STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
Mr. James DeWolfe
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would like to call the Resources Committee of the House to order, please. I am Jim DeWolfe, Chairman of the Resources Committee. We are very pleased today to have Dr. Eldon Gunn with us representing the Nova Forest Alliance and Mr. Wade Prest, Past President, Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators Association.
Before we get underway, I would like to start off by introducing our members around the table. I am sorry that there are a few missing from the Opposition Parties but perhaps they will be coming in just a little later and we will introduce them as they come in.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MR. BRIAN BOUDREAU: If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would just like to acknowledge that my colleague, the member for Victoria, Ken MacAskill, who is a member of the committee, will be late this morning. I apologize because he is committed to another meeting.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, I understand that he is tied up with another meeting.
Darlene Henry is representing the Committees Office and I am sure Mr. Prest and Mr. Gunn have already met Darlene. Without further ado, I just want to mention that you please talk into the microphones because the session is being recorded and we are going to, as usual, have a presentation from I believe both presenters here today and then we will open the floor up to questions. I am really looking forward to this. I think you will be pleased to note that most of us around this table are from rural Nova Scotia and very much interested in the forest industry. It is very important to most of our constituencies that we represent. Having said that, I will now turn the floor over to Dr. Eldon Gunn.
MR. ELDON GUNN: Mr. Chairman, my name is Eldon Gunn. I am the Chairman of Nova Forest Alliance. I have provided a brief CV if people want to know a little more about my background. Today I am here on behalf of Nova Forest Alliance and I will try to confine most of my opinions to those of that organization.
Nova Forest Alliance is Nova Scotia's model forest project in the Canadian Model Forest Network. Our staff have prepared a brief backgrounder on the Nova Forest Alliance. I think most of you will have received it. It is brief and we certainly can provide lots more information to you. We have a Web site that is one good way of finding out some of the activities that we carry out.
Nova Forest Alliance has been in existence since 1998. We are part of what is referred to as Phase 2 of the model forest process. There were 10 Canadian model forests that came into existence in 1992. In 1997 the second phase began and the Waswanipi Cree Model Forest in Quebec was added to the Model Forest Network. We submitted a proposal in conjunction with the Fundy model forest and we came into existence and began operation in 1998.
Nova Forest Alliance is made up of more than 40 organizations and all the forest sectors are very well represented in our partnership. We have a very broad variety of community groups; professional and technical groups; environmental, recreational and tourism groups; and municipal, provincial and federal governments. With the exception of Kimberly-Clark, all the large forest companies that operate in central Nova Scotia are partners. Our partners are committed to working toward achieving sustainable forest management in Nova Scotia's Acadian forest type.
That last sentence is really the essence of our goals and objectives. There are really three parts to that phrase I would like to emphasize. The first of those is work together; the second of those is sustainable forest management; and the third is Acadian forest. I am going to deal with those in reverse order. As many of you will know, the Acadian forest is Nova Scotia's main forest type. It covers all of the province with the exception of northern Cape Breton. The forest there is more of a boreal forest. The Acadian forest also covers Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, parts of Maine, New Hampshire, New York, southern Quebec and southern Ontario.
I really think that few people realize what an exceptional forest we have here in Nova Scotia in the Acadian forest. The key phrase when you think of the Acadian forest is diversity. Ours is that transition forest that occurs between the northern coniferous forest, which contains softwood such as fir, hemlock, spruce and pine and the southern deciduous forest which contains hardwood such as maple, oak, poplar, birch, beech, et cetera. We have the best of both worlds, very much of a mixed forest.
Compared to the boreal forests our species are relatively long-lived. We are blessed with a highly productive forest and a complex one. Within Nova Scotia Loucks who did probably the last major classification of forest types in the Maritimes, identified six forest regions, broken up into a number of districts, all of which have different characteristic forest cover. We have a very complex, productive and, in many ways, exciting and challenging forest to work with, as many of you know.
One of the dominant themes of our NFA partnership has been to protect and enhance the fundamental characteristics of the Acadian forest. Sustainable forest management is the second key phrase of our partnership. As you know, sustainable forest management does not just refer to wood supply. Nova Scotia is a signatory and participant in the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers Statement, which lists six criteria for sustainable forest management. The criteria are quite long and wordy. Let me give you short versions of them.
Simply put, these criteria are: biodiversity; forest condition and productivity; soil and water; contribution to global cycles; multiple benefits to society; and decision-making processes. The essence of the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers Statement is unless one can demonstrate that you are sustainable in all these criteria, you really cannot be claiming you are managing your forests sustainably.
As you can imagine, finding good indicators for these criteria that are possible to identify, to monitor and to manage and, in many ways, the challenges for people to agree that these are good criteria, is a major challenge for both our province and our partners and it is one our partners are committed to working on. It really was the essence of when we came together in NFA, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers Statement of criterion indicators was a key focal point of Canadian forest policy, Nova Scotia forest policy and many of our companies were keenly interested in it because of the challenges of certification. That was one of the driving factors that brought together our organization.
We have been working on this process directly, we have a formal criterion indicators process that has been going on now for two years. We will be producing a state of the forests document this year, but it is also a key part of our many other activities, the activities you will find in the background material we have provided. One example that many of you will have heard about is our extensive survey work, to understand the opinion of the public on issues of sustainable forest management. What may not be clear to some, particularly with some of the press releases that have gone out on this survey, this survey is really the work of our entire partnership. In particular, our industrial partners spent a lot of time working on the design of this survey because sustainable forest management requires from everyone, including the industrial partners, a real understanding of society's desires for the forests.
I believe we provided you with a copy of the most recent survey results. You will find it is a big, fat, thick document and it will take quite a bit of time to read. I would urge you to read it. You will find the results do not lend themselves to simplistic answers. What is
clear is that the public does care deeply about our forests and many of you will know from your constituents that fact already, you don't need me to tell you that. They want it managed sustainably for a broad variety of values. The hopeful note I think we find in that survey is that the public does believe it is possible to manage the forest, to achieve the environmental, economic and social goals that are important to all Nova Scotians.
In the backgrounder material we have indicated some of the projects we are working on in an attempt to move toward sustainable forest management. These include: our working woodlot program; our best practices program for contractors and operators; our eco-system science projects; our harvest practices project; and our Antrim Demonstration Woodlot. One major challenge in the coming year is our work in creating a sustainable management process, in the context of a very complex Acadian forest that engages a large number of stakeholder communities. We are trying to engage these stakeholder communities in designing a process that is based both on community involvement and science.
The last of my three phrases was work together and in this phrase both words are equally important. As you can imagine, there is a lot of work. We have committee meetings going on all the time, it takes a lot of people's time, a lot of people's good efforts and we are lucky to have that.
The subject of forest management is complex and there are very few simple answers and it takes a lot of work to make progress. We run by committees and the committee work takes time. However, the committees also provide a key to working together. All our partners have rather strong commitments and pretty strong viewpoints and you have probably heard many of them from various stakeholders. What we do recognize is that progress requires solutions that respect and accommodate the needs of all forest stakeholders.
By spending time working together towards those common goals, our partners in the Nova Forest Alliance have been able to develop an understanding of what works for everybody who is in the room. We have a lot of meetings at church halls and church suppers. When you are having supper together on a regular basis you have to develop a respect for the people you are spending time with. This mutual respect that develops in these processes is, we believe, the key to achieving a sustainable forest management in Nova Scotia's Acadian forests, something that we all desire.
As members participating in government processes, of course, you people have lots to do. There is legislation going for you all the time, you have seen the Forests Act, you are seeing the sustainability regulations, you are seeing the wildlife habitat regulations coming before you. There is also lots to be done in the areas of taxation and finding taxationer's names that do not penalize people who manage their forest sustainably. When succession occurs, capital gains regimes are such that it doesn't force people to take actions that are not in the best interests of the forests. You people have lots of work to do and we are more than pleased to do anything we can to assist you. We are looking forward to moving this province
together, to achieving a sustainable management in the Acadian forests, which, I think, we all want.
With that, I will stop and will be happy to answer any questions after Mr. Prest has spoken or at whatever time you wish.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Dr. Gunn. I think the best thing to do now would be to move to Mr. Prest and we will hear his presentation and then we can direct our questions to both gentlemen, as we proceed. Dr. Gunn, while you were doing your presentation we had another member join us and I certainly welcome John MacDonell to the committee. John represents the constituency of Hants East.
MR. GUNN: I have had the pleasure of meeting John several times, in fact.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Prest, you probably know John as well.
