Proceedings of the Subcommittee on the
Boreal Forest
Issue 12 - Evidence - Morning sitting
MIRAMICHI, Wednesday, November 4, 1998
The Subcommittee on Boreal Forest of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 9:00 a.m. to continue its study on the present state and future of forestry in Canada as it relates to the boreal forest.
Senator Nicholas W. Taylor (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I would like to welcome Mr. Richard DeBow. We are looking forward to what you have to say about the New Brunswick Wildlife Federation's views on how to handle the forest. Thank you very much for coming.
Mr. Richard DeBow, President, New Brunswick Wildlife Federation: The New Brunswick Wildlife Federation was organized in 1924. For the past 74 years, it has represented the interests of resident sportspeople, hunters and anglers in our province. The federation has over 40 member branches throughout the province, and approximately 10,000 members and supporters.
Members of the federation are interested in all aspects of the out-of-doors, and are dedicated to fostering sound management and the wise use of the renewable and non-renewable resources of this province and of Canada. We believe that their recreational, social, economic and aesthetic values should continue for the benefit of this and future generations.
Our federation and its members are active in the promotion of conservation amongst all our citizens. Representatives of NBWF sit on a number of government committees and boards, at both the provincial and federal levels. Activities in various member branches run from adopt-a-stream and stream enhancement projects to junior conservation school, sponsoring courses on hunter education and fly-tying, and public meetings on resource management and conservation issues around the province. The federation has presented its views and briefs with respect to wildlife and forest management to various government agencies throughout its history, and it continues to do so.
Historically, the province of New Brunswick has had the highest percentage of hunters per capita in Canada. I heard on the radio this morning that we dropped to number two. I think Newfoundland is ahead of us now. I am not quite sure of that.
In 1997, there were over 82,000 resident hunters -- and some 5,000 non-resident hunters -- who participating in either big game or small game hunting in New Brunswick. Licence fees alone in 1997 were over $2 million for resident hunters.
Your mandate involves the boreal forest, of which we have only a small representative area in the northwestern corner of our province. We have not looked at that area in isolation, but we would like to give you some comments with respect to forests in general in New Brunswick.
The current concept of deer wintering yards is called a "Deer Wintering Area Management Unit." Our federation feels that it is essential to protect these critical habitat areas, which are necessary to sustain our deer in our long, cold winters -- particularly when there is a lot of snow.
Deer can generally withstand either cold or deep snow, but not both. Both generally occur together in mid-to-late winter, when deer are starting to decline in physical health. It is noteworthy that the six northern deer zones -- all across the northern part of New Brunswick -- are closed altogether to deer hunting. That includes the area in northwestern New Brunswick that contains our representative portion of boreal forest.
The centre part of New Brunswick has a different hunting regime. It is a "bucks only" system. In the southern part of New Brunswick, you can shoot both bucks and does. The farther north you go, the harder the winters are, and that is why it is more essential to protect the deer yards in those areas.
Biologists point to the extremely harsh winter conditions in those northern zones. That is not the entire story, however, because deer have survived in those areas with harsh weather conditions for the greater part of this century. What is new in those areas is the fact that forest companies are cutting the deer yards, and the introduction of the coyote by way of natural expansion to the east. In New Brunswick coyotes can be hunted, and our federation urges hunters to participate in this aspect of the sport.
With respect to deer yards, it is essential that they be protected, particularly on Crown land, but also on a cooperative stewardship basis with land owners in private lands. The latest concept in deer Wintering Area Management Units is that they evolve over time, and can be described as a floating system of deer yards. The Department of Natural Resources and Energy has good data on deer yards on Crown lands, and that is generally taken into consideration in the setting of management plans with timber licensees.
They do not have a good handle on deer yards on private land, however. Accordingly, the deer yards on private land should be inventoried, and provisions should be made for a cooperative protection of the areas on a stewardship basis with the landowners.
Buffer zones along our streams, rivers and lakes are essential. A stream in New Brunswick is defined in the Crown Lands Act as being one metre or more in width. However, it appears to us that this definition gets blurred in actual practice. The small feeder streams are essential to stream health, as they provide the cold water that is necessary for trout and salmon. Deer yards also occur in the sheltered coniferous hillsides along streams and rivers in these buffer zones, so the protection of habitat for one use assists in the protection of the streams for salmon and trout.
We accept the broad definition of wildlife, namely, anything that lives and is wild. Even though our focus is on hunting and fishing, our members have always been concerned about, and contributed to, conservation. The health of all renewable resources depends on the health of the land, the quality of water, and the maintenance of ecological functions.
Wildlife is a common property resource in New Brunswick, and all citizens are responsible for its stewardship. We need both quantity and quality of habitat in a healthy environment to meet and define population objectives. It is important to set desired population levels in cooperation with all resource users, and then to determine the habitat necessary to sustain them. Any management activities must be science-based, using ecological principles.
Slightly over half of the land in New Brunswick is privately owned, and slightly less than half is Crown land. Historically, hunters have been permitted to hunt on nearly all forested land. The system now in place on private land is that the landowner may post it as "open for hunting," "hunting with permission only," or "closed to hunting." Our federation is adamantly opposed to the concept of paid hunting, where it is necessary to pay a fee to hunt on forested land, whether on privately owned or on Crown land.
Wildlife is considered to be natural heritage in our province, and it traditionally provides many values and benefits to New Brunswickers. It is central to our province's character and culture, and wise use of it is a part of our lifestyle. The sustainable harvest of wildlife is part of our cultural heritage. It is part of why we stay here in this province, and it is essential to our way of life.
That is what I had prepared for you, but there are a couple of other things I think that I should address. The Protected Area Strategy in New Brunswick is currently under review. Dr. Louis LaPierre's report will be out next month. We accept that there should be representative areas of ecological zones around the province.
The report is not out, so we have not been able to study it, but there is another concept in Ontario that perhaps should be considered. That concept involves treating the whole of the province as an area, and having floating zones or control over these representative areas over time. That is different from picking a large area and setting it aside for perpetuity, and it is a different way of looking at protected areas. I am not sure that either way is right or wrong. We have not had a chance to study them, so we are not really able to comment on that.
With respect to endangered species, our view is that methods of protecting these species must be based on science. We are a little concerned that the ministers got together and fired the sub chairs of the members of the COSEWIC. In our view, that takes away the independent science-based role of COSEWIC. If the appointees are going to be only those named by government to represent government, then that becomes a concern.
As far as endangered species are concerned, there should be cooperative stewardship. We support the concept of some sort of financial credit for lost revenues to the landowner where that situation may arise.
Senator Robichaud: I am slightly surprised when you say that your federation is opposed to the concept of paid hunting. I will tell you why. A few years ago, and over a period of many years, a group of us hunted on a farm that was owned by a particular individual who had 5,000 to 6,000 acres. He kept this land very well groomed, and maintained tight control over who was hunting there and just what kind of activity was happening there. To me, he was the best conservationist, because he was aware of everyone who was there, and kept very strict control. We did not pay for hunting per se. We paid for lodging on that farm. Why would you be against that?
Mr. DeBow: My first point is that wildlife is not for sale as such. The second point is that our federation is a broad-based federation across New Brunswick. We feel that we represent the ordinary citizens of New Brunswick. If you start paying for access to hunting, then that can become elitist, and we are against that. I am not sure that the system that you are talking about was really paid hunting, which we view as simply paying for access. You were paying for your accommodations and that sort of thing.
Senator Robichaud: Yes.
Mr. DeBow: Historically, New Brunswickers have always had a right to go on any forested land to hunt. That has changed a little bit over the years, and we have this new system. That system seems to be working out. Look at the salmon in our rivers. Particularly in your area, there are large, exclusive salmon clubs, and the ordinary person cannot go to them. You can float down the river and canoe, but you just cannot stop and fish. We object to this elitism.
Senator Robichaud: I might have a problem with that if you put it that way. Are you aware of any special zones that would need protection on private woodlots, or other places in the province where no protection is afforded them?
Mr. DeBow: There is an area outside Moncton that is full of cedar and cedar swamps. It is an excellent deer wintering area. In the spring, you can drive by there and see 100 deer in an afternoon. Some of our members live out that way, and they are very concerned that if cedar prices, which are good now, rise any higher, the cedar will get cut and those cedar swamps will be lost as deer wintering areas. It is that type of thing that we need protection for.
One way of doing that is by entering into conservation agreements. This is a new concept in New Brunswick, because the legislation was just put into effect last year. I think that perhaps we can start working towards those agreements with the people in that area.
Senator Robichaud: Are you familiar with the marsh in Moncton between Dieppe and Chartersville?
Mr. DeBow: Yes.
Senator Robichaud: There is always a little back-filling or filling happening there. It is being filled a little at a time, progressively creeping forward. There is a bowling centre now that was built right on the edge of that marsh. It used to be marsh, I believe, but it is creeping slowly over. Are you concerned about that?
Mr. DeBow: We are concerned about losing our wetlands. The Dieppe area in Moncton is a prime example of that loss. The largest shopping centre in Eastern Canada, the Champlain Mall, is built right on the marsh. It took many tons of loads of fill before they could build on it. We lost wetland there.
There is still a lot of wetland in New Brunswick, but there is a creeping encroachment on wetland. I do not know how you control that type of encroachment. It is private land. If you zone it for no use, you are effectively expropriating it, and the landowner loses the value. It is very difficult problem.
Senator Robichaud: It is. Would you not find the same problem with woodlot owners that have particular habitats on their properties?
Mr. DeBow: As long as their cutting plans are scheduled over time, there is no problem. When prices are high, though, woodlot owners have a greater incentive to cut. They need good planning over time. I think we must determine which deer wintering areas and other areas need some sort of protection in the first place. We can then work with the woodlot owners to get them to ease up in their cutting in that area, or to cut it selectively, or to cut here and let it expand.
The floating concept of deer yards is to cut a little bit here, and then let it expand. As it expands over time, you can cut a little bit here and there. I think you have to designate the primary purpose of certain areas, and say that the purpose of this area is wildlife, cutting can be conducted there but it is not the primary purpose. The primary purpose on the woodlot in general is cutting but perhaps they, in effect, zone their own woodlot.
Senator Robichaud: Would you say that private woodlot owners are much more conscious now of those habitats than they were in the past? There has been some education, and some care has been taken in many cases. We visited a woodlot yesterday. I think it was a prime example of how private owners can look after their lots and take care of the habitat at the same time.
Mr. DeBow: Certainly, everyone is more aware of this. The big lumber companies and the woodlot owners are more aware, too. The lumber companies, in particular, are aware because of the certification that is required overseas. Some woodlots have been inherited, and some jobber or contractor comes along and offers the owner some money, and they do not have any understanding of the real value of it. They go in and they take everything right off, and it is gone. It is that situation that is the tragedy.
The Chairman: I am a little curious about your stand against paid hunting. It occurs pretty well across Canada now. You said that you are worried about private lot owners selling everything because they need the money, and then moving on. Yet, here we have a case where a private lot owner makes his or her property an acceptable habitat for wildlife, and you will not permit that person to recoup some of the costs incurred to make it that way.
