Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak to you here today.
My name is Gerry Salembier, and I am the assistant deputy minister for Western Economic Diversification in the province of British Columbia.
In French, it's called Diversification de l'économie de l'Ouest Canada, or DEO.
It is WD, for short, in English.
I'm going to be talking to you about the impacts that the current situation in the forest sector has, principally, on communities, what WD is doing to support those communities, and what else we think could be done.
I know you've heard from my colleagues at Natural Resources Canada about the challenges the industry and its workers are facing and that the situation is particularly acute in British Columbia. I'm not going to repeat the reasons for that; you've heard them several times. Suffice it to say that we do not see this situation as part of a normal industrial cycle.
You have heard about the impacts of all this on industry and on workers.
I will focus my remarks on the broader challenges the situation is imposing on the communities that rely on the forestry sector, which is where we see a role for WD.
The forest sector accounts for a smaller portion of overall economic activity than it once did in B.C., but it continues to be a primary economic driver for many rural and indigenous communities—and 98 communities in the province are considered economically dependent on forestry.
For those communities, it's hard to overstate the impact that the current situation is having on them. I've heard directly from many of those communities by way of a task force on mill closures, a collaboration between a group of community-based economic development organizations consisting of Community Futures organizations that receive their core operating funding from Western Diversification.
Their main point is that the impacts of the current situation extend well beyond the mill operators and the employees of those mill operators. The impacts include supply chain operators, other local businesses and community service providers. It's in addressing those broader impacts that the communities see a gap in the supports available to them.
I'd also like to note that some 10% of forest sector employees in B.C. identify as indigenous. That's considerably higher than the 6% of the provincial population that identify as indigenous. Indigenous peoples and their communities are disproportionately impacted by this situation.
What are we doing at WD?
The bulk of the supports WD provides to rural and forestry-dependent communities in B.C. is delivered by a network of community futures organizations, or CFs, that I mentioned.
There are 34 CFs serving rural communities throughout B.C., including four indigenous CFs.
WD provides them with over $10 million annually to deliver a variety of services to small business owners and entrepreneurs in rural communities.
We're working with that group on a targeted community resilience initiative, modelled on a very successful initiative that we funded and that the CFs—the community futures—delivered in response to the record severe wildfire seasons that we had in the province in 2017 and 2018. This community resilience initiative would focus on local priorities and support for communities. I can get into that in further detail if the committee is interested.
We're actively developing that project with them. We're seeking other partners to help with that, since the scale of the problem here exceeds the resources that we would have available within WD to deal with it.
I'd also like to briefly highlight our B.C. indigenous clean energy initiative. It's an initiative that provides support for indigenous communities that are working to develop clean energy options for their communities, including bioenergy projects that utilize forest biomass. That's an initiative that's funded jointly by us and the Province of B.C. It has been cited by first nations leaders involved as an example of what a nation-to-nation relationship could look like.
Beyond this, WD has also supported forestry-specific projects—often in promotion of indigenous participation in the sector.
We are also coordinating with other federal and provincial departments on the Intergovernmental Committee on Support for Forest Sector Workers and Communities that my colleague Beth MacNeil mentioned recently before your committee.
The work of that interdepartmental and federal-provincial group is quite consistent with what I'm hearing from the mill closures task force in British Columbia.
What more could we do?
We're hoping to help address some of the gap that has been identified through that community resilience initiative. As I said, the scale and the scope of the challenges are somewhat beyond what our current resourcing will allow us to do.
Outside of our core programming, from time to time in the past, we have delivered federal funding for community adjustment initiatives in the forest sector. If the committee is interested, I could get into that in more detail.
In closing, I would like to thank the committee for letting me provide my perspective on the issues at hand.
I will be glad to answer any questions that you have.
Thank you.