MR. WADE PREST: Yes I do, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to your committee this morning. Forests and forestry are something that are very passionate topics for me. I welcome every chance I get to share with others that which I have learned from my work, from endless time spent in the woods trying to decipher what is happening there and, of course, not least of all from what I have learned from the people I have worked with in the past and continue to work with.
Very quickly, my background is that I am from Mooseland, down on the Eastern Shore, which is about an hour's drive east of Dartmouth in towards but not quite into the Musquodoboit Valley. I come from a lumbering family and studied forestry in New Brunswick and in Switzerland. I spent some time working in Germany and Switzerland. I graduated from UNB in 1982, worked in Ontario for a bit and then I came home to Nova Scotia in 1985. I started my business as a woodlot owner, a forestry consultant and as a logging contractor and I have been doing that since that time. I became involved with the Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators Association and served for several years as president of that organization.
I have 10 minutes to speak to you and I want to concentrate on one theme this morning and it is very difficult to fit that into 10 minutes but I am going to rely on you all to ask questions afterwards, if there is something I go through too quickly and it is not clear what point I have been trying to make.
MR. CHAIRMAN: If I might just interject, Mr. Prest, we can only learn from someone of your calibre, so if you require a little more time, please take it.
MR. PREST: In the interests of me not getting off on tangents that I don't mean to, I am going to stick fairly closely to what I intended.
Forest management as practised in Nova Scotia today is both unsustainable and quite inappropriate for our province. It is unsustainable because we are not using the management systems which are suitable for our natural forest, our climate and our soils. It is in appropriate because it delivers fewer benefits to our people than is possible under a more appropriate management strategy.
As Dr. Gunn explained, our natural forest type is the Acadian forest. It is characterized by uneven-aged stands of long-lived species, red spruce, white pine, hemlock, yellow birch, sugar maple, and white ash, and under appropriate management, i.e. an even-aged system, this forest will produce, forever, a continuous supply of large dimension, very-high-value roundwood, which can support any number of high-value-added industries, in addition to the standard dimension lumber pulp and paper industries that we have today.
I will take issue with anyone who claims that today tree size and quality don't matter because of the technology that we have in our mills, because high-quality roundwood is worth more as a round log than all of the lumber that is going out of our province every day by the truckload. That is one thing that hasn't changed, even though our industry has adapted quite well to using a lower grade of roundwood. Where it is still growing, it is still worth a lot more.
At the same time, an uneven-aged management regime would conserve and protect the very stable ecosystems which themselves will produce a regular, God-given yield of the other forest values which we tend to take so much for granted. Foremost among these are clean air and abundant year-round supplies of pure, potable water. The recreational, the fish and wildlife, tourism and spiritual benefits, which our citizens increasingly demand are all provided in the highest possible quality by a well-managed Acadian forest. The secret to good management is so simple and so logical. You only take an amount of timber or other benefit that is in excess of what is needed to maintain the health and productivity of the ecosystem. You maintain the principle and you live on the annual interest earned.
In the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age ended, our forest ecosystems developed and accumulated a tremendous storehouse of physical and biological capital in its plant and animal life, and its soils. It is this accumulated surplus of capital that has sustained the health and productivity of our forests over the last centuries, since Europeans settled here and applied a new philosophy to forest use. This ecological capital that I have mentioned is a very real, very measurable thing, it is not a figure of speech I am using, and if you want me to explain more about that later, I will.
Contrary to common belief, even much of the first logging and clearing of land that was done here was detrimental to the forest. Ecologists feel that fire was not a significant factor in forest development here before European colonization, but after that time fire became a very popular method of clearing land. Most of the logging that was done was blatant high-grading from day one; sometimes it wasn't, but mostly it was high-grading. When fire followed logging, then the degradation and deterioration to the forest system was especially severe. By drawing on the accumulated surplus of ecological capital that had been built up, the forest demonstrated a remarkable resilience to the abuse of practices of the past and because of that storehouse of energy we still have very productive forests and great potential today.
In the last 50 years, the warning signs are becoming more prevalent and more clear to those who want to see them. Old-growth forests are found only in remnant pockets, and mature forests are becoming rare. Repeated clear-cutting is destroying stand structure and ecological function within stands and across forest landscapes, lower-value, shorter-lived species now make up an ever-increasing proportion of young and regenerating stands, straight from DNR data. They have done the studies and they know that is happening.
As balsam fir and white spruce make up more and more of our softwood stands, so increases the insect and disease problems and the cry to undertake expensive and unpopular spray programs. Now the public is being asked to pay the cost of expensive silviculture as a means of maintaining the wood supply. Along the Eastern Shore, we now have previously productive sites that will no longer even grow trees to merchantable size because the sites have been degraded so badly by repeated harvesting.
As the indicators of the ecosystem collapse become more apparent, our harvest level in the last 20 years has doubled. The rapid increase in harvest rates has been facilitated by mechanization in the woods and in the mills. Whereas 20 years ago the industry in Nova Scotia was labour intensive, today the key to contractor and sawmill survival is minimizing wage costs per unit of production. Our industry is working hard to reduce labour costs so we can export even more lumber, pulp and paper, and wood chips. Woodlots are being clear-cut from boundary to boundary in an attempt to repay the capital costs of equipment that is usually manufactured outside of Nova Scotia, and often outside of Canada.
The economic benefits to rural communities, through wages, have not kept pace with the harvest level. Forest workers must often work shift work, putting in 50 hours or more each week, and travel up to three hours each day to their work sites. Machine operators are often under considerable pressure to reach production targets, and forest machines tend to be high-maintenance items and are subject to a lot of downtime. Employee turnover can be surprisingly high. In short, simply getting men off the ground, away from the chainsaws and into air-conditioned cabs has not solved personnel problems for contractors. Witness the relatively high number of contractors from New Brunswick, and even Quebec, who are working round the clock in Nova Scotia today, and living out of travel trailers in the woods.
When you get out into the woods, you will see that the technological solutions are not always as glamorous as we have been led to believe.
Woodlot owners are receiving payments for their wood, unheard of a few years ago. Ironically, as the value of roundwood and forests has increased, the quality of stewardship of those forests has often deteriorated dramatically. Many woodlot owners have been carried along with the cash-it-in-for-the-big-bucks-now attitude.
Corporate consolidation, which is occurring globally in the wood products industry, is happening on a smaller scale in Nova Scotia. The number of small, private woodlot owners is decreasing, as is the acreage of forest land in that ownership category. Forest land is being steadily consolidated in the hands of those with the available or accessible capital; i.e., it is more and more being bought up by the big guys. Smaller, labour-intensive mills are selling out to larger operations. Many of those who attempt to venture into value-added manufacturing receive only lukewarm support from established mills or from government.
In summary, never have the forests of Nova Scotia given up so much so fast for so little benefit to Nova Scotians. We are no longer living on the interest our forest earns; we are quickly spending the principal. Repeated large-scale clear-cutting of ever-younger stands - and we will come back to that - is the surest way to destroy for all time the natural forest heritage of this province. I assure you there are many foresters, lumbermen, loggers and forest workers out there who share this view.
The former Chief Forester for Bowater Mersey for 31 years, Mr. Ralph Johnson, wrote in his book, Forests of Nova Scotia, "Clearcutting of extensive areas in Nova Scotia is second only to fire in being detrimental to the ecosystem." Later he said, "I remain unconvinced that clearcutting is the best option for the majority of our forest types. I am reasonably certain that clearcutting as commonly practised here offers little or no economic advantage over partial cutting systems when all costs are added in; and furthermore, that over the long run it is ecologically unsound." I think that is the most critical thing, too: in the long run, it is ecologically unsustainable. Mr. Johnson was a real industrial forester, but he was an old type of industrial forester. He was not an environmentalist or granola type or a radical.
[9:30 a.m.]
The new wood supply sustainability regulations, which have been introduced by the Department of Natural Resources, there are some good points and some bad points to them. But, basically, they are an attempt to maintain forest fibre production by substituting financial and labour resources and inputs for the failing bank of natural capital which sustained us for so long.
These regulations will have some effect in increasing the wood supply in the short term, medium term, but that whole approach to forest sustainability is wrong because it doesn't recognize that repeated, clear-cut harvesting of young stands is destroying the ecological foundations of forest productivity. It is an increasingly expensive way to produce a lower grade of roundwood. It emphasizes quantity over quality, which is a pattern that much of our industry has fallen into.
