Natural Resources Committee on Dec. 4th, 2020

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd also like to thank all the witnesses for joining our committee today and for the incredible amount of information we've heard, as my colleague Mr. McLean noted.

I'd like to ask my first question of Professor Lewis. You mentioned in your testimony that there are challenges of disconnection between agencies supporting the forestry sector and the need to invest in diverse products.

I'm wondering how you see this coordination between agencies best being done. Do you think the recent announcement of a new regional development agency for B.C., as a more contextually specific organization for B.C., could lead such an effort?

[Dr. Kathy Lewis]

Yes, I do think that is one of the best ways to move this forward. There are lots of opportunities for small and medium-scale businesses to be developed in the communities where the resources are. However, there aren't the local supports for them to do that. We don't have entrepreneurship centres, for example, in these smaller communities, or even in neighbouring larger communities that then can feed into them.

We need to have that regional focus and allow for what I call “place-based research” into what the best ideas are for these smaller communities moving forward. We don't want to do the same thing in every community. We need to have a good understanding of the resources that are available to those communities and how we can convert that to some form of economic diversification and economic sustainability.

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

Could you give us an example of place-based research?

[Dr. Kathy Lewis]

Yes. We have the Community Development Institute here at UNBC, which does a lot of research out in communities. For example, it's working with Kitimat on the developments there in terms of their industrial change over time, how that manifests itself in terms of community sustainability and how they deal with hundreds of workers coming into the community, living there for a while and then leaving.

That's the kind of idea I'm thinking of.

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

Thank you so much, Professor Lewis.

My next question is for Ms. Abusow, following up on the comments of my colleague Mr. Sidhu. It's great to hear about the number of youth who have been able to get work experience through your organization.

My question is this. Do you see a role for youth who could be hired through the youth employment and skills strategy, the Canada summer jobs program or perhaps Canada Green Corps to contribute to the reforestation efforts we have committed to?

Second, how can we as a government best support the youth of today to be best positioned to contribute to the forest sector of the future?

[Kathy Abusow]

Yes, absolutely, all of those programs, to the extent that they are interested, can certainly play an important role in providing youth with employment as part of the two billion trees strategy.

We've also heard many speakers talk as well about the need for a plan, so obviously there should be a larger plan that the youth get engaged in with regard to which species and where, as well as how to ensure diversity and resiliency and climate adaptation.

There most definitely is a role, and there is also a role for environmental education as part of this. In these training programs, when they are planning about trees, they can also learn about the world of trees and forests as windows onto the world and the sustainability solutions they can provide. They can start to learn some of these things we have heard about: the role of forests, the economic benefits, the conservation benefits, and the community benefits. What are the forests of the day? What are the forests of the future as well?

There are all sorts of learning opportunities, and I would love to do what we started to advance in our programs and in collaboration with others, which is to bust out the career pathway, so that if we need carbon modellers or we need mass timber architects or we need species recovery specialists with certain expertise in ecology and biology, we start demonstrating the skills that are required and the courses that should be taken, and that on-the-job experience is provided so that they get interested. That's the most rewarding thing that we've had so far. We've taken youth who really had no job prospects but who are now in a technical college or are going into a forestry school or into engineering.

The youth corps and the youth employment and skills strategy and all of these programs can support youth, and one of the things they can also do is support things like the two billion trees strategy. They can also support invasion strategies and many of the other topics and themes that we've heard about.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Weiler, I hate to tell you this, but that's all the time you have, although you were right on time. That's commendable.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

We go over to Mr. Simard now for two and a half minutes.

Go ahead, sir.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I will now address my friends at CRIBIQ, as well as Mr. Villeneuve.

I'd like to focus on one particular dimension. Earlier, CRIBIQ representatives said that tax incentives were needed to encourage bioproducts. I'd like them to tell us more about that.

Mr. Villeneuve, you said that getting the most out of forest products is a good strategy for capturing carbon. Can you explain that to us? To make it clear, I would ask you to do it as if you're explaining it to a four-year-old.

[Claude Villeneuve]

I would say that the wood is CO₂ in sticks. A piece of wood is carbon extracted from the atmosphere. When we have sustainable uses for wood, to replace products like steel or concrete, or even plastic products made from oil that emit a lot of greenhouse gases, wood absorbs carbon and keeps it there as long as it's in use.

