within provincial parks, where the objective of the management of the park is to provide natural burn, when there is a lightning strike and natural fire, you would allow that to burn to a certain degree before being worried about the risk of its jumping out and spotting out and going towards communities.
Senator Eaton: Do you think that is good forest management, or is it politically expedient to do it that way?
Mr. Walsh: When you are protecting communities, I think the public would demand that communities be protected. If that is what you mean by political, yes, that would be a political thing, as well as an economic thing, and it has a human safety component as well.
Senator Eaton: Dealing with the public more, in your remarks you were talking about the urban population and that people do not understand. There are then people who do live in the wilds and have a more general understanding of how good wood is. I get annoyed now when I go into Toronto and if I do not come in with a bag, I am charged 5 cents for a plastic bag. I keep wondering, why not have paper bags? I think the government has a huge responsibility in educating the public. The government is strong about no-smoking campaigns and all kinds of campaigns, but with such an important industry in Canada — and we have been listening to nine months of experts, from university professors, FPInnovations, foresters and officials from various companies — if nothing else, local governments can start educating kids in school. It is hugely important economically to this country and from an environmental point of view. I think sometimes the governments and the companies themselves have not been good about teaching kids that a tree has a life cycle and it is storing carbon now, but if it goes over the hill, it is no longer storing carbon.
Why do you think the government has been reluctant to take up the cause? It could be a sexy environmental cause. You go on about wind turbines; why not about the forests?
Mr. Walsh: I would have to agree with everything you just said. I do not make those kinds of decisions, but we have not been beyond making those types of recommendations in the past. It comes down to resources and being able to decide whether you will build a hospital or a highway —
Senator Eaton: Or a wind turbine?
Mr. Walsh: — versus taking the resources required to brand Ontario's forests and the marketing of the forests for the products that it develops. I think we have done a remarkably poor job on that. There is responsibility on some associations as well, whether it is the Ontario Forestry Association — and I think you have heard from some of those folks — or the Ontario Professional Foresters Association. People from these associations who know about these things take it upon themselves to educate the masses, where the voters are in Southern Ontario, in our case.
Senator Eaton: I hope you go home and make that recommendation to your education minister.
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué, you spoke about natural genetic improvement. Are there universities doing research into genetically modified trees?
Ms. Bigué: Yes. Researchers at Forestry Canada are working on creating genetically modified trees. Legislation in Canada currently prohibits planting genetically modified trees. But research is being done in Canada in this area, and I know researchers with Forestry Canada, and with Laval University and the University of Quebec, who are working on it. It's at the experimental stage.
What I'm talking about is trees that have been improved naturally from generation to generation.
Senator Eaton: Would you recommend that we spend more on genetically modified trees?
Ms. Bigué: Right now, we have genetically enhanced trees that we are not putting to good use. We should start by making good use of those trees, which we've been developing for over 40 years. If you only knew how much money has been invested in this in Canada; it isn't giving the desired returns. They need to be planted with the silvicultural treatments required. For us, that means tree plantations with genetically enhanced trees. This is where I would start.
Other countries, like China, plant genetically modified trees. They have fewer environmental constraints there.
Senator Eaton: They use them in China?
Ms. Bigué: Yes. There is a dichotomy in the world, if I may say so; but for us, we still have environmental constraints. Some environmental groups have their points of view, and society is changing. So, I think that we should at least be able to plant these genetically enhanced trees that we have been developing in Canada for so many years and provide the treatments needed so that they give the volume and quality yields we want.
Right now, we are using these trees to fill in logged areas that haven't recovered well, and then we don't take care of them or we take very little care of them. This doesn't give the yields we want, and we really have to think about that.
Senator Eaton: We need to focus on that.
Ms. Bigué: Yes. It would be interesting, in any case.
[English]
Senator Marshall: I am interested in hearing each of your opinions on the general condition of the forests in each of your jurisdictions. I know that is a fairly broad question, but when I hear Ms. Bigué speak about plantations, I get the impression that in Quebec you are in pretty good shape. However, when I hear about the forest fires out West, I get the impression that maybe British Columbia has some problems.
