No problem. Thank you very much.
Good morning, Chairman, Vice-Chairs, and members of the committee. We last presented to the committee on the oil sands. We are very pleased to be back here again as you look at this very important issue before you.
Our presentation today will be done mainly in English, because my command of French is limited. However, you do have a French version of the presentation.
I would like to start very briefly with an overview of the Canadian Boreal Initiative. I know that some of you are familiar with us and with our work.
We are about four years old out in the field, and really, our focus is on sustainability. Our focus is on bringing partners together who in previous eras and decades in the Canadian history of forest issues have been on opposite sides of the table. They are now together on the same side of the table proposing and implementing solutions that follow a sustainable path.
We have about 18 members that span the leadership of first nations, industry, the oil, gas, and forestry sectors, and conservation organizations. They are working together to implement solutions.
Our niche is really sustainability. So today we will cover much less the very tragic and important challenges facing the forest sector, which we are very sympathetic towards. We are very supportive of maintaining a vibrant, strong, and sustainable forest industry here in Canada. We think our niche can be helpful in terms of where we are going with sustainability. We are starting to see some real results out there that are helpful economically as well as in other ways for companies in terms of the challenges they face.
Collectively, the Canadian Boreal Initiative and our partners, who fall within a group we call our Boreal Leadership Council, support a balanced approach in Canada's boreal region. We support a path forward that embraces an approach that would see approximately half of Canada's boreal region being protected land of some form and the remaining half, approximately, being under sustainable management. This is a vision that is starting to touch down on the ground in different regions of the country.
We get behind real solutions. Our forestry companies have now ecologically certified, under a certification by the Forest Stewardship Council, over 50 million acres in the boreal region. Canada leads the world on this. We are the leading country that has FSC-certified lands under tenure. We're quite proud of that. We are working on land-use plans across the forest region as well, which I will focus on today.
We work very closely with a number of governments. We've just signed an MOU with the Government of the Northwest Territories, as an example. We are what we call a brokerage for solutions, and we're very happy to be here today.
Here is a snapshot of Canada's boreal region. We are one of three countries in the world that have large tracts of forest and that can still design how we will move into the future with them. The other countries are Brazil and Russia. Canada has probably the best chance of actually moving forward on a sustainable path. We have a responsibility to the world.
Our boreal region covers over half our land mass. It is a place of communities. It is a heartland for jobs in the forest sector. And other opportunities are coming on stream. Boreal ecosystems provide a variety of ecosystem services, such as carbon storage, that have a non-market value that is increasingly being recognized as a market value.
What I'd like to focus on before I move to recommendations, and building on Mr. Allan's presentation, is that slice of the pie that deals with sustainability and where the industry is headed, not only in certifying their forestry operations but in actually securing real markets. I'd like to say today that it's very promising. Moving in the direction of greening their operations is starting to pay off for companies, and they're actually better able to buffer the crisis that's now before us.
I'd like to give one very practical example. Last week Tembec Inc., one of our lead partners on forestry—the other two are Domtar and Al-Pac—announced a radical restructuring. I'm sure many of you noticed the news reports that came out on that last week. They cited that their environmentally friendly product approach helped them stay afloat. They cited that their contract with Home Depot, which is the biggest buyer of lumber in North America, was one of the things that allowed them to buffer the decline on the dollar, in particular, because they're offering a certified product. Their product is less vulnerable to the decline in the dollar because they secured their purchaser, which is Home Depot. Home Depot will stay with them even through a declining dollar. It had a huge impact on their ability to stay afloat.
They now want to be the global FSC giant, and they're headed in that direction. That move by Tembec was not an easy move. As recently as two years ago, they didn't have a secured market and secured buyers, particularly in the U.S., and they had invested $50 million and weren't yet seeing the market returns. So we give them a lot of credit for moving through a time of uncertainty and sticking with their FSE commitments, to see them through, to allow them to be more secure, and that's where they are today.
Another example is Cascade. In their fine paper line, their sales jumped 235% in the last year, and there are similar stories with Domtar.
What we are trying to say here is that sustainability is paying off in very real ways for companies. We recognize it still is a niche, but it is a very important one to recognize as you look at your study, considering the market opportunities and the market niches coming out of this.
In terms of our recommendations, we'd like to focus on a few areas that our colleagues may or may not be raising here today. They are really in two areas. One is land use planning and the second is the market for carbon. We'd like to stress those two here today.
First, on the supports for land use planning, land use planning is an exercise by which industry, first nations, conservation organizations, and governments sit around a table to plan in an area what areas are going to be open for resource development and what areas are to be protected over the longer term.
These kinds of fundamentally important planning exercises right now are covering about 60% of the boreal region. The federal government used to be a strong supporter of this type of work, and it really has backed away from that. We would like to recommend that you look at encouraging the reinstating of support for land use planning at the federal level. The reason we say this is that conflict across land uses increases the cost to industry, it is very troubling for first nations communities that are really looking to assert their treaty and aboriginal rights, and it's the fundamentally important type of decisions that support the sector being strong and the business certainty that is needed in order to operate, particularly in today's world. That is why the Canadian Boreal Initiative and the Forest Products Association of Canada released a joint statement last year calling on governments to support land use planning.
In terms of our recommendations, we recommend the committee support significantly increased federal funding for regional land use planning, in collaboration with the provinces and territories, aboriginal people, and stakeholders.
Our second recommendation—and I know it is not a new area for the committee—has to do with how we support carbon-friendly forestry and carbon offsets.
We are very quickly reaching a time when forest carbon is going to have a market value, and we'd like to promote that this is a tool that the federal government can, should be, and needs to be supporting. B.C. and Ontario are already there, and we need leadership at the federal level and from the standing committee to move forward in that area. Simply put—we have more details in our brief—there are two different kinds of mechanisms that can be supported that protect the carbon values in the land base, which are very significant. In fact, the boreal region around the northern part of the world has more carbon locked up in the land than any other ecosystem type in the world.
I'm getting the wrap-up signal from the chair.
The two types are carbon offsets for protection purposes and sustainable forestry. We can explore that more through our questions, but we would very much like to encourage the committee to support these types of offsets as a way of bringing another dollar to the table. The benefits could be accrued by the forest sector--by first nations in particular--and are helpful particularly if you think of areas that are a long haul distance from mills, areas that might have a better value on a carbon market than they might on a forestry market.
The recommendations are, first, to support those mechanisms for carbon management on the land, and second, for Canada to take a proactive position in international climate change negotiations to include mechanisms to protect carbon values in forest and peat lands in any climate change mitigation regime globally moving forward.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee.