THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 7, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 9 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on the growing issue of wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on forestry and agriculture industries, as well as rural and Indigenous communities, throughout the country.
Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning, everyone. It’s good to see bright and shining faces.
Before we begin, I would like to ask all people in the room to consult the cards in front of you for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents. We need to support and protect the folks who are working for us behind the scenes. Please keep in mind that the microphones and the earphones need to be kept separate. Please unplug them when you are not using them.
I would like to begin by welcoming members of the committee, our witnesses here in person and online. My name is Robert Black. I’m a senator from Ontario, and I chair this committee.
Before we hear from our witnesses, I would like to start by asking the senators around the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Simons: Good morning. I’m Paula Simons. I come from Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.
[Translation]
Senator Oudar: Good morning. Manuelle Oudar from Quebec. Welcome.
[English]
Senator McNair: Welcome. I’m John McNair from New Brunswick.
Senator McBean: Good morning. Marnie McBean, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Good morning, Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator White: Kuei. Judy White, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Marshall: Elizabeth Marshall, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Richards: David Richards, New Brunswick.
The Chair: Before we begin, I would like to share some good news, which comes from our committee. Canada Post unveiled last week two stamps: one on the Farmerettes and one on the Soldiers of the Soil — something we have been close to with our soils report. Both young women and young men volunteered to support the war effort to help grow crops in this province and others. They are being acknowledged and honoured through the Farmerettes stamp and the Soldiers of the Soil stamp. If you have a chance, you can buy those in your local post office.
With that, today the committee continues its study on the growing issue of wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on forestry and agricultural industries.
For our first panel, I’m pleased to welcome from the Forest Products Association of Canada, Eric Johnson, Vice President, Federal Government Relations; and Étienne Bélanger, Vice President, Indigenous Relations and Forestry. From the Canadian Forest Owners, we welcome Andrew de Vries, Chief Executive Officer, online; and from PRT Growing Services Ltd., Randy Fournier, Chief Executive Officer.
Welcome and thank you for being with us. Each of you will have five minutes for your presentations. I will signal at the end of four minutes, by raising one hand, that you have one minute to wrap up. When you see two hands up, that’s when it’s time to stop.
The floor is yours, Mr. Johnson, followed by Mr. De Vries and Mr. Fournier.
Eric Johnson, Vice President of Government Relations, Forest Products Association of Canada: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to this committee, honourable senators, about the impact of wildfire on agriculture, the forest industries and Indigenous communities.
I am here representing the Forest Products Association of Canada, or FPAC. We provide a voice for Canada’s wood, pulp, paper and wood-based bioproducts producers nationally. I would like to share our perspective on how Canada’s forest sector can support wildfire resilience.
The impacts of climate change, including rising temperatures, droughts and extreme weather, combined with a history of aggressive fire suppression, which has led to an unnatural accumulation of fuel loads — highly flammable branches, leaves and tree limbs — is now fuelling more severe wildfire seasons in Canada. The 2023 wildfire season was the worst on record, with over 17 million hectares of land burned, releasing 2.2 billion tonnes of CO2 and forcing thousands of Canadians to evacuate their homes. This year, the Jasper fire in the summer of 2024 further highlighted the devastating effects of wildfires, as it led to the evacuation of over 20,000 people and caused significant damage to the town and surrounding national park. These wildfires pose significant risks to public safety, infrastructure and the environment and have a disproportionate effect on Indigenous communities.
The role that the forest sector in Canada can play is crucial in mitigating the devastating impacts of wildfires through active forest management. By scaling up federal forest fire mitigation and prevention activities, we can significantly reduce wildfire risks on the land base. The Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative, announced in 2022, is a commendable first step, but more investment is needed across the country.
Climate-smart forestry, or CSF, is a holistic approach that integrates forest management with climate change mitigation and adaptation. Climate-smart forestry practices, such as afforestation, forest thinning and the use of FireSmart techniques, can enhance forest resilience and reduce fire fuel loads. By adopting climate-smart forestry, we can restore forest ecosystems, mitigate climate change and create a nature-positive economy that benefits all Canadians.
Indigenous communities have practised sustainable forest management for centuries. Enhancing capacity for Indigenous‑led fire management, such as cultural burns and collaborative emergency management planning, is essential. The federal government should provide financial and logistical support to facilitate Indigenous leadership in developing and implementing fire-related strategic actions.
To effectively address the wildfire crisis, we recommend the following four actions:
First, scale up federal forest fire mitigation and prevention activities by investing significantly more in initiatives like the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative. The government should emulate successful models, such as the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, prioritize fire prevention as a national policy objective and amend regulatory barriers to this objective.
Second, support the development and use of best-in-class predictive fire models that are accurate, up-to-date and adaptable to enable forested communities, First Nations, businesses and the public to make informed decisions for FireSmart planning, focusing on regionalized models that reflect recent fire patterns.
Third, we should enhance capacity for Indigenous-led fire management by extending financial and logistical support to Indigenous communities, utilizing existing Indigenous clauses in the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative and the Fighting and Managing Wildfires in a Changing Climate program.
Fourth, we should also convene stakeholders for a policy-focused conference to address wildfires in the country.
In conclusion, Canada’s forest sector stands ready to support national efforts to mitigate the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires. By integrating forest sector solutions into relevant policy and management frameworks, we can create increasingly fire-resistant landscapes, respond more quickly and effectively to fires and restore and regenerate affected areas. It is essential that governments, communities and industries work collaboratively to ensure the safety and prosperity of our forests and those who rely on them for generations to come.
Thank you very much for your time.
The Chair: Thank you.
Andrew de Vries, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forest Owners: Good morning. Thank you for having me here. I’m presenting to you today from a small town in southern British Columbia.
Canadian Forest Owners, or CFO, represents 450,000 private landowners across Canada. We manage 10% of the forest land base. Critically, we produce about 20% of Canada’s forest volume. Put another way, that is one in five logging trucks coming from private land. Equally importantly, every mill in Canada relies, to some extent, on private wood. If you think of Canadian Forest Owners as a country, we manage 25 million hectares from coast to coast, from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver Island. That area is equivalent roughly to Sweden and Finland. We create a massive economic benefit from these lands: $14.5 billion in revenue and 38,500 direct jobs.
Additionally, these lands have been managed for 100, 150 or even 200 years, in many cases handed down within families. These lands provide critical ecological goods and services, such as recreation, fish and wildlife habitat, non-timber forest products, water quality management and what we’re talking about today — fire resilience.
Generally, many private forest landowners are in close proximity to Canadian towns and cities, and we’re often the interface between Crown land and communities themselves. Many of these private forest lands, as I said, have been managed for generations and have been managed carefully to reduce fuel loads, but that’s not the case in all circumstances.
CFO supports tax-based and other incentives, such as the ones mentioned by Eric Johnson, to incentivize private forest landowners to allow for additional forest management on their land to reduce volumes of fuel associated with wildfires.
If we look to our partners in the south, in the U.S., we know that they have similar funds to ours, Community Wildfire Defense Program grants, and those often focus on private lands or Indigenous lands.
Private forests across Canada are managed and regulated differently than Crown forests and play a critical role in our forest land base across the country. Generally, forest owners have been managing their lands in a FireSmart way for a long time, and if we continue to offer them tools and incentives to do so, they will continue to do so.
CFO is supportive of initiatives — as Eric mentioned, we know if we get engaged in more stand tending, pre-commercial and commercial thinning, we will see an abundance of woody biomass across the country. Eric mentioned the Forest Enhancement Society of BC as an example of a program that works well. We would be supportive of those programs and markets that would accept the wood from these stand tendings. This would include pellet plants, pulp and paper plants, cogeneration. We would also encourage innovative markets, including biofuels, bioplastics and biochars. Those would all offer market-based solutions to this challenge.
Currently, our members across the country are active in fire stand management but also in training and forest firefighting. Many of our members have light or heavy equipment on their lands to help with fighting wildfires. Many of our larger and smaller members have invested in sophisticated equipment, such as weather monitoring stations, fire predictive stations to help manage their lands. They work closely with the Crown landowners, managers, the provinces, and one of our larger members has their own planes, helicopter and trucks ready to fight fires wherever they may occur, whether on private land or Crown land.
Our provincial woodlot associations, representing every province in the country, are actively engaged in providing FireSmart training and firefighter training to their members, contractors and youth. As I mentioned, our members are investing in new technologies to help move this along.
Given our proximity to towns and cities, forest owners must play a key role in wildfire strategies, and we will continue to manage our forests in a way to allow this to happen. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. de Vries.
Randy Fournier, Chief Executive Officer, PRT Growing Services Ltd.: Honourable members of the Senate committee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the critical importance of post-wildfire recovery. Canada’s PRT Growing Services is North America’s largest forest seedling producer. We enable next-generation forests through our nurseries by producing over 600 million seedlings annually that sustain the environment and habitats while also underpinning the rural economy.