It seems to me that one of the ways to help the woodlot owners save some of these lots you are talking about is to allow them to have other sources of income. Whether it is a turnstile at the gate for the tourists to come through and observe the woodpeckers in flight, or whether it is to pay to shoot a deer seems to be along the same line. I wonder if you are trying to have your cake and eat it too here. How would you answer that?
Mr. DeBow: My basis is historical. We see a form of discrimination. The owners of private land in southern New Brunswick are refusing access to people from northern New Brunswick who come down to hunt. There are no deer in northern New Brunswick, so they come down to southern New Brunswick to hunt.
The Chairman: That sounds like another toll highway. You Maritimers are shafting each other down here.
Mr. DeBow: Historically, we have always had the right to do that, and we would like to continue. The real problem we have is with the concept of discrimination, and who is allowed to hunt and who is not allowed to hunt. Since market hunting was outlawed at the turn of the century, we have objected to the sale of wildlife for commercial purposes in the conservation movement. That is part of our background and philosophy.
Senator Stratton: I am curious about two things. The number of hunters in New Brunswick has slipped from number one to number two in Canada. Is that a sign that hunting is waning there, as it is elsewhere? I know that the number of hunters is diminishing in Manitoba. Is that occurring here as well?
Mr. DeBow: Yes. In the mid-1980s, 110,000 big game licences sold. Last year, it was down to 65,000 or so.
Senator Stratton: That is dramatic.
Mr. DeBow: It is. From 1996 to 1997, there was approximately a 20 per cent decline. Some people blame that solely on the gun control regulations, but the other aspect is that the northern New Brunswick zones are closed, and there are fewer deer in the middle of New Brunswick. People realize they cannot really shoot a lot of deer.
I have not checked to see the trend in small game licences -- whether they have shifted to small game licences instead of taking a big game licence. I think that is only part of the reason. The big reason is governmental bureaucracy related to gun control. People are just going out of the firearms ownership business. They do not want to be bothered with all of the regulations. They are going to sell their guns, and get out of hunting. As for younger people, it is very difficult for 13 or 14 year olds to take the course, pay for the course, go through all the regulations, and then, when they are 16, or 18 years old, get the licence.
Senator Robichaud: If I may interject, that would not have affected the numbers in the past.
Mr. DeBow: The gun control debate itself has been going on for a long time. People are getting tired of seeing government step in and try to control the ownership of firearms. The FAC system has grown more difficult over time. It used to cost $10 to get an FAC. Now it is more than $50. Now you have to get a photograph on your FAC certificate as well. The registration system has not gone into effect, but the FAC system has been in effect for some time, and it affects the ability to purchase a firearm. I think there has been an effect there.
Senator Stratton: I am not a hunter. Could you tell us what a deer yard is? Second, I think in other parts of Canada, particularly in B.C., they are trying to develop linkages from wildlife area to wildlife area, because of the movement of wildlife up and down the interior of B.C.
Do these deer yards change? Once the deer yard is established, is it a permanent thing, or does it get used and then not used? In other words, are they mobile?
Mr. DeBow: Deer yards are an area to which deer have historically gone through winter. They have coniferous shelter to give deer protection from wind. The snow cover builds up in the trees, so there is good protection. It helps them keep warm. There is also access to hardwood shoots and small browse for them to feed on, so there is the concept of shelter and feed. They are historical areas. Deer usually start migrating towards them in December. Last year, we got an early snowfall, and a lot of the deer were caught outside the deer yard. I am not sure how they survived.
Deer yards evolve over time because the nature of the forest changes, which is the concept of this floating or expanding area. It sort of floats across that adjacent landscape. You cannot just say that this area is a deer yard and set it aside, because it is going to grow up and the deer are not going to have the necessary shelter and food.
There are areas that have been cut and the deer have not gone back. The forest companies say, "well, that is not a deer yard anymore." Of course it is not, for two reasons: It has all been cut over, and there are no deer to go back to them because they have not been able to survive over the winter.
Corridors are needed for the deer to get from area to area. You cannot have huge clear-cuts without access to different areas.
Senator Stratton: My second question is kind of an aside. In southern Manitoba, we have noticed a tremendous number of deer. I do not know whether it is as a result of the diminishing number of hunters, but there is a great number of deer. They are a hazard. They are almost becoming regular roadkill. Unfortunately, they also wreck the car. Is that occurring here?
Mr. DeBow: There certainly is roadkill, and there are areas along the southern part of New Brunswick down in Charlotte County where there have been serious accidents. They have put up fencing to keep the deer off the road. They are doing that along the new four-lane highway in some areas, and we are asking them to examine other areas.
I do not think that the population is expanding because of a lack of hunters, however. I think that 12,000 deer were killed last year, and it has been as high as 24,000 in other years. It was over 30,000 in 1985, but the number of hunters at that time was also almost double what it is now. I am not sure that we have huge population increases resulting from fewer hunters.
Senator Stratton: Yesterday we were out looking at different aspects of forest cutting and plantations. Fortunately, here the new forest seems to come up quite quickly and quite densely, because of the more moderate climate. I understand that selective cutting is done in these plantations, rather than clear-cutting. I also understand they go in after 10 or 12 years, clear things out, and keep a certain number of trees within a certain radius. After a certain number of years, they do another cut, and then repeat the process a certain number of years later. Is this advantageous for wildlife or deer in particular? Does it help in the formation of deer yards, or is it hindering wildlife? What is your view?
Mr. DeBow: I certainly do not think it helps wildlife, because it is a one-species plantation, and wildlife needs all different types of trees and undercover to live in. I do not think you are going to see a lot of wildlife in a plantation area, whether it is commercially thinned or not.
Senator Stratton: In your view, must you have a variety of hardwoods and coniferous to allow the proper mix?
Mr. DeBow: Certainly, up here in the Miramichi area, natural regeneration is very good. You do not need plantations unless you are trying to feed a mill, unless you are trying to grow trees for one specific purpose. Natural regeneration is very good. There are some areas where there must be some infilling or some planting, but a great amount of planting is not really needed here.
Senator Stratton: The forest companies have told us that, in order to meet the growing demand in future years, something like 20 per cent of forest should be kept on plantations. They say that simply leaving it as a naturally regenerating area does not allow for enough product. Essentially, a certain area of our boreal forest would be treated as tree farms, and specific types would be grown on those plantations. Do you have any views on that?
Mr. DeBow: My immediate reaction is that I would not like to see it, because I see plantations as sort of a sterile area, rather than an area that has wildlife and mixed coniferous and hardwood trees.
Senator Stratton: The reality is that, ultimately we will have to have a degree of that, whether it is fortunate or unfortunate. On the Prairies, there are very few examples of prairie tall grass. It is only left in very isolated areas. There is only one area in Manitoba that we can identify around the City of Winnipeg, and it has been found and preserved.
Wildlife species really have adapted quite well, however, except for the bison. Do you not feel that the wildlife in this case could adapt to the plantation type of forestation as they have done on the prairies, switching from wild tall grass to grown grains?
Mr. DeBow: I think that they would just move out of the area.
The Chairman: Something occurred to me when you argued against paid hunting. You were using traditional views when you were making your argument. Do not forget that, traditionally, people hunted quite often to put something in the larder. Now it is quite often a sport. In other words, it is not necessarily done to keep life and limb together for the people who are out there. It is like any other sport -- birdwatching or going to a football game. It seems that you are asking a private owner to subsidize your sport. How do you answer that argument?
Mr. DeBow: Wildlife in New Brunswick belongs to all New Brunswickers, and not just to the owner of the land that it happens to be on at a particular time. All New Brunswickers should have access to it.
The Chairman: Access to wildlife and blowing a hole in it are two different things.
Mr. DeBow: The wise use of our natural resources is the underlying theme. If a deer is going to slowly die of starvation over the winter, it is much better for a hunter to shoot it in the fall.
The Chairman: You are saving it from itself. I am a little curious about your coyotes. I live out on a farm, and I have a woodlot between Edmonton and Fort McMurray. It is a long way north of here. We have a lot of coyotes and a lot of deer. As a matter of fact, they are both pests. The coyotes, though, seem to live on mice more than on deer. I think we get a lot less snow in northern Alberta, although it is perhaps colder there than it is here. My father was from down here and, according to him, it was always colder here.
Senator Stratton: I somehow doubt that.
The Chairman: It is fairly cold where I live. I think the deer yard concept does not apply there because of a lack of snow. The deer move around. What are the coyotes doing, getting the fawns in the spring?
Mr. DeBow: First of all, the coyote that we have is much different from the western coyote.
The Chairman: They are bigger and meaner.
Mr. DeBow: Yes, they are.
The Chairman: You have been crossing them with sled dogs.
Mr. DeBow: All I know is that they have become bigger as they have moved east.
The Chairman: That happens to politicians, too.
Mr. DeBow: They have been all right so far. The biologists tell us that when they examine the skull of an eastern coyote, it is different from the skull of a western coyote. They are bigger, so they can take deer quite readily.
The deer wintering yards have high snow banks and just a little trail that they move back and forth on between the shelter and the feeding areas. There have been quite a few problems in deer yards in winter where the coyotes go in and take deer in these deer yards. There have been programs directed to snaring the coyotes and weeding the problem ones out in deer yards.
I am not sure that it is necessarily a spring problem, nor is it a young deer problem. Three to five years ago, the coyote population seemed to peak. Fundy National Park was almost cleaned out of deer and, certainly, there is no hunting in the park. The forests in the park did change somewhat because of the budworm damage and that sort of thing.
The coyotes were hard on the deer in the Fundy Park area. When they peak like that, they are very hard on the deer population. Then they sort of decreased in number. Now the coyote population seems to be going back up a little bit, because there are areas where people are not seeing the deer this fall where they are normally spotted. It has not been a cold fall yet, however, so the deer have not started to move.
The Chairman: I will move into another area. We have heard the strong message here, as well as in other provinces, that there is a lack of protected areas in the province, and too much land is committed to logging. Some people say there is too much private ownership. We have talked about private woodlots being sold, and so on.
In some places now -- particularly in the U.S. and Europe, and to a small extent in the rest of Canada -- people have been lobbying government to buy back private lands as they come on the market, in order to acquire these protected areas. Where the Crown already has it under licence, all they have to do is purchase the licence back, or whatever it is. In areas where you are long on private ownership but short on protected areas, have you pressured the government to establish a fund to buy lands back to get these protected areas? You would probably try to persuade your members to put money in a joint public-private fund to buy these lands.
Mr. DeBow: No, I guess we have never really thought of that. The New Brunswick Nature Trust is involved in it, but they are generally trying to buy and protect smaller areas that have a special purpose. We have never thought about buying back land. The Department of Natural Resources has told us for the last 15 years that every stick of wood in New Brunswick is scheduled for cutting at some point in time.
The Chairman: That is becoming increasingly common throughout the Western world. Whether it is oil rights, mining rights, quarry rights, or anything else, we are starting to find that maybe we should be buying them back. It is a pretty good use of the taxpayer's money, because everybody enjoys a protected area or park.
