Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 11 - Evidence - December 2, 2010
OTTAWA, Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 9 a.m. to study the current state and future of Canada's forest sector.
Senator Percy Mockler (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, I see that we have quorum, so I declare the meeting in session. I welcome each and every one of you this morning to the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. My name is Senator Percy Mockler, from New Brunswick, and I am chair of the committee. At this time, for the benefit of the witness, I would like to start by asking the senators to introduce themselves starting on my left.
Senator Mercer: Senator Terry Mercer from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: Good Morning, I am Fernand Robichaud, from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Mahovlich: Frank Mahovlich, Ontario.
Senator Fairbairn: Joyce Fairbairn from Southern Alberta.
Senator Meighen: Michael Meighen from Southern Ontario.
Senator Ogilvie: Kelvin Ogilvie, Nova Scotia.
Senator Eaton: Nicole Eaton, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Rivard: Good morning, I am Michel Rivard, from the province of Quebec.
The Chair: Thank you very much, honourable senators.
[English]
Today we welcome Ms. Barb Thomas, Chairperson of the Executive Council from the Poplar Council of Canada. Ms. Thomas, thank you very much for accepting our invitation to share with us your expertise, opinions and vision on the mandate of the committee.
Ms. Thomas is the second-last witness we will hear from. The last presentation will be next Tuesday, and then we will proceed to writing the report.
Honourable senators, the witness has presented a document but in only one official language. Is it agreed the presentation will be distributed today and then in the other language when it is translated?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Thank you, honourable senators.
Ms. Thomas, we again thank you for accepting our invitation. We ask you to make your presentation, which will be followed by questions from the honourable senators. You have the floor.
Barb Thomas, Chairperson of the Executive Council, Poplar Council of Canada: Thank you for the invitation to come here today.
Today I will give a brief overview of some thoughts from the Poplar Council of Canada. My opening slide just gives you an idea of a plantation that is currently growing in Northern Alberta in front of a large and active pulp mill. We see this as a huge Canadian opportunity.
Who is the Poplar Council of Canada? We are a group committed to promoting the wise use and conservation of both poplars and willows. We see our role as facilitating the exchange of information and promoting sound policies for management and conservation of poplars. Our membership is diverse and national in scope. We have members who are farmers, academics and everything in-between.
The organization has two very active working groups: the pesticide working group and the genetics working group. We also have 12 board members, who all contributed in their way to helping with this presentation today.
What makes poplars an interesting tree to speak about and to consider? It is very fast growing. It is a great potential for carbon sinks, and when you link the best site with the best clone with the best culture, silviculture, that is when we achieve that growth.
Poplars are hardy and can be selected for all regions of Canada. They are very easy to breed and to produce new material from. You need a branch and a bucket of water. You can take that branch and flower it and collect pollen and flower the females and make crosses and produce seed from that. From those seedlings, you can then take cuttings like with many horticultural crops, and you can root those cuttings, so it makes it very easy to propagate.
Poplars are extremely multi-purpose. They are used for pulp, energy, reclamation and many new and emerging technologies as well, and they are widely distributed, found right across the country from the Yukon to Newfoundland.
Today I would like to focus on two groups. One is our native species. We have a wide range of balsam poplar and trembling aspen that grow right across the country. There are other species as well, but they have smaller distributions. The typical rotation length of the native species is 60 to 120 years — that would be in terms of harvesting them as a crop — and traditionally they have been used for pulp, oriented strand board and veneer.
On the other side, we have these hybrids. What makes them hybrids? It is taking and crossing two different species of poplar together to create progeny. There are many options available because you can breed many different species.
The rotation length can be brought down to 12 to 25 years, and that is because of hybrid vigour, just like we have seen with agricultural crops in the past, with corn and other such crops. Traditionally they have been used and introduced in Canada as windbreaks and shelterbelts right across the Prairies around farms, and they were selected because of that fast growth because people needed protection and needed it fast around their farms.
Currently there are two programs that have intermittent breeding. One is in Indian Head, and that is a joint program between Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and some industry; the other is in Quebec, and that is a provincial program.
To give you an idea of what these hybrids really look like, the left-hand side of the slide shows a hybrid between two different species of poplars, and you can see how enormous that tree is when you think about putting your arms around it. On the right-hand side is the parent. That would be the pure species parent, and I can put my arms all the way around that tree. They are the same age. The hybrids put their volume on in diameter, not in height. The height is about the same, but they put it all on in diameter.
Emerging uses and flexibilities that we see are for carbon sequestration for offsets. That would be one right off the top. Bio-energy is another huge opportunity. We speak a lot about the energy side as being the leftovers from the forest, the branches or the sawdust. This is talking about a purpose-grown bio-energy crop here. These trees can have that rotation shortened to three to four years on that type of a system. The willows in particular lend themselves well to this.
Phytoremediation is another area for which poplars have been used worldwide, and that is helping to clean up degraded sites, used for municipal waste, any number of situations like that.