Whether non-commercial or commercial, forest infrastructure is a valuable Canadian asset contributing significantly to economic wealth, environmental health and cultural heritage. Yet, Canada’s approach to forest recovery after major wildfires, an Atlantic hurricane or an epidemic of mountain pine beetle reveals a gap between our love for trees versus an executed resolve to ensure forests endure as essential infrastructure for the environment and rural prosperity.
Canada’s abundance of trees creates complacency. We must value trees, not merely like them. Canada requires a national policy solution valuing forest infrastructure as an economic engine and ecological keystone that, when lost, is quickly restored.
What is valued gets maintained and, God forbid, immediately replaced if disaster strikes. Unlike others, Canada does not demonstrate immediate responsive value on destroyed trees. A month after Hurricane Helene, the State of Georgia announced funding for forest salvage, which will quickly progress. Land will be prepped, and seedlings will be ordered for earliest possible replanting, just like we witnessed with the 2023 Louisiana wildfires.
Actions speak. After two years of historic wildfires, underutilization of Canada’s surplus nursery capacity accentuates our insufficient response to lost trees.
Recent wildfires have been unprecedented. The number of 2023 wildfires remained within historical norms, but the destroyed area was over five times Canada’s 10-year average. This historically immense contiguous area destroyed inherent seed banks, and the remaining seeds are on too-distant perimeters, meaning forests cannot sufficiently renew themselves at this scale of destruction.
Without our giving Mother Nature an urgent hand-up, devastated lands risk permanent ecosystem conversion, as wildfires consume more than trees by impacting Indigenous and rural communities and prosperity while harming local habitats and environment.
This reality requires national policy that truly values trees. PRT recommends four themes for post-disaster recovery to ensure forest infrastructure resilience, economic productivity and sustainability endure for generations to come.
First, recognize forests as critical infrastructure. Prioritize post-disaster reforestation as essential to protecting economic and environmental wealth. Rapid action to restore forests to safeguard the federal jurisdictions of international trade and the environment is crucial to national prosperity.
Second, redeploy the 2 Billion Trees program funds to maximize post-disaster reforestation. The current structure cannot address post-wildfire replanting demands and lacks national solution agility. Redirect funds to replant destroyed Crown forests with 100% of approved costs covered for participating provinces and federal land. This self-insured reality restores lost Crown forest infrastructure to ensure rural prosperity and the environment do not suffer further.
Third, expedite land access. Current bureaucratic processes are slow by design, which delays timely reforestation and means missing the window for effective recovery. Swift access to lands for salvage and site preparation enables faster, more cost‑effective replanting to restore long-term economic and ecological value. Think of the State of Georgia.
Fourth, host private reforestation on Crown land, voluntary private investment options for timely replanting, private-funded replanting on Crown land to meet their sustainability or carbon‑offset-type goals. Forest ownership could then transfer to the Crown as a lease fee after a period fulfilling global permanency standards, approximately 40 years. Restore Crown forest lands by encouraging meaningful climate solutions from private industry to plant needed trees domestically on Crown land versus abroad.
These themes recognize our current reforestation approach and pace are insufficient for this scale of destruction. Mother Nature is well beyond her means to properly recover. Without policy‑driven timely reforestation, Canada’s vast wildfire-damaged lands will degrade and compromise the environment, economic stability and rural and Indigenous prosperity.
PRT wants to contribute to a national solution without subsidies. With effective federal resolve to engage resources and industry for post-disaster response, Canada can sustain economic and environmental wealth by recognizing forests are renewable infrastructure of national wealth and environmental balance.
Honourable members, there is government accountability to ensure Canada’s forests continue to provide for our people, economy and environment. Your support is crucial to fostering a national reforestation policy that responds swiftly to disaster to sustain rural economies, help the environment recover and restore our cherished natural heritage.
We very much thank you for your time and attention.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will now proceed to questions from senators. Senators, as always, I remind you that you have five minutes for your questions, and that includes the answer.
My first question is usually, “What would you consider wanting to include in a report?” Each of you has provided recommendations, so thank you for that. I have no further questions.
Senator Simons: Mr. Fournier, I want to start with you. This is a novel concept I’m hearing. I had always been under the impression that not only did forests renew themselves after a wildfire, but sometimes a wildfire was actually healthy for the cycle of the forest life. I come from north-central Alberta. There are certain trees that can only reseed after a fire.
If fires and fire cycles are, to a certain extent, natural and even a healthy part of the long-term life cycle of a forest, how do we decide where and whether to replant? Is there a danger of monocropping if you are bringing in a whole bunch of seedlings that are all the same kind of tree? How do you decide which seedlings are appropriate for what forest areas? In theory, you could bring in trees that are not native to that area.
And then I’m wondering if one of the other witnesses, perhaps Mr. Johnson or Mr. Bélanger wants to respond to Mr. Fournier’s proposal.
Mr. Fournier: Thank you, senator. Allow me to commend Alberta on their tremendous leadership post-wildfire. When I saw what was occurring in Alberta in the liberation of funds and the recognition of the importance of rapid recovery, it is absolutely commendable what’s happening in the province. Thank you.
Fantastic question. If you don’t mind, I’ll be rather illustrative. The difference between a fire this big and a fire this big is what matters. You are right; the forests and Mother Nature have a natural ability to recover, but we’re talking size and magnitude. As we go through and these fires become more expansive, which is what we saw in 2023 — it was five times the 10-year average — because of this expansiveness, you have cut a wide path. I mean this illustratively — pine cones don’t fly, so how do you reseed from the edges? It takes time. But when the edges are out here, you end up with permanent grasslands in the middle because you couldn’t get there before invasive species took over.
That is the point that we are making. We are in new territory. Honestly, it has been a game changer. The years 2023 and 2024 have left us with a level of problem, and, with full respect to government in terms of bureaucratic process and planning, we are at the moment when this is the difference between an emergency room and a planned surgery. You can leave Mother Nature to her own devices at a certain scale, but we are at a point now where that scale, in the view of many, has been exceeded in areas. It doesn’t mean every wildfire is treated the same, but the order of magnitude says we must do something.
To your question about monocultures, et cetera, whichever jurisdiction we go to in this great country, there will be a planting prescription. You cannot just show up and decide that although it used to be rose bushes, you now want blueberries. There will be a natural landscape to be restored, a natural mix of species to go in, as I said in my comments, commercial and non‑commercial.
If we are talking about the climate, carbon dioxide does not care if it is a commercial or non-commercial forest. It’s about whether there is a forest infrastructure in place. What we are recommending is to return to natural landscapes, but if we let Mother Nature take time, you could have permanent reversion or, at a minimum, whatever was lost will take more than a century to recover because you’ll go through all of the successive parts of Mother Nature. If we come in, clear and replant, you can return the forest canopy to what it was in a matter of decades as opposed to waiting further.
I hope I answered your question. Those would be my views about why Mother Nature needs a hand-up in these unprecedented times.
Senator Simons: I would like to hear from one of the gentlemen who work on Crown land if that is a prescription that you would endorse. Should that all be paid for by federal and provincial governments? Is there a place for commercial forestry to also be part of that replanting?
Étienne Bélanger, Vice President, Indigenous Relations and Forestry, Forest Products Association of Canada: We would support this recommendation and assessment to complement the challenging part in this. The fact that the fire cycle is no more natural and there are more fires taking place offsets regeneration capacity. The size of the fire matters, but also the pace at which fires come back. If a fire comes back too early after a first fire, the trees are not mature and not ready to self-regenerate after fires. In Quebec last year, it was assessed that up to 40% of the burn area will not regenerate, which is pretty dramatic and will change the forest landscape and composition, and it will impact the environment and the economy we can create out of it.
When we harvest land, we are under the obligation to renew land on all public land, but really, there is nobody on the hook to do the same after fires. We have been relying on natural regeneration following fires. As the forest owners, the Crown and provinces could decide to intervene in these areas where regeneration failed so as to regain forest health. That could have been super important for the 2 Billion Trees program, but it was not its primary focus. It could still be redesigned. The 2 Billion Trees program also led to increased capacity and nursery production, and that should be continued over the long term so as to make these investments make sense and because we will need that capacity in the future.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you very much. I’m sorry I was a little late. I’m a senator from Alberta.
I’m going to start with Mr. Fournier. I had another question completely, but your presentation was excellent. I want you to expand a little more — and it was said in one of your comments — about treating forests as assets. I was the previous mayor of Banff, and we worked hard for our urban forest to be considered an asset in terms of funding opportunities to maintain our urban forest. Fire, yes, but blowdowns and all kinds of things come into play. I was really intrigued by that word. I haven’t heard that since I was a mayor of forest being considered an asset for funding reasons.
