Evidence of meeting #14 for Natural Resources in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was forests.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Terry Duguid
Thank you. That brings our first panel to an end.
Thank you, Mr. Dahl and Mr. Jeffery, for telling a compelling story this morning about some of the challenges faced by the sector and by our communities. Thank you so much.
Colleagues, we will recess for just a few minutes while we set up the next panel.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Terry Duguid
Colleagues, if you could take your places, we'll begin our second panel.
I have just a few comments for the benefit of witnesses. For those participating today by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. Also, at the bottom of your screen, you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation—floor, English or French. I remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.
I'd now like to welcome our witnesses on Zoom for the second panel. As an individual, we have Dr. Robert Froese, professor, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta. From TorchLight Bioresources, Inc., we have Dr. Jamie Stephen, managing director. You will each have five minutes or less for your opening remarks.
Dr. Froese, you have the floor.
Robert Froese Professor, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It's an honour to appear before you today.
My name is Robert Froese. I'm a forest scientist and registered professional forester with more than two decades of experience in temperate and boreal forests across central and western North America. I currently teach and conduct research in forestry at the university level. My intent is to offer a perspective grounded in ecology and silviculture—what we know—while leaving, to policy-makers and ethicists, the question of what society wants from our forests.
Canadian forests are among the most resilient ecosystems on earth. They evolve with frequent stand-replacing disturbances—fire, insects and wind—and regenerate vigorously afterward. When harvesting follows sound science, it is not ecological harm; it is a disturbance we can shape, unlike wildfire and insects. Well-managed working forests are not degraded. They are renewed, often faster and more predictably than nature alone achieves in our modern fire-suppressed landscape.
Wood is also a powerful climate solution. It is the only major construction material that is renewable and biodegradable, and stores carbon for decades or centuries. Using one cubic metre of wood, instead of steel or concrete, avoids roughly one metric ton of CO2 emissions. The harvested tree is promptly replaced by a young stand, which sequesters carbon rapidly.
Expanding wood use in construction is one of Canada's most scalable low-cost emission reduction pathways, yet we actively manage only a small fraction of the land base where fire is a natural and recurring process. Across the boreal forest and montane west, fire ecologists document a persistent fire deficit. From 1984 to 2022, wildfires burned just 23% of the area expected under historical regimes. Fuels have accumulated and fire behaviour has intensified. Even as individual years, such as 2023, break modern records, they occur against the backdrop of decades with too little burning.
The recent mega-fires we have experienced are a predictable consequence of decades with too little active management across landscapes that had evolved with frequent fire. In many forest types, responsible harvesting remains the only tool available at the scale required to reduce hazardous fuels, maintain forest age-class diversity and keep landscapes within their natural range of variability, the conditions under which these ecosystems evolved.
In Canada, most of the fire deficit lies on provincial Crown land allocated for sustained yield timber production, where commercial harvesting and revenue-generating thinning are the primary, and often the only, scalable and self-funding mechanisms available. Prescribed fire, while valuable in specific circumstances, faces severe constraints from smoke regulations, risk aversion and limited operational windows across much of the boreal and montane west. A viable forest sector is, therefore, indispensable for delivering the active management these forests require. In short, a strong and innovative forest industry is not in conflict with ecological sustainability; it is essential to it.
I will close with the wisdom of my late professor of forest ecology, Dr. Hamish Kimmins: Forests do not need us to leave them alone. They need us to manage them wisely, based on what we know.
Canada has the knowledge, the land base and the people to do exactly that if we enable a forest sector capable of carrying out this work.
Thank you, and I welcome your questions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Terry Duguid
Thank you, Dr. Froese.
We now go to Dr. Jamie Stephen for up to five minutes.
Jamie Stephen Managing Director, TorchLight Bioresources Inc.
Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the invitation.
I am the managing director of TorchLight, a bioenergy adviser and project developer. We work at the interface of the forest products and energy sectors. Our clients and partners include forest products companies, airlines, manufacturers, oil sands producers, energy utilities, first nations and institutional investors. We have completed approximately 40 projects for the Government of Canada.