Another area is the input of aboriginal people into your wildlife federation. As you know, the Supreme Court is handing down decisions where our aboriginal people have rights to hunt and fish well their home reservations. That is the interpretation that the courts are giving to a lot of the early treaties, maybe not so much here, but certainly in the West. It seems to me that any organization that purports to support wildlife should have very strong aboriginal input. Do you have an aboriginal chapter?
Mr. DeBow: Unfortunately, we do not. That is something that is needed, and I think we have to educate both sides. We have not opened that door. We tried to open it five years ago with one meeting, but that did not get anywhere. We have not made any more efforts, which is unfortunate.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. DeBow. Your presentation was most informative.
Mr. Spinney, it is nice to see you again. You are a man of many talents.
Mr. Tom Spinney, Director, Forest Management Branch, New Brunswick Ministry of Natural Resources: I do not know about that. I was asked to come here this morning to give an overview of our system of Crown land management here in the province of New Brunswick. I will spend the next 20 minutes or so trying to do that.
Before getting into any detail, I would like to put Crown land in New Brunswick in perspective for you. The total land area of the province is approximately 7 million hectares. It is interesting to note that over 85 per cent of that land base is forested land. I think that is the largest percentage of forested land of any province in Canada. That, to a large degree, contributes to the fact that forestry is such a vital component of our economy and our way of life here in this province.
As this slide shows, the provincial Crown owns approximately half of the province's land base. The other major land ownerships consist of private woodlots, which are about 30 per cent of the land base, and industrial freehold lands, which are about 20 per cent. Industrial freehold is private land. It is owned by the large forestry companies, and there are primarily four: Avenor, Irving, Fraser and Georgia-Pacific. Just to complete the picture, there are some federal Crown lands here in the province as well, and they account for just over 1 per cent of the land base.
Throughout the rest of my presentation, I will be dealing with land management of Crown land. I would like to give you some appreciation of how our current forest management system evolved, and to give an outline of the types of things we manage for here, how we go about it, and some of the results.
How did our present system develop? It had its beginnings back in 1974 with the Forest Resources Study. At that time, the government commissioned a study. It was generally recognized by professionals in both industry and government that, if we continued along that path, and continued to support development of the forest industry, we were going to reach a critical point where we expanded capacity beyond the forest's ability to sustain the development.
The Forest Resources Study was commissioned to look at that issue, and to develop recommendations for addressing it. That culminated in 1992 with new provincial legislation -- the Crown Lands and Forests Act -- which sets out the framework for the system that we have in place here today. We have been working under that system since 1982.
The Crown Lands and Forests Act provides for Crown timber licences. We have ten licences here across the Crown land base. Each licence is managed by a licensee -- which is an industrial company -- following the management standards set by government.
Government and the forest companies have entered into a forest management agreement, and it is renewed every five years. That agreement sets out the responsibilities of the licensee and the government with respect to management of Crown lands under the licence system.
One of the major components of the system and the forest management agreement is the requirement that management plans be developed for these Crown timber licences. Really, the management plan is the key instrument that dictates how the management regimes are put in place on Crown land.
It is important to note that in the management plan process, government sets the objectives for management. They are not industry-established objectives. That is a very key point. Government decides, for example, whether we are going to manage Crown land just for timber and forget everything else, or whether we bring wildlife or water quality into the mix. Government makes that decision, not industry. We have set both timber and non-timber objectives. I will expand on that as we go on.
Government provides industry with the objectives. When I say "industry," I am talking about the licensees. Licensees are then charged with the responsibility to develop strategies to meet the objectives. They do that through their management plans. They submit those plans back to government for review and approval.
Let me talk about the management plan in a little more detail. In that planning process, forecasts are made for both timber and wildlife habitat supply over an 80-year horizon. This plan looks forward 80 years.
Harvest and habitat are both mapped for the next 25 years. That is to ensure that the predictions and the assumptions that are made in the management planning process can actually be put on the ground and take place. It is not just a paper exercise.
Management plans are updated every five years. I think this is key. They are redone every five years. It is not just an update. This allows new objectives to be brought in as the whole way of thinking of government and society evolve. It provides the opportunity to bring in new data as it is gathered, and it allows the management plan to stay current with the thinking.
Annual operating plans are derived from management plans. These operating plans detail the actual on-the-ground treatments that are going to take place during the next year. Again, they are prepared by the licensees, and submitted to our regional offices for approval. As the operating plans are put into place, the actions of the licensees are monitored by our staff to ensure that they are following the plans and all the government regulations that apply.
I will give you a little bit of history about management planning. I mentioned that we started in 1982 with the Crown Lands and Forests Act. That first management plan was rudimentary in comparison to what we have today. We had an old forest inventory at the time, a dated one, so our database was not the greatest. We did not have any really good information on things like deer wintering areas. What we did was to arbitrarily reduce the forest land base by 15 per cent to account for some of those things that we knew we had to provide for out there, but for which we did not have all the information. As I say, this was a pretty rudimentary approach compared to what we have today.
Moving on through the next generation of the plan in 1987 -- the five-year interval -- at that time we benefited from a new forest inventory that was put into place. We also have good geographic information gathered in those five years with respect to deer wintering areas. They were all mapped. We knew the widths of the buffers we wanted to put on watercourses, so those were mapped and put in the management plan as well.
In 1992, I think we made further gains with what I would call our first "multiple-use plan." We provided for a wildlife habitat return by having a mature coniferous forest habitat objective. We maintained the deer wintering areas in there as well. Actually, we expanded the deer wintering areas into what we call Wintering Area Management Units, which are larger areas. The concept was that we would try to manage that larger area over time to maintain deer winter habitat in the area. Buffers and reserves were included as well.
The most recent management plan is the fourth one in our time here. It was put in place in 1997. Again, the objectives that we had in place were for mature coniferous forest habitat, deer wintering areas, buffers and reserves. We also had a new objective, called biodiversity.
The other thing we did in the 1997 process was to develop a standard management plan format for the submission of plans. It has made them much easier to compare from licence to licence, and it has made them much more presentable and understandable, I hope, for the general public.
Just moving quickly through those objectives I mentioned, first is the mature coniferous forest habitat. If we were managing the forest without thinking about habitat, we would target the oldest stands first. I think that is fairly obvious. You cut older wood, and leave the younger wood to grow to maturity.
We were doing a very good job of that, to the extent that our biologists and others were concerned about the long-term impact of that because, over time, we were going to really eliminate the old forest here. We recognize that there are a number of wildlife species that depend on that type of habitat for their survival.
In 1992, we introduced this objective. It requires that 10 per cent of the softwood forest on each licence be maintained in a mature condition. That is forever -- not in one spot forever, but the 10 per cent is there for the wildlife species that depend on it. There are spacial configurations that apply to that as well.
Looking at it on a provincial basis, you can see the distribution of the mature habitat on the map. It encompasses, in total, approximately 250,000 hectares. It provides a home for species like the American marten, and there are 20-odd other species in the province that depend upon that sort of habitat.
The other objective we have relates to deer wintering areas. We have expanded the old concept of the deer yard, where deer congregate in the winter, to a larger area. The objective is to manage that area to provide a balance of age classes over time, and hopefully to sustain the habitat on some portion of that site. One of the instruments used to do that, interestingly enough, is harvesting within the Deer Wintering Area Management Unit in order to improve habitat.
At the present time, 270,000 hectares in this condition have been identified in the province. A larger proportion of that is scattered across the northern part of the province, where habitat becomes more critical. By managing these deer yards, we will hopefully provide the winter shelter and food requirements for the white-tailed deer population.
The next subject is watercourse buffers. In establishing watercourse buffers, our objective is to protect fish habitat and the water resource itself. Buffer widths vary from 30 metres to 150 metres, although they are sometimes wider than that. They are required on all watercourses greater than half a metre wide, and sometimes on watercourses smaller than that. Prescription harvesting is allowed in portions of watercourse buffers, and it is similar to what we do in deer wintering areas. The prescription is tailored to try to maintain the integrity of the buffer over time.
Obviously, if you just leave it alone, it will all fall down at some point in time. We try to do some selective harvesting in there. You saw yesterday where the regeneration was underneath the stands. If you can open up the stands a little bit, and get the sunlight to the forest floor, you can get that regeneration growing up. The aim is to get different age classes within the buffer areas.
I will just speak briefly here on reserves as well. These are areas where there is no harvesting. In some cases, it is because harvesting just is not allowed -- as is the case with the ecological reserves that we have here. In others, it is because we have some small, protected areas that are unique sites, similar to what we saw at Sheephouse Falls yesterday. It has those types of features. There are a number of those on each licence that we try to protect. The other instance where there is no harvesting is on some very steep-sloped areas. It is just not possible to harvest those.
I mentioned that in the 1997 management planning process, we introduced a biodiversity objective. I will be the first to tell you that this is a very basic and rudimentary objective. At the time, we were not -- and still are not -- exactly sure how to handle biodiversity. Some of this concept is still in the developmental stage. There are many opinions on what the right approach is. In any case, our approach in 1997 was to require that on each licence the broad forest cover types -- softwoods, softwood/hardwood, hardwood/softwood and hardwood -- be maintained on a licence within plus or minus 10 per cent of their present distribution. That is a crude biodiversity objective, but it is the best one that we thought we could come up with at the time.
We are working now towards the 2002 management plan. This is one area where we are concentrating our attention to try to develop a more meaningful ecosystem-based biodiversity objective. That is still in the developmental stage, so I cannot tell you yet how it is going to look in 2002 yet. A year from now, however, we should have the answer to that.
The management planning system that we have here evolves. At each five-year interval, we have the opportunity to bring in a new objective or to further develop an objective. As we learn more about the science of forestry, we can introduce it into the planning system at five-year intervals.
I do not want to leave timber supply out. If we were not interested in timber, we might not be doing any of this management planning at all. There are a few points I would like to make about the timber objective, and how we handle it in the management planning process. We project and we realize that we will hit a low point in the growing stock in 20 years.
On the slide, it says a shortfall in 20 years. It is not a shortfall; it is the low point in our growing stock. We have set our allowable cut figures today, and have done so since 1982, at levels that will take us through that low point. It is not that that in 20 years time we will not have wood to harvest. In 20 years time, we will be past the low point and, beyond that, the growing stock will increase and we will have more flexibility in how we distribute the uses of the forest at that time.
It is important to note, too, that we maximize the annual allowable cut of timber through the application of silviculture practices on the land base. The harvest level is calculated at a level that is sustainable over an 80-year horizon. The actual harvest levels are monitored on an annual basis to ensure that we stay within that allowable level.
I will review what we have covered so far. Management plans are prepared every five years. The last one was in 1997. It had objectives for MCFH, deer wintering areas, buffers, biodiversity and reserves. The harvest level was mapped for a 25-year period, and the harvest level equals the allowable cut calculation. We do not go beyond that.
I am just going to cover this part fairly quickly. If there are subsequent questions, that is fine. I do not want to go too much into the technical detail here of how we orchestrate the management planning process. The five key elements of the process are: forest inventory data, yield curves, post-harvest response, habitat definitions, and the wood supply model. I will speak briefly about each of those.
