Natural Resources Committee on Sept. 27th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today.

We're going to get under way with the second meeting in our new study on forest pests.

We have two witnesses this morning.

From the University of British Columbia, by video conference, we have Professor Carroll, who I hope can hear us and see us.

Also with us today is Peter Henry, from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.

I appreciate both of you making the effort to be here. The process is that each of you will be given up to 10 minutes to make a presentation to the committee in either official language.

On that note, Mr. Henry, you're here, so why don't we start with you? The floor is yours.

[Peter Henry, Manager, Forest Guides and Silviculture, Policy Division, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry]

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Peter Henry. I'm the manager of the forest guides and silviculture section of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. I'm pleased to speak to you on behalf of the ministry in regard to Ontario's forest pest management.

Ontario certainly shares your interest in the protection of our forests in order to ensure that they continue to provide all of the benefits to society and the environment. We are blessed with a large forested landscape that we rely upon to provide economic and ecological benefits to the province, the forest sector and everyone who benefits from having the forest.

The forest sector for Ontario contributes over $15.3 billion to our provincial economy, and 150,000 direct and indirect jobs. Sustainability of the forest sector is critical to the sustainability of a huge number of communities within the province and to the well-being of the province.

Ontario is concerned about changing populations of native forest pests, such as the Jack pine budworm and spruce budworm. We are currently experiencing a Jack pine budworm infestation that has increased in size sixfold over the last year. There is about to be some public consultation happening in Ontario related to a potential pest control program for that insect, so it is very top of mind.

There were also impacts noted from past spruce budworm outbreaks in Ontario, related to the fire situation this summer. Those of you who live in Ontario have probably heard a lot about the fires. Some of that was exacerbated by past spruce budworm damage.

Finally, we're concerned about forest pests that are not yet here in Ontario. You're going to be hearing about the mountain pine beetle. We are definitely concerned about the mountain pine beetle and its potential move eastward across the country. I've been taking a number of steps, which I'll talk about.

Now I'll provide a little overview of our legislative and policy framework related to pest management, the role of science in our pest management program, and the role of partnerships.

We recognize that native insects and diseases play important ecological roles in Ontario's forests. For example, they help renew the forest by creating conditions for regrowth. Disturbance is essential for the well-being of our forests. They also provide lots of food resources for things such as birds, like warblers. When there are outbreak conditions, there are other species that benefit from that. Our policy framework recognizes the positive roles of forest pests. As well, it addresses the need to limit damage by pests.

Our framework provides for the sustainability of our Crown forests. We have the Crown Forest Sustainability Act as our key piece of legislation. The principles of that act are to conserve large, healthy, diverse and productive Crown forests, and to provide for the long-term health and vigour of Crown forests. Our pest management program works to achieve these principles, and by doing so, contributes to the sustainability of our forests.

Ontario is also impacted by invasive forest pests that are not native to Ontario's forests. Invasive pests can pose immediate and serious threats to our forests because they often arrive with no natural enemies and our trees have not adapted defence mechanisms to fight those invasive species. In 2015, Ontario passed the Invasive Species Act to enhance our ability to deal with the threats posed by invasive species.

Our forest pest management program includes structured monitoring and reporting to detect and document forest pests and their damage across the landscape; science support to ensure that we have the best available information and techniques, such as survey techniques, pest diagnostics, management options and pesticide research, and a robust public planning system for pest control programs. If a pest outbreak occurs, we consider control actions and there is a public planning process associated with that before any actions can take place.

Our pest program relies entirely on science. Science provides us with methods to detect pests and forecast population trends, and that's important to support management decisions for actions. We rely on science to develop and evaluate management techniques—how to respond to pests. That might be research into pesticides, silviculture techniques to respond to pests, or effective controls to prevent the movement of pests.

Ontario supports science activities with a range of partners, including the Canadian Forest Service, other provinces, states and academia. For example, we've been participating in a five-year Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council project entitled “Turning risk into action for the mountain pine beetle epidemic”. Ontario felt it was important to be involved in and support that project in order to address the risk of the eastward movement of the mountain pine beetle. As the mountain pine beetle moves from lodgepole pine into Jack pine forest, potentially as it moves east, the dynamics of that pest may be different.

We've been active in looking at what potential mechanisms might be going on when it moves into new hosts. We've taken material out west to see if it's susceptible. We're taking logs of our Ontario white pine out west to test whether mountain pine beetle will populate and reproduce in that. It's definitely a concern for us and we're taking active steps.