Another quite new technology is nano-crystalline cellulose, or NCC. A pilot plant has either been built or is proposed to be built in Windsor. I believe that is linked with Domtar. This is a very interesting chemical use. It creates strength, particularly in things like paint. You can add a few drops to paint; it makes it very tough.
We hear a lot about ethanol production from things like corn, and this would be an alternate crop to use for ethanol production. In fact, there is a new plant in Boardman, Washington, to produce 1.2 million gallons of ethanol from hybrid poplar.
Another area I would like to mention is climate change forestry. That is where you have that short rotation, and therefore you can easily adjust and select for reduced moisture or warmer temperature conditions. As things change, you can turn over the crop with new selections.
I will speak now of some of the challenges. From a national perspective, we do not have a national breeding program. Some individual groups are doing some breeding for very specific purposes. To link with that breeding program, we then need to have rapid screening technologies for picking the best traits, and the best traits depend on what you want to use it for. Not one trait is necessarily going to suit all situations, but that is the flexibility.
Here are several examples. One is screening for high-density wood. That is a trait that could be used for multiple purposes. It could increase your energy output if you are using it for energy, and also it could increase your pulp output in a pulp mill, depending on the technology of the type of mill that it is.
Tolerance to challenging sites is another example. You can screen this material for better uptake of toxic or other types of site contaminations, or it could be used simply for municipal waste.
Another area, which has been a large challenge for hybrid poplars, is disease screening and resistance. There are resistant clones that can be selected. The beauty of this technology is that you can go in and pick individuals that will be disease-resistant. There are two main beasts that give us some challenges: One is Septoria stem canker, which with a single infection can weaken the stem, leading to breakage from wind throw; and the other is Melampsora leaf rust, which can basically defoliate the leaves, leaving no photosynthetic surface area and nothing to allow the tree to grow.
Interestingly, there are two proposals in with Genome Canada right now that both deal with issues around wood quality and disease-resistance screening.
I will show a couple of pictures just to give you an idea of what these things look like. This is a young hybrid poplar plantation growing in Alberta. This is a picture showing what that Septoria stem canker can look like. You can see why if a heavy wind came through those trees would go over. It is quite a sad sight.
These are some pictures from research. The student was looking at below-ground carbon and excavating out the roots of a hybrid poplar. This is a chamber system that can monitor and measure soil carbon.
Where do we see the opportunities? As I mentioned, there is a short rotation. It is a big jump to move down to 18 years from 60 or 80 years. We can breed for specific characteristics, as has been done for canola over many years. You understand what the parent characteristics are, and then you can breed them to produce them in the progeny.
We can pick the best individuals out of there. We can propagate them easily. Also, growing hybrid poplars provides some crop flexibility for farmers. They can put this on part of their land base and have their traditional agricultural crops on another part. It gives farmers a long-term investment. Farmers generally, certainly in Alberta, are getting older. The mean age has increased rapidly in the last few years, and they are having a hard time staying on the farm. This gives them an alternative.
It can also assist the forest industry with options — extensive management of their native versus having some intensive production sites where they can grow the same amount of fibre on a much smaller land base. They might need to look at those options because of their land being taken away due to development, due to oil and gas or due to any number of possible other competing uses of that land base.
Other industries can significantly benefit from carbon offsets and also simply from energy options.
I know silviculture was one of the main focuses of interest. We feel these are worth the investment, breeding the best clones and species for uses.
What are some of those uses? Fibre is still a very important use. Riparian rehabilitation could mean putting trees along edges of streams that are salmon spawning grounds, for example. They provide public enjoyment. Many hybrid poplars are grown in cities and parks because they grow fast and provide nice shade. There is also simply continued forest cover in some regions where climate change is moving in.
What is the best stock? How do we propagate this material? Should it be an unrooted cutting that is just a stem, or should we root it in the greenhouse? These are different technologies and silviculture tools that can be used to produce the crop. It is very important depending on what region of the country you are in and how much moisture there is.
For the best site selection to maximize yield and access to the best sites, we begin to get into the idea of public versus private land and availability of that land base for planting these hybrid poplars.
For the best site preparation and maintenance, what is the best fertilizer regime? How do we cultivate it properly? What about the use of herbicides? Herbicides in the right context can be extremely useful in removing competing vegetation when the primary crop is fibre.
There is maximum flexibility. There are many end uses a crop could go to, and that provides some economic flexibility for farmers or foresters.
I have a few more pictures. On the left-hand side, I am standing in front of a production bed called a stool bed. This is how we produce the material for the cuttings when we have a particular clone that we have selected and have identified that we want to use it in a program. There is a lot of material in one stem. You could take cuttings from that and then take that cutting and put it directly in the ground if you have enough moisture and heat, and it will sprout right from that cutting. You can grow it in the greenhouse and produce what is called a plug, not unlike the conifers, or you can have a long stem that you keep and you propagate for a bareroot cutting.