Mr. Fournier: Thank you for the question, senator. At the end of the day, I’m very proud to be in the forest products industry. It’s a renewable natural resource second to none. When I speak in terms of assets, there is the asset of rural prosperity and the rural economy. If we do not start to have industrial policy that starts to value this, we are going to see an even greater migration to urban centres. It’s inevitable because we are gutting out the core of Canada through our policy.
I also speak to it as an infrastructure asset, and I mean the word “infrastructure.” To me, it is no different than a bridge or a federal government building. It is national taxpayer infrastructure that is critical to national prosperity, both economic and environmental. If you think of habitats and wildlife efforts, like all the great efforts in Quebec around caribou, the very things we are out trying to fix are, in a manner of speaking, things that we actually helped to create and destroy. The less economic activity we have going on in forests, the more problems we are going to ultimately have.
I heard earlier about Finland and Sweden when Mr. de Vries was speaking in terms of the size of the private Canadian woodland that owners operate and what that means if you put it in terms of countries. If you look at Finland and Sweden, they treat their forests as an asset. They generate what Canada generates or more on a footprint that’s about the size of your shoe relative to the whole wardrobe that we have been blessed with.
That’s part of our problem. We have such an abundance of trees, we can see them. But if you think of the Atlantic cod — and I don’t want to go to a monoculture discussion — at what point do you get to a tipping point where something cannot recover for itself? That’s why I look at this as critical national infrastructure. We cannot wait until it is gone before we start to do the inevitable, enacting committees, et cetera, about how we get it back. The real job is how to not lose it in the first place.
I spoke in terms of post-wildfire recovery, but I echo FPAC’s comments and other comments about mitigation and how we not have it happen. But the reality is that I cannot tell you where or when, but I guarantee there will be at least one wildfire next year, and I’m pretty sure I can put an S on the end. I don’t know if it will be a record, and I don’t know if it will be epic, but I do feel that we are in uncharted territory.
Right now, our whole government structure is not around how to maintain the infrastructure; it is how to maybe respond when something happens. That’s why I’m advocating for the sake of environment, habitats and prosperity. Treat it as infrastructure. You don’t let a bridge or a building degrade. People constantly go back to renew or renovate and ensure safety. We need to do the same with our forests.
The last example I’ll give: A family home is valued. We don’t like our homes; we value our homes. If a home was, God forbid, destroyed, nobody sits and waits for it to regenerate or waits to see what happens. You have to go in, remove and start over. That’s the sad reality of wildfire. We need that level of infrastructure value on it from a national level to ensure that the provinces and the federal government are aligned so that when this hits, we are now in the emergency room. This is no longer a plan; this is triage, and we need to act accordingly.
Senator Sorensen: I very much encourage us to look at that in our report. At a municipal level — I don’t know about all municipalities — we certainly treated our urban forest in our 100-year asset plan and did our best to fund it with taxpayers’ dollars. I think that’s a great idea.
Mr. Fournier: As you say, these are Crown assets. This is self-insured. This is not a subsidy. This is not throwing out dollars from the government. It’s like a government building. It’s a self-insured asset at some point. You have to go back to your asset at times and reinvest. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. Just to be clear, I doubt that we’ll reach a second round. We have seven folks ahead of us; seven times five minutes is over half an hour.
Senator Richards: I have a couple of questions. Senator Simons’ question was really apropos this whole thing. When I was a kid, I had to gather pine cones for replantation. I did it for a whole summer when I was in Grade 11.
The trouble with pine was that it didn’t take to the soil like spruce or the indigenous timber that had been burned or replaced by clear-cutting or whatever was going on. It didn’t take as well to the soil, it didn’t protect the water level of the rivers, and it didn’t last as long. How do we mitigate this? How do we mitigate the replantation to get the same kind of forests that we had before the wildfire? As Senator Simons says, wildfires tend to regenerate growth over time. Maybe you could answer that.
Then I have a quick question for Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Fournier: Thank you for the question, senator. Our company operates 28 different nursery assets across North America from the Pacific Northwest to the U.S. Southeast. We see planting prescriptions, planting regimes and activity and planning of all magnitudes.
Your question is spot on, and I would offer from a Canadian perspective that predominantly we are talking about lands that are under provincial jurisdictions. Our provinces do a fantastic job laying out the ground rules for how you go back and reforest. What is it to look like? How does it go about? I am confident that the provinces have great control on what has to happen. What we have to work toward is a much better execution on the how because if we’re into historic wildfires and we end up in a situation where we come back too late — half a decade or a decade is much too late to think you’re going to come back and recover damaged lands. That is where I think you run into a risk, senator, of having a shift from what was there to what is now there.
My recommendation to this is that we know what was lost on any given wildfire. We know what the composition of the forest was. Provincial jurisdictions absolutely understand what there was and what should go back. It’s incumbent upon industry and government to ensure that we execute effectively so that we bring it back to what it was. Otherwise, we risk bringing it to something that it was never intended to be.
With regard to the collection of pine cones, I applaud you. PRT did launch some red pine collections this year because there is a bit of a deficit in Canada for seed. We did that because we recognize that not everything can be a spruce tree. You sit back and provide the forest an actual prescription that reflects nature as opposed to just monoculture. Thank you.
Senator Richards: I have a quick question for Mr. Johnson: Of the five First Nations reserves in the territory that I live in, two of them have their own fire departments. The rest rely on the White communities around them. How is that across Canada? Do you know how many First Nations have their own ability with their fire trucks if a fire arises? Do they have to rely on outside communities? If they do, isn’t that a harsh penalty to have to pay?
Mr. Bélanger: I do not have all of the details, but we know that there is a growing capacity in First Nations to participate in wildfire fighting. However, there is not as much recognition and use of these people and their resources as there should be, so we still import many firefighters from outside the country who go on First Nations traditional territory where they can further participate. There need to be support and training to obtain the qualifications that makes them recognized and then further used. It’s a bit of an issue in the current situation.
Senator Richards: The quicker, the better. If a First Nations reserve sees that there is a fire, and there is no one there to help mitigate it or immediately go out, try to confront it and put it out, and they have to wait for outside help, by that time it could be out of control. That’s the question I’m asking.
Mr. Bélanger: I support your direction. I think they are underused at the moment.
Senator Marshall: I have a question for all of you because all of you referenced the need for national policies and national solutions. It gives the impression that there is still room for improvement. I’d like to know what exactly is happening at the national level. Is there a national organization, such as the Canadian Federation of Independent Business?
I’d also like to know about your interactions with the various levels of government. Perhaps we can start with the Canadian Forest Owners because I don’t think we’ve heard from them yet. Is there room for improvement at the national level?
Mr. de Vries: Yes, there is room for improvement. Randy Fournier spoke to that very well, as did Eric Johnson, in their presentations. Eric and Étienne are probably more familiar with the national policies than I am.
What I can say currently is that our private forest landowners work very closely with provinces, and we haven’t seen much of the federal footprint being shared with private forest landowners from coast to coast. I may be mistaken in some specific jurisdictions. There may well be activities happening, but generally we’re not front and centre, unfortunately, in the national policies. I think that’s a key thing that needs to change because we’re the forest that tends to be around the communities, around the towns and cities.
Randy spoke to some very important points in his presentation about treating the forest as assets. Certainly, we treat them as assets. Randy also mentioned in his presentation the need to come in not only after fires but after hurricanes and those sorts of things and assist landowners.
As we know, there were massive hurricanes in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the last few years. Our landowners in Nova Scotia are still dealing with the results of that. Many forests were blown down. It takes a long time to get in there and salvage that wood at an effective rate, and there has been a loss of timber value because there hasn’t been that opportunity to go in and push that wood, harvest that wood, salvage that wood and get it reset. Randy has painted a picture for the Crown forests, and that happens on private forests as well.
Senator Marshall: When there is an issue that might be more localized to a certain province or area, is there involvement by the federal government? Not to pick on the federal government, but I’m just wondering: When there is a forest fire, you have this inter-agency organization that coordinates the planes and the firefighters, but is there something similar for forest management?
Mr. Johnson: Yes, there is. It tends to be within the federal jurisdiction of Parks Canada in terms of their management of the forests that they own. When it comes to jurisdiction versus jurisdiction, there is not a lot. There is a lot of regulation about what we cannot do — whether that is species at risk or Fisheries and Oceans Canada and some of their regulations — but there is not a lot of cooperation or integration in terms of forest management on the different parts of the Crown land.
We talked a lot about what happens after a forest fire, but we haven’t touched on what should be happening before a forest fire. When we think about communities at risk, we could be doing mechanical thinning. We could be doing prescribed burning. We could be building firebreaks and saving those communities. If we looked at this from a public safety perspective before there was a public emergency, we would do a little bit better on the number of evacuees each year.