Partnerships are important because forest pests don't recognize provincial or jurisdictional boundaries, and that's certainly a challenge we face with invasive pests. There are certain federal responsibilities under the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for those invasive forest pests. Native pests are under other people's jurisdictions, so we're working on those native pests. Something that falls in the cracks is mountain pine beetle, which we would say is not native to Ontario, but it's native to other parts of Canada. For CFIA, that is a native pest, and for us in Ontario, it's not a native pest. That will be a challenge.

On the positive side, when we have pest issues that we're dealing with, everybody comes to the table to try to address those issues.

Partnerships are certainly an efficient way to support science and deliver forest pest management activities. Through partnerships, we raise awareness about forest pests and their impacts. We improve our ability to detect forest pests. We coordinate actions across jurisdictional lines. In working together, we're hopefully more effective in our controls and responses.

Partnerships help to improve our scientific understanding of pest-host relationships, leading to improvements in risk assessment, which pests we should we be worrying about and when, and our monitoring and resource protection methods. We have active partnerships with quite a wide range of groups, but I'll give a couple of examples. One is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. There's a critical plant pest management working group that operates in Ontario with those provincial and federal agencies that intersect in their needs. Forest pests are what we're looking at.

There is the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers' forest pest working group, and another is the Pest Management Regulatory Agency. We work with them in terms of potential pesticides for use in forestry.

We also have a partnership with the Canadian Forest Service. We happen to have the benefit in Sault Ste. Marie of the Great Lakes Forestry Centre just down the road, and it's right next to the Ontario Forest Research Institute. There's a lot of collaboration that happens across the parking lot on pest-related issues.

As I mentioned earlier, for the mountain pine beetle project that we partnered in, there were 13 agencies, four provinces and states, the federal government, and five universities, all trying to further our understanding of mountain pine beetle and what it might do, or how its biology might change as it moves eastward. That's really important for us, because we're quite concerned about the threat of that particular pest moving east.

Of course, one of our strongest partners in pest management, the on-the-ground activities, is the forest industry. They are out on a daily basis in the forest. They are often the first ones to be there. They're there every day to detect if something is different or if there's some damage there that they weren't expecting. They're basically the ones who often flag some of those initial issues. They're out there actively engaged in managing the forests for the people of Ontario, in our context, and their observations and insights are important for early detection and effective response activities. As we go into a planning process, they are definitely key partners in any of the activities.

I have a couple of conclusions for your consideration.

Continued support and coordination of agencies that are involved in pest management activities or impacted by pests is required to ensure that our detection and monitoring efforts are successful so that we can detect these things at a time when we can respond with some management actions.

Continued support for the development of management tools is essential so that there are effective and efficient tools available to address forest pest problems and to reduce their impacts on the forest sector.

Lastly, continued support for the infrastructure required to develop pest risk assessments for both native and non-native pests is essential to ensure that we're able to appropriately address those risks and pests accordingly.

That's a key challenge certainly for the non-native pests as we need to do a lot of work in terms of what risk they might pose to the forest, because we've never experienced them before. It's unknown with a lot of these pests what impacts they might have, but the infrastructure associated with doing science-based pest risk assessments is important for us to develop management actions and respond to those things.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

Professor Carroll.

[Professor Allan Carroll, Professor, Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

I'd just like to take a few moments to outline the role that climate and climate change is playing in forest disturbances and make some special references to the mountain pine beetle, moving forward.

As Mr. Henry points out, natural disturbance is a part of forest ecosystems and indeed an integral part of forest ecosystems, and it can affect thousands to millions of hectares of Canadian forests annually. What tends to be counterintuitive to most people, however, is that the impacts in Canadian forests caused by insects actually tend to be much greater than those associated with fire. As I said, this is counterintuitive largely because, of course, fire gains so much attention in the media.

What we found is that insects cause the mortality of trees over a much greater area than fire does annually, and of course the synergies that this can play with subsequent fires is of prime concern, especially given the impacts in British Columbia over the past year with fuel loading quite likely from the mountain pine beetle outbreak that has been impacting the province for the last couple of decades.

There's evidence that disturbance from insects in forests is actually getting worse, and in fact, since about 1980, roughly 50 million hectares or more of western North America have suffered some level of mortality caused by bark beetles, of which mountain pine beetle is an example.