Policy and public perception are also extremely critical. Provincial regulations currently on the use of these hybrid poplars on Crown land vary from province to province. In B.C. you can plant hybrid poplars on Crown land. In Alberta you cannot. Some provinces I do not think have any regulations associated with it. Having access to a land base is an important way of being able to utilize this material. It is expensive to rent private land. It is flexible and can help us meet some of our climate change challenges, and this needs recognition and support.
Some provinces have afforestation protocols that are being developed. Many do not.
Regional considerations are necessary for research. You cannot take poplars and do all your research in one part of the country and expect it to be applicable in every other region, because poplars are quite unforgiving that way. We can select for each region, but you have to test them where you want to grow them.
Agricultural and tree crop policies are also variable. Again, in B.C., as long as your rotation is less than 12 years, as I understand it, it is considered agriculture. In Alberta, there are no regulations. In Quebec, if your private land is zoned for agriculture, you cannot put trees on it. Many different provincial policies limit access to land for planting this crop.
The public perception around planting hybrid poplar is critical for both on the farm and in the forest.
These are some of the products from pulp. These are energy pellets. These pictures came from Saskatchewan; the pellets are made from the hybrid poplar. There are some other ideas in B.C. This is furniture made from hybrid poplar. Again, from Saskatchewan, some different plywood options can be made from this product. This is a small-business farmer milling hybrid poplar at his own farm.
Finally, what do we see as the stability for this going forward? We need to develop and maintain a native and exotic collection of poplars for a national breeding program. We do not have all the species here in Canada that we need to do those crosses. Collections have been made in the past, and new collections need to be made and put on multiple sites across the country for flexibility in breeding as well as to reduce risk if, for example, one of these diseases came in and devastated the stand.
We need full rotation support for the research to maximize our knowledge. There was a program in the past, Forest 2020 PDA. Some of you may be familiar with it. It was very intense and for quite a short time period. It could have benefited from a little more lead time at the front end to get the right material prepared and monitoring on the post end to be able to see what happened with it. We need a bit more policy guidance on carbon.
We also need to coordinate land-use policy with the provinces for this short rotation crop, particularly on private land. Some farmers can grow them, while some farmers cannot, so the interest could be quite low in a region even though the opportunity and potential for an alternate crop might be there for that farmer.
We need to recognize the crop end-use flexibility and possibly consider some incentives for farmers to be growing this crop.
This is a picture of seed pods hanging off a female poplar in this corner. It is always a nice sign of spring when you see that hanging off the aspen trees. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Thomas. We will move to questions.
Senator Ogilvie: I have been very interested in your presentation today because over the course of my life I have seen many different views of the poplar and the willow. I wanted to ask you a couple of general questions first and then get perhaps into something more specific.
In the early slide where you showed that monstrous hybrid poplar, beautifully straight at the trunk and so on, how old was that tree?
Ms. Thomas: I am not exactly sure of the age of that tree. I took that picture on a field tour in the Pacific Northwest.
Senator Ogilvie: It was in the U.S.?
Ms. Thomas: It was in Washington, yes, but not unlike what you would see in B.C.
Senator Ogilvie: I thought the answer to the second part of that question would be B.C. because I cannot imagine a poplar tree that size existing anywhere east of B.C. I did not think that hybrids had been widely used in Canada for a very long time, at least on a deliberate basis. If it were another species, that tree would be quite old, so I am assuming that it is in the vicinity of 40 years or something of that nature. You do not know exactly?
Ms. Thomas: It is definitely younger than 40 years, yes. I would put it more in the 20- to 30-year range.
Senator Ogilvie: Good. That is where I wanted to come. That is really quite a remarkable tree, and I can imagine it growing that big that fast out in that condition, that climate, especially where it is surrounded by other large trees likely of other species somewhere in the vicinity so that the wind will not affect like it would on the Prairies. One problem with poplar is that it is not a tremendously strong tree, generally speaking.
You showed these deliberate plantations, and obviously most of those were relatively new. The trees that you showed were 15 or 20 feet high, so they are probably just a few years old, right? I was wondering what the uses were. You did show one example in Saskatchewan where it was being used for furniture, and there was at least one board there that had to be at least six inches wide. On the Prairies you are able to grow a poplar tree that is straight and strong enough to be able to take six- to eight-inch lumber out of it within 12 to 15 or 20 years?
Ms. Thomas: The plantation I showed you was being grown for pulp.
Senator Ogilvie: That was just an incidental use?
Ms. Thomas: No, that was the primary use.
Senator Ogilvie: No, you showed the furniture, so that was an incidental use, not a prime use of the plantation?
Ms. Thomas: That was an example of what hybrid poplar has been used for in the interior of B.C.
Senator Ogilvie: I am sorry. I thought you said Saskatchewan.
Ms. Thomas: That was the picture on the right.