Over the 22 years I have worked in bioenergy, Canada's forest products industry has lost 150,000 jobs. Annual timber harvest has declined by almost 50%. Most Canadians are aware that oil is Canada's largest net export today, but in 2004, our largest net export, more than three times the value of oil, was forest products at $53 billion in 2024 dollars. In 2000, Canada was exporting more newsprint than the next 10 countries combined. This production has declined by over 90%. As an example, Ontario used to have 20 pulp and paper mills, and now it has three.
It is true that industries come and go, but forests are different. The counterfactual is not stasis. In most of Canada the counterfactual to active forest management and harvest is wildfires. Canada's forests have gone from net carbon sinks to by far our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, more than everything else in our country combined on both counts. We debate about, frankly, irrelevant oil and gas caps and EV subsidies while our largest carbon asset burns and pollutes our air. Climate change is a numbers game. To put those numbers into perspective, Canada's 2023 wildfires alone emitted an estimated three billion tonnes of CO2. This is more than four times our annual anthropogenic emissions and 75% more emissions than the oil sands for the entire history of the oil sands since 1967. This country is completely missing the point on climate policy, but it seems to also be willing to ignore the tens of billions of dollars of costs to the Canadian economy caused by wildfires annually.
The answer to reducing wildfires is healthy forests, but healthy forests do not mean walking away; it means active management of our publicly owned asset, which when valued at $170 per tonne of CO2 has an asset value of $7.5 trillion. In 2023, we had a net asset loss of $500 billion.
Other boreal forest countries, namely Sweden and Finland, show what is possible. These countries harvest seven times the number of volume per forested commercial hectare as Canada, but on average, they have 2% of the wildfire rate per hectare. While Canada is losing billions of tonnes of carbon from its forests, these Nordic countries are increasing in-forest carbon stocks annually. Yes, counterintuitively they harvest more to store more carbon in the forest.
Can Canada follow the Nordic active management model that lowers the timber costs and builds forest carbon stocks? Yes, but not without bioenergy. It is important to remember that for every tonne of wood that becomes solid wood products, two tonnes of wood, as residues and low-grade timber, is generated. In the absence of pulp mills, the only viable market of sufficient scale to consume the hundreds of millions of tonnes of residues and low-grade wood is bioenergy, and the only viable bioenergy option that can be deployed at scale is heat and power.
The Nordics already show how this works, with almost 40% of energy in Sweden and Finland coming from bioenergy. Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki, along with hundreds of cities and towns, are heated using large heat and power plants fuelled by wood and connected to community-wide underground heat networks. Many manufacturers also use biomass to generate renewable and affordable process steam for low-carbon export products.
The Nordics are now taking bioenergy to the next level by adding carbon capture and storage in a combination known as BECCS. BECCS is the only technology that generates energy and permanently removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Think of it. A tree pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it as wood using energy from the sun. When wood is combusted, that's solar energy, what we call bioenergy, and CO2 is released. If we capture and store that CO2 subsurface, we have permanently removed CO2 from the atmosphere. This is called a carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. Since the CO2 removed could have come from any emitter globally, CDRs are an exportable product. Microsoft alone has already committed approximately $6 billion to BECCS CDR offtakes from projects in the Nordics and the U.S.
Most pulp mills and biomass plants in the Nordics are either planning to or are already implementing BECCS. However, Canada is the lowest-cost jurisdiction in the world to generate BECCS CDRs, and it is by far our largest climate-related export opportunity.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Terry Duguid
Thank you to our witnesses.
We'll now begin our first round of questions .
We'll start with Mr. Malette for six minutes.
Conservative
Gaétan Malette Conservative Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON
Thank you. My question is for Dr. Stephen.
Thank you for being here, both of you.
I'm going to go back to part of your speech and bring you to central Europe and the Scandinavian countries. We know that the basis of everything begins with a healthy boreal forest, and I've heard from you both—and agree—that we have one of the healthiest boreal forests in the world. You take the tree to a sawmill—and we have 500 sawmills in 300 communities in Canada. You then produce lumber, and from the lumber you have wood chips and by-products. Then you go on to biomass cogeneration to produce heat and electricity for the engine for your pulp mills and then your paper mills. Most of them used to be called “company X power, pulp and paper”.