It is unfair to allocate blame for this situation to any particular sector of the forestry community. Nova Scotia has been built on centuries of exploitation of its natural resources. So, up to now, all of our citizens have been benefactors of the liquidation of this natural wealth. But to preserve our forests' ability to continue to produce wealth, i.e., to be truly a renewable resource, we must soon make hard decisions about which path to take.
The forest industry cries that they need wood supply from all of the land base. They claim there is not enough wood and that no more forest can be set aside, yet all the while, mills continue to be modernized to increase their productive capacity. The public is distrustful of the industry, largely due to the predominance of clear-cutting, and they insist that more wilderness areas be protected.
The tourism operators are more upset than ever as roadsides and view scapes are degraded. The public is asking, does it all have to be clear-cut? I can tell you that the best management practices or programs of some of the companies are strictly public relations tools and they are not always fooling the people.
We need change. We need an ecology-based approach to management of our forests. We need an industry based on the yield of the forest, rather than trying to force the forest to adapt to our technology. We need an industry which will get the highest value for Nova Scotians out of less wood, thus preserving the other forest values and benefits for ourselves and our children.
It seems to me that the buck stops with elected politicians. It is up to you and your colleagues to put in place a process that will deal with this forestry dilemma that we are facing, a process which must not be controlled and manipulated by those who have already decided on the results that they would like the process to yield. First of all, you should have more confidence in yourselves and in your feelings. Don't make decisions based on the input of those who have their careers, reputations or money invested in maintaining the status quo. Talk to people in your communities, including the woodworkers, the hunters, the fishermen, the environmentalists. Talk to many of the mill owners, not just the large, most-noticed operations. Talk to the DNR personnel who work in the district and local offices, and gain their confidence so they will speak freely to you and speak their mind.
You might be quite surprised to find out that our current system of forest management has surprisingly fewer enthusiasts than you assumed. You must remember, there are a lot of people out there on the industrial forestry treadmill and it is difficult for many of them to get off, even if they want too. Thank you for hearing my point of view and if there are any questions, I will be glad to answer them.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you for giving us many points to ponder, as politicians. Who would like to start off? Mr. John MacDonell.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentation. Mr. Gunn, I am sorry that I walked in on yours. I am quite often late, but like to think I am worth waiting for. (Interruptions) I thought that would get a reaction.
I guess you know from previous conversations that we have had that I worry about the sustainability of the forest. For lots of reasons and probably for - in purely political terms I guess - I have a lot of people in my constituency who have jobs in the forest sector and I really worry about how long those jobs are going to last. I raised this, actually showed this document that is produced by the Department of Natural Resources to Downey Thompson who is involved with Elmsdale Lumber in my area. Downey's response was, well, I went to work for Elmsdale Lumber in 1947, I will soon be there 55 years. When I went to work they said there were only five years left in the forest sector and, he said, we are still going.
It is an argument that I have heard before, but I am concerned. The department has put together some numbers - numbers that I think people should be able to work with and my feeling is that there are probably, based on what they refer to as the operable forest, about 5 million acres. There are probably about 15 years left at the present harvest level and that is assuming the 5 million acres haven't been cut. We all know that whatever we have in Nova Scotia where you can cut trees, there are lots that have been cut.
I would like to know if you have any impression of how dire the situation is in this province, either one of you?
MR. GUNN: I can try to answer some and Wade - Wade and I see different sides of it. I have had a chance to look at some of the calculations the province has done and I guess I would urge people not to worry or get too doom and gloom about it. There is a side of Downey's argument that is right that the forest industry has been here and continues to be here. We have a group in the province - DNR - that do work very hard. The science is amazingly difficult. I think that is something you should realize, that the science is not simple on forest growth and yield any place in North America and in the complicated forest we have, it is even more difficult and if you try to go to a complex management regime of the type that Wade is talking about as opposed to the very simple clear-cut regimes, it becomes even harder yet, so it is difficult to get the answers in nice, clear simple form that everybody can stand up and say, yes, this is absolutely the right answer.
The other side of it is the province has worked hard, we have had in place a system of permanent sample plots in this province. We have 1,700 permanent sample plots that we have installed and they have been in place since 1965, they have been measured every five years in that time. We do have a GIS inventory system that we have put in place. It is an expensive one, but we fly air photos and take pictures and try to interpret the amount of standing inventory. As close as the estimates that come out of DNR can give you, the standing volume of the forest is not decreasing.
There is a difference between the standing volume of the forest and the Acadian characteristics of the forest. We do not have the Acadian forest that many of us would like to move toward. And so, we shouldn't say everything is great and everything is fine, but the fears of running out of wood tomorrow are also not, I think, realistic. I think we have to recognize the complexity of the situation we are in. We have an industry that exists, as Wade says, we have a long history that has built us to where we are. We have a whole lot of interests that are well established in the system and the real challenge is deciding where we want to end up and many of us would argue that it would end up into a forest that really does reflect the proper Acadian characteristics of our forest, and how to get there.
So those are the questions, where do we want to end up and how to get there. Those questions impinge upon a whole lot of different values. Some of them are simple. Clear-cutting is a challenge, we know that. Some parts of it are just stupidity. If you look at some of the cuts that have been done, nobody can defend those. Nobody would try. Well, nobody should try to. Some of the clear-cuts though, we have to look hard to find and recognize they are clear-cuts. I have been driving this road back and forth to Stewiacke now for five years. There has been a lot of land that has been removed from forestry there. Some of that is now called farms and some of that is now called subdivisions. There is a lot of land that is coming out of forest purposes to other reasons.
We are in a really complicated situation. I think it really requires the best efforts on all of us. As far as the science, I think the group at DNR is doing a good job moving there. There is lots more to be done, don't question me on that. There is a lot more to be done. I don't think I would worry. I haven't seen the numbers that convince me that there is an immediate problem.
MR. PREST: We certainly aren't going to run out of wood tomorrow because our mills are adapted to the resource that is out there today. I think what Downey misses is the fact that there is still lots of wood being cut because technology has changed to adapt to the deteriorating forest. Now, in the 1970's and 1980's, had cod been harvested on Grand Banks with schooners and dories, like when the Bluenose first went there in the 1920's, they probably would have been having a hard time being an economically viable industry. But technology had changed and so it allowed a cod stock that was under pressure and disappearing to be fished right to the point where it just about drove it into extinction. That was the technology that allowed that to happen, as the industry used the new technology to
push it right to the very end. Nobody knew when that was going to collapse. It happened and we still don't know the full effects of how far and how long for that resource, is it destroyed for all time or not?
I think that is what is often lost in that argument about our forest. Sure, everything looks great because it is still going on, but the technology has allowed us to do that.
MR. MACDONELL: Mr. Gunn, your comment was a good one, but I think if we had GPS and could have gone out and counted the fish like we can count the trees - we can actually walk around and see them - we probably would have had a better idea of what was going to happen in the case of the cod. Maybe we don't have perfect science when it comes to the trees and growth, et cetera, but we certainly know how big Nova Scotia is and we know how big the operable forest is and we know how much we are cutting every year and we have the registry of buyers to tell us that. Yes, I think that if we want to say we are going to cut nothing but poles that are 6" across or 4" across and that is going to become our forest until the end of time, well, probably, we can even exhaust that. In other words, we will go down to 3" and then we will go down to 2" and then we will laminate everything and we will chip it and glue it and you name it. If it has a leaf or a needle, we can probably do something with it, put it through a meat grinder and mix some glue with it and we can make a tree.
The question is, is that what we want the forest of Nova Scotia to become? That is my fear. I know in the case of Elmsdale, they get a lot of the pine logs, I think, from Kimberly-Clark or MacTara, or maybe both, but there are some of these mills that are not set up to handle big logs anymore. So if they are spending money on the technology to only mill small trees, what does that tell you? What message is there in that as to where our forest is going. If somebody wants to convince me that that is what our forest is, that we should be satisfied and think that supply will always be there, based on the fact that we can always grow smaller trees quicker, then we are done.
As far as our forest is an instrument of ecology to provide habitat, there are lots of organisms that don't run around the ground in the forest and they stay up in the canopy. What we are saying is we are obliterating that habitat for all time so that we can sell small trees or mill small trees. So I would definitely say that we have passed the point of sustainability for all the concerns that our forest really should be, for organisms and for people and so on. We have gone beyond that, we are against the wall, I guess, is what I would say.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Chipman.
MR. FRANK CHIPMAN: Mr. Chairman, I would certainly say, Mr. Prest, I agree with everything you have said so far. I am a woodlot owner myself and I have been involved in the forest industry for quite a number of years. I would say it seems like you have some harsh words for some of your partners and I am not going to point out any of your partners.