Senator Ogilvie: I was wondering how you got a poplar tree that you could make that kind of furniture out of on the Prairies. I am familiar with them being used as a windbreak on a piece of property in Manitoba, and I did not think that I could see that.
My third general question is you used a 60- to 100-year rotation length for a poplar stand. What do you mean by a rotation cycle on a poplar stand?
Ms. Thomas: In that instance, I was referring to trembling aspen that would have been harvested or could have burned in the boreal forest and then regrown up to an age when it could be a harvestable tree for a forest company — merchantable rotation age.
Senator Ogilvie: Okay. My final question relates to the carbon offset side. In my neck of the woods, poplar and willow are about the dirtiest trees in the forest in that they shed continuously from very young; they propagate via roots; the young grow up around the base of the trees and die off very quickly. In other words, a tremendous amount of carbon is being regenerated very early in the life cycle of the poplars. Obviously you are developing hybrids, and maybe this is not the case in some of them, but in my real world, the willows shed like banshees. Under a willow tree is one of the greatest collections of branches and leaves that I find in the kinds of trees I am familiar with.
Given the fact that in the life cycle of a tree that is carbon neutral in the best of times, it is only a carbon sink in the first few years through the rapid initial growth phase, and given that the aspen and willow tend to shed a tremendous amount of carbon in their natural growth cycle, I am slightly skeptical of their being good for carbon. I know that earlier they were promoted as a great carbon sink with the possibility of using them as carbon offsets, but I have to say I am just a little skeptical of their value as a carbon offset or a carbon sink. Indeed, growing simply as trees, given that they have a very short lifetime to maturity, their net neutral impact on carbon occurs quickly relative to some longer- growing species.
Could you explain to me what you think you see as the real carbon offset value of aspen?
Ms. Thomas: Much of the land that these hybrid poplars are being put onto is previously cleared land, and so it is bringing lands that have been taken out of a forest base and putting them back into trees.
A great deal of maintenance goes on, so the suckering and dying that you speak of would not be part of this system. Over the course of a 20-year rotation, for example, there would be an increase in soil carbon; there would be an increase in below-ground carbon that is harder to measure and so often gets ignored. In the above-ground component, there would not be that shedding because the trees are not getting to the same age.
Then, depending on the end-use of that material, if it is going to pulp or oriented strand board or some other product, it can be in the system for a very long time storing carbon or into housing or some type of product.
The Climate Action Reserve, CAR, in California has put some permanence values on life-use of material in different products. For example, they have put pulp I believe for 100 years at about 6 per cent. They have put oriented strand board at about 58 per cent in terms of persistence and not being degraded and emitting.
Senator Ogilvie: Thank you very much.
Senator Mercer: Dr. Thomas, thank you very much for the presentation. It is fascinating. I am not as skeptical as my colleague Senator Ogilvie mainly because I may not be as knowledgeable of the science.
You are the second to last witness. We have finally found a tree that has a 12- to 25-year rotation. Those of us who visited a number of forests during this study know that 12 to 25 years is pretty fast in Canada.
How new is this technology? How new are the hybrids? Have they been around a long time? If so, how come they are not, pardon the pun, popular?
Ms. Thomas: As I mentioned, they have been used for shelterbelts for a hundred years on the Prairies. They are well- known in that type of scenario.
Senator Mercer: That is not the hybrids?
Ms. Thomas: Yes, the hybrids are exactly what is being planted because they grow quickly, and these farms needed fast protection from the wind. The agriculture station in Indian Head has distributed hybrid poplars for a hundred years. They have been breeding them intermittently, not throughout that entire time but for many years.
One reason it has not really been jumped on as an opportunity is that we have so much native forest. I do not think people saw a need to put land into intensive production and produce fibre when there were these vast forests out there.
Senator Mercer: If we are just in the business of carbon offsets and doing this for purely environmental aspects as opposed to a commercial aspect to harvest the trees, and, as I understand it, they will grow anywhere in the country and they grow quickly, it seems this is something we should pursue.
Why are you not able to plant these on Crown land in Alberta?
Ms. Thomas: Provincial policies allow only native species to be planted on Crown land. These are hybrids, and one parent may be from another country; for instance, it might be a Populus nigra from Europe that has been bred with our native balsam poplar. That is considered an exotic species, so it is not allowed to be grown on Crown land at the current time.
Senator Mercer: Following Senator Ogilvie's question, I noted that in your picture of the furniture, all the captions were correct — the furniture was from British Columbia — but you did show a small-business farmer in Saskatchewan milling. It looked like commercial length. I assume these were trees that were harvested in Saskatchewan. That means that they were growing tall and straight enough to produce commercial value lumber?
Ms. Thomas: The note sent to me with that photo indicated that, although this is what this farmer does, he was not sure that this actually was hybrid poplar that was being shown in the picture. That was a little misleading.
