Natural Resources Committee on Sept. 27th, 2018

[Richard Briand]

We can slow down their spread. I don't think we can stop them completely with our control efforts, but we can have a significant impact in terms of slowing them down and minimizing the impact on the forests over time. Eventually we're going to get some help from Mother Nature to provide some cold weather at the right time of year, which will really knock them back.

We can be very effective, and research has been done that confirms that Alberta's program, combined with industry and government, is effective.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Cannings, go ahead.

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

Thank you both for being here.

I'll start with Mr. Bélanger, with some questioning along the lines of what I was talking about to the previous witnesses.

I'm from British Columbia. British Columbia is in a kind of post-apocalyptic phase for the mountain pine beetle, and looking to the future for ways of preventing this from happening again.

I just want to pick up on a comment you made, which was a bit of a surprise to me, and that was about a legal requirement to plant the same species that you cut. I know that in British Columbia there's a legal requirement, or the province directs companies to cut species in the same proportion that is in their timber supply area, so you can't just go in there and cut nothing but lodgepole pine or Douglas fir. You have to take things in proportion, as I understand it.

However, I didn't know there was a requirement to go back and plant all that. What we see—at least what I see on the land—is a company clear-cutting an area that might have been lodgepole pine-dominated, or half pine and half spruce, and then it's all planted to pine.

I'm wondering if you can let me know what that legal requirement is. Does it change from province to province, or is it across Canada?

[Étienne Bélanger]

Yes, it does change from province to province. What is common is that they all require that you bring back the forest “free to grow”, so it has to be regenerated when you harvest the area. Typically, there are requirements. You can do that either through natural regeneration or artificially by replanting. Normally, the requirement about what you're allowed to plant will be that you're only allowed to plant seedlings that have grown from seeds from the region.

There are now trials in B.C. to do what they call “assisted migration”, where they will be purposely planting trees from a different region, although it's on a trial basis. They created that exception to the rule to allow for these tests to take place, either in changing the species from height or from latitude. Normally, in most regimes, and from what I know, when you plant, you're required to regenerate using the same species from the same region, considering that you might plant only one species but it might become a mixed stand because some other less-desired species will still come and regenerate themselves naturally, such as aspen, for example.

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

In terms of asking what the federal government's role could be in this regeneration phase, I know that in British Columbia forest companies are required to replant the areas they cut, and by law they keep up with that. It seems, from what I've heard, that the province has fallen behind. With all the fires and the mountain pine beetle kill, there's a real deficit right now in that planting.

I'm wondering if you see this as a place where the federal government could step in and say, “Look, we understand this is a disaster, so here's some disaster relief funding to replant, with some strings attached”—which perhaps might be that there be some attempt to return the forest to a more diverse stand that would be less susceptible. Is this something that FPAC would be behind?

[Étienne Bélanger]

Yes, that's something we would be supportive of. We see that weakness in our current forest management approach. Mr. Briand alluded to it. The fact is that we operate on half of one per cent of the forest every year, which gives us a very limited ability, through forestry only, to change the forest composition.

If more funding were created for us to also regenerate some of these stands that are devastated by mountain pine beetle, spruce budworm or fire, and that are not currently regenerating because the trees are still there, blocking some of the regeneration, there would be ways to.... No one is responsible for that at the moment. These forests are waiting. They're either waiting to burn or to fall down after years and years.

These are huge volumes that are not coming back. These are productive and healthy forests that are not coming back or are coming back very slowly. Since there are no legal requirements to address this in the programs that are in place at the moment, that could be a very new, proactive and significant role that the federal or another government could decide to take on, for sure.

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

I have two minutes, and I'd ask Mr. Briand basically the same question, about how West Fraser decides what to replant with. What are your directives? What constraints are you operating under? How do you make those decisions on what to replant or on how to salvage logs? Let's just stick with the replanting for now.

[Richard Briand]

Sure. The replanting is driven almost entirely by the regulations of Alberta. I'll speak to Alberta specifically. We do need to regenerate species: the same species in the same proportions that we harvest. That is in regulation in our regeneration standards today.

There have definitely been some adjustments in those standards to reflect the changing climate in terms of the seed source. That was referred to earlier. Some seeds from lower elevations now can be planted at higher elevations. There have been those kinds of things. In terms of the actual shift to different species, it's something that's been researched and discussed a bit, but there have been no changes in any regulations or guidelines around that.

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

Is there any favouritism, if you will, that West Fraser might have for pine, which grows faster than spruce, just because you might get a faster return? I don't know how the land tenure is in Alberta versus British Columbia, but....

[Richard Briand]

Generally, our approach is driven by the ecosites. There are some sites where pine will grow better, and there are other sites where white spruce will grow better. Our silviculture foresters go out into each cutblock and make an assessment on what will have the best chance of success. It is site-specific.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Cannings, that's your time, but as we talked about, I have to excuse myself a bit early.