Could each of you give some idea as to what the condition is of your forests and also what else needs to be done, and could you talk a bit about silviculture and whether the forests are regenerating on their own?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: I think that it's important to preserve natural regeneration. When we log a forest, if the forest doesn't adequately regenerate itself naturally, we need to at least keep the forest cover the way it was before the logging. It's important so that we don't lose what we had. As I said, we can now do better with plantation forestry. I don't know if I covered all the aspects of your question.
[English]
Senator Marshall: In Quebec is there still a lot to be done, or is the province keeping up with what is happening? The trees are being cut. Are they replanting the trees?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: We have an umbrella act; in other words, when forests do not regenerate well, we must replant trees where needed. New legislation was also adopted recently.
[English]
Senator Marshall: Would it be the province, the government that monitors that? Who ensures that the work is being done?
[Translation]
Ms. Bigué: Yes. Now, with the new legislation, the province would proceed with management plans. However, it's fairly complicated because, before getting to the management plans, land development plans will be established by the local communities. An entire process has been put in place so that people are more concerned about forest management in Quebec.
[English]
Senator Marshall: What is happening in Ontario?
Mr. Walsh: In Ontario we have similar legislation that requires that every hectare that is harvested be regenerated according to the prescription in a sustainable forest management plan approved for each forest. For every cubic metre of wood harvested, a certain amount of money goes into a designated trust fund called the Forest Renewal Trust. That is a government pot of money. Companies are responsible for regenerating the land according to the plan, and they are reimbursed from that fund to pay for the silviculture on the forest.
During the implementation of the plan there is a monitoring that goes on, both by the industry itself — and they have to report to us — and as well by the government, with spot checks and so forth. Every five years an independent forest audit is done on each forest to verify that that management is taking place. A report is provided to the legislature on the results of that. I would have to say we are moving towards the desired future forest condition that we have planned out. However, that does not mean there is not room for improvement to the practices to increase the yield, like some of the things Ms. Bigué has been saying, and to do stand improvement. Nature has given us forests that can always be improved upon in their production of quality products that can be used in a mill.
Senator Marshall: You mentioned a fund where money is put in and used for silviculture or whatever. We are in hard economic times. Is that fund still intact? Is that still working as initially envisioned?
Mr. Walsh: It is intact. As I said, for every cubic metre they harvest, they pay; they cannot harvest if they cannot pay. We are required to keep a minimum balance in that account.
There have been situations where companies have gone bankrupt, and that has created challenges for the government. In a couple of instances the government has had to top up the funds. By law we have to have that money there to regenerate the forests.
Senator Marshall: Those reports being generated are generally positive, as opposed to critical?
Mr. Walsh: They are generally positive. Every auditor has recommendations for improvement. For example, there are areas where we can do more tending. When you go out and plant trees, you cannot just walk away and think everything is good. You have to come back, just like a farmer, and take care of the weeds or the competing vegetation, or your trees could die. In some cases they say we have not done enough of that, so we endeavour to do more. I think that is it.
Senator Marshall: It sounds like it is progressing as it should.
What is happening in British Columbia?
Mr. Betts: Like the other two jurisdictions, we have regulations that require reforestation.
Since I have been in the business, and it goes back to the 1970s, we have planted six billion trees. There was a massive reforestation effort. Any area that is disturbed for logging, we are doing a pretty good job of cleaning up. We used to have a backlog, and that was cleaned up by both federal and provincial dollars during the 1980s and 1990s through the Forest Resource Development Agreement. We managed to get to the backlog areas where we had let things go, and we brought them up.
As I have described, we now have a problem with 18 million hectares that have been attacked by the beetle. We now have the threat that that landscape poses. We have $10 billion worth of investments in reforestation, plantation and fertilization on the landscape.
There is a huge debate going on as to what area is not sufficiently restocked in British Columbia. What area is not regenerating trees right now in the wake of the mountain pine beetle, in the wake of fire and on lands that we have managed and so forth? To give you an idea of the estimates, because we have not been able to get out on the landscape to make sense of it, it ranges from 200,000 hectares, upwards to 9 million hectares.
We have only been able to do some sampling on the landscape around what is regenerating naturally. We think that somewhere in the order of 60 per cent of the area that has been hit is starting to come back, but not in nice, neatly defined areas. It is kind of patchy.
