Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 4th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I apologize for starting a little bit late, but some of us had some things in the House to attend to.

We're carrying on with our study on forests pests and invasive species. We have two witnesses in the first hour. We have Gail Wallin, who is chair of the board of the Canadian Council on Invasive Species; and David MacLean, professor at the University of New Brunswick.

Thank you both for joining us. The process is that each of you will be given up to 10 minutes to make a presentation, and that will be followed by questions from around the table.

Mr. MacLean, you can start.

[Professor David MacLean, Emeritus Professor, University of New Brunswick, As an Individual]

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for the invitation to come here.

I'll just tell you a little bit about myself first. I'm an emeritus professor at the University of New Brunswick in the faculty of forestry and environmental management. I joined UNB as dean in 1999, and before that, I spent 21 years with the Canadian Forest Service working on the spruce budworm's effects on forest. My background is forest ecology, not forest entomology. I look at budworm from the forest's standpoint rather than from the insect's standpoint. I have 40 years of experience now. I began my career on the Cape Breton Highlands in 1978, when a huge budworm outbreak ended up killing 87% of the fir trees in 30 plots that we maintained across the highlands.

I'm also the lead scientist of the Healthy Forest Partnership, which I believe you heard about in a previous session. There's an early intervention spruce budworm research project going on in New Brunswick right now. I'll speak more about that a little later.

I thought I'd start off with a little bit of background about spruce budworm. These are five facts about budworm.

It's a native insect. It has evolved with our balsam fir and spruce forests. To some extent, it serves the same ecological function that forest fires serve with Jack pine, which is a recycling of stands. It kills off the overstorey trees and there's often the advanced regeneration of balsam fir, at least in some areas, or of intolerant hardwood species, which are underneath and ready to take over when the stand recycles.

Budworm larvae strongly prefer to eat the new shoots. They really only eat the new shoots. They do this repeatedly year after year, and outbreaks typically last about 10 years. Trees start to die after about four or five years. The real problem with budworm outbreaks is the huge amount of mortality that results in certain stand types. My rules of thumb are to expect 85% mortality in older balsam fir stands, expect 35% to 40% mortality in older spruce stands—and by “older” I mean 50- to 60-year-old mature ones—and expect the same with young fir.

For the trees that survive, there's also stemwood growth production that's going on as well. Probably about 90% of the stemwood production is reduced during periods of active defoliation.

Although budworm fir forests can be viewed as ecologically resilient—it will come back from it, it's not destroyed—from an economic standpoint it's devastating because of this huge amount of mortality that occurs.

In research at the University of New Brunswick, a couple of Ph.D. students working on both the timber supply effects of outbreaks and the socio-economic effects of those timber supplies projected a cost of up to $15.3 billion over the next 40 years if an outbreak similar to what happened in Cape Breton in the 1970s were to occur now. This translates into 57,000 person-years of lost employment and mill closures that would result from this. There would be about a one-third reduction in annual allowable cut.

We do have very accurate models and decision support systems for spruce budworm because there has been interest in this insect for a long time. They've been in development since the early 1990s.

There are essentially five management options for dealing with a spruce budworm outbreak.

The first option is to do nothing and to just accept the mortality that will occur.

The second option is silviculture before an outbreak to try to restructure the forest to reduce the most damaging stand types. This focuses on reducing balsam fir. It's definitely the one that is killed the most.

The third option is to salvage during an outbreak or after the outbreak. You have a narrow time window with that. You only have two to four years or so when the trees are still usable. It's tricky because the trees don't all die at once. They die over a period of time. Also, it's usually happening over huge areas so logistically it's very difficult to make a big effect through salvage.

The fourth option is foliage protection by using biological insecticides. We're not using chemicals at all now. Bacillus thuringiensis and tebufenozide are two biologically acting insecticides that could be used. In the past, they would have been used in a reactive sense to keep trees alive. They'd let defoliation happen for at least two years and then start spraying to keep the trees alive.

The fifth option is an early intervention strategy. We really don't know for sure that it will work, but after four years of trials it has been working so far. This is also an insecticide application, but it's done way earlier in the outbreak, before you start to see defoliation occurring.

The Healthy Forest Partnership is a consortium that's been running this early intervention strategy project. Phase one was from 2014 to 2018—$18 million, with $10 million coming through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and a number of others. Then phase two was approved by the federal government in the last budget, with $75 million through Natural Resources Canada, with a 60:40 funding match, so an additional 40% is required from provinces and industry across Atlantic Canada.

