Thank you very much.
It is a real pleasure to be here today. It's a hazard of being the third speaker that a lot of good comments have already been made, so I'll try to avoid stating those yet again.
In terms of a few of the high points, I think one of the things that I'm hoping you heard was the importance of ensuring the natural infrastructure. There are certainly, particularly in southern Ontario, a lot of threats to our natural infrastructure—to our wetlands, to our grasslands and certainly to our forests.
Certainly, here in southern Ontario, we see development pressures and agricultural pressures constantly impeding those natural infrastructures and, as a result, I think, we have seen an increase in the flooding in this particular area. One thing of interest to note is that the flooding situation is not new to Ontario. In fact, some hundred years ago, flooding was a rather natural occurrence. Well, not natural: it occurred because of the heavy deforestation that occurred throughout southern Ontario, with the land being stripped forests and trees. Certainly, thereupon, we saw an increased amount of flooding through much of southern Ontario.
There was a fellow by the name of Zavitz, a forester, who more than a decade ago recognized that the solution to this was to plant trees, so he started planting trees—well over a billion—throughout southern Ontario to address the flooding situation. Today, you can see throughout the moraines that a lot of the sand-flats that used to be there are now treed and moving into natural forests. It has worked. It sustained and reduced the amount of flooding from what occurred back in that period, but we're seeing it again now with the constant influx of development. We're seeing areas stripped away. I see that in eastern Ontario 600 acres of forest has been stripped for agricultural purposes.
This is not sustainable. Unfortunately, these types of cash crops have a long-lasting impact on our natural environment, and there need to be some incentives created to encourage landowners to keep trees on their property and/or to establish more trees on their property.
In Ontario, we certainly have programs such as the managed forest tax incentive program and the conservation land tax incentive program. These reduce the taxes that landowners have to pay for those properties. Also, we had a program called the 50-million tree program, which reduced the landowners' costs of planting trees on their property. From my perspective, if we as a society expect landowners to provide their lands and to put trees on their property and create that societal benefit, we need to encourage them to do so, and that's by reducing the costs for the landowners.
These are the kinds of programs that are essential to making sure that we have that natural infrastructure in the future.
I think we recognize that with wildfires—Kate touched on this quite well—we have seen an increase. Just to speak to that briefly in terms of what can happen, I think there has been an increase in wildfires, primarily because of the increase in drought. As well, we as a society have tried to fight fires for decades by putting out relatively small fires. What's happening now is that we're getting a certain situation where you have drought, high winds and an incredible fuel load, and now these fires are the so-called perfect storm and we can't put them out. We see fires such as Parry Sound 33, which burned well over 11,000 hectares. That was well over 11,000 hectares of fire. There was a fire up in Temagami of about 33,000 hectares.
Although fires are a natural phenomenon in our ecosystems and there are a lot forests that depend on fire, you need to realize that these fires are far more severe than the natural ground-burning type of fires. Because of that, they're scorching the soils and increasing the amount of erosion that will occur after the fire. It's incumbent upon us as a society, I think, to get in there and do something to get those forests established back on that land.
There are various aspects to this that we need to look at. As I originally started to speak to in my comments, in a large part of this, trees are the answer. We've known that trees provide incredible benefits for society, from sequestering carbon, as Kate mentioned—and not just reducing carbon emissions, but actually sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere—to all the other values that they provide. I think it's just incumbent upon us to look towards methods and means to ensure that we keep those forests on our landscape.
Certainly with forest management, utilizing the wood products that come out of our sustainably managed forests.... As Kate mentioned, we have the best-managed forests in the world here in Canada and certainly in Ontario. We should all recognize and be very proud of that. At the same time, we also need to realize that using wood products that are sustainably managed is good for the environment, and so we should be making sure that we promote that every time and at every opportunity we can.
Those are my comments for this afternoon. I tried to keep them brief because there have been some very good statements made already, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.