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.