Senator Mercer: That is a necessary disclaimer.
Senator Ogilvie: That was the basis of my question; a little suspicious, as you noticed.
Senator Mercer: That is your nature.
[Translation]
Senator Rivard: We had several witnesses who told us that when comparing the growth rate of some trees, one is always envious of the situation of Brazil because, in that country, the temperature is favourable to tree growth.
Is it possible to compare the growth rate of the poplars of Canada with the eucalyptus of Brazil, for example? Naturally, the fact that there is snow here and not in Brazil should be taken into account. Since poplars grow fast, can a comparison be made between the two?
[English]
Ms. Thomas: The growth rates in Brazil are extremely high. As I mentioned, that rotation length can go from 12 to 25 years. I am not sure whether you are familiar with the term "mean annual increment'' — how many cubic metres can be grown per hectare per year. In British Columbia, those values can be up in the 30 to 40 range, which is extremely high. In Brazil, I believe those numbers exceed that, but that would be the most competitive comparison.
On the Prairies, we could be looking at numbers in the range of 12 to 18. Again, that leads to that difference in the rotations, to get comparable volumes. Yes, we cannot grow eucalyptus here, but we can grow hybrid poplars very quickly in the right regions and relative to a natural rotation, quite comparable.
[Translation]
Senator Rivard: To come back to Canada, how does the price per cubic meter of poplar wood compare with the price of traditional lumber such as spruce tree pulp or jack pine?
[English]
Ms. Thomas: I am not as familiar with the rate of conifers. However, I do know that in the boreal forest, the comparable growth rate for aspen would be 2 or 2.5 cubic metres. I believe that spruce, for example, would be in that same range for the boreal region. It is much slower, requiring the longer rotations to get a comparable amount of volume off the same piece of land, the same hectarage.
[Translation]
Senator Rivard: For how many years have the provinces been favouring the poplar along highways to make windbreaks? Is that a recent discovery or has it been there for more than 50 years?
[English]
Ms. Thomas: It is not recent. It is 100 years. That might be recent in some areas, but for Canada, there is a 100-year history of using these trees on the Prairies. Many of the first settlers actually brought hybrids with them from Europe, and then they were put in. As I mentioned, many of these trees were archived at the Indian Head Shelterbelt Centre, and then hybrids occurred at the facility just naturally. Those seeds were collected, and the trees were screened and tested. There is a long history, but it is in a different sector from forestry and therefore has been somewhat under the radar as an opportunity.
[Translation]
Senator Robichaud: Thank you, Madam, for your presentation.
[English]
In one of your slides, you show emerging uses and flexibilities. One of them is to clean up degraded or toxic sites. How much are these plants being used for those purposes?
We have many old dump sites. Have you succeeded in interesting those who own the sites, the provinces or the counties, to use this kind of plant?
Ms. Thomas: It has been much more commonly used in other parts of the world for cleanup of sites, including in the U.S. It is being used for garbage dumps around Chicago, for example, or can be used for dry cleaning sites or gas stations that have been abandoned. It has been quite underutilized in Canada as an opportunity. Some new work is going on for using it with sewage associated with various towns and communities. I know some work is being done in Alberta in that area. I believe it is a huge opportunity, and there has been some testing and use of it up in the oil sands area with some of their reclamation challenges.
Again, it simply has not been tested enough, or there has not been enough material available to screen for those sorts of purposes so that people look to this as an alternative to engineering feats that can fix many of these problems. It can be used in combination with some other mechanism. As a council, we have not promoted it per se ourselves, but we have information available, and we are trying to use opportunities such as this to be able to express that these trees can be used for a wide variety of activities.
In Sweden, a town I visited there had an energy plant that grew hybrid poplar and willow that was being used for energy to generate power for the community. Process water was then discharged from the plant, went through settling ponds and back through the plantations to be cleaned, essentially, before the water moved back into the regular system in the community. It was a lovely and elegant system to see in place.
Senator Robichaud: Somehow we have not succeeded in encouraging municipalities to go that way in Canada; have we?
Ms. Thomas: No. As I mentioned, some tests are being done now in Alberta, but it is very limited. Actually, in Vernon, British Columbia, some work was done, probably about 20 years ago, headed up by Dr. Mike Carlson.
Senator Robichaud: You show a slide of pellets here. Are there mills that use exclusively poplar to produce those pellets, or is that a mix?
Ms. Thomas: I am sorry, but I cannot answer that question. I am not sure. That was sent to me from a colleague in Saskatchewan, and he did not give me the details on exactly what the composition of the pellet was. I did visit a pellet plant recently down in Syracuse that was exclusively using poplars to produce pellets for energy. That was part of a meeting tour.
Senator Robichaud: I do not want to call it "waste,'' but were there other uses, and then what they could not use commercially in other applications was used for pellets; is that right?
Ms. Thomas: They were using the whole tree. They were using the fibre that you might typically think would go for the pulp and have just branches going for pellets. They were using the entire tree for the pellet as a grown crop.
