This is a subject that's a bit dear to my heart. Growing up having the ability to work with my grandfather and his brothers, my uncle Koozma gave us a mantra: take care of the land, and the land will take of you.
We are farmers of the land, in the forest industry. We are no longer what we were painted with back in the sixties and seventies, as some kind of neanderthals. The amount of work we go through, the technology that is used to put out a cutting permit, is unbelievable.
My grandfather would never believe what we're doing to cut a tree down, the amount of work and effort. We are all environmentalists. We all work really hard at doing the right thing in the forest industry, and that's true right across Canada, I believe. We need to be celebrating this. I have challenged the B.C. government to put out commercials to celebrate it and to promote it and to tell people that we are actually planting trees.
That's the most critical thing for me: we need the forest industry healthy, we need the forests healthy and we need to manage them.
I'm starting to sound like Donald Trump when I throw things out here as ideas, but when we think about the pine beetle epidemic that happened in central British Columbia—it started in Tweedsmuir Park—I have to believe that had we dealt with it in the park, it wouldn't have come out of the park and exponentially grown to the point that it actually ended up in Alberta. We need to manage the forests as we can, as the experts that we have.