First I will speak about the forest inventory data. Since 1987, we have had a GIS-based forest inventory. We have an update process in place, whereby we redo one-tenth of the province every year. In a sense, it is a rolling ten-year inventory. Therefore, the inventory never gets out of date by more than ten years. We update the inventory annually for harvesting and silviculture treatments that are done on the land base. The inventory gives us information on broad species groups and their age and class distribution.
The element that really predicts how forests will grow is yield curves. It determines how the forest stands move over time, how they increase in volume and then decrease again. They are generated from information that we have gathered on the forest dating well back into the early 1950s. We have yield curves both for natural stands and for managed stands for plantations, for instance.
The line graph on the slide might be a typical yield curve where, in a forest stand, the volume increases over time to a point of maturity, and thereafter it starts to fall off. We say that they are "over-mature" beyond that point. Some decline much more sharply than that, but that is a typical yield curve.
We monitor yields on an annual basis to ensure that the data that we have used in these projections is accurate. We compare the actual harvest levels with the yield projection.
I will expand briefly on the wildlife habitat definition. From researching the literature on various wildlife species, our biologists have formulated a definition of the type of forest habitat that is required by these species at the critical point in their development. What they have done is to define that condition in terms of forest stand characteristics. These characteristics are then placed on yield curves, so we can say that for a certain period of time this forest stand will provide the condition that the wildlife species requires.
By way of example, on this graph this particular wildlife species would require the type of habitat that this forest stand would provide between ages 40 and 60. That stand type would provide habitat during that period -- not before, and not after. Therefore, we cannot count on it to provide wildlife habitat except when it is in that condition.
One of the other elements is post-harvest response. This predicts how new stands will develop after harvest. This type of information is critical to managing both the timber resource and the wildlife resource, as I am sure you can appreciate.
The elements that I have talked about -- the inventory, the yield curves, the habitat definition and the post-harvest response -- are all brought together in a wood supply model, a computer model. It allows the testing of various management scenarios.
You can put basically any objective you want in there. You can say that you are just going to manage for wildlife, if you want to, and see what the results are, or that you are only going to manage for timber. You can set them at of the levels that you think are appropriate. From that, we calculate the actual timber and habitat supply. We require, of course, that the habitat supply match our objectives. The timber is what is left over, if you like, after the habitat objective is met.
I will go through a few results of the management planning process. We talked about the allowable cut. That is what we limit the harvest level to. In the 1997 process, the end result was that the softwood timber supply was 3.6 million cubic metres per year, and the hardwood was 1.6 cubic metres per year. This is the allowable cut level. It is the level we can harvest sustainably every year. It is critical to note here, this is the allowable cut after we have met the other non-timber objectives. Those non-timber objectives have been fully met, and this is the timber supply after that.
The allowable cut is supported by an extensive silviculture program. Over the last couple of years, we have spent approximately $28 million annually to finance silviculture on Crown lands. For a small province like New Brunswick, that is a lot of money. It represents close to half of our whole department's annual operating budget. It is a big investment for us.
Silviculture is in the form of either planting or spacing. You can see the results in spacing the young stands that are out there, similar to what we saw taking place with the spacing saw operators out there yesterday. Smaller portions are undertaken in planting -- either full planting, or fill planting. I will not go into that, because I think you had a description of that yesterday.
The following example illustrates why we are doing silviculture, and why we are making this investment. If we had never done any silviculture here in the province, our allowable cut today in softwood would be 1.5 million cubic metres, but because of what we have done in the past, we can sustain 3.6 million cubic metres per year. You can see that is a very significant effect. If we continue on into the future, once we get beyond that low point in the growing stock that will appear in about 20 years, the allowable cut will start to increase. In 40 years time, we will be up to a level of 5.1 million cubic metres. That figure assumes that all other objectives are held where they are today. Obviously, if we adopt a protected area strategy, that takes some of the land base out of production, and that volume will not be achieved. I am just making a comparison to present day objectives.
To summarize, the allowable cut is calculated through the wood supply modelling exercise every five years as part of management planning. The harvest locations are mapped on a 25-year horizon, so we are sure there will be areas that realistically can be harvested. The harvest level is kept to the allowable cut calculation. It is not exceeded. In the management planning process, we provide for other values or objectives as the government sets them. The government decides what those objectives will be, and then they are brought into the management planning process.
If I leave you with no other thought, let it be that the Crown land management system is based on the principle of sustainability. I think that is the key for those of us who work in the exercise. We have a system that will sustain the objectives that we have in place. As we develop and incorporate new objectives, they will have their impacts on various other values and uses of the forest, but we will continue to operate on this prime principle.
Senator Robichaud: Thank you for a good presentation. It was well put together, and there is a lot of information there. You mentioned the numbers of the annual allowable cut, or AAC. It is only for the Crown lands, is it not?
Mr. Spinney: That is correct. Everything I covered there is Crown land.
Senator Robichaud: Have you given any consideration to the private woodlots when you work out the AAC? Do you have as much information on them as you would on the Crown lands?
Mr. Spinney: No, we do not. Are you asking if we have a system of managing private woodlots similar to Crown lands?
Senator Robichaud: In a way, yes.
Mr. Spinney: I will attempt to answer that. No, we do not, because our inventory information on that is not as good. More importantly than that, we do not have the jurisdiction to manage private land here in the province. The provincial government just does not have that jurisdiction. We are concerned about the management of that land.
We know from our data that, in certain areas of the province, the private woodlot sector is being harvested above what is sustainable over time. I cannot tell you exactly how much, because we do not have the data. I think most people will agree -- even those in the private woodlot sector itself -- that it is being overharvested in some areas.
To date, we have tried to address that through what I would call a "soft approach," as opposed to a regulatory approach. We are trying to address it through education, and that is a long-term process. We are trying to address it through some incentives. We are financing a silviculture program on private woodlots annually here, and we have been doing so for a number of years. That certainly will help the situation, but I would suggest that it is only one component of it.
While we are concerned, we do not have the jurisdiction in place today to regulate what a private woodlot owner does with this land. I also think there would be a lot of opposition to that type of regulation.
Senator Stratton: I would like to ask a supplemental to that question. Would it not be to the benefit of everyone -- including the woodlot owners and particularly the private forestry companies -- to have some kind of control or at least have the woodlot operators on side?
You are telling me that the long-term sustainability of the volumes required by the forestry companies is not there if there is overcutting in the private woodlot sector. Essentially, they are going to run into a shortfall in the province and then, in the future, the pressure to increase the volume of cutting on Crown lands will increase. I do not see why the three of you are not sitting down and trying to work this out. We heard last night that the overcutting that is occurring could be alarming. What do you think of that? Is there anything in the works to bring that about?
Mr. Spinney: I agree with you. It would be to the advantage of all parties involved if something like that could be developed. You asked why do we not sit down together. The three parties have sat through numerous sections over the last five years, trying to come to an agreement on what would make sense, and what would be acceptable. The one thing that has come back loud and clear is that it is not politically acceptable to regulate what people can do on their land.
The things woodlot owners do agree with are the ones I mentioned we are already doing -- silviculture, education and that type of thing. In the long term, it is true that, if overharvesting continues, it will result in a shortfall down the road, and pressures will be put on other sources of supply.
The Chairman: Has anybody investigated the income tax ramifications, and how that might be used to avoid capital gains or complete sell-out? Sometimes that can be used to encourage people to keep their lots for wood, and not necessarily in a punitive way. It could be in a positive way, in terms of the write-offs and so on that would be allowed.
For instance, I think many people who have private lots may have other income from working in the mill, or from other forms of employment. I do not know whether they could deduct the costs and expenses of operating their private lot from their salaried income. I doubt they can do so now, but I suspect that you should turn the cat loose in the federal bag a little. That is, tell them that if they want to have lots of forests and lots of sustainability, perhaps we should be looking at the Federal Income Tax Act. It would be good for Canada.
Senator Robichaud: You are telling him what he should tell us.
The Chairman: I am just trying to get a little support to kick the federal income tax in the hind end.
Mr. Spinney: That would be under federal jurisdiction, and I am certainly not an expert on that. However, what I do know about it is that problems have been noted there. Disincentives to long-term sustainable management exist within the tax system today. The subject has been raised to the federal finance committee by both the Federation of Woodlot Owners, with whom I think you spoke last night, and our department. Beyond that, I cannot speak on that subject.
The Chairman: Thank you. I just wanted to get that into the record.
Senator Robichaud: We are a subcommittee on the boreal forest. We are concerned about the boreal forest in New Brunswick. Is the boreal forest treated differently? Do you consider the whole of New Brunswick as just one great big forest, or do you give some consideration to the boreal part of it -- which is higher up in the north -- that you would not give to the Acadian forest?
Mr. Spinney: As you know, we have very little of the boreal forest in this province. Perhaps 2 per cent of the land base is in that area. I do not think it matters whether you are talking about the boreal forest, the Acadian forest, or any other kind of forest.
Every kind of forest has various components. We attempt to manage the forest in a fashion that is suitable for that component of the forest. Softwood, spruce, fir, and maybe some jack pine characterize the Boreal forest. Certainly, what you do in the boreal forest in terms of treatments, regeneration, and that type of thing will differ from what you do in other types of forest.
We do not sit down at the first of the year and say this is the boreal forest, what are we going to do there, and this is the Acadian forest, we have to do something different there. We look at the actual forest characteristics of it, too. In a sense, the whole forest is a forest base, and we try to meet the objectives that I mentioned by applying stand level prescriptions that make sense. I am not sure if that answers your question.
Senator Robichaud: Yes, it does. The government has very good relations with the licence holders on the Crown lands. You have to, in a way, to ensure that the plans are put into place and followed.
Mr. Spinney: Yes, we do. As I mentioned, we started this system in 1982, and there have been growing pains. However, at the time industry and government sat down and asked if this system made sense. I think industry saw that it at least gave some long-term security of supply and a rational management approach to forest management, so industry bought in as well. We certainly had our differences to iron out in the initial years. I think we have developed a really good working relationship. For the most part, we all seem to be targeting the same end results.
Senator Robichaud: Mr. Irving owns a lot of forest land in New Brunswick. How does he fit into that? It is private land -- it is not Crown land. I suppose he has some licences.
Mr. Spinney: Yes.
Senator Robichaud: You do not know what is being cut on those lands that are not within the private woodlots or part of the Crown lands?
Mr. Spinney: If you think back to that slide I had, those lands were part of the industrial freehold depicted there. The system that industrial freehold owners use to manage their lands is very similar to the way that Crown land is managed. They have objectives for wildlife habitat and for water quality, and so on, but, aside from some environmental regulations, they are not government-imposed objectives.
We do not have anything in the regulations that says that industry cannot cut more than the allowable cut. Those land bases are managed on a sustainable basis, however, and, if you think about it, it is in industry's best interest to do that. That represents their most secure source of supply. It is the one they have control of, so it is in their best interest to ensure that they are sustaining that over time.
Senator Robichaud: You are satisfied that they do?
Mr. Spinney: Yes.
The Chairman: Is the industrial freehold expanding? Can they, or are they, buying out the private woodlot owners?