Mr. Cannings is going to take the chair for the rest of the meeting.

Mr. Whalen, you're next. I think you're probably the last person up anyway.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Enjoy your next meeting, wherever you're off to.

The first question I have is for the analysts. I'm hoping you can prepare a chart for us just to help us maintain some status here on the facts about federal and provincial expenditures on forest pest management over the past 20 years. It's just so we can see how much the provinces and the federal government have been spending on this topic over time, so we can be grounded in that. I think that would be helpful for us.

Mr. Bélanger, other witnesses have talked to us about landscape scale management. Could you explain in a few words what this is about to help the translators, interpreters and the writing of the French version of our report? It would be very helpful to us.

[Étienne Bélanger]

Certainly.

The landscape-scale management approach refers to the scale at which we will set our management objectives. One of Canada's unique features, which gives it environmental advantages over many other countries, is that we consider the composition of forests at the landscape level in relation to their historical state. The objective is, for example, to see the landscape evolve according to its forests, to see if the 50-year management has led us to younger forests through the elimination of white pine, or to determine the type of forest that can be recreated that would be more representative of a natural landscape across the country. This is often referred to as the ecosystem approach.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Right. I've heard those terms before.

When we talk

about this ecosystem-wide management.... Now that we have some verbs and whatnot for the translators, I'll go back to English. It's a lot easier for you.

What type of experimentation remains to be done to determine whether planting or just burning the existing stands, or another type of approach, is best for the environment from a landscape management perspective? What could be done to determine which is best? Is this something that scientists understand well, or is it something that we need to experiment on to determine?

[Étienne Bélanger]

It is something that is continuously studied. I think we have a very good understanding of what we're doing, but our understanding keeps improving. Tests can continue, but what gets valued on the land and what we as a society decide to focus on also change over time. Achieving these evolving objectives also requires continuous research to see if it's going to work.

For example, nowadays, trying to help woodland caribou recover is a top issue. There's a variety of approaches being tested now to see how it can be achieved. That requires quite a bit of research, because you can't rely only on a baseline hypothesis and apply it across the full landscape in the hope that it's going to work in each case. You need to continuously research your management approaches to test whether or not they are meeting the objective. That's both in terms of research and in terms of maintaining systems of continuous learning in place.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

When I look at the severe challenge facing us, not just with the spread of forest pests, but also with managing the risks associated with the dead stands that exist both in Quebec, with regard to the spruce budworm, and in B.C., with the mountain pine beetle, does it present an opportunity for forest management scientists, but also the provinces and perhaps companies, to develop standards by which these stands can be harvested? Some economic value, perhaps, in a subsidized way, can be extracted to reduce the overall forest fire risk, because it seems that this is a major concern, not only for the loss of people's homes and property but also for the loss of life for firefighters and in terms of their risks.

Can we more proactively manage these dead stands in a way that can allow for their more rapid regeneration, perhaps by controlled burning in some fashion, at least so that if a forest fire develops in a particular area we've done the necessary preparatory work so that firefighters can access and protect the neighbouring communities in a more efficient fashion?

I'm hoping to get answers from both parties.

[Étienne Bélanger]

I can start.

I would say yes, but not only because the efforts to salvage dead stands are very significant. That should probably not be the only avenue to address the issue that I think you're getting at.

In some provinces, they're getting almost their full wood supply through salvage harvest in the current context, so it's hard to do more on that front, but also, in evolving our forest management strategies and how you do harvests in more normal circumstances, you could have the objective of creating a forest structure that is less prone to burn, or replacing some more intense forest management activities closer to communities, or redesigning your roads to help with fire management in the future.

Our forestry has not been taught in the first place to design forest intervention for dealing with future burn stands or future invasion. If you were to take these objectives now as being more important than they used to be, it could change how we manage our forests on a landscape basis.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Briand, it's easy enough for people in Ottawa or even for academics, but it's your company and your employees that would ultimately be tasked or procured to implement any recommendation for large-scale landscape management techniques.

Do you have any particular views? If you were just going to engage in some blue-sky thinking or some brainstorming around this, where do you think the industry should be going?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Richard Cannings]

He has 10 seconds, so you might want to stop talking and let him speak for 10 seconds.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thanks, Richard.

[Richard Briand]

Briefly, my response would be that we do a lot of research around trying to replicate natural disturbance patterns, based predominantly on historical fires. We continue to work on it to try to see how those are going to evolve over time in a changing climate.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Richard Cannings]

That brings us to the end of the first round.

I suggest that we end things there, unless it's the will of the committee to give five minutes to the Conservative side. We can just thank the witnesses and call it a day.

Mr. Eglinski, go ahead.