Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2020

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

I guess it has at least partially, but it twigged another question that I wasn't thinking of asking, and now I will.

You mentioned the petrochemical industry and the oil and gas industry. In Fruitvale, here in my riding, there's a company building a new plant to take in forest waste products and create renewable natural gas. This is a big plant they're building. It's not some add-on. It happens to be on an old brownfield site from an old sawmill that went out of business years ago, but they have plans to build this one and perhaps several more.

Is that something that FPInnovations gets into, this production of fuels like renewable natural gas from forest waste products? Again, we've heard of.... Right now, the interior of B.C. is very smoky because all the slash is being burned, as you know, with more carbon than all the cars in British Columbia put together. This is a way to create a cleaner fuel. Is this something that you have been hearing of and are promoting?

[Stéphane Renou]

Absolutely. We're involved in all of the RNG projects we can be. We have a team in B.C., in Vancouver, actually, working on this. As well, we have one in eastern Canada, more on the liquid fuel side, with the La Tuque team. There is a lot to do there.

To go back to your first question, I now realize that I didn't answer the question about volume, about how much fibre. If we get to bioproducts that have a higher value, then the ratio of value and jobs to the amount of fibre will change. That's the key. If I have fibre today at $900 a tonne and I make a value-added product at a higher price, then I create more value around it. Then it's technically more difficult, so I do create more jobs around it too. So there is a path there that we need to think about.

There are some things the forest industry won't do. The forest industry cannot replace all the jet fuel. There's too much volume. The forest industry also cannot tackle, at the other extreme, all the small niche bioproducts because there's not enough volume to justify the capex. The trick is to find the right applications to fit well with the volumes of fibre that we have and the value. I'm also thinking more about the promoters of bioplastics and higher-value bioplastics, if we're talking about PHBs or PHVs, a series of plastics whose costs are much higher than those of polypropylene or normal plastic. Those have added value.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks very much. I'm going to have to stop you there. My apologies for interrupting.

[Stéphane Renou]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Mr. Cannings.

Ms. Harder, we go to you now for five minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I'll give that to Bob Zimmer, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Sure.

Bob.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I want to thank all of the panellists for testifying today.

Derek, I want to follow along with what my colleague Rachel Harder was asking about, and that's the two billion trees question. Could you elaborate a little bit for us? I just want to confirm this: you said that your organization is planting right now five to six million seedlings per year in Canada. Is that accurate?

[Derek Nighbor]

No. I'm not sure if I made the mistake or if it came back from Ms. Harder, but it's 500 million to 600 million. It's closer to 600 million annually. It's been as low as a little over 500 million annually.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

So that's quite a bit. With the math there, it would have taken many of our lifetimes to get even close to the two billion, but even that set of numbers is quite ambitious, to say the least.

I did a bit of a calculation. Two billion trees, you said, is approximately 1,000 trees per minute. Is that what you said?

[Derek Nighbor]

Yes, that's at our 500,000 to 600,000 number. It comes out to about 1,000 per minute if you run the calculation.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

So just based on your calculation, I have 1,000 per minute, so that's about 60,000 per hour for eight hours a day. It works out to about 480,000 trees per day.

That said, it would take 4,166 days to plant that number of trees. We all know that you can't plant trees in the north 365 days of the year. The planting season is about 120 days per year. I think that's accurate, about four months a year. Is that accurate, Derek—four to five months?

[Derek Nighbor]

That's right. It would vary from province to province.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Sure. So based on those numbers, just to plant the two billion trees, we're looking at 34 years to plant the two billion trees and this government currently has no plan to even start. I'll just say this and then I'll ask you another question, Derek.

I think it highlights—and we've seen this with the softwood lumber agreement—that there's no plan to really tackle that issue. There's no plan to plant the two billion trees. There's no plan to help our forest industry. There's no plan to help our mills. There's no plan to help our loggers, and there's no plan to help our forestry workers. I think it signals a sad reality, and I hope that changes.

I'm just going to move on to the next question, Derek, for you again. I hate to keep picking on you, but you're the guy to whom we've asked many questions before. I guess you know a lot about this stuff.