Mr. Spinney: It is difficult to give a "yes" or "no" answer to that question. To my knowledge, not many private woodlots are being purchased by the large industrial companies here. What we had seen over the past five years or so is woodlots being purchased by harvesting contractors. They purchase the land basically to harvest it. They harvest it and, quite frankly, I am not sure what happens to it after that.
Senator Robichaud: They just leave it there.
Mr. Spinney: In some cases, yes.
The Chairman: Historically, how did these industrial freehold people get access to that much land? Did they buy it from the Crown, or was it from the Queen? Where did it come from?
Senator Stratton: Perhaps we could be given some historical background. How did this all start?
Mr. Spinney: I am not sure I can answer that. I will only tell you what I know, and I will not go beyond that. If you look back in history, large tracts of land here in the province were granted to, for instance, the New Brunswick Railway Company. I am only surmising this, but I suspect that was to finance it, or as collateral to build railroads.
The Chairman: It was done all through the west. After they got the land grant to build a railroad, they declared bankruptcy. The directors then bought all the land back for a dollar, and left the government with a railroad that had not been built.
Mr. Spinney: At least part of the industrial freehold base was acquired by these companies through purchasing those grounds in the past. I really cannot speak for all of the industrial freehold with any degree of accuracy.
Senator Robichaud: What kind of pressures are brought upon your department by industry in relation to the AAC?
Mr. Spinney: First of all, thinking back here, the AAC is developed through a process that we guide, but it is developed and calculated by the licensees. Industry calculates the allowable cut. Obviously, we monitor that they are doing it properly, and that they are coming up with the realistic answer.
They are part of the process, and I think that is the key here. At the end of the day, when you do your wood supply analysis, a number comes out. When we put our heads together and say you did everything the way it was supposed to be done and this is the number, there really is no avenue for pressure to harvest beyond the AAC.
Senator Robichaud: It all depends on what attitude is taken. If you need fibre, and you can sell it and make money, there is a tendency to say that more is growing than you people with your conservative estimates have calculated.
Mr. Spinney: I understand what you are saying, but industry is so much a part of the management system here, and we do have a good relationship. Through working through that management planning process, we will agree collectively on the output. Pressures are not being brought to bear to exceed that.
The types of pressure we experience come from the hundred-odd mills here in the province, and have to do with what portion of the AAC they actually receive. Of course, by nature, everyone wants more than they are getting today. They think we should take it away from mill "X" and give it to mill "Y" for all sorts of reasons.
Senator Robichaud: You are confident that nothing like what happened to the groundfish will happen in the forestry sector? There were projections, and scientists were coming out with some signs, but industry was saying, "we think we can go and catch more." Then, all of a sudden, we realized that we had overfished. Not only that, but there were other factors that contributed to that overfishing. Are you confident that we are not in this type of situation?
Mr. Spinney: I will make two comments in response to that. First of all, trees are much easier to count and account for than fish are. You can go out there and see where they are. You can go back year after year and see how fast they are growing, or not growing. You can measure the effects of other things on them much more easily than you can with fish.
Second, and I have tried to stress it here earlier, this whole process of allowable cut calculation and management planning is redone every five years. If something were to take place that we had not accounted for, we would have the opportunity to bring it into the equation and incorporate it into the planning. To answer your question, yes, I am very confident.
Senator Stratton: The private woodlots have not been accounted for. It would appear that that is the big question here.
Mr. Spinney: Yes, I understand what you are saying. The comments I just made apply only to Crown land. The whole private woodlot issue is still there.
The Chairman: I gather that 25 per cent of the wood that goes through a mill is from private woodlots.
Mr. Spinney: It is 25 per cent to 30 per cent, yes.
The Chairman: We have heard nothing today about the licensees and subcontractors. Perhaps I misunderstood, but yesterday I heard that, when you grant a licence to an operator, that licensee is forced to take so many subcontractors, ancestral mill operators or whatever it is, or cutters in the area. Can you expand on that?
Mr. Spinney: Yes. For each of the ten licences, there are what we call "sub-licensees" in addition to the licensee. Sub-licensees operate mills or processing facilities in the areas. When we determine the allowable cut, we distribute that formally to each mill in the province. Each licensee and sub-licensee receives a portion of that.
The Chairman: Is that done on the basis of their capacity?
Mr. Spinney: It is based on their capacity and their historic reliance on Crown timber. Recently, we have been paying attention to value-added manufacturing, and we have been trying to support that as a way of creating and keeping jobs here in the province. Those types of things are taken into consideration. A sub-licensee has a right to his designated volume from the licence each year. The licensee has the obligation to provide for the sub-licensee's needs, and formal agreements are drawn up to cover the sub-licensee's existence.
The Chairman: It sounds like a shotgun wedding, though. It is not the case that most people feel sorry for licensees, but are there cases where a licensee can end up as nothing more than a midwife for a bunch of sub-licensees? How big do those things get?
Mr. Spinney: There are two or three really large sub-licensees in the province. For the most part, they are significantly smaller than a licensee would be. However, your point on the shotgun wedding is fairly accurate. In reality, the Crown Lands and Forests Act gives the minister the authority to instruct the licensee to issue a sub-licence.
The Chairman: Is that done in a transparent manner? Is an appeal process available? If Senator Robichaud and I bought a mill, and were pretty friendly with the premier, do you think we could double the quota?
Mr. Spinney: Do I have to handle all of these questions?
The Chairman: Now that we point out the shotgun weddings, we just want to point out what to do with the kids.
Mr. Spinney: I can speak to part of that, at least. Certainly, the establishment or the distribution of timber allocations to sub- licensees is done in recognition of all other mills' needs as well. We are very conscious of the fact that each mill in the province needs a supply of timber to be viable. You do not see many cases -- or probably any cases -- where you are taking away from one mill to the extent that it can no longer operate.
Senator Robichaud: Is it not a constant struggle for the small mills to get saw logs?
Mr. Spinney: I would say that they are probably a lot better off now than they would have been before the Crown Lands and Forests Act, because now they have a formal allocation. If it is saw logs for their mill, it is saw log material. They know before the year starts what volume of saw timber they can get for their mill from Crown lands and then, of course, they will have to look at supplementing that with other sources of supply.
Senator Stratton: Briefly, I would like to go back to the question of habitat for wildlife. Were you talking about clear-cuts being 500 metres or more with your slide demonstration? Is that a correct interpretation?
Mr. Spinney: No. That slide was on mature coniferous forest habitat, and it talked about the configuration of that habitat.
Senator Stratton: They have to be a minimum of 500 metres.
Mr. Spinney: Yes.
Senator Stratton: Are there any limitations on the width and length of clear-cuts?
Mr. Spinney: We have a clear-cut size limit of 100 hectares here. The average clear-cut size across the province is around 32 hectares.
Senator Stratton: I want to tie that into wildlife. Wildlife obviously does not like vast open spaces. Trees in vast, open spaces are at risk of blowdown. When you were talking about deer yards, you were, in essence, saying that you encourage the lumber companies or the forestry companies to maintain them as such, so that they do not overgrow and become forests, and therefore not usable by the deer. Is that correct?
Mr. Spinney: That is correct.
Senator Stratton: They are sustained in that fashion, but what about linkages? When you have a deer yard, you have cuts around, and there are wildlife refuges. They are interconnected. Has the province given any thought to that? Is there something underway?
Mr. Spinney: Yes, thought has been given to that. When we speak of this, we think as well of the watercourse buffers. In many cases, they provide this conductivity. I am not a biologist, so I am getting a little beyond my expertise here, but I am told by the biologists that that is not a prime consideration when it comes to deer, but that it is one for other wildlife species.
The Chairman: As for aboriginal input into your five-year plans, I gather the solution you devised was to go out and perform another shotgun wedding, telling the licensees that they would have to give four or five per cent of their cut to the aboriginal population. That was sort of an ad hoc situation. Is there any long-term planning? Does that appear to be roughly the way the problem will be handled in the future?
Mr. Spinney: It is today, for the short term. I do not think any of us know exactly where this is going to take us in the long term. You have probably heard that a task force has been established here to look at aboriginal issues. We expect its report to be ready in early 1999, and it may provide some insight into the future directions to take. At this point in time, we foresee the same sort of logging agreements that we negotiated this year with the First Nation communities to be back in place next year, and at the same level.
The Chairman: I have a quick, technical question in the fall-down area. If you get a protective zone that has a tremendous amount of fall-down because it was an area with old stands, does that hurt the filtering quality of the forestry as far as water coming into the stream?
Mr. Spinney: Are you talking about watercourse buffers?
The Chairman: Yes. Say you had a buffer around a stream. It gets a little old because you have not thinned it out enough, and trees blow down.
Mr. Spinney: I have asked biologists that question. They say that a forest that is all blown down and lying there is better than something that is all tracked through with skidders. I think they are right in that opinion. What we are trying to do is operate the forested land so that neither of those two things happens.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming out. Your presentation was most enlightening. I suppose that if we call you when we are preparing our final report, you will be ready to answer.
Mr. Spinney: Certainly.
The Chairman: Thank you. Good luck with your marriages. Next on the agenda is Mr. David Coon, from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick.
Mr. David Coon, Conservation Council of New Brunswick: I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak with you today, and I appreciate the opportunity for all of us in New Brunswick who had the chance to come and speak. It is terrific to see the Senate subcommittee coming to our province to hear what citizens and different organizations have to say about the state of our forests.
I am will try to keep my remarks brief, which is not an easy task for me sometimes, particularly on this issue. I would have loved to have a debate with Mr. Spinney today, and then we could have had a big discussion.
The Chairman: He has enough trouble with the marriages.
Mr. Coon: In any event, I will make a couple of comments, but I will more or less stick to my original game plan.
The Conservation Council is a citizens' organization, and was established in 1969 in New Brunswick. It is concerned with resource conservation, environmental protection, and the sustainability of our resource-dependent communities.
We are a membership-based group with a board of directors. We have three directors in the Miramichi area, and one of them -- Norman Richardson -- is here today. He is a logging contractor, a woodlot owner, and Christmas tree grower. If you want to buy wreaths or Christmas trees before you leave, I am sure he will take your orders. He will ship them anywhere.
That is the kind of organization we have. We do a lot of work in the resource sectors, promoting more ecological approaches to resource management, and more local involvement in the decision-making about how those resources are used by the resource-dependent communities.
You already have heard this morning that New Brunswick's forests are not largely boreal, but Acadian. The Acadian forest is a very fascinating forest, and it is very diverse. It is composed of 32 different tree species, more than any other forest type in North America at our latitude. There is a tremendous diversity of forest communities or forest types within the Acadian forest.
The forest ecologists at the Department of Natural Resources who work for Mr. Spinney would say there are maybe 30 to 40 different types of forests within the province. There are ten basic ones, and they include the more boreal-like forests high up in the Appalachians -- the New Brunswick highlands as we call them -- or up in northwestern New Brunswick on the extreme side there adjacent to Quebec. There are also rich hardwood forests, mixed forests, cedar forests, and forests that have a combination of red spruce and northern hardwoods.
The interesting thing about our forests is that we are in a transition zone between the hardwood forests of southern New England and the boreal forests of eastern Quebec. That creates a very interesting system. Whenever you get an ecological transition between two areas, interesting things happen.
