I'll give you an example of some direct experience I've had with this as a land-based research director in the west out of the Foothills Research Institute.
Parks Canada noticed the first iterations of the mountain pine beetle. The overflights were just coming over the mountains. The landscape was already being turned orange in B.C. and the scientists and elders were saying that they were coming over the mountains and you couldn't stop them. They asked the indigenous elders and businesses in the region what they should do.
The indigenous leadership, businesses and elders said, “The story is in the later chapters here. You should have never prevented us from continuing to utilize fire every spring and every fall as the snows left and came. That's when we would use fire to control the insects and to increase energetic flows on the landscape. The only thing you can really hope to do is to use prescribed burning to try to save what you can at a stand level, but it's going to be very hard because the forest has been allowed to run wild.”
Parks Canada came up with a response, a summer project, and they came back to the elders and said they were going to burn some areas where there's a high likelihood that the mountain pine beetle is going to nest. They're already there and we know they're going to overwinter and then they're going to continue west. The elders said not to start a fire in July. Parks Canada said that's when they have their summer students and their firefighter crews. The elders said not to do that because the sun is at the height of its power and the insects are going to be at the height of their power. The fires are going to get away. The fires got away. This was in the late 1990s, and it almost went across into the provincial lands from Jasper.
The mechanism there of federal, provincial and business leaders asking indigenous people and coming together in a coordinating group and working through the mechanics of it—that is the answer, sir. That's already in place in provinces and regions through the forestry entities and the first nations groups that have accommodated provincial and territorial governments. Forest management groups are already doing this.
We just have to supply resources, and we have to let those groups, those partnerships, come up with the solutions.