Mr. Speaker, one of my main concerns with the two-billion-tree plan is that it might simply serve as a distraction from the hard work that we have to do to reach our climate targets. There will be real benefits if we do this right, but those benefits are small in relation to the task at hand. On the other hand, there are greater benefits to be had if we change the way we manage forests, and we should explore those with the provinces.
Every year in British Columbia, for instance, we burn forestry waste. This slash burning puts as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as all of the cars in British Columbia combined. Let us stop doing that. When we are measuring the benefits that forests can provide us in our fight against climate change, remember that it is not as simple as how many trees we plant. It is much more complicated than that. It includes how and where we harvest trees, what we do with forestry waste and what products we produce from the trees we cut.