I notice that you don't have Kimberly-Clark on here as a member. Is there any reason for that . . .
MR. PREST: Yes, that is correct .
MR. CHIPMAN: . . . because you have Bowater which I don't think are in your - well, maybe Bowater does have land in that area. I know some of the other partners here but I notice that you don't have . . .
MR. GUNN. Yes, Kimberly-Clark declined to join.
MR. CHIPMAN: Is there any reason that you know of?
MR. GUNN: I think I would have to ask you to speak to them about that. They had indicated one of the problems is they feel they lack time to come to our meetings.
MR. CHIPMAN: Anyway, I had a question, and this has always been a concern of mine. I live in Annapolis and I know the Western Valley Development Authority did a survey here two or three years ago on the number of loads of roundwood that left Digby and went across to Saint John. These are products that could create jobs here in Nova Scotia. We have talked about this among ourselves in caucus, a group of us, and we have said, is there any kind of legislation? I am not sure there is but when you look at some of the other products that are exportable, say gypsum, this type of thing, do you know of any type of legislation? Are we limiting? Is there anything constitutionally that says we can't legislate to keep those jobs in the Province of Nova Scotia?
MR. GUNN: I can answer briefly. As you see, I am also a member of the Forest Technical Advisory Committee and I will say that the Department of Natural Resources is looking at that issue and is bringing it before us. What the answers are going to be, I do not know; we haven't seen them yet. It has been my understanding it is a concern to the department at the present time.
MR. CHIPMAN: I know on several instances I have talked to people, woodlot owners in this province who have exported their - I should say, not exported, they have sold them to companies from outside the province, companies that are paying higher prices than they are here in Nova Scotia. How is that possible? Out-of-province companies come in here and pay higher prices to take them to another province and process them and sell them. Are we being, I guess I don't want to say cheated, I am trying to think of a kind word and that is hard to come up with.
MR. GUNN: I am a woodlot owner too and I have looked at some of those prices myself. You are correct. There are, in some cases, quite attractive prices for exporting large-dimension timber. Wade would know more about this than I do but it is my understanding
that not many mills in the province are set up to get the value out of that large type of timber. As Mr. MacDonell has mentioned, many of the mills have moved toward the small-dimension timber. That is one aspect of it. I don't know why we don't have companies in the province that are in the business of producing large amounts of hardwood, premium material. I am not aware of mills in the province that are in the business of veneer logs to any large extent. There are perhaps a few and they are small operations, certainly, like Maria Burgess' operation. She is one of our partners who does take a small amount of wood and produces very high-valued product from it but there is not a lot of that type of industry in the province.
MR. CHIPMAN: Would you agree or not agree that, in reference to Mr. MacDonell's statement, that a lot of the smaller species are being used because of technology that MacTara brought in to utilize underutilized species, say balsam fir? That has been a benefit to get a higher value out of that wood than normal.
MR. GUNN: I think it is complicated. There are two or three different ways of looking at it. If you remember our older system, go back 10 or 15 years, we put the wood directly into the pulp mills so I think many of us would agree that is a very low value-added mechanism and by doing that it really didn't get much utilization out of our forests at all. MacTara, for sure, and some of the other mills have moved to utilize small-dimension timber and in many ways have replaced the wood rooms of the pulp mills. Some aspects of that are quite positive. If it is because of the reason that we have a steadily declining standing diameter, then that is not positive.
I think it is a mixture of those things and my understanding would be that a lot of it came from increasing technology, making it possible to replace that process of purely groundwood going into pulp mills and put in a more value-added process where the sawmills, stud mills in particular, could exploit some of that wood and the chips from that then become the feed to the pulp mills. That is a pattern you see in North American industry, it is not necessarily local. It has certainly happened in New Brunswick; Irving has been doing that for quite awhile. On the West Coast, you see the same type of thing. The pulp mills are not typically the final, do not drive the harvesting process, it typically would go through a sawmill and it is the chips that go to the pulp mill. It is a change there. I think it is probably more industrial, just the nature of the technology and the nature of the industry, than any particular reflection of our forests.
MR. CHIPMAN: There is a large discrepancy among pricing across the province. I know I spoke to a gentlemen from the eastern part of the province in Antigonish and I believe they get around $122 a cord roadside for pulpwood whereas in the western part of the province, it was $56 here, probably a year or so ago, I think it is higher now. Do you think if there were some organization - I know there has been talk of having a pulpwood marketing board - throughout the province that that may be more of an incentive to maintain and manage forests and a better . . .
MR. PREST: I don't think that is necessarily . . .
MR. CHIPMAN: I guess I am saying wood is not any more valuable from Antigonish County than it is from Annapolis County, but there is a big discrepancy in the price. Why is that? I know why it is, because there is no organization. My other question is, do you feel that if there was organization that would benefit the industry?
MR. PREST: The industry in the province is hampered more by the lack of a cohesive policy at the government level by government than it is by disorganization of woodlot owners.
We spoke about the fact that there are no mills here to take advantage of higher value roundwood so that all gets shipped out of the province. Thirty or forty years ago when the Government of Nova Scotia was desperate to do anything to get pulp mills to come in, all that time has gone by since then when there has never been any initiative on behalf of the government to get a high-value veneer plant in Nova Scotia. That has never, ever happened - I don't know if it has ever been considered by government. It is certainly nothing that we know about.
What has happened as far as those price differences, that is strictly a function of supply and demand and StoraEnso has a new mill that is using a lot of wood and in that end of the province, the wood supply is much more critical than it is in the western part of the province. That alone accounts for that difference.
MR. GUNN: I think I agree with that comment and the other - you have to remember the budworm attack in the 1970's removed an awful lot of wood from that end of the province. That will cause a pricing differential by itself and just the way the industry is located and structured will have something to do with it too.
MR. CHIPMAN: You know that is fine and dandy, but you know if you go to the Digby Neck area where there has been a lot of bark beetle and there has been a lot of clear-cutting, a lot of that wood is being exported to New Brunswick and New Brunswick is paying pretty reasonable prices too, up in the $120 range. In western Nova Scotia the pulp and paper companies are paying less than half of that.
MR. PREST: Bowater Mersey has a lot of their own land and they are getting a lot of chips and they are paying what they have to pay to get what pulpwood they need. They don't need much of that free market pulpwood.
MR. CHIPMAN: I wasn't referring - I was thinking more or less of Irving that is coming and taking it to New Brunswick, than Bowater.
MR. PREST: The pulpwood?
MR. CHIPMAN: Yes.
MR. GUNN: That is what is bringing some of the prices up for landowners in that region though, traditionally. Wade was correct.
MR. CHIPMAN: I might want to come back and ask another question later.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We will turn it over to Mr. Taylor.
MR. BROOKE TAYLOR: I would just like to ask a couple of questions about the Nova Forest Alliance. When you do look at the composition of the partnership, it is quite impressive. Most of the major harvesters, if not all stakeholders, are represented. I know you have several hundred, maybe thousand hectares under the model concept. How many of your partners, as far as you are concerned, employ abusive practices? I think Wade mentioned abusive practices. I know government has a responsibility here, has a role to play, but there must be quite an education process that has been undertaken with the alliance, with its membership. How is that progressing?
MR. GUNN: That is a challenging question. I don't think I would be happy at all to say any of our partners employ abusive practices, but it is probably true to say that many of our partners are exploring ways in which they change their practices. We are in a situation where, as Wade has very clearly outlined, the nature of the industry has and must evolve. The large organizations do have some advantages when you try to deal with them in terms of looking at sustainable forest management. They have professional staff, and they are aware of the pressures of certification and the needs of the marketplace for recognized environmentally sustainable wood products.
So there are market pressures on those larger organizations, and because of that they are looking to find ways of accommodating to the realities of that market. The pressures of certification, one should never underestimate. You see companies like Home Depot, for example, who have said that they will not purchase wood that is not a certified product.
One of the unique challenges we have in Nova Scotia is that so much of our land is not managed by professional organizations such as the larger companies. We have well over half of the land in the area that is our partnership in the hands of small, private landowners. Small, private landowners are people like me, who live in the city. We have rural connections, but we don't know much, maybe, about the opportunities for sustainable management, and we have limited time and limited knowledge. So when some circumstances occur, such as succession, such as maybe taxation regimes that make it look like it is expensive to hold our land in a sustainable way, when circumstances occur some let that land just go to the highest bidder, and that highest bidder isn't always the person who is going to manage that land sustainability.
