Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, Madam Vice-Chair, MPs, committee members and staff, thank you very much for inviting us to contribute to the study that is under way. My name is Bradley Young, and I'm the Executive Director of the National Aboriginal Forestry Association. I come from the Opaskwayak C

Natural Resources committee  They are. I can put them up on the screen—

Natural Resources committee  They're English only. My apologies.

Natural Resources committee  I'll give you an example of some direct experience I've had with this as a land-based research director in the west out of the Foothills Research Institute. Parks Canada noticed the first iterations of the mountain pine beetle. The overflights were just coming over the mountain

Natural Resources committee  Yes, there is—

Natural Resources committee  Definitely. There's a logical coordinating corporate memory—knowledge memory, I guess—in place through the indigenous forestry program. Before that, we had the first nations forestry program, and before that we had this thing called something like the interim land and range agree

Natural Resources committee  I think it's fantastic that those discussions are proceeding. The fire marshalls and the firefighting units in a lot of the rural first nations communities are, to me, some of the last iterations of the older societies that were tasked with protecting the indigenous communities.

Natural Resources committee  If you look at a little bit of history there, the joint venture partnership model is in place and it implies that any joint venture is a partnership. In the forest sector, that's how most indigenous groups entered into the sector. Right there, at a fundamental level, it's already

Natural Resources committee  Yes.

Natural Resources committee  How long do I have, sir? Do I have a minute or two minutes?

Natural Resources committee  There's wisdom in that, in terms of respecting nature, but there's also the immediacy for communities that are living in big, same-age-class forests that are stressed and that are undergoing forcings from the natural world. That is not a natural dynamic, actually. That's a recent

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Cannings. You have some of the jagged outcomes of colonization and the current administrative structures there, but I'm not going to critique that. What I'm going to say is that British Columbians are slowly figuring it out. You have eight milli

Natural Resources committee  There are the beginnings of it. There are some good indigenous organizations working with the provincial ministry of forests and natural resources, the B.C. First Nations Forestry Council and, in the interior, some of the tribal councils. Stuwix forest management and some of the

Natural Resources committee  I'll put it up on the screen, and my apologies to the committee members who don't understand English.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. The numbers are shown on the screen. Offhand, there are about 69 million cubic metres of commercial tenure in B.C. First nations have about eight million cubic metres of that, or 11%, a national best. As B.C.'s provincial forest is more or less equal to all the other provinc