Natural Resources Committee on Sept. 27th, 2018

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

With all due respect, the issues that suggests are a bit of a red herring. The mountain pine beetle is incredibly good at what it does and there is lots of variation in the populations.

I do know of the work you're referring to, and I am a bit concerned that it suggests that we have this sort of evolving scary Frankenbeetle that is going to cause a lot of issues. It's a fascinating scientific question—believe me—and I think the work that was done was laudable. It was very good, but from the perspective of management, I don't think it's all that relevant, simply because the beetles will attack and kill trees. They will do so as long as the trees are available to them and the climate allows them to persist.

Whether we've had changes in what those things actually are, from the point of view of the beetle, I think is somewhat immaterial because older pine trees are at risk. Older pine trees that are stressed due to drought and other conditions are at higher risk, and where beetles can persist through the winter, trees are at higher risk still. Those three things together, effectively, have been coming to a head, not only in your area but all the way across the boreal and sub-boreal area toward Saskatchewan.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I'm sorry I'm leaving you out, sir, but the only thing I can tell you is that the pine beetle is coming, so get prepared.

[Peter Henry]

I'm hoping this work will help slow that down.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

I've watched it move across the province.

Mr. Carroll, Parks Canada's guiding principles and operating policies state that:

National park ecosystems will be managed with minimal interference to natural processes.

We constantly hear that the pine beetle is a natural process, but there is a following sentence there that reads:

However, active management may be allowed when the structure or function of an ecosystem has been seriously altered and manipulation is the only possible alternative available to restore ecological integrity.

I am bringing this question up because you're probably aware that, if you drive from the west side of Jasper National Park to the east side, you will see it is brown. It is not green anymore, folks; it is brown. I can give you letters from two or three different people. The town of Jasper is in a panic situation for fire. The residents are panicking. The visitations are down because of the brownness of our park, yet we're not seeing any action being taken to stop the pine beetle within the park. It has moved through the park. We've watched it over the last seven or eight years, and now it's out the gate and it's spreading through western Alberta.

Do you believe action needs to be taken and that there could be more action taken?

I'm putting you in a tight spot.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Yes. It's a complex question, and you and I have discussed this in the past. What I will do here is be as brief as possible.

Mr. Henry alluded to some of the problems with the mountain pine beetle in terms of what it is. Is it invasive, or is it native? In the context of Jasper National Park, all scientific evidence suggests that it's invasive, in which case it's not a natural disturbance agent.

Banff treated it the very same way and it was very effective about 10 years ago, in terms of slowing the spread down into the Bow River valley.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Yes, they did it.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Insofar as what to do now, Jasper really no longer has a mountain pine beetle problem. It has a dead tree problem. The mountain pine beetle is now an issue of Hinton, and in fact it's now in the Sundre FMA, if you hadn't heard.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Yes, it is.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Effectively, Jasper has a problem with dead trees and a high fire risk. Should they be doing something? Absolutely. They do have a community that they need to protect, and I believe they are doing work to actually protect that community with FireSmart applications.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Cannings.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you both for being here. I have about 50 questions and time for maybe three or so. With again apologies to Mr. Henry, I'm going to start with Dr. Carroll.

I'm from British Columbia and the pine beetle is the big issue there in our forests. I'm from the Okanagan valley, so I've been on the edge of it, but I watched with some trepidation as that infestation moved south in 2006-07, in big flights off the Cariboo Plateau into the Thompson valley.

You just mentioned that Jasper has a dead tree problem. In British Columbia, that's mainly where we're at. It seems the really huge epidemic of the mountain pine beetle has calmed down a fair bit. In looking to the future and what roles government might have.... Mr. Henry also touched on this, so I'd let him comment at the end. What should we be doing about harvesting strategies, silviculture techniques, to reduce the chance of this happening again?

There was a historical aspect to this, as well as climate, where we had a lot of fires back 200 years ago, so we had these huge monocultures, even-age stands of old pines that contributed to it. Now we're in a replanting phase. I know the Government of B.C. is trying to replant some things, and it's behind in that scheduling. What I'm seeing is that we need more forest diversity in terms of species, structure, and age structure. Is that being done? Is that what you're seeing being done on the ground in British Columbia, that they're replanting different species?