I am coming to the missing link, or where we've fallen behind, because we were a world leader. Dr. Stephen, why has Canada fallen behind the Scandinavian countries and parts of Europe that have capitalized on these bioenergy technologies to generate power? Where's our missing link, and what do we need to become again a world leader?
Managing Director, TorchLight Bioresources Inc.
It absolutely comes down to markets, and in Canada, jurisdiction for electricity is with the provinces. If you cannot sell power to the grid, you cannot have a combined heat and power plant.
Alberta is the only province that essentially has open access. Obviously, it is still regulated, but it has open access. The others are controlled by either provincial Crown utilities or other mechanisms. If you cannot sell power, you cannot have that source of revenue.
In general, we have very low-cost natural gas for most of the country. I currently live in Nova Scotia, so the the Maritimes and Newfoundland are obviously the exception there, but competing on a heat-only basis is generally very difficult in Canada. That's why we're suggesting that BECCS, as an exportable product and as one that can actually lower the cost of energy, is really the pathway to moving forward.
Conservative
Gaétan Malette Conservative Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON
Thank you.
We have examples in Ontario. It's a provincial issue, but I guess you're talking about PPAs, power purchase agreements. There is such a thing in Thunder Bay with one of the major forestry companies there.
I guess what you're saying is that policies have to change within Canada.
Managing Director, TorchLight Bioresources Inc.
I would say so. Bioenergy is a renewable energy, so it is often grouped with wind and solar. However, bioenergy is a dispatchable energy, which means that you can turn it up and down and on and off. If it gets colder, you can have more. Oftentimes, in the procurement policies or the competitive energy policies for electricity, you put biomass in with wind and solar. With regard to the cost on a per-megawatt-hour basis, biomass is typically more expensive than wind and, in many cases, solar.
However, what we need to be thinking about is not only the cost of generation but also the cost to the consumer and the levelized cost of energy for the entire system. This is where bioenergy, as a dispatchable resource and as the only one that's at scale in many jurisdictions in Canada and can be turned up and down, has to be dealt with differently. Ultimately, we also have to think of it as a public resource and about how there are very significant macroeconomic benefits to having biomass power and combined heat and power plants in terms of retention of jobs in the solid wood products sector and also on the forest management side.
Conservative
Gaétan Malette Conservative Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON
Yes. You've touched on this, and at times we seem to forget about it—that it is also a tremendous control for emissions of CO2. If we don't harvest our forests, we're in big trouble.
Managing Director, TorchLight Bioresources Inc.
I would go as far as to say that I don't see a lot of point in a bunch of our other climate policies if we do not deal with the emissions from the forest. It is our primary climate responsibility to the world, I would argue. In 2023, it's estimated that Canada's wildfires were responsible for 82,000 premature deaths, with 90% of those occurring outside of Canada. We have a responsibility, and I would argue that we are not taking that responsibility seriously enough.
Conservative
Gaétan Malette Conservative Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON
Do we have the expertise here to go forward with these projects in Canada? Do we need help?
Managing Director, TorchLight Bioresources Inc.
Absolutely. This does not require any technology development.
We have incredible professional foresters, and I would argue that we need a lot more, given the size of our resource. Germany, for example, has a dramatically higher number of professional foresters relative to their forest land base. It is important to remember that forestry is a registered profession, just like engineering and just like being a lawyer. We have great training schools. I was fortunate to attend the University of British Columbia in their faculty of forestry, but we have great ones across the country.
Every professional forester I speak with is just beside themselves in terms of finding markets for low-grade wood and being able to do management of forestry for the forest. I think it's important to recognize on the bioenergy side that when we talk about solid wood products, bioenergy allows you to manage a forest for the forest. You need to have a market for that low-grade wood. We can't forget that not all trees are created equal.
What the Nordics are doing is going in every five to 10 years and removing the low-grade trees, because they're thinking about the long-term health and vitality of that forest, but you have to have a market for that. If we only have markets for saw logs and we only have saw logs, that's actually not permitted on Crown land, because it's high-grading. It's reducing the genetic quality of the forest. We have to have a market not only for the residues but for that low-grade wood that is bug-infested, diseased and dying. Trees need light and space to grow, and it is humans who come in and have a very positive impact with our skill sets and with our rural communities.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Terry Duguid
I'm sorry. I'm looking at the second round there. You distracted me.