Senator Eaton: To follow up on Senator Robichaud's question, I went around the University of Guelph. You know that they are doing experiments. They have a hybrid poplar that grows for 20 years that can be cut down every three years to this root. They harvest it and make pellets. They were doing interesting experiments with that.
Ms. Thomas: That was Andy Gordon's work?
Senator Eaton: Yes. Things are being done in the East as well as in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
When you talk about growing poplars faster and bigger, are you talking about genetic modification or just natural selection?
Ms. Thomas: We do have natural hybrids and hybrid zones where two different species overlap. For example, in Southern Alberta as well as in Quebec you have cottonwoods, P. deltoides, that hybridize with balsam. Those are natural hybrid zones. Then you can also take individuals and cross breed them, as I mentioned, like in the greenhouse.
It is a very simple system to be able to breed, so you can bring pollen from another species from Europe, for example, and have pollen come in and then be able to breed it. The males and females with poplars are on different trees, so there is no molecular, genetic lab-bench, if you will, manipulation of these trees. This is breeding with a paintbrush, basically.
Senator Eaton: I am not against genetic modification, GM. I think GM has produced some wonderful foods, such as canola. Would say that that is not genetically modified, that it is really helped along with your paintbrush and on the bench, and that is natural selection? I am just asking you that question deliberately because we have heard so many people say that, yes, we could do GM trees, but many countries will not take them. That is why I am posing the question to you.
Ms. Thomas: GM, to my thinking, has a different role in this. You do your breeding and select your best individuals that are going to be for a particular characteristic — like the phytoremediation use. It is a good clone for taking a particular toxic material up. Then you might want to go in and introduce, say, Roundup-resistance into that particular clone. That is where the GM component of it would come into it.
The original breeding and selecting is very traditional technology. I guess everyone's definition of genetic modification is a little different.
Senator Eaton: Would you support it?
Ms. Thomas: Genetic modification?
Senator Eaton: Yes, in trees.
Ms. Thomas: I think in the right context. One of the major challenges we have is that although these rotation lengths are short, they are long relative to those of an agricultural crop, where you can do modifications on an annual cycle and see the benefits.
To go back to the Roundup-resistance or glyphosate-resistance trait, it could have huge benefit in the right situation for plantation forestry because it would allow to you remove the competition that is keeping your yields down. Currently we do a great deal of maintenance in these stands, but all the weeds are clustered around the base of the tree. It is extremely challenging, because that is where the biggest problem is.
Senator Eaton: You do not want to cut the tree by removing it?
Ms. Thomas: Exactly. If you could spray glyphosate, for example, over those trees and get rid of that competition right beside the stem, you could leave the middle of the row actually with some plant material in it and even increase your carbon base on that site.
Senator Eaton: Following carbon, this is not something I understand, so I might be a bit over my head, but perhaps you will explain it to me. Why has Canada been so lax in using our forested material in negotiations regarding climate change?
The world talks about our oil sands, they talk about this and about that, but we have not stood up for ourselves and said, "We are the most forested country in the world, so drop dead.'' Why do you think it is we have been so shy about promoting trees as carbon sinks?
Ms. Thomas: I am not really sure I am in a position to fully answer that question.
Senator Eaton: Any explanation you can help me with is appreciated. Is it because we are not educated about our trees or about the carbon-storing value of our trees?
Ms. Thomas: There is a great deal of knowledge about the carbon-storing value of our trees. However, as I understand it, our forests are not necessarily distributed in an age distribution that maximizes that carbon. We have older forests that, as they get past their peak to harvest, from a forestry perspective, they begin to break down and go through their natural cycle, and then they start to emit the carbon from that site.
Also, there are a lot of peat lands in many areas of our boreal forest, and as there has been a drying trend, those peat lands are started to emit carbon as well, interspersed with forests, et cetera. Where do you draw the border around what a stand is?
Senator Eaton: Is it basically because we have not divided the country up into young carbon-storing and old carbon- emitting areas? We have not created a map.
Ms. Thomas: That could be one way to look at it. That is just one perspective. I am sure there are others on what that might look like.
Senator Eaton: Thank you very much.
Senator Meighen: Dr. Thomas, can you tell me who the Poplar Council of Canada is? What is the makeup?
Ms. Thomas: As I mentioned, we are a very diverse group. Everyone is a volunteer except for our executive assistant. It consists of people who are interested in poplars, who have come forward, who want to promote the use of this material and who work with this material. As I said, that is why we have such a diverse group of members from farmers, woodlot owners, people doing research on poplars and private consultants. There are also Canadian Forest Service employees who are members. There is a whole range of government, private and academic members.
Senator Meighen: I am sorry if I missed that. The way you describe it I gather there is not much budget for marketing or promotion?
Ms. Thomas: No.
Senator Meighen: What is an afforestation protocol?
