Environment Committee on Nov. 29th, 2018

[Wayne Stetski]

We welcome written submissions. If you would like to follow up on how we can help you be more successful, that would be great.

[Carolyn Butts]

Thank you. That's terrific.

[Wayne Stetski]

I'll move to forestry.

We know that shipping raw logs out of Canada ships jobs out of Canada. Have you looked at carbon in relation to raw logs and its overall impact on greenhouse gas in general, in a global sense?

[Kate Lindsay, Vice-President, Sustainability and Environmental Partnerships, Forest Products Association of Canada]

I don't think we've looked at that in detail.

You will have heard from Dr. Werner Kurz and the Canadian Forest Service. They do look at land use and land use change emissions. They account using a carbon budget model based on forest products that come from Canada.

I'd have to get back to you or follow up with Dr. Werner Kurz to see if they account for all of the products, in whatever form, whether it's unmanufactured or manufactured, globally.

[Wayne Stetski]

I also have a quick question around encouraging bioenergy.

I was mayor of Cranbrook for a few years. We had a tremendous fire year and had the winds been a little different, we would have been in really serious trouble. We also worked to create a grassland ecosystem around my part of British Columbia. There are thousands of piles of wood that have been cut, piled and potentially could be burned or will be burned at some point.

When you look at fireproofing those communities, it also potentially provides opportunity for recreation. You can put a network of trails around the community.

However, trying to get a long-term secure source of fibre for burning to create bioenergy was a problem because the forest companies didn't want to give up any of their allowable cut.

If you've looked at that problem, what sort of recommendations do you think could help make bioenergy from waste wood more successful in Canada?

[Robert Larocque]

Personally, I think that on the bioenergy side there's been a lot of recent policy that will make a huge impact. Carbon pricing is one of them. There's another clean fuel standard, including one, the renewable energy, in British Columbia, that will make another one.

I would challenge the committee that right now on the carbon, and I'll call them incentives, it's only on bioenergy. If we put all that wood into a tall wood building, there's no carbon credit, but if I burn it and make a biofuel out of it, we get a carbon credit. I think the long-term play here is to make bioplastics, make biomaterial that lasts for a long time, generation and generation. I think the policies are there for biofuels. You're going to see a significant change in biofuel in Canada.

Personally, I think we should be putting those products in a table like here, and I think that's a gap that's missing right now in the policies at least for the next five years. I think we need to address that.

[Wayne Stetski]

We appreciate that recommendation.

Just quickly, I get to teach a class at College of the Rockies every year in Cranbrook, one of my two great colleges, the other being Selkirk. The last time I went to the class, the professor said to me, now that you're a member of Parliament, how are you doing with your carbon footprint? Of course the answer is, embarrassingly bad.

What advice might you have for us to appease our consciences a bit about the fact that we are very much contributing to greenhouse gases as members of Parliament because we fly back and forth all the time?

[Nevin Rosaasen]

I'll take a stab at this one, since it isn't specific to this.

Absolutely, carbon markets work and price signals are needed for the reductions to be achieved. As members of Parliament, it's important to recognize that you're doing important business in having input and crafting legislation, informing other members in regard to what we can do as a collective. But you're always going to have the outliers who need to travel. The face-to-face meetings cannot be replaced by webinars.

I, myself, work from home. I use webinar. I have been paperless, other than today, since graduate school in 2010. I covered carbon markets, and the important thing to know is that we're already making so many changes in mitigation technologies. You've heard from all three members in our testimony; we're all working toward the same end goal. Again, it would be a shame if we don't take this low-hanging fruit and capitalize on the bioeconomy that Canada has to offer.

Don, do you have any comments?

[The Chair]

We're out of time here, but if anybody wants to pick that up, they can do that in a future round.

Now we're going to jump over to Mr. Amos for six minutes.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you to all three of our witnesses.

I'm going to be fairly clipped in my questioning because really what I'm trying to do is get evidence on the record for the purposes of our study. I wanted to get a clear answer from Ms. Butts first.

Are you in favour of a price on pollution?

[Carolyn Butts]

Yes.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you.

For the Forest Products Association of Canada, my understanding is that not only have your members been doing a number of great things across the range of carbon emissions reduction possibilities, but FPAC as an organization is not in any way opposed to pricing carbon or creating a market for carbon emissions. Is that the case?

