I think there's a profound misunderstanding.
First of all, I believe that our assistant deputy minister was referring to carbon stocks, not the annual flux. The fact that the average carbon content of forest ecosystems in Canada is around 220 tonnes of carbon per hectare means that this carbon has accumulated in some cases over thousands of years in the forest soil and over hundreds of years in the plant biomass.
What matters here is not how much carbon is stored. It's how much revenue...how much carbon is removed from the atmosphere. I think this is the fundamental problem that so many people misunderstand. When we talk about net negative emissions, we talk about how the annual rate of removal from the land sector must exceed the emissions from all other sectors combined.
It's not how much carbon is stored in the forest. It's the rate of removal of CO2 from the atmosphere that's the indicator that we must quantify and better understand. We also must understand how we can manage our forest to increase that sink.