To Senator Sorensen’s question earlier about the asset, there is quite an easy way to put value on the forest: Half of a tree’s weight is carbon. We have a price on carbon. We can do very simple math to understand how much that value is. We could be building houses out of that and restoring it. We could be manufacturing pulp and paper out of that and valuing that.
Bioenergy, district heating and building sources for that fibre so we can go in and do those other things on the land base that manage for fire first and have a market for that fibre afterwards is what is important to make sure we have the whole ecosystem for our members.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you to the witnesses. It’s both helpful and interesting. My first question will be for Mr. de Vries.
I have to admit I’m very intrigued with how it works for forest owners. This is a bit of a practical question. I’m trying to understand how it would work. If you are a forest owner and there’s a fire, what are the steps for assessing the fire, choosing solutions like replanting, in the context of how much help and how much support you get and by whom? I’m just trying to get a sense of the mechanics of all of this when it comes to recovery after a fire if you’re a forest owner.
Mr. de Vries: Thank you very much. I’d like to come back to the three steps we need to consider, as Mr. Johnson mentioned. We should be talking about prevention and valuing these assets. So many forest owners are taking care of their stands to minimize fuel loads and make sure they are not only conserving habitat for fish and wildlife but providing timber values. I think the types of things we’ve talked about — mechanical thinning, pre-commercial thinning and commercial thinning — that’s prevention.
When there is a fire on a private forest land base — let’s remember that I represent members who have as little as 10 acres and larger members who have tens of thousands of acres. Forest owners tend to be in close proximity to their forests — not always, but many times — and they would have a good handle of the risk that’s going to be happening in any season.
Like Crown lands, if there is a lightning strike on our lands — lightning is random, so we’ll get hit — I think it will really depend on the scale of the fire, the seasonal attribute. Is it a hot, dry summer? Is it a wet summer? Private forest landowners would respond to the best of their ability, which in some cases is very sophisticated, and put that fire out right away. If they weren’t able to put it out on their own right away, they would certainly contact the provincial agencies, and there is a coordinated role at the provincial levels. We’ve seen that come into action across Canada over the last few summers. In that sense, once there is a very large fire, we are no different than Crown forests. We are part of that system.
I would like to also emphasize the point that Mr. Fournier spoke about concerning getting in and reforesting. Forest owners, for the most part, harvest and reforest on a prompt scale. If they become part of a large forest fire or other natural disturbance such as a hurricane, that may overwhelm them. That may be beyond their capacity to manage. I think Mr. Bélanger raised a very good point about being able to retool the 2 Billion Trees program to help in these situations, and we would be willing to participate in those systems as well. These tend to be the forests in and around communities.
Senator Petitclerc: I have just one point about recovery. Are there any gaps in what a private forest owner would need when it comes to recovery and replanting? Are they on their own, or is there enough support?
Mr. de Vries: Generally, you’re on your own. It’s your asset, but it depends on the province. I’m not familiar with the federal policies in this regard. In many cases, the forest owners are able to take care of it, but if you become part of a larger natural disaster, then we’re like everybody else. If you have a small fire by your home, you can fix it, but if your home has been wiped out, you need to bring in the contractors and the experts. We’re no different.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you.
Senator McBean: Thank you. Mr. de Vries, Senator Petitclerc asked and you answered about how the private forest owners are basically doing some FireSmart mitigation efforts, but maybe you can tell us what sort of incentives or support systems you think could encourage more private forest owners to invest in wildfire mitigation. They are, as you say, kind of on the doorstep of communities. Maybe you can divide that into pre-fire and post-fire incentives and supports.
Mr. de Vries: Thank you. For pre-fire, we’ve been advocating for many years, as early as 2011, for a program called a “personal silvicultural savings and investment plan,” or PSSIP, that would be similar to an RRSP. Many smaller forest owners will harvest once or twice a lifetime. They experience a spike in income; that income is taxed, usually at a high rate, and then that income is not directly available to them. The PSSIP is like an RRSP in that we would be able to recognize the benefits of that harvest income, invest it in a separate account and that account could be drawn on over the years to reforest, improve road infrastructure and improve fire resiliency.
There are other countries — France and Norway have similar programs that incentivize long-term savings for forest managers in a similar fashion. We’ve advocated for that in the past. It has been recommended by a previous Senate committee and the Finance Committee at the parliamentary level several times, but is it has not been implemented. That’s an incentive-based system we would strongly advocate for, and that would help in creating that fire resiliency.
I think we’ve discussed in the hearings today about the opportunities to maybe retool the 2 Billion Trees program to help with pre-fire forest fire resiliency. We would support an initiative like that.
In terms of post-fire, I think it depends on scale. If there is a very small fire, many owners can deal with that; they have plans in place. But if it is a very large fire, a catastrophic fire, we’re the same as everybody else. We don’t necessarily have the opportunities to participate, and sometimes the scale is too big for us to participate. If I think about the hurricanes in Nova Scotia, landowners in Nova Scotia are still cleaning up. There is no market for that fallen timber; it has been degraded, and it’s hard to get off the land. If you own 100 acres, you have a criss‑cross of sticks on your land now and not a crop anymore.
Senator McBean: Simplistically, I see that in my head as all the ads with Kurt Browning doing the CHIP Reverse Mortgage, using the asset that you’re living in before you’re not living.
Mr. Fournier, what strategies does PRT Growing implement in its seeding production to enhance forest resilience against the wildfires? Are there particular species or genetic selections that are better suited? Are you adjusting the crop genetically to be more resistant to climate changes?
Mr. Fournier: Thank you for the question, senator. Like any other company supplying a market, we supply what a customer asks for. That being said, in Canada, planning prescriptions are very well defined, so customers are asking us for products that will fit a provincial planting regime. In that regard we are extending our efforts and developments around hardwood species. We recognize the value of fire-safe forests, and we recognize where the nation is going to have to go irrespective of views. We know this is the direction. We are investing private funds in advance of that need showing up to ensure that we’re at the ready to be able to supply the forest products industry, private wood owners and others.
Respectfully, with Mr. Bélanger’s comments from the FPAC’s standpoint, there is no shortage of nursery capacity in Canada. There is absolutely no need for federal or provincial expansion of capacity. Private funds are more than capable of expanding capacity in order to meet many of these new challenges, such as FireSmart forests.
We are also in discussions with First Nations and Indigenous partners around native plant development. This is an area that is very niche today, but we recognize that the planning prescriptions of the future are not going to be 100% conifer going right back into a forest. We are now starting to delve deeper into native plants. I’m not going to sit back and say that we have the solution today, but given our scale, we’re going to be part of the solution when that day comes.
Senator Burey: Thank you for sharing your expertise. I always learn a lot. It’s fascinating.
I was taken aback by your statements about the urgency, that we are in uncharted territory and that we need to come up with a better strategy and plan. I was especially taken with the emergency room and planned surgery analogy. I am a physician, so it really hit home, and it’s so true.
You made a number of recommendations, and this is for everyone. I was reading the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development’s report, and I’m just going to quote from it:
Given early tree planting results and the issues with establishing partnerships, it is unlikely that the 2 Billion Trees Program will meet its objectives unless significant changes are made. . . .
That was in 2023. I’m asking you because we have spoken about the 2 Billion Trees program: What are the specific lessons learned that we are going to use in the strategies that you think we should have going forward?
Mr. Fournier: That’s a fantastic question, senator. Thank you for that. The 2 Billion Trees program was well intended. It did a tremendous job defining the what. What it completely missed on was the how. This is what we need to improve on. Going back to Senator Marshall’s earlier question, what the 2 Billion Trees program is missing is a comma. I’ve said it with the minister’s office; we’ve said it repeatedly for the last couple of years: Good intention, but how do we leverage it? The comma that’s missing — I will go back to my emergency room analogy — is that when things happen, the rules of the game don’t necessarily change, but how you go about executing does. Forest planning and forest management are inherently long term. It is planned out in decades. People think forward, and that’s the way it goes. But when you have a hurricane or a forest fire, it’s like the emergency room. I can plan to have heart surgery, and that gets scheduled six months out. But if I have a heart attack, all that goes out the window, and now we have to go into proper movement.
An absolutely true story from a conversation as recently as yesterday with one of our First Nations partners — I say partners, but we’re working towards a partnership, so I don’t want to mislead this committee — they are ready to act on an initiative together. And through the 2 Billion Trees program, it’s fantastic: We can go and get funding, we can do this, and there is a whole bunch of wildfire prescription that we can go do and restore, but it’s on Crown land. This means that the province has a say, as it should. The reality is that the moment that group goes out and says, “I’ll take over and treat that land” — because it’s a Crown asset, and it’s the province’s role to do this, but they don’t have the time or the resources, so private sector comes in — according to my understanding, they now take on the liability to finish the job they started, which is a 15-year Free to Grow program: monitoring, reporting, restoring if it doesn’t go right. If you receive 5 years of funding from the 2 Billion Trees program, you just took on a 15-year liability.
