Natural Resources committee  I think there's a profound misunderstanding. First of all, I believe that our assistant deputy minister was referring to carbon stocks, not the annual flux. The fact that the average carbon content of forest ecosystems in Canada is around 220 tonnes of carbon per hectare means t

Natural Resources committee  Yes. It is published in the annual “The State of Canada's Forests” report. It is published in the national greenhouse gas inventory that Environment Canada compiles and reports. The forest sector data, since 2016 on an annual basis and for the period 1990 to the reporting year, a

Natural Resources committee  Is this question directed to me?

Natural Resources committee  First, thank you for commenting on the work that we're doing. I appreciate that, and I'm sure my colleagues do too. I'm not here to give particular advice about what government should or should not do, except for one thing. That is to please rely on the scientific facts when you

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question. I'm very familiar with the study that you are referring to. It does indeed include a number of assumptions and errors that are incorrect. Our model does track the carbon and the impacts of harvesting, including the impacts on dead organic matter poo

Natural Resources committee  It's a simple question of population density. If you look at the size of Scandinavian countries and their population density, they have roads to just about anywhere and you can pretty much access any piece of boreal forest in Scandinavia relatively easily. In Canada, in contrast,

Natural Resources committee  Yes. It was just in the context of this particular slide that I used to highlight the impacts of the fires of 2017 and 2018. Our system, which I described earlier, calculates the emissions from wildfires from 1990 onward on an annual basis for all of the managed forest broken do

Natural Resources committee  When we refer to slash burning, what we're talking about are the branches, the tops and broken pieces of wood that stay behind. I would estimate that, depending on the area in which we harvest, it will be between 5% and 25% of the carbon in the above-ground biomass that is not re

Natural Resources committee  Again, depending on what the product is, I would say between 30% and 40%, or sometimes 50%, of what is harvested ends up in the final product, remembering that some of these products themselves could be short lived. For example, if the final product is cardboard for packaging, it

Natural Resources committee  First of all, that lag time is not necessarily that long. It could be as little as five to 10 years, depending on the site and the rate of regrowth of forest. But, yes, if we fail to regenerate adequately, that lag time could be longer. It could be as long as 20 years and in extr

Natural Resources committee  Yes. I think colleagues in British Columbia and my team are all collaborating at present on various approaches to maximizing not only the value but also the employment and climate change mitigation benefits of alternative uses of wood and biomass. If we harvest green trees to tu

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Cannings. The challenge here is that, as with all ecological systems, it really depends. When we manage and harvest wood that was already killed by mountain pine beetle, spruce beetle, wildfire, drought or other calamities, we have a very differen

Natural Resources committee  This is a very complex question. I will try to answer it very briefly. First of all, the rate of carbon uptake of a forest stand increases with its age. It peaks, depending on which part of the country you're in, between, say, 50 and 150 years of age. On the west coast of Britis

Natural Resources committee  The system has been in operation since 2006 for Canada to report to the United Nations Framework Convention. We generate the numbers and we transfer them to Environment and Climate Change Canada, which combines them with all other sectors. The system combines computer models wi

Natural Resources committee  Yes. The challenge is that it is very expensive to measure a plot on the ground and to have them distributed across the country. In order to get an estimate of the entire area, we basically combine ground measurements with remote sensing from aircraft and from satellites, as well