Diversity is, in many ways, the strength of our forests. It can provide us with a wide range of products, and it allows the forest to withstand environmental effects like climate change. From a forestry perspective, we are in better shape here to deal with climate change, because we have such a diversity of species naturally that grow in our forests, unlike the boreal forest which has a very limited number of species. Much of the boreal forest is going to feel the effects of climate change in a negative way. We have to know which of the species here to back, I guess, in the context of climate change, and we have to ensure that we are not organizing our forest management practices against them.
I have a printout from DNRE, and its shows the diversity of forest types in the province. When we are talking about forest management, it is kind of like the story about the blind men and the elephant. Depending on where you are, you think the forest should be managed this way. For example, the forest is one way around the Chatham area. If you go to another part of the province, it is different. Depending on which part of the province you are talking about, different approaches should be taken.
That actually feeds into the academic approach, too. The academic approach is changing dramatically now at UNB, which is a renowned forestry school in Canada, if not in North America. There used to be sort of an archetypal forest in the past that people had in mind when they thought about forest management. That is beginning to change considerably. That is kind of a black and white vision, as opposed to the many colours in the chart that I showed you.
Diversity is based on the changes in soil types, temperature, climate, elevation, slope, and so on. The one-size-fits-all approach is problematic, especially when it comes to forest management, harvesting and silviculture from an ecological point of view in terms of biodiversity, and maintaining the ecological health of the forest.
This chart shows the ten big groupings of forest types within our province. You can see some of the dominant species in each of those cases. If you put that across the province, you get various combinations and permutations of that. One of the things we are concerned about from a biodiversity perspective is that today our harvesting and silviculture forest practices are perpetuating trends that started in the last century, and building on them. They are shifting us to more of a boreal-type mix of species, and selecting against some of these other species that are typical of the Acadian forest.
The other remarkable thing about our forests is their history; they have been subject to intensive harvesting since 1805. Napoleon blockaded the Baltic ports, which had been the major timber supply source for Great Britain. They shifted their attention to Canada for their timber supplies, and notably to New Brunswick. The first area to be harvested was my area in Charlotte County, and later came the Miramichi and other parts of the province.
The interesting thing is that the intensity of the harvest in the first half of the 19th century wrought changes in the forest that we are still feeling today. It is hard to believe, because all this was done by physical labour. Harvesting must have been intense. As a result of this harvesting, the big red spruce largely disappeared. In terms of the sizes of high quality red spruce in the province, they are no longer very available. White pine is in a similar situation.
The debates raged on the floor of the legislature in the 1840s about the sustainability of our forests, and forestry in the province. It is fascinating to read some of those debates. At one point, the lieutenant-governor even entered the fray. Whether that was politic or not at the time, he did it. These debates are long-standing, and not something that has come about because of the modern day environmental movement. They stem directly from the sustainability issues of our forests.
We think that many positive changes are occurring. Internationally, I think that the biodiversity accord, which was signed and ratified by Canada, will have implications for New Brunswick and for forests across Canada. I think that the National Forest Accord, if it is implemented the way it is laid out, will have important implications.
Committees like this one, of course, are important as well. I think is quite appropriate and encouraging that representatives of our Parliament come and listen to Canadians on this issue. The other thing that we are seeing is a public demand for better stewardship in our forests, and that certainly shows no signs of letting up.
We are of the view that current forestry practises are undermining the ecological health of our forests, that they are killing jobs, and that they are foreclosing on future economic opportunities for our children in this province. In our view, the balance is wrong. It is overly focused on volume production, and it is overly focused on getting the wood out of the forests and into the mills as cheaply as possible.
We are talking about sustainability, sustainable forestry, and all the rest of this. We have to start from the perspective of what are we trying to sustain. If it is maintaining an inventory of fibre, sustaining the availability of a wood supply, that is one discussion, and it is more straightforward. There are some interesting debates around that issue.
On the other hand, if we are talking about trying to sustain a healthy forest, that is different. If we are talking about healthy soils and the ecological processes that run the forest, nutrient cycling that fertilizes the soil in the forest floors. Where these kinds of things are functional, you have a much more complicated discussion.
We have very little understanding of how forest ecosystems function, because the development of a forest is done on the scale of hundreds of years. The lifespans of individual tree species range from 100 years to 400 or 500 years, in the case of hemlock in New Brunswick. When you talk about sustainability issues, you have to look both forward and backward for quite a distance.
Having looked at the indicators out there, we believe that we are not sustaining New Brunswick's forests on Crown land. I am speaking about Crown land here from an ecological point of view.
I am convinced that we have the best forest management planning system in the country. The Department of Natural Resources has developed the best ecological land classification, and there is expertise in that department. Contrary to what Mr. Spinney was saying, some of his staff have expertise in how to look at biodiversity conservation in the context of timber management, expertise that is second-to-none within provincial departments in the country. We are well positioned to make some changes here.
From an ecological perspective, we say that we are not sustaining our forests, and there are indicators that demonstrate that. We look at the species mix. In fact, two foresters from DNRE gave a paper to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association last year, and it looked at species composition today compared to in the past. They found that current forestry practices appear to be perpetuating what has happened in the past, in terms of reducing the frequency and abundance of a whole range of tree species in our forest.
The species that have been reduced tend to be longer-lived tree species, and they tend to be the ones that do not grow well in clear-cuts. They tend to grow more slowly, and therefore they are often thinned out when spacing and thinning is happening. Some of the species so affected would include hemlock, cedar, red spruce, sugar maple, and so on. These are declining in abundance and frequency. At the same time, we are seeing a significant increase in species like balsam fir, white spruce, and poplar, which do well in clear-cuts and in open sun, have short lifespans, and grow quickly.
We are not seeing declines just in particular tree species. We are seeing declines in entire forest types. At a forestry conference at the Premier's Round Table last fall, Dr. Judy Loo of the Canadian Forest Service gave a paper. She pointed out that we are seeing declines in mixed forests in the province, and in cedar forests.
Certainly, our rich upland forests began to decline a very long time ago, when some of the best sites began to be cleared off for agriculture. That decline has continued, however, as those kinds of areas have been converted to plantations or other kinds of forest types.
We are seeing that happen. Major changes in the species composition of the forest cover -- the types of forest communities out there -<#0107> will obviously have implications for the other species that live there. As you lose the distribution, frequency, and abundance of these forest types, that will obviously affect plants and animals. That is a very clear indicator that we are going in the wrong direction from a biodiversity perspective, and from the perspective of maintaining the ecological health of the forest.
There are also other indicators. Reed Noss, a renowned conservation biologist in North America, lists a number in the context of forestry. They include things like stand age distribution, structural diversity, road density, fragmentation, sensitive species, and disturbance regimes. He argues that it is a question of which direction you are taking. Are you tending towards what we call a "more natural situation" for those indicators, or to one that is very unnatural? When I say "natural," I do not mean parks. I am talking about the natural composition and natural structures that would be encouraged in harvesting and silviculture in the province.
Clearly, on all of these counts, we are on a downward trajectory. We have very young forests across the province, very simplified systems, more fragmented ones, a very extensive road network, and serious problems with some of the sensitive species in the province.
I mention caribou and wolf here, not because anything has happened in recent years, but because it is interesting to note that, compared to other parts of the country, we lost our top predators a long time ago. The last time we had the wolf was in the 1930s. One of the major ungulates in the province, the caribou, which traditionally was far more common than deer, is gone from the province.
These big animals have gone, and that has implications for the system as well. When they are removed, there is kind of a cascading effect. We do not have the money to go in and do that kind of research in this province, and that is probably true in most provinces. It is unfortunate. We have not done a biological survey in the province, and no biological survey exists.
To place Crown forests on a more sustainable footing, there needs to be a better balance between pursuing the volume production goals for fibre, and maintaining and restoring the ecological health of the forest. That requires changing harvesting and silviculture practices. It means using a far greater variety of harvesting and silviculture practices.
The good news is that many of these practices are better suited to people than to machines, and these kinds of practices will add value to our forests. There is a lot of talk about value-added in the industry, but that is all in the processing end. To really add value, you also want to add value in the woods, in terms of the diversity of available species. If we are squeezing out some species, we should perhaps be encouraging those to come back.
In terms of the sizes of trees available, these kinds of things add value in the woods. Silvicultural interventions and certain types of harvesting can encourage a more diverse mix of species, or a more natural mix of species and sizes of trees.
The system we have moved into here is to try to get the wood out of our forests and into the mills as cheaply as possible. To do that, the process is highly mechanized, very efficient, and very impressive from an economic efficiency perspective.
That high mechanization, of course, is only possible when you are basically clearing the forest. Afterwards, you are either allowing natural regeneration, or planting and herbiciding a plantation. That is the situation on Crown land today. If we move in this direction, then this kind of harvesting silviculture will employ more people, and require more smarts in how we carry out our management.
The bad news is that, on the processing side, our industry is largely a volume-driven industry. We have small operations that are not like that, but overall the industry is dominated by pulp, stud wood, et cetera. Any shift in the balance from a singular volume-driven industry to a more value-driven one will mean change, and that has implications over the long term.
We are in a terrific position now for putting forestry in the province on a more ecologically sustainable footing. DNRE has the tools at hand, and as I mentioned earlier, we have this excellent forest management planning system. We have the ecological land classification system, which is really the planning tool that you can use to begin to address concerns about conserving biological diversity within our timber management plans.
You have to know what is out there, what the landscape looks like from that perspective, and how that informs the kind of harvesting and silviculture that we do. DNRE has that information. Interestingly enough, it was originally developed in planning for protected areas where logging would not occur, but it lends itself very well to this situation. I think it will be used even more in the future for helping develop forest management plans that help conserve biodiversity.
Clearly, we will always use the vast majority of our forests to support the economic well-being of our communities. That means we must learn how to extract timber from the forest in ways that conserve and restore the biological diversity, if we are to maintain healthy forests for the long term.
In our view, one of the ways to effectively improve that is to generate a sense of stewardship over our Crown lands, and to put people in local communities more in the driver's seat when it comes to decision-making about resource management. We have promoted ideas around community forest management. I have provided copies of something called "Working With the Woods," which has some of those notions in it. I have also given you copies of a discussion paper on reconciling aboriginal rights with issues of community forest management and ecological management. The details really are in the paper called "We Are All Here To Stay", and I urge you to look at it.
I do not want to discuss community management in my presentation, because it is such a large topic. It is quite a switch from where we have been. Essentially, we are talking about shifting some of the responsibilities from the public at the provincial level to the public at the local level. At the local level, people are closer, have a longer-term interest in what happens in the local forest, and have a more diverse interest in what is happening to that forest in terms of the way they relate to the forest in their communities.
Let us turn now to aboriginal issues. In thinking about community forestry, for some years it has been clear to us that the only way change would occur on Crown land was if aboriginal people exercised their rights to log on Crown land. They have been doing that, and they also have been moving through the courts. That has opened the door, and many of the people who work in the woods are saying that the next step will be the creation of a new regime. That new regime will allow people other than aboriginal people to have access to Crown land, in terms of working on Crown land and earning a living from Crown land.
