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.