What we have been trying to do is get the message out to everybody, in the Nova Forest Alliance area, that you have options, you don't have to just say this land has to be clear-cut. You can ask a contractor what are some different ways you could manage this land. What would my land look like after you finish harvesting my property? What will your harvest do to the brooks, streams and wildlife in my area? You should be able to develop an understanding of that with your contractor before you start to harvest.
This is where we see the opportunity. We can deal with the large companies through regulations, through government working with them. It is not trivial, but in many ways it is easy we know who they are and we could talk to them. The real challenge in Nova Scotia is how do we manage this half, or more, of our land base and, more importantly, the most productive part of our land base. How do you manage that in a way that is going to result in sustainability? That is what we are trying to work on, where we see the difficulty. Anybody who looks at Nova Scotia sees the challenge. If this was the Province of British Columbia where the Crown owns 98 per cent of the land, we just pass a few regulations and we are done.
[10:00 a.m.]
MR. TAYLOR: If I could just interject, Mr. Chairman. We heard, during the presentation, that there are environmental, recreational, economic and social goals that most people believe in. You talk about sustainability right now, Mr. Gunn, and I think that is certainly an honourable objective, but it seems to me that the principle of attaining the Acadian forest can't be met if we are just, and I think you would agree, concerned about sustainability. I think Wade, during his presentation, talked about air, water and some of those other types of concerns.
My question is - maybe I should be more blunt and I won't mention any names here in the partnership, you have a large number of acres/hectares under the Nova Forest model - what percentage of your partners is really committed to going back and trying to establish a true Acadian forest? I don't say the responsibility is yours any more than it is government's, but it is quite admirable and very supportable to be part of a model forest. But if you don't have the sincerity from your partners, it has to be very frustrating, at times, and there must be an educational process that you are trying to employ, or somebody should. I am not saying the responsibility is yours, but what progress is being made? I see some names here that people would say, well, gee, it is really hypocritical. We see some of these people are partners in the alliance, but they have been accused of, somebody said, abusive practices. Well, if these people aren't doing it, who in the heck is?
MR. GUNN: I think all of our partners are committed to getting to the Acadian forest. The problem we have is time. We can't get there tomorrow. We know that. We can't get there in 10 years time. We know that, but we can move in that direction. The question is, how do we start to do that without destroying the economies of some small towns and
without destroying the ecologies of some areas. It is always that compromise in between. There are certain things of which there should be no compromise. There is no excuse for polluting brooks and streams. There is really no excuse for some of the types of practices that we have all seen, clear-cuts right to the road.
We have an example that our general manager has shown many people, clear-cuts right to the edge of a graveyard. It is just stupid, it doesn't make any sense. That type of thing, we can and should eliminate as fast as we can. I know of none of our partners that would condone that type of practice. Getting to the Acadian forest, where we think it should be, will take a very long time. We have degraded our forests in the sense that it is not the Acadian forest that we inherited, there is no question of that. Whether we have degraded in terms of our forest productivity and our ability to produce fibre volume, I think there is a lot of reasonable debate about that. I am less concerned about that than maybe some others are. The trick is, how do you move over time? The encouraging thing is, it has been done in other jurisdictions. You look at the way Irving is managing some of their lands. They have moved from what was a straight clear-cutting regime to a series of entries, so that the forest is not a single grow it, cut it, grow it, cut it, which I think few of us accept as the way to manage our forests.
Changing the practices, the equipment, the culture, the education, the skills of the people in the area takes a lot of time. I think we have to be patient and work towards that. If we do that with good will and good spirit, I think there is a lot of chance for progress here. I guess what I urge is, don't throw up your hands in despair, there is no reason to do that. Work toward the goal and don't be too impatient; we don't want to say that it is going to take us forever. Just keep the goal in mind and work toward it.
MR. TAYLOR: Speaking of sustainability, the Nova Forest Alliance and the administration thereof, I understand most of your funding comes from the federal government. Is that sustainable in the long-term? I hope it is because I think your goals are very admirable, I am not suggesting otherwise but . . .
MR. GUNN: Gosh, I hope so because we have awfully good staff who we have put in place over time. They are a tremendous resource and I sure hope we can keep them. The federal government is coming to the end of Phase II of the Model Forest Program, that ends this fiscal year, so we are technically entering the last year of our existence. There is an indication from the federal government, particularly the Canadian Forest Service, they are contemplating a Phase III. The precise design of Phase III is not yet apparent to us. As you know, the federal government has a habit of waiting to the very last moment to announce these things and the assumption is everybody can then immediately get up and running. We have been asking, and certainly would appreciate anything any of you could do to help us ask, for some clarity from the federal government as to when this program will come into existence and we will get some indication that the program will proceed.
In the meantime, we are trying to get commitments from our partners, that they wish to maintain this process and to work on Phase III and, I guess, maybe to get a commitment from a few partners who haven't joined us at the present time, to recognize that this is one way for people in Nova Scotia to work together to move toward sustainable forest management. So we are trying to move towards it but any help you can give us in looking at sources of funding in Phase III would be very much appreciated.
MR. PREST: Not only funding-wise, but the Nova Forest Alliance is trying to swing things around, it is trying to change things, it is trying to foster, help and facilitate the process of halting the decline and turning things around. I think they are working against the Department of Natural Resources. I don't think the Department of Natural Resources is helping because the Department of Natural Resources doesn't or fails to recognize the problem that we have to keep those mills going and if another mill modernizes next month, we have to provide more wood, we have to provide wood to keep those mills open, and the jobs, and all of the tax dollars that economic activity generates; that is what it seems to me. I don't think the Department of Natural Resources has the right approach to help the Nova Forest Alliance with this job.
MR. GUNN: The Department of Natural Resources is one of our partners so I will refrain from commenting on that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: If I might jump in for a moment. Mr. Prest, you indicated you worked in Sweden, in the forest industry, that is correct, isn't it?
MR. PREST: I worked in Sweden for a bit. I worked in Germany and studied in Switzerland, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So you have some idea of the Swedish model and we have heard a lot about that in years gone by, how they worked towards a sustainable forest industry over there. Whether that be fact or not, I don't know, but I heard they have a model there that may be of interest to us here. I am wondering, are we following many of the practices that they use over there? Is that a model that would allow us to reach some sort of fruition with our goal in forest management and sustainability?
MR. PREST: Some interesting things are happening in Europe and they have over the last 20 years. When I spent some time, a few years, it was from 1979 to the end of 1981 - most of that time was spent on the continent, in Germany - there were real questions coming up, as to the validity of their forest management systems. The clear-cut and plant, and intensive-management type of forestry really is something that was developed in Germany in the last century, and it became a model that was brought to North America.
By the 1980's, the Germans were recognizing that the system wasn't working ecologically. In most of the German states today, it is illegal forestry practice to clear-cut and plant single species stands of trees. It is also the same thing in Switzerland, it is no longer legal to grow trees that way. In Scandinavia, what we sometimes forget is that they have really only been in their intensive management system for one rotation. It has been 100 years, but it is still only one rotation for the trees. The same problems haven't shown up to the same degree in Scandinavia as they have in Germany.
What they found in Germany, just in the short term, was that things like acid rain changing the soil was killing trees. Other factors were causing the trees to die. They were indirect causes, because what has happened is that the soils and the ecology of the sites had been degraded to the point where the trees could no longer resist the stresses that were being put on it by modern society. What they have had to do in Germany is get back to planting more natural forests, having hard woods in the stands, allowing some trees to fall down, rot and go back into the ground. When I was in Germany even the cones on the trees would be gathered up for firewood. Every branch that fell off a tree was gathered up and burned for firewood. Nothing was allowed to ever go back into the soil to rot. So the accumulation of a lot of years of that kind of management has terrible effects on the site and on the ecology.
The type of things that I am concerned about are being recognized in more and more countries, and quite a bit so in the United States. In Nova Scotia, probably, they are not very well recognized. Part of that problem, and as Eldon referred to the research plots and the permanent sample plots that we have, it seems we got a good start back in the 1960's, and through the 1970's and the 1980's, when Dr. Bailey was running the Research and Silviculture Division of DNR, out of Truro, they did a lot of work, they got a lot of plots, they got a lot of data.
In recent years, well, you can take one guess what has happened to research budgets for the Department of Natural Resources. We got a good start, but they haven't been able to continue on with the natural progression of their research. Had they been able to do that, then I believe they would be researching these questions today. Part of the reason, and I certainly didn't want here to come to say, you should try to find more money for the research division of the department, because I guess we know that you should. I would say that is one thing that has had an effect in keeping Nova Scotia from keeping up with forestry science, the way it should have.