An aboriginal task force with former Supreme Court Justice La Forest and Provincial Judge Graydon Nicholas was put in place by the provincial government to make recommendations about aboriginal logging. I expect that the report will come out in December. It will be interesting to see the difference between the interim agreements and the commission's final recommendations. That will be a watershed event for the way we manage Crown lands in this province. We shall see. These are exciting times.
I mentioned that we believed a diversity of harvesting silviculture to be necessary on Crown land, in order to better conserve and restore its biological diversity, maintain its ecological integrity, and maintain the health of our forests. That diversity can be seen on private woodlots across this province. You had the benefit of listening to Jean-Guy Comeau last night. He was the recipient of our Milton F. Gregg Conservation Award last year. Milton Gregg was our first honourary president.
As you go across this province, you will find some remarkable forestry on private woodlots. There certainly are problems on some private woodlots, however. In some cases, you can find the same overcutting situation on private woodlots that you see on Crown land. When they are criticized for that locally, the contractors say they are not doing anything different from what is done over on Crown land. In terms of harvesting, they are not doing anything different, and their question is: what is the fuss here?
I will say one more thing about private woodlots. It is a situation that is kind of galling for all of us who own private woodlots. Scratch a New Brunswicker, and you find a private woodlot owner. As a private woodlot owner, if I decide to clear off a part of my woodlot, and put a blueberry field there, or plant potatoes or raise sheep, that is perfectly within my rights.
Within the province, we have developed our processing capacity for wood products far beyond our woods ability to support that. The wood growing on private woodlots is factored into the inventory of supply for our wood processing sector. It is my wood and my woodlot, however, and I should be able to decide what I do with that woodlot, as long as I leave buffer zones and do all those kinds of things on my land that the province requires of me.
This creates a very interesting dynamic, and woodlot owners have been scapegoated because the Irvings see that wood as their wood, or Repap sees that wood as its wood. Their feeling is that that wood should come into their mills, and not go elsewhere. How dare you sell that wood across the border into Maine because you get a better price there; how dare you play the market and try to earn more money from your wood and not sell it to them, because that will mess up the wood supply.
That just goes to show you how tight we are for wood supply, and how much overcapacity we have in this province. The former Minister of Natural Resources was fond of saying that every tree has a name on it in this province, and it is the name of Irving, Repap, or one of the various mills who survive off our forests, and that increasingly import wood into the province.
You compared forestry to the cod situation, and there is a similarity. In Newfoundland, you ended up with far too much fish processing capacity for what was actually in the sea. We are in that situation in New Brunswick now. We have far too much wood processing capacity for the trees in the forest, and for the ability of our forests to supply them. That has put us in a box, because it means that to try to anything that would result in the restoration of biodiversity or the protection of ecological integrity within the timber management plans, or to act on other values like establishing protected areas, will stress that situation further.
The former Dean of Forestry at UNB has said that, in terms of wood supply, we are walking along the edge of a precipice here. Anything unexpected that happens is going to knock us off. We have maintained the flow of fibre to the mills by saying we will basically ignore the need to maintain the ecological integrity of our forests, or to conserve biodiversity. We are racking up a debt that way, an ecological debt.
I think we are only beginning to recognize that. Therefore, we are looking for major changes in the way Crown forest lands are managed. I think it is interesting to note that when you asked Tom Spinney how large industrial freeholds manage their lands, he said that it was pretty much the same way Crown lands are managed. If that is the case, where is the public interest?
I would think that a company would manage private land in a somewhat different way that commonly held lands -- they were once called "Crown Lands Reserved for Indians" -- would be managed. The point is that they are being managed in similar ways, because they are being managed for similar goals.
What we are saying is that, in the case of Crown lands, a far better balance needs to be struck than we have managed to achieve to date. Far more participation is needed in deciding what the goals and objectives are for Crown lands, which dictate how the licensees develop their forest management plans.
There is no input into the goals and objectives that are developed every five years for Crown lands -- none whatsoever. There is no public process. Every five years, the licensee's performance is evaluated. There is no public process in that evaluation. We had to go to court some years ago to appeal a right-to-information request that was turned down. We wanted to get the first set of evaluations, in order to see how the licensees were doing on Crown lands with respect to their obligations to New Brunswickers.
I will end there. I went on longer than I intended, but this is a big topic, and I wanted to touch on a number of areas. Your committee has a broad mandate, so I wanted to touch on a number of the areas within that mandate. I am prepared to answer any questions.
Senator Stratton: Thank you for coming. It is rather interesting, because we get such a diversity of opinions as we go around the country. In your action plan for Crown land conservation, item one is simply, "Stop establishing tree plantations on Crown lands." How many mills are there in New Brunswick?
Mr. Coon: It depends on what kind of mills you are talking about. Are you speaking of pulp and paper mills?
Senator Stratton: I am speaking of all forestry product mills.
Mr. Coon: There are nine pulp and paper mills, ten if you count the tissue mill. There are hundreds of sawmills, although their numbers have been decreasing. Some of them are very small, and some of them are very large. A handful of sawmills process the bulk of the lumber.
Senator Stratton: The employment numbers would be fairly significant.
Mr. Coon: Employment has been dropping significantly in the woods and on the processing side. As we have moved to bigger sawmills, there are far fewer small and medium-sized sawmills. The mills have gone through a lot of technological change, as they have tried to squeeze every economical efficiency that they could from their operations. Employment has been declining in the forestry sector.
Senator Stratton: It still employs a significant number of people.
Mr. Coon: Of course -- forestry is the backbone of the New Brunswick economy. It is the lifeblood of our communities. There is absolutely no doubt about that. That is why it is so difficult to have a public debate about this issue. In so many communities, people are afraid to speak their minds about what is going on because their job, their wife's job, or their child's job depends on the industry. Therefore, the companies have tremendous power over public discourse within the communities.
Senator Stratton: We have to sustain jobs as well as forests. Looking at all that information on employment, would it not be appropriate to work out a balance, whereby a certain percentage of the forests could be used for plantations?
Mr. Coon: I am not so sure that the plantations would sustain more jobs than modifying harvesting silviculture would. I know that such modifications would employ more people than the plantations currently do. With respect to plantations, there should be a public process in this province to determine goals and objectives for Crown land. If we then decide that some percentage of Crown land should be used for plantations or turned into potato fields or what have you, let us have that discussion, and let us decide that. At this point the conversion of forest to plantation has continued apace in the province on Crown lands, and there is no question that that is problematic from an ecological perspective.
Senator Stratton: You say that people should be employed in silviculture, and if the demand is to sustain a certain volume of timber, that is the bottom line. How does silviculture contribute significantly to the bottom line? If you are saying that we should not have plantations, that we should develop another way of harvesting, or use another way of harvesting to protect that growth, how do we sustain the volumes that are needed, and thereby continue providing jobs? Does silviculture do that?
Mr. Coon: That is the point of silviculture.
Senator Stratton: I understand that.
Mr. Coon: Tree planting is silviculture. Spacing is silviculture.
Senator Stratton: I understand that. The companies are saying that, in order to get productivity and volumes, there must be plantations. You are saying that there must be silviculture. If I can walk out and see the plantations and see the number of trees out there, then how can I accept the fact that silviculture should be done, that it will produce the same volumes? Essentially, that is what we are talking about.
Mr. Coon: You may not get exactly the same volumes. At some point, you must say there is an upper limit to the volume of wood we can grow on this landscape, and still maintain its ecological integrity. Let us do silviculture and harvest in ways that increases growth to that level, but not beyond.
Senator Stratton: The pressure will be to go beyond that level, and to do so by using plantations. That is the pressure.
Mr. Coon: Of course it is.
Senator Stratton: If that is the pressure, is there no way for us to look at it and say, "all right, the economic reality is jobs"? Could we not accept a certain percentage of plantations? We have heard other conservation groups saying plantations are all right, but there should be a limit. Some of the forestry companies are saying that perhaps the limit should be 20 per cent. Some of the conservation people are saying that is too much -- that it should be 10 per cent. You are coming out unequivocally and just saying "no plantations".
Mr. Coon: Absolutely. I am saying "no" until we have a public process where we can involve New Brunswickers in the discussion about how more Crown lands should be converted to plantations. Obviously, we have many plantations on Crown lands now.
Clearly, there should not be any further establishment of plantations. This is Crown land. It is not private land. There are negative consequences to this focus on converting forests to tree farms, just as there would be from converting forests to potato fields in terms of the ecological health of the forest. That is key.
The pressure is not to sustain jobs, because jobs are lost all the time in our mills. For business reasons, decisions are made all the time that kill many jobs. If jobs were killed for environmental reasons, somehow that seems less moral than if they were killed for business reasons. Something is wrong in that balance.
The demand is coming from the forest companies' need to compete as effectively as they can in the international marketplace against competitors in other areas of the world, and in other areas of Canada. If those companies could do it with ten people instead of 500 people, they would do so. It is not a question of doing it to sustain jobs. If jobs were a more important goal in our forest management planning, we would be doing it differently.
Senator Stratton: You still have to worry about the bottom line. If you have a company, you are responsible to a shareholder, and that person demands a return on his or her investment. He or she will say you have too many jobs in conservation, or that you are doing too much silviculture; our bottom line is low, and we are not competing with this guy over here. That is the economic reality, is it not?
Mr. Coon: That is the economic reality. The government's responsibility is to say that, when you are using Crown land, public interest and ecological interest need to be factored in, and we need a better balance. You would therefore expect that the management of industrial freehold land would look much different from what happens on Crown lands. Clearly, on industrial freehold, the public interest is more limited, because it is private property as opposed common property.
Senator Stratton: You do not see a problem in having plantations on industrial freehold land.
Mr. Coon: No, nor on woodlots. It is their property. If they want to have plantations, they will have plantations. If they want to put in potato fields, they will put in potato fields.
The Chairman: What you are saying, then, is that there are plenty of areas where plantations can be started -- industrial lots and private woodlots, for example -- and therefore publicly owned lands should not be an areas for plantations. That is, there are plenty of other areas in the province for them.
Mr. Coon: That is reasonable, sure.
Senator Robichaud: Mr. Coon, if you were to set the AAC cut on Crown land, how would that differ from what is now being set?
Mr. Coon: I think it would differ in two ways. We are a partner in model forests, including the Fundy Model Forest, which is sponsored by the Irvings. Guidelines that would incorporate biodiversity goals as a key element have been developed there for harvesting forest management.
They did an analysis of those types of forests in southeastern New Brunswick. You cannot necessarily apply this analysis throughout the whole province, however, because the forests are different. In that area of the province, it would have resulted in the reduction in the AAC of somewhere around 20 per cent, depending on exactly what you did. This is interesting. This suggests that, if we are to maintain the health of that forest, we would, in fact, have to see a significant reduction in the annual cut.
Our annual allowable cut right now is, as Mr. Spinney pointed out, quite high. Today it is 3.6 million cubic metres, compared to the 1.5 it would be without silviculture. This annual level is sustainable because it is based on what might happen in the future. It is not based on trees that are growing today. The figure of 1.5 million cubic metres is based on what is growing today -- that is the amount that can be cut, based on what is growing today.