You talked about the forest sink and you said 14 megatonnes. I just want you to elaborate on that a little bit, because I think what's often not highlighted and what we were referring to a little bit earlier is what a great job the forestry industry is already doing to sequester carbon by just growing trees and using biomass to heat mills and to make energy with. Can you just explain the 14 megatonnes?

[Derek Nighbor]

Actually, with your and the chair's permission, I'd like Kate, who is our in-house carbon forestry expert, to get that.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Sure.

[Kate Lindsay]

Thanks, Mr. Zimmer, for the question.

This is available in “The State of Canada's Forests” report that NRCan produces. There is quite a team of carbon modellers at the Canadian Forest Service. This is in line with the international science that we really need the managed forests to sequester the most carbon moving forward.

The area that's under management is sequestering more carbon than the unmanaged forest, so this 14 megatonnes comes out of the carbon budget model. That's based on the area where we have monitoring set up across Canada and a whole bunch of inputs around growth and yield and the species and what those are capable of storing.

Then, I think, where the evolution is going, which is fantastic, is the carbon sequestered in the harvested wood products, particularly in those long-lived products like the mass timber we were just talking about, so that's calculated in there as well. It's really about maximizing that carbon sequestration potential using forest management into the future.

[Derek Nighbor]

Mr. Zimmer, with your permission, can I just add to that quickly?

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Sure.

[Derek Nighbor]

As the government embarks on its conservation agenda—and conservation is very important—we often find ourselves in the middle of a debate. Active forest management, sustainable forest management in Canada, is about conservation. About half of our managed forest is under some kind of a conservation measure.

There's no doubt, as the government pursues that ambitious conservation agenda, that there are some groups out there that want to use that as an opportunity or an excuse to just lock down land, to get industry, whether it's mining or oil and gas or forestry, off the landscape. Our counter to that is that our forestry workers are that first line of defence in detecting pest infestations. We are the first line of defence when forest fires are breaking out. It's our workers who are digging trenches and firebreaks and working with local enforcement.

I challenge some of those people who want to get us off the land base, because if you imagine us off the land base, that carbon alternative, that alternative to addressing fire and pest risks in a changing climate, is a very real one. In my Australian—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Nighbor, I'm going to have to stop you there.

Thanks, Mr. Zimmer.

Mr. Weiler, you're up, for five minutes.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to ask a question of all three witnesses. I really appreciate the time that everybody has spent to detail some of the respective requests that are in for pre-budget right now, especially on how dedicating financial resources could spur innovation, whether that's shovel-ready projects, research or demonstration projects.

I was hoping to take a bit of a different tack with my first question and just mention that policies such as the clean fuel standard, which require emissions intensity reductions in refineries, at the same time create opportunities and more sustainable energy products. Our plan to ban single-use plastics creates opportunities in the development of biodegradable, recyclable or reusable alternatives.

On this line of thinking, I was hoping that you could speak a bit to the role you see regulations playing in encouraging innovation in the forestry sector and in the bioeconomy. This is a question for each of the three witnesses, please.

[Derek Nighbor]

You go ahead, Stéphane.

[Stéphane Renou]

Derek will probably say a bit of the same thing that I will.

Regulation has an extremely important role. Policy, I will say, is fundamental moving forward. When you're trying to change the equilibrium in the economy to move from one type to the other to introduce more products, to introduce biofuels, etc., you will need that accelerator in terms of policy to get us there. That's fundamental. Now, on when and which one and how, etc., there is a lot of debate, but it's needed to make a move.

Derek, I'll give you the ball.

[Derek Nighbor]

I'll go back to my comment about provincial and federal policy and regulatory coherence here.

In the development of the clean fuel standard—and as I said, it's still under development and debate and discussion—when we saw this land use biodiversity requirement come out, the B.C. government, which has a very ambitious bioeconomy agenda, was among the first to stand up and say: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We have a plan here in B.C. We're managing the land base, and you're doing something that's getting in the way or overlapping.”

So we've received and welcome that CCC information, and there has been good discussion to go from there, but I think that when it comes to forestry, given that provincial responsibility and that really detailed regulation on biodiversity and land management that we're facing, we would just ask that the feds be mindful of that and work with your counterparts at the provincial level.