MR. CHAIRMAN: In Germany, when they determined that the system of clear-cutting wasn't working ecologically, is that because they realized that forests were made up of a whole lot more than just trees, it is fauna, the mosses and everything, a regeneration of all this so-called complete forest just wasn't happening?
MR. PREST: That is right. All that stuff in sum is what you call ecological capital, nutrients and carbon in the soil that has decomposed and gone into the soil and is partially decomposed, nutrients and so on.
MR. CHAIRMAN: It is the life cycle of a forest, isn't it?
MR. PREST: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Who is next? Mrs. Baillie.
MRS. MURIEL BAILLIE: This is for, Mr. Wade Prest. You spoke with great feeling, almost angry at what is going on. You made me feel rather heartsick. You compared our forestry with cod fishing, and I guess you said it was due to technology. Technology is here in the forest industry, right? It is not going to go away. A couple of years ago, up my way, they were doing clear-cutting, and they were going 24 hours a day. Drive up in the back roads at 2:00 in the morning, lights are on and machines are going.
What are we going to do? Technology is here, we can't go back, but is it necessary for these people, these firms or contractors, to go 24 hours a day? The wood is not going to go away. Is it necessary for them to do this to pay off their machines? What are your views on that? What is going to happen?
MR. PREST: The reason that operations run around the clock in that manner is to reduce costs of harvesting. So all those sorts of things, running machines longer, reduce harvesting costs. It is part of a free market; it is part of a global market. The industry in this province is very concerned in trying to get its costs down so we can export more lumber. The cheaper we can produce the lumber for, the more of it we can sell. It seems to me that in our economic system that we have, the more we sell the better we think we are doing, and I think that government buys into that because it means there are more taxes being paid.
The executive level of government is not at all interested in seeing the forest industry cut back on the level of activity because they don't want to see any tax dollars lost. They need every tax dollar they can get because they have bigger problems: they have the education system, the health care system and there is that budget they are trying to balance. I don't think that the forest is a very high priority to the executive level of government, not just this government, but governments of the past as well.
That is why those things are happening. The industry is very competitive. In the long run, the strong will survive and the weaker ones will not. The only solution that I feel that there is for that type of harvesting and that type of forestry is there has to be standards set, basically by law - they could be set by companies, but I don't know if the companies would do that - there has to be standards set as to the way forests can be treated, and the condition
that they must be left in, and certain requirements for regeneration and stocking and productivity.
When those conditions are in place - those standards are in place - then just the daytime/nighttime mechanized operations are not well-suited for accomplishing those standards or those objectives, because all those things do is just reduce harvesting costs. In Nova Scotia, it seems that there has always been a separation between harvesting costs and silviculture costs; silviculture costs are what the public traditionally has paid to make up for the brutal harvesting that is being done.
Most foresters will agree that harvesting and silviculture are not two separate things, but they should be. If you do your harvesting in a certain way, you reduce the need to carry out silvicultural treatments, so you incur higher costs on your harvesting, you eliminate your costs for silviculture. Why it has developed that way in Nova Scotia in the industry is because industry pays for harvesting and traditionally the public has paid for silviculture. So the industry has been able to reduce its harvesting costs at no consequence to itself because the public purse traditionally paid to have the mistakes fixed up, and until there is that kind of a system put in place to require a certain standard of forestry operations, I think that probably is what you will see continue.
MRS. BAILLIE: I had a question for Mr. Gunn, but it was answered.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We can come around again if you have another thought. Mr. Boudreau, you are next.
MR. BRIAN BOUDREAU: I am certainly enjoying the presentation. I have to admit that I really don't know a whole lot about forestry, but it is obvious that both of you are very well-informed and educated on this topic, and I appreciate the opportunity to sit here and listen to you. It appears that you have a lot of good ideas and all we have to do now is convince somebody to listen.
In regard to the jobs, does anybody know, how many jobs do we have in this industry in the province?
MR. GUNN: I can't give you that number. John would probably know it.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: It's 22, 000.
MR. BOUDREAU: So, 22,000. When you made the comments about the budgets and the research area in DNR. What about the federal government? Is the federal government doing any of this type of research?
MR. GUNN: There are two answers there, three answers, actually. One is that when the federal government starting withdrawing from all the federal-provincial programs, there was an argument that forestry is not a federal responsibility. So there was a justification to get out of that. The second argument is there are forest research labs in the Maritime Provinces. They are located in Fredericton and there is a research staff there. We had a night that we put on in Truro, about one year ago, where we invited the federal scientists to come down and talk about the research they are doing, so we have contacts there. The third answer to it is that we are part of the federal funding program, Nova Forest Alliance. They put money into us, approximately $400,000 per year. Some of that is looking at research. Much of it is our education-communications programs that, as part of this, are finding ways of getting better practice.
So the federal government is there, but many of us would like to encourage more federal dollars in research in forestry. There are federal programs in other ways, both through the NSERC and other networks of centres of excellence. There is the sustainable forestry network operating out of the University of Alberta, but there are people in Nova Scotia who participate in that. Dr. Duinker at Dalhousie is one in particular. He works with us, also, at Nova Forest Alliance. There are now being developed a number of other federal programs, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. A number of the projects that are being proposed in that are projects that are of potential interest in research in forestry.
I think many of us would like to have a larger share of those federal dollars for research, dedicated to research in the forest industry, because forests are one of the major characteristics of Canada. We are one of the world's great forest nations. If we don't know how to manage our forest, then pity the rest of the world. It is really important that the government put research dollars into forest management. Obviously, we would like to encourage those research dollars in forest management to come to Nova Scotia, too.
MR. BOUDREAU: I agree. Mr. Gunn, you indicated that you thought that DNR did a relatively reasonable job in studying the forests in Nova Scotia. However, the other gentleman indicated that he felt that, because of the budget decreases in the DNR, in particular, there was more that could be done in that area. It sort of conflicts. Do either one of you feel that DNR is paying too much attention to certain areas in the forestry and they should be paying, maybe, more attention to a specific area?
MR. PREST: Any difference of opinion on what it would be, in this whole matter of clear-cutting and so on that Mr. Gunn and I have, could all be solved by research, one way or the other. There is not a lot of research or attention being paid to that question by DNR in Nova Scotia and by the research people. They haven't got a big budget. They haven't got very many people. There was a good start. They have a lot of PSPs out there. They are having trouble getting the data collected all the time now.
They are doing some things, but I think there is a real need for more resources for them so that they can investigate this, because people in the rest of the continent are investigating it and it is being investigated in the rest of the world. So, perhaps they would prove me wrong but they would prove one way or another.
MR. GUNN: They are working hard at it. They have a very limited budget, as I am sure all of you will be aware, and you are probably aware why they have a limited budget. We have financially challenging times in Nova Scotia, but I guess I would put in my two cents' worth: money spent to develop research and knowledge of the forest in Nova Scotia is money very well spent. The other thing you have to remember is with that small staff there is only so much work you can do.
In every endeavour of life, and in particular forestry, we go from one crisis to another. It sounds like ancient history now but in the 1970's, the crisis was the budworm. So our whole concern in Nova Scotia is will we be able to survive this massive budworm attack. Much of the forest management work was done to find ways of solving that problem. The modelling work that we have been doing is aimed at a forest environment that was characteristic of that period of time. As we go to try to model and understand and have the science for these much more complex ecosystems that are characteristic of the Acadian forest, you need different types of models, different types of research. We are slowly moving towards that. We are funding work through the Nova Forest Alliance, in partnership with DNR, towards looking at an ecological land classification and finding ecological land classification-based prescriptions for forest management.
The province is continuing to do research. I believe the 1,700 permanent sample plots that I mentioned, since 1965, are in the process of being doubled. If you check with the people in the Department of Natural Resources, they could give you the exact number but under the Forests Act and the sustainability regulations that came with that, there was also a commitment to double the amount of PSP work. There is ground work being done because the GIS data comes from air photos and those air photos need to be ground-true. So as part of that process people are on the ground trying to ground-true those air photos. So there is ongoing work; it is hard work and people are doing it.
More resources certainly would be useful, but to my knowledge the people in the department are working as hard as they can given the resources they have to move forward. I am sure they would appreciate more resources and those of us who are associated with the industry and with forest communities in Nova Scotia would appreciate those resources too. That is a decision, obviously, only you people in government can decide as to how to allocate those resources.
MR. BOUDREAU: I appreciate that answer because I know so many individuals who work at DNR and I have a lot of respect for their abilities. I feel the same way you do, actually, I don't believe they have been given the proper tools in order to deliver exactly what we need.