If you put it in the context of a fire threat, whether it is regenerating or not becomes beside the point if the landscape is loading itself with fuel. We are in an age of uncertainty as to what the future holds. Historically, we have been doing a good job of managing, but now we are confronted with something beyond anything that our regulations have allowed.
There is a tendency to not do anything bold right now because we do not know what it will do, and that is holding us back from moving decisively. We are at a point where we need to throw a few efforts at the wall to see what works and what does not. Nature will not be fooled, and it is moving inexorably in the direction of more Binta Lake fires, things on the scale of Yosemite fires, that kind of stuff. There will be a slate-cleaner on the landscape, which will be a setback for the investments we have made to date, as well as what it provides for the future, to say nothing of the immediate threat.
Senator Marshall: For the areas that have been burned over, does that damage the soil, or is there a special challenge with regard to regeneration there?
Mr. Betts: Yes, I think the soil has been damaged, but we have not been able to do that kind of fire effects study yet.
Most of the modelling we do on fires has been built on information we got from the boreal forests. The forests in British Columbia behave differently. We are just now seeing this new fire behaviour and trying to make sense of it.
We have seen areas where the landscape has been converted to what I call moon dust, and that will take a lot of time to recover. We have seen that south of the border, in the Wenatchee forest, and of course back in 1910, all through Idaho and Montana. There were huge fires back in that generation. We know that tremendous damage can be done.
What our exposure is to this point is hard to say. I hate to get on this pulpit all the time, but if you look at climate change and the circumstances on the landscape, the trend is toward more damaging fires of that type. Also, there is fire behaviour that will kind of catch us by surprise.
My principal concern is we are being judicious about how we apply our suppression crews, and we are trying not to put people in jeopardy. We will be forced again and again to make tougher decisions. We have 11,000 kilometres of transmission line in the province. That is the major grid. It actually literally sags in the summer due to the draw, if I understand the way that electricity is wheeled. The air conditioners in California depend on our lines. You see where I am going with this.
Also, there are watersheds, which I did not dwell on. My city of Nelson has a beautiful natural watershed. It does an excellent job. We are wasteful in our use of water. If that were to burn, we would suddenly have to create municipal infrastructure to create that. We will be pushed more and more with these kinds of decisions, which risks putting our resources into jeopardy.
[Translation]
Senator Chaput: Ms. Bigué, your presentation was very interesting, and my first questions are for you.
When you told us about the Quebec Intensive Silviculture Network and its various players, you mentioned universities, the federal and provincial levels of government, industries and major private sector organizations. Where do municipalities fall into this?
Ms. Bigué: Municipalities are not involved. It is a network for research, development and knowledge transfer. The municipalities are not involved as members of the network. However, if it is in their interest, they are informed.
Senator Chaput: If municipalities want to become a partner, do you accept them?
Ms. Bigué: Yes. If they want to work on the same thing as us.
Senator Chaput: I understand. Then you told us about new ways to encourage the best possible practices. You explained what some of these are or what your model was. Have you spoken with stakeholders in other provinces or is it currently a Quebec model, in Quebec and for Quebec?
Ms. Bigué: We belong to the Poplar Council of Canada. This organization develops enhanced trees and is interested in doing so in other provinces. I do not know whether the model in other provinces is the same as the Quebec model we are proposing.
Senator Chaput: Right now, it's the Quebec model.
Ms. Bigué: I do not know if this is the case because it is not a Quebec model, as such. We talk about the TRIAD concept, for example, which aims to protect the forest. We want to increase the network of protected areas, create a more ecosystemic development and, through a third party, do intensive silviculture. The idea originated with American researchers. So the model isn't uniquely Quebecois.
Senator Chaput: So the model could apply to other provinces if there was interest?
Ms. Bigué: Absolutely.
Senator Chaput: You have partly answered my question, but is this practice used outside Canada?
Ms. Bigué: Plantation forestry is used in Brazil and New Zealand, for example. New Zealand has a very large area of natural forest. The pinus radiata is grown in a very small part.
Senator Chaput: And it has been successful?
Ms. Bigué: Oh, absolutely.
[English]
Senator Chaput: Mr. Walsh, in your presentation, I believe you talked about thinking about the future in regard to a strong labour force because, according to what you have told us, it will be needed. I believe you said there should be an Aboriginal focus on that labour force. Is this just an idea, or has it gone further than just being an idea? In other words, has it been discussed with Aboriginal peoples? Is there an interest on their part to be part of this?