Ms. Thomas: An afforestation protocol, as I have used the term, would be taking a piece of agricultural land that was previously cleared — if we put a date on it, such as Kyoto had, of December 31, 1989 — and then planting trees back onto that land. That is considered, in this situation, afforestation as opposed to reforestation of a site that had been cleared of trees but much more recently.
An example of a protocol would be the afforestation protocol that allows individuals who are planting those trees to be able to get carbon credits associated with that planting of new land essentially being brought into productivity from a tree perspective.
Senator Meighen: Like Senator Ogilvie, I have lived long enough to see different attitudes toward poplar. At one point it was a weed only. Was there any one scientific or technological breakthrough that caused the poplar to become a useful pulp product?
Ms. Thomas: I know a lot of work was done on how to kill and remove aspen because conifer was what was wanted by industry. I am more familiar with the West than the East, but we have a great deal of aspen out there, and companies like Daishowa and Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries came in saw this as an opportunity for producing pulp. I am not sure whether there was one technology. The technology was there; it was just recognizing that a species out there was being wasted and could be fully utilized. That is my view of how that may have occurred.
Senator Meighen: Beaver are very fond of poplar. If I were a deer, would I like that?
Ms. Thomas: Sadly, yes.
Senator Meighen: Do poplars or aspen serve as a food source for animals?
Ms. Thomas: The native aspen I am sure are eaten by moose, et cetera. I know in our plantations in Northeastern Alberta, which I am much more familiar with, in the first few years the ungulates, the moose and the deer, did not know they were there, so we called it the honeymoon phase. However, they now know they are there, and they are like ice cream, so even though they prefer some over others, when times are tough, they will come through and eat what they can get. Interestingly enough, they also simply do quite a bit of damage. They will break the stems even if they do not eat them. This is not a new concern. In some British Columbia plantations, MacMillan Bloedel had some poplar plantations, and they had issues. They had to berm and fence to keep the ungulates out. Yes, they do like the poplar.
Senator Ogilvie: I wanted come back to root propagation. In my experience, the darn things are almost impossible to kill because they send out these roots, and budding keeps growing up through the ground and so on.
Poplars make marvellous kindling. They are very easy to split.
Ms. Thomas: They also make great chopsticks.
Senator Ogilvie: Do all poplar species propagate through root propagation or are capable of it, or are there only certain ones for which that is a significant aspect of their life cycle?
Ms. Thomas: The hybrid poplars come from a group of poplars that have far less suckering or root propagation than you would see with the aspen. That suckering is what you really see with trembling aspen and to a much lesser degree with the other poplars. The other poplars tend to be more stump sprouts that come out closer to the stem.
The beauty of the hybrids is that you do not have to deal with the roots at all; you deal with the stem. The picture I showed where I was standing in front of the stool bed, that might be a six- or eight-foot tall one-year-old growth that you can take cuttings from and that is very easy to propagate. I did not go into this in detail, but if you have a hybrid aspen, you cannot propagate aspens that way. You have to use some other technique. They will not root from a cutting.
Some of the hybrid aspens we are also working with have some very attractive wood quality features. We have to go to other technology for that, such as tissue culture or root propagation. It is more expensive, and so it needs to be of higher value to go down that route, but the branches are the key with the hybrid poplars.
Senator Ogilvie: In those plantation trees you showed that were roughly 12 to 15 feet high, is there a problem on an ongoing management basis with young sap shoots coming up through the ground?
Ms. Thomas: No, there is not. In those stands, we have no problem with that. We do have some research being done with hybrid aspen, and in those stands we do not do the cultivation down the middle of the row. We use mowing or some other technique that will not damage or cut the roots at all because cutting the roots of the aspen is what promotes it to sucker.
Senator Ogilvie: Thank you very much.
Senator Mercer: We talked about using poplars to help reclaim and cleanse toxic sites. If we have a toxic site — perhaps a municipal dump or an old service station location, as you mentioned — and then plant some poplars, in layman's terms please tell us what happens and at what point we can use the land for purposes other than growing poplars as it is no longer toxic.
Ms. Thomas: Some testing was done on the site initially to determine that it had some toxic chemical of some sort or a problem. When you put the right material, the right clone onto that site, it begins to take up that toxic compound. You would have to monitor over time to see when the site was moved from a brown site back to a healthy site. You can also take measurements in the trees, in the leaves and in the wood, to see what is being taken up.
There is a term in forestry called "luxury consumption,'' and that is where trees often take up more than what they need. For example, cedar takes up calcium in levels much higher than it actually needs for healthy growth. This would be the same example, not that toxic compounds are healthy for their growth, but they can take them up and absorb them into their system, so it would be a matter of monitoring and removing that from the site once you had reached levels that were considered acceptable.
Senator Mercer: Does it make the trees toxic, or do the leaves have no toxicity?