The question that brings forth, and one that I focus on as well as colleagues of mine—the few of us who do work on these issues—is whether climate change will exacerbate these impacts into the future.

As you might expect, this is a very difficult question to get into, but we can actually gain some lessons and insights from studies that have occurred from deep time, from millions of years in the past. Recent evidence shows, based upon fossilized evidence of insect disturbance in forests, that as temperatures warm so will that disturbance increase. We have every expectation, as our climate continues to change, that we will suffer increasing levels of insect mortality or insect disturbance across Canadian forests.

To that end, evidence is actually emerging, too, that we do have bourgeoning evidence that the mountain pine beetle, the spruce beetle and indeed the western spruce budworm in western Canada have all been affected by a warming environment. In fact, we continue to work on that as we focus further and further on the issue.

There are two primary ways in which a warming environment can affect forest disturbances. These are not mutually exclusive, but the first is that for a range-limited species, a warming environment can actually create new habitat and allow that species to move into areas that it couldn't previously occupy. The mountain pine beetle is the best example of that sort of issue.

The second is for species that are ubiquitous. In other words, they occur everywhere their host trees occur. Examples of this could be the eastern spruce budworm, or the spruce beetle, for that matter. In this particular case, we are noticing that, in a warming environment, the outbreaks themselves that are associated with these species tend to be getting worse in terms of their frequency, their severity and their duration. To this end, we have the spruce beetle in Yukon and northern British Columbia as a very good example in that particular case.

I mentioned that I was going to focus a bit on the mountain pine beetle, and I know it is an important issue and it's one that I've worked on extensively. Indeed Mr. Henry referred to the TRIA-Net. I'm actually a principal investigator and a theme leader in that particular network.

The mountain pine beetle is perhaps the first and best example of climate-related impacts in terms of forest disturbances in Canada.

It's important to point out that it's a problem that actually has arisen as a consequence of a couple of things. The first and foremost is our success at fire suppression across the west. We have become very good at putting out fires across Canada and particularly in British Columbia, to the extent that we have removed fire—aside from this past couple of years—almost entirely from the pine-dominated ecosystems. This has actually caused an increase in the amount of older trees, which would be the preferable food source for the mountain pine beetle.

In doing so, in the absence of climate change, we created a smorgasbord for the mountain pine beetle and have effectively allowed the populations to build to unprecedented levels.

On top of that, the second driver of this big outbreak has been a warming environment. This has allowed the beetles to survive better. It has allowed them to expand their range, as I mentioned earlier. This range has expanded to the point where the beetles have breached the Rocky Mountains and have begun to spread across Alberta.

In fact, in the 10 or more years since it's been on the eastern side of the Rockies, it has continued to spread across Alberta and we now have it right on the border of Saskatchewan. Indeed in the Cold Lake air weapons range, we have a population detected already. It's quite a concern.

Given the work that I have done with colleagues associated with the TRIA-Net, the NSERC-sponsored program in which I was involved, we can pretty much conclude that as long as populations remain in the outbreak phase—in other words, they remain large and they remain aggressive—eastward expansion remains highly likely. Beetles in that particular phase are capable of finding and successfully attacking Jack pine trees without too much of a problem.

The difference, though, is that if the populations are able to collapse, if we are able to slow the spread to the point where beetle populations actually return to a sub-outbreak or endemic state, then spread becomes much less likely. Indeed, some emerging evidence from my lab shows that persistence in the long run in these new pine habitats by sub-outbreak populations of the mountain pine beetle is actually highly unlikely, as a consequence of competition from other aspects of those forests.

The last point I'd like to emphasize is that the Government of Alberta has actually devoted a great deal of resources, roughly half a billion dollars, to slowing the spread of the mountain pine beetle in the last 10 or 12 years, certainly since 2006.

I recently completed a study, funded in part by the Government of Alberta, looking at whether these efforts have been effective. We can conclude that, yes, indeed, they have been effective. The efforts on the part of Alberta have slowed the spread of the mountain pine beetle significantly. This is a highly important point, especially in combination with the point I made just a moment ago in terms of the collapse of populations back to the endemic level. If we can continue to focus on the mountain pine beetle in efforts to slow its spread, then we might get lucky enough to have these populations finally collapse to this sub-outbreak phase and, in doing so, essentially reduce the likelihood of eastward spread by a considerable amount.