Mr. Walsh: There is. In fact, I mentioned earlier that we have an environmental assessment coverage approval to do forestry in Ontario as long as we follow certain conditions, and one of the conditions we have to follow is to try to involve the Aboriginal people more in the economic benefits from the management of the forest sector. Every district manager within Ontario has a responsibility to communicate with the Aboriginal communities and work with the companies, the government and the Aboriginal community to try to find ways to involve them more in the economy.
There is a whole host of examples where they have been more involved, and yes, they do have a great interest in becoming involved because they are looking for economic opportunities to help with the social issues they find on their reserves. They are looking for jobs and employment and economy.
Senator Chaput: Would it go as far as training or teaching whatever needs to be taught in schools and colleges?
Mr. Walsh: We have some provincial programs in place. One is at Confederation College in Thunder Bay. It is an Aboriginal forestry program. There have been programs in other community colleges where we have tried to support the development of interested Aboriginal people in getting that forestry education.
As well, the various districts have planning teams set up, and they have local citizens' committees. They also have committees set up with Aboriginal people, and they meet to engage them in forestry and educate them about the impacts of forestry and the activities, and they are learning that way as well.
Senator Chaput: Thank you.
Mr. Walsh: It could improve. There could be more.
Senator Duffy: Mr. Betts, I was fascinated by your slide show on the Binta Lake fire. You talked about clear-cut areas where fuel was left behind. Then, later in your presentation, you made reference to the idea of using this fuel, the scrap wood, as it were, for other purposes such as generating heat or presumably steam, electricity, whatever, by burning it.
What are the economics here? Is there a commercial value in that fuel that has been left behind? We have heard many stories about modern logging techniques and how they squeeze every last bit out of a log. Why would they not take that and make use of it now if it were of some commercial value?
Mr. Betts: That is a good question, which is code for I really do not know. To be honest with you, the industry does use some of what is called bycatch, and that is a by-product of their harvest processes, and also what is left over from their sawmilling. They use that in some cases to power their mills. That makes logical sense to them. In the current market conditions, from their perspective, they are not set up to chip that wood or put it into pellets, so it has not attracted their attention.
We are having trouble figuring out what the commercial potential is. Our sector thinks that, on the landscape, there is about $48 billion worth of thermal heat out there, sitting there in dead wood, which I will say will convert itself into fire and flame and smoke. We are just beginning to make the business case for that now.
One of the problems we have is that much of our mapping does not recognize this biomass on the landscape properly, so when we are asking whether we can make money on this, we are working from inventories that do not reflect what is actually there. They also tend to run it through the old economy, which typically does not place a high value on this. Also, we do not have the schools yet. We do not have the reactors or the facilities in place yet to actually take and pay a premium for this. We are caught at a crossroads where circumstances are conspiring to get this off the ground.
We can do better analyses that actually recognize the inventory as it truly is on the land, not reflecting just saw logs but that there is biomass out there. We tend to think of electricity for this. I am saying no, because B.C. has a lot of gravity and water, which you cannot compete against for generation. Our main value will be thermal energy. You always hear that natural gas is trading at $6 in some places, but that tends to be the price you get where they are wheeling and dealing in a commodities market. When you finally get to the burner tip in the individual community, the price is higher than that. It might be twice or three times that.
Those business cases have yet to be made. We are working to make them now, and we need to do some research, and that is where the federal government can help us make those arguments. You also need to factor in other consequences of some abstract arguments, such as that it makes perfect sense because we have avoided costs. All those arguments make the business case ambiguous.
Senator Duffy: We have had witnesses, and the chair knows it well because I believe they were woodlot owners from New Brunswick, who talked about having small community thermal plants fuelled by biomass from the local area that had been left behind by logging operations in New Brunswick. On a small scale and in that limited geographic area, one can see it. Even in my home city of Charlottetown, we are burning garbage and other waste, other biofuels, to generate steam, which heats I believe about 85 buildings in the capital, including the university and the hospitals and so on. The technology seems to be there. However, I would think that in the vast spaces of British Columbia, the haulage distance to nearby communities would also perhaps be a factor, but I believe you are on to something that would solve two or three different problems if we were to go down that road. Who takes the lead? How do we get this beyond our committee here?