What do I recommend to the question earlier of how federal and provincial could get together? Imagine a simple comma that says that the rules all apply, but when private industry or a First Nations group steps up to restore a Crown asset, and their funding goes only for 5 years, the provincial or federal government just underwrites the liability over the next 10 years. These are your assets anyway. Industry mobilized to help you get that Crown asset back, but industry can’t be expected to carry the full liability beyond the means of what they’re funded to do.
That would be my comment regarding the difference between a planned surgery and when emergencies hit. There are things you must do, and our policy in the 2 Billion Trees program misses the comma.
Senator Burey: Are there any other comments?
Mr. Bélanger: One of the reasons why the 2 Billion Trees program is unlikely to meet their target in time was the early focus on private land and surrounding urban areas as opposed to building partnerships with provincial authorities so as to apply the 2 Billion Trees program on Crown land as soon as possible and leverage that possibility. That took time and led to complex discussions about the strings attached to going on Crown land, but from a restoration perspective and in the climate adaptation era we’re in, it could have been the early focus.
Senator Burey: Okay. Thank you very much. If there are any other comments, they could respond in writing.
The Chair: You would like responses in written format for that question?
Senator Burey: Yes.
The Chair: I would encourage all witnesses to do that if you think you have further things to add.
Senator McNair: Gentlemen, thank you for being here today. This is an interesting discussion. We could be here all day and continue this conversation and still have questions for you.
Mr. Fournier, you get the award for the sticker that probably represents the four of you, which reads, “I love Canadian forestry” on your computer.
Mr. Fournier: I apologize. I forgot that was on there. I use this to hold my notes.
Senator McNair: Don’t apologize. It’s very appropriate.
Mr. Fournier: Thank you.
Senator McNair: You talked about a couple of things, but I’ll come back to that. Your organization, Mr. Fournier, was quoted in a recent news article about the partnering with the Tłı̨chǫ Government on the Northwest Territories’ largest tree-planting project ever to support and scale reforestation efforts there. Your organization said:
The Tłı̨chǫ Government has mounted an unprecedented response to the devastating wildfires in 2023, demonstrating leadership that is critical to the future health of damaged forests. . . .
Could you elaborate on it a bit, and is this a very practical example of your first theme, which is to recognize forests as critical infrastructure?
Mr. Fournier: That’s a fantastic question; thank you. This is Tłı̨chǫ self-governed land. This is the land base over which they have the authority to take decisions and enact actions. Frankly, when you think of everything we spoke about today — we’ve talked about commercial; we’ve talked about rural prosperity; we’ve talked about the environment. This isn’t about carbon credits; it’s not about vanity. This is a community that recognizes they lost forest habitat critical to their traditional way of life. This is about replanting what they lost in order to ensure that migratory patterns of wildlife, et cetera, do not shift and go elsewhere, because what has been lost has displaced the traditional way of life. These are obviously my words of why they’ve embarked on this. The reason it’s unprecedented — and we absolutely want to point to this as a shining light, and we are a partner with this; we are not the partner. As much as I wish I could say it’s all us, it’s their leadership that came out with native seed collection. They got out and collected seed on Tłı̨chǫ land. What was lost has been recovered. What was left, that’s now in storage at PRT.
We’ve processed the seed. We will be sowing the first 1 million seedlings in February and March in our greenhouses and nurseries to get ready for first planting. Over the next five years, they’re going to put in the neighbourhood of 10 million to 12 million trees back in the ground. The key point is that if you leave it to Mother Nature, there will be trees, and vegetation will come back, but it will become predominantly aspen and Jack pine. That’s not everything that was there in the past, and that’s not what is desirable to the Tłı̨chǫ for habitat and wildlife.
There will be a mix of spruce, all of which are indigenous to the area, but the point is they’ve come back with a planting prescription that solves a need for the community. We applaud this. As a microcosm, if you did this as a nation and looked back at everything that has been damaged, there is no excuse we could not do the same from coast to coast. It’s just a question of leadership, and I applaud the Tłı̨chǫ Government for what they have embarked upon.
[Translation]
Senator Oudar: My question is for Mr. Fournier. First, I want to thank all four of you this morning for this very important information.
Mr. Fournier, you talked about something very interesting, a national policy. Thanks for the suggestions you made about a policy we should have. These are not empty words. It is a very meaningful suggestion to consider the forests as infrastructure, assets, to maximize restoration and adopt more reforestation measures. You piqued my curiosity with something that has not been mentioned by other groups. I think you want to draw our attention to the bureaucracy, which is far too cumbersome for favouring effective and efficient restoration.
If there is not enough time for you to provide tangible examples that might guide the committee in making its recommendations to the government, you could provide them to us in writing.
What do you want the committee to know in terms of this bureaucracy that seems to be an obstacle to you? What solutions might we apply to be more efficient?
[English]
Mr. Fournier: Fantastic question. What I’m drawing attention to — and I think I said it earlier, but I will reiterate — if I think of it through the lens of NRCan or the Canadian Forest Service, when I say “bureaucratic processes,” they are slow by design. The reason for that is we are a developed nation. We are a nation with a long history, and, by rights of that, we have put in policies and procedures which are meant to be fiduciary. We walk; we don’t run. We think, we plan, and we execute, and that is good, solid discipline and rigour.
However, back to my comment around emergency and urgency, if somebody were to lose their job tomorrow, within two weeks EI would be there because we have set up a structure to respond when this happens. The reality with forests is that you measure forests in decades and centuries, and our policies, procedures and methodology are set up accordingly. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it makes it insufficient to react when what is upon us, such as these historic wildfires, happens.
I’ll give the example with Jasper. I mean this with full due respect. We had a meeting booked with NRCan’s senior levels at a time when we thought about cancelling the meeting, because there is a human impact around Jasper. There is a community impact, and there is a time and place for everything. But it takes time to get meetings, so we thought, let’s at least have a conversation. The one thing that struck me coming out of this — and this is not to paint a negative picture of NRCan, but it gives an example of how our processes work. We were in there saying we need to act. What can we do to help? How can we get some seedlings going? How can we be ready? It takes about 18 months from the time you plant a seed — it’s like a baby; it takes 9 months just to grow it — and we have winter in Canada, so you don’t plant until the next spring. How can we help, and how can we go? One piece that stuck with me was, “Thank you; that’s a great idea, but our scientists are en route.” That’s when I sat back, and the wheels stopped turning for me, thinking, this is our problem. That is a great answer when you have a long-term problem. That is a great answer when there is time to study the causes of cardiovascular disease, as opposed to when you get to the emergency room — that is not the time to figure out how to treat this.
That is my comment on the bureaucracy. It’s not that we are flawed, and it’s not that I’m calling it out to say, “Shame on us.” Our systems work, but they do not work with urgency. We are in a situation where we need that pivot. That’s for the good of taxpayers, the economy, the environment and everybody. I trust that hits the note, senator.
The Chair: Thank you very much, witnesses: Mr. Johnson, Mr. Bélanger, Mr. Fournier and Mr. de Vries. Thank you very much for your participation today and the passion we saw from each of you. Your testimony and insight are very much appreciated.
Colleagues, for our second panel today, we welcome, from Little Red River Cree Nation, Chief Conroy Sewepagaham; from K’asho Got’ine Charter Community, Fort Good Hope Dene Band, Chief Collin Pierrot; and from the K’ahsho Got’ine Foundation, Darcy Edgi, President.
Welcome, gentlemen, and thank you for being with us. You will have five minutes for your presentations. At one minute left, I’ll put my hand up, and at 20 seconds left, I’ll put two hands up, and I’d appreciate it if you could wrap up at that point.
Conroy Sewepagaham, Chief, Little Red River Cree Nation: Good morning. I was hoping for a little more caffeine, so I could function.
Chair and honourable senators, thank you for the invite. Our community has experienced some challenging times in the last few years. I did share some notes, but I’m going to wing it just like most of my talks.
Our communities are Garden River, Fox Lake and John D’Or Prairie. All these three towns compose Little Red River Cree Nation. Last year and the year before, as mentioned, it has been arduous. Before I begin, I would like to say a few words for folks listening back home.
[Cree spoken]
Chair, honourable senators, as mentioned, in spring 2023, it started like any typical spring day. Soon, smoke filled the air, and the skies darkened. Within 72 hours, we had to evacuate all our 4,000 residents in our town of Fox Lake. We used boats, canoes, barges, whatever water vessels we could find to get them across to Peace River. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Thankfully, we didn’t lose one life. The Paskwa fire of 2023 did leave 800 residents without a home. In its wake, it also left behind over 100 homes burned or damaged. During this time, during the evacuation, we saw numerous instances of our folks, people, residents of all walks of life coming together and helping us get through that tough time.