In reference to one of the questions that you were asked, in regard to woodlot owners, when it comes to these private contractors offering different prices or whatever, is there an education program available for woodlot owners in this province, such as perhaps maybe newsletters or something that would educate the individual owners on some of the issues that you have brought up?
MR. GUNN: There are two at least. The department has a home study course available over the Web so that woodlot owners can access that and learn various aspects of forest management from that. It is true that the extension work of the department has been cut back quite a bit over the years, it has been difficult for that side of it to be able to be carried out. We in the Nova Forest Alliance have taken some efforts from that. We have held a series of seminars and continue to hold those seminars. Among the subjects we look at is everything from forest practises on the woodlot to taxation and how a landowner can properly structure themselves so that they can survive the tax regimes that are imposed on them, and try to give various alternatives to woodlot owners on what types of things can be done on their land.
[10:30 a.m.]
We have a Woodlot Opportunities Program in existence right now that we would like to see publicized more, and we are trying to publicize it ourselves, where if a woodlot owner calls us, we will have someone go for a walk on their woodlot. We definitely do not propose a harvest plan for them. That is not our job; we are not trying to be a timber harvester, we are trying to point out opportunities for them. If they are interested in wildlife, if they are interested in protecting certain aspects of the brooks and streams, if they are interested in finding different types of species on their land, knowing about the wildflowers and other things on their land, we will point out those opportunities too.
What we try to do through this program is go out with the woodlot owner and ask, what are your goals and objectives, and we will try to point out some opportunities to meet those goals and objectives. It is a program we have in place. Yes, we are looking for more funding for it, too. It is expensive for us to mount, but we think it is a way of dealing with woodlot owners who may be somewhat reticent to call up either a contractor or a mill and say, what do you think I should do with my land. They want somebody who can come with an objective point of view, and give them some opportunities that they might want to pursue. We have been trying to do that. There are opportunities. We think there is a real good role that we can play in doing that. Right now, we are just constrained in resources, too, as to what we can do there.
MR. PREST: There will come a time when those initiatives, that the NFA is working on now, modified, developed and proven successful, need to be applied to the province as a whole, because the NFA area is one-tenth of the area of the province. Certainly what the NFA is doing with woodlot owners in their area at this point is the bright light on the horizon. I can say that being involved with woodlot owners for many years, there are some real possibilities there, but the time will come when we are going to need help to expand it beyond the NFA area.
MR. BOUDREAU: I appreciate both those answers. One of the issues that I run across a lot is that individuals are not aware that these programs are available. I think it is very important, in any aspect, whether we are talking about forestry or health care or whatever, that individual Nova Scotians are aware that these programs are there. That is where I feel that government can take advantage of a group such as yours, and save money, actually, in getting the information out to the people who are affected.
I have one other question - I know the Chairman is going to cut me off in a minute - regarding the comments about the mills, when you feel that the mills are putting pressure on the deliverer and the production, and stuff like that. What I am hearing - you didn't say it, you definitely did not say that - and understanding, between the lines, is that perhaps larger companies are maybe dictating or affecting the government's role in regard to this. Do you feel the larger companies are having a larger input in the direction government goes within forestry management?
MR. GUNN: Some of that is going to be natural. One of the problems we have with woodlot owners is that it is hard to identify them. We want to go and speak to small, private woodlot owners, but who are they? We have 5,000 woodlot owners in our Nova Forest Alliance area; there are 30,000 woodlot owners in the province. They don't speak with a single voice, they are hard to even contact in any nice way. When issues do come up, large companies - obviously it is much easier for them to organize their thoughts and their viewpoints. It is probably natural, and it is one of the difficulties of our political process. I don't think it is necessarily anything more than that - large interests of all kinds, when economic issues are involved, will speak their piece. Government has to decide how it reacts to that. I think it is that simple.
There is knowledge that exists in the large companies and, certainly, that has probably been brought to bear in arguments to DNR over the years. We know there are economic issues in the large companies and, yes, affect the companies, but also affect all of our constituencies, too. It is always, I think, a matter of finding that balance. I guess that, in many ways, your role, is to find the proper way of balancing off those interests and instructing the staff of government how to deal with those many different messages they will receive.
MR. PREST: I think there are relatively few companies in this province who have guided the forest industry development and forest policy over the last 30 years. Without naming, I think it is the bigger the companies, the more drag they have. I have been dealing with politicians and the ministers and the deputy ministers and on and on for 10 years or so in woodlot owner politics. I can't say I have a good feeling about how our system is working. I don't have a good feeling at all.
I think that the real problem is between elected politicians and the upper level bureaucrats. I think, probably, most of you know that, too. I don't know when it is going to change, but if you want to really get down to the base of the problem, then I think that you have to recognize it and not forget about that after you leave.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. I now move to Mr. Chipman. We have room for about five minutes of questions.
MR. FRANK CHIPMAN: Would you say the high grading of the past has probably taken the best genetic species of each type? I guess what I am saying are the characteristics of those good quality trees, have we lost those, the ones that we had say 150 years ago?
MR. PREST: A very important aspect of ecological capital is genetic, because, in your natural forest, 10,000 years after the ice age disappeared, for our forest to develop and for genetics to work and for natural selection and survival of the fittest, all that 10,000 year process was reflected in the genetic composition of our forests 500 years ago. I think that should answer you.
MR. CHIPMAN: We talked about, earlier, the short-sighted approach. Take the money and run now. I think that is the prevalent attitude. There is no doubt about that. Do you think that DNR, the province, and maybe I shouldn't be asking this question by either one of you, do you think they lack long-term vision?
MR. GUNN: No, I don't think that.
MR. CHIPMAN: So you think they lack one or you don't think they lack one?
MR. GUNN: No, I don't think they lack one.
MR. CHIPMAN: Okay. It was a question I wanted to ask because there is a lot of concern. Of course, we have this forest sustainability fund and, to me, that shows some long-term vision that we are looking ahead. There has to be something in place. I want to be quick here because I know the Chairman wants to have some other questions asked.
Machinery, it is interesting and I have always said this, too. I spoke to somebody the other day. We talked about the type of machinery and size of machinery in the forest today. You have equipment there worth $450,000 or $500,000. It seems the only way you can pay for that equipment, and that equipment is similar to what I talked about, selling ramwood out of the province, selling gypsum out of the province. You are bringing in manufactured equipment that was probably produced in Japan or Sweden, I don't know where the forestry equipment came from. But the jobs we created there, the only way you pay for it is you come in and deplete the resource. Would you agree with that, Mr. Prest?
MR. PREST: Yes, I agree with that. That is what driving it when you see the machines working around the clock. It is not because there is a contractor who likes to work that way. It is because he has gotten himself into a situation where, at the rate that he is paid for his work, that is what he has to do in order to make payments on the machines. There is no doubt about it.
I have to acknowledge that as you reduce harvesting costs, perhaps that allows the woodlot owner to get more for his stumpage. That is a possibility too when that happens, but what is wrong with that is that the woodlot owner in that case - and I am not popular for saying this in woodlot owners' circles, you can imagine - but, what is happening to a great degree, I will be honest here, the woodlot owner is getting more than he should be and he is getting more, but the woodlot itself is taking the brunt and its degradation is what is allowing him to get more money for his wood today.
MR. CHIPMAN: One more final question. You say that Nova Scotia probably had one of the best areas for natural regenerations because of our Maritime climate?
MR. PREST: I don't think there is any question of that. We are so fortunate that we can make a lot of mistakes in our forest and still get a second and a third chance. That is the point where we are now; we have to make sure we turn things around before we do run out of chances.
MR. GUNN: I agree, natural regeneration is key here.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I move to Mr. Macdonnell. I am sorry, he was next on the list and I stepped right over him. We will give you an extra 10 seconds there.
MR. MACDONELL: I want to make a few comments and Mr. Chipman had raised one around why these machines run 24 hours and I thought that it is important for Mrs. Baillie to know that quite often the machines aren't owned by the mills, they are owned by the contractors, or owned by the banks really, and some poor guy is trying to pay for it and that is the reason they are running the way they are. The mills aren't on the hook at all if this guy goes under, they will just wait for somebody else to come along and make the investment and try to survive after that.