[Robert Larocque]

You're right that we're not opposed to pricing carbon, but I just want to be clear that it needs to come with consideration for international trade-exposed industries.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Okay, thank you. Is it your understanding that the federal government's policy of pricing pollution comes with considered treatment for trade-exposed industries?

[Robert Larocque]

For the current intent, I would say yes, but we're still waiting for final details that should be released, I'm assuming, before January 1, 2019.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Okay, thank you.

Mr. Rosaasen, again I have a very simple question. Is your organization in favour of pricing carbon pollution?

[Nevin Rosaasen]

Yes, very much so, with the caveat that we need to understand that this is all in regard to a carbon cycle. If you're going to price pollution on one hand, or carbon, you need to give credit where you're sequestering carbon, whether it's in forestry products that are used in building materials, whether it's agricultural products that are exported around the world. We're also a trade-exposed industry in agriculture. In the province that I represent for my day job, in Alberta, 85% of the four major crops that we produce are for export destinations. We still remain the breadbasket of the world out in the Prairies. So yes, absolutely it would be....

We would be remiss, though, if we did not include all of the ecosystem services that we do provide with everything we're doing, from the type of conservation tillage practices that have been adopted and the mitigation strategies. To give you an indication, we've gone to producing three times as much food with the same amount of inputs in less than 25 years.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you for that. I appreciate the detail.

I'd like to turn back to forest products, and go more specifically to next-generation forest products that can not only help the forestry sector but also help our society shift towards more sustainably produced products. A case in point would be that of next-generation industrial sugars, which new-generation forestry companies are looking to produce.

Could you comment on the helpfulness of the fall economic statement, particularly with regard to accelerated capital cost allowances, clean energy tax writeoffs and machinery and manufacturing tax writeoffs, which stimulate this kind of investment? Will they be helpful for the forestry industry?

[Robert Larocque]

The devil is in the details, but from what we heard in the fall economic statement, they will be helpful. We are seriously looking into the tax writeoff on clean energy as well as the one on machinery. I can't discredit all of the government support in the last ten years relating to.... We couldn't make those bioproducts if we hadn't done research 10 years ago, for example.

There have been some programs regarding commercialization and market access, like the Canada wood export program, and the kind of program around the building code. Yes, this one helps, but we can't forget about all the other work that has been done in the last 10 years.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Other supports are important as well.

I'm running out of time. Do you feel that the necessary support has been provided by entities such as Natural Resources Canada or the National Research Council, to enable next-generation forestry products to hit market in Canada?

[Robert Larocque]

I think we're 75% of the way there. One of the gaps I'm seeing is in bioproducts and biomaterials. We're missing a huge opportunity to incentivize that kind of stuff. It's only on biofuels.

Number two is the value chain. The support has been there. We can make the sugars. I totally agree with you. We could do that tomorrow morning in a mill in Quebec, but can someone in Europe buy it? That's the next wave—working with the “Exxons” and the “Shells” and all of that. Their value chain is different from ours, and it's about expanding those value chains.

It goes a little bit towards what they were saying also—to get support. The Government of Canada could be a leader in promoting that, through procurement purchases, for example. That would help open up those markets.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

That's very helpful. Thank you, all six of you.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

Mr. Nuttall, we'll go over to you next.

[Alexander Nuttall, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, CPC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your presentations today.

Before I ask my questions about the presentations, Mr. Chair, I would like to know where Ms. McKenna is.

There is $500 million in the Supplementary Estimates, but Ms. McKenna is not here.

We have not seen her. We've been demanding over and over again, meeting after meeting, that she show up, but she hasn't. The supplemental estimates will basically affect everything within this department and within this committee. Therefore they are always able to be discussed, but the minister has been in Ottawa—she represents an Ottawa riding—swimming at the YMCA during committee meetings or around committee meetings. There are a whole bunch of different things we have on the record, but we cannot get the minister in here to discuss $500 million in supplemental spending within this department. If there is a reason that these dollars need to be spent, it is up to this committee, this Parliament and this procedure to hold this minister to account.

Second—and I'm going to follow up on some questioning by my colleague Joël earlier towards Ms. Butts—there was a question regarding the carbon tax and the need for a carbon tax when you are reusing products that are garbage, and then not applying a carbon tax at that point because it's not really production of a new product. You're actually stopping the waste, and so on.

[Carolyn Butts]

You could give them a rebate.