After the fires finally were extinguished, as of June of this year, during that time we had to prepare for a winter rebuild in our community of Fox Lake. However, the winter rebuild was delayed because our ice road season was cut down from 120 days to now shortest on record less than 45 days of hauling. We had a warm spring this year; however, it was wet. Thankfully for our operations, we were able to get across and haul the lighter goods and services to our community of Fox Lake. We are now waiting for this winter to bring in the fuels, the building materials, everything that is needed to do this rebuild for our community.
This year, despite having a wet spring, we had a dry summer combined with strong winds and, within the span of two months all the way up to July, we had drought conditions. It took a thunderstorm to come through our communities up in our hills called the Caribou Mountains to start a new set of fires. These ones, a plethora of them combined, were known as the Semo Complex. For the first time in our nation’s history, we had to evacuate all our three towns; 8,700 residents and community members who call our nation home were evacuated.
Again, thankfully, these fires didn’t leave any path of destruction. Thankfully, no one was hurt. However, the same cannot be said with our forests. We have a timber quota of 15,000 square kilometres. That fire burned our livelihood. What we are estimating is the loss of $150 million taken away from our pockets, taken away from jobs. From back-to-back fires we have had, we’re assuming this is the new normal.
If you have any questions, that would be great. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. Moving on to Chief Pierrot.
Collin Pierrot, Chief, K’asho Got’ine Charter Community, Fort Good Hope Dene Band: Good morning. My name is Chief Collin Pierrot. I am from the Northwest Territories, from a region called the Sahtú Region. I come from a community which in our language is called [Dene Kede spoken].
Our tribe is called the K’asho Got’ine — “Big Willow People” in our language. My community has a membership of 900, but we have a little over 500 who live in the community.
First of all, I want to start off by saying thank you for inviting us to this hearing and hearing our story of what happened during the summer of 2024, in June. My colleague Darcy Edgi sits as the chairperson of the K’ahsho Got’ine Foundation, or KGF. It is a protected area, a conservation area that Canada funds also. Anyway, we’ll get back to the story.
Like Chief Conroy here, our community has no highway in or out. We either fly or boat out of the community in the summertime. I was in a meeting in Yellowknife. I decided to take the weekend off and sit in Yellowknife for a couple of days. On Saturday morning, I was going to have brunch and got a phone call around 8:30 or 9 that there was fire spotted outside of our community, less than a mile away. From there on, I stayed on the phone asking every five minutes what type of smoke that was coming out.
I have fought fire since I was 18 years old, in 1988. In 2016, I stopped fighting fire. So I have a vast knowledge of how fire works, the condition of it, the weather that comes with it. I asked my senior administrative officer to continue giving me updates on the smoke that was coming out to a point of where I mentioned to him to call in all the band councillors. That includes Darcy here, who also sits as a band councillor. We assembled the council. I was on the phone, and my sub-chief, Joseph Tobac, was out on the front lines of this fire when it first started. He came back in, and I told him to call for an emergency evacuation and put the town in a state of emergency. During that time, while I was on the phone, all that was put in place, and they started evacuating people as soon as possible.
The airport runway we have is not very long but it is large enough to get a Dash 7 in there, which holds about 40 to 42 people. They were flying them in and out on a little Beechcraft. They got the elders out first. During that time, I got in touch with our MLA, and he helped me get in touch with the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, or ECC, to help get larger planes in there to make the evacuation faster. I think it was about two hours that passed, and by about 1:30 I was back in the community. By the time I got back to the community, all I could see was a wall of flames coming towards the community.
I had my older brother with me in the plane, and he himself too has vast knowledge of firefighting. He was used in the ECC department to train firefighters. He was alongside with me. We flew in. We waited for a while to see if the department of ECC was going to send any crews in.
The Chair: Just take your time, but wrap it up please.
Mr. Pierrot: During that time, we noticed that ECC sent in a crew of three inexperienced people. I was lucky that about 85% to 90% of my community members are previous firefighters. In a small community like that, the majority of our municipal staff, each one of them has firefighting experience. When the fire started, we asked for equipment. They told us to run up to the ECC base and get the fire equipment, only to find out there was no fire equipment in the community — maybe five bags of hoses; that was it. So we used our two water trucks that we use to deliver water to the community and a fire truck. Twenty of us got on there and started fighting fire.
The planes that were sent in went to Norman Wells to mix their fire retardant to help us with the fire only to find out they had no retardant there. They had to fly two and a half hours back to Yellowknife to mix the retardant. It was another two hours there and back — a total of eight hours. They burned their flying time out. When you’re flying, you only have eight hours, and they burned it out with one drop. That was it.
For the first 25 hours, we were left on our own to fight the fire with no firefighting equipment — nothing from the ECC to help us out with this fire. For the first four days of the fire, we were left on our own without any fire equipment. It took that long to —
The Chair: Thank you. I know there are lots of questions, so let’s get to those questions. I apologize for interrupting you.
Senator Simons: Tansi. Thank you very much for being with us.
Chief Sewepagaham, I know you also have experience with firefighting. We just heard some disturbing testimony from Mr. Pierrot about the lack of response from ECC. Can you talk to us a little about whether you had a parallel experience with your two years of fires?
Mr. Sewepagaham: To echo my fellow chief here, we have approximately 1,500 homes. Every home has two or three wildland firefighters. It is our primary economy aside from forestry. When the 2023 fires happened, a couple thousand of us were told we couldn’t action it. Despite the training and certification, we had to wait to be called. We do have our own wildland firefighting operation that we contract and subcontract to the province.
Senator Simons: So you are doing firefighting for other people, but you were told you could not defend your own community.
Mr. Sewepagaham: Yes, that’s correct.
We took it upon ourselves. We waited for the day operations to do their thing, and we fought the fire in Paskwa and Fox Lake for our home community at night; so from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., we fought this fire. We gave one hour in between to let the day crews in which the contractors and all the other provincial firefighters come in to fight the fire during the daytime. We did that for nearly a month before they finally asked us to come to fight the fire during the daytime.
The same thing happened in 2024 when this fire was at the doorsteps of all three towns. It took them half a month to nearly a month to actually let a lot of our crews fight these fires.
I’m not saying they didn’t outright call us — there were one or two crews of seven — but when you have thousands who are willing and ready to fight these fires, they should call upon us. What we have been taught in firefighting is that as soon as you see that smoke, if you can get it down, control it or manage it within 24 hours, that’s the goal for each fire. However, just like my colleague and my friend in the “real North,” we aren’t necessarily given that type of luxury, especially with remote communities in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories.
Senator Simons: I’m not sure people appreciate how remote you are. You have 8,000 people living there; it is not a small community, but it’s really hard to get to.
You talked about your own forestry operation. Because we are the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, can you talk about what it means to your community, how much commercial logging you are doing, and what the loss of that means? Do you have other places you can log instead?
The Chair: And you have 30 seconds.
Mr. Sewepagaham: This means approximately 70 years of employment was wiped out. Our deciduous and mixed boreal forest takes quite some time to grow. My generation will not necessarily have the same benefits as previous generations with our forestry operations. So we will be operating at a loss until the new trees grow again.
Senator Simons: Thank you all for being here.
Senator Marshall: Chief Sewepagaham and Chief Pierrot, you talked about the evacuation process. I represent Newfoundland and Labrador, and we have a lot of isolated communities. Can you elaborate on the process you used to evacuate? Did you already have an existing evacuation plan?
What’s the top recommendation you would have with regard to dealing with evacuation in case of fire? Once the fire starts, panic sets in, but you have to move fast.
Mr. Sewepagaham: My recommendation for my colleagues around the table is to make sure that communication is key. Ensure all your constituents, memberships or towns are given the right information at specific times. Essentially, it becomes redundant, but the more information that individuals and the memberships have — it calms them down to tell the truth about what is happening on the ground. Make sure you have an emergency response plan for wildfires, because that’s one of the things with our evacuation plans — it helped us gain some humanity in getting our people out of danger.
Senator Marshall: So you already had an evacuation plan prior to the fire.
Mr. Sewepagaham: That’s correct, yes.
Senator Marshall: What about you, Chief Pierrot? You said you have a runway, whereas Chief Sewepagaham had to use boats and canoes, so you had access to aircraft. Did you already have an evacuation plan or something you knew would kick in as soon as you knew you had to evacuate?
Mr. Pierrot: I forgot to mention that I have been sitting in leadership as chief since 2022. So I had about eight months of sitting in there, and I came across an old emergency plan that they had that needed to be updated. We didn’t use it.
Again, I went off of my knowledge of firefighting. We did take a training course in there. You have your staff assembled, and you have everybody put in place. We went off that. We started evacuating the elders, babies and mothers and anybody with breathing problems from smoke. They were the first ones out.