A comment was made about cutting smaller wood and Mr. Chipman made it around the ability to cut fir in the mills, but I don't think that is actually the case. I don't think there is much fir - if it is, it has to be good - in this province. There are places where you can cut good fir, but that is not the rule. Certainly, I know in my area in Stanley, the woodlot there, supposedly from what I have been told, there are a lot of old black spruce stands that aren't big and so it was one of the reasons MacTara was in there at the regret or opposition of some of the local mills that wanted access into that stand. MacTara was able to make the case that they had the technology to get the most out of these smaller diameter trees that actually had reached the end of their growth. The other mills say there is lots of other stuff there we could have had access to.
Your statement, Dr. Gunn, around the fact of the value added when it comes to pulp and I was thinking that pulp and paper, and I don't know the difference between once you take a couple cords of pulpwood and a roll of paper comes out the other end of the mill, I don't know what the costs are between those two processes. It would seem to me that looking at a roll of paper is somewhere in the range of $800 and it takes a couple cords of wood to make it. I don't know if there is much better value unless there are an awful lot of costs in between that I don't know of. I do know now that the pulp mills are pretty fussy about the quality of the wood that they take and they are probably not going to take much fir or what we used to think was a place where, if you are going to do silviculture and actually, that is one of the concerns I have, what do you do with this stuff if you are going to have a silviculture program.
Somebody was saying, where is the question? I will come to one. It would seem to me that if we are going to have sustainability in the province and we know how big the province is, that we would have to apply an allowable annual cut. If you are going to tie anything to sustainability, putting money into silviculture is a good thing to do, like your idea or your statement about harvesting in a sustainable fashion so that you can reduce the money in silviculture by harvesting in an appropriate way. But when we talk about regeneration, I know if clear-cutting is the major harvesting practice and we have good regeneration, then we find that nobody replants because we have good regeneration. When it comes to the idea that we are going to spend money on silviculture, it doesn't seem to happen because we don't harvest with any other treatments.
I think it is kind of getting off the hook for mills, especially when it comes to Crown land, because they just go in and harvest them, and say, well, gee, it is regenerating great, even though we are responsible for the silviculture. It would seem to me that you have to somehow analyze how much you cut in relation to how fast you can regenerate so many cords or so many tons or so many metres cubed.
Do you think that not having an annual allowable cut would be problematic in sustaining the forestry industry? I guess putting a limit on the cut is what I am trying to say.
MR. PREST: It has often been said that we can't have an annual allowable cut in Nova Scotia because so much of the land is private land, so you can't enforce it. With the mentality that we have today, perhaps so, but we could work towards that. We could define a sustainable harvest level, which I think we probably do. We do have that figure, DNR does have that, and it is broken down by land class and so on.
There has to be an attitude within the whole sector that this is important, and that we are going to work within that. Everybody has to work together to understand that everybody can't just be totally free to do things exactly as they would like to do it, because we don't live in that kind of a world. It is free enterprise, but that doesn't mean that every mill can do exactly what it wants; it can't mean that every woodlot owner can do exactly what he wants whenever he wants. We have to get away from that so that people understand that a little bit better and start working together. I don't think it would be impossible to see, in the future, us working within a sustainable harvest level for the province.
MR. GUNN: If I could add there, it is not that we don't do them, the province does have ways of calculating levels of harvest that are "an annual allowable cut". Let me put my scientist hat on and say that the calculation of that is not a trivial calculation and does need input from a variety of sources. We are going to be doing that as part of our sustainable forest management process within NFA.
As you point out, though, a very important thing to understand is that a cut is not a cut. Fir is a good example. One of our major challenges in Nova Scotia is to make sure that we utilize the fir and, as you indicate, for many of our mills, they find it difficult to use the fir. If we could find ways of getting fir removed from the forest - and fir is not a dominant species in the classic Acadian forest - if we could find ways of getting that harvested at appropriate times, that could do as much as anything to improve the health of our forests. Yes, I am afraid at times that will mean clear-cutting certain patches of fir.
That is very important to recognize that management of forest, you just can't say volume of wood, you have to talk about the species, you have to talk about the age of the wood, you have to talk about the quality of land it is located on, and if you approach that properly, we can do a very good job. The trick of regulation is the tough one. There are two approaches to regulation, one is telling Eldon Gunn, as a landowner, you have to do this. Many of us would probably be a little pessimistic about our ability to do that in Nova Scotia. I don't think we should do that.
The other is to set examples of good practice, and to constantly put them before the people of the province, what good practice in the forest means. That is going to come from two reasons. One is just because many of us believe in it and want to promote this, it is the type of thing that Wade and I are doing here today; the other is there are going to be pressures from certification processes and other pressures from a public that is consuming forest products, and they want to know that the forest products they are consuming are not
degrading the environment. Those pressures will, eventually, and are resulting now in guidelines that industry is going to get better, better and better at what it does. So, we have to find ways of working within the tools we have. The particular land base we have, the particular ownership structure we have in Nova Scotia, I think we will all see it is really tough to put in highly prescriptive rules on individual landowners. I think there are lots of opportunity for education and for demonstration of what good practice, is. People in Nova Scotia do want to do good practice if they can see how it can work then they will adopt it. If they don't know about it, then what can they do?
MR. PREST: The way Crown land is managed is very important because a lot of the public and a lot of the woodlot-owning public look at the Crown land around them and they make some judgments on what they see happening there and that can have a great effect on the attitude they take towards their own property.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. We will finish up with Mr. Taylor.
MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, the time went by very quickly, I guess it does when you are having fun. I agree with my colleague, Brian, that it has been very helpful and informative for us this morning to have you folks come in and impart a little bit of information about the forestry to us as legislators. I would have liked to have had an opportunity to talk a little bit about the gypsy moth and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency but time doesn't permit. However, I would like our presenters to make a comment as succinct as possible about the fact that really there is no management relative to wilderness area protection spaces. I know some people, probably the majority of people in Nova Scotia think that is a good thing, many stakeholders do not. I just wonder what your personal views are on that?
MR. PREST: Well, I think that the biggest obstacle to politicians or DNR to have the public believe in integrated resource management or multi-use of Crown land is because of what they see as an example from the past of how it has been done. It doesn't really matter what is written on paper about what the guidelines are of how Crown land is managed under multiple-use or integrated resource management, if you want to know what it looks like, go out in the woods and see. Then maybe you will understand why so many of the public don't understand what is written, because what is written often is an entirely different vision or version of what you see happening out there in the woods. That is one of the biggest problems that you will have, convincing the public that they can be satisfied with less than total protection.
I do believe in multiple-use. I believe in integrated resource management but I get faced with, am I going to go for that or am I going to go for the total protection because that is the only way I can believe that it can be protected at all?
MR. GUNN: Within Canada and within Nova Scotia, we have commitments to have representative protected areas in all of our ecosystems. They are typical of the country and of the province. I don't think there is anyone who would debate that that is important in Nova Scotia. The question I think Wade is hinting at is the extent of that. The practicality of it. In your constituencies, you will know the ability to actually use the forest for combined multiple-uses is very important to all members of your constituencies and most Nova Scotians agree with that. In fact, the result of our public opinion survey is that Nova Scotians do want to see the lands of the province managed for multiple values. The ongoing question are examples of how to do that.
I guess I would like to invite some of you to come for a walk in the woods some day. In the Antrim woodlot that we have under management, we can show you some examples of what the potentials are of the forest in Nova Scotia and I think you will be very encouraged when you see that. It is important for people to go out and see examples like that of what is possible. It should be possible to have the very best of environmental values, the very best of social values, and high economic values coming out of our forests, and we should not hesitate to try to attain all of those goals.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, gentlemen. I think, having reviewed all the questions that came from around this table, we have covered a great deal of territory and I want to thank you, Mr. Prest and Dr. Gunn for not only a most interesting presentation, but also for open and frank responses to our questions. I would like to say one of the comments that was made, that the buck stops here, with the politicians, and surely with 70 per cent to 75 per cent of Nova Scotia's forests in the hands of the private sector, with little government control I certainly believe that the future success of a sustainable forest industry in this province depends totally on the cooperation of all stakeholders, the government, the woodlot owners and operators and the big companies. The industry itself must take a more responsible stand. Don't be too quick to pass the buck. We have to work cooperatively to keep this wonderful industry going for many years to come.
Again, I want to thank you and I think I speak for the committee in saying that we have certainly learned a great deal from our conversation here today, and I hope that you will be able to come back again sometime. Thank you again.
The next meeting of the committee will take place on May 8, 2001, and we will be reviewing the water quality in the province. We will have the Department of the Environment here.
MR. BOUDREAU: Mr. Chairman, may I request a copy of these minutes be provided to the minister responsible for forestry, just to keep him up do date?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
[The meeting adjourned at 10:57 a.m.]