Finally, I'd just like to conclude by saying that you might recall that I mentioned that the mountain pine beetle is perhaps the first and best example of a climate change impact. However, it's only one of a whole series of species that are likely to respond to a warming environment by increasing their disturbances in Canadian forests. We effectively have a canary in the coal mine in so far as future disturbances are likely to occur associated with other species.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Professor Carroll.

Mr. Hehr, you're going to start us off.

[Kent Hehr, Calgary Centre, Lib.]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for your presentations.

My question is for Dr. Carroll. I represent Calgary Centre, so I'm very familiar with the pine beetle and its devastation in Alberta over the course of the last 15 years. You've indicated that you see that it's moving toward the Saskatchewan border. I note that you said that some of the intervention strategies worked in Alberta.

Should we be replicating some of those in Saskatchewan and Ontario as preventive measures to try to deal with the spread at this time?

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

In short, the answer to that would be yes.

It's worth pointing out that the efforts on the part of Alberta to this point have primarily focused on attempting to kill beetles directly and, in doing so, reduce the population. It's those efforts that have shown an impact of slowing the spread. That said, Alberta has what it calls its healthy pine strategy, where they've been attempting to focus more on harvesting mature pine and reintroducing a variability on the landscape, the same as you would expect with a normal fire regime. Saskatchewan has to some degree also moved along these lines.

It's worth pointing out that the Government of Saskatchewan actually has been aiding Alberta in its efforts at slowing the spread of the mountain pine beetle.

The longer answer would be that, indeed, anything that can be done to reduce forest susceptibility along the eastern margins of the mountain pine beetle spread would be a highly valuable exercise.

[Kent Hehr]

I also noted in your presentation that you were saying fire suppression has played a role in allowing the spread of bugs and pine beetles.

Have we started to alter our fire suppression and how we're going about doing this as national and provincial governments look more deeply into this issue?

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

It's certainly an issue that we're considering. Have we altered our practices? Not yet. We don't have the capacity to do so in an effective manner at this point in time.

The problem that we've reached—the stage at which we currently exist—is effectively the product of many decades of effective fire suppression, so it's not something that can be reversed overnight. Indeed, the impacts that the mountain pine beetle has had on British Columbia, by causing all of that mortality over roughly 16-million hectares of the pine-dominated forests, has actually caused fuel loading in these forests that in all likelihood has severely exacerbated the fires of the past two summers, although the data for that statement is still emerging.

As we proceed further east and begin to look back at British Columbia, any jurisdiction that currently manages pine—or any forest, for that matter—needs to start considering the demographics of those forests as it pertains to susceptibility to insects. If it's out of skew from what you would expect from a historical fire regime, then there is a high likelihood that it will become very good food for insects moving forward.

[Kent Hehr]

I was also noting that you were researching past outbreaks, going back into the glacial record and as climate has changed in the past.

Were you seeing in that research evidence of pine beetle, and those types of larva occurring in our past geological record? Is any of that research playing a part in what we're doing today?

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

We do have evidence of mountain pine beetle activity that goes back over 8,000 years in western North America. That evidence is primarily based upon fossilized bits of insects collected from lakes. All that can really tell us is that the beetles were there, and we can only assume they were doing then what they are doing today.

The other reference I was making was to studies that have looked at fossilized evidence of other types of insect disturbance from as much as 56 million years ago, during a time when we had a climate change event that was similar in rate and severity as what we're expecting today. In that particular case, there was a significant increase in forest-like disturbances back in those times as well.

[Kent Hehr]

My last question is for both of you.

Can you identify gaps where the federal government could be aiding in helping to control or study forest pests?

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

I can take a stab at that, and perhaps Mr. Henry can follow.

I was a Canadian Forest Service scientist until eight or nine years ago, after which I moved to the University of British Columbia. I have some familiarity with the federal government and its structure in terms of forest research.

Indeed, there is a paucity of people who do the type of research that I do. I think that sort of statement is also applicable to scientists who study fire, for example, as well.

There is every expectation that as the climate changes and the environment warms, that disturbance in general—whether it be from insects or fire—is going to get worse. I think we're ill-prepared, from the point of view of the research that we do—our capacity, at least—across the country, whether it be academia or government, to provide the answers we need to effectively adapt to these changes.

[Kent Hehr]

Okay.

[Peter Henry]

I support those comments, but I'm also thinking about the development of management approaches that might be effective at a landscape scale. What British Columbia and Alberta have experienced, this is millions of hectares. It's not like you can go out and harvest all the old trees before the beetles get there. You cannot do that scale of activity, so there's thinking about the kinds of activities that can be done in concert to address the landscape-scale series of disturbance events that are coming.