What is the early intervention strategy? It really comes down to a very simple concept: intensive monitoring and early detection of hot spots when populations are just beginning to rise, so with approximately 2,000 sample points across northern New Brunswick with three trees sampled in each of the public points. This is really intensive monitoring. Then there is small-area, targeted, biological pesticide application to reduce the populations in those hot spots.

The third element of it is research on tools and techniques to try to disrupt budworm moth mating and migration. There is a big outbreak going on in Quebec right now. We periodically get influxes of moths from Quebec.

Evidence so far after four years of treatment suggests that the early intervention strategy appears to be working. Our target is to keep populations below seven larvae per branch. The second instar larvae stage is the overwintering stage. They are really tiny, but they are the ones that will grow to do the feeding in the following summer. We're doing this much earlier than previous treatments. We're treating with insecticides all areas that have budworm, regardless of land ownership. The provincial regulations are such that an individual landowner can opt out if they choose. There's a very sophisticated contact and communication with landowners to inform them of what's going on and why. So far we've had about 2% of private landowners opt out across the four years. It requires a very strong provincial commitment and communications component.

We've been treating increasing areas over the period. It was about 5,000 hectares in the very first year, in 2014, and it was up to 225,000 hectares in 2018, this past year. Budworm populations in the treated blocks have been consistently reduced by about 70% through our treatments.

In general, areas are not being treated in successive years. The areas that were treated in 2017 typically weren't treated again in 2018. Following four years of treatments, the Quebec-New Brunswick border is evident from the air. You can fly over it and see the defoliation on the Quebec side and not on the New Brunswick side. Aerial surveys flying aircraft over to detect defoliation detected 2,500 hectares of defoliation in New Brunswick in 2017, and only 500 hectares in 2018, in comparison with 2.5 million hectares in Gaspésie and Baie-St.-Laurent, immediately on the other side of the border. In the budworm population, the second instar larvae populations are much higher in adjacent Quebec than in New Brunswick.

The key successes so far are reducing budworm populations, and the innovative science with broad, practical applications. There's a very successful public engagement and citizen science component to the program. We've really been trying to get out ahead with communications by talking to mayors, town councils, individual landowners and the media in the affected areas. We've been avoiding serious defoliation in the wood supply losses, and we've developed a unique and powerful partnership among industry, universities, governments and communities.

I have five recommendations of what can be done to protect the Canadian forest sector from the spread of forest pests, which is your mandate.

The first one I would state is to support Natural Resources Canada's Canadian Forest Service science program because CFS has the largest entomology expertise for dealing with native and introduced forest insects in Canada.

The second is somewhat self-serving, but I say continue to support the Healthy Forest Partnership early intervention strategy research project. We're very grateful to the federal government for the funding that has been provided for this. This is the first attempt anywhere to conduct, area-wide within the province of New Brunswick, population management of a native insect. One of my colleagues calls it whack-a-mole. They are starting to come up here, and we whack them back down with the insecticide treatment.

My third recommendation is to seek input from provinces and industry on what their most important forest pest problems are and to require innovative research approaches to pest management, not just business-as-usual approaches. All federal funding to protect the Canadian forest sector should be in partnership with the provinces.

My fourth recondition is to use the Healthy Forest Partnership as a model for other innovative research partnerships with provinces, researchers, communities and universities. We currently have over 20 partners. As a sub-thought to that, it's critical that provinces be onside and be committed to their required contributions. With a 60:40 funding split, it doesn't work if the provinces aren't onside. Communication is really important.

My last point is that one important area that is difficult to research on meaningful temporal and spatial scales, because it requires very large areas and long time periods, is the use of silviculture and forest management to change the forest landscape to reduce future pest outbreaks. This is a specific area where the federal government resources, in partnership with industry and provinces, could help with the establishment of some long-term forest landscape restructuring studies.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Professor.

Ms. Wallin.

[Gail Wallin, Chair, Canadian Council on Invasive Species]

Thank you.

I'm chair of the Canadian Council on Invasive Species. It's an organization that was established about 10 years ago as a result of a national invasive species forum that called for an out-of-government, national voice for invasive species, except the term, "invasive species" wasn't so often used at that time; it was called many different things.

I'm the chair of that board. I hail from the home of the mountain pine beetle in central B.C., and I have been at the front edges of B.C., northeast B.C. and Alberta, as we've talked about keeping it out of this area, so I'm very familiar with that discussion. I know that's not popular here, but I've lived and breathed this for the last 10 years.