Senator Marshall: All the people who were evacuated, were they all evacuated by aircraft?
Mr. Pierrot: Yes. Prior to the fire that started, we had what we call a fish camp down the river about 10 kilometres down the Mackenzie River. They were teaching young people how to make what we call “dry fish.” Half the communities went to Norman Wells and Délı̨nę, and the other 150, we evacuated by boat. They had no time to be evacuated; we evacuated them by boat, down to this fish camp, and they stayed down there for three and a half weeks.
Senator Marshall: You mentioned the Dash 7. I’m trying to relate to the coast of Labrador. Where did the Dash 7 aircraft come from?
Mr. Pierrot: Yellowknife.
Senator Marshall: Were they government aircraft or private sector?
Mr. Pierrot: Private sector, yes. One was Air Tindi, and the other one was Summit Air.
The Chair: I apologize. There are so many questions. Thank you for your testimony.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you all for being here. I’m going to follow up with Senator Simons’ theme of questioning; both chiefs have answered to some degree — just a little more time to elaborate. I might start with Chief Pierrot. I want to ask about who takes a lead on firefighting and evacuation efforts. Your comments to that were interesting, so I would be curious to hear your comments on that.
Then, to you, Chief Sewepagaham, because of the significant loss, I’m curious to know, with the economic impact and the infrastructure lost, if there are supports in place today to help your community.
But I’m going to start with what it looked like in your community in terms of first responders.
Mr. Pierrot: To be honest, it didn’t look good. When you see who the first responders are, usually you have the RCMP and nurses hanging around. It’s sad to say when the evacuation started, the RCMP called in their own private plane and got their members and their families out first. Later on, the Health Department evacuated the community first. After that, both stores, the Northern and the Co-Op, evacuated and left us there alone. We had to run and help with the evacuation and, at the same time, prepare to fight this fire. We were basically left there on our own to defend it.
Senator Sorensen: That’s very difficult to hear.
Sir, could you comment on the community today, and what supports are in place?
Mr. Sewepagaham: Right now, we had to advocate quite a bit and twist some arms in the federal government. Something we’ve actually been talking about almost on a monthly basis is the policies in place. We’re not mad at the people — keep that in mind — I am not mad at anyone around this table, and I’m not mad at the staff, but I do have a bone to pick with the policies that are currently in place with the First Nations, especially with federal First Nations and on-reserve, especially in terms of responding to fires and dealing with the fires after they tore into our community. What has been hampering our rebuild efforts quite a bit is the bureaucracy that we have to go through. Even though I’ve been explaining to our folks in the regional offices that when we want to rebuild Fox Lake, I don’t want to rebuild Fox Lake the way it was; I want to rebuild Fox Lake the way it should be.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you. Senator Simons has pointed this out before — and I am also a senator from Alberta — when we saw the devastation of Jasper, we were all very horrified about what happened to Jasper, but the publicity around that and the response are clearly very different.
Mr. Sewepagaham: The contrast is pretty stark, but we have to keep going.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you, sir.
Senator Burey: Thank you, chiefs. It is an honour to be here with you listening and sharing what you’re telling us. This is one of the roles of the Senate, I have to say, and I am so happy that you were able to come today and share this information with us.
I want to hear about what happens after the fire. You were saying that 800 residents are without a home. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looks like and what is needed?
Mr. Sewepagaham: As of November, we were actually able to rebuild quite a few homes for them — you should see the smiling faces for them to have a brand-new home — but we still have about 60% waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. The biggest challenge we have in Fox Lake is the logistics because we have to coordinate the majority of our building in the wintertime. However, last year we dealt with logistical issues with the ice roads going into the community. It was costly, to say the least, because we have a dam upstream that, unfortunately, released water in January and washed our ice bridges away. That’s why our timeline was shortened from 120 days to less than 45 days. We’re hoping our rebuild will not take a decade. We’re trying to shorten it down to five years, knock on wood.
Senator Burey: I wanted to hear from Chief Pierrot. What does it look like? Do you have displaced community members who aren’t able to return?
Mr. Pierrot: During the fire, like I said, we had about 20 of our community members who stepped up. We have a fire department. During the fire, we had a dispute with the ECC. Wildfire fighters came in with a crew and said they’re taking over the fire. We let them, and the fire took off again. At the time, I turned our fire department into what we call the “fire brigade” now. Those 20 people who were helping fight fires became part of the fire brigade, and we took over the fire. The first day was the hardest day to go through because we had a wall of flames coming at us about 200 feet in the air. We didn’t lose those structures, so we brought everyone back home.
Senator Burey: What about the mental health and health aspects after? Is there any support? In that little bit of time — I’m sorry; I know we won’t be finished. Or respond by writing. But you could begin.
Mr. Sewepagaham: Let’s put it this way, senator: Every time my community members, including myself, smell smoke, we are automatically thrown back to that day.
Senator Burey: The trauma, yes.
Mr. Pierrot: During the fire, we lost two lives. One was a helicopter pilot who was helping us fight the fire, and the other was a young man who lost his life before the fire. At that time, we reached out to numerous ministers, requesting that they send in trauma teams for the firefighters. The majority of the firefighters were related to the young guy whom they lost, and we ended up with nothing. Still today, we haven’t received any trauma teams coming in or anything.
Senator Burey: Thank you, chief.
Senator McNair: Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today and talking about this. It’s incomprehensible to even think about being there on the ground and being left alone to deal with your own problem at that point.
Talking about health care, they got out on the previous plane. I admire the fact that you can be here today and say you’re not angry at people; you’re angry at the bureaucracy or the things that didn’t work right, and it’s about fixing it. I commend you for taking such a positive approach on trying to fix it.
All the experts say that Indigenous guardians are critical to Canada’s wildfire response. I think I would insert “urgent” wildfire response. We know how important it is to get there when it starts, as you said, to try to beat it down in the 24-hour period. There has been some progress. Over 2023, I think you had to fight very hard to get people on the line. In 2024, it was a bit different story.
Mr. Edgi, your community, or your foundation, your guardians, essentially, this year, I believe, in 2024, when wildfires threatened the town of Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories, your guardians first assisted with the evacuation of community members, but then, more importantly, thanks to the training that you had, you joined the front line and ultimately helped save the town. Is there progress on recognizing Indigenous expertise in this area and facilitating it?
Darcy Edgi, President, K’ahsho Got’ine Foundation: For me, I was there from start to finish. When the fire came, we converted a water truck into a fire truck, and I was running that truck. The wall was coming, so we cut some —, tore down some trees and soaked the ground in the middle. We had the guys behind us for the fire that was passing us, to blow out those hotspots, but we saved the town, though, the community. We were left on our own. Even with the chopper crash, I was the first truck there. We never got no mental help or counselling, nothing. I saw this big flame, and I didn’t even know it was a chopper burning. We just did our job.
The ECC sent pumps in right at the start — a bunch of equipment, five pumps — but they had no foot valves, so they couldn’t get to the water source, so they were useless. We fixed one fire truck and four water trucks, converted them into fire trucks. That’s how we started battling that fire.
We never stopped for days. We went like 20 hours or 23 hours with no sleep, sleep for two to four hours, get up and start fighting it again. But we saved our town, every house, except for that one life that was lost, the chopper pilot. I feel bad for his family. I was thankful that he was there to help us.
Senator McBean: Thank you for coming so far. I apologize that we have to cut you off and stuff like that so we can get to all the information. I’d like to give my time back to you, Chief Pierrot. You finished your story with the pilots having timed out. Do you have a conclusion that you wanted to make for your statement at the beginning?
Mr. Pierrot: When this was all said and done, we had a bit of time to come together and put our stories together, because after the evacuation, I learned that two people from my council went down to the fish camp to where the evacuees were, and three other councillors went to Norman Wells, where all the other evacuees were, and myself, Darcy and a couple of the other councillors stayed in the community, so we were divided up.
Everyone came together, and we shared our stories and put it together that we need funding. We need funding for our fire departments. Right now, our fire departments are not funded very well. They only consist of the chief getting a stipend once a month of $500. The fire truck we have is outdated.
I requested from ECC that we look to see if we can get funding for our community to continue this fire brigade that we started. They had a fire crew in Fort Good Hope under the ECC, and I’m sad to say no one wants to join their government firefighting team. They’ve tried every way, and no one came forward. We set up this fire brigade, and everybody comes out.
Senator McBean: It sounds like the ECC fire brigade — why would you join that team when they’re showing up with useless equipment versus your team, which has the historical knowledge?
Can you describe ways that wildfires have, before this, affected your communities and traditional ways? This fire was different. You were away, and you said the smoke was different. You decided to call for an evacuation.
Mr. Pierrot: Everybody knows the colour of smoke when fire starts off. It starts off white, smouldering, and as soon as it starts turning grey and black, you know the fire is at full crown, and it’s rolling at full blaze. That was one of the ways I was telling. It was the smoke.
I lost my train of thought here. What was your question again?
The Chair: You have 30 seconds.
Senator McBean: I’ll just give it to you. Do you have anything left that you would like to say? Mr. Edgi, you’ve come a long way. Is there something you’d like to tell us?
Mr. Edgi: I think the policies they have of not fighting a fire . . . This mop-up crew, they should fight the fire. That’s the reason we saved our town: because we battled that fire. We didn’t wait for it. If we had waited, we would have been burned.
Senator McBean: Thank you.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you. My colleagues have said it. In this study, we have heard from many experts and academics and researchers, but to hear about what happened versus to hear it from the people who were there, it is very important and valuable, so thank you for this. I feel very grateful.
Chief Conroy, I really applaud your positive approach. You did mention, though, it happened in 2023. It happened again the same way in 2024 in terms of the knowledge and expertise that was not used, like your knowledge, your expertise in firefighting.
So there are two questions. One is — and maybe this is for both of you — are there lessons learned? Are you confident that history in those specific situations will not repeat itself when it comes to your knowledge, your expertise on the ground and the inadequate response, I suppose? Are you confident that history will not repeat itself?
Mr. Sewepagaham: From our perspective, history would only repeat itself if we did the same thing from previous years, so if we can change some of those policies and bring the humanity back into it, this way, local Indigenous knowledge can be incorporated into our fire guardianship, and fire guardian programs can be developed to some extent. I think a lot of these fires could have been handled within 24 hours. It’s just our remoteness and the lack of infrastructure in place but also the lack of resources.
I think for many of us in our northern communities, we’re at a point where we’re fed up with watching from the sidelines. That’s why we took it upon ourselves to do what we need to do to save our towns, and I’m not speaking for my fellow chief and Darcy, but we would do it all over again because building homes up north takes years.
Senator Petitclerc: Again, this if for you, but please, Chief Pierrot, if you have a comment — you mentioned the fires are a new normal, and we have to build resilience. You said something that resonated. You said you didn’t want to rebuild as it was but as it should be. I assume this also includes “as it should be” within that new normal of possibly more climate events. What does that look like? How do you rebuild “as it should be” to be resilient?
Mr. Sewepagaham: Having strong communication and partnership with all forms of government, all levels of government, and not for us to work in silos.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you. Yes. Did you want to add to that if the chair gives me 10 seconds?
Mr. Pierrot: I think earlier the question was about the kinds of changes and stuff like that. Everything that I see and the changes that we could make — we have to start making changes not only at the community level but also at the government level because of climate change. Climate change is happening at a very fast rate.
Springtime is not springtime anymore. Springtime happens in early April now, and it’s drying up already. Everybody waits for June to get set up, but they’re not thinking about April or May, where it’s already dry and you could hear the crackling on the ground. Nobody’s looking at that. Everybody is waiting for June, the normal time to set up their fire bases.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you for this.
Senator White: Thank you, chiefs and Mr. Edgi, for presenting your story today. Many of my colleagues find it shocking that this could occur in 2024. As a First Nations person myself, regrettably, none of this is shocking to me. It’s good that we have this forum so that these stories can be heard by people like senators.
What I’d like to hear a little bit more about — more for the education of the senators around the table — is how our Indigenous knowledge and traditional knowledge would better prepare you. Not the policies of the federal government — let’s park them — but how would your own knowledge and your own practices better equip you had all the supports been in place from the government?
Mr. Pierrot: I have to be honest. Two years ago, I mentioned that I lost faith in the fire department with the Government of Northwest Territories, or GNWT, after the 2023 fire in Hay River, N.W.T., and Enterprise and Yellowknife itself, when they were evacuated — how slow the government acted. When that fire took place, I and other leaders in my community decided that we were going to evacuate our own community members out of Yellowknife four days prior to their evacuation.
What stood apart for me was when I was listening to the news and the mayor in Fort Smith was crying, asking people to leave Fort Smith; usually, you don’t hear the mayor begging people to come out of the community. My first question was: Where are the wildfire fighters there? Their headquarters are there. Where are they? Why did they abandon them and leave the mayor to beg his people to leave the community? That is when I lost all confidence in these people and decided that we were going to take matters into our own hands.
As you heard before in our statements here from the guardians, in 2023, we asked wildfire fighters from the Yukon to come and help train community members alongside the four guardians we had there. We trained 30 people, and we were already prepared for 2024. I’m glad that we did this, because had we not, we would have been caught off guard. Thank you.
The Chair: Chief Sewepagaham, do you have anything to add? You have about 45 seconds.
Mr. Sewepagaham: Mahsi’cho for your stories. The reason why I try to give them as much of the mic as I can is because they’ve travelled much further than I have. In terms of learning Indigenous knowledge and what we can incorporate in our firefighting, there is a plethora of things. As the chief mentioned, looking at the crowning as an observer and telling your people what to do after that — that’s what we can bring to the table. Looking at the ground and seeing the different changes in our local regions — that’s what we can bring to the table. Being on the front lines, living there every day and noticing these minute changes, even in the microclimate — that we can bring to the table.
When we have incident commanders coming into our communities telling us that this fire is going to behave this way, and we’re saying, “No, in terms of elevation of the Caribou Mountains, the winds are not going to shift the way you predicted or what the books have told you” — that is what we can bring to the table.
The reason why I’m talking about that is because we see that first-hand when they first action to see complex fires. Our colleague felt that things were going to behave in a certain way, and our knowledge keepers and our fire guardians and all our firefighters came together and said, “No, that’s not what is going to happen because the way the mountain is, it’s going to create these wind tunnels.” That’s something that a lot of these scientists and a lot of our colleagues up in the echelons of research have failed to mention. It’s not the size of the fires. It’s the speed at which it creates the most destruction, and that’s what we need research on.
Senator Richards: Thank you for being here. I have two quick questions. Chief Pierrot, how long did it take the fire to crown? Initially, it wasn’t crowned, and then it was crowned. How long was that? It couldn’t have been that long before it crowned.
Mr. Pierrot: I received the phone call in the morning about 9:30. Probably by 11:30, it was at full crown already.
Senator Richards: Was that quicker than usual that the fire crowned this time around? I’m wondering about the speed of the fire this time.
Mr. Pierrot: Yes. It was quicker because of climate change and the dryness of the land. When it is that dry, fire creates its own weather and its own wind.
Senator Richards: Once it crowns, it creates its own wind; it creates everything.
Chief Sewepagaham, I asked the previous panel how many First Nations reserves or nations had their own firefighting capabilities, and it would be imperative they did so. Now I hear that the authorities who were talking to you told you not to even fight your fire. That’s like telling people they can’t be allowed to defend themselves in their own homes.
I find that almost incomprehensible, sir, that they would tell you that you weren’t allowed to fight this fire.
Mr. Sewepagaham: Senator, as our colleague had mentioned, it’s normal for us to be told not to do things, even though we know if we did, things would be different.
Senator Richards: I’m glad you did finally begin to fight your own fire. I’m glad that you disobeyed the instructions of the authorities and did that. I’m glad.
Mr. Sewepagaham: To add to that, if we didn’t fight that fire during the nighttime — because historically First Nations have always fought fires. If you look into a lot of these strata and their soils, especially in our communities or in our town of John D’Or, you can actually dig into the soil and see strata of annual fires happening in our communities. That’s because that was part of our cultural burning or fire management. But if we didn’t fight that fire during the nighttime just because we found a loophole in the agency’s policies, we would have lost an additional 41 homes.
Senator Richards: Do you think the authorities have caught on and are going to reassess their method of doing this with you?
Mr. Sewepagaham: I hope so because what we actually did is we even hired and got into partnership with a drone company, and we used our Indigenous knowledge and uploaded it into this system called Fire AI. This way, our knowledge keepers can be incorporated forever so we don’t lose their technical expertise and their local knowledge. We have “digital elders” flying up in the air, aiding our firefighters on the ground.
The Chair: Thank you, Chief Sewepagaham, Chief Pierrot and Mr. Edgi, for your participation today. We do apologize for having to keep it within the time; we have another committee coming in here. Your testimony and insight have been much appreciated. Please know that our Library of Parliament analysts will have captured what you have shared with us. If you wish to give us more information, don’t hesitate to send it to our clerk in written format.
I want to say thanks to our committee members. Your active participation and insightful, thoughtful questions are very much appreciated.
I also want to take a moment to thank the staff who support us in our offices and the folks behind us, our interpreters, the Debates team transcribing the meeting, the committee room attendant, the multimedia services technicians, the broadcasting team, the recording centre, the Information Services Directorate and our page today, Charlotte. Thank you very much. We couldn’t do what we do here every committee meeting without your help, everyone.
(The committee adjourned.)