Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 30th, 2020

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm sorry I was unable to be here earlier.

Mr. Paradis, last summer, I had a very educational experience. I was present for a woodcut that took place in a private forest. I was told that you have to be a passionate person to get into this business, since you can only harvest a forest after about 70 years. There were discussions on this subject with the main representatives of the forest producers' unions, Mr. Daniel Fillion and Mr. Pierre-Maurice Gagnon, to name but a few. I was told that it might be interesting to set up an income averaging system for forestry operations. In this way, logging revenues could be divided appropriately.

What's your opinion about this?

[Alain Paradis]

Certainly, the industry's wood fibre needs are met to a large extent by fibre from private forests. We now have much less access to the public forest. In the last 10 years, the supply of wood fibre from the public forest has decreased by 10 million cubic metres. So there is a lot of potential in the private forest.

In terms of income averaging projects, the industry must have access to this wood. Mechanisms or benchmarks need to be put in place to ensure a stable supply for forest producers. These are things that need to be looked at.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

During your presentation, you emphasized the interminable conflict we have with the United States. I have also had discussions in recent months with people at Resolved Forest Products. They told me that one of the main causes of irritation was access to cash. Throughout the entire period of the conflict, because of the way the government's cash access program works, you had to be almost technically bankrupt to be able to benefit from it.

Have you encountered the same kind of problem yourself?

[Alain Paradis]

Yes, absolutely. The last two years have been disastrous for our companies. If the market doesn't allow us to have enough revenue to cover our production costs, there's a problem. The production costs are not so much related to production as to the purchase of the fibre, which is now very expensive.

We do indeed need support to get through the low cycle periods that are due to the markets. Otherwise—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

My apologies, but I'm going to have to stop you there, Mr. Paradis.

Mr. Cannings, it's over to you for two and a half minutes.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Paradis.

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

I'm going to turn back to Dr. Kurz.

Thank you again for highlighting the value of long-lived wood products, like engineered wood and mass timber construction. I have a private member's bill that I started in the last Parliament. It's now in the Senate and will be coming back this way. It promotes the use of wood, especially mass timber construction, simply by highlighting those greenhouse gas sequestration benefits you mentioned.

Whenever I promote this online or anywhere, I get push-back from my friends in the cement sector, who say that cement is better than wood because it's longer-lived, and they claim that the forest industry doesn't take into account all the negative emissions from harvest through a life-cycle analysis. I wondered how you would answer that criticism. Does your model take into account the life cycle, the full emissions involved in harvesting wood and the life of that wood, and how does that compare to cement?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

Thank you for the question.

I'm very familiar with the study that you are referring to. It does indeed include a number of assumptions and errors that are incorrect.

Our model does track the carbon and the impacts of harvesting, including the impacts on dead organic matter pools in the litter, on the forest floor and in the soil, as well as in harvested wood products. There are limitations to the spacial resolution of the kinds of models that we use to apply to all of Canada. We're currently working on that, to go to much higher spacial resolution and spatially explicit approaches. The specific concern that the industry has expressed is with regard to inadequate regeneration on roads and landings, and they have shown examples of that. This is clearly something that we need to address, but we have also already done analysis of the potential impact of that, and it is much smaller than what is suggested by the report.

Having said that, it is clear that the cement industry will also undertake efforts to improve its carbon footprint. As all sectors evolve towards more competitive greenhouse gas strategies, the substitution benefits and displacement factors that we use in our models need to improve over time as the other sectors become more competitive as well. These are areas of ongoing research, but it's incorrect to claim that we're not accounting for these various issues.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Dr. Kurz. Thank you, Mr. Cannings.

It's over to you, Mr. Patzer, for five minutes.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Kurz, I'm going to stay with you.

Earlier you said that the Scandinavians have better data on climate change and their managed forests. Why is their data better than ours?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

It's a simple question of population density. If you look at the size of Scandinavian countries and their population density, they have roads to just about anywhere and you can pretty much access any piece of boreal forest in Scandinavia relatively easily. In Canada, in contrast, we have huge expenses for using helicopters to approach and measure plots that are in distant locations.

It's simply a question of population density and the resources available to do these kinds of inventories. One reason we invest heavily and continue to explore ways to improve our remote sensing satellite based approaches is so we can use data over larger geographic areas with finer spatial resolution to conduct these kinds of analyses and demonstrate how Canada's forest management is sustainable, what the impacts of climate change are and how fast forests recover from harvesting and wildfires, etc.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you.

You mentioned 200 megatonnes for forest fires. In your slide deck, it says that's from 2017 and 2018. Do you have a year-by-year set of data that would tell us what the national number is? In your report, that was just from British Columbia, too. Am I correct?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

Yes. It was just in the context of this particular slide that I used to highlight the impacts of the fires of 2017 and 2018.