The Canadian Council is a federally registered, non-profit organization. It has a board of directors that is representative from coast to coast to coast. Its mandate, its format, its direction came from not just the first national invasive species forum in Canada, but the successive ones because they provided that direction. It's a non-profit, four-chamber board, so it has federal, provincial and territorial governments on it, industry, businesses, the indigenous, and it has chapters of the provincial and territorial invasive species councils that exist in Canada.

That's the model of the board. There are two main drivers for the board and for the council: pathways and partnerships. You'll see those two themes throughout. When we talk about invasive species, based on the national invasive alien species strategy, that normally means outside Canada or outside a region; it's foreign to that area. The federal government has defined that term.

I'm going to talk for just a couple of minutes about the Canadian council and then I'm going to talk about our recommendations to you, as a standing committee. I talked about our main themes. We've done a number of things. We've held a number of national invasive species forums; we held the first North American invasive species forum here in Ottawa about three years ago in partnership with the federal government. The forum rotates among Canada, the States and Mexico. We've also had a number of national workshops where we drilled down on some of the key themes, such as mapping invasive species so that people can have access to knowing where the forest pests are in Canada; the aquatic invasive species; and how we can share data better, both across and beyond governments.

We facilitated the North American invasive species framework, which now Environment Canada, Mexico and the United States are working on. We've developed a range of other programs such as national outreach campaigns because we all know that for invasive species prevention, it's important to have the Canadians on side.

As we take a look at how we move forward when we talk about forest pests, I looked at a number of the other presentations you've had. You've had lots of information about the economic impacts; I think that's a given. You know that forest pests cause a huge economic loss to us at an urban and a rural level. At the beginning, people thought forest pests were just that rural forest thing; they didn't realize they applied to the urban environment, and that's wrong. Forest pests are a major theme for urban forests also.

The other part I want to raise on behalf of the Canadian council is that we look at it not just as an economic issue, but as an environmental issue. Healthy forests are important for Canada from the biodiversity side, which we're pretty proud of in Canada, and also species at risk. Very few species at risk strategies don't list invasive species as a top threat that's causing the decline. If we take the economic and the environmental risk, invasive species, forest pests are a huge issue. They affect our trade. We put in place a lot of trade regulations, and a lot of regulations are put on in Canada to reduce the spread.

Recognizing that you probably already have a good handle on the impacts, I'm going to talk about what we think are some of the things that need to be addressed from a forest pest side. I'm going to end up with five specific actions. First, for all invasive species including forest pests, economically and environmentally the best thing by far is prevention, stopping that species from getting into that region or that country. Once it's there, the second step is to have an early response and quickly eradicate it. If you don't do that immediately, you're usually in a control mechanism to try to reduce and contain that population. All the research consistently shows prevention is your best, most cost-effective tool. To have effective prevention or quick response, you need to be organized ahead of time across governments, have a good plan, and understand roles, responsibilities and resources because no forest pests recognize borders.

The other area we need to look at is that even though we might be talking more free trade or open trade, when it comes to forest pests you actually want more barriers. You want more barriers in place so that we're not bringing them in. We need the public to be aware so that the public can take action. Many of the forest pests are moved by people. Building on what Dr. MacLean said, partnerships are really important. Again, just like pests don't recognize jurisdictions, you have to work together on it. There's no sense us tackling one species in B.C. if Alberta is tackling a different species. We'll both be ineffective at it.

I have some recommendations on behalf of the council.

First, over top of everything else, we need to close the borders. You've talked about spruce budworm and mountain pine beetle. They already exist in the country. Dr. MacLean would be far more familiar with this, but a number of spruce budworm varieties exist. They're native to someplace in Canada. What's not native to Canada is the Asian gypsy moth, I think, or the pink gypsy moth. Those are all foreign to us. If we can keep those out of the country....

Some of them are established. The European gypsy moth is back east. It's not out west. Right now the Asian gypsy moth has been eradicated from Canada. If we let it come in, we're going to have the cost of trying to eradicate it and control it in the future. We need to close borders for sure.

We need to make sure that we have cross-border collaboration under way within Canada and across our borders. All the forest pests coming into the country are generally coming in through trade. They're coming in on cargoes, container ships, etc. Yes, there are trade implications. Wood packaging has to be treated. We have a lot of container ships coming in that could bring in the gypsy moth or other species.

We need to involve the forest industry. Working in partnership is really important, because the forest industry has a vested interest in the economic side. They can also be a lead in helping to reduce the spread within the country by adopting and implementing best practices. Many of them are now working under different forest certification programs. More and more of those certification programs are recognizing those best practices.