That brings in climate as well. I've seen predictive maps of what the forests of B.C. will look like 100 years from now, and you have ponderosa pines in Vanderhoof.

It's a big question, but what are the sorts of things we should be doing for the future to reduce the chances of these really devastating epidemics of mountain pine beetle and other forest pests?

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Your question is another complex one, and I'll do my best to be brief.

It's worth pointing out that the fire suppression activities came on the heels of significant disturbance, which essentially removed fire from the forest and produced a very old, contiguous pine smorgasbord for the mountain pine beetle. Indeed, some of the research I did a while back showed that we had about three and a half times as much mature pine on the landscape at the start of the outbreak as we had 100 years previously. That speaks directly to this lack of diversity, as you've mentioned.

The problem we have with these extensive mortality efforts at salvaging, which, of course, can't keep up with the number of dead trees and the fires on top of all of that, means that our hands are tied in terms of the amount of area that we can actually influence through harvesting. Remember, we are mandated in Canada across the board, as well as in British Columbia, that we replace what we remove from the forest so that we can remain sustainable in terms of our harvesting activities.

That actually is a problem as far as our reforestation activities are concerned, because lodgepole pine remains the favourite species by most companies and the most eligible species to be replaced over most of these areas. As a consequence, it is being put back, and arguably not appropriately in many of these areas that are currently being harvested, to the extent that we do run the risk of having this problem occur again in, say, 60 to 80 years.

Should we be diversifying? Yes, and that diversification is not just in terms of tree species, because we need to keep in mind what sites might look like in the future versus what they look like today. We also need to diversify in terms of the structure of our forests.

One interesting conclusion we drew from our analysis of the demographics of pine prior to the outbreak was that if we were to remove fire from the system, we needed to increase the amount of clear-cutting. In effect, and this is a hard thing to say to most people, we didn't cut enough pine prior to the outbreak. Had we done so, we would have had a more diverse landscape from the point of view of at least its age-class structure and a much lesser likelihood of a sustained, large outbreak of mountain pine beetle.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

On that last point, about needing to cut more pine, would it have been better had we been cutting pine in a different way over the last 50 years, and instead of clear-cutting, doing more thinning as is done in ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests, where you take out a lot of the old trees but plant smaller trees?

The big, old trees that are left there are healthier. They're not competing as much with the other trees for the water. The pheromone trails are disrupted. I've heard that this is one of the harvesting techniques that would have improved it, not more clear-cutting but cutting in a different way.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Absolutely. In places where lodgepole pine would have been mixed with other species, and today where it is currently mixed with other species, I would highly recommend that you remove the lodgepole and let the other species dominate the site.

In other areas, where lodgepole pine is uniform—which is a massive area, the Chilcotin plateau being almost uniformly lodgepole pine, at least historically—it's a different thing. In that particular case, those trees and that ecosystem is fire-adapted and is dependent upon fire to be renewed periodically.

The problem we have is that, through clear-cut harvesting, we can't quite emulate the pattern of disturbance of fire, because we cut with cut-blocks that are limited to 50 hectares in size, with certain adjacency rules that typically create a little checkerboard pattern. You've seen this if you've flown from Kelowna to Vancouver. It is a very susceptible landscape to the spread of disturbance, whether it be insects or fire.

Historically, fire would have burned predominantly small patches, but the occasional large patch of perhaps 10,000 hectares would have been burned. Unfortunately, I don't think we could convince the public that a 10,000 hectare clear-cut would be the wisest ecological choice.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's all your time, unfortunately.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I had about 20 more questions for both of you.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Ms. Damoff, you have the floor.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

When I heard what you were studying, I was quite excited. I'm going to switch gears, though, and talk about the urban forest.

I was on Oakville town council for five years. The council in Oakville has done a lot of work around the urban forest. The tree canopy there is 27.8%, with two million trees, and the structural value is over $1 billion. That's only one municipality.