Mr. Betts: I asked myself why I would come here to make a presentation. Frankly, I am looking for champions or people in government who can help change the paradigm that currently dominates. You have hit it on the head there, Senator Duffy. We do not have to do this on a grand scale. We are not talking about bringing in Singaporian investments to build a big, massive plant that will consume everything.
No, let us start from a sensible place; let us make the economic case for individual communities. They will be small. In a sense, they will be looking at a bio-energy reserve, which is a concept we are trying to get through. In that situation, they manage that threat I portrayed, convert that threat into their local economy, reforest and also manage the landscape. That is the scale.
You can take out some of these diesel generators that are working in First Nation communities and stop taking natural gas from our good neighbours in Alberta. It works together on that.
Where does it get momentum from? I do not know the answer to that question. I have been on the margins of politics, as have you as a reporter. When does an idea suddenly get that gravitational pull and become an initiative? What is the mystery behind politics, where what makes sense suddenly emerges as the thing to do? Will we need a few more Kelowna accords before we get there, though I hate to draw that dreadful comparison? What will it take?
I think it will take some champions within the government. Groups like mine are small entrepreneurs. We live on the margins of the economy. We would like to think that makes us smart and more nimble. In many respects, we are willing to engage, whereas the licensees are wedded to a whole different approach to forestry. I am trying to choose my words carefully. They are not really set up for this. I think they would like to control this, but I do not know whether their hearts are interested in getting into this.
However, groups like my smaller players and many of the harvest contractors are buying chippers and making money. They are selling and it and making sense. That is how the entrepreneurial system works. Maybe that is how this will evolve. You just need to create conditions on the landscape through some tenure reform and again through people who are prepared to champion this. There are many forces and imperatives working against it. I am not saying there is a conspiracy, but this is a radical departure from how we have done business before. We need to act on it soon.
In a sense, I am echoing your question back, and I do not know if I answered it.
Senator Duffy: I am sure I speak for all senators in saying that we enjoyed your presentation, and we thank you for coming. We are sorry that business across the street in the big chamber kept us from the committee chamber, but we appreciate your making time for us.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Senator Duffy. I must bring to the floor the experience a few members of this committee had when we visited Williams Lake in British Columbia. They did exactly what you were suggesting, Senator Duffy. What brought them together was a need to have a better community, where the sawmills and pellet mill came together and decided that they should do something with the forest because this was the community's way of life.
They had sawmills, and they had power production through the things that they were not using in the mills. They left some on the forest floor — not all of it, but they had to leave some there to ensure there was enough to cover the forest floor.
It was just people coming together and wanting to make better use of their resource. I think that is very good example.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: I have a question for Ms. Bigué. You were talking about genetic enhancement.
Ms. Bigué: Yes.
The Deputy Chair: You then said genetically modified. It's not the same thing in my mind.
Ms. Bigué: No.
The Deputy Chair: We need to watch the terms we use because they could cause us problems, couldn't they?
Ms. Bigué: Yes. So, in the presentation, I was only talking about genetic enhancement. That's the material we're working with, but someone asked me about genetic modification. This is why I try to make the distinction between genetically enhanced and genetically modified. Basically, they are concepts that we explain over and over so people don't get confused. There is Canadian legislation that prohibits planting genetically modified trees. It is very important to make this distinction.
The Deputy Chair: That's why I asked the question. We need to agree on the terms.
Ms. Bigué: We are working on genetically enhanced trees.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
I would like to thank you for taking the time to present to us. We have discussed silviculture, among other things. We will certainly take your comments into account when we draft our report.
So, thank you, everyone. If you have other comments to make later, please contact our clerk. We will be happy to hear from you.
We had a second part to our agenda, which was the consideration of future business and the budget.
The witnesses are now free to leave.
[English]
Do we do the second part tonight or do we put it off until Thursday morning? We have lost a few players because we started late because the Senate was sitting late.
Senator Marshall: I am a substitute, so I find it difficult to make a contribution regarding what we should do next because I do not know what we have done in the past.
Senator Duffy: Mr. Chair, we may want to wait until Thursday.
The Deputy Chair: Is it agreed? It is agreed.
With no further business, we have finished with our agenda.
(The committee adjourned.)