I think on the mountain pine beetle there's lot of work that has been done in terms of detection, and it's one of those species that when it's there killing a tree, you can see that. Alberta very successfully was hunting for it and cutting down and killing those beetles. For us in Ontario we're thinking about further research in how the dynamics of the species might change when it moves into our forest. We're concerned about our white and red pine forest, which the beetle hasn't gotten to yet, and what exactly it's going to do there. We're not sure, but it's those dynamics with a new ecology, a new ecosystem, when it moves in there. There needs to be further research on that as well as, I would say, going back to management techniques. We do have some control over some of our fire management actions.

Ontario does have a fire management strategy, and it's not fight every fire everywhere. However, you start to layer on other resource values and things such as if you happen to be trying to manage for caribou habitat, which requires older forests. That's a direction that tells you to maintain older trees out there and perhaps more of those, which are those susceptible trees that Professor Carroll was talking about. You're creating more of that.

We're trying to balance those with the needs of the forest industry. For the fire management people, they're trying to protect value. Around communities, they're trying to put those fires out actively. I think it's about the combination of activities that might take place that can reflect or consider those other values that we're trying to achieve in the forest—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I'm going to have to ask you wrap up at the end of this.

[Peter Henry]

—with some specific management actions that we can implement at a reasonable scale.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

[Kent Hehr]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Eglinski.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I'd like to start off first by thanking both of our guests today, Mr. Henry and Professor Carroll. I think I've spoken to you before from my riding of Yellowhead. I'd like to thank you for the work that you've been doing.

But first of all, I'd like to thank this committee for taking this study on. Since I've been elected, one of my biggest pushes in the House of Commons, when asking questions, is that we have to get something done with the pine beetle.

My riding of Yellowhead is at the eastern entrance of Jasper National Park. We've watched the pine beetle come in from the west side. I've been working with Professor Carroll and the University of British Columbia and many agencies, such as the CFS, to try to fight them.

To give you an idea how bad it's getting, folks, as Professor Carroll said, we were keeping them at bay in 2013, 2014 and 2015. We were keeping them at bay with West Fraser, the corporation, spending a lot of its own resources, and the Province of British Columbia, of course, the forestry department, fighting to hold the trees at bay, cutting down the ones that were infected. In 2017, there was a tenfold increase in the number of trees reported. That's how fast they are adapting and why I think it's so urgent that the government needs to react.

My first question is for Mr. Carroll.

What can government...and I'm not talking about the provincial governments. We know what the Province of B.C. did. They have spent millions and billions of dollars trying to combat it. We know that the Province of Alberta is spending as much money as they can in their budget each year to combat it. You're a former CFS scientist. Do you feel there's a role that the federal government has to take beyond leaving it under the control of the provinces?

I know we do the research and that's great, but we need to look at combatting it and stopping it.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Yes. It's worth pointing out that the federal government in previous iterations has actually expended a great deal of money towards the mountain pine beetle, but that hasn't actually been consistent in recent years.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

No.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

That said, yes, there is a significant role. The beetle has crossed from B.C. to Alberta and now threatens to cross from Alberta to Saskatchewan. I do know that the Government of Alberta has begun dropping very significant hints that their level of commitment to the problem can't continue at the rate that it's been continuing for the past 10 or 12 years, at roughly 30-odd million dollars per year. They're suggesting that they need to pull away.

This to me is highly concerning simply because, as I indicated, we do have significant evidence for effective spread control or slowing the spread on the part of the efforts of the Alberta government. In my opinion, if we weren't to keep up the pressure on the beetle, the potential for us to cause the populations to collapse and effectively remove its ability to spread will be severely compromised if we pull away from these efforts, if Alberta can't keep it up.

From the point of view of the role of the federal government, that might be perhaps the most obvious one.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

You've been involved with the pine beetle for a long time, I think going back to the late seventies.

The pine beetle is adapting. It's adapting very quickly to the changing environment. I remember, in 2003 when I was the mayor of Fort St. John, being told that I was on the northern B.C. pine beetle task force, and being told that the pine beetle would never cross the Rocky Mountains. That was the science of the day.

Can you give us some examples of how they've adapted? I believe even the strain we have coming through Jasper right now is a combination of the southern pine beetle from Alberta and the northern one getting together and amalgamating there.