Ms. Thomas: That is where the testing comes in, knowing what material you are putting on that site. If you plant a tree that cannot tolerate the toxicity, it will not be the one you want on that site.
Senator Mercer: My layman's question again is: You have planted the tree and it has grown; it has helped cleanse the site. Where has the toxicity gone? It is in the tree.
Ms. Thomas: Therefore, what do you do with the tree?
Senator Mercer: Yes.
Ms. Thomas: There are many end products it can be used for. Burning for energy at high heat could be one way of using it. I am not sure we know enough about that answer in terms of our own situations.
Senator Mercer: A poplar growth planted on a toxic site could not be certified as we have seen so many other forests certified now, could it?
Ms. Thomas: Do you mean with the Forest Stewardship Council? Is that what you are referring to?
Senator Mercer: Yes.
Ms. Thomas: I am not sure about that particular situation. I do not know that FSC covers toxic sites as one of their areas, but you can get hybrid poplars certified. Potlatch had its plantations certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Senator Mercer: However, that is not on a toxic site.
Ms. Thomas: No. I do not know that the Forest Stewardship Council covers that in its rulings.
Senator Mercer: You made reference to the tar sands and using poplars perhaps to reclaim some of that at some future date. One would think it probably would be difficult to certify that forest that you might create in northern Alberta.
Ms. Thomas: I am not sure if that would be difficult. I think you would have to work with the certification agency, because it might be a new situation for them to consider.
However, the tar sands are on Crown land and right now we cannot use the hybrids to help with that problem.
Senator Mercer: You said you are allowed to plant only native products. I guess we would not see any maple trees planted in Alberta, either, then. Thank you.
Senator Fairbairn: Thank you very much. My colleague at the other end has been asking good questions about Alberta. As I was listening to you and thinking of both the south and the north, they do not stay there without enormous amounts of trees and different kinds of trees.
You have spoken of the North and there is a lot of history there. What happens in the mountain area? Is that area maybe more difficult in what you are working with than elsewhere in that province farther north?
Ms. Thomas: In terms of an opportunity?
Senator Fairbairn: In terms of an opportunity, but also in terms of the differences between the north and the south. I wondered if there was something you can tell me about that area.
Ms. Thomas: There are many species of poplars in Southern Alberta, so I think it is a matter of having the right material for that area under drier conditions, for example. We would need to be able to screen for drought tolerance if we were growing away from the river's edge, because all the poplars grow along the river in Southern Alberta.
Senator Fairbairn: At this point it seems to be both sides whether it is lots of that type of weather and then the other type of weather — none at all. It is a difficult situation right now.
Ms. Thomas: The mountain region is more conifer-dominated; there are more pine and spruce, and there is not as much aspen, although there is some. Having the potential to grow these trees everywhere does not mean that is always the best choice in all regions. It may be better to stick with the conifer in some of those areas. If a company was interested, they could look for and test material for their area.
Senator Mahovlich: I have a quick question. Our forefathers never used poplars. The antique shops in Quebec had no poplar. My wife dragged me all over the antique shops for a collection of pine furniture.
Senator Fairbairn: The pine is lovely.
Senator Mahovlich: It is beautiful, but why did they not use poplar?
Ms. Thomas: I think they had maple and other nice hardwoods that they used.
Senator Mahovlich: However, pine was the collector's choice.
Ms. Thomas: Poplar has been considered a weed species for most of our life here.
Senator Mahovlich: Do you want to change that view?
Ms. Thomas: Yes.
Senator Mahovlich: Good luck.
Do you have beavers in Northern Alberta?
Ms. Thomas: Yes.
Senator Mahovlich: How do you stop them from taking away the poplars?
Ms. Thomas: The beavers have not been in our plantations, per se. Our plantations are not necessarily by a river system or somewhere that a beaver might be.
Senator Mahovlich: I see there was a lake there. The water must be coming in somewhere.
Ms. Thomas: In one of the pictures, you mean?
Senator Mahovlich: Yes, of the plantation. If you look at the plantation picture, there is a lake to the right and a river going right into it.
Ms. Thomas: The beavers do create challenges out on the forest management area in the native forests.
Senator Mahovlich: I think they use the poplar to make their dams and homes.
Ms. Thomas: They do, where they are close to the river systems. We have not seen the beavers in the plantations yet.
Senator Mahovlich: Okay. Good luck.
The Chair: As we conclude, Ms. Thomas, will you please take two notes? Please respond in writing, with your Poplar Council of Canada regarding the number of poplar plantations across Canada, province by province, and also provide us the percentage of non-hybrid and hybrid in plantations across Canada.
Ms. Thomas: The percentage?
The Chair: Percentage, yes.
Ms. Thomas: The second one I can answer easily, if you wish, but would you like them in writing?
The Chair: If possible.
Ms. Thomas: Okay.
The Chair: Ms. Thomas, on behalf of the committee, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and views with the committee.
(The committee adjourned.)