Senator Robichaud: Mr. Spinney said they are looking 85 years into the future, and then it is checked every so often.
Mr. Coon: Owing to the various types of silviculture that are done, you get credits, in a sense. You can cut more today based on what you think will happen in the future, based on that form of silviculture.
The reality is that we do not really know what will happen in the future. We can only make our best guess. We can put some error bars in there, and say as long as we do not have some big forest fires, budworm outbreaks, or blowdowns, and as long as acid rain does not slow down the growth of the forest, then what we are cutting today is probably all right. If any of those things happen, in retrospect we will have been overcutting.
It is a gamble, in a sense. You base your predictions for what will happen to the wood supply in the future on the silviculture that you are doing today. That silviculture allows you to cut more today than you would otherwise be able to do, if you follow me.
Senator Robichaud: Yes, I do. I thought these people were relatively confident in the data they had, and in the practices used to that are used to maintain this level of harvesting. Even though we might have fires or so on, there are ways to control those to a certain extent. At least I thought that they were confident, and I have some confidence in them.
Mr. Coon: Tell me this: How far in the future could you reliably predict anything? Yes, if they were suggesting what would happen five years from now, it might be possible. A prediction for ten years from now might also be possible. I do not believe, however, that it is possible to make a prediction for 80 years from now with any degree of accuracy.
Obviously, for the volume of wood growing, all that silviculture will have a net positive effect. There is no question about that. However, there is a problem with quantifying it down to the point where you can say you can cut this much more wood today because of what we think will happen in the future. The important thing is whether you are being conservative or liberal about that. That is, are you being cautious, or are you being prudent?
Some would argue -- in fact, we would argue -- that this current allowable cut is not very prudent. It is higher than it should be. We should have bigger error bars and less confidence in these predictions for 80 years from now because, in the natural world, it is very difficult to predict what will happen.
Again, this is sort of what happened in the fishery. The managers sat down with their models. Managing that way, with models dealing with cyber fish or cyber trees, making projections on all this stuff, and giving it out to the politicians, all seems to have higher level of certainty, because there are numbers. For instance, 3.6 is a good number. The models do not deserve this level of confidence because of the time scales we are talking about.
In the southeastern part of the province, if you actually wanted to manage the forests in ways that would not undermine its ecological health and biodiversity, then you would be looking at something like a 20 per cent reduction of annual allowable cut, which is significant.
Senator Robichaud: Yes, it is very significant. How would you deal with the people who would be affected? This is something that we could predict; that is, there would be a great deal of unrest if people were unable to go out in the woods and work.
Mr. Coon: You would be able to go out in the woods and work. There would be lots of work in the woods. The problem would be on the mill side of things. New Brunswick is in a very difficult position right now. We are cutting at a level that is far above what is necessary to maintain the biological diversity of our forests, and to maintain their ecological health. In other words, we are cutting at levels that are too high if we are concerned about maintaining the health of the forest. If we decide to continue to cut at that high level, and in the ways we are cutting, the health of our forests will continue to degrade.
It is not just how much we are cutting, but the way we are cutting and doing silviculture. What are the implications of that, and are we willing to accept those implications?
I have already touched on some of the implications. We are seeing a decline in the abundance and distribution of particular types of trees, particular sizes of trees, and particular types of forests. Also, you are will see things like the budworm outbreak. It is already happening. Those outbreaks will become far more intense than they ever were, and more expensive to fight, because the diversity that normally would keep them within some realm of reason -- things such as natural pest controls -- is being lost. You are paying a price by doing that.
Of course, you cannot forecast all the implications of undermining the ecological health of the forest by continuing to degrade its biological diversity, but you can identify some of them.
Senator Robichaud: Are you not painting a very negative picture of what could happen in the future? In the past, there were major budworm infestations. The forests were not cut in the same way. They were not in the state that they are in now, but we still had major infestations, and we recuperated from that.
Mr. Coon: It is clear that both the intensity and the length of the infestations have increased dramatically over time, and that has been influenced by our activities and by the nature of the forest today compared to the historical record. It is clear that this trend will only continue unless we reverse it. Fighting these things, as you know, is very expensive -- not only financially, but also politically. Consider the spray programs, for example.
What you really want to do is to maintain and restore a forest that has a more natural composition in its structure, and work that into how you harvest and carry out silviculture. That is what we are saying here. Clearly, today we are nowhere near that goal.
Mr. Spinney mentioned that they have set a biodiversity objective for the five year plan that they are currently developing. There will be an interesting political challenge there. How far do you go with that? With regard to the endangered species legislation in the province, we know that a decision was made not to list a whole bunch of species that scientists had suggested were endangered. Most of those species were plants, and the decision was made because of concerns that this would hamper forestry operations in the province.
We are interested in seeing what will happen with the recommendations on how to work that into the forest management plan in New Brunswick. What will finally be accepted, and how will what is accepted differ from what the scientists or the forest ecologists recommend? It was the same thing with the mature coniferous habitat for the pine marten and the other 25 species or so that Tom Spinney talked about. The original proposals for that were much different from what finally came out.
In a sense, it is all right if the compromises are made in a political forum, as long as the political choices are ultimately made in the public interest. If they are made at a technical or a bureaucratic level before they even reach an open forum, however, it is possible that inappropriate trade-offs are being made.
Senator Robichaud: You say "possible."
Mr. Coon: It is a question how much trust you have in the back room. How much faith do you have in the back room? That is the issue here.
Senator Robichaud: You say we are not where you want to be, but that we are moving in that direction. Perhaps we are not moving as fast as you would like to move, but more consideration is now being given to biodiversity than in the past. Previously, we did not hear too much about that.
Mr. Coon: There is no question that that is happening. We are seeing that, and it is encouraging. In fact, I am quite hopeful about what will happen in forest management in the province.
The dark side of this, however, is that, one way or the other, we are in deep trouble in New Brunswick on the processing side. If we do nothing, we will see a big rationalization in the industry from a business perspective. In terms of the forests, we need to consider whether or not what is being done today is what needs to be done there 60 years from now.
We are narrowing our options by focusing on relatively few species at the expense of other tree species that could be marketable or desirable as products. We are focusing on certain sizes as opposed to other sizes, and certain ages as opposed to other ages. We are taking a diverse forest with quite a broad age potential, and narrowing and simplifying it to meet today's economic demands.
We are planning for 80 years down the road, and, as Mr. Spinney said, we do not really know what the economic forces or the market will be like 80 years down the road. In the short term, people in the industry are saying that we will see a big rationalization in Canada and New Brunswick -- that mills will close, and that we will be unable to compete as effectively with mills in the southern climates, where trees can grow much faster.
Will the way that we are setting up Crown lands to meet today's needs serve us well in the future? Even economically, I would argue that is not the case. We are foreclosing on options there.
Senator Robichaud: You mentioned the caribou. There are no more caribou in New Brunswick. Do you relate their disappearance to habitat or overhunting?
Mr. Coon: The caribou were extirpated. I did not actually mention the wolf and caribou in the context of forestry. I put it in there because I thought it was interesting and add a bit of flavour to the subject. The fact that, in recent memory, there are no caribou or wolf in New Brunswick is a favourite subject of mine. They are gone, but we do not think about why they are gone.
In the context of caribou, it is an interesting question. Part of what happened there was that we opened up the landscape, more land got cleared for settlement and for agriculture, and more land got cleared because of the type of forests we were doing. Deer like that kind of habitat, and deer became much more common, much more abundant.
We know that deer carry a parasitic worm. The thinking is that we created habitat conditions that favoured deer, which created a great abundance of deer, and brought them into closer proximity to the caribou. The caribou could not survive the worm. The moose is also affected by this parasite, but its habitat is different from the deer habitat.
The other thing is that caribou seem to thrive on the older growth kind of habitat, and that was largely eliminated from New Brunswick a long time ago. This is the thinking as to why the caribou disappeared.
Senator Stratton: It is like the bison.
Senator Robichaud: You killed it all.
Senator Stratton: We killed it all.
Mr. Coon: It is not people. There is no question that we could have existed with the caribou and the wolf in New Brunswick. We did not, and that is a sad story. With the caribou, it was kind of an indirect thing, because the habitat was increased incidentally and not intentionally. That enhanced deer populations, and was part of the reason the caribou were wiped out.
The wolf was another matter. We had bounties on the wolf. Now we have the coyotes, and they kind of took over.
Senator Robichaud: We also have bounties on seals, and we could never get rid of them.
The Chairman: Actually, I heard earlier that your wolf has been crossed with the coyote here, and that the coyote is bigger and meaner here.
Mr. Coon: The coyotes here are fascinating. Socially, they are very different from your western coyotes. They hunt in packs. Their social behaviour is more wolf-like. It is quite intriguing.
The Chairman: Your aim is to preserve more species. You make an interesting argument that forestry over the last 200 years has contributed to the annihilation of many of the least attractive species, and that they may, in fact, have been quite important. They might have been accomplishing things like putting out odours or chemicals to keep some of the spruce budworm down. Your aim is to have more species. Would that not also be accomplished by establishing protected areas in the province?
Mr. Coon: I do not think so. I think that you really end up with islands in a sense with those protected areas. They will only represent 2 per cent, or 4 per cent -- whatever the figure is, it would be something small.
The Chairman: It seems that you are asking a lot. That is, you want commercial establishments to cut back their timber in order to get a variety of species that they cannot use.
Mr. Coon: They may have to increase their imports in those cases.
The Chairman: You brought up an interesting point about public input. Not that your input -- or anyone else's -- should rule the day, but have you looked at the Ontario system? Ontario recently put in a system where there is a five-year audit. The audit is done independently, and neither the government nor the industry controls the audit committee. There is room on that committee for groups such as yours, and for other groups too, of course. Perhaps you should contact your colleagues in Ontario, and see what the legislation there is like. It might give you a starting point, and it provides that input that you spoke about.
Mr. Coon: It sounds interesting. I think this will be an ongoing and increasingly common discussion in the province. In fact, I think we will see it open up. I think things are moving in that direction. It almost happened the last time around, with the last five-year plan.
The Chairman: As the recent American experience shows, you never know what happens in elections.
Senator Stratton: Are you getting anywhere on herbicides? One of your points was that you want to stop the use of herbicides. There is now a deadline in Ontario and Quebec.
Mr. Coon: The only way you will get at herbicides is to get at plantations. If you are going to do plantation forestry, you are going to need herbicides. There is no way around it. That is the way it works. If you are going to go that way, herbicides are part of the package.
I think about 75 per cent of the herbicides that we use in the province would be used around plantation establishments. If you were not establishing plantations on Crown land, then you would eliminate about 75 per cent of the requirement for herbicide use. It really has to do with the types of forestry practices that you are using. I do not think you can say, "We are not going to use herbicide" and continue to do the same kind of forestry. Some of the woodlot marketing boards in the province do not have herbicide rules, which is interesting. In any event, that is sort of how we see the herbicide question.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming out. For organizations such as yours, I realize that coming here always takes away from another job. We appreciate your input.
The committee adjourned.