Our system, which I described earlier, calculates the emissions from wildfires from 1990 onward on an annual basis for all of the managed forest broken down by region in the country.

The Canadian Forest Service also maintains estimates of area burned in the north for which we don't have as good emissions estimates, but we're working on that. We also have estimates of area burned further back into the 1950s. The further back you go, the poorer the quality of data. Of course, there were no satellites at that time.

All in all, I will say that yes, we have the tools and the technology to provide estimates and we are reporting these annually in the scientific literature, in the greenhouse gas inventories and in the “State of Canada's Forests” report that are all available publicly online.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you for that.

We got a report earlier. I think it was when Beth MacNeil was here. We had 223 million hectares of managed forest land in Canada. It's reported that Canada's managed forests sequester 220 tonnes of carbon per hectare. When I did that math on that, it's 49 billion tonnes of sequestered carbon per year.

When we're discussing carbon sinks and we're discussing what our emissions are, with numbers like that, I'm just wondering...I think you said earlier our footprint was somewhere around 14....

If we're sequestering on our managed forest land per year 49 billion—so, gigatonnes—I'm just wondering....

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

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.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you for clarifying that. I was just running those numbers and wondering where that was all lining up.

Do you have a dataset on the yearly number that is scrubbed from the atmosphere that you could table with this committee?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

Yes. It is published in the annual “The State of Canada's Forests” report. It is published in the national greenhouse gas inventory that Environment Canada compiles and reports. The forest sector data, since 2016 on an annual basis and for the period 1990 to the reporting year, are all publicly available on the Internet. Just google NIR 2020 and you will get the numbers, or google "state of Canada's forests report 2018". The 2020 report will be available shortly, if it's not already online.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Kurz, and thank you, Mr. Patzer.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Ms. Jones, you are up for five minutes.

This will be the last round of questions.

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning to all of our guests.

I have to say this is probably one of the most interesting panels we've had since the forestry study started, because it speaks about innovation and the tremendous research and testing that's happening in the industry sector within Canada. I especially want to thank Mr. Kurz for his presentation and for the research that he's done through Natural Resources as a scientist in this country. I think many of us are, or at least I am, hearing a lot of information for the first time, and I'm excited about it.

Companies in Canada are really innovating in the forest sector, not just in new product development, but also in environmental conservation and all of the other measures that go with that.

We're a committee that's doing a study. This study will make recommendations to the Government of Canada and future governments about how forestry should be managed in this country, not only in terms of management, but also in terms of the programs that fit best, support the industry and allow it to continue to grow and innovate.

That would be my question this morning. What are your recommendations to us as a committee going forward on what you see as being the most helpful and useful in the work you're doing in Canada right now?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

Is this question directed to me?

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

It's directed to the full panel, but if you want to take a shot at it first, go ahead.

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

First, thank you for commenting on the work that we're doing. I appreciate that, and I'm sure my colleagues do too.

I'm not here to give particular advice about what government should or should not do, except for one thing. That is to please rely on the scientific facts when you make your decisions on what is climate effective for a sector recovery. We have the tools. We can deploy these tools.

We're working with provinces, territories, multiple states in the U.S., European countries and other countries around the world to deploy these Canadian tools to do these kinds of analyses. The technology is there. The science is there. If you want to make science-based policy decisions, build them on these tools.

[Dr. Mohini Mohan Sain]

I'd like to comment on that last question.

In my opinion, we see fragmented efforts when we are looking at bioenergy and at some of the value-added products. Then you have mass timber. I think mass timber is definitely going to make a significant part of our economic recovery. At the same time, I think if you do the life-cycle analysis, you will get the type of mitigation of CO2 that you are looking for.

Having said that, CO2 is everywhere. Therefore, trapping CO2 and using it in a way that is appealing to the forest industry would be one of the groundbreaking technologies.

I would like to propose to the government to promote a concept of biorefinery. For anybody who is doing pallets or something similar, the government can probably look at that investment to transform it in the local region, in the northern part, wherever the forests are intensive or there's biomass, and how that compares to a total conversion system, where we're not throwing CO2 away.

If we are really generating CO2, we have to trap it, purify it, and then put it back as a chemical or as a value-added product. I think if the investment goes in that direction, there will be very good effects.

The second thing is a carbon credit. It is difficult for industry to compete with the existing phytochemical, plastics and chemical industries. Therefore, it needs anything to start with to give it revenue generation to grow. I think we need to look at some sort of credit. A carbon credit would be one way to go about it.

Give the innovation a chance; otherwise, these innovations will go outside the country and it won't help. This is what Finland and Scandinavia are doing. We have to do it better. We have to do it more effectively and be more targeted. That is my view.

Thank you.