Go ahead.
Liberal
Corey Hogan Liberal Calgary Confederation, AB
You could reward that distraction with more time, Chair.
Liberal
Corey Hogan Liberal Calgary Confederation, AB
Thank you to our witnesses. I appreciate the expertise they bring.
Dr. Froese, I'm hoping you can talk to us about silviculture in Canada versus other jurisdictions, particularly when it comes to growth and yield, and maybe, in particular, compared to Nordic countries, because they've come up a fair bit in the last while here.
Scandinavia often has more plantation models—often monoculture, often in straight lines, growing fast and harvested in 20 to 25 years—and in many cases those are on fifth- or sixth-generation stands. When you contrast that with the Canadian model, we plant for diversity. Trees are in competition with each other and it's for longer growth periods. Obviously, our colder climate also contributes, but as a result, it's a stronger product.
There are relative strengths and weaknesses of each system. I'm hoping that you can help the committee unpack them.
Professor, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, As an Individual
Certainly. Thank you for the question. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts.
Silviculture as a tool is a tool available to help us guide the development of forests to produce certain values. Those values can be economic—we can produce products or goods and services that people demand or desire from the forest—and they can be non-market values as well.
In these systems where forests are small, in smaller countries with small forest land bases, with forests they did not inherit from nature beforehand, they've been developed for a long period of time. There can be a significant amount of demand, and I think generally that silviculture is responsive to the market. If we have a market for small-diameter logs, if the supply is low and the demand is high, then we know, through forest science and silviculture and the science of forest growth and yield, that we can produce those values to meet the market.
Why are our systems different?
A professor of mine on silviculture—I'm fortunate to be a graduate of the University of British Columbia as well—said that our forests are inexpensive because we didn't have to pay a lot to make them. We just inherited them when North America was settled and developed by Europeans. It's very easy for us to acquire forest resources at low cost. If you wanted to develop a mine, you would have to dig a hole in the ground and build it out. We have the tools to do these things. It's just a question of whether there's a market value for doing so.
There are also a lot of mechanisms that incentivize different kinds of silviculture. I've argued for many years that silviculture, again, is just a tool that we use to produce certain values. If the value that is attached to a forest is, say, a particular spiritual and structural old-growth value, we can use silviculture and forestry to produce that value. If the value we want is more low-carbon building products and more bioenergy, we can do that as well.
I think the difference between Canada and Europe reflects the incredible supply that we have had of very low-cost forests. We just go out and get them, and there's a relative lack of that in Europe, again, matched with demand.
Liberal
Corey Hogan Liberal Calgary Confederation, AB
In the Canadian context, what is in natural abundance often doesn't end up being the one that's lower cost in the long run because the Europeans will look to models that are more easily harvested as they go through those second- and third-generation stands. That's fine. Actually, I am a huge proponent of the way Canada approaches forest management in terms of the quality of wood.
However, as we start looking at more engineered wood products, I'm wondering if you see advantages, areas for concern or disadvantages for Canadian forest products relative to other countries.
Professor, Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, As an Individual
I think it's well understood that the raw materials we produce are of high quality and have a wide variety of applications, so I don't think we have a disadvantage compared to Europe. It's just a question of making the most of that opportunity.
Again, my expertise is in forest growth and yield, and in forest biology, not in economics. We do face lots of challenges in Canada in terms of long transportation distances, distance to markets and so forth, and I know, in fact, that they impact the economics of doing those things. However, we have mills and facilities that produce all sorts of engineered wood products that I think are competitive on scale. I built a shop myself and was surprised to learn that we make LVL—laminated veneer lumber—out of peeled lodgepole pine here in Alberta, when I was told that we couldn't have an economy built around veneer coming from these small-diameter, long-rotation trees.
I think the technologies are there, and we have the capabilities to do it.
Liberal
Corey Hogan Liberal Calgary Confederation, AB
You talked about wood being a powerful climate solution that's renewable, biodegradable and stores carbon for decades or centuries. I wonder if you could expand on that for this committee.
