Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 4th, 2018

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Of course.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Cannings.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chubaty, for appearing before us here.

I'm from British Columbia, so the mountain pine beetle is a huge issue, of course. I'm a biologist. I remember working in the Chilcotin back in the late seventies when we had what we thought was a big outbreak then, but it paled in comparison to the devastation of the late nineties and the early 2000s.

You talked about what set that up and the forest fire suppression. From what I understand, though, that monoculture was set up more than 100 years ago when settlers first arrived and burned vast parts of the landscape; and of course, lodgepole pine, being a species that comes in after fires, that created those big monocultures. Then we had the fire suppression.

I hear you talking about mitigation and adaptation in these areas where we simply can't control the beetle. However, in British Columbia we have a forest that's been radically changed from what it was 100 years ago. We have a forest economy that's been devastated.

The important thing I see is to look to the future and how we can avoid this happening again. Yet, the immediate reaction, of course, is to go in and salvage as much as you can as fast as you can, clear-cutting vast areas.

I had a friend who was a logger in central B.C., who was working full tilt there a few years ago in the midst of the salvage operations. He told me he had never cut so much spruce in his life. There, they were given cutting licences and clear-cutting areas.

So, we're left with these clear-cuts that used to be forests of leading spruce. Now probably a lot of them are being planted to lodgepole pine. At the time of that salvage, there were some concerns raised from the forest research community that we should be leaving as much of these areas as possible not to salvage, or at least not to clear-cutting, because there were all these young fern spruce growing that would provide a more biodiverse and resilient forest in the future.

I'm just wondering if you could comment on that and perhaps on what the plans are for Alberta. I think Alberta has a better chance at it because the Jack pine isn't something that normally occurs in these vast monocultures—or at least it doesn't in Alberta and Saskatchewan now.

[Alex Chubaty]

You're right. Certainly, the management decisions and the management strategies that have led to the situation in B.C. in particular are not just fire suppression—and that's a big piece of the story—but certainly the fact that we do have these uniform age stands is really the key point there.

Just having a monoculture, which would just be everything being a single species, that is less of a concern if there is a mix of ages. Typically, when you have fire coming through these forests, it does help provide some of that variation in age, which adds to the resiliency of those forests to these sorts of outbreaks.

With respect to the second part of your question, in terms of what we can now do, now that we have clear-cut large areas and we're replanting, I believe we need to be ensuring that when we go to replant we're not just putting back another monoculture and that it's not going to end up being a uniform age class, because that would set us up in another 100 years to go through the exact same problem again.

We really do need to be mindful of trying to plant mixed species but also of trying to alter, potentially, our harvest regimes so that we aren't just clear-cutting large swathes and we are leaving some residuals in order to have a nice mixture of growth in the forests.

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

Does your group mainly work in the boreal forest? Are you thinking further than mountain pine beetle impacts? Are you working on broader scale landscape issues, on things like caribou, on how we should be managing the boreal forest, on what sort of harvest practices we should be doing for the long term to reduce insect pests, deal with fire situations, and manage for biodiversity, including caribou, which we're hearing a lot about these days?

[Alex Chubaty]

That's exactly right.

I am an ecological modeller, so I work on simulating and forecasting landscape conditions and landscape changes in the boreal forests. Currently the groups I'm working with are engaged in looking at exactly those things you mentioned: that intersection between fire, the vegetation dynamics and the succession processes involved in regenerating the forest, and also insect outbreaks—mountain pine beetle, in particular—and then looking at addressing those other outcomes on caribou and other wildlife. We're definitely taking an integrated approach to that problem.

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

Do you think there is a solution where we can cover off all those bases? Is there a win-win situation?

[Alex Chubaty]

I believe so. I think we've definitely made a lot of good progress in recent years and we're getting a lot of interest from not only forest companies but also from, as I mentioned, government and universities where people are interested in coming up with these integrated approaches. We're in a situation where we just haven't had all of the opportunities to fund some of this work, but there is a lot of good research that has happened and is continuing to happen.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Whalen.

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

Thank you very much for joining us today.

This map is really sobering. We see that probably 50% of all the forest in British Columbia is affected. Is that the right order of magnitude?

[Alex Chubaty]

Yes, it's about 50%.

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

Talking about just British Columbia for a second, how much of the forest will be replanted in a normal year in British Columbia?

[Alex Chubaty]

I would have to double-check the numbers. I don't know off the top of my head.

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

Would you have any sense of how much of the forest is harvested every year?

[Alex Chubaty]

Let me just double-check. No, I can't speak to that, unfortunately.

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

Is it even 1%?

[Alex Chubaty]

It's probably more than that. They certainly do try to replant after they've harvested an area.

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

No, but I mean is the amount of forest that's harvested even 1% of the British Columbia forest?

[Alex Chubaty]

Typically, you mean. I'm not sure. I don't know what the exact percentage is.

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

I'm just looking at this map and I'm asking why we are doing anything. This is a natural species. It's a cyclical thing. If you look south of the border in the U.S., you see they've had these things every couple of decades for eons. They still have forests. What do the forests in the U.S. look like that have a comparable climate to what we have now and would have had a comparable climate a hundred years ago?

[Alex Chubaty]

Although we have had these cycles, these periodic outbreaks, there's been nothing at the scale of what we've seen in B.C. and now in Alberta.

Just the magnitude of the outbreak is substantial, and obviously when 50% or more of the merchantable pine is taken out by the beetle, that obviously has severe economic consequences.

The risk is that—

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

But sir, it's not going away. This insect exists. It's there. It's attacked these trees. It's going to be a new ecology after this. Why are we trying to manage an ecology when we don't even know what it's meant to look like because climate change is happening and nature will take its course?

I'm trying to understand why we should not just in some sense leave well enough alone, because there's no way we can spend enough money to treat even a significant or a measurable portion of this vast area that we've talked about, so why don't we just leave well enough alone?

[Alex Chubaty]

You're right that we certainly can't go in and treat all the massive infestation in B.C. and that western part of Alberta, and that's why I said in those regions—

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

But even along that zone... I'm looking at that line. That line is thousands of kilometres long, the red line.

Not only that, it's not as if you can stop it, because the climate is changing, the planet is warming and these beetles are coming.

I'm trying to figure out why we are trying to manage a crisis that's unmanageable. Why isn't it better just to say this is what we see the forest looking like when this crisis has passed? Why don't we try to do a few things that will encourage the forest to get to that state a little sooner, so we can deal with the fire problem?