While I was on council, we were dealing with the emerald ash borer. Because of climate change, extreme weather events, and things such as the emerald ash borer, the Asian longhorned beetle, which is the next thing that may be coming, and a number of other pests that are invasive species, municipalities are left holding the bag. I know Oakville was spending over $25 million to try to deal with the emerald ash borer. We had a strategy, but Burlington was doing it differently, London was doing it differently, and as you said, Mr. Henry, bugs don't know borders.

One of my concerns is that, for something such as the emerald ash borer, my understanding is that the research came predominantly from the United States. We didn't have enough research here in Canada on the emerald ash borer to be able to deal with it properly. Do you see a role for the federal government in enhanced research on these invasive species?

Mr. Carroll, I see you shaking your head. I'll start with you.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

The bulk of the research largely has been driven by the U.S., but quite a few of my Canadian Forest Service colleagues and others in academia do work directly with the U.S. scientists as well. In a sense, the science isn't respecting the borders either in that regard. There is a fairly significant effort on the way. Could there be more done? Absolutely, there's no question about it.

The emerald ash borer is a particularly nasty invasive species. At this point in time, colleagues tell me that we could lose the entire genus Fraxinus in North America, which is striking. The last time we had something nearly as bad as this was with the chestnut blight about 100 years ago.

There are significant issues, not only from the point of view of urban forestry but forestry in general, in regard to the impacts of the emerald ash borer. Effective management of the emerald ash borer remains elusive. We have yet to really develop a way that we can deal with it. Just that very statement alone indicates that additional research is desperate for new solutions.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

One of the things that apparently has happened in Oakville is that the European buckthorn has taken hold, which is another invasive species. Because the ash trees are gone, the light can now get into the forest, so the largest growth in tree canopy in Oakville between 2005 and 2015 was the European buckthorn.

We have no strategy to deal with that whatsoever, and there's no assistance for municipalities to be able to deal with that. It's a cascade of events when you're dealing with the loss of the ash trees and then you have something else taking hold.

[Prof. Allan Carroll]

Absolutely. Ecosystems are not static and they respond to inputs of disturbance constantly. That's just how they work, and if there happens to be another species capable of exploiting the resources that the one species under threat has given up, they will exploit it for sure.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

My understanding is that the Asian longhorned beetle is the next one we're watching in Ontario. Oakville is participating in the monitoring of it. That's being done by the federal government.

Their experience in Oakville with the emerald ash borer is that the federal government comes in, watches for it, says it's there, and then leaves. It's left with the municipality, which has limited resources for research and dealing with it.

Mr. Henry, could you comment on the Asian longhorned beetle and the impact of that?

[Peter Henry]

I can. That is one of the pests that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is dealing with. Ontario is contributing quite a bit in terms of supporting all the monitoring.

It was detected near Pearson International Airport, suspected to have come in in packing materials that were not suitably treated. There was an infestation identified, thousands of trees were cut out of that area, and then there was a series of five years' worth of surveys to try to determine whether we got them all. Subsequent to that, there was another find, so we're back into another series of monitoring exercises.

One of the challenges that gets highlighted with the invasive species—and I'm thinking about research from the U.S. for emerald ash borer or from other places for Asian longhorned beetle—is that we don't know what insect might show up on our doorstep, so we can't do the research ahead of time.

The Canadian Forest Service did some fantastic work associated with one of the most effective pesticide treatments for emerald ash borer, which is being implemented in Oakville and other municipalities, and that is TreeAzin. That was developed at the Great Lakes Forestry Centre and is being used to treat street trees.

Another issue you're highlighting is that in the urban environment trees are very valuable. Management techniques are totally different from when we're out in the forest. The urban environment is a disturbed environment already, so when you take out those trees, as you indicated with buckthorn, you have a new invasive species that will come in and take over. That is probably a more prevalent issue than in the natural forest situation, because there are other species that would jump into that situation.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

One of the things that was really obvious when we were treating emerald ash borer is that Quebec had a program that was province-wide and Ontario did not. I'm not even suggesting that it should fall to the provinces, because it needs to be national.

I understand you don't have any role to play for the municipalities in terms of treating the trees. Is that correct?

[Peter Henry]

Correct.