Firewood has been identified as one of the pathways, within Canada and beyond Canada, for spreading forest pests. Our council is working with Natural Resources Canada, CFIA, and other partners to make sure there's a national campaign to stop the movement of firewood. Yes, it applies to regulated areas for specific pests that Environment Canada or CFIA has regulated, but it also applies outside of that area. In the same way we see people recycling now, we're looking to have people handle firewood responsibly in the future.

Across Canada there are different regulations for different forest pests, and lots of places that don't have regulations. Again, federal, provincial and territory governments need to take a look at and understand where there are gaps in our regulations so that we can either close them or work around them. A big one for the council is making sure we have national information hubs. That's come out from every invasive species forum we've ever had. Can we have better national mapping so that people have access to knowing how far the spread of X invasive species is? Where is that forest pest? What's coming in from Washington or from the south?

Those national information hubs would also help involve people. For most invasive species, many times they have been reported by citizens, engaged citizens who have reported the weird bug in their backyard or the weird fish. Getting people to report invasive species is really important.

Definitely there should be investment in research, not just for the surveillance side but also to see what we can do if that pink gypsy moth does arrive in Canada—or the nun moth, which will make the gypsy moth look minor. If it does arrive, we need the tools ready to go.

I'd like to close with just a couple of comments. First, we need to be prepared. New Zealand and Australia are lead countries, often, in biosecurity. We have trade restrictions for wood packaging. We also have container pre-certification processes for containers coming into Canada by other ports checking them out. However, we don't have one of the tools New Zealand has, which is pre-certification for used vehicles. Used vehicles are actually a major transporter of invasive species. That's where your egg masses will hide, etc., and be moved over. So we could be taking a look at other countries like that.

Some of the tools they've used in the south include having all partners contribute to the biosecurity of the country. The federal level, states, industry and importers—the trade—all contribute to the biosecurity around those countries. Those will be tools, because resources will always be an issue.

I want to close and thank you in particular for putting this on your agenda and recognizing that forest pests are a big issue for Canada. I thank you for having the time.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks to both of you.

Mr. Whalen, I think you're going to start us off.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to both of you for coming.

It's a very important and interesting topic, especially as we're dealing with crises, but I'm wondering about this as I look over some of the data we've received about the amount of money that governments are spending on this.

It really seems to be crisis management all the time, rather than some type of an ongoing process in which governments interact with the forest in a managed fashion so that we could manage all of these pests continually forever, but then I wonder if we would be going the wrong way again and going too far, perhaps not with the invasive species side, but certainly with the spruce budworm.

Dr. MacLean, should we be managing these pests in the way we're managing them? Or should we say, well, we've identified that it's coming in here, so why don't we clear this stand in a fashion and extract the economic value we can from this stand before the pest moves in, and then just manage it as an economic loss, rather than always trying to maximize the future value of something that nature won't let us do?

[Prof. David MacLean]

That's a good question. Thank you.

Part of the difficulty is the scale. If it were small, isolated areas, I think we could do what you say. We could go in and do it, but look at just the province of Quebec, where the outbreak started in about 2005-06 in the north shore, north of Baie-Comeau, and got bigger and bigger, so that by 2017 it was in 7 million hectares. It's now 8.2 million hectares based on their surveys this year. Even with all of the salvaging that they can do, there's no road access in the north and it's just impossible to harvest there.

The Province of Quebec is spraying insecticides to try to keep trees alive. That's their approach. It's gone beyond where an early intervention approach would work. They're doing about 250,000 hectares or something of that order out of the 7 million or 8 million hectares that are there.

Salvage, harvesting and restructuring the forest are integral, along with some use of insecticides. The three can be merged together with an integrated long-term planning approach, so that you're using harvesting to reduce the vulnerability and using salvage in some places and insecticides in others. We've done that in other provinces.

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

Maybe that's a good place for me to interject, Dr. MacLean.

It seems like New Brunswick is moving down that role, and that through the Healthy Forest Partnership you have, there are ways in which you're already doing that. You're testing early intervention and small-use pesticides and whatnot.

Is there any clearing and harvesting or selective harvesting that you're doing in connection with this program? Or are you really just piloting and testing early interventions with insecticides at this stage?

[Prof. David MacLean]

I think the harvesting tends to try to target the older balsam fir anyway, the most vulnerable species. J.D. Irving is the company that's the most active in terms of planting. In some of their privately owned land bases they've really targeted switching the balsam fir into spruce, which is less vulnerable and more productive. On their Black Brook district land base, they've done that for most of the areas.

If there's a lot of balsam fir there, it's hard to get rid of it all, so pre-commercial thinning of young firs is also done in some other areas. It makes it less vulnerable, but not non-vulnerable. I think it is being used.