For example, if you set up a wooden structure or install a beam in an arena, as long as the arena stands, the CO₂ will be trapped. Wood can store CO₂ that was in the atmosphere and was disturbing the climate.

The more we put wood and sustainable forest products in the service of humans, the more we will limit the harmful effects of rising CO₂ levels that come from burning fossil fuels.

[Roger Bernier]

If I may, I'd like to draw another parallel.

As mentioned earlier, wood is mostly made of sugars. The petrochemical industry has long derived these raw materials—commonly referred to as “monomers”—from oil. Nowadays, technology has made it possible to manufacture those same monomers from wood sugars. It's therefore possible to substitute in industrial products that we use every day like detergents, adhesives, glues—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Bernier. I apologize, but that's all the time we have for this round.

[Roger Bernier]

No problem. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Cannings, you have two and a half minutes.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

You are strict, Mr. Chair.

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

Thank you.

I would like to go back to—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I don't enjoy it. Trust me.

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

I'd like to go back to Ms. Daviet again.

As I said, in our last meeting we had Dr. Werner Kurz talking to us about the Canadian Forest Service's methods of modelling, monitoring and reporting carbon emissions, as well as the carbon budget in the forest sector.

I know that you've done a lot of work in that regard. I wonder if you might spend a couple of minutes talking about what you like about the way Canada reports on carbon monitoring and the carbon balance in Canadian forests and how we take credit for that in our fight against climate change.

[Florence Daviet]

Sure.

I think there are a couple of different pieces. The carbon budget model is obviously what we use for our national inventory, which tracks the emissions from forests and some activities in wetlands and peatlands and some activities in agriculture. The national inventory is great because it tracks, year by year, what's going out into the atmosphere and what's being sequestered.

One of the gaps—and I know that the scientists are anxious to continue to improve our national inventory—is that we don't capture all of the activities that cause emissions. There's new science, for example, that shows that when we have roads built into peatlands, that does cause significant emissions—even winter roads, for example.

We need to continue to improve the information that we have in our national inventory and to understand how these various activities are, in fact, causing emissions, so that when you put a price on carbon, you start to understand how different kinds of management practices are potentially detrimental, in some cases, in reaching our climate objectives and making good economic sense. I think that's one element that we need to think about.

I think the second piece is the work that's being done using the carbon budget model to look at mitigation pathways. One of the challenges with any modelling is that when they look at different pathways beyond the direct emission reductions that happen when we harvest less, there are all of these externalities or additional things that happen after that. It may be that it leaks and goes somewhere else, or in some cases if you say we'll substitute this product for another product, you have to make a lot of assumptions about how you're going to get that market to shift and make sure that those new goods are being used and that we're not just increasing our use of all products and therefore having more greenhouse gas emissions occurring annually, which we cannot afford at this point. We really have to turn things around.

In all modelling exercises, we have to be very careful about the assumptions that we make over time and place and about the types of assumptions we're making around demand and how well and quickly we can shift markets.

In general, I tend to focus more on where we're actually achieving direct emission reductions and contract those things, and I tend to get a little bit more concerned when we're putting a lot of emphasis on substitution when it's unclear how we're going to get there.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

All right.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Mr. Cannings.

Mr. Zimmer, we go over to you for five minutes.

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

I want to particularly ask questions of Dr. Kathy Lewis.

Welcome. I've been up to UNBC many times, and we were part of some major funding announcements there for these initiatives. They're great. We have the experts in Canada.

As you know, UNBC has been recognized as Canada's greenest university for its environmental and energy performance. Can you tell us about the successes of the UNBC energy initiative?

[Dr. Kathy Lewis]

I can tell you a bit about it.

We have been on a track for energy conservation pretty much ever since we started at UNBC. We made some great inroads with the start of our pellet plants. We have a pellet boiler that takes in wood pellets and is used to heat our greenhouse systems through a hot water system. The bigger project came along with our gasification system. That takes wood waste from one of our local sawmills—entirely wood waste—and converts it to a gas. It's technology that I have no understanding of. That is then used to heat water, which offsets our use of natural gas for heating the campus.

I think that's what you were asking about. That's one of the pathways we've been taking to reduce our energy consumption.