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

If New Brunswick and the companies are already doing this and trying to actively manage the forest, at least on the private lands, what role does the federal government have to play in stepping into that relationship?

[Prof. David MacLean]

What we're trying with this early intervention strategy of the Healthy Forest Partnership couldn't happen without the federal government. It couldn't be afforded. I think the role, both from a research perspective internally in Natural Resources Canada.... Our group has over 30 scientists working on a whole variety of projects. There are 10 different projects going on that I haven't spoken about and that NRCan is helping with.

The funding is helping to do the level of treatments that are required. We're projecting up to 550,000 hectares of treatment two or three years from now when it reaches the peak of the outbreak. It depends a bit on what happens in Quebec and how many moths get exported south into New Brunswick. There was a really bad case of that in 2016. We got off easy this year. It helps if they're not exporting moths to us. Actually, they sent some to Newfoundland this year, it appears.

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

Maybe we should make sure that the Healthy Forest Partnership is engaged there to do early intervention.

[Prof. David MacLean]

Do you mean in Quebec or in Newfoundland? They are a partner in Newfoundland, so it's Atlantic-wide. Right now the activity is in northern New Brunswick but both Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are active and participating. We had a meeting earlier this week where there was discussion from Newfoundland that they may have some areas to treat in the upcoming year.

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

Ms. Wallin, in a similar vein, right across the country invasive species will be coming all the time, not just on the tree pest side but on other plants and in the oceans. What national sustainable funding currently exists for organizations like yours, and where would it be coming from?

[Gail Wallin]

I don't think there has been targeted federal funding on a large scale for organizations like ours. Environment Canada provides us some money or the provincial governments do, but I think what you're driving at is where it should be funded. Is that what you're asking?

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

Well, your job or the job of your organization doesn't end tomorrow. There is no one crisis and once it's solved.... This is a continuous problem that exists as long as there is international trade and climate change. What type of stable program funding is in place to make sure that your organization continues to do its work indefinitely?

[Gail Wallin]

There isn't stable funding and there probably never should be one single source of stable funding. It has to be done through partnerships, federal, provincial and private. That's the model our council is striving towards. We're not there yet.

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

Who are some of your private partners?

[Gail Wallin]

Our private partners have come through industry, like the horticulture industry, but not on the forestry side yet. We're just courting a couple that I won't name right now that are working with us on the firewood side. We're hoping that those will be funders. For the large-scale industries, from J.D. Irving to Canadian Forest Products, by reducing the movement—in our case, firewood is an example—it will actually be a tool to help them. Just like your healthy partnership model where you have federal, provincial and private, that model needs to apply to the work that we do.

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

That's it for my time. Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Falk, you're next.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses. I've enjoyed listening to your testimony thus far. You are obviously very passionate about your work and you are also very knowledgeable and I appreciate that.

Ms. Wallin, I'll start with you. You've talked about natural or domestic species and the more invasive ones. What is your opinion on some of the more domestic species that we have, like the mountain pine beetle. Are there ways to eradicate it?

[Gail Wallin]

There are two things: Native species such as mountain pine beetle, such as budworm, are native to some places in Canada. Their range has expanded. It is totally linked with climate change, with wind patterns, etc. I don't believe there is a goal in Canada to eradicate any species. That's not in keeping with our biodiversity thinking. We want to maintain them, but what happens with native species like this is they hit a peak cycle and they will really explode. Part of that is linked to forest management, and why they have exploded may be due to lack of forest fires or too many forest fires or whatever. I come from a world where there weren't enough fires and now we have them in spades. Those are our tools. When you're hitting native species and they have economic and biodiversity impacts, like the two you've mentioned, it's more of a control issue. How can you reduce their impact? You're not trying to eradicate those. With foreign ones, you're trying to prevent them and then eradicate them, so you don't have the same economic impact.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Is there any benefit to any of our species, like the mountain pine beetle? The discussions so far have been completely from the perspective that there is nothing positive about the mountain pine beetle. Is there anything positive?

[Gail Wallin]

I would have to answer that from a biodiversity side—and I have Dr. Cannings beside me, I'm sure he would speak up—all native species have a role in our natural ecosystems. Taking any of them out, mosquitoes being the obvious ones that we always complain about, they have a very functional role.... What we're dealing with is that we've seen explosions of some of our forest pests, largely because of... it could be partially the weather but the part we have control over is our forest management, our fire protection. We can change those things to minimize the upscale or the outbreak levels. Our Canadian council has not called for the eradication of any native species.